United Arab Emirates

Visual grounding of Language aims at enriching textual representations of language with multiple sources of visual knowledge such as images and videos. Although visual grounding is an area of intense research, inter-lingual aspects of visual grounding have not received much attention. The present study investigates the inter-lingual visual grounding of word embeddings. We propose an implicit alignment technique between the two spaces of vision and language in which inter-lingual textual information interacts in order to enrich pre-trained textual word embeddings. We focus on three languages in our experiments, namely, English, Arabic, and German. We obtained visually grounded vector representations for these languages and studied whether visual grounding on one or multiple languages improved the performance of embeddings on word similarity and categorization benchmarks. Our experiments suggest that inter-lingual knowledge improves the performance of grounded embeddings in similar languages such as German and English. However, inter-lingual grounding of German or English with Arabic led to a slight degradation in performance on word similarity benchmarks. On the other hand, we observed an opposite trend on categorization benchmarks where Arabic had the most improvement on English. In the discussion section, several reasons for those findings are laid out. We hope that our experiments provide a baseline for further research on inter lingual visual grounding.

EMNLP 2022

Visual Grounding of Inter-lingual Word-Embeddings

visual grounding

multilinguality

word embeddings

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

The 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics is taking place May 22-27, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Dublin and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to this anniversary edition with an almost 50-50 in-person and virtual participation. 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, three amazing keynote events and two new initiatives of invited talks: Spotlight Talks for Young Rising Stars (STIRS) and The Next Big Idea Talks. Posters (including Findings of ACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop will have an oral session and a poster session as part of Poster Session 1. The program also features eight Tutorials and 28 Workshops. 

 
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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

workshop paper

## Welcome to EMNLP 2022!
I am delighted to welcome you to EMNLP 2022! I believe this conference has been complicated beyond any precedent. Over the past year, it’s been thrilling to see the organization team approach each new puzzle with creativity and enthusiasm. We hope that those participating in Abu Dhabi as well as those joining remotely will leave the conference feeling newly inspired by the program and newly connected to our ever-growing community. Following EMNLP 2021 and major NLP conferences since, EMNLP 2022 is “hybrid,” serving both virtual and in-person participants.

Our key innovations for EMNLP 2022 include:

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Welcome!
EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.

Discourse relations are typically modeled as a discrete class that characterizes the relation between segments of text (e.g. causal explanations, expansions). However, such predefined discrete classes limit the universe of potential relationships and their nuanced differences. Adding higher-level semantic structure to contextual word embeddings, we propose representing discourse relations as points in high dimensional continuous space. However, unlike words, discourse relations often have no surface form (relations are in between two segments, often with no word or phrase in that gap) which presents a challenge for existing embedding techniques. We present a novel method for automatically creating discourse relation embeddings (DiscRE), addressing the embedding challenge through a weakly supervised, multitask approach to learn diverse and nuanced relations in social media. Results show DiscRE representations obtain the best performance on Twitter discourse relation classification (macro F1=0.76), social media causality prediction (from F1=0.79 to 0.81), and perform beyond modern sentence and word transformers at traditional discourse relation classification, capturing novel nuanced relations (e.g. relations at the intersection of causal explanations and counterfactuals).

Discourse Relation Embeddings: Representing the Relations between Discourse Segments in Social Media

Image captioning models tend to describe images in an object-centric way, emphasising visible objects. But image descriptions can also abstract away from objects and describe the type of scene depicted. In this paper, we explore the potential of a state of the art Vision and Language model, VinVL, to caption images at the scene level using  (1) a novel dataset which pairs images with both object-centric and scene descriptions. Through (2) an in-depth analysis of the effect of the fine-tuning, we show (3) that a small amount of curated data suffices to generate scene descriptions without losing the capability to identify object-level concepts in the scene; the model acquires a more holistic view of the image compared to when object-centric descriptions are generated. We discuss the parallels between these results and insights from computational and cognitive science research on scene perception.

Understanding Cross-modal Interactions in V&L Models that Generate Scene Descriptions

We explore the utility of explicit structure for representation learning in NLP by developing StrAE： an autoencoding framework that faithfully leverages given sentence structure to learn multi-level node embeddings in an unsupervised fashion, which is then evaluated on a suite of downstream tasks. We train StrAE using four different input structures and multiple objectives, including a novel contrastive objective over structure. We find that using explicit structure can lead to better embeddings for downstream tasks compared to a non-structural baseline (GloVE) trained on the same data. Also, the kind of structure used has a measurable effect on task performance, with structure induced from the attention of a large language model (RoBERTa) performing best. Moreover, the right kind of structure employed with the contrastive objective performs on par with a Fasttext baseline on averaged downstream task performance, without access to subword information. Finally, averaged across different tasks and kinds of structure, the novel contrastive objective outperforms standard cross-entropy.

StrAE: Autoencoding for Pre-Trained Embeddings using Explicit Structure

This paper introduces DeepParliament, a legal domain Benchmark Dataset that gathers bill documents and metadata and performs various bill status classification tasks. The proposed dataset text covers a broad range of bills from 1986 to the present and contains richer information on parliament bill content. Data collection, detailed statistics and analyses are provided in the paper. Moreover, we experimented with different types of models ranging from RNN to pretrained and reported the results. We are proposing two new benchmarks: Binary and Multi-Class Bill Status classification. Models developed for bill documents and relevant supportive tasks may assist Members of Parliament (MPs), presidents, and other legal practitioners. It will help review or prioritise bills, thus speeding up the billing process, improving the quality of decisions and reducing the time consumption in both houses. Considering that the foundation of the country"s democracy is Parliament and state legislatures, we anticipate that our research will be an essential addition to the Legal NLP community. This work will be the first to present a Parliament bill prediction task. In order to  improve the accessibility of legal AI resources and promote reproducibility, we have made our code and dataset publicly accessible at github.com/monk1337/DeepParliament.

DeepParliament: A Legal domain Benchmark & Dataset for Parliament Bills Prediction

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are taking over in different industries starting from producing video subtitles to interactive digital assistants. ASR output can be used in automatic indexing, categorizing, searching along with normal human readability. Raw transcripts from ASR systems are difficult to interpret since it usually produces text without punctuation and case information (all lower, all upper, camel case etc.), thus limiting the performance of downstream NLP tasks. We proposed an approach to restore the punctuation and case for both English and Hinglish (i.e Hindi vocabulary in Latin script) languages. We have performed a classification task using encoder-based transformers which is a mini BERT consisting of 4 encoder layers for punctuation and case restoration instead of the traditional Seq2Seq model considering the latency constraint in real world use cases. It consists of  a total number of 15 distinct classes for the model which includes 5 punctuations i.e Period(.), Comma(,), Single Quote(‘), Double Quote(") & Question Mark(?) with different combinations of casing. The model is benchmarked on an internal dataset which was based on user conversation with the voice assistant and it achieves a F1(macro) score of 91.52% on the test set.

Punctuation and case restoration in code mixed Indian languages

Adversarial attack of structured prediction models faces various challenges such as the difficulty of perturbing discrete words, the sentence quality issue, and the sensitivity of outputs to small perturbations.  In this work, we introduce SHARP, a new attack method that formulates the black-box adversarial attack as a search-based optimization problem with a specially designed objective function considering sentence fluency, meaning preservation and attacking effectiveness. Additionally, three different searching strategies are analyzed and compared, \ie, Beam Search, Metropolis-Hastings Sampling, and Hybrid Search. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacking strategies on two challenging structured prediction tasks: part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. Through automatic and human evaluations, we show that our method performs a more potent attack compared with pioneer arts. Moreover, the generated adversarial examples can be used to successfully boost the robustness and performance of the victim model via adversarial training.

Probing Script Knowledge from Pre-Trained Models

This paper describes the Inria ALMAnaCH team submission to the WMT 2022 general translation shared task. Participating in the language directions \{cs,ru,uk\}→en and cs↔uk, we experiment with the use of a dedicated Latin-script transcription convention aimed at representing all Slavic languages involved in a way that maximises character- and word-level correspondences between them as well as with the English language. Our hypothesis was that bringing the source and target language closer could have a positive impact on machine translation results. We provide multiple comparisons, including bilingual and multilingual baselines, with and without transcription. Initial results indicate that the transcription strategy was not successful, resulting in lower results than baselines. We nevertheless submitted our multilingual, transcribed models as our primary systems, and in this paper provide some indications as to why we got these negative results.

Inria-ALMAnaCH at WMT 2022: Does Transcription Help Cross-Script Machine Translation?

In this paper, we describe our NAIST-NICT-TIT submission to the WMT22 general machine translation task. We participated in this task for the English ↔ Japanese language pair.
Our system is characterized as an ensemble of Transformer big models, k-nearest-neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT) (Khandelwal et al., 2021), and reranking.

In our translation system, we construct the datastore for kNN-MT from back-translated monolingual data and integrate kNN-MT into the ensemble model. We designed a reranking system to select a translation from the n-best translation candidates generated by the translation system. We also use a context-aware model to improve the document-level consistency of the translation.

NAIST-NICT-TIT WMT22 General MT Task Submission

This paper describes Tencent AI Lab - Shanghai Jiao Tong University (TAL-SJTU) Low-Resource Translation systems for the WMT22 shared task. 
We participate in the general translation task on English-Livonian.
Our system is based on M2M100 with novel techniques that adapt it to the target language pair.
(1) Cross-model word embedding alignment: inspired by cross-lingual word embedding alignment, we successfully transfer a pre-trained word embedding to M2M100, enabling it to support Livonian.
(2) Gradual adaptation strategy: we exploit Estonian and Latvian as auxiliary languages for many-to-many translation training and then adapt to English-Livonian.
(3) Data augmentation: to enlarge the parallel data for English-Livonian, we construct pseudo-parallel data with Estonian and Latvian as pivot languages.
(4) Fine-tuning: to make the most of all available data, we fine-tune the model with the validation set and online back-translation, further boosting the performance.
In model evaluation: (1) We find that previous work underestimated the translation performance of Livonian due to inconsistent Unicode normalization, which may cause a discrepancy of up to 14.9 BLEU score.
(2) In addition to the standard validation set, we also employ round-trip BLEU to evaluate the models, which we find more appropriate for this task. 
Finally, our unconstrained system achieves BLEU scores of 17.0 and 30.4 for English to/from Livonian.

Tencent AI Lab - Shanghai Jiao Tong University Low-Resource Translation System for the WMT22 Translation Task

This paper describes Lan-Bridge Translation systems for the WMT 2022 General Translation shared task. We participate in 18 language directions: English to and from Czech, German, Ukrainian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, English to Croatian, French to German, Yakut to and from Russian and Ukrainian to and from Czech.To develop systems covering all these direc\_x0002\_tions, we mainly focus on multilingual mod\_x0002\_els. In general, we apply data corpus filtering, scaling model size, sparse expert model (in par\_x0002\_ticular, Transformer with adapters), large scale backtranslation and language model reranking techniques. Our system ranks first in 6 directions based on automatic evaluation.

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