Canada

Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental illnesses, but relatively little is known about how to detect them from language. The primary clinical manifestation of anxiety is worry associated cognitive distortions, which are likely expressed at the discourse-level of semantics. Here, we investigate the development of a modern linguistic assessment for degree of anxiety, specifically evaluating the utility of discourse-level information in addition to lexical-level large language model embeddings. We find that a combined lexico-discourse model outperforms models based solely on state-of-the-art contextual embeddings (RoBERTa), with discourse-level representations derived from Sentence-BERT and DiscRE both providing additional predictive power not captured by lexical-level representations. Interpreting the model, we find that discourse patterns of causal explanations, among others, were used significantly more by those scoring high in anxiety, dovetailing with psychological literature.

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ACL 2023

Discourse-Level Representations can Improve Prediction of Degree of Anxiety

anxiety prediction

discourse

computational social science

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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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.

Anxiety disorders are the most common of mental illnesses, but relatively little is known about how to detect them from language. The primary clinical manifestation of anxiety is worry associated cognitive distortions, which are likely expressed at the discourse-level of semantics. Here, we investigate the development of a modern linguistic assessment for degree of anxiety, specifically evaluating the utility of discourse-level information in addition to lexical-level large language model embeddings. We find that a combined lexico-discourse model outperforms models based solely on state-of-the-art contextual embeddings (RoBERTa), with discourse-level representations derived from Sentence-BERT and DiscRE both providing additional predictive power not captured by lexical-level representations. Interpreting the model, we find that discourse patterns of causal explanations, among others, were used significantly more by those scoring high in anxiety, dovetailing with psychological literature.

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poster

We tackle the problem of neural machine translation of mathematical formulae between ambiguous presentation languages and unambiguous content languages. Compared to neural machine translation on natural language, mathematical formulae have a much smaller vocabulary and much longer sequences of symbols, while their translation requires extreme precision to satisfy mathematical information needs. In this work, we perform the tasks of translating from LaTeX to Mathematica as well as from LaTeX to semantic LaTeX. While recurrent, recursive, and transformer networks struggle with preserving all contained information, we find that convolutional sequence-to-sequence networks achieve 95.1% and 90.7% exact matches, respectively.

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Neural Machine Translation for Mathematical Formulae

State-of-the-art models can perform well in controlled environments, but they often struggle when presented with out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, making OOD detection a critical component of NLP systems. In this paper, we focus on highlighting the limitations of existing approaches to OOD detection in NLP. Specifically, we evaluated eight OOD detection methods that are easily integrable into existing NLP systems and require no additional OOD data or model modifications. One of our contributions is providing a well-structured research environment that allows for full reproducibility of the results. Additionally, our analysis shows that existing OOD detection methods for NLP tasks are not yet sufficiently sensitive to capture all samples characterized by various types of distributional shifts. Particularly challenging testing scenarios arise in cases of background shift and randomly shuffled word order within in domain texts. This highlights the need for future work to develop more effective OOD detection approaches for the NLP problems, and our work provides a well-defined foundation for further research in this area.

Classical Out-of-Distribution Detection Methods Benchmark in Text Classification Tasks

Argument Clustering with Deep Metric Learning for Semantic Frame Induction

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/980da88c-3a61-4fa4-be43-69feb30465c9" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Acquiring Frame Element Knowledge with Deep Metric Learning for Semantic Frame Induction

Multi-Dialectal Representation Learning of Sinitic Phonology

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/bc4cc57b-b532-4ac5-862c-50f52a6ecb76" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Multi-Dialectal Representation Learning of Sinitic Phonology

A State-Vector Framework For Dataset Effects

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/cee70547-25cc-494e-8024-f5e22f5b412c" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

A State-Vector Framework For Dataset Effects

Probing for Hyperbole in Pre-Trained Language Models

<iframe src="https://app.sli.do/event/uyG7EHDP5trs2LHubv2Gj8/embed/polls/5d30ef99-31f6-494b-b7ad-3556906236f6" width="300" height="400"></iframe>

Probing for Hyperbole in Pre-Trained Language Models

We present Visual Knowledge oriented Programming platform (<b>VisKoP</b>), a knowledge base question answering (KBQA) system that integrates human into the loop to edit and debug the knowledge base (KB) queries. VisKoP not only provides a neural program induction module, which converts natural language questions into knowledge oriented program language (KoPL), but also maps KoPL programs into graphical elements. KoPL programs can be edited with simple graphical operators, such as <i>''dragging''</i> to add knowledge operators and <i>''slot filling''</i> to designate operator arguments. Moreover, VisKoP provides auto-completion for its knowledge base schema and users can easily debug the KoPL program by checking its intermediate results. To facilitate the practical KBQA on a million-entity-level KB, we design a highly efficient KoPL execution engine for the back-end. Experiment results show that VisKoP is highly efficient and user interaction can fix a large portion of wrong KoPL programs to acquire the correct answer. The VisKoP online demo, highly efficient KoPL engine, and screencast video are now publicly available.

VisKoP: Visual Knowledge oriented Programming for Interactive Knowledge Base Question Answering

Neuron analysis provides insights into how knowledge is structured in representations and discovers the role of neurons in the network. In addition to developing an understanding of our models, neuron analysis enables various applications such as debiasing, domain adaptation and architectural search. We present NeuroX, a comprehensive open-source toolkit to conduct neuron analysis of natural language processing models. It implements various interpretation methods under a unified API, and provides a framework for data processing and evaluation, thus making it easier for researchers and practitioners to perform neuron analysis. The Python toolkit is available at https://www.github.com/fdalvi/NeuroX.

Demo Video available at: https://youtu.be/mLhs2YMx4u8

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NeuroX Library for Neuron Analysis of Deep NLP Models

Information extraction systems often produce
hundreds to thousands of strings on a specific
topic. We present a method that facilitates
better consumption of these strings, in an ex-
ploratory setting in which a user wants to both
get a broad overview of what's available, and a
chance to dive deeper on some aspects. The sys-
tem works by grouping similar items together,
and arranging the remaining items into a hierar-
chical navigable DAG structure. We apply the
method to medical information extraction.

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Hierarchy Builder: Organizing Textual Spans into a Hierarchy to Facilitate Navigation

ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces: https://huggingface.co/spaces/bigscience-data/roots-search. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.

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Neural Machine Translation for Mathematical Formulae

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