Canada

Stance Detection is the task of identifying the position of an author of a text towards an issue or a target. Previous studies on Stance Detection indicate that the existing systems are non-robust to the variations and errors in input sentences. Our proposed methodology uses Contrastive Learning to learn sentence representations by bringing semantically similar sentences and sentences implying the same stance closer to each other in the embedding space. We compare our approach to a pretrained transformer model directly finetuned with the stance datasets. We use char-level and word-level adversarial perturbation attacks to measure the resilience of the models and we show that our approach achieves better performances and is more robust to the different adversarial perturbations introduced to the test data. The results indicate that our approach performs better on small-sized and class-imbalanced stance datasets.

ACL 2023

Exploration of Contrastive Learning Strategies toward more Robust Stance Detection

contrastive learning

stance detection

robustness

## Welcome!
"I am excited to welcome you to this year’s edition of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing! Importantly, it marks the 30th edition of EMNLP. With over 8,000 submissions, more than 3,000 accepted papers, and thousands of attendees, we have come a long way from that first
workshop, which had 14 accepted papers. As the field looks ahead, Suzhou is the fitting location for celebrating this milestone: rooted in a long literary tradition, yet modern and forward-looking, and home to a large share of the NLP community." 

*Message from the General Chair, Dirk Hovy*

EMNLP 2025

Celebrate 30 Years of EMNLP! 
EMNLP 2025 will be held in Suzhou, China from November 5th to November 9th, 2025.

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

Social media is an extremely potent tool for influencing public opinion, particularly during important events such as elections, pandemics, and national conflicts. Emotions are a crucial aspect of this influence, but detecting them accurately in the political domain is a significant challenge due to the lack of suitable emotion labels and training datasets. In this paper, we present a generalized approach to emotion detection that can be adapted to the political domain with minimal performance sacrifice. Our approach is designed to be easily integrated into existing models without the need for additional training or fine-tuning. We demonstrate the zero-shot and few-shot performance of our model on the 2017 French presidential elections and propose efficient emotion groupings that would aid in effectively analyzing influence campaigns and agendas on social media.

Adapting Emotion Detection to Analyze Influence Campaigns on Social Media

Where do the meaning of emoji come from? Though it is often assumed that emoji are fully iconic, with meanings derived from their visual forms, we argue that this is only one component of their meaning. We surveyed users and non-users of the Chinese social media platform WeChat for their interpretations of emoji specific to WeChat. We find that some emoji show significant differences in their interpretations between users and non-users, as well as how familiar a person is with the specific emoji’s use. We argue that this reflects a more complex process for building the meaning of emoji on a platform than pure iconicity.

Not Just Iconic: Emoji Interpretation is Shaped by Use

The dominance of English is a well-known issue in NLP research. In this position paper, I turn to state-of-the-art psychological insights to explain why this problem is especially persistent in research on automatic emotion detection, and why the seemingly promising approach of using multilingual models to include lower-resourced languages might not be the desired solution. Instead, I campaign for the use of models that acknowledge linguistic and cultural differences in emotion conceptualization and verbalization. Moreover, I see much potential in NLP to better understand emotions and emotional language use across different languages.

The Paradox of Multilingual Emotion Detection

People globally quit their jobs at high rates during the COVID-19 pandemic, yet there is scant research about emotional trajectories surrounding voluntary resignations before or during that era. To explore long-term emotional language patterns before and after quitting a job, we amassed a Reddit sample of people who indicated resigning on a specific day (n = 7,436), each of whom was paired with a comparison user matched on posting history. After excluding people on the basis of low posting frequency and word count, we analyzed 150.3 million words (53.1% from 5,134 target users who indicated quitting) using SALLEE, a dictionary-based syntax-aware tool, and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) dictionaries. Based on posts in the year before and after quitting, people who had quit their jobs used more sadness and anxiety language than matched comparison users. Lower rates of "I" pronouns and cognitive processing language were associated with less sadness and anxiety surrounding quitting. Emotional trajectories during and before the pandemic were parallel, though pandemic messages were more negative. The results have relevance for strategic self-distancing as a means of regulating negative emotions around major life changes.

Sadness and Anxiety Language in Reddit Messages Before and After Quitting a Job

Twitter and parliamentary speeches are very different communication channels, but many members of parliament (MPs) make use of both. Focusing on the topic of climate change, we undertake a comparative analysis of speeches and tweets uttered by MPs in Germany in a recent six-year period. By keyword/hashtag analyses and topic modeling, we find substantial differences along party lines, with left-leaning parties discussing climate change through a crisis frame, while liberal and conservative parties try to address climate change through the lens of climate-friendly technology and practices. Only the AfD denies the need to adopt climate
change mitigating measures, demeaning those concerned about a deteriorating climate as climate cult or fanatics. Our analysis reveals that climate change communication does not differ substantially between Twitter and parliamentary speeches, but across the political spectrum.

Communicating Climate Change: A Comparison Between Tweets and Speeches by German Members of Parliament

Recent years have seen a proliferation of aggressive social media posts, often wreaking even real-world consequences for victims. Aggressive behaviour on social media is especially evident during important sociopolitical events such as elections, communal incidents, and public protests. In this paper, we introduce a dataset in English to model political aggression. The dataset comprises public tweets collated across the time-frames of two of the most recent Indian general elections. We manually annotate this data for the task of aggression detection and analyze this data for aggressive behaviour. To benchmark the efficacy of our dataset, we perform experiments by fine-tuning pre-trained language models and comparing the results with models trained on an existing but general domain dataset. Our models consistently outperform the models trained on existing data. Our best model achieves a macro F1-score of 66.66 on our dataset. We also train models on a combined version of both datasets, achieving best macro F1-score of 92.77, on our dataset. Additionally, we create subsets of code-mixed and non-code-mixed data from the combined dataset to observe variations in results due to the Hindi-English code-mixing phenomenon. We publicly release the anonymized data, code, and models for further research.

Modelling Political Aggression on Social Media Platforms

This presentation describes the system for the YNU-HPCC team in WASSA-2023 Shared Task 1: Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification. This task needs to predict the empathy, emotion, and personality of the empathic reactions. This system is mainly based on the Decoding-enhanced BERT with disentangled attention (DeBERTa) model with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa). Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning in PEFT is used to reduce the training parameters of large language models. Moreover, back translation is introduced to augment the training dataset. This system achieved relatively good results on the competition’s official leaderboard.

YNU-HPCC at WASSA-2023 Shared Task 1: Large-scale Language Model with LoRA Fine-Tuning for Empathy Detection and Emotion Classification

We present a study on using the RoBERTa language model for emotion classification of essays as part of the 'Shared Task on Empathy Detection, Emotion Classification and Personality Detection in Interactions' organized as part of 'WASSA 2023' at 'ACL 2023'. Emotion classification is a challenging task in natural language processing, and imbalanced datasets further exacerbate this challenge. In this study, we explore the use of various data balancing techniques in combination with RoBERTa to improve the classification performance. We evaluate the performance of our approach (denoted by adityapatkar on Codalab) on a benchmark multi-label dataset of essays annotated with eight emotion categories, provided by the Shared Task organizers. Our results show that the proposed approach achieves the best macro F1 score in the competition's training and evaluation phase. Our study provides insights into the potential of RoBERTa for handling imbalanced data in emotion classification. The results can have implications for the natural language processing tasks related to emotion classification.

AdityaPatkar at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion, and Personality Shared Task: RoBERTa-Based Emotion Classification of Essays, Improving Performance on Imbalanced Data

The WASSA 2023 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion and other personality traits consists of essays, conversations and articles in textual form and participants' demographic information in numerical form. To address the tasks, our contributions include (1) converting numerical information into meaningful text information using appropriate templates, (2) summarising lengthy articles, and (3) augmenting training data by paraphrasing. To achieve these contributions, we leveraged two separate T5-based pre-trained transformers. We then fine-tuned pre-trained BERT, DistilBERT and ALBERT for predicting empathy and personality traits. We used the Optuna hyperparameter optimisation framework to fine-tune learning rates, batch sizes and weight initialisation. Our proposed system achieved its highest performance – a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.750 – on the conversation-level empathy prediction task. The system implementation is publicly available at https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/WASSA23-empathy-emotion.

Curtin OCAI at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion and Personality Shared Task: Demographic-Aware Prediction Using Multiple Transformers

In this paper, we present Team Hawk’s participation in Track 1 of the WASSA 2023 shared task. The objective of the task is to understand the empathy that emerges between individuals during their conversations. In our study, we developed a multi-tasking framework that is capable of automatically assessing empathy, intensity of emotion, and polarity of emotion within participants’ conversations. Our proposed core model extends the transformer architecture, utilizing two separate RoBERTabased encoders to encode both the articles and conversations. Subsequently, a sequence of self-attention, position-wise feed-forward, and dense layers are employed to predict the regression scores for the three sub-tasks: empathy, intensity of emotion, and polarity of emotion. Our best model achieved average Pearson’s correlation of 0.7710 (Empathy: 0.7843, Emotion Polarity: 0.7917, Emotion Intensity: 0.7381) on the released development set and 0.7250 (Empathy: 0.8090, Emotion Polarity: 0.7010, Emotion Intensity: 0.6650) on the released test set. These results earned us the 3rd position in the test set evaluation phase of Track 1.

Team_Hawk at WASSA 2023 Empathy, Emotion, and Personality Shared Task: Multi-tasking Multi-encoder based transformers for Empathy and Emotion Prediction in Conversations

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Next from ACL 2023

Adapting Emotion Detection to Analyze Influence Campaigns on Social Media

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