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We investigate zero-shot cross-lingual news sentiment detection, aiming to develop robust sentiment classifiers that can be deployed across multiple languages without target-language training data. We introduce novel evaluation datasets in several less-resourced languages, and experiment with a range of approaches including the use of machine translation; in-context learning with large language models; and various intermediate training regimes including a novel task objective, POA, that leverages paragraph-level information. Our results demonstrate significant improvements over the state of the art, with in-context learning generally giving the best performance, but with the novel POA approach giving a competitive alternative with much lower computational overhead. We also show that language similarity is not in itself sufficient for predicting the success of cross-lingual transfer, but that similarity in semantic content and structure can be equally important., Comment: The first two authors share equal contribution

We introduce ClarQ-LLM, an evaluation framework consisting of bilingual English-Chinese conversation tasks, conversational agents and evaluation metrics, designed to serve as a strong benchmark for assessing agents' ability to ask clarification questions in task-oriented dialogues. The benchmark includes 31 different task types, each with 10 unique dialogue scenarios between information seeker and provider agents. The scenarios require the seeker to ask questions to resolve uncertainty and gather necessary information to complete tasks. Unlike traditional benchmarks that evaluate agents based on fixed dialogue content, ClarQ-LLM includes a provider conversational agent to replicate the original human provider in the benchmark. This allows both current and future seeker agents to test their ability to complete information gathering tasks through dialogue by directly interacting with our provider agent. In tests, LLAMA3.1 405B seeker agent managed a maximum success rate of only 60.05\%, showing that ClarQ-LLM presents a strong challenge for future research.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending and analyzing lengthy sequential inputs, owing to their extensive context windows that allow processing millions of tokens in a single forward pass. However, this paper uncovers a surprising limitation: LLMs fall short when handling long input sequences. We investigate this issue using three datasets and two tasks (sentiment analysis and news categorization) across various LLMs, including Claude 3, Gemini Pro, GPT 3.5 Turbo, Llama 3 Instruct, and Mistral Instruct models. To address this limitation, we propose and evaluate ad-hoc solutions that substantially enhance LLMs' performance on long input sequences by up to 50%, while reducing API cost and latency by up to 93% and 50%, respectively., Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, 6 tables

The application of machine learning (ML) in detecting, diagnosing, and treating mental health disorders is garnering increasing attention. Traditionally, research has focused on single modalities, such as text from clinical notes, audio from speech samples, or video of interaction patterns. Recently, multimodal ML, which combines information from multiple modalities, has demonstrated significant promise in offering novel insights into human behavior patterns and recognizing mental health symptoms and risk factors. Despite its potential, multimodal ML in mental health remains an emerging field, facing several complex challenges before practical applications can be effectively developed. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the data availability and current state-of-the-art multimodal ML applications for mental health. It discusses key challenges that must be addressed to advance the field. The insights from this survey aim to deepen the understanding of the potential and limitations of multimodal ML in mental health, guiding future research and development in this evolving domain.

In the domain of text-to-image generative models, biases inherent in training datasets often propagate into generated content, posing significant ethical challenges, particularly in socially sensitive contexts. We introduce FairCoT, a novel framework that enhances fairness in diffusion models through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning within multimodal generative large language models (LLMs). FairCoT employs iterative CoT refinement and attire-based attribute prediction to systematically mitigate biases, ensuring diverse and equitable representation in generated images. By integrating iterative reasoning processes, FairCoT addresses the limitations of zero-shot CoT in sensitive scenarios, balancing creativity with ethical responsibility. Experimental evaluations across multiple models, including DALL-E and various Stable Diffusion variants, demonstrate that FairCoT significantly improves fairness and diversity metrics without compromising image quality or relevance. Our approach advances ethical AI practices in generative modeling, promoting socially responsible content generation and setting new standards for fairness in AI-generated imagery.

Dehumanisation involves the perception and or treatment of a social group's members as less than human. This phenomenon is rarely addressed with computational linguistic techniques. We adapt a recently proposed approach for English, making it easier to transfer to other languages and to evaluate, introducing a new sentiment resource, the use of zero-shot cross-lingual valence and arousal detection, and a new method for statistical significance testing. We then apply it to study attitudes to migration expressed in Slovene newspapers, to examine changes in the Slovene discourse on migration between the 2015-16 migration crisis following the war in Syria and the 2022-23 period following the war in Ukraine. We find that while this discourse became more negative and more intense over time, it is less dehumanising when specifically addressing Ukrainian migrants compared to others., Comment: The first authors have contributted equally. Accepted at LREC-COLING

An important concept in organisational behaviour is how hierarchy affects the voice of individuals, whereby members of a given organisation exhibit differing power relations based on their hierarchical position. Although there have been prior studies of the relationship between hierarchy and voice, they tend to focus on more qualitative small-scale methods and do not account for structural aspects of the organisation. This paper develops large-scale computational techniques utilising temporal network analysis to measure the effect that organisational hierarchy has on communication patterns within an organisation, focusing on the structure of pairwise interactions between individuals. We focus on one major organisation as a case study - the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - a major technical standards development organisation for the Internet. A particularly useful feature of the IETF is a transparent hierarchy, where participants take on explicit roles (e.g. Area Directors, Working Group Chairs). Its processes are also open, so we have visibility into the communication of people at different hierarchy levels over a long time period. We utilise a temporal network dataset of 989,911 email interactions among 23,741 participants to study how hierarchy impacts communication patterns. We show that the middle levels of the IETF are growing in terms of their dominance in communications. Higher levels consistently experience a higher proportion of incoming communication than lower levels, with higher levels initiating more communications too. We find that communication tends to flow "up" the hierarchy more than "down". Finally, we find that communication with higher-levels is associated with future communication more than for lower-levels, which we interpret as "facilitation". We conclude by discussing the implications this has on patterns within the wider IETF and for other organisations.

Dementia is associated with language disorders which impede communication. Here, we automatically learn linguistic disorder patterns by making use of a moderately-sized pre-trained language model and forcing it to focus on reformulated natural language processing (NLP) tasks and associated linguistic patterns. Our experiments show that NLP tasks that encapsulate contextual information and enhance the gradient signal with linguistic patterns benefit performance. We then use the probability estimates from the best model to construct digital linguistic markers measuring the overall quality in communication and the intensity of a variety of language disorders. We investigate how the digital markers characterize dementia speech from a longitudinal perspective. We find that our proposed communication marker is able to robustly and reliably characterize the language of people with dementia, outperforming existing linguistic approaches; and shows external validity via significant correlation with clinical markers of behaviour. Finally, our proposed linguistic disorder markers provide useful insights into gradual language impairment associated with disease progression., Comment: It has been accepted to appear at EMNLP23

We study the influence of different activation functions in the output layer of deep neural network models for soft and hard label prediction in the learning with disagreement task. In this task, the goal is to quantify the amount of disagreement via predicting soft labels. To predict the soft labels, we use BERT-based preprocessors and encoders and vary the activation function used in the output layer, while keeping other parameters constant. The soft labels are then used for the hard label prediction. The activation functions considered are sigmoid as well as a step-function that is added to the model post-training and a sinusoidal activation function, which is introduced for the first time in this paper., Comment: Accepted in ACL 2023 SemEval Workshop as selected task paper

In light of unprecedented increases in the popularity of the internet and social media, comment moderation has never been a more relevant task. Semi-automated comment moderation systems greatly aid human moderators by either automatically classifying the examples or allowing the moderators to prioritize which comments to consider first. However, the concept of inappropriate content is often subjective, and such content can be conveyed in many subtle and indirect ways. In this work, we propose CoRAL -- a language and culturally aware Croatian Abusive dataset covering phenomena of implicitness and reliance on local and global context. We show experimentally that current models degrade when comments are not explicit and further degrade when language skill and context knowledge are required to interpret the comment., Comment: Findings of the ACL: AACL-IJCNLP, 2022

User-generated content is full of misspellings. Rather than being just random noise, we hypothesise that many misspellings contain hidden semantics that can be leveraged for language understanding tasks. This paper presents a fine-grained annotated corpus of misspelling in Thai, together with an analysis of misspelling intention and its possible semantics to get a better understanding of the misspelling patterns observed in the corpus. In addition, we introduce two approaches to incorporate the semantics of misspelling: Misspelling Average Embedding (MAE) and Misspelling Semantic Tokens (MST). Experiments on a sentiment analysis task confirm our overall hypothesis: additional semantics from misspelling can boost the micro F1 score up to 0.4-2%, while blindly normalising misspelling is harmful and suboptimal., Comment: To be published in LREC2022

In text-to-SQL tasks -- as in much of NLP -- compositional generalization is a major challenge: neural networks struggle with compositional generalization where training and test distributions differ. However, most recent attempts to improve this are based on word-level synthetic data or specific dataset splits to generate compositional biases. In this work, we propose a clause-level compositional example generation method. We first split the sentences in the Spider text-to-SQL dataset into sub-sentences, annotating each sub-sentence with its corresponding SQL clause, resulting in a new dataset Spider-SS. We then construct a further dataset, Spider-CG, by composing Spider-SS sub-sentences in different combinations, to test the ability of models to generalize compositionally. Experiments show that existing models suffer significant performance degradation when evaluated on Spider-CG, even though every sub-sentence is seen during training. To deal with this problem, we modify a number of state-of-the-art models to train on the segmented data of Spider-SS, and we show that this method improves the generalization performance., Comment: To appear in Findings of NAACL 2022

Moderation of reader comments is a significant problem for online news platforms. Here, we experiment with models for automatic moderation, using a dataset of comments from a popular Croatian newspaper. Our analysis shows that while comments that violate the moderation rules mostly share common linguistic and thematic features, their content varies across the different sections of the newspaper. We therefore make our models topic-aware, incorporating semantic features from a topic model into the classification decision. Our results show that topic information improves the performance of the model, increases its confidence in correct outputs, and helps us understand the model's outputs., Comment: Accepted to RANLP 2021

Recently, there has been significant progress in studying neural networks for translating text descriptions into SQL queries under the zero-shot cross-domain setting. Despite achieving good performance on some public benchmarks, we observe that existing text-to-SQL models do not generalize when facing domain knowledge that does not frequently appear in the training data, which may render the worse prediction performance for unseen domains. In this work, we investigate the robustness of text-to-SQL models when the questions require rarely observed domain knowledge. In particular, we define five types of domain knowledge and introduce Spider-DK (DK is the abbreviation of domain knowledge), a human-curated dataset based on the Spider benchmark for text-to-SQL translation. NL questions in Spider-DK are selected from Spider, and we modify some samples by adding domain knowledge that reflects real-world question paraphrases. We demonstrate that the prediction accuracy dramatically drops on samples that require such domain knowledge, even if the domain knowledge appears in the training set, and the model provides the correct predictions for related training samples., Comment: To appear in EMNLP 2021

Addressing the mismatch between natural language descriptions and the corresponding SQL queries is a key challenge for text-to-SQL translation. To bridge this gap, we propose an SQL intermediate representation (IR) called Natural SQL (NatSQL). Specifically, NatSQL preserves the core functionalities of SQL, while it simplifies the queries as follows: (1) dispensing with operators and keywords such as GROUP BY, HAVING, FROM, JOIN ON, which are usually hard to find counterparts for in the text descriptions; (2) removing the need for nested subqueries and set operators; and (3) making schema linking easier by reducing the required number of schema items. On Spider, a challenging text-to-SQL benchmark that contains complex and nested SQL queries, we demonstrate that NatSQL outperforms other IRs, and significantly improves the performance of several previous SOTA models. Furthermore, for existing models that do not support executable SQL generation, NatSQL easily enables them to generate executable SQL queries, and achieves the new state-of-the-art execution accuracy., Comment: To appear in EMNLP Findings 2021

Dementia affects cognitive functions of adults, including memory, language, and behaviour. Standard diagnostic biomarkers such as MRI are costly, whilst neuropsychological tests suffer from sensitivity issues in detecting dementia onset. The analysis of speech and language has emerged as a promising and non-intrusive technology to diagnose and monitor dementia. Currently, most work in this direction ignores the multi-modal nature of human communication and interactive aspects of everyday conversational interaction. Moreover, most studies ignore changes in cognitive status over time due to the lack of consistent longitudinal data. Here we introduce a novel fine-grained longitudinal multi-modal corpus collected in a natural setting from healthy controls and people with dementia over two phases, each spanning 28 sessions. The corpus consists of spoken conversations, a subset of which are transcribed, as well as typed and written thoughts and associated extra-linguistic information such as pen strokes and keystrokes. We present the data collection process and describe the corpus in detail. Furthermore, we establish baselines for capturing longitudinal changes in language across different modalities for two cohorts, healthy controls and people with dementia, outlining future research directions enabled by the corpus.

The current dominance of deep neural networks in natural language processing is based on contextual embeddings such as ELMo, BERT, and BERT derivatives. Most existing work focuses on English; in contrast, we present here the first multilingual empirical comparison of two ELMo and several monolingual and multilingual BERT models using 14 tasks in nine languages. In monolingual settings, our analysis shows that monolingual BERT models generally dominate, with a few exceptions such as the dependency parsing task, where they are not competitive with ELMo models trained on large corpora. In cross-lingual settings, BERT models trained on only a few languages mostly do best, closely followed by massively multilingual BERT models., Comment: 45 pages

We present two multimodal fusion-based deep learning models that consume ASR transcribed speech and acoustic data simultaneously to classify whether a speaker in a structured diagnostic task has Alzheimer's Disease and to what degree, evaluating the ADReSSo challenge 2021 data. Our best model, a BiLSTM with highway layers using words, word probabilities, disfluency features, pause information, and a variety of acoustic features, achieves an accuracy of 84% and RSME error prediction of 4.26 on MMSE cognitive scores. While predicting cognitive decline is more challenging, our models show improvement using the multimodal approach and word probabilities, disfluency and pause information over word-only models. We show considerable gains for AD classification using multimodal fusion and gating, which can effectively deal with noisy inputs from acoustic features and ASR hypotheses., Comment: INTERSPEECH 2021. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2106.09668

This paper is a submission to the Alzheimer's Dementia Recognition through Spontaneous Speech (ADReSS) challenge, which aims to develop methods that can assist in the automated prediction of severity of Alzheimer's Disease from speech data. We focus on acoustic and natural language features for cognitive impairment detection in spontaneous speech in the context of Alzheimer's Disease Diagnosis and the mini-mental state examination (MMSE) score prediction. We proposed a model that obtains unimodal decisions from different LSTMs, one for each modality of text and audio, and then combines them using a gating mechanism for the final prediction. We focused on sequential modelling of text and audio and investigated whether the disfluencies present in individuals' speech relate to the extent of their cognitive impairment. Our results show that the proposed classification and regression schemes obtain very promising results on both development and test sets. This suggests Alzheimer's Disease can be detected successfully with sequence modeling of the speech data of medical sessions.

Recently, there has been significant progress in studying neural networks to translate text descriptions into SQL queries. Despite achieving good performance on some public benchmarks, existing text-to-SQL models typically rely on the lexical matching between words in natural language (NL) questions and tokens in table schemas, which may render the models vulnerable to attacks that break the schema linking mechanism. In this work, we investigate the robustness of text-to-SQL models to synonym substitution. In particular, we introduce Spider-Syn, a human-curated dataset based on the Spider benchmark for text-to-SQL translation. NL questions in Spider-Syn are modified from Spider, by replacing their schema-related words with manually selected synonyms that reflect real-world question paraphrases. We observe that the accuracy dramatically drops by eliminating such explicit correspondence between NL questions and table schemas, even if the synonyms are not adversarially selected to conduct worst-case adversarial attacks. Finally, we present two categories of approaches to improve the model robustness. The first category of approaches utilizes additional synonym annotations for table schemas by modifying the model input, while the second category is based on adversarial training. We demonstrate that both categories of approaches significantly outperform their counterparts without the defense, and the first category of approaches are more effective., Comment: To appear in ACL 2021

We describe a set of experiments for building a temporal mental health dynamics system. We utilise a pre-existing methodology for distant-supervision of mental health data mining from social media platforms and deploy the system during the global COVID-19 pandemic as a case study. Despite the challenging nature of the task, we produce encouraging results, both explicit to the global pandemic and implicit to a global phenomenon, Christmas Depression, supported by the literature. We propose a methodology for providing insight into temporal mental health dynamics to be utilised for strategic decision-making.

State of the art natural language processing tools are built on context-dependent word embeddings, but no direct method for evaluating these representations currently exists. Standard tasks and datasets for intrinsic evaluation of embeddings are based on judgements of similarity, but ignore context; standard tasks for word sense disambiguation take account of context but do not provide continuous measures of meaning similarity. This paper describes an effort to build a new dataset, CoSimLex, intended to fill this gap. Building on the standard pairwise similarity task of SimLex-999, it provides context-dependent similarity measures; covers not only discrete differences in word sense but more subtle, graded changes in meaning; and covers not only a well-resourced language (English) but a number of less-resourced languages. We define the task and evaluation metrics, outline the dataset collection methodology, and describe the status of the dataset so far.

One of the fundamental requirements for models of semantic processing in dialogue is incrementality: a model must reflect how people interpret and generate language at least on a word-by-word basis, and handle phenomena such as fragments, incomplete and jointly-produced utterances. We show that the incremental word-by-word parsing process of Dynamic Syntax (DS) can be assigned a compositional distributional semantics, with the composition operator of DS corresponding to the general operation of tensor contraction from multilinear algebra. We provide abstract semantic decorations for the nodes of DS trees, in terms of vectors, tensors, and sums thereof; using the latter to model the underspecified elements crucial to assigning partial representations during incremental processing. As a working example, we give an instantiation of this theory using plausibility tensors of compositional distributional semantics, and show how our framework can incrementally assign a semantic plausibility measure as it parses phrases and sentences., Comment: accepted in SemDial 2018: https://semdial.hypotheses.org/program/accepted-papers

This paper presents a geometric approach to the problem of modelling the relationship between words and concepts, focusing in particular on analogical phenomena in language and cognition. Grounded in recent theories regarding geometric conceptual spaces, we begin with an analysis of existing static distributional semantic models and move on to an exploration of a dynamic approach to using high dimensional spaces of word meaning to project subspaces where analogies can potentially be solved in an online, contextualised way. The crucial element of this analysis is the positioning of statistics in a geometric environment replete with opportunities for interpretation., Comment: In Proceedings SLPCS 2016, arXiv:1608.01018

We present STIR (STrongly Incremental Repair detection), a system that detects speech repairs and edit terms on transcripts incrementally with minimal latency. STIR uses information-theoretic measures from n-gram models as its principal decision features in a pipeline of classifiers detecting the different stages of repairs. Results on the Switchboard disfluency tagged corpus show utterance-final accuracy on a par with state-of-the-art incremental repair detection methods, but with better incremental accuracy, faster time-to-detection and less computational overhead. We evaluate its performance using incremental metrics and propose new repair processing evaluation standards., Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures, EMNLP conference long paper 2014

We provide a comparative study between neural word representations and traditional vector spaces based on co-occurrence counts, in a number of compositional tasks. We use three different semantic spaces and implement seven tensor-based compositional models, which we then test (together with simpler additive and multiplicative approaches) in tasks involving verb disambiguation and sentence similarity. To check their scalability, we additionally evaluate the spaces using simple compositional methods on larger-scale tasks with less constrained language: paraphrase detection and dialogue act tagging. In the more constrained tasks, co-occurrence vectors are competitive, although choice of compositional method is important; on the larger-scale tasks, they are outperformed by neural word embeddings, which show robust, stable performance across the tasks., Comment: To be published in EMNLP 2014

Social media have substantially altered the way brands and businesses advertise: Online Social Networks provide brands with more versatile and dynamic channels for advertisement than traditional media (e.g., TV and radio). Levels of engagement in such media are usually measured in terms of content adoption (e.g., likes and retweets) and sentiment, around a given topic. However, sentiment analysis and topic identification are both non-trivial tasks. In this paper, using data collected from Twitter as a case study, we analyze how engagement and sentiment in promoted content spread over a 10-day period. We find that promoted tweets lead to higher positive sentiment than promoted trends; although promoted trends pay off in response volume. We observe that levels of engagement for the brand and promoted content are highest on the first day of the campaign, and fall considerably thereafter. However, we show that these insights depend on the use of robust machine learning and natural language processing techniques to gather focused, relevant datasets, and to accurately gauge sentiment, rather than relying on the simple keyword- or frequency-based metrics sometimes used in social media research.