10 accepted papers
A large body of research has found substantial gender bias in NLP systems. Most of this research takes a binary, essentialist view of gender: limiting its variation to the categories _men_ and _women_, conflating gender with sex, and ignoring different sexual identities. But gender and sexuality exi
Annotating event descriptions with their aspectual features is often seen as a pre-requisite to temporal reasoning. However, a recent study by Pruś et al. (2024) has shown that non-experts’ annotations of the aspectual class of English verb phrases can disagree with both expert linguistic annotation…
Many NLP researchers are experiencing an existential crisis triggered by the astonishing success of ChatGPT and other systems based on large language models (LLMs). After such a disruptive change to our understanding of the field, what is left to do? Taking a historical lens, we look for guidance fr…
Sigmoid output layers are widely used in multi-label classification (MLC) tasks, in which multiple labels can be assigned to any input. In many practical MLC tasks, the number of possible labels is in the thousands, often exceeding the number of input features and resulting in a low-rank output laye…
Sentiment analysis (SA) systems are used in many products and hundreds of languages. Gender and racial biases are well-studied in English SA systems, but understudied in other languages, with few resources for such studies. To remedy this, we build a counterfactual evaluation corpus for gender and r…
Sentiment analysis (SA) systems are widely deployed in many of the world's languages, and there is well-documented evidence of demographic bias in these systems. In languages beyond English, scarcer training data is often supplemented with transfer learning using pre-trained models, including multil…
Classifiers in natural language processing (NLP) often have a large number of output classes. For example, neural language models (LMs) and machine translation (MT) models both predict tokens from a vocabulary of thousands. The Softmax output layer of these models typically receives as input a dense…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems learn harmful societal biases that cause them to amplify inequality as they are deployed in more and more situations. To guide efforts at debiasing these systems, the NLP community relies on a variety of metrics that quantify bias in models. Some of these me…
Given a large amount of unannotated speech in a low-resource language, can we classify the speech utterances by topicƒ We consider this question in the setting where a small amount of speech in the low-resource language is paired with text translations in a high-resource language. We develop an effe…
Recent work on unsupervised term discovery (UTD) aims to identify and cluster repeated word-like units from audio alone. These systems are promising for some very low-resource languages where transcribed audio is unavailable, or where no written form of the language exists. However, in some cases it…