Canada

Patent descriptions are a crucial component of patent applications, as they are key to understanding the invention and play a significant role in securing patent grants. While discursive analyses have been undertaken for scientific articles, they have not been as thoroughly explored for patent descriptions, despite the increasing importance of Intellectual Property and the constant rise of the number of patent applications. In this study, we propose an annotation scheme containing 16 classes that allows categorizing each sentence in patent descriptions according to their discursive roles. We publish an experimental human-annotated corpus of 16 patent descriptions and analyze challenges that may be encountered in such work. This work can be base for an automated annotation and thus contribute to enriching linguistic resources in the patent domain.

ACL 2023

Annotating Discursive Roles of Sentences in Patent Descriptions

patent drafting

discursive annotation

patent description

### Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025)

Message from the General Chair: 
*It is my great pleasure and honor to welcome you to the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2025), held in beautiful Vienna, Austria, from July 27 to August 1, 2025. ACL2025continues our field’s tradition of excellence in scholarship, innovation, and inclusivity, and I am deeply grateful to the many volunteers who have worked tirelessly to bring this event to life.* 
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ACL 2025

Welcome to The 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 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.

Cross-lingual annotation projection is a practical method for improving performance on low resource structured prediction tasks. An important step in annotation projection is obtaining alignments between the source and target texts, which enables the mapping of annotations across the texts. By manually correcting automatically generated alignments, we examine the impact of alignment quality—automatic, manual, and mixed—on downstream performance for two information extraction tasks and quantify the trade-off between annotation effort and model performance.

The Effect of Alignment Correction on Cross-Lingual Annotation Projection

Annotators are not fungible. Their demographics, life experiences, and backgrounds all contribute to how they label data. However, NLP has only recently considered how annotator identity might influence their decisions. Here, we present POPQUORN (the POtato-Prolific dataset for QUestion-Answering, Offensiveness, text Rewriting, and politeness rating with demographic Nuance). POPQUORN contains 45,000 annotations from 1,484 annotators, drawn from a representative sample regarding sex, age, and race as the US population. Through a series of analyses, we show that annotators' background plays a significant role in their judgments. Further, our work shows that backgrounds not previously considered in NLP (e.g., education), are meaningful and should be considered. Our study suggests that understanding the background of annotators and collecting labels from a demographically balanced pool of crowd workers is important to reduce the bias of datasets. The dataset, annotator background, and annotation interface are available at: https://github.com/Jiaxin-Pei/Potato-Prolific-Dataset.

When Do Annotator Demographics Matter? Measuring the Influence of Annotator Demographics with the POPQUORN Dataset

This paper presents HaVQA, the first multimodal dataset for visual question-answering (VQA) tasks in the Hausa language. The dataset was created by manually translating 6,022 English question-answer pairs, which are associated with 1,555 unique images from the Visual Genome dataset. As a result, the dataset provides 12,044 gold standard English-Hausa parallel sentences that were translated in a fashion that guarantees their semantic match with the corresponding visual information. We conducted several baseline experiments on the dataset, including visual question answering, visual question elicitation, text-only and multimodal machine translation.

HaVQA: A Dataset for Visual Question Answering and Multimodal Research in Hausa Language

The mythological domain has various ways of expressing events and background knowledge. Using data extracted according to the hylistic approach (Zgoll 2019), we annotated a data set of 6315 German sentences from various mythological contexts and geographical origins, like Ancient Greece and Rome or Mesopotamia, into four categories: single-point events (e.g. actions), durative-constant (background knowledge, continuous states), durative-initial, and durative-resultative. This data is used to train a classifier, which is able to reliably distinguish event types.

Orpheus Came to His End by Being Struck by a Thunderbolt': Annotating Events in Mythological Sequences

We present a novel dataset for physical and abstract plausibility of events in English. Based on naturally occurring sentences extracted from Wikipedia, we infiltrate degrees of abstractness, and automatically generate perturbed pseudo-implausible events. We annotate a filtered and balanced subset for plausibility using crowd-sourcing, and perform extensive cleansing to ensure annotation quality. In-depth quantitative analyses indicate that annotators favor plausibility over implausibility and disagree more on implausible events. Furthermore, our plausibility dataset is the first to capture abstractness in events to the same extent as concreteness, and
we find that event abstractness has an impact on plausibility ratings: 
more concrete event participants trigger a perception of implausibility.

A Dataset for Physical and Abstract Plausibility and Sources of Human Disagreement

The Turkish particle dA is a focus-associated enclitic, and it can act as a discourse connective conveying multiple senses, like additive, contrastive, causal etc. Like many other linguistic expressions, it is subject to usage ambiguity and creates a challenge in natural language automatization tasks. For the first time, we annotate the discourse and non-discourse connnective occurrences of dA in Turkish with the PDTB principles. Using a minimal set of linguistic features, we develop binary classifiers to distinguish its discourse connective usage from its other usages. We show that despite its ability to cliticize to any syntactic type, variable position in the sentence and having a wide argument span, its discourse/non-discourse connective usage can be annotated reliably and its discourse usage can be disambiguated by exploiting local cues.

Annotating and Disambiguating the Discourse Usage of the Enclitic dA in Turkish

This work presents two corpora based on excerpts from two German novels with an infor- mal narration style. We performed fine-grained multi-layer annotations of animate referents, assigning local and global prominence-lending features to the annotated referring expressions. In addition, our corpora include annotations of intra-sentential segments, which can serve as a more reliable unit of length measurement. Furthermore, we present two exemplary studies demonstrating how to use these corpora.

Multi-layered Annotation of Conversation-like Narratives in German

Most tasks in NLP require labeled data. Data labeling is often done on crowdsourcing platforms due to scalability reasons. However, publishing data on public platforms can only be done if no privacy-relevant information is included.
Textual data often contains sensitive information like person names or locations. In this work, we investigate how removing personally identifiable information (PII) as well as applying differential privacy (DP) rewriting can enable text with privacy-relevant information to be used for crowdsourcing. We find that DP-rewriting before crowdsourcing can preserve privacy while still leading to good label quality
for certain tasks and data. PII-removal led to good label quality in all examined tasks, however, there are no privacy guarantees given.

Crowdsourcing on Sensitive Data with Privacy-Preserving Text Rewriting

The availability of annotated legal corpora is crucial for a number of tasks. Annotation is mostly assumed to be a straightforward task: as long as the annotation scheme is well defined and the guidelines are clear, annotators are expected to agree on the labels. This is not always the case, especially in legal annotation, which can be extremely difficult even for expert annotators. We propose a legal annotation procedure that takes into account annotator certainty and improves it through negotiation. We also collect annotator feedback and show that our approach contributes to a positive annotation environment. Our work invites reflection on often neglected ethical concerns regarding legal annotation.

Annotators-in-the-loop: Testing a Novel Annotation Procedure on Italian Case Law

We reports on a three-part series of original methods geared towards producing semantic annotations for the decompositional marker "again". The three methods are (i) exhaustive expert annotation based on a comprehensive set of guidelines, (ii) extension of expert annotation by predicting presuppositions with a Multinomial Naïve Bayes classifier in the context of a meta-analysis to optimize feature selection and (iii) quality-controlled crowdsourcing with ensuing evaluation and KMeans clustering of annotation vectors.

Next from ACL 2023

The Effect of Alignment Correction on Cross-Lingual Annotation Projection

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