Span Modeling for Idiomaticity and Figurative Language Detection with Span Contrastive Loss

The category of figurative language contains many varieties, some of which are non-compositional in nature. This type of phrase or multi-word expression (MWE) includes idioms, which represent a single meaning that does not consist of the sum of its words. For language models, this presents a unique problem due to tokenization and adjacent contextual embeddings. Many large language models have overcome this issue with large phrase vocabulary, though immediate recognition frequently fails without one- or few-shot prompting or instruction finetuning. The best results have been achieved with BERT-based or LSTM finetuning approaches. The model in this paper contains one such variety. We propose BERT- and RoBERTa-based models finetuned with a combination of slot loss and span contrastive loss (SCL) with hard negative reweighting to improve idiomaticity detection, attaining state of the art sequence accuracy performance on existing datasets. Comparative ablation studies show the effectiveness of SCL and its generalizability. The geometric mean of F1 and sequence accuracy (SA) is also proposed to assess a model's span awareness and general performance together.

BiosERC: Integrating Biography Speakers Supported by LLMs for ERC Tasks

In the Emotion Recognition in Conversation task, recent investigations have utilized attention mechanisms exploring relationships among utterances from intra- and inter-speakers for modeling emotional interaction between them. However, attributes such as speaker personality traits remain unexplored and present challenges in terms of their applicability to other tasks or compatibility with diverse model architectures. Therefore, this work introduces a novel framework named BiosERC, which investigates speaker characteristics in a conversation. By employing Large Language Models (LLMs), we extract the "biographical information" of the speaker within a conversation as supplementary knowledge injected into the model to classify emotional labels for each utterance. Our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on three famous benchmark datasets: IEMOCAP, MELD, and EmoryNLP, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalization of our model and showcasing its potential for adaptation to various conversation analysis tasks. Our source code is available at https://github.com/yingjie7/BiosERC.