Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Vocabulary Adaptation for Domain Adaptation in Neural Machine Translation

Neural network methods exhibit strong performance only in a few resource-rich domains. Practitioners therefore employ domain adaptation from resource-rich domains that are, in most cases, distant from the target domain. Domain adaptation between distant domains (e.g., movie subtitles and research papers), however, cannot be performed effectively due to mismatches in vocabulary; it will encounter many domain-specific words (e.g., “angstrom”) and words whose meanings shift across domains (e.g., “conductor”). In this study, aiming to solve these vocabulary mismatches in domain adaptation for neural machine translation (NMT), we propose vocabulary adaptation, a simple method for effective fine-tuning that adapts embedding layers in a given pretrained NMT model to the target domain. Prior to fine-tuning, our method replaces the embedding layers of the NMT model by projecting general word embeddings induced from monolingual data in a target domain onto a source-domain embedding space. Experimental results indicate that our method improves the performance of conventional fine-tuning by 3.86 and 3.28 BLEU points in En-Ja and De-En translation, respectively.
Fine-tuning BERT for multi-domain and multi-label incivil language detection

Incivility is a problem on social media, and it comes in many forms (name-calling, vulgarity, threats, etc.) and domains (microblog posts, online news comments, Wikipedia edits, etc.). Training machine learning models to detect such incivility must handle the multi-label and multi-domain nature of the problem. We present a BERT-based model for incivility detection and propose several approaches for training it for multi-label and multi-domain datasets. We find that individual binary classifiers outperform a joint multi-label classifier, and that simply combining multiple domains of training data outperforms other recently-proposed fine tuning strategies. We also establish new state-of-the-art performance on several incivility detection datasets.
Integrating Task Specific Information into Pretrained Language Models for Low Resource Fine Tuning

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have improved the performance of natural language understanding in recent years. Such models are pretrained on large corpora, which encode the general prior knowledge of natural languages but are agnostic to information characteristic of downstream tasks. This often results in overfitting when fine-tuned with low resource datasets where task-specific information is limited. In this paper, we integrate label information as a task-specific prior into the self-attention component of pretrained BERT models. Experiments on several benchmarks and real-word datasets suggest that the proposed approach can largely improve the performance of pretrained models when fine-tuning with small datasets.
Punctuation Restoration using Transformer Models for High-and Low-Resource Languages

Punctuation restoration is a common post-processing problem for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. It is important to improve the readability of the transcribed text for the human reader and facilitate NLP tasks. Current state-of-art address this problem using different deep learning models. Recently, transformer models have proven their success in downstream NLP tasks, and these models have been explored very little for the punctuation restoration problem. In this work, we explore different transformer based models and propose an augmentation strategy for this task, focusing on high-resource (English) and low-resource (Bangla) languages. For English, we obtain comparable state-of-the-art results, while for Bangla, it is the ﬁrst reported work, which can serve as a strong baseline for future work. We have made our developed Bangla dataset publicly available for the research community.
Using Transfer-based Language Models to Detect Hateful and Offensive Language Online

Distinguishing hate speech from non-hate offensive language is challenging, as hate speech not always includes offensive slurs and offensive language not always express hate. Here, four deep learners based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), with either general or domain-specific language models, were tested against two datasets containing tweets labelled as either ‘Hateful’, ‘Normal’ or ‘Offensive’. The results indicate that the attention-based models profoundly confuse hate speech with offensive and normal language. However, the pre-trained models outperform state-of-the-art results in terms of accurately predicting the hateful instances.
Do We Need to Create Big Datasets to Learn a Task?

Deep Learning research has been largely accelerated by the development of huge datasets such as Imagenet. The general trend has been to create big datasets to make a deep neural network learn. A huge amount of resources is being spent in creating these big datasets, developing models, training them, and iterating this process to dominate leaderboards. We argue that the trend of creating bigger datasets needs to be revised by better leveraging the power of pre-trained language models. Since the language models have already been pre-trained with huge amount of data and have basic linguistic knowledge, there is no need to create big datasets to learn a task. Instead, we need to create a dataset that is sufficient for the model to learn various task-specific terminologies, such as ‘Entailment’, ‘Neutral’, and ‘Contradiction’ for NLI. As evidence, we show that RoBERTA is able to achieve near-equal performance on 2% data of SNLI. We also observe competitive zero-shot generalization on several OOD datasets. In this paper, we propose a baseline algorithm to find the optimal dataset for learning a task.
Cancer Registry Information Extraction via Transfer Learning

A cancer registry is a critical and massive database for which various types of domain knowledge are needed and whose maintenance requires labor-intensive data curation. In order to facilitate the curation process for building a high-quality and integrated cancer registry database, we compiled a cross-hospital corpus and applied neural network methods to develop a natural language processing system for extracting cancer registry variables buried in unstructured pathology reports. The performance of the developed networks was compared with various baselines using standard micro-precision, recall and F-measure. Furthermore, we conducted experiments to study the feasibility of applying transfer learning to rapidly develop a well-performing system for processing reports from different sources that might be presented in different writing styles and formats. The results demonstrate that the transfer learning method enables us to develop a satisfactory system for a new hospital with only a few annotations and suggest more opportunities to reduce the burden of cancer registry curation.
On the Use of Web Search to Improve Scientific Collections

Despite the advancements in search engine features, ranking methods, technologies, and the availability of programmable APIs, current-day open-access digital libraries still rely on crawl-based approaches for acquiring their underlying document collections. In this paper, we propose a novel search-driven framework for acquiring documents for such scientific portals. Within our framework, publicly-available research paper titles and author names are used as queries to a Web search engine. We were able to obtain ~267,000 unique research papers through our fully-automated framework using ~76,000 queries, resulting in almost 200,000 more papers than the number of queries. Moreover, through a combination of title and author name search, we were able to recover 78% of the original searched titles.
OpenUE: An Open Toolkit of Universal Extraction from Text

Natural language processing covers a wide variety of tasks with token-level or sentence-level understandings. In this paper, we provide a simple insight that most tasks can be represented in a single universal extraction format. We introduce a prototype model and provide an open-source and extensible toolkit called OpenUE for various extraction tasks. OpenUE allows developers to train custom models to extract information from the text and supports quick model validation for researchers. Besides, OpenUE provides various functional modules to maintain sufficient modularity and extensibility. Except for the toolkit, we also deploy an online demo with restful APIs to support real-time extraction without training and deploying. Additionally, the online system can extract information in various tasks, including relational triple extraction, slot & intent detection, event extraction, and so on. We release the source code, datasets, and pre-trained models to promote future researches in http://github.com/zjunlp/openue.
Coreference for Discourse Parsing: A Neural Approach

We present preliminary results on investigating the benefits of coreference resolution features for neural RST discourse parsing by considering different levels of coupling of the discourse parser with the coreference resolver. In particular, starting with a strong baseline neural parser unaware of any coreference information, we compare a parser which utilizes only the output of a neural coreference resolver, with a more sophisticated model, where discourse parsing and coreference resolution are jointly learned in a neural multitask fashion. Results indicate that these initial attempts to incorporate coreference information do not boost the performance of discourse parsing in a statistically significant way.
Consistent Response Generation with Controlled Specificity

We propose a method to control the specificity of responses while maintaining the consistency with the utterances. We first design a metric based on pointwise mutual information, which measures the co-occurrence degree between an utterance and a response. To control the specificity of generated responses, we add the distant supervision based on the co-occurrence degree and a PMI-based word prediction mechanism to a sequence-to-sequence model. With these mechanisms, our model outputs the words with optimal specificity for a given specificity control variable. In experiments with open-domain dialogue corpora, automatic and human evaluation results confirm that our model controls the specificity of the response more sensitively than the conventional model and can generate highly consistent responses.
Diversify Question Generation with Continuous Content Selectors and Question Type Modeling

Generating questions based on answers and relevant contexts is a challenging task. Recent work mainly pays attention to the quality of a single generated question. However, question generation is actually a one-to-many problem, as it is possible to raise questions with different focuses on contexts and various means of expression. In this paper, we explore the diversity of question generation and come up with methods from these two aspects. Specifically, we relate contextual focuses with content selectors, which are modeled by a continuous latent variable with the technique of conditional variational auto-encoder (CVAE). In the realization of CVAE, a multimodal prior distribution is adopted to allow for more diverse content selectors. To take into account various means of expression, question types are explicitly modeled and a diversity-promoting algorithm is proposed further. Experimental results on public datasets show that our proposed method can significantly improve the diversity of generated questions, especially from the perspective of using different question types. Overall, our proposed method achieves a better trade-off between generation quality and diversity compared with existing approaches.
MeDAL: Medical Abbreviation Disambiguation Dataset for Natural Language Understanding Pretraining

One of the biggest challenges that prohibit the use of many current NLP methods in clinical settings is the availability of public datasets. In this work, we present MeDAL, a large medical text dataset curated for abbreviation disambiguation, designed for natural language understanding pre-training in the medical domain. We pre-trained several models of common architectures on this dataset and empirically showed that such pre-training leads to improved performance and convergence speed when fine-tuning on downstream medical tasks.
InVeRo: Making Semantic Role Labeling Accessible with Intelligible Verbs and Roles

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is deeply dependent on complex linguistic resources and sophisticated neural models, which makes the task difficult to approach for non-experts. To address this issue we present a new platform named Intelligible Verbs and Roles (InVeRo). This platform provides access to a new verb resource, VerbAtlas, and a state-of-the-art pretrained implementation of a neural, span-based architecture for SRL. Both the resource and the system provide human-readable verb sense and semantic role information, with an easy to use Web interface and RESTful APIs available at http://nlp.uniroma1. it/invero.
Attending to Long-Distance Document Context for Sequence Labeling

We present in this work a method for incorporating global context in long documents when making local decisions in sequence labeling problems like NER. Inspired by work in featurized log-linear models (Chieu and Ng, 2002; Sutton and McCallum, 2004), our model learns to attend to multiple mentions of the same word type in generating a representation for each token in context, extending that work to learning representations that can be incorporated into modern neural models. Attending to broader context at test time provides complementary information to pretraining (Gururangan et al., 2020), yields strong gains over equivalently parameterized models lacking such context, and performs best at recognizing entities with high TF-IDF scores (i.e., those that are important within a document).
Understanding the Source of Semantic Regularities in Word Embeddings

Semantic relations are core to how humans understand and express concepts in the real world using language. Recently, there has been a thread of research aimed at modeling these relations by learning vector representations from text corpora. Most of these approaches focus strictly on leveraging the co-occurrences of relationship word pairs within sentences. In this paper, we investigate the hypothesis that examples of a lexical relation in a corpus are fundamental to a neural word embedding’s ability to complete analogies involving the relation. Our experiments, in which we remove all known examples of a relation from training corpora, show only marginal degradation in analogy completion performance involving the removed relation. This finding enhances our understanding of neural word embeddings, showing that co-occurrence information of a particular semantic relation is the not the main source of their structural regularity.
Context-aware Stand-alone Neural Spelling Correction

Existing natural language processing systems are vulnerable to noisy inputs resulting from misspellings. On the contrary, humans can easily infer the corresponding correct words from their misspellings and surrounding context. Inspired by this, we address the stand-alone spelling correction problem, which only corrects the spelling of each token without additional token insertion or deletion, by utilizing both spelling information and global context representations. We present a simple yet powerful solution that jointly detects and corrects misspellings as a sequence labeling task by fine-turning a pre-trained language model. Our solution outperform the previous state-of-the-art result by 12.8% absolute F0.5 score.
Classification of Syncope Cases in Norwegian Medical Records

Loss of consciousness, so-called syncope, is a commonly occurring symptom associated with worse prognosis for a number of heart-related diseases. We present a comparison of methods for a diagnosis classification task in Norwegian clinical notes, targeting syncope, i.e. fainting cases. We find that an often neglected baseline with keyword matching constitutes a rather strong basis, but more advanced methods do offer some improvement in classification performance, especially a convolutional neural network model. The developed pipeline is planned to be used for quantifying unregistered syncope cases in Norway.
Understanding Weekly COVID-19 Concerns through Dynamic Content-Specific LDA Topic Modeling

The novelty and global scale of the COVID-19 pandemic has lead to rapid societal changes in a short span of time. As government policy and health measures shift, public perceptions and concerns also change, an evolution documented within discourse on social media.We propose a dynamic content-specific LDA topic modeling technique that can help to identify different domains of COVID-specific discourse that can be used to track societal shifts in concerns or views. Our experiments show that these model-derived topics are more coherent than standard LDA topics, and also provide new features that are more helpful in prediction of COVID-19 related outcomes including social mobility and unemployment rate.
Deeply Embedded Knowledge Representation & Reasoning For Natural Language Question Answering: A Practitioner’s Perspective

Successful application of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is largely limited by the availability of a robust and general purpose natural language parser. Even though several projects have been launched in the pursuit of developing a universal meaning representation language, the existence of an accurate universal parser is far from reality. This has severely limited the application of knowledge representation and reasoning (KR) in the field of NLP and also prevented a proper evaluation of KR based NLU systems. Our goal is to build KR based systems for Natural Language Understanding without relying on a parser. Towards this we propose a method named Deeply Embedded Knowledge Representation & Reasoning (DeepEKR) where we replace the parser by a neural network, soften the symbolic representation so that a deterministic mapping exists between the parser neural network and the interpretable logical form, and finally replace the symbolic solver by an equivalent neural network, so the model can be trained end-to-end. We evaluate our method with respect to the task of Qualitative Word Problem Solving on the two available datasets (QuaRTz and QuaRel). Our system achieves same accuracy as that of the state-of-the-art accuracy on QuaRTz, outperforms the state-of-the-art on QuaRel and severely outperforms a traditional KR based system. The results show that the bias introduced by a KR solution does not prevent it from doing a better job at the end task. Moreover, our method is interpretable due to the bias introduced by the KR approach.
Reconstructing Manual Information Extraction with DB-to-Document Backprojection: Experiments in the Life Science Domain

We introduce a novel scientific document processing task for making previously inaccessible information in printed paper documents available to automatic processing. We describe our data set of scanned documents and data records from the biological database SABIO-RK, provide a definition of the task, and report findings from preliminary experiments. Rigorous evaluation proved challenging due to lack of gold-standard data and a difficult notion of correctness. Qualitative inspection of results, however, showed the feasibility and usefulness of the task
Alleviating Digitization Errors in Named Entity Recognition for Historical Documents

This paper tackles the task of named entity recognition (NER) applied to digitized historical texts obtained from processing digital images of newspapers using optical character recognition (OCR) techniques. We argue that the main challenge for this task is that the OCR process leads to misspellings and linguistic errors in the output text. Moreover, historical variations can be present in aged documents, which can impact the performance of the NER process. We conduct a comparative evaluation on two historical datasets in German and French against previous state-of-the-art models, and we propose a model based on a hierarchical stack of Transformers to approach the NER task for historical data. Our findings show that the proposed model clearly improves the results on both historical datasets, and does not degrade the results for modern datasets.
Tweeki: Linking Named Entities on Twitter to a Knowledge Graph

To identify what entities are being talked about in tweets, we need to automatically link named entities that appear in tweets to structured KBs like WikiData. Existing approaches often struggle with such short, noisy texts, or their complex design and reliance on supervision make them brittle, difficult to use and maintain, and lose significance over time. Further, there is a lack of a large, linked corpus of tweets to aid researchers, along with lack of gold dataset to evaluate the accuracy of entity linking. In this paper, we introduce (1) Tweeki, an unsupervised, modular entity linking system for Twitter, (2) TweekiData, a large, automatically-annotated corpus of Tweets linked to entities in WikiData, and (3) TweekiGold, a gold dataset for entity linking evaluation. Through comprehensive analysis, we show that Tweeki is comparable to the performance of recent state-of-the-art entity linkers models, the dataset is of high quality, and a use case of how the dataset can be used to improve downstream tasks in social media analysis (geolocation prediction).
A Little Bit Is Worse Than None: Ranking with Limited Training Data

Researchers have proposed simple yet effective techniques for the retrieval problem based on using BERT as a relevance classifier to rerank initial candidates from keyword search. In this work, we tackle the challenge of fine-tuning these models for specific domains in a data and computationally efficient manner. Typically, researchers fine-tune models using corpus-specific labeled data from sources such as TREC. We first answer the question: How much data of this type do we need? Recognizing that the most computationally efficient training is no training, we explore zero-shot ranking using BERT models that have already been fine-tuned with the large MS MARCO passage retrieval dataset. We arrive at the surprising and novel finding that “some” labeled in-domain data can be worse than none at all.
Open Domain Question Answering based on Text Enhanced Knowledge Graph with Hyperedge Infusion

The incompleteness of knowledge base (KB) is a vital factor limiting the performance of question answering (QA). This paper proposes a novel QA method by leveraging text information to enhance the incomplete KB. The model enriches the entity representation through semantic information contained in the text, and employs graph convolutional networks to update the entity status. Furthermore, to exploit the latent structural information of text, we treat the text as hyperedges connecting entities among it to complement the deficient relations in KB, and hypergraph convolutional networks are further applied to reason on the hypergraph-formed text. Extensive experiments on the WebQuestionsSP benchmark with different KB settings prove the effectiveness of our model.