Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
DoTAT: A Domain-oriented Text Annotation Tool

We propose DoTAT, a domain-oriented text annotation tool. The tool designs and implements functions heavily in need in domain-oriented information extraction. Firstly, the tool supports a multi-person collaborative process with automatically merging and review, which can greatly improve the annotation accuracy. Secondly, the tool provides annotation of events, nested event and nested entity, which are frequently required in domain-related text structuring tasks. Finally, DoTAT provides visual annotation specification definition, automatic batch annotation and iterative annotation to improve annotation efficiency. Experiments on the ACE2005 dataset show that DoTAT can reduce the event annotation time by 19.7% compared with existing annotation tools. The accuracy without review is 84.09%, 1.35% higher than Brat and 2.59% higher than Webanno. The accuracy of DoTAT even reaches 93.76% with review. The demonstration video can be accessed from https://ecust-nlp-docker.oss-cn-shanghai.aliyuncs. com/dotat_demo. mp4. A live demo website is available at https://github.com/FXLP/MarkTool.
Conversational Bots for Psychotherapy: A Study of Generative Transformer Models Using Domain-specific Dialogues

Conversational bots have become non-traditional methods for therapy among individuals suffering from psychological illnesses. Leveraging deep neural generative language models, we propose a deep trainable neural conversational model for therapy-oriented response generation. We leverage transfer learning methods during training on therapy and counseling based data from Reddit and AlexanderStreet. This was done to adapt existing generative models – GPT2 and DialoGPT – to the task of automated dialog generation. Through quantitative evaluation of the linguistic quality, we observe that the dialog generation model - DialoGPT (345M) with transfer learning on video data attains scores similar to a human response baseline. However, human evaluation of responses by conversational bots show mostly signs of generic advice or information sharing instead of therapeutic interaction.
Machine Translation for Livonian: Catering to 20 Speakers

Livonian is one of the most endangered languages in Europe with just a tiny handful of speakers and virtually no publicly available corpora. In this paper we tackle the task of developing neural machine translation (NMT) between Livonian and English, with a two-fold aim: on one hand, preserving the language and on the other – enabling access to Livonian folklore, lifestories and other textual intangible heritage as well as making it easier to create further parallel corpora. We rely on Livonian’s linguistic similarity to Estonian and Latvian and collect parallel and monolingual data for the four languages for translation experiments. We combine different low-resource NMT techniques like zero-shot translation, cross-lingual transfer and synthetic data creation to reach the highest possible translation quality as well as to find which base languages are empirically more helpful for transfer to Livonian. The resulting NMT systems and the collected monolingual and parallel data, including a manually translated and verified translation benchmark, are publicly released via OPUS and Huggingface repositories.
Robust Product Classification with Instance-Dependent Noise

Noisy labels in large E-commerce product data (i.e., product items are placed into incorrect categories) is a critical issue for product categorization task because they are unavoidable, non-trivial to remove and degrade prediction performance significantly. Training a product title classification model which is robust to noisy labels in the data is very important to make product classification applications more practical. In this paper, we study the impact of instance-dependent noise to performance of product title classification by comparing our data denoising algorithm and different noise-resistance training algorithms which were designed to prevent a classifier model from over-fitting to noise. We develop a simple yet effective Deep Neural Network for product title classification to use as a base classifier. Along with recent methods of stimulating instance-dependent noise, we propose a novel noise stimulation algorithm based on product title similarity. Our experiments cover multiple datasets, various noise methods and different training solutions. Results uncover the limit of classification task when noise rate is not negligible and data distribution is highly skewed.
KADO@LT-EDI-ACL2022: BERT-based Ensembles for Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text

Depression is a common and serious mental illness that early detection can improve the patient’s symptoms and make depression easier to treat. This paper mainly introduces the relevant content of the task “Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text at DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022”. The goal of DepSign is to classify the signs of depression into three labels namely “not depressed”, “moderately depressed”, and “severely depressed” based on social media’s posts. In this paper, we propose a predictive ensemble model that utilizes the fine-tuned contextualized word embedding, ALBERT, DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BERT base model. We show that our model outperforms the baseline models in all considered metrics and achieves an F1 score of 54% and accuracy of 61%, ranking 5th on the leader-board for the DepSign task.
Communication and Coordination Challenges Mitigation in Offshore Software Development Outsourcing Relationships: Findings from Systematic Literature Review

— Over the last decade, many firms in the world have started adopting Global Software Development (GSD) in order to reduce software development cost, and access to qualified resources and modern technology. Due to the rapid development of ICTs, the GSD has become an acceptable business strategy with several paradigms. One of the rising business paradigms of GSD is Offshore Software Development Outsourcing (OSDO). The objective of this research is to provide mitigation advice for addressing communication and coordination challenges from vendors' perspectives in OSDO relationships. We have performed systematic literature review (SLR) process for identifying the practices/solutions for these challenges. We have identified 65 practices for addressing these challenges. This paper can help the OSDO vendor organizations to use the identified practices in order to address the communication and coordination challenges in OSDO relationships.
Predicate-Argument Based Bi-Encoder for Paraphrase Identification

Paraphrase identification involves identifying whether a pair of sentences express the same or similar meanings. While cross-encoders have achieved high performances across several benchmarks, bi-encoders such as SBERT have been widely applied to sentence pair tasks. They exhibit substantially lower computation complexity and are better suited to symmetric tasks. In this work, we adopt a bi-encoder approach to the paraphrase identification task, and investigate the impact of explicitly incorporating predicate-argument information into SBERT through weighted aggregation. Experiments on six paraphrase identification datasets demonstrate that, with a minimal increase in parameters, the proposed model is able to outperform SBERT/SRoBERTa significantly. Further, ablation studies reveal that the predicate-argument based component plays a significant role in the performance gain.
Towards Fine-grained Classification of Climate Change related Social Media Text

With climate change becoming a cause of concern worldwide, it becomes essential to gauge people’s reactions. This can help educate and spread awareness about it and help leaders improve decision-making. This work explores the fine-grained classification and Stance detection of climate change-related social media text. Firstly, we create two datasets, ClimateStance and ClimateEng, consisting of 3777 tweets each, posted during the 2019 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and comprehensively outline the dataset collection, annotation methodology, and dataset composition. Secondly, we propose the task of Climate Change stance detection based on our proposed ClimateStance dataset. Thirdly, we propose a fine-grained classification based on the ClimateEng dataset, classifying social media text into five categories: Disaster, Ocean/Water, Agriculture/Forestry, Politics, and General. We benchmark both the datasets for climate change stance detection and fine-grained classification using state-of-the-art methods in text classification. We also create a Reddit-based dataset for both the tasks, ClimateReddit, consisting of 6262 pseudo-labeled comments along with 329 manually annotated comments for the label. We then perform semi-supervised experiments for both the tasks and benchmark their results using the best-performing model for the supervised experiments. Lastly, we provide insights into the ClimateStance and ClimateReddit using part-of-speech tagging and named-entity recognition.
Dynamic Global Memory for Document-level Argument Extraction

Extracting informative arguments of events from news articles is a challenging problem in information extraction, which requires a global contextual understanding of each document. While recent work on document-level extraction has gone beyond single-sentence and increased the cross-sentence inference capability of end-to-end models, they are still restricted by certain input sequence length constraints and usually ignore the global context between events. To tackle this issue, we introduce a new global neural generation-based framework for document-level event argument extraction by constructing a document memory store to record the contextual event information and leveraging it to implicitly and explicitly help with decoding of arguments for later events. Empirical results show that our framework outperforms prior methods substantially and it is more robust to adversarially annotated examples with our constrained decoding design.
Modeling Persuasive Discourse to Adaptively Support Students’ Argumentative Writing

We introduce an argumentation annotation approach to model the structure of argumentative discourse in student-written business model pitches. Additionally, the annotation scheme captures a series of persuasiveness scores such as the specificity, strength, evidence, and relevance of the pitch and the individual components. Based on this scheme, we annotated a corpus of 200 business model pitches in German. Moreover, we trained predictive models to detect argumentative discourse structures and embedded them in an adaptive writing support system for students that provides them with individual argumentation feedback independent of an instructor, time, and location. We evaluated our tool in a real-world writing exercise and found promising results for the measured self-efficacy and perceived ease-of-use. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of persuasive business model pitches with 3,207 annotated sentences in German language and our annotation guidelines.
Challenges in including extra-linguistic context in pre-trained language models

To successfully account for language, computational models need to take into account both the linguistic context (the content of the utterances) and the extra-linguistic context (for instance, the participants in a dialogue). We focus on a referential task that asks models to link entity mentions in a TV show to the corresponding characters, and design an architecture that attempts to account for both kinds of context. In particular, our architecture combines a previously proposed specialized module (an “entity library”) for character representation with transfer learning from a pre-trained language model. We find that, although the model does improve linguistic contextualization, it fails to successfully integrate extra-linguistic information about the participants in the dialogue. Our work shows that it is very challenging to incorporate extra-linguistic information into pre-trained language models.
Translate-Train Embracing Translationese Artifacts

Translate-train is a general training approach to multilingual tasks. The key idea is to use the translator of the target language to generate training data to mitigate the gap between the source and target languages. However, its performance is often hampered by the artifacts in the translated texts (translationese). We discover that such artifacts have common patterns in different languages and can be modeled by deep learning, and subsequently propose an approach to conduct translate-train using Translationese Embracing the effect of Artifacts (TEA). TEA learns to mitigate such effect on the training data of a source language (whose original and translationese are both available), and applies the learned module to facilitate the inference on the target language. Extensive experiments on the multilingual QA dataset TyDiQA demonstrate that TEA outperforms strong baselines.
Deep Inductive Logic Reasoning for Multi-Hop Reading Comprehension

Multi-hop reading comprehension requires an ability to reason across multiple documents. On the one hand, deep learning approaches only implicitly encode query-related information into distributed embeddings which fail to uncover the discrete relational reasoning process to infer the correct answer. On the other hand, logic-based approaches provide interpretable rules to infer the target answer, but mostly work on structured data where entities and relations are well-defined. In this paper, we propose a deep-learning based inductive logic reasoning method that firstly extracts query-related (candidate-related) information, and then conducts logic reasoning among the filtered information by inducing feasible rules that entail the target relation. The reasoning process is accomplished via attentive memories with novel differentiable logic operators. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our model, we evaluate it on two reading comprehension datasets, namely WikiHop and MedHop.
Updated Headline Generation: Creating Updated Summaries for Evolving News Stories

We propose the task of updated headline generation, in which a system generates a headline for an updated article, considering both the previous article and headline. The system must identify the novel information in the article update, and modify the existing headline accordingly. We create data for this task using the NewsEdits corpus by automatically identifying contiguous article versions that are likely to require a substantive headline update. We find that models conditioned on the prior headline and body revisions produce headlines judged by humans to be as factual as gold headlines while making fewer unnecessary edits compared to a standard headline generation model. Our experiments establish benchmarks for this new contextual summarization task.
A Taxonomy of Empathetic Questions in Social Dialogs

Effective question-asking is a crucial component of a successful conversational chatbot. It could help the bots manifest empathy and render the interaction more engaging by demonstrating attention to the speaker’s emotions. However, current dialog generation approaches do not model this subtle emotion regulation technique due to the lack of a taxonomy of questions and their purpose in social chitchat. To address this gap, we have developed an empathetic question taxonomy (EQT), with special attention paid to questions’ ability to capture communicative acts and their emotion-regulation intents. We further design a crowd-sourcing task to annotate a large subset of the EmpatheticDialogues dataset with the established labels. We use the crowd-annotated data to develop automatic labeling tools and produce labels for the whole dataset. Finally, we employ information visualization techniques to summarize co-occurrences of question acts and intents and their role in regulating interlocutor’s emotion. These results reveal important question-asking strategies in social dialogs. The EQT classification scheme can facilitate computational analysis of questions in datasets. More importantly, it can inform future efforts in empathetic question generation using neural or hybrid methods.
WASSA 2022 Shared Task: Predicting Empathy, Emotion and Personality in Reaction to News Stories

This paper presents the results that were obtained from WASSA 2022 shared task on predicting empathy, emotion, and personality in reaction to news stories. Participants were given access to a dataset comprising empathic reactions to news stories where harm is done to a person, group, or other. These reactions consist of essays and Batson’s empathic concern and personal distress scores. The dataset was further extended in WASSA 2021 shared task to include news articles, person-level demographic information (e.g. age, gender), personality information, and Ekman’s six basic emotions at essay level Participation was encouraged in four tracks: predicting empathy and distress scores, predicting emotion categories, predicting personality and predicting interpersonal reactivity. In total, 14 teams participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods and resources used by the participating teams.
Controlling Translation Formality Using Pre-trained Multilingual Language Models

This paper describes the University of Maryland’s submission to the Special Task on Formality Control for Spoken Language Translation at IWSLT, which evaluates translation from English into 6 languages with diverse grammatical formality markers. We investigate to what extent this problem can be addressed with a single multilingual model, simultaneously controlling its output for target language and formality. Results show that this strategy can approach the translation quality and formality control achieved by dedicated translation models. However, the nature of the underlying pre-trained language model and of the finetuning samples greatly impact results.
AMR-DA: Data Augmentation by Abstract Meaning Representation

Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) is a semantic representation for NLP/NLU. In this paper, we propose to use it for data augmentation in NLP. Our proposed data augmentation technique, called AMR-DA, converts a sample sentence to an AMR graph, modifies the graph according to various data augmentation policies, and then generates augmentations from graphs. Our method combines both sentence-level techniques like back translation and token-level techniques like EDA (Easy Data Augmentation). To evaluate the effectiveness of our method, we apply it to the tasks of semantic textual similarity (STS) and text classification. For STS, our experiments show that AMR-DA boosts the performance of the state-of-the-art models on several STS benchmarks. For text classification, AMR-DA outperforms EDA and AEDA and leads to more robust improvements.
MUCS@Text-LT-EDI@ACL 2022: Detecting Sign of Depression from Social Media Text using Supervised Learning Approach

Social media has seen enormous growth in its users recently and knowingly or unknowingly the behavior of a person will be reflected in the comments she/he posts on social media. Users having the sign of depression may post negative or disturbing content seeking the attention of other users. Hence, social media data can be analysed to check whether the users’ have the sign of depression and help them to get through the situation if required. However, as analyzing the increasing amount of social media data manually in laborious and error-prone, automated tools have to be developed for the same. To address the issue of detecting the sign of depression content on social media, in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe an Ensemble of Machine Learning (ML) models and a Transfer Learning (TL) model submitted to “Detecting Signs of Depression from Social Media Text-LT-EDI@ACL 2022” (DepSign-LT-EDI@ACL-2022) shared task at Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2022. Both frequency and text based features are used to train an Ensemble model and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) fine-tuned with raw text is used to train the TL model. Among the two models, the TL model performed better with a macro averaged F-score of 0.479 and placed 18th rank in the shared task. The code to reproduce the proposed models is available in github page1.
Contrastive Learning-Enhanced Nearest Neighbor Mechanism for Multi-Label Text Classification

Multi-Label Text Classification (MLTC) is a fundamental and challenging task in natural language processing. Previous studies mainly focus on learning text representation and modeling label correlation but neglect the rich knowledge from the existing similar instances when predicting labels of a specific text. To make up for this oversight, we propose a k nearest neighbor (kNN) mechanism which retrieves several neighbor instances and interpolates the model output with their labels. Moreover, we design a multi-label contrastive learning objective that makes the model aware of the kNN classification process and improves the quality of the retrieved neighbors while inference. Extensive experiments show that our method can bring consistent and significant performance improvement to multiple MLTC models including the state-of-the-art pretrained and non-pretrained ones.
Improving Multiple Documents Grounded Goal-Oriented Dialog Systems via Diverse Knowledge Enhanced Pretrained Language Model

In this paper, we mainly discuss about our submission to MultiDoc2Dial task, which aims to model the goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. The proposed task is split into grounding span prediction and agent response generation. The baseline for the task is the retrieval augmented generation model, which consists of a dense passage retrieval model for the retrieval part and the BART model for the generation part. The main challenge of this task is that the system requires a great amount of pre-trained knowledge to generate answers grounded in multiple documents. To overcome this challenge, we adopt model pretraining, fine-tuning, and multi-task learning to enhance our model’s coverage of pretrained knowledge. We experimented with various settings of our method to show the effectiveness of our approaches.
Quantifying Clinical Outcome Measures in Patients with Epilepsy Using the Electronic Health Record

A wealth of important clinical information lies untouched in the Electronic Health Record, often in the form of unstructured textual documents. For patients with Epilepsy, such information includes outcome measures like Seizure Frequency and Dates of Last Seizure, key parameters that guide all therapy for these patients. Transformer models have been able to extract such outcome measures from unstructured clinical note text as sentences with human-like accuracy; however, these sentences are not yet usable in a quantitative analysis for large-scale studies. In this study, we developed a pipeline to quantify these outcome measures. We used text summarization models to convert unstructured sentences into specific formats, and then employed rules-based quantifiers to calculate seizure frequencies and dates of last seizure. We demonstrated that our pipeline of models does not excessively propagate errors and we analyzed its mistakes. We anticipate that our methods can be generalized outside of epilepsy to other disorders to drive large-scale clinical research.
Improving the Adversarial Robustness of NLP Models by Information Bottleneck

Existing studies have demonstrated that adversarial examples can be directly attributed to the presence of non-robust features, which are highly predictive, but can be easily manipulated by adversaries to fool NLP models. In this study, we explore the feasibility of capturing task-specific robust features, while eliminating the non-robust ones by using the information bottleneck theory. Through extensive experiments, we show that the models trained with our information bottleneck-based method are able to achieve a significant improvement in robust accuracy, exceeding performances of all the previously reported defense methods while suffering almost no performance drop in clean accuracy on SST-2, AGNEWS and IMDB datasets.