OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Interpretable Charge Predictions for Criminal Cases: Learning to Generate Court Views from Fact Descriptions
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose to study the problem of COURT VIEW GENeration from the fact description in a criminal case. The task aims to improve the interpretability of charge prediction systems and help automatic legal document generation. We formulate this task as a text-to-text natural language generation (NLG) problem. Sequenceto-sequence model has achieved cutting-edge performances in many NLG tasks. However, due to the non-distinctions of fact descriptions, it is hard for Seq2Seq model to generate charge-discriminative court views. In this work, we explore charge labels to tackle this issue. We propose a label-conditioned Seq2Seq model with attention for this problem, to decode court views conditioned on encoded charge labels. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our method.
Learning to Rank Question-Answer Pairs Using Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder with Latent Topic Clustering
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end neural architecture for ranking candidate answers, that adapts a hierarchical recurrent neural network and a latent topic clustering module. With our proposed model, a text is encoded to a vector representation from an word-level to a chunk-level to effectively capture the entire meaning. In particular, by adapting the hierarchical structure, our model shows very small performance degradations in longer text comprehension while other state-of-the-art recurrent neural network models suffer from it. Additionally, the latent topic clustering module extracts semantic information from target samples. This clustering module is useful for any text related tasks by allowing each data sample to find its nearest topic cluster, thus helping the neural network model analyze the entire data. We evaluate our models on the Ubuntu Dialogue Corpus and consumer electronic domain question answering dataset, which is related to Samsung products. The proposed model shows state-of-the-art results for ranking question-answer pairs.
Consistent CCG Parsing over Multiple Sentences for Improved Logical Reasoning
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

In formal logic-based approaches to Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE), a Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) parser is used to parse input premises and hypotheses to obtain their logical formulas. Here, it is important that the parser processes the sentences consistently; failing to recognize a similar syntactic structure results in inconsistent predicate argument structures among them, in which case the succeeding theorem proving is doomed to failure. In this work, we present a simple method to extend an existing CCG parser to parse a set of sentences consistently, which is achieved with an inter-sentence modeling with Markov Random Fields (MRF). When combined with existing logic-based systems, our method always shows improvement in the RTE experiments on English and Japanese languages.
Diverse Few-Shot Text Classification with Multiple Metrics
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

We study few-shot learning in natural language domains. Compared to many existing works that apply either metric-based or optimization-based meta-learning to image domain with low inter-task variance, we consider a more realistic setting, where tasks are diverse. However, it imposes tremendous difficulties to existing state-of-the-art metric-based algorithms since a single metric is insufficient to capture complex task variations in natural language domain. To alleviate the problem, we propose an adaptive metric learning approach that automatically determines the best weighted combination from a set of metrics obtained from meta-training tasks for a newly seen few-shot task. Extensive quantitative evaluations on real-world sentiment analysis and dialog intent classification datasets demonstrate that the proposed method performs favorably against state-of-the-art few shot learning algorithms in terms of predictive accuracy. We make our code and data available for further study.
TypeSQL: Knowledge-Based Type-Aware Neural Text-to-SQL Generation
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

Interacting with relational databases through natural language helps users of any background easily query and analyze a vast amount of data. This requires a system that understands users' questions and converts them to SQL queries automatically. In this paper we present a novel approach, TypeSQL, which views this problem as a slot filling task. Additionally, TypeSQL utilizes type information to better understand rare entities and numbers in natural language questions. We test this idea on the WikiSQL dataset and outperform the prior state-of-the-art by 5.5% in much less time. We also show that accessing the content of databases can significantly improve the performance when users' queries are not well-formed. TypeSQL gets 82.6% accuracy, a 17.5% absolute improvement compared to the previous content-sensitive model.
Neural Machine Translation for Bilingually Scarce Scenarios: a Deep Multi-Task Learning Approach
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

Neural machine translation requires large amounts of parallel training text to learn a reasonable-quality translation model. This is particularly inconvenient for language pairs for which enough parallel text is not available. In this paper, we use monolingual linguistic resources in the source side to address this challenging problem based on a multi-task learning approach. More specifically, we scaffold the machine translation task on auxiliary tasks including semantic parsing, syntactic parsing, and named-entity recognition. This effectively injects semantic and/or syntactic knowledge into the translation model, which would otherwise require a large amount of training bitext. We empirically evaluate and show the effectiveness of our multi-task learning approach on three translation tasks: English-to-French, English-to-Farsi, and English-to-Vietnamese.
SHAPED: Shared-Private Encoder-Decoder for Text Style Adaptation
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

Supervised training of abstractive language generation models results in learning conditional probabilities over language sequences based on the supervised training signal. When the training signal contains a variety of writing styles, such models may end up learning an 'average' style that is directly influenced by the training data make-up and cannot be controlled by the needs of an application. We describe a family of model architectures capable of capturing both generic language characteristics via shared model parameters, as well as particular style characteristics via private model parameters. Such models are able to generate language according to a specific learned style, while still taking advantage of their power to model generic language phenomena. Furthermore, we describe an extension that uses a mixture of output distributions from all learned styles to perform on-the fly style adaptation based on the textual input alone. Experimentally, we find that the proposed models consistently outperform models that encapsulate single-style or average-style language generation capabilities.
Guiding Neural Machine Translation with Retrieved Translation Pieces
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

One of the difficulties of neural machine translation (NMT) is the recall and appropriate translation of low-frequency words or phrases. In this paper, we propose a simple, fast, and effective method for recalling previously seen translation examples and incorporating them into the NMT decoding process. Specifically, for an input sentence, we use a search engine to retrieve sentence pairs whose source sides are similar with the input sentence, and then collect $n$-grams that are both in the retrieved target sentences and aligned with words that match in the source sentences, which we call "translation pieces". We compute pseudo-probabilities for each retrieved sentence based on similarities between the input sentence and the retrieved source sentences, and use these to weight the retrieved translation pieces. Finally, an existing NMT model is used to translate the input sentence, with an additional bonus given to outputs that contain the collected translation pieces. We show our method improves NMT translation results up to 6 BLEU points on three narrow domain translation tasks where repetitiveness of the target sentences is particularly salient. It also causes little increase in the translation time, and compares favorably to another alternative retrieval-based method with respect to accuracy, speed, and simplicity of implementation.
Gender Bias in Coreference Resolution: Evaluation and Debiasing Methods
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

We introduce a new benchmark, WinoBias, for coreference resolution focused on gender bias. Our corpus contains Winograd-schema style sentences with entities corresponding to people referred by their occupation (e.g. the nurse, the doctor, the carpenter). We demonstrate that a rule-based, a feature-rich, and a neural coreference system all link gendered pronouns to pro-stereotypical entities with higher accuracy than anti-stereotypical entities, by an average difference of 21.1 in F1 score. Finally, we demonstrate a data-augmentation approach that, in combination with existing word-embedding debiasing techniques, removes the bias demonstrated by these systems in WinoBias without significantly affecting their performance on existing coreference benchmark datasets. Our dataset and code are available at http://winobias.org.
Generating Continuous Representations of Medical Texts
Venue: Conference NAACL 2018
Year: 2018

We present an architecture that generates medical texts while learning an informative, continuous representation with discriminative features. During training the input to the system is a dataset of captions for medical X-Rays. The acquired continuous representations are of particular interest for use in many machine learning techniques where the discrete and high-dimensional nature of textual input is an obstacle. We use an Adversarially Regularized Autoencoder to create realistic text in both an unconditional and conditional setting. We show that this technique is applicable to medical texts which often contain syntactic and domain-specific shorthands. A quantitative evaluation shows that we achieve a lower model perplexity than a traditional LSTM generator.
Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Peer review is a core element of the scientific process, particularly in conference-centered fields such as ML and NLP. However, only few studies have evaluated its properties empirically. Aiming to fill this gap, we present a corpus that contains over 4k reviews and 1.2k author responses from ACL-2018. We quantitatively and qualitatively assess the corpus. This includes a pilot study on paper weaknesses given by reviewers and on quality of author responses. We then focus on the role of the rebuttal phase, and propose a novel task to predict after-rebuttal (i.e., final) scores from initial reviews and author responses. Although author responses do have a marginal (and statistically significant) influence on the final scores, especially for borderline papers, our results suggest that a reviewer's final score is largely determined by her initial score and the distance to the other reviewers' initial scores. In this context, we discuss the conformity bias inherent to peer reviewing, a bias that has largely been overlooked in previous research. We hope our analyses will help better assess the usefulness of the rebuttal phase in NLP conferences.
ComQA: A Community-sourced Dataset for Complex Factoid Question Answering with Paraphrase Clusters
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

To bridge the gap between the capabilities of the state-of-the-art in factoid question answering (QA) and what users ask, we need large datasets of real user questions that capture the various question phenomena users are interested in, and the diverse ways in which these questions are formulated. We introduce ComQA, a large dataset of real user questions that exhibit different challenging aspects such as compositionality, temporal reasoning, and comparisons. ComQA questions come from the WikiAnswers community QA platform, which typically contains questions that are not satisfactorily answerable by existing search engine technology. Through a large crowdsourcing effort, we clean the question dataset, group questions into paraphrase clusters, and annotate clusters with their answers. ComQA contains 11,214 questions grouped into 4,834 paraphrase clusters. We detail the process of constructing ComQA, including the measures taken to ensure its high quality while making effective use of crowdsourcing. We also present an extensive analysis of the dataset and the results achieved by state-of-the-art systems on ComQA, demonstrating that our dataset can be a driver of future research on QA.
VQD: Visual Query Detection In Natural Scenes
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

We propose Visual Query Detection (VQD), a new visual grounding task. In VQD, a system is guided by natural language to localize a variable number of objects in an image. VQD is related to visual referring expression recognition, where the task is to localize only one object. We describe the first dataset for VQD and we propose baseline algorithms that demonstrate the difficulty of the task compared to referring expression recognition.
Massively Multilingual Adversarial Speech Recognition
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

We report on adaptation of multilingual end-to-end speech recognition models trained on as many as 100 languages. Our findings shed light on the relative importance of similarity between the target and pretraining languages along the dimensions of phonetics, phonology, language family, geographical location, and orthography. In this context, experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of two additional pretraining objectives in encouraging language-independent encoder representations: a context-independent phoneme objective paired with a language-adversarial classification objective.
Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Multilingual neural machine translation (NMT) enables training a single model that supports translation from multiple source languages into multiple target languages. In this paper, we push the limits of multilingual NMT in terms of number of languages being used. We perform extensive experiments in training massively multilingual NMT models, translating up to 102 languages to and from English within a single model. We explore different setups for training such models and analyze the trade-offs between translation quality and various modeling decisions. We report results on the publicly available TED talks multilingual corpus where we show that massively multilingual many-to-many models are effective in low resource settings, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art while supporting up to 59 languages. Our experiments on a large-scale dataset with 102 languages to and from English and up to one million examples per direction also show promising results, surpassing strong bilingual baselines and encouraging future work on massively multilingual NMT.
On Difficulties of Cross-Lingual Transfer with Order Differences: A Case Study on Dependency Parsing
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Different languages might have different word orders. In this paper, we investigate cross-lingual transfer and posit that an order-agnostic model will perform better when transferring to distant foreign languages. To test our hypothesis, we train dependency parsers on an English corpus and evaluate their transfer performance on 30 other languages. Specifically, we compare encoders and decoders based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and modified self-attentive architectures. The former relies on sequential information while the latter is more flexible at modeling word order. Rigorous experiments and detailed analysis shows that RNN-based architectures transfer well to languages that are close to English, while self-attentive models have better overall cross-lingual transferability and perform especially well on distant languages.
What do Entity-Centric Models Learn? Insights from Entity Linking in Multi-Party Dialogue
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Humans use language to refer to entities in the external world. Motivated by this, in recent years several models that incorporate a bias towards learning entity representations have been proposed. Such entity-centric models have shown empirical success, but we still know little about why. In this paper we analyze the behavior of two recently proposed entity-centric models in a referential task, Entity Linking in Multi-party Dialogue (SemEval 2018 Task 4). We show that these models outperform the state of the art on this task, and that they do better on lower frequency entities than a counterpart model that is not entity-centric, with the same model size. We argue that making models entity-centric naturally fosters good architectural decisions. However, we also show that these models do not really build entity representations and that they make poor use of linguistic context. These negative results underscore the need for model analysis, to test whether the motivations for particular architectures are borne out in how models behave when deployed.
Multi-task Learning for Multi-modal Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Related tasks often have inter-dependence on each other and perform better when solved in a joint framework. In this paper, we present a deep multi-task learning framework that jointly performs sentiment and emotion analysis both. The multi-modal inputs (i.e., text, acoustic and visual frames) of a video convey diverse and distinctive information, and usually do not have equal contribution in the decision making. We propose a context-level inter-modal attention framework for simultaneously predicting the sentiment and expressed emotions of an utterance. We evaluate our proposed approach on CMU-MOSEI dataset for multi-modal sentiment and emotion analysis. Evaluation results suggest that multi-task learning framework offers improvement over the single-task framework. The proposed approach reports new state-of-the-art performance for both sentiment analysis and emotion analysis.
Consistency by Agreement in Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Generalization and reliability of multilingual translation often highly depend on the amount of available parallel data for each language pair of interest. In this paper, we focus on zero-shot generalization---a challenging setup that tests models on translation directions they have not been optimized for at training time. To solve the problem, we (i) reformulate multilingual translation as probabilistic inference, (ii) define the notion of zero-shot consistency and show why standard training often results in models unsuitable for zero-shot tasks, and (iii) introduce a consistent agreement-based training method that encourages the model to produce equivalent translations of parallel sentences in auxiliary languages. We test our multilingual NMT models on multiple public zero-shot translation benchmarks (IWSLT17, UN corpus, Europarl) and show that agreement-based learning often results in 2-3 BLEU zero-shot improvement over strong baselines without any loss in performance on supervised translation directions.
Context-Aware Cross-Lingual Mapping
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Cross-lingual word vectors are typically obtained by fitting an orthogonal matrix that maps the entries of a bilingual dictionary from a source to a target vector space. Word vectors, however, are most commonly used for sentence or document-level representations that are calculated as the weighted average of word embeddings. In this paper, we propose an alternative to word-level mapping that better reflects sentence-level cross-lingual similarity. We incorporate context in the transformation matrix by directly mapping the averaged embeddings of aligned sentences in a parallel corpus. We also implement cross-lingual mapping of deep contextualized word embeddings using parallel sentences with word alignments. In our experiments, both approaches resulted in cross-lingual sentence embeddings that outperformed context-independent word mapping in sentence translation retrieval. Furthermore, the sentence-level transformation could be used for word-level mapping without loss in word translation quality.
CITE: A Corpus of Image-Text Discourse Relations
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

This paper presents a novel crowd-sourced resource for multimodal discourse: our resource characterizes inferences in image-text contexts in the domain of cooking recipes in the form of coherence relations. Like previous corpora annotating discourse structure between text arguments, such as the Penn Discourse Treebank, our new corpus aids in establishing a better understanding of natural communication and common-sense reasoning, while our findings have implications for a wide range of applications, such as understanding and generation of multimodal documents.
MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

We introduce a large-scale dataset of math word problems and an interpretable neural math problem solver that learns to map problems to operation programs. Due to annotation challenges, current datasets in this domain have been either relatively small in scale or did not offer precise operational annotations over diverse problem types. We introduce a new representation language to model precise operation programs corresponding to each math problem that aim to improve both the performance and the interpretability of the learned models. Using this representation language, our new dataset, MathQA, significantly enhances the AQuA dataset with fully-specified operational programs. We additionally introduce a neural sequence-to-program model enhanced with automatic problem categorization. Our experiments show improvements over competitive baselines in our MathQA as well as the AQuA dataset. The results are still significantly lower than human performance indicating that the dataset poses new challenges for future research. Our dataset is available at: https://math-qa.github.io/math-QA/
Playing Text-Adventure Games with Graph-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Venue: Conference NAACL 2019
Year: 2019

Text-based adventure games provide a platform on which to explore reinforcement learning in the context of a combinatorial action space, such as natural language. We present a deep reinforcement learning architecture that represents the game state as a knowledge graph which is learned during exploration. This graph is used to prune the action space, enabling more efficient exploration. The question of which action to take can be reduced to a question-answering task, a form of transfer learning that pre-trains certain parts of our architecture. In experiments using the TextWorld framework, we show that our proposed technique can learn a control policy faster than baseline alternatives. We have also open-sourced our code at https://github.com/rajammanabrolu/KG-DQN.