TASK DEFINITION: In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
PROBLEM: In colored graphs, node classes are often associated with either their neighbors class or with information not incorporated in the graph associated with each node. We here propose that node classes are also associated with topological features of the nodes. We use this association to improve Graph machine learning in general and specifically, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN). 

 First, we show that even in the absence of any external information on nodes, a good accuracy can be obtained on the prediction of the node class using either topological features, or using the neighbors class as an input to a GCN. This accuracy is slightly less than the one that can be obtained using content based GCN.

 Secondly, we show that explicitly adding the topology as an input to the GCN does not improve the accuracy when combined with external information on nodes. However,  adding an additional adjacency matrix with edges between distant nodes with similar topology to the GCN does significantly improve its accuracy, leading to results better than all state of the art methods in multiple datasets.

SOLUTION: Topology-Based Graph Convolutional Network (GCN)

PROBLEM: We propose Automating Science Journalism (ASJ), the process of producing a press release from a scientific paper, as a novel task that can serve as a new benchmark for neural abstractive summarization. ASJ is a challenging task as it requires long source texts to be summarized to long target texts, while also paraphrasing complex scientific concepts to be understood by the general audience. For this purpose, we introduce a specialized dataset for ASJ that contains scientific papers and their press releases from Science Daily. While state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models could easily generate convincing press releases for ASJ, these are generally nonfactual and deviate from the source. To address this issue, we improve seq2seq generation via transfer learning by co-training with new targets: (i) scientific abstracts of sources and (ii) partitioned press releases. We further design a measure for factuality that scores how pertinent to the scientific papers the press releases under our seq2seq models are. Our quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows sizable improvements over a strong baseline, suggesting that the proposed framework could improve seq2seq summarization beyond ASJ.

SOLUTION: New: application of seq2seq modelling to automating sciene journalism; highly abstractive dataset; transfer learning tricks; automatic evaluation measure.

PROBLEM:  Many tasks in natural language processing involve comparing two sentences to compute some notion of relevance, entailment, or similarity. Typically this comparison is done either at the word level or at the sentence level, with no attempt to leverage the inherent structure of the sentence. When sentence structure is used for comparison, it is obtained during a non-differentiable pre-processing step, leading to propagation of errors. We introduce a model of structured alignments between sentences, showing how to compare two sentences by matching their latent structures. Using a structured attention mechanism, our model matches possible spans in the first sentence to possible spans in the second sentence, simultaneously discovering the tree structure of each sentence and performing a comparison, in a model that is fully differentiable and is trained only on the comparison objective. We evaluate this model on two sentence comparison tasks: the Stanford natural language inference dataset and the TREC-QA dataset. We find that comparing spans results in superior performance to comparing words individually, and that the learned trees are consistent with actual linguistic structures.

SOLUTION:
Matching sentences by learning the latent constituency tree structures with a variant of the inside-outside algorithm embedded as a neural network layer.