mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Perturbation Sensitivity Analysis to Detect Unintended Model Biases
Authors: Ben Hutchinson, Margaret Mitchell Vinodkumar Prabhakaran
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Data-driven statistical Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques leverage large amounts of language data to build models that can understand language. However, most language data reflect the public discourse at the time the data was produced, and hence NLP models are susceptible to learning incidental associations around named referents at a particular point in time, in addition to general linguistic meaning. An NLP system designed to model notions such as sentiment and toxicity should ideally produce scores that are independent of the identity of such entities mentioned in text and their social associations. For example, in a general purpose sentiment analysis system, a phrase such as I hate Katy Perry should be interpreted as having the same sentiment as I hate Taylor Swift. Based on this idea, we propose a generic evaluation framework, Perturbation Sensitivity Analysis, which detects unintended model biases related to named entities, and requires no new annotations or corpora. We demonstrate the utility of this analysis by employing it on two different NLP models --- a sentiment model and a toxicity model --- applied on online comments in English language from four different genres.
Automatically Inferring Gender Associations from Language
Authors: Kathy McKeown Serina Chang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper, we pose the question: do people talk about women and men in different ways? We introduce two datasets and a novel integration of approaches for automatically inferring gender associations from language, discovering coherent word clusters, and labeling the clusters for the semantic concepts they represent. The datasets allow us to compare how people write about women and men in two different settings -- one set draws from celebrity news and the other from student reviews of computer science professors. We demonstrate that there are large-scale differences in the ways that people talk about women and men and that these differences vary across domains. Human evaluations show that our methods significantly outperform strong baselines.
Reporting the Unreported: Event Extraction for Analyzing the Local Representation of Hate Crimes
Authors: Leigh Yeh, Mohammad Atari, Brendan Kennedy, Gwenyth Portillo Wightman, Elaine Gonzalez, Natalie Delong, Rhea Bhatia, Arineh Mirinjian, Xiang Ren, Morteza Dehghani Aida Mostafazadeh Davani
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Official reports of hate crimes in the US are under-reported relative to the actual number of such incidents. Further, despite statistical approximations, there are no official reports from a large number of US cities regarding incidents of hate. Here, we first demonstrate that event extraction and multi-instance learning, applied to a corpus of local news articles, can be used to predict instances of hate crime. We then use the trained model to detect incidents of hate in cities for which the FBI lacks statistics. Lastly, we train models on predicting homicide and kidnapping, compare the predictions to FBI reports, and establish that incidents of hate are indeed under-reported, compared to other types of crimes, in local press.
Minimally Supervised Learning of Affective Events Using Discourse Relations
Authors: Yugo Murawaki, Sadao Kurohashi Jun Saito
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recognizing affective events that trigger positive or negative sentiment has a wide range of natural language processing applications but remains a challenging problem mainly because the polarity of an event is not necessarily predictable from its constituent words. In this paper, we propose to propagate affective polarity using discourse relations. Our method is simple and only requires a very small seed lexicon and a large raw corpus. Our experiments using Japanese data show that our method learns affective events effectively without manually labeled data. It also improves supervised learning results when labeled data are small.
Event Detection with Multi-Order Graph Convolution and Aggregated Attention
Authors: Xiaolong Jin, Xiangbin Meng, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng Haoran Yan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Syntactic relations are broadly used in many NLP tasks. For event detection, syntactic relation representations based on dependency tree can better capture the interrelations between candidate trigger words and related entities than sentence representations. But, existing studies only use first-order syntactic relations (i.e., the arcs) in dependency trees to identify trigger words. For this reason, this paper proposes a new method for event detection, which uses a dependency tree based graph convolution network with aggregative attention to explicitly model and aggregate multi-order syntactic representations in sentences. Experimental comparison with state-of-the-art baselines shows the superiority of the proposed method.
Coverage of Information Extraction from Sentences and Paragraphs
Authors: Nitisha Jain, Paramita Mirza, Gerhard Weikum Simon Razniewski
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Scalar implicatures are language features that imply the negation of stronger statements, e.g., “She was married twice” typically implicates that she was not married thrice. In this paper we discuss the importance of scalar implicatures in the context of textual information extraction. We investigate how textual features can be used to predict whether a given text segment mentions all objects standing in a certain relationship with a certain subject. Preliminary results on Wikipedia indicate that this prediction is feasible, and yields informative assessments.
HMEAE: Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction
Authors: Ziqi Wang, Xu Han, Zhiyuan Liu, Juanzi Li, Peng Li, Maosong Sun, Jie Zhou, Xiang Ren Xiaozhi Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Existing event extraction methods classify each argument role independently, ignoring the conceptual correlations between different argument roles. In this paper, we propose a Hierarchical Modular Event Argument Extraction (HMEAE) model, to provide effective inductive bias from the concept hierarchy of event argument roles. Specifically, we design a neural module network for each basic unit of the concept hierarchy, and then hierarchically compose relevant unit modules with logical operations into a role-oriented modular network to classify a specific argument role. As many argument roles share the same high-level unit module, their correlation can be utilized to extract specific event arguments better. Experiments on real-world datasets show that HMEAE can effectively leverage useful knowledge from the concept hierarchy and significantly outperform the state-of-the-art baselines. The source code can be obtained from r̆lhttps://github.com/thunlp/HMEAE.
Entity, Relation, and Event Extraction with Contextualized Span Representations
Authors: Ulme Wennberg, Yi Luan, Hannaneh Hajishirzi David Wadden
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We examine the capabilities of a unified, multi-task framework for three information extraction tasks: named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction. Our framework (called DyGIE++) accomplishes all tasks by enumerating, refining, and scoring text spans designed to capture local (within-sentence) and global (cross-sentence) context. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art results across all tasks, on four datasets from a variety of domains. We perform experiments comparing different techniques to construct span representations. Contextualized embeddings like BERT perform well at capturing relationships among entities in the same or adjacent sentences, while dynamic span graph updates model long-range cross-sentence relationships. For instance, propagating span representations via predicted coreference links can enable the model to disambiguate challenging entity mentions. Our code is publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/dwadden/dygiepp and can be easily adapted for new tasks or datasets.
Next Sentence Prediction helps Implicit Discourse Relation Classification within and across Domains
Authors: Vera Demberg Wei Shi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most difficult tasks in discourse parsing. Previous studies have generally focused on extracting better representations of the relational arguments. In order to solve the task, it is however additionally necessary to capture what events are expected to cause or follow each other. Current discourse relation classifiers fall short in this respect. We here show that this shortcoming can be effectively addressed by using the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) proposed by Devlin et al. (2019), which were trained on a next-sentence prediction task, and thus encode a representation of likely next sentences. The BERT-based model outperforms the current state of the art in 11-way classification by 8% points on the standard PDTB dataset. Our experiments also demonstrate that the model can be successfully ported to other domains: on the BioDRB dataset, the model outperforms the state of the art system around 15% points.
Split or Merge: Which is Better for Unsupervised RST Parsing?
Authors: Tsutomu Hirao, Kengo Nakamura, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Manabu Okumura, Masaaki Nagata Naoki Kobayashi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsing is crucial for many downstream NLP tasks that require a discourse structure for a text. Most of the previous RST parsers have been based on supervised learning approaches. That is, they require an annotated corpus of sufficient size and quality, and heavily rely on the language and domain dependent corpus. In this paper, we present two language-independent unsupervised RST parsing methods based on dynamic programming. The first one builds the optimal tree in terms of a dissimilarity score function that is defined for splitting a text span into smaller ones. The second builds the optimal tree in terms of a similarity score function that is defined for merging two adjacent spans into a large one. Experimental results on English and German RST treebanks showed that our parser based on span merging achieved the best score, around 0.8 F$_1$ score, which is close to the scores of the previous supervised parsers.
BERT for Coreference Resolution: Baselines and Analysis
Authors: Omer Levy, Luke Zettlemoyer, Daniel Weld Mandar Joshi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We apply BERT to coreference resolution, achieving a new state of the art on the GAP (+11.5 F1) and OntoNotes (+3.9 F1) benchmarks. A qualitative analysis of model predictions indicates that, compared to ELMo and BERT-base, BERT-large is particularly better at distinguishing between related but distinct entities (e.g., President and CEO), but that there is still room for improvement in modeling document-level context, conversations, and mention paraphrasing. We will release all code and trained models upon publication.
Linguistic Versus Latent Relations for Modeling Coherent Flow in Paragraphs
Authors: Eduard Hovy Dongyeop Kang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Generating a long, coherent text such as a paragraph requires a high-level control of different levels of relations between sentences (e.g., tense, coreference). We call such a logical connection between sentences as a (paragraph) flow. In order to produce a coherent flow of text, we explore two forms of intersentential relations in a paragraph: one is a human-created linguistical relation that forms a structure (e.g., discourse tree) and the other is a relation from latent representation learned from the sentences themselves. Our two proposed models incorporate each form of relations into document-level language models: the former is a supervised model that jointly learns a language model as well as discourse relation prediction, and the latter is an unsupervised model that is hierarchically conditioned by a recurrent neural network (RNN) over the latent information. Our proposed models with both forms of relations outperform the baselines in partially conditioned paragraph generation task. Our codes and data are publicly available.
Event Causality Recognition Exploiting Multiple Annotators' Judgments and Background Knowledge
Authors: Ryu Iida, Kentaro Torisawa, Jong-Hoon Oh, Julien Kloetzer Kazuma Kadowaki
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We propose new BERT-based methods for recognizing event causality such as “smoke cigarettes” --\ensuremath> “die of lung cancer” written in web texts. In our methods, we grasp each annotator`s policy by training multiple classifiers, each of which predicts the labels given by a single annotator, and combine the resulting classifiers' outputs to predict the final labels determined by majority vote. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of supplying background knowledge to our classifiers. Since BERT models are pre-trained with a large corpus, some sort of background knowledge for event causality may be learned during pre-training. Our experiments with a Japanese dataset suggest that this is actually the case: Performance improved when we pre-trained the BERT models with web texts containing a large number of event causalities instead of Wikipedia articles or randomly sampled web texts. However, this effect was limited. Therefore, we further improved performance by simply adding texts related to an input causality candidate as background knowledge to the input of the BERT models. We believe these findings indicate a promising future research direction.
What Part of the Neural Network Does This? Understanding LSTMs by Measuring and Dissecting Neurons
Authors: Jimmy Lin, Yaoliang Yu Ji Xin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Memory neurons of long short-term memory (LSTM) networks encode and process information in powerful yet mysterious ways. While there has been work to analyze their behavior in carrying low-level information such as linguistic properties, how they directly contribute to label prediction remains unclear. We find inspiration from biologists and study the affinity between individual neurons and labels, propose a novel metric to quantify the sensitivity of neurons to each label, and conduct experiments to show the validity of our proposed metric. We discover that some neurons are trained to specialize on a subset of labels, and while dropping an arbitrary neuron has little effect on the overall accuracy of the model, dropping label-specialized neurons predictably and significantly degrades prediction accuracy on the associated label. We further examine the consistency of neuron-label affinity across different models. These observations provide insight into the inner mechanisms of LSTMs.
Quantity doesn`t buy quality syntax with neural language models
Authors: Aaron Mueller, Tal Linzen Marten van Schijndel
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Recurrent neural networks can learn to predict upcoming words remarkably well on average; in syntactically complex contexts, however, they often assign unexpectedly high probabilities to ungrammatical words. We investigate to what extent these shortcomings can be mitigated by increasing the size of the network and the corpus on which it is trained. We find that gains from increasing network size are minimal beyond a certain point. Likewise, expanding the training corpus yields diminishing returns; we estimate that the training corpus would need to be unrealistically large for the models to match human performance. A comparison to GPT and BERT, Transformer-based models trained on billions of words, reveals that these models perform even more poorly than our LSTMs in some constructions. Our results make the case for more data efficient architectures.
Higher-order Comparisons of Sentence Encoder Representations
Authors: Artur Kulmizev, Felix Hill, Daniel M. Low, Anders Søgaard Mostafa Abdou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) is a technique developed by neuroscientists for comparing activity patterns of different measurement modalities (e.g., fMRI, electrophysiology, behavior). As a framework, RSA has several advantages over existing approaches to interpretation of language encoders based on probing or diagnostic classification: namely, it does not require large training samples, is not prone to overfitting, and it enables a more transparent comparison between the representational geometries of different models and modalities. We demonstrate the utility of RSA by establishing a previously unknown correspondence between widely-employed pretrained language encoders and human processing difficulty via eye-tracking data, showcasing its potential in the interpretability toolbox for neural models.
Text Genre and Training Data Size in Human-like Parsing
Authors: Adhiguna Kuncoro, Keith Hall, Chris Dyer, Jonathan Brennan John Hale
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Domain-specific training typically makes NLP systems work better. We show that this extends to cognitive modeling as well by relating the states of a neural phrase-structure parser to electrophysiological measures from human participants. These measures were recorded as participants listened to a spoken recitation of the same literary text that was supplied as input to the neural parser. Given more training data, the system derives a better cognitive model --- but only when the training examples come from the same textual genre. This finding is consistent with the idea that humans adapt syntactic expectations to particular genres during language comprehension (Kaan and Chun, 2018; Branigan and Pickering, 2017).
Feature2Vec: Distributional semantic modelling of human property knowledge
Authors: Paul Miller, Barry Devereux Steven Derby
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Feature norm datasets of human conceptual knowledge, collected in surveys of human volunteers, yield highly interpretable models of word meaning and play an important role in neurolinguistic research on semantic cognition. However, these datasets are limited in size due to practical obstacles associated with exhaustively listing properties for a large number of words. In contrast, the development of distributional modelling techniques and the availability of vast text corpora have allowed researchers to construct effective vector space models of word meaning over large lexicons. However, this comes at the cost of interpretable, human-like information about word meaning. We propose a method for mapping human property knowledge onto a distributional semantic space, which adapts the word2vec architecture to the task of modelling concept features. Our approach gives a measure of concept and feature affinity in a single semantic space, which makes for easy and efficient ranking of candidate human-derived semantic properties for arbitrary words. We compare our model with a previous approach, and show that it performs better on several evaluation tasks. Finally, we discuss how our method could be used to develop efficient sampling techniques to extend existing feature norm datasets in a reliable way.
Sunny and Dark Outside?! Improving Answer Consistency in VQA through Entailed Question Generation
Authors: Karan Sikka, Ajay Divakaran, Stefan Lee, Giedrius Burachas Arijit Ray
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: While models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) have steadily improved over the years, interacting with one quickly reveals that these models lack consistency. For instance, if a model answers “red” to “What color is the balloon?”, it might answer “no” if asked, “Is the balloon red?”. These responses violate simple notions of entailment and raise questions about how effectively VQA models ground language. In this work, we introduce a dataset, ConVQA, and metrics that enable quantitative evaluation of consistency in VQA. For a given observable fact in an image (e.g. the balloon`s color), we generate a set of logically consistent question-answer (QA) pairs (e.g. Is the balloon red?) and also collect a human-annotated set of common-sense based consistent QA pairs (e.g. Is the balloon the same color as tomato sauce?). Further, we propose a consistency-improving data augmentation module, a Consistency Teacher Module (CTM). CTM automatically generates entailed (or similar-intent) questions for a source QA pair and fine-tunes the VQA model if the VQA`s answer to the entailed question is consistent with the source QA pair. We demonstrate that our CTM-based training improves the consistency of VQA models on the Con-VQA datasets and is a strong baseline for further research.
GeoSQA: A Benchmark for Scenario-based Question Answering in the Geography Domain at High School Level
Authors: Yulin Shen, Xiao Li, Yuang Wei, Gong Cheng, Lin Zhou, Xinyu Dai, Yuzhong Qu Zixian Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Scenario-based question answering (SQA) has attracted increasing research attention. It typically requires retrieving and integrating knowledge from multiple sources, and applying general knowledge to a specific case described by a scenario. SQA widely exists in the medical, geography, and legal domains---both in practice and in the exams. In this paper, we introduce the GeoSQA dataset. It consists of 1,981 scenarios and 4,110 multiple-choice questions in the geography domain at high school level, where diagrams (e.g., maps, charts) have been manually annotated with natural language descriptions to benefit NLP research. Benchmark results on a variety of state-of-the-art methods for question answering, textual entailment, and reading comprehension demonstrate the unique challenges presented by SQA for future research.
Revisiting the Evaluation of Theory of Mind through Question Answering
Authors: Y-Lan Boureau, Maximilian Nickel Matthew Le
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Theory of mind, i.e., the ability to reason about intents and beliefs of agents is an important task in artificial intelligence and central to resolving ambiguous references in natural language dialogue. In this work, we revisit the evaluation of theory of mind through question answering. We show that current evaluation methods are flawed and that existing benchmark tasks can be solved without theory of mind due to dataset biases. Based on prior work, we propose an improved evaluation protocol and dataset in which we explicitly control for data regularities via a careful examination of the answer space. We show that state-of-the-art methods which are successful on existing benchmarks fail to solve theory-of-mind tasks in our proposed approach.
Multi-passage BERT: A Globally Normalized BERT Model for Open-domain Question Answering
Authors: Patrick Ng, Xiaofei Ma, Ramesh Nallapati, Bing Xiang Zhiguo Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: BERT model has been successfully applied to open-domain QA tasks. However, previous work trains BERT by viewing passages corresponding to the same question as independent training instances, which may cause incomparable scores for answers from different passages. To tackle this issue, we propose a multi-passage BERT model to globally normalize answer scores across all passages of the same question, and this change enables our QA model find better answers by utilizing more passages. In addition, we find that splitting articles into passages with the length of 100 words by sliding window improves performance by 4%. By leveraging a passage ranker to select high-quality passages, multi-passage BERT gains additional 2%. Experiments on four standard benchmarks showed that our multi-passage BERT outperforms all state-of-the-art models on all benchmarks. In particular, on the OpenSQuAD dataset, our model gains 21.4% EM and 21.5% F1 over all non-BERT models, and 5.8% EM and 6.5% F1 over BERT-based models.
A Span-Extraction Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Ting Liu, Wanxiang Che, Li Xiao, Zhipeng Chen, Wentao Ma, Shijin Wang, Guoping Hu Yiming Cui
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) has become enormously popular recently and has attracted a lot of attention. However, the existing reading comprehension datasets are mostly in English. In this paper, we introduce a Span-Extraction dataset for Chinese machine reading comprehension to add language diversities in this area. The dataset is composed by near 20,000 real questions annotated on Wikipedia paragraphs by human experts. We also annotated a challenge set which contains the questions that need comprehensive understanding and multi-sentence inference throughout the context. We present several baseline systems as well as anonymous submissions for demonstrating the difficulties in this dataset. With the release of the dataset, we hosted the Second Evaluation Workshop on Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension (CMRC 2018). We hope the release of the dataset could further accelerate the Chinese machine reading comprehension research. Resources are available: r̆lhttps://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2018
MICRON: Multigranular Interaction for Contextualizing RepresentatiON in Non-factoid Question Answering
Authors: Seungtaek Choi, Haeju Park, Seung-won Hwang Hojae Han
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: This paper studies the problem of non-factoid question answering, where the answer may span over multiple sentences. Existing solutions can be categorized into representation- and interaction-focused approaches. We combine their complementary strength, by a hybrid approach allowing multi-granular interactions, but represented at word level, enabling an easy integration with strong word-level signals. Specifically, we propose MICRON: Multigranular Interaction for Contextualizing RepresentatiON, a novel approach which derives contextualized uni-gram representation from n-grams. Our contributions are as follows: First, we enable multi-granular matches between question and answer $n$-grams. Second, by contextualizing word representation with surrounding n-grams, MICRON can naturally utilize word-based signals for query term weighting, known to be effective in information retrieval. We validate MICRON in two public non-factoid question answering datasets: WikiPassageQA and InsuranceQA, showing our model achieves the state of the art among baselines with reported performances on both datasets.
Machine Reading Comprehension Using Structural Knowledge Graph-aware Network
Authors: Yuanzhe Zhang, Xinwei Feng, Xiangwen Liao, Wenbin Jiang, Yajuan Lyu, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao Delai Qiu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Leveraging external knowledge is an emerging trend in machine comprehension task. Previous work usually utilizes knowledge graphs such as ConceptNet as external knowledge, and extracts triples from them to enhance the initial representation of the machine comprehension context. However, such method cannot capture the structural information in the knowledge graph. To this end, we propose a Structural Knowledge Graph-aware Network(SKG) model, constructing sub-graphs for entities in the machine comprehension context. Our method dynamically updates the representation of the knowledge according to the structural information of the constructed sub-graph. Experiments show that SKG achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ReCoRD dataset.
Answering Conversational Questions on Structured Data without Logical Forms
Authors: Francesco Piccinno, Peter Shaw, Massimo Nicosia, Yasemin Altun Thomas Mueller
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We present a novel approach to answering sequential questions based on structured objects such as knowledge bases or tables without using a logical form as an intermediate representation. We encode tables as graphs using a graph neural network model based on the Transformer architecture. The answers are then selected from the encoded graph using a pointer network. This model is appropriate for processing conversations around structured data, where the attention mechanism that selects the answers to a question can also be used to resolve conversational references. We demonstrate the validity of this approach with competitive results on the Sequential Question Answering (SQA) task.
Improving Answer Selection and Answer Triggering using Hard Negatives
Authors: Shweta Garg, Kartik Mehta, Nikhil Rasiwasia Sawan Kumar
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: In this paper, we establish the effectiveness of using hard negatives, coupled with a siamese network and a suitable loss function, for the tasks of answer selection and answer triggering. We show that the choice of sampling strategy is key for achieving improved performance on these tasks. Evaluating on recent answer selection datasets - InsuranceQA, SelQA, and an internal QA dataset, we show that using hard negatives with relatively simple model architectures (bag of words and LSTM-CNN) drives significant performance gains. On InsuranceQA, this strategy alone improves over previously reported results by a minimum of 1.6 points in P@1. Using hard negatives with a Transformer encoder provides a further improvement of 2.3 points. Further, we propose to use quadruplet loss for answer triggering, with the aim of producing globally meaningful similarity scores. We show that quadruplet loss function coupled with the selection of hard negatives enables bag-of-words models to improve F1 score by 2.3 points over previous baselines, on SelQA answer triggering dataset. Our results provide key insights into answer selection and answer triggering tasks.
Can You Unpack That? Learning to Rewrite Questions-in-Context
Authors: Denis Peskov, Jordan Boyd-Graber Ahmed Elgohary
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Question answering is an AI-complete problem, but existing datasets lack key elements of language understanding such as coreference and ellipsis resolution. We consider sequential question answering: multiple questions are asked one-by-one in a conversation between a questioner and an answerer. Answering these questions is only possible through understanding the conversation history. We introduce the task of question-in-context rewriting: given the context of a conversation`s history, rewrite a context-dependent into a self-contained question with the same answer. We construct, CANARD, a dataset of 40,527 questions based on QuAC (Choi et al., 2018) and train Seq2Seq models for incorporating context into standalone questions.
Quoref: A Reading Comprehension Dataset with Questions Requiring Coreferential Reasoning
Authors: Nelson F. Liu, Ana Marasović, Noah A. Smith, Matt Gardner Pradeep Dasigi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Machine comprehension of texts longer than a single sentence often requires coreference resolution. However, most current reading comprehension benchmarks do not contain complex coreferential phenomena and hence fail to evaluate the ability of models to resolve coreference. We present a new crowdsourced dataset containing more than 24K span-selection questions that require resolving coreference among entities in over 4.7K English paragraphs from Wikipedia. Obtaining questions focused on such phenomena is challenging, because it is hard to avoid lexical cues that shortcut complex reasoning. We deal with this issue by using a strong baseline model as an adversary in the crowdsourcing loop, which helps crowdworkers avoid writing questions with exploitable surface cues. We show that state-of-the-art reading comprehension models perform significantly worse than humans on this benchmark---the best model performance is 70.5 F1, while the estimated human performance is 93.4 F1.
Zero-shot Reading Comprehension by Cross-lingual Transfer Learning with Multi-lingual Language Representation Model
Authors: Chi-Liang Liu, Hung-yi Lee Tsung-Yuan Hsu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Because it is not feasible to collect training data for every language, there is a growing interest in cross-lingual transfer learning. In this paper, we systematically explore zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning on reading comprehension tasks with language representation model pre-trained on multi-lingual corpus. The experimental results show that with pre-trained language representation zero-shot learning is feasible, and translating the source data into the target language is not necessary and even degrades the performance. We further explore what does the model learn in zero-shot setting.
QuaRTz: An Open-Domain Dataset of Qualitative Relationship Questions
Authors: Matt Gardner, Kevin Lin, Peter Clark Oyvind Tafjord
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: We introduce the first open-domain dataset, called QuaRTz, for reasoning about textual qualitative relationships. QuaRTz contains general qualitative statements, e.g., “A sunscreen with a higher SPF protects the skin longer.”, twinned with 3864 crowdsourced situated questions, e.g., “Billy is wearing sunscreen with a lower SPF than Lucy. Who will be best protected from the sun?”, plus annotations of the properties being compared. Unlike previous datasets, the general knowledge is textual and not tied to a fixed set of relationships, and tests a system`s ability to comprehend and apply textual qualitative knowledge in a novel setting. We find state-of-the-art results are substantially (20%) below human performance, presenting an open challenge to the NLP community.
Giving BERT a Calculator: Finding Operations and Arguments with Reading Comprehension
Authors: Luheng He, Kenton Lee, Emily Pitler Daniel Andor
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Reading comprehension models have been successfully applied to extractive text answers, but it is unclear how best to generalize these models to abstractive numerical answers. We enable a BERT-based reading comprehension model to perform lightweight numerical reasoning. We augment the model with a predefined set of executable \textquoteleftprograms' which encompass simple arithmetic as well as extraction. Rather than having to learn to manipulate numbers directly, the model can pick a program and execute it. On the recent Discrete Reasoning Over Passages (DROP) dataset, designed to challenge reading comprehension models, we show a 33% absolute improvement by adding shallow programs. The model can learn to predict new operations when appropriate in a math word problem setting (Roy and Roth, 2015) with very few training examples.
A Gated Self-attention Memory Network for Answer Selection
Authors: Quan Hung Tran, Trung Bui, Daisuke Kihara Tuan Lai
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Answer selection is an important research problem, with applications in many areas. Previous deep learning based approaches for the task mainly adopt the Compare-Aggregate architecture that performs word-level comparison followed by aggregation. In this work, we take a departure from the popular Compare-Aggregate architecture, and instead, propose a new gated self-attention memory network for the task. Combined with a simple transfer learning technique from a large-scale online corpus, our model outperforms previous methods by a large margin, achieving new state-of-the-art results on two standard answer selection datasets: TrecQA and WikiQA.
Polly Want a Cracker: Analyzing Performance of Parroting on Paraphrase Generation Datasets
Authors: Hung-Yi Lee Hong-Ren Mao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Paraphrase generation is an interesting and challenging NLP task which has numerous practical applications. In this paper, we analyze datasets commonly used for paraphrase generation research, and show that simply parroting input sentences surpasses state-of-the-art models in the literature when evaluated on standard metrics. Our findings illustrate that a model could be seemingly adept at generating paraphrases, despite only making trivial changes to the input sentence or even none at all.
Query-focused Sentence Compression in Linear Time
Authors: Brendan O′Connor Abram Handler
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Search applications often display shortened sentences which must contain certain query terms and must fit within the space constraints of a user interface. This work introduces a new transition-based sentence compression technique developed for such settings. Our query-focused method constructs length and lexically constrained compressions in linear time, by growing a subgraph in the dependency parse of a sentence. This theoretically efficient approach achieves an 11x empirical speedup over baseline ILP methods, while better reconstructing gold constrained shortenings. Such speedups help query-focused applications, because users are measurably hindered by interface lags. Additionally, our technique does not require an ILP solver or a GPU.
Generating Personalized Recipes from Historical User Preferences
Authors: Shuyang Li, Jianmo Ni, Julian McAuley Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Existing approaches to recipe generation are unable to create recipes for users with culinary preferences but incomplete knowledge of ingredients in specific dishes. We propose a new task of personalized recipe generation to help these users: expanding a name and incomplete ingredient details into complete natural-text instructions aligned with the user`s historical preferences. We attend on technique- and recipe-level representations of a user`s previously consumed recipes, fusing these \textquoteleftuser-aware' representations in an attention fusion layer to control recipe text generation. Experiments on a new dataset of 180K recipes and 700K interactions show our model`s ability to generate plausible and personalized recipes compared to non-personalized baselines.
Generating Highly Relevant Questions
Authors: Deyi Xiong Jiazuo Qiu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: The neural seq2seq based question generation (QG) is prone to generating generic and undiversified questions that are poorly relevant to the given passage and target answer. In this paper, we propose two methods to address the issue. (1) By a partial copy mechanism, we prioritize words that are morphologically close to words in the input passage when generating questions; (2) By a QA-based reranker, from the n-best list of question candidates, we select questions that are preferred by both the QA and QG model. Experiments and analyses demonstrate that the proposed two methods substantially improve the relevance of generated questions to passages and answers.
Improving Neural Story Generation by Targeted Common Sense Grounding
Authors: Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder, Julian McAuley, Garrison Cottrell Huanru Henry Mao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Stories generated with neural language models have shown promise in grammatical and stylistic consistency. However, the generated stories are still lacking in common sense reasoning, e.g., they often contain sentences deprived of world knowledge. We propose a simple multi-task learning scheme to achieve quantitatively better common sense reasoning in language models by leveraging auxiliary training signals from datasets designed to provide common sense grounding. When combined with our two-stage fine-tuning pipeline, our method achieves improved common sense reasoning and state-of-the-art perplexity on the WritingPrompts (Fan et al., 2018) story generation dataset.
Abstract Text Summarization: A Low Resource Challenge
Authors: Petr Motlicek Shantipriya Parida
Published in: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) (Main Conference Track), 2019

Abstract: Text summarization is considered as a challenging task in the NLP community. The availability of datasets for the task of multilingual text summarization is rare, and such datasets are difficult to construct. In this work, we build an abstract text summarizer for the German language text using the state-of-the-art “Transformer” model. We propose an iterative data augmentation approach which uses synthetic data along with the real summarization data for the German language. To generate synthetic data, the Common Crawl (German) dataset is exploited, which covers different domains. The synthetic data is effective for the low resource condition and is particularly helpful for our multilingual scenario where availability of summarizing data is still a challenging issue. The data are also useful in deep learning scenarios where the neural models require a large amount of training data for utilization of its capacity. The obtained summarization performance is measured in terms of ROUGE and BLEU score. We achieve an absolute improvement of +1.5 and +16.0 in ROUGE1 F1 (R1_F1) on the development and test sets, respectively, compared to the system which does not rely on data augmentation.