pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Manifold Regularization for Locally Stable Deep Neural Networks
Authors: Charles Jin, Martin Rinard
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00

We apply concepts from manifold regularization to develop new regularization techniques for training locally stable deep neural networks. Our regularizers are based on a sparsification of the graph Laplacian which holds with high probability when the data is sparse in high dimensions, as is common in deep learning. Empirically, our networks exhibit stability in a diverse set of perturbation models, including $\ell_2$, $\ell_\infty$, and Wasserstein-based perturbations; in particular, we achieve 40% adversarial accuracy on CIFAR-10 against an adaptive PGD attack using $\ell_\infty$ perturbations of size $\epsilon = 8/255$, and state-of-the-art verified accuracy of 21% in the same perturbation model. Furthermore, our techniques are efficient, incurring overhead on par with two additional parallel forward passes through the network.
NYTWIT: A Dataset of Novel Words in the New York Times
Authors: Yuval Pinter, Cassandra L. Jacobs, Max Bittker
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8

We present the New York Times Word Innovation Types dataset, or NYTWIT, a collection of over 2,500 novel English words published in the New York Times between November 2017 and March 2019, manually annotated for their class of novelty (such as lexical derivation, dialectal variation, blending, or compounding). We present baseline results for both uncontextual and contextual prediction of novelty class, showing that there is room for improvement even for state-of-the-art NLP systems. We hope this resource will prove useful for linguists and NLP practitioners by providing a real-world environment of novel word appearance.
Natural Language QA Approaches using Reasoning with External Knowledge
Authors: Chitta Baral, Pratyay Banerjee, Kuntal Kumar Pal, Arindam Mitra
Date: 2020-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Survey

Question answering (QA) in natural language (NL) has been an important aspect of AI from its early days. Winograd's ``councilmen'' example in his 1972 paper and McCarthy's Mr. Hug example of 1976 highlights the role of external knowledge in NL understanding. While Machine Learning has been the go-to approach in NL processing as well as NL question answering (NLQA) for the last 30 years, recently there has been an increasingly emphasized thread on NLQA where external knowledge plays an important role. The challenges inspired by Winograd's councilmen example, and recent developments such as the Rebooting AI book, various NLQA datasets, research on knowledge acquisition in the NLQA context, and their use in various NLQA models have brought the issue of NLQA using ``reasoning'' with external knowledge to the forefront. In this paper, we present a survey of the recent work on them. We believe our survey will help establish a bridge between multiple fields of AI, especially between (a) the traditional fields of knowledge representation and reasoning and (b) the field of NL understanding and NLQA.
Synthetic Error Dataset Generation Mimicking Bengali Writing Pattern
Authors: Md. Habibur Rahman Sifat, Chowdhury Rafeed Rahman, Mohammad Rafsan, Md. Hasibur Rahman
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation

While writing Bengali using English keyboard, users often make spelling mistakes. The accuracy of any Bengali spell checker or paragraph correction module largely depends on the kind of error dataset it is based on. Manual generation of such error dataset is a cumbersome process. In this research, We present an algorithm for automatic misspelled Bengali word generation from correct word through analyzing Bengali writing pattern using QWERTY layout English keyboard. As part of our analysis, we have formed a list of most commonly used Bengali words, phonetically similar replaceable clusters, frequently mispressed replaceable clusters, frequently mispressed insertion prone clusters and some rules for Juktakkhar (constant letter clusters) handling while generating errors.
A Post-processing Method for Detecting Unknown Intent of Dialogue System via Pre-trained Deep Neural Network Classifier
Authors: Ting-En Lin, Hua Xu
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Intent Detection, Novelty Detection

With the maturity and popularity of dialogue systems, detecting user's unknown intent in dialogue systems has become an important task. It is also one of the most challenging tasks since we can hardly get examples, prior knowledge or the exact numbers of unknown intents. In this paper, we propose SofterMax and deep novelty detection (SMDN), a simple yet effective post-processing method for detecting unknown intent in dialogue systems based on pre-trained deep neural network classifiers. Our method can be flexibly applied on top of any classifiers trained in deep neural networks without changing the model architecture. We calibrate the confidence of the softmax outputs to compute the calibrated confidence score (i.e., SofterMax) and use it to calculate the decision boundary for unknown intent detection. Furthermore, we feed the feature representations learned by the deep neural networks into traditional novelty detection algorithm to detect unknown intents from different perspectives. Finally, we combine the methods above to perform the joint prediction. Our method classifies examples that differ from known intents as unknown and does not require any examples or prior knowledge of it. We have conducted extensive experiments on three benchmark dialogue datasets. The results show that our method can yield significant improvements compared with the state-of-the-art baselines
ECSP: A New Task for Emotion-Cause Span-Pair Extraction and Classification
Authors: Hongliang Bi, Pengyuan Liu
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Cause Extraction, Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction, Emotion Classification, General Classification

Emotion cause analysis such as emotion cause extraction (ECE) and emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) have gradually attracted the attention of many researchers. However, there are still two shortcomings in the existing research: 1) In most cases, emotion expression and cause are not the whole clause, but the span in the clause, so extracting the clause-pair rather than the span-pair greatly limits its applications in real-world scenarios; 2) It is not enough to extract the emotion expression clause without identifying the emotion categories, the presence of emotion clause does not necessarily convey emotional information explicitly due to different possible causes. In this paper, we propose a new task: Emotion-Cause Span-Pair extraction and classification (ECSP), which aims to extract the potential span-pair of emotion and corresponding causes in a document, and make emotion classification for each pair. In the new ECSP task, ECE and ECPE can be regarded as two special cases at the clause-level. We propose a span-based extract-then-classify (ETC) model, where emotion and cause are directly extracted and paired from the document under the supervision of target span boundaries, and corresponding categories are then classified using their pair representations and localized context. Experiments show that our proposed ETC model outperforms the SOTA model of ECE and ECPE task respectively and gets a fair-enough results on ECSP task.
Automatic Recognition of the General-Purpose Communicative Functions defined by the ISO 24617-2 Standard for Dialog Act Annotation
Authors: Eugénio Ribeiro, Ricardo Ribeiro, David Martins de Matos
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

ISO 24617-2, the standard for dialog act annotation, defines a hierarchically organized set of general-purpose communicative functions. The automatic recognition of these functions, although practically unexplored, is relevant for a dialog system, since they provide cues regarding the intention behind the segments and how they should be interpreted. We explore the recognition of general-purpose communicative functions in the DialogBank, which is a reference set of dialogs annotated according to this standard. To do so, we propose adaptations of existing approaches to flat dialog act recognition that allow them to deal with the hierarchical classification problem. More specifically, we propose the use of a hierarchical network with cascading outputs and maximum a posteriori path estimation to predict the communicative function at each level of the hierarchy, preserve the dependencies between the functions in the path, and decide at which level to stop. Furthermore, since the amount of dialogs in the DialogBank is reduced, we rely on transfer learning processes to reduce overfitting and improve performance. The results of our experiments show that the hierarchical approach outperforms a flat one and that each of its components plays an important role towards the recognition of general-purpose communicative functions.
Generating Emotionally Aligned Responses in Dialogues using Affect Control Theory
Authors: Nabiha Asghar, Ivan Kobyzev, Jesse Hoey, Pascal Poupart, Muhammad Bilal Sheikh
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation

State-of-the-art neural dialogue systems excel at syntactic and semantic modelling of language, but often have a hard time establishing emotional alignment with the human interactant during a conversation. In this work, we bring Affect Control Theory (ACT), a socio-mathematical model of emotions for human-human interactions, to the neural dialogue generation setting. ACT makes predictions about how humans respond to emotional stimuli in social situations. Due to this property, ACT and its derivative probabilistic models have been successfully deployed in several applications of Human-Computer Interaction, including empathetic tutoring systems, assistive healthcare devices and two-person social dilemma games. We investigate how ACT can be used to develop affect-aware neural conversational agents, which produce emotionally aligned responses to prompts and take into consideration the affective identities of the interactants.
Discovering linguistic (ir)regularities in word embeddings through max-margin separating hyperplanes
Authors: Noel Kennedy, Imogen Schofield, Dave C. Brodbelt, David B. Church, Dan G. O'Neill
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Word Embeddings

We experiment with new methods for learning how related words are positioned relative to each other in word embedding spaces. Previous approaches learned constant vector offsets: vectors that point from source tokens to target tokens with an assumption that these offsets were parallel to each other. We show that the offsets between related tokens are closer to orthogonal than parallel, and that they have low cosine similarities. We proceed by making a different assumption; target tokens are linearly separable from source and un-labeled tokens. We show that a max-margin hyperplane can separate target tokens and that vectors orthogonal to this hyperplane represent the relationship between source and targets. We find that this representation of the relationship obtains the best results in dis-covering linguistic regularities. We experiment with vector space models trained by a variety of algorithms (Word2vec: CBOW/skip-gram, fastText, or GloVe), and various word context choices such as linear word-order, syntax dependency grammars, and with and without knowledge of word position. These experiments show that our model, SVMCos, is robust to a range of experimental choices when training word embeddings.
Multi-task Learning Based Neural Bridging Reference Resolution
Authors: Juntao Yu, Massimo Poesio
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Multi-Task Learning

We propose a multi task learning-based neural model for resolving bridging references tackling two key challenges. The first challenge is the lack of large corpora annotated with bridging references. To address this, we use multi-task learning to help bridging reference resolution with coreference resolution. We show that substantial improvements of up to 8 p.p. can be achieved on full bridging resolution with this architecture. The second challenge is the different definitions of bridging used in different corpora, meaning that hand-coded systems or systems using special features designed for one corpus do not work well with other corpora. Our neural model only uses a small number of corpus independent features, thus can be applied to different corpora. Evaluations with very different bridging corpora (ARRAU, ISNOTES, BASHI and SCICORP) suggest that our architecture works equally well on all corpora, and achieves the SoTA results on full bridging resolution for all corpora, outperforming the best reported results by up to 36.3 p.p..
The growing amplification of social media: Measuring temporal and social contagion dynamics for over 150 languages on Twitter for 2009-2020
Authors: Thayer Alshaabi, David R. Dewhurst, Joshua R. Minot, Michael V. Arnold, Jane L. Adams, Christopher M. Danforth, Peter Sheridan Dodds
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00

Working from a dataset of 118 billion messages running from the start of 2009 to the end of 2019, we identify and explore the relative daily use of over 150 languages on Twitter. We find that eight languages comprise 80% of all tweets, with English, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese being the most dominant. To quantify social spreading in each language over time, we compute the 'contagion ratio': The balance of retweets to organic messages. We find that for the most common languages on Twitter there is a growing tendency, though not universal, to retweet rather than share new content. By the end of 2019, the contagion ratios for half of the top 30 languages, including English and Spanish, had reached above 1 -- the naive contagion threshold. In 2019, the top 5 languages with the highest average daily ratios were, in order, Thai (7.3), Hindi, Tamil, Urdu, and Catalan, while the bottom 5 were Russian, Swedish, Esperanto, Cebuano, and Finnish (0.26). Further, we show that over time, the contagion ratios for most common languages are growing more strongly than those of rare languages.
Investigating the Decoders of Maximum Likelihood Sequence Models: A Look-ahead Approach
Authors: Yu-Siang Wang, Yen-Ling Kuo, Boris Katz
Date: 2020-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Multimodal Machine Translation, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Sentence, Translation

We demonstrate how we can practically incorporate multi-step future information into a decoder of maximum likelihood sequence models. We propose a "k-step look-ahead" module to consider the likelihood information of a rollout up to k steps. Unlike other approaches that need to train another value network to evaluate the rollouts, we can directly apply this look-ahead module to improve the decoding of any sequence model trained in a maximum likelihood framework. We evaluate our look-ahead module on three datasets of varying difficulties: IM2LATEX-100k OCR image to LaTeX, WMT16 multimodal machine translation, and WMT14 machine translation. Our look-ahead module improves the performance of the simpler datasets such as IM2LATEX-100k and WMT16 multimodal machine translation. However, the improvement of the more difficult dataset (e.g., containing longer sequences), WMT14 machine translation, becomes marginal. Our further investigation using the k-step look-ahead suggests that the more difficult tasks suffer from the overestimated EOS (end-of-sentence) probability. We argue that the overestimated EOS probability also causes the decreased performance of beam search when increasing its beam width. We tackle the EOS problem by integrating an auxiliary EOS loss into the training to estimate if the model should emit EOS or other words. Our experiments show that improving EOS estimation not only increases the performance of our proposed look-ahead module but also the robustness of the beam search.
Pseudo Labeling and Negative Feedback Learning for Large-scale Multi-label Domain Classification
Authors: Joo-Kyung Kim, Young-Bum Kim
Date: 2020-03-08 00:00:00
Tasks: domain classification, General Classification, Reranking

In large-scale domain classification, an utterance can be handled by multiple domains with overlapped capabilities. However, only a limited number of ground-truth domains are provided for each training utterance in practice while knowing as many as correct target labels is helpful for improving the model performance. In this paper, given one ground-truth domain for each training utterance, we regard domains consistently predicted with the highest confidences as additional pseudo labels for the training. In order to reduce prediction errors due to incorrect pseudo labels, we leverage utterances with negative system responses to decrease the confidences of the incorrectly predicted domains. Evaluating on user utterances from an intelligent conversational system, we show that the proposed approach significantly improves the performance of domain classification with hypothesis reranking.
Keeping it simple: Implementation and performance of the proto-principle of adaptation and learning in the language sciences
Authors: Petar Milin, Harish Tayyar Madabushi, Michael Croucher, Dagmar Divjak
Date: 2020-03-08 00:00:00

In this paper we present the Widrow-Hoff rule and its applications to language data. After contextualizing the rule historically and placing it in the chain of neurally inspired artificial learning models, we explain its rationale and implementational considerations. Using a number of case studies we illustrate how the Widrow-Hoff rule offers unexpected opportunities for the computational simulation of a range of language phenomena that make it possible to approach old problems from a novel perspective.
Shallow Discourse Annotation for Chinese TED Talks
Authors: Wanqiu Long, Xinyi Cai, James E. M. Reid, Bonnie Webber, Deyi Xiong
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: LREC 2020 5
Tasks: Translation

Text corpora annotated with language-related properties are an important resource for the development of Language Technology. The current work contributes a new resource for Chinese Language Technology and for Chinese-English translation, in the form of a set of TED talks (some originally given in English, some in Chinese) that have been annotated with discourse relations in the style of the Penn Discourse TreeBank, adapted to properties of Chinese text that are not present in English. The resource is currently unique in annotating discourse-level properties of planned spoken monologues rather than of written text. An inter-annotator agreement study demonstrates that the annotation scheme is able to achieve highly reliable results.
Sentence Analogies: Exploring Linguistic Relationships and Regularities in Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Xunjie Zhu, Gerard de Melo
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings

While important properties of word vector representations have been studied extensively, far less is known about the properties of sentence vector representations. Word vectors are often evaluated by assessing to what degree they exhibit regularities with regard to relationships of the sort considered in word analogies. In this paper, we investigate to what extent commonly used sentence vector representation spaces as well reflect certain kinds of regularities. We propose a number of schemes to induce evaluation data, based on lexical analogy data as well as semantic relationships between sentences. Our experiments consider a wide range of sentence embedding methods, including ones based on BERT-style contextual embeddings. We find that different models differ substantially in their ability to reflect such regularities.
A Multi-Source Entity-Level Sentiment Corpus for the Financial Domain: The FinLin Corpus
Authors: Tobias Daudert
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sentiment Analysis

We introduce FinLin, a novel corpus containing investor reports, company reports, news articles, and microblogs from StockTwits, targeting multiple entities stemming from the automobile industry and covering a 3-month period. FinLin was annotated with a sentiment score and a relevance score in the range [-1.0, 1.0] and [0.0, 1.0], respectively. The annotations also include the text spans selected for the sentiment, thus, providing additional insight into the annotators' reasoning. Overall, FinLin aims to complement the current knowledge by providing a novel and publicly available financial sentiment corpus and to foster research on the topic of financial sentiment analysis and potential applications in behavioural science.
An Empirical Investigation of Pre-Trained Transformer Language Models for Open-Domain Dialogue Generation
Authors: Piji Li
Date: 2020-03-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Diversity, Text Generation

We present an empirical investigation of pre-trained Transformer-based auto-regressive language models for the task of open-domain dialogue generation. Training paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning is employed to conduct the parameter learning. Corpora of News and Wikipedia in Chinese and English are collected for the pre-training stage respectively. Dialogue context and response are concatenated into a single sequence utilized as the input of the models during the fine-tuning stage. A weighted joint prediction paradigm for both context and response is designed to evaluate the performance of models with or without the loss term for context prediction. Various of decoding strategies such as greedy search, beam search, top-k sampling, etc. are employed to conduct the response text generation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the typical single-turn and multi-turn dialogue corpora such as Weibo, Douban, Reddit, DailyDialog, and Persona-Chat. Detailed numbers of automatic evaluation metrics on relevance and diversity of the generated results for the languages models as well as the baseline approaches are reported.
Frozen Binomials on the Web: Word Ordering and Language Conventions in Online Text
Authors: Katherine Van Koevering, Austin R. Benson, Jon Kleinberg
Date: 2020-03-07 00:00:00

There is inherent information captured in the order in which we write words in a list. The orderings of binomials --- lists of two words separated by `and' or `or' --- has been studied for more than a century. These binomials are common across many areas of speech, in both formal and informal text. In the last century, numerous explanations have been given to describe what order people use for these binomials, from differences in semantics to differences in phonology. These rules describe primarily `frozen' binomials that exist in exactly one ordering and have lacked large-scale trials to determine efficacy. Online text provides a unique opportunity to study these lists in the context of informal text at a very large scale. In this work, we expand the view of binomials to include a large-scale analysis of both frozen and non-frozen binomials in a quantitative way. Using this data, we then demonstrate that most previously proposed rules are ineffective at predicting binomial ordering. By tracking the order of these binomials across time and communities we are able to establish additional, unexplored dimensions central to these predictions. Expanding beyond the question of individual binomials, we also explore the global structure of binomials in various communities, establishing a new model for these lists and analyzing this structure for non-frozen and frozen binomials. Additionally, novel analysis of trinomials --- lists of length three --- suggests that none of the binomials analysis applies in these cases. Finally, we demonstrate how large data sets gleaned from the web can be used in conjunction with older theories to expand and improve on old questions.