pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Data Augmentation with Unsupervised Machine Translation Improves the Structural Similarity of Cross-lingual Word Embeddings
Authors: Sosuke Nishikawa, Ryokan Ri, Yoshimasa Tsuruoka
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: ACL 2021 5
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Word Embeddings, Data Augmentation, Machine Translation, Translation, Unsupervised Machine Translation, Word Embeddings

Unsupervised cross-lingual word embedding (CLWE) methods learn a linear transformation matrix that maps two monolingual embedding spaces that are separately trained with monolingual corpora. This method relies on the assumption that the two embedding spaces are structurally similar, which does not necessarily hold true in general. In this paper, we argue that using a pseudo-parallel corpus generated by an unsupervised machine translation model facilitates the structural similarity of the two embedding spaces and improves the quality of CLWEs in the unsupervised mapping method. We show that our approach outperforms other alternative approaches given the same amount of data, and, through detailed analysis, we show that data augmentation with the pseudo data from unsupervised machine translation is especially effective for mapping-based CLWEs because (1) the pseudo data makes the source and target corpora (partially) parallel; (2) the pseudo data contains information on the original language that helps to learn similar embedding spaces between the source and target languages.
Linguistic Features for Readability Assessment
Authors: Tovly Deutsch, Masoud Jasbi, Stuart Shieber
Date: 2020-05-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Deep Learning, Text Classification

Readability assessment aims to automatically classify text by the level appropriate for learning readers. Traditional approaches to this task utilize a variety of linguistically motivated features paired with simple machine learning models. More recent methods have improved performance by discarding these features and utilizing deep learning models. However, it is unknown whether augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features would improve performance further. This paper combines these two approaches with the goal of improving overall model performance and addressing this question. Evaluating on two large readability corpora, we find that, given sufficient training data, augmenting deep learning models with linguistically motivated features does not improve state-of-the-art performance. Our results provide preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that the state-of-the-art deep learning models represent linguistic features of the text related to readability. Future research on the nature of representations formed in these models can shed light on the learned features and their relations to linguistically motivated ones hypothesized in traditional approaches.
Learning to refer informatively by amortizing pragmatic reasoning
Authors: Julia White, Jesse Mu, Noah D. Goodman
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00

A hallmark of human language is the ability to effectively and efficiently convey contextually relevant information. One theory for how humans reason about language is presented in the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework, which captures pragmatic phenomena via a process of recursive social reasoning (Goodman & Frank, 2016). However, RSA represents ideal reasoning in an unconstrained setting. We explore the idea that speakers might learn to amortize the cost of RSA computation over time by directly optimizing for successful communication with an internal listener model. In simulations with grounded neural speakers and listeners across two communication game datasets representing synthetic and human-generated data, we find that our amortized model is able to quickly generate language that is effective and concise across a range of contexts, without the need for explicit pragmatic reasoning.
SANA : Sentiment Analysis on Newspapers comments in Algeria
Authors: Hichem Rahab, Abdelhafid Zitouni, Mahieddine Djoudi
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis

It is very current in today life to seek for tracking the people opinion from their interaction with occurring events. A very common way to do that is comments in articles published in newspapers web sites dealing with contemporary events. Sentiment analysis or opinion mining is an emergent field who is the purpose is finding the behind phenomenon masked in opinionated texts. We are interested in our work by comments in Algerian newspaper websites. For this end, two corpora were used SANA and OCA. SANA corpus is created by collection of comments from three Algerian newspapers, and annotated by two Algerian Arabic native speakers, while OCA is a freely available corpus for sentiment analysis. For the classification we adopt Supports vector machines, naive Bayes and knearest neighbors. Obtained results are very promising and show the different effects of stemming in such domain, also knearest neighbors give important improvement comparing to other classifiers unlike similar works where SVM is the most dominant. From this study we observe the importance of dedicated resources and methods the newspaper comments sentiment analysis which we look forward in future works.
Recognizing Chinese Judicial Named Entity using BiLSTM-CRF
Authors: Pin Tang, Pinli Yang, Yuang Shi, Yi Zhou, Feng Lin, Yan Wang
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation Extraction, Retrieval

Named entity recognition (NER) plays an essential role in natural language processing systems. Judicial NER is a fundamental component of judicial information retrieval, entity relation extraction, and knowledge map building. However, Chinese judicial NER remains to be more challenging due to the characteristics of Chinese and high accuracy requirements in the judicial filed. Thus, in this paper, we propose a deep learning-based method named BiLSTM-CRF which consists of bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) and conditional random fields (CRF). For further accuracy promotion, we propose to use Adaptive moment estimation (Adam) for optimization of the model. To validate our method, we perform experiments on judgment documents including commutation, parole and temporary service outside prison, which is acquired from China Judgments Online. Experimental results achieve the accuracy of 0.876, recall of 0.856 and F1 score of 0.855, which suggests the superiority of the proposed BiLSTM-CRF with Adam optimizer.
Detecting Group Beliefs Related to 2018's Brazilian Elections in Tweets A Combined Study on Modeling Topics and Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Brenda Salenave Santana, Aline Aver Vanin
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Mining, Sentiment Analysis

2018's Brazilian presidential elections highlighted the influence of alternative media and social networks, such as Twitter. In this work, we perform an analysis covering politically motivated discourses related to the second round in Brazilian elections. In order to verify whether similar discourses reinforce group engagement to personal beliefs, we collected a set of tweets related to political hashtags at that moment. To this end, we have used a combination of topic modeling approach with opinion mining techniques to analyze the motivated political discourses. Using SentiLex-PT, a Portuguese sentiment lexicon, we extracted from the dataset the top 5 most frequent group of words related to opinions. Applying a bag-of-words model, the cosine similarity calculation was performed between each opinion and the observed groups. This study allowed us to observe an exacerbated use of passionate discourses in the digital political scenario as a form of appreciation and engagement to the groups which convey similar beliefs.
BiERU: Bidirectional Emotional Recurrent Unit for Conversational Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Wei Li, Wei Shao, Shaoxiong Ji, Erik Cambria
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition in Conversation, Sentence, Sentiment Classification

Sentiment analysis in conversations has gained increasing attention in recent years for the growing amount of applications it can serve, e.g., sentiment analysis, recommender systems, and human-robot interaction. The main difference between conversational sentiment analysis and single sentence sentiment analysis is the existence of context information which may influence the sentiment of an utterance in a dialogue. How to effectively encode contextual information in dialogues, however, remains a challenge. Existing approaches employ complicated deep learning structures to distinguish different parties in a conversation and then model the context information. In this paper, we propose a fast, compact and parameter-efficient party-ignorant framework named bidirectional emotional recurrent unit for conversational sentiment analysis. In our system, a generalized neural tensor block followed by a two-channel classifier is designed to perform context compositionality and sentiment classification, respectively. Extensive experiments on three standard datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms the state of the art in most cases.
Learning to Recognise Words using Visually Grounded Speech
Authors: Sebastiaan Scholten, Danny Merkx, Odette Scharenborg
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Retrieval

We investigated word recognition in a Visually Grounded Speech model. The model has been trained on pairs of images and spoken captions to create visually grounded embeddings which can be used for speech to image retrieval and vice versa. We investigate whether such a model can be used to recognise words by embedding isolated words and using them to retrieve images of their visual referents. We investigate the time-course of word recognition using a gating paradigm and perform a statistical analysis to see whether well known word competition effects in human speech processing influence word recognition. Our experiments show that the model is able to recognise words, and the gating paradigm reveals that words can be recognised from partial input as well and that recognition is negatively influenced by word competition from the word initial cohort.
Neural Entity Linking: A Survey of Models Based on Deep Learning
Authors: Ozge Sevgili, Artem Shelmanov, Mikhail Arkhipov, Alexander Panchenko, Chris Biemann
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Entity Embeddings, Entity Linking, Survey

This survey presents a comprehensive description of recent neural entity linking (EL) systems developed since 2015 as a result of the "deep learning revolution" in natural language processing. Its goal is to systemize design features of neural entity linking systems and compare their performance to the remarkable classic methods on common benchmarks. This work distills a generic architecture of a neural EL system and discusses its components, such as candidate generation, mention-context encoding, and entity ranking, summarizing prominent methods for each of them. The vast variety of modifications of this general architecture are grouped by several common themes: joint entity mention detection and disambiguation, models for global linking, domain-independent techniques including zero-shot and distant supervision methods, and cross-lingual approaches. Since many neural models take advantage of entity and mention/context embeddings to represent their meaning, this work also overviews prominent entity embedding techniques. Finally, the survey touches on applications of entity linking, focusing on the recently emerged use-case of enhancing deep pre-trained masked language models based on the Transformer architecture.
"Judge me by my size (noun), do you?'' YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework
Authors: Aparna Garimella, Carmen Banea, Nabil Hossain, Rada Mihalcea
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The subjective nature of humor makes computerized humor generation a challenging task. We propose an automatic humor generation framework for filling the blanks in Mad Libs stories, while accounting for the demographic backgrounds of the desired audience. We collect a dataset consisting of such stories, which are filled in and judged by carefully selected workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We build upon the BERT platform to predict location-biased word fillings in incomplete sentences, and we fine tune BERT to classify location-specific humor in a sentence. We leverage these components to produce YodaLib, a fully-automated Mad Libs style humor generation framework, which selects and ranks appropriate candidate words and sentences in order to generate a coherent and funny story tailored to certain demographics. Our experimental results indicate that YodaLib outperforms a previous semi-automated approach proposed for this task, while also surpassing human annotators in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.
Efficient Deployment of Conversational Natural Language Interfaces over Databases
Authors: Anthony Colas, Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt, Moumita Sinha, Doo Soon Kim
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: WS 2020 7
Tasks: Chatbot, Question Answering

Many users communicate with chatbots and AI assistants in order to help them with various tasks. A key component of the assistant is the ability to understand and answer a user's natural language questions for question-answering (QA). Because data can be usually stored in a structured manner, an essential step involves turning a natural language question into its corresponding query language. However, in order to train most natural language-to-query-language state-of-the-art models, a large amount of training data is needed first. In most domains, this data is not available and collecting such datasets for various domains can be tedious and time-consuming. In this work, we propose a novel method for accelerating the training dataset collection for developing the natural language-to-query-language machine learning models. Our system allows one to generate conversational multi-term data, where multiple turns define a dialogue session, enabling one to better utilize chatbot interfaces. We train two current state-of-the-art NL-to-QL models, on both an SQL and SPARQL-based datasets in order to showcase the adaptability and efficacy of our created data.
BPGC at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection in News Articles with Multi-Granularity Knowledge Sharing and Linguistic Features based Ensemble Learning
Authors: Rajaswa Patil, Somesh Singh, Swati Agarwal
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: Articles, Ensemble Learning, Propaganda detection, Task 2

Propaganda spreads the ideology and beliefs of like-minded people, brainwashing their audiences, and sometimes leading to violence. SemEval 2020 Task-11 aims to design automated systems for news propaganda detection. Task-11 consists of two sub-tasks, namely, Span Identification - given any news article, the system tags those specific fragments which contain at least one propaganda technique; and Technique Classification - correctly classify a given propagandist statement amongst 14 propaganda techniques. For sub-task 1, we use contextual embeddings extracted from pre-trained transformer models to represent the text data at various granularities and propose a multi-granularity knowledge sharing approach. For sub-task 2, we use an ensemble of BERT and logistic regression classifiers with linguistic features. Our results reveal that the linguistic features are the strong indicators for covering minority classes in a highly imbalanced dataset.
LRG at SemEval-2020 Task 7: Assessing the Ability of BERT and Derivative Models to Perform Short-Edits based Humor Grading
Authors: Siddhant Mahurkar, Rajaswa Patil
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In this paper, we assess the ability of BERT and its derivative models (RoBERTa, DistilBERT, and ALBERT) for short-edits based humor grading. We test these models for humor grading and classification tasks on the Humicroedit and the FunLines dataset. We perform extensive experiments with these models to test their language modeling and generalization abilities via zero-shot inference and cross-dataset inference based approaches. Further, we also inspect the role of self-attention layers in humor-grading by performing a qualitative analysis over the self-attention weights from the final layer of the trained BERT model. Our experiments show that all the pre-trained BERT derivative models show significant generalization capabilities for humor-grading related tasks.
CNRL at SemEval-2020 Task 5: Modelling Causal Reasoning in Language with Multi-Head Self-Attention Weights based Counterfactual Detection
Authors: Rajaswa Patil, Veeky Baths
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: SEMEVAL 2020
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Detection

In this paper, we describe an approach for modelling causal reasoning in natural language by detecting counterfactuals in text using multi-head self-attention weights. We use pre-trained transformer models to extract contextual embeddings and self-attention weights from the text. We show the use of convolutional layers to extract task-specific features from these self-attention weights. Further, we describe a fine-tuning approach with a common base model for knowledge sharing between the two closely related sub-tasks for counterfactual detection. We analyze and compare the performance of various transformer models in our experiments. Finally, we perform a qualitative analysis with the multi-head self-attention weights to interpret our models' dynamics.
Neural Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in NLP---A Survey
Authors: Alan Ramponi, Barbara Plank
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Out-of-Distribution Generalization, Survey, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Deep neural networks excel at learning from labeled data and achieve state-of-the-art resultson a wide array of Natural Language Processing tasks. In contrast, learning from unlabeled data, especially under domain shift, remains a challenge. Motivated by the latest advances, in this survey we review neural unsupervised domain adaptation techniques which do not require labeled target domain data. This is a more challenging yet a more widely applicable setup. We outline methods, from early traditional non-neural methods to pre-trained model transfer. We also revisit the notion of domain, and we uncover a bias in the type of Natural Language Processing tasks which received most attention. Lastly, we outline future directions, particularly the broader need for out-of-distribution generalization of future NLP.
A Unified Feature Representation for Lexical Connotations
Authors: Emily Allaway, Kathleen McKeown
Date: 2020-05-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: EACL 2021 2
Tasks: Stance Detection

Ideological attitudes and stance are often expressed through subtle meanings of words and phrases. Understanding these connotations is critical to recognizing the cultural and emotional perspectives of the speaker. In this paper, we use distant labeling to create a new lexical resource representing connotation aspects for nouns and adjectives. Our analysis shows that it aligns well with human judgments. Additionally, we present a method for creating lexical representations that captures connotations within the embedding space and show that using the embeddings provides a statistically significant improvement on the task of stance detection when data is limited.
Conversational Machine Comprehension: a Literature Review
Authors: Somil Gupta, Bhanu Pratap Singh Rawat, Hong Yu
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Conversational Machine Comprehension (CMC), a research track in conversational AI, expects the machine to understand an open-domain natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. While most of the research in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) revolves around single-turn question answering (QA), multi-turn CMC has recently gained prominence, thanks to the advancement in natural language understanding via neural language models such as BERT and the introduction of large-scale conversational datasets such as CoQA and QuAC. The rise in interest has, however, led to a flurry of concurrent publications, each with a different yet structurally similar modeling approach and an inconsistent view of the surrounding literature. With the volume of model submissions to conversational datasets increasing every year, there exists a need to consolidate the scattered knowledge in this domain to streamline future research. This literature review attempts at providing a holistic overview of CMC with an emphasis on the common trends across recently published models, specifically in their approach to tackling conversational history. The review synthesizes a generic framework for CMC models while highlighting the differences in recent approaches and intends to serve as a compendium of CMC for future researchers.
Stance in Replies and Quotes (SRQ): A New Dataset For Learning Stance in Twitter Conversations
Authors: Ramon Villa-Cox, Sumeet Kumar, Matthew Babcock, Kathleen M. Carley
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Opinion Mining

Automated ways to extract stance (denying vs. supporting opinions) from conversations on social media are essential to advance opinion mining research. Recently, there is a renewed excitement in the field as we see new models attempting to improve the state-of-the-art. However, for training and evaluating the models, the datasets used are often small. Additionally, these small datasets have uneven class distributions, i.e., only a tiny fraction of the examples in the dataset have favoring or denying stances, and most other examples have no clear stance. Moreover, the existing datasets do not distinguish between the different types of conversations on social media (e.g., replying vs. quoting on Twitter). Because of this, models trained on one event do not generalize to other events. In the presented work, we create a new dataset by labeling stance in responses to posts on Twitter (both replies and quotes) on controversial issues. To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the largest human-labeled stance dataset for Twitter conversations with over 5200 stance labels. More importantly, we designed a tweet collection methodology that favors the selection of denial-type responses. This class is expected to be more useful in the identification of rumors and determining antagonistic relationships between users. Moreover, we include many baseline models for learning the stance in conversations and compare the performance of various models. We show that combining data from replies and quotes decreases the accuracy of models indicating that the two modalities behave differently when it comes to stance learning.
Online Versus Offline NMT Quality: An In-depth Analysis on English-German and German-English
Authors: Maha Elbayad, Michael Ustaszewski, Emmanuelle Esperança-Rodier, Francis Brunet Manquat, Jakob Verbeek, Laurent Besacier
Date: 2020-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: COLING 2020 8
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

We conduct in this work an evaluation study comparing offline and online neural machine translation architectures. Two sequence-to-sequence models: convolutional Pervasive Attention (Elbayad et al. 2018) and attention-based Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017) are considered. We investigate, for both architectures, the impact of online decoding constraints on the translation quality through a carefully designed human evaluation on English-German and German-English language pairs, the latter being particularly sensitive to latency constraints. The evaluation results allow us to identify the strengths and shortcomings of each model when we shift to the online setup.