ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
From Examples to Rules: Neural Guided Rule Synthesis for Information Extraction (2022)

While deep learning approaches to information extraction have had many successes, they can be difficult to augment or maintain as needs shift. Rule-based methods, on the other hand, can be more easily modified. However, crafting rules requires expertise in linguistics and the domain of interest, making it infeasible for most users. Here we attempt to combine the advantages of these two directions while mitigating their drawbacks. We adapt recent advances from the adjacent field of program synthesis to information extraction, synthesizing rules from provided examples. We use a transformer-based architecture to guide an enumerative search, and show that this reduces the number of steps that need to be explored before a rule is found. Further, we show that without training the synthesis algorithm on the specific domain, our synthesized rules achieve state-of-the-art performance on the 1-shot scenario of a task that focuses on few-shot learning for relation classification, and competitive performance in the 5-shot scenario.
Enhancing Relation Extraction via Adversarial Multi-task Learning (2022)

Relation extraction (RE) is a sub-field of information extraction, which aims to extract the relation between two given named entities (NEs) in a sentence and thus requires a good understanding of contextual information, especially the entities and their surrounding texts. However, limited attention is paid by most existing studies to re-modeling the given NEs and thus lead to inferior RE results when NEs are sometimes ambiguous. In this paper, we propose a RE model with two training stages, where adversarial multi-task learning is applied to the first training stage to explicitly recover the given NEs so as to enhance the main relation extractor, which is trained alone in the second stage. In doing so, the RE model is optimized by named entity recognition (NER) and thus obtains a detailed understanding of entity-aware context. We further propose the adversarial mechanism to enhance the process, which controls the effect of NER on the main relation extractor and allows the extractor to benefit from NER while keep focusing on RE rather than the entire multi-task learning. Experimental results on two English benchmark datasets for RE demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art performance is observed on both datasets.
Query Obfuscation by Semantic Decomposition (2022)

We propose a method to protect the privacy of search engine users by decomposing the queries using semantically \textit{related} and unrelated \textit{distractor} terms. Instead of a single query, the search engine receives multiple decomposed query terms. Next, we reconstruct the search results relevant to the original query term by aggregating the search results retrieved for the decomposed query terms. We show that the word embeddings learnt using a distributed representation learning method can be used to find semantically related and distractor query terms. We derive the relationship between the \textit{obfuscity} achieved through the proposed query anonymisation method and the \textit{reconstructability} of the original search results using the decomposed queries. We analytically study the risk of discovering the search engine users' information intents under the proposed query obfuscation method, and empirically evaluate its robustness against clustering-based attacks. Our experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately reconstruct the search results for user queries, without compromising the privacy of the search engine users.
TWEET-FID: An Annotated Dataset for Multiple Foodborne Illness Detection Tasks (2022)

Foodborne illness is a serious but preventable public health problem {--} with delays in detecting the associated outbreaks resulting in productivity loss, expensive recalls, public safety hazards, and even loss of life. While social media is a promising source for identifying unreported foodborne illnesses, there is a dearth of labeled datasets for developing effective outbreak detection models. To accelerate the development of machine learning-based models for foodborne outbreak detection, we thus present TWEET-FID (TWEET-Foodborne Illness Detection), the first publicly available annotated dataset for multiple foodborne illness incident detection tasks. TWEET-FID collected from Twitter is annotated with three facets: tweet class, entity type, and slot type, with labels produced by experts as well as by crowdsource workers. We introduce several domain tasks leveraging these three facets: text relevance classification (TRC), entity mention detection (EMD), and slot filling (SF). We describe the end-to-end methodology for dataset design, creation, and labeling for supporting model development for these tasks. A comprehensive set of results for these tasks leveraging state-of-the-art single-and multi-task deep learning methods on the TWEET-FID dataset are provided. This dataset opens opportunities for future research in foodborne outbreak detection.
Named Entity Recognition to Detect Criminal Texts on the Web (2022)

This paper presents a toolkit that applies named-entity extraction techniques to identify information related to criminal activity in texts from the Polish Internet. The methodological and technical assumptions were established following the requirements of our application users from the Border Guard. Due to the specificity of the users' needs and the specificity of web texts, we used original methodologies related to the search for desired texts, the creation of domain lexicons, the annotation of the collected text resources, and the combination of rule-based and machine-learning techniques for extracting the information desired by the user. The performance of our tools has been evaluated on 6240 manually annotated text fragments collected from Internet sources. Evaluation results and user feedback show that our approach is feasible and has potential value for real-life applications in the daily work of border guards. Lexical lookup combined with hand-crafted rules and regular expressions, supported by text statistics, can make a decent specialized entity recognition system in the absence of large data sets required for training a good neural network.
Task-Driven and Experience-Based Question Answering Corpus for In-Home Robot Application in the House3D Virtual Environment (2022)

At present, more and more work has begun to pay attention to the long-term housekeeping robot scene. Naturally, we wonder whether the robot can answer the questions raised by the owner according to the actual situation at home. These questions usually do not have a clear text context, are directly related to the actual scene, and it is difficult to find the answer from the general knowledge base (such as Wikipedia). Therefore, the experience accumulated from the task seems to be a more natural choice. We present a corpus called TEQA (task-driven and experience-based question answering) in the long-term household task. Based on a popular in-house virtual environment (AI2-THOR) and agent task experiences of ALFRED, we design six types of questions along with answering including 24 question templates, 37 answer templates, and nearly 10k different question answering pairs. Our corpus aims at investigating the ability of task experience understanding of agents for the daily question answering scenario on the ALFRED dataset.
ELRC Action: Covering Confidentiality, Correctness and Cross-linguality (2022)

We describe the language technology (LT) assessments carried out in the ELRC action (European Language Resource Coordination) of the European Commission, which aims towards minimising language barriers across the EU. We zoom in on the two most extensive assessments. These LT specifications do not only involve experiments with tools and techniques but also an extensive consultation round with stakeholders from public organisations, academia and industry, in order to gather insights into scenarios and best practices. The LT specifications concern (1) the field of automated anonymisation, which is motivated by the need of public and other organisations to be able to store and share data, and (2) the field of multilingual fake news processing, which is motivated by the increasingly pressing problem of disinformation and the limited language coverage of systems for automatically detecting misleading articles. For each specification, we set up a corresponding proof-of-concept software to demonstrate the opportunities and challenges involved in the field.
RadQA: A Question Answering Dataset to Improve Comprehension of Radiology Reports (2022)

We present a radiology question answering dataset, RadQA, with 3074 questions posed against radiology reports and annotated with their corresponding answer spans (resulting in a total of 6148 question-answer evidence pairs) by physicians. The questions are manually created using the clinical referral section of the reports that take into account the actual information needs of ordering physicians and eliminate bias from seeing the answer context (and, further, organically create unanswerable questions). The answer spans are marked within the Findings and Impressions sections of a report. The dataset aims to satisfy the complex clinical requirements by including complete (yet concise) answer phrases (which are not just entities) that can span multiple lines. We conduct a thorough analysis of the proposed dataset by examining the broad categories of disagreement in annotation (providing insights on the errors made by humans) and the reasoning requirements to answer a question (uncovering the huge dependence on medical knowledge for answering the questions). The advanced transformer language models achieve the best F1 score of 63.55 on the test set, however, the best human performance is 90.31 (with an average of 84.52). This demonstrates the challenging nature of RadQA that leaves ample scope for future method research.
Knowledge Graph - Deep Learning: A Case Study in Question Answering in Aviation Safety Domain (2022)

In the commercial aviation domain, there are a large number of documents, like accident reports of NTSB and ASRS, and regulatory directives ADs. There is a need for a system to efficiently access these diverse repositories to serve the demands of the aviation industry, such as maintenance, compliance, and safety. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge Graph (KG) guided Deep Learning (DL) based Question Answering (QA) system to cater to these requirements. We construct a KG from aircraft accident reports and contribute this resource to the community of researchers. The efficacy of this resource is tested and proved by the proposed QA system. Questions in Natural Language are converted into SPARQL (the interface language of the RDF graph database) queries and are answered from the KG. On the DL side, we examine two different QA models, BERT-QA and GPT3-QA, covering the two paradigms of answer formulation in QA. We evaluate our system on a set of handcrafted queries curated from the accident reports. Our hybrid KG + DL QA system, KGQA + BERT-QA, achieves 7{\%} and 40.3{\%} increase in accuracy over KGQA and BERT-QA systems respectively. Similarly, the other combined system, KGQA + GPT3-QA, achieves 29.3{\%} and 9.3{\%} increase in accuracy over KGQA and GPT3-QA systems respectively. Thus, we infer that the combination of KG and DL is better than either KG or DL individually for QA, at least in our chosen domain.
A Bayesian Topic Model for Human-Evaluated Interpretability (2022)

One desiderata of topic modeling is to produce interpretable topics. Given a cluster of document-tokens comprising a topic, we can order the topic by counting each word. It is natural to think that each topic could easily be labeled by looking at the words with the highest word count. However, this is not always the case. A human evaluator can often have difficulty identifying a single label that accurately describes the topic as many top words seem unrelated. This paper aims to improve interpretability in topic modeling by providing a novel, outperforming interpretable topic model Our approach combines two previously established subdomains in topic modeling: nonparametric and weakly-supervised topic models. Given a nonparametric topic model, we can include weakly-supervised input using novel modifications to the nonparametric generative model. These modifications lay the groundwork for a compelling setting{---}one in which most corpora, without any previous supervised or weakly-supervised input, can discover interpretable topics. This setting also presents various challenging sub-problems of which we provide resolutions. Combining nonparametric topic models with weakly-supervised topic models leads to an exciting discovery{---}a complete, self-contained and outperforming topic model for interpretability.
A Large Interlinked Knowledge Graph of the Italian Cultural Heritage (2022)

Knowledge is the lifeblood for a plethora of applications such as search, recommender systems and natural language understanding. Thanks to the efforts in the fields of Semantic Web and Linked Open Data a growing number of interlinked knowledge bases are supporting the development of advanced knowledge-based applications. Unfortunately, for a large number of domain-specific applications, these knowledge bases are unavailable. In this paper, we present a resource consisting of a large knowledge graph linking the Italian cultural heritage entities (defined in the ArCo ontology) with the concepts defined on well-known knowledge bases (i.e., DBpedia and the Getty GVP ontology). We describe the methodologies adopted for the semi-automatic resource creation and provide an in-depth analysis of the resulting interlinked graph.
Training on Lexical Resources (2022)

We propose using lexical resources (thesaurus, VAD) to fine-tune pretrained deep nets such as BERT and ERNIE. Then at inference time, these nets can be used to distinguish synonyms from antonyms, as well as VAD distances. The inference method can be applied to words as well as texts such as multiword expressions (MWEs), out of vocabulary words (OOVs), morphological variants and more. Code and data are posted on \url{https://github.com/kwchurch/syn_ant}.
Challenging the Assumption of Structure-based embeddings in Few- and Zero-shot Knowledge Graph Completion (2022)

In this paper, we report experiments on Few- and Zero-shot Knowledge Graph completion, where the objective is to add missing relational links between entities into an existing Knowledge Graph with few or no previous examples of the relation in question. While previous work has used pre-trained embeddings based on the structure of the graph as input for a neural network, nobody has, to the best of our knowledge, addressed the task by only using textual descriptive data associated with the entities and relations, much since current standard benchmark data sets lack such information. We therefore enrich the benchmark data sets for these tasks by collecting textual description data to provide a new resource for future research to bridge the gap between structural and textual Knowledge Graph completion. Our results show that we can improve the results for Knowledge Graph completion for both Few- and Zero-shot scenarios with up to a two-fold increase of all metrics in the Zero-shot setting. From a more general perspective, our experiments demonstrate the value of using textual resources to enrich more formal representations of human knowledge and in the utility of transfer learning from textual data and text collections to enrich and maintain knowledge resources.
Open Terminology Management and Sharing Toolkit for Federation of Terminology Databases (2022)

Consolidated access to current and reliable terms from different subject fields and languages is necessary for content creators and translators. Terminology is also needed in AI applications such as machine translation, speech recognition, information extraction, and other natural language processing tools. In this work, we facilitate standards-based sharing and management of terminology resources by providing an open terminology management solution - the EuroTermBank Toolkit. It allows organisations to manage and search their terms, create term collections, and share them within and outside the organisation by participating in the network of federated databases. The data curated in the federated databases are automatically shared with EuroTermBank, the largest multilingual terminology resource in Europe, allowing translators and language service providers as well as researchers and students to access terminology resources in their most current version.
RELATE: Generating a linguistically inspired Knowledge Graph for fine-grained emotion classification (2022)

Several existing resources are available for sentiment analysis (SA) tasks that are used for learning sentiment specific embedding (SSE) representations. These resources are either large, common-sense knowledge graphs (KG) that cover a limited amount of polarities/emotions or they are smaller in size (e.g.: lexicons), which require costly human annotation and cover fine-grained emotions. Therefore using knowledge resources to learn SSE representations is either limited by the low coverage of polarities/emotions or the overall size of a resource. In this paper, we first introduce a new directed KG called {\textquoteleft}RELATE', which is built to overcome both the issue of low coverage of emotions and the issue of scalability. RELATE is the first KG of its size to cover Ekman`s six basic emotions that are directed towards entities. It is based on linguistic rules to incorporate the benefit of semantics without relying on costly human annotation. The performance of {\textquoteleft}RELATE' is evaluated by learning SSE representations using a Graph Convolutional Neural Network (GCN).
Language technology practitioners as language managers: arbitrating data bias and predictive bias in ASR (2022)

Despite the fact that variation is a fundamental characteristic of natural language, automatic speech recognition systems perform systematically worse on non-standardised and marginalised language varieties. In this paper we use the lens of language policy to analyse how current practices in training and testing ASR systems in industry lead to the data bias giving rise to these systematic error differences. We believe that this is a useful perspective for speech and language technology practitioners to understand the origins and harms of algorithmic bias, and how they can mitigate it. We also propose a re-framing of language resources as (public) infrastructure which should not solely be designed for markets, but for, and with meaningful cooperation of, speech communities.
Masader: Metadata Sourcing for Arabic Text and Speech Data Resources (2022)

The NLP pipeline has evolved dramatically in the last few years. The first step in the pipeline is to find suitable annotated datasets to evaluate the tasks we are trying to solve. Unfortunately, most of the published datasets lack metadata annotations that describe their attributes. Not to mention, the absence of a public catalogue that indexes all the publicly available datasets related to specific regions or languages. When we consider low-resource dialectical languages, for example, this issue becomes more prominent. In this paper, we create Masader, the largest public catalogue for Arabic NLP datasets, which consists of 200 datasets annotated with 25 attributes. Furthermore, we develop a metadata annotation strategy that could be extended to other languages. We also make remarks and highlight some issues about the current status of Arabic NLP datasets and suggest recommendations to address them.
Linghub2: Language Resource Discovery Tool for Language Technologies (2022)

Language resources are a key component of natural language processing and related research and applications. Users of language resources have different needs in terms of format, language, topics, etc. for the data they need to use. Linghub (McCrae and Cimiano, 2015) was first developed for this purpose, using the capabilities of linked data to represent metadata, and tackling the heterogeneous metadata issue. Linghub aimed at helping language resources and technology users to easily find and retrieve relevant data, and identify important information on access, topics, etc. This work describes a rejuvenation and modernisation of the 2015 platform into using a popular open source data management system, DSpace, as foundation. The new platform, Linghub2, contains updated and extended resources, more languages offered, and continues the work towards homogenisation of metadata through conversions, through linkage to standardisation strategies and community groups, such as the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) community group.
CxLM: A Construction and Context-aware Language Model (2022)

Constructions are direct form-meaning pairs with possible schematic slots. These slots are simultaneously constrained by the embedded construction itself and the sentential context. We propose that the constraint could be described by a conditional probability distribution. However, as this conditional probability is inevitably complex, we utilize language models to capture this distribution. Therefore, we build CxLM, a deep learning-based masked language model explicitly tuned to constructions' schematic slots. We first compile a construction dataset consisting of over ten thousand constructions in Taiwan Mandarin. Next, an experiment is conducted on the dataset to examine to what extent a pretrained masked language model is aware of the constructions. We then fine-tune the model specifically to perform a cloze task on the opening slots. We find that the fine-tuned model predicts masked slots more accurately than baselines and generates both structurally and semantically plausible word samples. Finally, we release CxLM and its dataset as publicly available resources and hope to serve as new quantitative tools in studying construction grammar.
The Lexometer: A Shiny Application for Exploratory Analysis and Visualization of Corpus Data (2022)

Often performing even simple data science tasks with corpus data requires significant expertise in data science and programming languages like R and Python. With the aim of making quantitative research more accessible for researchers in the language sciences, we present the Lexometer, a Shiny application that integrates numerous data analysis and visualization functions into an easy-to-use graphical user interface. Some functions of the Lexometer are: filtering large databases to generate subsets of the data and variables of interest, providing a range of graphing techniques for both single and multiple variable analysis, and providing the data in a table format which can further be filtered as well as provide methods for cleaning the data. The Lexometer aims to be useful to language researchers with differing levels of programming expertise and to aid in broadening the inclusion of corpus-based empirical evidence in the language sciences.