ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Chatbot with a Discourse Structure-Driven Dialogue Management (2017)

We build a chat bot with iterative content exploration that leads a user through a personalized knowledge acquisition session. The chat bot is designed as an automated customer support or product recommendation agent assisting a user in learning product features, product usability, suitability, troubleshooting and other related tasks. To control the user navigation through content, we extend the notion of a linguistic discourse tree (DT) towards a set of documents with multiple sections covering a topic. For a given paragraph, a DT is built by DT parsers. We then combine DTs for the paragraphs of documents to form what we call extended DT, which is a basis for interactive content exploration facilitated by the chat bot. To provide cohesive answers, we use a measure of rhetoric agreement between a question and an answer by tree kernel learning of their DTs.
Marine Variable Linker: Exploring Relations between Changing Variables in Marine Science Literature (2017)

We report on a demonstration system for text mining of literature in marine science and related disciplines. It automatically extracts variables ({\textquotedblleft}CO2{\textquotedblright}) involved in events of change/increase/decrease ({\textquotedblleft}increasing CO2{\textquotedblright}), as well as co-occurrence and causal relations among these events ({\textquotedblleft}increasing CO2 causes a decrease in pH in seawater{\textquotedblright}), resulting in a big knowledge graph. A web-based graphical user interface targeted at marine scientists facilitates searching, browsing and visualising events and their relations in an interactive way.
Neoveille, a Web Platform for Neologism Tracking (2017)

This paper details a software designed to track neologisms in seven languages through newspapers monitor corpora. The platform combines state-of-the-art processes to track linguistic changes and a web platform for linguists to create and manage their corpora, accept or reject automatically identified neologisms, describe linguistically the accepted neologisms and follow their lifecycle on the monitor corpora. In the following, after a short state-of-the-art in Neologism Retrieval, Analysis and Life-tracking, we describe the overall architecture of the system. The platform can be freely browsed at \url{www.neoveille.org} where detailed presentation is given. Access to the editing modules is available upon request.
Building Web-Interfaces for Vector Semantic Models with the WebVectors Toolkit (2017)

In this demo we present WebVectors, a free and open-source toolkit helping to deploy web services which demonstrate and visualize distributional semantic models (widely known as word embeddings). WebVectors can be useful in a very common situation when one has trained a distributional semantics model for one`s particular corpus or language (tools for this are now widespread and simple to use), but then there is a need to demonstrate the results to general public over the Web. We show its abilities on the example of the living web services featuring distributional models for English, Norwegian and Russian.
InToEventS: An Interactive Toolkit for Discovering and Building Event Schemas (2017)

Event Schema Induction is the task of learning a representation of events (e.g., bombing) and the roles involved in them (e.g, victim and perpetrator). This paper presents InToEventS, an interactive tool for learning these schemas. InToEventS allows users to explore a corpus and discover which kind of events are present. We show how users can create useful event schemas using two interactive clustering steps.
ICE: Idiom and Collocation Extractor for Research and Education (2017)

Collocation and idiom extraction are well-known challenges with many potential applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our experimental, open-source software system, called ICE, is a python package for flexibly extracting collocations and idioms, currently in English. It also has a competitive POS tagger that can be used alone or as part of collocation/idiom extraction. ICE is available free of cost for research and educational uses in two user-friendly formats. This paper gives an overview of ICE and its performance, and briefly describes the research underlying the extraction algorithms.
Bib2vec: Embedding-based Search System for Bibliographic Information (2017)

We propose a novel embedding model that represents relationships among several elements in bibliographic information with high representation ability and flexibility. Based on this model, we present a novel search system that shows the relationships among the elements in the ACL Anthology Reference Corpus. The evaluation results show that our model can achieve a high prediction ability and produce reasonable search results.
The SUMMA Platform Prototype (2017)

We present the first prototype of the SUMMA Platform: an integrated platform for multilingual media monitoring. The platform contains a rich suite of low-level and high-level natural language processing technologies: automatic speech recognition of broadcast media, machine translation, automated tagging and classification of named entities, semantic parsing to detect relationships between entities, and automatic construction / augmentation of factual knowledge bases. Implemented on the Docker platform, it can easily be deployed, customised, and scaled to large volumes of incoming media streams.
Pragmatic descriptions of perceptual stimuli (2017)

This research proposal discusses pragmatic factors in image description, arguing that current automatic image description systems do not take these factors into account. I present a general model of the human image description process, and propose to study this process using corpus analysis, experiments, and computational modeling. This will lead to a better characterization of human image description behavior, providing a road map for future research in automatic image description, and the automatic description of perceptual stimuli in general.
Detecting spelling variants in non-standard texts (2017)

Spelling variation in non-standard language, e.g. computer-mediated communication and historical texts, is usually treated as a deviation from a standard spelling, e.g. 2mr as an non-standard spelling for tomorrow. Consequently, in normalization {--} the standard approach of dealing with spelling variation {--} so-called non-standard words are mapped to their corresponding standard words. However, there is not always a corresponding standard word. This can be the case for single types (like emoticons in computer-mediated communication) or a complete language, e.g. texts from historical languages that did not develop to a standard variety. The approach presented in this thesis proposal deals with spelling variation in absence of reference to a standard. The task is to detect pairs of types that are variants of the same morphological word. An approach for spelling-variant detection is presented, where pairs of potential spelling variants are generated with Levenshtein distance and subsequently filtered by supervised machine learning. The approach is evaluated on historical Low German texts. Finally, further perspectives are discussed.
Replication issues in syntax-based aspect extraction for opinion mining (2017)

Reproducing experiments is an important instrument to validate previous work and build upon existing approaches. It has been tackled numerous times in different areas of science. In this paper, we introduce an empirical replicability study of three well-known algorithms for syntactic centric aspect-based opinion mining. We show that reproducing results continues to be a difficult endeavor, mainly due to the lack of details regarding preprocessing and parameter setting, as well as due to the absence of available implementations that clarify these details. We consider these are important threats to validity of the research on the field, specifically when compared to other problems in NLP where public datasets and code availability are critical validity components. We conclude by encouraging code-based research, which we think has a key role in helping researchers to understand the meaning of the state-of-the-art better and to generate continuous advances.
Discourse Relations and Conjoined VPs: Automated Sense Recognition (2017)

Sense classification of discourse relations is a sub-task of shallow discourse parsing. Discourse relations can occur both across sentences (\textit{inter-sentential}) and within sentences (\textit{intra-sentential}), and more than one discourse relation can hold between the same units. Using a newly available corpus of discourse-annotated intra-sentential conjoined verb phrases, we demonstrate a sequential classification pipeline for their multi-label sense classification. We assess the importance of each feature used in the classification, the feature scope, and what is lost in moving from gold standard manual parses to the output of an off-the-shelf parser.
Deception detection in Russian texts (2017)

Humans are known to detect deception in speech randomly and it is therefore important to develop tools to enable them to detect deception. The problem of deception detection has been studied for a significant amount of time, however the last 10-15 years have seen methods of computational linguistics being employed. Texts are processed using different NLP tools and then classified as deceptive/truthful using machine learning methods. While most research has been performed for English, Slavic languages have never been a focus of detection deception studies. The paper deals with deception detection in Russian narratives. It employs a specially designed corpus of truthful and deceptive texts on the same topic from each respondent, N = 113. The texts were processed using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software that is used in most studies of text-based deception detection. The list of parameters computed using the software was expanded due to the designed users' dictionaries. A variety of text classification methods was employed. The accuracy of the model was found to depend on the author`s gender and text type (deceptive/truthful).
A Computational Model of Human Preferences for Pronoun Resolution (2017)

We present a cognitive computational model of pronoun resolution that reproduces the human interpretation preferences of the Subject Assignment Strategy and the Parallel Function Strategy. Our model relies on a probabilistic pronoun resolution system trained on corpus data. Factors influencing pronoun resolution are represented as features weighted by their relative importance. The importance the model gives to the preferences is in line with psycholinguistic studies. We demonstrate the cognitive plausibility of the model by running it on experimental items and simulating antecedent choice and reading times of human participants. Our model can be used as a new means to study pronoun resolution, because it captures the interaction of preferences.
Automatic Extraction of News Values from Headline Text (2017)

Headlines play a crucial role in attracting audiences' attention to online artefacts (e.g. news articles, videos, blogs). The ability to carry out an automatic, large-scale analysis of headlines is critical to facilitate the selection and prioritisation of a large volume of digital content. In journalism studies news content has been extensively studied using manually annotated news values - factors used implicitly and explicitly when making decisions on the selection and prioritisation of news items. This paper presents the first attempt at a fully automatic extraction of news values from headline text. The news values extraction methods are applied on a large headlines corpus collected from The Guardian, and evaluated by comparing it with a manually annotated gold standard. A crowdsourcing survey indicates that news values affect people`s decisions to click on a headline, supporting the need for an automatic news values detection.
Assessing Convincingness of Arguments in Online Debates with Limited Number of Features (2017)

We propose a new method in the field of argument analysis in social media to determining convincingness of arguments in online debates, following previous research by Habernal and Gurevych (2016). Rather than using argument specific feature values, we measure feature values relative to the average value in the debate, allowing us to determine argument convincingness with fewer features (between 5 and 35) than normally used for natural language processing tasks. We use a simple forward-feeding neural network for this task and achieve an accuracy of 0.77 which is comparable to the accuracy obtained using 64k features and a support vector machine by Habernal and Gurevych.
Zipf`s and Benford`s laws in Twitter hashtags (2017)

Social networks have transformed communication dramatically in recent years through the rise of new platforms and the development of a new language of communication. This landscape requires new forms to describe and predict the behaviour of users in networks. This paper presents an analysis of the frequency distribution of hashtag popularity in Twitter conversations. Our objective is to determine if these frequency distribution follow some well-known frequency distribution that many real-life sets of numerical data satisfy. In particular, we study the similarity of frequency distribution of hashtag popularity with respect to Zipf`s law, an empirical law referring to the phenomenon that many types of data in social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution. Additionally, we also analyse Benford`s law, is a special case of Zipf`s law, a common pattern about the frequency distribution of leading digits. In order to compute correctly the frequency distribution of hashtag popularity, we need to correct many spelling errors that Twitter`s users introduce. For this purpose we introduce a new filter to correct hashtag mistake based on string distances. The experiments obtained employing datasets of Twitter streams generated under controlled conditions show that Benford`s law and Zipf`s law can be used to model hashtag frequency distribution.
A Multi-aspect Analysis of Automatic Essay Scoring for Brazilian Portuguese (2017)

Several methods for automatic essay scoring (AES) for English language have been proposed. However, multi-aspect AES systems for other languages are unusual. Therefore, we propose a multi-aspect AES system to apply on a dataset of Brazilian Portuguese essays, which human experts evaluated according to five aspects defined by Brazilian Government to the National Exam to High School Student (ENEM). These aspects are skills that student must master and every skill is assessed apart from each other. Besides the prediction of each aspect, the feature analysis also was performed for each aspect. The AES system proposed employs several features already employed by AES systems for English language. Our results show that predictions for some aspects performed well with the features we employed, while predictions for other aspects performed poorly. Also, it is possible to note the difference between the five aspects in the detailed feature analysis we performed. Besides these contributions, the eight millions of enrollments every year for ENEM raise some challenge issues for future directions in our research.
Literal or idiomatic? Identifying the reading of single occurrences of German multiword expressions using word embeddings (2017)

Non-compositional multiword expressions (MWEs) still pose serious issues for a variety of natural language processing tasks and their ubiquity makes it impossible to get around methods which automatically identify these kind of MWEs. The method presented in this paper was inspired by Sporleder and Li (2009) and is able to discriminate between the literal and non-literal use of an MWE in an unsupervised way. It is based on the assumption that words in a text form cohesive units. If the cohesion of these units is weakened by an expression, it is classified as literal, and otherwise as idiomatic. While Sporleder an Li used \textit{Normalized Google Distance} to modell semantic similarity, the present work examines the use of a variety of different word embeddings.
Evaluating the Reliability and Interaction of Recursively Used Feature Classes for Terminology Extraction (2017)

Feature design and selection is a crucial aspect when treating terminology extraction as a machine learning classification problem. We designed feature classes which characterize different properties of terms based on distributions, and propose a new feature class for components of term candidates. By using random forests, we infer optimal features which are later used to build decision tree classifiers. We evaluate our method using the ACL RD-TEC dataset. We demonstrate the importance of the novel feature class for downgrading termhood which exploits properties of term components. Furthermore, our classification suggests that the identification of reliable term candidates should be performed successively, rather than just once.
Universal Dependencies (2017)

Universal Dependencies (UD) is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages. This tutorial gives an introduction to the UD framework and resources, from basic design principles to annotation guidelines and existing treebanks. We also discuss tools for developing and exploiting UD treebanks and survey applications of UD in NLP and linguistics.
Practical Neural Machine Translation (2017)

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has achieved new breakthroughs in machine translation in recent years. It has dominated recent shared translation tasks in machine translation research, and is also being quickly adopted in industry. The technical differences between NMT and the previously dominant phrase-based statistical approach require that practictioners learn new best practices for building MT systems, ranging from different hardware requirements, new techniques for handling rare words and monolingual data, to new opportunities in continued learning and domain adaptation.This tutorial is aimed at researchers and users of machine translation interested in working with NMT. The tutorial will cover a basic theoretical introduction to NMT, discuss the components of state-of-the-art systems, and provide practical advice for building NMT systems.
Imitation learning for structured prediction in natural language processing (2017)

Imitation learning is a learning paradigm originally developed to learn robotic controllers from demonstrations by humans, e.g. autonomous flight from pilot demonstrations. Recently, algorithms for structured prediction were proposed under this paradigm and have been applied successfully to a number of tasks including syntactic dependency parsing, information extraction, coreference resolution, dynamic feature selection, semantic parsing and natural language generation. Key advantages are the ability to handle large output search spaces and to learn with non-decomposable loss functions. Our aim in this tutorial is to have a unified presentation of the various imitation algorithms for structure prediction, and show how they can be applied to a variety of NLP tasks.All material associated with the tutorial will be made available through \url{https://sheffieldnlp.github.io/ImitationLearningTutorialEACL2017/}.
Word Vector Space Specialisation (2017)

Specialising vector spaces to maximise their content with respect to one key property of vector space models (e.g. semantic similarity vs. relatedness or lexical entailment) while mitigating others has become an active and attractive research topic in representation learning. Such specialised vector spaces support different classes of NLP problems. Proposed approaches fall into two broad categories: a) Unsupervised methods which learn from raw textual corpora in more sophisticated ways (e.g. using context selection, extracting co-occurrence information from word patterns, attending over contexts); and b) Knowledge-base driven approaches which exploit available resources to encode external information into distributional vector spaces, injecting knowledge from semantic lexicons (e.g., WordNet, FrameNet, PPDB). In this tutorial, we will introduce researchers to state-of-the-art methods for constructing vector spaces specialised for a broad range of downstream NLP applications. We will deliver a detailed survey of the proposed methods and discuss best practices for intrinsic and application-oriented evaluation of such vector spaces.Throughout the tutorial, we will provide running examples reaching beyond English as the only (and probably the easiest) use-case language, in order to demonstrate the applicability and modelling challenges of current representation learning architectures in other languages.
Integer Linear Programming formulations in Natural Language Processing (2017)

Making decisions in natural language processing problems often involves assigning values to sets of interdependent variables where the expressive dependency structure can influence, or even dictate what assignments are possible. This setting includes a broad range of structured prediction problems such as semantic role labeling, named entity and relation recognition, co-reference resolution, dependency parsing and semantic parsing. The setting is also appropriate for cases that may require making global decisions that involve multiple components, possibly pre-designed or pre-learned, as in event recognition and analysis, summarization, paraphrasing, textual entailment and question answering. In all these cases, it is natural to formulate the decision problem as a constrained optimization problem, with an objective function that is composed of learned models, subject to domain or problem specific constraints.Over the last few years, starting with a couple of papers written by (Roth {\&} Yih, 2004, 2005), dozens of papers have been using the Integer linear programming (ILP) formulation developed there, including several award-winning papers (e.g., (Martins, Smith, {\&} Xing, 2009; Koo, Rush, Collins, Jaakkola, {\&} Sontag., 2010; Berant, Dagan, {\&} Goldberger, 2011)).This tutorial will present the key ingredients of ILP formulations of natural language processing problems, aiming at guiding readers through the key modeling steps, explaining the learning and inference paradigms and exemplifying these by providing examples from the literature. We will cover a range of topics, from the theoretical foundations of learning and inference with ILP models, to practical modeling guides, to software packages and applications.The goal of this tutorial is to introduce the computational framework to broader ACL community, motivate it as a generic framework for learning and inference in global NLP decision problems, present some of the key theoretical and practical issues involved and survey some of the existing applications of it as a way to promote further development of the framework and additional applications. We will also make connections with some of the {\textquotedblleft}hot{\textquotedblright} topics in current NLP research and show how they can be used within the general framework proposed here. The tutorial will thus be useful for many of the senior and junior researchers that have interest in global decision problems in NLP, providing a concise overview of recent perspectives and research results.
Monolingual Phrase Alignment on Parse Forests (2017)

We propose an efficient method to conduct phrase alignment on parse forests for paraphrase detection. Unlike previous studies, our method identifies syntactic paraphrases under linguistically motivated grammar. In addition, it allows phrases to non-compositionally align to handle paraphrases with non-homographic phrase correspondences. A dataset that provides gold parse trees and their phrase alignments is created. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method conducts highly accurate phrase alignment compared to human performance.