ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automated Graph Generation at Sentence Level for Reading Comprehension Based on Conceptual Graphs (2020)

This paper proposes a novel miscellaneous-context-based method to convert a sentence into a knowledge embedding in the form of a directed graph. We adopt the idea of conceptual graphs to frame for the miscellaneous textual information into conceptual compactness. We first empirically observe that this graph representation method can (1) accommodate the slot-filling challenges in typical question answering and (2) access to the sentence-level graph structure in order to explicitly capture the neighbouring connections of reference concept nodes. Secondly, we propose a task-agnostic semantics-measured module, which cooperates with the graph representation method, in order to (3) project an edge of a sentence-level graph to the space of semantic relevance with respect to the corresponding concept nodes. As a result of experiments on the QA-type relation extraction, the combination of the graph representation and the semantics-measured module achieves the high accuracy of answer prediction and offers human-comprehensible graphical interpretation for every well-formed sample. To our knowledge, our approach is the first towards the interpretable process of learning vocabulary representations with the experimental evidence.
ForceReader: a BERT-based Interactive Machine Reading Comprehension Model with Attention Separation (2020)

The release of BERT revolutionized the development of NLP. Various BERT-based reading comprehension models have been proposed, thus updating the performance ranking of reading comprehension tasks. However, the above BERT-based models inherently employ BERT`s combined input method, representing the input question and paragraph as a single packed sequence, without further modification for reading comprehension. This paper makes an in-depth analysis of this input method, proposes a problem of this approach. We call it attention deconcentration. Accordingly, this paper proposes ForceReader, a BERT-based interactive machine reading comprehension model. First, ForceReader proposes a novel solution called the Attention Separation Representation to respond to attention deconcentration. Moreover, starting from the logical nature of reading comprehension tasks, ForceReader adopts Multi-mode Reading and Interactive Reasoning strategy. For the calculation of attention, ForceReader employs Conditional Background Attention to solve the lack of the overall context semantic after the separation of attention. As an integral model, ForceReader shows a significant improvement in reading comprehension tasks compared to BERT. Moreover, this paper makes detailed visual analyses of the attention and propose strategies accordingly. This may be another argument to the explanations of the attention.
NUT-RC: Noisy User-generated Text-oriented Reading Comprehension (2020)

Reading comprehension (RC) on social media such as Twitter is a critical and challenging task due to its noisy, informal, but informative nature. Most existing RC models are developed on formal datasets such as news articles and Wikipedia documents, which severely limit their performances when directly applied to the noisy and informal texts in social media. Moreover, these models only focus on a certain type of RC, extractive or generative, but ignore the integration of them. To well address these challenges, we come up with a noisy user-generated text-oriented RC model. In particular, we first introduce a set of text normalizers to transform the noisy and informal texts to the formal ones. Then, we integrate the extractive and the generative RC model by a multi-task learning mechanism and an answer selection module. Experimental results on TweetQA demonstrate that our NUT-RC model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art social media-oriented RC models.
To What Degree Can Language Borders Be Blurred In BERT-based Multilingual Spoken Language Understanding? (2020)

This paper addresses the question as to what degree a BERT-based multilingual Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) model can transfer knowledge across languages. Through experiments we will show that, although it works substantially well even on distant language groups, there is still a gap to the ideal multilingual performance. In addition, we propose a novel BERT-based adversarial model architecture to learn language-shared and language-specific representations for multilingual SLU. Our experimental results prove that the proposed model is capable of narrowing the gap to the ideal multilingual performance.
Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension with Language Branch Knowledge Distillation (2020)

Cross-lingual Machine Reading Comprehension (CLMRC) remains a challenging problem due to the lack of large-scale annotated datasets in low-source languages, such as Arabic, Hindi, and Vietnamese. Many previous approaches use translation data by translating from a rich-source language, such as English, to low-source languages as auxiliary supervision. However, how to effectively leverage translation data and reduce the impact of noise introduced by translation remains onerous. In this paper, we tackle this challenge and enhance the cross-lingual transferring performance by a novel augmentation approach named Language Branch Machine Reading Comprehension (LBMRC). A language branch is a group of passages in one single language paired with questions in all target languages. We train multiple machine reading comprehension (MRC) models proficient in individual language based on LBMRC. Then, we devise a multilingual distillation approach to amalgamate knowledge from multiple language branch models to a single model for all target languages. Combining the LBMRC and multilingual distillation can be more robust to the data noises, therefore, improving the model`s cross-lingual ability. Meanwhile, the produced single multilingual model can apply to all target languages, which saves the cost of training, inference, and maintenance for multiple models. Extensive experiments on two CLMRC benchmarks clearly show the effectiveness of our proposed method.
Neural Networks approaches focused on French Spoken Language Understanding: application to the MEDIA Evaluation Task (2020)

In this paper, we present a study on a French Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) task: the MEDIA task. Many works and studies have been proposed for many tasks, but most of them are focused on English language and tasks. The exploration of a richer language like French within the framework of a SLU task implies to recent approaches to handle this difficulty. Since the MEDIA task seems to be one of the most difficult, according several previous studies, we propose to explore Neural Networks approaches focusing of three aspects: firstly, the Neural Network inputs and more specifically the word embeddings; secondly, we compared French version of BERT against the best setup through different ways; Finally, the comparison against State-of-the-Art approaches. Results show that the word embeddings trained on a small corpus need to be updated during SLU model training. Furthermore, the French BERT fine-tuned approaches outperform the classical Neural Network Architectures and achieves state of the art results. However, the contextual embeddings extracted from one of the French BERT approaches achieve comparable results in comparison to word embedding, when integrated into the proposed neural architecture.
Syntactic Graph Convolutional Network for Spoken Language Understanding (2020)

Slot filling and intent detection are two major tasks for spoken language understanding. In most existing work, these two tasks are built as joint models with multi-task learning with no consideration of prior linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model that applies a graph convolutional network over dependency trees to integrate the syntactic structure for learning slot filling and intent detection jointly. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public benchmark datasets and outperforms existing work. At last, we apply the BERT model to further improve the performance on both slot filling and intent detection.
Conversational Machine Comprehension: a Literature Review (2020)

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.
Robust Machine Reading Comprehension by Learning Soft labels (2020)

Neural models have achieved great success on the task of machine reading comprehension (MRC), which are typically trained on hard labels. We argue that hard labels limit the model capability on generalization due to the label sparseness problem. In this paper, we propose a robust training method for MRC models to address this problem. Our method consists of three strategies, 1) label smoothing, 2) word overlapping, 3) distribution prediction. All of them help to train models on soft labels. We validate our approach on the representative architecture - ALBERT. Experimental results show that our method can greatly boost the baseline with 1{\%} improvement in average, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on NewsQA and QUOREF.
Reinforced Multi-task Approach for Multi-hop Question Generation (2020)

Question generation (QG) attempts to solve the inverse of question answering (QA) problem by generating a natural language question given a document and an answer. While sequence to sequence neural models surpass rule-based systems for QG, they are limited in their capacity to focus on more than one supporting fact. For QG, we often require multiple supporting facts to generate high-quality questions. Inspired by recent works on multi-hop reasoning in QA, we take up Multi-hop question generation, which aims at generating relevant questions based on supporting facts in the context. We employ multitask learning with the auxiliary task of answer-aware supporting fact prediction to guide the question generator. In addition, we also proposed a question-aware reward function in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to maximize the utilization of the supporting facts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on the multi-hop question answering dataset, HotPotQA. Empirical evaluation shows our model to outperform the single-hop neural question generation models on both automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE and human evaluation metrics for quality and coverage of the generated questions.
Knowledge-enriched, Type-constrained and Grammar-guided Question Generation over Knowledge Bases (2020)

Question generation over knowledge bases (KBQG) aims at generating natural-language questions about a subgraph, i.e. a set of triples. Two main challenges still face the current crop of encoder-decoder-based methods, especially on small subgraphs: (1) low diversity and poor fluency due to the limited information contained in the subgraphs, and (2) semantic drift due to the decoder`s oblivion of the semantics of the answer entity. We propose an innovative knowledge-enriched, type-constrained and grammar-guided KBQG model, named KTG, to addresses the above challenges. In our model, the encoder is equipped with auxiliary information from the KB, and the decoder is constrained with word types during QG. Specifically, entity domain and description, as well as relation hierarchy information are considered to construct question contexts, while a conditional copy mechanism is incorporated to modulate question semantics according to current word types. Besides, a novel reward function featuring grammatical similarity is designed to improve both generative richness and syntactic correctness via reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments show that our proposed model outperforms existing methods by a significant margin on two widely-used benchmark datasets SimpleQuestion and PathQuestion.
Adapting a Language Model for Controlled Affective Text Generation (2020)

Human use language not just to convey information but also to express their inner feelings and mental states. In this work, we adapt the state-of-the-art language generation models to generate affective (emotional) text. We posit a model capable of generating affect-driven and topic focused sentences without losing grammatical correctness as the affect intensity increases. We propose to incorporate emotion as prior for the probabilistic state-of-the-art text generation model such as GPT-2. The model gives a user the flexibility to control the category and intensity of emotion as well as the topic of the generated text. Previous attempts at modelling fine-grained emotions fall out on grammatical correctness at extreme intensities, but our model is resilient to this and delivers robust results at all intensities. We conduct automated evaluations and human studies to test the performance of our model, and provide a detailed comparison of the results with other models. In all evaluations, our model outperforms existing affective text generation models.
Generating Instructions at Different Levels of Abstraction (2020)

When generating technical instructions, it is often convenient to describe complex objects in the world at different levels of abstraction. A novice user might need an object explained piece by piece, while for an expert, talking about the complex object (e.g. a wall or railing) directly may be more succinct and efficient. We show how to generate building instructions at different levels of abstraction in Minecraft. We introduce the use of hierarchical planning to this end, a method from AI planning which can capture the structure of complex objects neatly. A crowdsourcing evaluation shows that the choice of abstraction level matters to users, and that an abstraction strategy which balances low-level and high-level object descriptions compares favorably to ones which don`t.
\textquotedblleftJudge me by my size (noun), do you?\textquotedblright YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework (2020)

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{\textregistered} 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.
Does Chinese BERT Encode Word Structure? (2020)

Contextualized representations give significantly improved results for a wide range of NLP tasks. Much work has been dedicated to analyzing the features captured by representative models such as BERT. Existing work finds that syntactic, semantic and word sense knowledge are encoded in BERT. However, little work has investigated word features for character languages such as Chinese. We investigate Chinese BERT using both attention weight distribution statistics and probing tasks, finding that (1) word information is captured by BERT; (2) word-level features are mostly in the middle representation layers; (3) downstream tasks make different use of word features in BERT, with POS tagging and chunking relying the most on word features, and natural language inference relying the least on such features.
Noise Isn`t Always Negative: Countering Exposure Bias in Sequence-to-Sequence Inflection Models (2020)

Morphological inflection, like many sequence-to-sequence tasks, sees great performance from recurrent neural architectures when data is plentiful, but performance falls off sharply in lower-data settings. We investigate one aspect of neural seq2seq models that we hypothesize contributes to overfitting - teacher forcing. By creating different training and test conditions, exposure bias increases the likelihood that a system too closely models its training data. Experiments show that teacher-forced models struggle to recover when they enter unknown territory. However, a simple modification to the training algorithm to more closely mimic test conditions creates models that are better able to generalize to unseen environments.
Morphologically Aware Word-Level Translation (2020)

We propose a novel morphologically aware probability model for bilingual lexicon induction, which jointly models lexeme translation and inflectional morphology in a structured way. Our model exploits the basic linguistic intuition that the lexeme is the key lexical unit of meaning, while inflectional morphology provides additional syntactic information. This approach leads to substantial performance improvements{---}19{\%} average improvement in accuracy across 6 language pairs over the state of the art in the supervised setting and 16{\%} in the weakly supervised setting. As another contribution, we highlight issues associated with modern BLI that stem from ignoring inflectional morphology, and propose three suggestions for improving the task.
Analogy Models for Neural Word Inflection (2020)

Analogy is assumed to be the cognitive mechanism speakers resort to in order to inflect an unknown form of a lexeme based on knowledge of other words in a language. In this process, an analogy is formed between word forms within an inflectional paradigm but also across paradigms. As neural network models for inflection are typically trained only on lemma-target form pairs, we propose three new ways to provide neural models with additional source forms to strengthen analogy-formation, and compare our methods to other approaches in the literature. We show that the proposed methods of providing a Transformer sequence-to-sequence model with additional analogy sources in the input are consistently effective, and improve upon recent state-of-the-art results on 46 languages, particularly in low-resource settings. We also propose a method to combine the analogy-motivated approach with data hallucination or augmentation. We find that the two approaches are complementary to each other and combining the two approaches is especially helpful when the training data is extremely limited.
Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology (2020)

The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might apply the conventional criteria of free/bound and content/function features to distinguish word-forming affixes from bound roots in Chinese is still far from clear. Issues involving polysemy and diachronic dynamics further blur the boundaries. In this paper, we propose three quantitative features in a computational model of affixoid behavior in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that, except for in a very few cases, there are no clear criteria that can be used to identify an affix`s status in an isolating language like Chinese. A diachronic check using contextualized embeddings with the WordNet Sense Inventory also demonstrates the possible role of the polysemy of lexical roots across diachronic settings.
One Comment from One Perspective: An Effective Strategy for Enhancing Automatic Music Comment (2020)

The automatic generation of music comments is of great significance for increasing the popularity of music and the music platform`s activity. In human music comments, there exists high distinction and diverse perspectives for the same song. In other words, for a song, different comments stem from different musical perspectives. However, to date, this characteristic has not been considered well in research on automatic comment generation. The existing methods tend to generate common and meaningless comments. In this paper, we propose an effective multi-perspective strategy to enhance the diversity of the generated comments. The experiment results on two music comment datasets show that our proposed model can effectively generate a series of diverse music comments based on different perspectives, which outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin.
A Tale of Two Linkings: Dynamically Gating between Schema Linking and Structural Linking for Text-to-SQL Parsing (2020)

In Text-to-SQL semantic parsing, selecting the correct entities (tables and columns) for the generated SQL query is both crucial and challenging; the parser is required to connect the natural language (NL) question and the SQL query to the structured knowledge in the database. We formulate two linking processes to address this challenge: schema linking which links explicit NL mentions to the database and structural linking which links the entities in the output SQL with their structural relationships in the database schema. Intuitively, the effectiveness of these two linking processes changes based on the entity being generated, thus we propose to dynamically choose between them using a gating mechanism. Integrating the proposed method with two graph neural network-based semantic parsers together with BERT representations demonstrates substantial gains in parsing accuracy on the challenging Spider dataset. Analyses show that our proposed method helps to enhance the structure of the model output when generating complicated SQL queries and offers more explainable predictions.