ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SB\_NITK at MEDIQA 2021: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Question Summarization in Medical Domain (2021)

Recent strides in the healthcare domain, have resulted in vast quantities of streaming data available for use for building intelligent knowledge-based applications. However, the challenges introduced to the huge volume, velocity of generation, variety and variability of this medical data have to be adequately addressed. In this paper, we describe the model and results for our submission at MEDIQA 2021 Question Summarization shared task. In order to improve the performance of summarization of consumer health questions, our method explores the use of transfer learning to utilize the knowledge of NLP transformers like BART, T5 and PEGASUS. The proposed models utilize the knowledge of pre-trained NLP transformers to achieve improved results when compared to conventional deep learning models such as LSTM, RNN etc. Our team SB{\_}NITK ranked 12th among the total 22 submissions in the official final rankings. Our BART based model achieved a ROUGE-2 F1 score of 0.139.
Optum at MEDIQA 2021: Abstractive Summarization of Radiology Reports using simple BART Finetuning (2021)

This paper describes experiments undertaken and their results as part of the BioNLP MEDIQA 2021 challenge. We participated in Task 3: Radiology Report Summarization. Multiple runs were submitted for evaluation, from solutions leveraging transfer learning from pre-trained transformer models, which were then fine tuned on a subset of MIMIC-CXR, for abstractive report summarization. The task was evaluated using ROUGE and our best performing system obtained a ROUGE-2 score of 0.392.
QIAI at MEDIQA 2021: Multimodal Radiology Report Summarization (2021)

This paper describes the solution of the QIAI lab sent to the Radiology Report Summarization (RRS) challenge at MEDIQA 2021. This paper aims to investigate whether using multimodality during training improves the summarizing performances of the model at test-time. Our preliminary results shows that taking advantage of the visual features from the x-rays associated to the radiology reports leads to higher evaluation metrics compared to a text-only baseline system. These improvements are reported according to the automatic evaluation metrics METEOR, BLEU and ROUGE scores. Our experiments can be fully replicated at the following address: \url{https://github.com/jbdel/vilmedic}.
NLM at MEDIQA 2021: Transfer Learning-based Approaches for Consumer Question and Multi-Answer Summarization (2021)

The quest for seeking health information has swamped the web with consumers' healthrelated questions, which makes the need for efficient and reliable question answering systems more pressing. The consumers' questions, however, are very descriptive and contain several peripheral information (like patient`s medical history, demographic information, etc.), that are often not required for answering the question. Furthermore, it contributes to the challenges of understanding natural language questions for automatic answer retrieval. Also, it is crucial to provide the consumers with the exact and relevant answers, rather than the entire pool of answer documents to their question. One of the cardinal tasks in achieving robust consumer health question answering systems is the question summarization and multi-document answer summarization. This paper describes the participation of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Consumer Question and Multi-Answer Summarization tasks of the MEDIQA 2021 challenge at NAACL-BioNLP workshop. In this work, we exploited the capabilities of pre-trained transformer models and introduced a transfer learning approach for the abstractive Question Summarization and extractive Multi-Answer Summarization tasks by first pre-training our model on a task-specific summarization dataset followed by fine-tuning it for both the tasks via incorporating medical entities. We achieved the second, sixth and the fourth position for the Question Summarization task in terms ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L scores respectively.
IBMResearch at MEDIQA 2021: Toward Improving Factual Correctness of Radiology Report Abstractive Summarization (2021)

Although recent advances in abstractive summarization systems have achieved high scores on standard natural language metrics like ROUGE, their lack of factual consistency remains an open challenge for their use in sensitive real-world settings such as clinical practice. In this work, we propose a novel approach to improve factual correctness of a summarization system by re-ranking the candidate summaries based on a factual vector of the summary. We applied this process during our participation in MEDIQA 2021 Task 3: Radiology Report Summarization, where the task is to generate an impression summary of a radiology report, given findings and background as inputs. In our system, we first used a transformer-based encoder-decoder model to generate top N candidate impression summaries for a report, then trained another transformer-based model to predict a 14-observations-vector of the impression based on the findings and background of the report, and finally, utilized this vector to re-rank the candidate summaries. We also employed a source-specific ensembling technique to accommodate for distinct writing styles from different radiology report sources. Our approach yielded 2nd place in the challenge.
UETrice at MEDIQA 2021: A Prosper-thy-neighbour Extractive Multi-document Summarization Model (2021)

This paper describes a system developed to summarize multiple answers challenge in the MEDIQA 2021 shared task collocated with the BioNLP 2021 Workshop. We propose an extractive summarization architecture based on several scores and state-of-the-art techniques. We also present our novel prosper-thy-neighbour strategies to improve performance. Our model has been proven to be effective with the best ROUGE-1/ROUGE-L scores, being the shared task runner up by ROUGE-2 F1 score (over 13 participated teams).
MNLP at MEDIQA 2021: Fine-Tuning PEGASUS for Consumer Health Question Summarization (2021)

This paper details a Consumer Health Question (CHQ) summarization model submitted to MEDIQA 2021 for shared task 1: Question Summarization. Many CHQs are composed of multiple sentences with typos or unnecessary information, which can interfere with automated question answering systems. Question summarization mitigates this issue by removing this unnecessary information, aiding automated systems in generating a more accurate summary. Our summarization approach focuses on applying multiple pre-processing techniques, including question focus identification on the input and the development of an ensemble method to combine question focus with an abstractive summarization method. We use the state-of-art abstractive summarization model, PEGASUS (Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization), to generate abstractive summaries. Our experiments show that using our ensemble method, which combines abstractive summarization with question focus identification, improves performance over using summarization alone. Our model shows a ROUGE-2 F-measure of 11.14{\%} against the official test dataset.
UETfishes at MEDIQA 2021: Standing-on-the-Shoulders-of-Giants Model for Abstractive Multi-answer Summarization (2021)

This paper describes a system developed to summarize multiple answers challenge in the MEDIQA 2021 shared task collocated with the BioNLP 2021 Workshop. We present an abstractive summarization model based on BART, a denoising auto-encoder for pre-training sequence-to-sequence models. As focusing on the summarization of answers to consumer health questions, we propose a query-driven filtering phase to choose useful information from the input document automatically. Our approach achieves potential results, rank no.2 (evaluated on extractive references) and no.3 (evaluated on abstractive references) in the final evaluation.
Negation Scope Resolution for Chinese as a Second Language (2021)

This paper studies Negation Scope Resolution (NSR) for Chinese as a Second Language (CSL), which shows many unique characteristics that distinguish itself from {\textquotedblleft}standard{\textquotedblright} Chinese. We annotate a new moderate-sized corpus that covers two background L1 languages, viz. English and Japanese. We build a neural NSR system, which achieves a new state-of-the-art accuracy on English benchmark data. We leverage this system to gauge how successful NSR for CSL can be. Different native language backgrounds of language learners result in unequal cross-lingual transfer, which has a significant impact on processing second language data. In particular, manual annotation, empirical evaluation and error analysis indicate two non-obvious facts: 1) L2-Chinese, L1-Japanese data are more difficult to analyze and thus annotate than L2-Chinese, L1-English data; 2) computational models trained on L2-Chinese, L1-Japanese data perform better than models trained on L2-Chinese, L1-English data.
Text Simplification by Tagging (2021)

Edit-based approaches have recently shown promising results on multiple monolingual sequence transduction tasks. In contrast to conventional sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models, which learn to generate text from scratch as they are trained on parallel corpora, these methods have proven to be much more effective since they are able to learn to make fast and accurate transformations while leveraging powerful pre-trained language models. Inspired by these ideas, we present TST, a simple and efficient Text Simplification system based on sequence Tagging, leveraging pre-trained Transformer-based encoders. Our system makes simplistic data augmentations and tweaks in training and inference on a pre-existing system, which makes it less reliant on large amounts of parallel training data, provides more control over the outputs and enables faster inference speeds. Our best model achieves near state-of-the-art performance on benchmark test datasets for the task. Since it is fully non-autoregressive, it achieves faster inference speeds by over 11 times than the current state-of-the-art text simplification system.
Employing distributional semantics to organize task-focused vocabulary learning (2021)

How can a learner systematically prepare for reading a book they are interested in? In this paper, we explore how computational linguistic methods such as distributional semantics, morphological clustering, and exercise generation can be combined with graph-based learner models to answer this question both conceptually and in practice. Based on highly structured learner models and concepts from network analysis, the learner is guided to efficiently explore the targeted lexical space. They practice using multi-gap learning activities generated from the book. In sum, the approach combines computational linguistic methods with concepts from network analysis and tutoring systems to support learners in pursuing their individual reading task goals.
Synthetic Data Generation for Grammatical Error Correction with Tagged Corruption Models (2021)

Synthetic data generation is widely known to boost the accuracy of neural grammatical error correction (GEC) systems, but existing methods often lack diversity or are too simplistic to generate the broad range of grammatical errors made by human writers. In this work, we use error type tags from automatic annotation tools such as ERRANT to guide synthetic data generation. We compare several models that can produce an ungrammatical sentence given a clean sentence and an error type tag. We use these models to build a new, large synthetic pre-training data set with error tag frequency distributions matching a given development set. Our synthetic data set yields large and consistent gains, improving the state-of-the-art on the BEA-19 and CoNLL-14 test sets. We also show that our approach is particularly effective in adapting a GEC system, trained on mixed native and non-native English, to a native English test set, even surpassing real training data consisting of high-quality sentence pairs.
Broad Linguistic Complexity Analysis for Greek Readability Classification (2021)

This paper explores the linguistic complexity of Greek textbooks as a readability classification task. We analyze textbook corpora for different school subjects and textbooks for Greek as a Second Language, covering a very wide spectrum of school age groups and proficiency levels. A broad range of quantifiable linguistic complexity features (lexical, morphological and syntactic) are extracted and calculated. Conducting experiments with different feature subsets, we show that the different linguistic dimensions contribute orthogonal information, each contributing towards the highest result achieved using all linguistic feature subsets. A readability classifier trained on this basis reaches a classification accuracy of 88.16{\%} for the Greek as a Second Language corpus. To investigate the generalizability of the classification models, we also perform cross-corpus evaluations. We show that the model trained on the most varied text collection (for Greek as a school subject) generalizes best. In addition to advancing the state of the art for Greek readability analysis, the paper also contributes insights on the role of different feature sets and training setups for generalizable readability classification.
Character Set Construction for Chinese Language Learning (2021)

To promote efficient learning of Chinese characters, pedagogical materials may present not only a single character, but a set of characters that are related in meaning and in written form. This paper investigates automatic construction of these character sets. The proposed model represents a character as averaged word vectors of common words containing the character. It then identifies sets of characters with high semantic similarity through clustering. Human evaluation shows that this representation outperforms direct use of character embeddings, and that the resulting character sets capture distinct semantic ranges.
Identifying negative language transfer in learner errors using POS information (2021)

A common mistake made by language learners is the misguided usage of first language rules when communicating in another language. In this paper, n-gram and recurrent neural network language models are used to represent language structures and detect when Chinese native speakers incorrectly transfer rules from their first language (i.e., Chinese) into their English writing. These models make it possible to inform corrective error feedback with error causes, such as negative language transfer. We report the results of our negative language detection experiments with n-gram and recurrent neural network models that were trained using part-of-speech tags. The best performing model achieves an F1-score of 0.51 when tasked with recognizing negative language transfer in English learner data.
Document-level grammatical error correction (2021)

Document-level context can provide valuable information in grammatical error correction (GEC), which is crucial for correcting certain errors and resolving inconsistencies. In this paper, we investigate context-aware approaches and propose document-level GEC systems. Additionally, we employ a three-step training strategy to benefit from both sentence-level and document-level data. Our system outperforms previous document-level and all other NMT-based single-model systems, achieving state of the art on a common test set.
Essay Quality Signals as Weak Supervision for Source-based Essay Scoring (2021)

Human essay grading is a laborious task that can consume much time and effort. Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has thus been proposed as a fast and effective solution to the problem of grading student writing at scale. However, because AES typically uses supervised machine learning, a human-graded essay corpus is still required to train the AES model. Unfortunately, such a graded corpus often does not exist, so creating a corpus for machine learning can also be a laborious task. This paper presents an investigation of replacing the use of human-labeled essay grades when training an AES system with two automatically available but weaker signals of essay quality: word count and topic distribution similarity. Experiments using two source-based essay scoring (evidence score) corpora show that while weak supervision does not yield a competitive result when training a neural source-based AES model, it can be used to successfully extract Topical Components (TCs) from a source text, which are required by a supervised feature-based AES model. In particular, results show that feature-based AES performance is comparable with either automatically or manually constructed TCs.
Parsing Argumentative Structure in English-as-Foreign-Language Essays (2021)

This paper presents a study on parsing the argumentative structure in English-as-foreign-language (EFL) essays, which are inherently noisy. The parsing process consists of two steps, linking related sentences and then labelling their relations. We experiment with several deep learning architectures to address each task independently. In the sentence linking task, a biaffine model performed the best. In the relation labelling task, a fine-tuned BERT model performed the best. Two sentence encoders are employed, and we observed that non-fine-tuning models generally performed better when using Sentence-BERT as opposed to BERT encoder. We trained our models using two types of parallel texts: original noisy EFL essays and those improved by annotators, then evaluate them on the original essays. The experiment shows that an end-to-end in-domain system achieved an accuracy of .341. On the other hand, the cross-domain system achieved 94{\%} performance of the in-domain system. This signals that well-written texts can also be useful to train argument mining system for noisy texts.
Training and Domain Adaptation for Supervised Text Segmentation (2021)

Unlike traditional unsupervised text segmentation methods, recent supervised segmentation models rely on Wikipedia as the source of large-scale segmentation supervision. These models have, however, predominantly been evaluated on the in-domain (Wikipedia-based) test sets, preventing conclusions about their general segmentation efficacy. In this work, we focus on the domain transfer performance of supervised neural text segmentation in the educational domain. To this end, we first introduce K12Seg, a new dataset for evaluation of supervised segmentation, created from educational reading material for grade-1 to college-level students. We then benchmark a hierarchical text segmentation model (HITS), based on RoBERTa, in both in-domain and domain-transfer segmentation experiments. While HITS produces state-of-the-art in-domain performance (on three Wikipedia-based test sets), we show that, subject to the standard full-blown fine-tuning, it is susceptible to domain overfitting. We identify adapter-based fine-tuning as a remedy that substantially improves transfer performance.
Data Strategies for Low-Resource Grammatical Error Correction (2021)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is a task that has been extensively investigated for the English language. However, for low-resource languages the best practices for training GEC systems have not yet been systematically determined. We investigate how best to take advantage of existing data sources for improving GEC systems for languages with limited quantities of high quality training data. We show that methods for generating artificial training data for GEC can benefit from including morphological errors. We also demonstrate that noisy error correction data gathered from Wikipedia revision histories and the language learning website Lang8, are valuable data sources. Finally, we show that GEC systems pre-trained on noisy data sources can be fine-tuned effectively using small amounts of high quality, human-annotated data.
Towards a Data Analytics Pipeline for the Visualisation of Complexity Metrics in L2 writings (2021)

We present the design of a tool for the visualisation of linguistic complexity in second language (L2) learner writings. We show how metrics can be exploited to visualise complexity in L2 writings in relation to CEFR levels.
Estonian as a Second Language Teacher`s Tools (2021)

The paper presents the results of the project {\textquotedblleft}Teacher`s Tools{\textquotedblright} (et {\~O}petaja t{\"o}{\"o}riistad) published as a subpage of the new language portal S{\~o}naveeb developed by the Institute of the Estonian Language. The toolbox includes four modules: vocabulary, grammar, communicative language activities and text evaluation. The tools are aimed to help teachers and specialists of Estonian as a second language plan courses, create new educational materials, exercises and tests based on CEFR level descriptions.
Assessing Grammatical Correctness in Language Learning (2021)

We present experiments on assessing the grammatical correctness of learners' answers in a language-learning System (references to the System, and the links to the released data and code are withheld for anonymity). In particular, we explore the problem of detecting alternative-correct answers: when more than one inflected form of a lemma fits syntactically and semantically in a given context. We approach the problem with the methods for grammatical error detection (GED), since we hypothesize that models for detecting grammatical mistakes can assess the correctness of potential alternative answers in a learning setting. Due to the paucity of training data, we explore the ability of pre-trained BERT to detect grammatical errors and then fine-tune it using synthetic training data. In this work, we focus on errors in inflection. Our experiments show a. that pre-trained BERT performs worse at detecting grammatical irregularities for Russian than for English; b. that fine-tuned BERT yields promising results on assessing the correctness of grammatical exercises; and c. establish a new benchmark for Russian. To further investigate its performance, we compare fine-tuned BERT with one of the state-of-the-art models for GED (Bell et al., 2019) on our dataset and RULEC-GEC (Rozovskaya and Roth, 2019). We release the manually annotated learner dataset, used for testing, for general use.
On the application of Transformers for estimating the difficulty of Multiple-Choice Questions from text (2021)

Classical approaches to question calibration are either subjective or require newly created questions to be deployed before being calibrated. Recent works explored the possibility of estimating question difficulty from text, but did not experiment with the most recent NLP models, in particular Transformers. In this paper, we compare the performance of previous literature with Transformer models experimenting on a public and a private dataset. Our experimental results show that Transformers are capable of outperforming previously proposed models. Moreover, if an additional corpus of related documents is available, Transformers can leverage that information to further improve calibration accuracy. We characterize the dependence of the model performance on some properties of the questions, showing that it performs best on questions ending with a question mark and Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs) with one correct choice.