ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Decoding Strategies for Neural Referring Expression Generation (2018)

RNN-based sequence generation is now widely used in NLP and NLG (natural language generation). Most work focusses on how to train RNNs, even though also decoding is not necessarily straightforward: previous work on neural MT found seq2seq models to radically prefer short candidates, and has proposed a number of beam search heuristics to deal with this. In this work, we assess decoding strategies for referring expression generation with neural models. Here, expression length is crucial: output should neither contain too much or too little information, in order to be pragmatically adequate. We find that most beam search heuristics developed for MT do not generalize well to referring expression generation (REG), and do not generally outperform greedy decoding. We observe that beam search heuristics for termination seem to override the model`s knowledge of what a good stopping point is. Therefore, we also explore a recent approach called trainable decoding, which uses a small network to modify the RNN`s hidden state for better decoding results. We find this approach to consistently outperform greedy decoding for REG.
Context-sensitive Natural Language Generation for robot-assisted second language tutoring (2018)

This paper describes the L2TOR intelligent tutoring system (ITS), focusing primarily on its output generation module. The L2TOR ITS is developed for the purpose of investigating the efficacy of robot-assisted second language tutoring in early childhood. We explain the process of generating contextually-relevant utterances, such as task-specific feedback messages, and discuss challenges regarding multimodality and multilingualism for situated natural language generation from a robot tutoring perspective.
Learning from limited datasets: Implications for Natural Language Generation and Human-Robot Interaction (2018)

One of the most natural ways for human robot communication is through spoken language. Training human-robot interaction systems require access to large datasets which are expensive to obtain and labour intensive. In this paper, we describe an approach for learning from minimal data, using as a toy example language understanding in spoken dialogue systems. Understanding of spoken language is crucial because it has implications for natural language generation, i.e. correctly understanding a user`s utterance will lead to choosing the right response/action. Finally, we discuss implications for Natural Language Generation in Human-Robot Interaction.
Shaping a social robot`s humor with Natural Language Generation and socially-aware reinforcement learning (2018)

Humor is an important aspect in human interaction to regulate conversations, increase interpersonal attraction and trust. For social robots, humor is one aspect to make interactions more natural, enjoyable, and to increase credibility and acceptance. In combination with appropriate non-verbal behavior, natural language generation offers the ability to create content on-the-fly. This work outlines the building-blocks for providing an individual, multimodal interaction experience by shaping the robot`s humor with the help of Natural Language Generation and Reinforcement Learning based on human social signals.
From sensors to sense: Integrated heterogeneous ontologies for Natural Language Generation (2018)

We propose the combination of a robotics ontology (KnowRob) with a linguistically motivated one (GUM) under the upper ontology DUL. We use the DUL Event, Situation, Description pattern to formalize reasoning techniques to convert between a robot`s beliefstate and its linguistic utterances. We plan to employ these techniques to equip robots with a reason-aloud ability, through which they can explain their actions as they perform them, in natural language, at a level of granularity appropriate to the user, their query and the context at hand.
A farewell to arms: Non-verbal communication for non-humanoid robots (2018)

Human-robot interactions situated in a dynamic environment create a unique mix of challenges for conversational systems. We argue that, on the one hand, NLG can contribute to addressing these challenges and that, on the other hand, they pose interesting research problems for NLG. To illustrate our position we describe our research on non-humanoid robots using non-verbal signals to support communication.
Being data-driven is not enough: Revisiting interactive instruction giving as a challenge for NLG (2018)

Modeling traditional NLG tasks with data-driven techniques has been a major focus of research in NLG in the past decade. We argue that existing modeling techniques are mostly tailored to textual data and are not sufficient to make NLG technology meet the requirements of agents which target fluid interaction and collaboration in the real world. We revisit interactive instruction giving as a challenge for datadriven NLG and, based on insights from previous GIVE challenges, propose that instruction giving should be addressed in a setting that involves visual grounding and spoken language. These basic design decisions will require NLG frameworks that are capable of monitoring their environment as well as timing and revising their verbal output. We believe that these are core capabilities for making NLG technology transferrable to interactive systems.
Improved Neural Machine Translation using Side Information (2018)

In this work, we investigate whether side information is helpful in neural machine translation (NMT). We study various kinds of side information, including topical information, personal trait, then propose different ways of incorporating them into the existing NMT models. Our experimental results show the benefits of side information in improving the NMT models.
Text-dependent Forensic Voice Comparison: Likelihood Ratio Estimation with the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Gaussian Mixture Model (2018)

Among the more typical forensic voice comparison (FVC) approaches, the acoustic-phonetic statistical approach is suitable for text-dependent FVC, but it does not fully exploit available time-varying information of speech in its modelling. The automatic approach, on the other hand, essentially deals with text-independent cases, which means temporal information is not explicitly incorporated in the modelling. Text-dependent likelihood ratio (LR)-based FVC studies, in particular those that adopt the automatic approach, are few. This preliminary LR-based FVC study compares two statistical models, the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and the Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM), for the calculation of forensic LRs using the same speech data. FVC experiments were carried out using different lengths of Japanese short words under a forensically realistic, but challenging condition: only two speech tokens for model training and LR estimation. Log-likelihood-ratio cost (Cllr) was used as the assessment metric. The study demonstrates that the HMM system constantly outperforms the GMM system in terms of average Cllr values. However, words longer than three mora are needed if the advantage of the HMM is to become evident. With a seven-mora word, for example, the HMM outperformed the GMM by a Cllr value of 0.073.
Development of Natural Language Processing Tools for Cook Islands M\=aori (2018)

This paper presents three ongoing projects for NLP in Cook Islands Maori: Untrained Forced Alignment (approx. 9{\%} error when detecting the center of words), speech-to-text (37{\%} WER in the best trained models) and POS tagging (92{\%} accuracy for the best performing model). Included as part of these projects are new resources filling in a gap in Australasian languages, including gold standard POS-tagged written corpora, transcribed speech corpora, time-aligned corpora down to the level of phonemes. These are part of efforts to accelerate the documentation of Cook Islands Maori and to increase its vitality amongst its users.
Unsupervised Mining of Analogical Frames by Constraint Satisfaction (2018)

It has been demonstrated that vector-based representations of words trained on large text corpora encode linguistic regularities that may be exploited via the use of vector space arithmetic. This capability has been extensively explored and is generally measured via tasks which involve the automated completion of linguistic proportional analogies. The question remains, however, as to what extent it is possible to induce relations from word embeddings in a principled and systematic way, without the provision of exemplars or seed terms. In this paper we propose an extensible and efficient framework for inducing relations via the use of constraint satisfaction. The method is efficient, unsupervised and can be customized in various ways. We provide both quantitative and qualitative analysis of the results.
Specifying Conceptual Models Using Restricted Natural Language (2018)

The key activity to design an information system is conceptual modelling which brings out and describes the general knowledge that is required to build a system. In this paper we propose a novel approach to conceptual modelling where the domain experts will be able to specify and construct a model using a restricted form of natural language. A restricted natural language is a subset of a natural language that has well-defined computational properties and therefore can be translated unambiguously into a formal notation. We will argue that a restricted natural language is suitable for writing precise and consistent specifications that lead to executable conceptual models. Using a restricted natural language will allow the domain experts to describe a scenario in the terminology of the application domain without the need to formally encode this scenario. The resulting textual specification can then be automatically translated into the language of the desired conceptual modelling framework.
Extracting structured data from invoices (2018)

Business documents encode a wealth of information in a format tailored to human consumption {--} i.e. aesthetically disbursed natural language text, graphics and tables. We address the task of extracting key fields (e.g. the amount due on an invoice) from a wide-variety of potentially unseen document formats. In contrast to traditional template driven extraction systems, we introduce a content-driven machine-learning approach which is both robust to noise and generalises to unseen document formats. In a comparison of our approach with alternative invoice extraction systems, we observe an absolute accuracy gain of 20{\textbackslash}{\%} across compared fields, and a 25{\textbackslash}{\%}{--}94{\textbackslash}{\%} reduction in extraction latency.
Exploring Textual and Speech information in Dialogue Act Classification with Speaker Domain Adaptation (2018)

In spite of the recent success of Dialogue Act (DA) classification, the majority of prior works focus on text-based classification with oracle transcriptions, i.e. human transcriptions, instead of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)`s transcriptions. In spoken dialog systems, however, the agent would only have access to noisy ASR transcriptions, which may further suffer performance degradation due to domain shift. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of using both acoustic and textual signals, either oracle or ASR transcriptions, and investigate speaker domain adaptation for DA classification. Our multimodal model proves to be superior to the unimodal models, particularly when the oracle transcriptions are not available. We also propose an effective method for speaker domain adaptation, which achieves competitive results.
Cluster Labeling by Word Embeddings and WordNet`s Hypernymy (2018)

Cluster labeling is the assignment of representative labels to clusters obtained from the organization of a document collection. Once assigned, the labels can play an important role in applications such as navigation, search and document classification. However, finding appropriately descriptive labels is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose various approaches for assigning labels to word clusters by leveraging word embeddings and the synonymity and hypernymy relations in the WordNet lexical ontology. Experiments carried out using the WebAP document dataset have shown that one of the approaches stand out in the comparison and is capable of selecting labels that are reasonably aligned with those chosen by a pool of four human annotators.
A Comparative Study of Embedding Models in Predicting the Compositionality of Multiword Expressions (2018)

In this paper, we perform a comparative evaluation of off-the-shelf embedding models over the task of compositionality prediction of multiword expressions(``MWEs''). Our experimental results suggest that character- and document-level models capture knowledge of MWE compositionality and are effective in modelling varying levels of compositionality, with the advantage over word-level models that they do not require token-level identification of MWEs in the training corpus.
Towards Efficient Machine Translation Evaluation by Modelling Annotators (2018)

Accurate evaluation of translation has long been a difficult, yet important problem. Current evaluations use direct assessment (DA), based on crowd sourcing judgements from a large pool of workers, along with quality control checks, and a robust method for combining redundant judgements. In this paper we show that the quality control mechanism is overly conservative, which increases the time and expense of the evaluation. We propose a model that does not rely on a pre-processing step to filter workers and takes into account varying annotator reliabilities. Our model effectively weights each worker`s scores based on the inferred precision of the worker, and is much more reliable than the mean of either the raw scores or the standardised scores. We also show that DA does not deliver on the promise of longitudinal evaluation, and propose redesigning the structure of the annotation tasks that can solve this problem.
Overview of the 2018 ALTA Shared Task: Classifying Patent Applications (2018)

We present an overview of the 2018 ALTA shared task. This is the 9th of the series of shared tasks organised by ALTA since 2010. The task was to classify Australian patent classifications following the sections defined by the International Patient Classification (IPC), using data made available by IP Australia. We introduce the task, describe the data and present the results of the participating teams. Some of the participating teams outperformed state of the art.
Classifying Patent Applications with Ensemble Methods (2018)

We present methods for the automatic classification of patent applications using an annotated dataset provided by the organizers of the ALTA 2018 shared task - Classifying Patent Applications. The goal of the task is to use computational methods to categorize patent applications according to a coarse-grained taxonomy of eight classes based on the International Patent Classification (IPC). We tested a variety of approaches for this task and the best results, 0.778 micro-averaged F1-Score, were achieved by SVM ensembles using a combination of words and characters as features. Our team, BMZ, was ranked first among 14 teams in the competition.
Universal Language Model Fine-tuning for Patent Classification (2018)

This paper describes the methods used for the 2018 ALTA Shared Task. The task this year was to automatically classify Australian patents into their main International Patent Classification section. Our final submission used a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Universal Language Model with Fine-tuning (ULMFiT). Our system achieved the best results in the student category.
SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affect in Tweets (2018)

We present the SemEval-2018 Task 1: Affect in Tweets, which includes an array of subtasks on inferring the affectual state of a person from their tweet. For each task, we created labeled data from English, Arabic, and Spanish tweets. The individual tasks are: 1. emotion intensity regression, 2. emotion intensity ordinal classification, 3. valence (sentiment) regression, 4. valence ordinal classification, and 5. emotion classification. Seventy-five teams (about 200 team members) participated in the shared task. We summarize the methods, resources, and tools used by the participating teams, with a focus on the techniques and resources that are particularly useful. We also analyze systems for consistent bias towards a particular race or gender. The data is made freely available to further improve our understanding of how people convey emotions through language.
SeerNet at SemEval-2018 Task 1: Domain Adaptation for Affect in Tweets (2018)

The paper describes the best performing system for the SemEval-2018 Affect in Tweets(English) sub-tasks. The system focuses on the ordinal classification and regression sub-tasks for valence and emotion. For ordinal classification valence is classified into 7 different classes ranging from -3 to 3 whereas emotion is classified into 4 different classes 0 to 3 separately for each emotion namely anger, fear, joy and sadness. The regression sub-tasks estimate the intensity of valence and each emotion. The system performs domain adaptation of 4 different models and creates an ensemble to give the final prediction. The proposed system achieved 1stposition out of 75 teams which participated in the fore-mentioned sub-tasks. We outperform the baseline model by margins ranging from 49.2{\%} to 76.4 {\%}, thus, pushing the state-of-the-art significantly.
SemEval 2018 Task 2: Multilingual Emoji Prediction (2018)

This paper describes the results of the first Shared Task on Multilingual Emoji Prediction, organized as part of SemEval 2018. Given the text of a tweet, the task consists of predicting the most likely emoji to be used along such tweet. Two subtasks were proposed, one for English and one for Spanish, and participants were allowed to submit a system run to one or both subtasks. In total, 49 teams participated to the English subtask and 22 teams submitted a system run to the Spanish subtask. Evaluation was carried out emoji-wise, and the final ranking was based on macro F-Score. Data and further information about this task can be found at \url{https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/17344}.
T\"ubingen-Oslo at SemEval-2018 Task 2: SVMs perform better than RNNs in Emoji Prediction (2018)

This paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2018 task Multilingual Emoji Prediction. We participated in both English and Spanish subtasks, experimenting with support vector machines (SVMs) and recurrent neural networks. Our SVM classifier obtained the top rank in both subtasks with macro-averaged F1-measures of 35.99{\%} for English and 22.36{\%} for Spanish data sets. Similar to a few earlier attempts, the results with neural networks were not on par with linear SVMs.
SemEval-2018 Task 3: Irony Detection in English Tweets (2018)

This paper presents the first shared task on irony detection: given a tweet, automatic natural language processing systems should determine whether the tweet is ironic (Task A) and which type of irony (if any) is expressed (Task B). The ironic tweets were collected using irony-related hashtags (i.e. {\#}irony, {\#}sarcasm, {\#}not) and were subsequently manually annotated to minimise the amount of noise in the corpus. Prior to distributing the data, hashtags that were used to collect the tweets were removed from the corpus. For both tasks, a training corpus of 3,834 tweets was provided, as well as a test set containing 784 tweets. Our shared tasks received submissions from 43 teams for the binary classification Task A and from 31 teams for the multiclass Task B. The highest classification scores obtained for both subtasks are respectively F1= 0.71 and F1= 0.51 and demonstrate that fine-grained irony classification is much more challenging than binary irony detection.
THU\_NGN at SemEval-2018 Task 3: Tweet Irony Detection with Densely connected LSTM and Multi-task Learning (2018)

Detecting irony is an important task to mine fine-grained information from social web messages. Therefore, the Semeval-2018 task 3 is aimed to detect the ironic tweets (subtask A) and their ironic types (subtask B). In order to address this task, we propose a system based on a densely connected LSTM network with multi-task learning strategy. In our dense LSTM model, each layer will take all outputs from previous layers as input. The last LSTM layer will output the hidden representations of texts, and they will be used in three classification task. In addition, we incorporate several types of features to improve the model performance. Our model achieved an F-score of 70.54 (ranked 2/43) in the subtask A and 49.47 (ranked 3/29) in the subtask B. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our system.
SemEval 2018 Task 4: Character Identification on Multiparty Dialogues (2018)

Character identification is a task of entity linking that finds the global entity of each personal mention in multiparty dialogue. For this task, the first two seasons of the popular TV show Friends are annotated, comprising a total of 448 dialogues, 15,709 mentions, and 401 entities. The personal mentions are detected from nominals referring to certain characters in the show, and the entities are collected from the list of all characters in those two seasons of the show. This task is challenging because it requires the identification of characters that are mentioned but may not be active during the conversation. Among 90+ participants, four of them submitted their system outputs and showed strengths in different aspects about the task. Thorough analyses of the distributed datasets, system outputs, and comparative studies are also provided. To facilitate the momentum, we create an open-source project for this task and publicly release a larger and cleaner dataset, hoping to support researchers for more enhanced modeling.
AMORE-UPF at SemEval-2018 Task 4: BiLSTM with Entity Library (2018)

This paper describes our winning contribution to SemEval 2018 Task 4: Character Identification on Multiparty Dialogues. It is a simple, standard model with one key innovation, an entity library. Our results show that this innovation greatly facilitates the identification of infrequent characters. Because of the generic nature of our model, this finding is potentially relevant to any task that requires the effective learning from sparse or imbalanced data.
SemEval-2018 Task 5: Counting Events and Participants in the Long Tail (2018)

This paper discusses SemEval-2018 Task 5: a referential quantification task of counting events and participants in local, long-tail news documents with high ambiguity. The complexity of this task challenges systems to establish the meaning, reference and identity across documents. The task consists of three subtasks and spans across three domains. We detail the design of this referential quantification task, describe the participating systems, and present additional analysis to gain deeper insight into their performance.
KOI at SemEval-2018 Task 5: Building Knowledge Graph of Incidents (2018)

We present KOI (Knowledge of Incidents), a system that given news articles as input, builds a knowledge graph (KOI-KG) of incidental events. KOI-KG can then be used to efficiently answer questions such {\textquotedblleft}How many killing incidents happened in 2017 that involve Sean?{\textquotedblright} The required steps in building the KG include: (i) document preprocessing involving word sense disambiguation, named-entity recognition, temporal expression recognition and normalization, and semantic role labeling; (ii) incidental event extraction and coreference resolution via document clustering; and (iii) KG construction and population.