ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Computational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (2019)

We present Computational Linguistics Applications for Multimedia Services (CLAMS), a platform that provides access to computational content analysis tools for archival multimedia material that appear in different media, such as text, audio, image, and video. The primary goal of CLAMS is: (1) to develop an interchange format between multimodal metadata generation tools to ensure interoperability between tools; (2) to provide users with a portable, user-friendly workflow engine to chain selected tools to extract meaningful analyses; and (3) to create a public software development kit (SDK) for developers that eases deployment of analysis tools within the CLAMS platform. CLAMS is designed to help archives and libraries enrich the metadata associated with their mass-digitized multimedia collections, that would otherwise be largely unsearchable.
Correcting Whitespace Errors in Digitized Historical Texts (2019)

Whitespace errors are common to digitized archives. This paper describes a lightweight unsupervised technique for recovering the original whitespace. Our approach is based on count statistics from Google n-grams, which are converted into a likelihood ratio test computed from interpolated trigram and bigram probabilities. To evaluate this approach, we annotate a small corpus of whitespace errors in a digitized corpus of newspapers from the 19th century United States. Our technique identifies and corrects most whitespace errors while introducing a minimal amount of oversegmentation: it achieves 77{\%} recall at a false positive rate of less than 1{\%}, and 91{\%} recall at a false positive rate of less than 3{\%}.
On the Feasibility of Automated Detection of Allusive Text Reuse (2019)

The detection of allusive text reuse is particularly challenging due to the sparse evidence on which allusive references rely {---} commonly based on none or very few shared words. Arguably, lexical semantics can be resorted to since uncovering semantic relations between words has the potential to increase the support underlying the allusion and alleviate the lexical sparsity. A further obstacle is the lack of evaluation benchmark corpora, largely due to the highly interpretative character of the annotation process. In the present paper, we aim to elucidate the feasibility of automated allusion detection. We approach the matter from an Information Retrieval perspective in which referencing texts act as queries and referenced texts as relevant documents to be retrieved, and estimate the difficulty of benchmark corpus compilation by a novel inter-annotator agreement study on query segmentation. Furthermore, we investigate to what extent the integration of lexical semantic information derived from distributional models and ontologies can aid retrieving cases of allusive reuse. The results show that (i) despite low agreement scores, using manual queries considerably improves retrieval performance with respect to a windowing approach, and that (ii) retrieval performance can be moderately boosted with distributional semantics.
The limits of Spanglish? (2019)

Linguistic code-switching (C-S) is common in oral bilingual vernacular speech. When used in literature, C-S becomes an artistic choice that can mirror the patterns of bilingual interactions. But it can also potentially exceed them. What are the limits of C-S? We model features of C-S in corpora of contemporary U.S. Spanish-English literary and conversational data to analyze why some critics view the {\textquoteleft}Spanglish' texts of Ilan Stavans as deviating from a C-S norm.
Sign Clustering and Topic Extraction in Proto-Elamite (2019)

We describe a first attempt at using techniques from computational linguistics to analyze the undeciphered proto-Elamite script. Using hierarchical clustering, n-gram frequencies, and LDA topic models, we both replicate results obtained by manual decipherment and reveal previously-unobserved relationships between signs. This demonstrates the utility of these techniques as an aid to manual decipherment.
Distantly Supervised Biomedical Knowledge Acquisition via Knowledge Graph Based Attention (2019)

The increased demand for structured scientific knowledge has attracted considerable attention in extracting scientific relation from the ever growing scientific publications. Distant supervision is widely applied approach to automatically generate large amounts of labelled data with low manual annotation cost. However, distant supervision inevitably accompanies the wrong labelling problem, which will negatively affect the performance of Relation Extraction (RE). To address this issue, (Han et al., 2018) proposes a novel framework for jointly training both RE model and Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) model to extract structured knowledge from non-scientific dataset. In this work, we firstly investigate the feasibility of this framework on scientific dataset, specifically on biomedical dataset. Secondly, to achieve better performance on the biomedical dataset, we extend the framework with other competitive KGC models. Moreover, we proposed a new end-to-end KGC model to extend the framework. Experimental results not only show the feasibility of the framework on the biomedical dataset, but also indicate the effectiveness of our extensions, because our extended model achieves significant and consistent improvements on distant supervised RE as compared with baselines.
Scalable, Semi-Supervised Extraction of Structured Information from Scientific Literature (2019)

As scientific communities grow and evolve, there is a high demand for improved methods for finding relevant papers, comparing papers on similar topics and studying trends in the research community. All these tasks involve the common problem of extracting structured information from scientific articles. In this paper, we propose a novel, scalable, semi-supervised method for extracting relevant structured information from the vast available raw scientific literature. We extract the fundamental concepts of {\textquotedblleft}aim{\textquotedblright}, {\textquotedblright}method{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}result{\textquotedblright} from scientific articles and use them to construct a knowledge graph. Our algorithm makes use of domain-based word embedding and the bootstrap framework. Our experiments show that our system achieves precision and recall comparable to the state of the art. We also show the domain independence of our algorithm by analyzing the research trends of two distinct communities - computational linguistics and computer vision.
Understanding the Polarity of Events in the Biomedical Literature: Deep Learning vs. Linguistically-informed Methods (2019)

An important task in the machine reading of biochemical events expressed in biomedical texts is correctly reading the polarity, i.e., attributing whether the biochemical event is a promotion or an inhibition. Here we present a novel dataset for studying polarity attribution accuracy. We use this dataset to train and evaluate several deep learning models for polarity identification, and compare these to a linguistically-informed model. The best performing deep learning architecture achieves 0.968 average F1 performance in a five-fold cross-validation study, a considerable improvement over the linguistically informed model average F1 of 0.862.
Dataset Mention Extraction and Classification (2019)

Datasets are integral artifacts of empirical scientific research. However, due to natural language variation, their recognition can be difficult and even when identified, can often be inconsistently referred across and within publications. We report our approach to the Coleridge Initiative`s Rich Context Competition, which tasks participants with identifying dataset surface forms (dataset mention extraction) and associating the extracted mention to its referred dataset (dataset classification). In this work, we propose various neural baselines and evaluate these model on one-plus and zero-shot classification scenarios. We further explore various joint learning approaches - exploring the synergy between the tasks - and report the issues with such techniques.
Annotating with Pros and Cons of Technologies in Computer Science Papers (2019)

This paper explores a task for extracting a technological expression and its pros/cons from computer science papers. We report ongoing efforts on an annotated corpus of pros/cons and an analysis of the nature of the automatic extraction task. Specifically, we show how to adapt the targeted sentiment analysis task for pros/cons extraction in computer science papers and conduct an annotation study. In order to identify the challenges of the automatic extraction task, we construct a strong baseline model and conduct an error analysis. The experiments show that pros/cons can be consistently annotated by several annotators, and that the task is challenging due to domain-specific knowledge. The annotated dataset is made publicly available for research purposes.
Browsing Health: Information Extraction to Support New Interfaces for Accessing Medical Evidence (2019)

Standard paradigms for search do not work well in the medical context. Typical information needs, such as retrieving a full list of medical interventions for a given condition, or finding the reported efficacy of a particular treatment with respect to a specific outcome of interest cannot be straightforwardly posed in typical text-box search. Instead, we propose faceted-search in which a user specifies a condition and then can browse treatments and outcomes that have been evaluated. Choosing from these, they can access randomized control trials (RCTs) describing individual studies. Realizing such a view of the medical evidence requires information extraction techniques to identify the population, interventions, and outcome measures in an RCT. Patients, health practitioners, and biomedical librarians all stand to benefit from such innovation in search of medical evidence. We present an initial prototype of such an interface applied to pre-registered clinical studies. We also discuss pilot studies into the applicability of information extraction methods to allow for similar access to all published trial results.
An Analysis of Deep Contextual Word Embeddings and Neural Architectures for Toponym Mention Detection in Scientific Publications (2019)

Toponym detection in scientific papers is an open task and a key first step in place entity enrichment of documents. We examine three common neural architectures in NLP: 1) convolutional neural network, 2) multi-layer perceptron (both applied in a sliding window context) and 3) bidirectional LSTM and apply contextual and non-contextual word embedding layers to these models. We find that deep contextual word embeddings improve the performance of the bi-LSTM with CRF neural architecture achieving the best performance when multiple layers of deep contextual embeddings are concatenated. Our best performing model achieves an average F1 of 0.910 when evaluated on overlap macro exceeding previous state-of-the-art models in the toponym detection task.
STAC: Science Toolkit Based on Chinese Idiom Knowledge Graph (2019)

Chinese idioms (Cheng Yu) have seen five thousand years' history and culture of China, meanwhile they contain large number of scientific achievement of ancient China. However, existing Chinese online idiom dictionaries have limited function for scientific exploration. In this paper, we first construct a Chinese idiom knowledge graph by extracting domains and dynasties and associating them with idioms, and based on the idiom knowledge graph, we propose a Science Toolkit for Ancient China (STAC) aiming to support scientific exploration. In the STAC toolkit, idiom navigator helps users explore overall scientific progress from idiom perspective with visualization tools, and idiom card and idiom QA shorten action path and avoid thinking being interrupted while users are reading and writing. The current STAC toolkit is deployed at http://120.92.208.22:7476/demo/{\#}/stac.
Playing by the Book: An Interactive Game Approach for Action Graph Extraction from Text (2019)

Understanding procedural text requires tracking entities, actions and effects as the narrative unfolds. We focus on the challenging real-world problem of action-graph extraction from materials science papers, where language is highly specialized and data annotation is expensive and scarce. We propose a novel approach, Text2Quest, where procedural text is interpreted as instructions for an interactive game. A learning agent completes the game by executing the procedure correctly in a text-based simulated lab environment. The framework can complement existing approaches and enables richer forms of learning compared to static texts. We discuss potential limitations and advantages of the approach, and release a prototype proof-of-concept, hoping to encourage research in this direction.
Textual and Visual Characteristics of Mathematical Expressions in Scholar Documents (2019)

Mathematical expressions (ME) are widely used in scholar documents. In this paper we analyze characteristics of textual and visual MEs characteristics for the image-to-LaTeX translation task. While there are open data-sets of LaTeX files with MEs included it is very complicated to extract these MEs from a document and to compile the list of MEs. Therefore we release a corpus of open-access scholar documents with PDF and JATS-XML parallel files. The MEs in these documents are LaTeX encoded and are document independent. The data contains more than 1.2 million distinct annotated formulae and more than 80 million raw tokens of LaTeX MEs in more than 8 thousand documents. While the variety of textual lengths and visual sizes of MEs are not well defined we found that the task of analyzing MEs in scholar documents can be reduced to the subtask of a particular text length, image width and height bounds, and display MEs can be processed as arrays of partial MEs.
Introduction to Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT): 7th Workshop on Rhetorical Structure Theory and Related Formalisms (2019)

This overview summarizes the main contributions of the accepted papers at the 2019 workshop on Discourse Relation Parsing and Treebanking (DISRPT 2019). Co-located with NAACL 2019 in Minneapolis, the workshop`s aim was to bring together researchers working on corpus-based and computational approaches to discourse relations. In addition to an invited talk, eighteen papers outlined below were presented, four of which were submitted as part of a shared task on elementary discourse unit segmentation and connective detection.
Toward Cross-theory Discourse Relation Annotation (2019)

In this exploratory study, we attempt to automatically induce PDTB-style relations from RST trees. We work with a German corpus of news commentary articles, annotated for RST trees and explicit PDTB-style relations and we focus on inducing the implicit relations in an automated way. Preliminary results look promising as a high-precision (but low-recall) way of finding implicit relations where there is no shallow structure annotated at all, but mapping proves more difficult in cases where EDUs and relation arguments overlap, yet do not seem to signal the same relation.
Acquiring Annotated Data with Cross-lingual Explicitation for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification (2019)

Implicit discourse relation classification is one of the most challenging and important tasks in discourse parsing, due to the lack of connectives as strong linguistic cues. A principle bottleneck to further improvement is the shortage of training data (ca. 18k instances in the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB)). Shi et al. (2017) proposed to acquire additional data by exploiting connectives in translation: human translators mark discourse relations which are implicit in the source language explicitly in the translation. Using back-translations of such explicitated connectives improves discourse relation parsing performance. This paper addresses the open question of whether the choice of the translation language matters, and whether multiple translations into different languages can be effectively used to improve the quality of the additional data.
From News to Medical: Cross-domain Discourse Segmentation (2019)

The first step in discourse analysis involves dividing a text into segments. We annotate the first high-quality small-scale medical corpus in English with discourse segments and analyze how well news-trained segmenters perform on this domain. While we expectedly find a drop in performance, the nature of the segmentation errors suggests some problems can be addressed earlier in the pipeline, while others would require expanding the corpus to a trainable size to learn the nuances of the medical domain.
Nuclearity in RST and signals of coherence relations (2019)

We investigate the relationship between the notion of nuclearity as proposed in Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) and the signalling of coherence relations. RST relations are categorized as either mononuclear (comprising a nucleus and a satellite span) or multinuclear (comprising two or more nuclei spans). We examine how mononuclear relations (e.g., Antithesis, Condition) and multinuclear relations (e.g., Contrast, List) are indicated by relational signals, more particularly by discourse markers (e.g., because, however, if, therefore). We conduct a corpus study, examining the distribution of either type of relations in the RST Discourse Treebank (Carlson et al., 2002) and the distribution of discourse markers for those relations in the RST Signalling Corpus (Das et al., 2015). Our results show that discourse markers are used more often to signal multinuclear relations than mononuclear relations. The findings also suggest a complex relationship between the relation types and syntactic categories of discourse markers (subordinating and coordinating conjunctions).
The Rhetorical Structure of Attribution (2019)

The relational status of Attribution in Rhetorical Structure Theory has been a matter of ongoing debate. Although several researchers have weighed in on the topic, and although numerous studies have relied upon attributional structures for their analyses, nothing approaching consensus has emerged. This paper identifies three basic issues that must be resolved to determine the relational status of attributions. These are identified as the Discourse Units Issue, the Nuclearity Issue, and the Relation Identification Issue. These three issues are analyzed from the perspective of classical RST. A finding of this analysis is that the nuclearity and the relational identification of attribution structures are shown to depend on the writer`s intended effect, such that attributional relations cannot be considered as a single relation, but rather as attributional instances of other RST relations.
Annotating Shallow Discourse Relations in Twitter Conversations (2019)

We introduce our pilot study applying PDTB-style annotation to Twitter conversations. Lexically grounded coherence annotation for Twitter threads will enable detailed investigations of the discourse structure of conversations on social media. Here, we present our corpus of 185 threads and annotation, including an inter-annotator agreement study. We discuss our observations as to how Twitter discourses differ from written news text wrt. discourse connectives and relations. We confirm our hypothesis that discourse relations in written social media conversations are expressed differently than in (news) text. We find that in Twitter, connective arguments frequently are not full syntactic clauses, and that a few general connectives expressing EXPANSION and CONTINGENCY make up the majority of the explicit relations in our data.
A Discourse Signal Annotation System for RST Trees (2019)

This paper presents a new system for open-ended discourse relation signal annotation in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), implemented on top of an online tool for RST annotation. We discuss existing projects annotating textual signals of discourse relations, which have so far not allowed simultaneously structuring and annotating words signaling hierarchical discourse trees, and demonstrate the design and applications of our interface by extending existing RST annotations in the freely available GUM corpus.
EusDisParser: improving an under-resourced discourse parser with cross-lingual data (2019)

Development of discourse parsers to annotate the relational discourse structure of a text is crucial for many downstream tasks. However, most of the existing work focuses on English, assuming a quite large dataset. Discourse data have been annotated for Basque, but training a system on these data is challenging since the corpus is very small. In this paper, we create the first demonstrator based on RST for Basque, and we investigate the use of data in another language to improve the performance of a Basque discourse parser. More precisely, we build a monolingual system using the small set of data available and investigate the use of multilingual word embeddings to train a system for Basque using data annotated for another language. We found that our approach to building a system limited to the small set of data available for Basque allowed us to get an improvement over previous approaches making use of many data annotated in other languages. At best, we get 34.78 in F1 for the full discourse structure. More data annotation is necessary in order to improve the results obtained with these techniques. We also describe which relations match with the gold standard, in order to understand these results.
Beyond The Wall Street Journal: Anchoring and Comparing Discourse Signals across Genres (2019)

Recent research on discourse relations has found that they are cued not only by discourse markers (DMs) but also by other textual signals and that signaling information is indicative of genres. While several corpora exist with discourse relation signaling information such as the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB, Prasad et al. 2008) and the Rhetorical Structure Theory Signalling Corpus (RST-SC, Das and Taboada 2018), they both annotate the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) section of the Penn Treebank (PTB, Marcus et al. 1993), which is limited to the news domain. Thus, this paper adapts the signal identification and anchoring scheme (Liu and Zeldes, 2019) to three more genres, examines the distribution of signaling devices across relations and genres, and provides a taxonomy of indicative signals found in this dataset.
Towards the Data-driven System for Rhetorical Parsing of Russian Texts (2019)

Results of the first experimental evaluation of machine learning models trained on Ru-RSTreebank {--} first Russian corpus annotated within RST framework {--} are presented. Various lexical, quantitative, morphological, and semantic features were used. In rhetorical relation classification, ensemble of CatBoost model with selected features and a linear SVM model provides the best score (macro F1 = 54.67 {\ensuremath{\pm}} 0.38). We discover that most of the important features for rhetorical relation classification are related to discourse connectives derived from the connectives lexicon for Russian and from other sources.
RST-Tace A tool for automatic comparison and evaluation of RST trees (2019)

This paper presents RST-Tace, a tool for automatic comparison and evaluation of RST trees. RST-Tace serves as an implementation of Iruskieta`s comparison method, which allows trees to be compared and evaluated without the influence of decisions at lower levels in a tree in terms of four factors: constituent, attachment point, nuclearity as well as relation. RST-Tace can be used regardless of the language or the size of rhetorical trees. This tool aims to measure the agreement between two annotators. The result is reflected by F-measure and inter-annotator agreement. Both the comparison table and the result of the evaluation can be obtained automatically.