ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Impact of Pragmatic Phenomena on Irony Detection in Tweets: A Multilingual Corpus Study (2017)

This paper provides a linguistic and pragmatic analysis of the phenomenon of irony in order to represent how Twitter`s users exploit irony devices within their communication strategies for generating textual contents. We aim to measure the impact of a wide-range of pragmatic phenomena in the interpretation of irony, and to investigate how these phenomena interact with contexts local to the tweet. Informed by linguistic theories, we propose for the first time a multi-layered annotation schema for irony and its application to a corpus of French, English and Italian tweets. We detail each layer, explore their interactions, and discuss our results according to a qualitative and quantitative perspective.
A Multi-View Sentiment Corpus (2017)

Sentiment Analysis is a broad task that involves the analysis of various aspect of the natural language text. However, most of the approaches in the state of the art usually investigate independently each aspect, i.e. Subjectivity Classification, Sentiment Polarity Classification, Emotion Recognition, Irony Detection. In this paper we present a Multi-View Sentiment Corpus (MVSC), which comprises 3000 English microblog posts related the movie domain. Three independent annotators manually labelled MVSC, following a broad annotation schema about different aspects that can be grasped from natural language text coming from social networks. The contribution is therefore a corpus that comprises five different views for each message, i.e. subjective/objective, sentiment polarity, implicit/explicit, irony, emotion. In order to allow a more detailed investigation on the human labelling behaviour, we provide the annotations of each human annotator involved.
A Systematic Study of Neural Discourse Models for Implicit Discourse Relation (2017)

Inferring implicit discourse relations in natural language text is the most difficult subtask in discourse parsing. Many neural network models have been proposed to tackle this problem. However, the comparison for this task is not unified, so we could hardly draw clear conclusions about the effectiveness of various architectures. Here, we propose neural network models that are based on feedforward and long-short term memory architecture and systematically study the effects of varying structures. To our surprise, the best-configured feedforward architecture outperforms LSTM-based model in most cases despite thorough tuning. Further, we compare our best feedforward system with competitive convolutional and recurrent networks and find that feedforward can actually be more effective. For the first time for this task, we compile and publish outputs from previous neural and non-neural systems to establish the standard for further comparison.
Cross-lingual RST Discourse Parsing (2017)

Discourse parsing is an integral part of understanding information flow and argumentative structure in documents. Most previous research has focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English RST Discourse Treebank. However, discourse treebanks for other languages exist, including Spanish, German, Basque, Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese. The treebanks share the same underlying linguistic theory, but differ slightly in the way documents are annotated. In this paper, we present (a) a new discourse parser which is simpler, yet competitive (significantly better on 2/3 metrics) to state of the art for English, (b) a harmonization of discourse treebanks across languages, enabling us to present (c) what to the best of our knowledge are the first experiments on cross-lingual discourse parsing.
Dialog state tracking, a machine reading approach using Memory Network (2017)

In an end-to-end dialog system, the aim of dialog state tracking is to accurately estimate a compact representation of the current dialog status from a sequence of noisy observations produced by the speech recognition and the natural language understanding modules. This paper introduces a novel method of dialog state tracking based on the general paradigm of machine reading and proposes to solve it using an End-to-End Memory Network, MemN2N, a memory-enhanced neural network architecture. We evaluate the proposed approach on the second Dialog State Tracking Challenge (DSTC-2) dataset. The corpus has been converted for the occasion in order to frame the hidden state variable inference as a question-answering task based on a sequence of utterances extracted from a dialog. We show that the proposed tracker gives encouraging results. Then, we propose to extend the DSTC-2 dataset with specific reasoning capabilities requirement like counting, list maintenance, yes-no question answering and indefinite knowledge management. Finally, we present encouraging results using our proposed MemN2N based tracking model.
Sentence Segmentation in Narrative Transcripts from Neuropsychological Tests using Recurrent Convolutional Neural Networks (2017)

Automated discourse analysis tools based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) aiming at the diagnosis of language-impairing dementias generally extract several textual metrics of narrative transcripts. However, the absence of sentence boundary segmentation in the transcripts prevents the direct application of NLP methods which rely on these marks in order to function properly, such as taggers and parsers. We present the first steps taken towards automatic neuropsychological evaluation based on narrative discourse analysis, presenting a new automatic sentence segmentation method for impaired speech. Our model uses recurrent convolutional neural networks with prosodic, Part of Speech (PoS) features, and word embeddings. It was evaluated intrinsically on impaired, spontaneous speech as well as normal, prepared speech and presents better results for healthy elderly (CTL) (F1 = 0.74) and Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) patients (F1 = 0.70) than the Conditional Random Fields method (F1 = 0.55 and 0.53, respectively) used in the same context of our study. The results suggest that our model is robust for impaired speech and can be used in automated discourse analysis tools to differentiate narratives produced by MCI and CTL.
Joint, Incremental Disfluency Detection and Utterance Segmentation from Speech (2017)

We present the joint task of incremental disfluency detection and utterance segmentation and a simple deep learning system which performs it on transcripts and ASR results. We show how the constraints of the two tasks interact. Our joint-task system outperforms the equivalent individual task systems, provides competitive results and is suitable for future use in conversation agents in the psychiatric domain.
From Segmentation to Analyses: a Probabilistic Model for Unsupervised Morphology Induction (2017)

A major motivation for unsupervised morphological analysis is to reduce the sparse data problem in under-resourced languages. Most previous work focus on segmenting surface forms into their constituent morphs (taking: tak +ing), but surface form segmentation does not solve the sparse data problem as the analyses of take and taking are not connected to each other. We present a system that adapts the MorphoChains system (Narasimhan et al., 2015) to provide morphological analyses that aim to abstract over spelling differences in functionally similar morphs. This results in analyses that are not compelled to use all the orthographic material of a word (stopping: stop +ing) or limited to only that material (acidified: acid +ify +ed). On average across six typologically varied languages our system has a similar or better F-score on EMMA (a measure of underlying morpheme accuracy) than three strong baselines; moreover, the total number of distinct morphemes identified by our system is on average 12.8{\%} lower than for Morfessor (Virpioja et al., 2013), a state-of-the-art surface segmentation system.
Creating POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing Experts via Topic Modeling (2017)

Part of speech (POS) taggers and dependency parsers tend to work well on homogeneous datasets but their performance suffers on datasets containing data from different genres. In our current work, we investigate how to create POS tagging and dependency parsing experts for heterogeneous data by employing topic modeling. We create topic models (using Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to determine genres from a heterogeneous dataset and then train an expert for each of the genres. Our results show that the topic modeling experts reach substantial improvements when compared to the general versions. For dependency parsing, the improvement reaches 2 percent points over the full training baseline when we use two topics.
Universal Dependencies and Morphology for Hungarian - and on the Price of Universality (2017)

In this paper, we present how the principles of universal dependencies and morphology have been adapted to Hungarian. We report the most challenging grammatical phenomena and our solutions to those. On the basis of the adapted guidelines, we have converted and manually corrected 1,800 sentences from the Szeged Treebank to universal dependency format. We also introduce experiments on this manually annotated corpus for evaluating automatic conversion and the added value of language-specific, i.e. non-universal, annotations. Our results reveal that converting to universal dependencies is not necessarily trivial, moreover, using language-specific morphological features may have an impact on overall performance.
Addressing the Data Sparsity Issue in Neural AMR Parsing (2017)

Neural attention models have achieved great success in different NLP tasks. However, they have not fulfilled their promise on the AMR parsing task due to the data sparsity issue. In this paper, we describe a sequence-to-sequence model for AMR parsing and present different ways to tackle the data sparsity problem. We show that our methods achieve significant improvement over a baseline neural attention model and our results are also competitive against state-of-the-art systems that do not use extra linguistic resources.
Generating Natural Language Question-Answer Pairs from a Knowledge Graph Using a RNN Based Question Generation Model (2017)

In recent years, knowledge graphs such as Freebase that capture facts about entities and relationships between them have been used actively for answering factoid questions. In this paper, we explore the problem of automatically generating question answer pairs from a given knowledge graph. The generated question answer (QA) pairs can be used in several downstream applications. For example, they could be used for training better QA systems. To generate such QA pairs, we first extract a set of keywords from entities and relationships expressed in a triple stored in the knowledge graph. From each such set, we use a subset of keywords to generate a natural language question that has a unique answer. We treat this subset of keywords as a sequence and propose a sequence to sequence model using RNN to generate a natural language question from it. Our RNN based model generates QA pairs with an accuracy of 33.61 percent and performs 110.47 percent (relative) better than a state-of-the-art template based method for generating natural language question from keywords. We also do an extrinsic evaluation by using the generated QA pairs to train a QA system and observe that the F1-score of the QA system improves by 5.5 percent (relative) when using automatically generated QA pairs in addition to manually generated QA pairs available for training.
Enumeration of Extractive Oracle Summaries (2017)

To analyze the limitations and the future directions of the extractive summarization paradigm, this paper proposes an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation to obtain extractive oracle summaries in terms of ROUGE-N. We also propose an algorithm that enumerates all of the oracle summaries for a set of reference summaries to exploit F-measures that evaluate which system summaries contain how many sentences that are extracted as an oracle summary. Our experimental results obtained from Document Understanding Conference (DUC) corpora demonstrated the following: (1) room still exists to improve the performance of extractive summarization; (2) the F-measures derived from the enumerated oracle summaries have significantly stronger correlations with human judgment than those derived from single oracle summaries.
Neural Semantic Encoders (2017)

We present a memory augmented neural network for natural language understanding: Neural Semantic Encoders. NSE is equipped with a novel memory update rule and has a variable sized encoding memory that evolves over time and maintains the understanding of input sequences through read, compose and write operations. NSE can also access 1 multiple and shared memories. In this paper, we demonstrated the effectiveness and the flexibility of NSE on five different natural language tasks: natural language inference, question answering, sentence classification, document sentiment analysis and machine translation where NSE achieved state-of-the-art performance when evaluated on publically available benchmarks. For example, our shared-memory model showed an encouraging result on neural machine translation, improving an attention-based baseline by approximately 1.0 BLEU.
Efficient Benchmarking of NLP APIs using Multi-armed Bandits (2017)

Comparing NLP systems to select the best one for a task of interest, such as named entity recognition, is critical for practitioners and researchers. A rigorous approach involves setting up a hypothesis testing scenario using the performance of the systems on query documents. However, often the hypothesis testing approach needs to send a lot of document queries to the systems, which can be problematic. In this paper, we present an effective alternative based on the multi-armed bandit (MAB). We propose a hierarchical generative model to represent the uncertainty in the performance measures of the competing systems, to be used by Thompson Sampling to solve the resulting MAB. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data show that our approach requires significantly fewer queries compared to the standard benchmarking technique to identify the best system according to F-measure.
Character-Word LSTM Language Models (2017)

We present a Character-Word Long Short-Term Memory Language Model which both reduces the perplexity with respect to a baseline word-level language model and reduces the number of parameters of the model. Character information can reveal structural (dis)similarities between words and can even be used when a word is out-of-vocabulary, thus improving the modeling of infrequent and unknown words. By concatenating word and character embeddings, we achieve up to 2.77{\%} relative improvement on English compared to a baseline model with a similar amount of parameters and 4.57{\%} on Dutch. Moreover, we also outperform baseline word-level models with a larger number of parameters.
A Hierarchical Neural Model for Learning Sequences of Dialogue Acts (2017)

We propose a novel hierarchical Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) for learning sequences of Dialogue Acts (DAs). The input in this task is a sequence of utterances (i.e., conversational contributions) comprising a sequence of tokens, and the output is a sequence of DA labels (one label per utterance). Our model leverages the hierarchical nature of dialogue data by using two nested RNNs that capture long-range dependencies at the dialogue level and the utterance level. This model is combined with an attention mechanism that focuses on salient tokens in utterances. Our experimental results show that our model outperforms strong baselines on two popular datasets, Switchboard and MapTask; and our detailed empirical analysis highlights the impact of each aspect of our model.
A Network-based End-to-End Trainable Task-oriented Dialogue System (2017)

Teaching machines to accomplish tasks by conversing naturally with humans is challenging. Currently, developing task-oriented dialogue systems requires creating multiple components and typically this involves either a large amount of handcrafting, or acquiring costly labelled datasets to solve a statistical learning problem for each component. In this work we introduce a neural network-based text-in, text-out end-to-end trainable goal-oriented dialogue system along with a new way of collecting dialogue data based on a novel pipe-lined Wizard-of-Oz framework. This approach allows us to develop dialogue systems easily and without making too many assumptions about the task at hand. The results show that the model can converse with human subjects naturally whilst helping them to accomplish tasks in a restaurant search domain.
May I take your order? A Neural Model for Extracting Structured Information from Conversations (2017)

In this paper we tackle a unique and important problem of extracting a structured order from the conversation a customer has with an order taker at a restaurant. This is motivated by an actual system under development to assist in the order taking process. We develop a sequence-to-sequence model that is able to map from unstructured conversational input to the structured form that is conveyed to the kitchen and appears on the customer receipt. This problem is critically different from other tasks like machine translation where sequence-to-sequence models have been used: the input includes two sides of a conversation; the output is highly structured; and logical manipulations must be performed, for example when the customer changes his mind while ordering. We present a novel sequence-to-sequence model that incorporates a special attention-memory gating mechanism and conversational role markers. The proposed model improves performance over both a phrase-based machine translation approach and a standard sequence-to-sequence model.
A Two-stage Sieve Approach for Quote Attribution (2017)

We present a deterministic sieve-based system for attributing quotations in literary text and a new dataset: QuoteLi3. Quote attribution, determining who said what in a given text, is important for tasks like creating dialogue systems, and in newer areas like computational literary studies, where it creates opportunities to analyze novels at scale rather than only a few at a time. We release QuoteLi3, which contains more than 6,000 annotations linking quotes to speaker mentions and quotes to speaker entities, and introduce a new algorithm for quote attribution. Our two-stage algorithm first links quotes to mentions, then mentions to entities. Using two stages encapsulates difficult sub-problems and improves system performance. The modular design allows us to tune for overall performance or higher precision, which is useful for many real-world use cases. Our system achieves an average F-score of 87.5 across three novels, outperforming previous systems, and can be tuned for precision of 90.4 at a recall of 65.1.
Out-of-domain FrameNet Semantic Role Labeling (2017)

Domain dependence of NLP systems is one of the major obstacles to their application in large-scale text analysis, also restricting the applicability of FrameNet semantic role labeling (SRL) systems. Yet, current FrameNet SRL systems are still only evaluated on a single in-domain test set. For the first time, we study the domain dependence of FrameNet SRL on a wide range of benchmark sets. We create a novel test set for FrameNet SRL based on user-generated web text and find that the major bottleneck for out-of-domain FrameNet SRL is the frame identification step. To address this problem, we develop a simple, yet efficient system based on distributed word representations. Our system closely approaches the state-of-the-art in-domain while outperforming the best available frame identification system out-of-domain. We publish our system and test data for research purposes.
TDParse: Multi-target-specific sentiment recognition on Twitter (2017)

Existing target-specific sentiment recognition methods consider only a single target per tweet, and have been shown to miss nearly half of the actual targets mentioned. We present a corpus of UK election tweets, with an average of 3.09 entities per tweet and more than one type of sentiment in half of the tweets. This requires a method for multi-target specific sentiment recognition, which we develop by using the context around a target as well as syntactic dependencies involving the target. We present results of our method on both a benchmark corpus of single targets and the multi-target election corpus, showing state-of-the art performance in both corpora and outperforming previous approaches to multi-target sentiment task as well as deep learning models for single-target sentiment.
Annotating Derivations: A New Evaluation Strategy and Dataset for Algebra Word Problems (2017)

We propose a new evaluation for automatic solvers for algebra word problems, which can identify mistakes that existing evaluations overlook. Our proposal is to evaluate such solvers using derivations, which reflect how an equation system was constructed from the word problem. To accomplish this, we develop an algorithm for checking the equivalence between two derivations, and show how derivation annotations can be semi-automatically added to existing datasets. To make our experiments more comprehensive, we include the derivation annotation for DRAW-1K, a new dataset containing 1000 general algebra word problems. In our experiments, we found that the annotated derivations enable a more accurate evaluation of automatic solvers than previously used metrics. We release derivation annotations for over 2300 algebra word problems for future evaluations.
An Extensive Empirical Evaluation of Character-Based Morphological Tagging for 14 Languages (2017)

This paper investigates neural character-based morphological tagging for languages with complex morphology and large tag sets. Character-based approaches are attractive as they can handle rarely- and unseen words gracefully. We evaluate on 14 languages and observe consistent gains over a state-of-the-art morphological tagger across all languages except for English and French, where we match the state-of-the-art. We compare two architectures for computing character-based word vectors using recurrent (RNN) and convolutional (CNN) nets. We show that the CNN based approach performs slightly worse and less consistently than the RNN based approach. Small but systematic gains are observed when combining the two architectures by ensembling.
Neural Multi-Source Morphological Reinflection (2017)

We explore the task of multi-source morphological reinflection, which generalizes the standard, single-source version. The input consists of (i) a target tag and (ii) multiple pairs of source form and source tag for a lemma. The motivation is that it is beneficial to have access to more than one source form since different source forms can provide complementary information, e.g., different stems. We further present a novel extension to the encoder-decoder recurrent neural architecture, consisting of multiple encoders, to better solve the task. We show that our new architecture outperforms single-source reinflection models and publish our dataset for multi-source morphological reinflection to facilitate future research.