ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Use of Lexicons to aid Deep Learning towards the Detection of Abusive Language (2019)

Detecting abusive language is a significant research topic, which has received a lot of attention recently. Our work focused on detecting personal attacks in online conversations. State-of-the-art research on this task has largely used deep learning with word embeddings. We explored the use of sentiment lexicons as well as semantic lexicons towards improving the accuracy of the baseline Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) using regular word embeddings. This is a work in progress, limited by time constraints and appropriate infrastructure. Our preliminary results showed promise for utilizing lexicons, especially semantic lexicons, for the task of detecting abusive language.
Entity-level Classification of Adverse Drug Reactions: a Comparison of Neural Network Models (2019)

This paper presents our experimental work on exploring the potential of neural network models developed for aspect-based sentiment analysis for entity-level adverse drug reaction (ADR) classification. Our goal is to explore how to represent local context around ADR mentions and learn an entity representation, interacting with its context. We conducted extensive experiments on various sources of text-based information, including social media, electronic health records, and abstracts of scientific articles from PubMed. The results show that Interactive Attention Neural Network (IAN) outperformed other models on four corpora in terms of macro F-measure. This work is an abridged version of our recent paper accepted to Programming and Computer Software journal in 2019.
Context Effects on Human Judgments of Similarity (2019)

The semantic similarity of words forms the basis of many natural language processing methods. These computational similarity measures are often based on a mathematical comparison of vector representations of word meanings, while human judgments of similarity differ in lacking geometrical properties, e.g., symmetric similarity and triangular similarity. In this study, we propose a novel task design to further explore human behavior by asking whether a pair of words is deemed more similar depending on an immediately preceding judgment. Results from a crowdsourcing experiment show that people consistently judge words as more similar when primed by a judgment that evokes a relevant relationship. Our analysis further shows that word2vec similarity correlated significantly better with the out-of-context judgments, thus confirming the methodological differences in human-computer judgments, and offering a new testbed for probing the differences.
NLP Automation to Read Radiological Reports to Detect the Stage of Cancer Among Lung Cancer Patients (2019)

A common challenge in the healthcare industry today is physicians have access to massive amounts of healthcare data but have little time and no appropriate tools. For instance, the risk prediction model generated by logistic regression could predict the probability of diseases occurrence and thus prioritizing patients' waiting list for further investigations. However, many medical reports available in current clinical practice system are not yet ready for analysis using either statistics or machine learning as they are in unstructured text format. The complexity of medical information makes the annotation or validation of data very challenging and thus acts as a bottleneck to apply machine learning techniques in medical data. This study is therefore conducted to create such annotations automatically where the computer can read radiological reports for oncologists and mark the staging of lung cancer. This staging information is obtained using the rule-based method implemented using the standards of Tumor Node Metastasis (TNM) staging along with deep learning technology called Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) to extract clinical information from the Computed Tomography (CT) text report. The empirical experiment shows promising results being the accuracy of up to 85{\%}.
Augmenting Named Entity Recognition with Commonsense Knowledge (2019)

Commonsense can be vital in some applications like Natural Language Understanding (NLU), where it is often required to resolve ambiguity arising from implicit knowledge and underspecification. In spite of the remarkable success of neural network approaches on a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks, many of them struggle to react effectively in cases that require commonsense knowledge. In the present research, we take advantage of the availability of the open multilingual knowledge graph ConceptNet, by using it as an additional external resource in Named Entity Recognition (NER). Our proposed architecture involves BiLSTM layers combined with a CRF layer that was augmented with some features such as pre-trained word embedding layers and dropout layers. Moreover, apart from using word representations, we used also character-based representation to capture the morphological and the orthographic information. Our experiments and evaluations showed an improvement in the overall performance with +2.86 in the F1-measure. Commonsense reasonnig has been employed in other studies and NLP tasks but to the best of our knowledge, there is no study relating the integration of a commonsense knowledge base in NER.
Pardon the Interruption: Automatic Analysis of Gender and Competitive Turn-Taking in United States Supreme Court Hearings (2019)

The United States Supreme Court plays a key role in defining the legal basis for gender discrimination throughout the country, yet there are few checks on gender bias within the court itself. In conversational turn-taking, interruptions have been documented as a marker of bias between speakers of different genders. The goal of this study is to automatically differentiate between respectful and disrespectful conversational turns taken during official hearings, which could help in detecting bias and finding remediation techniques for discourse in the courtroom. In this paper, I present a corpus of turns annotated by legal professionals, and describe the design of a semi-supervised classifier that will use acoustic and lexical features to analyze turn-taking at scale. On completion of annotations, this classifier will be trained to extract the likelihood that turns are respectful or disrespectful for use in studies of speech trends.
Evaluating Coherence in Dialogue Systems using Entailment (2019)

Evaluating open-domain dialogue systems is difficult due to the diversity of possible correct answers. Automatic metrics such as BLEU correlate weakly with human annotations, resulting in a significant bias across different models and datasets. Some researchers resort to human judgment experimentation for assessing response quality, which is expensive, time consuming, and not scalable. Moreover, judges tend to evaluate a small number of dialogues, meaning that minor differences in evaluation configuration may lead to dissimilar results. In this paper, we present interpretable metrics for evaluating topic coherence by making use of distributed sentence representations. Furthermore, we introduce calculable approximations of human judgment based on conversational coherence by adopting state-of-the-art entailment techniques. Results show that our metrics can be used as a surrogate for human judgment, making it easy to evaluate dialogue systems on large-scale datasets and allowing an unbiased estimate for the quality of the responses. This paper has been accepted in NAACL 2019.
Exploiting machine algorithms in vocalic quantification of African English corpora (2019)

Towards procedural fidelity in the processing of African English speech corpora, this work demonstrates how the adaptation of machine-assisted segmentation of phonemes and automatic extraction of acoustic values can significantly speed up the processing of naturalistic data and make the vocalic analysis of the varieties less impressionistic. Research in African English phonology has, till date, been least data-driven {--} much less the use of comparative corpora for cross-varietal assessments. Using over 30 hours of naturalistic data (from 28 speakers in 5 Nigerian cities), the procedures for segmenting audio files into phonemic units via the Munich Automatic Segmentation System (MAUS), and the extraction of their spectral values in Praat are explained. Evidence from the speech corpora supports a more complex vocalic inventory than attested in previous auditory/manual-based accounts {--} thus reinforcing the resourcefulness of the algorithms for the current data and cognate varieties. Keywords: machine algorithms; naturalistic data; African English phonology; vowel segmentation
Assessing the Ability of Neural Machine Translation Models to Perform Syntactic Rewriting (2019)

We describe work in progress for evaluating performance of sequence-to-sequence neural networks on the task of syntax-based reordering for rules applicable to simultaneous machine translation. We train models that attempt to rewrite English sentences using rules that are commonly used by human interpreters. We examine the performance of these models to determine which forms of rewriting are more difficult for them to learn and which architectures are the best at learning them.
Authorship Recognition with Short-Text using Graph-based Techniques (2019)

In recent years, studies of authorship recognition has aroused great interest in graph-based analysis. Modeling the writing style of each author using a network of co-occurrence words. However, short texts can generate some changes in the topology of network that cause impact on techniques of feature extraction based on graph topology. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of global-strategy and local-strategy based on complex network measurements comparing with graph2vec a graph embedding technique based on skip-gram model. The experiment consists of evaluating how each modification in the length of text affects the accuracy of authorship recognition on both techniques using cross-validation and machine learning techniques.
A Parallel Corpus Mixtec-Spanish (2019)

This work is about the compilation process of parallel documents Spanish-Mixtec. There are not many Spanish-Mixec parallel texts and most of the sources are non-digital books. Due to this, we need to face the errors when digitizing the sources and difficulties in sentence alignment, as well as the fact that does not exist a standard orthography. Our parallel corpus consists of sixty texts coming from books and digital repositories. These documents belong to different domains: history, traditional stories, didactic material, recipes, ethnographical descriptions of each town and instruction manuals for disease prevention. We have classified this material in five major categories: didactic (6 texts), educative (6 texts), interpretative (7 texts), narrative (39 texts), and poetic (2 texts). The final total of tokens is 49,814 Spanish words and 47,774 Mixtec words. The texts belong to the states of Oaxaca (48 texts), Guerrero (9 texts) and Puebla (3 texts). According to this data, we see that the corpus is unbalanced in what refers to the representation of the different territories. While 55{\%} of speakers are in Oaxaca, 80{\%} of texts come from this region. Guerrero has the 30{\%} of speakers and the 15{\%} of texts and Puebla, with the 15{\%} of the speakers has a representation of the 5{\%} in the corpus.
Emoji Usage Across Platforms: A Case Study for the Charlottesville Event (2019)

We study emoji usage patterns across two social media platforms, one of them considered a fringe community called Gab, and the other Twitter. We find that Gab tends to comparatively use more emotionally charged emoji, but also seems more apathetic towards the violence during the event, while Twitter takes a more empathetic approach to the event.
Reading KITTY: Pitch Range as an Indicator of Reading Skill (2019)

While affective outcomes are generally positive for the use of eBooks and computer-based reading tutors in teaching children to read, learning outcomes are often poorer (Korat and Shamir, 2004). We describe the first iteration of Reading Kitty, an iOS application that uses NLP and speech processing to focus children`s time on close reading and prosody in oral reading, while maintaining an emphasis on creativity and artifact creation. We also share preliminary results demonstrating that pitch range can be used to automatically predict readers' skill level.
Adversarial Attack on Sentiment Classification (2019)

In this paper, we propose a white-box attack algorithm called {\textquotedblleft}Global Search{\textquotedblright} method and compare it with a simple misspelling noise and a more sophisticated and common white-box attack approach called {\textquotedblleft}Greedy Search{\textquotedblright}. The attack methods are evaluated on the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) sentiment classifier trained on the IMDB movie review dataset. The attack success rate is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the attack methods and the perplexity of the sentences is used to measure the degree of distortion of the generated adversarial examples. The experiment results show that the proposed {\textquotedblleft}Global Search{\textquotedblright} method generates more powerful adversarial examples with less distortion or less modification to the source text.
CSI Peru News: finding the culprit, victim and location in news articles (2019)

We introduce a shift on the DS method over the domain of crime-related news from Peru, attempting to find the culprit, victim and location of a crime description from a RE perspective. Obtained results are highly promising and show that proposed modifications are effective in non-traditional domains.
Exploring Social Bias in Chatbots using Stereotype Knowledge (2019)

Exploring social bias in chatbot is an important, yet relatively unexplored problem. In this paper, we propose an approach to understand social bias in chatbots by leveraging stereotype knowledge. It allows interesting comparison of bias between chatbots and humans, and provides intuitive analysis of existing chatbots by borrowing the finer-grain concepts of sexism and racism.
Cross-Sentence Transformations in Text Simplification (2019)

Current approaches to Text Simplification focus on simplifying sentences individually. However, certain simplification transformations span beyond single sentences (e.g. joining and re-ordering sentences). In this paper, we motivate the need for modelling the simplification task at the document level, and assess the performance of sequence-to-sequence neural models in this setup. We analyse parallel original-simplified documents created by professional editors and show that there are frequent rewriting transformations that are not restricted to sentence boundaries. We also propose strategies to automatically evaluate the performance of a simplification model on these cross-sentence transformations. Our experiments show the inability of standard sequence-to-sequence neural models to learn these transformations, and suggest directions towards document-level simplification.
Unsupervised Induction of Ukrainian Morphological Paradigms for the New Lexicon: Extending Coverage for Named Entities and Neologisms using Inflection Tables and Unannotated Corpora (2019)

The paper presents an unsupervised method for quickly extending a Ukrainian lexicon by generating paradigms and morphological feature structures for new Named Entities and neologisms, which are not covered by existing static morphological resources. This approach addresses a practical problem of modelling paradigms for entities created by the dynamic processes in the lexicon: this problem is especially serious for highly-inflected languages in domains with specialised or quickly changing lexicon. The method uses an unannotated Ukrainian corpus and a small fixed set of inflection tables, which can be found in traditional grammar textbooks. The advantage of the proposed approach is that updating the morphological lexicon does not require training or linguistic annotation, allowing fast knowledge-light extension of an existing static lexicon to improve morphological coverage on a specific corpus. The method is implemented in an open-source package on a GitHub repository. It can be applied to other low-resourced inflectional languages which have internet corpora and linguistic descriptions of their inflection system, following the example of inflection tables for Ukrainian. Evaluation results shows consistent improvements in coverage for Ukrainian corpora of different corpus types.
Multiple Admissibility: Judging Grammaticality using Unlabeled Data in Language Learning (2019)

We present our work on the problem of Multiple Admissibility (MA) in language learning. Multiple Admissibility occurs in many languages when more than one grammatical form of a word fits syntactically and semantically in a given context. In second language (L2) education - in particular, in intelligent tutoring systems/computer-aided language learning (ITS/CALL) systems, which generate exercises automatically - this implies that multiple alternative answers are possible. We treat the problem as a grammaticality judgement task. We train a neural network with an objective to label sentences as grammatical or ungrammatical, using a {\textquotedblleft}simulated learner corpus{\textquotedblright}: a dataset with correct text, and with artificial errors generated automatically. While MA occurs commonly in many languages, this paper focuses on learning Russian. We present a detailed classification of the types of constructions in Russian, in which MA is possible, and evaluate the model using a test set built from answers provided by the users of a running language learning system.
Numbers Normalisation in the Inflected Languages: a Case Study of Polish (2019)

Text normalisation in Text-to-Speech systems is a process of converting written expressions to their spoken forms. This task is complicated because in many cases the normalised form depends on the context. Furthermore, when we analysed languages like Croatian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian or Slovak there is additional difficulty related to their inflected nature. In this paper we want to show how to deal with this problem for one of these languages: Polish, without having a large dedicated data set and using solutions prepared for other NLP tasks. We limited our study to only numbers expressions, which are the most common non-standard words to normalise. The proposed solution is a combination of morphological tagger and transducer supported by a dictionary of numbers in their spoken forms. The data set used for evaluation is based on the part of 1-million word subset of the National Corpus of Polish. The accuracy of the described approach is presented with a comparison to a simple baseline and two commercial systems: Google Cloud Text-to-Speech and Amazon Polly.
What does Neural Bring? Analysing Improvements in Morphosyntactic Annotation and Lemmatisation of Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian (2019)

We present experiments on Slovenian, Croatian and Serbian morphosyntactic annotation and lemmatisation between the former state-of-the-art for these three languages and one of the best performing systems at the CoNLL 2018 shared task, the Stanford NLP neural pipeline. Our experiments show significant improvements in morphosyntactic annotation, especially on categories where either semantic knowledge is needed, available through word embeddings, or where long-range dependencies have to be modelled. On the other hand, on the task of lemmatisation no improvements are obtained with the neural solution, mostly due to the heavy dependence of the task on the lookup in an external lexicon, but also due to obvious room for improvements in the Stanford NLP pipeline`s lemmatisation.
AGRR 2019: Corpus for Gapping Resolution in Russian (2019)

This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the gapping dataset for Russian that consists of 7.5k sentences with gapping (as well as 15k relevant negative sentences) and comprises data from various genres: news, fiction, social media and technical texts. The dataset was prepared for the Automatic Gapping Resolution Shared Task for Russian (AGRR-2019) - a competition aimed at stimulating the development of NLP tools and methods for processing of ellipsis. In this paper, we pay special attention to the gapping resolution methods that were introduced within the shared task as well as an alternative test set that illustrates that our corpus is a diverse and representative subset of Russian language gapping sufficient for effective utilization of machine learning techniques.
Creating a Corpus for Russian Data-to-Text Generation Using Neural Machine Translation and Post-Editing (2019)

In this paper, we propose an approach for semi-automatically creating a data-to-text (D2T) corpus for Russian that can be used to learn a D2T natural language generation model. An error analysis of the output of an English-to-Russian neural machine translation system shows that 80{\%} of the automatically translated sentences contain an error and that 53{\%} of all translation errors bear on named entities (NE). We therefore focus on named entities and introduce two post-editing techniques for correcting wrongly translated NEs.
Data Set for Stance and Sentiment Analysis from User Comments on Croatian News (2019)

Nowadays it is becoming more important than ever to find new ways of extracting useful information from the evergrowing amount of user-generated data available online. In this paper, we describe the creation of a data set that contains news articles and corresponding comments from Croatian news outlet 24 sata. Our annotation scheme is specifically tailored for the task of detecting stances and sentiment from user comments as well as assessing if commentator claims are verifiable. Through this data, we hope to get a better understanding of the publics viewpoint on various events. In addition, we also explore the potential of applying supervised machine learning models toautomate annotation of more data.
A Dataset for Noun Compositionality Detection for a Slavic Language (2019)

This paper presents the first gold-standard resource for Russian annotated with compositionality information of noun compounds. The compound phrases are collected from the Universal Dependency treebanks according to part of speech patterns, such as ADJ+NOUN or NOUN+NOUN, using the gold-standard annotations. Each compound phrase is annotated by two experts and a moderator according to the following schema: the phrase can be either compositional, non-compositional, or ambiguous (i.e., depending on the context it can be interpreted both as compositional or non-compositional). We conduct an experimental evaluation of models and methods for predicting compositionality of noun compounds in unsupervised and supervised setups. We show that methods from previous work evaluated on the proposed Russian-language resource achieve the performance comparable with results on English corpora.
The Second Cross-Lingual Challenge on Recognition, Normalization, Classification, and Linking of Named Entities across Slavic Languages (2019)

We describe the Second Multilingual Named Entity Challenge in Slavic languages. The task is recognizing mentions of named entities in Web documents, their normalization, and cross-lingual linking. The Challenge was organized as part of the 7th Balto-Slavic Natural Language Processing Workshop, co-located with the ACL-2019 conference. Eight teams participated in the competition, which covered four languages and five entity types. Performance for the named entity recognition task reached 90{\%} F-measure, much higher than reported in the first edition of the Challenge. Seven teams covered all four languages, and five teams participated in the cross-lingual entity linking task. Detailed evaluation information is available on the shared task web page.