ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Aggregated Semantic Matching for Short Text Entity Linking (2018)

The task of entity linking aims to identify concepts mentioned in a text fragments and link them to a reference knowledge base. Entity linking in long text has been well studied in previous work. However, short text entity linking is more challenging since the text are noisy and less coherent. To better utilize the local information provided in short texts, we propose a novel neural network framework, Aggregated Semantic Matching (ASM), in which two different aspects of semantic information between the local context and the candidate entity are captured via representation-based and interaction-based neural semantic matching models, and then two matching signals work jointly for disambiguation with a rank aggregation mechanism. Our evaluation shows that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-arts on public tweet datasets.
Adversarial Over-Sensitivity and Over-Stability Strategies for Dialogue Models (2018)

We present two categories of model-agnostic adversarial strategies that reveal the weaknesses of several generative, task-oriented dialogue models: Should-Not-Change strategies that evaluate over-sensitivity to small and semantics-preserving edits, as well as Should-Change strategies that test if a model is over-stable against subtle yet semantics-changing modifications. We next perform adversarial training with each strategy, employing a max-margin approach for negative generative examples. This not only makes the target dialogue model more robust to the adversarial inputs, but also helps it perform significantly better on the original inputs. Moreover, training on all strategies combined achieves further improvements, achieving a new state-of-the-art performance on the original task (also verified via human evaluation). In addition to adversarial training, we also address the robustness task at the model-level, by feeding it subword units as both inputs and outputs, and show that the resulting model is equally competitive, requires only 1/4 of the original vocabulary size, and is robust to one of the adversarial strategies (to which the original model is vulnerable) even without adversarial training.
Improving Response Selection in Multi-Turn Dialogue Systems by Incorporating Domain Knowledge (2018)

Building systems that can communicate with humans is a core problem in Artificial Intelligence. This work proposes a novel neural network architecture for response selection in an end-to-end multi-turn conversational dialogue setting. The architecture applies context level attention and incorporates additional external knowledge provided by descriptions of domain-specific words. It uses a bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) for encoding context and responses and learns to attend over the context words given the latent response representation and vice versa. In addition, it incorporates external domain specific information using another GRU for encoding the domain keyword descriptions. This allows better representation of domain-specific keywords in responses and hence improves the overall performance. Experimental results show that our model outperforms all other state-of-the-art methods for response selection in multi-turn conversations.
The Lifted Matrix-Space Model for Semantic Composition (2018)

Tree-structured neural network architectures for sentence encoding draw inspiration from the approach to semantic composition generally seen in formal linguistics, and have shown empirical improvements over comparable sequence models by doing so. Moreover, adding multiplicative interaction terms to the composition functions in these models can yield significant further improvements. However, existing compositional approaches that adopt such a powerful composition function scale poorly, with parameter counts exploding as model dimension or vocabulary size grows. We introduce the Lifted Matrix-Space model, which uses a global transformation to map vector word embeddings to matrices, which can then be composed via an operation based on matrix-matrix multiplication. Its composition function effectively transmits a larger number of activations across layers with relatively few model parameters. We evaluate our model on the Stanford NLI corpus, the Multi-Genre NLI corpus, and the Stanford Sentiment Treebank and find that it consistently outperforms TreeLSTM (Tai et al., 2015), the previous best known composition function for tree-structured models.
End-to-End Neural Entity Linking (2018)

Entity Linking (EL) is an essential task for semantic text understanding and information extraction. Popular methods separately address the Mention Detection (MD) and Entity Disambiguation (ED) stages of EL, without leveraging their mutual dependency. We here propose the first neural end-to-end EL system that jointly discovers and links entities in a text document. The main idea is to consider all possible spans as potential mentions and learn contextual similarity scores over their entity candidates that are useful for both MD and ED decisions. Key components are context-aware mention embeddings, entity embeddings and a probabilistic mention - entity map, without demanding other engineered features. Empirically, we show that our end-to-end method significantly outperforms popular systems on the Gerbil platform when enough training data is available. Conversely, if testing datasets follow different annotation conventions compared to the training set (e.g. queries/ tweets vs news documents), our ED model coupled with a traditional NER system offers the best or second best EL accuracy.
Modelling Salient Features as Directions in Fine-Tuned Semantic Spaces (2018)

In this paper we consider semantic spaces consisting of objects from some particular domain (e.g. IMDB movie reviews). Various authors have observed that such semantic spaces often model salient features (e.g. how scary a movie is) as directions. These feature directions allow us to rank objects according to how much they have the corresponding feature, and can thus play an important role in interpretable classifiers, recommendation systems, or entity-oriented search engines, among others. Methods for learning semantic spaces, however, are mostly aimed at modelling similarity. In this paper, we argue that there is an inherent trade-off between capturing similarity and faithfully modelling features as directions. Following this observation, we propose a simple method to fine-tune existing semantic spaces, with the aim of improving the quality of their feature directions. Crucially, our method is fully unsupervised, requiring only a bag-of-words representation of the objects as input.
Model Transfer with Explicit Knowledge of the Relation between Class Definitions (2018)

This paper investigates learning methods for multi-class classification using labeled data for the target classification scheme and another labeled data for a similar but different classification scheme (support scheme). We show that if we have prior knowledge about the relation between support and target classification schemes in the form of a class correspondence table, we can use it to improve the model performance further than the simple multi-task learning approach. Instead of learning the individual classification layers for the support and target schemes, the proposed method converts the class label of each example on the support scheme into a set of candidate class labels on the target scheme via the class correspondence table, and then uses the candidate labels to learn the classification layer for the target scheme. We evaluate the proposed method on two tasks in NLP. The experimental results show that our method effectively learns the target schemes especially for the classes that have a tight connection to certain support classes.
Aiming to Know You Better Perhaps Makes Me a More Engaging Dialogue Partner (2018)

There have been several attempts to define a plausible motivation for a chit-chat dialogue agent that can lead to engaging conversations. In this work, we explore a new direction where the agent specifically focuses on discovering information about its interlocutor. We formalize this approach by defining a quantitative metric. We propose an algorithm for the agent to maximize it. We validate the idea with human evaluation where our system outperforms various baselines. We demonstrate that the metric indeed correlates with the human judgments of engagingness.
Neural Maximum Subgraph Parsing for Cross-Domain Semantic Dependency Analysis (2018)

We present experiments for cross-domain semantic dependency analysis with a neural Maximum Subgraph parser. Our parser targets 1-endpoint-crossing, pagenumber-2 graphs which are a good fit to semantic dependency graphs, and utilizes an efficient dynamic programming algorithm for decoding. For disambiguation, the parser associates words with BiLSTM vectors and utilizes these vectors to assign scores to candidate dependencies. We conduct experiments on the data sets from SemEval 2015 as well as Chinese CCGBank. Our parser achieves very competitive results for both English and Chinese. To improve the parsing performance on cross-domain texts, we propose a data-oriented method to explore the linguistic generality encoded in English Resource Grammar, which is a precisionoriented, hand-crafted HPSG grammar, in an implicit way. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our data-oriented method across a wide range of conditions.
From Random to Supervised: A Novel Dropout Mechanism Integrated with Global Information (2018)

Dropout is used to avoid overfitting by randomly dropping units from the neural networks during training. Inspired by dropout, this paper presents GI-Dropout, a novel dropout method integrating with global information to improve neural networks for text classification. Unlike the traditional dropout method in which the units are dropped randomly according to the same probability, we aim to use explicit instructions based on global information of the dataset to guide the training process. With GI-Dropout, the model is supposed to pay more attention to inapparent features or patterns. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the dropout with global information on seven text classification tasks, including sentiment analysis and topic classification.
Sequence to Sequence Mixture Model for Diverse Machine Translation (2018)

Sequence to sequence (SEQ2SEQ) models lack diversity in their generated translations. This can be attributed to their limitations in capturing lexical and syntactic variations in parallel corpora, due to different styles, genres, topics, or ambiguity of human translation process. In this paper, we develop a novel sequence to sequence mixture (S2SMIX) model that improves both translation diversity and quality by adopting a committee of specialized translation models rather than a single translation model. Each mixture component selects its own training dataset via optimization of the marginal log-likelihood, which leads to a soft clustering of the parallel corpus. Experiments on four language pairs demonstrate the superiority of our mixture model compared to SEQ2SEQ model with the standard and diversity encouraged beam search. Our mixture model incurs negligible additional parameters and no extra computation in the decoding time.
CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies (2018)

Every year, the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2018, one of two tasks was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on test input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. This shared task constitutes a 2nd edition{---}the first one took place in 2017 (Zeman et al., 2017); the main metric from 2017 has been kept, allowing for easy comparison, also in 2018, and two new main metrics have been used. New datasets added to the Universal Dependencies collection between mid-2017 and the spring of 2018 have contributed to increased difficulty of the task this year. In this overview paper, we define the task and the updated evaluation methodology, describe data preparation, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems.
The 2018 Shared Task on Extrinsic Parser Evaluation: On the Downstream Utility of English Universal Dependency Parsers (2018)

We summarize empirical results and tentative conclusions from the Second Extrinsic Parser Evaluation Initiative (EPE 2018). We review the basic task setup, downstream applications involved, and end-to-end results for seventeen participating teams. Based on in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis, we correlate intrinsic evaluation results at different layers of morph-syntactic analysis with observed downstream behavior.
CEA LIST: Processing Low-Resource Languages for CoNLL 2018 (2018)

In this paper, we describe the system used for our first participation at the CoNLL 2018 shared task. The submitted system largely reused the state of the art parser from CoNLL 2017 (\url{https://github.com/tdozat/Parser-v2}). We enhanced this system for morphological features predictions, and we used all available resources to provide accurate models for low-resource languages. We ranked 5th of 27 participants in MLAS for building morphology aware dependency trees, 2nd for morphological features only, and 3rd for tagging (UPOS) and parsing (LAS) low-resource languages.
Semi-Supervised Neural System for Tagging, Parsing and Lematization (2018)

This paper describes the ICS PAS system which took part in CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. The system consists of jointly trained tagger, lemmatizer, and dependency parser which are based on features extracted by a biLSTM network. The system uses both fully connected and dilated convolutional neural architectures. The novelty of our approach is the use of an additional loss function, which reduces the number of cycles in the predicted dependency graphs, and the use of self-training to increase the system performance. The proposed system, i.e. ICS PAS (Warszawa), ranked 3th/4th in the official evaluation obtaining the following overall results: 73.02 (LAS), 60.25 (MLAS) and 64.44 (BLEX).
Towards Better UD Parsing: Deep Contextualized Word Embeddings, Ensemble, and Treebank Concatenation (2018)

This paper describes our system (HIT-SCIR) submitted to the CoNLL 2018 shared task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. We base our submission on Stanford`s winning system for the CoNLL 2017 shared task and make two effective extensions: 1) incorporating deep contextualized word embeddings into both the part of speech tagger and parser; 2) ensembling parsers trained with different initialization. We also explore different ways of concatenating treebanks for further improvements. Experimental results on the development data show the effectiveness of our methods. In the final evaluation, our system was ranked first according to LAS (75.84{\%}) and outperformed the other systems by a large margin.
Joint Learning of POS and Dependencies for Multilingual Universal Dependency Parsing (2018)

This paper describes the system of team LeisureX in the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system predicts the part-of-speech tag and dependency tree jointly. For the basic tasks, including tokenization, lemmatization and morphology prediction, we employ the official baseline model (UDPipe). To train the low-resource languages, we adopt a sampling method based on other richresource languages. Our system achieves a macro-average of 68.31{\%} LAS F1 score, with an improvement of 2.51{\%} compared with the UDPipe.
Multilingual Universal Dependency Parsing from Raw Text with Low-Resource Language Enhancement (2018)

This paper describes the system of our team Phoenix for participating CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Given the annotated gold standard data in CoNLL-U format, we train the tokenizer, tagger and parser separately for each treebank based on an open source pipeline tool UDPipe. Our system reads the plain texts for input, performs the pre-processing steps (tokenization, lemmas, morphology) and finally outputs the syntactic dependencies. For the low-resource languages with no training data, we use cross-lingual techniques to build models with some close languages instead. In the official evaluation, our system achieves the macro-averaged scores of 65.61{\%}, 52.26{\%}, 55.71{\%} for LAS, MLAS and BLEX respectively.
An Improved Neural Network Model for Joint POS Tagging and Dependency Parsing (2018)

We propose a novel neural network model for joint part-of-speech (POS) tagging and dependency parsing. Our model extends the well-known BIST graph-based dependency parser (Kiperwasser and Goldberg, 2016) by incorporating a BiLSTM-based tagging component to produce automatically predicted POS tags for the parser. On the benchmark English Penn treebank, our model obtains strong UAS and LAS scores at 94.51{\%} and 92.87{\%}, respectively, producing 1.5+{\%} absolute improvements to the BIST graph-based parser, and also obtaining a state-of-the-art POS tagging accuracy at 97.97{\%}. Furthermore, experimental results on parsing 61 {\textquotedblleft}big{\textquotedblright} Universal Dependencies treebanks from raw texts show that our model outperforms the baseline UDPipe (Straka and Strakova, 2017) with 0.8{\%} higher average POS tagging score and 3.6{\%} higher average LAS score. In addition, with our model, we also obtain state-of-the-art downstream task scores for biomedical event extraction and opinion analysis applications. Our code is available together with all pre-trained models at: \url{https://github.com/datquocnguyen/jPTDP}
IBM Research at the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task on Multilingual Parsing (2018)

This paper presents the IBM Research AI submission to the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task on Parsing Universal Dependencies. Our system implements a new joint transition-based parser, based on the Stack-LSTM framework and the Arc-Standard algorithm, that handles tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, morphological tagging and dependency parsing in one single model. By leveraging a combination of character-based modeling of words and recursive composition of partially built linguistic structures we qualified 13th overall and 7th in low resource. We also present a new sentence segmentation neural architecture based on Stack-LSTMs that was the 4th best overall.
Universal Dependency Parsing with a General Transition-Based DAG Parser (2018)

This paper presents our experiments with applying TUPA to the CoNLL 2018 UD shared task. TUPA is a general neural transition-based DAG parser, which we use to present the first experiments on recovering enhanced dependencies as part of the general parsing task. TUPA was designed for parsing UCCA, a cross-linguistic semantic annotation scheme, exhibiting reentrancy, discontinuity and non-terminal nodes. By converting UD trees and graphs to a UCCA-like DAG format, we train TUPA almost without modification on the UD parsing task. The generic nature of our approach lends itself naturally to multitask learning.
82 Treebanks, 34 Models: Universal Dependency Parsing with Multi-Treebank Models (2018)

We present the Uppsala system for the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task on universal dependency parsing. Our system is a pipeline consisting of three components: the first performs joint word and sentence segmentation; the second predicts part-of-speech tags and morphological features; the third predicts dependency trees from words and tags. Instead of training a single parsing model for each treebank, we trained models with multiple treebanks for one language or closely related languages, greatly reducing the number of models. On the official test run, we ranked 7th of 27 teams for the LAS and MLAS metrics. Our system obtained the best scores overall for word segmentation, universal POS tagging, and morphological features.
Tree-Stack LSTM in Transition Based Dependency Parsing (2018)

We introduce tree-stack LSTM to model state of a transition based parser with recurrent neural networks. Tree-stack LSTM does not use any parse tree based or hand-crafted features, yet performs better than models with these features. We also develop new set of embeddings from raw features to enhance the performance. There are 4 main components of this model: stack`s {\ensuremath{\sigma}}-LSTM, buffer`s {\ensuremath{\beta}}-LSTM, actions' LSTM and tree-RNN. All LSTMs use continuous dense feature vectors (embeddings) as an input. Tree-RNN updates these embeddings based on transitions. We show that our model improves performance with low resource languages compared with its predecessors. We participate in CoNLL 2018 UD Shared Task as the {\textquotedblleft}KParse{\textquotedblright} team and ranked 16th in LAS, 15th in BLAS and BLEX metrics, of 27 participants parsing 82 test sets from 57 languages.
Turku Neural Parser Pipeline: An End-to-End System for the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task (2018)

In this paper we describe the TurkuNLP entry at the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task on Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Compared to the last year, this year the shared task includes two new main metrics to measure the morphological tagging and lemmatization accuracies in addition to syntactic trees. Basing our motivation into these new metrics, we developed an end-to-end parsing pipeline especially focusing on developing a novel and state-of-the-art component for lemmatization. Our system reached the highest aggregate ranking on three main metrics out of 26 teams by achieving 1st place on metric involving lemmatization, and 2nd on both morphological tagging and parsing.
SEx BiST: A Multi-Source Trainable Parser with Deep Contextualized Lexical Representations (2018)

We describe the SEx BiST parser (Semantically EXtended Bi-LSTM parser) developed at Lattice for the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task (Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies). The main characteristic of our work is the encoding of three different modes of contextual information for parsing: (i) Treebank feature representations, (ii) Multilingual word representations, (iii) ELMo representations obtained via unsupervised learning from external resources. Our parser performed well in the official end-to-end evaluation (73.02 LAS {--} 4th/26 teams, and 78.72 UAS {--} 2nd/26); remarkably, we achieved the best UAS scores on all the English corpora by applying the three suggested feature representations. Finally, we were also ranked 1st at the optional event extraction task, part of the 2018 Extrinsic Parser Evaluation campaign.
The SLT-Interactions Parsing System at the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task (2018)

This paper describes our system (SLT-Interactions) for the CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system performs three main tasks: word segmentation (only for few treebanks), POS tagging and parsing. While segmentation is learned separately, we use neural stacking for joint learning of POS tagging and parsing tasks. For all the tasks, we employ simple neural network architectures that rely on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for learning task-dependent features. At the basis of our parser, we use an arc-standard algorithm with Swap action for general non-projective parsing. Additionally, we use neural stacking as a knowledge transfer mechanism for cross-domain parsing of low resource domains. Our system shows substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 4.18{\%} in LAS across all languages. Overall, we are placed at the 12th position on the official test sets.