ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Is the Understanding of Explicit Discourse Relations Required in Machine Reading Comprehension? (2021)

An in-depth analysis of the level of language understanding required by existing Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) benchmarks can provide insight into the reading capabilities of machines. In this paper, we propose an ablation-based methodology to assess the extent to which MRC datasets evaluate the understanding of explicit discourse relations. We define seven MRC skills which require the understanding of different discourse relations. We then introduce ablation methods that verify whether these skills are required to succeed on a dataset. By observing the drop in performance of neural MRC models evaluated on the original and the modified dataset, we can measure to what degree the dataset requires these skills, in order to be understood correctly. Experiments on three large-scale datasets with the BERT-base and ALBERT-xxlarge model show that the relative changes for all skills are small (less than 6{\%}). These results imply that most of the answered questions in the examined datasets do not require understanding the discourse structure of the text. To specifically probe for natural language understanding, there is a need to design more challenging benchmarks that can correctly evaluate the intended skills.
Why Is MBTI Personality Detection from Texts a Difficult Task? (2021)

Automatic detection of the four MBTI personality dimensions from texts has recently attracted noticeable attention from the natural language processing and computational linguistic communities. Despite the large collections of Twitter data for training, the best systems rarely even outperform the majority-class baseline. In this paper, we discuss the theoretical reasons for such low results and present the insights from an annotation study that further shed the light on this issue.
Enconter: Entity Constrained Progressive Sequence Generation via Insertion-based Transformer (2021)

Pretrained using large amount of data, autoregressive language models are able to generate high quality sequences. However, these models do not perform well under hard lexical constraints as they lack fine control of content generation process. Progressive insertion based transformers can overcome the above limitation and efficiently generate a sequence in parallel given some input tokens as constraint. These transformers however may fail to support hard lexical constraints as their generation process is more likely to terminate prematurely. The paper analyses such early termination problems and proposes the ENtity CONstrained insertion TransformER(ENCONTER), a new insertion transformer that addresses the above pitfall without compromising much generation efficiency. We introduce a new training strategy that considers predefined hard lexical constraints (e.g., entities to be included in the generated sequence). Our experiments show that ENCONTER outperforms other baseline models in several performance metrics rendering it more suitable in practical applications.
Meta-Learning for Effective Multi-task and Multilingual Modelling (2021)

Natural language processing (NLP) tasks (e.g. question-answering in English) benefit from knowledge of other tasks (e.g., named entity recognition in English) and knowledge of other languages (e.g., question-answering in Spanish). Such shared representations are typically learned in isolation, either across tasks or across languages. In this work, we propose a meta-learning approach to learn the interactions between both tasks and languages. We also investigate the role of different sampling strategies used during meta-learning. We present experiments on five different tasks and six different languages from the XTREME multilingual benchmark dataset. Our meta-learned model clearly improves in performance compared to competitive baseline models that also include multi-task baselines. We also present zero-shot evaluations on unseen target languages to demonstrate the utility of our proposed model.
\textquotedblleftKilling Me\textquotedblright Is Not a Spoiler: Spoiler Detection Model using Graph Neural Networks with Dependency Relation-Aware Attention Mechanism (2021)

Several machine learning-based spoiler detection models have been proposed recently to protect users from spoilers on review websites. Although dependency relations between context words are important for detecting spoilers, current attention-based spoiler detection models are insufficient for utilizing dependency relations. To address this problem, we propose a new spoiler detection model called SDGNN that is based on syntax-aware graph neural networks. In the experiments on two real-world benchmark datasets, we show that our SDGNN outperforms the existing spoiler detection models.
BERTese: Learning to Speak to BERT (2021)

Large pre-trained language models have been shown to encode large amounts of world and commonsense knowledge in their parameters, leading to substantial interest in methods for extracting that knowledge. In past work, knowledge was extracted by taking manually-authored queries and gathering paraphrases for them using a separate pipeline. In this work, we propose a method for automatically rewriting queries into {\textquotedblleft}BERTese{\textquotedblright}, a paraphrase query that is directly optimized towards better knowledge extraction. To encourage meaningful rewrites, we add auxiliary loss functions that encourage the query to correspond to actual language tokens. We empirically show our approach outperforms competing baselines, obviating the need for complex pipelines. Moreover, BERTese provides some insight into the type of language that helps language models perform knowledge extraction.
Lifelong Knowledge-Enriched Social Event Representation Learning (2021)

The ability of humans to symbolically represent social events and situations is crucial for various interactions in everyday life. Several studies in cognitive psychology have established the role of mental state attributions in effectively representing variable aspects of these social events. In the past, NLP research on learning event representations often focuses on construing syntactic and semantic information from language. However, they fail to consider the importance of pragmatic aspects and the need to consistently update new social situational information without forgetting the accumulated experiences. In this work, we propose a representation learning framework to directly address these shortcomings by integrating social commonsense knowledge with recent advancements in the space of lifelong language learning. First, we investigate methods to incorporate pragmatic aspects into our social event embeddings by leveraging social commonsense knowledge. Next, we introduce continual learning strategies that allow for incremental consolidation of new knowledge while retaining and promoting efficient usage of prior knowledge. Experimental results on event similarity, reasoning, and paraphrase detection tasks prove the efficacy of our social event embeddings.
GLaRA: Graph-based Labeling Rule Augmentation for Weakly Supervised Named Entity Recognition (2021)

Instead of using expensive manual annotations, researchers have proposed to train named entity recognition (NER) systems using heuristic labeling rules. However, devising labeling rules is challenging because it often requires a considerable amount of manual effort and domain expertise. To alleviate this problem, we propose GLARA, a graph-based labeling rule augmentation framework, to learn new labeling rules from unlabeled data. We first create a graph with nodes representing candidate rules extracted from unlabeled data. Then, we design a new graph neural network to augment labeling rules by exploring the semantic relations between rules. We finally apply the augmented rules on unlabeled data to generate weak labels and train a NER model using the weakly labeled data. We evaluate our method on three NER datasets and find that we can achieve an average improvement of +20{\%} F1 score over the best baseline when given a small set of seed rules.
An End-to-end Model for Entity-level Relation Extraction using Multi-instance Learning (2021)

We present a joint model for entity-level relation extraction from documents. In contrast to other approaches - which focus on local intra-sentence mention pairs and thus require annotations on mention level - our model operates on entity level. To do so, a multi-task approach is followed that builds upon coreference resolution and gathers relevant signals via multi-instance learning with multi-level representations combining global entity and local mention information. We achieve state-of-the-art relation extraction results on the DocRED dataset and report the first entity-level end-to-end relation extraction results for future reference. Finally, our experimental results suggest that a joint approach is on par with task-specific learning, though more efficient due to shared parameters and training steps.
WER-BERT: Automatic WER Estimation with BERT in a Balanced Ordinal Classification Paradigm (2021)

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are evaluated using Word Error Rate (WER), which is calculated by comparing the number of errors between the ground truth and the transcription of the ASR system. This calculation, however, requires manual transcription of the speech signal to obtain the ground truth. Since transcribing audio signals is a costly process, Automatic WER Evaluation (e-WER) methods have been developed to automatically predict the WER of a speech system by only relying on the transcription and the speech signal features. While WER is a continuous variable, previous works have shown that positing e-WER as a classification problem is more effective than regression. However, while converting to a classification setting, these approaches suffer from heavy class imbalance. In this paper, we propose a new balanced paradigm for e-WER in a classification setting. Within this paradigm, we also propose WER-BERT, a BERT based architecture with speech features for e-WER. Furthermore, we introduce a distance loss function to tackle the ordinal nature of e-WER classification. The proposed approach and paradigm are evaluated on the Librispeech dataset and a commercial (black box) ASR system, Google Cloud`s Speech-to-Text API. The results and experiments demonstrate that WER-BERT establishes a new state-of-the-art in automatic WER estimation.
Two Training Strategies for Improving Relation Extraction over Universal Graph (2021)

This paper explores how the Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction (DS-RE) can benefit from the use of a Universal Graph (UG), the combination of a Knowledge Graph (KG) and a large-scale text collection. A straightforward extension of a current state-of-the-art neural model for DS-RE with a UG may lead to degradation in performance. We first report that this degradation is associated with the difficulty in learning a UG and then propose two training strategies: (1) Path Type Adaptive Pretraining, which sequentially trains the model with different types of UG paths so as to prevent the reliance on a single type of UG path; and (2) Complexity Ranking Guided Attention mechanism, which restricts the attention span according to the complexity of a UG path so as to force the model to extract features not only from simple UG paths but also from complex ones. Experimental results on both biomedical and NYT10 datasets prove the robustness of our methods and achieve a new state-of-the-art result on the NYT10 dataset. The code and datasets used in this paper are available at \url{https://github.com/baodaiqin/UGDSRE}.
Adaptation of Back-translation to Automatic Post-Editing for Synthetic Data Generation (2021)

Automatic Post-Editing (APE) aims to correct errors in the output of a given machine translation (MT) system. Although data-driven approaches have become prevalent also in the APE task as in many other NLP tasks, there has been a lack of qualified training data due to the high cost of manual construction. eSCAPE, a synthetic APE corpus, has been widely used to alleviate the data scarcity, but it might not address genuine APE corpora`s characteristic that the post-edited sentence should be a minimally edited revision of the given MT output. Therefore, we propose two new methods of synthesizing additional MT outputs by adapting back-translation to the APE task, obtaining robust enlargements of the existing synthetic APE training dataset. Experimental results on the WMT English-German APE benchmarks demonstrate that our enlarged datasets are effective in improving APE performance.
Removing Word-Level Spurious Alignment between Images and Pseudo-Captions in Unsupervised Image Captioning (2021)

Unsupervised image captioning is a challenging task that aims at generating captions without the supervision of image-sentence pairs, but only with images and sentences drawn from different sources and object labels detected from the images. In previous work, pseudo-captions, i.e., sentences that contain the detected object labels, were assigned to a given image. The focus of the previous work was on the alignment of input images and pseudo-captions at the sentence level. However, pseudo-captions contain many words that are irrelevant to a given image. In this work, we investigate the effect of removing mismatched words from image-sentence alignment to determine how they make this task difficult. We propose a simple gating mechanism that is trained to align image features with only the most reliable words in pseudo-captions: the detected object labels. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms the previous methods without introducing complex sentence-level learning objectives. Combined with the sentence-level alignment method of previous work, our method further improves its performance. These results confirm the importance of careful alignment in word-level details.
Towards More Fine-grained and Reliable NLP Performance Prediction (2021)

Performance prediction, the task of estimating a system`s performance without performing experiments, allows us to reduce the experimental burden caused by the combinatorial explosion of different datasets, languages, tasks, and models. In this paper, we make two contributions to improving performance prediction for NLP tasks. First, we examine performance predictors not only for holistic measures of accuracy like F1 or BLEU, but also \textit{fine-grained} performance measures such as accuracy over individual classes of examples. Second, we propose methods to understand the \textit{reliability} of a performance prediction model from two angles: confidence intervals and calibration. We perform an analysis of four types of NLP tasks, and both demonstrate the feasibility of fine-grained performance prediction and the necessity to perform reliability analysis for performance prediction methods in the future.
Metrical Tagging in the Wild: Building and Annotating Poetry Corpora with Rhythmic Features (2021)

A prerequisite for the computational study of literature is the availability of properly digitized texts, ideally with reliable meta-data and ground-truth annotation. Poetry corpora do exist for a number of languages, but larger collections lack consistency and are encoded in various standards, while annotated corpora are typically constrained to a particular genre and/or were designed for the analysis of certain linguistic features (like rhyme). In this work, we provide large poetry corpora for English and German, and annotate prosodic features in smaller corpora to train corpus driven neural models that enable robust large scale analysis. We show that BiLSTM-CRF models with syllable embeddings outperform a CRF baseline and different BERT-based approaches. In a multi-task setup, particular beneficial task relations illustrate the inter-dependence of poetic features. A model learns foot boundaries better when jointly predicting syllable stress, aesthetic emotions and verse measures benefit from each other, and we find that caesuras are quite dependent on syntax and also integral to shaping the overall measure of the line.
Enhancing Aspect-level Sentiment Analysis with Word Dependencies (2021)

Aspect-level sentiment analysis (ASA) has received much attention in recent years. Most existing approaches tried to leverage syntactic information, such as the dependency parsing results of the input text, to improve sentiment analysis on different aspects. Although these approaches achieved satisfying results, their main focus is to leverage the dependency arcs among words where the dependency type information is omitted; and they model different dependencies equally where the noisy dependency results may hurt model performance. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance aspect-level sentiment analysis with word dependencies, where the type information is modeled by key-value memory networks and different dependency results are selectively leveraged. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, where it outperforms baseline models on all datasets and achieves state-of-the-art performance on three of them.
Using and comparing Rhetorical Structure Theory parsers with rst-workbench (2021)

I present rst-workbench, a software package that simplifies the installation and usage of numerous end-to-end Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) parsers. The tool offers a web-based interface that allows users to enter text and let multiple RST parsers generate analyses concurrently. The resulting RST trees can be compared visually, manually post-edited (in the browser) and stored for later usage.
SF-QA: Simple and Fair Evaluation Library for Open-domain Question Answering (2021)

Although open-domain question answering (QA) draws great attention in recent years, it requires large amounts of resources for building the full system and it is often difficult to reproduce previous results due to complex configurations. In this paper, we introduce SF-QA: simple and fair evaluation framework for open-domain QA. SF-QA framework modularizes the pipeline open-domain QA system, which makes the task itself easily accessible and reproducible to research groups without enough computing resources. The proposed evaluation framework is publicly available and anyone can contribute to the code and evaluations.
Finite-state script normalization and processing utilities: The Nisaba Brahmic library (2021)

This paper presents an open-source library for efficient low-level processing of ten major South Asian Brahmic scripts. The library provides a flexible and extensible framework for supporting crucial operations on Brahmic scripts, such as NFC, visual normalization, reversible transliteration, and validity checks, implemented in Python within a finite-state transducer formalism. We survey some common Brahmic script issues that may adversely affect the performance of downstream NLP tasks, and provide the rationale for finite-state design and system implementation details.
CovRelex: A COVID-19 Retrieval System with Relation Extraction (2021)

This paper presents CovRelex, a scientific paper retrieval system targeting entities and relations via relation extraction on COVID-19 scientific papers. This work aims at building a system supporting users efficiently in acquiring knowledge across a huge number of COVID-19 scientific papers published rapidly. Our system can be accessed via \url{https://www.jaist.ac.jp/is/labs/nguyen-lab/systems/covrelex/}.
MATILDA - Multi-AnnoTator multi-language InteractiveLight-weight Dialogue Annotator (2021)

Dialogue Systems are becoming ubiquitous in various forms and shapes - virtual assistants(Siri, Alexa, etc.), chat-bots, customer sup-port, chit-chat systems just to name a few. The advances in language models and their publication have democratised advanced NLP.However, data remains a crucial bottleneck. Our contribution to this essential pillar isMATILDA, to the best of our knowledge the first multi-annotator, multi-language dialogue annotation tool. MATILDA allows the creation of corpora, the management of users, the annotation of dialogues, the quick adaptation of the user interface to any language and the resolution of inter-annotator disagreement. We evaluate the tool on ease of use, annotation speed and interannotation resolution for both experts and novices and conclude that this tool not only supports the full pipeline for dialogue annotation, but also allows non-technical people to easily use it. We are completely open-sourcing the tool at \url{https://github.com/wluper/matilda} and provide a tutorial video1.
AnswerQuest: A System for Generating Question-Answer Items from Multi-Paragraph Documents (2021)

One strategy for facilitating reading comprehension is to present information in a question-and-answer format. We demo a system that integrates the tasks of question answering (QA) and question generation (QG) in order to produce Q{\&}A items that convey the content of multi-paragraph documents. We report some experiments for QA and QG that yield improvements on both tasks, and assess how they interact to produce a list of Q{\&}A items for a text. The demo is accessible at qna.sdl.com.
T-NER: An All-Round Python Library for Transformer-based Named Entity Recognition (2021)

Language model (LM) pretraining has led to consistent improvements in many NLP downstream tasks, including named entity recognition (NER). In this paper, we present T-NER (Transformer-based Named Entity Recognition), a Python library for NER LM finetuning. In addition to its practical utility, T-NER facilitates the study and investigation of the cross-domain and cross-lingual generalization ability of LMs finetuned on NER. Our library also provides a web app where users can get model predictions interactively for arbitrary text, which facilitates qualitative model evaluation for non-expert programmers. We show the potential of the library by compiling nine public NER datasets into a unified format and evaluating the cross-domain and cross- lingual performance across the datasets. The results from our initial experiments show that in-domain performance is generally competitive across datasets. However, cross-domain generalization is challenging even with a large pretrained LM, which has nevertheless capacity to learn domain-specific features if fine- tuned on a combined dataset. To facilitate future research, we also release all our LM checkpoints via the Hugging Face model hub.
Forum 4.0: An Open-Source User Comment Analysis Framework (2021)

With the increasing number of user comments in diverse domains, including comments on online journalism and e-commerce websites, the manual content analysis of these comments becomes time-consuming and challenging. However, research showed that user comments contain useful information for different domain experts, which is thus worth finding and utilizing. This paper introduces Forum 4.0, an open-source framework to semi-automatically analyze, aggregate, and visualize user comments based on labels defined by domain experts. We demonstrate the applicability of Forum 4.0 with comments analytics scenarios within the domains of online journalism and app stores. We outline the underlying container architecture, including the web-based user interface, the machine learning component, and the task manager for time-consuming tasks. We finally conduct machine learning experiments with simulated annotations and different sampling strategies on existing datasets from both domains to evaluate Forum 4.0`s performance. Forum 4.0 achieves promising classification results (ROC-AUC {\ensuremath{\geq}} 0.9 with 100 annotated samples), utilizing transformer-based embeddings with a lightweight logistic regression model. We explain how Forum 4.0`s architecture is applicable for millions of user comments in real-time, yet at feasible training and classification costs.