ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sparse Victory -- A Large Scale Systematic Comparison of count-based and prediction-based vectorizers for text classification (2019)

In this paper we study the performance of several text vectorization algorithms on a diverse collection of 73 publicly available datasets. Traditional sparse vectorizers like Tf-Idf and Feature Hashing have been systematically compared with the latest state of the art neural word embeddings like Word2Vec, GloVe, FastText and character embeddings like ELMo, Flair. We have carried out an extensive analysis of the performance of these vectorizers across different dimensions like classification metrics (.i.e. precision, recall, accuracy), dataset-size, and imbalanced data (in terms of the distribution of the number of class labels). Our experiments reveal that the sparse vectorizers beat the neural word and character embedding models on 61 of the 73 datasets by an average margin of 3-5{\%} (in terms of macro f1 score) and this performance is consistent across the different dimensions of comparison.
A Fine-Grained Annotated Multi-Dialectal Arabic Corpus (2019)

We present ARAP-Tweet 2.0, a corpus of 5 million dialectal Arabic tweets and 50 million words of about 3000 Twitter users from 17 Arab countries. Compared to the first version, the new corpus has significant improvements in terms of the data volume and the annotation quality. It is fully balanced with respect to dialect, gender, and three age groups: under 25 years, between 25 and 34, and 35 years and above. This paper describes the process of creating the corpus starting from gathering the dialectal phrases to find the users, to annotating their accounts and retrieving their tweets. We also report on the evaluation of the annotation quality using the inter-annotator agreement measures which were applied to the whole corpus and not just a subset. The obtained results were substantial with average Cohen`s Kappa values of 0.99, 0.92, and 0.88 for the annotation of gender, dialect, and age respectively. We also discuss some challenges encountered when developing this corpus.s.
Personality-dependent Neural Text Summarization (2019)

In Natural Language Generation systems, personalization strategies - i.e, the use of information about a target author to generate text that (more) closely resembles human-produced language - have long been applied to improve results. The present work addresses one such strategy - namely, the use of Big Five personality information about the target author - applied to the case of abstractive text summarization using neural sequence-to-sequence models. Initial results suggest that having access to personality information does lead to more accurate (or human-like) text summaries, and paves the way for more robust systems of this kind.
Self-Adaptation for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (2019)

Lack of labelled data in the target domain for training is a common problem in domain adaptation. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation method that combines projection and self-training based approaches. Using the labelled data from the source domain, we first learn a projection that maximises the distance among the nearest neighbours with opposite labels in the source domain. Next, we project the source domain labelled data using the learnt projection and train a classifier for the target class prediction. We then use the trained classifier to predict pseudo labels for the target domain unlabelled data. Finally, we learn a projection for the target domain as we did for the source domain using the pseudo-labelled target domain data, where we maximise the distance between nearest neighbours having opposite pseudo labels. Experiments on a standard benchmark dataset for domain adaptation show that the proposed method consistently outperforms numerous baselines and returns competitive results comparable to that of SOTA including self-training, tri-training, and neural adaptations.
Speculation and Negation detection in French biomedical corpora (2019)

In this work, we propose to address the detection of negation and speculation, and of their scope, in French biomedical documents. It has been indeed observed that they play an important role and provide crucial clues for other NLP applications. Our methods are based on CRFs and BiLSTM. We reach up to 97.21 {\%} and 91.30 {\%} F-measure for the detection of negation and speculation cues, respectively, using CRFs. For the computing of scope, we reach up to 90.81 {\%} and 86.73 {\%} F-measure on negation and speculation, respectively, using BiLSTM-CRF fed with word embeddings.
Porting Multilingual Morphological Resources to OntoLex-Lemon (2019)

We describe work consisting in porting various morphological resources to the OntoLex-Lemon model. A main objective of this work is to offer a uniform representation of different morphological data sets in order to be able to compare and interlink multilingual resources and to cross-check and interlink or merge the content of morphological resources of one and the same language. The results of our work will be published on the Linguistic Linked Open Data cloud.
Dependency-Based Self-Attention for Transformer NMT (2019)

In this paper, we propose a new Transformer neural machine translation (NMT) model that incorporates dependency relations into self-attention on both source and target sides, dependency-based self-attention. The dependency-based self-attention is trained to attend to the modifiee for each token under constraints based on the dependency relations, inspired by Linguistically-Informed Self-Attention (LISA). While LISA is originally proposed for Transformer encoder for semantic role labeling, this paper extends LISA to Transformer NMT by masking future information on words in the decoder-side dependency-based self-attention. Additionally, our dependency-based self-attention operates at sub-word units created by byte pair encoding. The experiments show that our model improves 1.0 BLEU points over the baseline model on the WAT`18 Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus Japanese-to-English translation task.
Detecting Toxicity in News Articles: Application to Bulgarian (2019)

Online media aim for reaching ever bigger audience and for attracting ever longer attention span. This competition creates an environment that rewards sensational, fake, and toxic news. To help limit their spread and impact, we propose and develop a news toxicity detector that can recognize various types of toxic content. While previous research primarily focused on English, here we target Bulgarian. We created a new dataset by crawling a website that for five years has been collecting Bulgarian news articles that were manually categorized into eight toxicity groups. Then we trained a multi-class classifier with nine categories: eight toxic and one non-toxic. We experimented with different representations based on ElMo, BERT, and XLM, as well as with a variety of domain-specific features. Due to the small size of our dataset, we created a separate model for each feature type, and we ultimately combined these models into a meta-classifier. The evaluation results show an accuracy of 59.0{\%} and a macro-F1 score of 39.7{\%}, which represent sizable improvements over the majority-class baseline (Acc=30.3{\%}, macro-F1=5.2{\%}).
De-Identification of Emails: Pseudonymizing Privacy-Sensitive Data in a German Email Corpus (2019)

We deal with the pseudonymization of those stretches of text in emails that might allow to identify real individual persons. This task is decomposed into two steps. First, named entities carrying privacy-sensitive information (e.g., names of persons, locations, phone numbers or dates) are identified, and, second, these privacy-bearing entities are replaced by synthetically generated surrogates (e.g., a person originally named {\textquoteleft}John Doe' is renamed as {\textquoteleft}Bill Powers'). We describe a system architecture for surrogate generation and evaluate our approach on CodeAlltag, a German email corpus.
Lexical Quantile-Based Text Complexity Measure (2019)

This paper introduces a new approach to estimating the text document complexity. Common readability indices are based on average length of sentences and words. In contrast to these methods, we propose to count the number of rare words occurring abnormally often in the document. We use the reference corpus of texts and the quantile approach in order to determine what words are rare, and what frequencies are abnormal. We construct a general text complexity model, which can be adjusted for the specific task, and introduce two special models. The experimental design is based on a set of thematically similar pairs of Wikipedia articles, labeled using crowdsourcing. The experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of the proposed approach.
Demo Application for LETO: Learning Engine Through Ontologies (2019)

The massive amount of multi-formatted information available on the Web necessitates the design of software systems that leverage this information to obtain knowledge that is valid and useful. The main challenge is to discover relevant information and continuously update, enrich and integrate knowledge from various sources of structured and unstructured data. This paper presents the Learning Engine Through Ontologies(LETO) framework, an architecture for the continuous and incremental discovery of knowledge from multiple sources of unstructured and structured data. We justify the main design decision behind LETO`s architecture and evaluate the framework`s feasibility using the Internet Movie Data Base(IMDB) and Twitter as a practical application.
Sentence Simplification for Semantic Role Labelling and Information Extraction (2019)

In this paper, we report on the extrinsic evaluation of an automatic sentence simplification method with respect to two NLP tasks: semantic role labelling (SRL) and information extraction (IE). The paper begins with our observation of challenges in the intrinsic evaluation of sentence simplification systems, which motivates the use of extrinsic evaluation of these systems with respect to other NLP tasks. We describe the two NLP systems and the test data used in the extrinsic evaluation, and present arguments and evidence motivating the integration of a sentence simplification step as a means of improving the accuracy of these systems. Our evaluation reveals that their performance is improved by the simplification step: the SRL system is better able to assign semantic roles to the majority of the arguments of verbs and the IE system is better able to identify fillers for all IE template slots.
OlloBot - Towards A Text-Based Arabic Health Conversational Agent: Evaluation and Results (2019)

We introduce OlloBot, an Arabic conversational agent that assists physicians and supports patients with the care process. It doesn`t replace the physicians, instead provides health tracking and support and assists physicians with the care delivery through a conversation medium. The current model comprises healthy diet, physical activity, mental health, in addition to food logging. Not only OlloBot tracks user daily food, it also offers useful tips for healthier living. We will discuss the design, development and testing of OlloBot, and highlight the findings and limitations arose from the testing.
Developing the Old Tibetan Treebank (2019)

This paper presents a full procedure for the development of a segmented, POS-tagged and chunkparsed corpus of Old Tibetan. As an extremely low-resource language, Old Tibetan poses non-trivial problems in every step towards the development of a searchable treebank. We demonstrate, however, that a carefully developed, semisupervised method of optimising and extending existing tools for Classical Tibetan, as well as creating specific ones for Old Tibetan can address these issues. We thus also present the first very Tibetan Treebank in a variety of formats to facilitate research in the fields of NLP, historical linguistics and Tibetan Studies.
Summarizing Legal Rulings: Comparative Experiments (2019)

In the context of text summarization, texts in the legal domain have peculiarities related to their length and to their specialized vocabulary. Recent neural network-based approaches can achieve high-quality scores for text summarization. However, these approaches have been used mostly for generating very short abstracts for news articles. Thus, their applicability to the legal domain remains an open issue. In this work, we experimented with ten extractive and four abstractive models in a real dataset of legal rulings. These models were compared with an extractive baseline based on heuristics to select the most relevant parts of the text. Our results show that abstractive approaches significantly outperform extractive methods in terms of ROUGE scores.
Entropy as a Proxy for Gap Complexity in Open Cloze Tests (2019)

This paper presents a pilot study of entropy as a measure of gap complexity in open cloze tests aimed at learners of English. Entropy is used to quantify the information content in each gap, which can be used to estimate complexity. Our study shows that average gap entropy correlates positively with proficiency levels while individual gap entropy can capture contextual complexity. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first unsupervised information-theoretical approach to evaluating the quality of cloze tests.
Song Lyrics Summarization Inspired by Audio Thumbnailing (2019)

Given the peculiar structure of songs, applying generic text summarization methods to lyrics can lead to the generation of highly redundant and incoherent text. In this paper, we propose to enhance state-of-the-art text summarization approaches with a method inspired by audio thumbnailing. Instead of searching for the thumbnail clues in the audio of the song, we identify equivalent clues in the lyrics. We then show how these summaries that take into account the audio nature of the lyrics outperform the generic methods according to both an automatic evaluation and human judgments.
Comparing Automated Methods to Detect Explicit Content in Song Lyrics (2019)

The Parental Advisory Label (PAL) is a warning label that is placed on audio recordings in recognition of profanity or inappropriate references, with the intention of alerting parents of material potentially unsuitable for children. Since 2015, digital providers {--} such as iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Music and Deezer {--} also follow PAL guidelines and tag such tracks as {\textquotedblleft}explicit{\textquotedblright}. Nowadays, such labelling is carried out mainly manually on voluntary basis, with the drawbacks of being time consuming and therefore costly, error prone and partly a subjective task. In this paper, we compare automated methods ranging from dictionary-based lookup to state-of-the-art deep neural networks to automatically detect explicit contents in English lyrics. We show that more complex models perform only slightly better on this task, and relying on a qualitative analysis of the data, we discuss the inherent hardness and subjectivity of the task.
Linguistic classification: dealing jointly with irrelevance and inconsistency (2019)

In this paper, we present new methods for language classification which put to good use both syntax and fuzzy tools, and are capable of dealing with irrelevant linguistic features (i.e. features which should not contribute to the classification) and even inconsistent features (which do not make sense for specific languages). We introduce a metric distance, based on the generalized Steinhaus transform, which allows one to deal jointly with irrelevance and inconsistency. To evaluate our methods, we test them on a syntactic data set, due to the linguist G. Longobardi and his school. We obtain phylogenetic trees which sometimes outperform the ones obtained by Atkinson and Gray.
Corpus Lexicography in a Wider Context (2019)

This paper describes a set of tools that offers comprehensive solutions for corpus lexicography. The tools perform a range of tasks, including construction of corpus lexicon, integrating information from external dictionaries, internal analysis of the lexicon, and lexical analysis of the corpus. The set of tools is particularly useful for creating dictionaries for under-resourced languages. The tools are integrated in a general-purpose software that includes additional tools for various research tasks, such as linguistic development analysis. Equipped with a user-friendly interface, the described system can be easily incorporated in research in a variety of fields.
A Universal System for Automatic Text-to-Phonetics Conversion (2019)

This paper describes an automatic text-to-phonetics conversion system. The system was constructed to primarily serve as a research tool. It is implemented in a general-purpose linguistic software, which allows it to be incorporated in a multifaceted linguistic research in essentially any language. The system currently relies on two mechanisms to generate phonetic transcriptions from texts: (i) importing ready-made phonetic word forms from external dictionaries, and (ii) automatic generation of phonetic word forms based on a set of deterministic linguistic rules. The current paper describes the proposed system and its potential application to linguistic research.
Two Discourse Tree - Based Approaches to Indexing Answers (2019)

We explore anatomy of answers with respect to which text fragments from an answer are worth matching with a question and which should not be matched. We apply the Rhetorical Structure Theory to build a discourse tree of an answer and select elementary discourse units that are suitable for indexing. Manual rules for selection of these discourse units as well as automated classification based on web search engine mining are evaluated con-cerning improving search accuracy. We form two sets of question-answer pairs for FAQ and community QA search domains and use them for evaluation of the proposed indexing methodology, which delivers up to 16 percent improvement in search recall.
Discourse-Based Approach to Involvement of Background Knowledge for Question Answering (2019)

We introduce a concept of a virtual discourse tree to improve question answering (Q/A) recall for complex, multi-sentence questions. Augmenting the discourse tree of an answer with tree fragments obtained from text corpora playing the role of ontology, we obtain on the fly a canonical discourse representation of this answer that is independent of the thought structure of a given author. This mechanism is critical for finding an answer that is not only relevant in terms of questions entities but also in terms of inter-relations between these entities in an answer and its style. We evaluate the Q/A system enabled with virtual discourse trees and observe a substantial increase of performance answering complex questions such as Yahoo! Answers and www.2carpros.com.
On a Chatbot Providing Virtual Dialogues (2019)

We present a chatbot that delivers content in the form of virtual dialogues automatically produced from the plain texts that are extracted and selected from the documents. This virtual dialogue content is provided in the form of answers derived from the found and selected documents split into fragments, and questions that are automatically generated for these answers based on the initial text.
Assessing socioeconomic status of Twitter users: A survey (2019)

Every day, the emotion and opinion of different people across the world are reflected in the form of short messages using microblogging platforms. Despite the existence of enormous potential introduced by this data source, the Twitter community is still ambiguous and is not fully explored yet. While there are a huge number of studies examining the possibilities of inferring gender and age, there exist hardly researches on socioeconomic status (SES) inference of Twitter users. As socioeconomic status is essential to treating diverse questions linked to human behavior in several fields (sociology, demography, public health, etc.), we conducted a comprehensive literature review of SES studies, inference methods, and metrics. With reference to the research on literature`s results, we came to outline the most critical challenges for researchers. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first review that introduces the different aspects of SES inference. Indeed, this article provides the benefits for practitioners who aim to process and explore Twitter SES inference.
Divide and Extract -- Disentangling Clause Splitting and Proposition Extraction (2019)

Proposition extraction from sentences is an important task for information extraction systems Evaluation of such systems usually conflates two aspects: splitting complex sentences into clauses and the extraction of propositions. It is thus difficult to independently determine the quality of the proposition extraction step. We create a manually annotated proposition dataset from sentences taken from restaurant reviews that distinguishes between clauses that need to be split and those that do not. The resulting proposition evaluation dataset allows us to independently compare the performance of proposition extraction systems on simple and complex clauses. Although performance drastically drops on more complex sentences, we show that the same systems perform best on both simple and complex clauses. Furthermore, we show that specific kinds of subordinate clauses pose difficulties to most systems.
Sparse Coding in Authorship Attribution for Polish Tweets (2019)

The study explores application of a simple Convolutional Neural Network for the problem of authorship attribution of tweets written in Polish. In our solution we use two-step compression of tweets using Byte Pair Encoding algorithm and vectorisation as an input to the distributional model generated for the large corpus of Polish tweets by word2vec algorithm. Our method achieves results comparable to the state-of-the-art approaches for the similar task on English tweets and expresses a very good performance in the classification of Polish tweets. We tested the proposed method in relation to the number of authors and tweets per author. We also juxtaposed results for authors with different topic backgrounds against each other.
Automatic Question Answering for Medical MCQs: Can It go Further than Information Retrieval? (2019)

We present a novel approach to automatic question answering that does not depend on the performance of an information retrieval (IR) system and does not require that the training data come from the same source as the questions. We evaluate the system performance on a challenging set of university-level medical science multiple-choice questions. Best performance is achieved when combining a neural approach with an IR approach, both of which work independently. Unlike previous approaches, the system achieves statistically significant improvement over the random guess baseline even for questions that are labeled as challenging based on the performance of baseline solvers.
Self-Knowledge Distillation in Natural Language Processing (2019)

Since deep learning became a key player in natural language processing (NLP), many deep learning models have been showing remarkable performances in a variety of NLP tasks. Such high performance can be explained by efficient knowledge representation of deep learning models. Knowledge distillation from pretrained deep networks suggests that we can use more information from the soft target probability to train other neural networks. In this paper, we propose a self-knowledge distillation method, based on the soft target probabilities of the training model itself, where multimode information is distilled from the word embedding space right below the softmax layer. Due to the time complexity, our method approximates the soft target probabilities. In experiments, we applied the proposed method to two different and fundamental NLP tasks: language model and neural machine translation. The experiment results show that our proposed method improves performance on the tasks.