ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Character-level Supervision for Low-resource POS Tagging (2018)

Neural part-of-speech (POS) taggers are known to not perform well with little training data. As a step towards overcoming this problem, we present an architecture for learning more robust neural POS taggers by jointly training a hierarchical, recurrent model and a recurrent character-based sequence-to-sequence network supervised using an auxiliary objective. This way, we introduce stronger character-level supervision into the model, which enables better generalization to unseen words and provides regularization, making our encoding less prone to overfitting. We experiment with three auxiliary tasks: lemmatization, character-based word autoencoding, and character-based random string autoencoding. Experiments with minimal amounts of labeled data on 34 languages show that our new architecture outperforms a single-task baseline and, surprisingly, that, on average, raw text autoencoding can be as beneficial for low-resource POS tagging as using lemma information. Our neural POS tagger closes the gap to a state-of-the-art POS tagger (MarMoT) for low-resource scenarios by 43{\%}, even outperforming it on languages with templatic morphology, e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish, by some margin.
Training a Neural Network in a Low-Resource Setting on Automatically Annotated Noisy Data (2018)

Manually labeled corpora are expensive to create and often not available for low-resource languages or domains. Automatic labeling approaches are an alternative way to obtain labeled data in a quicker and cheaper way. However, these labels often contain more errors which can deteriorate a classifier`s performance when trained on this data. We propose a noise layer that is added to a neural network architecture. This allows modeling the noise and train on a combination of clean and noisy data. We show that in a low-resource NER task we can improve performance by up to 35{\%} by using additional, noisy data and handling the noise.
Multi-task learning for historical text normalization: Size matters (2018)

Historical text normalization suffers from small datasets that exhibit high variance, and previous work has shown that multi-task learning can be used to leverage data from related problems in order to obtain more robust models. Previous work has been limited to datasets from a specific language and a specific historical period, and it is not clear whether results generalize. It therefore remains an open problem, when historical text normalization benefits from multi-task learning. We explore the benefits of multi-task learning across 10 different datasets, representing different languages and periods. Our main finding{---}contrary to what has been observed for other NLP tasks{---}is that multi-task learning mainly works when target task data is very scarce.
Compositional Language Modeling for Icon-Based Augmentative and Alternative Communication (2018)

Icon-based communication systems are widely used in the field of Augmentative and Alternative Communication. Typically, icon-based systems have lagged behind word- and character-based systems in terms of predictive typing functionality, due to the challenges inherent to training icon-based language models. We propose a method for synthesizing training data for use in icon-based language models, and explore two different modeling strategies. We propose a method to generate language models for corpus-less symbol-set.
Multimodal Neural Machine Translation for Low-resource Language Pairs using Synthetic Data (2018)

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of training a multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) system with image features for a low-resource language pair, Hindi and English, using synthetic data. A three-way parallel corpus which contains bilingual texts and corresponding images is required to train a MNMT system with image features. However, such a corpus is not available for low resource language pairs. To address this, we developed both a synthetic training dataset and a manually curated development/test dataset for Hindi based on an existing English-image parallel corpus. We used these datasets to build our image description translation system by adopting state-of-the-art MNMT models. Our results show that it is possible to train a MNMT system for low-resource language pairs through the use of synthetic data and that such a system can benefit from image features.
Multi-Task Active Learning for Neural Semantic Role Labeling on Low Resource Conversational Corpus (2018)

Most Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) approaches are supervised methods which require a significant amount of annotated corpus, and the annotation requires linguistic expertise. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Task Active Learning framework for Semantic Role Labeling with Entity Recognition (ER) as the auxiliary task to alleviate the need for extensive data and use additional information from ER to help SRL. We evaluate our approach on Indonesian conversational dataset. Our experiments show that multi-task active learning can outperform single-task active learning method and standard multi-task learning. According to our results, active learning is more efficient by using 12{\%} less of training data compared to passive learning in both single-task and multi-task setting. We also introduce a new dataset for SRL in Indonesian conversational domain to encourage further research in this area.
Domain Adapted Word Embeddings for Improved Sentiment Classification (2018)

Generic word embeddings are trained on large-scale generic corpora; Domain Specific (DS) word embeddings are trained only on data from a domain of interest. This paper proposes a method to combine the breadth of generic embeddings with the specificity of domain specific embeddings. The resulting embeddings, called Domain Adapted (DA) word embeddings, are formed by first aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA (KCCA) and then combining them via convex optimization. Results from evaluation on sentiment classification tasks show that the DA embeddings substantially outperform both generic, DS embeddings when used as input features to standard or state-of-the-art sentence encoding algorithms for classification.
Investigating Effective Parameters for Fine-tuning of Word Embeddings Using Only a Small Corpus (2018)

Fine-tuning is a popular method to achieve better performance when only a small target corpus is available. However, it requires tuning of a number of metaparameters and thus it might carry risk of adverse effect when inappropriate metaparameters are used. Therefore, we investigate effective parameters for fine-tuning when only a small target corpus is available. In the current study, we target at improving Japanese word embeddings created from a huge corpus. First, we demonstrate that even the word embeddings created from the huge corpus are affected by domain shift. After that, we investigate effective parameters for fine-tuning of the word embeddings using a small target corpus. We used perplexity of a language model obtained from a Long Short-Term Memory network to assess the word embeddings input into the network. The experiments revealed that fine-tuning sometimes give adverse effect when only a small target corpus is used and batch size is the most important parameter for fine-tuning. In addition, we confirmed that effect of fine-tuning is higher when size of a target corpus was larger.
Semi-Supervised Learning with Auxiliary Evaluation Component for Large Scale e-Commerce Text Classification (2018)

The lack of high-quality labeled training data has been one of the critical challenges facing many industrial machine learning tasks. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning method to utilize unlabeled data and user feedback signals to improve the performance of ML models. The method employs a primary model Main and an auxiliary evaluation model Eval, where Main and Eval models are trained iteratively by automatically generating labeled data from unlabeled data and/or users' feedback signals. The proposed approach is applied to different text classification tasks. We report results on both the publicly available Yahoo! Answers dataset and our e-commerce product classification dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the classification error rate by 4{\%} and up to 15{\%} across various experimental setups and datasets. A detailed comparison with other semi-supervised learning approaches is also presented later in the paper. The results from various text classification tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms those developed in previous related studies.
Low-rank passthrough neural networks (2018)

Various common deep learning architectures, such as LSTMs, GRUs, Resnets and Highway Networks, employ state passthrough connections that support training with high feed-forward depth or recurrence over many time steps. These {\textquotedblleft}Passthrough Networks{\textquotedblright} architectures also enable the decoupling of the network state size from the number of parameters of the network, a possibility has been studied by Sak et al. (2014) with their low-rank parametrization of the LSTM. In this work we extend this line of research, proposing effective, low-rank and low-rank plus diagonal matrix parametrizations for Passthrough Networks which exploit this decoupling property, reducing the data complexity and memory requirements of the network while preserving its memory capacity. This is particularly beneficial in low-resource settings as it supports expressive models with a compact parametrization less susceptible to overfitting. We present competitive experimental results on several tasks, including language modeling and a near state of the art result on sequential randomly-permuted MNIST classification, a hard task on natural data.
Sociolinguistic Corpus of WhatsApp Chats in Spanish among College Students (2018)

This work presents the Sociolinguistic Corpus of WhatsApp Chats in Spanish among College Students, a corpus of raw data for general use. Its purpose is to offer data for the study of of language and interactions via Instant Messaging (IM) among bachelors. Our paper consists of an overview of both the corpus`s content and demographic metadata. Furthermore, it presents the current research being conducted with it {---}namely parenthetical expressions, orality traits, and code-switching. This work also includes a brief outline of similar corpora and recent studies in the field of IM.
A Crowd-Annotated Spanish Corpus for Humor Analysis (2018)

Computational Humor involves several tasks, such as humor recognition, humor generation, and humor scoring, for which it is useful to have human-curated data. In this work we present a corpus of 27,000 tweets written in Spanish and crowd-annotated by their humor value and funniness score, with about four annotations per tweet, tagged by 1,300 people over the Internet. It is equally divided between tweets coming from humorous and non-humorous accounts. The inter-annotator agreement Krippendorff`s alpha value is 0.5710. The dataset is available for general usage and can serve as a basis for humor detection and as a first step to tackle subjectivity.
A Twitter Corpus for Hindi-English Code Mixed POS Tagging (2018)

Code-mixing is a linguistic phenomenon where multiple languages are used in the same occurrence that is increasingly common in multilingual societies. Code-mixed content on social media is also on the rise, prompting the need for tools to automatically understand such content. Automatic Parts-of-Speech (POS) tagging is an essential step in any Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipeline, but there is a lack of annotated data to train such models. In this work, we present a unique language tagged and POS-tagged dataset of code-mixed English-Hindi tweets related to five incidents in India that led to a lot of Twitter activity. Our dataset is unique in two dimensions: (i) it is larger than previous annotated datasets and (ii) it closely resembles typical real-world tweets. Additionally, we present a POS tagging model that is trained on this dataset to provide an example of how this dataset can be used. The model also shows the efficacy of our dataset in enabling the creation of code-mixed social media POS taggers.
Detecting Offensive Tweets in Hindi-English Code-Switched Language (2018)

The exponential rise of social media websites like Twitter, Facebook and Reddit in linguistically diverse geographical regions has led to hybridization of popular native languages with English in an effort to ease communication. The paper focuses on the classification of offensive tweets written in Hinglish language, which is a portmanteau of the Indic language Hindi with the Roman script. The paper introduces a novel tweet dataset, titled Hindi-English Offensive Tweet (HEOT) dataset, consisting of tweets in Hindi-English code switched language split into three classes: non-offensive, abusive and hate-speech. Further, we approach the problem of classification of the tweets in HEOT dataset using transfer learning wherein the proposed model employing Convolutional Neural Networks is pre-trained on tweets in English followed by retraining on Hinglish tweets.
SocialNLP 2018 EmotionX Challenge Overview: Recognizing Emotions in Dialogues (2018)

This paper describes an overview of the Dialogue Emotion Recognition Challenge, EmotionX, at the Sixth SocialNLP Workshop, which recognizes the emotion of each utterance in dialogues. This challenge offers the EmotionLines dataset as the experimental materials. The EmotionLines dataset contains conversations from Friends TV show transcripts (Friends) and real chatting logs (EmotionPush), where every dialogue utterance is labeled with emotions. Organizers provide baseline results. 18 teams registered in this challenge and 5 of them submitted their results successfully. The best team achieves the unweighted accuracy 62.48 and 62.5 on EmotionPush and Friends, respectively. In this paper we present the task definition, test collection, the evaluation results of the groups that participated in this challenge, and their approach.
EmotionX-DLC: Self-Attentive BiLSTM for Detecting Sequential Emotions in Dialogues (2018)

In this paper, we propose a self-attentive bidirectional long short-term memory (SA-BiLSTM) network to predict multiple emotions for the EmotionX challenge. The BiLSTM exhibits the power of modeling the word dependencies, and extracting the most relevant features for emotion classification. Building on top of BiLSTM, the self-attentive network can model the contextual dependencies between utterances which are helpful for classifying the ambiguous emotions. We achieve 59.6 and 55.0 unweighted accuracy scores in the Friends and the EmotionPush test sets, respectively.
EmotionX-AR: CNN-DCNN autoencoder based Emotion Classifier (2018)

In this paper, we model emotions in EmotionLines dataset using a convolutional-deconvolutional autoencoder (CNN-DCNN) framework. We show that adding a joint reconstruction loss improves performance. Quantitative evaluation with jointly trained network, augmented with linguistic features, reports best accuracies for emotion prediction; namely joy, sadness, anger, and neutral emotion in text.
EmotionX-SmartDubai\_NLP: Detecting User Emotions In Social Media Text (2018)

This paper describes the working note on {\textquotedblleft}EmotionX{\textquotedblright} shared task. It is hosted by SocialNLP 2018. The objective of this task is to detect the emotions, based on each speaker`s utterances that are in English. Taking this as multiclass text classification problem, we have experimented to develop a model to classify the target class. The primary challenge in this task is to detect the emotions in short messages, communicated through social media. This paper describes the participation of SmartDubai{\_}NLP team in EmotionX shared task and our investigation to detect the emotions from utterance using Neural networks and Natural language understanding.
EmotionX-Area66: Predicting Emotions in Dialogues using Hierarchical Attention Network with Sequence Labeling (2018)

This paper presents our system submitted to the EmotionX challenge. It is an emotion detection task on dialogues in the EmotionLines dataset. We formulate this as a hierarchical network where network learns data representation at both utterance level and dialogue level. Our model is inspired by Hierarchical Attention network (HAN) and uses pre-trained word embeddings as features. We formulate emotion detection in dialogues as a sequence labeling problem to capture the dependencies among labels. We report the performance accuracy for four emotions (anger, joy, neutral and sadness). The model achieved unweighted accuracy of 55.38{\%} on Friends test dataset and 56.73{\%} on EmotionPush test dataset. We report an improvement of 22.51{\%} in Friends dataset and 36.04{\%} in EmotionPush dataset over baseline results.
EmotionX-JTML: Detecting emotions with Attention (2018)

This paper addresses the problem of automatic recognition of emotions in conversational text datasets for the EmotionX challenge. Emotion is a human characteristic expressed through several modalities (e.g., auditory, visual, tactile). Trying to detect emotions only from the text becomes a difficult task even for humans. This paper evaluates several neural architectures based on Attention Models, which allow extracting relevant parts of the context within a conversation to identify the emotion associated with each utterance. Empirical results in the validation datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach compared to the reference models for some instances, and other cases show better results with simpler models.
Towards Automation of Sense-type Identification of Verbs in OntoSenseNet (2018)

In this paper, we discuss the enrichment of a manually developed resource, OntoSenseNet for Telugu. OntoSenseNet is a sense annotated resource that marks each verb of Telugu with a primary and a secondary sense. The area of research is relatively recent but has a large scope of development. We provide an introductory work to enrich the OntoSenseNet to promote further research in Telugu. Classifiers are adopted to learn the sense relevant features of the words in the resource and also to automate the tagging of sense-types for verbs. We perform a comparative analysis of different classifiers applied on OntoSenseNet. The results of the experiment prove that automated enrichment of the resource is effective using SVM classifiers and Adaboost ensemble.
Improving Classification of Twitter Behavior During Hurricane Events (2018)

A large amount of social media data is generated during natural disasters, and identifying the relevant portions of this data is critical for researchers attempting to understand human behavior, the effects of information sources, and preparatory actions undertaken during these events. In order to classify human behavior during hazard events, we employ machine learning for two tasks: identifying hurricane related tweets and classifying user evacuation behavior during hurricanes. We show that feature-based and deep learning methods provide different benefits for tweet classification, and ensemble-based methods using linguistic, temporal, and geospatial features can effectively classify user behavior.
Political discourse classification in social networks using context sensitive convolutional neural networks (2018)

In this study we propose a new approach to analyse the political discourse in on-line social networks such as Twitter. To do so, we have built a discourse classifier using Convolutional Neural Networks. Our model has been trained using election manifestos annotated manually by political scientists following the Regional Manifestos Project (RMP) methodology. In total, it has been trained with more than 88,000 sentences extracted from more that 100 annotated manifestos. Our approach takes into account the context of the phrase in order to classify it, like what was previously said and the political affiliation of the transmitter. To improve the classification results we have used a simplified political message taxonomy developed within the Electronic Regional Manifestos Project (E-RMP). Using this taxonomy, we have validated our approach analysing the Twitter activity of the main Spanish political parties during 2015 and 2016 Spanish general election and providing a study of their discourse.
The First Multilingual Surface Realisation Shared Task (SR`18): Overview and Evaluation Results (2018)

We report results from the SR`18 Shared Task, a new multilingual surface realisation task organised as part of the ACL`18 Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation. As in its English-only predecessor task SR`11, the shared task comprised two tracks with different levels of complexity: (a) a shallow track where the inputs were full UD structures with word order information removed and tokens lemmatised; and (b) a deep track where additionally, functional words and morphological information were removed. The shallow track was offered in ten, and the deep track in three languages. Systems were evaluated (a) automatically, using a range of intrinsic metrics, and (b) by human judges in terms of readability and meaning similarity. This report presents the evaluation results, along with descriptions of the SR`18 tracks, data and evaluation methods. For full descriptions of the participating systems, please see the separate system reports elsewhere in this volume.
BinLin: A Simple Method of Dependency Tree Linearization (2018)

Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 is a workshop on generating sentences from lemmatized sets of dependency triples. This paper describes the results of our participation in the challenge. We develop a data-driven pipeline system which first orders the lemmas and then conjugates the words to finish the surface realization process. Our contribution is a novel sequential method of ordering lemmas, which, despite its simplicity, achieves promising results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, describe its limitations and outline ways to improve it.
IIT (BHU) Varanasi at MSR-SRST 2018: A Language Model Based Approach for Natural Language Generation (2018)

This paper describes our submission system for the Shallow Track of Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 (SRST`18). The task was to convert genuine UD structures, from which word order information had been removed and the tokens had been lemmatized, into their correct sentential form. We divide the problem statement into two parts, word reinflection and correct word order prediction. For the first sub-problem, we use a Long Short Term Memory based Encoder-Decoder approach. For the second sub-problem, we present a Language Model (LM) based approach. We apply two different sub-approaches in the LM Based approach and the combined result of these two approaches is considered as the final output of the system.
Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 (SR18): The Tilburg University Approach (2018)

This study describes the approach developed by the Tilburg University team to the shallow task of the Multilingual Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 (SR18). Based on (Castro Ferreira et al., 2017), the approach works by first preprocessing an input dependency tree into an ordered linearized string, which is then realized using a statistical machine translation model. Our approach shows promising results, with BLEU scores above 50 for 5 different languages (English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) and above 35 for the Dutch language.