ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Can Neural Image Captioning be Controlled via Forced Attention? (2019)

Learned dynamic weighting of the conditioning signal (attention) has been shown to improve neural language generation in a variety of settings. The weights applied when generating a particular output sequence have also been viewed as providing a potentially explanatory insight in the internal workings of the generator. In this paper, we reverse the direction of this connection and ask whether through the control of the attention of the model we can control its output. Specifically, we take a standard neural image captioning model that uses attention, and fix the attention to predetermined areas in the image. We evaluate whether the resulting output is more likely to mention the class of the object in that area than the normally generated caption. We introduce three effective methods to control the attention and find that these are producing expected results in up to 27.43{\%} of the cases.
Towards a Metric for Automated Conversational Dialogue System Evaluation and Improvement (2019)

We present {\textquotedblleft}AutoJudge{\textquotedblright}, an automated evaluation method for conversational dialogue systems. The method works by first generating dialogues based on self-talk, i.e. dialogue systems talking to itself. Then, it uses human ratings on these dialogues to train an automated judgement model. Our experiments show that AutoJudge correlates well with the human ratings and can be used to automatically evaluate dialogue systems, even in deployed systems. In a second part, we attempt to apply AutoJudge to improve existing systems. This works well for re-ranking a set of candidate utterances. However, our experiments show that AutoJudge cannot be applied as reward for reinforcement learning, although the metric can distinguish good from bad dialogues. We discuss potential reasons, but state here already that this is still an open question for further research.
Generating Paraphrases with Lean Vocabulary (2019)

In this work, we examine whether it is possible to achieve the state of the art performance in paraphrase generation with reduced vocabulary. Our approach consists of building a convolution to sequence model (Conv2Seq) partially guided by the reinforcement learning, and training it on the subword representation of the input. The experiment on the Quora dataset, which contains over 140,000 pairs of sentences and corresponding paraphrases, found that with less than 1,000 token types, we were able to achieve performance which exceeded that of the current state of the art.
A Personalized Data-to-Text Support Tool for Cancer Patients (2019)

In this paper, we present a novel data-to-text system for cancer patients, providing information on quality of life implications after treatment, which can be embedded in the context of shared decision making. Currently, information on quality of life implications is often not discussed, partly because (until recently) data has been lacking. In our work, we rely on a newly developed prediction model, which assigns patients to scenarios. Furthermore, we use data-to-text techniques to explain these scenario-based predictions in personalized and understandable language. We highlight the possibilities of NLG for personalization, discuss ethical implications and also present the outcomes of a first evaluation with clinicians.
Natural Language Generation at Scale: A Case Study for Open Domain Question Answering (2019)

Current approaches to Natural Language Generation (NLG) for dialog mainly focus on domain-specific, task-oriented applications (e.g. restaurant booking) using limited ontologies (up to 20 slot types), usually without considering the previous conversation context. Furthermore, these approaches require large amounts of data for each domain, and do not benefit from examples that may be available for other domains. This work explores the feasibility of applying statistical NLG to scenarios requiring larger ontologies, such as multi-domain dialog applications or open-domain question answering (QA) based on knowledge graphs. We model NLG through an Encoder-Decoder framework using a large dataset of interactions between real-world users and a conversational agent for open-domain QA. First, we investigate the impact of increasing the number of slot types on the generation quality and experiment with different partitions of the QA data with progressively larger ontologies (up to 369 slot types). Second, we perform multi-task learning experiments between open-domain QA and task-oriented dialog, and benchmark our model on a popular NLG dataset. Moreover, we experiment with using the conversational context as an additional input to improve response generation quality. Our experiments show the feasibility of learning statistical NLG models for open-domain QA with larger ontologies.
Using NLG for speech synthesis of mathematical sentences (2019)

People with sight impairments can access to a mathematical expression by using its LaTeX source. However, this mechanisms have several drawbacks: (1) it assumes the knowledge of the LaTeX, (2) it is slow, since LaTeX is verbose and (3) it is error-prone since LATEX is a typographical language. In this paper we study the design of a natural language generation system for producing a mathematical sentence, i.e. a natural language sentence expressing the semantics of a mathematical expression. Moreover, we describe the main results of a first human based evaluation experiment of the system for Italian language.
Teaching FORGe to Verbalize DBpedia Properties in Spanish (2019)

Statistical generators increasingly dominate the research in NLG. However, grammar-based generators that are grounded in a solid linguistic framework remain very competitive, especially for generation from deep knowledge structures. Furthermore, if built modularly, they can be ported to other genres and languages with a limited amount of work, without the need of the annotation of a considerable amount of training data. One of these generators is FORGe, which is based on the Meaning-Text Model. In the recent WebNLG challenge (the first comprehensive task addressing the mapping of RDF triples to text) FORGe ranked first with respect to the overall quality in human evaluation. We extend the coverage of FORGE`s open source grammatical and lexical resources for English, so as to further improve the English texts, and port them to Spanish, to achieve a comparable quality. This confirms that, as already observed in the case of SimpleNLG, a robust universal grammar-driven framework and a systematic organization of the linguistic resources can be an adequate choice for NLG applications.
Generating justifications for norm-related agent decisions (2019)

We present an approach to generating natural language justifications of decisions derived from norm-based reasoning. Assuming an agent which maximally satisfies a set of rules specified in an object-oriented temporal logic, the user can ask factual questions (about the agent`s rules, actions, and the extent to which the agent violated the rules) as well as {\textquotedblleft}why{\textquotedblright} questions that require the agent comparing actual behavior to counterfactual trajectories with respect to these rules. To produce natural-sounding explanations, we focus on the subproblem of producing natural language clauses from statements in a fragment of temporal logic, and then describe how to embed these clauses into explanatory sentences. We use a human judgment evaluation on a testbed task to compare our approach to variants in terms of intelligibility, mental model and perceived trust.
Towards Generating Math Word Problems from Equations and Topics (2019)

A math word problem is a narrative with a specific topic that provides clues to the correct equation with numerical quantities and variables therein. In this paper, we focus on the task of generating math word problems. Previous works are mainly template-based with pre-defined rules. We propose a novel neural network model to generate math word problems from the given equations and topics. First, we design a fusion mechanism to incorporate the information of both equations and topics. Second, an entity-enforced loss is introduced to ensure the relevance between the generated math problem and the equation. Automatic evaluation results show that the proposed model significantly outperforms the baseline models. In human evaluations, the math word problems generated by our model are rated as being more relevant (in terms of solvability of the given equations and relevance to topics) and natural (i.e., grammaticality, fluency) than the baseline models.
DisSim: A Discourse-Aware Syntactic Text Simplification Framework for English and German (2019)

We introduce DisSim, a discourse-aware sentence splitting framework for English and German whose goal is to transform syntactically complex sentences into an intermediate representation that presents a simple and more regular structure which is easier to process for downstream semantic applications. For this purpose, we turn input sentences into a two-layered semantic hierarchy in the form of core facts and accompanying contexts, while identifying the rhetorical relations that hold between them. In that way, we preserve the coherence structure of the input and, hence, its interpretability for downstream tasks.
Real World Voice Assistant System for Cooking (2019)

This study presents a voice assistant system to support cooking by utilizing smart speakers in Japan. This system not only speaks the procedures written in recipes point by point but also answers the common questions from users for the specified recipes. The system applies machine comprehension techniques to millions of recipes for answering the common questions in cooking such as {\textquotedblleft}人参はどうしたらよいですか (How should I cook carrots?){\textquotedblright}. Furthermore, numerous machine-learning techniques are applied to generate better responses to users.
VAE-PGN based Abstractive Model in Multi-stage Architecture for Text Summarization (2019)

This paper describes our submission to the TL;DR challenge. Neural abstractive summarization models have been successful in generating fluent and consistent summaries with advancements like the copy (Pointer-generator) and coverage mechanisms. However, these models suffer from their extractive nature as they learn to copy words from the source text. In this paper, we propose a novel abstractive model based on Variational Autoencoder (VAE) to address this issue. We also propose a Unified Summarization Framework for the generation of summaries. Our model eliminates non-critical information at a sentence-level with an extractive summarization module and generates the summary word by word using an abstractive summarization module. To implement our framework, we combine submodules with state-of-the-art techniques including Pointer-Generator Network (PGN) and BERT while also using our new VAE-PGN abstractive model. We evaluate our model on the benchmark Reddit corpus as part of the TL;DR challenge and show that our model outperforms the baseline in ROUGE score while generating diverse summaries.
Generating Abstractive Summaries with Finetuned Language Models (2019)

Neural abstractive document summarization is commonly approached by models that exhibit a mostly extractive behavior. This behavior is facilitated by a copy-attention which allows models to copy words from a source document. While models in the mostly extractive news summarization domain benefit from this inductive bias, they commonly fail to paraphrase or compress information from the source document. Recent advances in transfer-learning from large pretrained language models give rise to alternative approaches that do not rely on copy-attention and instead learn to generate concise and abstractive summaries. In this paper, as part of the TL;DR challenge, we compare the abstractiveness of summaries from different summarization approaches and show that transfer-learning can be efficiently utilized without any changes to the model architecture. We demonstrate that the approach leads to a higher level of abstraction for a similar performance on the TL;DR challenge tasks, enabling true natural language compression.
Towards Summarization for Social Media - Results of the TL;DR Challenge (2019)

In this paper, we report on the results of the TL;DR challenge, discussing an extensive manual evaluation of the expected properties of a good summary based on analyzing the comments provided by human annotators.
Generating Quantified Descriptions of Abstract Visual Scenes (2019)

Quantified expressions have always taken up a central position in formal theories of meaning and language use. Yet quantified expressions have so far attracted far less attention from the Natural Language Generation community than, for example, referring expressions. In an attempt to start redressing the balance, we investigate a recently developed corpus in which quantified expressions play a crucial role; the corpus is the result of a carefully controlled elicitation experiment, in which human participants were asked to describe visually presented scenes. Informed by an analysis of this corpus, we propose algorithms that produce computer-generated descriptions of a wider class of visual scenes, and we evaluate the descriptions generated by these algorithms in terms of their correctness, completeness, and human-likeness. We discuss what this exercise can teach us about the nature of quantification and about the challenges posed by the generation of quantified expressions.
What goes into a word: generating image descriptions with top-down spatial knowledge (2019)

Generating grounded image descriptions requires associating linguistic units with their corresponding visual clues. A common method is to train a decoder language model with attention mechanism over convolutional visual features. Attention weights align the stratified visual features arranged by their location with tokens, most commonly words, in the target description. However, words such as spatial relations (e.g. \textit{next to} and \textit{under}) are not directly referring to geometric arrangements of pixels but to complex geometric and conceptual representations. The aim of this paper is to evaluate what representations facilitate generating image descriptions with spatial relations and lead to better grounded language generation. In particular, we investigate the contribution of three different representational modalities in generating relational referring expressions: (i) pre-trained convolutional visual features, (ii) different top-down geometric relational knowledge between objects, and (iii) world knowledge captured by contextual embeddings in language models.
Semi-Supervised Neural Text Generation by Joint Learning of Natural Language Generation and Natural Language Understanding Models (2019)

In Natural Language Generation (NLG), End-to-End (E2E) systems trained through deep learning have recently gained a strong interest. Such deep models need a large amount of carefully annotated data to reach satisfactory performance. However, acquiring such datasets for every new NLG application is a tedious and time-consuming task. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised deep learning scheme that can learn from non-annotated data and annotated data when available. It uses a NLG and a Natural Language Understanding (NLU) sequence-to-sequence models which are learned jointly to compensate for the lack of annotation. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that, with limited amount of annotated data, the method can achieve very competitive results while not using any pre-processing or re-scoring tricks. These findings open the way to the exploitation of non-annotated datasets which is the current bottleneck for the E2E NLG system development to new applications.
Neural Generation for Czech: Data and Baselines (2019)

We present the first dataset targeted at end-to-end NLG in Czech in the restaurant domain, along with several strong baseline models using the sequence-to-sequence approach. While non-English NLG is under-explored in general, Czech, as a morphologically rich language, makes the task even harder: Since Czech requires inflecting named entities, delexicalization or copy mechanisms do not work out-of-the-box and lexicalizing the generated outputs is non-trivial. In our experiments, we present two different approaches to this this problem: (1) using a neural language model to select the correct inflected form while lexicalizing, (2) a two-step generation setup: our sequence-to-sequence model generates an interleaved sequence of lemmas and morphological tags, which are then inflected by a morphological generator.
Modeling Confidence in Sequence-to-Sequence Models (2019)

Recently, significant improvements have been achieved in various natural language processing tasks using neural sequence-to-sequence models. While aiming for the best generation quality is important, ultimately it is also necessary to develop models that can assess the quality of their output. In this work, we propose to use the similarity between training and test conditions as a measure for models' confidence. We investigate methods solely using the similarity as well as methods combining it with the posterior probability. While traditionally only target tokens are annotated with confidence measures, we also investigate methods to annotate source tokens with confidence. By learning an internal alignment model, we can significantly improve confidence projection over using state-of-the-art external alignment tools. We evaluate the proposed methods on downstream confidence estimation for machine translation (MT). We show improvements on segment-level confidence estimation as well as on confidence estimation for source tokens. In addition, we show that the same methods can also be applied to other tasks using sequence-to-sequence models. On the automatic speech recognition (ASR) task, we are able to find 60{\%} of the errors by looking at 20{\%} of the data.
A Good Sample is Hard to Find: Noise Injection Sampling and Self-Training for Neural Language Generation Models (2019)

Deep neural networks (DNN) are quickly becoming the de facto standard modeling method for many natural language generation (NLG) tasks. In order for such models to truly be useful, they must be capable of correctly generating utterances for novel meaning representations (MRs) at test time. In practice, even sophisticated DNNs with various forms of semantic control frequently fail to generate utterances faithful to the input MR. In this paper, we propose an architecture agnostic self-training method to sample novel MR/text utterance pairs to augment the original training data. Remarkably, after training on the augmented data, even simple encoder-decoder models with greedy decoding are capable of generating semantically correct utterances that are as good as state-of-the-art outputs in both automatic and human evaluations of quality.
A Stable Variational Autoencoder for Text Modelling (2019)

Variational Autoencoder (VAE) is a powerful method for learning representations of high-dimensional data. However, VAEs can suffer from an issue known as latent variable collapse (or KL term vanishing), where the posterior collapses to the prior and the model will ignore the latent codes in generative tasks. Such an issue is particularly prevalent when employing VAE-RNN architectures for text modelling (Bowman et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2017). In this paper, we present a new architecture called Full-Sampling-VAE-RNN, which can effectively avoid latent variable collapse. Compared to the general VAE-RNN architectures, we show that our model can achieve much more stable training process and can generate text with significantly better quality.
Comparison between Automatic and Human Subtitling: A Case Study with Game of Thrones (2019)

In this submission, I would like to share my experiences with the software DeepL and the comparison analysis I have made with human subtitling offered by the DVD version of the corpus I have chosen as the topic of my study {--} the eight Seasons of Game of Thrones. The idea is to study if the version proposed by an automatic translation program could be used as a first draft for the professional subtitler. It is expected that the latter would work on the form of the subtitles, that is to say mainly on their length, in a second step.
Parallel Corpus of Croatian-Italian Administrative Texts (2019)

Parallel corpora constitute a unique re-source for providing assistance to human translators. The selection and preparation of the parallel corpora also conditions the quality of the resulting MT engine. Since Croatian is a national language and Italian is officially recognized as a minority lan-guage in seven cities and twelve munici-palities of Istria County, a large amount of parallel texts is produced on a daily basis. However, there have been no attempts in using these texts for compiling a parallel corpus. A domain-specific sentence-aligned parallel Croatian-Italian corpus of administrative texts would be of high value in creating different language tools and resources. The aim of this paper is, therefore, to explore the value of parallel documents which are publicly available mostly in pdf format and to investigate the use of automatically-built dictionaries in corpus compilation. The effects that a document format and, consequently sentence splitting, and the dictionary input have on the sentence alignment process are manually evaluated.
What Influences the Features of Post-editese? A Preliminary Study (2019)

While a number of studies have shown evidence of translationese phenomena, that is, statistical differences between original texts and translated texts (Gellerstam, 1986), results of studies searching for translationese features in postedited texts (what has been called {\textquotedblright}posteditese{\textquotedblright} (Daems et al., 2017)) have presented mixed results. This paper reports a preliminary study aimed at identifying the presence of post-editese features in machine-translated post-edited texts and at understanding how they differ from translationese features. We test the influence of factors such as post-editing (PE) levels (full vs. light), translation proficiency (professionals vs. students) and text domain (news vs. literary). Results show evidence of post-editese features, especially in light PE texts and in certain domains.
Designing a Frame-Semantic Machine Translation Evaluation Metric (2019)

We propose a metric for machine translation evaluation based on frame semantics which does not require the use of reference translations or human corrections, but is aimed at comparing original and translated output directly. The metrics is described on the basis of an existing manual frame-semantic annotation of a parallel corpus with an English original and a Brazilian Portuguese and a German translation. We discuss implications of our metrics design, including the potential of scaling it for multiple languages.