ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Using Semantic Similarity as Reward for Reinforcement Learning in Sentence Generation (2019)

Traditional model training for sentence generation employs cross-entropy loss as the loss function. While cross-entropy loss has convenient properties for supervised learning, it is unable to evaluate sentences as a whole, and lacks flexibility. We present the approach of training the generation model using the estimated semantic similarity between the output and reference sentences to alleviate the problems faced by the training with cross-entropy loss. We use the BERT-based scorer fine-tuned to the Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) task for semantic similarity estimation, and train the model with the estimated scores through reinforcement learning (RL). Our experiments show that reinforcement learning with semantic similarity reward improves the BLEU scores from the baseline LSTM NMT model.
Sentiment Classification Using Document Embeddings Trained with Cosine Similarity (2019)

In document-level sentiment classification, each document must be mapped to a fixed length vector. Document embedding models map each document to a dense, low-dimensional vector in continuous vector space. This paper proposes training document embeddings using cosine similarity instead of dot product. Experiments on the IMDB dataset show that accuracy is improved when using cosine similarity compared to using dot product, while using feature combination with Naive Bayes weighted bag of n-grams achieves a competitive accuracy of 93.68{\%}. Code to reproduce all experiments is available at \url{https://github.com/tanthongtan/dv-cosine}.
Detecting Adverse Drug Reactions from Biomedical Texts with Neural Networks (2019)

Detection of adverse drug reactions in postapproval periods is a crucial challenge for pharmacology. Social media and electronic clinical reports are becoming increasingly popular as a source for obtaining health related information. In this work, we focus on extraction information of adverse drug reactions from various sources of biomedical textbased information, including biomedical literature and social media. We formulate the problem as a binary classification task and compare the performance of four state-of-the-art attention-based neural networks in terms of the F-measure. We show the effectiveness of these methods on four different benchmarks.
Annotating and Analyzing Semantic Role of Elementary Units and Relations in Online Persuasive Arguments (2019)

For analyzing online persuasions, one of the important goals is to semantically understand how people construct comments to persuade others. However, analyzing the semantic role of arguments for online persuasion has been less emphasized. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel annotation scheme that captures the semantic role of arguments in a popular online persuasion forum, so-called ChangeMyView. Through this study, we have made the following contributions: (i) proposing a scheme that includes five types of elementary units (EUs) and two types of relations. (ii) annotating ChangeMyView which results in 4612 EUs and 2713 relations in 345 posts. (iii) analyzing the semantic role of persuasive arguments. Our analyses captured certain characteristic phenomena for online persuasion.
A Japanese Word Segmentation Proposal (2019)

Current Japanese word segmentation methods, that use a morpheme-based approach, may produce different segmentations for the same strings. This occurs when these strings appear in different sentences. The cause is the influence of different contexts around these strings affecting the probabilistic models used in segmentation algorithms. This paper presents an alternative to the current morpheme-based scheme for Japanese word segmentation. The proposed scheme focuses on segmenting inflections as single words instead of separating the auxiliary verbs and other morphemes from the stems. Some morphological segmentation rules are presented for each type of word and these rules are implemented in a program which is properly described. The program is used to generate a segmentation of a sentence corpus, whose consistency is calculated and compared with the current morpheme-based segmentation of the same corpus. The experiments show that this method produces a much more consistent segmentation than the morpheme-based one.
Sakura: Large-scale Incorrect Example Retrieval System for Learners of Japanese as a Second Language (2019)

This study develops an incorrect example retrieval system, called Sakura, using a large-scale Lang-8 dataset for Japanese language learners. Existing example retrieval systems do not include grammatically incorrect examples or present only a few examples, if any. If a retrieval system has a wide coverage of incorrect examples along with the correct counterpart, learners can revise their composition themselves. Considering the usability of retrieving incorrect examples, our proposed system uses a large-scale corpus to expand the coverage of incorrect examples and presents correct expressions along with incorrect expressions. Our intrinsic and extrinsic evaluations indicate that our system is more useful than a previous system.
SLATE: A Super-Lightweight Annotation Tool for Experts (2019)

Many annotation tools have been developed, covering a wide variety of tasks and providing features like user management, pre-processing, and automatic labeling. However, all of these tools use Graphical User Interfaces, and often require substantial effort to install and configure. This paper presents a new annotation tool that is designed to fill the niche of a lightweight interface for users with a terminal-based workflow. SLATE supports annotation at different scales (spans of characters, tokens, and lines, or a document) and of different types (free text, labels, and links), with easily customisable keybindings, and unicode support. In a user study comparing with other tools it was consistently the easiest to install and use. SLATE fills a need not met by existing systems, and has already been used to annotate two corpora, one of which involved over 250 hours of annotation effort.
lingvis.io - A Linguistic Visual Analytics Framework (2019)

We present a modular framework for the rapid-prototyping of linguistic, web-based, visual analytics applications. Our framework gives developers access to a rich set of machine learning and natural language processing steps, through encapsulating them into micro-services and combining them into a computational pipeline. This processing pipeline is auto-configured based on the requirements of the visualization front-end, making the linguistic processing and visualization design, detached independent development tasks. This paper describes the constellation and modality of our framework, which continues to support the efficient development of various human-in-the-loop, linguistic visual analytics research techniques and applications.
SARAL: A Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Domain-Focused Information Retrieval System for Effective Rapid Document Triage (2019)

With the increasing democratization of electronic media, vast information resources are available in less-frequently-taught languages such as Swahili or Somali. That information, which may be crucially important and not available elsewhere, can be difficult for monolingual English speakers to effectively access. In this paper we present an end-to-end cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) and summarization system for low-resource languages that 1) enables English speakers to search foreign language repositories of text and audio using English queries, 2) summarizes the retrieved documents in English with respect to a particular information need, and 3) provides complete transcriptions and translations as needed. The SARAL system achieved the top end-to-end performance in the most recent IARPA MATERIAL CLIR+summarization evaluations. Our demonstration system provides end-to-end open query retrieval and summarization capability, and presents the original source text or audio, speech transcription, and machine translation, for two low resource languages.
Jiuge: A Human-Machine Collaborative Chinese Classical Poetry Generation System (2019)

Research on the automatic generation of poetry, the treasure of human culture, has lasted for decades. Most existing systems, however, are merely model-oriented, which input some user-specified keywords and directly complete the generation process in one pass, with little user participation. We believe that the machine, being a collaborator or an assistant, should not replace human beings in poetic creation. Therefore, we proposed Jiuge, a human-machine collaborative Chinese classical poetry generation system. Unlike previous systems, Jiuge allows users to revise the unsatisfied parts of a generated poem draft repeatedly. According to the revision, the poem will be dynamically updated and regenerated. After the revision and modification procedure, the user can write a satisfying poem together with Jiuge system collaboratively. Besides, Jiuge can accept multi-modal inputs, such as keywords, plain text or images. By exposing the options of poetry genres, styles and revision modes, Jiuge, acting as a professional assistant, allows constant and active participation of users in poetic creation.
Rapid Customization for Event Extraction (2019)

Extracting events in the form of who is involved in what at when and where from text, is one of the core information extraction tasks that has many applications such as web search and question answering. We present a system for rapidly customizing event extraction capability to find new event types (what happened) and their arguments (who, when, and where). To enable extracting events of new types, we develop a novel approach to allow a user to find, expand and filter event triggers by exploring an unannotated development corpus. The system will then generate mention level event annotation automatically and train a neural network model for finding the corresponding events. To enable extracting arguments for new event types, the system makes novel use of the ACE annotation dataset to train a generic argument attachment model for extracting Actor, Place, and Time. We demonstrate that with less than 10 minutes of human effort per event type, the system achieves good performance for 67 novel event types. Experiments also show that the generic argument attachment model performs well on the novel event types. Our system (code, UI, documentation, demonstration video) is released as open source.
A Multiscale Visualization of Attention in the Transformer Model (2019)

The Transformer is a sequence model that forgoes traditional recurrent architectures in favor of a fully attention-based approach. Besides improving performance, an advantage of using attention is that it can also help to interpret a model by showing how the model assigns weight to different input elements. However, the multi-layer, multi-head attention mechanism in the Transformer model can be difficult to decipher. To make the model more accessible, we introduce an open-source tool that visualizes attention at multiple scales, each of which provides a unique perspective on the attention mechanism. We demonstrate the tool on BERT and OpenAI GPT-2 and present three example use cases: detecting model bias, locating relevant attention heads, and linking neurons to model behavior.
PostAc : A Visual Interactive Search, Exploration, and Analysis Platform for PhD Intensive Job Postings (2019)

Over 60{\%} of Australian PhD graduates land their first job after graduation outside academia, but this job market remains largely hidden to these job seekers. Employers' low awareness and interest in attracting PhD graduates means that the term {\textquotedblleft}PhD{\textquotedblright} is rarely used as a keyword in job advertisements; 80{\%} of companies looking to employ similar researchers do not specifically ask for a PhD qualification. As a result, typing in {\textquotedblleft}PhD{\textquotedblright} to a job search engine tends to return mostly academic jobs. We set out to make the market for advanced research skills more visible to job seekers. In this paper, we present PostAc, an online platform of authentic job postings that helps PhD graduates sharpen their career thinking. The platform is underpinned by research on the key factors that identify what an employer is looking for when they want to hire a highly skilled researcher. Its ranking model leverages the free-form text embedded in the job description to quantify the most sought-after PhD skills and educate information seekers about the Australian job-market appetite for PhD skills. The platform makes visible the geographic location, industry sector, job title, working hours, continuity, and wage of the research intensive jobs. This is the first data-driven exploration in this field. Both empirical results and online platform will be presented in this paper.
An adaptable task-oriented dialog system for stand-alone embedded devices (2019)

This paper describes a spoken-language end-to-end task-oriented dialogue system for small embedded devices such as home appliances. While the current system implements a smart alarm clock with advanced calendar scheduling functionality, the system is designed to make it easy to port to other application domains (e.g., the dialogue component factors out domain-specific execution from domain-general actions such as requesting and updating slot values). The system does not require internet connectivity because all components, including speech recognition, natural language understanding, dialogue management, execution and text-to-speech, run locally on the embedded device (our demo uses a Raspberry Pi). This simplifies deployment, minimizes server costs and most importantly, eliminates user privacy risks. The demo video in alarm domain is here youtu.be/N3IBMGocvHU
AlpacaTag: An Active Learning-based Crowd Annotation Framework for Sequence Tagging (2019)

We introduce an open-source web-based data annotation framework (AlpacaTag) for sequence tagging tasks such as named-entity recognition (NER). The distinctive advantages of AlpacaTag are three-fold. 1) Active intelligent recommendation: dynamically suggesting annotations and sampling the most informative unlabeled instances with a back-end active learned model; 2) Automatic crowd consolidation: enhancing real-time inter-annotator agreement by merging inconsistent labels from multiple annotators; 3) Real-time model deployment: users can deploy their models in downstream systems while new annotations are being made. AlpacaTag is a comprehensive solution for sequence labeling tasks, ranging from rapid tagging with recommendations powered by active learning and auto-consolidation of crowd annotations to real-time model deployment.
ConvLab: Multi-Domain End-to-End Dialog System Platform (2019)

We present ConvLab, an open-source multi-domain end-to-end dialog system platform, that enables researchers to quickly set up experiments with reusable components and compare a large set of different approaches, ranging from conventional pipeline systems to end-to-end neural models, in common environments. ConvLab offers a set of fully annotated datasets and associated pre-trained reference models. As a showcase, we extend the MultiWOZ dataset with user dialog act annotations to train all component models and demonstrate how ConvLab makes it easy and effortless to conduct complicated experiments in multi-domain end-to-end dialog settings.
Demonstration of a Neural Machine Translation System with Online Learning for Translators (2019)

We present a demonstration of our system, which implements online learning for neural machine translation in a production environment. These techniques allow the system to continuously learn from the corrections provided by the translators. We implemented an end-to-end platform integrating our machine translation servers to one of the most common user interfaces for professional translators: SDL Trados Studio. We pretend to save post-editing effort as the machine is continuously learning from its mistakes and adapting the models to a specific domain or user style.
FASTDial: Abstracting Dialogue Policies for Fast Development of Task Oriented Agents (2019)

We present a novel abstraction framework called FASTDial for designing task oriented dialogue agents, built on top of the OpenDial toolkit. This framework is meant to facilitate prototyping and development of dialogue systems from scratch also by non tech savvy especially when limited training data is available. To this end, we use a generic and simple frame-slots data-structure with pre-defined dialogue policies that allows for fast design and implementation at the price of some flexibility reduction. Moreover, it allows for minimizing programming effort and domain expert training time, by hiding away many implementation details. We provide a system demonstration screencast video in the following link: \url{https://vimeo.com/329840716}
A Neural, Interactive-predictive System for Multimodal Sequence to Sequence Tasks (2019)

We present a demonstration of a neural interactive-predictive system for tackling multimodal sequence to sequence tasks. The system generates text predictions to different sequence to sequence tasks: machine translation, image and video captioning. These predictions are revised by a human agent, who introduces corrections in the form of characters. The system reacts to each correction, providing alternative hypotheses, compelling with the feedback provided by the user. The final objective is to reduce the human effort required during this correction process. This system is implemented following a client-server architecture. For accessing the system, we developed a website, which communicates with the neural model, hosted in a local server. From this website, the different tasks can be tackled following the interactive{--}predictive framework. We open-source all the code developed for building this system. The demonstration in hosted in \url{http://casmacat.prhlt.upv.es/interactive-seq2seq}.
NeuralClassifier: An Open-source Neural Hierarchical Multi-label Text Classification Toolkit (2019)

In this paper, we introduce NeuralClassifier, a toolkit for neural hierarchical multi-label text classification. NeuralClassifier is designed for quick implementation of neural models for hierarchical multi-label classification task, which is more challenging and common in real-world scenarios. A salient feature is that NeuralClassifier currently provides a variety of text encoders, such as FastText, TextCNN, TextRNN, RCNN, VDCNN, DPCNN, DRNN, AttentiveConvNet and Transformer encoder, etc. It also supports other text classification scenarios, including binary-class and multi-class classification. Built on PyTorch, the core operations are calculated in batch, making the toolkit efficient with the acceleration of GPU. Experiments show that models built in our toolkit achieve comparable performance with reported results in the literature.
ADVISER: A Dialog System Framework for Education \& Research (2019)

In this paper, we present ADVISER - an open source dialog system framework for education and research purposes. This system supports multi-domain task-oriented conversations in two languages. It additionally provides a flexible architecture in which modules can be arbitrarily combined or exchanged - allowing for easy switching between rules-based and neural network based implementations. Furthermore, ADVISER offers a transparent, user-friendly framework designed for interdisciplinary collaboration: from a flexible back end, allowing easy integration of new features, to an intuitive graphical user interface supporting nontechnical users.
KCAT: A Knowledge-Constraint Typing Annotation Tool (2019)

In this paper, we propose an efficient Knowledge Constraint Fine-grained Entity Typing Annotation Tool, which further improves the entity typing process through entity linking together with some practical functions.
An Environment for Relational Annotation of Political Debates (2019)

This paper describes the MARDY corpus annotation environment developed for a collaboration between political science and computational linguistics. The tool realizes the complete workflow necessary for annotating a large newspaper text collection with rich information about claims (demands) raised by politicians and other actors, including claim and actor spans, relations, and polarities. In addition to the annotation GUI, the tool supports the identification of relevant documents, text pre-processing, user management, integration of external knowledge bases, annotation comparison and merging, statistical analysis, and the incorporation of machine learning models as {\textquotedblleft}pseudo-annotators{\textquotedblright}.
GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text (2019)

The rapid improvement of language models has raised the specter of abuse of text generation systems. This progress motivates the development of simple methods for detecting generated text that can be used by non-experts. In this work, we introduce GLTR, a tool to support humans in detecting whether a text was generated by a model. GLTR applies a suite of baseline statistical methods that can detect generation artifacts across multiple sampling schemes. In a human-subjects study, we show that the annotation scheme provided by GLTR improves the human detection-rate of fake text from 54{\%} to 72{\%} without any prior training. GLTR is open-source and publicly deployed, and has already been widely used to detect generated outputs.
OpenKiwi: An Open Source Framework for Quality Estimation (2019)

We introduce OpenKiwi, a Pytorch-based open source framework for translation quality estimation. OpenKiwi supports training and testing of word-level and sentence-level quality estimation systems, implementing the winning systems of the WMT 2015{--}18 quality estimation campaigns. We benchmark OpenKiwi on two datasets from WMT 2018 (English-German SMT and NMT), yielding state-of-the-art performance on the word-level tasks and near state-of-the-art in the sentence-level tasks.
Microsoft Icecaps: An Open-Source Toolkit for Conversation Modeling (2019)

The Intelligent Conversation Engine: Code and Pre-trained Systems (Microsoft Icecaps) is an upcoming open-source natural language processing repository. Icecaps wraps TensorFlow functionality in a modular component-based architecture, presenting an intuitive and flexible paradigm for constructing sophisticated learning setups. Capabilities include multitask learning between models with shared parameters, upgraded language model decoding features, a range of built-in architectures, and a user-friendly data processing pipeline. The system is targeted toward conversational tasks, exploring diverse response generation, coherence, and knowledge grounding. Icecaps also provides pre-trained conversational models that can be either used directly or loaded for fine-tuning or bootstrapping other models; these models power an online demo of our framework.
PerspectroScope: A Window to the World of Diverse Perspectives (2019)

This work presents PerspectroScope, a web-based system which lets users query a discussion-worthy natural language claim, and extract and visualize various perspectives in support or against the claim, along with evidence supporting each perspective. The system thus lets users explore various perspectives that could touch upon aspects of the issue at hand. The system is built as a combination of retrieval engines and learned textual-entailment-like classifiers built using a few recent developments in natural language understanding. To make the system more adaptive, expand its coverage, and improve its decisions over time, our platform employs various mechanisms to get corrections from the users. PerspectroScope is available at github.com/CogComp/perspectroscope Web demo link: \url{http://orwell.seas.upenn.edu:4002/} Link to demo video: \url{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXBTR1Sp3Bs}