ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards High Accuracy Named Entity Recognition for Icelandic (2019)

We report on work in progress which consists of annotating an Icelandic corpus for named entities (NEs) and using it for training a named entity recognizer based on a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory model. Currently, we have annotated 7,538 NEs appearing in the first 200,000 tokens of a 1 million token corpus, MIM-GOLD, originally developed for serving as a gold standard for part-of-speech tagging. Our best performing model, trained on this subset of MIM-GOLD, and enriched with external word embeddings, obtains an overall F1 score of 81.3{\%} when categorizing NEs into the following four categories: persons, locations, organizations and miscellaneous. Our preliminary results are promising, especially given the fact that 80{\%} of MIM-GOLD has not yet been used for training.
Neural Cross-Lingual Transfer and Limited Annotated Data for Named Entity Recognition in Danish (2019)

Named Entity Recognition (NER) has greatly advanced by the introduction of deep neural architectures. However, the success of these methods depends on large amounts of training data. The scarcity of publicly-available human-labeled datasets has resulted in limited evaluation of existing NER systems, as is the case for Danish. This paper studies the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer for Danish, evaluates its complementarity to limited gold data, and sheds light on performance of Danish NER.
The Seemingly (Un)systematic Linking Element in Danish (2019)

The use of a linking element between compound members is a common phenomenon in Germanic languages. Still, the exact use and conditioning of such elements is a disputed topic in linguistics. In this paper we address the issue of predicting the use of linking elements in Danish. Following previous research that shows how the choice of linking element might be conditioned by phonology, we frame the problem as a language modeling task: Considering the linking elements -s/-{\ensuremath{\varnothing}} the problem becomes predicting what is most probable to encounter next, a syllable boundary or the joining element, {\textquoteleft}s'. We show that training a language model on this task reaches an accuracy of 94 {\%}, and in the case of an unsupervised model, the accuracy reaches 80{\%}.
LEGATO: A flexible lexicographic annotation tool (2019)

This article is a report from an ongoing project aiming at analyzing lexical and grammatical competences of Swedish as a Second language (L2). To facilitate lexical analysis, we need access to metalinguistic information about relevant vocabulary that L2 learners can use and understand. The focus of the current article is on the lexical annotation of the vocabulary scope for a range of lexicographical aspects, such as morphological analysis, valency, types of multi-word units, etc. We perform parts of the analysis automatically, and other parts manually. The rationale behind this is that where there is no possibility to add information automatically, manual effort needs to be added. To facilitate the latter, a tool LEGATO has been designed, implemented and currently put to active testing.
The OPUS Resource Repository: An Open Package for Creating Parallel Corpora and Machine Translation Services (2019)

This paper presents a flexible and powerful system for creating parallel corpora and for running neural machine translation services. Our package provides a scalable data repository backend that offers transparent data pre-processing pipelines and automatic alignment procedures that facilitate the compilation of extensive parallel data sets from a variety of sources. Moreover, we develop a web-based interface that constitutes an intuitive frontend for end-users of the platform. The whole system can easily be distributed over virtual machines and implements a sophisticated permission system with secure connections and a flexible database for storing arbitrary metadata. Furthermore, we also provide an interface for neural machine translation that can run as a service on virtual machines, which also incorporates a connection to the data repository software.
Garnishing a phonetic dictionary for ASR intake (2019)

We present a new method for preparing a lexical-phonetic database as a resource for acoustic model training. The research is an offshoot of the ongoing Project Ravnur (Speech Recognition for Faroese), but the method is language-independent. At NODALIDA 2019 we demonstrate the method (called SHARP) online, showing how a traditional lexical-phonetic dictionary (with a very rich phone inventory) is transformed into an ASR-friendly database (with reduced phonetics, preventing data sparseness). The mapping procedure is informed by a corpus of speech transcripts. We conclude with a discussion on the benefits of a well-thought-out BLARK design (Basic Language Resource Kit), making tools like SHARP possible.
Docria: Processing and Storing Linguistic Data with Wikipedia (2019)

The availability of user-generated content has increased significantly over time. Wikipedia is one example of a corpora which spans a huge range of topics and is freely available. Storing and processing these corpora requires flexible documents models as they may contain malicious and incorrect data. Docria is a library which attempts to address this issue by providing a solution which can be used with small to large corpora, from laptops using Python interactively in a Jupyter notebook to clusters running map-reduce frameworks with optimized compiled code. Docria is available as open-source code.
UniParse: A universal graph-based parsing toolkit (2019)

This paper describes the design and use of the graph-based parsing framework and toolkit UniParse, released as an open-source python software package. UniParse as a framework novelly streamlines research prototyping, development and evaluation of graph-based dependency parsing architectures. UniParse does this by enabling highly efficient, sufficiently independent, easily readable, and easily extensible implementations for all dependency parser components. We distribute the toolkit with ready-made configurations as re-implementations of all current state-of-the-art first-order graph-based parsers, including even more efficient Cython implementations of both encoders and decoders, as well as the required specialised loss functions.
Mark my Word: A Sequence-to-Sequence Approach to Definition Modeling (2019)

Defining words in a textual context is a useful task both for practical purposes and for gaining insight into distributed word representations. Building on the distributional hypothesis, we argue here that the most natural formalization of definition modeling is to treat it as a sequence-to-sequence task, rather than a word-to-sequence task: given an input sequence with a highlighted word, generate a contextually appropriate definition for it. We implement this approach in a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model. Our proposal allows to train contextualization and definition generation in an end-to-end fashion, which is a conceptual improvement over earlier works. We achieve state-of-the-art results both in contextual and non-contextual definition modeling.
Improving Semantic Dependency Parsing with Syntactic Features (2019)

We extend a state-of-the-art deep neural architecture for semantic dependency parsing with features defined over syntactic dependency trees. Our empirical results show that only gold-standard syntactic information leads to consistent improvements in semantic parsing accuracy, and that the magnitude of these improvements varies with the specific combination of the syntactic and the semantic representation used. In contrast, automatically predicted syntax does not seem to help semantic parsing. Our error analysis suggests that there is a significant overlap between syntactic and semantic representations.
To Lemmatize or Not to Lemmatize: How Word Normalisation Affects ELMo Performance in Word Sense Disambiguation (2019)

In this paper, we critically evaluate the widespread assumption that deep learning NLP models do not require lemmatized input. To test this, we trained versions of contextualised word embedding ELMo models on raw tokenized corpora and on the corpora with word tokens replaced by their lemmas. Then, these models were evaluated on the word sense disambiguation task. This was done for the English and Russian languages. The experiments showed that while lemmatization is indeed not necessary for English, the situation is different for Russian. It seems that for rich-morphology languages, using lemmatized training and testing data yields small but consistent improvements: at least for word sense disambiguation. This means that the decisions about text pre-processing before training ELMo should consider the linguistic nature of the language in question.
Is Multilingual BERT Fluent in Language Generation? (2019)

The multilingual BERT model is trained on 104 languages and meant to serve as a universal language model and tool for encoding sentences. We explore how well the model performs on several languages across several tasks: a diagnostic classification probing the embeddings for a particular syntactic property, a cloze task testing the language modelling ability to fill in gaps in a sentence, and a natural language generation task testing for the ability to produce coherent text fitting a given context. We find that the currently available multilingual BERT model is clearly inferior to the monolingual counterparts, and cannot in many cases serve as a substitute for a well-trained monolingual model. We find that the English and German models perform well at generation, whereas the multilingual model is lacking, in particular, for Nordic languages. The code of the experiments in the paper is available at: \url{https://github.com/TurkuNLP/bert-eval}
Multilingual Probing of Deep Pre-Trained Contextual Encoders (2019)

Encoders that generate representations based on context have, in recent years, benefited from adaptations that allow for pre-training on large text corpora. Earlier work on evaluating fixed-length sentence representations has included the use of {\textquoteleft}probing' tasks, that use diagnostic classifiers to attempt to quantify the extent to which these encoders capture specific linguistic phenomena. The principle of probing has also resulted in extended evaluations that include relatively newer word-level pre-trained encoders. We build on probing tasks established in the literature and comprehensively evaluate and analyse {--} from a typological perspective amongst others {--} multilingual variants of existing encoders on probing datasets constructed for 6 non-English languages. Specifically, we probe each layer of a multiple monolingual RNN-based ELMo models, the transformer-based BERT`s cased and uncased multilingual variants, and a variant of BERT that uses a cross-lingual modelling scheme (XLM).
Cross-Domain Sentiment Classification using Vector Embedded Domain Representations (2019)

Due to the differences between reviews in different product categories, creating a general model for cross-domain sentiment classification can be a difficult task. This paper proposes an architecture that incorporates domain knowledge into a neural sentiment classification model. In addition to providing a cross-domain model, this also provides a quantifiable representation of the domains as numeric vectors. We show that it is possible to cluster the domain vectors and provide qualitative insights into the inter-domain relations. We also a) present a new data set for sentiment classification that includes a domain parameter and preprocessed data points, and b) perform an ablation study in order to determine whether some word groups impact performance.
Multiclass Text Classification on Unbalanced, Sparse and Noisy Data (2019)

This paper discusses methods to improve the performance of text classification on data that is difficult to classify due to a large number of unbalanced classes with noisy examples. A variety of features are tested, in combination with three different neural-network-based methods with increasing complexity. The classifiers are applied to a songtext{--}artist dataset which is large, unbalanced and noisy. We come to the conclusion that substantial improvement can be obtained by removing unbalancedness and sparsity from the data. This fulfils a classification task unsatisfactorily{---}however, with contemporary methods, it is a practical step towards fairly satisfactory results.
The unreasonable effectiveness of Neural Models in Language Decoding (2019)

This tutorial will provide an in-depth look at the experiments, jointly carried out by KantanMT and eBay during 2018, to determine which Neural Model delivers the best translation performance for eBay Customer Service content. It will lay out the timeline, process and mechanisms used to customise Neural MT models and how these were used in conjunction with Human Based evaluations to determine which approach to Neural MT provided the best translation outcomes.The tutorial will cover the following topics and methods:- Structural differences in Neural Networks and how they assist the language decoding process {--} RNN, CNN and TNN will be covered in detailed.- Customisation of Neural MT using the KantanMT Platform- Using MQM Framework for the evaluation and comparison of Translation Outputs and comparison to Human Translation- Collation and analysis of experimental findings in reaching our decision to standardise on Transformer type networks.Participants of the tutorial will get a clear understanding of Neural Model types and the differences, it will also cover how to customise these models and then how to set up a controlled experiment to determine translation performance.
Challenge Test Sets for MT Evaluation (2019)

Most of the test sets used for the evaluation of MT systems reflect the frequency distribution of different phenomena found in naturally occurring data ({\textquotedblright}standard{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblright}natural{\textquotedblright} test sets). However, to better understand particular strengths and weaknesses of MT systems, especially those based on neural networks, it is necessary to apply more focused evaluation procedures. Therefore, another type of test sets ({\textquotedblright}challenge{\textquotedblright} test sets, also called {\textquotedblright}test suites{\textquotedblright}) is being increasingly employed in order to highlight points of difficulty which are relevant to model development, training, or using of the given system. This tutorial will be useful for anyone (researchers, developers, users, translators) interested in detailed evaluation and getting a better understanding of machine translation (MT) systems and models. The attendees will learn about the motivation and linguistic background of challenge test sets and a range of testing possibilities applied to the state-of-the-art MT systems, as well as a number of practical aspects and challenges.
A Deep Learning Curve for Post-Editing 2 (2019)

In the last couple of years, machine translation technology has seen major changes with the breakthrough of neural machine translation (NMT), a growing number of providers and translation platforms. Machine Translation generally is experiencing a peak in demand from translation buyers, thanks to Machine Learning and AI being omnipresent in the media and at industry events. At the same time, new models for defining translation quality are becoming more widely adopted. These changes have profound implications for translators, LSPs and translation buyers: translators have to adjust their post-editing approaches, while LSPs and translation buyers are faced with decisions on selecting providers, best approaches for updating MT systems, financial investments, integrating tools, and getting the timing for implementation right for an optimum ROI.In this tutorial on MT and post-editing we would like to continue sharing the latest trends in the field of MT technologies, and discuss their impact on post-editing practices as well as integrating MT on large, multi-language translation programs. We will look at tool compatibility, different use cases of MT and dynamic quality models, and share our experience of measuring performance.
Practical Statistics for Research in Machine Translation and Translation Studies (2019)

The tutorial will introduce a set of very useful statistical tests for conducting analyses in the research areas of Machine Translation (MT) and Translation Studies (TS). For each statistical test, the presenter will: 1) introduce it in the context of a common research example that pertains to the area of MT and/or TS 2) explain the technique behind the test and its assumptions 3) cover common pitfalls when the test is applied in research studies, and 4) conduct a hands-on activity so that attendees can put the knowledge acquired in practice straight-away. All examples and exercises will be in R. The following statistical tests will be covered: t-tests (both parametric and non-parametric), bootstrap resampling, Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients, linear mixed-effects models.
Maximizing Stylistic Control and Semantic Accuracy in NLG: Personality Variation and Discourse Contrast (2019)

Neural generation methods for task-oriented dialogue typically generate from a meaning representation that is populated using a database of domain information, such as a table of data describing a restaurant. While earlier work focused solely on the semantic fidelity of outputs, recent work has started to explore methods for controlling the style of the generated text while simultaneously achieving semantic accuracy. Here we experiment with two stylistic benchmark tasks, generating language that exhibits variation in personality, and generating discourse contrast. We report a huge performance improvement in both stylistic control and semantic accuracy over the state of the art on both of these benchmarks. We test several different models and show that putting stylistic conditioning in the decoder and eliminating the semantic re-ranker used in earlier models results in more than 15 points higher BLEU for Personality, with a reduction of semantic error to near zero. We also report an improvement from .75 to .81 in controlling contrast and a reduction in semantic error from 16{\%} to 2{\%}.
Incorporating Textual Evidence in Visual Storytelling (2019)

Previous work on visual storytelling mainly focused on exploring image sequence as evidence for storytelling and neglected textual evidence for guiding story generation. Motivated by human storytelling process which recalls stories for familiar images, we exploit textual evidence from similar images to help generate coherent and meaningful stories. To pick the images which may provide textual experience, we propose a two-step ranking method based on image object recognition techniques. To utilize textual information, we design an extended Seq2Seq model with two-channel encoder and attention. Experiments on the VIST dataset show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models without heavy engineering.
Fine-Grained Control of Sentence Segmentation and Entity Positioning in Neural NLG (2019)

The move from pipeline Natural Language Generation (NLG) approaches to neural end-to-end approaches led to a loss of control in sentence planning operations owing to the conflation of intermediary micro-planning stages into a single model. Such control is highly necessary when the text should be tailored to respect some constraints such as which entity to be mentioned first, the entity position, the complexity of sentences, etc. In this paper, we introduce fine-grained control of sentence planning in neural data-to-text generation models at two levels - realization of input entities in desired sentences and realization of the input entities in the desired position among individual sentences. We show that by augmenting the input with explicit position identifiers, the neural model can achieve a great control over the output structure while keeping the naturalness of the generated text intact. Since sentence level metrics are not entirely suitable to evaluate this task, we used a metric specific to our task that accounts for the model`s ability to achieve control. The results demonstrate that the position identifiers do constraint the neural model to respect the intended output structure which can be useful in a variety of domains that require the generated text to be in a certain structure.
Zero-shot Chinese Discourse Dependency Parsing via Cross-lingual Mapping (2019)

Due to the absence of labeled data, discourse parsing still remains challenging in some languages. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient method to conduct zero-shot Chinese text-level dependency parsing by leveraging English discourse labeled data and parsing techniques. We first construct the Chinese-English mapping from the level of sentence and elementary discourse unit (EDU), and then exploit the parsing results of the corresponding English translations to obtain the discourse trees for the Chinese text. This method can automatically conduct Chinese discourse parsing, with no need of a large scale of Chinese labeled data.
Talking about what is not there: Generating indefinite referring expressions in Minecraft (2019)

When generating technical instructions, it is often necessary to describe an object that does not exist yet. For example, an NLG system which explains how to build a house needs to generate sentences like {\textquotedblleft}build *a wall of height five to your left*{\textquotedblright} and {\textquotedblleft}now build *a wall on the other side*.{\textquotedblright} Generating (indefinite) referring expressions to objects that do not exist yet is fundamentally different from generating the usual definite referring expressions, because the new object must be distinguished from an infinite set of possible alternatives. We formalize this problem and present an algorithm for generating such expressions, in the context of generating building instructions within the Minecraft video game.
Generating Quantified Referring Expressions with Perceptual Cost Pruning (2019)

We model the production of quantified referring expressions (QREs) that identify collections of visual items. To address this task, we propose a method of perceptual cost pruning, which consists of two steps: (1) determine what subset of quantity information can be perceived given a time limit t, and (2) apply a preference order based REG algorithm (e.g., the Incremental Algorithm) to this reduced set of information. We demonstrate that this method successfully improves the human-likeness of the IA in the QRE generation task and successfully models human-generated language in most cases.
A case study on context-bound referring expression generation (2019)

In recent years, Bayesian models of referring expression generation have gained prominence in order to produce situationally more adequate referring expressions. Basically, these models enable the integration of different parameters into the decision process for using a specific referring expression like the cardinality of the object set, the configuration and complexity of the visual field, and the discriminatory power of available attributes that need to be combined with visual salience and personal preference. This paper describes and discusses the results of an empirical study on the production of referring expressions in visual fields with different object configurations of varying complexity and different contextual premises for using a referring expression. The visual fields are set up using data from the TUNA experiment with plain random or pragmatically enriched configurations which allow for target inference. Different categories of the situational contexts, in which the referring expressions are produced, provide different degrees of cooperativeness, so that generation quality and its relations to contextual user intention can be observed. The results of the study suggest that Bayesian approaches must integrate individual generation preference and the cooperativeness of the situational task in order to model the broad variance between speakers more adequately.