ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
GAKE: Graph Aware Knowledge Embedding (2016)

Knowledge embedding, which projects triples in a given knowledge base to d-dimensional vectors, has attracted considerable research efforts recently. Most existing approaches treat the given knowledge base as a set of triplets, each of whose representation is then learned separately. However, as a fact, triples are connected and depend on each other. In this paper, we propose a graph aware knowledge embedding method (GAKE), which formulates knowledge base as a directed graph, and learns representations for any vertices or edges by leveraging the graph`s structural information. We introduce three types of graph context for embedding: neighbor context, path context, and edge context, each reflects properties of knowledge from different perspectives. We also design an attention mechanism to learn representative power of different vertices or edges. To validate our method, we conduct several experiments on two tasks. Experimental results suggest that our method outperforms several state-of-art knowledge embedding models.
Ranking Responses Oriented to Conversational Relevance in Chat-bots (2016)

For automatic chatting systems, it is indeed a great challenge to reply the given query considering the conversation history, rather than based on the query only. This paper proposes a deep neural network to address the context-aware response ranking problem by end-to-end learning, so as to help to select conversationally relevant candidate. By combining the multi-column convolutional layer and the recurrent layer, our model is able to model the semantics of the utterance sequence by grasping the semantic clue within the conversation, on the basis of the effective representation for each sentence. Especially, the network utilizes attention pooling to further emphasis the importance of essential words in conversations, thus the representations of contexts tend to be more meaningful and the performance of candidate ranking is notably improved. Meanwhile, due to the adoption of attention pooling, it is possible to visualize the semantic clues. The experimental results on the large amount of conversation data from social media have shown that our approach is promising for quantifying the conversational relevance of responses, and indicated its good potential for building practical IR based chat-bots.
Probabilistic Prototype Model for Serendipitous Property Mining (2016)

Besides providing the relevant information, amusing users has been an important role of the web. Many web sites provide serendipitous (unexpected but relevant) information to draw user traffic. In this paper, we study the representative scenario of mining an amusing quiz. An existing approach leverages a knowledge base to mine an unexpected property then find quiz questions on such property, based on prototype theory in cognitive science. However, existing deterministic model is vulnerable to noise in the knowledge base. Therefore, we instead propose to leverage probabilistic approach to build a prototype that can overcome noise. Our extensive empirical study shows that our approach not only significantly outperforms baselines by 0.06 in accuracy, and 0.11 in serendipity but also shows higher relevance than the traditional relevance-pursuing baseline using TF-IDF.
Identifying Cross-Cultural Differences in Word Usage (2016)

Personal writings have inspired researchers in the fields of linguistics and psychology to study the relationship between language and culture to better understand the psychology of people across different cultures. In this paper, we explore this relation by developing cross-cultural word models to identify words with cultural bias {--} i.e., words that are used in significantly different ways by speakers from different cultures. Focusing specifically on two cultures: United States and Australia, we identify a set of words with significant usage differences, and further investigate these words through feature analysis and topic modeling, shedding light on the attributes of language that contribute to these differences.
Reading-Time Annotations for \textquotedblleftBalanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese\textquotedblright (2016)

The Dundee Eyetracking Corpus contains eyetracking data collected while native speakers of English and French read newspaper editorial articles. Similar resources for other languages are still rare, especially for languages in which words are not overtly delimited with spaces. This is a report on a project to build an eyetracking corpus for Japanese. Measurements were collected while 24 native speakers of Japanese read excerpts from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese Texts were presented with or without segmentation (i.e. with or without space at the boundaries between bunsetsu segmentations) and with two types of methodologies (eyetracking and self-paced reading presentation). Readers' background information including vocabulary-size estimation and Japanese reading-span score were also collected. As an example of the possible uses for the corpus, we also report analyses investigating the phenomena of anti-locality.
\textquotedblleftHow Bullying is this Message?\textquotedblright: A Psychometric Thermometer for Bullying (2016)

Cyberbullying statistics are shocking, the number of affected young people is increasing dramatically with the affordability of mobile technology devices combined with a growing number of social networks. This paper proposes a framework to analyse Tweets with the goal to identify cyberharassment in social networks as an important step to protect people from cyberbullying. The proposed framework incorporates latent or hidden variables with supervised learning to determine potential bullying cases resembling short blogging type texts such as Tweets. It uses the LIWC2007 - tool that translates Tweet messages into 67 numeric values, representing 67 word categories. The output vectors are then used as features for four different classifiers implemented in Weka. Tests on all four classifiers delivered encouraging predictive capability of Tweet messages. Overall it was found that the use of numeric psychometric values outperformed the same algorithms using both filtered and unfiltered words as features. The best performing algorithms was Random Forest with an F1-value of 0.947 using psychometric features compared to a value of 0.847 for the same algorithm using words as features.
Learning grammatical categories using paradigmatic representations: Substitute words for language acquisition (2016)

Learning syntactic categories is a fundamental task in language acquisition. Previous studies show that co-occurrence patterns of preceding and following words are essential to group words into categories. However, the neighboring words, or frames, are rarely repeated exactly in the data. This creates data sparsity and hampers learning for frame based models. In this work, we propose a paradigmatic representation of word context which uses probable substitutes instead of frames. Our experiments on child-directed speech show that models based on probable substitutes learn more accurate categories with fewer examples compared to models based on frames.
Understanding the Lexical Simplification Needs of Non-Native Speakers of English (2016)

We report three user studies in which the Lexical Simplification needs of non-native English speakers are investigated. Our analyses feature valuable new insight on the relationship between the non-natives' notion of complexity and various morphological, semantic and lexical word properties. Some of our findings contradict long-standing misconceptions about word simplicity. The data produced in our studies consists of 211,564 annotations made by 1,100 volunteers, which we hope will guide forthcoming research on Text Simplification for non-native speakers of English.
How Interlocutors Coordinate with each other within Emotional Segments? (2016)

In this paper, we aim to investigate the coordination of interlocutors behavior in different emotional segments. Conversational coordination between the interlocutors is the tendency of speakers to predict and adjust each other accordingly on an ongoing conversation. In order to find such a coordination, we investigated 1) lexical similarities between the speakers in each emotional segments, 2) correlation between the interlocutors using psycholinguistic features, such as linguistic styles, psychological process, personal concerns among others, and 3) relation of interlocutors turn-taking behaviors such as competitiveness. To study the degree of coordination in different emotional segments, we conducted our experiments using real dyadic conversations collected from call centers in which agent`s emotional state include empathy and customer`s emotional states include anger and frustration. Our findings suggest that the most coordination occurs between the interlocutors inside anger segments, where as, a little coordination was observed when the agent was empathic, even though an increase in the amount of non-competitive overlaps was observed. We found no significant difference between anger and frustration segment in terms of turn-taking behaviors. However, the length of pause significantly decreases in the preceding segment of anger where as it increases in the preceding segment of frustration.
Advancing Linguistic Features and Insights by Label-informed Feature Grouping: An Exploration in the Context of Native Language Identification (2016)

We propose a hierarchical clustering approach designed to group linguistic features for supervised machine learning that is inspired by variationist linguistics. The method makes it possible to abstract away from the individual feature occurrences by grouping features together that behave alike with respect to the target class, thus providing a new, more general perspective on the data. On the one hand, it reduces data sparsity, leading to quantitative performance gains. On the other, it supports the formation and evaluation of hypotheses about individual choices of linguistic structures. We explore the method using features based on verb subcategorization information and evaluate the approach in the context of the Native Language Identification (NLI) task.
Modeling Diachronic Change in Scientific Writing with Information Density (2016)

Previous linguistic research on scientific writing has shown that language use in the scientific domain varies considerably in register and style over time. In this paper we investigate the introduction of information theory inspired features to study long term diachronic change on three levels: lexis, part-of-speech and syntax. Our approach is based on distinguishing between sentences from 19th and 20th century scientific abstracts using supervised classification models. To the best of our knowledge, the introduction of information theoretic features to this task is novel. We show that these features outperform more traditional features, such as token or character n-grams, while leading to more compact models. We present a detailed analysis of feature informativeness in order to gain a better understanding of diachronic change on different linguistic levels.
Different Contexts Lead to Different Word Embeddings (2016)

Recent work for learning word representations has applied successfully to many NLP applications, such as sentiment analysis and question answering. However, most of these models assume a single vector per word type without considering polysemy and homonymy. In this paper, we present an extension to the CBOW model which not only improves the quality of embeddings but also makes embeddings suitable for polysemy. It differs from most of the related work in that it learns one semantic center embedding and one context bias instead of training multiple embeddings per word type. Different context leads to different bias which is defined as the weighted average embeddings of local context. Experimental results on similarity task and analogy task show that the word representations learned by the proposed method outperform the competitive baselines.
Machine Learning for Metrical Analysis of English Poetry (2016)

In this work we tackle the challenge of identifying rhythmic patterns in poetry written in English. Although poetry is a literary form that makes use standard meters usually repeated among different authors, we will see in this paper how performing such analyses is a difficult task in machine learning due to the unexpected deviations from such standard patterns. After breaking down some examples of classical poetry, we apply a number of NLP techniques for the scansion of poetry, training and testing our systems against a human-annotated corpus. With these experiments, our purpose is establish a baseline of automatic scansion of poetry using NLP tools in a straightforward manner and to raise awareness of the difficulties of this task.
Automated speech-unit delimitation in spoken learner English (2016)

In order to apply computational linguistic analyses and pass information to downstream applications, transcriptions of speech obtained via automatic speech recognition (ASR) need to be divided into smaller meaningful units, in a task we refer to as {\textquoteleft}speech-unit (SU) delimitation'. We closely recreate the automatic delimitation system described by Lee and Glass (2012), {\textquoteleft}Sentence detection using multiple annotations', Proceedings of INTERSPEECH, which combines a prosodic model, language model and speech-unit length model in log-linear fashion. Since state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) tools have been developed to deal with written text and its characteristic sentence-like units, SU delimitation helps bridge the gap between ASR and NLP, by normalising spoken data into a more canonical format. Previous work has focused on native speaker recordings; we test the system of Lee and Glass (2012) on non-native speaker (or {\textquoteleft}learner') data, achieving performance above the state-of-the-art. We also consider alternative evaluation metrics which move away from the idea of a single {\textquoteleft}truth' in SU delimitation, and frame this work in the context of downstream NLP applications.
Learning to Identify Sentence Parallelism in Student Essays (2016)

Parallelism is an important rhetorical device. We propose a machine learning approach for automated sentence parallelism identification in student essays. We build an essay dataset with sentence level parallelism annotated. We derive features by combining generalized word alignment strategies and the alignment measures between word sequences. The experimental results show that sentence parallelism can be effectively identified with a F1 score of 82{\%} at pair-wise level and 72{\%} at parallelism chunk level. Based on this approach, we automatically identify sentence parallelism in more than 2000 student essays and study the correlation between the use of sentence parallelism and the types and quality of essays.
Evaluating anaphora and coreference resolution to improve automatic keyphrase extraction (2016)

In this paper we analyze the effectiveness of using linguistic knowledge from coreference and anaphora resolution for improving the performance for supervised keyphrase extraction. In order to verify the impact of these features, we define a baseline keyphrase extraction system and evaluate its performance on a standard dataset using different machine learning algorithms. Then, we consider new sets of features by adding combinations of the linguistic features we propose and we evaluate the new performance of the system. We also use anaphora and coreference resolution to transform the documents, trying to simulate the cohesion process performed by the human mind. We found that our approach has a slightly positive impact on the performance of automatic keyphrase extraction, in particular when considering the ranking of the results.
Retrieving Occurrences of Grammatical Constructions (2016)

Finding authentic examples of grammatical constructions is central in constructionist approaches to linguistics, language processing, and second language learning. In this paper, we address this problem as an information retrieval (IR) task. To facilitate research in this area, we built a benchmark collection by annotating the occurrences of six constructions in a Swedish corpus. Furthermore, we implemented a simple and flexible retrieval system for finding construction occurrences, in which the user specifies a ranking function using lexical-semantic similarities (lexicon-based or distributional). The system was evaluated using standard IR metrics on the new benchmark, and we saw that lexical-semantical rerankers improve significantly over a purely surface-oriented system, but must be carefully tailored for each individual construction.
Automatic Extraction of Learner Errors in ESL Sentences Using Linguistically Enhanced Alignments (2016)

We propose a new method of automatically extracting learner errors from parallel English as a Second Language (ESL) sentences in an effort to regularise annotation formats and reduce inconsistencies. Specifically, given an original and corrected sentence, our method first uses a linguistically enhanced alignment algorithm to determine the most likely mappings between tokens, and secondly employs a rule-based function to decide which alignments should be merged. Our method beats all previous approaches on the tested datasets, achieving state-of-the-art results for automatic error extraction.
Contrasting Vertical and Horizontal Transmission of Typological Features (2016)

Linguistic typology provides features that have a potential of uncovering deep phylogenetic relations among the world`s languages. One of the key challenges in using typological features for phylogenetic inference is that horizontal (spatial) transmission obscures vertical (phylogenetic) signals. In this paper, we characterize typological features with respect to the relative strength of vertical and horizontal transmission. To do this, we first construct (1) a spatial neighbor graph of languages and (2) a phylogenetic neighbor graph by collapsing known language families. We then develop an autologistic model that predicts a feature`s distribution from these two graphs. In the experiments, we managed to separate vertically and/or horizontally stable features from unstable ones, and the results are largely consistent with previous findings.
How Regular is Japanese Loanword Adaptation? A Computational Study (2016)

The modifications that foreign loanwords undergo when adapted into Japanese have been the subject of much study in linguistics. The scholarly interest of the topic can be attributed to the fact that Japanese loanwords undergo a complex series of phonological adaptations, something which has been puzzling scholars for decades. While previous studies of Japanese loanword accommodation have focused on specific phonological phenomena of limited scope, the current study leverages computational methods to provide a more complete description of all the sound changes that occur when adopting English words into Japanese. To investigate this, we have developed a parallel corpus of 250 English transcriptions and their respective Japanese equivalents. These words were then used to develop a wide-coverage finite state transducer based phonological grammar that mimics the behavior of the Japanese adaption process. By developing rules with the goal of accounting completely for a large number of borrowing and analyzing forms mistakenly generated by the system, we discovered an internal inconsistency inside the loanword phonology of the Japanese language, something arguably underestimated by previous studies. The result of the investigation suggests that there are multiple {\textquoteleft}dimensions' that shape the output form of the current Japanese loanwords. These dimensions include orthography, phonetics, and historical changes.
Using Linguistic Data for English and Spanish Verb-Noun Combination Identification (2016)

We present a linguistic analysis of a set of English and Spanish verb+noun combinations (VNCs), and a method to use this information to improve VNC identification. Firstly, a sample of frequent VNCs are analysed in-depth and tagged along lexico-semantic and morphosyntactic dimensions, obtaining satisfactory inter-annotator agreement scores. Then, a VNC identification experiment is undertaken, where the analysed linguistic data is combined with chunking information and syntactic dependencies. A comparison between the results of the experiment and the results obtained by a basic detection method shows that VNC identification can be greatly improved by using linguistic information, as a large number of additional occurrences are detected with high precision.
Analyzing Gender Bias in Student Evaluations (2016)

University students in the United States are routinely asked to provide feedback on the quality of the instruction they have received. Such feedback is widely used by university administrators to evaluate teaching ability, despite growing evidence that students assign lower numerical scores to women and people of color, regardless of the actual quality of instruction. In this paper, we analyze students' written comments on faculty evaluation forms spanning eight years and five STEM disciplines in order to determine whether open-ended comments reflect these same biases. First, we apply sentiment analysis techniques to the corpus of comments to determine the overall affect of each comment. We then use this information, in combination with other features, to explore whether there is bias in how students describe their instructors. We show that while the gender of the evaluated instructor does not seem to affect students' expressed level of overall satisfaction with their instruction, it does strongly influence the language that they use to describe their instructors and their experience in class.
Adverse Drug Reaction Classification With Deep Neural Networks (2016)

We study the problem of detecting sentences describing adverse drug reactions (ADRs) and frame the problem as binary classification. We investigate different neural network (NN) architectures for ADR classification. In particular, we propose two new neural network models, Convolutional Recurrent Neural Network (CRNN) by concatenating convolutional neural networks with recurrent neural networks, and Convolutional Neural Network with Attention (CNNA) by adding attention weights into convolutional neural networks. We evaluate various NN architectures on a Twitter dataset containing informal language and an Adverse Drug Effects (ADE) dataset constructed by sampling from MEDLINE case reports. Experimental results show that all the NN architectures outperform the traditional maximum entropy classifiers trained from n-grams with different weighting strategies considerably on both datasets. On the Twitter dataset, all the NN architectures perform similarly. But on the ADE dataset, CNN performs better than other more complex CNN variants. Nevertheless, CNNA allows the visualisation of attention weights of words when making classification decisions and hence is more appropriate for the extraction of word subsequences describing ADRs.
Chinese Preposition Selection for Grammatical Error Diagnosis (2016)

Misuse of Chinese prepositions is one of common word usage errors in grammatical error diagnosis. In this paper, we adopt the Chinese Gigaword corpus and HSK corpus as L1 and L2 corpora, respectively. We explore gated recurrent neural network model (GRU), and an ensemble of GRU model and maximum entropy language model (GRU-ME) to select the best preposition from 43 candidates for each test sentence. The experimental results show the advantage of the GRU models over simple RNN and n-gram models. We further analyze the effectiveness of linguistic information such as word boundary and part-of-speech tag in this task.