ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Attention-over-Attention Neural Networks for Reading Comprehension (2017)

Cloze-style reading comprehension is a representative problem in mining relationship between document and query. In this paper, we present a simple but novel model called attention-over-attention reader for better solving cloze-style reading comprehension task. The proposed model aims to place another attention mechanism over the document-level attention and induces {\textquotedblleft}attended attention{\textquotedblright} for final answer predictions. One advantage of our model is that it is simpler than related works while giving excellent performance. In addition to the primary model, we also propose an N-best re-ranking strategy to double check the validity of the candidates and further improve the performance. Experimental results show that the proposed methods significantly outperform various state-of-the-art systems by a large margin in public datasets, such as CNN and Children`s Book Test.
Alignment at Work: Using Language to Distinguish the Internalization and Self-Regulation Components of Cultural Fit in Organizations (2017)

Cultural fit is widely believed to affect the success of individuals and the groups to which they belong. Yet it remains an elusive, poorly measured construct. Recent research draws on computational linguistics to measure cultural fit but overlooks asymmetries in cultural adaptation. By contrast, we develop a directed, dynamic measure of cultural fit based on linguistic alignment, which estimates the influence of one person`s word use on another`s and distinguishes between two enculturation mechanisms: internalization and self-regulation. We use this measure to trace employees' enculturation trajectories over a large, multi-year corpus of corporate emails and find that patterns of alignment in the first six months of employment are predictive of individuals' downstream outcomes, especially involuntary exit. Further predictive analyses suggest referential alignment plays an overlooked role in linguistic alignment.
Representations of language in a model of visually grounded speech signal (2017)

We present a visually grounded model of speech perception which projects spoken utterances and images to a joint semantic space. We use a multi-layer recurrent highway network to model the temporal nature of spoken speech, and show that it learns to extract both form and meaning-based linguistic knowledge from the input signal. We carry out an in-depth analysis of the representations used by different components of the trained model and show that encoding of semantic aspects tends to become richer as we go up the hierarchy of layers, whereas encoding of form-related aspects of the language input tends to initially increase and then plateau or decrease.
Spectral Analysis of Information Density in Dialogue Predicts Collaborative Task Performance (2017)

We propose a perspective on dialogue that focuses on relative information contributions of conversation partners as a key to successful communication. We predict the success of collaborative task in English and Danish corpora of task-oriented dialogue. Two features are extracted from the frequency domain representations of the lexical entropy series of each interlocutor, power spectrum overlap (PSO) and relative phase (RP). We find that PSO is a negative predictor of task success, while RP is a positive one. An SVM with these features significantly improved on previous task success prediction models. Our findings suggest that the strategic distribution of information density between interlocutors is relevant to task success.
Affect-LM: A Neural Language Model for Customizable Affective Text Generation (2017)

Human verbal communication includes affective messages which are conveyed through use of emotionally colored words. There has been a lot of research effort in this direction but the problem of integrating state-of-the-art neural language models with affective information remains an area ripe for exploration. In this paper, we propose an extension to an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) language model for generation of conversational text, conditioned on affect categories. Our proposed model, Affect-LM enables us to customize the degree of emotional content in generated sentences through an additional design parameter. Perception studies conducted using Amazon Mechanical Turk show that Affect-LM can generate naturally looking emotional sentences without sacrificing grammatical correctness. Affect-LM also learns affect-discriminative word representations, and perplexity experiments show that additional affective information in conversational text can improve language model prediction.
Domain Attention with an Ensemble of Experts (2017)

An important problem in domain adaptation is to quickly generalize to a new domain with limited supervision given K existing domains. One approach is to retrain a global model across all K + 1 domains using standard techniques, for instance Daum{\'e} III (2009). However, it is desirable to adapt without having to re-estimate a global model from scratch each time a new domain with potentially new intents and slots is added. We describe a solution based on attending an ensemble of domain experts. We assume K domain specific intent and slot models trained on respective domains. When given domain K + 1, our model uses a weighted combination of the K domain experts' feedback along with its own opinion to make predictions on the new domain. In experiments, the model significantly outperforms baselines that do not use domain adaptation and also performs better than the full retraining approach.
Learning Discourse-level Diversity for Neural Dialog Models using Conditional Variational Autoencoders (2017)

While recent neural encoder-decoder models have shown great promise in modeling open-domain conversations, they often generate dull and generic responses. Unlike past work that has focused on diversifying the output of the decoder from word-level to alleviate this problem, we present a novel framework based on conditional variational autoencoders that capture the discourse-level diversity in the encoder. Our model uses latent variables to learn a distribution over potential conversational intents and generates diverse responses using only greedy decoders. We have further developed a novel variant that is integrated with linguistic prior knowledge for better performance. Finally, the training procedure is improved through introducing a bag-of-word loss. Our proposed models have been validated to generate significantly more diverse responses than baseline approaches and exhibit competence of discourse-level decision-making.
Hybrid Code Networks: practical and efficient end-to-end dialog control with supervised and reinforcement learning (2017)

End-to-end learning of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) is an attractive solution for dialog systems; however, current techniques are data-intensive and require thousands of dialogs to learn simple behaviors. We introduce Hybrid Code Networks (HCNs), which combine an RNN with domain-specific knowledge encoded as software and system action templates. Compared to existing end-to-end approaches, HCNs considerably reduce the amount of training data required, while retaining the key benefit of inferring a latent representation of dialog state. In addition, HCNs can be optimized with supervised learning, reinforcement learning, or a mixture of both. HCNs attain state-of-the-art performance on the bAbI dialog dataset (Bordes and Weston, 2016), and outperform two commercially deployed customer-facing dialog systems at our company.
Generating Contrastive Referring Expressions (2017)

The referring expressions (REs) produced by a natural language generation (NLG) system can be misunderstood by the hearer, even when they are semantically correct. In an interactive setting, the NLG system can try to recognize such misunderstandings and correct them. We present an algorithm for generating corrective REs that use contrastive focus ({\textquotedblleft}no, the BLUE button{\textquotedblright}) to emphasize the information the hearer most likely misunderstood. We show empirically that these contrastive REs are preferred over REs without contrast marking.
Modeling Source Syntax for Neural Machine Translation (2017)

Even though a linguistics-free sequence to sequence model in neural machine translation (NMT) has certain capability of implicitly learning syntactic information of source sentences, this paper shows that source syntax can be explicitly incorporated into NMT effectively to provide further improvements. Specifically, we linearize parse trees of source sentences to obtain structural label sequences. On the basis, we propose three different sorts of encoders to incorporate source syntax into NMT: 1) Parallel RNN encoder that learns word and label annotation vectors parallelly; 2) Hierarchical RNN encoder that learns word and label annotation vectors in a two-level hierarchy; and 3) Mixed RNN encoder that stitchingly learns word and label annotation vectors over sequences where words and labels are mixed. Experimentation on Chinese-to-English translation demonstrates that all the three proposed syntactic encoders are able to improve translation accuracy. It is interesting to note that the simplest RNN encoder, i.e., Mixed RNN encoder yields the best performance with an significant improvement of 1.4 BLEU points. Moreover, an in-depth analysis from several perspectives is provided to reveal how source syntax benefits NMT.
Sequence-to-Dependency Neural Machine Translation (2017)

Nowadays a typical Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model generates translations from left to right as a linear sequence, during which latent syntactic structures of the target sentences are not explicitly concerned. Inspired by the success of using syntactic knowledge of target language for improving statistical machine translation, in this paper we propose a novel Sequence-to-Dependency Neural Machine Translation (SD-NMT) method, in which the target word sequence and its corresponding dependency structure are jointly constructed and modeled, and this structure is used as context to facilitate word generations. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on Chinese-English and Japanese-English translation tasks.
Detect Rumors in Microblog Posts Using Propagation Structure via Kernel Learning (2017)

How fake news goes viral via social media? How does its propagation pattern differ from real stories? In this paper, we attempt to address the problem of identifying rumors, i.e., fake information, out of microblog posts based on their propagation structure. We firstly model microblog posts diffusion with propagation trees, which provide valuable clues on how an original message is transmitted and developed over time. We then propose a kernel-based method called Propagation Tree Kernel, which captures high-order patterns differentiating different types of rumors by evaluating the similarities between their propagation tree structures. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed kernel-based approach can detect rumors more quickly and accurately than state-of-the-art rumor detection models.
EmoNet: Fine-Grained Emotion Detection with Gated Recurrent Neural Networks (2017)

Accurate detection of emotion from natural language has applications ranging from building emotional chatbots to better understanding individuals and their lives. However, progress on emotion detection has been hampered by the absence of large labeled datasets. In this work, we build a very large dataset for fine-grained emotions and develop deep learning models on it. We achieve a new state-of-the-art on 24 fine-grained types of emotions (with an average accuracy of 87.58{\%}). We also extend the task beyond emotion types to model Robert Plutick`s 8 primary emotion dimensions, acquiring a superior accuracy of 95.68{\%}.
Beyond Binary Labels: Political Ideology Prediction of Twitter Users (2017)

Automatic political orientation prediction from social media posts has to date proven successful only in distinguishing between publicly declared liberals and conservatives in the US. This study examines users' political ideology using a seven-point scale which enables us to identify politically moderate and neutral users {--} groups which are of particular interest to political scientists and pollsters. Using a novel data set with political ideology labels self-reported through surveys, our goal is two-fold: a) to characterize the groups of politically engaged users through language use on Twitter; b) to build a fine-grained model that predicts political ideology of unseen users. Our results identify differences in both political leaning and engagement and the extent to which each group tweets using political keywords. Finally, we demonstrate how to improve ideology prediction accuracy by exploiting the relationships between the user groups.
Leveraging Behavioral and Social Information for Weakly Supervised Collective Classification of Political Discourse on Twitter (2017)

Framing is a political strategy in which politicians carefully word their statements in order to control public perception of issues. Previous works exploring political framing typically analyze frame usage in longer texts, such as congressional speeches. We present a collection of weakly supervised models which harness collective classification to predict the frames used in political discourse on the microblogging platform, Twitter. Our global probabilistic models show that by combining both lexical features of tweets and network-based behavioral features of Twitter, we are able to increase the average, unsupervised F1 score by 21.52 points over a lexical baseline alone.
A Nested Attention Neural Hybrid Model for Grammatical Error Correction (2017)

Grammatical error correction (GEC) systems strive to correct both global errors inword order and usage, and local errors inspelling and inflection. Further developing upon recent work on neural machine translation, we propose a new hybrid neural model with nested attention layers for GEC.Experiments show that the new model can effectively correct errors of both types by incorporating word and character-level information, and that the model significantly outperforms previous neural models for GEC as measured on the standard CoNLL-14 benchmark dataset. Further analysis also shows that the superiority of the proposed model can be largely attributed to the use of the nested attention mechanism, which has proven particularly effective incorrecting local errors that involve small edits in orthography.
TextFlow: A Text Similarity Measure based on Continuous Sequences (2017)

Text similarity measures are used in multiple tasks such as plagiarism detection, information ranking and recognition of paraphrases and textual entailment. While recent advances in deep learning highlighted the relevance of sequential models in natural language generation, existing similarity measures do not fully exploit the sequential nature of language. Examples of such similarity measures include n-grams and skip-grams overlap which rely on distinct slices of the input texts. In this paper we present a novel text similarity measure inspired from a common representation in DNA sequence alignment algorithms. The new measure, called TextFlow, represents input text pairs as continuous curves and uses both the actual position of the words and sequence matching to compute the similarity value. Our experiments on 8 different datasets show very encouraging results in paraphrase detection, textual entailment recognition and ranking relevance.
Friendships, Rivalries, and Trysts: Characterizing Relations between Ideas in Texts (2017)

Understanding how ideas relate to each other is a fundamental question in many domains, ranging from intellectual history to public communication. Because ideas are naturally embedded in texts, we propose the first framework to systematically characterize the relations between ideas based on their occurrence in a corpus of documents, independent of how these ideas are represented. Combining two statistics{---}cooccurrence within documents and prevalence correlation over time{---}our approach reveals a number of different ways in which ideas can cooperate and compete. For instance, two ideas can closely track each other`s prevalence over time, and yet rarely cooccur, almost like a {\textquotedblleft}cold war{\textquotedblright} scenario. We observe that pairwise cooccurrence and prevalence correlation exhibit different distributions. We further demonstrate that our approach is able to uncover intriguing relations between ideas through in-depth case studies on news articles and research papers.
Polish evaluation dataset for compositional distributional semantics models (2017)

The paper presents a procedure of building an evaluation dataset. for the validation of compositional distributional semantics models estimated for languages other than English. The procedure generally builds on steps designed to assemble the SICK corpus, which contains pairs of English sentences annotated for semantic relatedness and entailment, because we aim at building a comparable dataset. However, the implementation of particular building steps significantly differs from the original SICK design assumptions, which is caused by both lack of necessary extraneous resources for an investigated language and the need for language-specific transformation rules. The designed procedure is verified on Polish, a fusional language with a relatively free word order, and contributes to building a Polish evaluation dataset. The resource consists of 10K sentence pairs which are human-annotated for semantic relatedness and entailment. The dataset may be used for the evaluation of compositional distributional semantics models of Polish.
Automatic Annotation and Evaluation of Error Types for Grammatical Error Correction (2017)

Until now, error type performance for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) systems could only be measured in terms of recall because system output is not annotated. To overcome this problem, we introduce ERRANT, a grammatical ERRor ANnotation Toolkit designed to automatically extract edits from parallel original and corrected sentences and classify them according to a new, dataset-agnostic, rule-based framework. This not only facilitates error type evaluation at different levels of granularity, but can also be used to reduce annotator workload and standardise existing GEC datasets. Human experts rated the automatic edits as {\textquotedblleft}Good{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}Acceptable{\textquotedblright} in at least 95{\%} of cases, so we applied ERRANT to the system output of the CoNLL-2014 shared task to carry out a detailed error type analysis for the first time.
Evaluation Metrics for Machine Reading Comprehension: Prerequisite Skills and Readability (2017)

Knowing the quality of reading comprehension (RC) datasets is important for the development of natural-language understanding systems. In this study, two classes of metrics were adopted for evaluating RC datasets: prerequisite skills and readability. We applied these classes to six existing datasets, including MCTest and SQuAD, and highlighted the characteristics of the datasets according to each metric and the correlation between the two classes. Our dataset analysis suggests that the readability of RC datasets does not directly affect the question difficulty and that it is possible to create an RC dataset that is easy to read but difficult to answer.
A Minimal Span-Based Neural Constituency Parser (2017)

In this work, we present a minimal neural model for constituency parsing based on independent scoring of labels and spans. We show that this model is not only compatible with classical dynamic programming techniques, but also admits a novel greedy top-down inference algorithm based on recursive partitioning of the input. We demonstrate empirically that both prediction schemes are competitive with recent work, and when combined with basic extensions to the scoring model are capable of achieving state-of-the-art single-model performance on the Penn Treebank (91.79 F1) and strong performance on the French Treebank (82.23 F1).
Semantic Dependency Parsing via Book Embedding (2017)

We model a dependency graph as a book, a particular kind of topological space, for semantic dependency parsing. The spine of the book is made up of a sequence of words, and each page contains a subset of noncrossing arcs. To build a semantic graph for a given sentence, we design new Maximum Subgraph algorithms to generate noncrossing graphs on each page, and a Lagrangian Relaxation-based algorithm tocombine pages into a book. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the bookembedding framework across a wide range of conditions. Our parser obtains comparable results with a state-of-the-art transition-based parser.
Neural Word Segmentation with Rich Pretraining (2017)

Neural word segmentation research has benefited from large-scale raw texts by leveraging them for pretraining character and word embeddings. On the other hand, statistical segmentation research has exploited richer sources of external information, such as punctuation, automatic segmentation and POS. We investigate the effectiveness of a range of external training sources for neural word segmentation by building a modular segmentation model, pretraining the most important submodule using rich external sources. Results show that such pretraining significantly improves the model, leading to accuracies competitive to the best methods on six benchmarks.
Neural Machine Translation via Binary Code Prediction (2017)

In this paper, we propose a new method for calculating the output layer in neural machine translation systems. The method is based on predicting a binary code for each word and can reduce computation time/memory requirements of the output layer to be logarithmic in vocabulary size in the best case. In addition, we also introduce two advanced approaches to improve the robustness of the proposed model: using error-correcting codes and combining softmax and binary codes. Experiments on two English-Japanese bidirectional translation tasks show proposed models achieve BLEU scores that approach the softmax, while reducing memory usage to the order of less than 1/10 and improving decoding speed on CPUs by x5 to x10.
What do Neural Machine Translation Models Learn about Morphology? (2017)

Neural machine translation (MT) models obtain state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a simple, end-to-end architecture. However, little is known about what these models learn about source and target languages during the training process. In this work, we analyze the representations learned by neural MT models at various levels of granularity and empirically evaluate the quality of the representations for learning morphology through extrinsic part-of-speech and morphological tagging tasks. We conduct a thorough investigation along several parameters: word-based vs. character-based representations, depth of the encoding layer, the identity of the target language, and encoder vs. decoder representations. Our data-driven, quantitative evaluation sheds light on important aspects in the neural MT system and its ability to capture word structure.
Context-Dependent Sentiment Analysis in User-Generated Videos (2017)

Multimodal sentiment analysis is a developing area of research, which involves the identification of sentiments in videos. Current research considers utterances as independent entities, i.e., ignores the interdependencies and relations among the utterances of a video. In this paper, we propose a LSTM-based model that enables utterances to capture contextual information from their surroundings in the same video, thus aiding the classification process. Our method shows 5-10{\%} performance improvement over the state of the art and high robustness to generalizability.