yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: We present EventPlus, a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction. Event information, especially event temporal knowledge, is a type of common sense knowledge that helps people understand how stories evolve and provides predictive hints for future events. EventPlus as the first comprehensive temporal event understanding pipeline provides a convenient tool for users to quickly obtain annotations about events and their temporal information for any user-provided document. Furthermore, we show EventPlus can be easily adapted to other domains (e.g., biomedical domain). We make EventPlus publicly available to facilitate event-related information extraction and downstream applications.
Title: COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in literature to understand the disease mechanism and the related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities, relations and events) from scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence. All of the data, KGs, reports.
Title: Multifaceted Domain-Specific Document Embeddings
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Current document embeddings require large training corpora but fail to learn high-quality representations when confronted with a small number of domain-specific documents and rare terms. Further, they transform each document into a single embedding vector, making it hard to capture different notions of document similarity or explain why two documents are considered similar. In this work, we propose our Faceted Domain Encoder, a novel approach to learn multifaceted embeddings for domain-specific documents. It is based on a Siamese neural network architecture and leverages knowledge graphs to further enhance the embeddings even if only a few training samples are available. The model identifies different types of domain knowledge and encodes them into separate dimensions of the embedding, thereby enabling multiple ways of finding and comparing related documents in the vector space. We evaluate our approach on two benchmark datasets and find that it achieves the same embedding quality as state-of-the-art models while requiring only a tiny fraction of their training data. An interactive demo, our source code, and the evaluation datasets are available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/multifaceted-embeddings and a screencast is available on YouTube: https://youtu.be/HHcsX2clEwg
Title: Improving Evidence Retrieval for Automated Explainable Fact-Checking
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Automated fact-checking on a large-scale is a challenging task that has not been studied systematically until recently. Large noisy document collections like the web or news articles make the task more difficult. We describe a three-stage automated fact-checking system, named Quin+, using evidence retrieval and selection methods. We demonstrate that using dense passage representations leads to much higher evidence recall in a noisy setting. We also propose two sentence selection approaches, an embedding-based selection using a dense retrieval model, and a sequence labeling approach for context-aware selection. Quin+ is able to verify open-domain claims using results from web search engines.
Title: Interactive Plot Manipulation using Natural Language
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: We present an interactive Plotting Agent, a system that enables users to directly manipulate plots using natural language instructions within an interactive programming environment. The Plotting Agent maps language to plot updates. We formulate this problem as a slot-based task-oriented dialog problem, which we tackle with a sequence-to-sequence model. This plotting model while accurate in most cases, still makes errors, therefore, the system allows a feedback mode, wherein the user is presented with a top-k list of plots, among which the user can pick the desired one. From this kind of feedback, we can then, in principle, continuously learn and improve the system. Given that plotting is widely used across data-driven fields, we believe our demonstration will be of interest to both practitioners such as data scientists broadly defined, and researchers interested in natural language interfaces.
Title: ActiveAnno: General-Purpose Document-Level Annotation Tool with Active Learning Integration
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: ActiveAnno is an annotation tool focused on document-level annotation tasks developed both for industry and research settings. It is designed to be a general-purpose tool with a wide variety of use cases. It features a modern and responsive web UI for creating annotation projects, conducting annotations, adjudicating disagreements, and analyzing annotation results. ActiveAnno embeds a highly configurable and interactive user interface. The tool also integrates a RESTful API that enables integration into other software systems, including an API for machine learning integration. ActiveAnno is built with extensible design and easy deployment in mind, all to enable users to perform annotation tasks with high efficiency and high-quality annotation results.
Title: TextEssence: A Tool for Interactive Analysis of Semantic Shifts Between Corpora
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Embeddings of words and concepts capture syntactic and semantic regularities of language; however, they have seen limited use as tools to study characteristics of different corpora and how they relate to one another. We introduce TextEssence, an interactive system designed to enable comparative analysis of corpora using embeddings. TextEssence includes visual, neighbor-based, and similarity-based modes of embedding analysis in a lightweight, web-based interface. We further propose a new measure of embedding confidence based on nearest neighborhood overlap, to assist in identifying high-quality embeddings for corpus analysis. A case study on COVID-19 scientific literature illustrates the utility of the system. TextEssence can be found at https://textessence.github.io.
Title: Supporting Spanish Writers using Automated Feedback
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We present a tool that provides automated feedback to students studying Spanish writing. The feedback is given for four categories: topic development, coherence, writing conventions, and essay organization. The tool is made freely available via a Google Docs add-on. A small user study with third-level students in Mexico shows that students found the tool generally helpful and that most of them plan to continue using it as they work to improve their writing skills.
Title: Alexa Conversations: An Extensible Data-driven Approach for Building Task-oriented Dialogue Systems
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Traditional goal-oriented dialogue systems rely on various components such as natural language understanding, dialogue state tracking, policy learning and response generation. Training each component requires annotations which are hard to obtain for every new domain, limiting scalability of such systems. Similarly, rule-based dialogue systems require extensive writing and maintenance of rules and do not scale either. End-to-End dialogue systems, on the other hand, do not require module-specific annotations but need a large amount of data for training. To overcome these problems, in this demo, we present Alexa Conversations, a new approach for building goal-oriented dialogue systems that is scalable, extensible as well as data efficient. The components of this system are trained in a data-driven manner, but instead of collecting annotated conversations for training, we generate them using a novel dialogue simulator based on a few seed dialogues and specifications of APIs and entities provided by the developer. Our approach provides out-of-the-box support for natural conversational phenomenon like entity sharing across turns or users changing their mind during conversation without requiring developers to provide any such dialogue flows. We exemplify our approach using a simple pizza ordering task and showcase its value in reducing the developer burden for creating a robust experience. Finally, we evaluate our system using a typical movie ticket booking task integrated with live APIs and show that the dialogue simulator is an essential component of the system that leads to over 50% improvement in turn-level action signature prediction accuracy.
Title: RESIN: A Dockerized Schema-Guided Cross-document Cross-lingual Cross-media Information Extraction and Event Tracking System
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: We present a new information extraction system that can automatically construct temporal event graphs from a collection of news documents from multiple sources, multiple languages (English and Spanish for our experiment), and multiple data modalities (speech, text, image and video). The system advances state-of-the-art from two aspects: (1) extending from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-lingual cross-media event extraction, coreference resolution and temporal event tracking; (2) using human curated event schema library to match and enhance the extraction output. We have made the dockerlized system publicly available for research purpose at GitHub, with a demo video.
Title: MUDES: Multilingual Detection of Offensive Spans
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: The interest in offensive content identification in social media has grown substantially in recent years. Previous work has dealt mostly with post level annotations. However, identifying offensive spans is useful in many ways. To help coping with this important challenge, we present MUDES, a multilingual system to detect offensive spans in texts. MUDES features pre-trained models, a Python API for developers, and a user-friendly web-based interface. A detailed description of MUDES’ components is presented in this paper.
Title: Sampling and Filtering of Neural Machine Translation Distillation Data
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: In most of neural machine translation distillation or stealing scenarios, the highest-scoring hypothesis of the target model (teacher) is used to train a new model (student). If reference translations are also available, then better hypotheses (with respect to the references) can be oversampled and poor hypotheses either removed or undersampled. This paper explores the sampling method landscape (pruning, hypothesis oversampling and undersampling, deduplication and their combination) with English to Czech and English to German MT models using standard MT evaluation metrics. We show that careful oversampling and combination with the original data leads to better performance when compared to training only on the original or synthesized data or their direct combination.
Title: IceSum: An Icelandic Text Summarization Corpus
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: summarization
Abstract: Automatic Text Summarization (ATS) is the task of generating concise and fluent summaries from one or more documents. In this paper, we present IceSum, the first Icelandic corpus annotated with human-generated summaries. IceSum consists of 1,000 online news articles and their extractive summaries. We train and evaluate several neural network-based models on this dataset, comparing them against a selection of baseline methods. We find that an encoder-decoder model with a sequence-to-sequence based extractor obtains the best results, outperforming all baseline methods. Furthermore, we evaluate how the size of the training corpus affects the quality of the generated summaries. We release the corpus and the models with an open license.
Title: Negation typology and general representation models for cross-lingual zero-shot negation scope resolution in Russian, French, and Spanish.
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Negation is a linguistic universal that poses difficulties for cognitive and computational processing. Despite many advances in text analytics, negation resolution remains an acute and continuously researched question in Natural Language Processing. Reliable negation parsing affects results in biomedical text mining, sentiment analysis, machine translation, and many other fields. The availability of multilingual pre-trained general representation models makes it possible to experiment with negation detection in languages that lack annotated data. In this work we test the performance of two state-of-the-art contextual representation models, Multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa. We resolve negation scope by conducting zero-shot transfer between English, Spanish, French, and Russian. Our best result amounts to a token-level F1-score of 86.86% between Spanish and Russian. We correlate these results with a linguistic negation typology and lexical capacity of the models.
Title: Representations of Meaning in Neural Networks for NLP: a Thesis Proposal
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Neural networks are the state-of-the-art method of machine learning for many problems in NLP. Their success in machine translation and other NLP tasks is phenomenal, but their interpretability is challenging. We want to find out how neural networks represent meaning. In order to do this, we propose to examine the distribution of meaning in the vector space representation of words in neural networks trained for NLP tasks. Furthermore, we propose to consider various theories of meaning in the philosophy of language and to find a methodology that would enable us to connect these areas.
Title: Towards Layered Events and Schema Representations in Long Documents
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: In this thesis proposal, we explore the application of event extraction to literary texts. Considering the lengths of literary documents modeling events in different granularities may be more adequate to extract meaningful information, as individual elements contribute little to the overall semantics. We adapt the concept of schemas as sequences of events all describing a single process, connected through shared participants extending it to for multiple schemas in a document. Segmentation of event sequences into schemas is approached by modeling event sequences, on such task as the narrative cloze task, the prediction of missing events in sequences. We propose building on sequences of event embeddings to form schema embeddings, thereby summarizing sections of documents using a single representation. This approach will allow for the comparisons of different sections of documents and entire literary works. Literature is a challenging domain based on its variety of genres, yet the representation of literary content has received relatively little attention.
Title: Parallel Text Alignment and Monolingual Parallel Corpus Creation from Philosophical Texts for Text Simplification
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Text simplification is a growing field with many potential useful applications. Training text simplification algorithms generally requires a lot of annotated data, however there are not many corpora suitable for this task. We propose a new unsupervised method for aligning text based on Doc2Vec embeddings and a new alignment algorithm, capable of aligning texts at different levels. Initial evaluation shows promising results for the new approach. We used the newly developed approach to create a new monolingual parallel corpus composed of the works of English early modern philosophers and their corresponding simplified versions.
Title: Syntax-Based Attention Masking for Neural Machine Translation
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We present a simple method for extending transformers to source-side trees. We define a number of masks that limit self-attention based on relationships among tree nodes, and we allow each attention head to learn which mask or masks to use. On translation from English to various low-resource languages, and translation in both directions between English and German, our method always improves over simple linearization of the source-side parse tree and almost always improves over a sequence-to-sequence baseline, by up to +2.1 BLEU.
Title: Multi-Modal Image Captioning for the Visually Impaired
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: One of the ways blind people understand their surroundings is by clicking images and relying on descriptions generated by image-captioning systems. Current work on captioning images for the visually impaired do not use the textual data present in the image when generating captions. This problem is critical as many visual scenes contain text, and 21% of the questions asked by blind people about the images they click pertain to the text present in them. In this work, we propose altering AoANet, a state-of-the-art image-captioning system, to leverage text detected in the image as an input feature. In addition, we use a pointer-generator network to copy detected text to the caption when tokens need to be reproduced accurately. Our model outperforms AoANet on the benchmark dataset VizWiz, giving a 35% and 16.2% performance improvement on CIDEr and SPICE scores, respectively.
Title: Open-Domain Question Answering with Pre-Constructed Question Spaces
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: Open-domain question answering aims at locating the answers to user-generated questions in massive collections of documents. Retriever-readers and knowledge graph approaches are two big families of solutions to this task. A retriever-reader first applies information retrieval techniques to locate a few passages that are likely to be relevant, and then feeds the retrieved text to a neural network reader to extract the answer. Alternatively, knowledge graphs can be constructed and queried to answer users’ questions. We propose an algorithm with a novel reader-retriever design that differs from both families. Our reader-retriever first uses an offline reader to read the corpus and generate collections of all answerable questions associated with their answers, and then uses an online retriever to respond to user queries by searching the pre-constructed question spaces for answers that are most likely to be asked in the given way. We further combine one retriever-reader and two reader-retrievers into a hybrid model called R6 for the best performance. Experiments with two large-scale public datasets show that R6 achieves state-of-the-art accuracy.
Title: A Sliding-Window Approach to Automatic Creation of Meeting Minutes
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: Meeting minutes record any subject matter discussed, decisions reached and actions taken at the meeting. The importance of automatic minuting cannot be overstated. In this paper, we present a sliding window approach to automatic generation of meeting minutes. It aims at addressing issues pertaining to the nature of spoken text, including the lengthy transcript and lack of document structure, which make it difficult to identify salient content to be included in meeting minutes. Our approach combines a sliding-window approach and a neural abstractive summarizer to navigate through the raw transcript to find salient content. The approach is evaluated on transcripts of natural meeting conversations, where we compare results obtained for human transcripts and two versions of automatic transcripts and discuss how and to what extent the summarizer succeeds at capturing salient content.
Title: Exploration and Discovery of the COVID-19 Literature through Semantic Visualization
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: We propose semantic visualization as a linguistic visual analytic method. It can enable exploration and discovery over large datasets of complex networks by exploiting the semantics of the relations in them. This involves extracting information, applying parameter reduction operations, building hierarchical data representation and designing visualization. We also present the accompanying COVID-SemViz a searchable and interactive visualization system for knowledge exploration of COVID-19 data to demonstrate the application of our proposed method. In the user studies, users found that semantic visualization-powered COVID-SemViz is helpful in terms of finding relevant information and discovering unknown associations.
Title: Shuffled-token Detection for Refining Pre-trained RoBERTa
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: State-of-the-art transformer models have achieved robust performance on a variety of NLP tasks. Many of these approaches have employed domain agnostic pre-training tasks to train models that yield highly generalized sentence representations that can be fine-tuned for specific downstream tasks. We propose refining a pre-trained NLP model using the objective of detecting shuffled tokens. We use a sequential approach by starting with the pre-trained RoBERTa model and training it using our approach. Applying random shuffling strategy on the word-level, we found that our approach enables the RoBERTa model achieve better performance on 4 out of 7 GLUE tasks. Our results indicate that learning to detect shuffled tokens is a promising approach to learn more coherent sentence representations.
Title: Morphology-Aware Meta-Embeddings for Tamil
Venue: NAACL (2021)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: In this work, we explore generating morphologically enhanced word embeddings for Tamil, a highly agglutinative South Indian language with rich morphology that remains low-resource with regards to NLP tasks. We present here the first-ever word analogy dataset for Tamil, consisting of 4499 hand-curated word tetrads across 10 semantic and 13 morphological relation types. Using a rules-based segmenter to capture morphology as well as meta-embedding techniques, we train meta-embeddings that outperform existing baselines by 16% on our analogy task and appear to mitigate a previously observed trade-off between semantic and morphological accuracy.