yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Multilingual Whispers: Generating Paraphrases with Translation
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Naturally occurring paraphrase data, such as multiple news stories about the same event, is a useful but rare resource. This paper compares translation-based paraphrase gathering using human, automatic, or hybrid techniques to monolingual paraphrasing by experts and non-experts. We gather translations, paraphrases, and empirical human quality assessments of these approaches. Neural machine translation techniques, especially when pivoting through related languages, provide a relatively robust source of paraphrases with diversity comparable to expert human paraphrases. Surprisingly, human translators do not reliably outperform neural systems. The resulting data release will not only be a useful test set, but will also allow additional explorations in translation and paraphrase quality assessments and relationships.
Title: Personalizing Grammatical Error Correction: Adaptation to Proficiency Level and L1
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Grammar error correction (GEC) systems have become ubiquitous in a variety of software applications, and have started to approach human-level performance for some datasets. However, very little is known about how to efficiently personalize these systems to the user’s characteristics, such as their proficiency level and first language, or to emerging domains of text. We present the first results on adapting a general purpose neural GEC system to both the proficiency level and the first language of a writer, using only a few thousand annotated sentences. Our study is the broadest of its kind, covering five proficiency levels and twelve different languages, and comparing three different adaptation scenarios: adapting to the proficiency level only, to the first language only, or to both aspects simultaneously. We show that tailoring to both scenarios achieves the largest performance improvement (3.6 F0.5) relative to a strong baseline.
Title: Exploiting BERT for End-to-End Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the modeling power of contextualized embeddings from pre-trained language models, e.g. BERT, on the E2E-ABSA task. Specifically, we build a series of simple yet insightful neural baselines to deal with E2E-ABSA. The experimental results show that even with a simple linear classification layer, our BERT-based architecture can outperform state-of-the-art works. Besides, we also standardize the comparative study by consistently utilizing a hold-out validation dataset for model selection, which is largely ignored by previous works. Therefore, our work can serve as a BERT-based benchmark for E2E-ABSA.
Title: Training on Synthetic Noise Improves Robustness to Natural Noise in Machine Translation
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Contemporary machine translation systems achieve greater coverage by applying subword models such as BPE and character-level CNNs, but these methods are highly sensitive to orthographical variations such as spelling mistakes. We show how training on a mild amount of random synthetic noise can dramatically improve robustness to these variations, without diminishing performance on clean text. We focus on translation performance on natural typos, and show that robustness to such noise can be achieved using a balanced diet of simple synthetic noises at training time, without access to the natural noise data or distribution.
Title: Character-Based Models for Adversarial Phone Extraction: Preventing Human Sex Trafficking
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Illicit activity on the Web often uses noisy text to obscure information between client and seller, such as the seller’s phone number. This presents an interesting challenge to language understanding systems; how do we model adversarial noise in a text extraction system? This paper addresses the sex trafficking domain, and proposes some of the first neural network architectures to learn and extract phone numbers from noisy text. We create a new adversarial advertisement dataset, propose several RNN-based models to solve the problem, and most notably propose a visual character language model to interpret unseen unicode characters. We train a CRF jointly with a CNN to improve number recognition by 89% over just a CRF. Through data augmentation in this unique model, we present the first results on characters never seen in training.
Title: Tkol, Httt, and r/radiohead: High Affinity Terms in Reddit Communities
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Language is an important marker of a cultural group, large or small. One aspect of language variation between communities is the employment of highly specialized terms with unique significance to the group. We study these high affinity terms across a wide variety of communities by leveraging the rich diversity of Reddit.com. We provide a systematic exploration of high affinity terms, the often rapid semantic shifts they undergo, and their relationship to subreddit characteristics across 2600 diverse subreddits. Our results show that high affinity terms are effective signals of loyal communities, they undergo more semantic shift than low affinity terms, and that they are partial barrier to entry for new users. We conclude that Reddit is a robust and valuable data source for testing further theories about high affinity terms across communities.
Title: Large Scale Question Paraphrase Retrieval with Smoothed Deep Metric Learning
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: The goal of a Question Paraphrase Retrieval (QPR) system is to retrieve equivalent questions that result in the same answer as the original question. Such a system can be used to understand and answer rare and noisy reformulations of common questions by mapping them to a set of canonical forms. This has large-scale applications for community Question Answering (cQA) and open-domain spoken language question answering systems. In this paper we describe a new QPR system implemented as a Neural Information Retrieval (NIR) system consisting of a neural network sentence encoder and an approximate k-Nearest Neighbour index for efficient vector retrieval. We also describe our mechanism to generate an annotated dataset for question paraphrase retrieval experiments automatically from question-answer logs via distant supervision. We show that the standard loss function in NIR, triplet loss, does not perform well with noisy labels. We propose smoothed deep metric loss (SDML) and with our experiments on two QPR datasets we show that it significantly outperforms triplet loss in the noisy label setting.
Title: Hey Siri. Ok Google. Alexa: A topic modeling of user reviews for smart speakers
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: User reviews provide a significant source of information for companies to understand their market and audience. In order to discover broad trends in this source, researchers have typically used topic models such as Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). However, while there are metrics to choose the “best” number of topics, it is not clear whether the resulting topics can also provide in-depth, actionable product analysis. Our paper examines this issue by analyzing user reviews from the Best Buy US website for smart speakers. Using coherence scores to choose topics, we test whether the results help us to understand user interests and concerns. We find that while coherence scores are a good starting point to identify a number of topics, it still requires manual adaptation based on domain knowledge to provide market insights. We show that the resulting dimensions capture brand performance and differences, and differentiate the market into two distinct groups with different properties.
Title: Predicting Algorithm Classes for Programming Word Problems
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We introduce the task of algorithm class prediction for programming word problems. A programming word problem is a problem written in natural language, which can be solved using an algorithm or a program. We define classes of various programming word problems which correspond to the class of algorithms required to solve the problem. We present four new datasets for this task, two multiclass datasets with 550 and 1159 problems each and two multilabel datasets having 3737 and 3960 problems each. We pose the problem as a text classification problem and train neural network and non-neural network based models on this task. Our best performing classifier gets an accuracy of 62.7 percent for the multiclass case on the five class classification dataset, Codeforces Multiclass-5 (CFMC5). We also do some human-level analysis and compare human performance with that of our text classification models. Our best classifier has an accuracy only 9 percent lower than that of a human on this task. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first reported results on such a task. We make our code and datasets publicly available.
Title: Automatic identification of writers’ intentions: Comparing different methods for predicting relationship goals in online dating profile texts
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Psychologically motivated, lexicon-based text analysis methods such as LIWC (Pennebaker et al., 2015) have been criticized by computational linguists for their lack of adaptability, but they have not often been systematically compared with either human evaluations or machine learning approaches. The goal of the current study was to assess the effectiveness and predictive ability of LIWC on a relationship goal classification task. In this paper, we compared the outcomes of (1) LIWC, (2) machine learning, and (3) a human baseline. A newly collected corpus of online dating profile texts (a genre not explored before in the ACL anthology) was used, accompanied by the profile writers’ self-selected relationship goal (long-term versus date). These three approaches were tested by comparing their performance on identifying both the intended relationship goal and content-related text labels. Results show that LIWC and machine learning models correlate with human evaluations in terms of content-related labels. LIWC’s content-related labels corresponded more strongly to humans than those of the classifier. Moreover, all approaches were similarly accurate in predicting the relationship goal.
Title: Contextualized Word Representations from Distant Supervision with and for NER
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: We describe a special type of deep contextualized word representation that is learned from distant supervision annotations and dedicated to named entity recognition. Our extensive experiments on 7 datasets show systematic gains across all domains over strong baselines, and demonstrate that our representation is complementary to previously proposed embeddings. We report new state-of-the-art results on CONLL and ONTONOTES datasets.
Title: Extract, Transform and Filling: A Pipeline Model for Question Paraphrasing based on Template
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Question paraphrasing aims to restate a given question with different expressions but keep the original meaning. Recent approaches are mostly based on neural networks following a sequence-to-sequence fashion, however, these models tend to generate unpredictable results. To overcome this drawback, we propose a pipeline model based on templates. It follows three steps, a) identifies template from the input question, b) retrieves candidate templates, c) fills candidate templates with original topic words. Experiment results on two self-constructed datasets show that our model outperforms the sequence-to-sequence model in a large margin and the advantage is more promising when the size of training sample is small.
Title: An In-depth Analysis of the Effect of Lexical Normalization on the Dependency Parsing of Social Media
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: Existing natural language processing systems have often been designed with standard texts in mind. However, when these tools are used on the substantially different texts from social media, their performance drops dramatically. One solution is to translate social media data to standard language before processing, this is also called normalization. It is well-known that this improves performance for many natural language processing tasks on social media data. However, little is known about which types of normalization replacements have the most effect. Furthermore, it is unknown what the weaknesses of existing lexical normalization systems are in an extrinsic setting. In this paper, we analyze the effect of manual as well as automatic lexical normalization for dependency parsing. After our analysis, we conclude that for most categories, automatic normalization scores close to manually annotated normalization and that small annotation differences are important to take into consideration when exploiting normalization in a pipeline setup.
Title: Who wrote this book? A challenge for e-commerce
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Modern e-commerce catalogs contain millions of references, associated with textual and visual information that is of paramount importance for the products to be found via search or browsing. Of particular significance is the book category, where the author name(s) field poses a significant challenge. Indeed, books written by a given author might be listed with different authors’ names due to abbreviations, spelling variants and mistakes, among others. To solve this problem at scale, we design a composite system involving open data sources for books, as well as deep learning components, such as approximate match with Siamese networks and name correction with sequence-to-sequence networks. We evaluate this approach on product data from the e-commerce website Rakuten France, and find that the top proposal of the system is the normalized author name with 72% accuracy.
Title: Mining Tweets that refer to TV programs with Deep Neural Networks
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: The automatic analysis of expressions of opinion has been well studied in the opinion mining area, but a remaining problem is robustness for user-generated texts. Although consumer-generated texts are valuable since they contain a great number and wide variety of user evaluations, spelling inconsistency and the variety of expressions make analysis difficult. In order to tackle such situations, we applied a model that is reported to handle context in many natural language processing areas, to the problem of extracting references to the opinion target from text. Experiments on tweets that refer to television programs show that the model can extract such references with more than 90% accuracy.
Title: Normalising Non-standardised Orthography in Algerian Code-switched User-generated Data
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We work with Algerian, an under-resourced non-standardised Arabic variety, for which we compile a new parallel corpus consisting of user-generated textual data matched with normalised and corrected human annotations following data-driven and our linguistically motivated standard. We use an end-to-end deep neural model designed to deal with context-dependent spelling correction and normalisation. Results indicate that a model with two CNN sub-network encoders and an LSTM decoder performs the best, and that word context matters. Additionally, pre-processing data token-by-token with an edit-distance based aligner significantly improves the performance. We get promising results for the spelling correction and normalisation, as a pre-processing step for downstream tasks, on detecting binary Semantic Textual Similarity.
Title: Dialect Text Normalization to Normative Standard Finnish
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: We compare different LSTMs and transformer models in terms of their effectiveness in normalizing dialectal Finnish into the normative standard Finnish. As dialect is the common way of communication for people online in Finnish, such a normalization is a necessary step to improve the accuracy of the existing Finnish NLP tools that are tailored for normative Finnish text. We work on a corpus consisting of dialectal data of 23 distinct Finnish dialects. The best functioning BRNN approach lowers the initial word error rate of the corpus from 52.89 to 5.73.
Title: A Cross-Topic Method for Supervised Relevance Classification
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: In relevance classification, we hope to judge whether some utterances expressed on a topic are relevant or not. A usual method is to train a specific classifier respectively for each topic. However, in that way, it easily causes an underfitting problem in supervised learning model, since annotated data can be insufficient for every single topic. In this paper, we explore the common features beyond different topics and propose our cross-topic relevance embedding aggregation methodology (CREAM) that can expand the range of training data and apply what has been learned from source topics to a target topic. In our experiment, we show that our proposal could capture common features within a small amount of annotated data and improve the performance of relevance classification compared with other baselines.
Title: Exploring Multilingual Syntactic Sentence Representations
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Abstract: We study methods for learning sentence embeddings with syntactic structure. We focus on methods of learning syntactic sentence-embeddings by using a multilingual parallel-corpus augmented by Universal Parts-of-Speech tags. We evaluate the quality of the learned embeddings by examining sentence-level nearest neighbours and functional dissimilarity in the embedding space. We also evaluate the ability of the method to learn syntactic sentence-embeddings for low-resource languages and demonstrate strong evidence for transfer learning. Our results show that syntactic sentence-embeddings can be learned while using less training data, fewer model parameters, and resulting in better evaluation metrics than state-of-the-art language models.
Title: FASPell: A Fast, Adaptable, Simple, Powerful Chinese Spell Checker Based On DAE-Decoder Paradigm
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We propose a Chinese spell checker – FASPell based on a new paradigm which consists of a denoising autoencoder (DAE) and a decoder. In comparison with previous state-of-the-art models, the new paradigm allows our spell checker to be Faster in computation, readily Adaptable to both simplified and traditional Chinese texts produced by either humans or machines, and to require much Simpler structure to be as much Powerful in both error detection and correction. These four achievements are made possible because the new paradigm circumvents two bottlenecks. First, the DAE curtails the amount of Chinese spell checking data needed for supervised learning (to <10k sentences) by leveraging the power of unsupervisedly pre-trained masked language model as in BERT, XLNet, MASS etc. Second, the decoder helps to eliminate the use of confusion set that is deficient in flexibility and sufficiency of utilizing the salient feature of Chinese character similarity.
Title: Latent semantic network induction in the context of linked example senses
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: The Princeton WordNet is a powerful tool for studying language and developing natural language processing algorithms. With significant work developing it further, one line considers its extension through aligning its expert-annotated structure with other lexical resources. In contrast, this work explores a completely data-driven approach to network construction, forming a wordnet using the entirety of the open-source, noisy, user-annotated dictionary, Wiktionary. Comparing baselines to WordNet, we find compelling evidence that our network induction process constructs a network with useful semantic structure. With thousands of semantically-linked examples that demonstrate sense usage from basic lemmas to multiword expressions (MWEs), we believe this work motivates future research.
Title: SmokEng: Towards Fine-grained Classification of Tobacco-related Social Media Text
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Contemporary datasets on tobacco consumption focus on one of two topics, either public health mentions and disease surveillance, or sentiment analysis on topical tobacco products and services. However, two primary considerations are not accounted for, the language of the demographic affected and a combination of the topics mentioned above in a fine-grained classification mechanism. In this paper, we create a dataset of 3144 tweets, which are selected based on the presence of colloquial slang related to smoking and analyze it based on the semantics of the tweet. Each class is created and annotated based on the content of the tweets such that further hierarchical methods can be easily applied. Further, we prove the efficacy of standard text classification methods on this dataset, by designing experiments which do both binary as well as multi-class classification. Our experiments tackle the identification of either a specific topic (such as tobacco product promotion), a general mention (cigarettes and related products) or a more fine-grained classification. This methodology paves the way for further analysis, such as understanding sentiment or style, which makes this dataset a vital contribution to both disease surveillance and tobacco use research.
Title: Modelling Uncertainty in Collaborative Document Quality Assessment
Venue: EMNLP (2019)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: In the context of document quality assessment, previous work has mainly focused on predicting the quality of a document relative to a putative gold standard, without paying attention to the subjectivity of this task. To imitate people’s disagreement over inherently subjective tasks such as rating the quality of a Wikipedia article, a document quality assessment system should provide not only a prediction of the article quality but also the uncertainty over its predictions. This motivates us to measure the uncertainty in document quality predictions, in addition to making the label prediction. Experimental results show that both Gaussian processes (GPs) and random forests (RFs) can yield competitive results in predicting the quality of Wikipedia articles, while providing an estimate of uncertainty when there is inconsistency in the quality labels from the Wikipedia contributors. We additionally evaluate our methods in the context of a semi-automated document quality class assignment decision-making process, where there is asymmetric risk associated with overestimates and underestimates of document quality. Our experiments suggest that GPs provide more reliable estimates in this context.