yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: BERT Post-Training for Review Reading Comprehension and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Question-answering plays an important role in e-commerce as it allows potential customers to actively seek crucial information about products or services to help their purchase decision making. Inspired by the recent success of machine reading comprehension (MRC) on formal documents, this paper explores the potential of turning customer reviews into a large source of knowledge that can be exploited to answer user questions. We call this problem Review Reading Comprehension (RRC). To the best of our knowledge, no existing work has been done on RRC. In this work, we first build an RRC dataset called ReviewRC based on a popular benchmark for aspect-based sentiment analysis. Since ReviewRC has limited training examples for RRC (and also for aspect-based sentiment analysis), we then explore a novel post-training approach on the popular language model BERT to enhance the performance of fine-tuning of BERT for RRC. To show the generality of the approach, the proposed post-training is also applied to some other review-based tasks such as aspect extraction and aspect sentiment classification in aspect-based sentiment analysis. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed post-training is highly effective.
Title: Old is Gold: Linguistic Driven Approach for Entity and Relation Linking of Short Text
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Short texts challenge NLP tasks such as named entity recognition, disambiguation, linking and relation inference because they do not provide sufficient context or are partially malformed (e.g. wrt. capitalization, long tail entities, implicit relations). In this work, we present the Falcon approach which effectively maps entities and relations within a short text to its mentions of a background knowledge graph. Falcon overcomes the challenges of short text using a light-weight linguistic approach relying on a background knowledge graph. Falcon performs joint entity and relation linking of a short text by leveraging several fundamental principles of English morphology (e.g. compounding, headword identification) and utilizes an extended knowledge graph created by merging entities and relations from various knowledge sources. It uses the context of entities for finding relations and does not require training data. Our empirical study using several standard benchmarks and datasets show that Falcon significantly outperforms state-of-the-art entity and relation linking for short text query inventories.
Title: Be Consistent! Improving Procedural Text Comprehension using Label Consistency
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Our goal is procedural text comprehension, namely tracking how the properties of entities (e.g., their location) change with time given a procedural text (e.g., a paragraph about photosynthesis, a recipe). This task is challenging as the world is changing throughout the text, and despite recent advances, current systems still struggle with this task. Our approach is to leverage the fact that, for many procedural texts, multiple independent descriptions are readily available, and that predictions from them should be consistent (label consistency). We present a new learning framework that leverages label consistency during training, allowing consistency bias to be built into the model. Evaluation on a standard benchmark dataset for procedural text, ProPara (Dalvi et al., 2018), shows that our approach significantly improves prediction performance (F1) over prior state-of-the-art systems.
Title: MathQA: Towards Interpretable Math Word Problem Solving with Operation-Based Formalisms
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We introduce a large-scale dataset of math word problems and an interpretable neural math problem solver by learning to map problems to their operation programs. Due to annotation challenges, current datasets in this domain have been either relatively small in scale or did not offer precise operational annotations over diverse problem types. We introduce a new representation language to model operation programs corresponding to each math problem that aim to improve both the performance and the interpretability of the learned models. Using this representation language, we significantly enhance the AQUA-RAT dataset with fully-specified operational programs. We additionally introduce a neural sequence-to-program model with automatic problem categorization. Our experiments show improvements over competitive baselines in our dataset as well as the AQUA-RAT dataset. The results are still lower than human performance indicating that the dataset poses new challenges for future research. Our dataset is available at https://math-qa.github.io/math-QA/
Title: DROP: A Reading Comprehension Benchmark Requiring Discrete Reasoning Over Paragraphs
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Reading comprehension has recently seen rapid progress, with systems matching humans on the most popular datasets for the task. However, a large body of work has highlighted the brittleness of these systems, showing that there is much work left to be done. We introduce a new reading comprehension benchmark, DROP, which requires Discrete Reasoning Over the content of Paragraphs. In this crowdsourced, adversarially-created, 55k-question benchmark, a system must resolve references in a question, perhaps to multiple input positions, and perform discrete operations over them (such as addition, counting, or sorting). These operations require a much more comprehensive understanding of the content of paragraphs, as they remove the paraphrase-and-entity-typing shortcuts available in prior datasets. We apply state-of-the-art methods from both the reading comprehension and semantic parsing literatures on this dataset and show that the best systems only achieve 38.4% F1 on our generalized accuracy metric, while expert human performance is 96%. We additionally present a new model that combines reading comprehension methods with simple numerical reasoning to achieve 51% F1.
Title: An Encoding Strategy Based Word-Character LSTM for Chinese NER
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: A recently proposed lattice model has demonstrated that words in character sequence can provide rich word boundary information for character-based Chinese NER model. In this model, word information is integrated into a shortcut path between the start and the end characters of the word. However, the existence of shortcut path may cause the model to degenerate into a partial word-based model, which will suffer from word segmentation errors. Furthermore, the lattice model can not be trained in batches due to its DAG structure. In this paper, we propose a novel word-character LSTM(WC-LSTM) model to add word information into the start or the end character of the word, alleviating the influence of word segmentation errors while obtaining the word boundary information. Four different strategies are explored in our model to encode word information into a fixed-sized representation for efficient batch training. Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-arts models.
Title: Highly Effective Arabic Diacritization using Sequence to Sequence Modeling
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
Abstract: Arabic text is typically written without short vowels (or diacritics). However, their presence is required for properly verbalizing Arabic and is hence essential for applications such as text to speech. There are two types of diacritics, namely core-word diacritics and case-endings. Most previous works on automatic Arabic diacritic recovery rely on a large number of manually engineered features, particularly for case-endings. In this work, we present a unified character level sequence-to-sequence deep learning model that recovers both types of diacritics without the use of explicit feature engineering. Specifically, we employ a standard neural machine translation setup on overlapping windows of words (broken down into characters), and then we use voting to select the most likely diacritized form of a word. The proposed model outperforms all previous state-of-the-art systems. Our best settings achieve a word error rate (WER) of 4.49% compared to the state-of-the-art of 12.25% on a standard dataset.
Title: SC-LSTM: Learning Task-Specific Representations in Multi-Task Learning for Sequence Labeling
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Multi-task learning (MTL) has been studied recently for sequence labeling. Typically, auxiliary tasks are selected specifically in order to improve the performance of a target task. Jointly learning multiple tasks in a way that benefit all of them simultaneously can increase the utility of MTL. In order to do so, we propose a new LSTM cell which contains both shared parameters that can learn from all tasks, and task-specific parameters that can learn task-specific information. We name it a Shared-Cell Long-Short Term Memory SC-LSTM. Experimental results on three sequence labeling benchmarks (named-entity recognition, text chunking, and part-of-speech tagging) demonstrate the effectiveness of our SC-LSTM cell.
Title: Learning to Denoise Distantly-Labeled Data for Entity Typing
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Distantly-labeled data can be used to scale up training of statistical models, but it is typically noisy and that noise can vary with the distant labeling technique. In this work, we propose a two-stage procedure for handling this type of data: denoise it with a learned model, then train our final model on clean and denoised distant data with standard supervised training. Our denoising approach consists of two parts. First, a filtering function discards examples from the distantly labeled data that are wholly unusable. Second, a relabeling function repairs noisy labels for the retained examples. Each of these components is a model trained on synthetically-noised examples generated from a small manually-labeled set. We investigate this approach on the ultra-fine entity typing task of Choi et al. (2018). Our baseline model is an extension of their model with pre-trained ELMo representations, which already achieves state-of-the-art performance. Adding distant data that has been denoised with our learned models gives further performance gains over this base model, outperforming models trained on raw distant data or heuristically-denoised distant data.
Title: A Simple and Robust Approach to Detecting Subject-Verb Agreement Errors
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: While rule-based detection of subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors is sensitive to syntactic parsing errors and irregularities and exceptions to the main rules, neural sequential labelers have a tendency to overfit their training data. We observe that rule-based error generation is less sensitive to syntactic parsing errors and irregularities than error detection and explore a simple, yet efficient approach to getting the best of both worlds: We train neural sequential labelers on the combination of large volumes of silver standard data, obtained through rule-based error generation, and gold standard data. We show that our simple protocol leads to more robust detection of SVA errors on both in-domain and out-of-domain data, as well as in the context of other errors and long-distance dependencies; and across four standard benchmarks, the induced model on average achieves a new state of the art.
Title: A Grounded Unsupervised Universal Part-of-Speech Tagger for Low-Resource Languages
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Unsupervised part of speech (POS) tagging is often framed as a clustering problem, but practical taggers need to ground their clusters as well. Grounding generally requires reference labeled data, a luxury a low-resource language might not have. In this work, we describe an approach for low-resource unsupervised POS tagging that yields fully grounded output and requires no labeled training data. We find the classic method of Brown et al. (1992) clusters well in our use case and employ a decipherment-based approach to grounding. This approach presumes a sequence of cluster IDs is a ‘ciphertext’ and seeks a POS tag-to-cluster ID mapping that will reveal the POS sequence. We show intrinsically that, despite the difficulty of the task, we obtain reasonable performance across a variety of languages. We also show extrinsically that incorporating our POS tagger into a name tagger leads to state-of-the-art tagging performance in Sinhalese and Kinyarwanda, two languages with nearly no labeled POS data available. We further demonstrate our tagger’s utility by incorporating it into a true ‘zero-resource’ variant of the MALOPA (Ammar et al., 2016) dependency parser model that removes the current reliance on multilingual resources and gold POS tags for new languages. Experiments show that including our tagger makes up much of the accuracy lost when gold POS tags are unavailable.
Title: On Difficulties of Cross-Lingual Transfer with Order Differences: A Case Study on Dependency Parsing
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: Different languages might have different word orders. In this paper, we investigate crosslingual transfer and posit that an orderagnostic model will perform better when transferring to distant foreign languages. To test our hypothesis, we train dependency parsers on an English corpus and evaluate their transfer performance on 30 other languages. Specifically, we compare encoders and decoders based on Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and modified self-attentive architectures. The former relies on sequential information while the latter is more flexible at modeling word order. Rigorous experiments and detailed analysis shows that RNN-based architectures transfer well to languages that are close to English, while self-attentive models have better overall cross-lingual transferability and perform especially well on distant languages.
Title: A Multi-Task Approach for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representations
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: We propose a generative model for a sentence that uses two latent variables, with one intended to represent the syntax of the sentence and the other to represent its semantics. We show we can achieve better disentanglement between semantic and syntactic representations by training with multiple losses, including losses that exploit aligned paraphrastic sentences and word-order information. We evaluate our models on standard semantic similarity tasks and novel syntactic similarity tasks. Empirically, we find that the model with the best performing syntactic and semantic representations also gives rise to the most disentangled representations.
Title: Self-Discriminative Learning for Unsupervised Document Embedding
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Unsupervised document representation learning is an important task providing pre-trained features for NLP applications. Unlike most previous work which learn the embedding based on self-prediction of the surface of text, we explicitly exploit the inter-document information and directly model the relations of documents in embedding space with a discriminative network and a novel objective. Extensive experiments on both small and large public datasets show the competitiveness of the proposed method. In evaluations on standard document classification, our model has errors that are 5 to 13% lower than state-of-the-art unsupervised embedding models. The reduction in error is even more pronounced in scarce label setting.
Title: Adaptive Convolution for Text Classification
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: low-resource methods for nlp
Abstract: In this paper, we present an adaptive convolution for text classification to give flexibility to convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Unlike traditional convolutions which utilize the same set of filters regardless of different inputs, the adaptive convolution employs adaptively generated convolutional filters conditioned on inputs. We achieve this by attaching filter-generating networks, which are carefully designed to generate input-specific filters, to convolution blocks in existing CNNs. We show the efficacy of our approach in existing CNNs based on the performance evaluation. Our evaluation indicates that all of our baselines achieve performance improvements with adaptive convolutions as much as up to 2.6 percentage point in seven benchmark text classification datasets.
Title: Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Opinion Target Extraction
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis involves the recognition of so called opinion target expressions (OTEs). To automatically extract OTEs, supervised learning algorithms are usually employed which are trained on manually annotated corpora. The creation of these corpora is labor-intensive and sufficiently large datasets are therefore usually only available for a very narrow selection of languages and domains. In this work, we address the lack of available annotated data for specific languages by proposing a zero-shot cross-lingual approach for the extraction of opinion target expressions. We leverage multilingual word embeddings that share a common vector space across various languages and incorporate these into a convolutional neural network architecture for OTE extraction. Our experiments with 5 languages give promising results: We can successfully train a model on annotated data of a source language and perform accurate prediction on a target language without ever using any annotated samples in that target language. Depending on the source and target language pairs, we reach performances in a zero-shot regime of up to 77% of a model trained on target language data. Furthermore, we can increase this performance up to 87% of a baseline model trained on target language data by performing cross-lingual learning from multiple source languages.
Title: Adversarial Category Alignment Network for Cross-domain Sentiment Classification
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Cross-domain sentiment classification aims to predict sentiment polarity on a target domain utilizing a classifier learned from a source domain. Most existing adversarial learning methods focus on aligning the global marginal distribution by fooling a domain discriminator, without taking category-specific decision boundaries into consideration, which can lead to the mismatch of category-level features. In this work, we propose an adversarial category alignment network (ACAN), which attempts to enhance category consistency between the source domain and the target domain. Specifically, we increase the discrepancy of two polarity classifiers to provide diverse views, locating ambiguous features near the decision boundaries. Then the generator learns to create better features away from the category boundaries by minimizing this discrepancy. Experimental results on benchmark datasets show that the proposed method can achieve state-of-the-art performance and produce more discriminative features.
Title: Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction with Target-fused Neural Sequence Labeling
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Opinion target extraction and opinion words extraction are two fundamental subtasks in Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA). Recently, many methods have made progress on these two tasks. However, few works aim at extracting opinion targets and opinion words as pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel sequence labeling subtask for ABSA named TOWE (Target-oriented Opinion Words Extraction), which aims at extracting the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target. A target-fused sequence labeling neural network model is designed to perform this task. The opinion target information is well encoded into context by an Inward-Outward LSTM. Then left and right contexts of the opinion target and the global context are combined to find the corresponding opinion words. We build four datasets for TOWE based on several popular ABSA benchmarks from laptop and restaurant reviews. The experimental results show that our proposed model outperforms the other compared methods significantly. We believe that our work may not only be helpful for downstream sentiment analysis task, but can also be used for pair-wise opinion summarization.
Title: Abstractive Summarization of Reddit Posts with Multi-level Memory Networks
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: We address the problem of abstractive summarization in two directions: proposing a novel dataset and a new model. First, we collect Reddit TIFU dataset, consisting of 120K posts from the online discussion forum Reddit. We use such informal crowd-generated posts as text source, in contrast with existing datasets that mostly use formal documents as source such as news articles. Thus, our dataset could less suffer from some biases that key sentences usually located at the beginning of the text and favorable summary candidates are already inside the text in similar forms. Second, we propose a novel abstractive summarization model named multi-level memory networks (MMN), equipped with multi-level memory to store the information of text from different levels of abstraction. With quantitative evaluation and user studies via Amazon Mechanical Turk, we show the Reddit TIFU dataset is highly abstractive and the MMN outperforms the state-of-the-art summarization models.
Title: Automatic learner summary assessment for reading comprehension
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Abstract: Automating the assessment of learner summary provides a useful tool for assessing learner reading comprehension. We present a summarization task for evaluating non-native reading comprehension and propose three novel approaches to automatically assess the learner summaries. We evaluate our models on two datasets we created and show that our models outperform traditional approaches that rely on exact word match on this task. Our best model produces quality assessments close to professional examiners.
Title: Data-efficient Neural Text Compression with Interactive Learning
Venue: NAACL (2019)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Neural sequence-to-sequence models have been successfully applied to text compression. However, these models were trained on huge automatically induced parallel corpora, which are only available for a few domains and tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel interactive setup to neural text compression that enables transferring a model to new domains and compression tasks with minimal human supervision. This is achieved by employing active learning, which intelligently samples from a large pool of unlabeled data. Using this setup, we can successfully adapt a model trained on small data of 40k samples for a headline generation task to a general text compression dataset at an acceptable compression quality with just 500 sampled instances annotated by a human.