yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: A Computational Approach to Feature Extraction for Identification of Suicidal Ideation in Tweets
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Technological advancements in the World Wide Web and social networks in particular coupled with an increase in social media usage has led to a positive correlation between the exhibition of Suicidal ideation on websites such as Twitter and cases of suicide. This paper proposes a novel supervised approach for detecting suicidal ideation in content on Twitter. A set of features is proposed for training both linear and ensemble classifiers over a dataset of manually annotated tweets. The performance of the proposed methodology is compared against four baselines that utilize varying approaches to validate its utility. The results are finally summarized by reflecting on the effect of the inclusion of the proposed features one by one for suicidal ideation detection.
Title: BCSAT : A Benchmark Corpus for Sentiment Analysis in Telugu Using Word-level Annotations
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: The presented work aims at generating a systematically annotated corpus that can support the enhancement of sentiment analysis tasks in Telugu using word-level sentiment annotations. From OntoSenseNet, we extracted 11,000 adjectives, 253 adverbs, 8483 verbs and sentiment annotation is being done by language experts. We discuss the methodology followed for the polarity annotations and validate the developed resource. This work aims at developing a benchmark corpus, as an extension to SentiWordNet, and baseline accuracy for a model where lexeme annotations are applied for sentiment predictions. The fundamental aim of this paper is to validate and study the possibility of utilizing machine learning algorithms, word-level sentiment annotations in the task of automated sentiment identification. Furthermore, accuracy is improved by annotating the bi-grams extracted from the target corpus.
Title: Reinforced Extractive Summarization with Question-Focused Rewards
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: summarization
Abstract: We investigate a new training paradigm for extractive summarization. Traditionally, human abstracts are used to derive goldstandard labels for extraction units. However, the labels are often inaccurate, because human abstracts and source documents cannot be easily aligned at the word level. In this paper we convert human abstracts to a set of Cloze-style comprehension questions. System summaries are encouraged to preserve salient source content useful for answering questions and share common words with the abstracts. We use reinforcement learning to explore the space of possible extractive summaries and introduce a question-focused reward function to promote concise, fluent, and informative summaries. Our experiments show that the proposed method is effective. It surpasses state-of-the-art systems on the standard summarization dataset.
Title: Graph-based Filtering of Out-of-Vocabulary Words for Encoder-Decoder Models
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Encoder-decoder models typically only employ words that are frequently used in the training corpus because of the computational costs and/or to exclude noisy words. However, this vocabulary set may still include words that interfere with learning in encoder-decoder models. This paper proposes a method for selecting more suitable words for learning encoders by utilizing not only frequency, but also co-occurrence information, which we capture using the HITS algorithm. The proposed method is applied to two tasks: machine translation and grammatical error correction. For Japanese-to-English translation, this method achieved a BLEU score that was 0.56 points more than that of a baseline. It also outperformed the baseline method for English grammatical error correction, with an F-measure that was 1.48 points higher.
Title: Exploring Chunk Based Templates for Generating a subset of English Text
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Natural Language Generation (NLG) is a research task which addresses the automatic generation of natural language text representative of an input non-linguistic collection of knowledge. In this paper, we address the task of the generation of grammatical sentences in an isolated context given a partial bag-of-words which the generated sentence must contain. We view the task as a search problem (a problem of choice) involving combinations of smaller chunk based templates extracted from a training corpus to construct a complete sentence. To achieve that, we propose a fitness function which we use in conjunction with an evolutionary algorithm as the search procedure to arrive at a potentially grammatical sentence (modeled by the fitness score) which satisfies the input constraints.
Title: Trick Me If You Can: Adversarial Writing of Trivia Challenge Questions
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Modern question answering systems have been touted as approaching human performance. However, existing question answering datasets are imperfect tests. Questions are written with humans in mind, not computers, and often do not properly expose model limitations. To address this, we develop an adversarial writing setting, where humans interact with trained models and try to break them. This annotation process yields a challenge set, which despite being easy for trivia players to answer, systematically stumps automated question answering systems. Diagnosing model errors on the evaluation data provides actionable insights to explore in developing robust and generalizable question answering systems.
Title: Alignment Analysis of Sequential Segmentation of Lexicons to Improve Automatic Cognate Detection
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Ranking functions in information retrieval are often used in search engines to extract the relevant answers to the query. This paper makes use of this notion of information retrieval and applies onto the problem domain of cognate detection. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) positional tokenization, which incorporates the sequential notion; (2) graphical error modelling, which calculates the morphological shifts. The current research work only distinguishes whether a pair of words are cognates or not. However, we also study if we could predict a possible cognate from the given input. Our study shows that language modelling based retrieval functions with positional tokenization and error modelling tend to give better results than competing baselines.
Title: Mixed Feelings: Natural Text Generation with Variable, Coexistent Affective Categories
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Conversational agents, having the goal of natural language generation, must rely on language models which can integrate emotion into their responses. Recent projects outline models which can produce emotional sentences, but unlike human language, they tend to be restricted to one affective category out of a few. To my knowledge, none allow for the intentional coexistence of multiple emotions on the word or sentence level. Building on prior research which allows for variation in the intensity of a singular emotion, this research proposal outlines an LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) language model which allows for variation in multiple emotions simultaneously.
Title: Automatic Spelling Correction for Resource-Scarce Languages using Deep Learning
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Spelling correction is a well-known task in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Automatic spelling correction is important for many NLP applications like web search engines, text summarization, sentiment analysis etc. Most approaches use parallel data of noisy and correct word mappings from different sources as training data for automatic spelling correction. Indic languages are resource-scarce and do not have such parallel data due to low volume of queries and non-existence of such prior implementations. In this paper, we show how to build an automatic spelling corrector for resource-scarce languages. We propose a sequence-to-sequence deep learning model which trains end-to-end. We perform experiments on synthetic datasets created for Indic languages, Hindi and Telugu, by incorporating the spelling mistakes committed at character level. A comparative evaluation shows that our model is competitive with the existing spell checking and correction techniques for Indic languages.
Title: Automatic Question Generation using Relative Pronouns and Adverbs
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: This paper presents a system that automatically generates multiple, natural language questions using relative pronouns and relative adverbs from complex English sentences. Our system is syntax-based, runs on dependency parse information of a single-sentence input, and achieves high accuracy in terms of syntactic correctness, semantic adequacy, fluency and uniqueness. One of the key advantages of our system, in comparison with other rule-based approaches, is that we nearly eliminate the chances of getting a wrong wh-word in the generated question, by fetching the requisite wh-word from the input sentence itself. Depending upon the input, we generate both factoid and descriptive type questions. To the best of our information, the exploitation of wh-pronouns and wh-adverbs to generate questions is novel in the Automatic Question Generation task.
Title: Platforms for Non-speakers Annotating Names in Any Language
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: We demonstrate two annotation platforms that allow an English speaker to annotate names for any language without knowing the language. These platforms provided high-quality ’‘silver standard” annotations for low-resource language name taggers (Zhang et al., 2017) that achieved state-of-the-art performance on two surprise languages (Oromo and Tigrinya) at LoreHLT20171 and ten languages at TAC-KBP EDL2017 (Ji et al., 2017). We discuss strengths and limitations and compare other methods of creating silver- and gold-standard annotations using native speakers. We will make our tools publicly available for research use.
Title: NovelPerspective: Identifying Point of View Characters
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We present NovelPerspective: a tool to allow consumers to subset their digital literature, based on point of view (POV) character. Many novels have multiple main characters each with their own storyline running in parallel. A well-known example is George R. R. Martin’s novel: “A Game of Thrones”, and others from that series. Our tool detects the main character that each section is from the POV of, and allows the user to generate a new ebook with only those sections. This gives consumers new options in how they consume their media; allowing them to pursue the storylines sequentially, or skip chapters about characters they find boring. We present two heuristic-based baselines, and two machine learning based methods for the detection of the main character.
Title: Out-of-the-box Universal Romanization Tool uroman
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We present uroman, a tool for converting text in myriads of languages and scripts such as Chinese, Arabic and Cyrillic into a common Latin-script representation. The tool relies on Unicode data and other tables, and handles nearly all character sets, including some that are quite obscure such as Tibetan and Tifinagh. uroman converts digital numbers in various scripts to Western Arabic numerals. Romanization enables the application of string-similarity metrics to texts from different scripts without the need and complexity of an intermediate phonetic representation. The tool is freely and publicly available as a Perl script suitable for inclusion in data processing pipelines and as an interactive demo web page.
Title: HarriGT: A Tool for Linking News to Science
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Being able to reliably link scientific works to the newspaper articles that discuss them could provide a breakthrough in the way we rationalise and measure the impact of science on our society. Linking these articles is challenging because the language used in the two domains is very different, and the gathering of online resources to align the two is a substantial information retrieval endeavour. We present HarriGT, a semi-automated tool for building corpora of news articles linked to the scientific papers that they discuss. Our aim is to facilitate future development of information-retrieval tools for newspaper/scientific work citation linking. HarriGT retrieves newspaper articles from an archive containing 17 years of UK web content. It also integrates with 3 large external citation networks, leveraging named entity extraction, and document classification to surface relevant examples of scientific literature to the user. We also provide a tuned candidate ranking algorithm to highlight potential links between scientific papers and newspaper articles to the user, in order of likelihood. HarriGT is provided as an open source tool (http://harrigt.xyz).
Title: Jack the Reader – A Machine Reading Framework
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Many Machine Reading and Natural Language Understanding tasks require reading supporting text in order to answer questions. For example, in Question Answering, the supporting text can be newswire or Wikipedia articles; in Natural Language Inference, premises can be seen as the supporting text and hypotheses as questions. Providing a set of useful primitives operating in a single framework of related tasks would allow for expressive modelling, and easier model comparison and replication. To that end, we present Jack the Reader (JACK), a framework for Machine Reading that allows for quick model prototyping by component reuse, evaluation of new models on existing datasets as well as integrating new datasets and applying them on a growing set of implemented baseline models. JACK is currently supporting (but not limited to) three tasks: Question Answering, Natural Language Inference, and Link Prediction. It is developed with the aim of increasing research efficiency and code reuse.
Title: YEDDA: A Lightweight Collaborative Text Span Annotation Tool
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Yedda, a lightweight but efficient and comprehensive open-source tool for text span annotation. Yedda provides a systematic solution for text span annotation, ranging from collaborative user annotation to administrator evaluation and analysis. It overcomes the low efficiency of traditional text annotation tools by annotating entities through both command line and shortcut keys, which are configurable with custom labels. Yedda also gives intelligent recommendations by learning the up-to-date annotated text. An administrator client is developed to evaluate annotation quality of multiple annotators and generate detailed comparison report for each annotator pair. Experiments show that the proposed system can reduce the annotation time by half compared with existing annotation tools. And the annotation time can be further compressed by 16.47% through intelligent recommendation.
Title: NextGen AML: Distributed Deep Learning based Language Technologies to Augment Anti Money Laundering Investigation
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Most of the current anti money laundering (AML) systems, using handcrafted rules, are heavily reliant on existing structured databases, which are not capable of effectively and efficiently identifying hidden and complex ML activities, especially those with dynamic and time-varying characteristics, resulting in a high percentage of false positives. Therefore, analysts are engaged for further investigation which significantly increases human capital cost and processing time. To alleviate these issues, this paper presents a novel framework for the next generation AML by applying and visualizing deep learning-driven natural language processing (NLP) technologies in a distributed and scalable manner to augment AML monitoring and investigation. The proposed distributed framework performs news and tweet sentiment analysis, entity recognition, relation extraction, entity linking and link analysis on different data sources (e.g. news articles and tweets) to provide additional evidence to human investigators for final decision-making. Each NLP module is evaluated on a task-specific data set, and the overall experiments are performed on synthetic and real-world datasets. Feedback from AML practitioners suggests that our system can reduce approximately 30% time and cost compared to their previous manual approaches of AML investigation.
Title: NLP Web Services for Resource-Scarce Languages
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: In this paper, we present a project where existing text-based core technologies were ported to Java-based web services from various architectures. These technologies were developed over a period of eight years through various government funded projects for 10 resource-scarce languages spoken in South Africa. We describe the API and a simple web front-end capable of completing various predefined tasks.
Title: DCFEE: A Document-level Chinese Financial Event Extraction System based on Automatically Labeled Training Data
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: We present an event extraction framework to detect event mentions and extract events from the document-level financial news. Up to now, methods based on supervised learning paradigm gain the highest performance in public datasets (such as ACE2005, KBP2015). These methods heavily depend on the manually labeled training data. However, in particular areas, such as financial, medical and judicial domains, there is no enough labeled data due to the high cost of data labeling process. Moreover, most of the current methods focus on extracting events from one sentence, but an event is usually expressed by multiple sentences in one document. To solve these problems, we propose a Document-level Chinese Financial Event Extraction (DCFEE) system which can automatically generate a large scaled labeled data and extract events from the whole document. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of it
Title: Sentence Suggestion of Japanese Functional Expressions for Chinese-speaking Learners
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: We present a computer-assisted learning system, Jastudy, which is particularly designed for Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) to learn Japanese functional expressions with suggestion of appropriate example sentences. The system automatically recognizes Japanese functional expressions using a free Japanese morphological analyzer MeCab, which is retrained on a new Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model. In order to select appropriate example sentences, we apply a pairwise-based machine learning tool, Support Vector Machine for Ranking (SVMrank) to estimate the complexity of the example sentences using Japanese–Chinese homographs as an important feature. In addition, we cluster the example sentences that contain Japanese functional expressions with two or more meanings and usages, based on part-of-speech, conjugation forms of verbs and semantic attributes, using the K-means clustering algorithm in Scikit-Learn. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
Title: Translating a Language You Don’t Know In the Chinese Room
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: In a corruption of John Searle’s famous AI thought experiment, the Chinese Room (Searle, 1980), we twist its original intent by enabling humans to translate text, e.g. from Uyghur to English, even if they don’t have any prior knowledge of the source language. Our enabling tool, which we call the Chinese Room, is equipped with the same resources made available to a machine translation engine. We find that our superior language model and world knowledge allows us to create perfectly fluent and nearly adequate translations, with human expertise required only for the target language. The Chinese Room tool can be used to rapidly create small corpora of parallel data when bilingual translators are not readily available, in particular for low-resource languages.
Title: SANTO: A Web-based Annotation Tool for Ontology-driven Slot Filling
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Supervised machine learning algorithms require training data whose generation for complex relation extraction tasks tends to be difficult. Being optimized for relation extraction at sentence level, many annotation tools lack in facilitating the annotation of relational structures that are widely spread across the text. This leads to non-intuitive and cumbersome visualizations, making the annotation process unnecessarily time-consuming. We propose SANTO, an easy-to-use, domain-adaptive annotation tool specialized for complex slot filling tasks which may involve problems of cardinality and referential grounding. The web-based architecture enables fast and clearly structured annotation for multiple users in parallel. Relational structures are formulated as templates following the conceptualization of an underlying ontology. Further, import and export procedures of standard formats enable interoperability with external sources and tools.
Title: NCRF++: An Open-source Neural Sequence Labeling Toolkit
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: This paper describes NCRF++, a toolkit for neural sequence labeling. NCRF++ is designed for quick implementation of different neural sequence labeling models with a CRF inference layer. It provides users with an inference for building the custom model structure through configuration file with flexible neural feature design and utilization. Built on PyTorch http://pytorch.org/, the core operations are calculated in batch, making the toolkit efficient with the acceleration of GPU. It also includes the implementations of most state-of-the-art neural sequence labeling models such as LSTM-CRF, facilitating reproducing and refinement on those methods.
Title: TALEN: Tool for Annotation of Low-resource ENtities
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: We present a new web-based interface, TALEN, designed for named entity annotation in low-resource settings where the annotators do not speak the language. To address this non-traditional scenario, TALEN includes such features as in-place lexicon integration, TF-IDF token statistics, Internet search, and entity propagation, all implemented so as to make this difficult task efficient and frictionless. We conduct a small user study to compare against a popular annotation tool, showing that TALEN achieves higher precision and recall against ground-truth annotations, and that users strongly prefer it over the alternative. TALEN is available at: github.com/CogComp/talen.
Title: A Web-scale system for scientific knowledge exploration
Venue: ACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: To enable efficient exploration of Web-scale scientific knowledge, it is necessary to organize scientific publications into a hierarchical concept structure. In this work, we present a large-scale system to (1) identify hundreds of thousands of scientific concepts, (2) tag these identified concepts to hundreds of millions of scientific publications by leveraging both text and graph structure, and (3) build a six-level concept hierarchy with a subsumption-based model. The system builds the most comprehensive cross-domain scientific concept ontology published to date, with more than 200 thousand concepts and over one million relationships.