yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Dear Sir or Madam, May I Introduce the GYAFC Dataset: Corpus, Benchmarks and Metrics for Formality Style Transfer
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Style transfer is the task of automatically transforming a piece of text in one particular style into another. A major barrier to progress in this field has been a lack of training and evaluation datasets, as well as benchmarks and automatic metrics. In this work, we create the largest corpus for a particular stylistic transfer (formality) and show that techniques from the machine translation community can serve as strong baselines for future work. We also discuss challenges of using automatic metrics.
Title: Improving Implicit Discourse Relation Classification by Modeling Inter-dependencies of Discourse Units in a Paragraph
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: discourse and pragmatics
Abstract: We argue that semantic meanings of a sentence or clause can not be interpreted independently from the rest of a paragraph, or independently from all discourse relations and the overall paragraph-level discourse structure. With the goal of improving implicit discourse relation classification, we introduce a paragraph-level neural networks that model inter-dependencies between discourse units as well as discourse relation continuity and patterns, and predict a sequence of discourse relations in a paragraph. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art systems on the benchmark corpus of PDTB.
Title: A Deep Ensemble Model with Slot Alignment for Sequence-to-Sequence Natural Language Generation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Natural language generation lies at the core of generative dialogue systems and conversational agents. We describe an ensemble neural language generator, and present several novel methods for data representation and augmentation that yield improved results in our model. We test the model on three datasets in the restaurant, TV and laptop domains, and report both objective and subjective evaluations of our best model. Using a range of automatic metrics, as well as human evaluators, we show that our approach achieves better results than state-of-the-art models on the same datasets.
Title: A Melody-Conditioned Lyrics Language Model
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: phonology, morphology, and word segmentation
Abstract: This paper presents a novel, data-driven language model that produces entire lyrics for a given input melody. Previously proposed models for lyrics generation suffer from the inability of capturing the relationship between lyrics and melody partly due to the unavailability of lyrics-melody aligned data. In this study, we first propose a new practical method for creating a large collection of lyrics-melody aligned data and then create a collection of 1,000 lyrics-melody pairs augmented with precise syllable-note alignments and word/sentence/paragraph boundaries. We then provide a quantitative analysis of the correlation between word/sentence/paragraph boundaries in lyrics and melodies. We then propose an RNN-based lyrics language model conditioned on a featurized melody. Experimental results show that the proposed model generates fluent lyrics while maintaining the compatibility between boundaries of lyrics and melody structures.
Title: Discourse-Aware Neural Rewards for Coherent Text Generation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: discourse and pragmatics
Abstract: In this paper, we investigate the use of discourse-aware rewards with reinforcement learning to guide a model to generate long, coherent text. In particular, we propose to learn neural rewards to model cross-sentence ordering as a means to approximate desired discourse structure. Empirical results demonstrate that a generator trained with the learned reward produces more coherent and less repetitive text than models trained with cross-entropy or with reinforcement learning with commonly used scores as rewards.
Title: Natural Answer Generation with Heterogeneous Memory
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: generation
Abstract: Memory augmented encoder-decoder framework has achieved promising progress for natural language generation tasks. Such frameworks enable a decoder to retrieve from a memory during generation. However, less research has been done to take care of the memory contents from different sources, which are often of heterogeneous formats. In this work, we propose a novel attention mechanism to encourage the decoder to actively interact with the memory by taking its heterogeneity into account. Our solution attends across the generated history and memory to explicitly avoid repetition, and introduce related knowledge to enrich our generated sentences. Experiments on the answer sentence generation task show that our method can effectively explore heterogeneous memory to produce readable and meaningful answer sentences while maintaining high coverage for given answer information.
Title: Query and Output: Generating Words by Querying Distributed Word Representations for Paraphrase Generation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Most recent approaches use the sequence-to-sequence model for paraphrase generation. The existing sequence-to-sequence model tends to memorize the words and the patterns in the training dataset instead of learning the meaning of the words. Therefore, the generated sentences are often grammatically correct but semantically improper. In this work, we introduce a novel model based on the encoder-decoder framework, called Word Embedding Attention Network (WEAN). Our proposed model generates the words by querying distributed word representations (i.e. neural word embeddings), hoping to capturing the meaning of the according words. Following previous work, we evaluate our model on two paraphrase-oriented tasks, namely text simplification and short text abstractive summarization. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the sequence-to-sequence baseline by the BLEU score of 6.3 and 5.5 on two English text simplification datasets, and the ROUGE-2 F1 score of 5.7 on a Chinese summarization dataset. Moreover, our model achieves state-of-the-art performances on these three benchmark datasets.
Title: Simplification Using Paraphrases and Context-Based Lexical Substitution
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Lexical simplification involves identifying complex words or phrases that need to be simplified, and recommending simpler meaning-preserving substitutes that can be more easily understood. We propose a complex word identification (CWI) model that exploits both lexical and contextual features, and a simplification mechanism which relies on a word-embedding lexical substitution model to replace the detected complex words with simpler paraphrases. We compare our CWI and lexical simplification models to several baselines, and evaluate the performance of our simplification system against human judgments. The results show that our models are able to detect complex words with higher accuracy than other commonly used methods, and propose good simplification substitutes in context. They also highlight the limited contribution of context features for CWI, which nonetheless improve simplification compared to context-unaware models.
Title: Zero-Shot Question Generation from Knowledge Graphs for Unseen Predicates and Entity Types
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: generation
Abstract: We present a neural model for question generation from knowledge graphs triples in a “Zero-shot” setup, that is generating questions for predicate, subject types or object types that were not seen at training time. Our model leverages triples occurrences in the natural language corpus in a encoder-decoder architecture, paired with an original part-of-speech copy action mechanism to generate questions. Benchmark and human evaluation show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art on this task.
Title: Automated Essay Scoring in the Presence of Biased Ratings
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: Studies in Social Sciences have revealed that when people evaluate someone else, their evaluations often reflect their biases. As a result, rater bias may introduce highly subjective factors that make their evaluations inaccurate. This may affect automated essay scoring models in many ways, as these models are typically designed to model (potentially biased) essay raters. While there is sizeable literature on rater effects in general settings, it remains unknown how rater bias affects automated essay scoring. To this end, we present a new annotated corpus containing essays and their respective scores. Different from existing corpora, our corpus also contains comments provided by the raters in order to ground their scores. We present features to quantify rater bias based on their comments, and we found that rater bias plays an important role in automated essay scoring. We investigated the extent to which rater bias affects models based on hand-crafted features. Finally, we propose to rectify the training set by removing essays associated with potentially biased scores while learning the scoring model.
Title: Content-Based Citation Recommendation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We present a content-based method for recommending citations in an academic paper draft. We embed a given query document into a vector space, then use its nearest neighbors as candidates, and rerank the candidates using a discriminative model trained to distinguish between observed and unobserved citations. Unlike previous work, our method does not require metadata such as author names which can be missing, e.g., during the peer review process. Without using metadata, our method outperforms the best reported results on PubMed and DBLP datasets with relative improvements of over 18% in F1@20 and over 22% in MRR. We show empirically that, although adding metadata improves the performance on standard metrics, it favors self-citations which are less useful in a citation recommendation setup. We release an online portal for citation recommendation based on our method, (URL: http://bit.ly/citeDemo) and a new dataset OpenCorpus of 7
 million research articles to facilitate future research on this task.
Title: Looking Beyond the Surface: A Challenge Set for Reading Comprehension over Multiple Sentences
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Abstract: We present a reading comprehension challenge in which questions can only be answered by taking into account information from multiple sentences. We solicit and verify questions and answers for this challenge through a 4-step crowdsourcing experiment. Our challenge dataset contains 6,500+ questions for 1000+ paragraphs across 7 different domains (elementary school science, news, travel guides, fiction stories, etc) bringing in linguistic diversity to the texts and to the questions wordings. On a subset of our dataset, we found human solvers to achieve an F1-score of 88.1%. We analyze a range of baselines, including a recent state-of-art reading comprehension system, and demonstrate the difficulty of this challenge, despite a high human performance. The dataset is the first to study multi-sentence inference at scale, with an open-ended set of question types that requires reasoning skills.
Title: Neural Automated Essay Scoring and Coherence Modeling for Adversarially Crafted Input
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We demonstrate that current state-of-the-art approaches to Automated Essay Scoring (AES) are not well-suited to capturing adversarially crafted input of grammatical but incoherent sequences of sentences. We develop a neural model of local coherence that can effectively learn connectedness features between sentences, and propose a framework for integrating and jointly training the local coherence model with a state-of-the-art AES model. We evaluate our approach against a number of baselines and experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness on both the AES task and the task of flagging adversarial input, further contributing to the development of an approach that strengthens the validity of neural essay scoring models.
Title: QuickEdit: Editing Text & Translations by Crossing Words Out
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We propose a framework for computer-assisted text editing. It applies to translation post-editing and to paraphrasing. Our proposal relies on very simple interactions: a human editor modifies a sentence by marking tokens they would like the system to change. Our model then generates a new sentence which reformulates the initial sentence by avoiding marked words. The approach builds upon neural sequence-to-sequence modeling and introduces a neural network which takes as input a sentence along with change markers. Our model is trained on translation bitext by simulating post-edits. We demonstrate the advantage of our approach for translation post-editing through simulated post-edits. We also evaluate our model for paraphrasing through a user study.
Title: Tempo-Lexical Context Driven Word Embedding for Cross-Session Search Task Extraction
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Task extraction is the process of identifying search intents over a set of queries potentially spanning multiple search sessions. Most existing research on task extraction has focused on identifying tasks within a single session, where the notion of a session is defined by a fixed length time window. By contrast, in this work we seek to identify tasks that span across multiple sessions. To identify tasks, we conduct a global analysis of a query log in its entirety without restricting analysis to individual temporal windows. To capture inherent task semantics, we represent queries as vectors in an abstract space. We learn the embedding of query words in this space by leveraging the temporal and lexical contexts of queries. Embedded query vectors are then clustered into tasks. Experiments demonstrate that task extraction effectiveness is improved significantly with our proposed method of query vector embedding in comparison to existing approaches that make use of documents retrieved from a collection to estimate semantic similarities between queries.
Title: Zero-Shot Sequence Labeling: Transferring Knowledge from Sentences to Tokens
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: Can attention- or gradient-based visualization techniques be used to infer token-level labels for binary sequence tagging problems, using networks trained only on sentence-level labels? We construct a neural network architecture based on soft attention, train it as a binary sentence classifier and evaluate against token-level annotation on four different datasets. Inferring token labels from a network provides a method for quantitatively evaluating what the model is learning, along with generating useful feedback in assistance systems. Our results indicate that attention-based methods are able to predict token-level labels more accurately, compared to gradient-based methods, sometimes even rivaling the supervised oracle network.
Title: Variable Typing: Assigning Meaning to Variables in Mathematical Text
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Information about the meaning of mathematical variables in text is useful in NLP/IR tasks such as symbol disambiguation, topic modeling and mathematical information retrieval (MIR). We introduce variable typing, the task of assigning one
 mathematical type (multi-word technical terms referring
 to mathematical concepts) to each variable in a sentence of
 mathematical text. As part of this work, we also introduce a new
 annotated data set composed of 33,524 data points extracted from
 scientific documents published on arXiv. Our intrinsic
 evaluation demonstrates that our data set is sufficient to
 successfully train and evaluate current classifiers from three
 different model architectures. The best performing model is
 evaluated on an extrinsic task: MIR, by producing a typed formula index. Our results show that the best performing MIR
 models make use of our typed index, compared to a formula index
 only containing raw symbols, thereby demonstrating the
 usefulness of variable typing.
Title: Learning beyond Datasets: Knowledge Graph Augmented Neural Networks for Natural Language Processing
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: low-resource methods for nlp
Abstract: Machine Learning has been the quintessential solution for many AI problems, but learning models are heavily dependent on specific training data. Some learning models can be incorporated with prior knowledge using a Bayesian setup, but these learning models do not have the ability to access any organized world knowledge on demand. In this work, we propose to enhance learning models with world knowledge in the form of Knowledge Graph (KG) fact triples for Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Our aim is to develop a deep learning model that can extract relevant prior support facts from knowledge graphs depending on the task using attention mechanism. We introduce a convolution-based model for learning representations of knowledge graph entity and relation clusters in order to reduce the attention space. We show that the proposed method is highly scalable to the amount of prior information that has to be processed and can be applied to any generic NLP task. Using this method we show significant improvement in performance for text classification with 20Newsgroups (News20) & DBPedia datasets, and natural language inference with Stanford Natural Language Inference (SNLI) dataset. We also demonstrate that a deep learning model can be trained with substantially less amount of labeled training data, when it has access to organized world knowledge in the form of a knowledge base.
Title: Comparing Constraints for Taxonomic Organization
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Building a taxonomy from the ground up involves several sub-tasks: selecting terms to include, predicting semantic relations between terms, and selecting a subset of relational instances to keep, given constraints on the taxonomy graph. Methods for this final step – taxonomic organization – vary both in terms of the constraints they impose, and whether they enable discovery of synonymous terms. It is hard to isolate the impact of these factors on the quality of the resulting taxonomy because organization methods are rarely compared directly. In this paper, we present a head-to-head comparison of six taxonomic organization algorithms that vary with respect to their structural and transitivity constraints, and treatment of synonymy. We find that while transitive algorithms out-perform their non-transitive counterparts, the top-performing transitive algorithm is prohibitively slow for taxonomies with as few as 50 entities. We propose a simple modification to a non-transitive optimum branching algorithm to explicitly incorporate synonymy, resulting in a method that is substantially faster than the best transitive algorithm while giving complementary performance.
Title: Improving Lexical Choice in Neural Machine Translation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We explore two solutions to the problem of mistranslating rare words in neural machine translation. First, we argue that the standard output layer, which computes the inner product of a vector representing the context with all possible output word embeddings, rewards frequent words disproportionately, and we propose to fix the norms of both vectors to a constant value. Second, we integrate a simple lexical module which is jointly trained with the rest of the model. We evaluate our approaches on eight language pairs with data sizes ranging from 100k to 8M words, and achieve improvements of up to +4.3 BLEU, surpassing phrase-based translation in nearly all settings.
Title: Universal Neural Machine Translation for Extremely Low Resource Languages
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new universal machine translation approach focusing on languages with a limited amount of parallel data. Our proposed approach utilizes a transfer-learning approach to share lexical and sentence level representations across multiple source languages into one target language. The lexical part is shared through a Universal Lexical Representation to support multi-lingual word-level sharing. The sentence-level sharing is represented by a model of experts from all source languages that share the source encoders with all other languages. This enables the low-resource language to utilize the lexical and sentence representations of the higher resource languages. Our approach is able to achieve 23 BLEU on Romanian-English WMT2016 using a tiny parallel corpus of 6k sentences, compared to the 18 BLEU of strong baseline system which uses multi-lingual training and back-translation. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach can achieve almost 20 BLEU on the same dataset through fine-tuning a pre-trained multi-lingual system in a zero-shot setting.
Title: Classical Structured Prediction Losses for Sequence to Sequence Learning
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine learning for nlp
Abstract: There has been much recent work on training neural attention models at the sequence-level using either reinforcement learning-style methods or by optimizing the beam. In this paper, we survey a range of classical objective functions that have been widely used to train linear models for structured prediction and apply them to neural sequence to sequence models. Our experiments show that these losses can perform surprisingly well by slightly outperforming beam search optimization in a like for like setup. We also report new state of the art results on both IWSLT’14 German-English translation as well as Gigaword abstractive summarization. On the large WMT’14 English-French task, sequence-level training achieves 41.5 BLEU which is on par with the state of the art.
Title: Deep Dirichlet Multinomial Regression
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Dirichlet Multinomial Regression (DMR) and other supervised topic models can incorporate arbitrary document-level features to inform topic priors. However, their ability to model corpora are limited by the representation and selection of these features – a choice the topic modeler must make. Instead, we seek models that can learn the feature representations upon which to condition topic selection. We present deep Dirichlet Multinomial Regression (dDMR), a generative topic model that simultaneously learns document feature representations and topics. We evaluate dDMR on three datasets: New York Times articles with fine-grained tags, Amazon product reviews with product images, and Reddit posts with subreddit identity. dDMR learns representations that outperform DMR and LDA according to heldout perplexity and are more effective at downstream predictive tasks as the number of topics grows. Additionally, human subjects judge dDMR topics as being more representative of associated document features. Finally, we find that supervision leads to faster convergence as compared to an LDA baseline and that dDMR’s model fit is less sensitive to training parameters than DMR.