yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Keep Your Bearings: Lightly-Supervised Information Extraction with Ladder Networks That Avoids Semantic Drift
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: We propose a novel approach to semi-supervised learning for information extraction that uses ladder networks (Rasmus et al., 2015). In particular, we focus on the task of named entity classification, defined as identifying the correct label (e.g., person or organization name) of an entity mention in a given context. Our approach is simple, efficient and has the benefit of being robust to semantic drift, a dominant problem in most semi-supervised learning systems. We empirically demonstrate the superior performance of our system compared to the state-of-the-art on two standard datasets for named entity classification. We obtain between 62% and 200% improvement over the state-of-art baseline on these two datasets.
Title: Semi-Supervised Event Extraction with Paraphrase Clusters
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Supervised event extraction systems are limited in their accuracy due to the lack of available training data. We present a method for self-training event extraction systems by bootstrapping additional training data. This is done by taking advantage of the occurrence of multiple mentions of the same event instances across newswire articles from multiple sources. If our system can make a high-confidence extraction of some mentions in such a cluster, it can then acquire diverse training examples by adding the other mentions as well. Our experiments show significant performance improvements on multiple event extractors over ACE 2005 and TAC-KBP 2015 datasets.
Title: Structure Regularized Neural Network for Entity Relation Classification for Chinese Literature Text
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Relation classification is an important semantic processing task in the field of natural language processing. In this paper, we propose the task of relation classification for Chinese literature text. A new dataset of Chinese literature text is constructed to facilitate the study in this task. We present a novel model, named Structure Regularized Bidirectional Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network (SR-BRCNN), to identify the relation between entities. The proposed model learns relation representations along the shortest dependency path (SDP) extracted from the structure regularized dependency tree, which has the benefits of reducing the complexity of the whole model. Experimental results show that the proposed method significantly improves the F1 score by 10.3, and outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches on Chinese literature text.
Title: Syntactic Patterns Improve Information Extraction for Medical Search
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Medical professionals search the published literature by specifying the type of patients, the medical intervention(s) and the outcome measure(s) of interest. In this paper we demonstrate how features encoding syntactic patterns improve the performance of state-of-the-art sequence tagging models (both neural and linear) for information extraction of these medically relevant categories. We present an analysis of the type of patterns exploited and of the semantic space induced for these, i.e., the distributed representations learned for identified multi-token patterns. We show that these learned representations differ substantially from those of the constituent unigrams, suggesting that the patterns capture contextual information that is otherwise lost.
Title: Syntactically Aware Neural Architectures for Definition Extraction
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information extraction
Abstract: Automatically identifying definitional knowledge in text corpora (Definition Extraction or DE) is an important task with direct applications in, among others, Automatic Glossary Generation, Taxonomy Learning, Question Answering and Semantic Search. It is generally cast as a binary classification problem between definitional and non-definitional sentences. In this paper we present a set of neural architectures combining Convolutional and Recurrent Neural Networks, which are further enriched by incorporating linguistic information via syntactic dependencies. Our experimental results in the task of sentence classification, on two benchmarking DE datasets (one generic, one domain-specific), show that these models obtain consistent state of the art results. Furthermore, we demonstrate that models trained on clean Wikipedia-like definitions can successfully be applied to more noisy domain-specific corpora.
Title: A Dynamic Oracle for Linear-Time 2-Planar Dependency Parsing
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: We propose an efficient dynamic oracle for training the 2-Planar transition-based parser, a linear-time parser with over 99% coverage on non-projective syntactic corpora. This novel approach outperforms the static training strategy in the vast majority of languages tested and scored better on most datasets than the arc-hybrid parser enhanced with the Swap transition, which can handle unrestricted non-projectivity.
Title: Are Automatic Methods for Cognate Detection Good Enough for Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Historical Linguistics?
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated cognate sets. Our findings suggest that phylogenies inferred from automated cognate sets come close to phylogenies inferred from expert-annotated ones, although on average, the latter are still superior. We conclude that future work on phylogenetic reconstruction can profit much from automatic cognate detection. Especially where scholars are merely interested in exploring the bigger picture of a language family’s phylogeny, algorithms for automatic cognate detection are a useful complement for current research on language phylogenies.
Title: Automatically Selecting the Best Dependency Annotation Design with Dynamic Oracles
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: This work introduces a new strategy to compare the numerous conventions that have been proposed over the years for expressing dependency structures and discover the one for which a parser will achieve the highest parsing performance. Instead of associating each sentence in the training set with a single gold reference we propose to consider a set of references encoding alternative syntactic representations. Training a parser with a dynamic oracle will then automatically select among all alternatives the reference that will be predicted with the highest accuracy. Experiments on the UD corpora show the validity of this approach.
Title: Consistent CCG Parsing over Multiple Sentences for Improved Logical Reasoning
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: In formal logic-based approaches to Recognizing Textual Entailment (RTE), a Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) parser is used to parse input premises and hypotheses to obtain their logical formulas. Here, it is important that the parser processes the sentences consistently; failing to recognize the similar syntactic structure results in inconsistent predicate argument structures among them, in which case the succeeding theorem proving is doomed to failure. In this work, we present a simple method to extend an existing CCG parser to parse a set of sentences consistently, which is achieved with an inter-sentence modeling with Markov Random Fields (MRF). When combined with existing logic-based systems, our method always shows improvement in the RTE experiments on English and Japanese languages.
Title: Exploiting Dynamic Oracles to Train Projective Dependency Parsers on Non-Projective Trees
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: Because the most common transition systems are projective, training a transition-based dependency parser often implies to either ignore or rewrite the non-projective training examples, which has an adverse impact on accuracy. In this work, we propose a simple modification of dynamic oracles, which enables the use of non-projective data when training projective parsers. Evaluation on 73 treebanks shows that our method achieves significant gains (+2 to +7 UAS for the most non-projective languages) and consistently outperforms traditional projectivization and pseudo-projectivization approaches.
Title: Improving Coverage and Runtime Complexity for Exact Inference in Non-Projective Transition-Based Dependency Parsers
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: We generalize Cohen, Gómez-Rodríguez, and Satta’s (2011) parser to a family of non-projective transition-based dependency parsers allowing polynomial-time exact inference. This includes novel parsers with better coverage than Cohen et al. (2011), and even a variant that reduces time complexity to O(n^6), improving over the known bounds in exact inference for non-projective transition-based parsing. We hope that this piece of theoretical work inspires design of novel transition systems with better coverage and better run-time guarantees.
Title: Towards a Variability Measure for Multiword Expressions
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: One of the most outstanding properties of multiword expressions (MWEs), especially verbal ones (VMWEs), important both in theoretical models and applications, is their idiosyncratic variability. Some MWEs are always continuous, while some others admit certain types of insertions. Components of some MWEs are rarely or never modified, while some others admit either specific or unrestricted modification. This unpredictable variability profile of MWEs hinders modeling and processing them as “words-with-spaces” on the one hand, and as regular syntactic structures on the other hand. Since variability of MWEs is a matter of scale rather than a binary property, we propose a 2-dimensional language-independent measure of variability dedicated to verbal MWEs based on syntactic and discontinuity-related clues. We assess its relevance with respect to a linguistic benchmark and its utility for the tasks of VMWE classification and variant identification on a French corpus.
Title: Defoiling Foiled Image Captions
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: We address the task of detecting foiled image captions, i.e. identifying whether a caption contains a word that has been deliberately replaced by a semantically similar word, thus rendering it inaccurate with respect to the image being described. Solving this problem should in principle require a fine-grained understanding of images to detect subtle perturbations in captions. In such contexts, encoding sufficiently descriptive image information becomes a key challenge. In this paper, we demonstrate that it is possible to solve this task using simple, interpretable yet powerful representations based on explicit object information over multilayer perceptron models. Our models achieve state-of-the-art performance on a recently published dataset, with scores exceeding those achieved by humans on the task. We also measure the upper-bound performance of our models using gold standard annotations. Our study and analysis reveals that the simpler model performs well even without image information, suggesting that the dataset contains strong linguistic bias.
Title: Pragmatically Informative Image Captioning with Character-Level Inference
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Abstract: We combine a neural image captioner with a Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model to make a system that is pragmatically informative: its objective is to produce captions that are not merely true but also distinguish their inputs from similar images. Previous attempts to combine RSA with neural image captioning require an inference which normalizes over the entire set of possible utterances. This poses a serious problem of efficiency, previously solved by sampling a small subset of possible utterances. We instead solve this problem by implementing a version of RSA which operates at the level of characters (“a”, “b”, “c”, ...) during the unrolling of the caption. We find that the utterance-level effect of referential captions can be obtained with only character-level decisions. Finally, we introduce an automatic method for testing the performance of pragmatic speaker models, and show that our model outperforms a non-pragmatic baseline as well as a word-level RSA captioner.
Title: Object Ordering with Bidirectional Matchings for Visual Reasoning
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Visual reasoning with compositional natural language instructions, e.g., based on the newly-released Cornell Natural Language Visual Reasoning (NLVR) dataset, is a challenging task, where the model needs to have the ability to create an accurate mapping between the diverse phrases and the several objects placed in complex arrangements in the image. Further, this mapping needs to be processed to answer the question in the statement given the ordering and relationship of the objects across three similar images. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end neural model for the NLVR task, where we first use joint bidirectional attention to build a two-way conditioning between the visual information and the language phrases. Next, we use an RL-based pointer network to sort and process the varying number of unordered objects (so as to match the order of the statement phrases) in each of the three images and then pool over the three decisions. Our model achieves strong improvements (of 4-6% absolute) over the state-of-the-art on both the structured representation and raw image versions of the dataset.
Title: Contextual Augmentation: Data Augmentation by Words with Paradigmatic Relations
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: low-resource methods for nlp
Abstract: We propose a novel data augmentation for labeled sentences called contextual augmentation. We assume an invariance that sentences are natural even if the words in the sentences are replaced with other words with paradigmatic relations. We stochastically replace words with other words that are predicted by a bi-directional language model at the word positions. Words predicted according to a context are numerous but appropriate for the augmentation of the original words. Furthermore, we retrofit a language model with a label-conditional architecture, which allows the model to augment sentences without breaking the label-compatibility. Through the experiments for six various different text classification tasks, we demonstrate that the proposed method improves classifiers based on the convolutional or recurrent neural networks.
Title: Cross-Lingual Learning-to-Rank with Shared Representations
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR) is a document retrieval task where the documents are written in a language different from that of the user’s query. This is a challenging problem for data-driven approaches due to the general lack of labeled training data. We introduce a large-scale dataset derived from Wikipedia to support CLIR research in 25 languages. Further, we present a simple yet effective neural learning-to-rank model that shares representations across languages and reduces the data requirement. This model can exploit training data in, for example, Japanese-English CLIR to improve the results of Swahili-English CLIR.
Title: Self-Attention with Relative Position Representations
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Relying entirely on an attention mechanism, the Transformer introduced by Vaswani et al. (2017) achieves state-of-the-art results for machine translation. In contrast to recurrent and convolutional neural networks, it does not explicitly model relative or absolute position information in its structure. Instead, it requires adding representations of absolute positions to its inputs. In this work we present an alternative approach, extending the self-attention mechanism to efficiently consider representations of the relative positions, or distances between sequence elements. On the WMT 2014 English-to-German and English-to-French translation tasks, this approach yields improvements of 1.3 BLEU and 0.3 BLEU over absolute position representations, respectively. Notably, we observe that combining relative and absolute position representations yields no further improvement in translation quality. We describe an efficient implementation of our method and cast it as an instance of relation-aware self-attention mechanisms that can generalize to arbitrary graph-labeled inputs.
Title: Text Segmentation as a Supervised Learning Task
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Text segmentation, the task of dividing a document into contiguous segments based on its semantic structure, is a longstanding challenge in language understanding. Previous work on text segmentation focused on unsupervised methods such as clustering or graph search, due to the paucity in labeled data. In this work, we formulate text segmentation as a supervised learning problem, and present a large new dataset for text segmentation that is automatically extracted and labeled from Wikipedia. Moreover, we develop a segmentation model based on this dataset and show that it generalizes well to unseen natural text.
Title: What’s in a Domain? Learning Domain-Robust Text Representations using Adversarial Training
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Most real world language problems require learning from heterogenous corpora, raising the problem of learning robust models which generalise well to both similar (in domain)
 and dissimilar (out of domain) instances to those seen in
 training. This requires learning an underlying task, while not
 learning irrelevant signals and biases specific to individual
 domains. We propose a novel method to optimise both in- and
 out-of-domain accuracy based on joint learning of a structured
 neural model with domain-specific and domain-general components,
 coupled with adversarial training for domain. Evaluating on
 multi-domain language identification and multi-domain sentiment
 analysis, we show substantial improvements over standard domain
 adaptation techniques, and domain-adversarial training.
Title: Automated Paraphrase Lattice Creation for HyTER Machine Translation Evaluation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We propose a variant of a well-known machine translation (MT) evaluation metric, HyTER (Dreyer and Marcu, 2012), which exploits reference translations enriched with meaning equivalent expressions. The original HyTER metric relied on hand-crafted paraphrase networks which restricted its applicability to new data. We test, for the first time, HyTER with automatically built paraphrase lattices. We show that although the metric obtains good results on small and carefully curated data with both manually and automatically selected substitutes, it achieves medium performance on much larger and noisier datasets, demonstrating the limits of the metric for tuning and evaluation of current MT systems.
Title: Exploiting Semantics in Neural Machine Translation with Graph Convolutional Networks
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Semantic representations have long been argued as potentially useful for enforcing meaning preservation and improving generalization performance of machine translation methods. In this work, we are the first to incorporate information about predicate-argument structure of source sentences (namely, semantic-role representations) into neural machine translation. We use Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to inject a semantic bias into sentence encoders and achieve improvements in BLEU scores over the linguistic-agnostic and syntax-aware versions on the English–German language pair.
Title: Incremental Decoding and Training Methods for Simultaneous Translation in Neural Machine Translation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We address the problem of simultaneous translation by modifying the Neural MT decoder to operate with dynamically built encoder and attention. We propose a tunable agent which decides the best segmentation strategy for a user-defined BLEU loss and Average Proportion (AP) constraint. Our agent outperforms previously proposed Wait-if-diff and Wait-if-worse agents (Cho and Esipova, 2016) on BLEU with a lower latency. Secondly we proposed data-driven changes to Neural MT training to better match the incremental decoding framework.
Title: Learning Hidden Unit Contribution for Adapting Neural Machine Translation Models
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: In this paper we explore the use of Learning Hidden Unit Contribution for the task of neural machine translation. The method was initially proposed in the context of speech recognition for adapting a general system to the specific acoustic characteristics of each speaker. Similar in spirit, in a machine translation framework we want to adapt a general system to a specific domain. We show that the proposed method achieves improvements of up to 2.6 BLEU points over a general system, and up to 6 BLEU points if the initial system has only been trained on out-of-domain data, a situation which may easily happen in practice. The good performance together with its short training time and small memory footprint make it a very attractive solution for domain adaptation.
Title: Neural Machine Translation Decoding with Terminology Constraints
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Despite the impressive quality improvements yielded by neural machine translation (NMT) systems, controlling their translation output to adhere to user-provided terminology constraints remains an open problem. We describe our approach to constrained neural decoding based on finite-state machines and multi-stack decoding which supports target-side constraints as well as constraints with corresponding aligned input text spans. We demonstrate the performance of our framework on multiple translation tasks and motivate the need for constrained decoding with attentions as a means of reducing misplacement and duplication when translating user constraints.
Title: On the Evaluation of Semantic Phenomena in Neural Machine Translation Using Natural Language Inference
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We propose a process for investigating the extent to which sentence representations arising from neural machine translation (NMT) systems encode distinct semantic phenomena. We use these representations as features to train a natural language inference (NLI) classifier based on datasets recast from existing semantic annotations. In applying this process to a representative NMT system, we find its encoder appears most suited to supporting inferences at the syntax-semantics interface, as compared to anaphora resolution requiring world knowledge. We conclude with a discussion on the merits and potential deficiencies of the existing process, and how it may be improved and extended as a broader framework for evaluating semantic coverage
Title: Using Word Vectors to Improve Word Alignments for Low Resource Machine Translation
Venue: NAACL (2018)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: We present a method for improving word alignments using word similarities. This method is based on encouraging common alignment links between semantically similar words. We use word vectors trained on monolingual data to estimate similarity. Our experiments on translating fifteen languages into English show consistent BLEU score improvements across the languages.