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The majority of work in targeted sentiment analysis has concentrated on finding better methods to improve the overall results. Within this paper we show that these models are not robust to linguistic phenomena, specifically negation and speculation. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning method to incorporate information from syntactic and semantic auxiliary tasks, including negation and speculation scope detection, to create models that are more robust to these phenomena. Further we create two challenge datasets to evaluate model performance on negated and speculative samples. We find that multi-task models and transfer learning from a language model can improve performance on these challenge datasets. However the results indicate that there is still much room for improvement in making our models more robust to linguistic phenomena such as negation and speculation.

NAACL 2021

Multi-task Learning of Negation and Speculation for Targeted Sentiment Classification

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

Semantic parsing aims at translating natural language (NL) utterances onto machine- interpretable programs, which can be executed against a real-world environment. The expensive annotation of utterance-program pairs has long been acknowledged as a major bottleneck for the deployment of contemporary neural models to real-life applications. In this work, we focus on the task of semi-supervised learning where a limited amount of annotated data is available together with many unlabeled NL utterances. Based on the observation that programs which correspond to NL utterances must be always executable, we propose to encourage a parser to generate executable programs for unlabeled utterances. Due to the large search space of executable programs, conventional methods that use approximations based on beam-search such as self-training and top-k marginal likelihood training, do not perform as well. Instead, we view the problem of learning from executions from the perspective of posterior regularization and propose a set of new training objectives. Experimental results on OVERNIGHT and GEOQUERY show that our new objectives outperform conventional methods, bridging the gap between semi-supervised and supervised learning.

Learning from Executions for Semantic Parsing

We describe a span-level supervised attention loss that improves compositional generalization in semantic parsers. Our approach builds on existing losses that encourage attention maps in neural sequence-to-sequence models to imitate the output of classical word alignment algorithms. Where past work has used word-level alignments, we focus on spans; borrowing ideas from phrase-based machine translation, we align subtrees in semantic parses to spans of input sentences, and encourage neural attention mechanisms to mimic these alignments. This method improves the performance of transformers, RNNs, and structured decoders on three benchmarks of compositional generalization.

Compositional Generalization for Neural Semantic Parsing via Span-level Supervised Attention

Knowledge graphs suffer from sparsity which degrades the quality of representations generated by various methods. While there is an abundance of textual information throughout the web and many existing knowledge bases, aligning information across these diverse data sources remains a challenge in the literature. Previous work has partially addressed this issue by enriching knowledge graph entities based on "hard" co-occurrence of words present in the entities of the knowledge graphs and external text, while we achieve "soft" augmentation by proposing a knowledge graph enrichment and embedding framework named EDGE. Given an original knowledge graph, we first generate a rich but noisy augmented graph using external texts in semantic and structural level. To distill the relevant knowledge and suppress the introduced noise, we design a graph alignment term in a shared embedding space between the original and augmented graph. To enhance the embedding learning on the augmented graph, we further regularize the locality relationship of the target entity based on negative sampling. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the robustness and effectiveness of EDGE in link prediction and node classification.

Edge: Enriching Knowledge Graph Embeddings with External Text

Reasoning about tabular information presents unique challenges to modern NLP approaches which largely rely on pre-trained contextualized embeddings of text. In this paper, we study these challenges through the problem of tabular natural language inference. We propose easy and effective modifications to how information is presented to a model for this task. We show via systematic experiments that these strategies substantially improve tabular inference performance.

Incorporating External Knowledge to Enhance Tabular Reasoning

The input vocabulary and their learned representations are crucial to the performance of neural NLP models. Using the full vocabulary results in less explainable and more memory intensive models, with the embedding layer often constituting the majority of model parameters. It is thus common to use a smaller vocabulary to lower memory requirements and construct more interpertable models. We propose a vocabulary selection method that views words as members of a team trying to maximize the model's performance. We apply power indices from cooperative game theory, including the Shapley value and Banzhaf index, that measure the relative importance of individual team members in accomplishing a joint task. We approximately compute these indices to identify the most influential words. Our empirical evaluation examines multiple NLP tasks, including sentence and document classification, question answering and textual entailment. We compare to baselines that select words based on frequency, TF-IDF and regression coefficients under L1 regularization, and show that this game-theoretic vocabulary selection outperforms all baselines on a range of different tasks and datasets.

Game-theoretic Vocabulary Selection via the Shapley Value and Banzhaf Index

Synthesizing data for semantic parsing has gained increasing attention recently. However, most methods require handcrafted (high- precision) rules in their generative process, hindering the exploration of diverse unseen data. In this work, we propose a generative model which features a (non-neural) PCFG that models the composition of programs (e.g., SQL), and a BART-based translation model that maps a program to an utterance. Due to the simplicity of PCFG and pre-trained BART, our generative model can be efficiently learned from existing data at hand. Moreover, explic- itly modeling compositions using PCFG leads to a better exploration of unseen programs, thus generate more diverse data. We evalu- ate our method in both in-domain and out-of- domain settings of text-to-SQL parsing on the standard benchmarks of GEOQUERY and SPIDER, respectively. Our empirical results show that the synthesized data generated from our model can substantially help a semantic parser achieve better compositional and domain gen- eralization.

Learning to Synthesize Data for Semantic Parsing

AI assistants can now carry out tasks for users by directly interacting with website UIs. Current semantic parsing and slot-filling techniques cannot flexibly adapt to many different websites without being constantly re-trained. We propose FLIN, a natural language interface for web navigation that maps user commands to concept-level actions (rather than low-level UI actions), thus being able to flexibly adapt to different websites and handle their transient nature. We frame this as a ranking problem: given a user command and a webpage, FLIN learns to score the most relevant navigation instruction (involving action and parameter values). To train and evaluate FLIN, we collect a dataset using nine popular websites from three domains. Our results show that FLIN was able to adapt to new websites in a given domain.

FLIN: A Flexible Natural Language Interface for Web Navigation

Recent work on aspect-level sentiment classification has demonstrated the efficacy of incorporating syntactic structures such as dependency trees with graph neural networks (GNN), but these approaches are usually vulnerable to parsing errors. To better leverage syntactic information in the face of unavoidable errors, we propose a simple yet effective graph ensemble technique, GraphMerge, to make use of the predictions from different parsers. Instead of assigning one set of model parameters to each dependency tree, we first combine the dependency relations from different parses before applying GNNs over the resulting graph. This allows GNN models to be robust to parse errors at no additional computational cost, and helps avoid overparameterization and overfitting from GNN layer stacking by introducing more connectivity into the ensemble graph. Our experiments on the SemEval 2014 Task 4 and ACL 14 Twitter datasets show that our GraphMerge model not only outperforms models with single dependency tree, but also beats other ensemble models without adding model parameters.

Graph Ensemble Learning over Multiple Dependency Trees for Aspect-level Sentiment Classification

The problem of detecting psychological stress in online posts, and more broadly, of detecting people in distress or in need of help, is a sensitive application for which the ability to interpret models is vital. Here, we present work exploring the use of a semantically related task, emotion detection, for equally competent but more explainable and human-like psychological stress detection as compared to a black-box model. In particular, we explore the use of multi-task learning as well as emotion-based language model fine-tuning. With our emotion-infused models, we see comparable results to state-of-the-art BERT. Our analysis of the words used for prediction show that the models mirror psychological components of stress.

Emotion-Infused Models for Explainable Psychological Stress Detection

The ﬂexibility of the inference process in Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) has recently led to revising traditional probabilistic topic models giving rise to Neural Topic Models (NTMs). Although these approaches have achieved signiﬁcant results, surprisingly very little work has been done on how to disentangle the latent topics. Existing topic models when applied to reviews may extract topics associated with writers’ subjective opinions mixed with those related to factual descriptions such as plot summaries in movie and book reviews. It is thus desirable to automatically separate opinion topics from plot/neutral ones enabling better interpretability. In this paper, we propose a neural topic model combined with adversarial training to disentangle opinion topics from plot and neutral ones. We conduct an extensive experimental assessment introducing a new collection of movie and book reviews paired with their plots, namely MOBO dataset, showing an improved coherence and variety of topics, a consistent disentanglement rate, and sentiment classiﬁcation performance superior to other supervised topic models.

Multi-task Learning of Negation and Speculation for Targeted Sentiment Classification

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