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This paper proposes a sophisticated neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. By introducing three novel components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier, our method PDC achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous efforts: (1) Pointer leverages the semantic information from bilingual dictionaries, for the first time, to better locate source words whose translation in dictionaries can potentially be used; (2) Disambiguator synthesizes contextual information from the source view and the target view, both of which contribute to distinguishing the proper translation of a specific source word from multiple candidates in dictionaries; (3) Copier systematically connects Pointer and Disambiguator based on a hierarchical copy mechanism seamlessly integrated with Transformer, thereby building an end-to-end architecture that could avoid error propagation problems in alternative pipe-line methods. The experimental results on Chinese-English and English-Japanese benchmarks demonstrate the PDC&#39;s overall superiority and effectiveness of each component.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Point, Disambiguate and Copy: Incorporating Bilingual Dictionaries for Neural Machine Translation

bilingual dictionary

disambiguation

machine translation

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ACL 2026

The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026) will take place in San Diego, California, from July 2 - 7, 2026.

This paper proposes a sophisticated neural architecture to incorporate bilingual dictionaries into Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. By introducing three novel components: Pointer, Disambiguator, and Copier, our method PDC achieves the following merits inherently compared with previous efforts: (1) Pointer leverages the semantic information from bilingual dictionaries, for the first time, to better locate source words whose translation in dictionaries can potentially be used; (2) Disambiguator synthesizes contextual information from the source view and the target view, both of which contribute to distinguishing the proper translation of a specific source word from multiple candidates in dictionaries; (3) Copier systematically connects Pointer and Disambiguator based on a hierarchical copy mechanism seamlessly integrated with Transformer, thereby building an end-to-end architecture that could avoid error propagation problems in alternative pipe-line methods. The experimental results on Chinese-English and English-Japanese benchmarks demonstrate the PDC's overall superiority and effectiveness of each component.

technical paper

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Aiming for a better integration of data-driven and linguistically-inspired approaches, we explore whether RST Nuclearity, assigning a binary assessment of importance between text segments, can be replaced by automatically generated, real-valued scores, in what we call a Weighted-RST framework. In particular, we find that weighted discourse trees from auxiliary tasks can benefit key NLP downstream applications, compared to nuclearity-centered approaches. We further show that real-valued importance distributions partially and interestingly align with the assessment and uncertainty of human annotators.

W-RST: Towards a Weighted RST-style Discourse Framework

Atomic clauses are fundamental text units for understanding complex sentences. Identifying the atomic sentences within complex sentences is important for applications such as summarization, argument mining, discourse analysis, discourse parsing, and question answering. Previous work mainly relies on rule-based methods dependent on parsing. We propose a new task to decompose each complex sentence into simple sentences derived from the tensed clauses in the source, and a novel problem formulation as a graph edit task. Our neural model learns to Accept, Break, Copy or Drop elements of a graph that combines word adjacency and grammatical dependencies. The full processing pipeline includes modules for graph construction, graph editing, and sentence generation from the output graph. We introduce DeSSE, a new dataset designed to train and evaluate complex sentence decomposition, and MinWiki, a subset of MinWikiSplit. ABCD achieves comparable performance as two parsing baselines on MinWiki. On DeSSE, which has a more even balance of complex sentence types, our model achieves higher accuracy on the number of atomic sentences than an encoder-decoder baseline. Results include a detailed error analysis.

ABCD: A Graph Framework to Convert Complex Sentences to a Covering Set of Simple Sentences

Many Question-Answering (QA) datasets contain unanswerable questions, but their treatment in QA systems remains primitive. Our analysis of the Natural Questions (Kwiatkowski et al. 2019) dataset reveals that a substantial portion of unanswerable questions (~21%) can be explained based on the presence of unverifiable presuppositions. Through a user preference study, we demonstrate that the oracle behavior of our proposed system---which provides responses based on presupposition failure---is preferred over the oracle behavior of existing QA systems. Then, we present a novel framework for implementing such a system in three steps: presupposition generation, presupposition verification, and explanation generation, reporting progress on each. Finally, we show that a simple modification of adding presuppositions and their verifiability to the input of a competitive end-to-end QA system yields modest gains in QA performance and unanswerability detection, demonstrating the promise of our approach.

Which Linguist Invented the Lightbulb? Presupposition Verification for Question-Answering

Text-level discourse rhetorical structure (DRS) parsing is known to be challenging due to the notorious lack of training data. Although recent top-down DRS parsers can better leverage global document context and have achieved certain success, the performance is still far from perfect. To our knowledge, all previous DRS parsers make local decisions for either bottom-up node composition or top-down split point ranking at each time step, and largely ignore DRS parsing from the global view point. Obviously, it is not sufficient to build an entire DRS tree only through these local decisions. In this work, we present our insight on evaluating the pros and cons of the entire DRS tree for global optimization. Specifically, based on recent well-performing top-down frameworks, we introduce a novel method to transform both gold standard and predicted constituency trees into tree diagrams with two color channels. After that, we learn an adversarial bot between gold and fake tree diagrams to estimate the generated DRS trees from a global perspective. We perform experiments on both RST-DT and CDTB corpora and use the original Parseval for performance evaluation. The experimental results show that our parser can substantially improve the performance when compared with previous state-of-the-art parsers.

Adversarial Learning for Discourse Rhetorical Structure Parsing

Discourse relations among arguments reveal logical structures of a debate conversation. However, no prior work has explicitly studied how the sequence of discourse relations influence a claim's impact. This paper empirically shows that the discourse relations between two arguments along the context path are essential factors for identifying the persuasive power of an argument. We further propose DisCOC to inject and fuse the sentence-level structural discourse information with contextualized features derived from large-scale language models. Experimental results and extensive analysis show that the attention and gate mechanisms that explicitly model contexts and texts can indeed help the argument impact classification task defined by Durmus et al. (2019), and discourse structures among the context path of the claim to be classified can further boost the performance.

Exploring Discourse Structures for Argument Impact Classification

Pre-trained language models induce dense entity representations that offer strong performance on entity-centric NLP tasks, but such representations are not immediately interpretable. This can be a barrier to model uptake in important domains such as biomedicine. There has been recent work on general interpretable representation learning (Onoe and Durrett, 2020), but these domain-agnostic representations do not readily transfer to the important domain of biomedicine. In this paper, we create a new entity type system and training set from a large corpus of biomedical texts by mapping entities to concepts in a medical ontology, and from these to Wikipedia pages whose categories are our types. From this mapping we derive Biomedical Interpretable Entity Representations BIERs), in which dimensions correspond to fine-grained entity types, and values are predicted probabilities that a given entity is of the corresponding type. We propose a novel method that exploits BIER's final sparse and intermediate dense representations to facilitate model and entity type debugging. We show that BIERs achieve strong performance in biomedical tasks including named entity disambiguation and entity linking, and we provide error analysis to highlight the utility of their interpretability, particularly in low-supervision settings. Finally, we provide our induced 68K biomedical type system, the corresponding 37 million triples of derived data used to train BIER models and our best performing model.

Biomedical Interpretable Entity Representations

State-of-the-art Variational Auto-Encoders (VAEs) for learning disentangled latent representations give impressive results in discovering features like pitch, pause duration, and accent in speech data, leading to highly controllable text-to-speech (TTS) synthesis. However, these LSTM-based VAEs fail to learn latent clusters of speaker attributes when trained on limited or noisy datasets. Further, different latent variables are found to encode the same features, limiting the control and expressiveness during speech synthesis. To resolve these issues, we propose REMMI (Reordered transformer Encoder with Minimal Mutual Information) where we minimize the mutual information between different latent variables and devise a modified Transformer architecture with layer reordering to learn controllable latent representations in speech data. We show that REMMI reduces the cluster overlap of speaker attributes by at least 30% over LSTM-VAE.

Learning Robust Latent Representations for Controllable Speech Synthesis

Having recognized gender bias as a major issue affecting current translation technologies, researchers have primarily attempted to mitigate it by working on the data front. However, whether algorithmic aspects concur to exacerbate unwanted outputs remains so far under-investigated. In this work, we bring the analysis on gender bias in automatic translation onto a seemingly neutral yet critical component: word segmentation. Can segmenting methods influence the ability to translate gender? Do certain segmentation approaches penalize the representation of feminine linguistic markings? We address these questions by comparing 5 existing segmentation strategies on the target side of speech translation systems. Our results on two language pairs (English-Italian/French) show that state-of-the-art subword splitting (BPE) comes at the cost of higher gender bias. In light of this finding, we propose a combined approach that preserves BPE overall translation quality, while leveraging the higher ability of character-based segmentation to properly translate gender.

How to Split: the Effect of Word Segmentation on Gender Bias in Speech Translation

In this paper, we analyze the interplay between the use of offensive language and mental health. We acquired publicly available datasets created for offensive language identification and depression detection and we train computational models to compare the use of offensive language in social media posts written by groups of individuals with and without self-reported depression diagnosis. We also look at samples written by groups of individuals whose posts show signs of depression according to recent related studies. Our analysis indicates that offensive language is more frequently used in the samples written by individuals with self-reported depression as well as individuals showing signs of depression. The results discussed here open new avenues in research in politeness/offensiveness and mental health.

An Exploratory Analysis of the Relation between Offensive Language and Mental Health

Automated Term Extraction (ATE), even though well-investigated, continues to be a challenging task. Approaches conventionally extract terms on corpus or document level and the benefits of neural models still remain underexplored with very few exceptions. We introduce three transformer-based term extraction models operating on sentence level: a language model for token classification, one for sequence classification, and an innovative use of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), which learns to reduce sentences to terms. All three models are trained and tested on the dataset of the ATE challenge TermEval 2020 in English, French, and Dutch across four specialized domains. The two best performing approaches are also evaluated on the ACL RD-TEC 2.0 dataset. Our models outperform previous baselines, one of which is BERT-based, by a substantial margin, with the token-classifier language model performing best.

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Towards Sense-level Bilingual Dictionary Induction

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