Thailand

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is a crucial task in natural language processing and has achieved remarkable advancements. However, most of the neural MRC models are still far from robust and fail to generalize well in real-world applications. In order to comprehensively verify the robustness and generalization of MRC models, we introduce a real-world Chinese dataset -- DuReader_robust . It is designed to evaluate the MRC models from three aspects: over-sensitivity, over-stability and generalization. Comparing to previous work, the instances in DuReader_robust are natural texts, rather than the altered unnatural texts. It presents the challenges when applying MRC models to real-world applications. The experimental results show that MRC models do not perform well on the challenge test set. Moreover, we analyze the behavior of existing models on the challenge test set, which may provide suggestions for future model development. The dataset and codes are publicly available at https://github.com/baidu/DuReader.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications

real-world

machine reading comprehension

generalization

robustness

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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).

poster

In the field of dialogue summarization, due to the lack of training data, it is often difficult for supervised summary generation methods to learn vital information from dialogue context with limited data. Several attempts on unsupervised summarization for text by leveraging semantic information solely or auto-encoder strategy (i.e., sentence compression), it however cannot be adapted to the dialogue scene due to the limited words in utterances and huge gap between the dialogue and its summary. In this study, we propose a novel unsupervised strategy to address this challenge, which roots from the hypothetical foundation that a superior summary approximates a replacement of the original dialogue, and they are roughly equivalent for auxiliary (self-supervised) tasks, e.g., dialogue generation. The proposed strategy RepSum is applied to generate both extractive and abstractive summary with the guidance of the followed n^{th} utterance generation and classification tasks. Extensive experiments on various datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model compared with the state-of-the-art methods.

RepSum: Unsupervised Dialogue Summarization based on Replacement Strategy

Abstractive summarization for long-document or multi-document remains challenging for the Seq2Seq architecture, as Seq2Seq is not good at analyzing long-distance relations in text.
In this paper, we present BASS, a novel framework for Boosting Abstractive Summarization based on a unified Semantic graph, 
which aggregates co-referent phrases distributing across a long range of 
context and conveys rich relations between phrases.
Further, a graph-based encoder-decoder model is proposed to improve both the document representation and summary generation process by leveraging the graph structure.
Specifically, several graph augmentation methods are designed to encode both the explicit and implicit relations in the text while the graph-propagation attention mechanism is developed in the decoder to select salient content into the summary.
Empirical results show that the proposed architecture brings substantial improvements for both long-document and multi-document summarization tasks.

BASS: Boosting Abstractive Summarization with Unified Semantic Graph

Professional summaries are written with document-level information, such as the theme of the document, in mind. This is in contrast with most seq2seq decoders which simultaneously learn to focus on salient content, while deciding what to generate, at each decoding step. With the motivation to narrow this gap, we introduce Focus Attention Mechanism, a simple yet effective method to encourage decoders to proactively generate tokens that are similar or topical to the input document. Further, we propose a Focus Sampling method to enable generation of diverse summaries, an area currently understudied in summarization. When evaluated on the BBC extreme summarization task, two state-of-the-art models augmented with Focus Attention generate summaries that are closer to the target and more faithful to their input documents, outperforming their vanilla counterparts on ROUGE and multiple faithfulness measures. We also empirically demonstrate that Focus Sampling is more effective in generating diverse and faithful summaries than top-k or nucleus sampling-based decoding methods.

Focus Attention: Promoting Faithfulness and Diversity in Summarization

The availability of large-scale datasets has driven the development of neural models that create generic summaries from single or multiple documents. In this work we consider query focused summarization (QFS), a task for which training data in the form of queries, documents, and summaries is not readily available. We propose to decompose QFS into (1) query modeling (i.e., finding supportive evidence within a set of documents for a query) and (2) conditional language modeling (i.e., summary generation). We introduce MaRGE, a Masked ROUGE Regression framework for evidence estimation and ranking which relies on a unified representation for summaries and queries, so that summaries in generic data can be converted into proxy queries for learning a query model. Experiments across QFS benchmarks and query types show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance despite learning from weak supervision.

Generating Query Focused Summaries from Query-Free Resources

In news articles the lead bias is a common phenomenon that usually dominates the learning signals for neural extractive summarizers, severely limiting their performance on data with different or even no bias. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to demote lead bias and make the summarizer focus more on the content semantics. Experiments on two news corpora with different degrees of lead bias show that our method can effectively demote the model's learned lead bias and improve its generality on out-of-distribution data, with little to no performance loss on in-distribution data.

Demoting the Lead Bias in News Summarization via Alternating Adversarial Learning

Detecting spans and classifying used manipulative techniques in those spans by means of the BART EncoderDecoder model to generate a marked up version of the input. How is it done, what are the limitations, and how can these be remedied.

BART for Span Detection and Classification

This paper describes the performance of the team \teamname~at SemEval 2021 Task 1 - Lexical Complexity Prediction. The main contribution of this paper is to fine-tune transformer-based language models pre-trained on several text corpora, some being general (E.g., Wikipedia, BooksCorpus), some being the corpora from which the CompLex Dataset was extracted, and others being from other specific domains such as Finance, Law, etc. We perform ablation studies on selecting the transformer models and how their individual complexity scores are aggregated to get the resulting complexity scores. Our method achieves a best Pearson Correlation of 0.784 in sub-task 1 (single word) and 0.836 in sub-task 2 (multiple word expressions).

SemEval-2021 Task 1 : Lexical Complexity Prediction using Transformer-based Language Models pre-trained on various text corpora

This paper introduces our systems for all three subtasks of SemEval-2021 Task 4: Reading Comprehension of Abstract Meaning.
To help our model better represent and understand abstract concepts in natural language, we well-design many simple and effective approaches adapted to the backbone model (RoBERTa).
Specifically, we formalize the subtasks into the multiple-choice question answering format and add special tokens to abstract concepts, then, the final prediction of QA is considered as the result of subtasks. Additionally, we employ many finetuning tricks to improve performance.
Experimental results show that our approach gains significant performance compared with the baseline systems.
Our system achieves eighth rank (87.51\%) and tenth rank (89.64\%) on the official blind test set of subtask 1 and subtask 2 respectively.

IIE-NLP-Eyas at SemEval-2021 Task 4: Enhancing PLM for ReCAM with Special Tokens, Re-Ranking, Siamese Encoders and Back Translation

MeasEval aims at identifying quantities along with the entities that are measured with additional properties within English scientific documents. The variety of styles used makes measurements, a most crucial aspect of scientific writing, challenging to extract. This paper presents ablation studies making the case for several preprocessing steps such as specialized tokenization rules. For linguistic structure, we encode dependency trees in a Deep Graph Convolution Network (DGCNN) for multi-task classification.

CLaC-np at SemEval-2021 Task 8: Dependency DGCNN

We developed a system to generate structured representations of research contributions described in NLP publications, achieving the top performance in the NCG shared task. We combined a cascade of neural models with rule-based methods. In particular, we proposed a novel approach for triple extraction, where we extracted triples with different characteristics using different relation classification methods.

DuReader_robust: A Chinese Dataset Towards Evaluating Robustness and Generalization of Machine Reading Comprehension in Real-World Applications

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