Dominican Republic

Biomedical Concept Normalization (BCN) is widely used in biomedical text processing as a fundamental module. Owing to numerous sur- face variants of biomedical concepts, BCN still remains challenging and unsolved. In this paper, we exploit biomedical concept hypernyms to facilitate BCN. We propose Biomedical Concept Normalizer with Hypernyms (BCNH), a novel framework that adopts list-wise training to make use of both hypernyms and synonyms, and also employs norm constraint on the representation of hypernym-hyponym entity pairs. The experimental results show that BCNH outperforms the previous state-of-the-art model on the NCBI dataset.

EMNLP 2021

Biomedical Concept Normalization by Leveraging Hypernyms

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EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Precisely defining the terminology is the first step in scientific communication. Developing neural text generation models for definition generation can circumvent the labor-intensity curation, further accelerating scientific discovery. Unfortunately, the lack of large-scale terminology definition dataset hinders the process toward definition generation. In this paper, we present a large-scale terminology definition dataset Graphine covering 2,010,648 terminology definition pairs, spanning 227 biomedical subdisciplines. Terminologies in each subdiscipline further form a directed acyclic graph, opening up new avenues for developing graph-aware text generation models. We then proposed a novel graph-aware definition generation model Graphex that integrates transformer with graph neural network. Our model outperforms existing text generation models by exploiting the graph structure of terminologies. We further demonstrated how Graphine can be used to evaluate pretrained language models, compare graph representation learning methods and predict sentence granularity. We envision Graphine to be a unique resource for definition generation and many other NLP tasks in biomedicine.

Graphine: A Dataset for Graph-aware Terminology Definition Generation

Tag recommendation relies on either a ranking function for top-k tags or an autoregressive generation method. However, the previous methods neglect one of two seemingly conflicting yet desirable characteristics of a tag set: orderlessness and inter-dependency. While the ranking approach fails to address the inter-dependency among tags when they are ranked, the autoregressive approach fails to take orderlessness into account because it is designed to utilize sequential relations among tokens. We propose a sequence-oblivious generation method for tag recommendation, in which the next tag to be generated is independent of the order of the generated tags and the order of the ground truth tags occurring in training data. Empirical results on two different domains, Instagram and Stack Overflow, show that our method is significantly superior to the previous approaches.

Leveraging Order-Free Tag Relations for Context-Aware Recommendation

Spelling Error Correction (SEC) that requires high-level language understanding is a challenging but useful task. Current SEC approaches normally leverage a pre-training then fine-tuning procedure that treats data equally. By contrast, Curriculum Learning (CL) utilizes training data differently during training and has shown its effectiveness in improving both performance and training efficiency in many other NLP tasks. In NMT, a model's performance has been shown sensitive to the difficulty of training examples, and CL has been shown effective to address this. In SEC, the data from different language learners are naturally distributed at different difficulty levels (some errors made by beginners are obvious to correct while some made by fluent speakers are hard), and we expect that designing a curriculum correspondingly for model learning may also help its training and bring about better performance. In this paper, we study how to further improve the performance of the state-of-the-art SEC method with CL, and propose a Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning (SSCL) approach. Specifically, we directly use the cross-entropy loss as criteria for: 1) scoring the difficulty of training data, and 2) evaluating the competence of the model. In our approach, CL improves the model training, which in return improves the CL measurement. In our experiments on the SIGHAN 2015 Chinese spelling check task, we show that SSCL is superior to previous norm-based and uncertainty-aware approaches, and establish a new state of the art (74.38% F1).

Self-Supervised Curriculum Learning for Spelling Error Correction

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) methods often require many trials before convergence, and no direct interpretability of trained policies is provided. In order to achieve fast convergence and interpretability for the policy in RL, we propose a novel RL method for text-based games with a recent neuro-symbolic framework called Logical Neural Network, which can learn symbolic and interpretable rules in their differentiable network. The method is first to extract first-order logical facts from text observation and external word meaning network (ConceptNet), then train a policy in the network with directly interpretable logical operators. Our experimental results show RL training with the proposed method converges significantly faster than other state-of-the-art neuro-symbolic methods in a TextWorld benchmark.

Neuro-Symbolic Reinforcement Learning with First-Order Logic

Despite its proven efficiency in other fields,data augmentation is less popular in the context of natural language processing (NLP) due to its complexity and limited results. A recent study (Longpre et al., 2020) showed for example that task-agnostic data augmentations fail to consistently boost the performance of pre-trained transformers even in low data regimes. In this paper, we investigate whether data-driven augmentation scheduling and the integration of a wider set of transformations canlead to improved performance where fixed and limited policies were unsuccessful. Our results suggest that, while this approach can help train better models in some settings, the improvements are unsubstantial. This negative result is meant to help researchers better understand the limitations of data augmentation for NLP.

Learning Data Augmentation Schedules for Natural Language Processing

In natural language understanding, topics that touch upon figurative language and pragmatics are notably difficult. We probe a novel use of locally aggregated descriptors – specifically, an architecture called NeXtVLAD – motivated by its accomplishments in computer vision, achieve tremendous success in the FigLang2020 sarcasm detection task. The reported F1 score of 93.1% is 14% higher than the next best result. We specifically investigate the extent to which the novel architecture is responsible for this boost, and find that it does not provide statistically significant benefits. Deep learning approaches are expensive, and we hope our insights highlighting the lack of benefits from introducing a resource-intensive component will aid future research to distill the effective elements from long and complex pipelines, thereby providing a boost to the wider research community.

An Investigation into the Contribution of Locally Aggregated Descriptors to Figurative Language Identification

Understanding linguistic modality is widely seen as important for downstream tasks such as Question Answering and Knowledge Graph Population. Entailment Graph learning might also be expected to benefit from attention to modality. We build Entailment Graphs using a news corpus filtered with a modality parser, and show that stripping modal modifiers from predicates in fact increases performance. This suggests that for some tasks, the pragmatics of modal modification of predicates allows them to contribute as evidence of entailment.

Blindness to Modality Helps Entailment Graph Mining

Although neural models have shown strong performance in datasets such as SNLI, they lack the ability to generalize out-of-distribution (OOD). In this work, we formulate a few-shot learning setup and examine the effects of natural language explanations on OOD generalization. We leverage the templates in the HANS dataset and construct templated natural language explanations for each template. Although generated explanations show competitive BLEU scores against groundtruth explanations, they fail to improve prediction performance. We further show that generated explanations often hallucinate information and miss key elements that indicate the label.

Investigating the Effect of Natural Language Explanations on Out-of-Distribution Generalization in Few-shot NLI

Much of recent progress in NLU was shown to be due to models' learning dataset-specific heuristics. We conduct a case study of generalization in NLI (from MNLI to the adversarially constructed HANS dataset) in a range of BERT-based architectures (adapters, Siamese Transformers, HEX debiasing), as well as with subsampling the data and increasing the model size. We report 2 successful and 3 unsuccessful strategies, all providing insights into how Transformer-based models learn to generalize.

Generalization in NLI: Ways (Not) To Go Beyond Simple Heuristics

For Semi-Supervised VAEs, a popular data-efficient framework in NLP, we justify and test the removal of 2 components. These are:

- The unobserved latent variable (z)
- Kullback-Leibler term.

The resulting model is smaller, faster, allows for more information}to be absorbed into the latent variables, requires no prior to be chosen, and does not lose accuracy in text classification.

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Graphine: A Dataset for Graph-aware Terminology Definition Generation

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