Dominican Republic

Substantial amounts of work are required to clean large collections of digitized books for NLP analysis, both because of the presence of errors in the scanned text and the presence of duplicate volumes in the corpora.
In this paper, we consider the issue of deduplication in the presence of optical character recognition (OCR) errors. We present methods to handle these errors, evaluated on a collection of 19,347 texts from the Project Gutenberg dataset and 96,635 texts from the HathiTrust Library. We demonstrate that improvements in language models now enable the detection and correction of OCR errors without consideration of the scanning image itself. The inconsistencies found by aligning pairs of scans of the same underlying work provides training data to build models for detecting and correcting errors. We identify the canonical version for each of 17,136 repeatedly-scanned books from 58,808 scans. Finally, we investigate methods to detect and correct errors in single-copy texts. We show that on average, our method corrects over six times as many errors as it introduces. We also provide interesting analysis on the relation between scanning quality and other factors such as location and publication year.

EMNLP 2021

Cleaning Dirty Books: Post-OCR Processing for Previously Scanned Texts

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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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.

Legal texts routinely use concepts that are difficult to understand. Lawyers elaborate on the meaning of such concepts by, among other things, carefully investigating how they have been used in the past. Finding text snippets that mention a particular concept in a useful way is tedious, time-consuming, and hence expensive. We assembled a data set of 26,959 sentences, coming from legal case decisions, and labeled them in terms of their usefulness for explaining selected legal concepts. Using the dataset we study the effectiveness of transformer models pre-trained on large language corpora to detect which of the sentences are useful. In light of models' predictions, we analyze various linguistic properties of the explanatory sentences as well as their relationship to the legal concept that needs to be explained. We show that the transformer-based models are capable of learning surprisingly sophisticated features and outperform the prior approaches to the task.

Discovering Explanatory Sentences in Legal Case Decisions Using Pre-trained Language Models

Code-switching (CS), a ubiquitous phenomenon due to the ease of communication it offers in multilingual communities still remains an understudied problem in language processing. The primary reasons behind this are: (1) minimal efforts in leveraging large pretrained multilingual models, and (2) the lack of annotated data. The distinguishing case of low performance of multilingual models in CS is the intra-sentence mixing of languages leading to switch points. We first benchmark two sequence labeling tasks – POS and NER on 4 different language pairs with a suite of pretrained models to identify the problems and select the best performing char-BERT model among them (addressing (1)). We then propose a self training method to repurpose the existing pretrained models using a switch-point bias by leveraging unannotated data (addressing (2)). We finally demonstrate that our approach performs well on both tasks by reducing the gap between the switch point performance while retaining the overall performance on two distinct language pairs in both the tasks. We plan to release our models and the code for all our experiments.

Switch Point biased Self-Training: Re-purposing Pretrained Models for Code-Switching

Language models such as GPT-2 have performed well on constructing syntactically sound sentences for text auto-completion tasks. However, such models often require considerable training effort to adapt to specific writing domains (e.g., medical). In this paper, we propose an intermediate training strategy to enhance pre-trained language models' performance in the text auto-completion task and fastly adapt them to specific domains. Our strategy includes a novel self-supervised training objective called Next Phrase Prediction (NPP), which encourages a language model to complete the partial query with enriched phrases and eventually improve the model's text auto-completion performance. Preliminary experiments have shown that our approach is able to outperform the baselines in auto-completion for email and academic-writing domains.

Improving Text Auto-Completion with Next Phrase Prediction

Jupyter notebook allows data scientists to write machine learning code together with its documentation in cells. In this paper, we propose a new task of code documentation generation (CDG) for computational notebooks. In contrast to the previous CDG tasks which focus on generating documentation for single code snippets, in a computational notebook, one documentation in a markdown cell often corresponds to multiple code cells, and these code cells have an inherent structure. We proposed a new model (HAConvGNN) that uses a hierarchical attention mechanism to consider the relevant code cells and the relevant code tokens information when generating the documentation. Tested on a new corpus constructed from well-documented Kaggle notebooks, we show that our model outperforms other baseline models.

HAConvGNN: Hierarchical Attention Based Convolutional Graph Neural Network for Code Documentation Generation in Jupyter Notebooks

Named entity disambiguation (NED), which involves mapping textual mentions to structured entities, is particularly challenging in the medical domain due to the presence of rare entities. Existing approaches are limited by the presence of coarse-grained structural resources in biomedical knowledge bases as well as the use of training datasets that provide low coverage over uncommon resources. In this work, we address these issues by proposing a cross-domain data integration method that transfers structural knowledge from a general text knowledge base to the medical domain. We utilize our integration scheme to augment structural resources and generate a large biomedical NED dataset for pretraining. Our pretrained model with injected structural knowledge achieves state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark medical NED datasets: MedMentions and BC5CDR. Furthermore, we improve disambiguation of rare entities by up to 57 accuracy points.

Cross-Domain Data Integration for Named Entity Disambiguation in Biomedical Text

Punctuation restoration is a fundamental requirement for the readability of text derived from Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. Most contemporary solutions are limited to predicting only a few of the most frequently occurring marks, such as periods, commas, and question marks - and only one per word. However, in written language, we deal with a much larger number of punctuation characters (such as parentheses, hyphens, etc.), and their combinations (like parenthesis followed by a dot). Such comprehensive punctuation cannot always be unambiguously reduced to a basic set of the most frequently occurring marks. In this work, we evaluate several methods in the comprehensive punctuation reconstruction task. We conduct experiments on parallel corpora of two different languages, English and Polish - languages with a relatively simple and complex morphology, respectively. We also investigate the influence of building a model on comprehensive punctuation on the quality of the basic punctuation restoration task

Comprehensive Punctuation Restoration for English and Polish

Although grammatical error correction (GEC) has achieved good performance on texts written by learners of English as a second language, performance on low error density domains where texts are written by English speakers of varying levels of proficiency can still be improved. In this paper, we propose a contrastive learning approach to encourage the GEC model to assign a higher probability to a correct sentence while reducing the probability of incorrect sentences that the model tends to generate, so as to improve the accuracy of the model. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the performance of GEC models in low error density domains, when evaluated on the benchmark CWEB dataset.

Grammatical Error Correction with Contrastive Learning in Low Error Density Domains

Precise information of word boundary can alleviate the problem of lexical ambiguity to improve the performance of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Thus, Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is a fundamental task in NLP. Due to the development of pre-trained language models (PLM), pre-trained knowledge can help neural methods solve the main problems of the CWS in significant measure. Existing methods have already achieved high performance on several benchmarks (e.g., Bakeoff-2005). However, recent outstanding studies are limited by the small-scale annotated corpus. To further improve the performance of CWS methods based on fine-tuning the PLMs, we propose a novel neural framework, LBGCN, which incorporates a lexicon-based graph convolutional network into the Transformer encoder. Experimental results on five benchmarks and four cross-domain datasets show the lexicon-based graph convolutional network successfully captures the information of candidate words and helps to improve performance on the benchmarks (Bakeoff-2005 and CTB6) and the cross-domain datasets (SIGHAN-2010). Further experiments and analyses demonstrate that our proposed framework effectively models the lexicon to enhance the ability of basic neural frameworks and strengthens the robustness in the cross-domain scenario.

Lexicon-Based Graph Convolutional Network for Chinese Word Segmentation

In Arabic Language, diacritics are used to specify meanings as well as pronunciations. However, diacritics are often omitted from written texts, which increases the number of possible meanings and pronunciations. This leads to an ambiguous text and makes the computational process on undiacritized text more difficult. In this paper, we propose a Linguistic Attentional Model for Arabic text Diacritization (LAMAD). In LAMAD, a new linguistic feature representation is presented, which utilizes both word and character contextual features. Then, a linguistic attention mechanism is proposed to capture the important linguistic features. In addition, we explore the impact of the linguistic features extracted from the text on Arabic text diacritization (ATD) by introducing them to the linguistic attention mechanism. The extensive experimental results on three datasets with different sizes illustrate that LAMAD outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models.

LAMAD: A Linguistic Attentional Model for Arabic Text Diacritization

While day-to-day questions come with a variety of answer types, the current question-answering (QA) literature has failed to adequately address the answer diversity of questions. To this end, we present GooAQ, a large-scale dataset with a variety of answer types. This dataset contains over 5 million questions and 3 million answers collected from Google. GooAQ \emph{questions} are collected semi-automatically from the Google search engine using its autocomplete feature. This results in naturalistic questions of practical interest that are nonetheless short and expressed using simple language. GooAQ \emph{answers} are mined from Google's responses to our collected questions, specifically from the answer boxes in the search results. This yields a rich space of answer types, containing both textual answers (short and long) as well as more structured ones such as collections. We benchmark T5 models on GooAQ and observe that: (a) in line with recent work, LM's strong performance on GooAQ's short-answer questions heavily benefit from annotated data; however, (b) their quality in generating coherent and accurate responses for questions requiring long responses (such as `how' and `why' questions) is less reliant on observing annotated data and mainly supported by their pre-training. We release GooAQ to facilitate further research on improving QA with diverse response types.

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