Dominican Republic

Although researches on word embeddings have made great progress in recent years, many tasks in natural language processing are on the sentence level. Thus, it is essential to learn sentence embeddings. Recently, Sentence BERT (SBERT) is proposed to learn embeddings on the sentence level, and it uses the inner product (or, cosine similarity) to compute semantic similarity between sentences. However, this measurement cannot well describe the semantic structures among sentences. The reason is that sentences may lie on a manifold in the ambient space rather than distribute in an Euclidean space. Thus, cosine similarity cannot approximate distances on the manifold. To tackle the severe problem, we propose a novel sentence embedding method called Sentence BERT with Locality Preserving (SBERT-LP), which discovers the sentence submanifold from a high-dimensional space and yields a compact sentence representation subspace by locally preserving geometric structures of sentences. We compare the SBERT-LP with several existing sentence embedding approaches from three perspectives: sentence similarity, sentence classification and sentence clustering. Experimental results and case studies demonstrate that our method encodes sentences better in the sense of semantic structures.

EMNLP 2021

Locality Preserving Sentence Encoding

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.

technical paper

The understanding of time expressions includes two sub-tasks: recognition and normalization. In recent years, significant progress has been made in the recognition of time expressions while research on normalization has lagged behind. Existing SOTA normalization methods highly rely on rules or grammars designed by experts, which limits their performance on emerging corpora, such as social media texts. In this paper, we model time expression normalization as a sequence of operations to construct the normalized temporal value, and we present a novel method called ARTime, which can automatically generate normalization rules from training data without expert interventions. Specifically, ARTime automatically captures possible operation sequences from annotated data and generates normalization rules on time expressions with common surface forms. The experimental results show that ARTime can significantly surpass SOTA methods on the Tweets benchmark, and achieves competitive results with existing expert-engineered rule methods on the TempEval-3 benchmark.

Automatic rule generation for time expression normalization

While contrastive learning is proven to be an effective training strategy in computer vision, Natural Language Processing (NLP) is only recently adopting it as a self-supervised alternative to Masked Language Modeling (MLM) for improving sequence representations. This paper introduces SupCL-Seq, which extends the supervised contrastive learning from computer vision to the optimization of sequence representations in NLP. 
By altering the dropout mask probability in standard Transformer architectures (e.g.~BERT-base), for every representation (anchor), we generate augmented altered views. A supervised contrastive loss is then utilized to maximize the system's capability of pulling together similar samples (e.g., anchors and their altered views) and pushing apart the samples belonging to the other classes. Despite its simplicity, SupCL-Seq leads to large gains in many sequence classification tasks on the GLUE benchmark compared to a standard BERT-base, including 6% absolute improvement on CoLA, 5.4% on MRPC, 4.7% on RTE and 2.6% on STS-B. We also show consistent gains over self-supervised contrastively learned representations, especially in non-semantic tasks. Finally we show that these gains are not solely due to augmentation, but rather to a downstream optimized sequence representation.

{S}up{CL}-{S}eq: {S}upervised {C}ontrastive {L}earning for Downstream Optimized Sequence Representations

The task of verifying the truthfulness of claims in textual documents, or fact-checking,
has received significant attention in recent years. Many existing evidence-based factchecking datasets contain synthetic claims and the models trained on these data might not
be able to verify real-world claims. Particularly few studies addressed evidence-based
fact-checking of health-related claims that require medical expertise or evidence from the
scientific literature. In this paper, we introduce HEALTHVER, a new dataset for evidence-based fact-checking of health-related claims that allows to study the validity of real-world claims by evaluating their truthfulness against scientific articles. Using a three-step data creation method, we first retrieved real-world claims from snippets returned by a search engine for questions about COVID-19. Then we
automatically retrieved and re-ranked relevant scientific papers using a T5 relevance-based
model. Finally, the relations between each evidence statement and the associated claim were
manually annotated as SUPPORT, REFUTE and NEUTRAL. To validate the created dataset
of 14,330 evidence-claim pairs, we developed baseline models based on pretrained language
models. Our experiments showed that training deep learning models on real-world medical claims greatly improves performance compared to models trained on synthetic and open-domain claims. Our results and manual analysis suggest that HEALTHVER provides a realistic and challenging dataset for future efforts on evidence-based fact-checking of health-related claims. The dataset, source code,
and a leaderboard are available at https://github.com/sarrouti/healthver.

Evidence-based Fact-Checking of Health-related Claims

In this paper, we address unsupervised chunking as a new task of syntactic structure induction, which is helpful for understanding the linguistic structures of human languages as well as processing low-resource languages. We propose a knowledge-transfer approach that heuristically induces chunk labels from state-of-the-art unsupervised parsing models; a hierarchical recurrent neural network (HRNN) learns from such induced chunk labels to smooth out the noise of the heuristics. Experiments show that our approach largely bridges the gap between supervised and unsupervised chunking.

Unsupervised Chunking as Syntactic Structure Induction with a Knowledge-Transfer Approach

In the last few years, several methods have been proposed to build meta-embeddings. The general aim was to obtain new representations integrating complementary knowledge from different source pre-trained embeddings thereby improving their overall quality. However, previous meta-embeddings have been evaluated using a variety of methods and datasets, which makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions regarding the merits of each approach. In this paper we propose a unified common framework, including both intrinsic and extrinsic tasks, for a fair and objective meta-embeddings evaluation. Furthermore, we present a new method to generate meta-embeddings, outperforming previous work on a large number of intrinsic evaluation benchmarks. Our evaluation framework also allows us to conclude that previous extrinsic evaluations of meta-embeddings have been overestimated.

Benchmarking Meta-embeddings: What Works and What Does Not

The dominant paradigm for semantic parsing in recent years is to formulate parsing as a sequence-to-sequence task, generating predictions with auto-regressive sequence decoders. In this work, we explore an alternative paradigm. We formulate semantic parsing as a dependency parsing task, applying graph-based decoding techniques developed for syntactic parsing. We compare various decoding techniques given the same pre-trained Transformer encoder on the TOP dataset, including settings where training data is limited or contains only partially-annotated examples. We find that our graph-based approach is competitive with sequence decoders on the standard setting, and offers significant improvements in data efficiency and settings where partially-annotated data is available.

Graph-Based Decoding for Task Oriented Semantic Parsing

Taxonomies are valuable resources for many applications, but the limited coverage due to the expensive manual curation process hinders their general applicability. Prior works attempt to automatically expand existing taxonomies to improve their coverage by learning concept embeddings in Euclidean space, while taxonomies, inherently hierarchical, more naturally align with the geometric properties of a hyperbolic space. In this paper, we present HyperExpan, a taxonomy expansion algorithm that seeks to preserve the structure of a taxonomy in a more expressive hyperbolic embedding space and learn to represent concepts and their relations with a Hyperbolic Graph Neural Network (HGNN). Specifically, HyperExpan leverages position embeddings to exploit the structure of the existing taxonomies, and characterizes the concept profile information to support the inference on new concepts that are unseen during training. Experiments show that our proposed HyperExpan outperforms baseline models with representation learning in a Euclidean feature space and achieves state-of-the-art performance on the taxonomy expansion benchmarks.

HyperExpan: Taxonomy Expansion with Hyperbolic Representation Learning

Recently, disentanglement based on a generative adversarial network or a variational autoencoder has significantly advanced the performance of diverse applications in CV and NLP domains. 
Nevertheless, those models still work on coarse levels in the disentanglement of closely related properties, such as syntax and semantics in human languages. This paper introduces a deep decomposable model based on VAE to disentangle syntax and semantics by using total correlation penalties on KL divergences. Notably, we decompose the KL divergence term of the original VAE so that the generated latent variables can be separated in a more clear-cut and interpretable way. 
Experiments on benchmark datasets show that our proposed model can significantly improve the disentanglement quality between syntactic and semantic representations for semantic similarity tasks and syntactic similarity tasks.

A Deep Decomposable Model for Disentangling Syntax and Semantics in Sentence Representation

Current state-of-the-art supervised word sense disambiguation (WSD) systems (such as GlossBERT and bi-encoder model) yield surprisingly good results by purely leveraging pre-trained language models and short dictionary definitions (or glosses) of the different word senses. While concise and intuitive, the sense gloss is just one of many ways to provide information about word senses. In this paper, we focus on enhancing the sense representations via incorporating synonyms, example phrases or sentences showing usage of word senses, and sense gloss of hypernyms. We show that incorporating such additional information boosts the performance on WSD. With the proposed enhancements, our system achieves an F1 score of 82.0% on the standard benchmark test dataset of the English all-words WSD task, surpassing all previous published scores on this benchmark dataset.

Improved Word Sense Disambiguation with Enhanced Sense Representations

Sememes are defined as the atomic units to describe the semantic meaning of concepts. Due to the difficulty of manually annotating sememes and the inconsistency of annotations between experts, the lexical sememe prediction task has been proposed. However, previous methods heavily rely on word or character embeddings, and ignore the fine-grained information. In this paper, we propose a novel pre-training method which is designed to better incorporate the internal information of Chinese character. The Glyph enhanced Chinese Character representation (GCC) is used to assist sememe prediction. We experiment and evaluate our model on HowNet, which is a famous sememe knowledge base. The experimental results show that our method outperforms existing non-external information models.

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