Dominican Republic

We introduce COMBO – a fully neural NLP system for accurate part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, lemmatisation, and (enhanced) dependency parsing. It predicts categorical morphosyntactic features whilst also exposes their vector representations, extracted from hidden layers. COMBO is an easy to install Python package with automatically downloadable pre-trained models for over 40 languages.
It maintains a balance between efficiency and quality. As it is an end-to-end system and its modules are jointly trained, its training is competitively fast. As its models are optimised for accuracy, they achieve often better prediction quality than SOTA. 
The COMBO library is available at: https://gitlab.clarin-pl.eu/syntactic-tools/combo.

EMNLP 2021

COMBO: State-of-the-Art Morphosyntactic Analysis

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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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

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

demo

Generative approaches have been recently shown to be effective for both Entity Disambiguation and Entity Linking (i.e., joint mention detection and disambiguation). However, the previously proposed autoregressive formulation for EL suffers from i) high computational cost due to a complex (deep) decoder, ii) non-parallelizable decoding that scales with the source sequence length, and iii) the need for training on a large amount of data. In this work, we propose a very efficient approach that parallelizes autoregressive linking across all potential mentions and relies on a shallow and efficient decoder. Moreover, we augment the generative objective with an extra discriminative component, i.e., a correction term which lets us directly optimize the generator's ranking. When taken together, these techniques tackle all the above issues: our model is >70 times faster and more accurate than the previous generative method, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches on the standard English dataset AIDA-CoNLL. Source code available at https://github.com/nicola-decao/efficient-autoregressive-EL

Highly Parallel Autoregressive Entity Linking with Discriminative Correction

Recent coreference resolution models rely heavily on span representations to find coreference links between word spans. As the number of spans is O(n2) in the length of text and the number of potential links is O(n4), various pruning techniques are necessary to make this approach computationally feasible. We propose instead to consider coreference links between individual words rather than word spans and then reconstruct the word spans. This reduces the complexity of the coreference model to O(n2) and allows it to consider all potential mentions without pruning any of them out. We also demonstrate that, with these changes, SpanBERT for coreference resolution will be significantly outperformed by RoBERTa. While being highly efficient, our model performs competitively with recent coreference resolution systems on the OntoNotes benchmark.

Word-Level Coreference Resolution

In this video we'll highlight some of the features in LightTag's annotation platform that we think are innovative. We'll touch on workforce management and quality assurance, drag and drop relationship annotation and UX tricks we learned from Facebook to maximize annotator productivity

LightTag: Text Annotation Platform

ET is a suite designed to support linguistic research and natural language processing tasks using corpora annotated in the CoNLL-U format. These goals are achieved by two integrated environments -- Interrogatório, an environment for querying and editing annotated corpora, and Julgamento, an environment for assessing their quality. ET is open-source, built on different Python Web technologies and has Web demonstrations available on-line. ET has been intensively used in our research group for over two years, being the chosen framework for several linguistic and NLP-related studies conducted by its researchers.

ET: A Workstation for Querying, Editing and Evaluating Annotated Corpora

We proposed polar embedding, which represents hierarchical structures in low-dimensional Euclidean space.
Word generalities and similarities are intuitively expressed using radius and angles in polar coordinates.
We introduced the Welsch loss function and SVGD for training embeddings in the angle limit of polar coordinates, which keeps angle distributions uniform and enables a model to leverage a whole space effectively.
Experimental results showed that polar embedding performs competitively or better than other models learned in low-dimensional Euclidean space.

Polar Embedding

Data augmentation aims at expanding training data with clean text using noising schemes to improve the performance of grammatical error correction (GEC). In practice, there are a great number of real error patterns in the manually annotated training data. We argue that these real error patterns can be introduced into clean text to effectively generate more real and high quality synthetic data, which is not fully explored by previous studies. Moreover, we also find that linguistic knowledge can be incorporated into data augmentation for generating more representative and more diverse synthetic data. In this paper, we propose a novel data augmentation method that fully considers the real error patterns and the linguistic knowledge for the GEC task. We conduct extensive experiments on public data sets and the experimental results show that our method outperforms several strong baselines with far less external unlabeled clean text data, highlighting its extraordinary effectiveness in the GEC task that lacks large-scale labeled training data.

Data Augmentation of Incorporating Real Error Patterns and Linguistic Knowledge for Grammatical Error Correction

Language models are trained only on text despite the fact that humans learn their first language in a highly interactive and multimodal environment where the first set of learned words are largely concrete, denoting physical entities and embodied states. To enrich language models with some of this missing experience, we leverage two sources of information: (1) the Lancaster Sensorimotor norms, which provide ratings (means and standard deviations) for over 40,000 English words along several dimensions of embodiment, and which capture the extent to which something is experienced across 11 different sensory modalities, and (2) vectors from coefficients of binary classifiers trained on images for the BERT vocabulary. We pre-trained the ELECTRA model and fine-tuned the RoBERTa model with these two sources of information then evaluate using the established GLUE benchmark and the Visual Dialog benchmark. We find that enriching language models with the Lancaster norms and image vectors improves results in both tasks, with some implications for robust language models that capture holistic linguistic meaning in a language learning context.

Enriching Language Models with Visually-grounded Word Vectors and the Lancaster Sensorimotor Norms

Pre-trained language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in solving various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There has been increasing interest in what knowledge these LMs contain and how we can extract that knowledge, treating LMs as knowledge bases (KBs). While there has been much work on probing LMs in the general domain, there has been little attention to whether these powerful LMs can be used as domain-specific KBs. To this end, we create the BioLAMA benchmark, which is comprised of 49K biomedical factual knowledge triples for probing biomedical LMs. We find that biomedical LMs with recently proposed probing methods can achieve up to 18.51% Acc@5 on retrieving biomedical knowledge. Although this seems promising given the task difficulty, our detailed analyses reveal that most predictions are highly correlated with prompt templates without any subjects, hence producing similar results on each relation and hindering their capabilities to be used as domain-specific KBs. We hope that BioLAMA can serve as a challenging benchmark for biomedical factual probing.

Can Language Models be Biomedical Knowledge Bases?

By exploiting the cross-modal attention, cross-BERT methods have achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in cross-modal retrieval. Nevertheless, the heavy text-image interactions in the cross-BERT model are prohibitively slow for large-scale retrieval. Late-interaction methods trade off retrieval accuracy and efficiency by exploiting cross-modal interaction only in the late stage, attaining a satisfactory retrieval speed. In this work, we propose an inflating and shrinking approach to further boost the efficiency and accuracy of late-interaction methods. The inflating operation plugs several codes in the input of the encoder to exploit the text-image interactions more thoroughly for higher retrieval accuracy. Then the shrinking operation gradually reduces the text-image interactions through knowledge distilling for higher efficiency. Through an inflating operation followed by a shrinking operation, both efficiency and accuracy of a late-interaction model are boosted. Systematic experiments on public benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our inflating and shrinking approach.

Inflate and Shrink:Enriching and Reducing Interactions for Fast Text-Image Retrieval

Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD documents is embedded in their XML metadata; meanwhile, it is easy to convert WORD documents to PDFs or images. Therefore, in an automated manner, we construct ReadingBank, a benchmark dataset that contains reading order, text, and layout information for 500,000 document images covering a wide spectrum of document types. This first-ever large-scale dataset unleashes the power of deep neural networks for reading order detection. Specifically, our proposed LayoutReader captures the text and layout information for reading order prediction using the seq2seq model. It performs almost perfectly in reading order detection and significantly improves both open-source and commercial OCR engines in ordering text lines in their results in our experiments. The dataset and models are publicly available at https: //aka.ms/layoutreader.

COMBO: State-of-the-Art Morphosyntactic Analysis

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Next from EMNLP 2021

Highly Parallel Autoregressive Entity Linking with Discriminative Correction

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ET: A Workstation for Querying, Editing and Evaluating Annotated Corpora