Dominican Republic

This work explores the capacities of character-based Neural Machine Translation to translate noisy User-Generated Content (UGC). Within a strict zero-shot scenario, we first study the detrimental impact on translation performance of various UGC phenomena on an annotated dataset we developed, and then show that such models are indeed incapable of handling unknown characters, for which we propose a simple but efficient solution.

EMNLP 2021

Noisy User-Generated Content Translation at the Character Level: Revisiting Open-Vocabulary Capabilities and Robustness of Char-Based Models

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.

workshop paper

Multimodal named entity recognition (MNER) requires to bridge the gap between language understanding and visual context. While many multimodal neural techniques have been proposed to incorporate images into the MNER task, the model's ability to leverage multimodal interactions remains poorly understood. In this work, we conduct in-depth analyses of existing multimodal fusion techniques from different perspectives and describe the scenarios where adding information from the image does not always boost performance. We also study the use of captions as a way to enrich the context for MNER. Experiments on three datasets from popular social platforms expose the bottleneck of existing multimodal models and the situations where using captions is beneficial.

Can images help recognize entities? A study of the role of images for Multimodal NER

State-of-the-art approaches to spelling error correction problem include Transformer-based Seq2Seq models, which require large training sets and suffer from slow inference time; and sequence labeling models based on Transformer encoders like BERT, which involve token-level label space and therefore a large pre-defined vocabulary dictionary. In this paper we present a Hierarchical Character Tagger model, or HCTagger, for short text spelling error correction. We use a pre-trained language model at the character level as a text encoder, and then predict character-level edits to transform the original text into its error-free form with a much smaller label space. For decoding, we propose a hierarchical multi-task approach to alleviate the issue of long-tail label distribution without introducing extra model parameters. Experiments on two public misspelling correction datasets demonstrate that HCTagger is an accurate and much faster approach than many existing models.

Hierarchical Character Tagger for Short Text Spelling Error Correction

Large-scale language models such as ELMo and BERT have pushed the horizon of what is possible in semantic role labeling (SRL), solving the out-of-vocabulary problem and enabling end-to-end systems, but they have also introduced significant biases. We evaluate three SRL parsers on very simple transitive sentences with verbs usually associated with animate subjects and objects, such as 
"Mary babysat Tom": a state-of-the-art parser based on BERT, an older parser based on GloVe, and an even older parser from before the days of word embeddings. When arguments are word forms predominantly used as person names, aligning with common sense expectations of animacy, the BERT-based parser is unsurprisingly superior; yet, with abstract or random nouns, the opposite picture emerges. We refer to this as "common sense bias" and present a challenge dataset for evaluating the extent to which parsers are sensitive to such a bias. Our code and challenge dataset are available

Common Sense Bias in Semantic Role Labeling

WhatsApp Messenger is one of the most popular channels for spreading information with a current reach of more than 180 countries and 2 billion people. Its widespread usage has made it one of the most popular media for information propagation among the masses during any socially engaging event. In the recent past, several countries have witnessed its effectiveness and influence in political and social campaigns. We observe a high surge in information and propaganda flow during election campaigning. In this paper, we explore a high-quality large-scale user-generated dataset curated from WhatsApp comprising of 281 groups, 31,078 unique users, and 223,404 messages shared before, during, and after the Indian General Elections 2019, encompassing all major Indian political parties and leaders. In addition to the raw noisy user-generated data, we present a fine-grained annotated dataset of 3,848 messages that will be useful to understand the various dimensions of WhatsApp political campaigning. We present several complementary insights into the investigative and sensational news stories from the same period. Exploratory data analysis and experiments showcase several exciting results and future research opportunities.

PoliWAM: An Exploration of a Large Scale Corpus of Political Discussions on WhatsApp Messenger

Due to unstructured sentences and some misspellings and errors, finding the named entities in a noisy environment such as social media takes much more effort than formal languages. The ParsTwiNER corpus, gathered from Persian Twitter, contains about 250k tokens, based on standard instructions such as MUC-6 or CoNLL 2003. Using Cohen's Kappa coefficient, the consistency of annotators is 0.95, a high score. We demonstrate that some state-of-the-art models were degraded on this corpus and trained a model using parallel transfer learning based on BERT architecture. The proposed model works well in informal Persian, as well as in formal Persian. The corpus and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/overfit-ir/parstwiner and https://huggingface.co/overfit/twiner-bert-base-mtl, respectively.

ParsTwiNER: A Corpus for Named Entity Recognition at Informal Persian

We present DreamDrug, a crowdsourced dataset for detecting mentions of drugs in
noisy user-generated item listings from darknet markets. Our dataset contains nearly 15,000 manually annotated drug entities in over 3,500 item listings scraped from the darknet market platform "DreamMarket" in 2017. We also train and evaluate baseline models for detecting these entities, using contextual language
models fine-tuned in a few-shot setting and on the full dataset, and examine the effect of pretraining on in-domain unannotated corpora.

DreamDrug - A crowdsourced NER dataset for detecting drugs in darknet markets

Code-mixed text generation systems have found applications in many downstream tasks, including speech recognition, translation and dialogue. A paradigm of these generation systems relies on well-defined grammatical theories of code-mixing, and there is a lack of comparison of these theories. We present a large-scale human evaluation of two popular grammatical theories, Matrix-Embedded Language (ML) and Equivalence Constraint (EC). We compare them against three heuristic-based models and quantitatively demonstrate the effectiveness of the two grammatical theories.

Comparing Grammatical Theories of Code-Mixing

The benchmark performance of cross-database semantic parsing has climbed steadily in recent years, catalyzed by the wide adoption of pre-trained language models. Yet existing work have shown that state-of-the-art cross-database semantic parsers struggle to generalize to novel user utterances, databases and query structures. To obtain transparent details on the strengths and limitation of these models, we propose a diagnostic testing approach based on controlled synthesis of canonical natural language and SQL pairs. Inspired by the "Checklist" paper (Ribeiro et al. 2020), we characterize a set of essential capabilities for cross-database semantic parsing models, and detailed the method for synthesizing the corresponding test data. We evaluated a variety of high performing models using the proposed approach, and identified several non-obvious weaknesses across models (e.g. unable to correctly select many columns). Our dataset and code are released as a test suite at: http://github.com/hclent/BehaviorCheckingSemPar.

Improving Punctuation Restoration for Speech Transcripts via External Data

Fake news causes significant damage to society. To deal with these fake news, several studies on building detection models and arranging datasets have been conducted.
Most of the fake news datasets depend on a specific time period. Consequently, the detection models trained on such a dataset have difficulty detecting novel fake news generated by political changes and social changes; they may possibly result in biased output from the input, including specific person names and organizational names. We refer to this problem as Diachronic Bias because it is caused by the creation date of news in each dataset. In this study, we confirm the bias, especially proper nouns including person names, from the deviation of phrase appearances in each dataset. Based on these findings, we propose masking methods using Wikidata to mitigate the influence of person names and validate whether they make fake news detection models robust through experiments with in-domain and out-of-domain data.

Mitigation of Diachronic Bias in Fake News Detection Dataset

This work takes a critical look at the evaluation of user-generated content (UGC) automatic translation and the well-known specificities of which raise many challenges for MT. We introduce the PMUMT, a new data set for UGC translation evaluation. Using this data set, we conduct several experiments to measure the impact of different kinds of UGC specificities on translation quality, more precisely than previously possible.

Next from EMNLP 2021

Can images help recognize entities? A study of the role of images for Multimodal NER

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Understanding the Impact of UGC Specificities on Translation Quality