Spain

The widespread usage of Twitter during emergencies has provided a new opportunity and timely resource to crisis responders for various disaster management tasks. Geolocation information of pertinent tweets is crucial for gaining situational awareness and delivering aid. However, the majority of tweets do not come with geoinformation. In this work, we focus on the task of location mention recognition from crisis-related tweets. Specifically, we investigate the influence of different types of labeled training data on the performance of a BERT-based classification model. We explore several training settings such as combing in- and out-domain data from news articles and general-purpose and crisis-related tweets. Furthermore, we investigate the effect of geospatial proximity while training on near or far-away events from the target event. Using five different datasets, our extensive experiments provide answers to several critical research questions that are useful for the research community to foster research in this important direction. For example, results show that, for training a location mention recognition model, Twitter-based data is preferred over general-purpose data; and crisis-related data is preferred over general-purpose Twitter data. Furthermore, training on data from geographically-nearby disaster events to the target event boosts the performance compared to training on distant events.

COLING 2020

Are We Ready for this Disaster? Towards Location Mention Recognition from Crisis Tweets

social analytics for disaster management

location mention recognition

transfer learning

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, 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.

poster

Modern models of event causality detection (ECD) are mainly based on supervised learning from small hand-labeled corpora. However, hand-labeled training data is expensive to produce, low coverage of causal expressions, and limited in size, which makes supervised methods hard to detect causal relations between events. To solve this data lacking problem, we investigate a data augmentation framework for ECD, dubbed as Knowledge Enhanced Distant Data Augmentation (KnowDis). Experimental results on two benchmark datasets EventStoryLine corpus and Causal-TimeBank show that 1) KnowDis can augment available training data assisted with the lexical and causal commonsense knowledge for ECD via distant supervision, and 2) our method outperforms previous methods by a large margin assisted with automatically labeled training data.

KnowDis: Knowledge Enhanced Data Augmentation for Event Causality Detection via Distant Supervision

Ask to learn, A Study on Curiosity-driven Question Generation.
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Ask to Learn

Conventional approaches for formality style transfer borrow models from neural machine translation, which typically requires massive parallel data for training. However, the dataset for formality style transfer is considerably smaller than translation corpora. Moreover, we observe that informal and formal sentences closely resemble each other, which is different from the translation task where two languages have different vocabularies and grammars. As a result, directly applying a sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model not only has the risk of over-fitting to the training set but also may fail to fully utilize the nature of informal and formal sentences. To tackle these problems, we present a new approach, Sequence-to-Sequence with Shared Latent Space (S2S-SLS), for formality style transfer, where we propose two auxiliary losses and adopt joint training of bi-directional transfer and auto-encoding. Experimental results show that S2S-SLS (with either RNN or Transformer architectures) consistently outperforms baselines in various settings, especially when we have limited data.

Formality Style Transfer with Shared Latent Space

We study annotation projection in text classification problems where source documents are published in multiple languages and may not be an exact translation of one another. In particular, we focus on the detection of unfair clauses in privacy policies and terms of service. We present the first English-German parallel asymmetric corpus for the task at hand. We study and compare
several language-agnostic sentence-level projection methods. Our results indicate that a combination of word embeddings and dynamic time warping performs best.

Cross-lingual Annotation Projection in Legal Texts

Cross-lingual entity alignment, which aims to match equivalent entities in KGs with different languages, has attracted considerable focus in recent years. Recently, many graph neural network (GNN) based methods are proposed for entity alignment and obtain promising results. However, existing GNN-based methods consider the two KGs independently and learn embeddings for different KGs separately, which ignore the useful pre-aligned links between two KGs. In this paper, we propose a novel Contextual Alignment Enhanced Cross Graph Attention Network (CAECGAT) for the task of cross-lingual entity alignment, which is able to jointly learn the embeddings in different KGs by propagating cross-KG information through pre-aligned seed alignments. We conduct extensive experiments on three benchmark cross-lingual entity alignment datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method obtains remarkable performance gains compared to state-of-the-art methods.

A Contextual Alignment Enhanced Cross Graph Attention Network for Cross-lingual Entity Alignment

Knowledge graph embedding is an important task and it will benefit lots of downstream applications. Currently, deep neural networks based methods achieve state-of-the-art performance. However, most of these existing methods are very complex and need much time for training and inference. To address this issue, we propose a simple but effective atrous convolution based knowledge graph embedding method. Compared with existing state-of-the-art methods, our method has following main characteristics. First, it effectively increases feature interactions by using atrous convolutions. Second, to address the original information forgotten issue and vanishing/exploding gradient issue, it uses the residual learning method. Third, it has simpler structure but much higher parameter efficiency. We evaluate our method on six benchmark datasets with different evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments show that our model is very effective. On these diverse datasets, it achieves better results than the compared state-of-the-art methods on most of evaluation metrics. The source codes of our model could be found at https://github.com/neukg/AcrE.

Knowledge Graph Embedding with Atrous Convolution and Residual Learning

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) has shown drastic improvement in its quality when translating clean input, such as text from the news domain. However, existing studies suggest that NMT still struggles with certain kinds of input with considerable noise, such as User-Generated Contents (UGC) on the Internet. To make better use of NMT for cross-cultural communication, one of the most promising directions is to develop a model that correctly handles these expressions. Though its importance has been recognized, it is still not clear as to what creates the great gap in performance between the translation of clean input and that of UGC. To answer the question, we present a new dataset, PheMT, for evaluating the robustness of MT systems against specific linguistic phenomena in Japanese-English translation. Our experiments with the created dataset revealed that not only our in-house models but even widely used off-the-shelf systems are greatly disturbed by the presence of certain phenomena.

PheMT: A Phenomenon-wise Dataset for Machine Translation Robustness on User-Generated Contents

Human-generated non-literal translations reflect the richness of human languages and are sometimes indispensable to ensure adequacy and fluency. Non-literal translations are difficult to produce even for human translators, especially for foreign language learners, and machine translations are still on the way to simulate human ones on this aspect. In order to foster the study on appropriate and creative non-literal translations, automatically detecting them in parallel corpora is an important step, which can benefit downstream NLP tasks or help to construct materials to teach translation. This article demonstrates that generic sentence representations produced by a pre-trained cross-lingual language model could be fine-tuned to solve this task. We show that there exists a moderate positive correlation between the prediction probability of being human translation and the non-literal translations’ proportion in a sentence. The fine-tuning experiments show an accuracy of 80.16% when predicting the presence of non-literal translations in a sentence and an accuracy of 85.20% when distinguishing literal and non-literal translations at phrase level. We further conduct a linguistic error analysis and propose directions for future work.

Detecting Non-literal Translations by Fine-tuning Cross-lingual Pre-trained Language Models

In this paper, we present Chinese lexical fusion recognition, a new task which could be regarded as one kind of coreference recognition. 
First, we introduce the task in detail, showing the relationship with coreference recognition and differences from the existing tasks. Second, we propose an end-to-end model for the task, handling mentions as well as coreference relationship jointly. The model exploits the state-of-the-art contextualized BERT representations as the encoder, and is further enhanced with the sememe knowledge from HowNet by graph attention networks. 
We manually annotate a benchmark dataset for the task and then conduct experiments on it. Results demonstrate that our final model is effective and competitive for the task. Detailed analysis is offered for comprehensively understanding the new task and our proposed model.


End to End Chinese Lexical Fusion Recognition with Sememe Knowledge

Weakly supervised machine reading comprehension (MRC) task is practical and promising for its easily available and massive training data, but inevitablely introduces noise. Existing related methods usually incorporate extra submodels to help filter noise before the noisy data is input to main models. However, these multistage methods often make training difficult, and the qualities of submodels are hard to be controlled. In this paper, we first explore and analyze the essential characteristics of noise from the perspective of loss distribution, and find that in the early stage of training, noisy samples usually lead to significantly larger loss values than clean ones. Based on the observation, we propose a hierarchical loss correction strategy to avoid fitting noise and enhance clean supervision signals, including using an unsupervisedly fitted Gaussian mixture model to calculate the weight factors for all losses to correct the loss distribution, and employ a hard bootstrapping loss to modify loss function. Experimental results on different weakly supervised MRC datasets show that the proposed methods can help improve models significantly.

Are We Ready for this Disaster? Towards Location Mention Recognition from Crisis Tweets

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