Spain

Sentiment analysis, especially for long documents, plausibly requires methods capturing complex linguistic structures. To accommodate this, we propose a novel framework to exploit task-related discourse for the task of sentiment analysis. More specifically, we are combining the large-scale, sentiment-dependent MEGA-DT treebank with a novel neural architecture for sentiment prediction, based on a hybrid TreeLSTM hierarchical attention model. Experiments show that our framework using sentiment-related discourse augmentations for sentiment prediction enhances the overall performance for long documents, even beyond previous approaches using well-established discourse parsers trained on human annotated data. We show that a simple ensemble approach can further enhance performance by selectively using discourse, depending on the document length.

COLING 2020

From Sentiment Annotations to Sentiment Prediction through Discourse Augmentation

task-related discourse

discourse annotations

treelstm

discourse structures

hybrid model

sentiment analysis

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

We tackle the task of automatically generating a function name from source code.
Existing generators face difficulties in generating low-frequency or out-of-vocabulary subwords. In this paper, we propose two strategies for copying low-frequency or out-of-vocabulary subwords in inputs. Our best performing model showed an improvement over the conventional method in terms of our modified F1 and accuracy on the Java-small and Java-large datasets.

Pointing to Subwords for Generating Function Names in Source Code

Acronyms are the short forms of phrases that facilitate conveying lengthy sentences in documents and serve as one of the mainstays of writing. Due to their importance, identifying acronyms and corresponding phrases (i.e., acronym identification (AI)) and finding the correct meaning of each acronym (i.e., acronym disambiguation (AD)) are crucial for text understanding. Despite the recent progress on this task, there are some limitations in the existing datasets which hinder further improvement. More specifically, limited size of manually annotated AI datasets or noises in the automatically created acronym identification datasets obstruct designing advanced high-performing acronym identification models. Moreover, the existing datasets are mostly limited to the medical domain and ignore other domains. In order to address these two limitations, we first create a manually annotated large AI dataset for scientific domain. This dataset contains 17,506 sentences which is substantially larger than previous scientific AI datasets. Next, we prepare an AD dataset for scientific domain with 62,441 samples which is significantly larger than previous scientific AD dataset. Our experiments show that the existing state-of-the-art models fall far behind human-level performance on both datasets proposed by this work. In addition, we propose a new deep learning model which utilizes the syntactical structure of the sentence to expand an ambiguous acronym in a sentence. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the new AD dataset, providing a strong baseline for future research on this dataset


What Does This Acronym Mean? Introducing a New Dataset for
Acronym Identification and Disambiguation

Domain knowledge is important for building Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems for low-resource settings, such as in the clinical domain. In this paper, a novel joint training method is introduced for adding knowledge base information from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) into language model pre-training for some clinical domain corpus. We show that in three different downstream clinical NLP tasks, our pre-trained language model outperforms the corresponding model with no knowledge base information and other state-of-the-art models. Specifically, in a natural language inference (NLI) task applied to clinical texts, our knowledge base pre-training approach improves accuracy by up to 1.7%, whereas in clinical name entity recognition (NER) tasks, the F1-score improves by up to 1.0%. The pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/noc-lab/clinical-kb-bert.

Enhancing Clinical BERT Embedding using a Biomedical Knowledge Base

In this study, linguistic knowledge at different levels are incorporated into the neural machine translation (NMT) framework to improve translation quality for language pairs with extremely limited data. Integrating manually designed or automatically extracted features into the NMT framework is known to be beneficial. However, this study emphasizes that the relevance of the features is crucial to the performance. Specifically, we propose two methods, 1) self relevance and 2) word-based relevance, to improve the representation of features for NMT. Experiments are conducted on translation tasks from English to eight Asian languages, with no more than twenty thousand sentences for training. The proposed methods improve translation quality for all tasks by up to 3.09 BLEU points. Discussions with visualization provide the explainability of the proposed methods where we show that the relevance methods provide weights to features thereby enhancing their impact on low-resource machine translation.

Improving Low-Resource NMT through Relevance Based Linguistic Features Incorporation

In the Query Focused Multi-Document Summarization (QF-MDS) task, a set of documents and a query are given where the goal is to generate a summary from these documents based on the given query. However, one major challenge for this task is the lack of availability of labeled training datasets. To overcome this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel weakly supervised learning approach via utilizing distant supervision. In particular, we use datasets similar to the target dataset as the training data where we leverage pre-trained sentence similarity models to generate the weak reference summary of each individual document in a document set from the multi-document gold reference summaries. Then, we iteratively train our summarization model on each single-document to alleviate the computational complexity issue that occurs while training neural summarization models in multiple documents (i.e., long sequences) at once. Experimental results on the Document Understanding Conferences (DUC) datasets show that our proposed approach sets a new state-of-the-art result in terms of various evaluation metrics.

WSL-DS: Weakly Supervised Learning with Distant Supervision for Query Focused Multi-Document Abstractive Summarization

Interpretability and explainability of deep neural networks are challenging due to their scale, complexity, and the agreeable notions on which the explaining process rests. Previous work, in particular, has focused on representing internal components of neural networks through human-friendly visuals and concepts. On the other hand, in real life, when making a decision, human tends to rely on similar situations and/or associations in the past. Hence arguably, a promising approach to make the model transparent is to design it in a way such that the model explicitly connects the current sample with the seen ones, and bases its decision on these samples. Grounded on that principle, we propose in this paper an explainable, evidence-based memory network architecture, which learns to summarize the dataset and extract supporting evidences to make its decision. Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular question answering datasets (i.e. TrecQA and WikiQA). Via further analysis, we show that this model can reliably trace the errors it has made in the validation step to the training instances that might have caused these errors. We believe that this error-tracing capability provides significant benefit in improving dataset quality in many applications.

Explain by Evidence: An Explainable Memory-based Neural Network for Question Answering

Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction methods based on the initialization and the self-learning have achieved great success in similar language pairs, e.g., English-Spanish. But they still fail and have an accuracy of 0% in many distant language pairs, e.g., English-Japanese. In this work, we show that this failure results from the gap between the actual initialization performance and the minimum initialization performance for the self-learning to succeed. We propose Iterative Dimension Reduction to bridge this gap. Our experiments show that this simple method does not hamper the performance of similar language pairs and achieves an accuracy of 13.64~55.53% between English and four distant languages, i.e., Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Thai.

A Simple and Effective Approach to Robust Unsupervised Bilingual Dictionary Induction

Word segmentation is a challenging pre­processing step for Thai Natural Language Processing due to the lack of explicit word boundaries. The previous systems rely on powerful neural network architecture alone and ignore linguistic substructures of Thai words. We utilize the linguistic observation that Thai strings can be segmented into syllables, which should narrow down the search space for the word boundaries and provide helpful features. Here, we propose a neural Thai Word Segmenter that uses syllable embeddings to capture linguistic constraints and uses dilated CNN filters to capture the environment of each character. Within this goal, we develop the first ML­-based Thai orthographical syllable segmenter, which yields syllable embeddings to be used as features by the word segmenter. Our word segmentation system outperforms the previous state-­of-­the-­art system in both speed and accuracy on both in-­domain and out-­domain datasets.

Syllable­based Neural Thai Word Segmentation

Joint intent detection and slot filling has recently achieved tremendous success in advancing the performance of utterance understanding. However, many joint models still suffer from the robustness problem, especially on noisy inputs or rare/unseen events. To address this issue, we propose a Joint Adversarial Training (JAT) model to improve the robustness of joint intent detection and slot filling, which consists of two parts: (1) automatically generating joint adversarial examples to attack the joint model, and (2) training the model to defend against the joint adversarial examples so as to robustify the model on small perturbations. As the generated joint adversarial examples have different impacts on the intent detection and slot filling loss, we further propose a Balanced Joint Adversarial Training (BJAT) model that applies a balance factor as a regularization term to the final loss function, which yields a stable training procedure. Extensive experiments and analyses on the lightweight models show that our proposed methods achieve significantly higher scores and substantially improve the robustness of both intent detection and slot filling. In addition, the combination of our BJAT with BERT-large achieves state-of-the-art results on two datasets.

Balanced Joint Adversarial Training for Robust Intent Detection and Slot Fill

In recent years, parsing performance is dramatically improved on in-domain texts thanks to the rapid progress of deep neural network models. 
The major challenge for current parsing research is to improve parsing performance on out-of-domain texts that are very different from the in-domain training data when there is only a small-scale out-domain labeled data.
To deal with this problem, we propose to improve the contextualized word representations via adversarial learning and fine-tuning BERT processes. 
Concretely, we apply adversarial learning to three representative semi-supervised domain adaption methods, i.e., direct concatenation (CON), feature augmentation (FA), and domain embedding (DE) with two useful strategies, i.e., fused target-domain word representations and orthogonality constraints, thus enabling to model more pure yet effective domain-specific and domain-invariant representations.
Simultaneously, we utilize a large-scale target-domain unlabeled data to fine-tune BERT with only the language model loss, thus obtaining reliable contextualized word representations that benefit for the cross-domain dependency parsing. 
Experiments on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed adversarial approaches achieve consistent improvements, and fine-tuning BERT further boosts the parsing accuracy by a large margin. 
Our single model achieves the same state-of-the-art performance as the top submitted system in the NLPCC-2019 shared task, which uses ensemble models and BERT.

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