Spain

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.

COLING 2020

Syllable­based Neural Thai Word Segmentation

orthographical-syllable

word-segmentation

thai-nlp

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

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.

Semi-supervised Domain Adaptation for Dependency Parsing via Improved Contextualized Word Representations

Traditional neural machine translation is limited to the topmost encoder layer’s context representation and cannot directly perceive the lower encoder layers. Existing solutions usually rely on the adjustment of network architecture, making the calculation more complicated or introducing additional structural restrictions. In this work, we propose layer-wise multi-view learning to solve this problem, circumventing the necessity to change the model structure. We regard each encoder layer’s off-the-shelf output, a by-product in layer-by-layer encoding, as the redundant view for the input sentence. In this way, in addition to the topmost encoder layer (referred to as the primary view), we also incorporate an intermediate encoder layer as the auxiliary view. We feed the two views to a partially shared decoder to maintain independent prediction. Consistency regularization based on KL divergence is used to encourage the two views to learn from each other. Extensive experimental results on five translation tasks show that our approach yields stable improvements over multiple strong baselines. As another bonus, our method is agnostic to network architectures and can maintain the same inference speed as the original model.

Layer-Wise Multi-View Learning for Neural Machine Translation

This paper proposed a new subword segmentation method for neural machine translation, "Bilingual Subword Segmentation," which tokenizes sentences to minimize the difference between the number of subword units in a sentence and that of its translation.
While existing subword segmentation methods tokenize a sentence without considering its translation, the proposed method tokenizes a sentence by using subword units induced from bilingual sentences; this method could be more favorable to machine translation. 
Evaluations on WAT Asian Scientific Paper Excerpt Corpus (ASPEC) English-to-Japanese and Japanese-to-English translation tasks and WMT14 English-to-German and German-to-English translation tasks show that our bilingual subword segmentation improves the performance of Transformer neural machine translation (up to +0.81 BLEU). 


Bilingual Subword Segmentation for Neural Machine Translation

Epidemiologists study the global impact of the spread of viruses by considering information on the DNA sequence and structure of viruses, as well as relying on accurate metadata. Although accurate localized geographical data is critical for creating maps of the locations of viruses and their migration paths, most publicly available databases, such as GenBank, provide insufficient details on the matter, limited to country or state level. Therefore, a manual inspection of biomedical articles is vital for obtaining more detailed information about the locations of the viruses.

TIMBERT: Toponym Identifier For The Medical Domain Based on BERT

The lack of annotated data is a big issue for building reliable NLP systems for most of the world’slanguages. But this problem can be alleviated by automatic data generation. In this paper, wepresent a new data augmentation method for artificially creating new dependency-annotated sen-tences. The main idea is to swap subtrees between annotated sentences while enforcing strongconstraints on those trees to ensure maximal grammaticality of the new sentences. We also pro-pose a method to perform low-resource experiments using resource-rich languages by mimickinglow-resource languages by sampling sentences under a low-resource distribution. In a series ofexperiments, we show that our newly proposed data augmentation method outperforms previousproposals using the same basic inputs.

Data Augmentation via Subtree Swapping for Dependency Parsing of Low-Resource Languages

Emotion-cause pair extraction (ECPE) aims at extracting emotions and causes as pairs from documents, where each pair contains an emotion clause and a set of cause clauses. Existing approaches address the task by first extracting emotion and cause clauses via two binary classifiers separately, and then training another binary classifier to pair them up. However, the extracted emotion-cause pairs of different emotion types cannot be distinguished from each other through simple binary classifiers, which limits the applicability of the existing approaches. Moreover, such two-step approaches may suffer from possible cascading errors. In this paper, to address the first problem, we assign emotion type labels to emotion and cause clauses so that emotion- cause pairs of different emotion types can be easily distinguished. As for the second problem, we reformulate the ECPE task as a unified sequence labeling task, which can extract multiple emotion-cause pairs in an end-to-end fashion. We propose an approach composed of a convolution neural network for encoding neighboring information and two Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory networks for two auxiliary tasks. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our approaches.

A Unified Sequence Labeling Model for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

A promising application of AI to healthcare is the retrieval of information from electronic health records (EHRs), e.g. to aid clinicians in finding relevant information for a consultation or to recruit suitable patients for a study.
This requires search capabilities far beyond simple string matching, including the retrieval of concepts (diagnoses, symptoms, medications, etc.) related to the one in question. 
The suitability of AI methods for such applications is tested by predicting the relatedness of concepts with known relatedness scores.
However, all existing biomedical concept relatedness datasets are notoriously small and consist of hand-picked concept pairs.
We open-source a novel concept relatedness benchmark overcoming these issues: it is six times larger than existing datasets 
and concept pairs are chosen based on co-occurrence in EHRs, ensuring their relevance for the application of interest.
We present an in-depth analysis of our new dataset and compare it to existing ones, highlighting that it is not only larger but also complements existing datasets in terms of the types of concepts included.
Initial experiments with state-of-the-art embedding methods show that our dataset is a challenging new benchmark for testing concept relatedness models.

Biomedical Concept Relatedness - A large EHR based benchmark

An essential task of most Question Answering (QA) systems is to re-rank the set of answer candidates, i.e., Answer Sentence Selection (AS2). These candidates are typically sentences either extracted from one or more documents preserving their natural order or retrieved by a search engine. Most state-of-the-art approaches to the task use huge neural models, such as BERT, or complex attentive architectures.
In this paper, we argue that by exploiting the intrinsic structure of the original rank together with an effective word-relatedness encoder, we achieve the highest accuracy among the cost-efficient models, with two orders of magnitude fewer parameters than the current state of the art. Our model takes 9.5 seconds to train on the WikiQA dataset, i.e., very fast in comparison with the 18 minutes required by a standard BERT-base fine-tuning.

A Study on Efficiency, Accuracy and Document Structure for Answer Sentence Selection

Sentence matching aims to identify the special relationship between two sentences, and plays a key role in many natural language processing tasks. However, previous studies mainly focused on exploiting either syntactic or semantic information for sentence matching, and no studies consider integrating both of them. In this study, we propose integrating syntax and semantics into BERT with sentence matching. In particular, we use an implicit syntax and semantics integration method that is less sensitive to the output structure information. Thus the implicit integration can alleviate the error propagation problem. The experimental results show that our approach has achieved state-of-the-art or competitive performance on several sentence matching datasets, demonstrating the benefits of implicitly integrating syntactic and semantic features in sentence matching.


Syllablebased Neural Thai Word Segmentation

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Next from COLING 2020

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Improving Variational Autoencoder for Text Modelling with Timestep-Wise Regularisation

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