Spain

As a conversational intelligence task, visual dialog entails answering a series of questions grounded in an image, using the dialog history as context. To generate correct answers, the comprehension of the semantic dependencies among implicit visual and textual contents is critical.

COLING 2020

Visual-Textual Alignment for Graph Inference in Visual Dialog

cross-media

visual dialog

computer vision

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

Relation Classification (RC) plays an important role in natural language processing (NLP). Current conventional supervised and distantly supervised RC models always make a closed-world assumption which ignores the emergence of novel relations in an open environment. To incrementally recognize the novel relations, current two solutions (i.e, re-training and lifelong learning) are designed but suffer from the lack of large-scale labeled data for novel relations. Meanwhile, prototypical network enjoys better performance on both fields of deep supervised learning and few-shot learning. However, it still suffers from the incompatible feature embedding problem when the novel relations come in. Motivated by them, we propose a two-phase
prototypical network with prototype attention alignment and triplet loss to dynamically recognize the novel relations with a few support instances meanwhile without catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model.

A Two-phase Prototypical Network Model for Incremental Few-shot Relation Classification

Local coherence relation between two phrases/sentences, such as cause-effect, and contrast gives a strong influence on whether a text is well-structured or not. This paper follows the assumption and presents a method for scoring text clarity by utilizing local coherence between adjacent sentences. We hypothesize that the coherence knowledge learned from the different domain data is beneficial for capturing a well-structured text and thus helpful for scoring text clarity. We propose a text clarity scoring method that utilizes local coherence analysis with an out-domain setting, i.e., the training data for the source and target tasks are different from each other. The method based on the pre-trained language model BERT firstly trains the local coherence model as an auxiliary manner and then re-trains it together with the text clarity scoring model. The experimental results by using the PeerRead benchmark dataset show the improvement compared with a single model, scoring text clarity model.

A Neural Local Coherence Analysis Model for Text Clarity Scoring

Paraphrase generation (PG) is of great importance to many downstream tasks in natural language processing. Diversity is an essential nature to PG for enhancing generalization capability and robustness of downstream applications. Recently, neural sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models have shown promising results in PG. However, traditional model training for PG focuses on optimizing model prediction against single reference and employs cross-entropy loss, which objective is unable to encourage model to generate diverse paraphrases. In this work, we present a novel approach with multi-objective learning to PG. We propose a learning-exploring method to generate sentences as learning objectives from the learned data distribution, and employ reinforcement learning to combine these new learning objectives for model training. We first design a sample-based algorithm to explore diverse sentences. Then we introduce several reward functions to evaluate the sampled sentences as learning signals in terms of expressive diversity and semantic fidelity, aiming to generate diverse and high-quality paraphrases. To effectively optimize model performance satisfying different evaluating aspects, we use a GradNorm-based algorithm that automatically balances these training objectives. Experiments and analyses on Quora and Twitter datasets demonstrate that our proposed method not only gains a significant increase in diversity but also improves generation quality over several state-of-the-art baselines.

A Learning-Exploring Method to Generate Diverse Paraphrases with Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning

Indigenous languages have been very challenging when dealing with NLP tasks and applications because of multiple reasons. These languages, in linguistic typology, are polysynthetic and highly inflected with rich morpho-phonemics and variable dialectal-dependent spellings; which affected studies on any NLP task in the recent years. Moreover, Indigenous languages have been considered as low-resource and/or endangered; which poses a great challenge for research related
to Artificial Intelligence and its fields, such as NLP and machine learning. In this paper, we propose a study on the Inuktitut language through pre-processing and neural machine translation, in order to revitalize the language which belongs to the Inuit family, a type of polysynthetic languages spoken in Northern Canada. Our focus is concentrated on: (1) the preprocessing phase, and (2) applications on specific NLP tasks such as morphological analysis and neural machine translation, both for Indigenous languages of Canada. Our evaluations in the context of low resource Inuktitut-English Neural Machine Translation, showed significant improvements of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art.

Revitalization of Indigenous Languages through Pre-processing and Neural Machine Translation: The case of Inuktitut

Conversational Emotion Recognition (CER) is a crucial task in Natural Language Processing (NLP) with wide applications. Prior works in CER generally focus on modeling emotion influences solely with utterance-level features, with little attention paid on phrase-level semantic connection between utterances. Phrases carry sentiments when they are referred to emotional events under certain topics, providing a global semantic connection between utterances throughout the entire conversation. In this work, we propose a two-stage Summarization and Aggregation Graph Inference Network (SumAggGIN), which seamlessly integrates inference for topic-related emotional phrases and local dependency reasoning over neighbouring utterances in a global-to-local fashion. Topic-related emotional phrases, which constitutes the global topic-related emotional connections, are recognized by our proposed heterogeneous Summarization Graph. Local dependencies, which captures short-term emotional effects between neighbouring utterances, are further injected via an Aggregation Graph to distinguish the subtle differences between utterances containing emotional phrases. The two steps of graph inference are tightly-coupled for a comprehensively understanding of emotional fluctuation. Experimental results on three CER benchmark datasets verify the effectiveness of our proposed model, which outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches.

Summarize before Aggregate: A Global-to-local Heterogeneous Graph Inference Network for Conversational Emotion Recognition

This article reports on an ongoing project aiming at automatization of pseudonymization of learner essays. The process includes three steps: identification of personal information in an unstructured text, labeling for a category, and pseudonymization. We experiment with rule-based methods for detection of 15 categories out of the suggested 19 (Megyesi et al., 2018) that we deem important and/or doable with automatic approaches. For the detection and labeling steps, we use resources covering personal names, geographic names, company and university names and others. For the pseudonymization step, we replace the item using another item of the same type from the above-mentioned resources. Evaluation of the detection and labeling steps are made on a set of manually anonymized essays. The results are promising and show that 89% of the personal information can be successfully identified in learner data, and annotated correctly with an inter-annotator agreement of 86% measured as Fleiss kappa and Krippendorff’s alpha.

Towards Privacy by Design in Learner Corpora Research: 
A Case of On-the-fly Pseudonymization of Swedish Learner Essays

We introduce ManyEnt, a benchmark for entity typing models in few-shot scenarios. ManyEnt offers a rich typeset, with a fine-grain variant featuring 256 entity types and a coarse-grain one with 53 entity types. Both versions have been derived from the Wikidata knowledge graph in a semi-automatic fashion. We also report results for two baselines using BERT, reaching up to 70.68% accuracy (10-way 1-shot).

ManyEnt: A Dataset for Few-shot Entity Typing

We propose a Hierarchical bi-directional self-attention Network framework (HabNet) for paper review rating prediction and recommendation which can serve as an effective decision-making tool for the academic paper review process.
HabNet leverages the hierarchical structure of the paper reviews with three levels of encoders: sentence encoder (level one), intra-review encoder (level two) and inter-review encoder (level three).

Hierarchical Bi-Directional Self-Attention Networks for Paper Review
Rating Recommendation

Deep inside-outside recursive autoencoder (DIORA) is a neural-based model designed for unsupervised constituency parsing. During its forward computation, it provides phrase and contextual representations for all spans in the input sentence. By utilizing the contextual representation of each leaf-level span, the span of length 1, to reconstruct the word inside the span, the model is trained without labeled data. In this work, we extend the training objective of DIORA by making use of all spans instead of only leaf-level spans. We test our new training objective on datasets of two languages: English and Japanese, and empirically show that our method achieves improvement in parsing accuracy over the original DIORA.

Deep Inside-outside Recursive Autoencoder with All-span Objective

We describe the collection of transcription corrections and grammatical error annotations for the CrowdED Corpus of spoken English monologues on business topics. The corpus recordings were crowdsourced from native speakers of English and learners of English with German as their first language. The new transcriptions and annotations are obtained from different crowdworkers: we analyse the 1108 new crowdworker submissions and propose that they can be used for automatic transcription post-editing and grammatical error correction for speech. To further explore the data we train grammatical error detection models with various configurations including pre-trained and contextual word representations as input, additional features and auxiliary objectives, and extra training data from written error-annotated corpora. We find that a model concatenating pre-trained and contextual word representations as input performs best, and that additional information does not lead to further performance gains.

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