Spain

This poster presents the data and evaluation of a writing assistance system that helps students improve their academic writing by incorporating vocabulary that is more typical in the academic setting. Given an input text, the system suggests word substitutions according to an academic word list, and ranks them with a masked language model. As there is no existing dataset for academic lexical substitution (LS), we constructed our evaluation data by compiling an academic word list and an informal word list, and transforming an LS dataset with these lists. Our approach makes use of BERT (Devlin et al., 2019), a masked language model that has been shown to attain good performance in lexical substitution (Zhou et al., 2019).

COLING 2020

Automatic Assistance for Academic Word Usage

academic writing

language model

lexical substitution

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

The dominance of machine learning-based NLP has led to overemphasizing model accuracies rather than studying the reasons behind their errors. In this paper, we explore and compare the error patterns of some common sentiment analysis models in the finance domain. We discover six linguistic patterns that are pervasive among the errors.

Financial Sentiment Analysis: An Investigation into Common Mistakes and Silver Bullets

Neural machine translation (NMT) models usually suffer from catastrophic forgetting during continual training where the models tend to gradually forget previously learned knowledge and swing to fit the newly added data which may have a different distribution, e.g. a different domain. Although many methods have been proposed to solve this problem, we cannot get to know what causes this phenomenon yet. Under the background of domain adaptation, we investigate the cause of catastrophic forgetting from the perspectives of modules and parameters (neurons). The investigation on the modules of the NMT model shows that some modules have tight relation with the general-domain knowledge while some other modules are more essential in the domain adaptation. And the investigation on the parameters shows that some parameters are important for both the general-domain and in-domain translation and the great change of them during continual training brings about the performance decline in general-domain. We conduct experiments across different language pairs and domains to ensure the validity and reliability of our findings.

Investigating Catastrophic Forgetting During Continual Training for Neural Machine Translation

Informational bias is bias conveyed through sentences or
clauses that provide tangential, speculative or background information
that can sway readers' opinions towards entities. By nature,
informational bias is context-dependent, but previous work on
informational bias detection has not explored the role of context beyond
the sentence. We present experiments with four kinds of context for
informational bias in English news articles: neighboring sentences, the
full article, articles on the same event from other news publishers, and
articles from the same domain (but potentially different events). We
find that integrating event context improves classification performance
over a very strong baseline. In addition, we perform the first error
analysis of models on this task. We find that the best-performing
context-inclusive model outperforms the baseline on
longer sentences, and sentences from politically centrist articles.

Context in Informational Bias Detection

Motion recognition is one of the basic cognitive capabilities of many life forms, however, detecting and understanding motion in text is not a trivial task. In addition, identifying motion entities in natural language is not only challenging but also beneficial for a better natural language understanding. In this paper, we present a Motion Entity Tagging (MET) model to identify entities in motion in a text using the Literal-Motion-in-Text (LiMiT) dataset for training and evaluating the model. Then we propose a new method to split clauses and phrases from complex and long motion sentences to improve the performance of our MET model. We also present results showing that motion features, in particular, entity in motion benefits the Named-Entity Recognition (NER) task. Finally, we present an analysis for the special co-occurrence relation between the person category in NER and animate entities in motion, which significantly improves the classification performance for the person category in NER.

Identifying Motion Entities in Natural Language and A Case Study for Named Entity Recognition

Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) is particularly challenging due to complex se-mantic interactions among multiple entities in a document. Among exiting approaches, Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) is one of the most effective approaches for doc-ument-level RE. However, traditional GCN simply takes word nodes and adjacency ma-trix to represent graphs, which is difficult to establish direct connections between distant entity pairs. In this paper, we propose Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks (GCGCN), a novel model which is composed of entities as nodes and context of entity pairs as edges between nodes to capture rich global context information of enti-ties in a document. Two hierarchical blocks, Context-aware Attention Guided Graph Convolution (CAGGC) for partially connected graphs and Multi-head Attention Guided Graph Convolution (MAGGC) for fully connected graphs, could take progressively more global context into account. Meantime, we leverage a large-scale distantly supervised da-ta to pre-train a GCGCN model with curriculum learning, which is then fine-tuned on the human-annotated data for further improving document-level RE performance. The exper-imental results on DocRED show that our model could effectively capture rich global context information in the document, leading to a state-of-the-art result. Our code is available at https://github.com/Huiweizhou/GCGCN.

Global Context-enhanced Graph Convolutional Networks for Document-level Relation Extraction

In this paper, we study sequence-to-sequence (S2S) keyphrase generation models from the perspective of diversity. Recent advances in neural natural language generation have made possible remarkable progress on the task of keyphrase generation, demonstrated through improvements on quality metrics such as F1 score. However, the importance of diversity in keyphrase generation has been largely ignored. We first analyze the extent of information redundancy present in the outputs generated by a baseline model trained using maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Our findings show that repetition of keyphrases is a major issue with MLE training. To alleviate this issue, we adopt neural unlikelihood (UL) objective for training the S2S model. Our version of UL training operates at (1) the target token level to discourage the generation of repeating tokens; (2) the copy token level to avoid copying repetitive tokens from the source text. Further, to encourage better model planning during the decoding process, we incorporate K-step ahead token prediction objective that computes both MLE and UL losses on future tokens as well. Through extensive experiments on datasets from three different domains we demonstrate that the proposed approach attains considerably large diversity gains, while maintaining competitive output quality.

Diverse Keyphrase Generation with Neural Unlikelihood Training

Academia and industry have developed machine learning and natural language processing models to detect online hate speech automatically. However, most of these existing methods adopt a supervised approach that heavily depends on labeled datasets for training. This results in the methods' poor detection performance of the hate speech class as the training datasets are highly imbalanced. In this paper, we propose HateGAN, a deep generative reinforcement learning model, which addresses the challenge of imbalance class by augmenting the dataset with hateful tweets. We conduct extensive experiments to augment two commonly-used hate speech detection datasets with the HateGAN generated tweets. Our experiment results show that HateGAN improves the detection performance of the hate speech class regardless of the classifiers and datasets used in the detection task. Specifically, we observe an average 5\% improvement for the hate class F1 scores across all state-of-the-art hate speech classifiers. We also conduct case studies to empirically examine the HateGAN generated hate speeches and show that the generated tweets are diverse, coherent, and relevant to hate speech detection.

HateGAN Model Data Augmentation for Hate Speech Detection ​

Deep pre-trained language models tend to become ubiquitous in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). These models learn contextualized representations by using a huge amount of unlabeled text data and obtain state of the art results on a multitude of NLP tasks, by enabling efficient transfer learning. For other languages besides English, there are limited options of such models, most of which are trained only on multi-lingual corpora. In this paper we introduce a Romanian-only pre-trained BERT model – RoBERT – and compare it with different multi-lingual models on seven Romanian specific NLP tasks grouped into three categories, namely: sentiment analysis, dialect and cross-dialect topic identification, and diacritics restoration. Our model surpasses the multi-lingual models, as well as a another mono-lingual implementation of BERT, on all tasks.

RoBERT – A Romanian BERT Model

Understanding image advertisements is a challenging task, often requiring non-literal interpretation. We argue that standard image-based predictions are insufficient for symbolism prediction. Following the intuition that texts and images are complementary in advertising, we introduce a multimodal ensemble of a state of the art image-based classifier, a classifier based on an object detection architecture, and a fine-tuned language model applied to texts extracted from ads by~OCR. The resulting system establishes a new state of the art in symbolism prediction.

Ad Lingua: Text Classification Improves Symbolism Prediction in Image Advertisements

Selectional preference is defined as the tendency of a predicate to favour particular arguments within a certain linguistic context, and likewise, reject others that result in conflicting or implausible meanings. The stellar success of contextual word embedding models such as BERT in NLP tasks has led many to question whether these models have learned linguistic information, but up till now, most research has focused on syntactic information. We investigate whether BERT contains information on the selectional preferences of words, by examining the probability it assigns to the dependent word given the presence of a head word in a sentence. We are using word pairs of head-dependent words in five different syntactic relations from the SP-10K corpus of selectional preference (Zhang et al., 2019), in sentences from the ukWaC corpus, and we are calculating the correlation of the plausibility score (from SP-10K) and the model probabilities. Our results show that overall, there is no strong positive or negative correlation in any syntactic relation, but we do find that certain head words have a strong correlation, and that masking all words but the head word yields the most positive correlations in most scenarios --which indicates that the semantics of the predicate is indeed an integral and influential factor for the selection of the argument.

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Always Keep your Target in Mind: Studying Semantics and Improving Performance of Neural Lexical Substitution

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