Spain

We set out to uncover the unique grammatical properties of an important yet so far under-researched type of natural language text: that of short labels typically found within structured datasets. We show that such labels obey a specific type of abbreviated grammar that we call the Language of Data, with properties significantly different from the kinds of text typically addressed in computational linguistics and NLP, such as ‘standard’ written language or social media messages. We analyse orthography, parts of speech, and syntax over a large, bilingual, hand-annotated corpus of data labels collected from a variety of domains. We perform experiments on tokenisation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition over real-world structured data, demonstrating that models adapted to the Language of Data outperform those trained on standard text. These observations point in a new direction to be explored as future research, in order to develop new NLP tools and models dedicated to the Language of Data.

COLING 2020

Exploring the Language of Data

language of data

grammar

short text

structured data

information extraction

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

Gesture typing is a method of typing words on a touch-based keyboard by creating a continuous trace passing through the relevant keys. This work is aimed at developing a keyboard that supports gesture typing in Indic languages. We begin by noting that when dealing with Indic languages, one needs to cater to two different sets of users: (i) users who prefer to type in the native Indic script (Devanagari, Bengali, etc.) and (ii) users who prefer to type in the English script but want the transliterated output in the native script. In both cases, we need a model that takes a trace as input and maps it to the intended word. To enable the development of these models, we create and release two datasets. First, we create a dataset containing keyboard traces for 193,658 words from 7 Indic languages. Second, we curate 104,412 English-Indic transliteration pairs from Wikidata across these languages. Using these datasets we build a model that performs path decoding, transliteration and transliteration correction. Unlike prior approaches, our proposed model does not make co-character independence assumptions during decoding. The overall accuracy of our model across the 7 languages varies from 70-95%.

Joint Transformer/RNN Architecture for Gesture Typing in Indic Languages

Unsupervised neural machine translation (NMT) utilizes only monolingual data for training. The quality of back-translated data plays an important role in the performance of NMT systems. In back-translation, all generated pseudo parallel sentence pairs are not of the same quality. Taking inspiration from domain adaptation where in-domain sentences are given more weight in training, in this paper we propose an approach to filter back-translated data as part of the training process of unsupervised NMT. Our approach gives more weight to good pseudo parallel sentence pairs in the back-translation phase. We calculate the weight of each pseudo parallel sentence pair using sentence-wise round-trip BLEU score which is normalized batch-wise. We compare our approach with the current state of the art approaches for unsupervised NMT.

Filtering Back-Translated Data in Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation

Automatic Charge Identification (ACI) is the task of identifying the relevant legal charges given the facts of a situation and the statutory laws that define these charges, and is a crucial aspect of the judicial process. Prior works focus on learning charge-side representations by modeling relationships between the charges, but not much effort has been made in improving fact-side representations. We observe that only a small fraction of sentences in the facts actually indicates the charges. 
We show that by using a very small subset (3%) of fact descriptions annotated with sentence-level charges, we can achieve an improvement across a range of different ACI models, as compared to modeling just the main document-level task on a much larger dataset.
Additionally, we propose a novel model that utilizes sentence-level charge labels as an auxiliary task, coupled with the main task of document-level charge identification in a multi-task learning framework. The proposed model comprehensively outperforms a large number of recent baseline models for ACI. The improvement in performance is particularly noticeable for the rare charges which are known to be especially challenging to identify.

Automatic Charge Identification from Facts: A Few Sentence-Level Charge Annotations is All You Need

Self-Attention Networks (SANs) are an integral part of successful neural architectures such as Transformer (Vaswani et al., 2017), and thus of pretrained language models such as BERT (Devlin et al., 2019) or GPT-3 (Brown et al., 2020). Training SANs on a task or pretraining them on language modeling requires large amounts of data and compute resources. We are searching for modifications to SANs that enable faster learning, i.e., higher accuracies after fewer update steps. We investigate three modifications to SANs: direct position interactions, learnable temperature, and convoluted attention. When evaluating them on part-of-speech tagging, we find that direct position interactions are an alternative to position embeddings, and convoluted attention has the potential to speed up the learning process.

Increasing Learning Efficiency of Self-Attention Networks through Direct Position Interactions, Learnable Temperature, and Convoluted Attention

Knowledge bases (KBs) are essential for many downstream NLP tasks, yet their prime shortcoming is that they are often incomplete. State-of-the-art frameworks for KB completion often lack sufficient accuracy to work fully automated without human supervision. As a remedy, we propose IntKB: a novel interactive framework for KB completion from text based on a question answering pipeline. Our framework is tailored to the specific needs of a human-in-the-loop paradigm: (i) We generate facts that are aligned with text snippets and are thus immediately verifiable by humans. (ii) Our system is designed such that it continuously learns during the KB completion task and, therefore, significantly improves its performance upon initial zero- and few-shot relations over time. (iii) We only trigger human interactions when there is enough information for a correct prediction. Therefore, we train our system with negative examples and a fold-option if there is no answer. Our framework yields a favorable performance: it achieves a hit@1 ratio of 26.3% for initially unseen relations, upon which it gradually improves to 45.7%.

IntKB: A Verifiable Interactive Framework for Knowledge Base Completion

Our goal is to evaluate the usefulness of unsupervised representation learning techniques for detecting stances of Fake News. Therefore we examine several pretrained language models with respect to their performance on two Fake News related data sets, both consisting of instances with a headline, an associated news article and the stance of the article towards the respective headline. Specifically, the aim is to understand how much hyperparameter tuning is necessary when finetuning the pretrained architectures, how well transfer learning works in this specific case of stance detection and how sensitive the models are to changes in hyperparameters such as batch size, learning rate (schedule), sequence length as well as the freezing technique. The results indicate that the computationally more expensive autoregression approach of XLNet (Yang et al., 2019) is outperformed by BERT-based models, notably by RoBERTa (Liu et al., 2019). While the learning rate seems to be the most important hyperparameter, experiments with different freezing techniques indicate that all evaluated architectures had already learned powerful language representations that pose a good starting point for finetuning them.

Evaluating Unsupervised Representation Learning for Detecting Stances of Fake News

Automatic identification of multiword expressions (MWEs), like 'to cut corners' (to do an incomplete job), is a pre-requisite for semantically-oriented downstream applications. This task is challenging because MWEs, especially verbal ones (VMWEs), exhibit surface variability. This paper deals with a subproblem of VMWE identification: the identification of occurrences of previously seen VMWEs. A simple language-independent system based on a combination of filters competes with the best systems from a recent shared task: it obtains the best averaged F-score over 11 languages (0.6653) and even the best score for both seen and unseen VMWEs due to the high proportion of seen VMWEs in texts. This highlights the fact that focusing on the identification of seen VMWEs could be a strategy to improve VMWE identification in general.

Verbal Multiword Expression Identification: Do We Need a Sledgehammer to Crack a Nut?

A natural language interface to databases (NLIDB) enables users without technical expertise to easily access information from relational databases. Interest in NLIDBs has resurged in the past years due to the availability of large datasets and improvements to neural sequence-to-sequence models. In this survey we focus on the key design decisions behind current state of the art neural approaches, which we group into encoder and decoder improvements. We highlight the three most important directions, namely linking question tokens to database schema elements(schema linking), better architectures for encoding the textual query taking into account the schema (schema encoding), and improved generation of structured queries using autoregressive neural models (grammar-based decoders). To foster future research, we also present an overview of the most important NLIDB datasets, together with a comparison of the top performing neural models and a short insight into recent non deep learning solutions.

Neural Approaches for Natural Language Interfaces to Databases: A Survey

Existing studies on using social media for deriving mental health status of users focus on the depression detection task. However, for case management and referral to psychiatrists, healthcare workers require practical and scalable depressive disorder screening and triage system. This study aims to design and evaluate a decision support system to reliably determine the depressive triage level by capturing fine-grained depressive symptoms expressed in user tweets through the emulation of Patient Health Questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) that is routinely used in clinical practice. 
The reliable detection of depressive symptoms from tweets is challenging because the 280-character limit on tweets incentivizes the use of creative artifacts in the utterances and figurative usage contributes to effective expression. We propose a novel BERT based robust multi-task learning framework to accurately identify the depressive symptoms using the auxiliary task of figurative usage detection. Specifically, our proposed novel task sharing mechanism, co-task aware attention, enables automatic selection of optimal information across the BERT layers and tasks by soft-sharing of parameters. Our results show that modeling figurative usage can
demonstrably improve the model’s robustness and reliability for distinguishing the depression symptoms.

Identifying Depressive Symptoms from Tweets: Figurative Language Enabled Multitask Learning Framework

We release ManyNames v2 (MN v2), a verified version of an object naming dataset that contains dozens of valid names per object for 25K images. We analyze issues in the data collection method originally employed, standard in Language & Vision (L&V), and find that the main source of noise in the data comes from simulating a naming context solely from an image with a target object marked with a bounding box, which causes subjects to sometimes disagree regarding which object is the target. We also find that both the degree of this uncertainty in the original data and the amount of true naming variation in MN v2 differs substantially across object domains.
We use MN v2 to analyze a popular L&V model and demonstrate its effectiveness on the task of object naming. However, our fine-grained analysis reveals that what appears to be human-like model behavior is not stable across domains, e.g., the model confuses people and clothing objects much more frequently than humans do. We also find that standard evaluations underestimate the actual effectiveness of the naming model: on the single-label names of the original dataset (Visual Genome), it obtains −27% accuracy points than on MN v2, that includes all valid object names.

Exploring the Language of Data

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