Spain

Slot-filling models in task-driven dialog systems rely on carefully annotated training data. However, annotations by crowd workers are often inconsistent or contain errors. Simple solutions like manually checking annotations or having multiple workers label each sample are expensive and waste effort on samples that are correct. If we can identify inconsistencies, we can focus effort where it is needed. Toward this end, we define six inconsistency types in slot-filling annotations. Using three new noisy crowd-annotated datasets, we show that a wide range of inconsistencies occur and can impact system performance if not addressed. We then introduce automatic methods of identifying inconsistencies. Experiments on our new datasets show that these methods effectively reveal inconsistencies in data, though there is further scope for improvement.

COLING 2020

Inconsistencies in Crowdsourced Slot-Filling Annotations: A Typology and Identification Methods

data quality

slot-filling

crowdsourcing

annotation

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 introduce Biased TextRank, a graph-based content extraction method inspired by the popular TextRank algorithm that ranks text spans according to their importance for language processing tasks and according to their relevance to an input "focus." Biased TextRank enables focused content extraction for text by modifying the random restarts in the execution of TextRank. The random restart probabilities are assigned based on the relevance of the graph nodes to the focus of the task. 
We present two applications of Biased TextRank: focused summarization and explanation extraction, and show that our algorithm leads to improved performance on two different datasets by significant ROUGE-N score margins. Much like its predecessor, Biased TextRank is unsupervised, easy to implement and orders of magnitude faster and lighter than current state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing methods for similar tasks.

Biased TextRank: Unsupervised Graph-Based Content Extraction

Generating adversarial examples for natural language is hard, as natural language consists of discrete symbols, and examples are often of variable lengths. In this paper, we propose a geometry-inspired attack for generating natural language adversarial examples. Our attack generates adversarial examples by iteratively approximating the decision boundary of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). Experiments on two datasets with two different models show that our attack fools natural language models with high success rates, while only replacing a few words. Human evaluation shows that adversarial examples generated by our attack are hard for humans to recognize. Further experiments show that adversarial training can improve model robustness against our attack.

A Geometry-Inspired Attack for Generating Natural Language Adversarial Examples

Dialogue Act Recognition (DAR) is a challenging problem in Natural Language Understanding, which aims to attach Dialogue Act (DA) labels to each utterance in a conversation. However, previous studies cannot fully recognize the specific expressions given by users due to the informality and diversity of natural language expressions. To solve this problem, we propose a Heterogeneous User History (HUH) graph convolution network, which utilizes the user's historical answers grouped by DA labels as additional clues to recognize the DA label of utterances. To handle the noise caused by introducing the user's historical answers, we design sets of denoising mechanisms, including a History Selection process, a Similarity Re-weighting process, and an Edge Re-weighting process. We evaluate the proposed method on two benchmark datasets MSDialog and MRDA. The experimental results verify the effectiveness of integrating user's historical answers, and show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Integrating User History into Heterogeneous Graph for Dialogue Act Recognition

This paper introduces the first corpus for Automatic Post-Editing of English and a low-resource language, Brazilian Portuguese. The source English texts were extracted from the WebNLG corpus and automatically translated into Portuguese using a state-of-the-art industrial neural machine translator. Post-edits were then obtained in an experiment with native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese. To assess the quality of the corpus, we performed error analysis and computed complexity indicators measuring how difficult the APE task would be. We report preliminary results of Phrase-Based and Neural Machine Translation Models on this new corpus. Data and code publicly available in our repository.

Building The First English-Brazilian Portuguese Corpus for Automatic Post-Editing

In community-based question answering (CQA) platforms, it takes time for a user to get useful information from among many answers. Although one solution is an answer ranking method, the user still needs to read through the top-ranked answers carefully. This paper proposes a new task of selecting a diverse and non-redundant answer set rather than ranking the answers. Our method is based on determinantal point processes (DPPs), and it calculates the answer importance and similarity between answers by using BERT. We built a dataset focusing on a Japanese CQA site, and the experiments on this dataset demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed several baseline methods.

Diverse and Non-redundant Answer Set Extraction on Community QAbased on DPPs

Automatic metrics play a significant role in summarization evaluation. Evaluating the quality of evaluation metrics, by meta evaluation is crucial for guiding the direction of system optimization. A recent meta evaluation Peyrard 2019 found that automatic metrics strongly disagree when ranking high scoring summaries We
revisit and build upon their experiments with a focus on two research
questions: (i): How do automated metrics correlate when ranking summaries
in different scoring ranges ( average, and high)? (ii) Which other factors affect the correlations of metrics?

Metrics also Disagree in the Low Scoring Range: Revisiting Summarization Evaluation Metrics

We present a novel, domain expert-controlled, replicable procedure for the construction of concept-modeling ground truths with the aim of evaluating the application of word embeddings. In particular, our method is designed to evaluate the application of word and paragraph embeddings in concept-focused textual domains, where a generic ontology does not provide enough information. We illustrate the procedure, and validate it by describing the construction of an expert ground truth, QuiNE-GT. QuiNE-GT is built to answer research questions concerning the concept of naturalized epistemology in QUINE, a 2-million-token, single-author, 20th-century English philosophy corpus of outstanding quality, cleaned up and enriched for the purpose. To the best of our ken, expert concept-modeling ground truths are extremely rare in current literature, nor has the theoretical methodology behind their construction ever been explicitly conceptualised and properly systematised. Expert-controlled concept-modeling ground truths are however essential to allow proper evaluation of word embeddings techniques, and increase their trustworthiness in specialised domains in which the detection of concepts through their expression in texts is important. We highlight challenges, requirements, and prospects for future work.

Expert Concept-Modeling Ground Truth Construction for Word Embeddings Evaluation in Concept-Focused Domains

Analyzes the pre-trained hidden representations learned from reviews on BERT for tasks in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). Understand the connection between (masked) language model and downstream tasks in ABSA. Use annotated datasets in ABSA to investigate (not training) both the attentions and the learned representations of BERT pre-trained on reviews. BERT uses very few self-attention heads to encode context words (such as prepositions or pronouns that indicating an aspect) and opinion words for an aspect. Most features in the representation of an aspect are dedicated to the fine-grained semantics of the domain (or product category) and the aspect itself, instead of carrying summarized opinions from its context.

Understanding Pre-trained BERT for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

We present a novel retrofitting model that can leverage relational knowledge available in a knowledge resource to improve word embeddings. The knowledge is captured in terms of relation inequality constraints that compare similarity of related and unrelated entities in the context of an anchor entity. These constraints are used as training data to learn a non-linear transformation function that maps original word vectors to a vector space respecting these constraints. The transformation function is learned in a similarity metric learning setting using Triplet network architecture. We applied our model to synonymy, antonymy and hypernymy relations in WordNet and observed large gains in performance over original distributional models as well as other retrofitting approaches on word similarity task and significant overall improvement on lexical entailment detection task.

A Retrofitting Model for Incorporating Semantic Relations into Word Embeddings

In this work, we present a model to generate e-commerce product summaries. The consistency between the generated summary and the product attributes is an essential criterion for the e- commerce product summarization task. To enhance the consistency, first, we encode the product attribute table to guide the process of summary generation. Second, we identify the attribute words from the vocabulary, and we constrain these attribute words can be presented in the summaries only through copying from the source, i.e., the attribute words not in the source cannot be generated. We construct a Chinese e-commerce product summarization dataset, and the experimental results on this dataset demonstrate that our models significantly improve the faithfulness.

Inconsistencies in Crowdsourced Slot-Filling Annotations: A Typology and Identification Methods

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