Spain

Neural models have achieved great success on the task of machine reading comprehension (MRC), which are typically trained on hard labels. We argue that hard labels limit the model capability on generalization due to the label sparseness problem. In this paper, we propose a robust training method for MRC models to address this problem. Our method consists of three strategies, 1) label smoothing, 2) word overlapping, 3) distribution prediction. All of them help to train models on soft labels. We validate our approach on the representative architecture ALBERT. Experimental results show that our method can greatly boost the baseline with 1% improvement in average, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on NewsQA and QUOREF.

COLING 2020

Robust Machine Reading Comprehension by Learning Soft labels

distribution prediction

word overlapping

soft label

machine reading comprehension

label smoothing

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

In this paper, we address the task of news-image captioning, which generates a description of an image given the image and its article body as input. This task is more challenging than the conventional image captioning, because it requires a joint understanding of image and text. We present a Transformer model that integrates text and image modalities and attends to textual features from visual features in generating a caption. Experiments based on automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation show that an article text provides primary information to reproduce news-image captions written by journalists. The results also demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art model. In addition, we also confirm that visual features contribute to improving the quality of news-image captions.

Image Caption Generation for News Articles

Work with neural word embeddings and lexical relations has largely focused on confirmatory experiments which use human-curated examples of semantic and syntactic relations to validate against. In this paper, we explore the degree to which lexical relations, such as those found in popular validation sets, can be derived and extended from a variety of neural embeddings using classical clustering methods. We show that the Word2Vec space of word-pairs (i.e., offset vectors) significantly outperforms other more contemporary methods, even in the presence of a large number of noisy offsets. Moreover, we show that via a simple nearest neighbor approach in the offset space, new examples of known relations can be discovered. Our results speak to the amenability of offset vectors from non-contextual neural embeddings to find semantically coherent clusters. This simple approach has implications for the exploration of emergent regularities and their examples, such as emerging trends on social media and their related posts.

Lexical Relation Mining in Neural Word Embeddings

To exploit the domain knowledge to guarantee the correctness of generated text has been a hot topic in recent years, especially for high professional domains such as medical. However, most of recent works only consider the information of unstructured text rather than structured information of the knowledge graph. In this paper, we focus on the medical topic-to-text generation task and adapt a knowledge-aware text generation model to the medical domain, named MedWriter, which not only introduces the specific knowledge from the external medical knowledge graph (MKG) but also is capable of learning graph-level representation. We conduct experiments on a medical literature dataset collected from medical journals, each of which has a set of topic words, an abstract of medical literature and a corresponding knowledge graph from CMeKG. Experimental results demonstrate incorporating knowledge graph into generation model can improve the quality of the generated text and has superiority over the competitor methods.


MedWriter: Knowledge-Aware Medical Text Generation


Tweets are specific text data when compared to general text. Although sentiment analysis over tweets has become very popular in the last decade for English, it is still difficult to find huge annotated corpora for non-English languages. The recent rise of the transformer models in Nat- ural Language Processing allows to achieve unparalleled performances in many tasks, but these models need a consequent quantity of text to adapt to the tweet domain. We propose the use of a multilingual transformer model, that we pre-train over English tweets on which we apply data-augmentation using automatic translation to adapt the model to non-English languages. Our experiments in French, Spanish, German and Italian suggest that the proposed technique is an efficient way to improve the results of the transformers over small corpora of tweets in a non- English language.

Improving Sentiment Analysis over non-English Tweets using Multilingual Transformers and Automatic Translation for Data-Augmentation

We present XHate-999, a multi-domain and multilingual evaluation data set for abusive language detection. By aligning test instances across six typologically diverse languages, XHate-999 for the first time allows for disentanglement of the domain transfer and language transfer effects in abusive language detection.
We conduct a series of domain- and language-transfer experiments with state-of-the-art monolingual and multilingual transformer models, setting strong baseline results and profiling XHate-999 as a comprehensive evaluation resource for abusive language detection. Finally, we show that domain- and language-adaptation, via intermediate masked language modeling on abusive corpora in the target language, can lead to improved abusive language detection in the target language in the zero-shot transfer setups.

XHATE-999: Analyzing and Detecting Abusive Language Across Domains and Languages

Soft contextualized data augmentation is a recent method that replaces one-hot representation of words with soft posterior distributions of an external language model, smoothing the input of neural machine translation systems. Label smoothing is another effective method that penalizes over-confident model outputs by discounting some probability mass from the true target word, smoothing the output of neural machine translation systems. Having the benefit of updating all word vectors in each optimization step and better regularizing the models, the two smoothing methods are shown to bring significant improvements in translation performance. In this work, we study how to best combine the methods and stack the improvements. Specifically, we vary the prior distributions to smooth with, the hyperparameters that control the smoothing strength, and the token selection procedures. We conduct extensive experiments on small datasets, evaluate the recipes on larger datasets, and examine the implications when back-translation is further used. Our results confirm cumulative improvements when input and output smoothing are used in combination, giving up to +1.9 BLEU scores on standard machine translation tasks, and reveal reasons why these smoothing methods should be preferred.

Unifying Input and Output Smoothing in Neural Machine Translation

Recently, many KB-to-text generation tasks have been proposed to bridge the gap between knowledge bases and natural language by directly converting a group of knowledge base triples into human-readable sentences. However, most of the existing models suffer from the off-topic problem, namely, the models are prone to generate some unrelated clauses that are somehow involved with certain input terms regardless of the given input data. This problem seriously degrades the quality of the generation results. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic topic tracker for solving this problem. Different from existing models, our proposed model learns a global hidden representation for topics and recognizes the corresponding topic during each generation step. The recognized topic is used as additional information to guide the generation process and thus alleviates the off-topic problem.
The experimental results show that our proposed model can enhance the performance of sentence generation and the off-topic problem is significantly mitigated.

Dynamic Topic Tracker for KB-to-Text Generation

•Emotion prediction is a critical task in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP).
•Code-Mixing, a progeny of multilingualism is a way in which multilingual people express themselves on social media by using linguistics units from different languages within a sentence or speech context.
•There has been work done on code-mixed social media corpus but not on emotion
prediction of Kannada-English code-mixed Twitter data.
• In this paper, we analyze the problem of emotion prediction on corpus obtained from code-mixed Kannada-English extracted from Twitter annotated with their respective ‘Emotion’ for each tweet.

Creation of Corpus and analysis in Code-Mixed Kannada-English Twitter data for Emotion Prediction

We propose a simple and robust method, which can effectively alleviate the posterior collapse issue of VAE via timestep-wise regularisation. Our approach is generic which can be applied to any RNN-based VAE models. Our approach outperforms the state-of-art on language modelling and yields better or comparable performance on dialogue response generation.

Improving Variational Autoencoder for Text Modelling with Timestep-Wise Regularisation

We present experiments on biomedical text simplification in French. We use two kinds of corpora -- parallel sentences extracted from existing health comparable corpora in French and WikiLarge corpus translated from English to French -- and a lexicon that associates medical terms with paraphrases. Then, we train neural models on these parallel corpora using different ratios of general and specialized sentences. We evaluate the results with BLEU, SARI and Kandel scores. The results point out that little specialized data helps significantly the simplification.

Robust Machine Reading Comprehension by Learning Soft labels

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