Korea, Republic of

Multi-label Text Classification (MLTC) is the task of categorizing documents into one or more topics. Considering the large volumes of data and varying domains of such tasks, fully-supervised learning requires manually fully annotated datasets which is costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we propose BERT-Flow-VAE (BFV), a Weakly-Supervised Multi-Label Text Classification (WSMLTC) model that reduces the need for full supervision. This new model: (1) produces BERT sentence embeddings and calibrates them using a flow model, (2) generates an initial topic-document matrix by averaging results of a seeded sparse topic model and a textual entailment model that only require surface name of topics and 4-6 seed words per topic, and (3) adopts a VAE framework to reconstruct the embeddings under the guidance of the topic-document matrix. Finally, (4) it uses the means produced by the encoder model in the VAE architecture as predictions for MLTC. Experimental results on 6 multi-label datasets show that BFV can substantially outperform other baseline WSMLTC models in key metrics and achieve approximately 84% performance of a fully-supervised model.

COLING 2022

BERT-Flow-VAE: A Weakly-supervised Model for Multi-Label Text Classification

weakly-supervised

multi-label text classification

variational autoencoder

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Essay exams have been attracting attention as a way of measuring the higher-order abilities of examinees, but they have two major drawbacks in that grading them is expensive and raises questions about fairness. As an approach to overcome these problems, automated essay scoring (AES) is in increasing need. Many AES models based on deep neural networks have been proposed in recent years and have achieved high accuracy, but most of these models are designed to predict only a single overall score. However, to provide detailed feedback in practical situations, we often require not only the overall score but also analytic scores corresponding to various aspects of the essay. Several neural AES models that can predict both the analytic scores and the overall score have also been proposed for this very purpose. However, conventional models are designed to have complex neural architectures for each analytic score, which makes interpreting the score prediction difficult. To improve the interpretability of the prediction while maintaining scoring accuracy, we propose a new neural model for automated analytic scoring that integrates a multidimensional item response theory model, which is a popular psychometric model.

Analytic Automated Essay Scoring based on Deep Neural Networks Integrating Multidimensional Item Response Theory

In this presentation, we would help interested viewers to delve into how and why structural bias is necessary for aspect sentiment triplet extraction.

Structural Bias for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction

In our presentation, we introduce our paper "Position Offset Label Prediction for Grammatical Error Correction". We mainly talk about our analysis on grammatical error correction task and corpus. We introduce our model which is designed according to the characteristic of this task. We report experimental result on GEC dataset of different languages.

Position Offset Label Prediction for Grammatical Error Correction

Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED) suffers the problems of numerous types of grammatical errors and insufficiency of training data. In this paper, we propose a string editing based CGED model that requires less training data by using a unified workflow to handle various types of grammatical errors. Two measures
are proposed in our model to enhance the performance of CGED. First, the detection and correction of grammatical errors are divided into different stages. In the stage of error detection, the model only outputs the types of grammatical errors so that the tag vocabulary size is significantly reduced compared with other string editing based models. Secondly, the correction of some grammatical errors is
converted to the task of masked character inference, which has plenty of training data and mature solutions. Experiments on datasets of NLPTEA-CGED demonstrate that our model outperforms other CGED models in many aspects.

String Editing based Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. ABSA can be divided into multiple tasks according to the different extracted elements. Existing generative methods usually treat the output as a whole string rather than the combination of different elements and only focus on a single task at once. This paper proposes a unified generative multi-task framework that can solve multiple ABSA tasks by controlling the type of task prompts consisting of multiple element prompts. Further, the proposed approach can train on simple tasks and transfer to difficult tasks by assembling task prompts, like assembling Lego bricks. We conduct experiments on six ABSA tasks across multiple benchmarks. Our proposed multi-task approach achieves new state-of-the-art results in almost all tasks and competitive results in task transfer scenarios.

LEGO-ABSA: A prompt-based task assemblable unified generative framework for multi-task Aspect-based sentiment analysis

The task of completing knowledge triplets has broad downstream applications. Both structural and semantic information plays an important role in knowledge graph completion. Unlike previous approaches that rely on either the structures or semantics of the knowledge graphs, we propose to jointly embed the semantics in the natural language description of the knowledge triplets with their structure information. Our method embeds knowledge graphs for the completion task via fine-tuning pre-trained language models with respect to a probabilistic structured loss, where the forward pass of the language models captures semantics and the loss reconstructs structures. Our extensive experiments on a variety of knowledge graph benchmarks have demonstrated the state-of-the-art performance of our method. We also show that our method can significantly improve the performance in a low-resource regime, thanks to the better use of semantics. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/pkusjh/LASS.

Joint Language Semantic and Structure Embedding for Knowledge Graph Completion

Medical Relation Extraction (MRE) task aims to extract relations between entities in medical texts. Traditional relation extraction methods achieve impressive success by exploring the syntactic information, e.g., dependency tree. However, the quality of the 1-best dependency tree for medical texts produced by an out-of-domain parser is relatively limited so that the performance of medical relation extraction method may degenerate. To this end, we propose a method to jointly model semantic and
syntactic information from medical texts based on causal explanation theory. We generate dependency forests consisting of the semanticembedded 1-best dependency tree. Then, a taskspecific causal explainer is adopted to prune the dependency forests, which are further fed into a designed graph convolutional network to learn the corresponding representation for downstream task. Empirically, the various comparisons on benchmark medical datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Supporting Medical Relation Extraction via Causality-Pruned Semantic Dependency Forest

One of AI’s grand challenges consists in the development of autonomous agents with communication systems offering the robustness, flexibility and adaptivity found in human languages. While the processes through which children acquire language are by now relatively well understood, a faithful computational operationalisation of the underlying mechanisms is still lacking. Two main cognitive processes are involved in child language acquisition. First, children need to reconstruct the intended meaning of observed utterances, a process called intention reading. Then, they can gradually abstract away from concrete utterances in a process called pattern finding and acquire productive schemata that generalise over form and meaning. In this paper, we introduce a mechanistic model of the intention reading process and its integration with pattern finding capacities. Concretely, we present an agent-based simulation in which an agent learns a grammar that enables them to ask and answer questions about a scene. This involves the reconstruction of queries that correspond to observed questions based on the answer and scene alone, and the generalization of linguistic schemata based on these reconstructed question-query pairs. The result is a productive grammar which can be used to map between natural language questions and queries without ever having observed the queries.

Language Acquisition through Intention Reading and Pattern Finding

Machine-learning-as-a-service (MLaaS) has attracted millions of users to their splendid large-scale models. Although published as black-box APIs, the valuable models behind these services are still vulnerable to imitation attacks. Recently, a series of works have demonstrated that attackers manage to steal or extract the victim models. Nonetheless, none of the previous stolen models can outperform the original black-box APIs. In this work, we conduct unsupervised domain adaptation and multi-victim ensemble to showing that attackers could potentially surpass victims, which is beyond previous understanding of model extraction. Extensive experiments on both benchmark datasets and real-world APIs validate that the imitators can succeed in outperforming the original black-box models on transferred domains. We consider our work as a milestone in the research of imitation attack, especially on NLP APIs, as the superior performance could influence the defense or even publishing strategy of API providers.


Student Surpasses Teacher: Imitation Attack for Black-Box NLP APIs

Explaining the reasoning of neural models has attracted attention in recent years. Providing highly-accessible and comprehensible explanations in natural language is useful for humans to understand the model's prediction results. In this work, we present a pilot study to investigate explanation generation with a narrative and causal structure for the scenario of health consulting. Our model generates a medical suggestion regarding the patient's concern and provides an explanation as the outline of the reasoning. To align the generated explanation with the suggestion, we propose a novel discourse-aware mechanism with multi-task learning. Experimental results show that our model achieves promising performances in both quantitative and human evaluation.

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Analytic Automated Essay Scoring based on Deep Neural Networks Integrating Multidimensional Item Response Theory

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