Spain

Recently, spoken language understanding (SLU) has attracted extensive research interests, and various SLU datasets have been proposed to promote the development. However, most of the existing methods focus on a single individual dataset, the efforts to improve the robustness of models and obtain better performance by combining the merits of various datasets are not well studied. In this paper, we argue that if these SLU datasets are considered together, different knowledge from different datasets could be learned jointly, and there are high chances to promote the performance of each dataset. At the same time, we further attempt to prevent data leakage when unifying multiple datasets which, arguably, is more useful in an industry setting. To this end, we propose a federated learning framework, which could unify various types of datasets as well as tasks to learn and fuse various types of knowledge, i.e., text representations, from different datasets and tasks, without the sharing of downstream task data. The fused text representations merge useful features from different SLU datasets and tasks and are thus much more powerful than the original text representations alone in individual tasks. At last, in order to provide multi-granularity text representations for our framework, we propose a novel Multi-view Encoder (MV-Encoder) as the backbone of our federated learning framework. Experiments on two SLU benchmark datasets, including two tasks (intention detection and slot filling) and federated learning settings (horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning and federated transfer learning), demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our approach. Specifically, we are able to get 1.53% improvement on the intent detection metric accuracy. And we could also boost the performance of a strong baseline by up to 5.29% on the slot filling metric F1. Furthermore, by leveraging BERT as an additional encoder, we establish new state-of-the-art results on SNIPS and ATIS datasets, where we get 99.33% and 98.28% in terms of accuracy on intent detection task as well as 97.20% and 96.41% in terms of F1 score on slot filling task, respectively.

COLING 2020

Federated Learning for Spoken Language Understanding

multi-view encoder

federated learning framework

spoken language understanding

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.

technical paper

A number of exciting advances have been made in automated fact-checking thanks to increasingly larger datasets and more powerful systems, leading to improvements in the complexity of claims which can be accurately fact-checked. However, despite these advances, there are still desirable functionalities missing from the fact-checking pipeline. In this survey, we focus on the explanation functionality -- that is fact-checking systems providing reasons for their predictions. We summarize existing methods for explaining the predictions of fact-checking systems and we explore trends in this topic. Further, we consider what makes for good explanations in this specific domain through a comparative analysis of existing fact-checking explanations against some desirable properties. Finally, we propose further research directions for generating fact-checking explanations, and describe how these may lead to improvements in the research area. Further resources are available at https://github.com/neemakot/Fact-Checking-Survey.

Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey

Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) serves as the core of many natural language processing tasks. 1) Most previous work develops a single specific neural model for NLSM tasks. 2) There is no previous work considering adversarial attack to improve the performance of NLSM tasks. 3) Adversarial attack is usually used to generate adversarial samples that can fool neural models. In this paper, we first find a phenomenon that different categories of samples have different vulnerabilities. Vulnerability is the difficulty degree in changing the label of a sample. Considering the phenomenon, we propose a general two-stage training framework to enhance neural models with Vulnerability via Adversarial Attack (VAA). We design criteria to measure the vulnerability which is obtained by adversarial attack. VAA framework can be adapted to various neural models by incorporating the vulnerability. In addition, we prove a theorem and four corollaries to explain the factors influencing vulnerability effectiveness. Experimental results show that VAA significantly improves the performance of neural models on NLSM datasets. The results are also consistent with the theorem and corollaries. The code is released on https://github.com/rzhangpku/VAA.

Enhancing Neural Models with Vulnerability via Adversarial Attack

Pre-trained transformer models have shown enormous success in improving performance on several downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning on a new task still requires large amounts of task-specific labeled data to achieve good performance. We consider this problem of learning to generalize to new tasks with a few examples as a meta-learning problem. While meta-learning has shown tremendous progress in recent years, its application is still limited to simulated problems or problems with limited diversity across tasks. We develop a novel method, LEOPARD, which enables optimization-based meta-learning across tasks with different number of classes, and evaluate different methods on generalization to diverse NLP classification tasks. LEOPARD is trained with the state-of-the-art transformer architecture and shows better generalization to tasks not seen at all during training, with as few as 4 examples per label. Across 17 NLP tasks, including diverse domains of entity typing, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and several other text classification tasks, we show that LEOPARD learns better initial parameters for few-shot learning than self-supervised pre-training or multi-task training, outperforming many strong baselines, for example, yielding 14.6% average relative gain in accuracy on unseen tasks with only 4 examples per label.

Learning to Few-Shot Learn Across Diverse Natural Language Classification Tasks

The task of concept prerequisite chain learning is to automatically determine the existence of prerequisite relationships among concept pairs. In this paper, we frame learning prerequisite relationships among concepts as an unsupervised task with no access to labeled concept pairs during training. We propose a model called the Relational-Variational Graph AutoEncoder (R-VGAE) to predict concept relations within a graph consisting of concept and resource nodes. Results show that our unsupervised approach outperforms graph-based semi-supervised methods and other baseline methods by up to 9.77% and 10.47% in terms of prerequisite relation prediction accuracy and F1 score. Our method is notably the first graph-based model that attempts to make use of deep learning representations for the task of unsupervised prerequisite learning. We also expand an existing corpus which totals 1,717 English Natural Language Processing (NLP)-related lecture slide files and manual concept pair annotations over 322 topics.

R-VGAE: Relational-variational Graph Autoencoder
for Unsupervised Prerequisite Chain Learning

We tackle implicit discourse relation recognition. Both self-attention and interactive-attention mechanisms have been applied for attention-aware representation learning, which improves the current discourse analysis models. To take advantage of the two attention mechanisms simultaneously, we develop a propagative attention learning model using a cross-coupled two-channel network. We experiment on Penn Discourse Treebank. The test results demonstrate that our model yields substantial improvements over the baselines (BiLSTM and BERT).

Interactively-Propagative Attention Learning for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition

Distantly supervised relation extraction has been widely applied in knowledge base construction due to its less requirement of human efforts. However, the automatically established training datasets in distant supervision contain low-quality instances with noisy words and overlapped relations, introducing great challenges to the accurate extraction of relations. To address this problem, we propose a novel Regularized Attentive Capsule Network (RA-CapNet) to better identify highly overlapped relations in each informal sentence. To discover multiple relation features in an instance, we embed multi-head attention into the capsule network as the low-level capsules, where the subtraction of two entities acts as a new form of relation query to select salient features regardless of their positions. To further discriminate overlapped relation features, we devise disagreement regularization to explicitly encourage the diversity among both multiple attention heads and low-level capsules. Extensive experiments conducted on widely used datasets show that our model achieves significant improvements in relation extraction.

Regularized Attentive Capsule Network for Overlapped Relation Extraction

Various methods have already been proposed for learning entity embeddings from text descriptions. Such embeddings are commonly used for inferring properties of entities, for recommendation and entity-oriented search, and for injecting background knowledge into neural architectures, among others. Entity embeddings essentially serve as a compact encoding of a similarity relation, but similarity is an inherently multi-faceted notion. By representing entities as single vectors, existing methods leave it to downstream applications to identify these different facets, and to select the most relevant ones. In this paper, we propose a model that instead learns several vectors for each entity, each of which intuitively captures a different aspect of the considered domain. We use a mixture-of-experts formulation to jointly learn these facet-specific embeddings. The individual entity embeddings are learned using a variant of the GloVe model, which has the advantage that we can easily identify which properties are modelled well in which of the learned embeddings. This is exploited by an associated gating network, which uses pre-trained word vectors to encourage the properties that are modelled by a given embedding to be semantically coherent, i.e.\ to encourage each of the individual embeddings to capture a meaningful facet.

A Mixture-of-Experts Model for Learning Multi-Facet Entity Embeddings

To advance understanding on how to engage readers, we advocate the novel task of automatic pull quote selection. Pull quotes are a component of articles specifically designed to catch the attention of readers with spans of text selected from the article and given more salient presentation. This task differs from related tasks such as summarization and clickbait identification by several aspects. We establish a spectrum of baseline approaches to the task, ranging from handcrafted features to a neural mixture-of-experts to cross-task models. By examining the contributions of individual features and embedding dimensions from these models, we uncover unexpected properties of pull quotes to help answer the important question of what engages readers. Human evaluation also supports the uniqueness of this task and the suitability of our selection models. The benefits of exploring this problem further are clear: pull quotes increase enjoyment and readability, shape reader perceptions, and facilitate learning. Code to reproduce this work is available at https://github.com/tannerbohn/AutomaticPullQuoteSelection.

Catching Attention with Automatic Pull Quote Selection

Owing to the continuous efforts by the Chinese NLP community, more and more Chinese machine reading comprehension datasets become available. To add diversity in this area, in this paper, we propose a new task called Sentence Cloze-style Machine Reading Comprehension (SC-MRC). The proposed task aims to ﬁll the right candidate sentence into the passage that has several blanks. We built a Chinese dataset called CMRC 2019 to evaluate the difﬁculty of the SC-MRC task. Moreover, to add more difﬁculties, we also made fake candidates that are similar to the correct ones, which requires the machine to judge their correctness in the context. The proposed dataset contains over 100K blanks (questions) within over 10K passages, which was originated from Chinese narrative stories. To evaluate the dataset, we implement several baseline systems based on the pre-trained models, and the results show that the state-of-the-art model still underperforms human performance by a large margin. We release the dataset and baseline system to further facilitate our community. Resources available through https://github.com/ymcui/cmrc2019

A Sentence Cloze Dataset for Chinese Machine Reading Comprehension

In this paper, we present a novel annotation approach to capture claims and premises of arguments and their relations in student-written persuasive peer reviews on business models in German language. We propose an annotation scheme based on annotation guidelines that allows to model claims and premises as well as support and attack relations for capturing the structure of argumentative discourse in student-written peer reviews. We conduct an annotation study with three annotators on 50 persuasive essays to evaluate our annotation scheme. The obtained inter-rater agreement of α = 0.57 for argument components and α = 0.49 for argumentative relations indicates that the proposed annotation scheme successfully guides annotators to moderate agreement. Finally, we present our freely available corpus of 1,000 persuasive student-written peer reviews on business models and our annotation guidelines to encourage future research on the design and development of argumentative writing support systems for students.


Federated Learning for Spoken Language Understanding

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