Spain

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.

COLING 2020

Catching Attention with Automatic Pull Quote Selection

selection

pull quotes

new task

engagement

attention

clickbait

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

technical paper

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.

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.


A Corpus for Argumentative Writing Support in German

Based on an exponentially increasing number of academic articles, discovering and citing comprehensive and appropriate resources has become a non-trivial task. Conventional citation recommender methods suffer from severe information loss. For example, they do not consider the section of the paper that the user is writing and for which they need to find a citation, the relatedness between the words in the local context (the text span that describes a citation), or the importance on each word from the local context. These shortcomings make such methods insufficient for recommending adequate citations to academic manuscripts. In this study, we propose a novel embedding-based neural network called "dual attention model for citation recommendation (DACR)" to recommend citations during manuscript preparation. Our method adapts embedding of three dimensions of semantic information: words in the local context, structural contexts, and the section on which a user is working. A neural network is designed to maximize the similarity between the embedding of the three input (local context words, section and structural contexts) and the target citation appearing in the context. The core of the neural network is composed of self-attention and additive attention, where the former aims to capture the relatedness between the contextual words and structural context, and the latter aims to learn the importance of them. The experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Dual Attention Model for Citation Recommendation

Recently there are increasing concerns about the fairness of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in real- world applications such as computer vision and recommendations. For example, recognition algorithms in computer vision are unfair to black people such as poorly detecting their faces and inappropriately identifying them as “gorillas”. As one crucial application of AI, dialogue systems have been extensively applied in our society. They are usually built with real human conversational data; thus they could inherit some fairness issues which are held in the real world. However, the fairness of dialogue systems has not been well investigated. In this paper, we per- form a pioneering study about the fairness issues in dialogue systems. In particular, we construct a benchmark dataset and propose quantitative measures to understand fairness in dialogue mod- els. Our studies demonstrate that popular dialogue models show significant prejudice towards different genders and races. Besides, to mitigate the bias in dialogue systems, we propose two simple but effective debiasing methods. Experiments show that our methods can reduce the bias in dialogue systems significantly. The dataset and the implementation are released to foster fairness research in dialogue systems.

Does Gender Matter? Towards Fairness in Dialogue Systems

In this paper we focus on connective identification and sense classification for explicit discourse relations in German, as two individual sub-tasks of the overarching Shallow Discourse Parsing task. We successively augment a purely-empirical approach based on contextualised embeddings with linguistic knowledge encoded in a connective lexicon. In this way, we improve over published results for connective identification, achieving a final F1-score of 87.93; and we introduce, to the best of our knowledge, first results for German sense classification, achieving an F1-score of 87.13. Our approach demonstrates that a connective lexicon can be a valuable resource for those languages that do not have a large PDTB-style-annotated corpus available.

Exploiting a lexical resource for discourse connective disambiguation in German

We present a bracketing-based encoding that can be used to represent any 2-planar dependency tree over a sentence of length n as a sequence of n labels, hence providing almost total coverage of crossing arcs in sequence labeling parsing. First, we show that existing bracketing encodings for parsing as labeling can only handle a very mild extension of projective trees. Second, we overcome this limitation by taking into account the well-known property of 2-planarity, which is present in the vast majority of dependency syntactic structures in treebanks, i.e., the arcs of a dependency tree can be split into two planes such that arcs in a given plane do not cross. We take advantage of this property to design a method that balances the brackets and that encodes the arcs belonging to each of those planes, allowing for almost unrestricted non-projectivity (∼99.9% coverage) in sequence labeling parsing. The experiments show that our linearizations improve over the accuracy of the original bracketing encoding in highly non-projective treebanks (on average by 0.4 LAS), while achieving a similar speed. Also, they are especially suitable when PoS tags are not used as input parameters to the models.

Bracketing Encodings for 2-Planar Dependency Parsing

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is the task that asks a machine to answer questions based on a given context. For Chinese MRC, due to the non-literal and non-compositional semantic characteristics, Chinese idioms pose unique challenges for machines to understand. Previous studies tend to treat idioms separately without fully exploiting the relationship among them. In this paper, we first define the concept of literal meaning coverage to measure the consistency between semantics and literal meanings for Chinese idioms. With the definition, we prove that the literal meanings of many idioms are far from their semantics, and we also verify that the synonymic relationship can mitigate this inconsistency, which would be beneficial for idiom comprehension. Furthermore, to fully utilize the synonymic relationship, we propose the synonym knowledge enhanced reader. Specifically, for each idiom, we first construct a synonym graph according to the annotations from a high-quality synonym dictionary or the cosine similarity between the pre-trained idiom embeddings and then incorporate the graph attention network and gate mechanism to encode the graph. Experimental results on ChID, a large-scale Chinese idiom reading comprehension dataset, show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Synonym Knowledge Enhanced Reader for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension

This work presents an in-depth investigation of the effectiveness of dependency-based syntactic features on the irony detection task in a multilingual perspective (English, Spanish, French and Italian). It focuses on the contribution from syntactic knowledge, exploiting linguistic resources where syntax is annotated according to the Universal Dependencies.
Three distinct experimental settings are provided. In the first, a variety of syntactic dependency-based features combined with classical machine learning classifiers are explored. In the second scenario, two well-known types of word embeddings are trained on parsed data and tested against gold standard datasets.
In the third setting, dependency-based syntactic features are combined into the Multilingual BERT architecture. The results suggest that fine-grained dependency-based syntactic information is informative for the detection of irony.

Multilingual Irony Detection with Dependency Syntax and Neural Models

Recently, automatic trivia fact extraction has attracted much research interest. Modern search engines have begun to provide trivia facts as the information for entities because they can motivate more user engagement. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised algorithm that automatically mines trivia facts for a given entity. Unlike previous studies, the proposed algorithm targets at a single Wikipedia article and leverages its hierarchical structure via top-down processing. Thus, the proposed algorithm offers two distinctive advantages: it does not incur high computation time, and it provides a domain-independent approach for extracting trivia facts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is over 100 times faster than the existing method which considers Wikipedia categories. Human evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can mine better trivia facts regardless of the target entity domain and outperforms the existing methods.

Hierarchical Trivia Fact Extraction from Wikipedia Articles

Document-level machine translation focuses on the translation of entire documents from a source to a target language. It is widely regarded as a challenging task since the translation of the individual sentences in the document needs to retain aspects of the discourse at document level. However, document-level translation models are usually not trained to explicitly ensure discourse quality. Therefore, in this paper we propose a training approach that explicitly optimizes two established discourse metrics, lexical cohesion (LC) and coherence (COH), by using a reinforcement learning objective. Experiments over four different language pairs and three translation domains have shown that our training approach has been able to achieve more cohesive and coherent document translations than other competitive approaches, yet without compromising the faithfulness to the reference translation. In the case of the Zh-En language pair, our method has achieved an improvement of 2.46 percentage points (pp) in LC and 1.17 pp in COH over the runner-up, while at the same time improving 0.63 pp in BLEU score and 0.47 pp in F_BERT.

Catching Attention with Automatic Pull Quote Selection

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