Spain

We release an urgency dataset that consists of English tweets relating to natural crises. The set is annotated along with annotations of their corresponding urgency status. Additionally, we release evaluation datasets for two low-resource languages, i.e. Sinhala and Odia, and demonstrate an effective zero-shot transfer from English to these two languages by training cross-lingual classifiers. We adopt cross-lingual embeddings constructed using different methods to extract features of the tweets, including a few state-of-the-art contextual embeddings such as BERT, RoBERTa and XLM-R. We train a variety of classifier architectures, supervised and semi supervised, on the extracted features. We also further experiment with ensembling the various classifiers. With very limited amounts of labeled data in English and zero data in the low resource languages, we show a successful framework of training monolingual and cross-lingual classifiers using deep learning methods which are known to be data hungry. Specifically, we show that the recent deep contextual embeddings are also helpful when dealing with very small-scale datasets. Classifiers that incorporate RoBERTa yield the best performance for the English urgency detection task, with 25% F1 score absolute improvement over the baselines. For the zero-shot transfer to low resource languages, classifiers that use LASER features perform the best for Sinhala transfer while XLM-R features benefit the Odia transfer the most.

COLING 2020

Detecting Urgency Status of Crisis Tweets: A Transfer Learning Approach for Low Resource Languages

urgency

low resource

transfer learning

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

In this study, we explore cross-lingual transfer learning in grammatical error correction (GEC) tasks. Many languages lack the resources required to train GEC models. Cross-lingual transfer learning from high-resource languages (the source models) is effective for training models of low-resource languages (the target models) for various tasks. However, in GEC tasks, the possibility of transferring grammatical knowledge (e.g., grammatical functions) across languages is not evident.
Therefore, we investigate cross-lingual transfer learning methods for GEC. Our results demonstrate that transfer learning from other languages can improve the accuracy of GEC. We also demonstrate that proximity to source languages has a significant impact on the accuracy of correcting certain types of errors.

Cross-lingual Transfer Learning for Grammatical Error Correction

Presents our study of cloze-style reading comprehension by imitating human reading comprehension. The outline includes: Motivations, Model part 1 - Fusion Representation, Model part 2 - Multi-choice Relational Reasoning, Experiments, Conclusion


Multi-choice Relational Reasoning for Machine Reading Comprehension

Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the others in representing lexical semantics appropriately?

Or in its non antagonistic counterpart: could there be a unified account of lexical semantics where these approaches seamlessly emerge as (partial) renderings of (different) aspects of a core semantic knowledge base?

In this paper, we contribute to these research questions with a number of 
experiments that systematically probe different lexical semantics theories for their levels of cognitive plausibility and of technological usefulness.

The empirical findings obtained from these experiments advance our insight on lexical semantics as the feature-based approach emerges as superior to the other ones, and arguably also move us closer to finding answers to the research questions above.

Comparative Probing of Lexical Semantics Theories for Cognitive Plausibility and Technological Usefulness

We conduct in this work an evaluation study comparing offline and online neural machine translation architectures. Two sequence-to-sequence models: convolutional Pervasive Attention (Elbayad et al. 2018) and attention-based Transformer (Vaswani et al. 2017) are considered. We investigate, for both architectures, the impact of online decoding constraints on the translation quality through a carefully designed human evaluation on English-German and German-English language pairs, the latter being particularly sensitive to latency constraints. The evaluation results allow us to identify the strengths and shortcomings of each model when we shift to the online setup.

Online Versus Offline NMT Quality: An In-depth Analysis on English–German and German–English

Knowledge graph embedding maps entities and relations into low-dimensional vector space. However, it is still challenging for many existing methods to model diverse relational patterns, especially symmetric and antisymmetric relations. To address this issue, we propose a novel model, AprilE, which employs triple-level self-attention and pseudo residual connection to model relational patterns. The triple-level self-attention treats head entity, relation, and tail entity as a sequence and captures the dependency within a triple. At the same time the pseudo residual
connection retains primitive semantic features. Furthermore, to deal with symmetric and antisymmetric relations, two schemas of score function are designed via a position-adaptive mechanism. Experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our model can produce expressive knowledge embedding and significantly outperforms most of the state-of-the-art works.

AprilE: Attention with Pseudo Residual Connection for Knowledge Graph Embedding

Prior work investigating the geometry of pre-trained word embeddings have shown that word embeddings to be distributed in a narrow cone and by centering and projecting using principal component vectors one can increase the accuracy of a given set of pre-trained word embeddings. However, theoretically, this post-processing step is equivalent to applying a linear autoencoder to minimise the squared l2 reconstruction error. This result contradicts prior work (Mu and Viswanath, 2018) that proposed to remove the top principal components from pre-trained embeddings. We experimentally verify our theoretical claims and show that retaining the top principal components is indeed useful for improving pre-trained word embeddings, without requiring access to additional linguistic resources or labelled data.

Autoencoding Improves Pre-trained Word Embeddings

We design the positional dependency-based word embedding (PoD) which considers both dependency context and positional context for aspect term extraction.

PoD: Positional Dependency-Based Word Embedding for Aspect Term Extraction

We attempt to bridge the gap between human comments and generated comments and the diversity of generated comments is our goal. We propose a multi-perspective mechanism to enhance automatic music comment. To optimize the multi-perspective components better, we designed a novel comment generation model based on multiple-perspective extraction training. We improve the differentia degree of comments and generate One Comment from One Perspective.

One Comment from One Perspective: An Effective Strategy for Enhancing Automatic Music Comment

We propose a family of metrics to assess language generation derived from population estimation methods widely used in ecology. More specifically, we use mark-recapture and maximum-likelihood methods that have been applied over the past several decades to estimate the size of closed populations in the wild. We propose three novel metrics: ME_Petersen and ME_CAPTURE, which retrieve a single-valued assessment, and ME_Schnabel which returns a double-valued metric to assess the evaluation set in terms of quality and diversity, separately. In synthetic experiments, our family of methods is sensitive to drops in quality and diversity. Moreover, our methods show a higher correlation to human evaluation than existing metrics on several challenging tasks, namely unconditional language generation, machine translation, and text summarization.

Mark-Evaluate: Assessing Language Generation using Population Estimation Methods

In Text-to-SQL semantic parsing, selecting the correct entities (tables and columns) for the generated SQL query is both crucial and challenging; the parser is required to connect the natural language (NL) question and the SQL query to the structured knowledge in the database. We formulate two linking processes to address this challenge: schema linking which links explicit NL mentions to the database and structural linking which links the entities in the output SQL with their structural relationships in the database schema. Intuitively, the effectiveness of these two linking processes changes based on the entity being generated, thus we propose to dynamically choose between them using a gating mechanism. Integrating the proposed method with two graph neural network-based semantic parsers together with BERT representations demonstrates substantial gains in parsing accuracy on the challenging Spider dataset. Analyses show that our proposed method helps to enhance the structure of the model output when generating complicated SQL queries and offers more explainable predictions.

Downloads

Next from COLING 2020

Cross-lingual Transfer Learning for Grammatical Error Correction

Similar lecture

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from COLING 2020

Cross-lingual Transfer Learning for Grammatical Error Correction

Similar lecture

Multilingual Neural Machine Translation

Downloads