Spain

Discourse structure tree construction is the fundamental task of discourse parsing and most previous work focused on English. Due to the cultural and linguistic differences, existing successful methods on English discourse parsing cannot be transformed into Chinese directly, especially in paragraph level suffering from longer discourse units and fewer explicit connectives. To alleviate the above issues, we propose two reading modes, i.e., the global backward reading and the local reverse reading, to construct Chinese paragraph level discourse trees. The former processes discourse units from the end to the beginning in a document to utilize the left-branching bias of discourse structure in Chinese, while the latter reverses the position of paragraphs in a discourse unit to enhance the differentiation of coherence between adjacent discourse units. The experimental results on Chinese MCDTB demonstrate that our model outperforms all strong baselines.

COLING 2020

Chinese Paragraph level Discourse Parsing with Global Backward and Local Reverse Reading

local reverse reading

global backward reading

discourse parsing

natural language processing

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

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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.

In this presentation, I will introduce our work about the abstractive dialogue summarization task. First, we introduce our proposed model, the Topic-word Guided Dialogue Graph Attention (TGDGA) network, which models the dialogue as an interaction graph according to the topic word information. Next, we show the experiments for our methods. Finally, we give a conclusion and the future directions.


Improving Abstractive Dialogue Summarization with Graph Structures and Topic Words

Current supervised relational triple extraction approaches require huge amounts of labeled data and thus suffer from poor performance in few-shot settings. However, people can grasp new knowledge by learning a few instances. To this end, we take the first step to study the few-shot relational triple extraction, which has not been well understood. Unlike previous single-task few-shot problems, relational triple extraction is more challenging as the entities and relations have implicit correlations. In this paper, We propose a novel multi-prototype embedding network model to jointly extract the composition of relational triples, namely, entity pairs and corresponding relations. To be specific, we design a hybrid prototypical learning mechanism that bridges text and knowledge concerning both entities and relations. Thus, implicit correlations between entities and relations are injected. Additionally, we propose a prototype-aware regularization to learn more representative prototypes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the performance of the few-shot triple extraction.

Bridging Text and Knowledge with Multi-Prototype Embedding for Few-Shot Relational Triple Extraction

Question answering over dialogue, a specialized machine reading comprehension task, aims to comprehend a dialogue and to answer specific questions.
Despite many advances, existing approaches for this task did not consider dialogue structure and background knowledge (e.g., relationships between speakers).
In this paper, we introduce a new approach for the task, featured by its novelty in structuring dialogue and integrating background knowledge for reasoning.
Specifically, different from previous ``structure-less" approaches, our method organizes a dialogue as a ``relational graph", using edges to represent relationships between entities. To encode this relational graph, we devise a relational graph convolutional network (R-GCN), which can traverse the graph's topological structure and effectively encode multi-relational knowledge for reasoning. The extensive experiments have justified the effectiveness of our approach over competitive baselines. Moreover, a deeper analysis shows that our model is better at tackling complex questions requiring relational reasoning and defending adversarial attacks with distracting sentences.

Graph-Based Knowledge Integration for Question Answering over Dialogue

Neural controllable text generation is an important area gaining attention due to its plethora of applications. Although there is a large body of prior work in controllable text generation, there is no unifying theme. In this work, we provide a new schema of the pipeline of the generation process by classifying it into five modules. The control of attributes in the generation process requires modification of these modules. We present an overview of different techniques used to perform the modulation of
these modules. We also provide an analysis on the advantages and disadvantages of these techniques. We further pave ways to develop new architectures based on the combination of the modules described in this paper.

Exploring Controllable Text Generation Techniques

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE), aiming to embed entities and relations into low-dimensional vectors, has attracted wide attention recently. However, the existing research is mainly based on the black-box neural models, which makes it difficult to interpret the learned representation. In this paper, we introduce DisenE, an end-to-end framework to learn disentangled knowledge graph embeddings. Specially, we introduce an attention-based mechanism that enables the model to explicitly focus on relevant components of entity embeddings according to a given relation. Furthermore, we introduce two novel regularizers to encourage each component of the entity representation to independently reflect an isolated semantic aspect. 
Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed DisenE investigates a perspective to address the interpretability of KGE and is proved to be an effective way to improve the performance of link prediction tasks.

DisenE: Disentangling Knowledge Graph Embeddings

Hoping for a large number of clicks and potentially high social shares, journalists of various news media outlets publish sensationalist headlines on social media. These headlines lure the readers to click on them and satisfy the curiosity gap in their mind. Low quality material pointed to by clickbaits leads to time wastage and annoyance for users. Even for enterprises publishing clickbaits, it hurts more than it helps as it erodes user trust, attracts wrong visitors, and produces negative signals for ranking algorithms. Hence, identifying and flagging clickbait titles is very essential. Previous work on clickbaits has majorly focused on binary classification of clickbait titles. However not all clickbaits are equally clickbaity. It is not only essential to identify a clickbait, but also to identify the intensity of the clickbait based on the strength of the clickbait. In this work, we model clickbait strength prediction as a regression problem. While previous methods have relied on traditional machine learning or vanilla recurrent neural networks, we rigorously investigate the use of transformers for clickbait strength prediction. On a benchmark dataset with ∼39K posts, our methods outperform all the existing methods in the Clickbait Challenge.

Predicting Clickbait Strength in Online Social Media

Text discourse parsing plays an important role in understanding information flow and argumentative structure in natural language. Previous research under the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) has mostly focused on inducing and evaluating models from the English treebank. However, the parsing tasks for other languages such as German, Dutch, and Portuguese are still challenging due to the shortage of annotated data. In this work, we investigate two approaches to establish a neural, cross-lingual discourse parser via: (1) utilizing multilingual vector representations; and (2) adopting segment-level translation of the source content. Experiment results show that both methods are effective even with limited training data, and achieve state-of-the-art performance on cross-lingual, document-level discourse parsing on all sub-tasks.

Multilingual Neural RST Discourse Parsing

Pre-trained language models have been widely applied to cross-domain NLP tasks like sentiment analysis, achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, due to the variety of users’ emotional expressions across domains, fine-tuning the pre-trained models on the source domain tends to overfit, leading to inferior results on the target domain. In this paper, we pre-train a sentiment aware language model (SENTIX) via domain-invariant sentiment knowledge from large-scale review datasets, and utilize it for cross-domain sentiment analysis task without fine-tuning. We propose several pre-training tasks based on existing lexicons and annotations at both token and sentence levels, such as emoticons, sentiment words, and ratings, without human interference. A series of experiments are conducted and the results indicate the great advantages of our model. We obtain new state-of-the-art results in all the cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks, and our proposed SENTIX can be trained with only 1% samples (18 samples) and it achieves better performance than BERT with 90% samples. Code is available at https://github.com/12190143/SentiX.

SentiX: A Sentiment-Aware Pre-Trained Model for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

Recently, pre-trained language models such as BERT have shown state-of-the-art accuracies in text matching. When being applied to IR (or QA), the BERT-based matching models need to online calculate the representations and interactions for all query-candidate pairs. The high inference cost has prohibited the deployments of BERT-based matching models in many practical applications. To address this issue, we propose a novel BERT-based text matching model, in which the representations and the interactions are decoupled. Then, the representations of the candidates can be calculated and stored offline, and directly retrieved during the online matching phase. To conduct the interactions and generate final matching scores, a lightweight attention network is designed. Experiments based on several large scale text matching datasets show that the proposed model, called FASTMATCH, can achieve up to 100X speed-up to BERT and RoBERTa at the online matching phase, while keeping more up to 98.7% of the performance.

FASTMATCH: Accelerating the Inference of BERT-based Text Matching

Several quality dimensions of natural language arguments have been investigated. Some are likely to be reflected in linguistic features (e.g., an argument's arrangement), whereas others depend on context (e.g., relevance) or topic knowledge (e.g., acceptability). In this paper, we study the intrinsic computational assessment of 15 dimensions, i.e., only learning from an argument's text. In systematic experiments with eight feature types on an existing corpus, we observe moderate but significant learning success for most dimensions. Rhetorical quality seems hardest to assess, and subjectivity features turn out strong, although length bias in the corpus impedes full validity. We also find that human assessors differ more clearly to each other than to our approach.

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