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Several quality dimensions of natural language arguments have been investigated. Some are likely to be reflected in linguistic features (e.g., an argument&#39;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&#39;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.

COLING 2020

Intrinsic Quality Assessment of Arguments

quality assessment

text analysis

computational argumentation

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.

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.

technical paper

Existing metonymy resolution approaches rely on features extracted from external resources like dictionaries and hand-crafted lexical resources. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end word-level classification approach based only on BERT, without dependencies on taggers, parsers, curated dictionaries of place names, or other external resources. We show that our approach achieves the state-of-the-art on 5 datasets, surpassing conventional BERT models and benchmarks by a large margin. We also show that our approach generalises well to unseen data.

Target Word Masking for Location Metonymy Resolution

Non-autoregressive models generate target words in a parallel way, which achieve a faster decoding speed but at the sacrifice of translation accuracy. To remedy a flawed translation by non-autoregressive models, a promising approach is to train a conditional masked translation model (CMTM), and refine the generated results within several iterations. Unfortunately, such approach hardly considers the \textit{sequential dependency} among target words, which inevitably results in a translation degradation. Hence, instead of solely training a Transformer-based CMTM, we propose a Self-Review Mechanism to infuse sequential information into it. Concretely, we insert a left-to-right mask to the same decoder of CMTM, and then induce it to autoregressively review whether each generated word from CMTM is supposed to be replaced or kept. The experimental results (WMT14 En↔De and WMT16 En↔Ro) demonstrate that our model uses dramatically less training computations than the typical CMTM, as well as outperforms several state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models by over 1 BLEU. Through knowledge distillation, our model even surpasses a typical left-to-right Transformer model, while significantly speeding up decoding.

Infusing Sequential Information into Conditional Masked Translation Model with Self-Review Mechanism

We propose to learn distributed sentence representation using the text's visual features as input. Different from the existing methods that render the words (or characters) of a sentence into images separately, we fold these images into a 3-dimensional sentence tensor. Then, multiple 3-dimensional convolutions with different lengths (the third dimension) are applied to the sentence tensor, which would act as bi-gram, tri-gram, quad-gram, and even five-gram detectors jointly. Similar to the Bi-LSTMs, these n-gram detectors learn both forward and backward distributional semantic knowledge from the sentence tensor. The proposed model uses bi-directional convolutions to learn text embedding according to the semantic order of words. The feature maps from the two directions are concatenated for final sentence embedding learning. Our model involves only a single layer of convolution which makes it easy and fast to train. We evaluate the sentence embeddings on several downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks, which demonstrate surprisingly excellent performance of the proposed model.

Learning distributed sentence vectors with bi-directional 3D convolutions

Question generation (QG) attempts to solve the inverse of question answering (QA) problem by generating a natural language question given a document and an answer. While sequence to sequence neural models surpass rule-based systems for QG, they are limited in their capacity to focus on more than one supporting fact. For QG, we often require multiple supporting facts to generate high-quality questions. Inspired by recent works on multi-hop reasoning in QA, we take up Multi-hop question generation, which aims at generating relevant questions based on supporting facts in the context. We employ multitask learning with the auxiliary task of answer aware supporting fact prediction to guide the question generator. In addition, we also proposed a question-aware reward function in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to maximize the utilization of the supporting facts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on the multi-hop question answering dataset, HotPotQA. Empirical evaluation shows our model to outperform the single-hop neural question generation models on both automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE and human evaluation metrics for
quality and coverage of the generated questions.

Reinforced Multi-task Approach for Multi-hop Question Generation

Traditional document similarity measures provide a coarse-grained distinction between similar and dissimilar documents. Typically, they do not consider in what aspects two documents are similar. This limits the granularity of applications like recommender systems that rely on document similarity. In this paper, we extend similarity with aspect information by performing a pairwise document classification task. We evaluate our aspect-based document similarity approach for research papers. Paper citations indicate the aspect-based similarity, i. e., the title of a section in which a citation occurs acts as a label for the pair of citing and cited paper. We apply a series of Transformer models such as RoBERTa, ELECTRA, XLNet, and BERT variations and compare them to an LSTM baseline. We perform our experiments on two newly constructed datasets of 172,073 research paper pairs from the ACL Anthology and CORD-19 corpus. Ac- cording to our results, SciBERT is the best performing system with F1-scores of up to 0.83. A qualitative analysis validates our quantitative results and indicates that aspect-based document similarity indeed leads to more fine-grained recommendations.

Aspect-based Document Similarity for Research Papers

A key bottleneck for developing dialog models is the lack of adequate training data. Due to privacy issues, dialog data is even scarcer in the health domain. We propose a novel method for creating dialog corpora which we apply to create doctor-patient interaction data. We use this data to learn both a generation and a hybrid classification/retrieval model and find that the generation model consistently outperforms the hybrid model. We show that our data creation method has several advantages. Not only does it allow for the semi-automatic creation of large quantities of training data. It also provides a natural way of guiding learning and a novel method for assessing the quality of human-machine interactions.

Learning Health-Bots from Training Data that was Automatically Created using Paraphrase Detection and Expert Knowledge

One of the most fundamental elements of narrative is character: if we are to understand a narrative, we must be able to identify the characters of that narrative. Therefore, character identification is a critical task in narrative natural language understanding. Most prior work has lacked a narratologically grounded definition of character, instead relying on simplified or implicit definitions that do not capture essential distinctions between characters and other referents
in narratives. In prior work we proposed a preliminary definition of character that was based in clear narratological principles: a character is an animate entity that is important to the plot. Here we flesh out this concept, demonstrate that it can be reliably annotated (0.78 Cohen’s κ), and provide annotations of 170 narrative texts, drawn from 3 different corpora, containing 1,347 character co-reference chains and 21,999 non-character chains that include 3,937 animate chains. Furthermore, we have shown that a supervised classifier using a simple set of easily computable
features can effectively identify these characters (overall F1 of 0.90). A detailed error analysis shows that character identification is first and foremost affected by co-reference quality, and further, that the shorter a chain is the harder it is to effectively identify as a character. We release our code and data for the benefit of other researchers

A Straightforward Approach to Narratologically Grounded Character Identification

In this paper, we introduce two advancements in the automatic keyphrase extraction (AKE) space- KeyGames and pke+. KeyGames is an unsupervised AKE framework that employs the concept of evolutionary game theory and consistent labelling problem to ensure consistent classification of candidates into keyphrase and non-keyphrase. Pke+ is a python based pipeline built on top of the existing pke library to standardize various AKE steps, namely candidate extraction and evaluation, to ensure truly systematic and comparable performance analysis of AKE models. In the experiments section, we compare the performance of KeyGames across three publicly available datasets (Inspec 2001, SemEval 2010, DUC 2001) against the results quoted by the existing state-of-the-art models as well as their performance when reproduced using pke+. The results show that KeyGames outperforms most of the state-of-the-art systems while generalizing better on input documents with different domains and length. Further, pke+’s pre-processing brings out improvement in several other system’s quoted performance as well.

KeyGames: A Game Theoretic approach to Automatic Keyphrase Extraction

Named entities pose a unique challenge to traditional methods of language modeling. While several domains are characterised with a high proportion of named entities, the occurrence of specific entities varies widely. Cooking recipes, for example, contain a lot of named entities — viz. ingredients, cooking techniques (also called processes), and utensils. However, some ingredients occur frequently within the instructions while most occur rarely. In this paper, we build upon the previous work done on language models developed for text with named entities by introducing a Hierarchically Disentangled Model. Training is divided into multiple branches with each branch producing a model with overlapping subsets of vocabulary. We found the existing datasets insufficient to accurately judge the performance of the model. Hence, we have curated 158,473 cooking recipes from several publicly available online sources. To reliably derive the entities within this corpus, we employ a combination of Named Entity Recognition (NER) as well as an unsupervised method of interpretation using dependency parsing and POS tagging,
followed by a further cleaning of the dataset. This unsupervised interpretation models instructions as action graphs and is specific to the corpus of cooking recipes, unlike NER which is a general method applicable to all corpora. To delve into the utility of our language model, we apply it to tasks such as graph-to-text generation and ingredients-to-recipe generation, comparing it to previous state-of-the-art baselines. We make our dataset (including annotations and processed action graphs) available for use, considering their potential use cases for language modeling and
text generation research.


Building Hierarchically Disentangled Language Models for Text
Generation with Named Entities

Previous work on bridging anaphora recognition (Hou et al., 2013a) casts the problem as a subtask of learning fine-grained information status (IS). However, these systems heavily depend on many hand-crafted linguistic features. In this paper, we propose a simple discourse context-aware BERT model for fine-grained IS classification. On the ISNotes corpus (Markert et al., 2012), our model achieves new state-of-the-art performance on fine-grained IS classification, obtaining a 4.8 absolute overall accuracy improvement compared to Hou et al. (2013a). More importantly, we also show an improvement of 10.5 F1 points for bridging anaphora recognition without using any complex hand-crafted semantic features designed for capturing the bridging phenomenon. We further analyze the trained model and find that the most attended signals for each IS category correspond well to linguistic notions of information status.

Intrinsic Quality Assessment of Arguments

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