Spain

Generating texts which express complex ideas spanning multiple sentences requires a structured representation of their content (document plan), but these representations are prohibitively expensive to manually produce. In this work, we address the problem of generating coherent multi-sentence texts from the output of an information extraction system, and in particular a knowledge graph. Graph- ical knowledge representations are ubiquitous in computing, but pose a significant challenge for text generation techniques due to their non-hierarchical nature, collapsing of long- distance dependencies, and structural variety. We introduce a novel graph transforming en- coder which can leverage the relational structure of such knowledge graphs without imposing linearization or hierarchical constraints. Incorporated into an encoder-decoder setup, we provide an end-to-end trainable system for graph-to-text generation that we apply to the domain of scientific text. Automatic and human evaluations show that our technique produces more informative texts which exhibit better document structure than competitive encoder-decoder methods.

COLING 2020

A Graph Representation of Semi-structured Data for Web Question Answering - COLING2020

semi-structured data

pre-training

question answering

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

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.

Span-based joint extraction models have shown their efficiency on entity recognition and relation extraction. These models regard text spans as candidate entities and span tuples as candidate relation tuples. Span semantic representations are shared in both entity recognition and relation extraction, while existing models cannot well capture semantics of these candidate entities and relations. To address these problems, we introduce a span-based joint extraction framework with attention-based semantic representations. Specially, attentions are utilized to calculate semantic representations, including span-specific and contextual ones. We further investigate effects of four attention variants in generating contextual semantic representations. Experiments show that our model outperforms previous systems and achieves state-of-the-art results on ACE2005, CoNLL2004 and ADE.

Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Attention-based Span-specific and Contextual Semantic Representations

Modern digital personal assistants interact with users through voice. Therefore, they heavily rely on automatic speech recognition (ASR) in order to convert speech to text and perform further tasks. We introduce EBERT, which stands for EmbraceBERT, with the goal of extracting more robust latent representations for the task of noisy ASR text classification. Conventionally, BERT is fine-tuned for downstream classification tasks using only the [CLS] starter token, with the remaining tokens being discarded. We propose using all encoded transformer tokens and further encode them using a novel attentive embracement layer and multi-head attention layer. This approach uses the otherwise discarded tokens as a source of additional information and the multi-head attention in conjunction with the attentive embracement layer to select important features from clean data during training. This allows for the extraction of a robust latent vector resulting in improved classification performance during testing when presented with noisy inputs. We show the impact of our model on both the Chatbot and Snips corpora for intent classification with ASR error. Results, in terms of F1-score and mean between 10 runs, show that our model significantly outperforms the baseline model. Code, data, and results available at https://github.com/gcunhase/EmbraceBERT.

Attentively Embracing Noise for Robust Latent Representation in BERT

Event extraction plays an important role in legal applications, including case push and auxiliary judgment. However, traditional event structure cannot express the connections between arguments, which are extremely important in legal events. Therefore, this paper defines a dynamic event structure for Chinese legal events. To distinguish between similar events, we design hierarchical event features for event detection. Moreover, to address the problem of long-distance semantic dependence and anaphora resolution in argument classification, we propose a novel pedal attention mechanism to extract the semantic relation between two words through their dependent adjacent words. We label a Chinese legal event dataset and evaluate our model on it. Experimental results demonstrate that our model can surpass other state-of-the-art models.

Hierarchical Chinese Legal event extraction via Pedal Attention Mechanism

As education switches from the traditional classroom environment to online education and assessment, teachers could not follow students’ learning behavior closely which leads to inaccurate assessment of students’ knowledge. A well-defined method to precisely measure difficulty of questions is critical as it can guide teachers in assessing students’ performance and help provide customized attention to students. In this paper, we explore the concept of question difficulty and share our new Chinese Driving Test Question Difficulty Comprehension (DT-QDC) dataset. Different from the existing question datasets, we mainly design for question evaluation and comprehension in online testing, so each question has enriched attributes and difficulty label.Additional attributes such as keywords, chapter, and question type would allow models to understand questions more precisely. We proposed the Ordinal Regression Multi-Source BERT (ORMS-BERT) model to assess the difficulty of the question, which outperforms different baselines by 6.77% on F1-score and 15.92% on MAE, 28.26% on MSE on the DT-QDC dataset, laying the foundation for the question difficulty comprehension task.

DT-QDC: A Dataset for Question Comprehension in Online Test

This paper proposes a general purpose relation extractor that uses Wikidata descriptions to represent the relation's surface form.
The results are tested on the FewRel 1.0 dataset, which provides an excellent framework for training and evaluating the proposed zero-shot learning system in English. 
This relation extractor architecture exploits the implicit knowledge of a language model through a question-answering approach.

Exploring the Zero Shot Limit of FewRel

This paper proposes a new approach to animacy detection, the task of determining whether an entity is represented as animate in a text. In particular, this work is focused on atypical animacy and examines the scenario in which typically inanimate objects, specifically machines, are given animate attributes. To address it, we have created the first dataset for atypical animacy detection, based on nineteenth-century sentences in English, with machines represented as either animate or inanimate. Our method builds on recent innovations in language modeling, specifically BERT contextualized word embeddings, to better capture fine-grained contextual properties of words. We present a fully unsupervised pipeline, which can be easily adapted to different contexts, and report its performance on an established animacy dataset and our newly introduced resource. We show that our method provides a substantially more accurate characterization of atypical animacy, especially when applied to highly complex forms of language use.

Living Machines: A study of atypical animacy

Automatically describing videos in natural language is an ambitious problem, which could bridge our understanding of vision and language. We propose a hierarchical approach, by first generating video descriptions as sequences of simple sentences, followed at the next level by a more complex and fluent description in natural language. While the simple sentences describe simple actions in the form of
(subject, verb, object), the second-level paragraph descriptions, indirectly using information from the first-level description, presents the visual content in a more compact, coherent and semantically rich manner. 
To this end, we introduce the first video dataset in the literature that is annotated with captions at two levels of linguistic complexity. We perform extensive tests that demonstrate that our hierarchical linguistic representation, from simple to complex language, allows us to train a two-stage network that is able to generate significantly more complex paragraphs than current one-stage approaches.

A hierarchical approach to vision-based language generation: from simple sentences to complex natural language

The interpretation of the lexical aspect of verbs in English plays a crucial role for recognizing textual entailment and learning discourse-level inferences.
We show that two elementary dimensions of aspectual class, states vs. events, and telic vs. atelic events, can be modelled effectively with distributional semantics. We find that a verb's local context is most indicative of its aspectual class, and demonstrate that closed class words tend to be stronger discriminating contexts than content words. Our approach outperforms previous work on three datasets. Lastly, we contribute a dataset of human--human conversations annotated with lexical aspect and present experiments that show the correlation of telicity with genre and discourse goals.

Aspectuality Across Genre: A Distributional Semantics Approach

We unveil the language encoded in sentence embeddings by conditionally generating from them. We perceive of this as a new unsupervised probing task and show that it correlates well with downstream task performance. We also illustrate how the language generated from different encoders differs. We apply our approach to generate sentence analogies from sentence embeddings.

Vec2Sent: Probing Sentence Embeddings With Natural Language Generation

In many domains, dialogue systems need to work collaboratively with users to successfully reconstruct the meaning the user had in mind. In this paper, we show how cognitive models of users' communicative strategies can be leveraged in a reinforcement learning approach to dialogue planning to enable interactive systems to give targeted, effective feedback about the system's understanding. We describe a prototype system that collaborates on reference tasks that distinguish arbitrarily varying color patches from similar distractors, and use experiments with crowd workers and analyses of our learned policies to document that our approach leads to context-sensitive clarification strategies that focus on key missing information, elicit correct answers that the system understands, and contribute to increasing dialogue success.

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