Spain

Recent image captioning models have made much progress for exploring the multi-modal interaction, such as attention mechanisms. Though these mechanisms can boost the interaction, there are still two gaps between the visual and language domains: (1) the gap between the visual features and textual semantics, (2) the gap between the disordering of visual features and the ordering of texts. To bridge the gaps we propose a high-level semantic planning (HSP) mechanism that incorporates both a semantic reconstruction and an explicit order planning. We integrate the planning mechanism to the attention based caption model and propose the High-level Semantic PLanning based Attention Network (HS-PLAN). First, an attention based reconstruction module is designed to reconstruct the visual features with high-level semantic information. Then we apply a pointer network to serialize the features and obtain the explicit order plan to guide the generation. Experiments conducted on MS COCO show that our model outperforms previous methods and achieves the state-of-the-art performance of 133.4% CIDEr-D score.

COLING 2020

Bridge the Gap: High-level Semantic Planning for Image Captioning

semantic planning

image captioning

natural language generation

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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.

We focus on a recently deployed system built for summarizing academic articles by concept tagging. The system has shown great coverage and high accuracy of concept identification which could be contributed by the knowledge acquired from millions of publications. Provided with the explainable concepts and knowledge encoded in a pre-trained neural model, we investigate whether the tagged concepts can be applied to a broader class of applications. We propose transforming the tagged concepts into sparse vectors as representations of academic documents. The effectiveness of the representations is analyzed theoretically by a proposed framework. We also empirically show that the representations can have advantages on academic topic discovery and paper recommendation.

Explainable and Sparse Representations of Academic Articles for Knowledge Exploration

The automatic summarization of argumentative texts has hardly been explored. This paper takes a further step in this direction, targeting news editorials, i.e., opinionated articles with a well-defined argumentation structure. With Webis-EditorialSum-2020, we present a corpus of 1330 carefully curated summaries for 266 news editorials. We evaluate these summaries based on a tailored annotation scheme, where a high-quality summary is expected to be thesis-indicative, persuasive, reasonable, concise, and self-contained. Our corpus contains at least three high-quality summaries for about 90% of the editorials, rendering it a valuable resource for the development and evaluation of summarization technology for long argumentative texts. We further report details of both, an in-depth corpus analysis, and the evaluation of two extractive summarization models.

News Editorials: Towards Summarizing Long Argumentative Texts

Mannual annotation for dependency parsing is both labourious and time costly, resulting in the difficulty to learn practical dependency parsers for many languages due to the lack of labelled training corpora. To compensate for the scarcity of labelled data, semi-supervised dependency parsing methods are developed to utilize unlabelled data in the training procedure of dependency parsers. In previous work, the autoencoder framework is a prevalent approach for the utilization of unlabelled data. In this framework, training sentences are reconstructed from a decoder conditioned on dependency trees predicted by an encoder. The tree structure requirement brings challenges for both the encoder and the decoder. Sophisticated techniques are employed to tackle these challenges at the expense of model complexity and approximations in encoding and decoding. In this paper, we propose a model based on the variational autoencoder framework. By relaxing the tree constraint in both the encoder and the decoder during training, we make the learning of our model fully arc-factored and thus circumvent the challenges brought by the tree constraint. We evaluate our model on datasets across several languages and the results demonstrate the advantage of our model over previous approaches in both parsing accuracy and speed.

Semi-Supervised Dependency Parsing with Arc-Factored Variational Autoencoding

Press releases have an increasingly strong influence on media coverage of health research; how- ever, they have been found to contain seriously exaggerated claims that can misinform the public and undermine public trust in science. In this study we propose an NLP approach to identify ex- aggerated causal claims made in health press releases that report on observational studies, which are designed to establish correlational findings, but are often exaggerated as causal. We devel- oped a new corpus and trained models that can identify causal claims in the main statements in a press release. By comparing the claims made in a press release with the corresponding claims in the original research paper, we found that 22% of press releases made exaggerated causal claims from correlational findings in observational studies. Furthermore, universities exagger- ated more often than journal publishers by a ratio of 1.5 to 1. Encouragingly, the exaggeration rate has slightly decreased over the past 10 years, despite the increase of the total number of press releases. More research is needed to understand the cause of the decreasing pattern.

Measuring correlation-to-causation exaggeration in press releases

Automatic evaluation of language generation systems is a well-studied problem in Natural Language Processing. While novel metrics are proposed every year, a few popular metrics remain as the \I{de facto} metrics to evaluate tasks such as image captioning and machine translation, despite their known limitations. This is partly due to ease of use, and partly because researchers expect to see them and know how to interpret them. In this paper, we urge the community for more careful consideration of how they automatically evaluate their models by demonstrating important failure cases on multiple datasets, language pairs and tasks. Our experiments show that metrics (i) usually prefer system outputs to human-authored texts, (ii) can be insensitive to correct translations of rare words, (iii) can yield surprisingly high scores when given a single sentence as system output for the entire test set.

Curious Case of Language Generation Evaluation Metrics: A Cautionary Tale

Semantic annotation tasks contain ambiguity and vagueness and require varying degrees of world knowledge. Disagreement is an important indication of these phenomena. Most traditional evaluation methods, however, critically hinge upon the notion of inter-annotator agreement. While alternative frameworks have been proposed, they do not move beyond agreement as the most important indicator of quality. Critically, evaluations usually do not distinguish between instances in which agreement is expected and instances in which disagreement is not only valid but de-sired because it captures the linguistic and cognitive phenomena in the data. We attempt to overcome these limitations using the example of a dataset that provides semantic representations for diagnostic experiments on language models. Ambiguity, vagueness, and difficulty are not only highly relevant for this use-case, but also play an important role in other types of semantic annotation tasks. We establish an additional, agreement-independent quality metric based on answer-coherence and evaluate it in comparison to existing metrics. We compare against a gold standard and evaluate on expected disagreement. Despite generally low agreement, annotations follow expected behavior and have high accuracy when selected based on coherence. We show that combining different quality metrics enables a more comprehensive evaluation than relying exclusively on agreement.


Would you describe a leopard as yellow?
Evaluating crowd annotations with justified and informative disagreement

Emotion recognition in textual conversations (ERTC) plays an important role in a wide range of applications, such as opinion mining, recommender systems, and so on. ERTC, however, is a challenging task. For one thing, speakers often rely on the context and commonsense knowledge to express emotions; for another, most utterances contain neutral emotion in conversations, as a result, the confusion between a few non-neutral utterances and much more neutral ones restrains the emotion recognition performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Aware Incremental Transformer with Multi-task Learning (KAITML) to address these challenges. Firstly, we devise a dual-level graph attention mechanism to leverage commonsense knowledge, which augments the semantic information of the utterance. Then we apply the Incremental Transformer to encode multi-turn contextual utterances. Moreover, we are the first to introduce multi-task learning to alleviate the aforementioned confusion and thus further improve the emotion recognition performance. Extensive experimental results show that our KAITML model outperforms the state-of-the-art models across five benchmark datasets.

Knowledge Aware Emotion Recognition in Textual Conversations via Multi-Task Incremental Transformer

Aspect-based sentiment analysis includes opinion aspect extraction and aspect sentiment classification. Researchers have attempted to discover the relationship between these two sub-tasks and have proposed the joint model for solving aspect-based sentiment analysis. However, they ignore a phenomenon: aspect boundary label and sentiment label of the same word can correct each other. To exploit this phenomenon, we propose a novel deep learning model named the label correction model. Specifically, given an input sentence, our model first predicts the aspect boundary label sequence and sentiment label sequence, then re-predicts the aspect boundary (sentiment) label sequence using the embeddings of the previously predicted sentiment (aspect boundary) label. The goal of the re-prediction operation (can be repeated multiple times) is to use the information of the sentiment (aspect boundary) label to correct the wrong aspect boundary (sentiment) label. Moreover, we explore two ways of using label embeddings: add and gate mechanism. We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets. Experimental results verify that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with several baselines.

Label Correction Model for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis

Automatic content scoring systems are widely used on short answer tasks to save human effort. However, the use of these systems can invite cheating strategies, such as students writing irrelevant answers in the hopes of gaining at least partial credit. We generate adversarial answers for benchmark content scoring datasets based on different methods of increasing sophistication and show that even simple methods lead to a surprising decrease in content scoring performance. As an extreme example, up to 60% of adversarial answers generated from random shuffling of words in real answers are accepted by a state-of-the-art scoring system. In addition to analyzing the vulnerabilities of content scoring systems, we examine countermeasures such as adversarial training and show that these measures improve system robustness against adversarial answers considerably but do not suffice to completely solve the problem.

The surprising vulnerability of automatic content scoring systems to adversarial input

For text generation from semantic graphs, past neural models encoded input structure via gated convolutions along graph edges. Although these operations provide local context, the distance messages can travel is bounded by the number of encoder propagation steps. We adopt recent efforts of applying Transformer self-attention to graphs to allow global feature propagation. Instead of feeding shortest paths to the vertex self-attention module, we train a model to learn them using generalized shortest-paths algorithms. This approach widens the receptive field of a graph encoder by exposing it to all possible graph paths. We explore how this path diversity affects performance across levels of AMR connectivity, demonstrating gains on AMRs of higher reentrancy counts and diameters. Analysis of generated sentences also supports high semantic coherence of our models for reentrant AMRs. Our best model achieves a 1.4 BLEU and 1.8 chrF++ margin over a baseline that encodes only pairwise-unique shortest paths.

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