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Events in a narrative differ in salience: some are more important to the story than others. Esti- mating event salience is useful for tasks such as story generation, and as a tool for text analysis in narratology and folkloristics. To compute event salience without any annotations, we adopt Barthes&#39; definition of event salience and propose several unsupervised methods that require only a pre-trained language model. Evaluating the proposed methods on folktales with event salience annotation, we show that the proposed methods outperform baseline methods and find fine-tuning a language model on narrative texts is a key factor in improving the proposed methods.

COLING 2020

Modeling Event Salience in Narratives via Barthes&#39; Cardinal Functions

event salience

narrative

language model

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.

Events in a narrative differ in salience: some are more important to the story than others. Esti- mating event salience is useful for tasks such as story generation, and as a tool for text analysis in narratology and folkloristics. To compute event salience without any annotations, we adopt Barthes' definition of event salience and propose several unsupervised methods that require only a pre-trained language model. Evaluating the proposed methods on folktales with event salience annotation, we show that the proposed methods outperform baseline methods and find fine-tuning a language model on narrative texts is a key factor in improving the proposed methods.

Modeling Event Salience in Narratives via Barthes' Cardinal Functions

technical paper

We propose Pointer- LSTM, a novel LSTM framework which relies on a pointer network to select important words for target prediction. The model maintains a coherent input process for the LSTM modules and makes it possible to change the skip rate during inference. Our evaluation on four public data sets demonstrates that Pointer-LSTM (a) is 1.1x∼3.5x faster than the standard LSTM architecture; (b) is more accurate than Leap-LSTM (the state-of-the-art LSTM skipping model) at high skip rates; and (c) reaches robust accuracy levels even when the skip rate is changed during inference.

Pointing to Select: A Fast Pointer-LSTM for Long Text Classification

Zero-shot slot filling has widely arisen to cope with data scarcity in target domains. However, previous approaches often ignore constraints between slot value representation and related slot description representation in the latent space and lack enough model robustness. In this paper, we propose a Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning with Adversarial Attack (CZSL-Adv) method for the cross-domain slot filling. The contrastive loss aims to map slot value contextual representations to the corresponding slot description representations. And we introduce an adversarial attack training strategy to improve model robustness. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines under both zero-shot and few-shot settings.

Contrastive Zero-Shot Learning for Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Adversarial Attack

In this paper we investigate the linguistic knowledge learned by a Neural Language Model (NLM) before and after a fine-tuning process and how this knowledge affects its predictions during several classification problems. We use a wide set of probing tasks, each of which corresponds to a distinct sentence-level feature extracted from different levels of linguistic annotation. We show that BERT is able to encode a wide range of linguistic characteristics, but it tends to lose this information when trained on specific downstream tasks. We also find that BERT's capacity to encode different kind of linguistic properties has a positive influence on its predictions: the more it stores readable linguistic information of a sentence, the higher will be its capacity of predicting the expected label assigned to that sentence.

Linguistic Profiling of a Neural Language Model

Slot filling and intent detection are two major tasks for spoken language understanding. In most existing work, these two tasks are built as joint models with multi-task learning with no consideration of prior linguistic knowledge. In this paper, we propose a novel joint model that applies a graph convolutional network over dependency trees to integrate the syntactic structure for learning slot filling and intent detection jointly. Experimental results show that our proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two public benchmark datasets and outperforms existing work. At last, we apply the BERT model to further improve the performance on both slot filling and intent detection.

Syntactic Graph Convolutional Network for Spoken Language Understanding

Most of the research on text simplification is limited to sentence level nowadays. In this paper, we are the first to investigate the helpfulness of document context on sentence simplification and apply it to the sequence-to-sequence model. We firstly construct a sentence simplification dataset in which the contexts for the original sentence are provided by Wikipedia corpus. The new dataset contains approximately 116K sentence pairs with context. We then propose a new model that makes full use of the context information. Our model uses neural networks to learn the different effects of the preceding sentences and the following sentences on the current sentence and applies them to the improved transformer model. Evaluated on the newly constructed dataset, our model achieves 36.52 on SARI value, which outperforms the best performing model in the baselines by 2.46 (7.22%), indicating that context indeed helps improve sentence simplification. In the ablation experiment, we show that using either the preceding sentences or the following sentences as context can significantly improve simplification.

On the Helpfulness of Document Context to Sentence Simplification

Long Short-Term Memory recurrent neural network (LSTM) is widely used and known to capture informative long-term syntactic dependencies. However, how such information are reflected in its internal vectors for natural text has not yet been sufficiently investigated. We analyze them by learning a language model where syntactic structures are implicitly given. We empirically show that the context update vectors, i.e. outputs of internal gates, are approximately quantized to binary or ternary values to help the language model to count the depth of nesting accurately, as Suzgun et al. (2019) recently show for synthetic Dyck languages. For some dimensions in the context vector, we show that their activations are highly correlated with the depth of phrase structures, such as VP and NP. Moreover, with an L1 regularization, we also found that it can accurately predict whether a word is inside a phrase structure or not from a small number of components of the context vector. Even for the case of learning from raw text, context vectors are shown to still correlate well with the phrase structures. Finally, we show that natural clusters of the functional words and the part of speeches that trigger phrases are represented in a small but principal subspace of the context-update vector of LSTM.


How LSTM Encodes Syntax: Exploring Context Vectors and Semi-Quantization on Natural Text

This paper surveys the first, three-year phase of a project at the National Research Council of Canada that is developing software to assist Indigenous communities in Canada in preserving their languages and extending their use. The project aimed to work within the empowerment paradigm, where collaboration with communities
and fulfillment of their goals is central. Since many of the technologies we developed were in response to community needs, the project ended up as a collection of diverse subprojects, including the creation of a sophisticated framework for building verb conjugators for highly inflectional polysynthetic languages (such as Kanyen’kéha, in the Iroquoian language family), release of what is probably the largest available corpus of sentences in a polysynthetic language (Inuktut) aligned with English sentences and experiments with machine translation (MT) systems trained on this corpus, free online services based on automatic speech recognition (ASR) for easing the transcription bottleneck for recordings of speech in Indigenous languages (and other languages), software for implementing text prediction and read-along audiobooks for Indigenous languages, and several other subprojects.


The Indigenous Languages Technology project at NRC Canada:
An empowerment-oriented approach to developing language software

We present the first evaluation of the applicability of a spatial arrangement method (SpAM) to a typologically diverse language sample, and its potential to produce semantic evaluation resources to support multilingual NLP, with a focus on verb semantics. We demonstrate SpAM’s utility in allowing for quick bottom-up creation of large-scale evaluation datasets that balance cross-lingual alignment with language specificity. Starting from a shared sample of 825 English verbs, translated into Chinese, Japanese, Finnish, Polish, and Italian, we apply a two-phase annotation process which produces (i) semantic verb classes and (ii) fine-grained similarity scores for nearly 130 thousand verb pairs. We use the two types of verb data to (a) examine cross-lingual similarities and variation, and (b) evaluate the capacity of static and contextualised representation models to accurately reflect verb semantics, contrasting the performance of large language-specific pretraining models with their multilingual equivalent on semantic clustering and lexical similarity, across different domains of verb meaning. We release the data from both phases as a large-scale multilingual resource, comprising 85 verb classes and nearly 130k pairwise similarity scores, offering a wealth of possibilities for further evaluation and research on multilingual verb semantics.

Manual Clustering and Spatial Arrangement of Verbs for Multilingual Evaluation and Typology Analysis

This paper explores an unsupervised approach to learning a compositional representation function for multi-word expressions (MWEs), and evaluates it on the Tratz dataset, which associates two-word expressions with the semantic relation between the compound constituents (e.g. the label employer is associated with the noun compound government agency) (Tratz, 2011). The composition function is based on recurrent neural networks, and is trained using the Skip-Gram objective to predict the words in the context of MWEs. Thus our approach can naturally leverage large unlabeled text sources. Further, our method can make use of provided MWEs when available, but can also function as a completely unsupervised algorithm, using MWE boundaries predicted by a single, domain-agnostic part-of-speech pattern. With pre-defined MWE boundaries, our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art performance on the coarse-grained evaluation of the Tratz dataset (Tratz, 2011), with an F1 score of 50.4%. The unsupervised version of our method approaches the performance of the supervised one, and even outperforms it in some configurations.

An Unsupervised Method for Learning Representations of Multi-word Expressions for Semantic Classification

In response to (i) inconclusive results in the literature as to the properties of coreference chains in written versus spoken language, and (ii) a general lack of work on automatic coreference resolution on both spoken language and social media, we undertake a corpus study involving the various genre sections of Ontonotes, the Switchboard corpus, and a corpus of Twitter conversations. Using a set of measures that previously have been applied individually to different data sets, we find fairly clear patterns of "behavior" for the different genres/media. Besides their role for psycholinguistic investigation (why do we employ different coreference strategies when we write or speak) and for the placement of Twitter in the spoken--written continuum, we see our results as a contribution to approaching genre-/media-specific coreference resolution.

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