Spain

We propose a novel method of automatic sentence alignment from noisy parallel documents. We first formalize the sentence alignment problem as the independent predictions of spans in the target document from sentences in the source document. We then introduce a total optimization method using integer linear programming to prevent span overlapping and obtain non-monotonic alignments. We implement cross-language span prediction by fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual language models based on BERT architecture and train them using pseudo-labeled data obtained from unsupervised sentence alignment method. While the baseline methods use sentence embeddings and assume monotonic alignment, our method can capture the token-to-token interaction between the tokens of source and target text and handle non-monotonic alignments. In sentence alignment experiments on English-Japanese, our method achieved 70.3 F1 scores, which are +8.0 points higher than the baseline method. In particular, our method improved by +53.9 F1 scores for extracting non-parallel sentences. Our method improved the downstream machine translation accuracy by 4.1 BLEU scores when the extracted bilingual sentences are used for fine-tuning a pre-trained Japanese-to-English translation model.

COLING 2020

SpanAlign: Sentence Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction and ILP

parallel corpus

span prediction

sentence alignment

machine translation

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.

technical paper

Active learning is able to significantly reduce the annotation cost for data-driven techniques. However, previous active learning approaches for natural language processing mainly depend on the entropy-based uncertainty criterion, and ignore the characteristics of natural language. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained language model based active learning approach for sentence matching. Differing from previous active learning, it can provide linguistic criteria from the pre-trained language model to measure instances and help select more effective instances for annotation. Experiments demonstrate our approach can achieve greater accuracy with fewer labeled training instances.

Pre-trained Language Model Based Active Learning for Sentence Matching

Our paper reports on a structured evaluation of feature-based Machine Learning algorithms for selecting the form of a referring expression in discourse context. Based on this evaluation, we selected seven feature sets from the literature, amounting to 65 distinct linguistic features. The features were then grouped into 9 broad classes. After building Random Forest models, we used Feature Importance Ranking and Sequential Forward Search methods to assess the “importance”
of the features. Combining the results of the two methods, we propose a consensus feature set. The 6 features in our consensus set come from 4 different classes, namely grammatical role, inherent features of the referent, antecedent form, and recency.

Choosing a Feature Set for Generating Referring Expressions in Context

As an audio format, podcasts are more varied in style and production type than broadcast news, contain more genres than typically studied in video data, and are more varied in style and format than previous corpora of conversations. When transcribed with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) they represent a noisy but fascinating collection of documents which can be studied through the lens of NLP, IR, and linguistics. Paired with the audio files, they are also a resource for speech processing and the study of paralinguistic, sociolinguistic, and acoustic aspects of the domain. We introduce a new corpus of 100,000 podcasts, and demonstrate the complexity of the domain with a case study of two tasks: (1) passage search and (2) summarization. This is orders of magnitude larger than previous speech corpora used for search and summarization. Our results show that the size and variability of this corpus opens up new avenues for research.

100,000 Podcasts: A Spoken English Document Corpus

This paper presents a neural machine translation model and dataset for the Chibchan language Bribri, with an average performance of BLEU 16.9±1.7. This was trained on an extremely small dataset (5923 Bribri-Spanish pairs), providing evidence for the applicability of NMT in extremely low-resource environments. We discuss the challenges entailed in managing training input from languages without standard orthographies, we provide evidence of successful learning of Bribri grammar, and also examine the translations of structures that are infrequent in major Indo-European languages, such as positional verbs, ergative markers, numerical classifiers and complex demonstrative systems. In addition to this, we perform an experiment of augmenting the dataset through iterative back-translation (Sennrich et al., 2016a; Hoang et al., 2018) by using Spanish sentences to create synthetic Bribri sentences. This improves the score by an average of 1.0 BLEU, but only when the new Spanish sentences belong to the same domain as the other Spanish examples. This contributes to the small but growing body of research on Chibchan NLP.

Neural Machine Translation Models with Back-Translation for the Extremely Low-Resource Indigenous Language Bribri

In this presentation I will talk about our paper author's sentiment analysis. Firstly, it's noteworthy to know how different is the sentiment analysis in news article vs other common domains. The challenges of the task will be introduced and the annotated dataset PerSenT which contains about 5.3k annotated documents and 38k annotated paragraphs will be discussed. Finally different baseline models with document supervisions, paragraph supervisions, and focused representations will be analyzed. We release this dataset as a challenge in entity sentiment analysis and document understanding.

Author's Sentiment Analysis

Identifying the key events in a document is critical to holistically understanding its important information. Although measuring the salience of events is highly contextual, most previous work has used a limited representation of events that omits essential information. In this work, we propose a highly contextual model of event salience that uses a rich representation of events, incorporates document-level information and allows for interactions between latent event encodings. Our experimental results on an event salience dataset (Liu et al., 2018) demonstrate that our model improves over previous work by an absolute 2-4 % on standard metrics, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance for the task. We also propose a new evaluation metric which addresses flaws in previous evaluation methodologies. Finally, we discuss the importance of salient event detection for the downstream task of summarization.

Is Killed More Significant than Fled? A Contextual Model for Salient Event Detection

Scientific keyphrase identification and classification is the task of detecting and classifying keyphrases from scholarly text with their types from a set of predefined classes. This task has a wide range of benefits, but it is still challenging in performance due to the lack of large amounts of labeled data required for training deep neural models. In order to overcome this challenge, we explore pre-trained language models BERT and SciBERT with intermediate task transfer learning, using 42 data-rich related intermediate-target task combinations. We reveal that intermediate task transfer learning on SciBERT induces a better starting point for target task fine-tuning compared with BERT and achieves competitive performance in scientific keyphrase identification and classification compared to both previous works and strong baselines. Interestingly, we observe that BERT with intermediate task transfer learning fails to improve the performance of scientific keyphrase identification and classification potentially due to significant catastrophic forgetting.
This result highlights that scientific knowledge achieved during the pre-training of language models on large scientific collections plays an important role in the target tasks. We also observe that sequence tagging related intermediate tasks, especially syntactic structure learning tasks such as POS Tagging, tend to work best for scientific keyphrase identification and classification.

Scientific Keyphrase Identification and Classification by Pre-Trained Language Models Intermediate Task Transfer Learning

Commitments and requests are a hallmark of collaborative communication, especially in organizational settings. Identifying specific tasks being committed to or requests from emails and chat messages can enable important downstream tasks, such as producing to-do lists, reminders, and calendar entries. State-of-the-art approaches for task identification rely on large annotated datasets, which are not always available, especially for domain-specific tasks. Accordingly, we propose Lin, an unsupervised approach of identifying tasks that leverages dependency parsing and VerbNet. Our evaluations show that Lin yields comparable or more accurate results than supervised models on domains with large training sets, and maintains its excellent performance on unseen domains.

Lin: Unsupervised Extraction of Tasks from Textual Communication

We propose a dynamic curriculum learning method to reorder training samples in training for low-resource neural machine translation. The order of training samples is dynamically determined in two ways - loss decline and model competence. This eases training by highlighting easy samples that the current model has enough competence to learn.

Dynamic Curriculum Learning for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation

Models of human sentence processing effort tend to focus on costs associated with retrieving structures and discourse referents from memory (memory-based) and/or on costs associated with anticipating upcoming words and structures based on contextual cues (expectation-based) (Levy,2008). Although evidence suggests that expectation and memory may play separable roles in language comprehension (Levy et al., 2013), theories of coreference processing have largely focused on memory: how comprehenders identify likely referents of linguistic expressions. In this study, we hypothesize that coreference tracking also informs human expectations about upcoming words, and we test this hypothesis by evaluating the degree to which incremental surprisal measures generated by a novel coreference-aware semantic parser explain human response times in a naturalistic self-paced reading experiment. Results indicate (1) that coreference information indeed guides human expectations and (2) that coreference effects on memory retrieval may exist independently of coreference effects on expectations. Together, these findings suggest that the language processing system exploits coreference information both to retrieve referents from memory and to anticipate upcoming material.

SpanAlign: Sentence Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction and ILP

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Next from COLING 2020

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