Spain

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.

COLING 2020

Lin: Unsupervised Extraction of Tasks from Textual Communication

verbnet

email intent detection

task extraction

dependency parsing

unsupervised

information extraction

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AAPT WM 22

technical paper

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.

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.

Coreference information guides human expectations during natural reading

Pretrained language models (PLMs) learn stereotypes held by humans and reflected in text from their training corpora, including gender bias. When PLMs are used for downstream tasks such as picking candidates for a job, people’s lives can be negatively affected by these learned stereotypes. Prior work usually identifies a linear gender subspace and removes gender information by eliminating the subspace. Following this line of work, we propose to use DensRay, an analytical method for obtaining interpretable dense subspaces. We show that DensRay performs on-par with prior approaches, but provide arguments that it is more robust and provide indications that it preserves language model performance better. By applying DensRay to attention heads and layers of BERT we show that gender information is spread across all attention heads and most of the layers. Also we show that DensRay can obtain gender bias scores on both token and sentence levels. Finally, we demonstrate that we can remove bias multilingually, e.g., from Chinese, using only English training data.

Monolingual and Multilingual Reduction of Gender Bias in Contextualized Representations

We propose a novel morphologically aware probability model for bilingual lexicon induction, which jointly models lexeme translation and inflectional morphology in a structured way. Our model exploits the basic linguistic intuition that the lexeme is the key lexical unit of meaning, while inflectional morphology provides additional syntactic information. This approach leads to substantial performance improvements—19% average improvement in accuracy across 6 language pairs over the state of the art in the supervised setting and 16% in the weakly supervised setting.As another contribution, we highlight issues associated with modern BLI that stem from ignoring inflectional morphology, and propose three suggestions for improving the task.

Morphologically Aware Word-Level Translation

A common step in developing an understanding of a vertical domain, e.g. shopping, dining, movies, medicine, etc., is curating a taxonomy of categories specific to the domain. These human created artifacts have been the subject of research in embeddings that attempt to encode aspects of the partial ordering property of taxonomies. We compare Box Embeddings, a natural containment-based representation of taxonomies, to partial-order embeddings and a baseline Bayes Net, in the context of representing the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) taxonomy given a set of 300K PubMed articles with subject labels from MeSH. We deeply explore the experimental properties of training box embeddings, including preparation of the training data, sampling ratios and class balance, initialization strategies, and propose a fix to the original box objective. We then present first results in using these techniques for representing a bipartite learning problem (i.e. collaborative filtering) in the presence of taxonomic relations within each partition, inferring disease (anatomical) locations from their use as subject labels in journal articles. Our box model substantially outperforms all baselines for taxonomic reconstruction and bipartite relationship experiments. This performance improvement is observed both in overall accuracy and the weighted spread by true taxonomic depth.

Embedding Semantic Taxonomies

We introduce dual-decoder Transformer, a new model architecture that jointly performs automatic speech recognition (ASR) and multilingual speech translation (ST). Our models are based on the original Transformer architecture (Vaswani et al., 2017) but consist of two decoders, each responsible for one task (ASR or ST). Our major contribution lies in how these decoders interact with each other: one decoder can attend to different information sources from the other via a dual-attention mechanism. We propose two variants of these architectures corresponding to two different levels of dependencies between the decoders, called the parallel and cross dual-decoder Transformers, respectively. Extensive experiments on the MuST-C dataset show that our models outperform the previously-reported highest translation performance in the multilingual settings, and outperform as well bilingual one-to-one results. Furthermore, our parallel models demonstrate no trade-off between ASR and ST compared to the vanilla multi-task architecture. Our code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/formiel/speech-translation.

Dual-decoder Transformer for Joint Automatic Speech Recognition and Multilingual Speech Translation

We propose a new self-explainable model for Natural Language Processing (NLP) text classification tasks. Our approach constructs explanations concurrently with the formulation of classification predictions. To do so, we extract a rationale from the text, then use it to predict a concept of interest as the final prediction. We provide three types of explanations: 1) rationale extraction, 2) a measure of feature importance, and 3) clustering of concepts. In addition, we show how our model can be compressed without applying complicated compression techniques. We experimentally demonstrate our explainability approach on a number of well-known text classification datasets.

RANCC: Rationalizing Neural Networks via Concept Clustering

We investigate the impact of political ideology biases in training data. Through a set of comparison studies, we examine the propagation of biases in several widely-used NLP models and its effect on the overall retrieval accuracy. Our work highlights the susceptibility of large, complex models to propagating the biases from human-selected input, which may lead to a deterioration of retrieval accuracy, and the importance of controlling for these biases. Finally, as a way to mitigate the bias, we propose to learn a text representation that is invariant to political ideology while still judging topic relevance.

Inflating Topic Relevance with Ideology: A Case Study of Political Ideology Bias in Social Topic Detection Models

While internalized “implicit knowledge” in pretrained transformers has led to fruitful progress in many natural language understanding tasks, how to most effectively elicit such knowledge remains an open question. Based on the text-to-text transfer transformer (T5) model, this work explores a template-based approach to extract implicit knowledge for commonsense reasoning on multiple-choice (MC) question answering tasks. Experiments on three representative MC datasets show the surprisingly good performance of our simple template, coupled with a logit normalization technique for disambiguation. Furthermore, we verify that our proposed template can be easily extended to other MC tasks with contexts such as supporting facts in open-book question answering settings. Starting from the MC task, this work initiates further research to find generic natural language templates that can effectively leverage stored knowledge in pretrained models.

Designing Templates for Eliciting Commonsense Knowledge from Pretrained Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Next generation virtual assistants are envisioned to handle multimodal inputs (e.g., vision, memories of previous interactions, and the user's utterances), and perform multimodal actions (e.g., displaying a route while generating the system's utterance).

We introduce Situated Interactive MultiModal Conversations (SIMMC) as a new direction aimed at training agents that take multimodal actions grounded in a co-evolving multimodal input context in addition to the dialog history.

We provide two SIMMC datasets totalling 13K human-human dialogs (169K utterances) collected using a multimodal Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) setup, on two shopping domains: (a) furniture -- grounded in a shared virtual environment; and (b) fashion -- grounded in an evolving set of images. Datasets include multimodal context of the items appearing in each scene, and contextual NLU, NLG and coreference annotations using a novel and unified framework of SIMMC conversational acts for both user and assistant utterances.

Finally, we present several tasks within SIMMC as objective evaluation protocols, such as structural API prediction, response generation, and dialog state tracking. We benchmark a collection of existing models on these SIMMC tasks as strong baselines, and demonstrate rich multimodal conversational interactions.

Our data, annotations, and models are publicly available (https://github.com/facebookresearch/simmc).

Lin: Unsupervised Extraction of Tasks from Textual Communication

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