Spain

Transformer-based language models achieve high performance on various tasks, but we still lack understanding of the kind of linguistic knowledge they learn and rely on. We evaluate three models (BERT, RoBERTa, and ALBERT), testing their grammatical and semantic knowledge by sentence-level probing, diagnostic cases, and masked prediction tasks. We focus on relative clauses (in American English) as a complex phenomenon needing contextual information and antecedent identification to be resolved. Based on a naturalistic dataset, probing shows that all three models indeed capture linguistic knowledge about grammaticality, achieving high performance.Evaluation on diagnostic cases and masked prediction tasks considering fine-grained linguistic knowledge, however, shows pronounced model-specific weaknesses especially on semantic knowledge, strongly impacting models’ performance. Our results highlight the importance of (a)model comparison in evaluation task and (b) building up claims of model performance and the linguistic knowledge they capture beyond purely probing-based evaluations.

COLING 2020

A Closer Look at Linguistic Knowledge in Masked Language Models: The Case of Relative Clauses in American English

pre-trained language models

probing

evaluation

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

Cognitive and social traits of individuals are reflected in language use. Moreover, individuals who are prone to spread fake news online often share common traits. Building on these ideas, we introduce a model that creates representations of individuals on social media based only on the language they produce, and use them to detect fake news. We show that language-based user representations are beneficial for this task. We also present an extended analysis of the language of fake news spreaders, showing that its main features are mostly domain independent and consistent across two English datasets. Finally, we exploit the relation between language use and connections in the social graph to assess the presence of the Echo Chamber effect in our data

Words are the Window to the Soul: Language-based User Representations for Fake News Detection

We propose a novel task of native-like expression identification, and a propose a classifier-based solution for it which involves (a) training three-way classifier on originally binary labelled data, and (b) applying an explainability method to the forward computation of the trained model to extract native-like expressions from identified sentences. Our crowdsourcing-based evaluation and in-depth analysis suggest that our method successfully uncovers linguistically interesting usages distinctive of native speech.

Native-like Expression Identification by Contrasting Native and Proficient Second Language Speakers

In this work we propose the task of multi-word lexical simplification, in which a sentence in natural language is made easier to understand by replacing its fragment with a simpler alternative, both of which can consist of many words. In order to explore this new direction, we contribute a corpus (MWLS1), including 1462 sentences in English from various sources with 7059 simplifications provided by human annotators. We also propose an automatic solution (Plainifier) based on a purpose-trained neural language model and evaluate its performance, comparing to human and resource-based baselines.

Multi-Word Lexical Simplification

Recent studies have revealed a number of pathologies of neural machine translation (NMT) systems. Hypotheses explaining these mostly suggest there is something fundamentally wrong with NMT as a model or its training algorithm, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE). Most of this evidence was gathered using maximum a posteriori (MAP) decoding, a decision rule aimed at identifying the highest-scoring translation, i.e. the mode. We argue that the evidence corroborates the inadequacy of MAP decoding more than casts doubt on the model and its training algorithm. In this work, we show that translation distributions do reproduce various statistics of the data well, but that beam search strays from such statistics. We show that some of the known pathologies and biases of NMT are due to MAP decoding and not to NMT's statistical assumptions nor MLE. In particular, we show that the most likely translations under the model accumulate so little probability mass that the mode can be considered essentially arbitrary. We therefore advocate for the use of decision rules that take into account the translation distribution holistically. We show that an approximation to minimum Bayes risk decoding gives competitive results confirming that NMT models do capture important aspects of translation well in expectation.

Is MAP Decoding All You Need? The Inadequacy of the Mode in Neural Machine Translation

The subjective nature of humor makes computerized humor generation a challenging task. We propose an automatic humor generation framework for filling the blanks in Mad Libs stories, while accounting for the demographic backgrounds of the desired audience. We collect a dataset consisting of such stories, which are filled in and judged by carefully selected workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We build upon the BERT platform to predict location-biased word fillings in incomplete sentences, and we fine-tune BERT to classify location-specific humor in a sentence. We leverage these components to produce YodaLib, a fully-automated Mad Libs style humor generation framework, which selects and ranks appropriate candidate words and sentences in order to generate a coherent and funny story tailored to certain demographics. Our experimental results indicate that YodaLib outperforms a previous semi-automated approach proposed for this task, while also surpassing human annotators in both qualitative and quantitative analyses.

"Judge me by my size (noun), do you?" YodaLib: A Demographic-Aware Humor Generation Framework

In order to facilitate natural language understanding, the key is to engage commonsense or background knowledge. However, how to engage commonsense effectively in question answering systems is still under exploration in both research academia and industry. In this paper, we propose a novel question-answering method by integrating multiple knowledge sources, i.e. ConceptNet,
Wikipedia, and the Cambridge Dictionary, to boost the performance. More concretely, we first introduce a novel graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module, which iteratively retrieves concepts and entities related to the given question and its choices from multiple knowledge sources. Afterward, we use a pre-trained language model to encode the question, retrieved knowledge and choices, and propose an answer choice-aware attention mechanism to fuse all hidden representations of the previous modules. Finally, the linear classifier for specific tasks is used to predict the answer. Experimental results on the CommonsenseQA dataset show that our method significantly outperforms other competitive methods and achieves the new state-ofthe-art. In addition, further ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of our graph-based iterative knowledge retrieval module and the answer choice-aware attention module in retrieving and synthesizing background knowledge from multiple knowledge sources.

Commonsense Question Answering by Graph-based Iterative Retrieval over Multiple Knowledge Sources

Emotion and sentiment classification in dialogues is a challenging task that has gained popularity in recent times. Humans tend to have multiple emotions with varying intensities while expressing their thoughts and feelings. Emotions in an utterance of dialogue can either be independent or dependent on the previous utterances, making the task complex and interesting. Multi-label emotion detection in conversations is a significant task that provides the ability to the system to understand the various emotions of the users interacting. On the other hand, sentiment analysis in dialogue or conversation helps in understanding the perspective of the user with respect to the ongoing conversation.
Besides text, additional information in the form of audio and video assists in identifying the correct emotions with the appropriate intensity and sentiments in an utterance of a dialogue. Lately, quite a few datasets have been made available for emotion and sentiment classification in dialogues. Still, these datasets are imbalanced in representing different emotions and consist of only a single emotion. Hence, we present at first a large-scale balanced Multimodal Multi-label Emotion, Intensity, and Sentiment Dialogue dataset (MEISD) collected from different TV series that has textual, audio, and visual features, and then establish a baseline setup for further research.

MEISD: A Multimodal Multi-Label Emotion, Intensity and Sentiment Dialogue Dataset for Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis in Conversations

Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and part-of-speech (POS) tagging are two fundamental tasks for Chinese language processing. Previous studies have demonstrated that jointly performing them can be an effective one-step solution to both tasks and this joint task can benefit from a good modeling of contextual features such as n-grams. However, their work on modeling such contextual features is limited to concatenating the features or their embeddings directly with the input embeddings without distinguishing whether the contextual features are important for the joint task in the specific context. Therefore, their models for the joint task could be misled by unimportant contextual information. In this paper, we propose a character-based neural model for the joint task enhanced by multi-channel attention of n-grams. In the attention module, n-gram features are categorized into different groups according to several criteria, and n-grams in each group are weighted and distinguished according to their importance for the joint task in the specific context. To categorize n-grams, we try two criteria in this study, i.e., n-gram frequency and length, so that n-grams having different capabilities of carrying contextual information are discriminatively learned by our proposed attention module. Experimental results on five benchmark datasets for CWS and POS tagging demonstrate that our approach outperforms strong baseline models and achieves state-of-the-art performance on all five datasets.

Joint Chinese Word Segmentation and Part-of-speech Tagging via Multi-channel Attention of Character N-grams

The Sumerian cuneiform script was invented more than 5,000 years ago and represents one of the oldest in history. We present the first attempt to translate Sumerian texts into English automatically. We publicly release high-quality corpora for standardized training and evaluation and report results on experiments with supervised, phrase-based, and transfer learning techniques for machine translation. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations indicate the usefulness of the translations. Our proposed methodology provides a broader audience of researchers with novel access to the data, accelerates the costly and time-consuming manual translation process, and helps them better explore the relationships between Sumerian cuneiform and Mesopotamian culture.

Towards the First Machine Translation System for Sumerian Transliterations

Multi-source neural machine translation aims to translate from parallel sources of information (e.g. languages, images, etc.) to a single target language, which has shown better performance than most one-to-one systems. Despite the remarkable success of existing models, they usually neglect the fact that multiple source inputs may have inconsistencies. Such differences might bring noise to the task and limit the performance of existing multi-source NMT approaches due to their indiscriminate usage of input sources for target word predictions. In this paper, we attempt to leverage the potential complementary information among distinct sources and alleviate the occasional conﬂicts of them. To accomplish that, we propose a source invariance network to learn the invariant information of parallel sources. Such network can be easily integrated with multi-encoder based multi-source NMT methods (e.g. multi-encoder RNN and transformer) to enhance the translation results. Extensive experiments on two multi-source translation tasks demonstrate that the proposed approach not only achieves clear gains in translation quality but also captures implicit invariance between different sources.

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