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The morphological status of affixes in Chinese has long been a matter of debate. How one might apply the conventional criteria of free/bound and content/function features to distinguish word-forming affixes from bound roots in Chinese is still far from clear. Issues involving polysemy and diachronic dynamics further blur the boundaries. In this paper, we propose three quantitative features in a computational model of affixoid behavior in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that, except for in a very few cases, there are no clear criteria that can be used to identify an affix’s status in an isolating language like Chinese. A diachronic check using contextualized embeddings with the WordNet Sense Inventory also demonstrates the possible role of the polysemy of lexical roots across diachronic settings.

COLING 2020

Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology

variational topic model

affixoid

derivational morphology

computational modeling

computational linguistics

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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

technical paper

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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.

Math word problems solving remains a challenging task where potential semantic and mathematical logic need to be mined from natural language. Although previous researches employ the Seq2Seq technique to transform text descriptions into equation expressions, most of them achieve inferior performance due to insufficient consideration in the design of encoder and decoder. Specifically, these models only consider input/output objects as sequences, ignoring the important structural information contained in text descriptions and equation expressions. To overcome those defects, a model with multi-encoders and multi-decoders is proposed in this paper, which combines sequence-based encoder and graph-based encoder to enhance the representation of text descriptions, and generates different equation expressions via sequence-based decoder and tree-based decoder. Experimental results on the dataset Math23K show that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods.

Solving Math Word Problems with Multi-Encoders and Multi-Decoders

A humanized dialogue system is expected to generate empathetic replies, which should be sensitive to the users' expressed emotion. The task of empathetic dialogue generation is proposed to address this problem. The essential challenges lie in accurately capturing the nuances of human emotion and considering the potential of user feedback, which are overlooked by the majority of existing work. In response to this problem, we propose a multi-resolution adversarial model -- EmpDG, to generate more empathetic responses. EmpDG exploits both the coarse-grained dialogue-level and fine-grained token-level emotions, the latter of which helps to better capture the nuances of user emotion. In addition, we introduce an interactive adversarial learning framework which exploits the user feedback, to identify whether the generated responses evoke emotion perceptivity in dialogues. Experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in both content quality and emotion perceptivity.

EmpDG: Multi-resolution Interactive Empathetic Dialogue Generation

In recent years, distantly-supervised relation extraction has achieved a certain success by using deep neural networks. Distant Supervision (DS) can automatically generate large-scale annotated data by aligning entity pairs from Knowledge Bases (KB) to sentences. However, these DS-generated datasets inevitably have wrong labels that result in incorrect evaluation scores during testing, which may mislead the researchers. To solve this problem, we build a new dataset NYT-H, where we use the DS-generated data as training data and hire annotators to label test data. Compared with the previous datasets, NYT-H has a much larger test set and then we can perform more accurate and consistent evaluation. Finally, we present the experimental results of several widely used systems on NYT-H. The experimental results show that the ranking lists of the comparison systems on the DS-labelled test data and human-annotated test data are different. This indicates that our human-annotated data is necessary for evaluation of distantly-supervised relation extraction.

Towards Accurate and Consistent Evaluation: A Dataset for Distantly-Supervised Relation Extraction

While bilingual corpora have been instrumental for machine translation, their utility for training translators has been less explored. We investigate the use of bilingual corpora as pedagogical tools for translation in the technical domain. In a user study, novice translators revised Chinese translations of English patents through bilingual concordancing. Results show that concordancing with an in-domain bilingual corpus can yield greater improvement in translation quality of technical terms than a general-domain bilingual corpus.

Using Bilingual Patents for Translation Training

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is a vital task in natural language processing. It aims to identify the logical relationship between two sentences. Most of the existing approaches make such inference based on semantic knowledge obtained through training corpus. The adoption of background knowledge is rarely seen or limited to a few specific types. In this paper, we propose a novel Knowledge Graph-enhanced NLI (KGNLI) model to leverage the usage of background knowledge stored in knowledge graphs in the field of NLI. KGNLI model consists of three components: a semantic-relation representation module, a knowledge-relation representation module, and a label prediction module. Different from previous methods, various kinds of background knowledge can be flexibly combined in the proposed KGNLI model. Experiments on four benchmarks, SNLI, MultiNLI, SciTail, and BNLI, validate the effectiveness of our model.

Knowledge-Enhanced Natural Language Inference Based on Knowledge Graphs

In this paper, we target improving the joint dialogue act recognition (DAR) and sentiment classification (SC) tasks by fully modeling the local contexts of utterances. First, we employ the dynamic convolution network (DCN) as the utterance encoder to capture the dialogue contexts. Further, we propose a novel context-aware dynamic convolution network (CDCN) to better leverage the local contexts when dynamically generating kernels. We extended our frameworks into bi-channel version (i.e., BDCN and BCDCN) under multi-task learning to achieve the joint DAR and SC. Two channels can learn their own feature representations for DAR and SC, respectively, but with latent interaction. Besides, we suggest enhancing the tasks by employing the DiaBERT language model. Our frameworks1 obtain state-of-the-art performances against all baselines on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating the importance of modeling the local contexts.


Modeling Local Contexts for Joint Dialogue Act Recognition and Sentiment Classification with Bi-channel Dynamic Convolutions

Cognates are variants of the same lexical form across different languages; for example "fonema" in Spanish and "phoneme" in English are cognates, both of which mean "a unit of sound". The task of automatic detection of cognates among any two languages can help downstream NLP tasks such as Cross-lingual Information Retrieval, Computational Phylogenetics, and Machine Translation. In this paper, we demonstrate the use of cross-lingual word embeddings for detecting cognates among fourteen Indian Languages. Our approach introduces the use of context from a knowledge graph to generate improved feature representations for cognate detection. We then evaluate the impact of our cognate detection mechanism on neural machine translation (NMT), as a downstream task. We evaluate our methods to detect cognates on a challenging dataset of twelve Indian languages, namely, Sanskrit, Hindi, Assamese, Oriya, Kannada, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi, Bengali, Marathi, and Malayalam. Additionally, we create evaluation datasets for two more Indian languages, Konkani and Nepali. We observe an improvement of up to 18% points, in terms of F-score, for cognate detection. Furthermore, we observe that cognates extracted using our method help improve NMT quality by up to 2.76 BLEU.

Harnessing Cross-lingual Features to Improve Cognate Detection for Low-resource Languages

We tackle implicit discourse relation classification, a task of automatically determining semantic relationships between arguments. The attention-worthy words in arguments are crucial clues for classifying the discourse relations. Attention mechanisms have been proven effective in highlighting attention-worthy words during encoding. However, our survey shows that some inessential words are unintentionally misjudged as attention-worthy words and, therefore, assigned heavier attention weights than should be. We propose a penalty-based loss re-estimation method to regulate the attention learning process, integrating penalty coefficients into the computation of loss by means of overstability of attention weight distributions. We conduct experiments on the Penn Discourse TreeBank (PDTB) corpus. The test results show that our loss re-estimation method leads to substantial improvements for a variety of attention mechanisms, and it obtains highly competitive performance compared to the state-of-the-art methods.

Using a Penalty-based Loss Re-estimation Method to Improve Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Syntactic dependency parsing is an important task in natural language processing. Unsupervised dependency parsing aims to learn a dependency parser from sentences that have no annotation of their correct parse trees. Despite its difficulty, unsupervised parsing is an interesting research direction because of its capability of utilizing almost unlimited unannotated text data. It also serves as the basis for other research in low-resource parsing. In this paper, we survey existing approaches to unsupervised dependency parsing, identify two major classes of approaches, and discuss recent trends. We hope that our survey can provide insights for researchers and facilitate future research on this topic.

A Survey of Unsupervised Dependency Parsing

Recent research indicates that taking advantage of complex syntactic features leads to favorable results in Semantic Role Labeling. Nonetheless, an analysis of the latest state-of-the-art multilingual systems reveals the difficulty of bridging the wide gap in performance between high-resource (e.g., English) and low-resource (e.g., German) settings. To overcome this issue, we propose a fully language-agnostic model that does away with morphological and syntactic features to achieve robustness across languages. Our approach outperforms the state of the art in all the languages of the CoNLL-2009 benchmark dataset, especially whenever a scarce amount of training data is available. Our objective is not to reject approaches that rely on syntax, rather to set a strong and consistent language-independent baseline for future innovations in Semantic Role Labeling.

Computational Modeling of Affixoid Behavior in Chinese Morphology

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