Spain

This paper presents M-GAAMA, a Multilingual Question Answering architecture and demo system. This is the first multilingual machine reading comprehension (MRC) demo which is able to answer questions in over 100 languages. M-GAAMA answers questions from a given passage in the same or different language. It incorporates several existing multilingual models that can be used interchangeably in the demo such as M-BERT and XLM-R. The M-GAAMA demo also improves language accessibility by incorporating the IBM Watson machine translation widget to provide additional capabilities to the user to see an answer in their desired language. We also show how M-GAAMA can be used in downstream tasks by incorporating it into an END-TO-END-QA system using CFO (Chakravarti et al., 2019). We experiment with our system architecture on the Multi-Lingual Question Answering (MLQA) and the COVID-19 CORD (Wang et al., 2020; Tang et al., 2020) datasets to provide insights into the performance of the system.

COLING 2020

A Multilingual Reading Comprehension System for more than 100 Languages

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

Advances in Natural Language Inference (NLI) have helped us understand what state-of-the-art models really learn and what their generalization power is. Recent research has revealed some heuristics and biases of these models. However, to date, there is no systematic effort to capitalize on those insights through a system that uses these to explain the NLI decisions. To this end, we propose XplaiNLI, an eXplainable, interactive, visualization interface that computes NLI with different methods and provides explanations for the decisions made by the different approaches.

XplaiNLI: Explainable Natural Language Inference through Visual Analytics

Teaching collaborative argumentation is an advanced skill that many K-12 teachers struggle to develop. To address this, we have developed Discussion Tracker, a classroom discussion analytics system based on novel algorithms for classifying argument moves, specificity, and collaboration. Results from a classroom deployment indicate that teachers found the analytics useful, and that the underlying classifiers perform with moderate to substantial agreement with humans.

Discussion Tracker: Supporting Teacher Learning about Students' Collaborative Argumentation in High School Classrooms

In this presentation, I will briefly talk about the goals of our interface, challenges in Arabic NLP and how we overcame those challenges. I will also show you how to navigate our interface.

An Online Readability Leveled Arabic Thesaurus

We demonstrate TrainX, a system for Named Entity Linking for medical experts.
It combines state-of-the-art entity recognition and linking architectures, such as Flair and fine-tuned Bi-Encoders based on BERT, with an easy-to-use interface for healthcare professionals.
We support medical experts in annotating training data by using active sampling strategies to forward informative samples to the annotator.
We demonstrate that our model is capable of linking against large knowledge bases, such as UMLS (3.6 million entities), and supporting zero-shot cases, where the linker has never seen the entity before. 
Those zero-shot capabilities help to mitigate the problem of rare and expensive training data that is a common issue in the medical domain.

TrainX – Named Entity Linking with Active Sampling and Bi-Encoders

Social media has become the new playground for bullies. Young people are now regularly exposed to a wide range of abuse online. In response to the increasing prevalence of cyberbullying, online social networks have increased efforts to clamp down on online abuse but unfortunately, the nature, complexity and sheer volume of cyberbullying means that many cyberbullying incidents go undetected. BullStop is a mobile app for detecting and preventing cyberbullying and online abuse on social media platforms. It uses deep learning models to identify instances of cyberbullying and can automatically initiate actions such as deleting offensive messages and blocking bullies on behalf of the user. Our system not only achieves impressive prediction results but also demonstrates excellent potential for use in real-world scenarios and is freely available on the Google Play Store.

BullStop: A Mobile App for Cyberbullying Prevention

The presentation described the system briefly, followed by a demonstration of functionalities.

Annobot: Platform for Annotating and Creating Datasets through Conversation with a Chatbot

Developing a platform that analyzes the content of curricula can help identify their shortcomings and whether they are tailored to specific desired outcomes. In this paper, we present a system to analyze Arabic curricula and provide insights into their content. It allows users to explore word presence, surface-forms used, as well as contrasting statistics between different countries from which the curricula were selected. Also, it provides a facility to grade text in reference to given grade-level and gives users feedback about the complexity or difficulty of words used in a text.

Arabic Curriculum Analysis

E-mail is a communication tool widely used by people of all ages on the Internet today, often in business and formal situations, especially in Japan. Moreover, Japanese E-mail communication has a set of specific rules taught using specialized guidebooks. E-mail literacy education for many Japanese students is typically provided in a traditional, yet inefficient lecture-based way. We propose a system to support Japanese students in writing E-mails to superiors (teachers, job hunting representatives, etc.). We firstly make an investigation into the importance of formal E-mails in Japan, and what is needed to successfully write a formal E-mail. Next, we develop the system in accordance with those rules. Finally, we evaluated the system twofold. The results, although performed on a small number of samples, were generally positive, and clearly indicated additional ways to improve the system.

Epistolary Education in 21st Century: A System to Support Composition of E-mails by Students to Superiors in Japanese

For the study of language change, historical data must be enriched with linguistic annotations. Since the manual creation of annotations requires a lot of effort, automating the process with NLP methods would be convenient. But the required amounts of training data are usually not available for historical data. This talk presents a study that investigates whether models trained on modern newspaper text can be used to automatically identify topological fields, i.e. syntactic structures, in different modern and historical German texts.

Automatic Topological Field Identification in (Historical) German Texts

Entity recognition provides semantic access to ancient materials in the Digital Humanities: it exposes people and places of interest in texts that cannot be read exhaustively, facilitates linking resources and can provide a window into text contents, even for texts with no translations. In this paper we present entity recognition for Coptic, the language of Hellenistic era Egypt. We evaluate NLP approaches to the task and lay out difficulties in applying them to a low-resource, morphologically complex language. We present solutions for named and non-named nested entity recognition and semi-automatic entity linking to Wikipedia, relying on robust dependency parsing, feature-based CRF models, and hand-crafted knowledge base resources, enabling high accuracy NER with orders of magnitude less data than those used for high resource languages. The results suggest avenues for research on other languages in similar settings.

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XplaiNLI: Explainable Natural Language Inference through Visual Analytics

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