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Many e-commerce services provide customer review systems. Previous laboratory studies have indicated that the ratings recorded by these systems differ from the actual evaluations of the users, owing to the influence of historical ratings in the system. Some studies have proposed using real-world datasets to model rating prediction. Herein, we propose an aspect-similarity-aware historical influence model for rating prediction using natural language processing techniques. In general, each user provides a rating considering different aspects. Thus, it can be assumed that historical ratings provided considering similar aspects to those of later ones will influence evaluations of users more. By focusing on the review-topic similarities, we show that our method predicts ratings more accurately than the previous historical-inference-aware model. In addition, we examine whether our model can predict ``intrinsic rating,&#39;&#39; which is given if users were not influenced by historical ratings. We performed an intrinsic rating prediction task, and showed that our model achieved improved performance. Our method can be useful to debias user ratings collected by customer review systems. The debiased ratings help users to make decision properly and systems to provide helpful recommendations. This might improve the user experience of e-commerce services.

COLING 2020

Aspect-Similarity-Aware Historical Influence Modeling for Rating Prediction

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

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Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Many e-commerce services provide customer review systems. Previous laboratory studies have indicated that the ratings recorded by these systems differ from the actual evaluations of the users, owing to the influence of historical ratings in the system. Some studies have proposed using real-world datasets to model rating prediction. Herein, we propose an aspect-similarity-aware historical influence model for rating prediction using natural language processing techniques. In general, each user provides a rating considering different aspects. Thus, it can be assumed that historical ratings provided considering similar aspects to those of later ones will influence evaluations of users more. By focusing on the review-topic similarities, we show that our method predicts ratings more accurately than the previous historical-inference-aware model. In addition, we examine whether our model can predict ``intrinsic rating,'' which is given if users were not influenced by historical ratings. We performed an intrinsic rating prediction task, and showed that our model achieved improved performance. Our method can be useful to debias user ratings collected by customer review systems. The debiased ratings help users to make decision properly and systems to provide helpful recommendations. This might improve the user experience of e-commerce services.

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.

E-commerce sites include advertising slogans along with information regarding items. Slogans can attract viewers' attention to increase sales or visits by emphasizing advantages of items. The aim of this study is to generate a slogan from a description of an item. To generate a slogan, we apply an encoder-decoder model which has shown effectiveness in many kinds of natural language generation tasks, such as abstractive summarization. However, slogan generation task has three characteristics that distinguish it from other natural language generation tasks: distinctiveness, topic emphasis, and style difference. To handle these three characteristics, we propose a compressed representation-based reconstruction model with refer-attention and conversion layers. The results of experiments with automatic and human evaluations indicate that our method achieves higher performance than conventional methods.

Distinctive Slogan Generation with Reconstruction

Coping with ambiguous questions has been a perennial problem in real-world dialogue systems.
Although clarification by asking questions is a common form of human interaction, it is hard to define appropriate questions to elicit more specific intents from a user.
In this work, we propose a reinforcement model to clarify ambiguous questions by suggesting refinements of the original query. We first formulate a collection partitioning problem to select a set of labels enabling us to distinguish potential unambiguous intents.
We list the chosen labels as intent phrases to the user for further confirmation. The selected label along with the original user query then serves as a refined query, for which a suitable response can more easily be identified.
The model is trained using reinforcement learning with a deep policy network. 
We evaluate our model based on real-world user clicks and demonstrate significant improvements across several different experiments.

Interactive Question Clarification in Dialogue via Reinforcement Learning

The goal of text simplification (TS) is to transform difficult text into a version that is easier to understand and more broadly accessible to a wide variety of readers. In some domains, such as healthcare, fully automated approaches cannot be used since information must be accurately preserved. Instead, semi-automated approaches can be used that assist a human writer in simplifying text faster and at a higher quality. In this paper, we examine the application of autocomplete to text simplification in the medical domain. We introduce a new parallel medical data set consisting of aligned English Wikipedia with Simple English Wikipedia sentences and examine the application of pretrained neural language models (PNLMs) on this dataset. We compare four PNLMs (BERT, RoBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-2), and show how the additional context of the sentence to be simplified can be incorporated to achieve better results (6.17% absolute improvement over the best individual model). We also introduce an ensemble model that combines the four PNLMs and outperforms the best individual model by 2.1%, resulting in an overall word prediction accuracy of 64.52%.


AutoMeTS: The Autocomplete for Medical Text Simplification.

Low-resource Machine Translation recently gained a lot of popularity, and for certain languages, it has made great strides. However, it is still difficult to track progress in other languages for which there is no publicly available evaluation data. In this paper, we introduce benchmark datasets for Arabic and its dialects. We describe our design process and motivations and analyze the datasets to understand their resulting properties. Numerous successful attempts use large monolingual corpora to augment low-resource pairs. We try to approach augmentation differently and investigate whether it is possible to improve MT models without any external sources of data. We accomplish this by bootstrapping existing parallel sentences and complement this with multilingual training to achieve strong baselines.

Datasets for Low-Resource Machine Translation of Arabic Dialects

Data scarcity is always a constraint on analyzing speech transcriptions for automatic Alzheimer’s disease (AD) detection, especially when the subjects are non-English speakers. To deal with this issue, this paper first proposes a contrastive learning method to obtain effective representations for text classification based on monolingual embeddings of BERT. Furthermore, a cross-lingual data augmentation method is designed by building autoencoders to learn the text representations
shared by both languages. Experiments on a Mandarin AD corpus show that the contrastive learning method can achieve better detection accuracy than conventional CNN-based and BERTbased methods. Our cross-lingual data augmentation method also outperforms other compared methods when using another English AD corpus for augmentation. Finally, a best detection accuracy of 81.6% is obtained by our proposed methods on the Mandarin AD corpus.

Text Classification by Contrastive Learning and Cross-lingual Data Augmentation for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection

Efficient document summarization requires evaluation measures that can not only rank a set of systems based on an average score, but also highlight which individual summary is better than another. However, despite the very active research on summarization approaches, few works have proposed new evaluation measures in the recent years. 

The standard measures relied upon for the development of summarization systems are most often ROUGE and BLEU which, despite being efficient in overall system ranking, remain lexical in nature and have a limited potential when it comes to training neural networks. 

In this work, we present HOLMS, a new hybrid evaluation measure for summarization that combines both language models pre-trained on large corpora and lexical similarity measures. Through several experiments, we show that HOLMS outperforms ROUGE and BLEU substantially in its correlation with human judgments on several extractive summarization datasets for both linguistic quality and pyramid scores. 


HOLMS: Alternative Summary Evaluation with Large Language Models

We present a new approach for detecting human-like social biases in word embeddings using representational similarity analysis. Specifically, we probe contextualized and non-contextualized embeddings for evidence of intersectional biases against Black women. We show that these embeddings represent Black women as simultaneously less feminine than White women, and less Black than Black men. This finding aligns with intersectionality theory, which argues that multiple identity categories (such as race or sex) layer on top of each other in order to create unique modes of discrimination that are not shared by any individual category.

Unequal Representations: Analyzing Intersectional Biases in Word Embeddings Using Representational Similarity Analysis

We propose a novel method that enables us to determine words that deserve to be emphasized from written text in visual media, relying only on the information from the self-attention distributions of pre-trained language models (PLMs). With extensive experiments and analyses, we show that 1) our zero-shot approach is superior to a reasonable baseline that adopts TF-IDF and that 2) there exist several attention heads in PLMs specialized for emphasis selection, confirming that PLMs are capable of recognizing important words in sentences.

Does Pre-trained Language Model Know What to Emphasize?

Maintenance record logbooks are an emerging text type in NLP. An important part of them typically consists of free text with many domain-specific technical terms, abbreviations, and non-standard spelling and grammar. This poses difficulties for NLP pipelines trained on standard corpora. Analyzing and annotating such documents is of particular importance in the development of predictive maintenance systems, which aim to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, prevent accidents, and save lives. In order to facilitate and encourage research in this area, we have developed MaintNet, a collaborative open-source library of technical and domain-specific language resources. MaintNet provides novel logbook data from the aviation, automotive, and facility maintenance domains along with tools to aid in their (pre-)processing and clustering. Furthermore, it provides a way to encourage discussion on and sharing of new datasets and tools for logbook data analysis.

MaintNet: A Collaborative Open-Source Library for Predictive Maintenance Language Resources

This paper introduces a web demo that showcases the main characteristics of the AutoGOAL framework. AutoGOAL is a framework in Python for automatically finding the best way to solve a given task. It has been designed mainly for automatic machine learning (AutoML) but it can be used in any scenario where several possible strategies are available to solve a given computational task. In contrast with alternative frameworks, AutoGOAL can be applied seamlessly to Natural Language Processing as well as structured classification problems. This paper presents an overview of the framework’s design and experimental evaluation in several machine learning problems, including two recent NLP challenges. The accompanying software demo is available online (https://autogoal.github.io/demo) and full source code is provided under the MIT open-source license.


Aspect-Similarity-Aware Historical Influence Modeling for Rating Prediction

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Distinctive Slogan Generation with Reconstruction

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