Spain

We analyze reference phenomena in a corpus of robot-assisted disaster response team communication. The annotation scheme we designed for this purpose distinguishes different types of entities, roles, reference units and relations. We focus particularly on mission-relevant objects, locations and actors and also annotate a rich set of reference links, including co-reference and various other kinds of relations. We explain the main categories used in our annotation and discuss challenging cases.

COLING 2020

Reference in Team Communication for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response: An Initial Analysis

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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.

technical paper

FNS shared task in building a summarization system for generating summaries from annual reports. Our strategy is based on two key steps: 1) A rule-based Table-of-Contents (TOC) extraction, 2) A binary classification of narrative sections. We propose an extractive summarization system to produce summaries of annual reports.

Extractive Summarization System for Annual Reports

Argumentation mining on essays is a new challenging task in natural language processing, which aims to identify the types and locations of argumentation components. Recent research mainly models the task as a sequence tagging problem and deal with all the argumentation components at word level. However, this task is not scale-independent. Some types of argumentation components which serve as core opinions on essays or paragraphs, are at essay level or paragraph level. Sequence tagging method conducts reasoning by local context words, and fails to effectively mine these components. To this end, we propose a multi-scale argumentation mining model, where we respectively mine different types of argumentation components at corresponding levels. Besides, an effective coarse-to-fine argumentation fusion mechanism is proposed to further improve the performance. We conduct a serial of experiments on the Persuasive Essay dataset
(PE 2.0). Experimental results indicate that our model outperforms existing models on mining all types of argumentation components.

Argumentation Mining on Essays at Multi Scales

Automatic emotion categorization has been predominantly formulated as text classification in which textual units are assigned to an emotion from a predefined inventory, for instance following the fundamental emotion classes proposed by Paul Ekman (fear, joy, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise) or Robert Plutchik (adding trust, anticipation). This approach ignores existing psychological theories to some degree, which provide explanations regarding the perception of events. For instance, the description that somebody discovers a snake is associated with fear, based on the appraisal as being an unpleasant and non-controllable situation. This emotion reconstruction is even possible without having access to explicit reports of a subjective feeling (for instance expressing this with the words “I am afraid.”). Automatic classification approaches therefore need to learn properties of events as latent variables (for instance that the uncertainty and the mental or physical effort associated with the encounter of a snake leads to fear). With this paper, we propose to make such interpretations of events explicit, following theories of cognitive appraisal of events, and show their potential for emotion classification when being encoded in classification models. Our results show that high quality appraisal dimension assignments in event descriptions lead to an improvement in the classification of discrete emotion categories. We make our corpus of appraisal-annotated emotion-associated event descriptions publicly available.

Appraisal Theories for Emotion Classification in Text

In 2019, about 293 billion emails were sent worldwide every day. They are a valuable source of information and knowledge for professionals. Since the 90’s, many studies have been done on emails and have highlighted the need for resources regarding numerous NLP tasks. Due to the lack of available resources for French, very few studies on emails have been conducted. Anaphora resolution in emails is an unexplored area, annotated resources are needed, at least to answer a first question: Does email communication have specifics that must be addressed to tackle the anaphora resolution task? In order to answer this question 1) we build a French emails corpus composed of 100 anonymized professional threads and make it vailable freely for scientific exploitation. 2) we provide annotations of anaphoric links in the email collection.

A dataset fo anaphora analysis in French Emails

Until recently, coreference resolution has been a critical task on the pipeline of any NLP task involving deep language understanding, such as machine translation, chatbots, summarization or sentiment analysis. However, nowadays, those end tasks are learned end-to-end by deep neural networks without adding any explicit knowledge about coreference. Thus, coreference resolution is used less in the training of other NLP tasks or trending pretrained language models. In this paper we present a new approach to face coreference resolution as a sequence to sequence task based on the Transformer architecture. This approach is simple and universal, compatible with any language or dataset (regardless of singletons) and easier to integrate with current language models architectures. We test it on the ARRAU corpus, where we get 65.6 F1 CoNLL. We see this approach not as a final goal, but a means to pretrain sequence to sequence language models (T5) on coreference resolution.

Sequence to Sequence Coreference Resolution

It is known that word embeddings exhibit biases inherited from the corpus, and those biases reflect social stereotypes. Recently, many studies have been conducted to analyze and mitigate biases in word embeddings. Unsupervised Bias Enumeration (UBE) (Swinger et al., 2019) is one of approach to analyze biases for English, and Hard Debias (Bolukbasi et al., 2016) is the common technique to mitigate gender bias. These methods focused on English, or, in smaller extent, on Indo-European languages. However, it is not clear whether these methods can be generalized to other languages. In this paper, we apply these analyzing and mitigating methods, UBE and Hard Debias, to Japanese word embeddings. Additionally, we examine whether these methods can be used for Japanese. We experimentally show that UBE and Hard Debias cannot be sufficiently adapted to Japanese embeddings.

Can Existing Methods Debias Languages Other than English? First Attempt to Analyze and Mitigate Japanese Word Embeddings

In this paper, we present two productive and functional recommender methods to improve the ac-curacy of predicting the right product for the user. One proposal is a survey-based recommender system that uses k-nearest neighbors. It recommends products by asking questions from the user, efficiently applying a binary product vector to the product attributes, and processing the request with a minimum error. The second proposal uses an enriched collaborative-based recommender system using enriched weighted vectors. Thanks to the style rules, the enriched collaborative-based method recommends outfits with competitive recommendation quality. We evaluated both of the proposals on a Kaggle fashion-dataset along with iMaterialist and, results show equivalent performance on binary gender and product attributes.

E-Commerce Content and Collaborative-based Recommendation using K-Nearest Neighbors and Enriched Weighted Vectors

Many NLP technologies are driven by data and knowledges, including linguistic data, business data as well as domain knowledges. In e-commerce platforms such as Alibaba's ecosystem, these data and knowledges are generated, processed and utilized to train machine learning models and systems for various applications such as information extraction, text generation, question answer, dialogue system and translation. etc.. Overall, the progress in NLP technologies, accumulation of data and knowledges as well as powerful NLP platforms make it easy to do business anywhere.

NLP Technologies and Applications for e-Commerce

This paper presents the results and findings of the Financial Narrative Summarisation shared task (FNS 2020) on summarising UK annual reports. The shared task was organised as part of the 1st Financial Narrative Processing and Financial Narrative Summarisation Workshop (FNP-FNS 2020). The shared task included one main task which is the use of either abstractive or extractive summarisation methodologies and techniques to automatically summarise UK financial annual reports. FNS summarisation shared task is the first to target financial annual reports. The data for the shared task was created and collected from publicly available UK annual reports published by firms listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). A total number of 24 systems from 9 different teams participated in the shared task. In addition we had 2 baseline summarisers and additional 2 topline summarisers to help evaluate and compare against the results of the participants.

The Financial Narrative Summarisation Shared Task (FNS 2020)

This is an introductory tutorial to UCCA (Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation), a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, with corpora annotated in English, German and French, and ongoing annotation in Russian and Hebrew. UCCA builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. The tutorial will provide a detailed introduction to the UCCA annotation guidelines, design philosophy and the available resources; and a comparison to other meaning representations. It will also survey the existing parsing work, including the findings of three recent shared tasks, in SemEval and CoNLL, that addressed UCCA parsing. Finally, the tutorial will present recent applications and extensions to the scheme, demonstrating its value for natural language processing in a range of languages and domains.

Reference in Team Communication for Robot-Assisted Disaster Response: An Initial Analysis

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