Articles

AbstractRecent work in NLP has attempted to deal with low-resource languages but still assumed a resource level that is not present for most languages, e.g., the availability of Wikipedia in the target language. We propose a simple method for cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) that works well in settings with …...

AbstractLeveraging zero-shot learning to learn mapping functions between vector spaces of different languages is a promising approach to bilingual dictionary induction. However, methods using this approach have not yet achieved high accuracy on the task. In this paper, we propose a bridging approach, where our main contribution is a knowledge …...

AbstractNeural machine translation represents an exciting leap forward in translation quality. But what longstanding weaknesses does it resolve, and which remain? We address these questions with a challenge set approach to translation evaluation and error analysis. A challenge set consists of a small set of sentences, each hand-designed to probe …...

AbstractMonolingual evaluation of Machine Translation (MT) aims to simplify human assessment by requiring assessors to compare the meaning of the MT output with a reference translation, opening up the task to a much larger pool of genuinely qualified evaluators. Monolingual evaluation runs the risk, however, of bias in favour of …...

AbstractMuch of human dialogue occurs in semi-cooperative settings, where agents with different goals attempt to agree on common decisions. Negotiations require complex communication and reasoning skills, but success is easy to measure, making this an interesting task for AI. We gather a large dataset of human-human negotiations on a multi-issue …...

AbstractDiscourse segmentation is the first step in building discourse parsers. Most work on discourse segmentation does not scale to real-world discourse parsing across languages, for two reasons: (i) models rely on constituent trees, and (ii) experiments have relied on gold standard identification of sentence and token boundaries. We therefore investigate …...

AbstractIn this work, we study the problem of part-of-speech tagging for Tweets. In contrast to newswire articles, Tweets are usually informal and contain numerous out-of-vocabulary words. Moreover, there is a lack of large scale labeled datasets for this domain. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel neural network to …...

AbstractWe present a novel approach for training artificial neural networks. Our approach is inspired by broad evidence in psychology that shows human learners can learn efficiently and effectively by increasing intervals of time between subsequent reviews of previously learned materials (spaced repetition). We investigate the analogy between training neural models …...

AbstractWe propose a new encoder-decoder approach to learn distributed sentence representations that are applicable to multiple purposes. The model is learned by using a convolutional neural network as an encoder to map an input sentence into a continuous vector, and using a long short-term memory recurrent neural network as a …...

AbstractHand-crafted rules and reinforcement learning (RL) are two popular choices to obtain dialogue policy. The rule-based policy is often reliable within predefined scope but not self-adaptable, whereas RL is evolvable with data but often suffers from a bad initial performance. We employ a companion learning framework to integrate the two …...

AbstractThe number of word embedding models is growing every year. Most of them are based on the co-occurrence information of words and their contexts. However, it is still an open question what is the best definition of context. We provide a systematical investigation of 4 different syntactic context types and …...

AbstractIn this paper we introduce a practical first step towards the creation of an automated debate agent: a state-of-the-art recurrent predictive model for predicting debate winners. By having an accurate predictive model, we are able to objectively rate the quality of a statement made at a specific turn in a …...

AbstractSeveral approaches have been proposed to model either the explicit sequential structure of an argumentative text or its implicit hierarchical structure. So far, the adequacy of these models of overall argumentation remains unclear. This paper asks what type of structure is actually important to tackle downstream tasks in computational argumentation. …...

AbstractNeural networks have achieved state-of-the-art performance on several structured-output prediction tasks, trained in a fully supervised fashion. However, annotated examples in structured domains are often costly to obtain, which thus limits the applications of neural networks. In this work, we propose Maximum Margin Reward Networks, a neural network-based framework that …...

AbstractRecommendations are often rated for their subjective quality, but few researchers have studied comment quality in terms of objective utility. We explore recommendation quality assessment with respect to both subjective (i.e. users’ ratings) and objective (i.e., did it influence? did it improve decisions?) metrics in a massive online geopolitical forecasting …...

AbstractHighlighting the recurrence of topics usage in candidates speeches is a key feature to identify the main ideas of each candidate during a political campaign. In this paper, we present a method combining standard topic modeling with signature mining for analyzing topic recurrence in speeches of Clinton and Trump during …...

AbstractMuch of our online communication is text-mediated and, lately, more common with automated agents. Unlike interacting with humans, these agents currently do not tailor their language to the type of person they are communicating to. In this pilot study, we measure the extent to which human perception of basic user …...

AbstractThe framing of an action influences how we perceive its actor. We introduce connotation frames of power and agency, a pragmatic formalism organized using frame semantic representations, to model how different levels of power and agency are implicitly projected on actors through their actions. We use the new power and …...

AbstractWe focus on non-standard usages of common words on social media. In the context of social media, words sometimes have other usages that are totally different from their original. In this study, we attempt to distinguish non-standard usages on social media from standard ones in an unsupervised manner. Our basic …...

AbstractSocial media collect and spread on the Web personal opinions, facts, fake news and all kind of information users may be interested in. Applying argument mining methods to such heterogeneous data sources is a challenging open research issue, in particular considering the peculiarities of the language used to write textual …...