Articles

AbstractConversational systems enable numerous valuable applications, and question-answering is an important component underlying many of these. However, conversational question-answering remains challenging due to the lack of realistic, domain-specific training data. Inspired by this bottleneck, we focus on conversational question generation as a means to generate synthetic conversations for training and …...

AbstractIdeological attitudes and stance are often expressed through subtle meanings of words and phrases. Understanding these connotations is critical to recognizing the cultural and emotional perspectives of the speaker. In this paper, we use distant labeling to create a new lexical resource representing connotation aspects for nouns and adjectives. Our …...

AbstractIn this paper, we propose to study language modelling as a multi-task problem, bringing together three strands of research: multi-task learning, linguistics, and interpretability. Based on hypotheses derived from linguistic theory, we investigate whether language models adhere to learning principles of multi-task learning during training. To showcase the idea, we …...

AbstractThis paper proposes a new task regarding event reason extraction from document-level texts. Unlike the previous causality detection task, we do not assign target events in the text, but only provide structural event descriptions, and such settings accord more with practice scenarios. Moreover, we annotate a large dataset FinReason for …...

AbstractTo track different levels of formality in written discourse, we introduce a novel type of lexicon for the German language, with entries ordered by their degree of (in)formality. We start with a set of words extracted from traditional lexicographic resources, extend it by sentence-based similarity computations, and let crowdworkers assess …...

AbstractDisagreements are pervasive in human communication. In this paper we investigate what makes disagreement constructive. To this end, we construct WikiDisputes, a corpus of 7425 Wikipedia Talk page conversations that contain content disputes, and define the task of predicting whether disagreements will be escalated to mediation by a moderator. We …...

AbstractRelation schemas are often pre-defined for each relation dataset. Relation types can be related from different datasets and have overlapping semantics. We hypothesize we can combine these datasets according to the semantic relatedness between the relation types to overcome the problem of lack of training data. It is often easy …...

AbstractDetecting arguments in online interactions is useful to understand how conflicts arise and get resolved. Users often use figurative language, such as sarcasm, either as persuasive devices or to attack the opponent by an ad hominem argument. To further our understanding of the role of sarcasm in shaping the disagreement …...

AbstractTarget-oriented opinion words extraction (TOWE) is a subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA). It aims to extract the corresponding opinion words for a given opinion target in a review sentence. Intuitively, the relation between an opinion target and an opinion word mostly relies on syntactics. In this study, we design …...

AbstractBiomedical question-answering (QA) has gained increased attention for its capability to provide users with high-quality information from a vast scientific literature. Although an increasing number of biomedical QA datasets has been recently made available, those resources are still rather limited and expensive to produce; thus, transfer learning via pre-trained language …...

AbstractThe great majority of languages in the world are considered under-resourced for successful application of deep learning methods. In this work, we propose a meta-learning approach to document classification in low-resource languages and demonstrate its effectiveness in two different settings: few-shot, cross-lingual adaptation to previously unseen languages; and multilingual joint-training …...

AbstractImposing the style of one image onto another is called style transfer. For example, the style of a Van Gogh painting might be imposed on a photograph to yield an interesting hybrid. This paper applies the adaptive normalization used for image style transfer to language semantics, i.e., the style is …...

AbstractWe present a novel dataset and model for a multilingual setting to approach the task of Joint Entity and Relation Extraction. The SMiLER dataset consists of 1.1 M annotated sentences, representing 36 relations, and 14 languages. To the best of our knowledge, this is currently both the largest and the …...

AbstractComputational modelling of political discourse tasks has become an increasingly important area of research in the field of natural language processing. Populist rhetoric has risen across the political sphere in recent years; however, due to its complex nature, computational approaches to it have been scarce. In this paper, we present …...

AbstractReinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful framework to address the discrepancy between loss functions used during training and the final evaluation metrics to be used at test time. When applied to neural Machine Translation (MT), it minimises the mismatch between the cross-entropy loss and non-differentiable evaluation metrics like BLEU. However, …...

AbstractThe transformer has been shown to outperform recurrent neural network-based sequence-to-sequence models in various word-level NLP tasks. Yet for character-level transduction tasks, e.g. morphological inflection generation and historical text normalization, there are few works that outperform recurrent models using the transformer. In an empirical study, we uncover that, in contrast …...

AbstractWe evaluate two common conjectures in error analysis of NLP models: (i) Morphology is predictive of errors; and (ii) the importance of morphology increases with the morphological complexity of a language. We show across four different tasks and up to 57 languages that of these conjectures, somewhat surprisingly, only (i) …...

AbstractLinguistic accommodation is the process in which speakers adjust their accent, diction, vocabulary, and other aspects of language according to the communication style of one another. Previous research has shown how linguistic accommodation correlates with gaps in the power and status of the speakers and the way it promotes approval …...

AbstractWe introduce a data augmentation technique based on byte pair encoding and a BERT-like self-attention model to boost performance on spoken language understanding tasks. We compare and evaluate this method with a range of augmentation techniques encompassing generative models such as VAEs and performance-boosting techniques such as synonym replacement and …...

AbstractManual evaluation is essential to judge progress on automatic text summarization. However, we conduct a survey on recent summarization system papers that reveals little agreement on how to perform such evaluation studies. We conduct two evaluation experiments on two aspects of summaries’ linguistic quality (coherence and repetitiveness) to compare Likert-type …...