Other Workshops and Events (2018)

This paper focuses on linguistic complexity from a relative perspective. It presents a grounded language learning system that can be used to study linguistic complexity from a developmental point of view and introduces a tool for generating a gold standard in order to evaluate the performance of the learning system. In general, researchers agree that it is more feasible to approach complexity from an objective or theory-oriented viewpoint than from a subjective or user-related point of view. Studies that have adopted a relative complexity approach have showed some preferences for L2 learners. In this paper, we try to show that computational models of the process of language acquisition may be an important tool to consider children and the process of first language acquisition as suitable candidates for evaluating the complexity of languages.

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Computational Complexity of Natural Languages: A Reasoned Overview
António Branco

There has been an upsurge of research interest in natural language complexity. As this interest will benefit from being informed by established contributions in this area, this paper presents a reasoned overview of central results concerning the computational complexity of natural language parsing. This overview also seeks to help to understand why, contrary to recent and widespread assumptions, it is by no means sufficient that an agent handles sequences of items under a pattern aⁿ bⁿ or under a pattern aⁿ b^m cⁿ d^m to ascertain ipso facto that this is the result of at least an underlying context-free grammar or an underlying context-sensitive grammar, respectively. In addition, it seeks to help to understand why it is also not sufficient that an agent handles sequences of items under a pattern aⁿ bⁿ for it to be deemed as having a cognitive capacity of higher computational complexity.

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Modeling Violations of Selectional Restrictions with Distributional Semantics
Emmanuele Chersoni | Adrià Torrens Urrutia | Philippe Blache | Alessandro Lenci

Distributional Semantic Models have been successfully used for modeling selectional preferences in a variety of scenarios, since distributional similarity naturally provides an estimate of the degree to which an argument satisfies the requirement of a given predicate. However, we argue that the performance of such models on rare verb-argument combinations has received relatively little attention: it is not clear whether they are able to distinguish the combinations that are simply atypical, or implausible, from the semantically anomalous ones, and in particular, they have never been tested on the task of modeling their differences in processing complexity. In this paper, we compare two different models of thematic fit by testing their ability of identifying violations of selectional restrictions in two datasets from the experimental studies.

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Comparing morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl
Ximena Gutierrez-Vasques | Victor Mijangos

We use two small parallel corpora for comparing the morphological complexity of Spanish, Otomi and Nahuatl. These are languages that belong to different linguistic families, the latter are low-resourced. We take into account two quantitative criteria, on one hand the distribution of types over tokens in a corpus, on the other, perplexity and entropy as indicators of word structure predictability. We show that a language can be complex in terms of how many different morphological word forms can produce, however, it may be less complex in terms of predictability of its internal structure of words.

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Uniform Information Density Effects on Syntactic Choice in Hindi
Ayush Jain | Vishal Singh | Sidharth Ranjan | Rajakrishnan Rajkumar | Sumeet Agarwal

According to the UNIFORM INFORMATION DENSITY (UID) hypothesis (Levy and Jaeger, 2007; Jaeger, 2010), speakers tend to distribute information density across the signal uniformly while producing language. The prior works cited above studied syntactic reduction in language production at particular choice points in a sentence. In contrast, we use a variant of the above UID hypothesis in order to investigate the extent to which word order choices in Hindi are influenced by the drive to minimize the variance of information across entire sentences. To this end, we propose multiple lexical and syntactic measures (at both word and constituent levels) to capture the uniform spread of information across a sentence. Subsequently, we incorporate these measures in machine learning models aimed to distinguish between a naturally occurring corpus sentence and its grammatical variants (expressing the same idea). Our results indicate that our UID measures are not a significant factor in predicting the corpus sentence in the presence of lexical surprisal, a competing control predictor. Finally, in the light of other recent works, we conclude with a discussion of reasons for UID not being suitable for a theory of word order.

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Investigating the importance of linguistic complexity features across different datasets related to language learning
Ildikó Pilán | Elena Volodina

We present the results of our investigations aiming at identifying the most informative linguistic complexity features for classifying language learning levels in three different datasets. The datasets vary across two dimensions: the size of the instances (texts vs. sentences) and the language learning skill they involve (reading comprehension texts vs. texts written by learners themselves). We present a subset of the most predictive features for each dataset, taking into consideration significant differences in their per-class mean values and show that these subsets lead not only to simpler models, but also to an improved classification performance. Furthermore, we pinpoint fourteen central features that are good predictors regardless of the size of the linguistic unit analyzed or the skills involved, which include both morpho-syntactic and lexical dimensions.

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An Approach to Measuring Complexity with a Fuzzy Grammar & Degrees of Grammaticality
Adrià Torrens Urrutia

This paper presents an approach to evaluate complexity of a given natural language input by means of a Fuzzy Grammar with some fuzzy logic formulations. Usually, the approaches in linguistics has described a natural language grammar by means of discrete terms. However, a grammar can be explained in terms of degrees by following the concepts of linguistic gradience & fuzziness. Understanding a grammar as a fuzzy or gradient object allows us to establish degrees of grammaticality for every linguistic input. This shall be meaningful for linguistic complexity considering that the less grammatical an input is the more complex its processing will be. In this regard, the degree of complexity of a linguistic input (which is a linguistic representation of a natural language expression) depends on the chosen grammar. The bases of the fuzzy grammar are shown here. Some of these are described by Fuzzy Type Theory. The linguistic inputs are characterized by constraints through a Property Grammar.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering
Eunsol Choi | Minjoon Seo | Danqi Chen | Robin Jia | Jonathan Berant

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Ruminating Reader: Reasoning with Gated Multi-hop Attention
Yichen Gong | Samuel Bowman

To answer the question in machine comprehension (MC) task, the models need to establish the interaction between the question and the context. To tackle the problem that the single-pass model cannot reflect on and correct its answer, we present Ruminating Reader. Ruminating Reader adds a second pass of attention and a novel information fusion component to the Bi-Directional Attention Flow model (BiDAF). We propose novel layer structures that construct a query aware context vector representation and fuse encoding representation with intermediate representation on top of BiDAF model. We show that a multi-hop attention mechanism can be applied to a bi-directional attention structure. In experiments on SQuAD, we find that the Reader outperforms the BiDAF baseline by 2.1 F1 score and 2.7 EM score. Our analysis shows that different hops of the attention have different responsibilities in selecting answers.

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Systematic Error Analysis of the Stanford Question Answering Dataset
Marc-Antoine Rondeau | T. J. Hazen

We analyzed the outputs of multiple question answering (QA) models applied to the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) to identify the core challenges for QA systems on this data set. Through an iterative process, challenging aspects were hypothesized through qualitative analysis of the common error cases. A classifier was then constructed to predict whether SQuAD test examples were likely to be difficult for systems to answer based on features associated with the hypothesized aspects. The classifier’s performance was used to accept or reject each aspect as an indicator of difficulty. With this approach, we ensured that our hypotheses were systematically tested and not simply accepted based on our pre-existing biases. Our explanations are not accepted based on human evaluation of individual examples. This process also enabled us to identify the primary QA strategy learned by the models, i.e., systems determined the acceptable answer type for a question and then selected the acceptable answer span of that type containing the highest density of words present in the question within its local vicinity in the passage.

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A Multi-Stage Memory Augmented Neural Network for Machine Reading Comprehension
Seunghak Yu | Sathish Reddy Indurthi | Seohyun Back | Haejun Lee

Reading Comprehension (RC) of text is one of the fundamental tasks in natural language processing. In recent years, several end-to-end neural network models have been proposed to solve RC tasks. However, most of these models suffer in reasoning over long documents. In this work, we propose a novel Memory Augmented Machine Comprehension Network (MAMCN) to address long-range dependencies present in machine reading comprehension. We perform extensive experiments to evaluate proposed method with the renowned benchmark datasets such as SQuAD, QUASAR-T, and TriviaQA. We achieve the state of the art performance on both the document-level (QUASAR-T, TriviaQA) and paragraph-level (SQuAD) datasets compared to all the previously published approaches.

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Tackling Adversarial Examples in QA via Answer Sentence Selection
Yuanhang Ren | Ye Du | Di Wang

Question answering systems deteriorate dramatically in the presence of adversarial sentences in articles. According to Jia and Liang (2017), the single BiDAF system (Seo et al., 2016) only achieves an F1 score of 4.8 on the ADDANY adversarial dataset. In this paper, we present a method to tackle this problem via answer sentence selection. Given a paragraph of an article and a corresponding query, instead of directly feeding the whole paragraph to the single BiDAF system, a sentence that most likely contains the answer to the query is first selected, which is done via a deep neural network based on TreeLSTM (Tai et al., 2015). Experiments on ADDANY adversarial dataset validate the effectiveness of our method. The F1 score has been improved to 52.3.

This paper introduces DuReader, a new large-scale, open-domain Chinese machine reading comprehension (MRC) dataset, designed to address real-world MRC. DuReader has three advantages over previous MRC datasets: (1) data sources: questions and documents are based on Baidu Search and Baidu Zhidao; answers are manually generated. (2) question types: it provides rich annotations for more question types, especially yes-no and opinion questions, that leaves more opportunity for the research community. (3) scale: it contains 200K questions, 420K answers and 1M documents; it is the largest Chinese MRC dataset so far. Experiments show that human performance is well above current state-of-the-art baseline systems, leaving plenty of room for the community to make improvements. To help the community make these improvements, both DuReader and baseline systems have been posted online. We also organize a shared competition to encourage the exploration of more models. Since the release of the task, there are significant improvements over the baselines.

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Robust and Scalable Differentiable Neural Computer for Question Answering
Jörg Franke | Jan Niehues | Alex Waibel

Deep learning models are often not easily adaptable to new tasks and require task-specific adjustments. The differentiable neural computer (DNC), a memory-augmented neural network, is designed as a general problem solver which can be used in a wide range of tasks. But in reality, it is hard to apply this model to new tasks. We analyze the DNC and identify possible improvements within the application of question answering. This motivates a more robust and scalable DNC (rsDNC). The objective precondition is to keep the general character of this model intact while making its application more reliable and speeding up its required training time. The rsDNC is distinguished by a more robust training, a slim memory unit and a bidirectional architecture. We not only achieve new state-of-the-art performance on the bAbI task, but also minimize the performance variance between different initializations. Furthermore, we demonstrate the simplified applicability of the rsDNC to new tasks with passable results on the CNN RC task without adaptions.

The recent work of Clark et al. (2018) introduces the AI2 Reasoning Challenge (ARC) and the associated ARC dataset that partitions open domain, complex science questions into easy and challenge sets. That paper includes an analysis of 100 questions with respect to the types of knowledge and reasoning required to answer them; however, it does not include clear definitions of these types, nor does it offer information about the quality of the labels. We propose a comprehensive set of definitions of knowledge and reasoning types necessary for answering the questions in the ARC dataset. Using ten annotators and a sophisticated annotation interface, we analyze the distribution of labels across the challenge set and statistics related to them. Additionally, we demonstrate that although naive information retrieval methods return sentences that are irrelevant to answering the query, sufficient supporting text is often present in the (ARC) corpus. Evaluating with human-selected relevant sentences improves the performance of a neural machine comprehension model by 42 points.

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RECIPE: Applying Open Domain Question Answering to Privacy Policies
Yan Shvartzshanider | Ananth Balashankar | Thomas Wies | Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

We describe our experiences in using an open domain question answering model (Chen et al., 2017) to evaluate an out-of-domain QA task of assisting in analyzing privacy policies of companies. Specifically, Relevant CI Parameters Extractor (RECIPE) seeks to answer questions posed by the theory of contextual integrity (CI) regarding the information flows described in the privacy statements. These questions have a simple syntactic structure and the answers are factoids or descriptive in nature. The model achieved an F1 score of 72.33, but we noticed that combining the results of this model with a neural dependency parser based approach yields a significantly higher F1 score of 92.35 compared to manual annotations. This indicates that future work which in-corporates signals from parsing like NLP tasks more explicitly can generalize better on out-of-domain tasks.

We propose a two-stage neural model to tackle question generation from documents. First, our model estimates the probability that word sequences in a document are ones that a human would pick when selecting candidate answers by training a neural key-phrase extractor on the answers in a question-answering corpus. Predicted key phrases then act as target answers and condition a sequence-to-sequence question-generation model with a copy mechanism. Empirically, our key-phrase extraction model significantly outperforms an entity-tagging baseline and existing rule-based approaches. We further demonstrate that our question generation system formulates fluent, answerable questions from key phrases. This two-stage system could be used to augment or generate reading comprehension datasets, which may be leveraged to improve machine reading systems or in educational settings.

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Comparative Analysis of Neural QA models on SQuAD
Soumya Wadhwa | Khyathi Chandu | Eric Nyberg

The task of Question Answering has gained prominence in the past few decades for testing the ability of machines to understand natural language. Large datasets for Machine Reading have led to the development of neural models that cater to deeper language understanding compared to information retrieval tasks. Different components in these neural architectures are intended to tackle different challenges. As a first step towards achieving generalization across multiple domains, we attempt to understand and compare the peculiarities of existing end-to-end neural models on the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD) by performing quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of the results attained by each of them. We observed that prediction errors reflect certain model-specific biases, which we further discuss in this paper.

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Adaptations of ROUGE and BLEU to Better Evaluate Machine Reading Comprehension Task
An Yang | Kai Liu | Jing Liu | Yajuan Lyu | Sujian Li

Current evaluation metrics to question answering based machine reading comprehension (MRC) systems generally focus on the lexical overlap between candidate and reference answers, such as ROUGE and BLEU. However, bias may appear when these metrics are used for specific question types, especially questions inquiring yes-no opinions and entity lists. In this paper, we make adaptations on the metrics to better correlate n-gram overlap with the human judgment for answers to these two question types. Statistical analysis proves the effectiveness of our approach. Our adaptations may provide positive guidance for the development of real-scene MRC systems.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on the Relevance of Linguistic Structure in Neural Architectures for NLP

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Compositional Morpheme Embeddings with Affixes as Functions and Stems as Arguments
Daniel Edmiston | Karl Stratos

This work introduces a novel, linguistically motivated architecture for composing morphemes to derive word embeddings. The principal novelty in the work is to treat stems as vectors and affixes as functions over vectors. In this way, our model’s architecture more closely resembles the compositionality of morphemes in natural language. Such a model stands in opposition to models which treat morphemes uniformly, making no distinction between stem and affix. We run this new architecture on a dependency parsing task in Korean—a language rich in derivational morphology—and compare it against a lexical baseline,along with other sub-word architectures. StAffNet, the name of our architecture, shows competitive performance with the state-of-the-art on this task.

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Unsupervised Source Hierarchies for Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Anna Currey | Kenneth Heafield

Incorporating source syntactic information into neural machine translation (NMT) has recently proven successful (Eriguchi et al., 2016; Luong et al., 2016). However, this is generally done using an outside parser to syntactically annotate the training data, making this technique difficult to use for languages or domains for which a reliable parser is not available. In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised tree-to-sequence (tree2seq) model for neural machine translation; this model is able to induce an unsupervised hierarchical structure on the source sentence based on the downstream task of neural machine translation. We adapt the Gumbel tree-LSTM of Choi et al. (2018) to NMT in order to create the encoder. We evaluate our model against sequential and supervised parsing baselines on three low- and medium-resource language pairs. For low-resource cases, the unsupervised tree2seq encoder significantly outperforms the baselines; no improvements are seen for medium-resource translation.

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Latent Tree Learning with Differentiable Parsers: Shift-Reduce Parsing and Chart Parsing
Jean Maillard | Stephen Clark

Latent tree learning models represent sentences by composing their words according to an induced parse tree, all based on a downstream task. These models often outperform baselines which use (externally provided) syntax trees to drive the composition order. This work contributes (a) a new latent tree learning model based on shift-reduce parsing, with competitive downstream performance and non-trivial induced trees, and (b) an analysis of the trees learned by our shift-reduce model and by a chart-based model.

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Syntax Helps ELMo Understand Semantics: Is Syntax Still Relevant in a Deep Neural Architecture for SRL?
Emma Strubell | Andrew McCallum

Do unsupervised methods for learning rich, contextualized token representations obviate the need for explicit modeling of linguistic structure in neural network models for semantic role labeling (SRL)? We address this question by incorporating the massively successful ELMo embeddings (Peters et al., 2018) into LISA (Strubell and McCallum, 2018), a strong, linguistically-informed neural network architecture for SRL. In experiments on the CoNLL-2005 shared task we find that though ELMo out-performs typical word embeddings, beginning to close the gap in F1 between LISA with predicted and gold syntactic parses, syntactically-informed models still out-perform syntax-free models when both use ELMo, especially on out-of-domain data. Our results suggest that linguistic structures are indeed still relevant in this golden age of deep learning for NLP.

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Subcharacter Information in Japanese Embeddings: When Is It Worth It?
Marzena Karpinska | Bofang Li | Anna Rogers | Aleksandr Drozd

Languages with logographic writing systems present a difficulty for traditional character-level models. Leveraging the subcharacter information was recently shown to be beneficial for a number of intrinsic and extrinsic tasks in Chinese. We examine whether the same strategies could be applied for Japanese, and contribute a new analogy dataset for this language.

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A neural parser as a direct classifier for head-final languages
Hiroshi Kanayama | Masayasu Muraoka | Ryosuke Kohita

This paper demonstrates a neural parser implementation suitable for consistently head-final languages such as Japanese. Unlike the transition- and graph-based algorithms in most state-of-the-art parsers, our parser directly selects the head word of a dependent from a limited number of candidates. This method drastically simplifies the model so that we can easily interpret the output of the neural model. Moreover, by exploiting grammatical knowledge to restrict possible modification types, we can control the output of the parser to reduce specific errors without adding annotated corpora. The neural parser performed well both on conventional Japanese corpora and the Japanese version of Universal Dependency corpus, and the advantages of distributed representations were observed in the comparison with the non-neural conventional model.

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Syntactic Dependency Representations in Neural Relation Classification
Farhad Nooralahzadeh | Lilja Øvrelid

We investigate the use of different syntactic dependency representations in a neural relation classification task and compare the CoNLL, Stanford Basic and Universal Dependencies schemes. We further compare with a syntax-agnostic approach and perform an error analysis in order to gain a better understanding of the results.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing
Udo Hahn | Véronique Hoste | Ming-Feng Tsai

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Economic Event Detection in Company-Specific News Text
Gilles Jacobs | Els Lefever | Véronique Hoste

This paper presents a dataset and supervised classification approach for economic event detection in English news articles. Currently, the economic domain is lacking resources and methods for data-driven supervised event detection. The detection task is conceived as a sentence-level classification task for 10 different economic event types. Two different machine learning approaches were tested: a rich feature set Support Vector Machine (SVM) set-up and a word-vector-based long short-term memory recurrent neural network (RNN-LSTM) set-up. We show satisfactory results for most event types, with the linear kernel SVM outperforming the other experimental set-ups

Sentiment analysis is the process of identifying the opinion expressed in text. Recently, it has been used to study behavioral finance, and in particular the effect of opinions and emotions on economic or financial decisions. In this paper, we use a public dataset of labeled tweets that has been labeled by Amazon Mechanical Turk and then we propose a baseline classification model. Then, by using Granger causality of both sentiment datasets with the different stocks, we shows that there is causality between social media and stock market returns (in both directions) for many stocks. Finally, We evaluate this causality analysis by showing that in the event of a specific news on certain dates, there are evidences of trending the same news on Twitter for that stock.

We introduce JOCo, a novel text corpus for NLP analytics in the field of economics, business and management. This corpus is composed of corporate annual and social responsibility reports of the top 30 US, UK and German companies in the major (DJIA, FTSE 100, DAX), middle-sized (S&P 500, FTSE 250, MDAX) and technology (NASDAQ, FTSE AIM 100, TECDAX) stock indices, respectively. Altogether, this adds up to 5,000 reports from 270 companies headquartered in three of the world’s most important economies. The corpus spans a time frame from 2000 up to 2015 and contains, in total, 282M tokens. We also feature JOCo in a small-scale experiment to demonstrate its potential for NLP-fueled studies in economics, business and management research.

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Word Embeddings-Based Uncertainty Detection in Financial Disclosures
Christoph Kilian Theil | Sanja Štajner | Heiner Stuckenschmidt

In this paper, we use NLP techniques to detect linguistic uncertainty in financial disclosures. Leveraging general-domain and domain-specific word embedding models, we automatically expand an existing dictionary of uncertainty triggers. We furthermore examine how an expert filtering affects the quality of such an expansion. We show that the dictionary expansions significantly improve regressions on stock return volatility. Lastly, we prove that the expansions significantly boost the automatic detection of uncertain sentences.

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A Simple End-to-End Question Answering Model for Product Information
Tuan Lai | Trung Bui | Sheng Li | Nedim Lipka

When evaluating a potential product purchase, customers may have many questions in mind. They want to get adequate information to determine whether the product of interest is worth their money. In this paper we present a simple deep learning model for answering questions regarding product facts and specifications. Given a question and a product specification, the model outputs a score indicating their relevance. To train and evaluate our proposed model, we collected a dataset of 7,119 questions that are related to 153 different products. Experimental results demonstrate that –despite its simplicity– the performance of our model is shown to be comparable to a more complex state-of-the-art baseline.

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Sentence Classification for Investment Rules Detection
Youness Mansar | Sira Ferradans

In the last years, compliance requirements for the banking sector have greatly augmented, making the current compliance processes difficult to maintain. Any process that allows to accelerate the identification and implementation of compliance requirements can help address this issues. The contributions of the paper are twofold: we propose a new NLP task that is the investment rule detection, and a group of methods identify them. We show that the proposed methods are highly performing and fast, thus can be deployed in production.

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Leveraging News Sentiment to Improve Microblog Sentiment Classification in the Financial Domain
Tobias Daudert | Paul Buitelaar | Sapna Negi

With the rising popularity of social media in the society and in research, analysing texts short in length, such as microblogs, becomes an increasingly important task. As a medium of communication, microblogs carry peoples sentiments and express them to the public. Given that sentiments are driven by multiple factors including the news media, the question arises if the sentiment expressed in news and the news article themselves can be leveraged to detect and classify sentiment in microblogs. Prior research has highlighted the impact of sentiments and opinions on the market dynamics, making the financial domain a prime case study for this approach. Therefore, this paper describes ongoing research dealing with the exploitation of news contained sentiment to improve microblog sentiment classification in a financial context.

This paper focuses on aspect extraction which is a sub-task of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis. The goal is to report an extraction method of financial aspects in microblog messages. Our approach uses a stock-investment taxonomy for the identification of explicit and implicit aspects. We compare supervised and unsupervised methods to assign predefined categories at message level. Results on 7 aspect classes show 0.71 accuracy, while the 32 class classification gives 0.82 accuracy for messages containing explicit aspects and 0.35 for implicit aspects.

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Unsupervised Word Influencer Networks from News Streams
Ananth Balashankar | Sunandan Chakraborty | Lakshminarayanan Subramanian

In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised learning framework to use news events for predicting trends in stock prices. We present Word Influencer Networks (WIN), a graph framework to extract longitudinal temporal relationships between any pair of informative words from news streams. Using the temporal occurrence of words, WIN measures how the appearance of one word in a news stream influences the emergence of another set of words in the future. The latent word-word influencer relationships in WIN are the building blocks for causal reasoning and predictive modeling. We demonstrate the efficacy of WIN by using it for unsupervised extraction of latent features for stock price prediction and obtain 2 orders lower prediction error compared to a similar causal graph based method. WIN discovered influencer links from seemingly unrelated words from topics like politics to finance. WIN also validated 67% of the causal evidence found manually in the text through a direct edge and the rest 33% through a path of length 2.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching

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Joint Part-of-Speech and Language ID Tagging for Code-Switched Data
Victor Soto | Julia Hirschberg

Code-switching is the fluent alternation between two or more languages in conversation between bilinguals. Large populations of speakers code-switch during communication, but little effort has been made to develop tools for code-switching, including part-of-speech taggers. In this paper, we propose an approach to POS tagging of code-switched English-Spanish data based on recurrent neural networks. We test our model on known monolingual benchmarks to demonstrate that our neural POS tagging model is on par with state-of-the-art methods. We next test our code-switched methods on the Miami Bangor corpus of English Spanish conversation, focusing on two types of experiments: POS tagging alone, for which we achieve 96.34% accuracy, and joint part-of-speech and language ID tagging, which achieves similar POS tagging accuracy (96.39%) and very high language ID accuracy (98.78%). Finally, we show that our proposed models outperform other state-of-the-art code-switched taggers.

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Phone Merging For Code-Switched Speech Recognition
Sunit Sivasankaran | Brij Mohan Lal Srivastava | Sunayana Sitaram | Kalika Bali | Monojit Choudhury

Speakers in multilingual communities often switch between or mix multiple languages in the same conversation. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of code-switched speech faces many challenges including the influence of phones of different languages on each other. This paper shows evidence that phone sharing between languages improves the Acoustic Model performance for Hindi-English code-switched speech. We compare baseline system built with separate phones for Hindi and English with systems where the phones were manually merged based on linguistic knowledge. Encouraged by the improved ASR performance after manually merging the phones, we further investigate multiple data-driven methods to identify phones to be merged across the languages. We show detailed analysis of automatic phone merging in this language pair and the impact it has on individual phone accuracies and WER. Though the best performance gain of 1.2% WER was observed with manually merged phones, we show experimentally that the manual phone merge is not optimal.

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Improving Neural Network Performance by Injecting Background Knowledge: Detecting Code-switching and Borrowing in Algerian texts
Wafia Adouane | Jean-Philippe Bernardy | Simon Dobnik

We explore the effect of injecting background knowledge to different deep neural network (DNN) configurations in order to mitigate the problem of the scarcity of annotated data when applying these models on datasets of low-resourced languages. The background knowledge is encoded in the form of lexicons and pre-trained sub-word embeddings. The DNN models are evaluated on the task of detecting code-switching and borrowing points in non-standardised user-generated Algerian texts. Overall results show that DNNs benefit from adding background knowledge. However, the gain varies between models and categories. The proposed DNN architectures are generic and could be applied to other low-resourced languages.

Code-Mixing (CM) is the phenomenon of alternating between two or more languages which is prevalent in bi- and multi-lingual communities. Most NLP applications today are still designed with the assumption of a single interaction language and are most likely to break given a CM utterance with multiple languages mixed at a morphological, phrase or sentence level. For example, popular commercial search engines do not yet fully understand the intents expressed in CM queries. As a first step towards fostering research which supports CM in NLP applications, we systematically crowd-sourced and curated an evaluation dataset for factoid question answering in three CM languages - Hinglish (Hindi+English), Tenglish (Telugu+English) and Tamlish (Tamil+English) which belong to two language families (Indo-Aryan and Dravidian). We share the details of our data collection process, techniques which were used to avoid inducing lexical bias amongst the crowd workers and other CM specific linguistic properties of the dataset. Our final dataset, which is available freely for research purposes, has 1,694 Hinglish, 2,848 Tamlish and 1,391 Tenglish factoid questions and their answers. We discuss the techniques used by the participants for the first edition of this ongoing challenge.

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Transliteration Better than Translation? Answering Code-mixed Questions over a Knowledge Base
Vishal Gupta | Manoj Chinnakotla | Manish Shrivastava

Humans can learn multiple languages. If they know a fact in one language, they can answer a question in another language they understand. They can also answer Code-mix (CM) questions: questions which contain both languages. This behavior is attributed to the unique learning ability of humans. Our task aims to study if machines can achieve this. We demonstrate how effectively a machine can answer CM questions. In this work, we adopt a two phase approach: candidate generation and candidate re-ranking to answer questions. We propose a Triplet-Siamese-Hybrid CNN (TSHCNN) to re-rank candidate answers. We show experiments on the SimpleQuestions dataset. Our network is trained only on English questions provided in this dataset and noisy Hindi translations of these questions and can answer English-Hindi CM questions effectively without the need of translation into English. Back-transliterated CM questions outperform their lexical and sentence level translated counterparts by 5% & 35% in accuracy respectively, highlighting the efficacy of our approach in a resource constrained setting.

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Language Identification and Analysis of Code-Switched Social Media Text
Deepthi Mave | Suraj Maharjan | Thamar Solorio

In this paper, we detail our work on comparing different word-level language identification systems for code-switched Hindi-English data and a standard Spanish-English dataset. In this regard, we build a new code-switched dataset for Hindi-English. To understand the code-switching patterns in these language pairs, we investigate different code-switching metrics. We find that the CRF model outperforms the neural network based models by a margin of 2-5 percentage points for Spanish-English and 3-5 percentage points for Hindi-English.

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Code-Switching Language Modeling using Syntax-Aware Multi-Task Learning
Genta Indra Winata | Andrea Madotto | Chien-Sheng Wu | Pascale Fung

Lack of text data has been the major issue on code-switching language modeling. In this paper, we introduce multi-task learning based language model which shares syntax representation of languages to leverage linguistic information and tackle the low resource data issue. Our model jointly learns both language modeling and Part-of-Speech tagging on code-switched utterances. In this way, the model is able to identify the location of code-switching points and improves the prediction of next word. Our approach outperforms standard LSTM based language model, with an improvement of 9.7% and 7.4% in perplexity on SEAME Phase I and Phase II dataset respectively.

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Predicting the presence of a Matrix Language in code-switching
Barbara Bullock | Wally Guzmán | Jacqueline Serigos | Vivek Sharath | Almeida Jacqueline Toribio

One language is often assumed to be dominant in code-switching but this assumption has not been empirically tested. We operationalize the matrix language (ML) at the level of the sentence, using three common definitions from linguistics. We test whether these converge and then model this convergence via a set of metrics that together quantify the nature of C-S. We conduct our experiment on four Spanish-English corpora. Our results demonstrate that our model can separate some corpora according to whether they have a dominant ML or not but that the corpora span a range of mixing types that cannot be sorted neatly into an insertional vs. alternational dichotomy.

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Automatic Detection of Code-switching Style from Acoustics
SaiKrishna Rallabandi | Sunayana Sitaram | Alan W Black

Multilingual speakers switch between languages in an non-trivial fashion displaying inter sentential, intra sentential, and congruent lexicalization based transitions. While monolingual ASR systems may be capable of recognizing a few words from a foreign language, they are usually not robust enough to handle these varied styles of code-switching. There is also a lack of large code-switched speech corpora capturing all these styles making it difficult to build code-switched speech recognition systems. We hypothesize that it may be useful for an ASR system to be able to first detect the switching style of a particular utterance from acoustics, and then use specialized language models or other adaptation techniques for decoding the speech. In this paper, we look at the first problem of detecting code-switching style from acoustics. We classify code-switched Spanish-English and Hindi-English corpora using two metrics and show that features extracted from acoustics alone can distinguish between different kinds of code-switching in these language pairs.

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Accommodation of Conversational Code-Choice
Anshul Bawa | Monojit Choudhury | Kalika Bali

Bilingual speakers often freely mix languages. However, in such bilingual conversations, are the language choices of the speakers coordinated? How much does one speaker’s choice of language affect other speakers? In this paper, we formulate code-choice as a linguistic style, and show that speakers are indeed sensitive to and accommodating of each other’s code-choice. We find that the saliency or markedness of a language in context directly affects the degree of accommodation observed. More importantly, we discover that accommodation of code-choices persists over several conversational turns. We also propose an alternative interpretation of conversational accommodation as a retrieval problem, and show that the differences in accommodation characteristics of code-choices are based on their markedness in context.

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Language Informed Modeling of Code-Switched Text
Khyathi Chandu | Thomas Manzini | Sumeet Singh | Alan W. Black

Code-switching (CS), the practice of alternating between two or more languages in conversations, is pervasive in most multi-lingual communities. CS texts have a complex interplay between languages and occur in informal contexts that make them harder to collect and construct NLP tools for. We approach this problem through Language Modeling (LM) on a new Hindi-English mixed corpus containing 59,189 unique sentences collected from blogging websites. We implement and discuss different Language Models derived from a multi-layered LSTM architecture. We hypothesize that encoding language information strengthens a language model by helping to learn code-switching points. We show that our highest performing model achieves a test perplexity of 19.52 on the CS corpus that we collected and processed. On this data we demonstrate that our performance is an improvement over AWD-LSTM LM (a recent state of the art on monolingual English).

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GHHT at CALCS 2018: Named Entity Recognition for Dialectal Arabic Using Neural Networks
Mohammed Attia | Younes Samih | Wolfgang Maier

This paper describes our system submission to the CALCS 2018 shared task on named entity recognition on code-switched data for the language variant pair of Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian dialectal Arabic. We build a a Deep Neural Network that combines word and character-based representations in convolutional and recurrent networks with a CRF layer. The model is augmented with stacked layers of enriched information such pre-trained embeddings, Brown clusters and named entity gazetteers. Our system is ranked second among those participating in the shared task achieving an FB1 average of 70.09%.

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Simple Features for Strong Performance on Named Entity Recognition in Code-Switched Twitter Data
Devanshu Jain | Maria Kustikova | Mayank Darbari | Rishabh Gupta | Stephen Mayhew

In this work, we address the problem of Named Entity Recognition (NER) in code-switched tweets as a part of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-switching (CALCS) at ACL’18. Code-switching is the phenomenon where a speaker switches between two languages or variants of the same language within or across utterances, known as intra-sentential or inter-sentential code-switching, respectively. Processing such data is challenging using state of the art methods since such technology is generally geared towards processing monolingual text. In this paper we explored ways to use language identification and translation to recognize named entities in such data, however, utilizing simple features (sans multi-lingual features) with Conditional Random Field (CRF) classifier achieved the best results. Our experiments were mainly aimed at the (ENG-SPA) English-Spanish dataset but we submitted a language-independent version of our system to the (MSA-EGY) Arabic-Egyptian dataset as well and achieved good results.

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Bilingual Character Representation for Efficiently Addressing Out-of-Vocabulary Words in Code-Switching Named Entity Recognition
Genta Indra Winata | Chien-Sheng Wu | Andrea Madotto | Pascale Fung

We propose an LSTM-based model with hierarchical architecture on named entity recognition from code-switching Twitter data. Our model uses bilingual character representation and transfer learning to address out-of-vocabulary words. In order to mitigate data noise, we propose to use token replacement and normalization. In the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching Shared Task, we achieved second place with 62.76% harmonic mean F1-score for English-Spanish language pair without using any gazetteer and knowledge-based information.

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Named Entity Recognition on Code-Switched Data Using Conditional Random Fields
Utpal Kumar Sikdar | Biswanath Barik | Björn Gambäck

Named Entity Recognition is an important information extraction task that identifies proper names in unstructured texts and classifies them into some pre-defined categories. Identification of named entities in code-mixed social media texts is a more difficult and challenging task as the contexts are short, ambiguous and often noisy. This work proposes a Conditional Random Fields based named entity recognition system to identify proper names in code-switched data and classify them into nine categories. The system ranked fifth among nine participant systems and achieved a 59.25% F1-score.

This paper describes the system for the Named Entity Recognition Shared Task of the Third Workshop on Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching (CALCS) submitted by the Bilingual Annotations Tasks (BATs) research group of the University of Texas. Our system uses several features to train a Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for classifying input words as Named Entities (NEs) using the Inside-Outside-Beginning (IOB) tagging scheme. We participated in the Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian Arabic (MSA-EGY) and English-Spanish (ENG-SPA) tasks, achieving weighted average F-scores of 65.62 and 54.16 respectively. We also describe the performance of a deep neural network (NN) trained on a subset of the CRF features, which did not surpass CRF performance.

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Tackling Code-Switched NER: Participation of CMU
Parvathy Geetha | Khyathi Chandu | Alan W Black

Named Entity Recognition plays a major role in several downstream applications in NLP. Though this task has been heavily studied in formal monolingual texts and also noisy texts like Twitter data, it is still an emerging task in code-switched (CS) content on social media. This paper describes our participation in the shared task of NER on code-switched data for Spanglish (Spanish + English) and Arabish (Arabic + English). In this paper we describe models that intuitively developed from the data for the shared task Named Entity Recognition on Code-switched Data. Owing to the sparse and non-linear relationships between words in Twitter data, we explored neural architectures that are capable of non-linearities fairly well. In specific, we trained character level models and word level models based on Bidirectional LSTMs (Bi-LSTMs) to perform sequential tagging. We train multiple models to identify nominal mentions and subsequently use this information to predict the labels of named entity in a sequence. Our best model is a character level model along with word level pre-trained multilingual embeddings that gave an F-score of 56.72 in Spanglish and a word level model that gave an F-score of 65.02 in Arabish on the test data.

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Multilingual Named Entity Recognition on Spanish-English Code-switched Tweets using Support Vector Machines
Daniel Claeser | Samantha Kent | Dennis Felske

This paper describes our system submission for the ACL 2018 shared task on named entity recognition (NER) in code-switched Twitter data. Our best result (F1 = 53.65) was obtained using a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with 14 features combined with rule-based post processing.

In the third shared task of the Computational Approaches to Linguistic Code-Switching (CALCS) workshop, we focus on Named Entity Recognition (NER) on code-switched social-media data. We divide the shared task into two competitions based on the English-Spanish (ENG-SPA) and Modern Standard Arabic-Egyptian (MSA-EGY) language pairs. We use Twitter data and 9 entity types to establish a new dataset for code-switched NER benchmarks. In addition to the CS phenomenon, the diversity of the entities and the social media challenges make the task considerably hard to process. As a result, the best scores of the competitions are 63.76% and 71.61% for ENG-SPA and MSA-EGY, respectively. We present the scores of 9 participants and discuss the most common challenges among submissions.

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IIT (BHU) Submission for the ACL Shared Task on Named Entity Recognition on Code-switched Data
Shashwat Trivedi | Harsh Rangwani | Anil Kumar Singh

This paper describes the best performing system for the shared task on Named Entity Recognition (NER) on code-switched data for the language pair Spanish-English (ENG-SPA). We introduce a gated neural architecture for the NER task. Our final model achieves an F1 score of 63.76%, outperforming the baseline by 10%.

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Code-Switched Named Entity Recognition with Embedding Attention
Changhan Wang | Kyunghyun Cho | Douwe Kiela

We describe our work for the CALCS 2018 shared task on named entity recognition on code-switched data. Our system ranked first place for MS Arabic-Egyptian named entity recognition and third place for English-Spanish.

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bib (full) Proceedings of Grand Challenge and Workshop on Human Multimodal Language (Challenge-HML)

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Getting the subtext without the text: Scalable multimodal sentiment classification from visual and acoustic modalities
Nathaniel Blanchard | Daniel Moreira | Aparna Bharati | Walter Scheirer

In the last decade, video blogs (vlogs) have become an extremely popular method through which people express sentiment. The ubiquitousness of these videos has increased the importance of multimodal fusion models, which incorporate video and audio features with traditional text features for automatic sentiment detection. Multimodal fusion offers a unique opportunity to build models that learn from the full depth of expression available to human viewers. In the detection of sentiment in these videos, acoustic and video features provide clarity to otherwise ambiguous transcripts. In this paper, we present a multimodal fusion model that exclusively uses high-level video and audio features to analyze spoken sentences for sentiment. We discard traditional transcription features in order to minimize human intervention and to maximize the deployability of our model on at-scale real-world data. We select high-level features for our model that have been successful in non-affect domains in order to test their generalizability in the sentiment detection domain. We train and test our model on the newly released CMU Multimodal Opinion Sentiment and Emotion Intensity (CMU-MOSEI) dataset, obtaining an F1 score of 0.8049 on the validation set and an F1 score of 0.6325 on the held-out challenge test set.

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Recognizing Emotions in Video Using Multimodal DNN Feature Fusion
Jennifer Williams | Steven Kleinegesse | Ramona Comanescu | Oana Radu

We present our system description of input-level multimodal fusion of audio, video, and text for recognition of emotions and their intensities for the 2018 First Grand Challenge on Computational Modeling of Human Multimodal Language. Our proposed approach is based on input-level feature fusion with sequence learning from Bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BLSTM) deep neural networks (DNNs). We show that our fusion approach outperforms unimodal predictors. Our system performs 6-way simultaneous classification and regression, allowing for overlapping emotion labels in a video segment. This leads to an overall binary accuracy of 90%, overall 4-class accuracy of 89.2% and an overall mean-absolute-error (MAE) of 0.12. Our work shows that an early fusion technique can effectively predict the presence of multi-label emotions as well as their coarse-grained intensities. The presented multimodal approach creates a simple and robust baseline on this new Grand Challenge dataset. Furthermore, we provide a detailed analysis of emotion intensity distributions as output from our DNN, as well as a related discussion concerning the inherent difficulty of this task.

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Multimodal Relational Tensor Network for Sentiment and Emotion Classification
Saurav Sahay | Shachi H Kumar | Rui Xia | Jonathan Huang | Lama Nachman

Understanding Affect from video segments has brought researchers from the language, audio and video domains together. Most of the current multimodal research in this area deals with various techniques to fuse the modalities, and mostly treat the segments of a video independently. Motivated by the work of (Zadeh et al., 2017) and (Poria et al., 2017), we present our architecture, Relational Tensor Network, where we use the inter-modal interactions within a segment (intra-segment) and also consider the sequence of segments in a video to model the inter-segment inter-modal interactions. We also generate rich representations of text and audio modalities by leveraging richer audio and linguistic context alongwith fusing fine-grained knowledge based polarity scores from text. We present the results of our model on CMU-MOSEI dataset and show that our model outperforms many baselines and state of the art methods for sentiment classification and emotion recognition.

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Convolutional Attention Networks for Multimodal Emotion Recognition from Speech and Text Data
Woo Yong Choi | Kyu Ye Song | Chan Woo Lee

Emotion recognition has become a popular topic of interest, especially in the field of human computer interaction. Previous works involve unimodal analysis of emotion, while recent efforts focus on multimodal emotion recognition from vision and speech. In this paper, we propose a new method of learning about the hidden representations between just speech and text data using convolutional attention networks. Compared to the shallow model which employs simple concatenation of feature vectors, the proposed attention model performs much better in classifying emotion from speech and text data contained in the CMU-MOSEI dataset.

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Sentiment Analysis using Imperfect Views from Spoken Language and Acoustic Modalities
Imran Sheikh | Sri Harsha Dumpala | Rupayan Chakraborty | Sunil Kumar Kopparapu

Multimodal sentiment classification in practical applications may have to rely on erroneous and imperfect views, namely (a) language transcription from a speech recognizer and (b) under-performing acoustic views. This work focuses on improving the representations of these views by performing a deep canonical correlation analysis with the representations of the better performing manual transcription view. Enhanced representations of the imperfect views can be obtained even in absence of the perfect views and give an improved performance during test conditions. Evaluations on the CMU-MOSI and CMU-MOSEI datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

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Polarity and Intensity: the Two Aspects of Sentiment Analysis
Leimin Tian | Catherine Lai | Johanna Moore

Current multimodal sentiment analysis frames sentiment score prediction as a general Machine Learning task. However, what the sentiment score actually represents has often been overlooked. As a measurement of opinions and affective states, a sentiment score generally consists of two aspects: polarity and intensity. We decompose sentiment scores into these two aspects and study how they are conveyed through individual modalities and combined multimodal models in a naturalistic monologue setting. In particular, we build unimodal and multimodal multi-task learning models with sentiment score prediction as the main task and polarity and/or intensity classification as the auxiliary tasks. Our experiments show that sentiment analysis benefits from multi-task learning, and individual modalities differ when conveying the polarity and intensity aspects of sentiment.

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ASR-based Features for Emotion Recognition: A Transfer Learning Approach
Noé Tits | Kevin El Haddad | Thierry Dutoit

During the last decade, the applications of signal processing have drastically improved with deep learning. However areas of affecting computing such as emotional speech synthesis or emotion recognition from spoken language remains challenging. In this paper, we investigate the use of a neural Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) as a feature extractor for emotion recognition. We show that these features outperform the eGeMAPS feature set to predict the valence and arousal emotional dimensions, which means that the audio-to-text mapping learned by the ASR system contains information related to the emotional dimensions in spontaneous speech. We also examine the relationship between first layers (closer to speech) and last layers (closer to text) of the ASR and valence/arousal.

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Seq2Seq2Sentiment: Multimodal Sequence to Sequence Models for Sentiment Analysis
Hai Pham | Thomas Manzini | Paul Pu Liang | Barnabás Poczós

Multimodal machine learning is a core research area spanning the language, visual and acoustic modalities. The central challenge in multimodal learning involves learning representations that can process and relate information from multiple modalities. In this paper, we propose two methods for unsupervised learning of joint multimodal representations using sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) methods: a Seq2Seq Modality Translation Model and a Hierarchical Seq2Seq Modality Translation Model. We also explore multiple different variations on the multimodal inputs and outputs of these seq2seq models. Our experiments on multimodal sentiment analysis using the CMU-MOSI dataset indicate that our methods learn informative multimodal representations that outperform the baselines and achieve improved performance on multimodal sentiment analysis, specifically in the Bimodal case where our model is able to improve F1 Score by twelve points. We also discuss future directions for multimodal Seq2Seq methods.

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DNN Multimodal Fusion Techniques for Predicting Video Sentiment
Jennifer Williams | Ramona Comanescu | Oana Radu | Leimin Tian

We present our work on sentiment prediction using the benchmark MOSI dataset from the CMU-MultimodalDataSDK. Previous work on multimodal sentiment analysis have been focused on input-level feature fusion or decision-level fusion for multimodal fusion. Here, we propose an intermediate-level feature fusion, which merges weights from each modality (audio, video, and text) during training with subsequent additional training. Moreover, we tested principle component analysis (PCA) for feature selection. We found that applying PCA increases unimodal performance, and multimodal fusion outperforms unimodal models. Our experiments show that our proposed intermediate-level feature fusion outperforms other fusion techniques, and it achieves the best performance with an overall binary accuracy of 74.0% on video+text modalities. Our work also improves feature selection for unimodal sentiment analysis, while proposing a novel and effective multimodal fusion architecture for this task.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP
Reza Haffari | Colin Cherry | George Foster | Shahram Khadivi | Bahar Salehi

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Character-level Supervision for Low-resource POS Tagging
Katharina Kann | Johannes Bjerva | Isabelle Augenstein | Barbara Plank | Anders Søgaard

Neural part-of-speech (POS) taggers are known to not perform well with little training data. As a step towards overcoming this problem, we present an architecture for learning more robust neural POS taggers by jointly training a hierarchical, recurrent model and a recurrent character-based sequence-to-sequence network supervised using an auxiliary objective. This way, we introduce stronger character-level supervision into the model, which enables better generalization to unseen words and provides regularization, making our encoding less prone to overfitting. We experiment with three auxiliary tasks: lemmatization, character-based word autoencoding, and character-based random string autoencoding. Experiments with minimal amounts of labeled data on 34 languages show that our new architecture outperforms a single-task baseline and, surprisingly, that, on average, raw text autoencoding can be as beneficial for low-resource POS tagging as using lemma information. Our neural POS tagger closes the gap to a state-of-the-art POS tagger (MarMoT) for low-resource scenarios by 43%, even outperforming it on languages with templatic morphology, e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, and Turkish, by some margin.

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Training a Neural Network in a Low-Resource Setting on Automatically Annotated Noisy Data
Michael A. Hedderich | Dietrich Klakow

Manually labeled corpora are expensive to create and often not available for low-resource languages or domains. Automatic labeling approaches are an alternative way to obtain labeled data in a quicker and cheaper way. However, these labels often contain more errors which can deteriorate a classifier’s performance when trained on this data. We propose a noise layer that is added to a neural network architecture. This allows modeling the noise and train on a combination of clean and noisy data. We show that in a low-resource NER task we can improve performance by up to 35% by using additional, noisy data and handling the noise.

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Multi-task learning for historical text normalization: Size matters
Marcel Bollmann | Anders Søgaard | Joachim Bingel

Historical text normalization suffers from small datasets that exhibit high variance, and previous work has shown that multi-task learning can be used to leverage data from related problems in order to obtain more robust models. Previous work has been limited to datasets from a specific language and a specific historical period, and it is not clear whether results generalize. It therefore remains an open problem, when historical text normalization benefits from multi-task learning. We explore the benefits of multi-task learning across 10 different datasets, representing different languages and periods. Our main finding—contrary to what has been observed for other NLP tasks—is that multi-task learning mainly works when target task data is very scarce.

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Compositional Language Modeling for Icon-Based Augmentative and Alternative Communication
Shiran Dudy | Steven Bedrick

Icon-based communication systems are widely used in the field of Augmentative and Alternative Communication. Typically, icon-based systems have lagged behind word- and character-based systems in terms of predictive typing functionality, due to the challenges inherent to training icon-based language models. We propose a method for synthesizing training data for use in icon-based language models, and explore two different modeling strategies. We propose a method to generate language models for corpus-less symbol-set.

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Multimodal Neural Machine Translation for Low-resource Language Pairs using Synthetic Data
Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Mohammed Hasanuzzaman | Qun Liu

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of training a multimodal neural machine translation (MNMT) system with image features for a low-resource language pair, Hindi and English, using synthetic data. A three-way parallel corpus which contains bilingual texts and corresponding images is required to train a MNMT system with image features. However, such a corpus is not available for low resource language pairs. To address this, we developed both a synthetic training dataset and a manually curated development/test dataset for Hindi based on an existing English-image parallel corpus. We used these datasets to build our image description translation system by adopting state-of-the-art MNMT models. Our results show that it is possible to train a MNMT system for low-resource language pairs through the use of synthetic data and that such a system can benefit from image features.

Most Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) approaches are supervised methods which require a significant amount of annotated corpus, and the annotation requires linguistic expertise. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Task Active Learning framework for Semantic Role Labeling with Entity Recognition (ER) as the auxiliary task to alleviate the need for extensive data and use additional information from ER to help SRL. We evaluate our approach on Indonesian conversational dataset. Our experiments show that multi-task active learning can outperform single-task active learning method and standard multi-task learning. According to our results, active learning is more efficient by using 12% less of training data compared to passive learning in both single-task and multi-task setting. We also introduce a new dataset for SRL in Indonesian conversational domain to encourage further research in this area.

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Domain Adapted Word Embeddings for Improved Sentiment Classification
Prathusha Kameswara Sarma | Yingyu Liang | Bill Sethares

Generic word embeddings are trained on large-scale generic corpora; Domain Specific (DS) word embeddings are trained only on data from a domain of interest. This paper proposes a method to combine the breadth of generic embeddings with the specificity of domain specific embeddings. The resulting embeddings, called Domain Adapted (DA) word embeddings, are formed by first aligning corresponding word vectors using Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) or the related nonlinear Kernel CCA (KCCA) and then combining them via convex optimization. Results from evaluation on sentiment classification tasks show that the DA embeddings substantially outperform both generic, DS embeddings when used as input features to standard or state-of-the-art sentence encoding algorithms for classification.

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Investigating Effective Parameters for Fine-tuning of Word Embeddings Using Only a Small Corpus
Kanako Komiya | Hiroyuki Shinnou

Fine-tuning is a popular method to achieve better performance when only a small target corpus is available. However, it requires tuning of a number of metaparameters and thus it might carry risk of adverse effect when inappropriate metaparameters are used. Therefore, we investigate effective parameters for fine-tuning when only a small target corpus is available. In the current study, we target at improving Japanese word embeddings created from a huge corpus. First, we demonstrate that even the word embeddings created from the huge corpus are affected by domain shift. After that, we investigate effective parameters for fine-tuning of the word embeddings using a small target corpus. We used perplexity of a language model obtained from a Long Short-Term Memory network to assess the word embeddings input into the network. The experiments revealed that fine-tuning sometimes give adverse effect when only a small target corpus is used and batch size is the most important parameter for fine-tuning. In addition, we confirmed that effect of fine-tuning is higher when size of a target corpus was larger.

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Semi-Supervised Learning with Auxiliary Evaluation Component for Large Scale e-Commerce Text Classification
Mingkuan Liu | Musen Wen | Selcuk Kopru | Xianjing Liu | Alan Lu

The lack of high-quality labeled training data has been one of the critical challenges facing many industrial machine learning tasks. To tackle this challenge, in this paper, we propose a semi-supervised learning method to utilize unlabeled data and user feedback signals to improve the performance of ML models. The method employs a primary model Main and an auxiliary evaluation model Eval, where Main and Eval models are trained iteratively by automatically generating labeled data from unlabeled data and/or users’ feedback signals. The proposed approach is applied to different text classification tasks. We report results on both the publicly available Yahoo! Answers dataset and our e-commerce product classification dataset. The experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the classification error rate by 4% and up to 15% across various experimental setups and datasets. A detailed comparison with other semi-supervised learning approaches is also presented later in the paper. The results from various text classification tasks demonstrate that our method outperforms those developed in previous related studies.

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Low-rank passthrough neural networks
Antonio Valerio Miceli Barone

Various common deep learning architectures, such as LSTMs, GRUs, Resnets and Highway Networks, employ state passthrough connections that support training with high feed-forward depth or recurrence over many time steps. These “Passthrough Networks” architectures also enable the decoupling of the network state size from the number of parameters of the network, a possibility has been studied by Sak et al. (2014) with their low-rank parametrization of the LSTM. In this work we extend this line of research, proposing effective, low-rank and low-rank plus diagonal matrix parametrizations for Passthrough Networks which exploit this decoupling property, reducing the data complexity and memory requirements of the network while preserving its memory capacity. This is particularly beneficial in low-resource settings as it supports expressive models with a compact parametrization less susceptible to overfitting. We present competitive experimental results on several tasks, including language modeling and a near state of the art result on sequential randomly-permuted MNIST classification, a hard task on natural data.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation
Simon Mille | Anja Belz | Bernd Bohnet | Emily Pitler | Leo Wanner

We report results from the SR’18 Shared Task, a new multilingual surface realisation task organised as part of the ACL’18 Workshop on Multilingual Surface Realisation. As in its English-only predecessor task SR’11, the shared task comprised two tracks with different levels of complexity: (a) a shallow track where the inputs were full UD structures with word order information removed and tokens lemmatised; and (b) a deep track where additionally, functional words and morphological information were removed. The shallow track was offered in ten, and the deep track in three languages. Systems were evaluated (a) automatically, using a range of intrinsic metrics, and (b) by human judges in terms of readability and meaning similarity. This report presents the evaluation results, along with descriptions of the SR’18 tracks, data and evaluation methods. For full descriptions of the participating systems, please see the separate system reports elsewhere in this volume.

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BinLin: A Simple Method of Dependency Tree Linearization
Yevgeniy Puzikov | Iryna Gurevych

Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 is a workshop on generating sentences from lemmatized sets of dependency triples. This paper describes the results of our participation in the challenge. We develop a data-driven pipeline system which first orders the lemmas and then conjugates the words to finish the surface realization process. Our contribution is a novel sequential method of ordering lemmas, which, despite its simplicity, achieves promising results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, describe its limitations and outline ways to improve it.

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IIT (BHU) Varanasi at MSR-SRST 2018: A Language Model Based Approach for Natural Language Generation
Shreyansh Singh | Ayush Sharma | Avi Chawla | A.K. Singh

This paper describes our submission system for the Shallow Track of Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 (SRST’18). The task was to convert genuine UD structures, from which word order information had been removed and the tokens had been lemmatized, into their correct sentential form. We divide the problem statement into two parts, word reinflection and correct word order prediction. For the first sub-problem, we use a Long Short Term Memory based Encoder-Decoder approach. For the second sub-problem, we present a Language Model (LM) based approach. We apply two different sub-approaches in the LM Based approach and the combined result of these two approaches is considered as the final output of the system.

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Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 (SR18): The Tilburg University Approach
Thiago Castro Ferreira | Sander Wubben | Emiel Krahmer

This study describes the approach developed by the Tilburg University team to the shallow task of the Multilingual Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 (SR18). Based on (Castro Ferreira et al., 2017), the approach works by first preprocessing an input dependency tree into an ordered linearized string, which is then realized using a statistical machine translation model. Our approach shows promising results, with BLEU scores above 50 for 5 different languages (English, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish) and above 35 for the Dutch language.

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The OSU Realizer for SRST ‘18: Neural Sequence-to-Sequence Inflection and Incremental Locality-Based Linearization
David King | Michael White

Surface realization is a nontrivial task as it involves taking structured data and producing grammatically and semantically correct utterances. Many competing grammar-based and statistical models for realization still struggle with relatively simple sentences. For our submission to the 2018 Surface Realization Shared Task, we tackle the shallow task by first generating inflected wordforms with a neural sequence-to-sequence model before incrementally linearizing them. For linearization, we use a global linear model trained using early update that makes use of features that take into account the dependency structure and dependency locality. Using this pipeline sufficed to produce surprisingly strong results in the shared task. In future work, we intend to pursue joint approaches to linearization and morphological inflection and incorporating a neural language model into the linearization choices.

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Generating High-Quality Surface Realizations Using Data Augmentation and Factored Sequence Models
Henry Elder | Chris Hokamp

This work presents state of the art results in reconstruction of surface realizations from obfuscated text. We identify the lack of sufficient training data as the major obstacle to training high-performing models, and solve this issue by generating large amounts of synthetic training data. We also propose preprocessing techniques which make the structure contained in the input features more accessible to sequence models. Our models were ranked first on all evaluation metrics in the English portion of the 2018 Surface Realization shared task.

In this paper we describe our system and experimental results on the development set of the Surface Realisation Shared Task. Our system is an entry for the Shallow-Task, with two different models based on deep-learning implementations for building the sentence combined with a rule-based morphology component.

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NILC-SWORNEMO at the Surface Realization Shared Task: Exploring Syntax-Based Word Ordering using Neural Models
Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo | Thiago Pardo

This paper describes the submission by the NILC Computational Linguistics research group of the University of São Paulo/Brazil to the Track 1 of the Surface Realization Shared Task (SRST Track 1). We present a neural-based method that works at the syntactic level to order the words (which we refer by NILC-SWORNEMO, standing for “Syntax-based Word ORdering using NEural MOdels”). Additionally, we apply a bottom-up approach to build the sentence and, using language-specific lexicons, we produce the proper word form of each lemma in the sentence. The results obtained by our method outperformed the average of the results for English, Portuguese and Spanish in the track.

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The DipInfo-UniTo system for SRST 2018
Valerio Basile | Alessandro Mazzei

This paper describes the system developed by the DipInfo-UniTo team to participate to the shallow track of the Surface Realization Shared Task 2018. The system employs two separate neural networks with different architectures to predict the word ordering and the morphological inflection independently from each other. The UniTO realizer is language independent, and its simple architecture allowed it to be scored in the central part of the final ranking of the shared task.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Abusive Language Online (ALW2)

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Neural Character-based Composition Models for Abuse Detection
Pushkar Mishra | Helen Yannakoudakis | Ekaterina Shutova

The advent of social media in recent years has fed into some highly undesirable phenomena such as proliferation of offensive language, hate speech, sexist remarks, etc. on the Internet. In light of this, there have been several efforts to automate the detection and moderation of such abusive content. However, deliberate obfuscation of words by users to evade detection poses a serious challenge to the effectiveness of these efforts. The current state of the art approaches to abusive language detection, based on recurrent neural networks, do not explicitly address this problem and resort to a generic OOV (out of vocabulary) embedding for unseen words. However, in using a single embedding for all unseen words we lose the ability to distinguish between obfuscated and non-obfuscated or rare words. In this paper, we address this problem by designing a model that can compose embeddings for unseen words. We experimentally demonstrate that our approach significantly advances the current state of the art in abuse detection on datasets from two different domains, namely Twitter and Wikipedia talk page.

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Hate Speech Dataset from a White Supremacy Forum
Ona de Gibert | Naiara Perez | Aitor García-Pablos | Montse Cuadros

Hate speech is commonly defined as any communication that disparages a target group of people based on some characteristic such as race, colour, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or other characteristic. Due to the massive rise of user-generated web content on social media, the amount of hate speech is also steadily increasing. Over the past years, interest in online hate speech detection and, particularly, the automation of this task has continuously grown, along with the societal impact of the phenomenon. This paper describes a hate speech dataset composed of thousands of sentences manually labelled as containing hate speech or not. The sentences have been extracted from Stormfront, a white supremacist forum. A custom annotation tool has been developed to carry out the manual labelling task which, among other things, allows the annotators to choose whether to read the context of a sentence before labelling it. The paper also provides a thoughtful qualitative and quantitative study of the resulting dataset and several baseline experiments with different classification models. The dataset is publicly available.

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A Review of Standard Text Classification Practices for Multi-label Toxicity Identification of Online Content
Isuru Gunasekara | Isar Nejadgholi

Language toxicity identification presents a gray area in the ethical debate surrounding freedom of speech and censorship. Today’s social media landscape is littered with unfiltered content that can be anywhere from slightly abusive to hate inducing. In response, we focused on training a multi-label classifier to detect both the type and level of toxicity in online content. This content is typically colloquial and conversational in style. Its classification therefore requires huge amounts of annotated data due to its variability and inconsistency. We compare standard methods of text classification in this task. A conventional one-vs-rest SVM classifier with character and word level frequency-based representation of text reaches 0.9763 ROC AUC score. We demonstrated that leveraging more advanced technologies such as word embeddings, recurrent neural networks, attention mechanism, stacking of classifiers and semi-supervised training can improve the ROC AUC score of classification to 0.9862. We suggest that in order to choose the right model one has to consider the accuracy of models as well as inference complexity based on the application.

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Predictive Embeddings for Hate Speech Detection on Twitter
Rohan Kshirsagar | Tyrus Cukuvac | Kathy McKeown | Susan McGregor

We present a neural-network based approach to classifying online hate speech in general, as well as racist and sexist speech in particular. Using pre-trained word embeddings and max/mean pooling from simple, fully-connected transformations of these embeddings, we are able to predict the occurrence of hate speech on three commonly used publicly available datasets. Our models match or outperform state of the art F1 performance on all three datasets using significantly fewer parameters and minimal feature preprocessing compared to previous methods.

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Challenges for Toxic Comment Classification: An In-Depth Error Analysis
Betty van Aken | Julian Risch | Ralf Krestel | Alexander Löser

Toxic comment classification has become an active research field with many recently proposed approaches. However, while these approaches address some of the task’s challenges others still remain unsolved and directions for further research are needed. To this end, we compare different deep learning and shallow approaches on a new, large comment dataset and propose an ensemble that outperforms all individual models. Further, we validate our findings on a second dataset. The results of the ensemble enable us to perform an extensive error analysis, which reveals open challenges for state-of-the-art methods and directions towards pending future research. These challenges include missing paradigmatic context and inconsistent dataset labels.

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Aggression Detection on Social Media Text Using Deep Neural Networks
Vinay Singh | Aman Varshney | Syed Sarfaraz Akhtar | Deepanshu Vijay | Manish Shrivastava

In the past few years, bully and aggressive posts on social media have grown significantly, causing serious consequences for victims/users of all demographics. Majority of the work in this field has been done for English only. In this paper, we introduce a deep learning based classification system for Facebook posts and comments of Hindi-English Code-Mixed text to detect the aggressive behaviour of/towards users. Our work focuses on text from users majorly in the Indian Subcontinent. The dataset that we used for our models is provided by TRAC-1in their shared task. Our classification model assigns each Facebook post/comment to one of the three predefined categories: “Overtly Aggressive”, “Covertly Aggressive” and “Non-Aggressive”. We experimented with 6 classification models and our CNN model on a 10 K-fold cross-validation gave the best result with the prediction accuracy of 73.2%.

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Creating a WhatsApp Dataset to Study Pre-teen Cyberbullying
Rachele Sprugnoli | Stefano Menini | Sara Tonelli | Filippo Oncini | Enrico Piras

Although WhatsApp is used by teenagers as one major channel of cyberbullying, such interactions remain invisible due to the app privacy policies that do not allow ex-post data collection. Indeed, most of the information on these phenomena rely on surveys regarding self-reported data. In order to overcome this limitation, we describe in this paper the activities that led to the creation of a WhatsApp dataset to study cyberbullying among Italian students aged 12-13. We present not only the collected chats with annotations about user role and type of offense, but also the living lab created in a collaboration between researchers and schools to monitor and analyse cyberbullying. Finally, we discuss some open issues, dealing with ethical, operational and epistemic aspects.

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Improving Moderation of Online Discussions via Interpretable Neural Models
Andrej Švec | Matúš Pikuliak | Marián Šimko | Mária Bieliková

Growing amount of comments make online discussions difficult to moderate by human moderators only. Antisocial behavior is a common occurrence that often discourages other users from participating in discussion. We propose a neural network based method that partially automates the moderation process. It consists of two steps. First, we detect inappropriate comments for moderators to see. Second, we highlight inappropriate parts within these comments to make the moderation faster. We evaluated our method on data from a major Slovak news discussion platform.

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Aggressive language in an online hacking forum
Andrew Caines | Sergio Pastrana | Alice Hutchings | Paula Buttery

We probe the heterogeneity in levels of abusive language in different sections of the Internet, using an annotated corpus of Wikipedia page edit comments to train a binary classifier for abuse detection. Our test data come from the CrimeBB Corpus of hacking-related forum posts and we find that (a) forum interactions are rarely abusive, (b) the abusive language which does exist tends to be relatively mild compared to that found in the Wikipedia comments domain, and tends to involve aggressive posturing rather than hate speech or threats of violence. We observe that the purpose of conversations in online forums tend to be more constructive and informative than those in Wikipedia page edit comments which are geared more towards adversarial interactions, and that this may explain the lower levels of abuse found in our forum data than in Wikipedia comments. Further work remains to be done to compare these results with other inter-domain classification experiments, and to understand the impact of aggressive language in forum conversations.

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The Effects of User Features on Twitter Hate Speech Detection
Elise Fehn Unsvåg | Björn Gambäck

The paper investigates the potential effects user features have on hate speech classification. A quantitative analysis of Twitter data was conducted to better understand user characteristics, but no correlations were found between hateful text and the characteristics of the users who had posted it. However, experiments with a hate speech classifier based on datasets from three different languages showed that combining certain user features with textual features gave slight improvements of classification performance. While the incorporation of user features resulted in varying impact on performance for the different datasets used, user network-related features provided the most consistent improvements.

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Interpreting Neural Network Hate Speech Classifiers
Cindy Wang

Deep neural networks have been applied to hate speech detection with apparent success, but they have limited practical applicability without transparency into the predictions they make. In this paper, we perform several experiments to visualize and understand a state-of-the-art neural network classifier for hate speech (Zhang et al., 2018). We adapt techniques from computer vision to visualize sensitive regions of the input stimuli and identify the features learned by individual neurons. We also introduce a method to discover the keywords that are most predictive of hate speech. Our analyses explain the aspects of neural networks that work well and point out areas for further improvement.

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Determining Code Words in Euphemistic Hate Speech Using Word Embedding Networks
Rijul Magu | Jiebo Luo

While analysis of online explicit abusive language detection has lately seen an ever-increasing focus, implicit abuse detection remains a largely unexplored space. We carry out a study on a subcategory of implicit hate: euphemistic hate speech. We propose a method to assist in identifying unknown euphemisms (or code words) given a set of hateful tweets containing a known code word. Our approach leverages word embeddings and network analysis (through centrality measures and community detection) in a manner that can be generalized to identify euphemisms across contexts- not just hate speech.

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Comparative Studies of Detecting Abusive Language on Twitter
Younghun Lee | Seunghyun Yoon | Kyomin Jung

The context-dependent nature of online aggression makes annotating large collections of data extremely difficult. Previously studied datasets in abusive language detection have been insufficient in size to efficiently train deep learning models. Recently, Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, a dataset much greater in size and reliability, has been released. However, this dataset has not been comprehensively studied to its potential. In this paper, we conduct the first comparative study of various learning models on Hate and Abusive Speech on Twitter, and discuss the possibility of using additional features and context data for improvements. Experimental results show that bidirectional GRU networks trained on word-level features, with Latent Topic Clustering modules, is the most accurate model scoring 0.805 F1.

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Boosting Text Classification Performance on Sexist Tweets by Text Augmentation and Text Generation Using a Combination of Knowledge Graphs
Sima Sharifirad | Borna Jafarpour | Stan Matwin

Text classification models have been heavily utilized for a slew of interesting natural language processing problems. Like any other machine learning model, these classifiers are very dependent on the size and quality of the training dataset. Insufficient and imbalanced datasets will lead to poor performance. An interesting solution to poor datasets is to take advantage of the world knowledge in the form of knowledge graphs to improve our training data. In this paper, we use ConceptNet and Wikidata to improve sexist tweet classification by two methods (1) text augmentation and (2) text generation. In our text generation approach, we generate new tweets by replacing words using data acquired from ConceptNet relations in order to increase the size of our training set, this method is very helpful with frustratingly small datasets, preserves the label and increases diversity. In our text augmentation approach, the number of tweets remains the same but their words are augmented (concatenation) with words extracted from their ConceptNet relations and their description extracted from Wikidata. In our text augmentation approach, the number of tweets in each class remains the same but the range of each tweet increases. Our experiments show that our approach improves sexist tweet classification significantly in our entire machine learning models. Our approach can be readily applied to any other small dataset size like hate speech or abusive language and text classification problem using any machine learning model.

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Learning Representations for Detecting Abusive Language
Magnus Sahlgren | Tim Isbister | Fredrik Olsson

This paper discusses the question whether it is possible to learn a generic representation that is useful for detecting various types of abusive language. The approach is inspired by recent advances in transfer learning and word embeddings, and we learn representations from two different datasets containing various degrees of abusive language. We compare the learned representation with two standard approaches; one based on lexica, and one based on data-specific n-grams. Our experiments show that learned representations do contain useful information that can be used to improve detection performance when training data is limited.

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Datasets of Slovene and Croatian Moderated News Comments
Nikola Ljubešić | Tomaž Erjavec | Darja Fišer

This paper presents two large newly constructed datasets of moderated news comments from two highly popular online news portals in the respective countries: the Slovene RTV MCC and the Croatian 24sata. The datasets are analyzed by performing manual annotation of the types of the content which have been deleted by moderators and by investigating deletion trends among users and threads. Next, initial experiments on automatically detecting the deleted content in the datasets are presented. Both datasets are published in encrypted form, to enable others to perform experiments on detecting content to be deleted without revealing potentially inappropriate content. Finally, the baseline classification models trained on the non-encrypted datasets are disseminated as well to enable real-world use.

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Cross-Domain Detection of Abusive Language Online
Mladen Karan | Jan Šnajder

We investigate to what extent the models trained to detect general abusive language generalize between different datasets labeled with different abusive language types. To this end, we compare the cross-domain performance of simple classification models on nine different datasets, finding that the models fail to generalize to out-domain datasets and that having at least some in-domain data is important. We also show that using the frustratingly simple domain adaptation (Daume III, 2007) in most cases improves the results over in-domain training, especially when used to augment a smaller dataset with a larger one.

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Did you offend me? Classification of Offensive Tweets in Hinglish Language
Puneet Mathur | Ramit Sawhney | Meghna Ayyar | Rajiv Shah

The use of code-switched languages (e.g., Hinglish, which is derived by the blending of Hindi with the English language) is getting much popular on Twitter due to their ease of communication in native languages. However, spelling variations and absence of grammar rules introduce ambiguity and make it difficult to understand the text automatically. This paper presents the Multi-Input Multi-Channel Transfer Learning based model (MIMCT) to detect offensive (hate speech or abusive) Hinglish tweets from the proposed Hinglish Offensive Tweet (HOT) dataset using transfer learning coupled with multiple feature inputs. Specifically, it takes multiple primary word embedding along with secondary extracted features as inputs to train a multi-channel CNN-LSTM architecture that has been pre-trained on English tweets through transfer learning. The proposed MIMCT model outperforms the baseline supervised classification models, transfer learning based CNN and LSTM models to establish itself as the state of the art in the unexplored domain of Hinglish offensive text classification.

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Decipherment for Adversarial Offensive Language Detection
Zhelun Wu | Nishant Kambhatla | Anoop Sarkar

Automated filters are commonly used by online services to stop users from sending age-inappropriate, bullying messages, or asking others to expose personal information. Previous work has focused on rules or classifiers to detect and filter offensive messages, but these are vulnerable to cleverly disguised plaintext and unseen expressions especially in an adversarial setting where the users can repeatedly try to bypass the filter. In this paper, we model the disguised messages as if they are produced by encrypting the original message using an invented cipher. We apply automatic decipherment techniques to decode the disguised malicious text, which can be then filtered using rules or classifiers. We provide experimental results on three different datasets and show that decipherment is an effective tool for this task.

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The Linguistic Ideologies of Deep Abusive Language Classification
Michael Castelle

This paper brings together theories from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to critically evaluate the so-called “language ideologies” — the set of beliefs and ways of speaking about language—in the practices of abusive language classification in modern machine learning-based NLP. This argument is made at both a conceptual and empirical level, as we review approaches to abusive language from different fields, and use two neural network methods to analyze three datasets developed for abusive language classification tasks (drawn from Wikipedia, Facebook, and StackOverflow). By evaluating and comparing these results, we argue for the importance of incorporating theories of pragmatics and metapragmatics into both the design of classification tasks as well as in ML architectures.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)

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Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 1: Research Track)
Colin Cherry | Graham Neubig

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Keynote: Unveiling the Linguistic Weaknesses of Neural MT
Arianna Bisazza

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Document-Level Information as Side Constraints for Improved Neural Patent Translation
Laura Jehl | Stefan Riezler

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Fluency Over Adequacy: A Pilot Study in Measuring User Trust in Imperfect MT
Marianna Martindale | Marine Carpuat

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Combining Quality Estimation and Automatic Post-editing to Enhance Machine Translation output
Rajen Chatterjee | Matteo Negri | Marco Turchi | Frédéric Blain | Lucia Specia

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Neural Morphological Tagging of Lemma Sequences for Machine Translation
Costanza Conforti | Matthias Huck | Alexander Fraser

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Context Models for OOV Word Translation in Low-Resource Languages
Angli Liu | Katrin Kirchhoff

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How Robust Are Character-Based Word Embeddings in Tagging and MT Against Wrod Scramlbing or Randdm Nouse?
Georg Heigold | Stalin Varanasi | Günter Neumann | Josef van Genabith

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Balancing Translation Quality and Sentiment Preservation (Non-archival Extended Abstract)
Pintu Lohar | Haithem Afli | Andy Way

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Register-sensitive Translation: a Case Study of Mandarin and Cantonese (Non-archival Extended Abstract)
Tak-sum Wong | John Lee

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An Evaluation of Two Vocabulary Reduction Methods for Neural Machine Translation
Duygu Ataman | Marcello Federico

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A Smorgasbord of Features to Combine Phrase-Based and Neural Machine Translation
Benjamin Marie | Atsushi Fujita

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Exploring Word Sense Disambiguation Abilities of Neural Machine Translation Systems (Non-archival Extended Abstract)
Rebecca Marvin | Philipp Koehn

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Improving Low Resource Machine Translation using Morphological Glosses (Non-archival Extended Abstract)
Steven Shearing | Christo Kirov | Huda Khayrallah | David Yarowsky

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A Dataset and Reranking Method for Multimodal MT of User-Generated Image Captions
Shigehiko Schamoni | Julian Hitschler | Stefan Riezler

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Simultaneous Translation using Optimized Segmentation
Maryam Siahbani | Hassan Shavarani | Ashkan Alinejad | Anoop Sarkar

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Why not be Versatile? Applications of the SGNMT Decoder for Machine Translation
Felix Stahlberg | Danielle Saunders | Gonzalo Iglesias | Bill Byrne

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: User Track)

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Proceedings of the 13th Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (Volume 2: User Track)
Janice Campbell | Alex Yanishevsky | Jennifer Doyon | Doug Jones

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Keynote: Machine Translation Beyond the Sentence
Macduff Hughes

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Keynote: Setting up a Machine Translation Program for IARPA
Carl Rubino

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Keynote: Use more Machine Translation and Keep Your Customers Happy
Glen Poor

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Technology Showcase and Presentations
Jennifer DeCamp

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Augmented Translation: A New Approach to Combining Human and Machine Capabilities
Arle Lommel

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Training, feedback and productivity measurement with NMT and Adaptive MT
Jean-Luc Saillard

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The Collision of Quality and Technology with Reality
Don DePalma

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Same-language machine translation for local flavours/flavors
Gema Ramírez-Sánchez | Janice Campbell

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Thinking of Going Neural? Factors Honda R&D Americas is Considering before Making the Switch
Phil Soldini

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Developing a Neural Machine Translation Service for the 2017-2018 European Union Presidency
Mārcis Pinnis | Rihards Kalnins

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Neural Won! Now What?
Alex Yanishevsky

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MT for L10n: How we build and evaluate MT systems at eBay
Jose Sánchez

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VMware MT Tiered Model
Lynn Ma

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Turning NMT Research into Commercial Products
Dragos Munteanu | Adrià Gispert

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Beyond Quality, Considerations for an MT solution
Quinn Lam

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Towards Less Post-Editing
Bill Lafferty

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The Impact of Advances in Neural and Statistical MT on the Translation Workforce
Jennifer DeCamp

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PEMT for the Public Sector - Evolution of a Solution
Konstantine Boukhvalov | Sandy Hogg

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Challenges in Speech Recognition and Translation of High-Value Low-Density Polysynthetic Languages
Judith Klavans | John Morgan | Stephen LaRocca | Jeffrey Micher | Clare Voss

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Evaluating Automatic Speech Recognition in Translation
Evelyne Tzoukermann | Corey Miller

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Portable Speech-to-Speech Translation on an Android Smartphone: The MFLTS System
Ralf Meermeier | Sean Colbath | Martha Lillie

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Tutorial: De-mystifying Neural MT
Dragos Munteanu | Ling Tsou

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Tutorial: MQM-DQF: A Good Marriage (Translation Quality for the 21st Century)
Arle Lommel | Alan Melby

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Tutorial: Corpora Quality Management for MT - Practices and Roles
Silvio Picinini | Pete Smith | Nicola Ueffing

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Argument Mining

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Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Argument Mining
Noam Slonim | Ranit Aharonov

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Argumentative Link Prediction using Residual Networks and Multi-Objective Learning
Andrea Galassi | Marco Lippi | Paolo Torroni

We explore the use of residual networks for argumentation mining, with an emphasis on link prediction. The method we propose makes no assumptions on document or argument structure. We evaluate it on a challenging dataset consisting of user-generated comments collected from an online platform. Results show that our model outperforms an equivalent deep network and offers results comparable with state-of-the-art methods that rely on domain knowledge.

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End-to-End Argument Mining for Discussion Threads Based on Parallel Constrained Pointer Architecture
Gaku Morio | Katsuhide Fujita

Argument Mining (AM) is a relatively recent discipline, which concentrates on extracting claims or premises from discourses, and inferring their structures. However, many existing works do not consider micro-level AM studies on discussion threads sufficiently. In this paper, we tackle AM for discussion threads. Our main contributions are follows: (1) A novel combination scheme focusing on micro-level inner- and inter- post schemes for a discussion thread. (2) Annotation of large-scale civic discussion threads with the scheme. (3) Parallel constrained pointer architecture (PCPA), a novel end-to-end technique to discriminate sentence types, inner-post relations, and inter-post interactions simultaneously. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed model shows better accuracy in terms of relations extraction, in comparison to existing state-of-the-art models.

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ArguminSci: A Tool for Analyzing Argumentation and Rhetorical Aspects in Scientific Writing
Anne Lauscher | Goran Glavaš | Kai Eckert

Argumentation is arguably one of the central features of scientific language. We present ArguminSci, an easy-to-use tool that analyzes argumentation and other rhetorical aspects of scientific writing, which we collectively dub scitorics. The main aspect we focus on is the fine-grained argumentative analysis of scientific text through identification of argument components. The functionality of ArguminSci is accessible via three interfaces: as a command line tool, via a RESTful application programming interface, and as a web application.

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Evidence Type Classification in Randomized Controlled Trials
Tobias Mayer | Elena Cabrio | Serena Villata

Randomized Controlled Trials (RCT) are a common type of experimental studies in the medical domain for evidence-based decision making. The ability to automatically extract the arguments proposed therein can be of valuable support for clinicians and practitioners in their daily evidence-based decision making activities. Given the peculiarity of the medical domain and the required level of detail, standard approaches to argument component detection in argument(ation) mining are not fine-grained enough to support such activities. In this paper, we introduce a new sub-task of the argument component identification task: evidence type classification. To address it, we propose a supervised approach and we test it on a set of RCT abstracts on different medical topics.

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Predicting the Usefulness of Amazon Reviews Using Off-The-Shelf Argumentation Mining
Marco Passon | Marco Lippi | Giuseppe Serra | Carlo Tasso

Internet users generate content at unprecedented rates. Building intelligent systems capable of discriminating useful content within this ocean of information is thus becoming a urgent need. In this paper, we aim to predict the usefulness of Amazon reviews, and to do this we exploit features coming from an off-the-shelf argumentation mining system. We argue that the usefulness of a review, in fact, is strictly related to its argumentative content, whereas the use of an already trained system avoids the costly need of relabeling a novel dataset. Results obtained on a large publicly available corpus support this hypothesis.

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An Argument-Annotated Corpus of Scientific Publications
Anne Lauscher | Goran Glavaš | Simone Paolo Ponzetto

Argumentation is an essential feature of scientific language. We present an annotation study resulting in a corpus of scientific publications annotated with argumentative components and relations. The argumentative annotations have been added to the existing Dr. Inventor Corpus, already annotated for four other rhetorical aspects. We analyze the annotated argumentative structures and investigate the relations between argumentation and other rhetorical aspects of scientific writing, such as discourse roles and citation contexts.

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Annotating Claims in the Vaccination Debate
Benedetta Torsi | Roser Morante

In this paper we present annotation experiments with three different annotation schemes for the identification of argument components in texts related to the vaccination debate. Identifying claims about vaccinations made by participants in the debate is of great societal interest, as the decision to vaccinate or not has impact in public health and safety. Since most corpora that have been annotated with argumentation information contain texts that belong to a specific genre and have a well defined argumentation structure, we needed to adjust the annotation schemes to our corpus, which contains heterogeneous texts from the Web. We started with a complex annotation scheme that had to be simplified due to low IAA. In our final experiment, which focused on annotating claims, annotators reached 57.3% IAA.

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Argument Component Classification for Classroom Discussions
Luca Lugini | Diane Litman

This paper focuses on argument component classification for transcribed spoken classroom discussions, with the goal of automatically classifying student utterances into claims, evidence, and warrants. We show that an existing method for argument component classification developed for another educationally-oriented domain performs poorly on our dataset. We then show that feature sets from prior work on argument mining for student essays and online dialogues can be used to improve performance considerably. We also provide a comparison between convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks when trained under different conditions to classify argument components in classroom discussions. While neural network models are not always able to outperform a logistic regression model, we were able to gain some useful insights: convolutional networks are more robust than recurrent networks both at the character and at the word level, and specificity information can help boost performance in multi-task training.

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Evidence Types, Credibility Factors, and Patterns or Soft Rules for Weighing Conflicting Evidence: Argument Mining in the Context of Legal Rules Governing Evidence Assessment
Vern R. Walker | Dina Foerster | Julia Monica Ponce | Matthew Rosen

This paper reports on the results of an empirical study of adjudicatory decisions about veterans’ claims for disability benefits in the United States. It develops a typology of kinds of relevant evidence (argument premises) employed in cases, and it identifies factors that the tribunal considers when assessing the credibility or trustworthiness of individual items of evidence. It also reports on patterns or “soft rules” that the tribunal uses to comparatively weigh the probative value of conflicting evidence. These evidence types, credibility factors, and comparison patterns are developed to be inter-operable with legal rules governing the evidence assessment process in the U.S. This approach should be transferable to other legal and non-legal domains.

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Feasible Annotation Scheme for Capturing Policy Argument Reasoning using Argument Templates
Paul Reisert | Naoya Inoue | Tatsuki Kuribayashi | Kentaro Inui

Most of the existing works on argument mining cast the problem of argumentative structure identification as classification tasks (e.g. attack-support relations, stance, explicit premise/claim). This paper goes a step further by addressing the task of automatically identifying reasoning patterns of arguments using predefined templates, which is called argument template (AT) instantiation. The contributions of this work are three-fold. First, we develop a simple, yet expressive set of easily annotatable ATs that can represent a majority of writer’s reasoning for texts with diverse policy topics while maintaining the computational feasibility of the task. Second, we create a small, but highly reliable annotated corpus of instantiated ATs on top of reliably annotated support and attack relations and conduct an annotation study. Third, we formulate the task of AT instantiation as structured prediction constrained by a feasible set of templates. Our evaluation demonstrates that we can annotate ATs with a reasonably high inter-annotator agreement, and the use of template-constrained inference is useful for instantiating ATs with only partial reasoning comprehension clues.

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Frame- and Entity-Based Knowledge for Common-Sense Argumentative Reasoning
Teresa Botschen | Daniil Sorokin | Iryna Gurevych

Common-sense argumentative reasoning is a challenging task that requires holistic understanding of the argumentation where external knowledge about the world is hypothesized to play a key role. We explore the idea of using event knowledge about prototypical situations from FrameNet and fact knowledge about concrete entities from Wikidata to solve the task. We find that both resources can contribute to an improvement over the non-enriched approach and point out two persisting challenges: first, integration of many annotations of the same type, and second, fusion of complementary annotations. After our explorations, we question the key role of external world knowledge with respect to the argumentative reasoning task and rather point towards a logic-based analysis of the chain of reasoning.

In this paper, we propose to incorporate topic aspects information for online comments convincingness evaluation. Our model makes use of graph convolutional network to utilize implicit topic information within a discussion thread to assist the evaluation of convincingness of each single comment. In order to test the effectiveness of our proposed model, we annotate topic information on top of a public dataset for argument convincingness evaluation. Experimental results show that topic information is able to improve the performance for convincingness evaluation. We also make a move to detect topic aspects automatically.

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Proposed Method for Annotation of Scientific Arguments in Terms of Semantic Relations and Argument Schemes
Nancy Green

This paper presents a proposed method for annotation of scientific arguments in biological/biomedical journal articles. Semantic entities and relations are used to represent the propositional content of arguments in instances of argument schemes. We describe an experiment in which we encoded the arguments in a journal article to identify issues in this approach. Our catalogue of argument schemes and a copy of the annotated article are now publically available.

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Using context to identify the language of face-saving
Nona Naderi | Graeme Hirst

We created a corpus of utterances that attempt to save face from parliamentary debates and use it to automatically analyze the language of reputation defence. Our proposed model that incorporates information regarding threats to reputation can predict reputation defence language with high confidence. Further experiments and evaluations on different datasets show that the model is able to generalize to new utterances and can predict the language of reputation defence in a new dataset.

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Dave the debater: a retrieval-based and generative argumentative dialogue agent
Dieu Thu Le | Cam-Tu Nguyen | Kim Anh Nguyen

In this paper, we explore the problem of developing an argumentative dialogue agent that can be able to discuss with human users on controversial topics. We describe two systems that use retrieval-based and generative models to make argumentative responses to the users. The experiments show promising results although they have been trained on a small dataset.

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PD3: Better Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Transfer By Combining Direct Transfer and Annotation Projection
Steffen Eger | Andreas Rücklé | Iryna Gurevych

We consider unsupervised cross-lingual transfer on two tasks, viz., sentence-level argumentation mining and standard POS tagging. We combine direct transfer using bilingual embeddings with annotation projection, which projects labels across unlabeled parallel data. We do so by either merging respective source and target language datasets or alternatively by using multi-task learning. Our combination strategy considerably improves upon both direct transfer and projection with few available parallel sentences, the most realistic scenario for many low-resource target languages.

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Cross-Lingual Argumentative Relation Identification: from English to Portuguese
Gil Rocha | Christian Stab | Henrique Lopes Cardoso | Iryna Gurevych

Argument mining aims to detect and identify argument structures from textual resources. In this paper, we aim to address the task of argumentative relation identification, a subtask of argument mining, for which several approaches have been recently proposed in a monolingual setting. To overcome the lack of annotated resources in less-resourced languages, we present the first attempt to address this subtask in a cross-lingual setting. We compare two standard strategies for cross-language learning, namely: projection and direct-transfer. Experimental results show that by using unsupervised language adaptation the proposed approaches perform at a competitive level when compared with fully-supervised in-language learning settings.

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More or less controlled elicitation of argumentative text: Enlarging a microtext corpus via crowdsourcing
Maria Skeppstedt | Andreas Peldszus | Manfred Stede

We present an extension of an annotated corpus of short argumentative texts that had originally been built in a controlled text production experiment. Our extension more than doubles the size of the corpus by means of crowdsourcing. We report on the setup of this experiment and on the consequences that crowdsourcing had for assembling the data, and in particular for annotation. We labeled the argumentative structure by marking claims, premises, and relations between them, following the scheme used in the original corpus, but had to make a few modifications in response to interesting phenomena in the data. Finally, we report on an experiment with the automatic prediction of this argumentation structure: We first replicated the approach of an earlier study on the original corpus, and compare the performance to various settings involving the extension.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

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Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications
Joel Tetreault | Jill Burstein | Ekaterina Kochmar | Claudia Leacock | Helen Yannakoudakis

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Using exemplar responses for training and evaluating automated speech scoring systems
Anastassia Loukina | Klaus Zechner | James Bruno | Beata Beigman Klebanov

Automated scoring engines are usually trained and evaluated against human scores and compared to the benchmark of human-human agreement. In this paper we compare the performance of an automated speech scoring engine using two corpora: a corpus of almost 700,000 randomly sampled spoken responses with scores assigned by one or two raters during operational scoring, and a corpus of 16,500 exemplar responses with scores reviewed by multiple expert raters. We show that the choice of corpus used for model evaluation has a major effect on estimates of system performance with r varying between 0.64 and 0.80. Surprisingly, this is not the case for the choice of corpus for model training: when the training corpus is sufficiently large, the systems trained on different corpora showed almost identical performance when evaluated on the same corpus. We show that this effect is consistent across several learning algorithms. We conclude that evaluating the model on a corpus of exemplar responses if one is available provides additional evidence about system validity; at the same time, investing effort into creating a corpus of exemplar responses for model training is unlikely to lead to a substantial gain in model performance.

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Using Paraphrasing and Memory-Augmented Models to Combat Data Sparsity in Question Interpretation with a Virtual Patient Dialogue System
Lifeng Jin | David King | Amad Hussein | Michael White | Douglas Danforth

When interpreting questions in a virtual patient dialogue system one must inevitably tackle the challenge of a long tail of relatively infrequently asked questions. To make progress on this challenge, we investigate the use of paraphrasing for data augmentation and neural memory-based classification, finding that the two methods work best in combination. In particular, we find that the neural memory-based approach not only outperforms a straight CNN classifier on low frequency questions, but also takes better advantage of the augmented data created by paraphrasing, together yielding a nearly 10% absolute improvement in accuracy on the least frequently asked questions.

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Predicting misreadings from gaze in children with reading difficulties
Joachim Bingel | Maria Barrett | Sigrid Klerke

We present the first work on predicting reading mistakes in children with reading difficulties based on eye-tracking data from real-world reading teaching. Our approach employs several linguistic and gaze-based features to inform an ensemble of different classifiers, including multi-task learning models that let us transfer knowledge about individual readers to attain better predictions. Notably, the data we use in this work stems from noisy readings in the wild, outside of controlled lab conditions. Our experiments show that despite the noise and despite the small fraction of misreadings, gaze data improves the performance more than any other feature group and our models achieve good performance. We further show that gaze patterns for misread words do not fully generalize across readers, but that we can transfer some knowledge between readers using multitask learning at least in some cases. Applications of our models include partial automation of reading assessment as well as personalized text simplification.

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Automatic Input Enrichment for Selecting Reading Material: An Online Study with English Teachers
Maria Chinkina | Ankita Oswal | Detmar Meurers

Input material at the appropriate level is crucial for language acquisition. Automating the search for such material can systematically and efficiently support teachers in their pedagogical practice. This is the goal of the computational linguistic task of automatic input enrichment (Chinkina & Meurers, 2016): It analyzes and re-ranks a collection of texts in order to prioritize those containing target linguistic forms. In the online study described in the paper, we collected 240 responses from English teachers in order to investigate whether they preferred automatic input enrichment over web search when selecting reading material for class. Participants demonstrated a general preference for the material provided by an automatic input enrichment system. It was also rated significantly higher than the texts retrieved by a standard web search engine with regard to the representation of linguistic forms and equivalent with regard to the relevance of the content to the topic. We discuss the implications of the results for language teaching and consider the potential strands of future research.

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Estimating Linguistic Complexity for Science Texts
Farah Nadeem | Mari Ostendorf

Evaluation of text difficulty is important both for downstream tasks like text simplification, and for supporting educators in classrooms. Existing work on automated text complexity analysis uses linear models with engineered knowledge-driven features as inputs. While this offers interpretability, these models have lower accuracy for shorter texts. Traditional readability metrics have the additional drawback of not generalizing to informational texts such as science. We propose a neural approach, training on science and other informational texts, to mitigate both problems. Our results show that neural methods outperform knowledge-based linear models for short texts, and have the capacity to generalize to genres not present in the training data.

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Second Language Acquisition Modeling
Burr Settles | Chris Brust | Erin Gustafson | Masato Hagiwara | Nitin Madnani

We present the task of second language acquisition (SLA) modeling. Given a history of errors made by learners of a second language, the task is to predict errors that they are likely to make at arbitrary points in the future. We describe a large corpus of more than 7M words produced by more than 6k learners of English, Spanish, and French using Duolingo, a popular online language-learning app. Then we report on the results of a shared task challenge aimed studying the SLA task via this corpus, which attracted 15 teams and synthesized work from various fields including cognitive science, linguistics, and machine learning.

We report the findings of the second Complex Word Identification (CWI) shared task organized as part of the BEA workshop co-located with NAACL-HLT’2018. The second CWI shared task featured multilingual and multi-genre datasets divided into four tracks: English monolingual, German monolingual, Spanish monolingual, and a multilingual track with a French test set, and two tasks: binary classification and probabilistic classification. A total of 12 teams submitted their results in different task/track combinations and 11 of them wrote system description papers that are referred to in this report and appear in the BEA workshop proceedings.

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Towards Single Word Lexical Complexity Prediction
David Alfter | Elena Volodina

In this paper we present work-in-progress where we investigate the usefulness of previously created word lists to the task of single-word lexical complexity analysis and prediction of the complexity level for learners of Swedish as a second language. The word lists used map each word to a single CEFR level, and the task consists of predicting CEFR levels for unseen words. In contrast to previous work on word-level lexical complexity, we experiment with topics as additional features and show that linking words to topics significantly increases accuracy of classification.

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COAST - Customizable Online Syllable Enhancement in Texts. A flexible framework for automatically enhancing reading materials
Heiko Holz | Zarah Weiss | Oliver Brehm | Detmar Meurers

This paper presents COAST, a web-based application to easily and automatically enhance syllable structure, word stress, and spacing in texts, that was designed in close collaboration with learning therapists to ensure its practical relevance. Such syllable-enhanced texts are commonly used in learning therapy or private tuition to promote the recognition of syllables in order to improve reading and writing skills. In a state of the art solutions for automatic syllable enhancement, we put special emphasis on syllable stress and support specific marking of the primary syllable stress in words. Core features of our tool are i) a highly customizable text enhancement and template functionality, and ii) a novel crowd-sourcing mechanism that we employ to address the issue of data sparsity in language resources. We successfully tested COAST with real-life practitioners in a series of user tests validating the concept of our framework.

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Annotating picture description task responses for content analysis
Levi King | Markus Dickinson

Given that all users of a language can be creative in their language usage, the overarching goal of this work is to investigate issues of variability and acceptability in written text, for both non-native speakers (NNSs) and native speakers (NSs). We control for meaning by collecting a dataset of picture description task (PDT) responses from a number of NSs and NNSs, and we define and annotate a handful of features pertaining to form and meaning, to capture the multi-dimensional ways in which responses can vary and can be acceptable. By examining the decisions made in this corpus development, we highlight the questions facing anyone working with learner language properties like variability, acceptability and native-likeness. We find reliable inter-annotator agreement, though disagreements point to difficult areas for establishing a link between form and meaning.

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Annotating Student Talk in Text-based Classroom Discussions
Luca Lugini | Diane Litman | Amanda Godley | Christopher Olshefski

Classroom discussions in English Language Arts have a positive effect on students’ reading, writing and reasoning skills. Although prior work has largely focused on teacher talk and student-teacher interactions, we focus on three theoretically-motivated aspects of high-quality student talk: argumentation, specificity, and knowledge domain. We introduce an annotation scheme, then show that the scheme can be used to produce reliable annotations and that the annotations are predictive of discussion quality. We also highlight opportunities provided by our scheme for education and natural language processing research.

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Toward Automatically Measuring Learner Ability from Human-Machine Dialog Interactions using Novel Psychometric Models
Vikram Ramanarayanan | Michelle LaMar

While dialog systems have been widely deployed for computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and formative assessment systems in recent years, relatively limited work has been done with respect to the psychometrics and validity of these technologies in evaluating and providing feedback regarding student learning and conversational ability. This paper formulates a Markov decision process based measurement model, and applies it to text chat data collected from crowdsourced native and non-native English language speakers interacting with an automated dialog agent. We investigate how well the model measures speaker conversational ability, and find that it effectively captures the differences in how native and non-native speakers of English accomplish the dialog task. Such models could have important implications for CALL systems of the future that effectively combine dialog management with measurement of learner conversational ability in real-time.

While immediate feedback on learner language is often discussed in the Second Language Acquisition literature (e.g., Mackey 2006), few systems used in real-life educational settings provide helpful, metalinguistic feedback to learners. In this paper, we present a novel approach leveraging task information to generate the expected range of well-formed and ill-formed variability in learner answers along with the required diagnosis and feedback. We combine this offline generation approach with an online component that matches the actual student answers against the pre-computed hypotheses. The results obtained for a set of 33 thousand answers of 7th grade German high school students learning English show that the approach successfully covers frequent answer patterns. At the same time, paraphrases and content errors require a more flexible alignment approach, for which we are planning to complement the method with the CoMiC approach successfully used for the analysis of reading comprehension answers (Meurers et al., 2011).

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NT2Lex: A CEFR-Graded Lexical Resource for Dutch as a Foreign Language Linked to Open Dutch WordNet
Anaïs Tack | Thomas François | Piet Desmet | Cédrick Fairon

In this paper, we introduce NT2Lex, a novel lexical resource for Dutch as a foreign language (NT2) which includes frequency distributions of 17,743 words and expressions attested in expert-written textbook texts and readers graded along the scale of the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). In essence, the lexicon informs us about what kind of vocabulary should be understood when reading Dutch as a non-native reader at a particular proficiency level. The main novelty of the resource with respect to the previously developed CEFR-graded lexicons concerns the introduction of corpus-based evidence for L2 word sense complexity through the linkage to Open Dutch WordNet (Postma et al., 2016). The resource thus contains, on top of the lemmatised and part-of-speech tagged lexical entries, a total of 11,999 unique word senses and 8,934 distinct synsets.

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Experiments with Universal CEFR Classification
Sowmya Vajjala | Taraka Rama

The Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) guidelines describe language proficiency of learners on a scale of 6 levels. While the description of CEFR guidelines is generic across languages, the development of automated proficiency classification systems for different languages follow different approaches. In this paper, we explore universal CEFR classification using domain-specific and domain-agnostic, theory-guided as well as data-driven features. We report the results of our preliminary experiments in monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual classification with three languages: German, Czech, and Italian. Our results show that both monolingual and multilingual models achieve similar performance, and cross-lingual classification yields lower, but comparable results to monolingual classification.

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Chengyu Cloze Test
Zhiying Jiang | Boliang Zhang | Lifu Huang | Heng Ji

We present a neural recommendation model for Chengyu, which is a special type of Chinese idiom. Given a query, which is a sentence with an empty slot where the Chengyu is taken out, our model will recommend the best Chengyu candidate that best fits the slot context. The main challenge lies in that the literal meaning of a Chengyu is usually very different from it’s figurative meaning. We propose a new neural approach to leverage the definition of each Chengyu and incorporate it as background knowledge. Experiments on both Chengyu cloze test and coherence checking in college entrance exams show that our system achieves 89.5% accuracy on cloze test and outperforms human subjects who attended competitive universities in China. We will make all of our data sets and resources publicly available as a new benchmark for research purposes.

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LaSTUS/TALN at Complex Word Identification (CWI) 2018 Shared Task
Ahmed AbuRa’ed | Horacio Saggion

This paper presents the participation of the LaSTUS/TALN team in the Complex Word Identification (CWI) Shared Task 2018 in the English monolingual track . The purpose of the task was to determine if a word in a given sentence can be judged as complex or not by a certain target audience. For the English track, task organizers provided a training and a development datasets of 27,299 and 3,328 words respectively together with the sentence in which each word occurs. The words were judged as complex or not by 20 human evaluators; ten of whom are natives. We submitted two systems: one system modeled each word to evaluate as a numeric vector populated with a set of lexical, semantic and contextual features while the other system relies on a word embedding representation and a distance metric. We trained two separate classifiers to automatically decide if each word is complex or not. We submitted six runs, two for each of the three subsets of the English monolingual CWI track.

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Cross-lingual complex word identification with multitask learning
Joachim Bingel | Johannes Bjerva

We approach the 2018 Shared Task on Complex Word Identification by leveraging a cross-lingual multitask learning approach. Our method is highly language agnostic, as evidenced by the ability of our system to generalize across languages, including languages for which we have no training data. In the shared task, this is the case for French, for which our system achieves the best performance. We further provide a qualitative and quantitative analysis of which words pose problems for our system.

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UnibucKernel: A kernel-based learning method for complex word identification
Andrei Butnaru | Radu Tudor Ionescu

In this paper, we present a kernel-based learning approach for the 2018 Complex Word Identification (CWI) Shared Task. Our approach is based on combining multiple low-level features, such as character n-grams, with high-level semantic features that are either automatically learned using word embeddings or extracted from a lexical knowledge base, namely WordNet. After feature extraction, we employ a kernel method for the learning phase. The feature matrix is first transformed into a normalized kernel matrix. For the binary classification task (simple versus complex), we employ Support Vector Machines. For the regression task, in which we have to predict the complexity level of a word (a word is more complex if it is labeled as complex by more annotators), we employ v-Support Vector Regression. We applied our approach only on the three English data sets containing documents from Wikipedia, WikiNews and News domains. Our best result during the competition was the third place on the English Wikipedia data set. However, in this paper, we also report better post-competition results.

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CAMB at CWI Shared Task 2018: Complex Word Identification with Ensemble-Based Voting
Sian Gooding | Ekaterina Kochmar

This paper presents the winning systems we submitted to the Complex Word Identification Shared Task 2018. We describe our best performing systems’ implementations and discuss our key findings from this research. Our best-performing systems achieve an F1 score of 0.8792 on the NEWS, 0.8430 on the WIKINEWS and 0.8115 on the WIKIPEDIA test sets in the monolingual English binary classification track, and a mean absolute error of 0.0558 on the NEWS, 0.0674 on the WIKINEWS and 0.0739 on the WIKIPEDIA test sets in the probabilistic track.

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Complex Word Identification Based on Frequency in a Learner Corpus
Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Mamoru Komachi

We introduce the TMU systems for the Complex Word Identification (CWI) Shared Task 2018. TMU systems use random forest classifiers and regressors whose features are the number of characters, the number of words, and the frequency of target words in various corpora. Our simple systems performed best on 5 tracks out of 12 tracks. Our ablation analysis revealed the usefulness of a learner corpus for CWI task.

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The Whole is Greater than the Sum of its Parts: Towards the Effectiveness of Voting Ensemble Classifiers for Complex Word Identification
Nikhil Wani | Sandeep Mathias | Jayashree Aanand Gajjam | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

In this paper, we present an effective system using voting ensemble classifiers to detect contextually complex words for non-native English speakers. To make the final decision, we channel a set of eight calibrated classifiers based on lexical, size and vocabulary features and train our model with annotated datasets collected from a mixture of native and non-native speakers. Thereafter, we test our system on three datasets namely News, WikiNews, and Wikipedia and report competitive results with an F1-Score ranging between 0.777 to 0.855 for each of the datasets. Our system outperforms multiple other models and falls within 0.042 to 0.026 percent of the best-performing model’s score in the shared task.

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Grotoco@SLAM: Second Language Acquisition Modeling with Simple Features, Learners and Task-wise Models
Sigrid Klerke | Héctor Martínez Alonso | Barbara Plank

We present our submission to the 2018 Duolingo Shared Task on Second Language Acquisition Modeling (SLAM). We focus on evaluating a range of features for the task, including user-derived measures, while examining how far we can get with a simple linear classifier. Our analysis reveals that errors differ per exercise format, which motivates our final and best-performing system: a task-wise (per exercise-format) model.

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Context Based Approach for Second Language Acquisition
Nihal V. Nayak | Arjun R. Rao

SLAM 2018 focuses on predicting a student’s mistake while using the Duolingo application. In this paper, we describe the system we developed for this shared task. Our system uses a logistic regression model to predict the likelihood of a student making a mistake while answering an exercise on Duolingo in all three language tracks - English/Spanish (en/es), Spanish/English (es/en) and French/English (fr/en). We conduct an ablation study with several features during the development of this system and discover that context based features plays a major role in language acquisition modeling. Our model beats Duolingo’s baseline scores in all three language tracks (AUROC scores for en/es = 0.821, es/en = 0.790 and fr/en = 0.812). Our work makes a case for providing favourable textual context for students while learning second language.

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Second Language Acquisition Modeling: An Ensemble Approach
Anton Osika | Susanna Nilsson | Andrii Sydorchuk | Faruk Sahin | Anders Huss

Accurate prediction of students’ knowledge is a fundamental building block of personalized learning systems. Here, we propose an ensemble model to predict student knowledge gaps. Applying our approach to student trace data from the online educational platform Duolingo we achieved highest score on all three datasets in the 2018 Shared Task on Second Language Acquisition Modeling. We describe our model and discuss relevance of the task compared to how it would be setup in a production environment for personalized education.

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Modeling Second-Language Learning from a Psychological Perspective
Alexander Rich | Pamela Osborn Popp | David Halpern | Anselm Rothe | Todd Gureckis

Psychological research on learning and memory has tended to emphasize small-scale laboratory studies. However, large datasets of people using educational software provide opportunities to explore these issues from a new perspective. In this paper we describe our approach to the Duolingo Second Language Acquisition Modeling (SLAM) competition which was run in early 2018. We used a well-known class of algorithms (gradient boosted decision trees), with features partially informed by theories from the psychological literature. After detailing our modeling approach and a number of supplementary simulations, we reflect on the degree to which psychological theory aided the model, and the potential for cognitive science and predictive modeling competitions to gain from each other.

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A Memory-Sensitive Classification Model of Errors in Early Second Language Learning
Brendan Tomoschuk | Jarrett Lovelett

In this paper, we explore a variety of linguistic and cognitive features to better understand second language acquisition in early users of the language learning app Duolingo. With these features, we trained a random forest classifier to predict errors in early learners of French, Spanish, and English. Of particular note was our finding that mean and variance in error for each user and token can be a memory efficient replacement for their respective dummy-encoded categorical variables. At test, these models improved over the baseline model with AUROC values of 0.803 for English, 0.823 for French, and 0.829 for Spanish.

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Annotation and Classification of Sentence-level Revision Improvement
Tazin Afrin | Diane Litman

Studies of writing revisions rarely focus on revision quality. To address this issue, we introduce a corpus of between-draft revisions of student argumentative essays, annotated as to whether each revision improves essay quality. We demonstrate a potential usage of our annotations by developing a machine learning model to predict revision improvement. With the goal of expanding training data, we also extract revisions from a dataset edited by expert proofreaders. Our results indicate that blending expert and non-expert revisions increases model performance, with expert data particularly important for predicting low-quality revisions.

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Language Model Based Grammatical Error Correction without Annotated Training Data
Christopher Bryant | Ted Briscoe

Since the end of the CoNLL-2014 shared task on grammatical error correction (GEC), research into language model (LM) based approaches to GEC has largely stagnated. In this paper, we re-examine LMs in GEC and show that it is entirely possible to build a simple system that not only requires minimal annotated data (∼1000 sentences), but is also fairly competitive with several state-of-the-art systems. This approach should be of particular interest for languages where very little annotated training data exists, although we also hope to use it as a baseline to motivate future research.

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A Semantic Role-based Approach to Open-Domain Automatic Question Generation
Michael Flor | Brian Riordan

We present a novel rule-based system for automatic generation of factual questions from sentences, using semantic role labeling (SRL) as the main form of text analysis. The system is capable of generating both wh-questions and yes/no questions from the same semantic analysis. We present an extensive evaluation of the system and compare it to a recent neural network architecture for question generation. The SRL-based system outperforms the neural system in both average quality and variety of generated questions.

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Automated Content Analysis: A Case Study of Computer Science Student Summaries
Yanjun Gao | Patricia M. Davies | Rebecca J. Passonneau

Technology is transforming Higher Education learning and teaching. This paper reports on a project to examine how and why automated content analysis could be used to assess precis writing by university students. We examine the case of one hundred and twenty-two summaries written by computer science freshmen. The texts, which had been hand scored using a teacher-designed rubric, were autoscored using the Natural Language Processing software, PyrEval. Pearson’s correlation coefficient and Spearman rank correlation were used to analyze the relationship between the teacher score and the PyrEval score for each summary. Three content models automatically constructed by PyrEval from different sets of human reference summaries led to consistent correlations, showing that the approach is reliable. Also observed was that, in cases where the focus of student assessment centers on formative feedback, categorizing the PyrEval scores by examining the average and standard deviations could lead to novel interpretations of their relationships. It is suggested that this project has implications for the ways in which automated content analysis could be used to help university students improve their summarization skills.

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Toward Data-Driven Tutorial Question Answering with Deep Learning Conversational Models
Mayank Kulkarni | Kristy Boyer

There has been an increase in popularity of data-driven question answering systems given their recent success. This pa-per explores the possibility of building a tutorial question answering system for Java programming from data sampled from a community-based question answering forum. This paper reports on the creation of a dataset that could support building such a tutorial question answering system and discusses the methodology to create the 106,386 question strong dataset. We investigate how retrieval-based and generative models perform on the given dataset. The work also investigates the usefulness of using hybrid approaches such as combining retrieval-based and generative models. The results indicate that building data-driven tutorial systems using community-based question answering forums holds significant promise.

We investigate how machine learning models, specifically ranking models, can be used to select useful distractors for multiple choice questions. Our proposed models can learn to select distractors that resemble those in actual exam questions, which is different from most existing unsupervised ontology-based and similarity-based methods. We empirically study feature-based and neural net (NN) based ranking models with experiments on the recently released SciQ dataset and our MCQL dataset. Experimental results show that feature-based ensemble learning methods (random forest and LambdaMART) outperform both the NN-based method and unsupervised baselines. These two datasets can also be used as benchmarks for distractor generation.

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A Portuguese Native Language Identification Dataset
Iria del Río Gayo | Marcos Zampieri | Shervin Malmasi

In this paper we present NLI-PT, the first Portuguese dataset compiled for Native Language Identification (NLI), the task of identifying an author’s first language based on their second language writing. The dataset includes 1,868 student essays written by learners of European Portuguese, native speakers of the following L1s: Chinese, English, Spanish, German, Russian, French, Japanese, Italian, Dutch, Tetum, Arabic, Polish, Korean, Romanian, and Swedish. NLI-PT includes the original student text and four different types of annotation: POS, fine-grained POS, constituency parses, and dependency parses. NLI-PT can be used not only in NLI but also in research on several topics in the field of Second Language Acquisition and educational NLP. We discuss possible applications of this dataset and present the results obtained for the first lexical baseline system for Portuguese NLI.

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OneStopEnglish corpus: A new corpus for automatic readability assessment and text simplification
Sowmya Vajjala | Ivana Lučić

This paper describes the collection and compilation of the OneStopEnglish corpus of texts written at three reading levels, and demonstrates its usefulness for through two applications - automatic readability assessment and automatic text simplification. The corpus consists of 189 texts, each in three versions (567 in total). The corpus is now freely available under a CC by-SA 4.0 license and we hope that it would foster further research on the topics of readability assessment and text simplification.

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The Effect of Adding Authorship Knowledge in Automated Text Scoring
Meng Zhang | Xie Chen | Ronan Cummins | Øistein E. Andersen | Ted Briscoe

Some language exams have multiple writing tasks. When a learner writes multiple texts in a language exam, it is not surprising that the quality of these texts tends to be similar, and the existing automated text scoring (ATS) systems do not explicitly model this similarity. In this paper, we suggest that it could be useful to include the other texts written by this learner in the same exam as extra references in an ATS system. We propose various approaches of fusing information from multiple tasks and pass this authorship knowledge into our ATS model on six different datasets. We show that this can positively affect the model performance at a global level.

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SB@GU at the Complex Word Identification 2018 Shared Task
David Alfter | Ildikó Pilán

In this paper, we describe our experiments for the Shared Task on Complex Word Identification (CWI) 2018 (Yimam et al., 2018), hosted by the 13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA) at NAACL 2018. Our system for English builds on previous work for Swedish concerning the classification of words into proficiency levels. We investigate different features for English and compare their usefulness using feature selection methods. For the German, Spanish and French data we use simple systems based on character n-gram models and show that sometimes simple models achieve comparable results to fully feature-engineered systems.

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Complex Word Identification: Convolutional Neural Network vs. Feature Engineering
Segun Taofeek Aroyehun | Jason Angel | Daniel Alejandro Pérez Alvarez | Alexander Gelbukh

We describe the systems of NLP-CIC team that participated in the Complex Word Identification (CWI) 2018 shared task. The shared task aimed to benchmark approaches for identifying complex words in English and other languages from the perspective of non-native speakers. Our goal is to compare two approaches: feature engineering and a deep neural network. Both approaches achieved comparable performance on the English test set. We demonstrated the flexibility of the deep-learning approach by using the same deep neural network setup in the Spanish track. Our systems achieved competitive results: all our systems were within 0.01 of the system with the best macro-F1 score on the test sets except on Wikipedia test set, on which our best system is 0.04 below the best macro-F1 score.

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Deep Learning Architecture for Complex Word Identification
Dirk De Hertog | Anaïs Tack

We describe a system for the CWI-task that includes information on 5 aspects of the (complex) lexical item, namely distributional information of the item itself, morphological structure, psychological measures, corpus-counts and topical information. We constructed a deep learning architecture that combines those features and apply it to the probabilistic and binary classification task for all English sets and Spanish. We achieved reasonable performance on all sets with best performances seen on the probabilistic task, particularly on the English news set (MAE 0.054 and F1-score of 0.872). An analysis of the results shows that reasonable performance can be achieved with a single architecture without any domain-specific tweaking of the parameter settings and that distributional features capture almost all of the information also found in hand-crafted features.

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NILC at CWI 2018: Exploring Feature Engineering and Feature Learning
Nathan Hartmann | Leandro Borges dos Santos

This paper describes the results of NILC team at CWI 2018. We developed solutions following three approaches: (i) a feature engineering method using lexical, n-gram and psycholinguistic features, (ii) a shallow neural network method using only word embeddings, and (iii) a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) language model, which is pre-trained on a large text corpus to produce a contextualized word vector. The feature engineering method obtained our best results for the classification task and the LSTM model achieved the best results for the probabilistic classification task. Our results show that deep neural networks are able to perform as well as traditional machine learning methods using manually engineered features for the task of complex word identification in English.

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Complex Word Identification Using Character n-grams
Maja Popović

This paper investigates the use of character n-gram frequencies for identifying complex words in English, German and Spanish texts. The approach is based on the assumption that complex words are likely to contain different character sequences than simple words. The multinomial Naive Bayes classifier was used with n-grams of different lengths as features, and the best results were obtained for the combination of 2-grams and 4-grams. This variant was submitted to the Complex Word Identification Shared Task 2018 for all texts and achieved F-scores between 70% and 83%. The system was ranked in the middle range for all English texts, as third of fourteen submissions for German, and as tenth of seventeen submissions for Spanish. The method is not very convenient for the cross-language task, achieving only 59% on the French text.

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Predicting Second Language Learner Successes and Mistakes by Means of Conjunctive Features
Yves Bestgen

This paper describes the system developed by the Centre for English Corpus Linguistics for the 2018 Duolingo SLAM challenge. It aimed at predicting the successes and mistakes of second language learners on each of the words that compose the exercises they answered. Its main characteristic is to include conjunctive features, built by combining word ngrams with metadata about the user and the exercise. It achieved a relatively good performance, ranking fifth out of 15 systems. Complementary analyses carried out to gauge the contribution of the different sets of features to the performance confirmed the usefulness of the conjunctive features for the SLAM task.

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Feature Engineering for Second Language Acquisition Modeling
Guanliang Chen | Claudia Hauff | Geert-Jan Houben

Knowledge tracing serves as a keystone in delivering personalized education. However, few works attempted to model students’ knowledge state in the setting of Second Language Acquisition. The Duolingo Shared Task on Second Language Acquisition Modeling provides students’ trace data that we extensively analyze and engineer features from for the task of predicting whether a student will correctly solve a vocabulary exercise. Our analyses of students’ learning traces reveal that factors like exercise format and engagement impact their exercise performance to a large extent. Overall, we extracted 23 different features as input to a Gradient Tree Boosting framework, which resulted in an AUC score of between 0.80 and 0.82 on the official test set.

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TMU System for SLAM-2018
Masahiro Kaneko | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Mamoru Komachi

We introduce the TMU systems for the second language acquisition modeling shared task 2018 (Settles et al., 2018). To model learner error patterns, it is necessary to maintain a considerable amount of information regarding the type of exercises learners have been learning in the past and the manner in which they answered them. Tracking an enormous learner’s learning history and their correct and mistaken answers is essential to predict the learner’s future mistakes. Therefore, we propose a model which tracks the learner’s learning history efficiently. Our systems ranked fourth in the English and Spanish subtasks, and fifth in the French subtask.

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Deep Factorization Machines for Knowledge Tracing
Jill-Jênn Vie

This paper introduces our solution to the 2018 Duolingo Shared Task on Second Language Acquisition Modeling (SLAM). We used deep factorization machines, a wide and deep learning model of pairwise relationships between users, items, skills, and other entities considered. Our solution (AUC 0.815) hopefully managed to beat the logistic regression baseline (AUC 0.774) but not the top performing model (AUC 0.861) and reveals interesting strategies to build upon item response theory models.

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CLUF: a Neural Model for Second Language Acquisition Modeling
Shuyao Xu | Jin Chen | Long Qin

Second Language Acquisition Modeling is the task to predict whether a second language learner would respond correctly in future exercises based on their learning history. In this paper, we propose a neural network based system to utilize rich contextual, linguistic and user information. Our neural model consists of a Context encoder, a Linguistic feature encoder, a User information encoder and a Format information encoder (CLUF). Furthermore, a decoder is introduced to combine such encoded features and make final predictions. Our system ranked in first place in the English track and second place in the Spanish and French track with an AUROC score of 0.861, 0.835 and 0.854 respectively.

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Neural sequence modelling for learner error prediction
Zheng Yuan

This paper describes our use of two recurrent neural network sequence models: sequence labelling and sequence-to-sequence models, for the prediction of future learner errors in our submission to the 2018 Duolingo Shared Task on Second Language Acquisition Modeling (SLAM). We show that these two models capture complementary information as combining them improves performance. Furthermore, the same network architecture and group of features can be used directly to build competitive prediction models in all three language tracks, demonstrating that our approach generalises well across languages.

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Automatic Distractor Suggestion for Multiple-Choice Tests Using Concept Embeddings and Information Retrieval
Le An Ha | Victoria Yaneva

Developing plausible distractors (wrong answer options) when writing multiple-choice questions has been described as one of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of the item-writing process. In this paper we propose a fully automatic method for generating distractor suggestions for multiple-choice questions used in high-stakes medical exams. The system uses a question stem and the correct answer as an input and produces a list of suggested distractors ranked based on their similarity to the stem and the correct answer. To do this we use a novel approach of combining concept embeddings with information retrieval methods. We frame the evaluation as a prediction task where we aim to “predict” the human-produced distractors used in large sets of medical questions, i.e. if a distractor generated by our system is good enough it is likely to feature among the list of distractors produced by the human item-writers. The results reveal that combining concept embeddings with information retrieval approaches significantly improves the generation of plausible distractors and enables us to match around 1 in 5 of the human-produced distractors. The approach proposed in this paper is generalisable to all scenarios where the distractors refer to concepts.

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Co-Attention Based Neural Network for Source-Dependent Essay Scoring
Haoran Zhang | Diane Litman

This paper presents an investigation of using a co-attention based neural network for source-dependent essay scoring. We use a co-attention mechanism to help the model learn the importance of each part of the essay more accurately. Also, this paper shows that the co-attention based neural network model provides reliable score prediction of source-dependent responses. We evaluate our model on two source-dependent response corpora. Results show that our model outperforms the baseline on both corpora. We also show that the attention of the model is similar to the expert opinions with examples.

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Cross-Lingual Content Scoring
Andrea Horbach | Sebastian Stennmanns | Torsten Zesch

We investigate the feasibility of cross-lingual content scoring, a scenario where training and test data in an automatic scoring task are from two different languages. Cross-lingual scoring can contribute to educational equality by allowing answers in multiple languages. Training a model in one language and applying it to another language might also help to overcome data sparsity issues by re-using trained models from other languages. As there is no suitable dataset available for this new task, we create a comparable bi-lingual corpus by extending the English ASAP dataset with German answers. Our experiments with cross-lingual scoring based on machine-translating either training or test data show a considerable drop in scoring quality.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 6th BioASQ Workshop A challenge on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering

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Proceedings of the 6th BioASQ Workshop A challenge on large-scale biomedical semantic indexing and question answering
Ioannis A. Kakadiaris | George Paliouras | Anastasia Krithara

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Results of the sixth edition of the BioASQ Challenge
Anastasios Nentidis | Anastasia Krithara | Konstantinos Bougiatiotis | Georgios Paliouras | Ioannis Kakadiaris

This paper presents the results of the sixth edition of the BioASQ challenge. The BioASQ challenge aims at the promotion of systems and methodologies through the organization of a challenge on two tasks: semantic indexing and question answering. In total, 26 teams with more than 90 systems participated in this year’s challenge. As in previous years, the best systems were able to outperform the strong baselines. This suggests that state-of-the-art systems are continuously improving, pushing the frontier of research.

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Semantic role labeling tools for biomedical question answering: a study of selected tools on the BioASQ datasets
Fabian Eckert | Mariana Neves

Question answering (QA) systems usually rely on advanced natural language processing components to precisely understand the questions and extract the answers. Semantic role labeling (SRL) is known to boost performance for QA, but its use for biomedical texts has not yet been fully studied. We analyzed the performance of three SRL tools (BioKIT, BIOSMILE and PathLSTM) on 1776 questions from the BioASQ challenge. We compared the systems regarding the coverage of the questions and snippets, as well as based on pre-defined criteria, such as easiness of installation, supported formats and usability. Finally, we integrated two of the tools in a simple QA system to further evaluate their performance over the official BioASQ test sets.

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Macquarie University at BioASQ 6b: Deep learning and deep reinforcement learning for query-based summarisation
Diego Mollá

This paper describes Macquarie University’s contribution to the BioASQ Challenge (BioASQ 6b, Phase B). We focused on the extraction of the ideal answers, and the task was approached as an instance of query-based multi-document summarisation. In particular, this paper focuses on the experiments related to the deep learning and reinforcement learning approaches used in the submitted runs. The best run used a deep learning model under a regression-based framework. The deep learning architecture used features derived from the output of LSTM chains on word embeddings, plus features based on similarity with the query, and sentence position. The reinforcement learning approach was a proof-of-concept prototype that trained a global policy using REINFORCE. The global policy was implemented as a neural network that used tf.idf features encoding the candidate sentence, question, and context.

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AUEB at BioASQ 6: Document and Snippet Retrieval
George Brokos | Polyvios Liosis | Ryan McDonald | Dimitris Pappas | Ion Androutsopoulos

We present AUEB’s submissions to the BioASQ 6 document and snippet retrieval tasks (parts of Task 6b, Phase A). Our models use novel extensions to deep learning architectures that operate solely over the text of the query and candidate document/snippets. Our systems scored at the top or near the top for all batches of the challenge, highlighting the effectiveness of deep learning for these tasks.

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MindLab Neural Network Approach at BioASQ 6B
Andrés Rosso-Mateus | Fabio A. González | Manuel Montes-y-Gómez

Biomedical Question Answering is concerned with the development of methods and systems that automatically find answers to natural language posed questions. In this work, we describe the system used in the BioASQ Challenge task 6b for document retrieval and snippet retrieval (with particular emphasis in this subtask). The proposed model makes use of semantic similarity patterns that are evaluated and measured by a convolutional neural network architecture. Subsequently, the snippet ranking performance is improved with a pseudo-relevance feedback approach in a later step. Based on the preliminary results, we reached the second position in snippet retrieval sub-task.

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AttentionMeSH: Simple, Effective and Interpretable Automatic MeSH Indexer
Qiao Jin | Bhuwan Dhingra | William Cohen | Xinghua Lu

There are millions of articles in PubMed database. To facilitate information retrieval, curators in the National Library of Medicine (NLM) assign a set of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) to each article. MeSH is a hierarchically-organized vocabulary, containing about 28K different concepts, covering the fields from clinical medicine to information sciences. Several automatic MeSH indexing models have been developed to improve the time-consuming and financially expensive manual annotation, including the NLM official tool – Medical Text Indexer, and the winner of BioASQ Task5a challenge – DeepMeSH. However, these models are complex and not interpretable. We propose a novel end-to-end model, AttentionMeSH, which utilizes deep learning and attention mechanism to index MeSH terms to biomedical text. The attention mechanism enables the model to associate textual evidence with annotations, thus providing interpretability at the word level. The model also uses a novel masking mechanism to enhance accuracy and speed. In the final week of BioASQ Chanllenge Task6a, we ranked 2nd by average MiF using an on-construction model. After the contest, we achieve close to state-of-the-art MiF performance of ∼ 0.684 using our final model. Human evaluations show AttentionMeSH also provides high level of interpretability, retrieving about 90% of all expert-labeled relevant words given an MeSH-article pair at 20 output.

The growing number of biomedical publications is a challenge for human researchers, who invest considerable effort to search for relevant documents and pinpointed answers. Biomedical Question Answering can automatically generate answers for a user’s topic or question, significantly reducing the effort required to locate the most relevant information in a large document corpus. Extractive summarization techniques, which concatenate the most relevant text units drawn from multiple documents, perform well on automatic evaluation metrics like ROUGE, but score poorly on human readability, due to the presence of redundant text and grammatical errors in the answer. This work moves toward abstractive summarization, which attempts to distill and present the meaning of the original text in a more coherent way. We incorporate a sentence fusion approach, based on Integer Linear Programming, along with three novel approaches for sentence ordering, in an attempt to improve the human readability of ideal answers. Using an open framework for configuration space exploration (BOOM), we tested over 2000 unique system configurations in order to identify the best-performing combinations for the sixth edition of Phase B of the BioASQ challenge.

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UNCC QA: Biomedical Question Answering system
Abhishek Bhandwaldar | Wlodek Zadrozny

In this paper, we detail our submission to the BioASQ competition’s Biomedical Semantic Question and Answering task. Our system uses extractive summarization techniques to generate answers and has scored highest ROUGE-2 and Rogue-SU4 in all test batch sets. Our contributions are named-entity based method for answering factoid and list questions, and an extractive summarization techniques for building paragraph-sized summaries, based on lexical chains. Our system got highest ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-SU4 scores for ideal-type answers in all test batch sets. We also discuss the limitations of the described system, such lack of the evaluation on other criteria (e.g. manual). Also, for factoid- and list -type question our system got low accuracy (which suggests that our algorithm needs to improve in the ranking of entities).

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An Adaption of BIOASQ Question Answering dataset for Machine Reading systems by Manual Annotations of Answer Spans.
Sanjay Kamath | Brigitte Grau | Yue Ma

BIOASQ Task B Phase B challenge focuses on extracting answers from snippets for a given question. The dataset provided by the organizers contains answers, but not all their variants. Henceforth a manual annotation was performed to extract all forms of correct answers. This article shows the impact of using all occurrences of correct answers for training on the evaluation scores which are improved significantly.

The ever-increasing magnitude of biomedical information sources makes it difficult and time-consuming for a human researcher to find the most relevant documents and pinpointed answers for a specific question or topic when using only a traditional search engine. Biomedical Question Answering systems automatically identify the most relevant documents and pinpointed answers, given an information need expressed as a natural language question. Generating a non-redundant, human-readable summary that satisfies the information need of a given biomedical question is the focus of the Ideal Answer Generation task, part of the BioASQ challenge. This paper presents a system for ideal answer generation (using ontology-based retrieval and a neural learning-to-rank approach, combined with extractive and abstractive summarization techniques) which achieved the highest ROUGE score of 0.659 on the BioASQ 5b batch 2 test.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the BioNLP 2018 workshop

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Proceedings of the BioNLP 2018 workshop
Dina Demner-Fushman | Kevin Bretonnel Cohen | Sophia Ananiadou | Junichi Tsujii

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Embedding Transfer for Low-Resource Medical Named Entity Recognition: A Case Study on Patient Mobility
Denis Newman-Griffis | Ayah Zirikly

Functioning is gaining recognition as an important indicator of global health, but remains under-studied in medical natural language processing research. We present the first analysis of automatically extracting descriptions of patient mobility, using a recently-developed dataset of free text electronic health records. We frame the task as a named entity recognition (NER) problem, and investigate the applicability of NER techniques to mobility extraction. As text corpora focused on patient functioning are scarce, we explore domain adaptation of word embeddings for use in a recurrent neural network NER system. We find that embeddings trained on a small in-domain corpus perform nearly as well as those learned from large out-of-domain corpora, and that domain adaptation techniques yield additional improvements in both precision and recall. Our analysis identifies several significant challenges in extracting descriptions of patient mobility, including the length and complexity of annotated entities and high linguistic variability in mobility descriptions.

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Multi-task learning for interpretable cause of death classification using key phrase prediction
Serena Jeblee | Mireille Gomes | Graeme Hirst

We introduce a multi-task learning model for cause-of-death classification of verbal autopsy narratives that jointly learns to output interpretable key phrases. Adding these key phrases outperforms the baseline model and topic modeling features.

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Identifying Risk Factors For Heart Disease in Electronic Medical Records: A Deep Learning Approach
Thanat Chokwijitkul | Anthony Nguyen | Hamed Hassanzadeh | Siegfried Perez

Automatic identification of heart disease risk factors in clinical narratives can expedite disease progression modelling and support clinical decisions. Existing practical solutions for cardiovascular risk detection are mostly hybrid systems entailing the integration of knowledge-driven and data-driven methods, relying on dictionaries, rules and machine learning methods that require a substantial amount of human effort. This paper proposes a comparative analysis on the applicability of deep learning, a re-emerged data-driven technique, in the context of clinical text classification. Various deep learning architectures were devised and evaluated for extracting heart disease risk factors from clinical documents. The data provided for the 2014 i2b2/UTHealth shared task focusing on identifying risk factors for heart disease was used for system development and evaluation. Results have shown that a relatively simple deep learning model can achieve a high micro-averaged F-measure of 0.9081, which is comparable to the best systems from the shared task. This is highly encouraging given the simplicity of the deep learning approach compared to the heavily feature-engineered hybrid approaches that were required to achieve state-of-the-art performances.

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Keyphrases Extraction from User-Generated Contents in Healthcare Domain Using Long Short-Term Memory Networks
Ilham Fathy Saputra | Rahmad Mahendra | Alfan Farizki Wicaksono

We propose keyphrases extraction technique to extract important terms from the healthcare user-generated contents. We employ deep learning architecture, i.e. Long Short-Term Memory, and leverage word embeddings, medical concepts from a knowledge base, and linguistic components as our features. The proposed model achieves 61.37% F-1 score. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach outperforms the baseline methods, i.e. RAKE and CRF, on the task of extracting keyphrases from Indonesian health forum posts.

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Identifying Key Sentences for Precision Oncology Using Semi-Supervised Learning
Jurica Ševa | Martin Wackerbauer | Ulf Leser

We present a machine learning pipeline that identifies key sentences in abstracts of oncological articles to aid evidence-based medicine. This problem is characterized by the lack of gold standard datasets, data imbalance and thematic differences between available silver standard corpora. Additionally, available training and target data differs with regard to their domain (professional summaries vs. sentences in abstracts). This makes supervised machine learning inapplicable. We propose the use of two semi-supervised machine learning approaches: To mitigate difficulties arising from heterogeneous data sources, overcome data imbalance and create reliable training data we propose using transductive learning from positive and unlabelled data (PU Learning). For obtaining a realistic classification model, we propose the use of abstracts summarised in relevant sentences as unlabelled examples through Self-Training. The best model achieves 84% accuracy and 0.84 F1 score on our dataset

Ontology alignment is the task of identifying semantically equivalent entities from two given ontologies. Different ontologies have different representations of the same entity, resulting in a need to de-duplicate entities when merging ontologies. We propose a method for enriching entities in an ontology with external definition and context information, and use this additional information for ontology alignment. We develop a neural architecture capable of encoding the additional information when available, and show that the addition of external data results in an F1-score of 0.69 on the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI) largebio SNOMED-NCI subtask, comparable with the entity-level matchers in a SOTA system.

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Sub-word information in pre-trained biomedical word representations: evaluation and hyper-parameter optimization
Dieter Galea | Ivan Laponogov | Kirill Veselkov

Word2vec embeddings are limited to computing vectors for in-vocabulary terms and do not take into account sub-word information. Character-based representations, such as fastText, mitigate such limitations. We optimize and compare these representations for the biomedical domain. fastText was found to consistently outperform word2vec in named entity recognition tasks for entities such as chemicals and genes. This is likely due to gained information from computed out-of-vocabulary term vectors, as well as the word compositionality of such entities. Contrastingly, performance varied on intrinsic datasets. Optimal hyper-parameters were intrinsic dataset-dependent, likely due to differences in term types distributions. This indicates embeddings should be chosen based on the task at hand. We therefore provide a number of optimized hyper-parameter sets and pre-trained word2vec and fastText models, available on https://github.com/dterg/bionlp-embed.

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PICO Element Detection in Medical Text via Long Short-Term Memory Neural Networks
Di Jin | Peter Szolovits

Successful evidence-based medicine (EBM) applications rely on answering clinical questions by analyzing large medical literature databases. In order to formulate a well-defined, focused clinical question, a framework called PICO is widely used, which identifies the sentences in a given medical text that belong to the four components: Participants/Problem (P), Intervention (I), Comparison (C) and Outcome (O). In this work, we present a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network based model to automatically detect PICO elements. By jointly classifying subsequent sentences in the given text, we achieve state-of-the-art results on PICO element classification compared to several strong baseline models. We also make our curated data public as a benchmarking dataset so that the community can benefit from it.

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Coding Structures and Actions with the COSTA Scheme in Medical Conversations
Nan Wang | Yan Song | Fei Xia

This paper describes the COSTA scheme for coding structures and actions in conversation. Informed by Conversation Analysis, the scheme introduces an innovative method for marking multi-layer structural organization of conversation and a structure-informed taxonomy of actions. In addition, we create a corpus of naturally occurring medical conversations, containing 318 video-recorded and manually transcribed pediatric consultations. Based on the annotated corpus, we investigate 1) treatment decision-making process in medical conversations, and 2) effects of physician-caregiver communication behaviors on antibiotic over-prescribing. Although the COSTA annotation scheme is developed based on data from the task-specific domain of pediatric consultations, it can be easily extended to apply to more general domains and other languages.

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A Neural Autoencoder Approach for Document Ranking and Query Refinement in Pharmacogenomic Information Retrieval
Jonas Pfeiffer | Samuel Broscheit | Rainer Gemulla | Mathias Göschl

In this study, we investigate learning-to-rank and query refinement approaches for information retrieval in the pharmacogenomic domain. The goal is to improve the information retrieval process of biomedical curators, who manually build knowledge bases for personalized medicine. We study how to exploit the relationships between genes, variants, drugs, diseases and outcomes as features for document ranking and query refinement. For a supervised approach, we are faced with a small amount of annotated data and a large amount of unannotated data. Therefore, we explore ways to use a neural document auto-encoder in a semi-supervised approach. We show that a combination of established algorithms, feature-engineering and a neural auto-encoder model yield promising results in this setting.

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Biomedical Event Extraction Using Convolutional Neural Networks and Dependency Parsing
Jari Björne | Tapio Salakoski

Event and relation extraction are central tasks in biomedical text mining. Where relation extraction concerns the detection of semantic connections between pairs of entities, event extraction expands this concept with the addition of trigger words, multiple arguments and nested events, in order to more accurately model the diversity of natural language. In this work we develop a convolutional neural network that can be used for both event and relation extraction. We use a linear representation of the input text, where information is encoded with various vector space embeddings. Most notably, we encode the parse graph into this linear space using dependency path embeddings. We integrate our neural network into the open source Turku Event Extraction System (TEES) framework. Using this system, our machine learning model can be easily applied to a large set of corpora from e.g. the BioNLP, DDI Extraction and BioCreative shared tasks. We evaluate our system on 12 different event, relation and NER corpora, showing good generalizability to many tasks and achieving improved performance on several corpora.

In this paper, we present a novel Biomedical Question Answering system, BioAMA: “Biomedical Ask Me Anything” on task 5b of the annual BioASQ challenge. In this work, we focus on a wide variety of question types including factoid, list based, summary and yes/no type questions that generate both exact and well-formed ‘ideal’ answers. For summary-type questions, we combine effective IR-based techniques for retrieval and diversification of relevant snippets for a question to create an end-to-end system which achieves a ROUGE-2 score of 0.72 and a ROUGE-SU4 score of 0.71 on ideal answer questions (7% improvement over the previous best model). Additionally, we propose a novel NLI-based framework to answer the yes/no questions. To train the NLI model, we also devise a transfer-learning technique by cross-domain projection of word embeddings. Finally, we present a two-stage approach to address the factoid and list type questions by first generating a candidate set using NER taggers and ranking them using both supervised or unsupervised techniques.

In this work, we develop a novel, completely unsupervised, neural language model-based document ranking approach to semantic tagging of documents, using the document to be tagged as a query into the GLM to retrieve candidate phrases from top-ranked related documents, thus associating every document with novel related concepts extracted from the text. For this we extend the word embedding-based general language model due to Ganguly et al 2015, to employ phrasal embeddings, and use the semantic tags thus obtained for downstream query expansion, both directly and in feedback loop settings. Our method, evaluated using the TREC 2016 clinical decision support challenge dataset, shows statistically significant improvement not only over various baselines that use standard MeSH terms and UMLS concepts for query expansion, but also over baselines using human expert–assigned concept tags for the queries, run on top of a standard Okapi BM25–based document retrieval system.

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Convolutional neural networks for chemical-disease relation extraction are improved with character-based word embeddings
Dat Quoc Nguyen | Karin Verspoor

We investigate the incorporation of character-based word representations into a standard CNN-based relation extraction model. We experiment with two common neural architectures, CNN and LSTM, to learn word vector representations from character embeddings. Through a task on the BioCreative-V CDR corpus, extracting relationships between chemicals and diseases, we show that models exploiting the character-based word representations improve on models that do not use this information, obtaining state-of-the-art result relative to previous neural approaches.

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Domain Adaptation for Disease Phrase Matching with Adversarial Networks
Miaofeng Liu | Jialong Han | Haisong Zhang | Yan Song

With the development of medical information management, numerous medical data are being classified, indexed, and searched in various systems. Disease phrase matching, i.e., deciding whether two given disease phrases interpret each other, is a basic but crucial preprocessing step for the above tasks. Being capable of relieving the scarceness of annotations, domain adaptation is generally considered useful in medical systems. However, efforts on applying it to phrase matching remain limited. This paper presents a domain-adaptive matching network for disease phrases. Our network achieves domain adaptation by adversarial training, i.e., preferring features indicating whether the two phrases match, rather than which domain they come from. Experiments suggest that our model has the best performance among the very few non-adaptive or adaptive methods that can benefit from out-of-domain annotations.

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Predicting Discharge Disposition Using Patient Complaint Notes in Electronic Medical Records
Mohamad Salimi | Alla Rozovskaya

Overcrowding in emergency rooms is a major challenge faced by hospitals across the United States. Overcrowding can result in longer wait times, which, in turn, has been shown to adversely affect patient satisfaction, clinical outcomes, and procedure reimbursements. This paper presents research that aims to automatically predict discharge disposition of patients who received medical treatment in an emergency department. We make use of a corpus that consists of notes containing patient complaints, diagnosis information, and disposition, entered by health care providers. We use this corpus to develop a model that uses the complaint and diagnosis information to predict patient disposition. We show that the proposed model substantially outperforms the baseline of predicting the most common disposition type. The long-term goal of this research is to build a model that can be implemented as a real-time service in an application to predict disposition as patients arrive.

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Bacteria and Biotope Entity Recognition Using A Dictionary-Enhanced Neural Network Model
Qiuyue Wang | Xiaofeng Meng

Automatic recognition of biomedical entities in text is the crucial initial step in biomedical text mining. In this pa-per, we investigate employing modern neural network models for recognizing biomedical entities. To compensate for the small amount of training data in biomedical domain, we propose to integrate dictionaries into the neural model. Our experiments on BB3 data sets demonstrate that state-of-the-art neural network model is promising in recognizing biomedical entities even with very little training data. When integrated with dictionaries, its performance could be greatly improved, achieving the competitive performance compared with the best dictionary-based system on the entities with specific terminology, and much higher performance on the entities with more general terminology.

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SingleCite: Towards an improved Single Citation Search in PubMed
Lana Yeganova | Donald C Comeau | Won Kim | W John Wilbur | Zhiyong Lu

A search that is targeted at finding a specific document in databases is called a Single Citation search. Single citation searches are particularly important for scholarly databases, such as PubMed, because users are frequently searching for a specific publication. In this work we describe SingleCite, a single citation matching system designed to facilitate user’s search for a specific document. We report on the progress that has been achieved towards building that functionality.

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A Framework for Developing and Evaluating Word Embeddings of Drug-named Entity
Mengnan Zhao | Aaron J. Masino | Christopher C. Yang

We investigate the quality of task specific word embeddings created with relatively small, targeted corpora. We present a comprehensive evaluation framework including both intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation that can be expanded to named entities beyond drug name. Intrinsic evaluation results tell that drug name embeddings created with a domain specific document corpus outperformed the previously published versions that derived from a very large general text corpus. Extrinsic evaluation uses word embedding for the task of drug name recognition with Bi-LSTM model and the results demonstrate the advantage of using domain-specific word embeddings as the only input feature for drug name recognition with F1-score achieving 0.91. This work suggests that it may be advantageous to derive domain specific embeddings for certain tasks even when the domain specific corpus is of limited size.

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MeSH-based dataset for measuring the relevance of text retrieval
Won Gyu Kim | Lana Yeganova | Donald Comeau | W John Wilbur | Zhiyong Lu

Creating simulated search environments has been of a significant interest in infor-mation retrieval, in both general and bio-medical search domains. Existing collec-tions include modest number of queries and are constructed by manually evaluat-ing retrieval results. In this work we pro-pose leveraging MeSH term assignments for creating synthetic test beds. We select a suitable subset of MeSH terms as queries, and utilize MeSH term assignments as pseudo-relevance rankings for retrieval evaluation. Using well studied retrieval functions, we show that their performance on the proposed data is consistent with similar findings in previous work. We further use the proposed retrieval evaluation framework to better understand how to combine heterogeneous sources of textual information.

Sequence labeling of biomedical entities, e.g., side effects or phenotypes, was a long-term task in BioNLP and MedNLP communities. Thanks to effects made among these communities, adverse reaction NER has developed dramatically in recent years. As an illuminative application, to achieve knowledge discovery via the combination of the text mining result and bioinformatics idea shed lights on the pharmacological mechanism research.

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Prediction Models for Risk of Type-2 Diabetes Using Health Claims
Masatoshi Nagata | Kohichi Takai | Keiji Yasuda | Panikos Heracleous | Akio Yoneyama

This study focuses on highly accurate prediction of the onset of type-2 diabetes. We investigated whether prediction accuracy can be improved by utilizing lab test data obtained from health checkups and incorporating health claim text data such as medically diagnosed diseases with ICD10 codes and pharmacy information. In a previous study, prediction accuracy was increased slightly by adding diagnosis disease name and independent variables such as prescription medicine. Therefore, in the current study we explored more suitable models for prediction by using state-of-the-art techniques such as XGBoost and long short-term memory (LSTM) based on recurrent neural networks. In the current study, text data was vectorized using word2vec, and the prediction model was compared with logistic regression. The results obtained confirmed that onset of type-2 diabetes can be predicted with a high degree of accuracy when the XGBoost model is used.

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On Learning Better Embeddings from Chinese Clinical Records: Study on Combining In-Domain and Out-Domain Data
Yaqiang Wang | Yunhui Chen | Hongping Shu | Yongguang Jiang

High quality word embeddings are of great significance to advance applications of biomedical natural language processing. In recent years, a surge of interest on how to learn good embeddings and evaluate embedding quality based on English medical text has become increasing evident, however a limited number of studies based on Chinese medical text, particularly Chinese clinical records, were performed. Herein, we proposed a novel approach of improving the quality of learned embeddings using out-domain data as a supplementary in the case of limited Chinese clinical records. Moreover, the embedding quality evaluation method was conducted based on Medical Conceptual Similarity Property. The experimental results revealed that selecting good training samples was necessary, and collecting right amount of out-domain data and trading off between the quality of embeddings and the training time consumption were essential factors for better embeddings.

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Investigating Domain-Specific Information for Neural Coreference Resolution on Biomedical Texts
Hai-Long Trieu | Nhung T. H. Nguyen | Makoto Miwa | Sophia Ananiadou

Existing biomedical coreference resolution systems depend on features and/or rules based on syntactic parsers. In this paper, we investigate the utility of the state-of-the-art general domain neural coreference resolution system on biomedical texts. The system is an end-to-end system without depending on any syntactic parsers. We also investigate the domain specific features to enhance the system for biomedical texts. Experimental results on the BioNLP Protein Coreference dataset and the CRAFT corpus show that, with no parser information, the adapted system compared favorably with the systems that depend on parser information on these datasets, achieving 51.23% on the BioNLP dataset and 36.33% on the CRAFT corpus in F1 score. In-domain embeddings and domain-specific features helped improve the performance on the BioNLP dataset, but they did not on the CRAFT corpus.

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Toward Cross-Domain Engagement Analysis in Medical Notes
Sara Rosenthal | Adam Faulkner

We present a novel annotation task evaluating a patient’s engagement with their health care regimen. The concept of engagement supplements the traditional concept of adherence with a focus on the patient’s affect, lifestyle choices, and health goal status. We describe an engagement annotation task across two patient note domains: traditional clinical notes and a novel domain, care manager notes, where we find engagement to be more common. The annotation task resulted in a kappa of .53, suggesting strong annotator intuitions regarding engagement-bearing language. In addition, we report the results of a series of preliminary engagement classification experiments using domain adaptation.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation (CC-NLG 2018)

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Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Creativity in Natural Language Generation (CC-NLG 2018)
Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira | Ben Burtenshaw | Raquel Hervás

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A Brief Introduction to Natural Language Generation within Computational Creativity
Ben Burtenshaw

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Seeking the Ideal Narrative Model for Computer-Generated Narratives
Mariana Ferreira | Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira

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Discourse Embellishment Using a Deep Encoder-Decoder Network
Leonid Berov | Kai Standvoss

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Exploring Lexical-Semantic Knowledge in the Generation of Novel Riddles in Portuguese
Hugo Gonçalo Oliveira | Ricardo Rodrigues

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Content Determination for Chess as a Source for Suspenseful Narratives
Richard Doust | Pablo Gervás

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Generating Stories Using Role-playing Games and Simulated Human-like Conversations
Alan Tapscott | Carlos León | Pablo Gervás

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic

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Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology: From Keyboard to Clinic
Kate Loveys | Kate Niederhoffer | Emily Prud’hommeaux | Rebecca Resnik | Philip Resnik

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What type of happiness are you looking for? - A closer look at detecting mental health from language
Alina Arseniev-Koehler | Sharon Mozgai | Stefan Scherer

Computational models to detect mental illnesses from text and speech could enhance our understanding of mental health while offering opportunities for early detection and intervention. However, these models are often disconnected from the lived experience of depression and the larger diagnostic debates in mental health. This article investigates these disconnects, primarily focusing on the labels used to diagnose depression, how these labels are computationally represented, and the performance metrics used to evaluate computational models. We also consider how medical instruments used to measure depression, such as the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ), contribute to these disconnects. To illustrate our points, we incorporate mixed-methods analyses of 698 interviews on emotional health, which are coupled with self-report PHQ screens for depression. We propose possible strategies to bridge these gaps between modern psychiatric understandings of depression, lay experience of depression, and computational representation.

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A Linguistically-Informed Fusion Approach for Multimodal Depression Detection
Michelle Morales | Stefan Scherer | Rivka Levitan

Automated depression detection is inherently a multimodal problem. Therefore, it is critical that researchers investigate fusion techniques for multimodal design. This paper presents the first-ever comprehensive study of fusion techniques for depression detection. In addition, we present novel linguistically-motivated fusion techniques, which we find outperform existing approaches.

We report on the creation of a dataset for studying assessment of suicide risk via online postings in Reddit. Evaluation of risk-level annotations by experts yields what is, to our knowledge, the first demonstration of reliability in risk assessment by clinicians based on social media postings. We also introduce and demonstrate the value of a new, detailed rubric for assessing suicide risk, compare crowdsourced with expert performance, and present baseline predictive modeling experiments using the new dataset, which will be made available to researchers through the American Association of Suicidology.

We describe the shared task for the CLPsych 2018 workshop, which focused on predicting current and future psychological health from an essay authored in childhood. Language-based predictions of a person’s current health have the potential to supplement traditional psychological assessment such as questionnaires, improving intake risk measurement and monitoring. Predictions of future psychological health can aid with both early detection and the development of preventative care. Research into the mental health trajectory of people, beginning from their childhood, has thus far been an area of little work within the NLP community. This shared task represents one of the first attempts to evaluate the use of early language to predict future health; this has the potential to support a wide variety of clinical health care tasks, from early assessment of lifetime risk for mental health problems, to optimal timing for targeted interventions aimed at both prevention and treatment.

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An Approach to the CLPsych 2018 Shared Task Using Top-Down Text Representation and Simple Bottom-Up Model Selection
Micah Iserman | Molly Ireland | Andrew Littlefield | Tyler Davis | Sage Maliepaard

The Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2018 Shared Task asked teams to predict cross-sectional indices of anxiety and distress, and longitudinal indices of psychological distress from a subsample of the National Child Development Study, started in the United Kingdom in 1958. Teams aimed to predict mental health outcomes from essays written by 11-year-olds about what they believed their lives would be like at age 25. In the hopes of producing results that could be easily disseminated and applied, we used largely theory-based dictionaries to process the texts, and a simple data-driven approach to model selection. This approach yielded only modest results in terms of out-of-sample accuracy, but most of the category-level findings are interpretable and consistent with existing literature on psychological distress, anxiety, and depression.

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Using contextual information for automatic triage of posts in a peer-support forum
Edgar Altszyler | Ariel J. Berenstein | David Milne | Rafael A. Calvo | Diego Fernandez Slezak

Mental health forums are online spaces where people can share their experiences anonymously and get peer support. These forums, require the supervision of moderators to provide support in delicate cases, such as posts expressing suicide ideation. The large increase in the number of forum users makes the task of the moderators unmanageable without the help of automatic triage systems. In the present paper, we present a Machine Learning approach for the triage of posts. Most approaches in the literature focus on the content of the posts, but only a few authors take advantage of features extracted from the context in which they appear. Our approach consists of the development and implementation of a large variety of new features from both, the content and the context of posts, such as previous messages, interaction with other users and author’s history. Our method has competed in the CLPsych 2017 Shared Task, obtaining the first place for several of the subtasks. Moreover, we also found that models that take advantage of post context improve significantly its performance in the detection of flagged posts (posts that require moderators attention), as well as those that focus on post content outperforms in the detection of most urgent events.

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Hierarchical neural model with attention mechanisms for the classification of social media text related to mental health
Julia Ive | George Gkotsis | Rina Dutta | Robert Stewart | Sumithra Velupillai

Mental health problems represent a major public health challenge. Automated analysis of text related to mental health is aimed to help medical decision-making, public health policies and to improve health care. Such analysis may involve text classification. Traditionally, automated classification has been performed mainly using machine learning methods involving costly feature engineering. Recently, the performance of those methods has been dramatically improved by neural methods. However, mainly Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been explored. In this paper, we apply a hierarchical Recurrent neural network (RNN) architecture with an attention mechanism on social media data related to mental health. We show that this architecture improves overall classification results as compared to previously reported results on the same data. Benefitting from the attention mechanism, it can also efficiently select text elements crucial for classification decisions, which can also be used for in-depth analysis.

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Cross-cultural differences in language markers of depression online
Kate Loveys | Jonathan Torrez | Alex Fine | Glen Moriarty | Glen Coppersmith

Depression is a global mental health condition that affects all cultures. Despite this, the way depression is expressed varies by culture. Uptake of machine learning technology for diagnosing mental health conditions means that increasingly more depression classifiers are created from online language data. Yet, culture is rarely considered as a factor affecting online language in this literature. This study explores cultural differences in online language data of users with depression. Written language data from 1,593 users with self-reported depression from the online peer support community 7 Cups of Tea was analyzed using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), topic modeling, data visualization, and other techniques. We compared the language of users identifying as White, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, and Asian or Pacific Islander. Exploratory analyses revealed cross-cultural differences in depression expression in online language data, particularly in relation to emotion expression, cognition, and functioning. The results have important implications for avoiding depression misclassification from machine-driven assessments when used in a clinical setting, and for avoiding inadvertent cultural biases in this line of research more broadly.

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Deep Learning for Depression Detection of Twitter Users
Ahmed Husseini Orabi | Prasadith Buddhitha | Mahmoud Husseini Orabi | Diana Inkpen

Mental illness detection in social media can be considered a complex task, mainly due to the complicated nature of mental disorders. In recent years, this research area has started to evolve with the continuous increase in popularity of social media platforms that became an integral part of people’s life. This close relationship between social media platforms and their users has made these platforms to reflect the users’ personal life with different limitations. In such an environment, researchers are presented with a wealth of information regarding one’s life. In addition to the level of complexity in identifying mental illnesses through social media platforms, adopting supervised machine learning approaches such as deep neural networks have not been widely accepted due to the difficulties in obtaining sufficient amounts of annotated training data. Due to these reasons, we try to identify the most effective deep neural network architecture among a few of selected architectures that were successfully used in natural language processing tasks. The chosen architectures are used to detect users with signs of mental illnesses (depression in our case) given limited unstructured text data extracted from the Twitter social media platform.

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Current and Future Psychological Health Prediction using Language and Socio-Demographics of Children for the CLPysch 2018 Shared Task
Sharath Chandra Guntuku | Salvatore Giorgi | Lyle Ungar

This article is a system description and report on the submission of a team from the University of Pennsylvania in the ’CLPsych 2018’ shared task. The goal of the shared task was to use childhood language as a marker for both current and future psychological health over individual lifetimes. Our system employs multiple textual features derived from the essays written and individuals’ socio-demographic variables at the age of 11. We considered several word clustering approaches, and explore the use of linear regression based on different feature sets. Our approach showed best results for predicting distress at the age of 42 and for predicting current anxiety on Disattenuated Pearson Correlation, and ranked fourth in the future health prediction task. In addition to the subtasks presented, we attempted to provide insight into mental health aspects at different ages. Our findings indicate that misspellings, words with illegible letters and increased use of personal pronouns are correlated with poor mental health at age 11, while descriptions about future physical activity, family and friends are correlated with good mental health.

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Predicting Psychological Health from Childhood Essays with Convolutional Neural Networks for the CLPsych 2018 Shared Task (Team UKNLP)
Anthony Rios | Tung Tran | Ramakanth Kavuluru

This paper describes the systems we developed for tasks A and B of the 2018 CLPsych shared task. The first task (task A) focuses on predicting behavioral health scores at age 11 using childhood essays. The second task (task B) asks participants to predict future psychological distress at ages 23, 33, 42, and 50 using the age 11 essays. We propose two convolutional neural network based methods that map each task to a regression problem. Among seven teams we ranked third on task A with disattenuated Pearson correlation (DPC) score of 0.5587. Likewise, we ranked third on task B with an average DPC score of 0.3062.

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A Psychologically Informed Approach to CLPsych Shared Task 2018
Almog Simchon | Michael Gilead

This paper describes our approach to the CLPsych 2018 Shared Task, in which we attempted to predict cross-sectional psychological health at age 11 and future psychological distress based on childhood essays. We attempted several modeling approaches and observed best cross-validated prediction accuracy with relatively simple models based on psychological theory. The models provided reasonable predictions in most outcomes. Notably, our model was especially successful in predicting out-of-sample psychological distress (across people and across time) at age 50.

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Predicting Psychological Health from Childhood Essays. The UGent-IDLab CLPsych 2018 Shared Task System.
Klim Zaporojets | Lucas Sterckx | Johannes Deleu | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder

This paper describes the IDLab system submitted to Task A of the CLPsych 2018 shared task. The goal of this task is predicting psychological health of children based on language used in hand-written essays and socio-demographic control variables. Our entry uses word- and character-based features as well as lexicon-based features and features derived from the essays such as the quality of the language. We apply linear models, gradient boosting as well as neural-network based regressors (feed-forward, CNNs and RNNs) to predict scores. We then make ensembles of our best performing models using a weighted average.

The CLPsych 2018 Shared Task B explores how childhood essays can predict psychological distress throughout the author’s life. Our main aim was to build tools to help our psychologists understand the data, propose features and interpret predictions. We submitted two linear regression models: ModelA uses simple demographic and word-count features, while ModelB uses linguistic, entity, typographic, expert-gazetteer, and readability features. Our models perform best at younger prediction ages, with our best unofficial score at 23 of 0.426 disattenuated Pearson correlation. This task is challenging and although predictive performance is limited, we propose that tight integration of expertise across computational linguistics and clinical psychology is a productive direction.

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Automatic Detection of Incoherent Speech for Diagnosing Schizophrenia
Dan Iter | Jong Yoon | Dan Jurafsky

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder which afflicts an estimated 0.7% of adults world wide. It affects many areas of mental function, often evident from incoherent speech. Diagnosing schizophrenia relies on subjective judgments resulting in disagreements even among trained clinicians. Recent studies have proposed the use of natural language processing for diagnosis by drawing on automatically-extracted linguistic features like discourse coherence and lexicon. Here, we present the first benchmark comparison of previously proposed coherence models for detecting symptoms of schizophrenia and evaluate their performance on a new dataset of recorded interviews between subjects and clinicians. We also present two alternative coherence metrics based on modern sentence embedding techniques that outperform the previous methods on our dataset. Lastly, we propose a novel computational model for reference incoherence based on ambiguous pronoun usage and show that it is a highly predictive feature on our data. While the number of subjects is limited in this pilot study, our results suggest new directions for diagnosing common symptoms of schizophrenia.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by impaired social communication and the presence of restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviors and interests. Prior research suggests that restricted patterns of behavior in ASD may be cross-domain phenomena that are evident in a variety of modalities. Computational studies of language in ASD provide support for the existence of an underlying dimension of restriction that emerges during a conversation. Similar evidence exists for restricted patterns of facial movement. Using tools from computational linguistics, computer vision, and information theory, this study tests whether cognitive-motor restriction can be detected across multiple behavioral domains in adults with ASD during a naturalistic conversation. Our methods identify restricted behavioral patterns, as measured by entropy in word use and mouth movement. Results suggest that adults with ASD produce significantly less diverse mouth movements and words than neurotypical adults, with an increased reliance on repeated patterns in both domains. The diversity values of the two domains are not significantly correlated, suggesting that they provide complementary information.

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Dynamics of an idiostyle of a Russian suicidal blogger
Tatiana Litvinova | Olga Litvinova | Pavel Seredin

Over 800000 people die of suicide each year. It is es-timated that by the year 2020, this figure will have in-creased to 1.5 million. It is considered to be one of the major causes of mortality during adolescence. Thus there is a growing need for methods of identifying su-icidal individuals. Language analysis is known to be a valuable psychodiagnostic tool, however the material for such an analysis is not easy to obtain. Currently as the Internet communications are developing, there is an opportunity to study texts of suicidal individuals. Such an analysis can provide a useful insight into the peculiarities of suicidal thinking, which can be used to further develop methods for diagnosing the risk of suicidal behavior. The paper analyzes the dynamics of a number of linguistic parameters of an idiostyle of a Russian-language blogger who died by suicide. For the first time such an analysis has been conducted using the material of Russian online texts. For text processing, the LIWC program is used. A correlation analysis was performed to identify the relationship between LIWC variables and number of days prior to suicide. Data visualization, as well as comparison with the results of related studies was performed.

Self-reported diagnosis statements have been widely employed in studying language related to mental health in social media. However, existing research has largely ignored the temporality of mental health diagnoses. In this work, we introduce RSDD-Time: a new dataset of 598 manually annotated self-reported depression diagnosis posts from Reddit that include temporal information about the diagnosis. Annotations include whether a mental health condition is present and how recently the diagnosis happened. Furthermore, we include exact temporal spans that relate to the date of diagnosis. This information is valuable for various computational methods to examine mental health through social media because one’s mental health state is not static. We also test several baseline classification and extraction approaches, which suggest that extracting temporal information from self-reported diagnosis statements is challenging.

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Predicting Human Trustfulness from Facebook Language
Mohammadzaman Zamani | Anneke Buffone | H. Andrew Schwartz

Trustfulness — one’s general tendency to have confidence in unknown people or situations — predicts many important real-world outcomes such as mental health and likelihood to cooperate with others such as clinicians. While data-driven measures of interpersonal trust have previously been introduced, here, we develop the first language-based assessment of the personality trait of trustfulness by fitting one’s language to an accepted questionnaire-based trust score. Further, using trustfulness as a type of case study, we explore the role of questionnaire size as well as word count in developing language-based predictive models of users’ psychological traits. We find that leveraging a longer questionnaire can yield greater test set accuracy, while, for training, we find it beneficial to include users who took smaller questionnaires which offers more observations for training. Similarly, after noting a decrease in individual prediction error as word count increased, we found a word count-weighted training scheme was helpful when there were very few users in the first place.

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Within and Between-Person Differences in Language Used Across Anxiety Support and Neutral Reddit Communities
Molly Ireland | Micah Iserman

Although many studies have distinguished between the social media language use of people who do and do not have a mental health condition, within-person context-sensitive comparisons (for example, analyzing individuals’ language use when seeking support or discussing neutral topics) are less common. Two dictionary-based analyses of Reddit communities compared (1) anxious individuals’ comments in anxiety support communities (e.g., /r/PanicParty) with the same users’ comments in neutral communities (e.g., /r/todayilearned), and, (2) within popular neutral communities, comments by members of anxiety subreddits with comments by other users. Each comparison yielded theory-consistent effects as well as unexpected results that suggest novel hypotheses to be tested in the future. Results have relevance for improving researchers’ and practitioners’ ability to unobtrusively assess anxiety symptoms in conversations that are not explicitly about mental health.

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Helping or Hurting? Predicting Changes in Users’ Risk of Self-Harm Through Online Community Interactions
Luca Soldaini | Timothy Walsh | Arman Cohan | Julien Han | Nazli Goharian

In recent years, online communities have formed around suicide and self-harm prevention. While these communities offer support in moment of crisis, they can also normalize harmful behavior, discourage professional treatment, and instigate suicidal ideation. In this work, we focus on how interaction with others in such a community affects the mental state of users who are seeking support. We first build a dataset of conversation threads between users in a distressed state and community members offering support. We then show how to construct a classifier to predict whether distressed users are helped or harmed by the interactions in the thread, and we achieve a macro-F1 score of up to 0.69.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2018)

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Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL 2018)
Asad Sayeed | Cassandra Jacobs | Tal Linzen | Marten van Schijndel

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Coreference and Focus in Reading Times
Evan Jaffe | Cory Shain | William Schuler

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Predictive power of word surprisal for reading times is a linear function of language model quality
Adam Goodkind | Klinton Bicknell

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Dynamic encoding of structural uncertainty in gradient symbols
Pyeong Whan Cho | Matthew Goldrick | Richard L. Lewis | Paul Smolensky

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Phonological (un)certainty weights lexical activation
Laura Gwilliams | David Poeppel | Alec Marantz | Tal Linzen

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Predicting and Explaining Human Semantic Search in a Cognitive Model
Filip Miscevic | Aida Nematzadeh | Suzanne Stevenson

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Modeling bilingual word associations as connected monolingual networks
Yevgen Matusevych | Amir Ardalan Kalantari Dehaghi | Suzanne Stevenson

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Experiential, Distributional and Dependency-based Word Embeddings have Complementary Roles in Decoding Brain Activity
Samira Abnar | Rasyan Ahmed | Max Mijnheer | Willem Zuidema

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Exactly two things to learn from modeling scope ambiguity resolution: Developmental continuity and numeral semantics
K.J. Savinelli | Greg Scontras | Lisa Pearl

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing

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Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of Computational Language Learning and Processing
Marco Idiart | Alessandro Lenci | Thierry Poibeau | Aline Villavicencio

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Predicting Brain Activation with WordNet Embeddings
João António Rodrigues | Ruben Branco | João Silva | Chakaveh Saedi | António Branco

The task of taking a semantic representation of a noun and predicting the brain activity triggered by it in terms of fMRI spatial patterns was pioneered by Mitchell et al. 2008. That seminal work used word co-occurrence features to represent the meaning of the nouns. Even though the task does not impose any specific type of semantic representation, the vast majority of subsequent approaches resort to feature-based models or to semantic spaces (aka word embeddings). We address this task, with competitive results, by using instead a semantic network to encode lexical semantics, thus providing further evidence for the cognitive plausibility of this approach to model lexical meaning.

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Do Speakers Produce Discourse Connectives Rationally?
Frances Yung | Vera Demberg

A number of different discourse connectives can be used to mark the same discourse relation, but it is unclear what factors affect connective choice. One recent account is the Rational Speech Acts theory, which predicts that speakers try to maximize the informativeness of an utterance such that the listener can interpret the intended meaning correctly. Existing prior work uses referential language games to test the rational account of speakers’ production of concrete meanings, such as identification of objects within a picture. Building on the same paradigm, we design a novel Discourse Continuation Game to investigate speakers’ production of abstract discourse relations. Experimental results reveal that speakers significantly prefer a more informative connective, in line with predictions of the RSA model.

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Language Production Dynamics with Recurrent Neural Networks
Jesús Calvillo | Matthew Crocker

We present an analysis of the internal mechanism of the recurrent neural model of sentence production presented by Calvillo et al. (2016). The results show clear patterns of computation related to each layer in the network allowing to infer an algorithmic account, where the semantics activates the semantically related words, then each word generated at each time step activates syntactic and semantic constraints on possible continuations, while the recurrence preserves information through time. We propose that such insights could generalize to other models with similar architecture, including some used in computational linguistics for language modeling, machine translation and image caption generation.

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Multi-glance Reading Model for Text Understanding
Pengcheng Zhu | Yujiu Yang | Wenqiang Gao | Yi Liu

In recent years, a variety of recurrent neural networks have been proposed, e.g LSTM. However, existing models only read the text once, it cannot describe the situation of repeated reading in reading comprehension. In fact, when reading or analyzing a text, we may read the text several times rather than once if we couldn’t well understand it. So, how to model this kind of the reading behavior? To address the issue, we propose a multi-glance mechanism (MGM) for modeling the habit of reading behavior. In the proposed framework, the actual reading process can be fully simulated, and then the obtained information can be consistent with the task. Based on the multi-glance mechanism, we design two types of recurrent neural network models for repeated reading: Glance Cell Model (GCM) and Glance Gate Model (GGM). Visualization analysis of the GCM and the GGM demonstrates the effectiveness of multi-glance mechanisms. Experiments results on the large-scale datasets show that the proposed methods can achieve better performance.

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Predicting Japanese Word Order in Double Object Constructions
Masayuki Asahara | Satoshi Nambu | Shin-Ichiro Sano

This paper presents a statistical model to predict Japanese word order in the double object constructions. We employed a Bayesian linear mixed model with manually annotated predicate-argument structure data. The findings from the refined corpus analysis confirmed the effects of information status of an NP as ‘givennew ordering’ in addition to the effects of ‘long-before-short’ as a tendency of the general Japanese word order.

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Affordances in Grounded Language Learning
Stephen McGregor | KyungTae Lim

We present a novel methodology involving mappings between different modes of semantic representation. We propose distributional semantic models as a mechanism for representing the kind of world knowledge inherent in the system of abstract symbols characteristic of a sophisticated community of language users. Then, motivated by insight from ecological psychology, we describe a model approximating affordances, by which we mean a language learner’s direct perception of opportunities for action in an environment. We present a preliminary experiment involving mapping between these two representational modalities, and propose that our methodology can become the basis for a cognitively inspired model of grounded language learning.

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Rating Distributions and Bayesian Inference: Enhancing Cognitive Models of Spatial Language Use
Thomas Kluth | Holger Schultheis

We present two methods that improve the assessment of cognitive models. The first method is applicable to models computing average acceptability ratings. For these models, we propose an extension that simulates a full rating distribution (instead of average ratings) and allows generating individual ratings. Our second method enables Bayesian inference for models generating individual data. To this end, we propose to use the cross-match test (Rosenbaum, 2005) as a likelihood function. We exemplarily present both methods using cognitive models from the domain of spatial language use. For spatial language use, determining linguistic acceptability judgments of a spatial preposition for a depicted spatial relation is assumed to be a crucial process (Logan and Sadler, 1996). Existing models of this process compute an average acceptability rating. We extend the models and – based on existing data – show that the extended models allow extracting more information from the empirical data and yield more readily interpretable information about model successes and failures. Applying Bayesian inference, we find that model performance relies less on mechanisms of capturing geometrical aspects than on mapping the captured geometry to a rating interval.

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The Role of Syntax During Pronoun Resolution: Evidence from fMRI
Jixing Li | Murielle Fabre | Wen-Ming Luh | John Hale

The current study examined the role of syntactic structure during pronoun resolution. We correlated complexity measures derived by the syntax-sensitive Hobbs algorithm and a neural network model for pronoun resolution with brain activity of participants listening to an audiobook during fMRI recording. Compared to the neural network model, the Hobbs algorithm is associated with larger clusters of brain activation in a network including the left Broca’s area.

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A Sound and Complete Left-Corner Parsing for Minimalist Grammars
Miloš Stanojević | Edward Stabler

This paper presents a left-corner parser for minimalist grammars. The relation between the parser and the grammar is transparent in the sense that there is a very simple 1-1 correspondence between derivations and parses. Like left-corner context-free parsers, left-corner minimalist parsers can be non-terminating when the grammar has empty left corners, so an easily computed left-corner oracle is defined to restrict the search.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference
Massimo Poesio | Vincent Ng | Maciej Ogrodniczuk

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Anaphora Resolution for Twitter Conversations: An Exploratory Study
Berfin Aktaş | Tatjana Scheffler | Manfred Stede

We present a corpus study of pronominal anaphora on Twitter conversations. After outlining the specific features of this genre, with respect to reference resolution, we explain the construction of our corpus and the annotation steps. From this we derive a list of phenomena that need to be considered when performing anaphora resolution on this type of data. Finally, we test the performance of an off-the-shelf resolution system, and provide some qualitative error analysis.

The ARRAU corpus is an anaphorically annotated corpus of English providing rich linguistic information about anaphora resolution. The most distinctive feature of the corpus is the annotation of a wide range of anaphoric relations, including bridging references and discourse deixis in addition to identity (coreference). Other distinctive features include treating all NPs as markables, including non-referring NPs; and the annotation of a variety of morphosyntactic and semantic mention and entity attributes, including the genericity status of the entities referred to by markables. The corpus however has not been extensively used for anaphora resolution research so far. In this paper, we discuss three datasets extracted from the ARRAU corpus to support the three subtasks of the CRAC 2018 Shared Task–identity anaphora resolution over ARRAU-style markables, bridging references resolution, and discourse deixis; the evaluation scripts assessing system performance on those datasets; and preliminary results on these three tasks that may serve as baseline for subsequent research in these phenomena.

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Rule- and Learning-based Methods for Bridging Resolution in the ARRAU Corpus
Ina Roesiger

We present two systems for bridging resolution, which we submitted to the CRAC shared task on bridging anaphora resolution in the ARRAU corpus (track 2): a rule-based approach following Hou et al. 2014 and a learning-based approach. The re-implementation of Hou et al. 2014 achieves very poor performance when being applied to ARRAU. We found that the reasons for this lie in the different bridging annotations: whereas the rule-based system suggests many referential bridging pairs, ARRAU contains mostly lexical bridging. We describe the differences between these two types of bridging and adapt the rule-based approach to be able to handle lexical bridging. The modified rule-based approach achieves reasonable performance on all (sub)-tasks and outperforms a simple learning-based approach.

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A Predictive Model for Notional Anaphora in English
Amir Zeldes

Notional anaphors are pronouns which disagree with their antecedents’ grammatical categories for notional reasons, such as plural to singular agreement in: “the government ... they”. Since such cases are rare and conflict with evidence from strictly agreeing cases (“the government ... it”), they present a substantial challenge to both coreference resolution and referring expression generation. Using the OntoNotes corpus, this paper takes an ensemble approach to predicting English notional anaphora in context on the basis of the largest empirical data to date. In addition to state of the art prediction accuracy, the results suggest that theoretical approaches positing a plural construal at the antecedent’s utterance are insufficient, and that circumstances at the anaphor’s utterance location, as well as global factors such as genre, have a strong effect on the choice of referring expression.

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Integrating Predictions from Neural-Network Relation Classifiers into Coreference and Bridging Resolution
Ina Roesiger | Maximilian Köper | Kim Anh Nguyen | Sabine Schulte im Walde

Cases of coreference and bridging resolution often require knowledge about semantic relations between anaphors and antecedents. We suggest state-of-the-art neural-network classifiers trained on relation benchmarks to predict and integrate likelihoods for relations. Two experiments with representations differing in noise and complexity improve our bridging but not our coreference resolver.

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Towards Bridging Resolution in German: Data Analysis and Rule-based Experiments
Janis Pagel | Ina Roesiger

Bridging resolution is the task of recognising bridging anaphors and linking them to their antecedents. While there is some work on bridging resolution for English, there is only little work for German. We present two datasets which contain bridging annotations, namely DIRNDL and GRAIN, and compare the performance of a rule-based system with a simple baseline approach on these two corpora. The performance for full bridging resolution ranges between an F1 score of 13.6% for DIRNDL and 11.8% for GRAIN. An analysis using oracle lists suggests that the system could, to a certain extent, benefit from ranking and re-ranking antecedent candidates. Furthermore, we investigate the importance of single features and show that the features used in our work seem promising for future bridging resolution approaches.

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Detecting and Resolving Shell Nouns in German
Adam Roussel

This paper describes the design and evaluation of a system for the automatic detection and resolution of shell nouns in German. Shell nouns are general nouns, such as fact, question, or problem, whose full interpretation relies on a content phrase located elsewhere in a text, which these nouns simultaneously serve to characterize and encapsulate. To accomplish this, the system uses a series of lexico-syntactic patterns in order to extract shell noun candidates and their content in parallel. Each pattern has its own classifier, which makes the final decision as to whether or not a link is to be established and the shell noun resolved. Overall, about 26.2% of the annotated shell noun instances were correctly identified by the system, and of these cases, about 72.5% are assigned the correct content phrase. Though it remains difficult to identify shell noun instances reliably (recall is accordingly low in this regard), this system usually assigns the right content to correctly classified cases. cases.

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PAWS: A Multi-lingual Parallel Treebank with Anaphoric Relations
Anna Nedoluzhko | Michal Novák | Maciej Ogrodniczuk

We present PAWS, a multi-lingual parallel treebank with coreference annotation. It consists of English texts from the Wall Street Journal translated into Czech, Russian and Polish. In addition, the texts are syntactically parsed and word-aligned. PAWS is based on PCEDT 2.0 and continues the tradition of multilingual treebanks with coreference annotation. The paper focuses on the coreference annotation in PAWS and its language-specific differences. PAWS offers linguistic material that can be further leveraged in cross-lingual studies, especially on coreference.

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A Fine-grained Large-scale Analysis of Coreference Projection
Michal Novák

We perform a fine-grained large-scale analysis of coreference projection. By projecting gold coreference from Czech to English and vice versa on Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0 Coref, we set an upper bound of a proposed projection approach for these two languages. We undertake a detailed thorough analysis that combines the analysis of projection’s subtasks with analysis of performance on individual mention types. The findings are accompanied with examples from the corpus.

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Modeling Brain Activity Associated with Pronoun Resolution in English and Chinese
Jixing Li | Murielle Fabre | Wen-Ming Luh | John Hale

Typological differences between English and Chinese suggest stronger reliance on salience of the antecedent during pronoun resolution in Chinese. We examined this hypothesis by correlating a difficulty measure of pronoun resolution derived by the activation-based ACT-R model with the brain activity of English and Chinese participants listening to a same audiobook during fMRI recording. The ACT-R model predicts higher overall difficulty for English speakers, which is supported at the brain level in left Broca’s area. More generally, it confirms that computational modeling approach is able to dissociate different dimensions that are involved in the complex process of pronoun resolution in the brain.

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Event versus entity co-reference: Effects of context and form of referring expression
Sharid Loáiciga | Luca Bevacqua | Hannah Rohde | Christian Hardmeier

Anaphora resolution systems require both an enumeration of possible candidate antecedents and an identification process of the antecedent. This paper focuses on (i) the impact of the form of referring expression on entity-vs-event preferences and (ii) how properties of the passage interact with referential form. Two crowd-sourced story-continuation experiments were conducted, using constructed and naturally-occurring passages, to see how participants interpret It and This pronouns following a context sentence that makes available event and entity referents. Our participants show a strong, but not categorical, bias to use This to refer to events and It to refer to entities. However, these preferences vary with passage characteristics such as verb class (a proxy in our constructed examples for the number of explicit and implicit entities) and more subtle author intentions regarding subsequent re-mention (the original event-vs-entity re-mention of our corpus items).

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Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
Tal Linzen | Grzegorz Chrupała | Afra Alishahi

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When does deep multi-task learning work for loosely related document classification tasks?
Emma Kerinec | Chloé Braud | Anders Søgaard

This work aims to contribute to our understanding of when multi-task learning through parameter sharing in deep neural networks leads to improvements over single-task learning. We focus on the setting of learning from loosely related tasks, for which no theoretical guarantees exist. We therefore approach the question empirically, studying which properties of datasets and single-task learning characteristics correlate with improvements from multi-task learning. We are the first to study this in a text classification setting and across more than 500 different task pairs.

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Analyzing Learned Representations of a Deep ASR Performance Prediction Model
Zied Elloumi | Laurent Besacier | Olivier Galibert | Benjamin Lecouteux

This paper addresses a relatively new task: prediction of ASR performance on unseen broadcast programs. In a previous paper, we presented an ASR performance prediction system using CNNs that encode both text (ASR transcript) and speech, in order to predict word error rate. This work is dedicated to the analysis of speech signal embeddings and text embeddings learnt by the CNN while training our prediction model. We try to better understand which information is captured by the deep model and its relation with different conditioning factors. It is shown that hidden layers convey a clear signal about speech style, accent and broadcast type. We then try to leverage these 3 types of information at training time through multi-task learning. Our experiments show that this allows to train slightly more efficient ASR performance prediction systems that - in addition - simultaneously tag the analyzed utterances according to their speech style, accent and broadcast program origin.

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Explaining non-linear Classifier Decisions within Kernel-based Deep Architectures
Danilo Croce | Daniele Rossini | Roberto Basili

Nonlinear methods such as deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performances in several semantic NLP tasks. However epistemologically transparent decisions are not provided as for the limited interpretability of the underlying acquired neural models. In neural-based semantic inference tasks epistemological transparency corresponds to the ability of tracing back causal connections between the linguistic properties of a input instance and the produced classification output. In this paper, we propose the use of a methodology, called Layerwise Relevance Propagation, over linguistically motivated neural architectures, namely Kernel-based Deep Architectures (KDA), to guide argumentations and explanation inferences. In such a way, each decision provided by a KDA can be linked to real examples, linguistically related to the input instance: these can be used to motivate the network output. Quantitative analysis shows that richer explanations about the semantic and syntagmatic structures of the examples characterize more convincing arguments in two tasks, i.e. question classification and semantic role labeling.

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Nightmare at test time: How punctuation prevents parsers from generalizing
Anders Søgaard | Miryam de Lhoneux | Isabelle Augenstein

Punctuation is a strong indicator of syntactic structure, and parsers trained on text with punctuation often rely heavily on this signal. Punctuation is a diversion, however, since human language processing does not rely on punctuation to the same extent, and in informal texts, we therefore often leave out punctuation. We also use punctuation ungrammatically for emphatic or creative purposes, or simply by mistake. We show that (a) dependency parsers are sensitive to both absence of punctuation and to alternative uses; (b) neural parsers tend to be more sensitive than vintage parsers; (c) training neural parsers without punctuation outperforms all out-of-the-box parsers across all scenarios where punctuation departs from standard punctuation. Our main experiments are on synthetically corrupted data to study the effect of punctuation in isolation and avoid potential confounds, but we also show effects on out-of-domain data.

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Evaluating Textual Representations through Image Generation
Graham Spinks | Marie-Francine Moens

We present a methodology for determining the quality of textual representations through the ability to generate images from them. Continuous representations of textual input are ubiquitous in modern Natural Language Processing techniques either at the core of machine learning algorithms or as the by-product at any given layer of a neural network. While current techniques to evaluate such representations focus on their performance on particular tasks, they don’t provide a clear understanding of the level of informational detail that is stored within them, especially their ability to represent spatial information. The central premise of this paper is that visual inspection or analysis is the most convenient method to quickly and accurately determine information content. Through the use of text-to-image neural networks, we propose a new technique to compare the quality of textual representations by visualizing their information content. The method is illustrated on a medical dataset where the correct representation of spatial information and shorthands are of particular importance. For four different well-known textual representations, we show with a quantitative analysis that some representations are consistently able to deliver higher quality visualizations of the information content. Additionally, we show that the quantitative analysis technique correlates with the judgment of a human expert evaluator in terms of alignment.

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On the Role of Text Preprocessing in Neural Network Architectures: An Evaluation Study on Text Categorization and Sentiment Analysis
Jose Camacho-Collados | Mohammad Taher Pilehvar

Text preprocessing is often the first step in the pipeline of a Natural Language Processing (NLP) system, with potential impact in its final performance. Despite its importance, text preprocessing has not received much attention in the deep learning literature. In this paper we investigate the impact of simple text preprocessing decisions (particularly tokenizing, lemmatizing, lowercasing and multiword grouping) on the performance of a standard neural text classifier. We perform an extensive evaluation on standard benchmarks from text categorization and sentiment analysis. While our experiments show that a simple tokenization of input text is generally adequate, they also highlight significant degrees of variability across preprocessing techniques. This reveals the importance of paying attention to this usually-overlooked step in the pipeline, particularly when comparing different models. Finally, our evaluation provides insights into the best preprocessing practices for training word embeddings.

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Jump to better conclusions: SCAN both left and right
Jasmijn Bastings | Marco Baroni | Jason Weston | Kyunghyun Cho | Douwe Kiela

Lake and Baroni (2018) recently introduced the SCAN data set, which consists of simple commands paired with action sequences and is intended to test the strong generalization abilities of recurrent sequence-to-sequence models. Their initial experiments suggested that such models may fail because they lack the ability to extract systematic rules. Here, we take a closer look at SCAN and show that it does not always capture the kind of generalization that it was designed for. To mitigate this we propose a complementary dataset, which requires mapping actions back to the original commands, called NACS. We show that models that do well on SCAN do not necessarily do well on NACS, and that NACS exhibits properties more closely aligned with realistic use-cases for sequence-to-sequence models.

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Understanding Convolutional Neural Networks for Text Classification
Alon Jacovi | Oren Sar Shalom | Yoav Goldberg

We present an analysis into the inner workings of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for processing text. CNNs used for computer vision can be interpreted by projecting filters into image space, but for discrete sequence inputs CNNs remain a mystery. We aim to understand the method by which the networks process and classify text. We examine common hypotheses to this problem: that filters, accompanied by global max-pooling, serve as ngram detectors. We show that filters may capture several different semantic classes of ngrams by using different activation patterns, and that global max-pooling induces behavior which separates important ngrams from the rest. Finally, we show practical use cases derived from our findings in the form of model interpretability (explaining a trained model by deriving a concrete identity for each filter, bridging the gap between visualization tools in vision tasks and NLP) and prediction interpretability (explaining predictions).

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Linguistic representations in multi-task neural networks for ellipsis resolution
Ola Rønning | Daniel Hardt | Anders Søgaard

Sluicing resolution is the task of identifying the antecedent to a question ellipsis. Antecedents are often sentential constituents, and previous work has therefore relied on syntactic parsing, together with complex linguistic features. A recent model instead used partial parsing as an auxiliary task in sequential neural network architectures to inject syntactic information. We explore the linguistic information being brought to bear by such networks, both by defining subsets of the data exhibiting relevant linguistic characteristics, and by examining the internal representations of the network. Both perspectives provide evidence for substantial linguistic knowledge being deployed by the neural networks.

Developing a method for understanding the inner workings of black-box neural methods is an important research endeavor. Conventionally, many studies have used an attention matrix to interpret how Encoder-Decoder-based models translate a given source sentence to the corresponding target sentence. However, recent studies have empirically revealed that an attention matrix is not optimal for token-wise translation analyses. We propose a method that explicitly models the token-wise alignment between the source and target sequences to provide a better analysis. Experiments show that our method can acquire token-wise alignments that are superior to those of an attention mechanism.

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Rule induction for global explanation of trained models
Madhumita Sushil | Simon Šuster | Walter Daelemans

Understanding the behavior of a trained network and finding explanations for its outputs is important for improving the network’s performance and generalization ability, and for ensuring trust in automated systems. Several approaches have previously been proposed to identify and visualize the most important features by analyzing a trained network. However, the relations between different features and classes are lost in most cases. We propose a technique to induce sets of if-then-else rules that capture these relations to globally explain the predictions of a network. We first calculate the importance of the features in the trained network. We then weigh the original inputs with these feature importance scores, simplify the transformed input space, and finally fit a rule induction model to explain the model predictions. We find that the output rule-sets can explain the predictions of a neural network trained for 4-class text classification from the 20 newsgroups dataset to a macro-averaged F-score of 0.80. We make the code available at https://github.com/clips/interpret_with_rules.

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Can LSTM Learn to Capture Agreement? The Case of Basque
Shauli Ravfogel | Yoav Goldberg | Francis Tyers

Sequential neural networks models are powerful tools in a variety of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. The sequential nature of these models raises the questions: to what extent can these models implicitly learn hierarchical structures typical to human language, and what kind of grammatical phenomena can they acquire? We focus on the task of agreement prediction in Basque, as a case study for a task that requires implicit understanding of sentence structure and the acquisition of a complex but consistent morphological system. Analyzing experimental results from two syntactic prediction tasks – verb number prediction and suffix recovery – we find that sequential models perform worse on agreement prediction in Basque than one might expect on the basis of a previous agreement prediction work in English. Tentative findings based on diagnostic classifiers suggest the network makes use of local heuristics as a proxy for the hierarchical structure of the sentence. We propose the Basque agreement prediction task as challenging benchmark for models that attempt to learn regularities in human language.

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Rearranging the Familiar: Testing Compositional Generalization in Recurrent Networks
João Loula | Marco Baroni | Brenden Lake

Systematic compositionality is the ability to recombine meaningful units with regular and predictable outcomes, and it’s seen as key to the human capacity for generalization in language. Recent work (Lake and Baroni, 2018) has studied systematic compositionality in modern seq2seq models using generalization to novel navigation instructions in a grounded environment as a probing tool. Lake and Baroni’s main experiment required the models to quickly bootstrap the meaning of new words. We extend this framework here to settings where the model needs only to recombine well-trained functional words (such as “around” and “right”) in novel contexts. Our findings confirm and strengthen the earlier ones: seq2seq models can be impressively good at generalizing to novel combinations of previously-seen input, but only when they receive extensive training on the specific pattern to be generalized (e.g., generalizing from many examples of “X around right” to “jump around right”), while failing when generalization requires novel application of compositional rules (e.g., inferring the meaning of “around right” from those of “right” and “around”).

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Evaluating the Ability of LSTMs to Learn Context-Free Grammars
Luzi Sennhauser | Robert Berwick

While long short-term memory (LSTM) neural net architectures are designed to capture sequence information, human language is generally composed of hierarchical structures. This raises the question as to whether LSTMs can learn hierarchical structures. We explore this question with a well-formed bracket prediction task using two types of brackets modeled by an LSTM. Demonstrating that such a system is learnable by an LSTM is the first step in demonstrating that the entire class of CFLs is also learnable. We observe that the model requires exponential memory in terms of the number of characters and embedded depth, where a sub-linear memory should suffice. Still, the model does more than memorize the training input. It learns how to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. On the other hand, we also observe that the model does not generalize well. We conclude that LSTMs do not learn the relevant underlying context-free rules, suggesting the good overall performance is attained rather by an efficient way of evaluating nuisance variables. LSTMs are a way to quickly reach good results for many natural language tasks, but to understand and generate natural language one has to investigate other concepts that can make more direct use of natural language’s structural nature.

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Interpretable Neural Architectures for Attributing an Ad’s Performance to its Writing Style
Reid Pryzant | Sugato Basu | Kazoo Sone

How much does “free shipping!” help an advertisement’s ability to persuade? This paper presents two methods for performance attribution: finding the degree to which an outcome can be attributed to parts of a text while controlling for potential confounders. Both algorithms are based on interpreting the behaviors and parameters of trained neural networks. One method uses a CNN to encode the text, an adversarial objective function to control for confounders, and projects its weights onto its activations to interpret the importance of each phrase towards each output class. The other method leverages residualization to control for confounds and performs interpretation by aggregating over learned word vectors. We demonstrate these algorithms’ efficacy on 118,000 internet search advertisements and outcomes, finding language indicative of high and low click through rate (CTR) regardless of who the ad is by or what it is for. Our results suggest the proposed algorithms are high performance and data efficient, able to glean actionable insights from fewer than 10,000 data points. We find that quick, easy, and authoritative language is associated with success, while lackluster embellishment is related to failure. These findings agree with the advertising industry’s emperical wisdom, automatically revealing insights which previously required manual A/B testing to discover.

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Interpreting Neural Networks with Nearest Neighbors
Eric Wallace | Shi Feng | Jordan Boyd-Graber

Local model interpretation methods explain individual predictions by assigning an importance value to each input feature. This value is often determined by measuring the change in confidence when a feature is removed. However, the confidence of neural networks is not a robust measure of model uncertainty. This issue makes reliably judging the importance of the input features difficult. We address this by changing the test-time behavior of neural networks using Deep k-Nearest Neighbors. Without harming text classification accuracy, this algorithm provides a more robust uncertainty metric which we use to generate feature importance values. The resulting interpretations better align with human perception than baseline methods. Finally, we use our interpretation method to analyze model predictions on dataset annotation artifacts.

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‘Indicatements’ that character language models learn English morpho-syntactic units and regularities
Yova Kementchedjhieva | Adam Lopez

Character language models have access to surface morphological patterns, but it is not clear whether or how they learn abstract morphological regularities. We instrument a character language model with several probes, finding that it can develop a specific unit to identify word boundaries and, by extension, morpheme boundaries, which allows it to capture linguistic properties and regularities of these units. Our language model proves surprisingly good at identifying the selectional restrictions of English derivational morphemes, a task that requires both morphological and syntactic awareness. Thus we conclude that, when morphemes overlap extensively with the words of a language, a character language model can perform morphological abstraction.

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LISA: Explaining Recurrent Neural Network Judgments via Layer-wIse Semantic Accumulation and Example to Pattern Transformation
Pankaj Gupta | Hinrich Schütze

Recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are temporal networks and cumulative in nature that have shown promising results in various natural language processing tasks. Despite their success, it still remains a challenge to understand their hidden behavior. In this work, we analyze and interpret the cumulative nature of RNN via a proposed technique named as Layer-wIse-Semantic-Accumulation (LISA) for explaining decisions and detecting the most likely (i.e., saliency) patterns that the network relies on while decision making. We demonstrate (1) LISA: “How an RNN accumulates or builds semantics during its sequential processing for a given text example and expected response” (2) Example2pattern: “How the saliency patterns look like for each category in the data according to the network in decision making”. We analyse the sensitiveness of RNNs about different inputs to check the increase or decrease in prediction scores and further extract the saliency patterns learned by the network. We employ two relation classification datasets: SemEval 10 Task 8 and TAC KBP Slot Filling to explain RNN predictions via the LISA and example2pattern.

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Analysing the potential of seq-to-seq models for incremental interpretation in task-oriented dialogue
Dieuwke Hupkes | Sanne Bouwmeester | Raquel Fernández

We investigate how encoder-decoder models trained on a synthetic dataset of task-oriented dialogues process disfluencies, such as hesitations and self-corrections. We find that, contrary to earlier results, disfluencies have very little impact on the task success of seq-to-seq models with attention. Using visualisations and diagnostic classifiers, we analyse the representations that are incrementally built by the model, and discover that models develop little to no awareness of the structure of disfluencies. However, adding disfluencies to the data appears to help the model create clearer representations overall, as evidenced by the attention patterns the different models exhibit.

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An Operation Sequence Model for Explainable Neural Machine Translation
Felix Stahlberg | Danielle Saunders | Bill Byrne

We propose to achieve explainable neural machine translation (NMT) by changing the output representation to explain itself. We present a novel approach to NMT which generates the target sentence by monotonically walking through the source sentence. Word reordering is modeled by operations which allow setting markers in the target sentence and move a target-side write head between those markers. In contrast to many modern neural models, our system emits explicit word alignment information which is often crucial to practical machine translation as it improves explainability. Our technique can outperform a plain text system in terms of BLEU score under the recent Transformer architecture on Japanese-English and Portuguese-English, and is within 0.5 BLEU difference on Spanish-English.

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Introspection for convolutional automatic speech recognition
Andreas Krug | Sebastian Stober

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have experienced great success in the past few years. The increasing complexity of these models leads to less understanding about their decision processes. Therefore, introspection techniques have been proposed, mostly for images as input data. Patterns or relevant regions in images can be intuitively interpreted by a human observer. This is not the case for more complex data like speech recordings. In this work, we investigate the application of common introspection techniques from computer vision to an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) task. To this end, we use a model similar to image classification, which predicts letters from spectrograms. We show difficulties in applying image introspection to ASR. To tackle these problems, we propose normalized averaging of aligned inputs (NAvAI): a data-driven method to reveal learned patterns for prediction of specific classes. Our method integrates information from many data examples through local introspection techniques for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We demonstrate that our method provides better interpretability of letter-specific patterns than existing methods.

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Learning and Evaluating Sparse Interpretable Sentence Embeddings
Valentin Trifonov | Octavian-Eugen Ganea | Anna Potapenko | Thomas Hofmann

Previous research on word embeddings has shown that sparse representations, which can be either learned on top of existing dense embeddings or obtained through model constraints during training time, have the benefit of increased interpretability properties: to some degree, each dimension can be understood by a human and associated with a recognizable feature in the data. In this paper, we transfer this idea to sentence embeddings and explore several approaches to obtain a sparse representation. We further introduce a novel, quantitative and automated evaluation metric for sentence embedding interpretability, based on topic coherence methods. We observe an increase in interpretability compared to dense models, on a dataset of movie dialogs and on the scene descriptions from the MS COCO dataset.

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What do RNN Language Models Learn about Filler–Gap Dependencies?
Ethan Wilcox | Roger Levy | Takashi Morita | Richard Futrell

RNN language models have achieved state-of-the-art perplexity results and have proven useful in a suite of NLP tasks, but it is as yet unclear what syntactic generalizations they learn. Here we investigate whether state-of-the-art RNN language models represent long-distance filler–gap dependencies and constraints on them. Examining RNN behavior on experimentally controlled sentences designed to expose filler–gap dependencies, we show that RNNs can represent the relationship in multiple syntactic positions and over large spans of text. Furthermore, we show that RNNs learn a subset of the known restrictions on filler–gap dependencies, known as island constraints: RNNs show evidence for wh-islands, adjunct islands, and complex NP islands. These studies demonstrates that state-of-the-art RNN models are able to learn and generalize about empty syntactic positions.

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Do Language Models Understand Anything? On the Ability of LSTMs to Understand Negative Polarity Items
Jaap Jumelet | Dieuwke Hupkes

In this paper, we attempt to link the inner workings of a neural language model to linguistic theory, focusing on a complex phenomenon well discussed in formal linguistics: (negative) polarity items. We briefly discuss the leading hypotheses about the licensing contexts that allow negative polarity items and evaluate to what extent a neural language model has the ability to correctly process a subset of such constructions. We show that the model finds a relation between the licensing context and the negative polarity item and appears to be aware of the scope of this context, which we extract from a parse tree of the sentence. With this research, we hope to pave the way for other studies linking formal linguistics to deep learning.

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Closing Brackets with Recurrent Neural Networks
Natalia Skachkova | Thomas Trost | Dietrich Klakow

Many natural and formal languages contain words or symbols that require a matching counterpart for making an expression well-formed. The combination of opening and closing brackets is a typical example of such a construction. Due to their commonness, the ability to follow such rules is important for language modeling. Currently, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are extensively used for this task. We investigate whether they are capable of learning the rules of opening and closing brackets by applying them to synthetic Dyck languages that consist of different types of brackets. We provide an analysis of the statistical properties of these languages as a baseline and show strengths and limits of Elman-RNNs, GRUs and LSTMs in experiments on random samples of these languages. In terms of perplexity and prediction accuracy, the RNNs get close to the theoretical baseline in most cases.

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Under the Hood: Using Diagnostic Classifiers to Investigate and Improve how Language Models Track Agreement Information
Mario Giulianelli | Jack Harding | Florian Mohnert | Dieuwke Hupkes | Willem Zuidema

How do neural language models keep track of number agreement between subject and verb? We show that ‘diagnostic classifiers’, trained to predict number from the internal states of a language model, provide a detailed understanding of how, when, and where this information is represented. Moreover, they give us insight into when and where number information is corrupted in cases where the language model ends up making agreement errors. To demonstrate the causal role played by the representations we find, we then use agreement information to influence the course of the LSTM during the processing of difficult sentences. Results from such an intervention reveal a large increase in the language model’s accuracy. Together, these results show that diagnostic classifiers give us an unrivalled detailed look into the representation of linguistic information in neural models, and demonstrate that this knowledge can be used to improve their performance.

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Iterative Recursive Attention Model for Interpretable Sequence Classification
Martin Tutek | Jan Šnajder

Natural language processing has greatly benefited from the introduction of the attention mechanism. However, standard attention models are of limited interpretability for tasks that involve a series of inference steps. We describe an iterative recursive attention model, which constructs incremental representations of input data through reusing results of previously computed queries. We train our model on sentiment classification datasets and demonstrate its capacity to identify and combine different aspects of the input in an easily interpretable manner, while obtaining performance close to the state of the art.

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Interpreting Word-Level Hidden State Behaviour of Character-Level LSTM Language Models
Avery Hiebert | Cole Peterson | Alona Fyshe | Nishant Mehta

While Long Short-Term Memory networks (LSTMs) and other forms of recurrent neural network have been successfully applied to language modeling on a character level, the hidden state dynamics of these models can be difficult to interpret. We investigate the hidden states of such a model by using the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm to identify points in the text at which the hidden state is similar. Focusing on whitespace characters prior to the beginning of a word reveals interpretable clusters that offer insight into how the LSTM may combine contextual and character-level information to identify parts of speech. We also introduce a method for deriving word vectors from the hidden state representation in order to investigate the word-level knowledge of the model. These word vectors encode meaningful semantic information even for words that appear only once in the training text.

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Importance of Self-Attention for Sentiment Analysis
Gaël Letarte | Frédérik Paradis | Philippe Giguère | François Laviolette

Despite their superior performance, deep learning models often lack interpretability. In this paper, we explore the modeling of insightful relations between words, in order to understand and enhance predictions. To this effect, we propose the Self-Attention Network (SANet), a flexible and interpretable architecture for text classification. Experiments indicate that gains obtained by self-attention is task-dependent. For instance, experiments on sentiment analysis tasks showed an improvement of around 2% when using self-attention compared to a baseline without attention, while topic classification showed no gain. Interpretability brought forward by our architecture highlighted the importance of neighboring word interactions to extract sentiment.

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Firearms and Tigers are Dangerous, Kitchen Knives and Zebras are Not: Testing whether Word Embeddings Can Tell
Pia Sommerauer | Antske Fokkens

This paper presents an approach for investigating the nature of semantic information captured by word embeddings. We propose a method that extends an existing human-elicited semantic property dataset with gold negative examples using crowd judgments. Our experimental approach tests the ability of supervised classifiers to identify semantic features in word embedding vectors and compares this to a feature-identification method based on full vector cosine similarity. The idea behind this method is that properties identified by classifiers, but not through full vector comparison are captured by embeddings. Properties that cannot be identified by either method are not. Our results provide an initial indication that semantic properties relevant for the way entities interact (e.g. dangerous) are captured, while perceptual information (e.g. colors) is not represented. We conclude that, though preliminary, these results show that our method is suitable for identifying which properties are captured by embeddings.

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An Analysis of Encoder Representations in Transformer-Based Machine Translation
Alessandro Raganato | Jörg Tiedemann

The attention mechanism is a successful technique in modern NLP, especially in tasks like machine translation. The recently proposed network architecture of the Transformer is based entirely on attention mechanisms and achieves new state of the art results in neural machine translation, outperforming other sequence-to-sequence models. However, so far not much is known about the internal properties of the model and the representations it learns to achieve that performance. To study this question, we investigate the information that is learned by the attention mechanism in Transformer models with different translation quality. We assess the representations of the encoder by extracting dependency relations based on self-attention weights, we perform four probing tasks to study the amount of syntactic and semantic captured information and we also test attention in a transfer learning scenario. Our analysis sheds light on the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various encoder representations. We observe that specific attention heads mark syntactic dependency relations and we can also confirm that lower layers tend to learn more about syntax while higher layers tend to encode more semantics.

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Evaluating Grammaticality in Seq2seq Models with a Broad Coverage HPSG Grammar: A Case Study on Machine Translation
Johnny Wei | Khiem Pham | Brendan O’Connor | Brian Dillon

Sequence to sequence (seq2seq) models are often employed in settings where the target output is natural language. However, the syntactic properties of the language generated from these models are not well understood. We explore whether such output belongs to a formal and realistic grammar, by employing the English Resource Grammar (ERG), a broad coverage, linguistically precise HPSG-based grammar of English. From a French to English parallel corpus, we analyze the parseability and grammatical constructions occurring in output from a seq2seq translation model. Over 93% of the model translations are parseable, suggesting that it learns to generate conforming to a grammar. The model has trouble learning the distribution of rarer syntactic rules, and we pinpoint several constructions that differentiate translations between the references and our model.

This paper analyzes the behavior of stack-augmented recurrent neural network (RNN) models. Due to the architectural similarity between stack RNNs and pushdown transducers, we train stack RNN models on a number of tasks, including string reversal, context-free language modelling, and cumulative XOR evaluation. Examining the behavior of our networks, we show that stack-augmented RNNs can discover intuitive stack-based strategies for solving our tasks. However, stack RNNs are more difficult to train than classical architectures such as LSTMs. Rather than employ stack-based strategies, more complex networks often find approximate solutions by using the stack as unstructured memory.

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Learning Explanations from Language Data
David Harbecke | Robert Schwarzenberg | Christoph Alt

PatternAttribution is a recent method, introduced in the vision domain, that explains classifications of deep neural networks. We demonstrate that it also generates meaningful interpretations in the language domain.

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How much should you ask? On the question structure in QA systems.
Barbara Rychalska | Dominika Basaj | Anna Wróblewska | Przemyslaw Biecek

Datasets that boosted state-of-the-art solutions for Question Answering (QA) systems prove that it is possible to ask questions in natural language manner. However, users are still used to query-like systems where they type in keywords to search for answer. In this study we validate which parts of questions are essential for obtaining valid answer. In order to conclude that, we take advantage of LIME - a framework that explains prediction by local approximation. We find that grammar and natural language is disregarded by QA. State-of-the-art model can answer properly even if ’asked’ only with a few words with high coefficients calculated with LIME. According to our knowledge, it is the first time that QA model is being explained by LIME.

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Does it care what you asked? Understanding Importance of Verbs in Deep Learning QA System
Barbara Rychalska | Dominika Basaj | Anna Wróblewska | Przemyslaw Biecek

In this paper we present the results of an investigation of the importance of verbs in a deep learning QA system trained on SQuAD dataset. We show that main verbs in questions carry little influence on the decisions made by the system - in over 90% of researched cases swapping verbs for their antonyms did not change system decision. We track this phenomenon down to the insides of the net, analyzing the mechanism of self-attention and values contained in hidden layers of RNN. Finally, we recognize the characteristics of the SQuAD dataset as the source of the problem. Our work refers to the recently popular topic of adversarial examples in NLP, combined with investigating deep net structure.

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Interpretable Textual Neuron Representations for NLP
Nina Poerner | Benjamin Roth | Hinrich Schütze

Input optimization methods, such as Google Deep Dream, create interpretable representations of neurons for computer vision DNNs. We propose and evaluate ways of transferring this technology to NLP. Our results suggest that gradient ascent with a gumbel softmax layer produces n-gram representations that outperform naive corpus search in terms of target neuron activation. The representations highlight differences in syntax awareness between the language and visual models of the Imaginet architecture.

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Language Models Learn POS First
Naomi Saphra | Adam Lopez

A glut of recent research shows that language models capture linguistic structure. Such work answers the question of whether a model represents linguistic structure. But how and when are these structures acquired? Rather than treating the training process itself as a black box, we investigate how representations of linguistic structure are learned over time. In particular, we demonstrate that different aspects of linguistic structure are learned at different rates, with part of speech tagging acquired early and global topic information learned continuously.

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Predicting and interpreting embeddings for out of vocabulary words in downstream tasks
Nicolas Garneau | Jean-Samuel Leboeuf | Luc Lamontagne

We propose a novel way to handle out of vocabulary (OOV) words in downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. We implement a network that predicts useful embeddings for OOV words based on their morphology and on the context in which they appear. Our model also incorporates an attention mechanism indicating the focus allocated to the left context words, the right context words or the word’s characters, hence making the prediction more interpretable. The model is a “drop-in” module that is jointly trained with the downstream task’s neural network, thus producing embeddings specialized for the task at hand. When the task is mostly syntactical, we observe that our model aims most of its attention on surface form characters. On the other hand, for tasks more semantical, the network allocates more attention to the surrounding words. In all our tests, the module helps the network to achieve better performances in comparison to the use of simple random embeddings.

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Probing sentence embeddings for structure-dependent tense
Geoff Bacon | Terry Regier

Learning universal sentence representations which accurately model sentential semantic content is a current goal of natural language processing research. A prominent and successful approach is to train recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to encode sentences into fixed length vectors. Many core linguistic phenomena that one would like to model in universal sentence representations depend on syntactic structure. Despite the fact that RNNs do not have explicit syntactic structural representations, there is some evidence that RNNs can approximate such structure-dependent phenomena under certain conditions, in addition to their widespread success in practical tasks. In this work, we assess RNNs’ ability to learn the structure-dependent phenomenon of main clause tense.

We present a large scale collection of diverse natural language inference (NLI) datasets that help provide insight into how well a sentence representation encoded by a neural network captures distinct types of reasoning. The collection results from recasting 13 existing datasets from 7 semantic phenomena into a common NLI structure, resulting in over half a million labeled context-hypothesis pairs in total. Our collection of diverse datasets is available at http://www.decomp.net/, and will grow over time as additional resources are recast and added from novel sources.

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Interpretable Word Embedding Contextualization
Kyoung-Rok Jang | Sung-Hyon Myaeng | Sang-Bum Kim

In this paper, we propose a method of calibrating a word embedding, so that the semantic it conveys becomes more relevant to the context. Our method is novel because the output shows clearly which senses that were originally presented in a target word embedding become stronger or weaker. This is possible by utilizing the technique of using sparse coding to recover senses that comprises a word embedding.

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State Gradients for RNN Memory Analysis
Lyan Verwimp | Hugo Van hamme | Vincent Renkens | Patrick Wambacq

We present a framework for analyzing what the state in RNNs remembers from its input embeddings. We compute the gradients of the states with respect to the input embeddings and decompose the gradient matrix with Singular Value Decomposition to analyze which directions in the embedding space are best transferred to the hidden state space, characterized by the largest singular values. We apply our approach to LSTM language models and investigate to what extent and for how long certain classes of words are remembered on average for a certain corpus. Additionally, the extent to which a specific property or relationship is remembered by the RNN can be tracked by comparing a vector characterizing that property with the direction(s) in embedding space that are best preserved in hidden state space.

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Extracting Syntactic Trees from Transformer Encoder Self-Attentions
David Mareček | Rudolf Rosa

This is a work in progress about extracting the sentence tree structures from the encoder’s self-attention weights, when translating into another language using the Transformer neural network architecture. We visualize the structures and discuss their characteristics with respect to the existing syntactic theories and annotations.

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Portable, layer-wise task performance monitoring for NLP models
Tom Lippincott

There is a long-standing interest in understanding the internal behavior of neural networks. Deep neural architectures for natural language processing (NLP) are often accompanied by explanations for their effectiveness, from general observations (e.g. RNNs can represent unbounded dependencies in a sequence) to specific arguments about linguistic phenomena (early layers encode lexical information, deeper layers syntactic). The recent ascendancy of DNNs is fueling efforts in the NLP community to explore these claims. Previous work has tended to focus on easily-accessible representations like word or sentence embeddings, with deeper structure requiring more ad hoc methods to extract and examine. In this work, we introduce Vivisect, a toolkit that aims at a general solution for broad and fine-grained monitoring in the major DNN frameworks, with minimal change to research patterns.

Human ability to understand language is general, flexible, and robust. In contrast, most NLU models above the word level are designed for a specific task and struggle with out-of-domain data. If we aspire to develop models with understanding beyond the detection of superficial correspondences between inputs and outputs, then it is critical to develop a unified model that can execute a range of linguistic tasks across different domains. To facilitate research in this direction, we present the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE, gluebenchmark.com): a benchmark of nine diverse NLU tasks, an auxiliary dataset for probing models for understanding of specific linguistic phenomena, and an online platform for evaluating and comparing models. For some benchmark tasks, training data is plentiful, but for others it is limited or does not match the genre of the test set. GLUE thus favors models that can represent linguistic knowledge in a way that facilitates sample-efficient learning and effective knowledge-transfer across tasks. While none of the datasets in GLUE were created from scratch for the benchmark, four of them feature privately-held test data, which is used to ensure that the benchmark is used fairly. We evaluate baselines that use ELMo (Peters et al., 2018), a powerful transfer learning technique, as well as state-of-the-art sentence representation models. The best models still achieve fairly low absolute scores. Analysis with our diagnostic dataset yields similarly weak performance over all phenomena tested, with some exceptions.

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Explicitly modeling case improves neural dependency parsing
Clara Vania | Adam Lopez

Neural dependency parsing models that compose word representations from characters can presumably exploit morphosyntax when making attachment decisions. How much do they know about morphology? We investigate how well they handle morphological case, which is important for parsing. Our experiments on Czech, German and Russian suggest that adding explicit morphological case—either oracle or predicted—improves neural dependency parsing, indicating that the learned representations in these models do not fully encode the morphological knowledge that they need, and can still benefit from targeted forms of explicit linguistic modeling.

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Language Modeling Teaches You More than Translation Does: Lessons Learned Through Auxiliary Syntactic Task Analysis
Kelly Zhang | Samuel Bowman

Recently, researchers have found that deep LSTMs trained on tasks like machine translation learn substantial syntactic and semantic information about their input sentences, including part-of-speech. These findings begin to shed light on why pretrained representations, like ELMo and CoVe, are so beneficial for neural language understanding models. We still, though, do not yet have a clear understanding of how the choice of pretraining objective affects the type of linguistic information that models learn. With this in mind, we compare four objectives—language modeling, translation, skip-thought, and autoencoding—on their ability to induce syntactic and part-of-speech information, holding constant the quantity and genre of the training data, as well as the LSTM architecture.

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Representation of Word Meaning in the Intermediate Projection Layer of a Neural Language Model
Steven Derby | Paul Miller | Brian Murphy | Barry Devereux

Performance in language modelling has been significantly improved by training recurrent neural networks on large corpora. This progress has come at the cost of interpretability and an understanding of how these architectures function, making principled development of better language models more difficult. We look inside a state-of-the-art neural language model to analyse how this model represents high-level lexico-semantic information. In particular, we investigate how the model represents words by extracting activation patterns where they occur in the text, and compare these representations directly to human semantic knowledge.

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Interpretable Structure Induction via Sparse Attention
Ben Peters | Vlad Niculae | André F. T. Martins

Neural network methods are experiencing wide adoption in NLP, thanks to their empirical performance on many tasks. Modern neural architectures go way beyond simple feedforward and recurrent models: they are complex pipelines that perform soft, differentiable computation instead of discrete logic. The price of such soft computing is the introduction of dense dependencies, which make it hard to disentangle the patterns that trigger a prediction. Our recent work on sparse and structured latent computation presents a promising avenue for enhancing interpretability of such neural pipelines. Through this extended abstract, we aim to discuss and explore the potential and impact of our methods.

Neural attention-based sequence-to-sequence models (seq2seq) (Sutskever et al., 2014; Bahdanau et al., 2014) have proven to be accurate and robust for many sequence prediction tasks. They have become the standard approach for automatic translation of text, at the cost of increased model complexity and uncertainty. End-to-end trained neural models act as a black box, which makes it difficult to examine model decisions and attribute errors to a specific part of a model. The highly connected and high-dimensional internal representations pose a challenge for analysis and visualization tools. The development of methods to understand seq2seq predictions is crucial for systems in production settings, as mistakes involving language are often very apparent to human readers. For instance, a widely publicized incident resulted from a translation system mistakenly translating “good morning” into “attack them” leading to a wrongful arrest (Hern, 2017).

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Grammar Induction with Neural Language Models: An Unusual Replication
Phu Mon Htut | Kyunghyun Cho | Samuel Bowman

Grammar induction is the task of learning syntactic structure without the expert-labeled treebanks (Charniak and Carroll, 1992; Klein and Manning, 2002). Recent work on latent tree learning offers a new family of approaches to this problem by inducing syntactic structure using the supervision from a downstream NLP task (Yogatama et al., 2017; Maillard et al., 2017; Choi et al., 2018). In a recent paper published at ICLR, Shen et al. (2018) introduce such a model and report near state-of-the-art results on the target task of language modeling, and the first strong latent tree learning result on constituency parsing. During the analysis of this model, we discover issues that make the original results hard to trust, including tuning and even training on what is effectively the test set. Here, we analyze the model under different configurations to understand what it learns and to identify the conditions under which it succeeds. We find that this model represents the first empirical success for neural network latent tree learning, and that neural language modeling warrants further study as a setting for grammar induction.

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Does Syntactic Knowledge in Multilingual Language Models Transfer Across Languages?
Prajit Dhar | Arianna Bisazza

Recent work has shown that neural models can be successfully trained on multiple languages simultaneously. We investigate whether such models learn to share and exploit common syntactic knowledge among the languages on which they are trained. This extended abstract presents our preliminary results.

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Exploiting Attention to Reveal Shortcomings in Memory Models
Kaylee Burns | Aida Nematzadeh | Erin Grant | Alison Gopnik | Tom Griffiths

The decision making processes of deep networks are difficult to understand and while their accuracy often improves with increased architectural complexity, so too does their opacity. Practical use of machine learning models, especially for question and answering applications, demands a system that is interpretable. We analyze the attention of a memory network model to reconcile contradictory performance on a challenging question-answering dataset that is inspired by theory-of-mind experiments. We equate success on questions to task classification, which explains not only test-time failures but also how well the model generalizes to new training conditions.

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End-to-end Image Captioning Exploits Distributional Similarity in Multimodal Space
Pranava Swaroop Madhyastha | Josiah Wang | Lucia Specia

We hypothesize that end-to-end neural image captioning systems work seemingly well because they exploit and learn ‘distributional similarity’ in a multimodal feature space, by mapping a test image to similar training images in this space and generating a caption from the same space. To validate our hypothesis, we focus on the ‘image’ side of image captioning, and vary the input image representation but keep the RNN text generation model of a CNN-RNN constant. Our analysis indicates that image captioning models (i) are capable of separating structure from noisy input representations; (ii) experience virtually no significant performance loss when a high dimensional representation is compressed to a lower dimensional space; (iii) cluster images with similar visual and linguistic information together. Our experiments all point to one fact: that our distributional similarity hypothesis holds. We conclude that, regardless of the image representation, image captioning systems seem to match images and generate captions in a learned joint image-text semantic subspace.

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Limitations in learning an interpreted language with recurrent models
Denis Paperno

In this submission I report work in progress on learning simplified interpreted languages by means of recurrent models. The data is constructed to reflect core properties of natural language as modeled in formal syntax and semantics. Preliminary results suggest that LSTM networks do generalise to compositional interpretation, albeit only in the most favorable learning setting.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)
James Thorne | Andreas Vlachos | Oana Cocarascu | Christos Christodoulopoulos | Arpit Mittal

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The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) Shared Task
James Thorne | Andreas Vlachos | Oana Cocarascu | Christos Christodoulopoulos | Arpit Mittal

We present the results of the first Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) Shared Task. The task challenged participants to classify whether human-written factoid claims could be SUPPORTED or REFUTED using evidence retrieved from Wikipedia. We received entries from 23 competing teams, 19 of which scored higher than the previously published baseline. The best performing system achieved a FEVER score of 64.21%. In this paper, we present the results of the shared task and a summary of the systems, highlighting commonalities and innovations among participating systems.

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The Data Challenge in Misinformation Detection: Source Reputation vs. Content Veracity
Fatemeh Torabi Asr | Maite Taboada

Misinformation detection at the level of full news articles is a text classification problem. Reliably labeled data in this domain is rare. Previous work relied on news articles collected from so-called “reputable” and “suspicious” websites and labeled accordingly. We leverage fact-checking websites to collect individually-labeled news articles with regard to the veracity of their content and use this data to test the cross-domain generalization of a classifier trained on bigger text collections but labeled according to source reputation. Our results suggest that reputation-based classification is not sufficient for predicting the veracity level of the majority of news articles, and that the system performance on different test datasets depends on topic distribution. Therefore collecting well-balanced and carefully-assessed training data is a priority for developing robust misinformation detection systems.

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Crowdsourcing Semantic Label Propagation in Relation Classification
Anca Dumitrache | Lora Aroyo | Chris Welty

Distant supervision is a popular method for performing relation extraction from text that is known to produce noisy labels. Most progress in relation extraction and classification has been made with crowdsourced corrections to distant-supervised labels, and there is evidence that indicates still more would be better. In this paper, we explore the problem of propagating human annotation signals gathered for open-domain relation classification through the CrowdTruth methodology for crowdsourcing, that captures ambiguity in annotations by measuring inter-annotator disagreement. Our approach propagates annotations to sentences that are similar in a low dimensional embedding space, expanding the number of labels by two orders of magnitude. Our experiments show significant improvement in a sentence-level multi-class relation classifier.

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Retrieve and Re-rank: A Simple and Effective IR Approach to Simple Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs
Vishal Gupta | Manoj Chinnakotla | Manish Shrivastava

SimpleQuestions is a commonly used benchmark for single-factoid question answering (QA) over Knowledge Graphs (KG). Existing QA systems rely on various components to solve different sub-tasks of the problem (such as entity detection, entity linking, relation prediction and evidence integration). In this work, we propose a different approach to the problem and present an information retrieval style solution for it. We adopt a two-phase approach: candidate generation and candidate re-ranking to answer questions. We propose a Triplet-Siamese-Hybrid CNN (TSHCNN) to re-rank candidate answers. Our approach achieves an accuracy of 80% which sets a new state-of-the-art on the SimpleQuestions dataset.

In this paper we present a browser plugin NewsScan that assists online news readers in evaluating the quality of online content they read by providing information nutrition labels for online news articles. In analogy to groceries, where nutrition labels help consumers make choices that they consider best for themselves, information nutrition labels tag online news articles with data that help readers judge the articles they engage with. This paper discusses the choice of the labels, their implementation and visualization.

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Joint Modeling for Query Expansion and Information Extraction with Reinforcement Learning
Motoki Taniguchi | Yasuhide Miura | Tomoko Ohkuma

Information extraction about an event can be improved by incorporating external evidence. In this study, we propose a joint model for pseudo-relevance feedback based query expansion and information extraction with reinforcement learning. Our model generates an event-specific query to effectively retrieve documents relevant to the event. We demonstrate that our model is comparable or has better performance than the previous model in two publicly available datasets. Furthermore, we analyzed the influences of the retrieval effectiveness in our model on the extraction performance.

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Towards Automatic Fake News Detection: Cross-Level Stance Detection in News Articles
Costanza Conforti | Mohammad Taher Pilehvar | Nigel Collier

In this paper, we propose to adapt the four-staged pipeline proposed by Zubiaga et al. (2018) for the Rumor Verification task to the problem of Fake News Detection. We show that the recently released FNC-1 corpus covers two of its steps, namely the Tracking and the Stance Detection task. We identify asymmetry in length in the input to be a key characteristic of the latter step, when adapted to the framework of Fake News Detection, and propose to handle it as a specific type of Cross-Level Stance Detection. Inspired by theories from the field of Journalism Studies, we implement and test two architectures to successfully model the internal structure of an article and its interactions with a claim.

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Belittling the Source: Trustworthiness Indicators to Obfuscate Fake News on the Web
Diego Esteves | Aniketh Janardhan Reddy | Piyush Chawla | Jens Lehmann

With the growth of the internet, the number of fake-news online has been proliferating every year. The consequences of such phenomena are manifold, ranging from lousy decision-making process to bullying and violence episodes. Therefore, fact-checking algorithms became a valuable asset. To this aim, an important step to detect fake-news is to have access to a credibility score for a given information source. However, most of the widely used Web indicators have either been shutdown to the public (e.g., Google PageRank) or are not free for use (Alexa Rank). Further existing databases are short-manually curated lists of online sources, which do not scale. Finally, most of the research on the topic is theoretical-based or explore confidential data in a restricted simulation environment. In this paper we explore current research, highlight the challenges and propose solutions to tackle the problem of classifying websites into a credibility scale. The proposed model automatically extracts source reputation cues and computes a credibility factor, providing valuable insights which can help in belittling dubious and confirming trustful unknown websites. Experimental results outperform state of the art in the 2-classes and 5-classes setting.

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Automated Fact-Checking of Claims in Argumentative Parliamentary Debates
Nona Naderi | Graeme Hirst

We present an automated approach to distinguish true, false, stretch, and dodge statements in questions and answers in the Canadian Parliament. We leverage the truthfulness annotations of a U.S. fact-checking corpus by training a neural net model and incorporating the prediction probabilities into our models. We find that in concert with other linguistic features, these probabilities can improve the multi-class classification results. We further show that dodge statements can be detected with an F1 measure as high as 82.57% in binary classification settings.

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Stance Detection in Fake News A Combined Feature Representation
Bilal Ghanem | Paolo Rosso | Francisco Rangel

With the uncontrolled increasing of fake news and rumors over the Web, different approaches have been proposed to address the problem. In this paper, we present an approach that combines lexical, word embeddings and n-gram features to detect the stance in fake news. Our approach has been tested on the Fake News Challenge (FNC-1) dataset. Given a news title-article pair, the FNC-1 task aims at determining the relevance of the article and the title. Our proposed approach has achieved an accurate result (59.6 % Macro F1) that is close to the state-of-the-art result with 0.013 difference using a simple feature representation. Furthermore, we have investigated the importance of different lexicons in the detection of the classification labels.

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Zero-shot Relation Classification as Textual Entailment
Abiola Obamuyide | Andreas Vlachos

We consider the task of relation classification, and pose this task as one of textual entailment. We show that this formulation leads to several advantages, including the ability to (i) perform zero-shot relation classification by exploiting relation descriptions, (ii) utilize existing textual entailment models, and (iii) leverage readily available textual entailment datasets, to enhance the performance of relation classification systems. Our experiments show that the proposed approach achieves 20.16% and 61.32% in F1 zero-shot classification performance on two datasets, which further improved to 22.80% and 64.78% respectively with the use of conditional encoding.

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Teaching Syntax by Adversarial Distraction
Juho Kim | Christopher Malon | Asim Kadav

Existing entailment datasets mainly pose problems which can be answered without attention to grammar or word order. Learning syntax requires comparing examples where different grammar and word order change the desired classification. We introduce several datasets based on synthetic transformations of natural entailment examples in SNLI or FEVER, to teach aspects of grammar and word order. We show that without retraining, popular entailment models are unaware that these syntactic differences change meaning. With retraining, some but not all popular entailment models can learn to compare the syntax properly.

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Where is Your Evidence: Improving Fact-checking by Justification Modeling
Tariq Alhindi | Savvas Petridis | Smaranda Muresan

Fact-checking is a journalistic practice that compares a claim made publicly against trusted sources of facts. Wang (2017) introduced a large dataset of validated claims from the POLITIFACT.com website (LIAR dataset), enabling the development of machine learning approaches for fact-checking. However, approaches based on this dataset have focused primarily on modeling the claim and speaker-related metadata, without considering the evidence used by humans in labeling the claims. We extend the LIAR dataset by automatically extracting the justification from the fact-checking article used by humans to label a given claim. We show that modeling the extracted justification in conjunction with the claim (and metadata) provides a significant improvement regardless of the machine learning model used (feature-based or deep learning) both in a binary classification task (true, false) and in a six-way classification task (pants on fire, false, mostly false, half true, mostly true, true).

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Affordance Extraction and Inference based on Semantic Role Labeling
Daniel Loureiro | Alípio Jorge

Common-sense reasoning is becoming increasingly important for the advancement of Natural Language Processing. While word embeddings have been very successful, they cannot explain which aspects of ‘coffee’ and ‘tea’ make them similar, or how they could be related to ‘shop’. In this paper, we propose an explicit word representation that builds upon the Distributional Hypothesis to represent meaning from semantic roles, and allow inference of relations from their meshing, as supported by the affordance-based Indexical Hypothesis. We find that our model improves the state-of-the-art on unsupervised word similarity tasks while allowing for direct inference of new relations from the same vector space.

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UCL Machine Reading Group: Four Factor Framework For Fact Finding (HexaF)
Takuma Yoneda | Jeff Mitchell | Johannes Welbl | Pontus Stenetorp | Sebastian Riedel

In this paper we describe our 2nd place FEVER shared-task system that achieved a FEVER score of 62.52% on the provisional test set (without additional human evaluation), and 65.41% on the development set. Our system is a four stage model consisting of document retrieval, sentence retrieval, natural language inference and aggregation. Retrieval is performed leveraging task-specific features, and then a natural language inference model takes each of the retrieved sentences paired with the claimed fact. The resulting predictions are aggregated across retrieved sentences with a Multi-Layer Perceptron, and re-ranked corresponding to the final prediction.

The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) shared task was launched to support the development of systems able to verify claims by extracting supporting or refuting facts from raw text. The shared task organizers provide a large-scale dataset for the consecutive steps involved in claim verification, in particular, document retrieval, fact extraction, and claim classification. In this paper, we present our claim verification pipeline approach, which, according to the preliminary results, scored third in the shared task, out of 23 competing systems. For the document retrieval, we implemented a new entity linking approach. In order to be able to rank candidate facts and classify a claim on the basis of several selected facts, we introduce two extensions to the Enhanced LSTM (ESIM).

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Team Papelo: Transformer Networks at FEVER
Christopher Malon

We develop a system for the FEVER fact extraction and verification challenge that uses a high precision entailment classifier based on transformer networks pretrained with language modeling, to classify a broad set of potential evidence. The precision of the entailment classifier allows us to enhance recall by considering every statement from several articles to decide upon each claim. We include not only the articles best matching the claim text by TFIDF score, but read additional articles whose titles match named entities and capitalized expressions occurring in the claim text. The entailment module evaluates potential evidence one statement at a time, together with the title of the page the evidence came from (providing a hint about possible pronoun antecedents). In preliminary evaluation, the system achieves .5736 FEVER score, .6108 label accuracy, and .6485 evidence F1 on the FEVER shared task test set.

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Uni-DUE Student Team: Tackling fact checking through decomposable attention neural network
Jan Kowollik | Ahmet Aker

In this paper we present our system for the FEVER Challenge. The task of this challenge is to verify claims by extracting information from Wikipedia. Our system has two parts. In the first part it performs a search for candidate sentences by treating the claims as query. In the second part it filters out noise from these candidates and uses the remaining ones to decide whether they support or refute or entail not enough information to verify the claim. We show that this system achieves a FEVER score of 0.3927 on the FEVER shared task development data set which is a 25.5% improvement over the baseline score.

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SIRIUS-LTG: An Entity Linking Approach to Fact Extraction and Verification
Farhad Nooralahzadeh | Lilja Øvrelid

This article presents the SIRIUS-LTG system for the Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) Shared Task. It consists of three components: 1) Wikipedia Page Retrieval: First we extract the entities in the claim, then we find potential Wikipedia URI candidates for each of the entities using a SPARQL query over DBpedia 2) Sentence selection: We investigate various techniques i.e. Smooth Inverse Frequency (SIF), Word Mover’s Distance (WMD), Soft-Cosine Similarity, Cosine similarity with unigram Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to rank sentences by their similarity to the claim. 3) Textual Entailment: We compare three models for the task of claim classification. We apply a Decomposable Attention (DA) model (Parikh et al., 2016), a Decomposed Graph Entailment (DGE) model (Khot et al., 2018) and a Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees (TalosTree) model (Sean et al., 2017) for this task. The experiments show that the pipeline with simple Cosine Similarity using TFIDF in sentence selection along with DA model as labelling model achieves the best results on the development set (F1 evidence: 32.17, label accuracy: 59.61 and FEVER score: 0.3778). Furthermore, it obtains 30.19, 48.87 and 36.55 in terms of F1 evidence, label accuracy and FEVER score, respectively, on the test set. Our system ranks 15th among 23 participants in the shared task prior to any human-evaluation of the evidence.

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Integrating Entity Linking and Evidence Ranking for Fact Extraction and Verification
Motoki Taniguchi | Tomoki Taniguchi | Takumi Takahashi | Yasuhide Miura | Tomoko Ohkuma

We describe here our system and results on the FEVER shared task. We prepared a pipeline system which composes of a document selection, a sentence retrieval, and a recognizing textual entailment (RTE) components. A simple entity linking approach with text match is used as the document selection component, this component identifies relevant documents for a given claim by using mentioned entities as clues. The sentence retrieval component selects relevant sentences as candidate evidence from the documents based on TF-IDF. Finally, the RTE component selects evidence sentences by ranking the sentences and classifies the claim simultaneously. The experimental results show that our system achieved the FEVER score of 0.4016 and outperformed the official baseline system.

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Robust Document Retrieval and Individual Evidence Modeling for Fact Extraction and Verification.
Tuhin Chakrabarty | Tariq Alhindi | Smaranda Muresan

This paper presents the ColumbiaNLP submission for the FEVER Workshop Shared Task. Our system is an end-to-end pipeline that extracts factual evidence from Wikipedia and infers a decision about the truthfulness of the claim based on the extracted evidence. Our pipeline achieves significant improvement over the baseline for all the components (Document Retrieval, Sentence Selection and Textual Entailment) both on the development set and the test set. Our team finished 6th out of 24 teams on the leader-board based on the preliminary results with a FEVER score of 49.06 on the blind test set compared to 27.45 of the baseline system.

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DeFactoNLP: Fact Verification using Entity Recognition, TFIDF Vector Comparison and Decomposable Attention
Aniketh Janardhan Reddy | Gil Rocha | Diego Esteves

In this paper, we describe DeFactoNLP, the system we designed for the FEVER 2018 Shared Task. The aim of this task was to conceive a system that can not only automatically assess the veracity of a claim but also retrieve evidence supporting this assessment from Wikipedia. In our approach, the Wikipedia documents whose Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) vectors are most similar to the vector of the claim and those documents whose names are similar to those of the named entities (NEs) mentioned in the claim are identified as the documents which might contain evidence. The sentences in these documents are then supplied to a textual entailment recognition module. This module calculates the probability of each sentence supporting the claim, contradicting the claim or not providing any relevant information to assess the veracity of the claim. Various features computed using these probabilities are finally used by a Random Forest classifier to determine the overall truthfulness of the claim. The sentences which support this classification are returned as evidence. Our approach achieved a 0.4277 evidence F1-score, a 0.5136 label accuracy and a 0.3833 FEVER score.

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An End-to-End Multi-task Learning Model for Fact Checking
Sizhen Li | Shuai Zhao | Bo Cheng | Hao Yang

With huge amount of information generated every day on the web, fact checking is an important and challenging task which can help people identify the authenticity of most claims as well as providing evidences selected from knowledge source like Wikipedia. Here we decompose this problem into two parts: an entity linking task (retrieving relative Wikipedia pages) and recognizing textual entailment between the claim and selected pages. In this paper, we present an end-to-end multi-task learning with bi-direction attention (EMBA) model to classify the claim as “supports”, “refutes” or “not enough info” with respect to the pages retrieved and detect sentences as evidence at the same time. We conduct experiments on the FEVER (Fact Extraction and VERification) paper test dataset and shared task test dataset, a new public dataset for verification against textual sources. Experimental results show that our method achieves comparable performance compared with the baseline system.

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Team GESIS Cologne: An all in all sentence-based approach for FEVER
Wolfgang Otto

In this system description of our pipeline to participate at the Fever Shared Task, we describe our sentence-based approach. Throughout all steps of our pipeline, we regarded single sentences as our processing unit. In our IR-Component, we searched in the set of all possible Wikipedia introduction sentences without limiting sentences to a fixed number of relevant documents. In the entailment module, we judged every sentence separately and combined the result of the classifier for the top 5 sentences with the help of an ensemble classifier to make a judgment whether the truth of a statement can be derived from the given claim.

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Team SWEEPer: Joint Sentence Extraction and Fact Checking with Pointer Networks
Christopher Hidey | Mona Diab

Many tasks such as question answering and reading comprehension rely on information extracted from unreliable sources. These systems would thus benefit from knowing whether a statement from an unreliable source is correct. We present experiments on the FEVER (Fact Extraction and VERification) task, a shared task that involves selecting sentences from Wikipedia and predicting whether a claim is supported by those sentences, refuted, or there is not enough information. Fact checking is a task that benefits from not only asserting or disputing the veracity of a claim but also finding evidence for that position. As these tasks are dependent on each other, an ideal model would consider the veracity of the claim when finding evidence and also find only the evidence that is relevant. We thus jointly model sentence extraction and verification on the FEVER shared task. Among all participants, we ranked 5th on the blind test set (prior to any additional human evaluation of the evidence).

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QED: A fact verification system for the FEVER shared task
Jackson Luken | Nanjiang Jiang | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe

This paper describes our system submission to the 2018 Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) shared task. The system uses a heuristics-based approach for evidence extraction and a modified version of the inference model by Parikh et al. (2016) for classification. Our process is broken down into three modules: potentially relevant documents are gathered based on key phrases in the claim, then any possible evidence sentences inside those documents are extracted, and finally our classifier discards any evidence deemed irrelevant and uses the remaining to classify the claim’s veracity. Our system beats the shared task baseline by 12% and is successful at finding correct evidence (evidence retrieval F1 of 62.5% on the development set).

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Team UMBC-FEVER : Claim verification using Semantic Lexical Resources
Ankur Padia | Francis Ferraro | Tim Finin

We describe our system used in the 2018 FEVER shared task. The system employed a frame-based information retrieval approach to select Wikipedia sentences providing evidence and used a two-layer multilayer perceptron to classify a claim as correct or not. Our submission achieved a score of 0.3966 on the Evidence F1 metric with accuracy of 44.79%, and FEVER score of 0.2628 F1 points.

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A mostly unlexicalized model for recognizing textual entailment
Mithun Paul | Rebecca Sharp | Mihai Surdeanu

Many approaches to automatically recognizing entailment relations have employed classifiers over hand engineered lexicalized features, or deep learning models that implicitly capture lexicalization through word embeddings. This reliance on lexicalization may complicate the adaptation of these tools between domains. For example, such a system trained in the news domain may learn that a sentence like “Palestinians recognize Texas as part of Mexico” tends to be unsupported, but this fact (and its corresponding lexicalized cues) have no value in, say, a scientific domain. To mitigate this dependence on lexicalized information, in this paper we propose a model that reads two sentences, from any given domain, to determine entailment without using lexicalized features. Instead our model relies on features that are either unlexicalized or are domain independent such as proportion of negated verbs, antonyms, or noun overlap. In its current implementation, this model does not perform well on the FEVER dataset, due to two reasons. First, for the information retrieval portion of the task we used the baseline system provided, since this was not the aim of our project. Second, this is work in progress and we still are in the process of identifying more features and gradually increasing the accuracy of our model. In the end, we hope to build a generic end-to-end classifier, which can be used in a domain outside the one in which it was trained, with no or minimal re-training.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI

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Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SCAI: The 2nd International Workshop on Search-Oriented Conversational AI
Aleksandr Chuklin | Jeff Dalton | Julia Kiseleva | Alexey Borisov | Mikhail Burtsev

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Neural Response Ranking for Social Conversation: A Data-Efficient Approach
Igor Shalyminov | Ondřej Dušek | Oliver Lemon

The overall objective of ‘social’ dialogue systems is to support engaging, entertaining, and lengthy conversations on a wide variety of topics, including social chit-chat. Apart from raw dialogue data, user-provided ratings are the most common signal used to train such systems to produce engaging responses. In this paper we show that social dialogue systems can be trained effectively from raw unannotated data. Using a dataset of real conversations collected in the 2017 Alexa Prize challenge, we developed a neural ranker for selecting ‘good’ system responses to user utterances, i.e. responses which are likely to lead to long and engaging conversations. We show that (1) our neural ranker consistently outperforms several strong baselines when trained to optimise for user ratings; (2) when trained on larger amounts of data and only using conversation length as the objective, the ranker performs better than the one trained using ratings – ultimately reaching a Precision@1 of 0.87. This advance will make data collection for social conversational agents simpler and less expensive in the future.

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Autonomous Sub-domain Modeling for Dialogue Policy with Hierarchical Deep Reinforcement Learning
Giovanni Yoko Kristianto | Huiwen Zhang | Bin Tong | Makoto Iwayama | Yoshiyuki Kobayashi

Solving composites tasks, which consist of several inherent sub-tasks, remains a challenge in the research area of dialogue. Current studies have tackled this issue by manually decomposing the composite tasks into several sub-domains. However, much human effort is inevitable. This paper proposes a dialogue framework that autonomously models meaningful sub-domains and learns the policy over them. Our experiments show that our framework outperforms the baseline without subdomains by 11% in terms of success rate, and is competitive with that with manually defined sub-domains.

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Building Dialogue Structure from Discourse Tree of a Question
Boris Galitsky | Dmitry Ilvovsky

In this section we propose a reasoning-based approach to a dialogue management for a customer support chat bot. To build a dialogue scenario, we analyze the discourse tree (DT) of an initial query of a customer support dialogue that is frequently complex and multi-sentence. We then enforce rhetorical agreement between DT of the initial query and that of the answers, requests and responses. The chat bot finds answers, which are not only relevant by topic but also suitable for a given step of a conversation and match the question by style, communication means, experience level and other domain-independent attributes. We evaluate a performance of proposed algorithm in car repair domain and observe a 5 to 10% improvement for single and three-step dialogues respectively, in comparison with baseline approaches to dialogue management.

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A Methodology for Evaluating Interaction Strategies of Task-Oriented Conversational Agents
Marco Guerini | Sara Falcone | Bernardo Magnini

In task-oriented conversational agents, more attention has been usually devoted to assessing task effectiveness, rather than to how the task is achieved. However, conversational agents are moving towards more complex and human-like interaction capabilities (e.g. the ability to use a formal/informal register, to show an empathetic behavior), for which standard evaluation methodologies may not suffice. In this paper, we provide a novel methodology to assess - in a completely controlled way - the impact on the quality of experience of agent’s interaction strategies. The methodology is based on a within subject design, where two slightly different transcripts of the same interaction with a conversational agent are presented to the user. Through a series of pilot experiments we prove that this methodology allows fast and cheap experimentation/evaluation, focusing on aspects that are overlooked by current methods.

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A Reinforcement Learning-driven Translation Model for Search-Oriented Conversational Systems
Wafa Aissa | Laure Soulier | Ludovic Denoyer

Search-oriented conversational systems rely on information needs expressed in natural language (NL). We focus here on the understanding of NL expressions for building keyword-based queries. We propose a reinforcement-learning-driven translation model framework able to 1) learn the translation from NL expressions to queries in a supervised way, and, 2) to overcome the lack of large-scale dataset by framing the translation model as a word selection approach and injecting relevance feedback as a reward in the learning process. Experiments are carried out on two TREC datasets. We outline the effectiveness of our approach.

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Research Challenges in Building a Voice-based Artificial Personal Shopper - Position Paper
Nut Limsopatham | Oleg Rokhlenko | David Carmel

Recent advances in automatic speech recognition lead toward enabling a voice conversation between a human user and an intelligent virtual assistant. This provides a potential foundation for developing artificial personal shoppers for e-commerce websites, such as Alibaba, Amazon, and eBay. Personal shoppers are valuable to the on-line shops as they enhance user engagement and trust by promptly dealing with customers’ questions and concerns. Developing an artificial personal shopper requires the agent to leverage knowledge about the customer and products, while interacting with the customer in a human-like conversation. In this position paper, we motivate and describe the artificial personal shopper task, and then address a research agenda for this task by adapting and advancing existing information retrieval and natural language processing technologies.

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Curriculum Learning Based on Reward Sparseness for Deep Reinforcement Learning of Task Completion Dialogue Management
Atsushi Saito

Learning from sparse and delayed reward is a central issue in reinforcement learning. In this paper, to tackle reward sparseness problem of task oriented dialogue management, we propose a curriculum based approach on the number of slots of user goals. This curriculum makes it possible to learn dialogue management for sets of user goals with large number of slots. We also propose a dialogue policy based on progressive neural networks whose modules with parameters are appended with previous parameters fixed as the curriculum proceeds, and this policy improves performances over the one with single set of parameters.

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Data Augmentation for Neural Online Chats Response Selection
Wenchao Du | Alan Black

Data augmentation seeks to manipulate the available data for training to improve the generalization ability of models. We investigate two data augmentation proxies, permutation and flipping, for neural dialog response selection task on various models over multiple datasets, including both Chinese and English languages. Different from standard data augmentation techniques, our method combines the original and synthesized data for prediction. Empirical results show that our approach can gain 1 to 3 recall-at-1 points over baseline models in both full-scale and small-scale settings.

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A Knowledge-Grounded Multimodal Search-Based Conversational Agent
Shubham Agarwal | Ondřej Dušek | Ioannis Konstas | Verena Rieser

Multimodal search-based dialogue is a challenging new task: It extends visually grounded question answering systems into multi-turn conversations with access to an external database. We address this new challenge by learning a neural response generation system from the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017). We introduce a knowledge-grounded multimodal conversational model where an encoded knowledge base (KB) representation is appended to the decoder input. Our model substantially outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity measures (over 9 BLEU points, 3 of which are solely due to the use of additional information from the KB).

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Embedding Individual Table Columns for Resilient SQL Chatbots
Bojan Petrovski | Ignacio Aguado | Andreea Hossmann | Michael Baeriswyl | Claudiu Musat

Most of the world’s data is stored in relational databases. Accessing these requires specialized knowledge of the Structured Query Language (SQL), putting them out of the reach of many people. A recent research thread in Natural Language Processing (NLP) aims to alleviate this problem by automatically translating natural language questions into SQL queries. While the proposed solutions are a great start, they lack robustness and do not easily generalize: the methods require high quality descriptions of the database table columns, and the most widely used training dataset, WikiSQL, is heavily biased towards using those descriptions as part of the questions. In this work, we propose solutions to both problems: we entirely eliminate the need for column descriptions, by relying solely on their contents, and we augment the WikiSQL dataset by paraphrasing column names to reduce bias. We show that the accuracy of existing methods drops when trained on our augmented, column-agnostic dataset, and that our own method reaches state of the art accuracy, while relying on column contents only.

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Exploring Named Entity Recognition As an Auxiliary Task for Slot Filling in Conversational Language Understanding
Samuel Louvan | Bernardo Magnini

Slot filling is a crucial task in the Natural Language Understanding (NLU) component of a dialogue system. Most approaches for this task rely solely on the domain-specific datasets for training. We propose a joint model of slot filling and Named Entity Recognition (NER) in a multi-task learning (MTL) setup. Our experiments on three slot filling datasets show that using NER as an auxiliary task improves slot filling performance and achieve competitive performance compared with state-of-the-art. In particular, NER is effective when supervised at the lower layer of the model. For low-resource scenarios, we found that MTL is effective for one dataset.

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Why are Sequence-to-Sequence Models So Dull? Understanding the Low-Diversity Problem of Chatbots
Shaojie Jiang | Maarten de Rijke

Diversity is a long-studied topic in information retrieval that usually refers to the requirement that retrieved results should be non-repetitive and cover different aspects. In a conversational setting, an additional dimension of diversity matters: an engaging response generation system should be able to output responses that are diverse and interesting. Sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models have been shown to be very effective for response generation. However, dialogue responses generated by Seq2Seq models tend to have low diversity. In this paper, we review known sources and existing approaches to this low-diversity problem. We also identify a source of low diversity that has been little studied so far, namely model over-confidence. We sketch several directions for tackling model over-confidence and, hence, the low-diversity problem, including confidence penalties and label smoothing.

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Retrieve and Refine: Improved Sequence Generation Models For Dialogue
Jason Weston | Emily Dinan | Alexander Miller

Sequence generation models for dialogue are known to have several problems: they tend to produce short, generic sentences that are uninformative and unengaging. Retrieval models on the other hand can surface interesting responses, but are restricted to the given retrieval set leading to erroneous replies that cannot be tuned to the specific context. In this work we develop a model that combines the two approaches to avoid both their deficiencies: first retrieve a response and then refine it – the final sequence generator treating the retrieval as additional context. We show on the recent ConvAI2 challenge task our approach produces responses superior to both standard retrieval and generation models in human evaluations.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

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Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
Sandra Kuebler | Garrett Nicolai

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Efficient Computation of Implicational Universals in Constraint-Based Phonology Through the Hyperplane Separation Theorem
Giorgio Magri

This paper focuses on the most basic implicational universals in phonological theory, called T-orders after Anttila and Andrus (2006). It develops necessary and sufficient constraint characterizations of T-orders within Harmonic Grammar and Optimality Theory. These conditions rest on the rich convex geometry underlying these frameworks. They are phonologically intuitive and have significant algorithmic implications.

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Lexical Networks in !Xung
Syed-Amad Hussain | Micha Elsner | Amanda Miller

We investigate the lexical network properties of the large phoneme inventory Southern African language Mangetti Dune !Xung as it compares to English and other commonly-studied languages. Lexical networks are graphs in which nodes (words) are linked to their minimal pairs; global properties of these networks are believed to mediate lexical access in the minds of speakers. We show that the network properties of !Xung are within the range found in previously-studied languages. By simulating data (”pseudolexicons”) with varying levels of phonotactic structure, we find that the lexical network properties of !Xung diverge from previously-studied languages when fewer phonotactic constraints are retained. We conclude that lexical network properties are representative of an underlying cognitive structure which is necessary for efficient word retrieval and that the phonotactics of !Xung may be shaped by a selective pressure which preserves network properties within this cognitively useful range.

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Acoustic Word Disambiguation with Phonogical Features in Danish ASR
Andreas Søeborg Kirkedal

Phonological features can indicate word class and we can use word class information to disambiguate both homophones and homographs in automatic speech recognition (ASR). We show Danish stød can be predicted from speech and used to improve ASR. We discover which acoustic features contain the signal of stød, how to use these features to predict stød and how we can make use of stød and stødpredictive acoustic features to improve overall ASR accuracy and decoding speed. In the process, we discover acoustic features that are novel to the phonetic characterisation of stød.

Computational Language Documentation attempts to make the most recent research in speech and language technologies available to linguists working on language preservation and documentation. In this paper, we pursue two main goals along these lines. The first is to improve upon a strong baseline for the unsupervised word discovery task on two very low-resource Bantu languages, taking advantage of the expertise of linguists on these particular languages. The second consists in exploring the Adaptor Grammar framework as a decision and prediction tool for linguists studying a new language. We experiment 162 grammar configurations for each language and show that using Adaptor Grammars for word segmentation enables us to test hypotheses about a language. Specializing a generic grammar with language specific knowledge leads to great improvements for the word discovery task, ultimately achieving a leap of about 30% token F-score from the results of a strong baseline.

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String Transduction with Target Language Models and Insertion Handling
Garrett Nicolai | Saeed Najafi | Grzegorz Kondrak

Many character-level tasks can be framed as sequence-to-sequence transduction, where the target is a word from a natural language. We show that leveraging target language models derived from unannotated target corpora, combined with a precise alignment of the training data, yields state-of-the art results on cognate projection, inflection generation, and phoneme-to-grapheme conversion.

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Complementary Strategies for Low Resourced Morphological Modeling
Alexander Erdmann | Nizar Habash

Morphologically rich languages are challenging for natural language processing tasks due to data sparsity. This can be addressed either by introducing out-of-context morphological knowledge, or by developing machine learning architectures that specifically target data sparsity and/or morphological information. We find these approaches to complement each other in a morphological paradigm modeling task in Modern Standard Arabic, which, in addition to being morphologically complex, features ubiquitous ambiguity, exacerbating sparsity with noise. Given a small number of out-of-context rules describing closed class morphology, we combine them with word embeddings leveraging subword strings and noise reduction techniques. The combination outperforms both approaches individually by about 20% absolute. While morphological resources already exist for Modern Standard Arabic, our results inform how comparable resources might be constructed for non-standard dialects or any morphologically rich, low resourced language, given scarcity of time and funding.

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Modeling Reduplication with 2-way Finite-State Transducers
Hossep Dolatian | Jeffrey Heinz

This article describes a novel approach to the computational modeling of reduplication. Reduplication is a well-studied linguistic phenomenon. However, it is often treated as a stumbling block within finite-state treatments of morphology. Most finite-state implementations of computational morphology cannot adequately capture the productivity of unbounded copying in reduplication, nor can they adequately capture bounded copying. We show that an understudied type of finite-state machines, two-way finite-state transducers (2-way FSTs), captures virtually all reduplicative processes, including total reduplication. 2-way FSTs can model reduplicative typology in a way which is convenient, easy to design and debug in practice, and linguistically-motivated. By virtue of being finite-state, 2-way FSTs are likewise incorporable into existing finite-state systems and programs. A small but representative typology of reduplicative processes is described in this article, alongside their corresponding 2-way FST models.

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Automatically Tailoring Unsupervised Morphological Segmentation to the Language
Ramy Eskander | Owen Rambow | Smaranda Muresan

Morphological segmentation is beneficial for several natural language processing tasks dealing with large vocabularies. Unsupervised methods for morphological segmentation are essential for handling a diverse set of languages, including low-resource languages. Eskander et al. (2016) introduced a Language Independent Morphological Segmenter (LIMS) using Adaptor Grammars (AG) based on the best-on-average performing AG configuration. However, while LIMS worked best on average and outperforms other state-of-the-art unsupervised morphological segmentation approaches, it did not provide the optimal AG configuration for five out of the six languages. We propose two language-independent classifiers that enable the selection of the optimal or nearly-optimal configuration for the morphological segmentation of unseen languages.

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A Comparison of Entity Matching Methods between English and Japanese Katakana
Michiharu Yamashita | Hideki Awashima | Hidekazu Oiwa

Japanese Katakana is one component of the Japanese writing system and is used to express English terms, loanwords, and onomatopoeia in Japanese characters based on the phonemes. The main purpose of this research is to find the best entity matching methods between English and Katakana. We built two research questions to clarify which types of entity matching systems works better than others. The first question is what transliteration should be used for conversion. We need to transliterate English or Katakana terms into the same form in order to compute the string similarity. We consider five conversions that transliterate English to Katakana directly, Katakana to English directly, English to Katakana via phoneme, Katakana to English via phoneme, and both English and Katakana to phoneme. The second question is what should be used for the similarity measure at entity matching. To investigate the problem, we choose six methods, which are Overlap Coefficient, Cosine, Jaccard, Jaro-Winkler, Levenshtein, and the similarity of the phoneme probability predicted by RNN. Our results show that 1) matching using phonemes and conversion of Katakana to English works better than other methods, and 2) the similarity of phonemes outperforms other methods while other similarity score is changed depending on data and models.

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Seq2Seq Models with Dropout can Learn Generalizable Reduplication
Brandon Prickett | Aaron Traylor | Joe Pater

Natural language reduplication can pose a challenge to neural models of language, and has been argued to require variables (Marcus et al., 1999). Sequence-to-sequence neural networks have been shown to perform well at a number of other morphological tasks (Cotterell et al., 2016), and produce results that highly correlate with human behavior (Kirov, 2017; Kirov & Cotterell, 2018) but do not include any explicit variables in their architecture. We find that they can learn a reduplicative pattern that generalizes to novel segments if they are trained with dropout (Srivastava et al., 2014). We argue that this matches the scope of generalization observed in human reduplication.

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A Characterwise Windowed Approach to Hebrew Morphological Segmentation
Amir Zeldes

This paper presents a novel approach to the segmentation of orthographic word forms in contemporary Hebrew, focusing purely on splitting without carrying out morphological analysis or disambiguation. Casting the analysis task as character-wise binary classification and using adjacent character and word-based lexicon-lookup features, this approach achieves over 98% accuracy on the benchmark SPMRL shared task data for Hebrew, and 97% accuracy on a new out of domain Wikipedia dataset, an improvement of ≈4% and 5% over previous state of the art performance.

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Phonetic Vector Representations for Sound Sequence Alignment
Pavel Sofroniev | Çağrı Çöltekin

This study explores a number of data-driven vector representations of the IPA-encoded sound segments for the purpose of sound sequence alignment. We test the alternative representations based on the alignment accuracy in the context of computational historical linguistics. We show that the data-driven methods consistently do better than linguistically-motivated articulatory-acoustic features. The similarity scores obtained using the data-driven representations in a monolingual context, however, performs worse than the state-of-the-art distance (or similarity) scoring methods proposed in earlier studies of computational historical linguistics. We also show that adapting representations to the task at hand improves the results, yielding alignment accuracy comparable to the state of the art methods.

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Sounds Wilde. Phonetically Extended Embeddings for Author-Stylized Poetry Generation
Aleksey Tikhonov | Ivan P. Yamshchikov

This paper addresses author-stylized text generation. Using a version of a language model with extended phonetic and semantic embeddings for poetry generation we show that phonetics has comparable contribution to the overall model performance as the information on the target author. Phonetic information is shown to be important for English and Russian language. Humans tend to attribute machine generated texts to the target author.

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On Hapax Legomena and Morphological Productivity
Janet Pierrehumbert | Ramon Granell

Quantifying and predicting morphological productivity is a long-standing challenge in corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. The same challenge reappears in natural language processing in the context of handling words that were not seen in the training set (out-of-vocabulary, or OOV, words). Prior research showed that a good indicator of the productivity of a morpheme is the number of words involving it that occur exactly once (the hapax legomena). A technical connection was adduced between this result and Good-Turing smoothing, which assigns probability mass to unseen events on the basis of the simplifying assumption that word frequencies are stationary. In a large-scale study of 133 affixes in Wikipedia, we develop evidence that success in fact depends on tapping the frequency range in which the assumptions of Good-Turing are violated.

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A Morphological Analyzer for Shipibo-Konibo
Ronald Cardenas | Daniel Zeman

We present a fairly complete morphological analyzer for Shipibo-Konibo, a low-resourced native language spoken in the Amazonian region of Peru. We resort to the robustness of finite-state systems in order to model the complex morphosyntax of the language. Evaluation over raw corpora shows promising coverage of grammatical phenomena, limited only by the scarce lexicon. We make this tool freely available so as to aid the production of annotated corpora and impulse further research in native languages of Peru.

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An Arabic Morphological Analyzer and Generator with Copious Features
Dima Taji | Salam Khalifa | Ossama Obeid | Fadhl Eryani | Nizar Habash

We introduce CALIMA-Star, a very rich Arabic morphological analyzer and generator that provides functional and form-based morphological features as well as built-in tokenization, phonological representation, lexical rationality and much more. This tool includes a fast engine that can be easily integrated into other systems, as well as an easy-to-use API and a web interface. CALIMA-Star also supports morphological reinflection. We evaluate CALIMA-Star against four commonly used analyzers for Arabic in terms of speed and morphological content.

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Sanskrit n-Retroflexion is Input-Output Tier-Based Strictly Local
Thomas Graf | Connor Mayer

Sanskrit /n/-retroflexion is one of the most complex segmental processes in phonology. While it is still star-free, it does not fit in any of the subregular classes that are commonly entertained in the literature. We show that when construed as a phonotactic dependency, the process fits into a class we call input-output tier-based strictly local (IO-TSL), a natural extension of the familiar class TSL. IO-TSL increases the power of TSL’s tier projection function by making it an input-output strictly local transduction. Assuming that /n/-retroflexion represents the upper bound on the complexity of segmental phonology, this shows that all of segmental phonology can be captured by combining the intuitive notion of tiers with the independently motivated machinery of strictly local mappings.

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Phonological Features for Morphological Inflection
Adam Wiemerslage | Miikka Silfverberg | Mans Hulden

Modeling morphological inflection is an important task in Natural Language Processing. In contrast to earlier work that has largely used orthographic representations, we experiment with this task in a phonetic character space, representing inputs as either IPA segments or bundles of phonological distinctive features. We show that both of these inputs, somewhat counterintuitively, achieve similar accuracies on morphological inflection, slightly lower than orthographic models. We conclude that providing detailed phonological representations is largely redundant when compared to IPA segments, and that articulatory distinctions relevant for word inflection are already latently present in the distributional properties of many graphemic writing systems.

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Extracting Morphophonology from Small Corpora
Marina Ermolaeva

Probabilistic approaches have proven themselves well in learning phonological structure. In contrast, theoretical linguistics usually works with deterministic generalizations. The goal of this paper is to explore possible interactions between information-theoretic methods and deterministic linguistic knowledge and to examine some ways in which both can be used in tandem to extract phonological and morphophonological patterns from a small annotated dataset. Local and nonlocal processes in Mishar Tatar (Turkic/Kipchak) are examined as a case study.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SMM4H: The 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications Workshop & Shared Task

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Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop SMM4H: The 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications Workshop & Shared Task
Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez | Davy Weissenbacher | Abeed Sarker | Michael Paul

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Football and Beer - a Social Media Analysis on Twitter in Context of the FIFA Football World Cup 2018
Roland Roller | Philippe Thomas | Sven Schmeier

In many societies alcohol is a legal and common recreational substance and socially accepted. Alcohol consumption often comes along with social events as it helps people to increase their sociability and to overcome their inhibitions. On the other hand we know that increased alcohol consumption can lead to serious health issues, such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases and diseases of the digestive system, to mention a few. This work examines alcohol consumption during the FIFA Football World Cup 2018, particularly the usage of alcohol related information on Twitter. For this we analyse the tweeting behaviour and show that the tournament strongly increases the interest in beer. Furthermore we show that countries who had to leave the tournament at early stage might have done something good to their fans as the interest in beer decreased again.

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Stance-Taking in Topics Extracted from Vaccine-Related Tweets and Discussion Forum Posts
Maria Skeppstedt | Manfred Stede | Andreas Kerren

The occurrence of stance-taking towards vaccination was measured in documents extracted by topic modelling from two different corpora, one discussion forum corpus and one tweet corpus. For some of the topics extracted, their most closely associated documents contained a proportion of vaccine stance-taking texts that exceeded the corpus average by a large margin. These extracted document sets would, therefore, form a useful resource in a process for computer-assisted analysis of argumentation on the subject of vaccination.

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Identifying Depression on Reddit: The Effect of Training Data
Inna Pirina | Çağrı Çöltekin

This paper presents a set of classification experiments for identifying depression in posts gathered from social media platforms. In addition to the data gathered previously by other researchers, we collect additional data from the social media platform Reddit. Our experiments show promising results for identifying depression from social media texts. More importantly, however, we show that the choice of corpora is crucial in identifying depression and can lead to misleading conclusions in case of poor choice of data.

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Overview of the Third Social Media Mining for Health (SMM4H) Shared Tasks at EMNLP 2018
Davy Weissenbacher | Abeed Sarker | Michael J. Paul | Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez

The goals of the SMM4H shared tasks are to release annotated social media based health related datasets to the research community, and to compare the performances of natural language processing and machine learning systems on tasks involving these datasets. The third execution of the SMM4H shared tasks, co-hosted with EMNLP-2018, comprised of four subtasks. These subtasks involve annotated user posts from Twitter (tweets) and focus on the (i) automatic classification of tweets mentioning a drug name, (ii) automatic classification of tweets containing reports of first-person medication intake, (iii) automatic classification of tweets presenting self-reports of adverse drug reaction (ADR) detection, and (iv) automatic classification of vaccine behavior mentions in tweets. A total of 14 teams participated and 78 system runs were submitted (23 for task 1, 20 for task 2, 18 for task 3, 17 for task 4).

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Changes in Psycholinguistic Attributes of Social Media Users Before, During, and After Self-Reported Influenza Symptoms
Lucie Flekova | Vasileios Lampos | Ingemar Cox

Previous research has linked psychological and social variables to physical health. At the same time, psychological and social variables have been successfully predicted from the language used by individuals in social media. In this paper, we conduct an initial exploratory study linking these two areas. Using the social media platform of Twitter, we identify users self-reporting symptoms that are descriptive of influenza-like illness (ILI). We analyze the tweets of those users in the periods before, during, and after the reported symptoms, exploring emotional, cognitive, and structural components of language. We observe a post-ILI increase in social activity and cognitive processes, possibly supporting previous offline findings linking more active social activities and stronger cognitive coping skills to a better immune status.

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Thumbs Up and Down: Sentiment Analysis of Medical Online Forums
Victoria Bobicev | Marina Sokolova

In the current study, we apply multi-class and multi-label sentence classification to sentiment analysis of online medical forums. We aim to identify major health issues discussed in online social media and the types of sentiments those issues evoke. We use ontology of personal health information for Information Extraction and apply Machine Learning methods in automated recognition of the expressed sentiments.

Social media-based text mining in healthcare has received special attention in recent times due to the enhanced accessibility of social media sites like Twitter. The increasing trend of spreading important information in distress can help patients reach out to prospective blood donors in a time bound manner. However such manual efforts are mostly inefficient due to the limited network of a user. In a novel step to solve this problem, we present an annotated Emergency Blood Donation Request (EBDR) dataset to classify tweets referring to the necessity of urgent blood donation requirement. Additionally, we also present an automated feature-based SVM classification technique that can help selective EBDR tweets reach relevant personals as well as medical authorities. Our experiments also present a quantitative evidence that linguistic along with handcrafted heuristics can act as the most representative set of signals this task with an accuracy of 97.89%.

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Dealing with Medication Non-Adherence Expressions in Twitter
Takeshi Onishi | Davy Weissenbacher | Ari Klein | Karen O’Connor | Graciela Gonzalez-Hernandez

Through a semi-automatic analysis of tweets, we show that Twitter users not only express Medication Non-Adherence (MNA) in social media but also their reasons for not complying; further research is necessary to fully extract automatically and analyze this information, in order to facilitate the use of this data in epidemiological studies.

This paper describes our system for the first and third shared tasks of the third Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) workshop, which aims to detect the tweets mentioning drug names and adverse drug reactions. In our system we propose a neural approach with hierarchical tweet representation and multi-head self-attention (HTR-MSA) for both tasks. Our system achieved the first place in both the first and third shared tasks of SMM4H with an F-score of 91.83% and 52.20% respectively.

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Classification of Medication-Related Tweets Using Stacked Bidirectional LSTMs with Context-Aware Attention
Orest Xherija

This paper describes the system that team UChicagoCompLx developed for the 2018 Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) Shared Task. We use a variant of the Message-level Sentiment Analysis (MSA) model of (Baziotis et al., 2017), a word-level stacked bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network equipped with attention, to classify medication-related tweets in the four subtasks of the SMM4H Shared Task. Without any subtask-specific tuning, the model is able to achieve competitive results across all subtasks. We make the datasets, model weights, and code publicly available.

Vaccination behaviour detection deals with predicting whether or not a person received/was about to receive a vaccine. We present our submission for vaccination behaviour detection shared task at the SMM4H workshop. Our findings are based on three prevalent text classification approaches: rule-based, statistical and deep learning-based. Our final submissions are: (1) an ensemble of statistical classifiers with task-specific features derived using lexicons, language processing tools and word embeddings; and, (2) a LSTM classifier with pre-trained language models.

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Neural DrugNet
Nishant Nikhil | Shivansh Mundra

In this paper, we describe the system submitted for the shared task on Social Media Mining for Health Applications by the team Light. Previous works demonstrate that LSTMs have achieved remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks. We deploy an ensemble of two LSTM models. The first one is a pretrained language model appended with a classifier and takes words as input, while the second one is a LSTM model with an attention unit over it which takes character tri-gram as input. We call the ensemble of these two models: Neural-DrugNet. Our system ranks 2nd in the second shared task: Automatic classification of posts describing medication intake.

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IRISA at SMM4H 2018: Neural Network and Bagging for Tweet Classification
Anne-Lyse Minard | Christian Raymond | Vincent Claveau

This paper describes the systems developed by IRISA to participate to the four tasks of the SMM4H 2018 challenge. For these tweet classification tasks, we adopt a common approach based on recurrent neural networks (BiLSTM). Our main contributions are the use of certain features, the use of Bagging in order to deal with unbalanced datasets, and on the automatic selection of difficult examples. These techniques allow us to reach 91.4, 46.5, 47.8, 85.0 as F1-scores for Tasks 1 to 4.

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Drug-Use Identification from Tweets with Word and Character N-Grams
Çağrı Çöltekin | Taraka Rama

This paper describes our systems in social media mining for health applications (SMM4H) shared task. We participated in all four tracks of the shared task using linear models with a combination of character and word n-gram features. We did not use any external data or domain specific information. The resulting systems achieved above-average scores among other participating systems, with F1-scores of 91.22, 46.8, 42.4, and 85.53 on tasks 1, 2, 3, and 4 respectively.

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Automatic Identification of Drugs and Adverse Drug Reaction Related Tweets
Segun Taofeek Aroyehun | Alexander Gelbukh

We describe our submissions to the Third Social Media Mining for Health Applications Shared Task. We participated in two tasks (tasks 1 and 3). For both tasks, we experimented with a traditional machine learning model (Naive Bayes Support Vector Machine (NBSVM)), deep learning models (Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM)), and the combination of deep learning model with SVM. We observed that the NBSVM reaches superior performance on both tasks on our development split of the training data sets. Official result for task 1 based on the blind evaluation data shows that the predictions of the NBSVM achieved our team’s best F-score of 0.910 which is above the average score received by all submissions to the task. On task 3, the combination of of BiLSTM and SVM gives our best F-score for the positive class of 0.394.

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UZH@SMM4H: System Descriptions
Tilia Ellendorff | Joseph Cornelius | Heath Gordon | Nicola Colic | Fabio Rinaldi

Our team at the University of Zürich participated in the first 3 of the 4 sub-tasks at the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task. We experimented with different approaches for text classification, namely traditional feature-based classifiers (Logistic Regression and Support Vector Machines), shallow neural networks, RCNNs, and CNNs. This system description paper provides details regarding the different system architectures and the achieved results.

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Deep Learning for Social Media Health Text Classification
Santosh T.y.s.s | Santosh Tokala | Vaibhav Gambhir | Animesh Mukherjee

This paper describes the systems developed for 1st and 2nd tasks of the 3rd Social Media Mining for Health Applications Shared Task at EMNLP 2018. The first task focuses on automatic detection of posts mentioning a drug name or dietary supplement, a binary classification. The second task is about distinguishing the tweets that present personal medication intake, possible medication intake and non-intake. We performed extensive experiments with various classifiers like Logistic Regression, Random Forest, SVMs, Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT) and deep learning architectures such as Long Short-Term Memory Networks (LSTM), jointed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and LSTM architecture, and attention based LSTM architecture both at word and character level. We have also explored using various pre-trained embeddings like Global Vectors for Word Representation (GloVe), Word2Vec and task-specific embeddings learned using CNN-LSTM and LSTMs.

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Using PPM for Health Related Text Detection
Victoria Bobicev | Victoria Lazu | Daniela Istrati

This paper describes the participation of the LILU team in SMM4H challenge on social media mining for health related events description such as drug intakes or vaccinations.

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Leveraging Web Based Evidence Gathering for Drug Information Identification from Tweets
Rupsa Saha | Abir Naskar | Tirthankar Dasgupta | Lipika Dey

In this paper, we have explored web-based evidence gathering and different linguistic features to automatically extract drug names from tweets and further classify such tweets into Adverse Drug Events or not. We have evaluated our proposed models with the dataset as released by the SMM4H workshop shared Task-1 and Task-3 respectively. Our evaluation results shows that the proposed model achieved good results, with Precision, Recall and F-scores of 78.5%, 88% and 82.9% respectively for Task1 and 33.2%, 54.7% and 41.3% for Task3.

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CLaC at SMM4H Task 1, 2, and 4
Parsa Bagherzadeh | Nadia Sheikh | Sabine Bergler

CLaC Labs participated in Tasks 1, 2, and 4 using the same base architecture for all tasks with various parameter variations. This was our first exploration of this data and the SMM4H Tasks, thus a unified system was useful to compare the behavior of our architecture over the different datasets and how they interact with different linguistic features.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing

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Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Ethics in Natural Language Processing
Mark Alfano | Dirk Hovy | Margaret Mitchell | Michael Strube

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On the Utility of Lay Summaries and AI Safety Disclosures: Toward Robust, Open Research Oversight
Allen Schmaltz

In this position paper, we propose that the community consider encouraging researchers to include two riders, a “Lay Summary” and an “AI Safety Disclosure”, as part of future NLP papers published in ACL forums that present user-facing systems. The goal is to encourage researchers–via a relatively non-intrusive mechanism–to consider the societal implications of technologies carrying (un)known and/or (un)knowable long-term risks, to highlight failure cases, and to provide a mechanism by which the general public (and scientists in other disciplines) can more readily engage in the discussion in an informed manner. This simple proposal requires minimal additional up-front costs for researchers; the lay summary, at least, has significant precedence in the medical literature and other areas of science; and the proposal is aimed to supplement, rather than replace, existing approaches for encouraging researchers to consider the ethical implications of their work, such as those of the Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative (CITI) Program and institutional review boards (IRBs).

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#MeToo Alexa: How Conversational Systems Respond to Sexual Harassment
Amanda Cercas Curry | Verena Rieser

Conversational AI systems, such as Amazon’s Alexa, are rapidly developing from purely transactional systems to social chatbots, which can respond to a wide variety of user requests. In this article, we establish how current state-of-the-art conversational systems react to inappropriate requests, such as bullying and sexual harassment on the part of the user, by collecting and analysing the novel #MeTooAlexa corpus. Our results show that commercial systems mainly avoid answering, while rule-based chatbots show a variety of behaviours and often deflect. Data-driven systems, on the other hand, are often non-coherent, but also run the risk of being interpreted as flirtatious and sometimes react with counter-aggression. This includes our own system, trained on “clean” data, which suggests that inappropriate system behaviour is not caused by data bias.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop Events and Stories in the News 2018

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Every Object Tells a Story
James Pustejovsky | Nikhil Krishnaswamy

Most work within the computational event modeling community has tended to focus on the interpretation and ordering of events that are associated with verbs and event nominals in linguistic expressions. What is often overlooked in the construction of a global interpretation of a narrative is the role contributed by the objects participating in these structures, and the latent events and activities conventionally associated with them. Recently, the analysis of visual images has also enriched the scope of how events can be identified, by anchoring both linguistic expressions and ontological labels to segments, subregions, and properties of images. By semantically grounding event descriptions in their visualization, the importance of object-based attributes becomes more apparent. In this position paper, we look at the narrative structure of objects: that is, how objects reference events through their intrinsic attributes, such as affordances, purposes, and functions. We argue that, not only do objects encode conventionalized events, but that when they are composed within specific habitats, the ensemble can be viewed as modeling coherent event sequences, thereby enriching the global interpretation of the evolving narrative being constructed.

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A Rich Annotation Scheme for Mental Events
William Croft | Pavlína Pešková | Michael Regan | Sook-kyung Lee

We present a rich annotation scheme for the structure of mental events. Mental events are those in which the verb describes a mental state or process, usually oriented towards an external situation. While physical events have been described in detail and there are numerous studies of their semantic analysis and annotation, mental events are less thoroughly studied. The annotation scheme proposed here is based on decompositional analyses in the semantic and typological linguistic literature. The scheme was applied to the news corpus from the 2016 Events workshop, and error analysis of the test annotation provides suggestions for refinement and clarification of the annotation scheme.

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Cross-Document Narrative Alignment of Environmental News: A Position Paper on the Challenge of Using Event Chains to Proxy Narrative Features
Ben Miller

Cross-document event chain co-referencing in corpora of news articles would achieve increased precision and generalizability from a method that consistently recognizes narrative, discursive, and phenomenological features such as tense, mood, tone, canonicity and breach, person, hermeneutic composability, speed, and time. Current models that capture primarily linguistic data such as entities, times, and relations or causal relationships may only incidentally capture narrative framing features of events. That limits efforts at narrative and event chain segmentation, among other predicate tasks for narrative search and narrative-based reasoning. It further limits research on audience engagement with journalism about complex subjects. This position paper explores the above proposition with respect to narrative theory and ongoing research on segmenting event chains into narrative units. Our own work in progress approaches this task using event segmentation, word embeddings, and variable length pattern matching in a corpus of 2,000 articles describing environmental events. Our position is that narrative features may or may not be implicitly captured by current methods explicitly focused on events as linguistic phenomena, that they are not explicitly captured, and that further research is required.

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Identifying the Discourse Function of News Article Paragraphs
W. Victor Yarlott | Cristina Cornelio | Tian Gao | Mark Finlayson

Discourse structure is a key aspect of all forms of text, providing valuable information both to humans and machines. We applied the hierarchical theory of news discourse developed by van Dijk to examine how paragraphs operate as units of discourse structure within news articles—what we refer to here as document-level discourse. This document-level discourse provides a characterization of the content of each paragraph that describes its relation to the events presented in the article (such as main events, backgrounds, and consequences) as well as to other components of the story (such as commentary and evaluation). The purpose of a news discourse section is of great utility to story understanding as it affects both the importance and temporal order of items introduced in the text—therefore, if we know the news discourse purpose for different sections, we should be able to better rank events for their importance and better construct timelines. We test two hypotheses: first, that people can reliably annotate news articles with van Dijk’s theory; second, that we can reliably predict these labels using machine learning. We show that people have a high degree of agreement with each other when annotating the theory (F1 > 0.8, Cohen’s kappa > 0.6), demonstrating that it can be both learned and reliably applied by human annotators. Additionally, we demonstrate first steps toward machine learning of the theory, achieving a performance of F1 = 0.54, which is 65% of human performance. Moreover, we have generated a gold-standard, adjudicated corpus of 50 documents for document-level discourse annotation based on the ACE Phase 2 corpus.

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An Evaluation of Information Extraction Tools for Identifying Health Claims in News Headlines
Shi Yuan | Bei Yu

This study evaluates the performance of four information extraction tools (extractors) on identifying health claims in health news headlines. A health claim is defined as a triplet: IV (what is being manipulated), DV (what is being measured) and their relation. Tools that can identify health claims provide the foundation for evaluating the accuracy of these claims against authoritative resources. The evaluation result shows that 26% headlines do not in-clude health claims, and all extractors face difficulty separating them from the rest. For those with health claims, OPENIE-5.0 performed the best with F-measure at 0.6 level for ex-tracting “IV-relation-DV”. However, the characteristic linguistic structures in health news headlines, such as incomplete sentences and non-verb relations, pose particular challenge to existing tools.

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Crowdsourcing StoryLines: Harnessing the Crowd for Causal Relation Annotation
Tommaso Caselli | Oana Inel

This paper describes a crowdsourcing experiment on the annotation of plot-like structures in English news articles. CrowdThruth methodology and metrics have been applied to select valid annotations from the crowd. We further run an in-depth analysis of the annotated data by comparing them with available expert data. Our results show a valuable use of crowdsourcing annotations for such complex semantic tasks, and suggest a new annotation approach which combine crowd and experts.

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Can You Spot the Semantic Predicate in this Video?
Christopher Reale | Claire Bonial | Heesung Kwon | Clare Voss

We propose a method to improve human activity recognition in video by leveraging semantic information about the target activities from an expert-defined linguistic resource, VerbNet. Our hypothesis is that activities that share similar event semantics, as defined by the semantic predicates of VerbNet, will be more likely to share some visual components. We use a deep convolutional neural network approach as a baseline and incorporate linguistic information from VerbNet through multi-task learning. We present results of experiments showing the added information has negligible impact on recognition performance. We discuss how this may be because the lexical semantic information defined by VerbNet is generally not visually salient given the video processing approach used here, and how we may handle this in future approaches.

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Fine-grained Structure-based News Genre Categorization
Zeyu Dai | Himanshu Taneja | Ruihong Huang

Journalists usually organize and present the contents of a news article following a well-defined structure. In this work, we propose a new task to categorize news articles based on their content presentation structures, which is beneficial for various NLP applications. We first define a small set of news elements considering their functions (e.g., introducing the main story or event, catching the reader’s attention and providing details) in a news story and their writing style (narrative or expository), and then formally define four commonly used news article structures based on their selections and organizations of news elements. We create an annotated dataset for structure-based news genre identification, and finally, we build a predictive model to assess the feasibility of this classification task using structure indicative features.

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On Training Classifiers for Linking Event Templates
Jakub Piskorski | Fredi Šarić | Vanni Zavarella | Martin Atkinson

The paper reports on exploring various machine learning techniques and a range of textual and meta-data features to train classifiers for linking related event templates automatically extracted from online news. With the best model using textual features only we achieved 94.7% (92.9%) F1 score on GOLD (SILVER) dataset. These figures were further improved to 98.6% (GOLD) and 97% (SILVER) F1 score by adding meta-data features, mainly thanks to the strong discriminatory power of automatically extracted geographical information related to events.

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HEI: Hunter Events Interface A platform based on services for the detection and reasoning about events
Antonio Sorgente | Antonio Calabrese | Gianluca Coda | Paolo Vanacore | Francesco Mele

In this paper we present the definition and implementation of the Hunter Events Interface (HEI) System. The HEI System is a system for events annotation and temporal reasoning in Natural Language Texts and media, mainly oriented to texts of historical and cultural contents available on the Web. In this work we assume that events are defined through various components: actions, participants, locations, and occurrence intervals. The HEI system, through independent services, locates (annotates) the various components, and successively associates them to a specific event. The objective of this work is to build a system integrating services for the identification of events, the discovery of their connections, and the evaluation of their consistency. We believe this interface is useful to develop applications that use the notion of story, to integrate data of digital cultural archives, and to build systems of fruition in the same field. The HEI system has been partially developed within the TrasTest project

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Figurative Language Processing
Beata Beigman Klebanov | Ekaterina Shutova | Patricia Lichtenstein | Smaranda Muresan | Chee Wee

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Challenges in Finding Metaphorical Connections
Katy Gero | Lydia Chilton

Poetry is known for its novel expression using figurative language. We introduce a writing task that contains the essential challenges of generating meaningful figurative language and can be evaluated. We investigate how to find metaphorical connections between abstract themes and concrete domains by asking people to write four-line poems on a given metaphor, such as “death is a rose” or “anger is wood”. We find that only 21% of poems successfully make a metaphorical connection. We present five alternate ways people respond to the prompt and release our dataset of 100 categorized poems. We suggest opportunities for computational approaches.

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Linguistic Features of Sarcasm and Metaphor Production Quality
Stephen Skalicky | Scott Crossley

Using linguistic features to detect figurative language has provided a deeper in-sight into figurative language. The purpose of this study is to assess whether linguistic features can help explain differences in quality of figurative language. In this study a large corpus of metaphors and sarcastic responses are collected from human subjects and rated for figurative language quality based on theoretical components of metaphor, sarcasm, and creativity. Using natural language processing tools, specific linguistic features related to lexical sophistication and semantic cohesion were used to predict the human ratings of figurative language quality. Results demonstrate linguistic features were able to predict small amounts of variance in metaphor and sarcasm production quality.

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Leveraging Syntactic Constructions for Metaphor Identification
Kevin Stowe | Martha Palmer

Identification of metaphoric language in text is critical for generating effective semantic representations for natural language understanding. Computational approaches to metaphor identification have largely relied on heuristic based models or feature-based machine learning, using hand-crafted lexical resources coupled with basic syntactic information. However, recent work has shown the predictive power of syntactic constructions in determining metaphoric source and target domains (Sullivan 2013). Our work intends to explore syntactic constructions and their relation to metaphoric language. We undertake a corpus-based analysis of predicate-argument constructions and their metaphoric properties, and attempt to effectively represent syntactic constructions as features for metaphor processing, both in identifying source and target domains and in distinguishing metaphoric words from non-metaphoric.

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Literal, Metphorical or Both? Detecting Metaphoricity in Isolated Adjective-Noun Phrases
Agnieszka Mykowiecka | Malgorzata Marciniak | Aleksander Wawer

The paper addresses the classification of isolated Polish adjective-noun phrases according to their metaphoricity. We tested neural networks to predict if a phrase has a literal or metaphorical sense or can have both senses depending on usage. The input to the neural network consists of word embeddings, but we also tested the impact of information about the domain of the adjective and about the abstractness of the noun. We applied our solution to English data available on the Internet and compared it to results published in papers. We found that the solution based on word embeddings only can achieve results comparable with complex solutions requiring additional information.

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Catching Idiomatic Expressions in EFL Essays
Michael Flor | Beata Beigman Klebanov

This paper presents an exploratory study on large-scale detection of idiomatic expressions in essays written by non-native speakers of English. We describe a computational search procedure for automatic detection of idiom-candidate phrases in essay texts. The study used a corpus of essays written during a standardized examination of English language proficiency. Automatically-flagged candidate expressions were manually annotated for idiomaticity. The study found that idioms are widely used in EFL essays. The study also showed that a search algorithm that accommodates the syntactic and lexical exibility of idioms can increase the recall of idiom instances by 30%, but it also increases the amount of false positives.

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Predicting Human Metaphor Paraphrase Judgments with Deep Neural Networks
Yuri Bizzoni | Shalom Lappin

We propose a new annotated corpus for metaphor interpretation by paraphrase, and a novel DNN model for performing this task. Our corpus consists of 200 sets of 5 sentences, with each set containing one reference metaphorical sentence, and four ranked candidate paraphrases. Our model is trained for a binary classification of paraphrase candidates, and then used to predict graded paraphrase acceptability. It reaches an encouraging 75% accuracy on the binary classification task, and high Pearson (.75) and Spearman (.68) correlations on the gradient judgment prediction task.

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A Report on the 2018 VUA Metaphor Detection Shared Task
Chee Wee (Ben) Leong | Beata Beigman Klebanov | Ekaterina Shutova

As the community working on computational approaches to figurative language is growing and as methods and data become increasingly diverse, it is important to create widely shared empirical knowledge of the level of system performance in a range of contexts, thus facilitating progress in this area. One way of creating such shared knowledge is through benchmarking multiple systems on a common dataset. We report on the shared task on metaphor identification on the VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus conducted at the NAACL 2018 Workshop on Figurative Language Processing.

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An LSTM-CRF Based Approach to Token-Level Metaphor Detection
Malay Pramanick | Ashim Gupta | Pabitra Mitra

Automatic processing of figurative languages is gaining popularity in NLP community for their ubiquitous nature and increasing volume. In this era of web 2.0, automatic analysis of sarcasm and metaphors is important for their extensive usage. Metaphors are a part of figurative language that compares different concepts, often on a cognitive level. Many approaches have been proposed for automatic detection of metaphors, even using sequential models or neural networks. In this paper, we propose a method for detection of metaphors at the token level using a hybrid model of Bidirectional-LSTM and CRF. We used fewer features, as compared to the previous state-of-the-art sequential model. On experimentation with VUAMC, our method obtained an F-score of 0.674.

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Unsupervised Detection of Metaphorical Adjective-Noun Pairs
Malay Pramanick | Pabitra Mitra

Metaphor is a popular figure of speech. Popularity of metaphors calls for their automatic identification and interpretation. Most of the unsupervised methods directed at detection of metaphors use some hand-coded knowledge. We propose an unsupervised framework for metaphor detection that does not require any hand-coded knowledge. We applied clustering on features derived from Adjective-Noun pairs for classifying them into two disjoint classes. We experimented with adjective-noun pairs of a popular dataset annotated for metaphors and obtained an accuracy of 72.87% with k-means clustering algorithm.

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Phrase-Level Metaphor Identification Using Distributed Representations of Word Meaning
Omnia Zayed | John Philip McCrae | Paul Buitelaar

Metaphor is an essential element of human cognition which is often used to express ideas and emotions that might be difficult to express using literal language. Processing metaphoric language is a challenging task for a wide range of applications ranging from text simplification to psychotherapy. Despite the variety of approaches that are trying to process metaphor, there is still a need for better models that mimic the human cognition while exploiting fewer resources. In this paper, we present an approach based on distributional semantics to identify metaphors on the phrase-level. We investigated the use of different word embeddings models to identify verb-noun pairs where the verb is used metaphorically. Several experiments are conducted to show the performance of the proposed approach on benchmark datasets.

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Bigrams and BiLSTMs Two Neural Networks for Sequential Metaphor Detection
Yuri Bizzoni | Mehdi Ghanimifard

We present and compare two alternative deep neural architectures to perform word-level metaphor detection on text: a bi-LSTM model and a new structure based on recursive feed-forward concatenation of the input. We discuss different versions of such models and the effect that input manipulation - specifically, reducing the length of sentences and introducing concreteness scores for words - have on their performance.

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Computationally Constructed Concepts: A Machine Learning Approach to Metaphor Interpretation Using Usage-Based Construction Grammatical Cues
Zachary Rosen

The current study seeks to implement a deep learning classification algorithm using argument-structure level representation of metaphoric constructions, for the identification of source domain mappings in metaphoric utterances. It thus builds on previous work in computational metaphor interpretation (Mohler et al. 2014; Shutova 2010; Bollegala & Shutova 2013; Hong 2016; Su et al. 2017) while implementing a theoretical framework based off of work in the interface of metaphor and construction grammar (Sullivan 2006, 2007, 2013). The results indicate that it is possible to achieve an accuracy of approximately 80.4% using the proposed method, combining construction grammatical features with a simple deep learning NN. I attribute this increase in accuracy to the use of constructional cues, extracted from the raw text of metaphoric instances.

Metaphors are figurative languages widely used in daily life and literatures. It’s an important task to detect the metaphors evoked by texts. Thus, the metaphor shared task is aimed to extract metaphors from plain texts at word level. We propose to use a CNN-LSTM model for this task. Our model combines CNN and LSTM layers to utilize both local and long-range contextual information for identifying metaphorical information. In addition, we compare the performance of the softmax classifier and conditional random field (CRF) for sequential labeling in this task. We also incorporated some additional features such as part of speech (POS) tags and word cluster to improve the performance of model. Our best model achieved 65.06% F-score in the all POS testing subtask and 67.15% in the verbs testing subtask.

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Di-LSTM Contrast : A Deep Neural Network for Metaphor Detection
Krishnkant Swarnkar | Anil Kumar Singh

The contrast between the contextual and general meaning of a word serves as an important clue for detecting its metaphoricity. In this paper, we present a deep neural architecture for metaphor detection which exploits this contrast. Additionally, we also use cost-sensitive learning by re-weighting examples, and baseline features like concreteness ratings, POS and WordNet-based features. The best performing system of ours achieves an overall F1 score of 0.570 on All POS category and 0.605 on the Verbs category at the Metaphor Shared Task 2018.

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Conditional Random Fields for Metaphor Detection
Anna Mosolova | Ivan Bondarenko | Vadim Fomin

We present an algorithm for detecting metaphor in sentences which was used in Shared Task on Metaphor Detection by First Workshop on Figurative Language Processing. The algorithm is based on different features and Conditional Random Fields.

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Detecting Figurative Word Occurrences Using Recurrent Neural Networks
Agnieszka Mykowiecka | Aleksander Wawer | Malgorzata Marciniak

The paper addresses detection of figurative usage of words in English text. The chosen method was to use neural nets fed by pretrained word embeddings. The obtained results show that simple solutions, based on words embeddings only, are comparable to complex solutions, using many sources of information which are not available for languages less-studied than English.

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Multi-Module Recurrent Neural Networks with Transfer Learning
Filip Skurniak | Maria Janicka | Aleksander Wawer

This paper describes multiple solutions designed and tested for the problem of word-level metaphor detection. The proposed systems are all based on variants of recurrent neural network architectures. Specifically, we explore multiple sources of information: pre-trained word embeddings (Glove), a dictionary of language concreteness and a transfer learning scenario based on the states of an encoder network from neural network machine translation system. One of the architectures is based on combining all three systems: (1) Neural CRF (Conditional Random Fields), trained directly on the metaphor data set; (2) Neural Machine Translation encoder of a transfer learning scenario; (3) a neural network used to predict final labels, trained directly on the metaphor data set. Our results vary between test sets: Neural CRF standalone is the best one on submission data, while combined system scores the highest on a test subset randomly selected from training data.

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Using Language Learner Data for Metaphor Detection
Egon Stemle | Alexander Onysko

This article describes the system that participated in the shared task on metaphor detection on the Vrije University Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus (VUA). The ST was part of the workshop on processing figurative language at the 16th annual conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL2018). The system combines a small assertion of trending techniques, which implement matured methods from NLP and ML; in particular, the system uses word embeddings from standard corpora and from corpora representing different proficiency levels of language learners in a LSTM BiRNN architecture. The system is available under the APLv2 open-source license.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Generalization in the Age of Deep Learning

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Generalization in the Age of Deep Learning
Yonatan Bisk | Omer Levy | Mark Yatskar

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Towards Inference-Oriented Reading Comprehension: ParallelQA
Soumya Wadhwa | Varsha Embar | Matthias Grabmair | Eric Nyberg

In this paper, we investigate the tendency of end-to-end neural Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) models to match shallow patterns rather than perform inference-oriented reasoning on RC benchmarks. We aim to test the ability of these systems to answer questions which focus on referential inference. We propose ParallelQA, a strategy to formulate such questions using parallel passages. We also demonstrate that existing neural models fail to generalize well to this setting.

Commonsense knowledge bases such as ConceptNet represent knowledge in the form of relational triples. Inspired by recent work by Li et al., we analyse if knowledge base completion models can be used to mine commonsense knowledge from raw text. We propose novelty of predicted triples with respect to the training set as an important factor in interpreting results. We critically analyse the difficulty of mining novel commonsense knowledge, and show that a simple baseline method that outperforms the previous state of the art on predicting more novel triples.

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Deep learning evaluation using deep linguistic processing
Alexander Kuhnle | Ann Copestake

We discuss problems with the standard approaches to evaluation for tasks like visual question answering, and argue that artificial data can be used to address these as a complement to current practice. We demonstrate that with the help of existing ‘deep’ linguistic processing technology we are able to create challenging abstract datasets, which enable us to investigate the language understanding abilities of multimodal deep learning models in detail, as compared to a single performance value on a static and monolithic dataset.

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The Fine Line between Linguistic Generalization and Failure in Seq2Seq-Attention Models
Noah Weber | Leena Shekhar | Niranjan Balasubramanian

Seq2Seq based neural architectures have become the go-to architecture to apply to sequence to sequence language tasks. Despite their excellent performance on these tasks, recent work has noted that these models typically do not fully capture the linguistic structure required to generalize beyond the dense sections of the data distribution (Ettinger et al., 2017), and as such, are likely to fail on examples from the tail end of the distribution (such as inputs that are noisy (Belinkov and Bisk, 2018), or of different length (Bentivogli et al., 2016)). In this paper we look at a model’s ability to generalize on a simple symbol rewriting task with a clearly defined structure. We find that the model’s ability to generalize this structure beyond the training distribution depends greatly on the chosen random seed, even when performance on the test set remains the same. This finding suggests that model’s ability to capture generalizable structure is highly sensitive, and more so, this sensitivity may not be apparent when evaluating the model on standard test sets.

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Extrapolation in NLP
Jeff Mitchell | Pontus Stenetorp | Pasquale Minervini | Sebastian Riedel

We argue that extrapolation to unseen data will often be easier for models that capture global structures, rather than just maximise their local fit to the training data. We show that this is true for two popular models: the Decomposable Attention Model and word2vec.

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

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Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation
Emiel Krahmer | Albert Gatt | Martijn Goudbeek

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Deep Graph Convolutional Encoders for Structured Data to Text Generation
Diego Marcheggiani | Laura Perez-Beltrachini

Most previous work on neural text generation from graph-structured data relies on standard sequence-to-sequence methods. These approaches linearise the input graph to be fed to a recurrent neural network. In this paper, we propose an alternative encoder based on graph convolutional networks that directly exploits the input structure. We report results on two graph-to-sequence datasets that empirically show the benefits of explicitly encoding the input graph structure.

We aim to automatically generate natural language descriptions about an input structured knowledge base (KB). We build our generation framework based on a pointer network which can copy facts from the input KB, and add two attention mechanisms: (i) slot-aware attention to capture the association between a slot type and its corresponding slot value; and (ii) a new table position self-attention to capture the inter-dependencies among related slots. For evaluation, besides standard metrics including BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE, we propose a KB reconstruction based metric by extracting a KB from the generation output and comparing it with the input KB. We also create a new data set which includes 106,216 pairs of structured KBs and their corresponding natural language descriptions for two distinct entity types. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods. The reconstructed KB achieves 68.8% - 72.6% F-score.

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Syntactic Manipulation for Generating more Diverse and Interesting Texts
Jan Milan Deriu | Mark Cieliebak

Natural Language Generation plays an important role in the domain of dialogue systems as it determines how users perceive the system. Recently, deep-learning based systems have been proposed to tackle this task, as they generalize better and require less amounts of manual effort to implement them for new domains. However, deep learning systems usually adapt a very homogeneous sounding writing style which expresses little variation. In this work, we present our system for Natural Language Generation where we control various aspects of the surface realization in order to increase the lexical variability of the utterances, such that they sound more diverse and interesting. For this, we use a Semantically Controlled Long Short-term Memory Network (SC-LSTM), and apply its specialized cell to control various syntactic features of the generated texts. We present an in-depth human evaluation where we show the effects of these surface manipulation on the perception of potential users.

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Automated learning of templates for data-to-text generation: comparing rule-based, statistical and neural methods
Chris van der Lee | Emiel Krahmer | Sander Wubben

The current study investigated novel techniques and methods for trainable approaches to data-to-text generation. Neural Machine Translation was explored for the conversion from data to text as well as the addition of extra templatization steps of the data input and text output in the conversion process. Evaluation using BLEU did not find the Neural Machine Translation technique to perform any better compared to rule-based or Statistical Machine Translation, and the templatization method seemed to perform similarly or sometimes worse compared to direct data-to-text conversion. However, the human evaluation metrics indicated that Neural Machine Translation yielded the highest quality output and that the templatization method was able to increase text quality in multiple situations.

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End-to-End Content and Plan Selection for Data-to-Text Generation
Sebastian Gehrmann | Falcon Dai | Henry Elder | Alexander Rush

Learning to generate fluent natural language from structured data with neural networks has become an common approach for NLG. This problem can be challenging when the form of the structured data varies between examples. This paper presents a survey of several extensions to sequence-to-sequence models to account for the latent content selection process, particularly variants of copy attention and coverage decoding. We further propose a training method based on diverse ensembling to encourage models to learn distinct sentence templates during training. An empirical evaluation of these techniques shows an increase in the quality of generated text across five automated metrics, as well as human evaluation.

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SimpleNLG-ZH: a Linguistic Realisation Engine for Mandarin
Guanyi Chen | Kees van Deemter | Chenghua Lin

We introduce SimpleNLG-ZH, a realisation engine for Mandarin that follows the software design paradigm of SimpleNLG (Gatt and Reiter, 2009). We explain the core grammar (morphology and syntax) and the lexicon of SimpleNLG-ZH, which is very different from English and other languages for which SimpleNLG engines have been built. The system was evaluated by regenerating expressions from a body of test sentences and a corpus of human-authored expressions. Human evaluation was conducted to estimate the quality of regenerated sentences.

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Adapting SimpleNLG to Galician language
Andrea Cascallar-Fuentes | Alejandro Ramos-Soto | Alberto Bugarín Diz

In this paper, we describe SimpleNLG-GL, an adaptation of the linguistic realisation SimpleNLG library for the Galician language. This implementation is derived from SimpleNLG-ES, the English-Spanish version of this library. It has been tested using a battery of examples which covers the most common rules for Galician.

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Going Dutch: Creating SimpleNLG-NL
Ruud de Jong | Mariët Theune

This paper presents SimpleNLG-NL, an adaptation of the SimpleNLG surface realisation engine for the Dutch language. It describes a novel method for determining and testing the grammatical constructions to be implemented, using target sentences sampled from a treebank.

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Learning to Flip the Bias of News Headlines
Wei-Fan Chen | Henning Wachsmuth | Khalid Al-Khatib | Benno Stein

This paper introduces the task of “flipping” the bias of news articles: Given an article with a political bias (left or right), generate an article with the same topic but opposite bias. To study this task, we create a corpus with bias-labeled articles from all-sides.com. As a first step, we analyze the corpus and discuss intrinsic characteristics of bias. They point to the main challenges of bias flipping, which in turn lead to a specific setting in the generation process. The paper in hand narrows down the general bias flipping task to focus on bias flipping for news article headlines. A manual annotation of headlines from each side reveals that they are self-informative in general and often convey bias. We apply an autoencoder incorporating information from an article’s content to learn how to automatically flip the bias. From 200 generated headlines, 73 are classified as understandable by annotators, and 83 maintain the topic while having opposite bias. Insights from our analysis shed light on how to solve the main challenges of bias flipping.

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Stylistically User-Specific Generation
Abdurrisyad Fikri | Hiroya Takamura | Manabu Okumura

Recent neural models for response generation show good results in terms of general responses. In real conversations, however, depending on the speaker/responder, similar utterances should require different responses. In this study, we attempt to consider individual user’s information in adjusting the notable sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model for more diverse, user-specific responses. We assume that we need user-specific features to adjust the response and we argue that some selected representative words from the users are suitable for this task. Furthermore, we prove that even for unseen or unknown users, our model can provide more diverse and interesting responses, while maintaining correlation with input utterances. Experimental results with human evaluation show that our model can generate more interesting responses than the popular seq2seqmodel and achieve higher relevance with input utterances than our baseline.

As unmanned vehicles become more autonomous, it is important to maintain a high level of transparency regarding their behaviour and how they operate. This is particularly important in remote locations where they cannot be directly observed. Here, we describe a method for generating explanations in natural language of autonomous system behaviour and reasoning. Our method involves deriving an interpretable model of autonomy through having an expert ‘speak aloud’ and providing various levels of detail based on this model. Through an online evaluation study with operators, we show it is best to generate explanations with multiple possible reasons but tersely worded. This work has implications for designing interfaces for autonomy as well as for explainable AI and operator training.

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Treat the system like a human student: Automatic naturalness evaluation of generated text without reference texts
Isabel Groves | Ye Tian | Ioannis Douratsos

The current most popular method for automatic Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation is comparing generated text with human-written reference sentences using a metrics system, which has drawbacks around reliability and scalability. We draw inspiration from second language (L2) assessment and extract a set of linguistic features to predict human judgments of sentence naturalness. Our experiment using a small dataset showed that the feature-based approach yields promising results, with the added potential of providing interpretability into the source of the problems.

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Content Aware Source Code Change Description Generation
Pablo Loyola | Edison Marrese-Taylor | Jorge Balazs | Yutaka Matsuo | Fumiko Satoh

We propose to study the generation of descriptions from source code changes by integrating the messages included on code commits and the intra-code documentation inside the source in the form of docstrings. Our hypothesis is that although both types of descriptions are not directly aligned in semantic terms —one explaining a change and the other the actual functionality of the code being modified— there could be certain common ground that is useful for the generation. To this end, we propose an architecture that uses the source code-docstring relationship to guide the description generation. We discuss the results of the approach comparing against a baseline based on a sequence-to-sequence model, using standard automatic natural language generation metrics as well as with a human study, thus offering a comprehensive view of the feasibility of the approach.

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Improving Context Modelling in Multimodal Dialogue Generation
Shubham Agarwal | Ondřej Dušek | Ioannis Konstas | Verena Rieser

In this work, we investigate the task of textual response generation in a multimodal task-oriented dialogue system. Our work is based on the recently released Multimodal Dialogue (MMD) dataset (Saha et al., 2017) in the fashion domain. We introduce a multimodal extension to the Hierarchical Recurrent Encoder-Decoder (HRED) model and show that this extension outperforms strong baselines in terms of text-based similarity metrics. We also showcase the shortcomings of current vision and language models by performing an error analysis on our system’s output.

Comments on a stock market often include the reason or cause of changes in stock prices, such as “Nikkei turns lower as yen’s rise hits exporters.” Generating such informative sentences requires capturing the relationship between different resources, including a target stock price. In this paper, we propose a model for automatically generating such informative market comments that refer to external resources. We evaluated our model through an automatic metric in terms of BLEU and human evaluation done by an expert in finance. The results show that our model outperforms the existing model both in BLEU scores and human judgment.

We present SpatialVOC2K, the first multilingual image dataset with spatial relation annotations and object features for image-to-text generation, built using 2,026 images from the PASCAL VOC2008 dataset. The dataset incorporates (i) the labelled object bounding boxes from VOC2008, (ii) geometrical, language and depth features for each object, and (iii) for each pair of objects in both orders, (a) the single best preposition and (b) the set of possible prepositions in the given language that describe the spatial relationship between the two objects. Compared to previous versions of the dataset, we have roughly doubled the size for French, and completely reannotated as well as increased the size of the English portion, providing single best prepositions for English for the first time. Furthermore, we have added explicit 3D depth features for objects. We are releasing our dataset for free reuse, along with evaluation tools to enable comparative evaluation.

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Adding the Third Dimension to Spatial Relation Detection in 2D Images
Brandon Birmingham | Adrian Muscat | Anja Belz

Detection of spatial relations between objects in images is currently a popular subject in image description research. A range of different language and geometric object features have been used in this context, but methods have not so far used explicit information about the third dimension (depth), except when manually added to annotations. The lack of such information hampers detection of spatial relations that are inherently 3D. In this paper, we use a fully automatic method for creating a depth map of an image and derive several different object-level depth features from it which we add to an existing feature set to test the effect on spatial relation detection. We show that performance increases are obtained from adding depth features in all scenarios tested.

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Automatic Opinion Question Generation
Yllias Chali | Tina Baghaee

We study the problem of opinion question generation from sentences with the help of community-based question answering systems. For this purpose, we use a sequence to sequence attentional model, and we adopt coverage mechanism to prevent sentences from repeating themselves. Experimental results on the Amazon question/answer dataset show an improvement in automatic evaluation metrics as well as human evaluations from the state-of-the-art question generation systems.

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Modelling Pro-drop with the Rational Speech Acts Model
Guanyi Chen | Kees van Deemter | Chenghua Lin

We extend the classic Referring Expressions Generation task by considering zero pronouns in “pro-drop” languages such as Chinese, modelling their use by means of the Bayesian Rational Speech Acts model (Frank and Goodman, 2012). By assuming that highly salient referents are most likely to be referred to by zero pronouns (i.e., pro-drop is more likely for salient referents than the less salient ones), the model offers an attractive explanation of a phenomenon not previously addressed probabilistically.

In this paper, we propose a self-learning architecture for generating natural language templates for conversational assistants. Generating templates to cover all the combinations of slots in an intent is time consuming and labor-intensive. We examine three different models based on our proposed architecture - Rule-based model, Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) model and Semantically Conditioned LSTM (SC-LSTM) model for the IoT domain - to reduce the human labor required for template generation. We demonstrate the feasibility of template generation for the IoT domain using our self-learning architecture. In both automatic and human evaluation, the self-learning architecture outperforms previous works trained with a fully human-labeled dataset. This is promising for commercial conversational assistant solutions.

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Enriching the WebNLG corpus
Thiago Castro Ferreira | Diego Moussallem | Emiel Krahmer | Sander Wubben

This paper describes the enrichment of WebNLG corpus (Gardent et al., 2017a,b), with the aim to further extend its usefulness as a resource for evaluating common NLG tasks, including Discourse Ordering, Lexicalization and Referring Expression Generation. We also produce a silver-standard German translation of the corpus to enable the exploitation of NLG approaches to other languages than English. The enriched corpus is publicly available.

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Towards making NLG a voice for interpretable Machine Learning
James Forrest | Somayajulu Sripada | Wei Pang | George Coghill

This paper presents a study to understand the issues related to using NLG to humanise explanations from a popular interpretable machine learning framework called LIME. Our study shows that self-reported rating of NLG explanation was higher than that for a non-NLG explanation. However, when tested for comprehension, the results were not as clear-cut showing the need for performing more studies to uncover the factors responsible for high-quality NLG explanations.

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Template-based multilingual football reports generation using Wikidata as a knowledge base
Lorenzo Gatti | Chris van der Lee | Mariët Theune

This paper presents a new version of a football reports generation system called PASS. The original version generated Dutch text and relied on a limited hand-crafted knowledge base. We describe how, in a short amount of time, we extended PASS to produce English texts, exploiting machine translation and Wikidata as a large-scale source of multilingual knowledge.

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Automatic Evaluation of Neural Personality-based Chatbots
Yujie Xing | Raquel Fernández

Stylistic variation is critical to render the utterances generated by conversational agents natural and engaging. In this paper, we focus on sequence-to-sequence models for open-domain dialogue response generation and propose a new method to evaluate the extent to which such models are able to generate responses that reflect different personality traits.

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Poem Machine - a Co-creative NLG Web Application for Poem Writing
Mika Hämäläinen

We present Poem Machine, an interactive online tool for co-authoring Finnish poetry with a computationally creative agent. Poem Machine can produce poetry of its own and assist the user in authoring poems. The main target group for the system is primary school children, and its use as a part of teaching is currently under study.

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Japanese Advertising Slogan Generator using Case Frame and Word Vector
Kango Iwama | Yoshinobu Kano

There has been many works published for automatic sentence generation of a variety of domains. However, there would be still no single method available at present that can generate sentences for all of domains. Each domain will require a suitable generation method. We focus on automatic generation of Japanese advertisement slogans in this paper. We use our advertisement slogan database, case frame information, and word vector information. We employed our system to apply for a copy competition for human copywriters, where our advertisement slogan was left as a finalist. Our system could be regarded as the world first system that generates slogans in a practical level, as an advertising agency already employs our system in their business.

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Underspecified Universal Dependency Structures as Inputs for Multilingual Surface Realisation
Simon Mille | Anja Belz | Bernd Bohnet | Leo Wanner

In this paper, we present the datasets used in the Shallow and Deep Tracks of the First Multilingual Surface Realisation Shared Task (SR’18). For the Shallow Track, data in ten languages has been released: Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. For the Deep Track, data in three languages is made available: English, French and Spanish. We describe in detail how the datasets were derived from the Universal Dependencies V2.0, and report on an evaluation of the Deep Track input quality. In addition, we examine the motivation for, and likely usefulness of, deriving NLG inputs from annotations in resources originally developed for Natural Language Understanding (NLU), and assess whether the resulting inputs supply enough information of the right kind for the final stage in the NLG process.

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LSTM Hypertagging
Reid Fu | Michael White

Hypertagging, or supertagging for surface realization, is the process of assigning lexical categories to nodes in an input semantic graph. Previous work has shown that hypertagging significantly increases realization speed and quality by reducing the search space of the realizer. Building on recent work using LSTMs to improve accuracy on supertagging for parsing, we develop an LSTM hypertagging method for OpenCCG, an open source NLP toolkit for CCG. Our results show significant improvements in both hypertagging accuracy and downstream realization performance.

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Sequence-to-Sequence Models for Data-to-Text Natural Language Generation: Word- vs. Character-based Processing and Output Diversity
Glorianna Jagfeld | Sabrina Jenne | Ngoc Thang Vu

We present a comparison of word-based and character-based sequence-to-sequence models for data-to-text natural language generation, which generate natural language descriptions for structured inputs. On the datasets of two recent generation challenges, our models achieve comparable or better automatic evaluation results than the best challenge submissions. Subsequent detailed statistical and human analyses shed light on the differences between the two input representations and the diversity of the generated texts. In a controlled experiment with synthetic training data generated from templates, we demonstrate the ability of neural models to learn novel combinations of the templates and thereby generalize beyond the linguistic structures they were trained on.

E-commerce platforms present products using titles that summarize product information. These titles cannot be created by hand, therefore an algorithmic solution is required. The task of automatically generating these titles given noisy user provided titles is one way to achieve the goal. The setting requires the generation process to be fast and the generated title to be both human-readable and concise. Furthermore, we need to understand if such generated titles are usable. As such, we propose approaches that (i) automatically generate product titles, (ii) predict their quality. Our approach scales to millions of products and both automatic and human evaluations performed on real-world data indicate our approaches are effective and applicable to existing e-commerce scenarios.

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Designing and testing the messages produced by a virtual dietitian
Luca Anselma | Alessandro Mazzei

This paper presents a project about the automatic generation of persuasive messages in the context of the diet management. In the first part of the paper we introduce the basic mechanisms related to data interpretation and content selection for a numerical data-to-text generation architecture. In the second part of the paper we discuss a number of factors influencing the design of the messages. In particular, we consider the design of the aggregation procedure. Finally, we present the results of a human-based evaluation concerning this design factor.

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Generation of Company descriptions using concept-to-text and text-to-text deep models: dataset collection and systems evaluation
Raheel Qader | Khoder Jneid | François Portet | Cyril Labbé

In this paper we study the performance of several state-of-the-art sequence-to-sequence models applied to generation of short company descriptions. The models are evaluated on a newly created and publicly available company dataset that has been collected from Wikipedia. The dataset consists of around 51K company descriptions that can be used for both concept-to-text and text-to-text generation tasks. Automatic metrics and human evaluation scores computed on the generated company descriptions show promising results despite the difficulty of the task as the dataset (like most available datasets) has not been originally designed for machine learning. In addition, we perform correlation analysis between automatic metrics and human evaluations and show that certain automatic metrics are more correlated to human judgments.

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Automatically Generating Questions about Novel Metaphors in Literature
Natalie Parde | Rodney Nielsen

The automatic generation of stimulating questions is crucial to the development of intelligent cognitive exercise applications. We developed an approach that generates appropriate Questioning the Author queries based on novel metaphors in diverse syntactic relations in literature. We show that the generated questions are comparable to human-generated questions in terms of naturalness, sensibility, and depth, and score slightly higher than human-generated questions in terms of clarity. We also show that questions generated about novel metaphors are rated as cognitively deeper than questions generated about non- or conventional metaphors, providing evidence that metaphor novelty can be leveraged to promote cognitive exercise.

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A Master-Apprentice Approach to Automatic Creation of Culturally Satirical Movie Titles
Khalid Alnajjar | Mika Hämäläinen

Satire has played a role in indirectly expressing critique towards an authority or a person from time immemorial. We present an autonomously creative master-apprentice approach consisting of a genetic algorithm and an NMT model to produce humorous and culturally apt satire out of movie titles automatically. Furthermore, we evaluate the approach in terms of its creativity and its output. We provide a solid definition for creativity to maximize the objectiveness of the evaluation.

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Can Neural Generators for Dialogue Learn Sentence Planning and Discourse Structuring?
Lena Reed | Shereen Oraby | Marilyn Walker

Responses in task-oriented dialogue systems often realize multiple propositions whose ultimate form depends on the use of sentence planning and discourse structuring operations. For example a recommendation may consist of an explicitly evaluative utterance e.g. Chanpen Thai is the best option, along with content related by the justification discourse relation, e.g. It has great food and service, that combines multiple propositions into a single phrase. While neural generation methods integrate sentence planning and surface realization in one end-to-end learning framework, previous work has not shown that neural generators can: (1) perform common sentence planning and discourse structuring operations; (2) make decisions as to whether to realize content in a single sentence or over multiple sentences; (3) generalize sentence planning and discourse relation operations beyond what was seen in training. We systematically create large training corpora that exhibit particular sentence planning operations and then test neural models to see what they learn. We compare models without explicit latent variables for sentence planning with ones that provide explicit supervision during training. We show that only the models with additional supervision can reproduce sentence planning and discourse operations and generalize to situations unseen in training.

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Neural Generation of Diverse Questions using Answer Focus, Contextual and Linguistic Features
Vrindavan Harrison | Marilyn Walker

Question Generation is the task of automatically creating questions from textual input. In this work we present a new Attentional Encoder–Decoder Recurrent Neural Network model for automatic question generation. Our model incorporates linguistic features and an additional sentence embedding to capture meaning at both sentence and word levels. The linguistic features are designed to capture information related to named entity recognition, word case, and entity coreference resolution. In addition our model uses a copying mechanism and a special answer signal that enables generation of numerous diverse questions on a given sentence. Our model achieves state of the art results of 19.98 Bleu_4 on a benchmark Question Generation dataset, outperforming all previously published results by a significant margin. A human evaluation also shows that the added features improve the quality of the generated questions.

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