Erik-Lân Do Dinh


2019

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Predicting Humorousness and Metaphor Novelty with Gaussian Process Preference Learning
Edwin Simpson | Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Tristan Miller | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The inability to quantify key aspects of creative language is a frequent obstacle to natural language understanding. To address this, we introduce novel tasks for evaluating the creativeness of language—namely, scoring and ranking text by humorousness and metaphor novelty. To sidestep the difficulty of assigning discrete labels or numeric scores, we learn from pairwise comparisons between texts. We introduce a Bayesian approach for predicting humorousness and metaphor novelty using Gaussian process preference learning (GPPL), which achieves a Spearman’s ρ of 0.56 against gold using word embeddings and linguistic features. Our experiments show that given sparse, crowdsourced annotation data, ranking using GPPL outperforms best–worst scaling. We release a new dataset for evaluating humour containing 28,210 pairwise comparisons of 4,030 texts, and make our software freely available.

2018

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Killing Four Birds with Two Stones: Multi-Task Learning for Non-Literal Language Detection
Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Steffen Eger | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Non-literal language phenomena such as idioms or metaphors are commonly studied in isolation from each other in NLP. However, often similar definitions and features are being used for different phenomena, challenging the distinction. Instead, we propose to view the detection problem as a generalized non-literal language classification problem. In this paper we investigate multi-task learning for related non-literal language phenomena. We show that in contrast to simply joining the data of multiple tasks, multi-task learning consistently improves upon four metaphor and idiom detection tasks in two languages, English and German. Comparing two state-of-the-art multi-task learning architectures, we also investigate when soft parameter sharing and learned information flow can be beneficial for our related tasks. We make our adapted code publicly available.

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One Size Fits All? A simple LSTM for non-literal token and construction-level classification
Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Steffen Eger | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the Second Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature

In this paper, we tackle four different tasks of non-literal language classification: token and construction level metaphor detection, classification of idiomatic use of infinitive-verb compounds, and classification of non-literal particle verbs. One of the tasks operates on the token level, while the three other tasks classify constructions such as “hot topic” or “stehen lassen” (“to allow sth. to stand” vs. “to abandon so.”). The two metaphor detection tasks are in English, while the two non-literal language detection tasks are in German. We propose a simple context-encoding LSTM model and show that it outperforms the state-of-the-art on two tasks. Additionally, we experiment with different embeddings for the token level metaphor detection task and find that 1) their performance varies according to the genre, and 2) word2vec embeddings perform best on 3 out of 4 genres, despite being one of the simplest tested model. In summary, we present a large-scale analysis of a neural model for non-literal language classification (i) at different granularities, (ii) in different languages, (iii) over different non-literal language phenomena.

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Weeding out Conventionalized Metaphors: A Corpus of Novel Metaphor Annotations
Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Hannah Wieland | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We encounter metaphors every day, but only a few jump out on us and make us stumble. However, little effort has been devoted to investigating more novel metaphors in comparison to general metaphor detection efforts. We attribute this gap primarily to the lack of larger datasets that distinguish between conventionalized, i.e., very common, and novel metaphors. The goal of this paper is to alleviate this situation by introducing a crowdsourced novel metaphor annotation layer for an existing metaphor corpus. Further, we analyze our corpus and investigate correlations between novelty and features that are typically used in metaphor detection, such as concreteness ratings and more semantic features like the Potential for Metaphoricity. Finally, we present a baseline approach to assess novelty in metaphors based on our annotations.

2017

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EELECTION at SemEval-2017 Task 10: Ensemble of nEural Learners for kEyphrase ClassificaTION
Steffen Eger | Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Ilia Kuznetsov | Masoud Kiaeeha | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2017)

This paper describes our approach to the SemEval 2017 Task 10: Extracting Keyphrases and Relations from Scientific Publications, specifically to Subtask (B): Classification of identified keyphrases. We explored three different deep learning approaches: a character-level convolutional neural network (CNN), a stacked learner with an MLP meta-classifier, and an attention based Bi-LSTM. From these approaches, we created an ensemble of differently hyper-parameterized systems, achieving a micro-F1-score of 0.63 on the test data. Our approach ranks 2nd (score of 1st placed system: 0.64) out of four according to this official score. However, we erroneously trained 2 out of 3 neural nets (the stacker and the CNN) on only roughly 15% of the full data, namely, the original development set. When trained on the full data (training+development), our ensemble has a micro-F1-score of 0.69. Our code is available from https://github.com/UKPLab/semeval2017-scienceie.

2016

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Token-Level Metaphor Detection using Neural Networks
Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Metaphor in NLP

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Still not there? Comparing Traditional Sequence-to-Sequence Models to Encoder-Decoder Neural Networks on Monotone String Translation Tasks
Carsten Schnober | Steffen Eger | Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We analyze the performance of encoder-decoder neural models and compare them with well-known established methods. The latter represent different classes of traditional approaches that are applied to the monotone sequence-to-sequence tasks OCR post-correction, spelling correction, grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, and lemmatization. Such tasks are of practical relevance for various higher-level research fields including digital humanities, automatic text correction, and speech recognition. We investigate how well generic deep-learning approaches adapt to these tasks, and how they perform in comparison with established and more specialized methods, including our own adaptation of pruned CRFs.

2015

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In-tool Learning for Selective Manual Annotation in Large Corpora
Erik-Lân Do Dinh | Richard Eckart de Castilho | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2015 System Demonstrations