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Recent advances in Named Entity Recognition (NER) show that document-level contexts can significantly improve model performance. In many application scenarios, however, such contexts are not available. In this paper, we propose to find external contexts of a sentence by retrieving and selecting a set of semantically relevant texts through a search engine, with the original sentence as the query. We find empirically that the contextual representations computed on the retrieval-based input view, constructed through the concatenation of a sentence and its external contexts, can achieve significantly improved performance compared to the original input view based only on the sentence. Furthermore, we can improve the model performance of both input views by Cooperative Learning, a training method that encourages the two input views to produce similar contextual representations or output label distributions. Experiments show that our approach can achieve new state-of-the-art performance on 8 NER data sets across 5 domains.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Improving Named Entity Recognition by External Context Retrieving and Cooperative Learning

multi-view learning

named entity recognition

information retrieval

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Learning discrete dialog structure graph from human-human dialogs yields basic insights into the structure of conversation, and also provides background knowledge to facilitate dialog generation. However, this problem is less studied in open-domain dialogue. In this paper, we conduct unsupervised discovery of discrete dialog structure from chitchat corpora, and then leverage it to facilitate coherent dialog generation in downstream systems. To this end, we present an unsupervised model, Discrete Variational Auto-Encoder with Graph Neural Network (DVAE-GNN), to discover discrete hierarchical latent dialog states (at the level of both session and utterance) and their transitions from corpus as a dialog structure graph. Then we leverage it as background knowledge to facilitate dialog management in a RL based dialog system. Experimental results on two benchmark corpora confirm that DVAE-GNN can discover meaningful dialog structure graph, and the use of dialog structure as background knowledge can significantly improve multi-turn coherence.

Discovering Dialog Structure Graph for Coherent Dialog Generation

We study the learning of a matching model for dialogue response selection. Motivated by the recent finding that models trained with random negative samples are not ideal in real-world scenarios, we propose a hierarchical curriculum learning framework that trains the matching model in an ``easy-to-difficult" scheme. Our learning framework consists of two complementary curricula: (1) corpus-level curriculum (CC); and (2) instance-level curriculum (IC). In CC, the model gradually increases its ability in finding the matching clues between the dialogue context and a response candidate. As for IC, it progressively strengthens the model's ability in identifying the mismatching information between the dialogue context and a response candidate. Empirical studies on three benchmark datasets with three state-of-the-art matching models demonstrate that the proposed learning framework significantly improves the model performance across various evaluation metrics.

Dialogue Response Selection with Hierarchical Curriculum Learning

In this paper, we present a neural model for joint dropped pronoun recovery (DPR) and conversational discourse parsing (CDP) in Chinese conversational speech. We show that DPR and CDP are closely related, and a joint model benefits both tasks. We refer to our model as DiscProReco, and it first encodes the tokens in each utterance in a conversation with a directed Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). The token states for an utterance are then aggregated to produce a single state for each utterance. The utterance states are then fed into a biaffine classifier to construct a conversational discourse graph. A second (multi-relational) GCN is then applied to the utterance states to produce a discourse relation-augmented representation for the utterances, which are then fused together with token states in each utterance as input to a dropped pronoun recovery layer. The joint model is trained and evaluated on a new Structure Parsing-enhanced Dropped Pronoun Recovery (SPDPR) data set that we annotated with both two types of information. Experimental results on the SPDPR dataset and other benchmarks show that DiscProReco significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines of both tasks.

A Joint Model for Dropped Pronoun Recovery and Conversational Discourse Parsing in Chinese Conversational Speech

Large pre-trained language generation models such as GPT-2 have demonstrated their effectiveness as language priors by reaching state-of-the-art results in various language generation tasks. However, the performance of pre-trained models on task-oriented dialog tasks is still under-explored. We propose a Pre-trainedRole Alternating Language model (PRAL), explicitly designed for task-oriented conversational systems. We design several techniques: start position randomization, knowledge distillation, and history discount to improve pre-training performance. In addition, we introduce a high-quality large-scale task-oriented dialog pre-training dataset by post-prossessing13 dialog datasets. We effectively adapt PRALon three downstream tasks. The results show that PRAL outperforms or is on par with state-of-the-art models.

PRAL: A Tailored Pre-Training Model for Task-Oriented Dialog Generation

Knowledge bases (KBs) and text often contain complementary knowledge: KBs store structured knowledge that can support long range reasoning, while text stores more comprehensive and timely knowledge in an unstructured way. Separately embedding the individual knowledge sources into vector spaces has demonstrated tremendous successes in encoding the respective knowledge, but how to jointly embed and reason with both knowledge sources to fully leverage the complementary information is still largely an open problem. We conduct a large-scale, systematic investigation of aligning KB and text embeddings for joint reasoning. We set up a novel evaluation framework with two evaluation tasks, few-shot link prediction and analogical reasoning, and evaluate an array of KB-text embedding alignment methods. We also demonstrate how such alignment can infuse textual information into KB embeddings for more accurate link prediction on emerging entities and events, using COVID-19 as a case study.

A Systematic Investigation of KB-Text Embedding Alignment at Scale

Weak supervision has shown promising results in many natural language processing tasks, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Existing work mainly focuses on learning deep NER models only with weak supervision, i.e., without any human annotation, and shows that by merely using weakly labeled data, one can achieve good performance, though still underperforms fully supervised NER with manually/strongly labeled data.
In this paper, we consider a more practical scenario, where we have both a small amount of strongly labeled data and a large amount of weakly labeled data. Unfortunately, we observe that weakly labeled data does not necessarily improve, or even deteriorate the model performance (due to the extensive noise in the weak labels) when we train deep NER models over a simple or weighted combination of the strongly labeled and weakly labeled data.
To address this issue, we propose a new multi-stage computational framework -- NEEDLE with three essential ingredients: (1) weak label completion, (2) noise-aware loss function, and (3) final fine-tuning over the strongly labeled data. Through experiments on E-commerce query NER and Biomedical NER, we demonstrate that NEEDLE can effectively suppress the noise of the weak labels and outperforms existing methods. In particular, we achieve new SOTA F1-scores on 3 Biomedical NER datasets: BC5CDR-chem 93.74, BC5CDR-disease 90.69, NCBI-disease 92.28.

Named Entity Recognition with Small Strongly Labeled and Large Weakly Labeled Data

Recently, there is an effort to extend fine-grained entity typing by using a richer and ultra-fine set of types, and labeling noun phrases including pronouns and nominal nouns instead of just named entity mentions. A key challenge for this ultra-fine entity typing task is that human annotated data are extremely scarce, and the annotation ability of existing distant or weak supervision approaches is very limited. To remedy this problem, in this paper, we propose to obtain training data for ultra-fine entity typing by using a BERT Masked Language Model (MLM). Given a mention in a sentence, our approach constructs an input for the BERT MLM so that it predicts context dependent hypernyms of the mention, which can be used as type labels. Experimental results demonstrate that, with the help of these automatically generated labels, the performance of an ultra-fine entity typing model can be improved substantially. We also show that our approach can be applied to improve traditional fine-grained entity typing after performing simple type mapping.

Ultra-Fine Entity Typing with Weak Supervision from a Masked Language Model

Existing conversational recommendation (CR) systems usually suffer from insufficient item information when conducted on short dialogue history and unfamiliar items.
Incorporating external information (e.g., reviews) is a potential solution to alleviate this problem.
Given that reviews often provide a rich and detailed user experience on different interests, they are potential ideal resources for providing high-quality recommendations within an informative conversation.
In this paper, we design a novel end-to-end framework, namely, Review-augmented Conversational Recommender (RevCore), where reviews are seamlessly incorporated to enrich item information and assist in generating both coherent and informative responses.
In detail, we extract sentiment-consistent reviews, perform review-enriched and entity-based recommendations for item suggestions, as well as use a review-attentive encoder-decoder for response generation.
Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach in yielding better performance on both recommendation and conversation responding.

RevCore: Review-Augmented Conversational Recommendation

In multi-label text classification (MLTC), each given document is associated with a set of correlated labels. To capture label correlations, previous classifier-chain and sequence-to-sequence models transform MLTC to a sequence prediction task. However, they tend to suffer from label order dependency, label combination over-fitting and error propagation problems. To address these problems, we introduce a novel approach with multi-task learning to enhance label correlation feedback. We first utilize a joint embedding (JE) mechanism to obtain the text and label representation simultaneously. In MLTC task, a document-label cross attention (CA) mechanism is adopted to generate a more discriminative document representation. Furthermore, we propose two auxiliary label co-occurrence prediction tasks to enhance label correlation learning: 1) Pairwise Label Co-occurrence Prediction (PLCP), and 2) Conditional Label Co-occurrence Prediction (CLCP). Experimental results on AAPD and RCV1-V2 datasets show that our method outperforms competitive baselines by a large margin.
We analyze low-frequency label performance, label dependency, label combination diversity and coverage speed to show the effectiveness of our proposed method on label correlation learning.

Enhancing Label Correlation Feedback in Multi-Label Text Classification via Multi-Task Learning

Commonsense question answering (QA) requires a model to grasp commonsense and factual knowledge to answer questions about world events. Many prior methods couple language modeling with knowledge graphs (KG). However, although a KG contains rich structural information, it lacks the context to provide a more precise understanding of the concepts. This creates a gap when fusing knowledge graphs into language modeling, especially when there is insufficient labeled data.
Thus, we propose to employ external entity descriptions to provide contextual information for knowledge understanding. 
We retrieve descriptions of related concepts from Wiktionary and feed them as additional input to pre-trained language models. The resulting model achieves state-of-the-art result in the CommonsenseQA dataset and the best result among non-generative models in OpenBookQA.

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