Korea, Republic of

Conversational machine reading comprehension (CMRC) aims to assist computers to understand an natural language text and thereafter engage in a multi-turn conversation to answer questions related to the text. Existing methods typically require three steps: (1) decision making based on entailment reasoning; (2) span extraction if required by the above decision; (3) question rephrasing based on the extracted span. However, for nearly all these methods, the span extraction and question rephrasing steps cannot fully exploit the fine-grained entailment reasoning information in decision making step because of their relative independence, which will further enlarge the information gap between decision making and question phrasing. Thus, to tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for conversational machine reading comprehension based on shared parameter mechanism, called entailment reasoning T5 (ET5). Despite the lightweight of our proposed framework, experimental results show that the proposed ET5 achieves new state-of-the-art results on the ShARC leaderboard with the BLEU-4 score of 55.2. Our model and code are publicly available at https://github.com/Yottaxx/ET5.

COLING 2022

ET5: A Novel End-to-end Framework for Conversational Machine Reading Comprehension

end-to-end framework

entailment reasoning

conversational machine reading

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COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

Unsupervised question answering is an attractive task due to its independence on labeled data. Previous works usually make use of heuristic rules as well as pre-trained models to construct data and train QA models. However, most of these works regard named entity (NE) as the only answer type, which ignores the high diversity of answers in the real world. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel unsupervised method by diversifying answers, named DiverseQA. Specifically, the proposed method is composed of three modules: data construction, data augmentation and denoising filter. Firstly, the data construction module extends the extracted named entity into a longer sentence constituent as the new answer span to construct a QA dataset with diverse answers. Secondly, the data augmentation module adopts an answer-type dependent data augmentation process via adversarial training in the embedding level. Thirdly, the denoising filter module is designed to alleviate the noise in the constructed data. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method outperforms previous unsupervised models on five benchmark datasets, including SQuADv1.1, NewsQA, TriviaQA, BioASQ, and DuoRC. Besides, the proposed method shows strong performance in the few-shot learning setting.

Unsupervised Question Answering via Answer Diversifying

This paper presents a novel multi-perspective document revision task. In conventional studies on document revision, tasks such as grammatical error correction, sentence reordering, and discourse relation classification have been performed individually; however, these tasks simultaneously should be revised to improve the readability and clarity of a whole document. Thus, our study defines multi-perspective document revision as a task that simultaneously revises multiple perspectives. To model the task, we design a novel Japanese multi-perspective document revision dataset that simultaneously handles seven perspectives to improve the readability and clarity of a document. Although a large amount of data that simultaneously handles multiple perspectives is needed to model multi-perspective document revision elaborately, it is difficult to prepare such a large amount of this data. Therefore, our study offers a multi-perspective document revision modeling method that can use a limited amount of matched data (i.e., data for the multi-perspective document revision task) and external partially-matched data (e.g., data for the grammatical error correction task). Experiments using our created dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of using multiple partially-matched datasets to model the multi-perspective document revision task.

Multi-Perspective Document Revision

The phenomenon of compounding is ubiquitous in Sanskrit. It serves for achieving brevity in expressing thoughts, while simultaneously enriching the lexical and structural formation of the language. In this work, we focus on the Sanskrit Compound Type Identification (SaCTI) task, where we consider the problem of identifying semantic relations between the components of a compound word. Earlier approaches solely rely on the lexical information obtained from the components and ignore the most crucial contextual and syntactic information useful for SaCTI. However, the SaCTI task is challenging primarily due to the implicitly encoded context-sensitive semantic relation between the compound components.
Thus, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture which incorporates the contextual information and enriches the complementary syntactic information using morphological tagging and dependency parsing as two auxiliary tasks. Experiments on the benchmark datasets for SaCTI show 6.1 points (Accuracy) and 7.7 points (F1-score) absolute gain compared to the state-of-the-art system. Further, our multi-lingual experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture in English and Marathi languages.The code and datasets are publicly available at this https URL

A Novel Multi-Task Learning Approach for Context-Sensitive Compound Type Identification in Sanskrit

In many linguistic fields requiring annotated data, multiple interpretations of a single item are possible. Multi-label annotations more accurately reflect this possibility. However, allowing for multi-label annotations also affects the chance that two coders agree with each other. Calculating inter-coder agreement for multi-label datasets is therefore not trivial. In the current contribution, we evaluate different metrics for calculating agreement on multi-label annotations: agreement on the intersection of annotated labels, an augmented version of Cohen's Kappa, and precision, recall and F1. We propose a bootstrapping method to obtain chance agreement for each measure, which allows us to obtain an adjusted agreement coefficient that is more interpretable. We demonstrate how various measures affect estimates of agreement on simulated datasets and present a case study of discourse relation annotations. We also show how the proportion of double labels, and the entropy of the label distribution, influences the measures outlined above and how a bootstrapped adjusted agreement can make agreement measures more comparable across datasets in multi-label scenarios.

Establishing annotation quality in multi-label annotations

Asymmetric text matching has becoming increasingly indispensable for many downstream tasks (e.g., IR and NLP). Here, asymmetry means that the documents involved for matching hold different amounts of information, e.g., a short query against a relatively longer document. The existing solutions mainly focus on modeling the feature interactions between asymmetric texts, but rarely go one step further to recognize discriminative features and perform feature denoising to enhance relevance learning. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive feature discrimination and denoising model for asymmetric text matching, called ADDAX.
For each asymmetric text pair, ADDAX is devised to explicitly distinguish discriminative features and filter out irrelevant features in a context-aware fashion. Concretely, a matching-adapted gating siamese cell (MAGS) is firstly devised to identify discriminative features and produce the corresponding hybrid representations for a text pair. Afterwards, we introduce a locality-constrained hashing denoiser to perform feature-level denoising by learning a discriminative low-dimensional binary codes for redundantly longer text. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets from different downstream tasks demonstrate
that the proposed ADDAX obtains substantial performance gain over 36 up-to-date state-of-the-art alternatives.

Adaptive Feature Discrimination and Denoising for Asymmetric Text Matching

Out-of-Domain (OOD) detection is a key com- ponent in a task-oriented dialog system, which aims to identify whether a query falls outside the predefined supported intent set. Previous softmax-based detection algorithms are proved to be overconfident for OOD samples. In this paper, we analyze overconfident OOD comes from distribution uncertainty due to the mis- match between the training and test distribu- tions, which makes the model can’t confidently make predictions thus probably causing abnor- mal softmax scores. We propose a Bayesian OOD detection framework to calibrate distri- bution uncertainty using Monte-Carlo Dropout. Our method is flexible and easily pluggable into existing softmax-based baselines and gains 33.33% OOD F1 improvements with increas- ing only 0.41% inference time compared to MSP. Further analyses show the effectiveness of Bayesian learning for OOD detection.

Distribution Calibration for Out-of-Domain Detection with Bayesian Approximation

The dialogue-based relation extraction (DialogRE) task aims to predict the relations between argument pairs that appear in dialogue. Most previous studies utilize fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) only with extensive features to supplement the low information density of the dialogue by multiple speakers. To effectively exploit inherent knowledge of PLMs without extra layers and consider scattered semantic cues on the relation between the arguments, we propose a Guiding model with RelAtional Semantics using Prompt (GRASP). We adopt a prompt-based fine-tuning approach and capture relational semantic clues of a given dialogue with 1) an argument-aware prompt marker strategy and 2) the relational clue detection task. In the experiments, GRASP achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of both F1 and F1c scores on a DialogRE dataset even though our method only leverages PLMs without adding any extra layers.

GRASP: Guiding model with RelAtional Semantics using Prompt for Dialogue Relation Extraction

Reinforcement Learning with Large Action Spaces for Neural Machine Translation

As digitized traditional cultural heritage documents have rapidly increased, resulting in an increased need for preservation and management, practical recognition of entities and typification of their classes has become essential. To achieve this, we propose KoCHET - a Korean cultural heritage corpus for the typical entity-related tasks, i.e., named entity recognition (NER), relation extraction (RE), and entity typing (ET). Advised by cultural heritage experts based on the data construction guidelines of government-affiliated organizations, KoCHET consists of respectively 112,362, 38,765, 113,198 examples for NER, RE, and ET tasks, covering all entity types related to Korean cultural heritage. Moreover, unlike the existing public corpora, modified redistribution can be allowed both domestic and foreign researchers. Our experimental results make the practical usability of KO- CHET more valuable in terms of cultural heritage. We also provide practical insights of KoCHET in terms of statistical and linguistic analysis. Our corpus is freely available at https://github.com/Gyeongmin47/KoCHET.

KoCHET: a Korean Cultural Heritage corpus for Entity-related Tasks

In a multilingual neural machine translation model that fully shares parameters across all languages, an artificial language token is usually used to guide translation into the desired target language. However, recent studies show that prepending language tokens sometimes fails to navigate the multilingual neural machine translation models into right translation directions, especially on zero-shot translation. To mitigate this issue, we propose two methods, language embedding embodiment and language-aware multi-head attention, to learn informative language representations to channel translation into right directions. The former embodies language embeddings into different critical switching points along the information flow from the source to the target, aiming at amplifying translation direction guiding signals. The latter exploits a matrix, instead of a vector, to represent a language in the continuous space. The matrix is chunked into multiple heads so as to learn language representations in multiple subspaces. Experiment results on two datasets for massively multilingual neural machine translation demonstrate that languageaware multi-head attention benefits both supervised and zero-shot translation and significantly alleviates the off-target translation issue. Further linguistic typology prediction experiments show that matrix-based language representations learned by our methods are capable of capturing rich linguistic typology features.

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