Spain

In this paper we focus on connective identification and sense classification for explicit discourse relations in German, as two individual sub-tasks of the overarching Shallow Discourse Parsing task. We successively augment a purely-empirical approach based on contextualised embeddings with linguistic knowledge encoded in a connective lexicon. In this way, we improve over published results for connective identification, achieving a final F1-score of 87.93; and we introduce, to the best of our knowledge, first results for German sense classification, achieving an F1-score of 87.13. Our approach demonstrates that a connective lexicon can be a valuable resource for those languages that do not have a large PDTB-style-annotated corpus available.

COLING 2020

Exploiting a lexical resource for discourse connective disambiguation in German

connective lexicons

discourse connectives

discourse parsing

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EACL 2024

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

technical paper

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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, 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.

We present a bracketing-based encoding that can be used to represent any 2-planar dependency tree over a sentence of length n as a sequence of n labels, hence providing almost total coverage of crossing arcs in sequence labeling parsing. First, we show that existing bracketing encodings for parsing as labeling can only handle a very mild extension of projective trees. Second, we overcome this limitation by taking into account the well-known property of 2-planarity, which is present in the vast majority of dependency syntactic structures in treebanks, i.e., the arcs of a dependency tree can be split into two planes such that arcs in a given plane do not cross. We take advantage of this property to design a method that balances the brackets and that encodes the arcs belonging to each of those planes, allowing for almost unrestricted non-projectivity (∼99.9% coverage) in sequence labeling parsing. The experiments show that our linearizations improve over the accuracy of the original bracketing encoding in highly non-projective treebanks (on average by 0.4 LAS), while achieving a similar speed. Also, they are especially suitable when PoS tags are not used as input parameters to the models.

Bracketing Encodings for 2-Planar Dependency Parsing

Machine reading comprehension (MRC) is the task that asks a machine to answer questions based on a given context. For Chinese MRC, due to the non-literal and non-compositional semantic characteristics, Chinese idioms pose unique challenges for machines to understand. Previous studies tend to treat idioms separately without fully exploiting the relationship among them. In this paper, we first define the concept of literal meaning coverage to measure the consistency between semantics and literal meanings for Chinese idioms. With the definition, we prove that the literal meanings of many idioms are far from their semantics, and we also verify that the synonymic relationship can mitigate this inconsistency, which would be beneficial for idiom comprehension. Furthermore, to fully utilize the synonymic relationship, we propose the synonym knowledge enhanced reader. Specifically, for each idiom, we first construct a synonym graph according to the annotations from a high-quality synonym dictionary or the cosine similarity between the pre-trained idiom embeddings and then incorporate the graph attention network and gate mechanism to encode the graph. Experimental results on ChID, a large-scale Chinese idiom reading comprehension dataset, show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Synonym Knowledge Enhanced Reader for Chinese Idiom Reading Comprehension

This work presents an in-depth investigation of the effectiveness of dependency-based syntactic features on the irony detection task in a multilingual perspective (English, Spanish, French and Italian). It focuses on the contribution from syntactic knowledge, exploiting linguistic resources where syntax is annotated according to the Universal Dependencies.
Three distinct experimental settings are provided. In the first, a variety of syntactic dependency-based features combined with classical machine learning classifiers are explored. In the second scenario, two well-known types of word embeddings are trained on parsed data and tested against gold standard datasets.
In the third setting, dependency-based syntactic features are combined into the Multilingual BERT architecture. The results suggest that fine-grained dependency-based syntactic information is informative for the detection of irony.

Multilingual Irony Detection with Dependency Syntax and Neural Models

Recently, automatic trivia fact extraction has attracted much research interest. Modern search engines have begun to provide trivia facts as the information for entities because they can motivate more user engagement. In this paper, we propose a new unsupervised algorithm that automatically mines trivia facts for a given entity. Unlike previous studies, the proposed algorithm targets at a single Wikipedia article and leverages its hierarchical structure via top-down processing. Thus, the proposed algorithm offers two distinctive advantages: it does not incur high computation time, and it provides a domain-independent approach for extracting trivia facts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is over 100 times faster than the existing method which considers Wikipedia categories. Human evaluation demonstrates that the proposed algorithm can mine better trivia facts regardless of the target entity domain and outperforms the existing methods.

Hierarchical Trivia Fact Extraction from Wikipedia Articles

Document-level machine translation focuses on the translation of entire documents from a source to a target language. It is widely regarded as a challenging task since the translation of the individual sentences in the document needs to retain aspects of the discourse at document level. However, document-level translation models are usually not trained to explicitly ensure discourse quality. Therefore, in this paper we propose a training approach that explicitly optimizes two established discourse metrics, lexical cohesion (LC) and coherence (COH), by using a reinforcement learning objective. Experiments over four different language pairs and three translation domains have shown that our training approach has been able to achieve more cohesive and coherent document translations than other competitive approaches, yet without compromising the faithfulness to the reference translation. In the case of the Zh-En language pair, our method has achieved an improvement of 2.46 percentage points (pp) in LC and 1.17 pp in COH over the runner-up, while at the same time improving 0.63 pp in BLEU score and 0.47 pp in F_BERT.

Leveraging Discourse Rewards for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation

Aspect-level sentiment classification aims to distinguish the sentiment polarities over aspect terms in a sentence. Existing approaches mostly focus on modeling the relationship between the given aspect words and their contexts with attention, and ignore the use of more elaborate knowledge implicit in the context. In this paper, we exploit syntactic awareness to the model by the graph attention network on the dependency tree structure and external pre-training knowledge by BERT language model, which helps to model the interaction between the context and aspect words better. And the subwords of BERT are integrated into the dependency tree graphs, which can obtain more accurate representations of words by graph attention. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.

Syntax-Aware Graph Attention Network for Aspect-Level Sentiment Classification

This presentation gives a brief description of the paper "Enhancing Extractive Text Summarization with Topic-Aware Graph Neural Networks", including the motivations, model structure, and experimental results.

Enhancing Extractive Summarization with Topic-Aware Neural Networks

This paper proposes a framework for the expression of typological statements which uses real-valued logics to capture the empirical truth value (truth degree) of a formula on a given data source, e.g. a collection of multilingual treebanks with comparable annotation. The formulae can be arbitrarily complex expressions of propositional logic. To illustrate the usefulness of such a framework, we present experiments on the Universal Dependencies treebanks for two use cases: (i) empirical (re-)evaluation of established formulae against the spectrum of available treebanks and (ii) evaluating new formulae (i.e. potential candidates for universals) generated by a search algorithm.

Real-Valued Logics for Typological Universals: Framework and Application

In contrast with the traditional single-grained word segmentation (SWS), where a sentence corresponds to a single word sequence, multi-grained Chinese word segmentation (MWS) aims to segment a sentence into multiple word sequences to preserve all words of different granularities. Due to the lack of manually annotated MWS data, previous work train and tune MWS models only on automatically generated pseudo MWS data. In this work, we further take advantage of the rich word boundary information in existing SWS data and naturally annotated data from dictionary example (DictEx) sentences, to advance the state-of-the-art MWS model based on the idea of weak supervision. Particularly, we propose to accommodate two types of weakly labeled data for MWS, i.e., SWS data and DictEx data by employing a simple yet competitive graph-based parser with local loss. Besides, we manually annotate a high-quality MWS dataset according to our newly compiled annotation guideline, consisting of over 9,000 sentences from two types of texts, i.e., canonical newswire (NEWS) and non-canonical web (BAIKE) data for better evaluation. Detailed evaluation shows that our proposed model with weakly labeled data significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art MWS model by 1.12 and 5.97 on NEWS and BAIKE data in F1.

Multi-grained Chinese Word Segmentation with Weakly Labeled Data

End-to-end neural data-to-text (D2T) generation has recently emerged as an alternative to pipeline-based architectures. However, it has faced challenges in generalizing to new domains and generating semantically consistent text. In this work, we present DataTuner, a neural, end-to-end data-to-text generation system that makes minimal assumptions about the data representation and the target domain. We take a two-stage generation-reranking approach, combining a fine-tuned language model with a semantic fidelity classifier. Each of our components is learnt end-to-end without the need for dataset-specific heuristics, entity delexicalization, or post-processing. We show that DataTuner achieves state of the art results on the automated metrics across four major D2T datasets (LDC2017T10, WebNLG, ViGGO, and Cleaned E2E), with a fluency assessed by human annotators nearing or exceeding the human-written reference texts. We further demonstrate that the model-based semantic fidelity scorer in DataTuner is a better assessment tool compared to traditional, heuristic-based measures. Our generated text has a significantly better semantic fidelity than the state of the art across all four datasets.

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