Measuring the similarity of short written contexts is a fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. This article provides a unifying framework by which short context problems can be categorized both by their intended application and proposed solution. The goal is to show that various problems and methodologies that appear quite different on the surface are in fact very closely related. The axes by which these categorizations are made include the format of the contexts (headed versus headless), the way in which the contexts are to be measured (first-order versus second-order similarity), and the information used to represent the features in the contexts (micro versus macro views). The unifying thread that binds together many short context applications and methods is the fact that similarity decisions must be made between contexts that share few (if any) words in common.
Measuring the similarity between two different sentential arguments is an important task in argument mining. However, one of the challenges in this field is that the dataset must be annotated using expertise in a variety of topics, making supervised learning with labeled data expensive. In this paper, we investigated whether this problem could be alleviated through transfer learning. We first adapted a pretrained language model to a domain of interest using self-supervised learning. Then, we fine-tuned the model to a task of measuring the similarity between sentences taken from different domai…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）
Measuring sentence semantic similarity using pre-trained language models such as BERT generally yields unsatisfactory zero-shot performance, and one main reason is ineffective token aggregation methods such as mean pooling. In this paper, we demonstrate under a Bayesian framework that distance between primitive statistics such as the mean of word embeddings are fundamentally flawed for capturing sentence-level semantic similarity. To remedy this issue, we propose to learn a categorical variational autoencoder (VAE) based on off-the-shelf pre-trained language models. We theoretically prove that…
Various applications in the areas of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence employ semantic similarity to solve challenging tasks, such as word sense disambiguation, text classification, information retrieval, machine translation, and document clustering. Previous work on semantic similarity followed a mono-relational approach using mostly the taxonomic relation "ISA". This paper explores the benefits of using all types of non-taxonomic relations in large linked data, such as WordNet knowledge graph, to enhance existing semantic similarity and relatedness measures. We propose a …
Dialog is a core building block of human natural language interactions. It contains multi-party utterances used to convey information from one party to another in a dynamic and evolving manner. The ability to compare dialogs is beneficial in many real world use cases, such as conversation analytics for contact center calls and virtual agent design. We propose a novel adaptation of the edit distance metric to the scenario of dialog similarity. Our approach takes into account various conversation aspects such as utterance semantics, conversation flow, and the participants. We evaluate this new a…
Brown University（布朗大学）；Southern Methodist University（南卫理公会大学）
Computerized document classification already orders the news articles that Apple's "News" app or Google's "personalized search" feature groups together to match a reader's interests. The invisible and therefore illegible decisions that go into these tailored searches have been the subject of a critique by scholars who emphasize that our intelligence about documents is only as good as our ability to understand the criteria of search. This article will attempt to unpack the procedures used in computational classification of texts, translating them into term legible to humanists, and examining op…
This study is to review the approaches used for measuring sentences similarity. Measuring similarity between natural language sentences is a crucial task for many Natural Language Processing applications such as text classification, information retrieval, question answering, and plagiarism detection. This survey classifies approaches of calculating sentences similarity based on the adopted methodology into three categories. Word-to-word based, structure based, and vector-based are the most widely used approaches to find sentences similarity. Each approach measures relatedness between short tex…
Sentiment and topic analysis are common methods used for social media monitoring. Essentially, these methods answers questions such as, "what is being talked about, regarding X", and "what do people feel, regarding X". In this paper, we investigate another venue for social media monitoring, namely issue ownership and agenda setting, which are concepts from political science that have been used to explain voter choice and electoral outcomes. We argue that issue alignment and agenda setting can be seen as a kind of semantic source similarity of the kind "how similar is source A to issue owner P,…
The ability to compare the semantic similarity between text corpora is important in a variety of natural language processing applications. However, standard methods for evaluating these metrics have yet to be established. We propose a set of automatic and interpretable measures for assessing the characteristics of corpus-level semantic similarity metrics, allowing sensible comparison of their behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our evaluation measures in capturing fundamental characteristics by evaluating them on a collection of classical and state-of-the-art metrics. Our measures re…
In this paper we introduce vSTS, a new dataset for measuring textual similarity of sentences using multimodal information. The dataset is comprised by images along with its respectively textual captions. We describe the dataset both quantitatively and qualitatively, and claim that it is a valid gold standard for measuring automatic multimodal textual similarity systems. We also describe the initial experiments combining the multimodal information.
How Much Were You Told? Measuring External Information in Peer Reviews
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；ISIR（智能系统与机器人研究所）；International Laboratory on Learning Systems (ILLS)（国际学习系统实验室）；Quebec AI Institute (MILA)（魁北克人工智能研究所）；CentraleSupélec（巴黎中央理工-高等电力学院）；Université Paris-Saclay（巴黎萨克雷大学）
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for measuring the degree of similarity between categories of two pieces of Persian text, which were published as descriptions of two separate advertisements. We built an appropriate dataset for this work using a dataset which consists of advertisements posted on an e-commerce website. We generated a significant number of paired texts from this dataset and assigned each pair a score from 0 to 3, which demonstrates the degree of similarity between the domains of the pair. In this work, we represent words with word embedding vectors derived from word2vec…
Online reviews have increasingly become a very important resource for consumers when making purchases. Though it is becoming more and more difficult for people to make well-informed buying decisions without being deceived by fake reviews. Prior works on the opinion spam problem mostly considered classifying fake reviews using behavioral user patterns. They focused on prolific users who write more than a couple of reviews, discarding one-time reviewers. The number of singleton reviewers however is expected to be high for many review websites. While behavioral patterns are effective when dealing…
When people converse about social or political topics, similar arguments are often paraphrased by different speakers, across many different conversations. Debate websites produce curated summaries of arguments on such topics; these summaries typically consist of lists of sentences that represent frequently paraphrased propositions, or labels capturing the essence of one particular aspect of an argument, e.g. Morality or Second Amendment. We call these frequently paraphrased propositions ARGUMENT FACETS. Like these curated sites, our goal is to induce and identify argument facets across multipl…
Measuring sentence similarity is a key research area nowadays as it allows machines to better understand human languages. In this paper, we proposed a Cross-Attention Siamese Network (CATsNet) to carry out the task of learning the semantic meanings of Chinese sentences and comparing the similarity between two sentences. This novel model is capable of catching non-local features. Additionally, we also tried to apply the long short-term memory (LSTM) network in the model to improve its performance. The experiments were conducted on the LCQMC dataset and the results showed that our model could ac…
Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In this paper we investigate semantic divergence across languages by measuring the semantic similarity of cognate sets in multiple languages. The method that we propose is based on cross-lingual word embeddings. In this paper we implement and evaluate our method on English and five Romance languages, but it can be extended easily to any language pair, requirin…
University of Helsinki（赫尔辛基大学）；Rootroo Ltd（Rootroo有限公司）
Measuring the semantic similarity of different texts has many important applications in Digital Humanities research such as information retrieval, document clustering and text summarization. The performance of different methods depends on the length of the text, the domain and the language. This study focuses on experimenting with some of the current approaches to Finnish, which is a morphologically rich language. At the same time, we propose a simple method, TFW2V, which shows high efficiency in handling both long text documents and limited amounts of data. Furthermore, we design an objective…
Here Is Not There: Measuring Entailment-Based Trajectory Similarity for Location-Privacy Protection and Beyond
University of Vienna（维也纳大学）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加利福尼亚大学圣巴巴拉分校）；University of Wisconsin–Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）；Austrian Institute of Technology（奥地利技术研究院）
Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies（海德堡理论研究所）；Google（谷歌）
This paper introduces a simple and effective form of data augmentation for recommender systems. A paraphrase similarity model is applied to widely available textual data, such as reviews and product descriptions, yielding new semantic relations that are added to the user-item graph. This increases the density of the graph without needing further labeled data. The data augmentation is evaluated on a variety of recommendation algorithms, using Euclidean, hyperbolic, and complex spaces, and over three categories of Amazon product reviews with differing characteristics. Results show that the data …
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；T. J. Watson Research Center, IBM（IBM T. J.沃森研究中心）
Measuring similarity between texts is an important task for several applications. Available approaches to measure document similarity are inadequate for document pairs that have non-comparable lengths, such as a long document and its summary. This is because of the lexical, contextual and the abstraction gaps between a long document of rich details and its concise summary of abstract information. In this paper, we present a document matching approach to bridge this gap, by comparing the texts in a common space of hidden topics. We evaluate the matching algorithm on two matching tasks and find …
Aspect category detection is one of the important and challenging subtasks of aspect-based sentiment analysis. Given a set of pre-defined categories, this task aims to detect categories which are indicated implicitly or explicitly in a given review sentence. Supervised machine learning approaches perform well to accomplish this subtask. Note that, the performance of these methods depends on the availability of labeled train data, which is often difficult and costly to obtain. Besides, most of these supervised methods require feature engineering to perform well. In this paper, we propose an uns…
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Jiangsu Key Laboratory of Data Engineering and Knowledge Service (Nanjing University)（江苏省数据工程与知识服务重点实验室（南京大学））；Alibaba Research Center for Complex Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University（杭州师范大学阿里巴巴复杂科学研究中心）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）
As with articles and journals, the customary methods for measuring books' academic impact mainly involve citations, which is easy but limited to interrogating traditional citation databases and scholarly book reviews, Researchers have attempted to use other metrics, such as Google Books, libcitation, and publisher prestige. However, these approaches lack content-level information and cannot determine the citation intentions of users. Meanwhile, the abundant online review resources concerning academic books can be used to mine deeper information and content utilizing altmetric perspectives. In …
Higher Colleges of Technology（高等技术学院）；Faculty of Computer Information Science（计算机信息科学学院）；The University of Central Punjab（中旁遮普大学）
Measuring plagiarism in programming assignments is an essential task to the educational procedure. This paper discusses the methods of plagiarism and its detection in introductory programming course assignments written in C++. A small corpus of assignments is made publically available. A general framework to compute the similarity between a solution pair is developed that uses the three token-based similarity methods as features and predicts if the solution is plagiarized. The importance of each feature is also measured, which in return ranks the effectiveness of each method in use. Finally, t…
Human judgments of word similarity have been a popular method of evaluating the quality of word embedding. But it fails to measure the geometry properties such as asymmetry. For example, it is more natural to say "Ellipses are like Circles" than "Circles are like Ellipses". Such asymmetry has been observed from a psychoanalysis test called word evocation experiment, where one word is used to recall another. Although useful, such experimental data have been significantly understudied for measuring embedding quality. In this paper, we use three well-known evocation datasets to gain insights into…
In our project, we focus on NLP-based hybrid recommendation systems. Our data is from Yelp Data. For our hybrid recommendation system, we have two major components: the first part is to embed the reviews with the Bert model and word2vec model; the second part is the implementation of an item-based collaborative filtering algorithm to compute the similarity of each review under different categories of restaurants. In the end, with the help of similarity scores, we are able to recommend users the most matched restaurant based on their recorded reviews. The coding work is split into several parts…
The Good, the Bad and the Constructive: Automatically Measuring Peer Review's Utility for Authors
NLP Department, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence（马尔代夫比兹艾兹大学人工智能学院自然语言处理系）；Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系通用知识处理实验室）；Hessian Center for AI (hessian.AI), TU Darmstadt（图尔努尔德马斯特大学海斯塞人工智能中心）
