Quality of questions and answers from community support websites (e.g. Microsoft Developers Network, Stackoverflow, Github, etc.) is difficult to define and a prediction model of quality questions and answers is even more challenging to implement. Previous works have addressed the question quality models and answer quality models separately using meta-features like number of up-votes, trustworthiness of the person posting the questions or answers, titles of the post, and context naive natural language processing features. However, there is a lack of an integrated question-answer quality model for community question answering websites in the literature. In this brief paper, we tackle the quality Q&A modeling problems from the community support websites using a recently developed deep learning model using bidirectional transformers. We investigate the applicability of transfer learning on Q&A quality modeling using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) trained on a separate tasks originally using Wikipedia. It is found that a further pre-training of BERT model along with finetuning on the Q&As extracted from Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) can boost the performance of automated quality prediction to more than 80%. Furthermore, the implementations are carried out for deploying the finetuned model in real-time scenario using AzureML in Azure knowledge base system.
We introduce a new language representation model called BERT, which stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. Unlike recent language representation models, BERT is designed to pre-train deep bidirectional representations from unlabeled text by jointly conditioning on both left and right context in all layers. As a result, the pre-trained BERT model can be fine-tuned with just one additional output layer to create state-of-the-art models for a wide range of tasks, such as question answering and language inference, without substantial task-specific architecture modifica…
The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model has been radically improving the performance of many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as Text Classification and Named Entity Recognition (NER) applications. However, it is challenging to scale BERT for low-latency and high-throughput industrial use cases due to its enormous size. We successfully optimize a Query-Title Relevance (QTR) classifier for deployment via a compact model, which we name BERT Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BertBiLSTM). The model is capable of inferring an input in at most 0.2ms o…
Zhejiang Informatization Development Institute, Hangzhou Dianzi University（杭州电子科技大学浙江信息化发展研究院）
We propose a new Named entity recognition (NER) method to effectively make use of the results of Part-of-speech (POS) tagging, Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and parsing while avoiding NER error caused by POS tagging error. This paper first uses Stanford natural language process (NLP) tool to annotate large-scale untagged data so as to reduce the dependence on the tagged data; then a new NLP model, g-BERT model, is designed to compress Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model in order to reduce calculation quantity; finally, the model is evaluated based on Chinese …
NLP Research Laboratory（自然语言处理研究实验室）；Shahid Beheshti University（沙希德贝赫什提大学）
Named entity recognition is a natural language processing task to recognize and extract spans of text associated with named entities and classify them in semantic Categories. Google BERT is a deep bidirectional language model, pre-trained on large corpora that can be fine-tuned to solve many NLP tasks such as question answering, named entity recognition, part of speech tagging and etc. In this paper, we use the pre-trained deep bidirectional network, BERT, to make a model for named entity recognition in Persian. We also compare the results of our model with the previous state of the art result…
National Taiwan University of Science and Technology（台湾科技大学）
In a spoken multiple-choice question answering (SMCQA) task, given a passage, a question, and multiple choices all in the form of speech, the machine needs to pick the correct choice to answer the question. While the audio could contain useful cues for SMCQA, usually only the auto-transcribed text is utilized in system development. Thanks to the large-scaled pre-trained language representation models, such as the bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), systems with only auto-transcribed text can still achieve a certain level of performance. However, previous studies hav…
East China University of Science and Technology（华东理工大学）；Shanghai Hospital Development Center（上海医院发展中心）
Entity and relation extraction is the necessary step in structuring medical text. However, the feature extraction ability of the bidirectional long short term memory network in the existing model does not achieve the best effect. At the same time, the language model has achieved excellent results in more and more natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present a focused attention model for the joint entity and relation extraction task. Our model integrates well-known BERT language model into joint learning through dynamic range attention mechanism, thus improving the feature repre…
National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), National Library of Medicine (NLM), National Institutes of Health (NIH)（美国国家生物技术信息中心（NCBI）、美国国家医学图书馆（NLM）、美国国立卫生研究院（NIH））
A biomedical relation statement is commonly expressed in multiple sentences and consists of many concepts, including gene, disease, chemical, and mutation. To automatically extract information from biomedical literature, existing biomedical text-mining approaches typically formulate the problem as a cross-sentence n-ary relation-extraction task that detects relations among n entities across multiple sentences, and use either a graph neural network (GNN) with long short-term memory (LSTM) or an attention mechanism. Recently, Transformer has been shown to outperform LSTM on many natural language…
University of Oxford（牛津大学）；The Alan Turing Institute（艾伦·图灵研究所）
Relying on large pretrained language models such as Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) for encoding and adding a simple prediction layer has led to impressive performance in many clinical natural language processing (NLP) tasks. In this work, we present a novel extension to the Transformer architecture, by incorporating signature transform with the self-attention model. This architecture is added between embedding and prediction layers. Experiments on a new Swedish prescription data show the proposed architecture to be superior in two of the three information extrac…
In this paper, we propose Multi$^2$OIE, which performs open information extraction (open IE) by combining BERT with multi-head attention. Our model is a sequence-labeling system with an efficient and effective argument extraction method. We use a query, key, and value setting inspired by the Multimodal Transformer to replace the previously used bidirectional long short-term memory architecture with multi-head attention. Multi$^2$OIE outperforms existing sequence-labeling systems with high computational efficiency on two benchmark evaluation datasets, Re-OIE2016 and CaRB. Additionally, we apply…
Raytheon BBN Technologies（雷神BBN技术公司）；University of Pittsburgh（匹兹堡大学）
Multiple neural language models have been developed recently, e.g., BERT and XLNet, and achieved impressive results in various NLP tasks including sentence classification, question answering and document ranking. In this paper, we explore the use of the popular bidirectional language model, BERT, to model and learn the relevance between English queries and foreign-language documents in the task of cross-lingual information retrieval. A deep relevance matching model based on BERT is introduced and trained by finetuning a pretrained multilingual BERT model with weak supervision, using home-made …
Even though BERT achieves successful performance improvements in various supervised learning tasks, applying BERT for unsupervised tasks still holds a limitation that it requires repetitive inference for computing contextual language representations. To resolve the limitation, we propose a novel deep bidirectional language model called Transformer-based Text Autoencoder (T-TA). The T-TA computes contextual language representations without repetition and has benefits of the deep bidirectional architecture like BERT. In run-time experiments on CPU environments, the proposed T-TA performs over si…
University of Tabriz（大不里士大学）；University of Orleans（奥尔良大学）
The objective of an expert recommendation system is to trace a set of candidates' expertise and preferences, recognize their expertise patterns, and identify experts. In this paper, we introduce a multimodal classification approach for expert recommendation system (BERTERS). In our proposed system, the modalities are derived from text (articles published by candidates) and graph (their co-author connections) information. BERTERS converts text into a vector using the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT). Also, a graph Representation technique called ExEm is used to extr…
Enhancing machine capabilities to answer questions has been a topic of considerable focus in recent years of NLP research. Language models like Embeddings from Language Models (ELMo)[1] and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) [2] have been very successful in developing general purpose language models that can be optimized for a large number of downstream language tasks. In this work, we focused on augmenting the pre-trained BERT language model with different output neural net architectures and compared their performance on question answering task posed by the Stanfor…
Beuth University of Applied Sciences Berlin（柏林贝思应用科学大学）
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) reach state-of-the-art results in a variety of Natural Language Processing tasks. However, understanding of their internal functioning is still insufficient and unsatisfactory. In order to better understand BERT and other Transformer-based models, we present a layer-wise analysis of BERT's hidden states. Unlike previous research, which mainly focuses on explaining Transformer models by their attention weights, we argue that hidden states contain equally valuable information. Specifically, our analysis focuses on models fine-tuned o…
Fraunhofer IAIS（弗劳恩霍夫智能分析与信息系统研究所）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；PricewaterhouseCoopers GmbH（普华永道有限责任公司）
We present KPI-BERT, a system which employs novel methods of named entity recognition (NER) and relation extraction (RE) to extract and link key performance indicators (KPIs), e.g. "revenue" or "interest expenses", of companies from real-world German financial documents. Specifically, we introduce an end-to-end trainable architecture that is based on Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) combining a recurrent neural network (RNN) with conditional label masking to sequentially tag entities before it classifies their relations. Our model also introduces a learnable RNN-b…
An important yet rarely tackled problem in dialogue state tracking (DST) is scalability for dynamic ontology (e.g., movie, restaurant) and unseen slot values. We focus on a specific condition, where the ontology is unknown to the state tracker, but the target slot value (except for none and dontcare), possibly unseen during training, can be found as word segment in the dialogue context. Prior approaches often rely on candidate generation from n-gram enumeration or slot tagger outputs, which can be inefficient or suffer from error propagation. We propose BERT-DST, an end-to-end dialogue state t…
Click counts are related to the amount of money that online advertisers paid to news sites. Such business models forced some news sites to employ a dirty trick of click-baiting, i.e., using a hyperbolic and interesting words, sometimes unfinished sentence in a headline to purposefully tease the readers. Some Indonesian online news sites also joined the party of clickbait, which indirectly degrade other established news sites' credibility. A neural network with a pre-trained language model M-BERT that acted as a embedding layer is then combined with a 100 nodes hidden layer and topped with a si…
BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and related pre-trained Transformers have provided large gains across many language understanding tasks, achieving a new state-of-the-art (SOTA). BERT is pre-trained on two auxiliary tasks: Masked Language Model and Next Sentence Prediction. In this paper we introduce a new pre-training task inspired by reading comprehension to better align the pre-training from memorization to understanding. Span Selection Pre-Training (SSPT) poses cloze-like training instances, but rather than draw the answer from the model's parameters, it is se…
CenturyLink（世纪互联公司）；International Management Institute Bhubaneswar（布巴内斯瓦尔国际管理学院）
The purpose of the study is to investigate the relative effectiveness of four different sentiment analysis techniques: (1) unsupervised lexicon-based model using Sent WordNet; (2) traditional supervised machine learning model using logistic regression; (3) supervised deep learning model using Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM); and, (4) advanced supervised deep learning models using Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We use publicly available labeled corpora of 50,000 movie reviews originally posted on internet movie database (IMDB) for analysis using Sent WordNet lexic…
Supervised deep learning requires large amounts of training data. In the context of the FIRE2019 Arabic irony detection shared task (IDAT@FIRE2019), we show how we mitigate this need by fine-tuning the pre-trained bidirectional encoders from transformers (BERT) on gold data in a multi-task setting. We further improve our models by by further pre-training BERT on `in-domain' data, thus alleviating an issue of dialect mismatch in the Google-released BERT model. Our best model acquires 82.4 macro F1 score, and has the unique advantage of being feature-engineering free (i.e., based exclusively on …
Nowadays, the development of social media allows people to access the latest news easily. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important for people to access the news so that they can take corresponding protective measures. However, the fake news is flooding and is a serious issue especially under the global pandemic. The misleading fake news can cause significant loss in terms of the individuals and the society. COVID-19 fake news detection has become a novel and important task in the NLP field. However, fake news always contain the correct portion and the incorrect portion. This fact increase…
Tokyo Metropolitan University（东京都立大学）；Osaka University（大阪大学）
We introduce the metric using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) (Devlin et al., 2019) for automatic machine translation evaluation. The experimental results of the WMT-2017 Metrics Shared Task dataset show that our metric achieves state-of-the-art performance in segment-level metrics task for all to-English language pairs.
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；DeepMind（深度思维）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）
Textual representation learners trained on large amounts of data have achieved notable success on downstream tasks; intriguingly, they have also performed well on challenging tests of syntactic competence. Given this success, it remains an open question whether scalable learners like BERT can become fully proficient in the syntax of natural language by virtue of data scale alone, or whether they still benefit from more explicit syntactic biases. To answer this question, we introduce a knowledge distillation strategy for injecting syntactic biases into BERT pretraining, by distilling the syntac…
Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines) Dhanbad（印度理工学院（印度矿业学院）丹巴德分校）
We explore the performance of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) at definition extraction. We further propose a joint model of BERT and Text Level Graph Convolutional Network so as to incorporate dependencies into the model. Our proposed model produces better results than BERT and achieves comparable results to BERT with fine tuned language model in DeftEval (Task 6 of SemEval 2020), a shared task of classifying whether a sentence contains a definition or not (Subtask 1).
King Abdulaziz University（阿卜杜勒阿齐兹国王大学）；University of Tabuk（塔布克大学）
The enormous amount of data being generated on the web and social media has increased the demand for detecting online hate speech. Detecting hate speech will reduce their negative impact and influence on others. A lot of effort in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain aimed to detect hate speech in general or detect specific hate speech such as religion, race, gender, or sexual orientation. Hate communities tend to use abbreviations, intentional spelling mistakes, and coded words in their communication to evade detection, adding more challenges to hate speech detection tasks. Thus, word…
Traditional Machine Learning Models and Bidirectional Encoder Representations From Transformer (BERT)-Based Automatic Classification of Tweets About Eating Disorders: Algorithm Development and Validation Study
University of León（莱昂大学）；Leibniz University of Hannover（汉诺威莱布尼茨大学）；Spanish National University for Distance Education（西班牙国家远程教育大学）
We develop a chatbot using Deep Bidirectional Transformer models (BERT) to handle client questions in financial investment customer service. The bot can recognize 381 intents, and decides when to say "I don't know" and escalates irrelevant/uncertain questions to human operators. Our main novel contribution is the discussion about uncertainty measure for BERT, where three different approaches are systematically compared on real problems. We investigated two uncertainty metrics, information entropy and variance of dropout sampling in BERT, followed by mixed-integer programming to optimize decisi…
Language models (LMs) pre-trained on massive amounts of text, in particular bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT), generative pre-training (GPT), and GPT-2, have become a key technology for many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present results using fine-tuned GPT, GPT-2, and their combination for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Unlike unidirectional LM GPT and GPT-2, BERT is bidirectional whose direct product of the output probabilities is no longer a valid language prior probability. A conversion method is proposed to compute the correct langu…
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) has recently achieved state-of-the-art performance on a broad range of NLP tasks including sentence classification, machine translation, and question answering. The BERT model architecture is derived primarily from the transformer. Prior to the transformer era, bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) has been the dominant modeling architecture for neural machine translation and question answering. In this paper, we investigate how these two modeling techniques can be combined to create a more powerful model architecture. We pr…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）
A well formed query is defined as a query which is formulated in the manner of an inquiry, and with correct interrogatives, spelling and grammar. While identifying well formed queries is an important task, few works have attempted to address it. In this paper we propose transformer based language model - Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to this task. We further imbibe BERT with parts-of-speech information inspired from earlier works. Furthermore, we also train the model in multiple curriculum settings for improvement in performance. Curriculum Learning over the ta…
School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston（德克萨斯大学休斯顿健康科学中心生物医学信息学院）
Developing high-performance entity normalization algorithms that can alleviate the term variation problem is of great interest to the biomedical community. Although deep learning-based methods have been successfully applied to biomedical entity normalization, they often depend on traditional context-independent word embeddings. Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), BERT for Biomedical Text Mining (BioBERT) and BERT for Clinical Text Mining (ClinicalBERT) were recently introduced to pre-train contextualized word representation models using bidirectional Transformers, a…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；University of Georgia（佐治亚大学）
Predicting the outcome of a process requires modeling the system dynamic and observing the states. In the context of social behaviors, sentiments characterize the states of the system. Affect Control Theory (ACT) uses sentiments to manifest potential interaction. ACT is a generative theory of culture and behavior based on a three-dimensional sentiment lexicon. Traditionally, the sentiments are quantified using survey data which is fed into a regression model to explain social behavior. The lexicons used in the survey are limited due to prohibitive cost. This paper uses a fine-tuned Bidirection…
Pre-training a transformer-based model for the language modeling task in a large dataset and then fine-tuning it for downstream tasks has been found very useful in recent years. One major advantage of such pre-trained language models is that they can effectively absorb the context of each word in a sentence. However, for tasks such as the answer selection task, the pre-trained language models have not been extensively used yet. To investigate their effectiveness in such tasks, in this paper, we adopt the pre-trained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) language model a…
College of Information and Computer Sciences（信息与计算机科学学院）；University of Massachusetts Amherst（马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校）
The bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) model has recently advanced the state-of-the-art in passage re-ranking. In this paper, we analyze the results produced by a fine-tuned BERT model to better understand the reasons behind such substantial improvements. To this aim, we focus on the MS MARCO passage re-ranking dataset and provide potential reasons for the successes and failures of BERT for retrieval. In more detail, we empirically study a set of hypotheses and provide additional analysis to explain the successful performance of BERT.
University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）
Social media currently provide a window on our lives, making it possible to learn how people from different places, with different backgrounds, ages, and genders use language. In this work we exploit a newly-created Arabic dataset with ground truth age and gender labels to learn these attributes both individually and in a multi-task setting at the sentence level. Our models are based on variations of deep bidirectional neural networks. More specifically, we build models with gated recurrent units and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT). We show the utility of multi-t…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Google AI Brain Team（谷歌人工智能大脑团队）
With the capability of modeling bidirectional contexts, denoising autoencoding based pretraining like BERT achieves better performance than pretraining approaches based on autoregressive language modeling. However, relying on corrupting the input with masks, BERT neglects dependency between the masked positions and suffers from a pretrain-finetune discrepancy. In light of these pros and cons, we propose XLNet, a generalized autoregressive pretraining method that (1) enables learning bidirectional contexts by maximizing the expected likelihood over all permutations of the factorization order an…
In recent years BERT shows apparent advantages and great potential in natural language processing tasks. However, both training and applying BERT requires intensive time and resources for computing contextual language representations, which hinders its universality and applicability. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose a deep bidirectional language model by using window masking mechanism at attention layer. This work computes contextual language representations without random masking as does in BERT and maintains the deep bidirectional architecture like BERT. To compute the same sentence r…
Social media are pervasive in our life, making it necessary to ensure safe online experiences by detecting and removing offensive and hate speech. In this work, we report our submission to the Offensive Language and hate-speech Detection shared task organized with the 4th Workshop on Open-Source Arabic Corpora and Processing Tools Arabic (OSACT4). We focus on developing purely deep learning systems, without a need for feature engineering. For that purpose, we develop an effective method for automatic data augmentation and show the utility of training both offensive and hate speech models off (…
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been widely used in the semantic analysis in recent years. Our paper mainly discusses a methodology to analyze the effect that context has on human perception of similar words, which is the third task of SemEval 2020. We apply several methods in calculating the distance between two embedding vector generated by Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT). Our team will_go won the 1st place in Finnish language track of subtask1, the second place in English track of subtask1.
This paper introduces HeBERT and HebEMO. HeBERT is a Transformer-based model for modern Hebrew text, which relies on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations for Transformers) architecture. BERT has been shown to outperform alternative architectures in sentiment analysis, and is suggested to be particularly appropriate for MRLs. Analyzing multiple BERT specifications, we find that while model complexity correlates with high performance on language tasks that aim to understand terms in a sentence, a more-parsimonious model better captures the sentiment of entire sentence. Either way, out B…
