At present, most Natural Language Processing technology is based on the results of Word Segmentation for Dependency Parsing, which mainly uses an end-to-end method based on supervised learning. There are two main problems with this method: firstly, the la-beling rules are complex and the data is too difficult to label, the workload of which is large; secondly, the algorithm cannot recognize the multi-granularity and diversity of language components. In order to solve these two problems, we propose labeling rules based on phrase windows, and designed corresponding phrase recognition algorithms. The labeling rule uses phrases as the minimum unit, di-vides sentences into 7 types of nestable phrase types, and marks the grammatical dependencies between phrases. The corresponding algorithm, drawing on the idea of identifying the target area in the image field, can find the start and end positions of various phrases in the sentence, and realize the synchronous recognition of nested phrases and grammatical dependencies. The results of the experiment shows that the labeling rule is convenient and easy to use, and there is no ambiguity; the algorithm is more grammatically multi-granular and diverse than the end-to-end algorithm. Experiments on the CPWD dataset improve the accuracy of the end-to-end method by about 1 point. The corresponding method was applied to the CCL2018 competition, and the first place in the Chinese Metaphor Sentiment Analysis Task.
Constituent and dependency parsing, the two classic forms of syntactic parsing, have been found to benefit from joint training and decoding under a uniform formalism, Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). However, decoding this unified grammar has a higher time complexity ($O(n^5)$) than decoding either form individually ($O(n^3)$) since more factors have to be considered during decoding. We thus propose an improved head scorer that helps achieve a novel performance-preserved parser in $O$($n^3$) time complexity. Furthermore, on the basis of this proposed practical HPSG parser, we inves…
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Opinion summarization aims to profile a target by extracting opinions from multiple documents. Most existing work approaches the task in a semi-supervised manner due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality annotation from thousands of documents. Among them, some use aspect and sentiment analysis as a proxy for identifying opinions. In this work, we propose a new framework, FineSum, which advances this frontier in three aspects: (1) minimal supervision, where only aspect names and a few aspect/sentiment keywords are available; (2) fine-grained opinion analysis, where sentiment analysis dril…
Representing and Parsing Korean Constituency Structure at Different Levels of Granularity
Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology（韩国科学技术院）；The University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Anyang University（安阳大学）
Peking University（北京大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）
We propose SentiBERT, a variant of BERT that effectively captures compositional sentiment semantics. The model incorporates contextualized representation with binary constituency parse tree to capture semantic composition. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that SentiBERT achieves competitive performance on phrase-level sentiment classification. We further demonstrate that the sentiment composition learned from the phrase-level annotations on SST can be transferred to other sentiment analysis tasks as well as related tasks, such as emotion classification tasks. Moreover, we conduct ablation…
Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago（芝加哥丰田理工学院）；Rutgers University（罗格斯大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
Accurate lexical entailment (LE) and natural language inference (NLI) often require large quantities of costly annotations. To alleviate the need for labeled data, we introduce WikiNLI: a resource for improving model performance on NLI and LE tasks. It contains 428,899 pairs of phrases constructed from naturally annotated category hierarchies in Wikipedia. We show that we can improve strong baselines such as BERT and RoBERTa by pretraining them on WikiNLI and transferring the models on downstream tasks. We conduct systematic comparisons with phrases extracted from other knowledge bases such as…
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences（人文与社会科学学院）
We compare three approaches to statistical machine translation (pure phrase-based, factored phrase-based and neural) by performing a fine-grained manual evaluation via error annotation of the systems' outputs. The error types in our annotation are compliant with the multidimensional quality metrics (MQM), and the annotation is performed by two annotators. Inter-annotator agreement is high for such a task, and results show that the best performing system (neural) reduces the errors produced by the worst system (phrase-based) by 54%.
Access to word-sentiment associations is useful for many applications, including sentiment analysis, stance detection, and linguistic analysis. However, manually assigning fine-grained sentiment association scores to words has many challenges with respect to keeping annotations consistent. We apply the annotation technique of Best-Worst Scaling to obtain real-valued sentiment association scores for words and phrases in three different domains: general English, English Twitter, and Arabic Twitter. We show that on all three domains the ranking of words by sentiment remains remarkably consistent …
University of Wuppertal（伍珀塔尔大学）；University of Konstanz（康斯坦茨大学）
Established cross-document coreference resolution (CDCR) datasets contain event-centric coreference chains of events and entities with identity relations. These datasets establish strict definitions of the coreference relations across related tests but typically ignore anaphora with more vague context-dependent loose coreference relations. In this paper, we qualitatively and quantitatively compare the annotation schemes of ECB+, a CDCR dataset with identity coreference relations, and NewsWCL50, a CDCR dataset with a mix of loose context-dependent and strict coreference relations. We propose a …
Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；School of Computer Science and Technology, Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）
At present, the deep end-to-end method based on supervised learning is used in entity recognition and dependency analysis. There are two problems in this method: firstly, background knowledge cannot be introduced; secondly, multi granularity and nested features of natural language cannot be recognized. In order to solve these problems, the annotation rules based on phrase window are proposed, and the corresponding multi-dimensional end-to-end phrase recognition algorithm is designed. This annotation rule divides sentences into seven types of nested phrases, and indicates the dependency between…
TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（莱布尼茨科学与技术信息中心）
Purpose: The aim of this work is to normalize the NLPCONTRIBUTIONS scheme (henceforward, NLPCONTRIBUTIONGRAPH) to structure, directly from article sentences, the contributions information in Natural Language Processing (NLP) scholarly articles via a two-stage annotation methodology: 1) pilot stage - to define the scheme (described in prior work); and 2) adjudication stage - to normalize the graphing model (the focus of this paper). Design/methodology/approach: We re-annotate, a second time, the contributions-pertinent information across 50 prior-annotated NLP scholarly articles in terms of a d…
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory（麻省理工学院计算机科学与人工智能实验室）；University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Common language models typically predict the next word given the context. In this work, we propose a method that improves language modeling by learning to align the given context and the following phrase. The model does not require any linguistic annotation of phrase segmentation. Instead, we define syntactic heights and phrase segmentation rules, enabling the model to automatically induce phrases, recognize their task-specific heads, and generate phrase embeddings in an unsupervised learning manner. Our method can easily be applied to language models with different network architectures since…
When looking at the structure of natural language, "phrases" and "words" are central notions. We consider the problem of identifying such "meaningful subparts" of language of any length and underlying composition principles in a completely corpus-based and language-independent way without using any kind of prior linguistic knowledge. Unsupervised methods for identifying "phrases", mining subphrase structure and finding words in a fully automated way are described. This can be considered as a step towards automatically computing a "general dictionary and grammar of the corpus". We hope that in …
VA Boston Healthcare System（波士顿退伍军人医疗保健系统）；Boston University School of Medicine（波士顿大学医学院）；University of Vermont（佛蒙特大学）
Sequence alignments are used to capture patterns composed of elements representing multiple conceptual levels through the alignment of sequences that contain overlapping and variable length annotations. The alignments also determine the proper context window of words and phrases that most directly impact the meaning of a given target within a sentence, eliminating the need to predefine a fixed context window of words surrounding the targets. We evaluated the system using the CoNLL-2003 named entity recognition (NER) task.
Language Model as an Annotator: Unsupervised Context-aware Quality Phrase Generation
College of Economics and Management, Beijing University of Technology（北京工业大学经济与管理学院）；School of Economics and Management, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学经济与管理学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学计算机科学系）
Recognizing non-standard entity types and relations, such as B2B products, product classes and their producers, in news and forum texts is important in application areas such as supply chain monitoring and market research. However, there is a decided lack of annotated corpora and annotation guidelines in this domain. In this work, we present a corpus study, an annotation schema and associated guidelines, for the annotation of product entity and company-product relation mentions. We find that although product mentions are often realized as noun phrases, defining their exact extent is difficult …
University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；University of Illinois at Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）
This paper introduces a new web-based software tool for annotating text, Text Annotation Graphs, or TAG. It provides functionality for representing complex relationships between words and word phrases that are not available in other software tools, including the ability to define and visualize relationships between the relationships themselves (semantic hypergraphs). Additionally, we include an approach to representing text annotations in which annotation subgraphs, or semantic summaries, are used to show relationships outside of the sequential context of the text itself. Users can use these s…
Open domain relation extraction systems identify relation and argument phrases in a sentence without relying on any underlying schema. However, current state-of-the-art relation extraction systems are available only for English because of their heavy reliance on linguistic tools such as part-of-speech taggers and dependency parsers. We present a cross-lingual annotation projection method for language independent relation extraction. We evaluate our method on a manually annotated test set and present results on three typologically different languages. We release these manual annotations and ext…
CVIT, IIIT-Hyderabad（海得拉巴国际信息技术研究所视觉信息技术中心）；Xerox Research Center India（施乐印度研究中心）
The recognition of human activities is one of the key problems in video understanding. Action recognition is challenging even for specific categories of videos, such as sports, that contain only a small set of actions. Interestingly, sports videos are accompanied by detailed commentaries available online, which could be used to perform action annotation in a weakly-supervised setting. For the specific case of Cricket videos, we address the challenge of temporal segmentation and annotation of ctions with semantic descriptions. Our solution consists of two stages. In the first stage, the video i…
TIB Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology（TIB莱布尼茨科学与技术信息中心）；University of Minnesota（明尼苏达大学）
There is currently a gap between the natural language expression of scholarly publications and their structured semantic content modeling to enable intelligent content search. With the volume of research growing exponentially every year, a search feature operating over semantically structured content is compelling. The SemEval-2021 Shared Task NLPContributionGraph (a.k.a. 'the NCG task') tasks participants to develop automated systems that structure contributions from NLP scholarly articles in the English language. Being the first-of-its-kind in the SemEval series, the task released structured…
We introduce \textsc{PoliteRewrite} -- a dataset for polite language rewrite which is a novel sentence rewrite task. Compared with previous text style transfer tasks that can be mostly addressed by slight token- or phrase-level edits, polite language rewrite requires deep understanding and extensive sentence-level edits over an offensive and impolite sentence to deliver the same message euphemistically and politely, which is more challenging -- not only for NLP models but also for human annotators to rewrite with effort. To alleviate the human effort for efficient annotation, we first propose …
Dublin Institute of Technology（都柏林理工学院）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；Prompsit Language Engineering（Prompsit语言工程公司）
This paper presents a quantitative fine-grained manual evaluation approach to comparing the performance of different machine translation (MT) systems. We build upon the well-established Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) error taxonomy and implement a novel method that assesses whether the differences in performance for MQM error types between different MT systems are statistically significant. We conduct a case study for English-to-Croatian, a language direction that involves translating into a morphologically rich language, for which we compare three MT systems belonging to different par…
Information extraction (IE) in scientific literature has facilitated many down-stream tasks. OpenIE, which does not require any relation schema but identifies a relational phrase to describe the relationship between a subject and an object, is being a trending topic of IE in sciences. The subjects, objects, and relations are often multiword expressions, which brings challenges for methods to identify the boundaries of the expressions given very limited or even no training data. In this work, we present a set of rules for extracting structured information based on dependency parsing that can be…
University of Maryland, College Park, MD（马里兰大学帕克分校（马里兰州））；Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA（卡内基梅隆大学（宾夕法尼亚州匹兹堡））；U.S. Dept. of Defense, Fort Meade, MD（美国国防部（马里兰州米德堡））；Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, MD（约翰霍普金斯应用物理实验室（马里兰州劳雷尔））；Johns Hopkins HLT Center of Excellence, Baltimore, MD（约翰霍普金斯HLT卓越中心（马里兰州巴尔的摩））
This paper describes our resource-building results for an eight-week JHU Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically-Informed Machine Translation. Specifically, we describe the construction of a modality annotation scheme, a modality lexicon, and two automated modality taggers that were built using the lexicon and annotation scheme. Our annotation scheme is based on identifying three components of modality: a trigger, a target and a holder. We describe how our modality lexicon was produced semi-automatically, expandin…
Bell Labs, Nokia（诺基亚贝尔实验室）；University College Dublin（都柏林大学学院）
Entity disambiguation, or mapping a phrase to its canonical representation in a knowledge base, is a fundamental step in many natural language processing applications. Existing techniques based on global ranking models fail to capture the individual peculiarities of the words and hence, either struggle to meet the accuracy requirements of many real-world applications or they are too complex to satisfy real-time constraints of applications. In this paper, we propose a new disambiguation system that learns specialized features and models for disambiguating each ambiguous phrase in the English la…
MIT Critical Data, Laboratory for Computational Physiology（麻省理工学院关键数据与计算生理学实验室）；Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences（哈佛大学约翰·A·保尔森工程与应用科学学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health（哈佛大学陈曾熙公共卫生学院）；Philips Research North America（飞利浦北美研究院）；Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center（贝斯以色列女执事医疗中心）；Massachusetts General Hospital（麻省总医院）；Tufts University School of Medicine（塔夫茨大学医学院）；University of Massachusetts（马萨诸塞大学）；Washington University School of Medicine（华盛顿大学医学院）
Objective: We investigate whether deep learning techniques for natural language processing (NLP) can be used efficiently for patient phenotyping. Patient phenotyping is a classification task for determining whether a patient has a medical condition, and is a crucial part of secondary analysis of healthcare data. We assess the performance of deep learning algorithms and compare them with classical NLP approaches. Materials and Methods: We compare convolutional neural networks (CNNs), n-gram models, and approaches based on cTAKES that extract pre-defined medical concepts from clinical notes and …
Institute of Computer Science Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院计算机科学研究所）
Pattern-based methods of IS-A relation extraction rely heavily on so called Hearst patterns. These are ways of expressing instance enumerations of a class in natural language. While these lexico-syntactic patterns prove quite useful, they may not capture all taxonomical relations expressed in text. Therefore in this paper we describe a novel method of IS-A relation extraction from patterns, which uses morpho-syntactical annotations along with grammatical case of noun phrases that constitute entities participating in IS-A relation. We also describe a method for increasing the number of extracte…
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）
Applications which use human speech as an input require a speech interface with high recognition accuracy. The words or phrases in the recognised text are annotated with a machine-understandable meaning and linked to knowledge graphs for further processing by the target application. These semantic annotations of recognised words can be represented as a subject-predicate-object triples which collectively form a graph often referred to as a knowledge graph. This type of knowledge representation facilitates to use speech interfaces with any spoken input application, since the information is repre…
