Acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) is a life-threatening condition that is often undiagnosed or diagnosed late. ARDS is especially prominent in those infected with COVID-19. We explore the automatic identification of ARDS indicators and confounding factors in free-text chest radiograph reports. We present a new annotated corpus of chest radiograph reports and introduce the Hierarchical Attention Network with Sentence Objectives (HANSO) text classification framework. HANSO utilizes fine-grained annotations to improve document classification performance. HANSO can extract ARDS-related information with high performance by leveraging relation annotations, even if the annotated spans are noisy. Using annotated chest radiograph images as a gold standard, HANSO identifies bilateral infiltrates, an indicator of ARDS, in chest radiograph reports with performance (0.87 F1) comparable to human annotations (0.84 F1). This algorithm could facilitate more efficient and expeditious identification of ARDS by clinicians and researchers and contribute to the development of new therapies to improve patient care.
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）
Subjectivity detection is the task of identifying objective and subjective sentences. Objective sentences are those which do not exhibit any sentiment. So, it is desired for a sentiment analysis engine to find and separate the objective sentences for further analysis, e.g., polarity detection. In subjective sentences, opinions can often be expressed on one or multiple topics. Aspect extraction is a subtask of sentiment analysis that consists in identifying opinion targets in opinionated text, i.e., in detecting the specific aspects of a product or service the opinion holder is either praising …
We propose a new uniform framework for text classification and ranking that can automate the process of identifying check-worthy sentences in political debates and speech transcripts. Our framework combines the semantic analysis of the sentences, with additional entity embeddings obtained through the identified entities within the sentences. In particular, we analyse the semantic meaning of each sentence using state-of-the-art neural language models such as BERT, ALBERT, and RoBERTa, while embeddings for entities are obtained from knowledge graph (KG) embedding models. Specifically, we instant…
Recurrent Neural Networks with Long Short-Term Memory cell (LSTM-RNN) have impressive ability in sequence data processing, particularly for language model building and text classification. This research proposes the combination of sentiment analysis, new approach of sentence vectors and LSTM-RNN as a novel way for Sexual Predator Identification (SPI). LSTM-RNN language model is applied to generate sentence vectors which are the last hidden states in the language model. Sentence vectors are fed into another LSTM-RNN classifier, so as to capture suspicious conversations. Hidden state enables to …
This paper presents a novel training method, Conditional Masked Language Modeling (CMLM), to effectively learn sentence representations on large scale unlabeled corpora. CMLM integrates sentence representation learning into MLM training by conditioning on the encoded vectors of adjacent sentences. Our English CMLM model achieves state-of-the-art performance on SentEval, even outperforming models learned using supervised signals. As a fully unsupervised learning method, CMLM can be conveniently extended to a broad range of languages and domains. We find that a multilingual CMLM model co-trained…
Natural language sentence matching is the task of comparing two sentences and identifying the relationship between them.It has a wide range of applications in natural language processing tasks such as reading comprehension, question and answer systems. The main approach is to compute the interaction between text representations and sentence pairs through an attention mechanism, which can extract the semantic information between sentence pairs well. However,this kind of method can not gain satisfactory results when dealing with complex semantic features. To solve this problem, we propose a sent…
University of Virginia（弗吉尼亚大学）；IBM Research AI（IBM研究院AI）
Explaining neural network models is important for increasing their trustworthiness in real-world applications. Most existing methods generate post-hoc explanations for neural network models by identifying individual feature attributions or detecting interactions between adjacent features. However, for models with text pairs as inputs (e.g., paraphrase identification), existing methods are not sufficient to capture feature interactions between two texts and their simple extension of computing all word-pair interactions between two texts is computationally inefficient. In this work, we propose t…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学）
Semantic role labeling (SRL) is the task of identifying the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. It is typically regarded as an important step in the standard NLP pipeline. As the semantic representations are closely related to syntactic ones, we exploit syntactic information in our model. We propose a version of graph convolutional networks (GCNs), a recent class of neural networks operating on graphs, suited to model syntactic dependency graphs. GCNs over syntactic dependency trees are used as sentence encoders, producing latent feature representations of words in a sentence. We obser…
In this work, we present a weakly supervised sentence extraction technique for identifying important sentences in scientific papers that are worthy of inclusion in the abstract. We propose a new attention based deep learning architecture that jointly learns to identify important content, as well as the cue phrases that are indicative of summary worthy sentences. We propose a new context embedding technique for determining the focus of a given paper using topic models and use it jointly with an LSTM based sequence encoder to learn attention weights across the sentence words. We use a collection…
In order to maximize the applicability of sentiment analysis results, it is necessary to not only classify the overall sentiment (positive/negative) of a given document but also to identify the main words that contribute to the classification. However, most datasets for sentiment analysis only have the sentiment label for each document or sentence. In other words, there is no information about which words play an important role in sentiment classification. In this paper, we propose a method for identifying key words discriminating positive and negative sentences by using a weakly supervised le…
Semantic role labeling (SRL) -- identifying the semantic relationships between a predicate and other constituents in the same sentence -- is a well-studied task in natural language understanding (NLU). However, many of these relationships are evident only at the level of the document, as a role for a predicate in one sentence may often be filled by an argument in a different one. This more general task, known as implicit semantic role labeling or argument linking, has received increased attention in recent years, as researchers have recognized its centrality to information extraction and NLU. …
The e-commerce has started a new trend in natural language processing through sentiment analysis of user-generated reviews. Different consumers have different concerns about various aspects of a specific product or service. Aspect category detection, as a subtask of aspect-based sentiment analysis, tackles the problem of categorizing a given review sentence into a set of pre-defined aspect categories. In recent years, deep learning approaches have brought revolutionary advances in multiple branches of natural language processing including sentiment analysis. In this paper, we propose a deep ne…
Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is the task of identifying sentiment polarity of a text given another text segment or aspect. In ABSA, a text can have multiple sentiments depending upon each aspect. Aspect Term Sentiment Analysis (ATSA) is a subtask of ABSA, in which aspect terms are contained within the given sentence. Most of the existing approaches proposed for ATSA, incorporate aspect information through a different subnetwork thereby overlooking the advantage of aspect terms' presence within the sentence. In this paper, we propose a model that leverages the positional information o…
We present a trainable model for identifying sentence boundaries in raw text. Given a corpus annotated with sentence boundaries, our model learns to classify each occurrence of ., ?, and ! as either a valid or invalid sentence boundary. The training procedure requires no hand-crafted rules, lexica, part-of-speech tags, or domain-specific information. The model can therefore be trained easily on any genre of English, and should be trainable on any other Roman-alphabet language. Performance is comparable to or better than the performance of similar systems, but we emphasize the simplicity of ret…
KDDI Research, Inc.（KDDI综合研究所）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）
Attackers create adversarial text to deceive both human perception and the current AI systems to perform malicious purposes such as spam product reviews and fake political posts. We investigate the difference between the adversarial and the original text to prevent the risk. We prove that the text written by a human is more coherent and fluent. Moreover, the human can express the idea through the flexible text with modern words while a machine focuses on optimizing the generated text by the simple and common words. We also suggest a method to identify the adversarial text by extracting the fea…
University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-尚佩恩分校）
Identifying mathematical relations expressed in text is essential to understanding a broad range of natural language text from election reports, to financial news, to sport commentaries to mathematical word problems. This paper focuses on identifying and understanding mathematical relations described within a single sentence. We introduce the problem of Equation Parsing -- given a sentence, identify noun phrases which represent variables, and generate the mathematical equation expressing the relation described in the sentence. We introduce the notion of projective equation parsing and provide …
In recent years online shopping has gained momentum and became an important venue for customers wishing to save time and simplify their shopping process. A key advantage of shopping online is the ability to read what other customers are saying about products of interest. In this work, we aim to maintain this advantage in situations where extreme brevity is needed, for example, when shopping by voice. We suggest a novel task of extracting a single representative helpful sentence from a set of reviews for a given product. The selected sentence should meet two conditions: first, it should be help…
Case Law has a significant impact on the proceedings of legal cases. Therefore, the information that can be obtained from previous court cases is valuable to lawyers and other legal officials when performing their duties. This paper describes a methodology of applying discourse relations between sentences when processing text documents related to the legal domain. In this study, we developed a mechanism to classify the relationships that can be observed among sentences in transcripts of United States court cases. First, we defined relationship types that can be observed between sentences in co…
University of Ottawa（渥太华大学）；American University（美利坚大学）
The detection of clandestine efforts to influence users in online communities is a challenging problem with significant active development. We demonstrate that features derived from the text of user comments are useful for identifying suspect activity, but lead to increased erroneous identifications when keywords over-represented in past influence campaigns are present. Drawing on research in native language identification (NLI), we use "named entity masking" (NEM) to create sentence features robust to this shortcoming, while maintaining comparable classification accuracy. We demonstrate that …
Guizhou University（贵州大学）；University of Massachusetts Boston（马萨诸塞大学波士顿分校）
A predicate head is a verbal expression that plays a role as the structural center of a sentence. Identifying predicate heads is critical to understanding a sentence. It plays the leading role in organizing the relevant syntactic elements in a sentence, including subject elements, adverbial elements, etc. For some languages, such as English, word morphologies are valuable for identifying predicate heads. However, Chinese offers no morphological information to indicate words` grammatical roles. A Chinese sentence often contains several verbal expressions; identifying the expression that plays t…
When the semantics of a sentence are not representable in a semantic parser's output schema, parsing will inevitably fail. Detection of these instances is commonly treated as an out-of-domain classification problem. However, there is also a more subtle scenario in which the test data is drawn from the same domain. In addition to formalizing this problem of domain-adjacency, we present a comparison of various baselines that could be used to solve it. We also propose a new simple sentence representation that emphasizes words which are unexpected. This approach improves the performance of a downs…
Our study identifies sentences in Wikipedia articles that are either identical or highly similar by applying techniques for near-duplicate detection of web pages. This is accomplished with a MapReduce implementation of minhash to identify clusters of sentences with high Jaccard similarity. We show that these clusters can be categorized into six different types, two of which are particularly interesting: identical sentences quantify the extent to which content in Wikipedia is copied and pasted, and near-duplicate sentences that state contradictory facts point to quality issues in Wikipedia.
Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation（语言、认知与计算研究所）；School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh（爱丁堡大学信息学院）
We consider the task of fine-grained sentiment analysis from the perspective of multiple instance learning (MIL). Our neural model is trained on document sentiment labels, and learns to predict the sentiment of text segments, i.e. sentences or elementary discourse units (EDUs), without segment-level supervision. We introduce an attention-based polarity scoring method for identifying positive and negative text snippets and a new dataset which we call SPOT (as shorthand for Segment-level POlariTy annotations) for evaluating MIL-style sentiment models like ours. Experimental results demonstrate s…
The paper describes the work that the team submitted to FinCausal 2020 Shared Task. This work is associated with the first sub-task of identifying causality in sentences. The various models used in the experiments tried to obtain a latent space representation for each of the sentences. Linear regression was performed on these representations to classify whether the sentence is causal or not. The experiments have shown BERT (Large) performed the best, giving a F1 score of 0.958, in the task of detecting the causality of sentences in financial texts and reports. The class imbalance was dealt wit…
Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology（斯科尔科沃科学技术研究院）；Universität Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg（马丁-路德·哈勒-维滕贝格大学）
We tackle the tasks of automatically identifying comparative sentences and categorizing the intended preference (e.g., "Python has better NLP libraries than MATLAB" => (Python, better, MATLAB). To this end, we manually annotate 7,199 sentences for 217 distinct target item pairs from several domains (27% of the sentences contain an oriented comparison in the sense of "better" or "worse"). A gradient boosting model based on pre-trained sentence embeddings reaches an F1 score of 85% in our experimental evaluation. The model can be used to extract comparative sentences for pro/con argumentation in…
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系）；College Park, MD 20742, USA（美国马里兰州学院公园市）
Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for neural machine translation.
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；Mobile Internet Group, Tencent（腾讯移动互联网事业群）
Semantic matching of natural language sentences or identifying the relationship between two sentences is a core research problem underlying many natural language tasks. Depending on whether training data is available, prior research has proposed both unsupervised distance-based schemes and supervised deep learning schemes for sentence matching. However, previous approaches either omit or fail to fully utilize the ordered, hierarchical, and flexible structures of language objects, as well as the interactions between them. In this paper, we propose Hierarchical Sentence Factorization---a techniq…
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院）
Argument search aims at identifying arguments in natural language texts. In the past, this task has been addressed by a combination of keyword search and argument identification on the sentence- or document-level. However, existing frameworks often address only specific components of argument search and do not address the following aspects: (1) argument-query matching: identifying arguments that frame the topic slightly differently than the actual search query; (2) argument identification: identifying arguments that consist of multiple sentences; (3) argument clustering: selecting retrieved ar…
Common algorithms for sentence and word-alignment allow the automatic identification of word translations from parallel texts. This study suggests that the identification of word translations should also be possible with non-parallel and even unrelated texts. The method proposed is based on the assumption that there is a correlation between the patterns of word co-occurrences in texts of different languages.
Identifying the different varieties of the same language is more challenging than unrelated languages identification. In this paper, we propose an approach to discriminate language varieties or dialects of Mandarin Chinese for the Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Malaysia and Singapore, a.k.a., the Greater China Region (GCR). When applied to the dialects identification of the GCR, we find that the commonly used character-level or word-level uni-gram feature is not very efficient since there exist several specific problems such as the ambiguity and context-dependent characteristic of w…
Oak Ridge National Laboratory（橡树岭国家实验室）；NIEHS（美国国家环境健康科学研究所）；NTP（美国国家毒理学计划）；NICEATM（国家毒理学替代方法评价中心）
Identifying and extracting data elements such as study descriptors in publication full texts is a critical yet manual and labor-intensive step required in a number of tasks. In this paper we address the question of identifying data elements in an unsupervised manner. Specifically, provided a set of criteria describing specific study parameters, such as species, route of administration, and dosing regimen, we develop an unsupervised approach to identify text segments (sentences) relevant to the criteria. A binary classifier trained to identify publications that met the criteria performs better …
The prevailing approach for training and evaluating paraphrase identification models is constructed as a binary classification problem: the model is given a pair of sentences, and is judged by how accurately it classifies pairs as either paraphrases or non-paraphrases. This pointwise-based evaluation method does not match well the objective of most real world applications, so the goal of our work is to understand how models which perform well under pointwise evaluation may fail in practice and find better methods for evaluating paraphrase identification models. As a first step towards that goa…
Imperial College London（帝国理工学院）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；ALTA Institute（ALTA研究所）
We introduce the novel task of detecting sustainability initiatives in company reports. Given a full report, the aim is to automatically identify mentions of practical activities that a company has performed in order to tackle specific societal issues. New methods for identifying continuous sentence spans need to be developed for capturing the multi-sentence structure of individual sustainability initiatives. We release a new dataset of company reports in which the text has been manually annotated with sustainability initiatives. We also evaluate different models for initiative detection, intr…
Inherently, the legal domain contains a vast amount of data in text format. Therefore it requires the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) to cater to the analytically demanding needs of the domain. The advancement of NLP is spreading through various domains, such as the legal domain, in forms of practical applications and academic research. Identifying critical sentences, facts and arguments in a legal case is a tedious task for legal professionals. In this research we explore the usage of sentence embeddings for multi-class classification to identify critical sentences in a legal…
We describe the Universitat d'Alacant submissions to the word- and sentence-level machine translation (MT) quality estimation (QE) shared task at WMT 2018. Our approach to word-level MT QE builds on previous work to mark the words in the machine-translated sentence as \textit{OK} or \textit{BAD}, and is extended to determine if a word or sequence of words need to be inserted in the gap after each word. Our sentence-level submission simply uses the edit operations predicted by the word-level approach to approximate TER. The method presented ranked first in the sub-task of identifying insertions…
Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology（斯里兰卡信息技术学院）
Similarity is a comparative-subjective measure that varies with the domain within which it is considered. In several NLP applications such as document classification, pattern recognition, chatbot question-answering, sentiment analysis, etc., identifying an accurate similarity score for sentence pairs has become a crucial area of research. In the existing models that assess similarity, the limitation of effectively computing this similarity based on contextual comparisons, the localization due to the centering theory, and the lack of non-semantic textual comparisons have proven to be drawbacks.…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）
To disclose overlapped multiple relations from a sentence still keeps challenging. Most current works in terms of neural models inconveniently assuming that each sentence is explicitly mapped to a relation label, cannot handle multiple relations properly as the overlapped features of the relations are either ignored or very difficult to identify. To tackle with the new issue, we propose a novel approach for multi-labeled relation extraction with capsule network which acts considerably better than current convolutional or recurrent net in identifying the highly overlapped relations within an in…
Relation extraction is the task of determining the relation between two entities in a sentence. Distantly-supervised models are popular for this task. However, sentences can be long and two entities can be located far from each other in a sentence. The pieces of evidence supporting the presence of a relation between two entities may not be very direct, since the entities may be connected via some indirect links such as a third entity or via co-reference. Relation extraction in such scenarios becomes more challenging as we need to capture the long-distance interactions among the entities and ot…
NIT Durgapur（杜尔加布尔国家理工学院）；Queen’s University Belfast（贝尔法斯特女王大学）
Disinformation is often presented in long textual articles, especially when it relates to domains such as health, often seen in relation to COVID-19. These articles are typically observed to have a number of trustworthy sentences among which core disinformation sentences are scattered. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised task of identifying sentences containing key disinformation within a document that is known to be untrustworthy. We design a three-phase statistical NLP solution for the task which starts with embedding sentences within a bespoke feature space designed for the task.…
Paris-Saclay University（巴黎-萨克雷大学）；UVSQ（凡尔赛大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Gustave Roussy（古斯塔夫·鲁西研究所）；Epiconcept Company（Epiconcept公司）；Accenture Labs（埃森哲实验室）；Sorbonne University（索邦大学）；University Sorbonne Paris Nord（索邦巴黎北大学）；Indian Institute of Science（印度科学学院）；Luxembourg Institute of Health（卢森堡健康研究院）
Objective: Leveraging machine learning methods, we aim to extract both explicit and implicit cause-effect associations in patient-reported, diabetes-related tweets and provide a tool to better understand opinion, feelings and observations shared within the diabetes online community from a causality perspective. Materials and Methods: More than 30 million diabetes-related tweets in English were collected between April 2017 and January 2021. Deep learning and natural language processing methods were applied to focus on tweets with personal and emotional content. A cause-effect-tweet dataset was …
Full Fact；University of Warwick（华威大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦玛丽女王大学）
In an effort to assist factcheckers in the process of factchecking, we tackle the claim detection task, one of the necessary stages prior to determining the veracity of a claim. It consists of identifying the set of sentences, out of a long text, deemed capable of being factchecked. This paper is a collaborative work between Full Fact, an independent factchecking charity, and academic partners. Leveraging the expertise of professional factcheckers, we develop an annotation schema and a benchmark for automated claim detection that is more consistent across time, topics and annotators than previ…
Chinese discourse coherence modeling remains a challenge taskin Natural Language Processing field.Existing approaches mostlyfocus on the need for feature engineering, whichadoptthe sophisticated features to capture the logic or syntactic or semantic relationships acrosssentences within a text.In this paper, we present an entity-drivenrecursive deep modelfor the Chinese discourse coherence evaluation based on current English discourse coherenceneural network model. Specifically, to overcome the shortage of identifying the entity(nouns) overlap across sentences in the currentmodel, Our combined …
While recent work on automated fact-checking has focused mainly on verifying and explaining claims, for which the list of claims is readily available, identifying check-worthy claim sentences from a text remains challenging. Current claim identification models rely on manual annotations for each sentence in the text, which is an expensive task and challenging to conduct on a frequent basis across multiple domains. This paper explores methodology to identify check-worthy claim sentences from fake news articles, irrespective of domain, without explicit sentence-level annotations. We leverage two…
