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Although previous research on Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) for Indonesian reviews in hotel domain has been conducted using CNN and XGBoost, its model did not generalize well in test data and high number of OOV words contributed to misclassification cases. Nowadays, most state-of-the-art results for wide array of NLP tasks are achieved by utilizing pretrained language representation. In this paper, we intend to incorporate one of the foremost language representation model, BERT, to perform ABSA in Indonesian reviews dataset. By combining multilingual BERT (m-BERT) with task transformation method, we manage to achieve significant improvement by 8% on the F1-score compared to the result from our previous study. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA), a task in sentiment analysis, predicts the sentiment polarity of specific aspects mentioned in the input sentence. Recent research has demonstrated the effectiveness of Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) and its variants in improving the performance of various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, including sentiment analysis. However, BERT, trained on Wikipedia and BookCorpus dataset, lacks domain-specific knowledge. Also, for the ABSA task, the Attention mechanism leverages the aspect information to determine the sentiment orientation of the aspect within the given sentence. Based on the abovementioned observations, this paper proposes a novel approach called the IAN-BERT model. The IAN-BERT model leverages attention mechanisms to enhance a post-trained BERT representation trained on Amazon and Yelp datasets. The objective is to capture domain-specific knowledge using BERT representation and identify the significance of context words with aspect terms and vice versa. By incorporating attention mechanisms, the IAN-BERT model aims to improve the model’s ability to extract more relevant and informative features from the input text, ultimately leading to better predictions. Experimental evaluations conducted on SemEval-14 (Restaurant and Laptop dataset) and MAMS dataset demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the IAN-BERT model in aspect-based sentiment analysis. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Due to the breathtaking growth of social media or newspaper user comments, online product reviews comments, sentiment analysis (SA) has captured substantial interest from the researchers. With the fast increase of domain, SA work aims not only to predict the sentiment of a sentence or document but also to give the necessary detail on different aspects of the sentence or document (i.e. aspect-based sentiment analysis). A considerable number of datasets for SA and aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) have been made available for English and other well-known European languages. In this paper, we present a manually annotated Bengali dataset of high quality, BAN-ABSA, which is annotated with aspect and its associated sentiment by three native Bengali speakers. The dataset consists of 2619 positive, 4721 negative and 1669 neutral data samples from 9009 unique comments gathered from some famous Bengali news portals. In addition, we conducted a baseline evaluation with a focus on deep learning model, achieved an accuracy of 78.75% for aspect term extraction and accuracy of 71.08% for sentiment classification. Experiments on the BAN-ABSA dataset show that the CNN model is better in terms of accuracy though Bi-LSTM significantly outperforms CNN model in terms of average F1-score. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of online student reviews regarding the learning process at a private university in Indonesia and to compare the effectiveness of several algorithms: Naive Bayes, K-NN, Decision Tree, and Indo-Bert. Traditional Sentiment Analysis methods can only analyze sentences as a whole, prompting this research to develop an Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) approach, which includes aspect extraction and sentiment classification. However, ABSA has inconsistencies in aspect detection and sentiment classification. To address this, we propose the BERT method using the pre-trained Indo-Bert model, currently the best NLP model for the Indonesian language. This study also fine-tunes hyperparameters to optimize results. The dataset comprises 10,000 student reviews obtained from online questionnaires. Experimental results show that the aspect extraction model has an accuracy of 0.890 and an F1-Score of 0.897, while the sentiment classification model has an accuracy of 0.879 and an F1-Score of 0.882. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in identifying aspects and sentiments in student reviews and provide a comparison between the four algorithms. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
spect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) is increasingly crucial in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for applications such as customer feedback analysis and product recommendation systems. ABSA goes beyond traditional sentiment analysis by extracting sentiments related to specific aspects mentioned in the text; existing attention-based models often need help to effectively connect aspects with context due to language complexity and multiple sentiment polarities in a single sentence. Recent research underscores the value of integrating syntactic information, such as dependency trees, to understand long-range syntactic relationships better and link aspects with context. Despite these advantages, challenges persist, including sensitivity to parsing errors and increased computational complexity when combining syntactic and semantic information. To address these issues, we propose Amplifying Aspect-Sentence Awareness (A3SN), a novel technique designed to enhance ABSA through amplifying aspect-sentence awareness attention. Following the transformer's standard process, our innovative approach incorporates multi-head attention mechanisms to augment the model with sentence and aspect semantic information. We added another multi-head attention module: amplify aspect-sentence awareness attention. By doubling its focus between the sentence and aspect, we effectively highlighted aspect importance within the sentence context. This enables accurate capture of subtle relationships and dependencies. Additionally, gated fusion integrates feature representations from multi-head and amplified aspect-sentence awareness attention mechanisms, which is essential for ABSA. Experimental results across three benchmark datasets demonstrate A3SN's effectiveness and outperform state-of-the-art (SOTA) baseline models. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Sentiment analysis is a natural language processing (NLP) task of identifying orextracting the sentiment content of a text unit. This task has become an active research topic since the early 2000s. During the two last editions of the VLSP workshop series, the shared task on Sentiment Analysis (SA) for Vietnamese has been organized in order to provide an objective evaluation measurement about the performance (quality) of sentiment analysis tools, and encouragethe development of Vietnamese sentiment analysis systems, as well as to provide benchmark datasets for this task. The rst campaign in 2016 only focused on the sentiment polarity classication, with a dataset containing reviews of electronic products. The second campaign in 2018 addressed the problem of Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) for Vietnamese, by providing two datasets containing reviews in restaurant and hotel domains. These data are accessible for research purpose via the VLSP website vlsp.org.vn/resources. This paper describes the built datasets as well as the evaluation results of the systems participating to these campaigns. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a task in natural language processing (NLP) that involves predicting the sentiment polarity towards a specific aspect in text. Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been shown to be effective tools for sentiment analysis tasks, but current research often overlooks affective information in the text, leading to irrelevant information being learned for specific aspects. To address this issue, we propose a novel GNN model, MHAKE-GCN, which is based on the graph convolutional neural network (GCN) and multi-head attention (MHA). Our model incorporates external sentiment knowledge into the GCN and fully extracts semantic and syntactic information from a sentence using MHA. By adding weights to sentiment words associated with aspect words, our model can better learn sentiment expressions related to specific aspects. Our model was evaluated on four publicly benchmark datasets and compared against twelve other methods. The results of the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the task of aspect-based sentiment analysis. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Sentiment analysis (SA) is also known as opinion mining, it is the process of gathering and analyzing people's opinions about a particular service, good, or company on websites like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and blogs, among other places. This article covers a thorough analysis of SA and its levels. This manuscript's main focus is on aspect-based SA, which helps manufacturing organizations make better decisions by examining consumers' viewpoints and opinions of their products. The many approaches and methods used in aspect-based sentiment analysis are covered in this review study (ABSA). The features associated with the aspects were manually drawn out in traditional methods, which made it a time-consuming and error-prone operation. Nevertheless, these restrictions may be overcome as artificial intelligence develops. Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of ABSA, researchers are increasingly using AI-based machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) techniques. Additionally, certain recently released ABSA approaches based on ML and DL are examined, contrasted, and based on this research, gaps in both methodologies are discovered. At the conclusion of this study, the difficulties that current ABSA models encounter are also emphasized, along with suggestions that can be made to improve the efficacy and precision of ABSA systems. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is currently among the most vigorous areas in natural language processing (NLP). Individuals, private and government institutions are increasingly using media sources for decision making. In the last decade, aspect extraction has been the most essential phase of sentiment analysis (SA) to conduct an abridged sentiment classification. However, previous studies on sentiment analysis mostly focused on explicit aspects extraction with limited work on implicit aspects. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic review that covers implicit, explicit, and the combination of both implicit and explicit aspect extractions. Therefore, this systematic review has been conducted to, 1) identify techniques used for extracting implicit, explicit, or both implicit and explicit aspects; 2) analyze the various evaluation metrics, data domains, and languages involved in the implicit and explicit aspect extraction in sentiment analysis from years 2008 to 2019; 3) identify the key challenges associated with the techniques based on the result of a comprehensive comparative analysis; and finally, 4) highlight the feasible opportunities for future research directions. This review can be used to assist novice and prominent researchers to understand the concept of both implicit and explicit aspect extractions in aspect-based sentiment analysis domain. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Sentiment analysis has become one of the most important tools in natural language processing, since it opens many possibilities to understand people's opinions on different topics. Aspect-based sentiment analysis aims to take this a step further and find out what exactly someone is talking about, and if he likes or dislikes it. Real world examples of perfect areas for this topic are the millions of available customer reviews in online shops. There have been multiple approaches to tackle this problem, using machine learning, deep learning and neural networks. However, currently the number of labeled reviews for training classifiers is very small. Therefore, we undertook multiple steps to research ways of improving ABSA performance on small datasets, by comparing recurrent and feed-forward neural networks and incorporating additional input data that was generated using different readily available NLP tools. | Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) |
Recent research on dialog state tracking (DST) focuses on methods that allow few- and zero-shot transfer to new domains or schemas. However, performance gains heavily depend on aggressive data augmentation and fine-tuning of ever larger language model based architectures. In contrast, general purpose language models, trained on large amounts of diverse data, hold the promise of solving any kind of task without task-specific training. We present preliminary experimental results on the ChatGPT research preview, showing that ChatGPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in zero-shot DST. Despite our findings, we argue that properties inherent to general purpose models limit their ability to replace specialized systems. We further theorize that the in-context learning capabilities of such models will likely become powerful tools to support the development of dedicated dialog state trackers and enable dynamic methods. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a sub-task of task-based dialogue systems where the user intention is tracked through a set of (domain, slot, slot-value) triplets. Existing DST models can be difficult to extend for new datasets with larger domains/slots mainly due to either of the two reasons- i) prediction of domain-slot as a pair, and ii) dependency of model parameters on the number of slots and domains. In this work, we propose to address these issues using a Hierarchical DST (Hi-DST) model. At a given turn, the model first detects a change in domain followed by domain prediction if required. Then it decides suitable action for each slot in the predicted domains and finds their value accordingly. The model parameters of Hi-DST are independent of the number of domains/slots. Due to the hierarchical modeling, it achieves O(|M|+|N|) belief state prediction for a single turn where M and N are the set of unique domains and slots respectively. We argue that the hierarchical structure helps in the model explainability and makes it easily extensible to new datasets. Experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset show that our proposed model achieves comparable joint accuracy performance to state-of-the-art DST models. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
The dialogue state tracking module is a crucial component of task-oriented dialogue systems. Recently, some Dialogue State Tracking (DST) methods have used the previous dialogue state as auxiliary input, resulting in errors that propagate and subsequently affect predictions. This paper proposes utilizing dialogue-level state as the prediction target and randomly removing historical dialogue state during training. The experiments demonstrate that this approach can effectively enhance the performance of the DST algorithm, alleviate error propagation, and achieve competitive results on both noisy (MultiWOZ 2.1) and clean (MultiWOZ 2.4) datasets. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
Sequence-to-sequence state-of-the-art systems for dialogue state tracking (DST) use the full dialogue history as input, represent the current state as a list with all the slots, and generate the entire state from scratch at each dialogue turn. This approach is inefficient, especially when the number of slots is large and the conversation is long. We propose Diable, a new task formalisation that simplifies the design and implementation of efficient DST systems and allows one to easily plug and play large language models. We represent the dialogue state as a table and formalise DST as a table manipulation task. At each turn, the system updates the previous state by generating table operations based on the dialogue context. Extensive experimentation on the MultiWoz datasets demonstrates that Diable (i) outperforms strong efficient DST baselines, (ii) is 2.4x more time efficient than current state-of-the-art methods while retaining competitive Joint Goal Accuracy, and (iii) is robust to noisy data annotations due to the table operations approach. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
Recently proposed dialogue state tracking (DST) approaches predict the dialogue state of a target turn sequentially based on the previous dialogue state. During the training time, the ground-truth previous dialogue state is utilized as the historical context. However, only the previously predicted dialogue state can be used in inference. This discrepancy might lead to error propagation, i.e., mistakes made by the model in the current turn are likely to be carried over to the following turns.To solve this problem, we propose Correctable Dialogue State Tracking (Correctable-DST). Specifically, it consists of three stages: (1) a Predictive State Simulator is exploited to generate a previously “predicted” dialogue state based on the ground-truth previous dialogue state during training; (2) a Slot Detector is proposed to determine the slots with an incorrect value in the previously “predicted” state and the slots whose values are to be updated in the current turn; (3) a State Generator takes the name of the above-selected slots as a prompt to generate the current state.Empirical results show that our approach achieves 67.51%, 68.24%, 70.30%, 71.38%, and 81.27% joint goal accuracy on MultiWOZ 2.0-2.4 datasets, respectively, and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
We present a method for performing zero-shot Dialogue State Tracking (DST) by casting the task as a learning-to-ask-questions framework. The framework learns to pair the best question generation (QG) strategy with in-domain question answering (QA) methods to extract slot values from a dialogue without any human intervention. A novel self-supervised QA pretraining step using in-domain data is essential to learn the structure without requiring any slot-filling annotations. Moreover, we show that QG methods need to be aligned with the same grammatical person used in the dialogue. Empirical evaluation on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset demonstrates that our approach, when used alongside robust QA models, outperforms existing zero-shot methods in the challenging task of zero-shot cross domain adaptation-given a comparable amount of domain knowledge during data creation. Finally, we analyze the impact of the types of questions used, and demonstrate that the algorithmic approach outperforms template-based question generation. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
Different from traditional task-oriented and open-domain dialogue systems, insurance agents aim to engage customers for helping them satisfy specific demands and emotional companionship. As a result, customer-to-agent dialogues are usually very long, and many turns of them are pure chit-chat without any useful marketing clues. This brings challenges to dialogue state tracking task in insurance marketing. To deal with these long and sparse dialogues, we propose a new dialogue state tracking architecture containing three components: dialogue encoder, Smart History Collector (SHC) and dialogue state classifier. SHC, a deliberately designed memory network, effectively selects relevant dialogue history via slot-attention, and then updates dialogue history memory. With SHC, our model is able to keep track of the vital information and filter out pure chit-chat. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed LS-DST significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on real insurance dialogue dataset. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
Few-shot dialogue state tracking (DST) model tracks user requests in dialogue with reliable accuracy even with a small amount of data. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-free few-shot DST with self-feeding belief state input. The self-feeding belief state input increases the accuracy in multi-turn dialogue by summarizing previous dialogue. Also, we newly developed a slot-gate auxiliary task. This new auxiliary task helps classify whether a slot is mentioned in the dialogue. Our model achieved the best score in a few-shot setting for four domains on multiWOZ 2.0. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
Task-oriented dialogue systems depend on dialogue state tracking to keep track of the intentions of users in the course of conversations. Although recent models in dialogue state tracking exhibit good performance, the errors in predicting the value of each slot at the current dialogue turn of these models are easily carried over to the next turn, and unlikely to be revised in the next turn, resulting in error propagation. In this paper, we propose a revisable state prediction for dialogue state tracking, which constructs a two-stage slot value prediction process composed of an original prediction and a revising prediction. The original prediction process jointly models the previous dialogue state and dialogue context to predict the original dialogue state of the current dialogue turn. Then, in order to avoid the errors existing in the original dialogue state continuing to the next dialogue turn, a revising prediction process utilizes the dialogue context to revise errors, alleviating the error propagation. Experiments are conducted on MultiWOZ 2.0, MultiWOZ 2.1, and MultiWOZ 2.4 and results indicate that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art works, achieving new state-of-the-art performances with 56.35, 58.09, and 75.65% joint goal accuracy, respectively, which has a significant improvement (2.15, 1.73, and 2.03%) over the previous best results. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
This paper focuses on end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems, which jointly handle dialogue state tracking (DST) and response generation. Traditional methods usually adopt a supervised paradigm to learn DST from a manually labeled corpus. However, the annotation of the corpus is costly, time-consuming, and cannot cover a wide range of domains in the real world. To solve this problem, we propose a multi-span prediction network (MSPN) that performs unsupervised DST for end-to-end task-oriented dialogue. Specifically, MSPN contains a novel split-merge copy mechanism that captures long-term dependencies in dialogues to automatically extract multiple text spans as keywords. Based on these keywords, MSPN uses a semantic distance based clustering approach to obtain the values of each slot. In addition, we propose an ontology-based reinforcement learning approach, which employs the values of each slot to train MSPN to generate relevant values. Experimental results on single-domain and multi-domain task-oriented dialogue datasets show that MSPN achieves state-of-the-art performance with significant improvements. Besides, we construct a new Chinese dialogue dataset MeDial in the low-resource medical domain, which further demonstrates the adaptability of MSPN. | Dialogue State Tracking (DST) |
The technological development in current era demands the need of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in all fields. The AI in medical field is not an exception for various real time applications as per user demands. The applications are medical report summarization, image captioning, Visual Question Answering (VQA) and Visual Question Generation (VQG). ImageCLEF is one of the forum which constantly conducing the challenges in these applications. In this paper, for the given MEDVQA-GI dataset, three medical VQA and one medical VQG models are proposed. The medical VQA models are developed using VisionTransformer (ViT), SegFormer and VisualBERT techniques through a combination of eighteen QA-pairs based on categories and resulted an accuracy of 95.6%, 95.7% and 62.4% respectively. Also, the proposed medical VQG model is developed using Category based Medical Visual Question Generation (CMVQG) technique only. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Earth vision research typically focuses on extracting geospatial object locations and categories but neglects the exploration of relations between objects and comprehensive reasoning. Based on city planning needs, we develop a multi-modal multi-task VQA dataset (EarthVQA) to advance relational reasoning-based judging, counting, and comprehensive analysis. The EarthVQA dataset contains 6000 images, corresponding semantic masks, and 208,593 QA pairs with urban and rural governance requirements embedded. As objects are the basis for complex relational reasoning, we propose a Semantic OBject Awareness framework (SOBA) to advance VQA in an object-centric way. To preserve refined spatial locations and semantics, SOBA leverages a segmentation network for object semantics generation. The object-guided attention aggregates object interior features via pseudo masks, and bidirectional cross-attention further models object external relations hierarchically. To optimize object counting, we propose a numerical difference loss that dynamically adds difference penalties, unifying the classification and regression tasks. Experimental results show that SOBA outperforms both advanced general and remote sensing methods. We believe this dataset and framework provide a strong benchmark for Earth vision's complex analysis. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Text-VQA aims at answering questions that require understanding the textual cues in an image. Despite the great progress of existing Text-VQA methods, their performance suffers from insufficient human-labeled question-answer (QA) pairs. However, we observe that, in general, the scene text is not fully exploited in the existing datasets -- only a small portion of the text in each image participates in the annotated QA activities. This results in a huge waste of useful information. To address this deficiency, we develop a new method to generate high-quality and diverse QA pairs by explicitly utilizing the existing rich text available in the scene context of each image. Specifically, we propose, TAG, a text-aware visual question-answer generation architecture that learns to produce meaningful, and accurate QA samples using a multimodal transformer. The architecture exploits underexplored scene text information and enhances scene understanding of Text-VQA models by combining the generated QA pairs with the initial training data. Extensive experimental results on two well-known Text-VQA benchmarks (TextVQA and ST-VQA) demonstrate that our proposed TAG effectively enlarges the training data that helps improve the Text-VQA performance without extra labeling effort. Moreover, our model outperforms state-of-the-art approaches that are pre-trained with extra large-scale data. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Visual Question Answering can be a functionally relevant task if purposed as such. In this paper, we aim to investigate and evaluate its efficacy in terms of localization-based question answering. We do this specifically in the context of autonomous driving where this functionality is important. To achieve our aim, we provide a new dataset, Auto-QA. Our new dataset is built over the Argoverse dataset and provides a truly multi-modal setting with seven views per frame and point-cloud LIDAR data being available for answering a localization-based question. We contribute localized attention adaptations of most popular VQA baselines and evaluate them on this task. We also provide joint point-cloud and image-based baselines that perform well on this task. An additional evaluation that we perform is to analyse whether the attention module is accurate or not for the image-based VQA baselines. To summarize, through this work we thoroughly analyze the localization abilities through visual question answering for autonomous driving and provide a new benchmark task for the same. Our best joint baseline model achieves a useful 74.8% accuracy on this task. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Recently, 3D vision-and-language tasks have attracted increasing research interest. Compared to other vision-and-language tasks, the 3D visual question answering (VQA) task is less exploited and is more susceptible to language priors and co-reference ambiguity. Meanwhile, a couple of recently proposed 3D VQA datasets do not well support 3D VQA task due to their limited scale and annotation methods. In this work, we formally define and address a 3D grounded question answering (GQA) task by collecting a new 3D VQA dataset, referred to as flexible and explainable 3D GQA (FE-3DGQA), with diverse and relatively free-form question-answer pairs, as well as dense and completely grounded bounding box annotations. To achieve more explainable answers, we label the objects appeared in the complex QA pairs with different semantic types, including answer-grounded objects (both appeared and not appeared in the questions), and contextual objects for answer-grounded objects. We also propose a new 3D VQA framework to effectively predict the completely visually grounded and explainable answer. Extensive experiments verify that our newly collected benchmark datasets can be effectively used to evaluate various 3D VQA methods from different aspects and our newly proposed framework also achieves the state-of-the-art performance on the new benchmark dataset. | Visual QA (VQA) |
To contribute to automating the medical vision-language model, we propose a novel Chest-Xray Different Visual Question Answering (VQA) task. Given a pair of main and reference images, this task attempts to answer several questions on both diseases and, more importantly, the differences between them. This is consistent with the radiologist's diagnosis practice that compares the current image with the reference before concluding the report. We collect a new dataset, namely MIMIC-Diff-VQA, including 700,703 QA pairs from 164,324 pairs of main and reference images. Compared to existing medical VQA datasets, our questions are tailored to the Assessment-Diagnosis-Intervention-Evaluation treatment procedure used by clinical professionals. Meanwhile, we also propose a novel expert knowledge-aware graph representation learning model to address this task. The proposed baseline model leverages expert knowledge such as anatomical structure prior, semantic, and spatial knowledge to construct a multi-relationship graph, representing the image differences between two images for the image difference VQA task. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is one of the most important tasks in autonomous driving, which requires accurate recognition and complex situation evaluations. How-ever, datasets annotated in a QA format, which guarantees precise language generation and scene recognition from driving scenes, have not been established yet. In this work, we introduce Markup-QA, a novel dataset annotation technique in which QAs are enclosed within markups. This approach facilitates the simultaneous evaluation of a model's capabilities in sentence generation and VQA. Moreover, using this annotation methodology, we designed the NuScenes-MQA dataset. This dataset empowers the development of vision language models, especially for autonomous driving tasks, by focusing on both descriptive capabilities and precise QA. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Visual Question Answering (VQA) deep-learning systems tend to capture superficial statistical correlations in the training data because of strong language priors and fail to generalize to test data with a significantly different question-answer (QA) distribution. To address this issue, we introduce a self-critical training objective that ensures that visual explanations of correct answers match the most influential image regions more than other competitive answer candidates. The influential regions are either determined from human visual/textual explanations or automatically from just significant words in the question and answer. We evaluate our approach on the VQA generalization task using the VQA-CP dataset, achieving a new state-of-the-art i.e., 49.5% using textual explanations and 48.5% using automatically annotated regions. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Despite Visual Question Answering (VQA) has realized impressive progress over the last few years, today's VQA models tend to capture superficial linguistic correlations in the train set and fail to generalize to the test set with different QA distributions. To reduce the language biases, several recent works introduce an auxiliary question-only model to regularize the training of targeted VQA model, and achieve dominating performance on VQA-CP. However, since the complexity of design, current methods are unable to equip the ensemble-based models with two indispensable characteristics of an ideal VQA model: 1) visual-explainable: the model should rely on the right visual regions when making decisions. 2) question-sensitive: the model should be sensitive to the linguistic variations in question. To this end, we propose a model-agnostic Counterfactual Samples Synthesizing (CSS) training scheme. The CSS generates numerous counterfactual training samples by masking critical objects in images or words in questions, and assigning different ground-truth answers. After training with the complementary samples (ie, the original and generated samples), the VQA models are forced to focus on all critical objects and words, which significantly improves both visual-explainable and question-sensitive abilities. In return, the performance of these models is further boosted. Extensive ablations have shown the effectiveness of CSS. Particularly, by building on top of the model LMH, we achieve a record-breaking performance of 58.95% on VQA-CP v2, with 6.5% gains. | Visual QA (VQA) |
While models for Visual Question Answering (VQA) have steadily improved over the years, interacting with one quickly reveals that these models lack consistency. For instance, if a model answers “red” to “What color is the balloon?”, it might answer “no” if asked, “Is the balloon red?”. These responses violate simple notions of entailment and raise questions about how effectively VQA models ground language. In this work, we introduce a dataset, ConVQA, and metrics that enable quantitative evaluation of consistency in VQA. For a given observable fact in an image (e.g. the balloon’s color), we generate a set of logically consistent question-answer (QA) pairs (e.g. Is the balloon red?) and also collect a human-annotated set of common-sense based consistent QA pairs (e.g. Is the balloon the same color as tomato sauce?). Further, we propose a consistency-improving data augmentation module, a Consistency Teacher Module (CTM). CTM automatically generates entailed (or similar-intent) questions for a source QA pair and fine-tunes the VQA model if the VQA’s answer to the entailed question is consistent with the source QA pair. We demonstrate that our CTM-based training improves the consistency of VQA models on the Con-VQA datasets and is a strong baseline for further research. | Visual QA (VQA) |
Recent state-of-the-art open-domain QA models are typically based on a two stage retriever-reader approach in which the retriever first finds the relevant knowledge/passages and the reader then leverages that to predict the answer. Prior work has shown that the performance of the reader usually tends to improve with the increase in the number of these passages. Thus, state-of-the-art models use a large number of passages (e.g. 100) for inference. While the reader in this approach achieves high prediction performance, its inference is computationally very expensive. We humans, on the other hand, use a more efficient strategy while answering: firstly, if we can confidently answer the question using our already acquired knowledge then we do not even use the external knowledge, and in the case when we do require external knowledge, we don't read the entire knowledge at once, instead, we only read that much knowledge that is sufficient to find the answer. Motivated by this procedure, we ask a research question"Can the open-domain QA reader utilize external knowledge efficiently like humans without sacrificing the prediction performance?"Driven by this question, we explore an approach that utilizes both 'closed-book' (leveraging knowledge already present in the model parameters) and 'open-book' inference (leveraging external knowledge). Furthermore, instead of using a large fixed number of passages for open-book inference, we dynamically read the external knowledge in multiple 'knowledge iterations'. Through comprehensive experiments on NQ and TriviaQA datasets, we demonstrate that this dynamic reading approach improves both the 'inference efficiency' and the 'prediction accuracy' of the reader. Comparing with the FiD reader, this approach matches its accuracy by utilizing just 18.32% of its reader inference cost and also outperforms it by achieving up to 55.10% accuracy on NQ Open. | Open-Domain QA |
The goal of the open-domain table QA task is to answer a question based on retrieving and extracting information from a large corpus of structured tables. Currently, the accuracy of the most popular framework in open-domain QA: the two-stage retrieval, is limited by the table retriever. Inspired by the research on Text-to-SQL, this paper proposes to use execution guidance to enhance the effect of table retrieval. Our contributions are mainly threefold: 1. Proposed using execution-guided method to enhance table retrieval to fully leveraging schema information of tables. 2. Proposed the pure Text-to-SQL task for open domains. We design a two-stage Table QA framework based on semantic parsing to generate logical forms and answers simultaneously. 3. Proposed an open-domain Text-to-SQL dataset: Open-domain WikiSQL. We change the original WikiSQL to become suitable for the Open-domain setting, by removing the approximate tables, decontextualizing the questions, etc. We conducted experiments on the new dataset using BM25 and DPR as the retriever, and HydraNet as the generator of SQL. The results show that the execute-guided significantly improves the table retrieval by 19% (DPR in hit@1) and achieves good performance (accuracy of logical form and execution improves by 12.7% and 13.1%) on end-to-end open-domain Text-to-SQL tasks as well. | Open-Domain QA |
Although counterfactual reasoning is a fundamental aspect of intelligence, the lack of large-scale counterfactual open-domain question-answering (QA) benchmarks makes it difficult to evaluate and improve models on this ability. To address this void, we introduce the first such dataset, named IfQA, where each question is based on a counterfactual presupposition via an"if"clause. For example, if Los Angeles was on the east coast of the U.S., what would be the time difference between Los Angeles and Paris? Such questions require models to go beyond retrieving direct factual knowledge from the Web: they must identify the right information to retrieve and reason about an imagined situation that may even go against the facts built into their parameters. The IfQA dataset contains over 3,800 questions that were annotated annotated by crowdworkers on relevant Wikipedia passages. Empirical analysis reveals that the IfQA dataset is highly challenging for existing open-domain QA methods, including supervised retrieve-then-read pipeline methods (EM score 36.2), as well as recent few-shot approaches such as chain-of-thought prompting with GPT-3 (EM score 27.4). The unique challenges posed by the IfQA benchmark will push open-domain QA research on both retrieval and counterfactual reasoning fronts. | Open-Domain QA |
Existing state-of-the-art methods for open-domain question-answering (ODQA) use an open book approach in which information is first retrieved from a large text corpus or knowledge base (KB) and then reasoned over to produce an answer. A recent alternative is to retrieve from a collection of previously-generated question-answer pairs; this has several practical advantages including being more memory and compute-efficient. Question-answer pairs are also appealing in that they can be viewed as an intermediate between text and KB triples: like KB triples, they often concisely express a single relationship, but like text, have much higher coverage than traditional KBs. In this work, we describe a new QA system that augments a text-to-text model with a large memory of question-answer pairs, and a new pre-training task for the latent step of question retrieval. The pre-training task substantially simplifies training and greatly improves performance on smaller QA benchmarks. Unlike prior systems of this sort, our QA system can also answer multi-hop questions that do not explicitly appear in the collection of stored question-answer pairs. | Open-Domain QA |
In recent years, extensive state-of-the-art research has been conducted on natural language processing (NLP) issues. This includes improved text generation and text comprehension models. These solutions are deeply data dependent, as models use high-quality data. The need for more data in a particular language severely restricts the number of available datasets. This investigation proposes methodology for creating conversational datasets (MCCD), designed to extract multi-turn and multi-user conversational datasets. MCCD can obtain data from existing sources and identify multiple answers to the same message to create conversation flows for the extracted datasets. MCCD creates larger datasets suited to question answering (Questions & Answers (QA)) of open-domain conversational agents. In addition, this article proposes a tool based on MCCD to assist future researchers and applications. Our software tool was applied to extract two human conversation datasets. The evaluation of our methodology and resulted datasets was conducted based on the training of a Portuguese NLP model. We explored the outcome models in a classification task, obtaining better results than a state-of-the-art models. | Open-Domain QA |
Deep NLP models have been shown to be brittle to input perturbations. Recent work has shown that data augmentation using counterfactuals — i.e. minimally perturbed inputs — can help ameliorate this weakness. We focus on the task of creating counterfactuals for question answering, which presents unique challenges related to world knowledge, semantic diversity, and answerability. To address these challenges, we develop a Retrieve-Generate-Filter(RGF) technique to create counterfactual evaluation and training data with minimal human supervision. Using an open-domain QA framework and question generation model trained on original task data, we create counterfactuals that are fluent, semantically diverse, and automatically labeled. Data augmentation with RGF counterfactuals improves performance on out-of-domain and challenging evaluation sets over and above existing methods, in both the reading comprehension and open-domain QA settings. Moreover, we find that RGF data leads to significant improvements in a model’s robustness to local perturbations. | Open-Domain QA |
While research on explaining predictions of open-domain QA systems (ODQA) is gaining momentum, most works do not evaluate whether these explanations improve user trust. Furthermore, many users interact with ODQA using voice -assistants, yet prior works exclusively focus on visual displays, risking (as we also show) incorrectly extrapolating the effectiveness of explanations across modalities. To better understand the effectiveness of ODQA explanations strategies in the wild, we conduct user studies that measure whether explanations help users correctly decide when to accept or reject an ODQA system’s answer. Unlike prior work, we control for explanation modality , i.e. , whether they are communicated to users through a spoken or visual interface, and contrast effectiveness across modalities. We show that explanations derived from retrieved evidence can outperform strong base-lines across modalities but the best explanation strategy varies with the modality. We show common failure cases of current explanations, emphasize end-to-end evaluation of explanations, and caution against evaluating them in proxy modalities that differ from deployment. | Open-Domain QA |
Question answering (QA) is a critical task for speech-based retrieval from knowledge sources, by sifting only the answers without requiring to read supporting documents. Specifically, open-domain QA aims to answer user questions on unrestricted knowledge sources. Ideally, adding a source should not decrease the accuracy, but we find this property (denoted as"monotonicity") does not hold for current state-of-the-art methods. We identify the cause, and based on that we propose Judge-Specialist framework. Our framework consists of (1) specialist retrievers/readers to cover individual sources, and (2) judge, a dedicated language model to select the final answer. Our experiments show that our framework not only ensures monotonicity, but also outperforms state-of-the-art multi-source QA methods on Natural Questions. Additionally, we show that our models robustly preserve the monotonicity against noise from speech recognition. | Open-Domain QA |
Although open-domain question answering (QA) draws great attention in recent years, it requires large amounts of resources for building the full system and it is often difficult to reproduce previous results due to complex configurations. In this paper, we introduce SF-QA: simple and fair evaluation framework for open-domain QA. SF-QA framework modularizes the pipeline open-domain QA system, which makes the task itself easily accessible and reproducible to research groups without enough computing resources. The proposed evaluation framework is publicly available and anyone can contribute to the code and evaluations. | Open-Domain QA |
Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previously, Min et al. (2020) have tackled this issue by generating disambiguated questions for all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question. This can be effective, but not ideal for providing an answer to the user. Instead, we propose to ask a clarification question, where the user's response will help identify the interpretation that best aligns with the user's intention. We first present CAMBIGNQ, a dataset consisting of 5,654 ambiguous questions, each with relevant passages, possible answers, and a clarification question. The clarification questions were efficiently created by generating them using InstructGPT and manually revising them as necessary. We then define a pipeline of tasks and design appropriate evaluation metrics. Lastly, we achieve 61.3 F1 on ambiguity detection and 40.5 F1 on clarification-based QA, providing strong baselines for future work. | Open-Domain QA |
In recent years, multiple-choice Visual Question Answering (VQA) has become topical and achieved remarkable progress. However, most pioneer multiple-choice VQA models are heavily driven by statistical correlations in datasets, which cannot perform well on multimodal understanding and suffer from poor generalization. In this paper, we identify two kinds of spurious correlations, i.e., a Vision-Answer bias (VA bias) and a Question-Answer bias (QA bias). To systematically and scientifically study these biases, we construct a new video question answering (videoQA) benchmark NExT-OOD in OOD setting and propose a graph-based cross-sample method for bias reduction. Specifically, the NExT-OOD is designed to quantify models’ generalizability and measure their reasoning ability comprehensively. It contains three sub-datasets including NExT-OOD-VA, NExT-OOD-QA, and NExT-OOD-VQA, which are designed for the VA bias, QA bias, and VA&QA bias, respectively. We evaluate several existing multiple-choice VQA models on our NExT-OOD, and illustrate that their performance degrades significantly compared with the results obtained on the original multiple-choice VQA dataset. Besides, to mitigate the VA bias and QA bias, we explicitly consider the cross-sample information and design a contrastive graph matching loss in our approach, which provides adequate debiasing guidance from the perspective of whole dataset, and encourages the model to focus on multimodal contents instead of spurious statistical regularities. Extensive experimental results illustrate that our method significantly outperforms other bias reduction strategies, demonstrating the effectiveness and generalizability of the proposed approach. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
Question answer (QA) system is closely related to NLP and IR tasks. An automated QA system should understand the semantics of question and derive answers relevant to it. In case of MCQ system this tasks becomes difficult as the model needs to understand the semantics and select an answer from a given choice. In this paper we propose a ensemble approach to predict answers to Multiple choice question using LSTM model, hybrid LSTM –Convolution NN model and Multilayer Perception (MLP) model. Firstly, by using LSTM and hybrid LSTM-CNN models are trained parallel. Multilayer Perception is used to predict option to training dataset separately. The 8thGr-NDMC datasets are selected for model evaluation and comparison. The 8th GR-NDMC is used for experimentation purpose. The observed results demonstrate that the proposed approach performs better than some other single forecasting models. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
The recent success of machine learning systems on various QA datasets could be interpreted as a significant improvement in models’ language understanding abilities. However, using various perturbations, multiple recent works have shown that good performance on a dataset might not indicate performance that correlates well with human’s expectations from models that “understand” language. In this work we consider a top performing model on several Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) datasets, and evaluate it against a set of expectations one might have from such a model, using a series of zero-information perturbations of the model’s inputs. Our results show that the model clearly falls short of our expectations, and motivates a modified training approach that forces the model to better attend to the inputs. We show that the new training paradigm leads to a model that performs on par with the original model while better satisfying our expectations. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
Open-domain question answering (QA) involves many knowledge and reasoning challenges, but are successful QA models actually learning such knowledge when trained on benchmark QA tasks? We investigate this via several new diagnostic tasks probing whether multiple-choice QA models know definitions and taxonomic reasoning—two skills widespread in existing benchmarks and fundamental to more complex reasoning. We introduce a methodology for automatically building probe datasets from expert knowledge sources, allowing for systematic control and a comprehensive evaluation. We include ways to carefully control for artifacts that may arise during this process. Our evaluation confirms that transformer-based multiple-choice QA models are already predisposed to recognize certain types of structural linguistic knowledge. However, it also reveals a more nuanced picture: their performance notably degrades even with a slight increase in the number of “hops” in the underlying taxonomic hierarchy, and with more challenging distractor candidates. Further, existing models are far from perfect when assessed at the level of clusters of semantically connected probes, such as all hypernym questions about a single concept. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
Data contamination in model evaluation has become increasingly prevalent with the growing popularity of large language models. It allows models to"cheat"via memorisation instead of displaying true capabilities. Therefore, contamination analysis has become an crucial part of reliable model evaluation to validate results. However, existing contamination analysis is usually conducted internally by large language model developers and often lacks transparency and completeness. This paper presents an extensive data contamination report for over 15 popular large language models across six popular multiple-choice QA benchmarks. We also introduce an open-source pipeline that enables the community to perform contamination analysis on customised data and models. Our experiments reveal varying contamination levels ranging from 1\% to 45\% across benchmarks, with the contamination degree increasing rapidly over time. Performance analysis of large language models indicates that data contamination does not necessarily lead to increased model metrics: while significant accuracy boosts of up to 14\% and 7\% are observed on contaminated C-Eval and Hellaswag benchmarks, only a minimal increase is noted on contaminated MMLU. We also find larger models seem able to gain more advantages than smaller models on contaminated test sets. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
This paper introduces FrenchMedMCQA, the first publicly available Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset in French for medical domain. It is composed of 3,105 questions taken from real exams of the French medical specialization diploma in pharmacy, mixing single and multiple answers. Each instance of the dataset contains an identifier, a question, five possible answers and their manual correction(s). We also propose first baseline models to automatically process this MCQA task in order to report on the current performances and to highlight the difficulty of the task. A detailed analysis of the results showed that it is necessary to have representations adapted to the medical domain or to the MCQA task: in our case, English specialized models yielded better results than generic French ones, even though FrenchMedMCQA is in French. Corpus, models and tools are available online. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
This paper introduces MedMCQA, a new large-scale, Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset designed to address real-world medical entrance exam questions. More than 194k high-quality AIIMS \&NEET PG entrance exam MCQs covering 2.4k healthcare topics and 21 medical subjects are collected with an average token length of 12.77 and high topical diversity. Each sample contains a question, correct answer(s), and other options which requires a deeper language understanding as it tests the 10+ reasoning abilities of a model across a wide range of medical subjects \&topics. A detailed explanation of the solution, along with the above information, is provided in this study. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
In a spoken multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) task, where passages, questions, and choices are given in the form of speech, usually only the auto-transcribed text is considered in system development. The acoustic-level information may contain useful cues for answer prediction. However, to the best of our knowledge, only a few studies focus on using the acoustic-level information or fusing the acoustic-level information with the text-level information for a spoken MCQA task. Therefore, this paper presents a hierarchical multistage multimodal (HMM) framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to integrate text- and acoustic-level statistics into neural modeling for spoken MCQA. Specifically, the acoustic-level statistics are expected to offset text inaccuracies caused by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems or representation inadequacy lurking in word embedding generators, thereby making the spoken MCQA system robust. In the proposed HMM framework, two modalities are first manipulated to separately derive the acoustic- and text-level representations for the passage, question, and choices. Next, these clever features are jointly involved in inferring the relationships among the passage, question, and choices. Then, a final representation is derived for each choice, which encodes the relationship of the choice to the passage and question. Finally, the most likely answer is determined based on the individual final representations of all choices. Evaluated on the data of “Formosa Grand Challenge - Talk to AI”, a Mandarin Chinese spoken MCQA contest held in 2018, the proposed HMM framework achieves remarkable improvements in accuracy over the text-only baseline. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
We introduce KorMedMCQA, the first Korean multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) benchmark derived from Korean healthcare professional licensing examinations, covering from the year 2012 to year 2023. This dataset consists of a selection of questions from the license examinations for doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, featuring a diverse array of subjects. We conduct baseline experiments on various large language models, including proprietary/open-source, multilingual/Korean-additional pretrained, and clinical context pretrained models, highlighting the potential for further enhancements. We make our data publicly available on HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/sean0042/KorMedMCQA) and provide a evaluation script via LM-Harness, inviting further exploration and advancement in Korean healthcare environments. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
Unsupervised question answering is a promising yet challenging task, which alleviates the burden of building large-scale annotated data in a new domain. It motivates us to study the unsupervised multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) problem. In this paper, we propose a novel framework designed to generate synthetic MCQA data barely based on contexts from the universal domain without relying on any form of manual annotation. Possible answers are extracted and used to produce related questions, then we leverage both named entities (NE) and knowledge graphs to discover plausible distractors to form complete synthetic samples. Experiments on multiple MCQA datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. | Multiple Choice QA (MCQA) |
Due to the enormous and exponential advancement in the online social network, the triad of Facebook, Twitter and Whatsapp posed a great challenge in the form of fake news in front of us. In recent years many events like false propaganda of the ‘US presidential election’, opinion spamming in ‘Brexit referendum’, and long-tail series of viral rumors after many natural calamities around the world, created a lot of chaos and law and order problem. Simultaneously, this rapid explosion of fake news also attracted the attention of different researchers to investigate the real cause of it and thus to developed some tools and techniques to relieve and discover the Rumors across online media as soon as possible. In this regard, the Machine Learning (ML) algorithms and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms emerged as the remarkably vital and essential tool to detect fake news in the current age. NLP when aided with machine learning produced many remarkable results that were possible just by manual fact-checking or by normal text detection process. We have systematically discussed the role of NLP and machine learning in the fake news detection process, and various detection techniques based on these. Basic terminology of NLP and machine learning too explained in brief. At last, we gave light on the future trends, open issues, challenges, and potential research oriented toward NLP and ML-based approaches. | NLP for Social Media |
One prominent dark side of online information behavior is the spreading of rumors. The feature analysis and crowd identification of social media rumor refuters based on machine learning methods can shed light on the rumor refutation process. This paper analyzed the association between user features and rumor refuting behavior in five main rumor categories: economics, society, disaster, politics, and military. Natural language processing (NLP) techniques are applied to quantify the user’s sentiment tendency and recent interests. Then, those results were combined with other personalized features to train an XGBoost classification model, and potential refuters can be identified. Information from 58,807 Sina Weibo users (including their 646,877 microblogs) for the five anti-rumor microblog categories was collected for model training and feature analysis. The results revealed that there were significant differences between rumor stiflers and refuters, as well as between refuters for different categories. Refuters tended to be more active on social media and a large proportion of them gathered in more developed regions. Tweeting history was a vital reference as well, and refuters showed higher interest in topics related with the rumor refuting message. Meanwhile, features such as gender, age, user labels and sentiment tendency also varied between refuters considering categories. | NLP for Social Media |
Social media has become a major source of information for healthcare professionals but due to the growing volume of data in unstructured format, analyzing these resources accurately has become a challenge. In this study, we trained health related NER and classification models on different datasets published within the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (#SMM4H 2022) workshop. Transformer based Bert for Token Classification and Bert for Sequence Classification algorithms as well as vanilla NER and text classification algorithms from Spark NLP library were utilized during this study without changing the underlying DL architecture. The trained models are available within a production-grade code base as part of the Spark NLP library; can scale up for training and inference in any Spark cluster; has GPU support and libraries for popular programming languages such as Python, R, Scala and Java. | NLP for Social Media |
Information about individuals can help to better understand what they say, particularly in social media where texts are short. Current approaches to modelling social media users pay attention to their social connections, but exploit this information in a static way, treating all connections uniformly. This ignores the fact, well known in sociolinguistics, that an individual may be part of several communities which are not equally relevant in all communicative situations. We present a model based on Graph Attention Networks that captures this observation. It dynamically explores the social graph of a user, computes a user representation given the most relevant connections for a target task, and combines it with linguistic information to make a prediction. We apply our model to three different tasks, evaluate it against alternative models, and analyse the results extensively, showing that it significantly outperforms other current methods. | NLP for Social Media |
From the day internet came into existence, the era of social networking sprouted. In the beginning, no one may have thought the internet would be a host of numerous amazing services the social networking. Today we can say that online applications and social networking websites have become a non-separable part of one’s life. Many people from diverse age groups spend hours daily on such websites. Despite thoughtlet is emotionally connected through media, these facilities bring along big threats with them such as cyber-attacks, which includes include lying. As social networking sites are increasing, cyberbullying is increasing day by day. To identify word similarities in the tweets made by bullies and make use of machine learning and can develop an ML model that automatically detects social media bullying actions. However, many social media bullying detection techniques have been implemented, but many of them were textual based. Under this background and motivation, it can help to prevent the happen of cyberbullying if we can develop relevant techniques to discover cyberbullying in social media. A machine learning model is proposed to detect and prevent bullying on Twitter. Naïve Bayes is used for training and testing social media bullying content. | NLP for Social Media |
Social media data become an integral part in the business data and should be integrated into the decisional process for better decision making based on information which reflects better the true situation of business in any field. However, social media data are unstructured and generated in very high frequency which exceeds the capacity of the data warehouse. In this work, we propose to extend the data warehousing process with a staging area which heart is a large scale system implementing an information extraction process using Storm and Hadoop frameworks to better manage their volume and frequency. Concerning structured information extraction, mainly events, we combine a set of techniques from NLP, linguistic rules and machine learning to succeed the task. Finally, we propose the adequate data warehouse conceptual model for events modeling and integration with enterprise data warehouse using an intermediate table called Bridge table. For application and experiments, we focus on drug abuse events extraction from Twitter data and their modeling into the Event Data Warehouse. | NLP for Social Media |
Participatory moments on social media platforms increasingly add up to something more substantial. Communicating our thoughts and feelings about the book through shared observations, appraisals, and illustrative examples. For instance, the data posted on social media platforms like Twitter can be mined for insights into users' values, beliefs, and emotions. The author's perspective can be better understood through the lens of sentiment analysis. Almost all studies of social media's massive user base have looked at how users' sentiments can be broken down into positive, negative, and neutral categories. In this project, we've set out to define the phrases in terms of four distinct emotional states: joy, rage, fear, and melancholy. There have been a lot of approaches implemented in the field of dynamic textual sentiment recognition in the event of further interactions, but not nearly enough of them were based on intensive training. In this research, we elaborate on a game-changing deep learning-based method (RNN+LSTM) for dealing with a variety of problems associated with emotion distribution by making use of informative data. We present a novel method for translating it to a binary distribution and a standard machine-learning classification problem, and we employ a comprehensive knowledge technique to settle the reconstructed matter. In terms of classification accuracy, our hybrid approach will prevail over more conventional ml methods. | NLP for Social Media |
Social media is an appropriate source for analyzing public attitudes towards the COVID-19 vaccine and various brands. Nevertheless, there are few relevant studies. In the research, we collected tweet posts by the UK and US residents from the Twitter API during the pandemic and designed experiments to answer three main questions concerning vaccination. To get the dominant sentiment of the civics, we performed sentiment analysis by VADER and proposed a new method that can count the individual's influence. This allows us to go a step further in sentiment analysis and explain some of the fluctuations in the data changing. The results indicated that celebrities could lead the opinion shift on social media in vaccination progress. Moreover, at the peak, nearly 40\% of the population in both countries have a negative attitude towards COVID-19 vaccines. Besides, we investigated how people's opinions toward different vaccine brands are. We found that the Pfizer vaccine enjoys the most popular among people. By applying the sentiment analysis tool, we discovered most people hold positive views toward the COVID-19 vaccine manufactured by most brands. In the end, we carried out topic modelling by using the LDA model. We found residents in the two countries are willing to share their views and feelings concerning the vaccine. Several death cases have occurred after vaccination. Due to these negative events, US residents are more worried about the side effects and safety of the vaccine. | NLP for Social Media |
Profanity is socially offensive language, which may also be called cursing, cussing, swearing, or expletives. Nowadays where everything is digitally managed, there are lots of online platforms and forums which people use. If we take an example of any social media platform like Twitter, their privacy policy suggests that users cannot share or write any obscene/vulgar language on a public platform. Several corporate and research organizations discuss how such content is found and controlled, such as computer vision research has developed to detect illegal practices in public spaces, NLP has progressed to detect profanity in social media texts. However, existing profanity detection systems still remain flawed because of various factors. In this paper, we define and analyze the system which will use NLP and Machine learning approach to solve this. It is usually framed as a supervised learning problem. Generic features such as Bag-Of-Words or embeddings systematically deliver fair success in classification. Lexical resources in combination with models such as Linear Support Vector Machine (SVM); feature modeling specific linguistic constructs making it more effective in classification. | NLP for Social Media |
Despite its relevance, the maturity of NLP for social media pales in comparison with general-purpose models, metrics and benchmarks. This fragmented landscape makes it hard for the community to know, for instance, given a task, which is the best performing model and how it compares with others. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a unified benchmark for NLP evaluation in social media, SuperTweetEval, which includes a heterogeneous set of tasks and datasets combined, adapted and constructed from scratch. We benchmarked the performance of a wide range of models on SuperTweetEval and our results suggest that, despite the recent advances in language modelling, social media remains challenging. | NLP for Social Media |
The Amount of legal information that is being produced on a daily basis in the law courts is increasing enormously and nowadays this information is available in electronic form also. The application of various machine learning and deep learning methods for processing of legal documents has been receiving considerate attention over the last few years. Legal document classification, translation, summarization, contract review, case prediction and information retrieval are some of the tasks that have received concentrated efforts from the research community. In this survey, we have performed a comprehensive study of various deep learning methods applied in the legal domain and classified various legal tasks into three broad categories, viz. legal data search, legal text analytics and legal intelligent interfaces. The proposed study suggests that deep learning models like CNNs, RNNs, LSTM and GRU, and multi-task deep learning models are being used actively to solve wide variety of legal tasks and are giving state-of-the-art performance. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
Claims, disputes, and litigations are major legal issues in construction projects, which often result in cost overruns, delays, and adverse working relationships among the contracting parties. Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) techniques offer great potentials that can process voluminous unstructured data from legal documents to draw insightful information about the root causes of issues and prevention strategies. Several efforts have been undertaken in the last decades that used NLP to tackle a wide range of problems related to legal issues in construction such as the quality review of contracts and the identification of common patterns in legal cases. The research line on NLP-based techniques for analyzing legal texts of construction projects has progressed well recently; it, however, is still in the early stage. This paper aims to perform a critical review of recently published articles to analyze the achievements and limitations of the state of the art on NLP-based approaches to address common legal issues associated with legal documents arising across different project stages. The study also provides a roadmap for future research to expand the adoption of NLP for the processing of legal texts in construction. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
LexNLP is an open source Python package focused on natural language processing and machine learning for legal and regulatory text. The package includes functionality to (i) segment documents, (ii) identify key text such as titles and section headings, (iii) extract over eighteen types of structured information like distances and dates, (iv) extract named entities such as companies and geopolitical entities, (v) transform text into features for model training, and (vi) build unsupervised and supervised models such as word embedding or tagging models. LexNLP includes pre-trained models based on thousands of unit tests drawn from real documents available from the SEC EDGAR database as well as various judicial and regulatory proceedings. LexNLP is designed for use in both academic research and industrial applications, and is distributed at the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/LexPredict/lexpredict-lexnlp. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
With the evolution of time, problem, and expectation of human beings, advancement of science and technology has facilitated scientific analysis of bulk dataset to generate desired output. This approach of bulk data analysis may be specifically implemented using Machine Learning and Data Analytics, which are the sub-domains of Artificial Intelligence (AI). The application of this cutting-edge technology can improve the efficiency of multivariate service sectors having societal significance (like legal system, education system, public transportation, rural healthcare management, etc), which directly or indirectly affect the well-being and productivity of an individual and the society as a whole. For example, India being a developing nation suffers due to insufficient number of judges, advocates, infrastructure, etc, and for which people have to wait long time to cherish their desired justice. In this paper, authors have proposed Machine Learning and Text Analytics-based legal support system to assist judges and advocates for faster delivery of justice to citizen. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
Natural language processing (NLP) methods for analyzing legal text offer legal scholars and practitioners a range of tools allowing to empirically analyze law on a large scale. However, researchers seem to struggle when it comes to identifying ethical limits to using NLP systems for acquiring genuine insights both about the law and the systems' predictive capacity. In this paper we set out a number of ways in which to think systematically about such issues. We place emphasis on three crucial normative parameters which have, to the best of our knowledge, been underestimated by current debates: (a) the importance of academic freedom, (b) the existence of a wide diversity of legal and ethical norms domestically but even more so internationally and (c) the threat of moralism in research related to computational law. For each of these three parameters we provide specific recommendations for the legal NLP community. Our discussion is structured around the study of a real-life scenario that has prompted recent debate in the legal NLP research community. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
The EU-funded project Lynx focuses on the creation of a knowledge graph for the legal domain (Legal Knowledge Graph, LKG) and its use for the semantic processing, analysis and enrichment of documents from the legal domain. This article describes the use cases covered in the project, the entire developed platform and the semantic analysis services that operate on the documents. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
In the last years, the legal domain has been revolutionized by the use of Information and Communication Technologies, producing large amount of digital information. Legal practitioners’ needs, then, in browsing these repositories has required to investigate more efficient retrieval methods, that assume more relevance because digital information is mostly unstructured. In this paper we analyze the state-of-the-art of artificial intelligence approaches for legal domain, focusing on Legal Information Retrieval systems based on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Knowledge Extraction techniques. Finally, we also discuss challenges – mainly focusing on retrieving similar cases, statutes or paragraph for supporting latest cases’ analysis – and open issues about Legal Information Retrieval systems. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
We present LEDGAR, a multilabel corpus of legal provisions in contracts. The corpus was crawled and scraped from the public domain (SEC filings) and is, to the best of our knowledge, the first freely available corpus of its kind. Since the corpus was constructed semi-automatically, we apply and discuss various approaches to noise removal. Due to the rather large labelset of over 12’000 labels annotated in almost 100’000 provisions in over 60’000 contracts, we believe the corpus to be of interest for research in the field of Legal NLP, (large-scale or extreme) text classification, as well as for legal studies. We discuss several methods to sample subcopora from the corpus and implement and evaluate different automatic classification approaches. Finally, we perform transfer experiments to evaluate how well the classifiers perform on contracts stemming from outside the corpus. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
Legal documents are unstructured, use legal jargon, and have considerable length, making them difficult to process automatically via conventional text processing techniques. A legal document processing system would benefit substantially if the documents could be segmented into coherent information units. This paper proposes a new corpus of legal documents annotated (with the help of legal experts) with a set of 13 semantically coherent units labels (referred to as Rhetorical Roles), e.g., facts, arguments, statute, issue, precedent, ruling, and ratio. We perform a thorough analysis of the corpus and the annotations. For automatically segmenting the legal documents, we experiment with the task of rhetorical role prediction: given a document, predict the text segments corresponding to various roles. Using the created corpus, we experiment extensively with various deep learning-based baseline models for the task. Further, we develop a multitask learning (MTL) based deep model with document rhetorical role label shift as an auxiliary task for segmenting a legal document. The proposed model shows superior performance over the existing models. We also experiment with model performance in the case of domain transfer and model distillation techniques to see the model performance in limited data conditions. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
We evaluated the capability of a state-of-the-art generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model to perform semantic annotation of short text snippets (one to few sentences) coming from legal documents of various types. Discussions of potential uses (e.g., document drafting, summarization) of this emerging technology in legal domain have intensified, but to date there has not been a rigorous analysis of these large language models' (LLM) capacity in sentence-level semantic annotation of legal texts in zero-shot learning settings. Yet, this particular type of use could unlock many practical applications (e.g., in contract review) and research opportunities (e.g., in empirical legal studies). We fill the gap with this study. We examined if and how successfully the model can semantically annotate small batches of short text snippets (10-50) based exclusively on concise definitions of the semantic types. We found that the GPT model performs surprisingly well in zero-shot settings on diverse types of documents (F1 = .73 on a task involving court opinions, .86 for contracts, and .54 for statutes and regulations). These findings can be leveraged by legal scholars and practicing lawyers alike to guide their decisions in integrating LLMs in wide range of workflows involving semantic annotation of legal texts. | NLP for the Legal Domain |
Prompt engineering, as an efficient and effective way to leverage Large Language Models (LLM), has drawn a lot of attention from the research community. The existing research primarily emphasizes the importance of adapting prompts to specific tasks, rather than specific LLMs. However, a good prompt is not solely defined by its wording, but also binds to the nature of the LLM in question. In this work, we first quantitatively demonstrate that different prompts should be adapted to different LLMs to enhance their capabilities across various down-stream tasks in NLP. Then we novelly propose a model-adaptive prompt optimizer (MAPO) method that optimizes the original prompts for each specific LLM in downstream tasks. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed method can effectively refine prompts for an LLM, leading to significant improvements over various downstream tasks. | Prompt Engineering |
Software requirement classification is a longstanding and important problem in requirement engineering. Previous studies have applied various machine learning techniques for this problem, including Support Vector Machine (SVM) and decision trees. With the recent popularity of NLP technique, the state-of-the-art approach NoRBERT utilizes the pre-trained language model BERT and achieves a satisfactory performance. However, the dataset PROMISE used by the existing approaches for this problem consists of only hundreds of requirements that are outdated according to today’s technology and market trends. Besides, the NLP technique applied in these approaches might be obsolete. In this paper, we propose an approach of prompt learning for requirement classification using BERT-based pretrained language models (PRCBERT), which applies flexible prompt templates to achieve accurate requirements classification. Experiments conducted on two existing small-size requirement datasets (PROMISE and NFR-Review) and our collected large-scale requirement dataset NFR-SO prove that PRCBERT exhibits moderately better classification performance than NoRBERT and MLM-BERT (BERT with the standard prompt template). On the de-labeled NFR-Review and NFR-SO datasets, Trans_PRCBERT (the version of PRCBERT which is fine-tuned on PROMISE) is able to have a satisfactory zero-shot performance with 53.27% and 72.96% F1-score when enabling a self-learning strategy. | Prompt Engineering |
In recent years, the advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has garnered significant attention in the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exhibiting exceptional performance across a wide variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, despite the high generality of LLMs, there exists a problem in controlling them to produce the desired output for each task. Fine-tuning is a conventional approach to improve performance for specific tasks, albeit at the expense of substantial time and computational resources. Prompt engineering serves as an effective alternative, steering models towards desired outputs for particular tasks, and has been validated to enhance the performance of LLMs. However, manual design of prompts is labor-intensive, which has increased interest in the automation of prompt engineering. In this study, we propose a method to automate prompt engineering optimization utilizing a genetic algorithm with novel genetic operators. Through experiments conducted to explore instructional prompts for solving Japanese multiple-choice questions, the efficacy of the proposed method was affirmed. The findings of this study underscore the feasibility of genetic algorithm-based automatic prompt engineering and genetic operators for prompts, and show their efficacy for Japanese, which has distinct linguistic characteristics compared to English and other languages. | Prompt Engineering |
Abstract Previous work in prompt engineering for large language models has introduced different gradient-free probability-based prompt selection methods that aim to choose the optimal prompt among the candidates for a given task but have failed to provide a comprehensive and fair comparison between each other. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to interpret and evaluate the existing probability-based prompt selection methods by performing extensive experiments on 13 common and diverse NLP tasks. We find that each of the existing methods can be interpreted as some variant of the method that maximizes mutual information between the input and the predicted output (MI). Utilizing this finding, we develop several other combinatorial variants of MI and increase the effectiveness of the oracle prompt selection method from 87.79% to 94.98%, measured as the ratio of the performance of the selected prompt to that of the optimal oracle prompt. Furthermore, considering that all the methods rely on the output probability distribution of the model that might be biased, we propose a novel calibration method called Calibration by Marginalization (CBM) that is orthogonal to the existing methods and helps increase the prompt selection effectiveness of the best method to 96.85%, achieving 99.44% of the oracle prompt F1 without calibration.1 | Prompt Engineering |
In the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), the technique of prompt engineering is a strategic method utilized to guide the responses of models such as ChatGPT. This research explores the intricacies of prompt engineering, with a specific focus on its effects on the quality of summaries generated by ChatGPT 3.5, an openly accessible chatbot developed by OpenAI. The study encompasses a comprehensive examination of 110 summaries produced from ten diverse paragraphs, employing eleven distinct summarization prompts under zero-shot setting. Evaluation is conducted using the BERT Score, a metric that offers a more contextually relevant assessment of summary quality. This study introduces an innovative approach to appraising the quality of summaries, setting it apart from prior investigations and delivering valuable insights into the nuances of prompt engineering's role within the NLP landscape. Ultimately, this inquiry illuminates the strengths and weaknesses associated with various prompts and their influence on ChatGPT 3.5's summarization capabilities, thereby making a significant contribution to the constantly evolving field of NLP and automated text summarization. | Prompt Engineering |
Inspired by human cognition, Jiang et al.(2023c) create a benchmark for assessing LLMs' lateral thinking-thinking outside the box. Building upon this benchmark, we investigate how different prompting methods enhance LLMs' performance on this task to reveal their inherent power for outside-the-box thinking ability. Through participating in SemEval-2024, task 9, Sentence Puzzle sub-task, we explore prompt engineering methods: chain of thoughts (CoT) and direct prompting, enhancing with informative descriptions, and employing contextualizing prompts using a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) pipeline. Our experiments involve three LLMs including GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Zephyr-7B-beta. We generate a dataset of thinking paths between riddles and options using GPT-4, validated by humans for quality. Findings indicate that compressed informative prompts enhance performance. Dynamic in-context learning enhances model performance significantly. Furthermore, fine-tuning Zephyr on our dataset enhances performance across other commonsense datasets, underscoring the value of innovative thinking. | Prompt Engineering |
Automated theorem proving can benefit a lot from methods employed in natural language processing, knowledge graphs and information retrieval: this non-trivial task combines formal languages understanding, reasoning, similarity search. We tackle this task by enhancing semantic similarity ranking with prompt engineering, which has become a new paradigm in natural language understanding. None of our approaches requires additional training. Despite encouraging results reported by prompt engineering approaches for a range of NLP tasks, for the premise selection task vanilla re-ranking by prompting GPT-3 doesn’t outperform semantic similarity ranking with SBERT, but merging of the both rankings shows better results. | Prompt Engineering |
Foundation AI models have emerged as powerful pre-trained models on a large scale, capable of seamlessly handling diverse tasks across multiple domains with minimal or no fine-tuning. These models, exemplified by the impressive achievements of GPT-3 and BERT in natural language processing (NLP), as well as CLIP and DALL-E in computer vision, have garnered considerable attention for their exceptional performance. A noteworthy addition to the realm of image segmentation is the Segment Anything Model (SAM), a foundation AI model that revolutionizes image segmentation. With a single click or a natural language prompt, SAM exhibits the remarkable ability to segment any object within an image, marking a significant paradigm shift in medical image segmentation. Unlike conventional approaches that rely on labeled data and domain-specific knowledge, SAM breaks free from these constraints. Deep convolutional neural network (DCNN)-based, SAM comprises an image encoder, a prompt encoder, and a mask decoder, showcasing its efficient and flexible architecture. Medical image segmentation, in particular, benefits from SAM’s exceptional speed and high-quality segmentation. In this paper, we delve into the effectiveness of SAM for medical image segmentation shedding light on its capabilities. Moreover, our investigation explores the strengths and limitations of prompt engineering in medical computer vision applications, not only encompassing SAM but also other foundation AI models. Through this exploration, we unravel their immense potential in catalyzing a paradigm shift in the field of medical imaging. | Prompt Engineering |
Large-scale pre-trained language models have contributed significantly to natural language processing by demonstrating remarkable abilities as few-shot learners. However, their effectiveness depends mainly on scaling the model parameters and prompt design, hindering their implementation in most real-world applications. This study proposes a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named DifferentiAble pRompT (DART), which can convert small language models into better few-shot learners without any prompt engineering. The main principle behind this approach involves reformulating potential natural language processing tasks into the task of a pre-trained language model and differentially optimizing the prompt template as well as the target label with backpropagation. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged to any pre-trained language models; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks. A comprehensive evaluation of standard NLP tasks demonstrates that the proposed approach achieves a better few-shot performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/DART. | Prompt Engineering |
State-of-the-art neural language models can now be used to solve ad-hoc language tasks through zero-shot prompting without the need for supervised training. This approach has gained popularity in recent years, and researchers have demonstrated prompts that achieve strong accuracy on specific NLP tasks. However, finding a prompt for new tasks requires experimentation. Different prompt templates with different wording choices lead to significant accuracy differences. PromptIDE allows users to experiment with prompt variations, visualize prompt performance, and iteratively optimize prompts. We developed a workflow that allows users to first focus on model feedback using small data before moving on to a large data regime that allows empirical grounding of promising prompts using quantitative measures of the task. The tool then allows easy deployment of the newly created ad-hoc models. We demonstrate the utility of PromptIDE (demo: http://prompt.vizhub.ai) and our workflow using several real-world use cases. | Prompt Engineering |
Automatic identification and expansion of ambiguous abbreviations are essential for biomedical natural language processing applications, such as information retrieval and question answering systems. In this paper, we present DEep Contextualized Biomedical. Abbreviation Expansion (DECBAE) model. DECBAE automatically collects substantial and relatively clean annotated contexts for 950 ambiguous abbreviations from PubMed abstracts using a simple heuristic. Then it utilizes BioELMo to extract the contextualized features of words, and feed those features to abbreviation-specific bidirectional LSTMs, where the hidden states of the ambiguous abbreviations are used to assign the exact definitions. Our DECBAE model outperforms other baselines by large margins, achieving average accuracy of 0.961 and macro-F1 of 0.917 on the dataset. It also surpasses human performance for expanding a sample abbreviation, and remains robust in imbalanced, low-resources and clinical settings. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
Acronyms are commonly used in human language as alternative forms of concepts to increase recognition, to reduce duplicate references to the same concept, and to stress important concepts. There are no standard rules for acronym creation; therefore, both machine-based acronym identification and acronym resolution are highly prone to error. This might be resolved by a human computation approach, which can take advantage of knowledge external to the document collection. Using three text collections with different properties, we compare a machine-based algorithm with a crowdsourcing approach to identify acronyms. We then perform acronym resolution using these two approaches, plus a game-based approach. The crowd and game-based methods outperform the machine algorithm, even when external information is not used. Also, crowd and game formats offered similar performance with a difference in cost. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
Hypernym and synonym matching are one of the mainstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. In this paper, we present systems that attempt to solve this problem. We designed these systems to participate in the FinSim-3, a shared task of FinNLP workshop at IJCAI-2021. The shared task is focused on solving this problem for the financial domain. We experimented with various transformer based pre-trained embeddings by fine-tuning these for either classification or phrase similarity tasks. We also augmented the provided dataset with abbreviations derived from prospectus provided by the organizers and definitions of the financial terms from DBpedia [Auer et al., 2007], Investopedia, and the Financial Industry Business Ontology (FIBO). Our best performing system uses both FinBERT [Araci, 2019] and data augmentation from the afore-mentioned sources. We observed that term expansion using data augmentation in conjunction with semantic similarity is beneficial for this task and could be useful for the other tasks that deal with short phrases. Our best performing model (Accuracy: 0.917, Rank: 1.156) was developed by fine-tuning SentenceBERT [Reimers et al., 2019] (with FinBERT at the backend) over an extended labelled set created using the hierarchy of labels present in FIBO. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
The current study aimed to explore the linguistic analysis of neologism related to Coronavirus (COVID-19). Recently, a new coronavirus disease COVID-19 has emerged as a respiratory infection with significant concern for global public health hazards. However, with each passing day, more and more confirmed cases are being reported worldwide which has alarmed the global authorities including the World Health Organization (WHO). In this study, the researcher uses the term neologism which means the coinage of new words. Neologism played a significant role throughout the history of epidemic and pandemic. The focus of this study is on the phenomenon of neologism to explore the creation of new words during the outbreak of COVID-19. The theoretical framework of this study is based on three components of neologism, i.e. word formation, borrowing, and lexical deviation. The researcher used the model of neologism as a research tool which is presented by Krishnamurthy in 2010. The study is also compared with the theory of onomasiology by Pavol Stekauer (1998). The secondary data have been used in this study. The data were collected from articles, books, Oxford Corpus, social media, and five different websites and retrieved from January 2020 to April 2020. The findings of this study revealed that with the outbreak of COVID-19, the majority of the people on social media and state briefings, the word-formation is utilized in the form of nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The abbreviations and acronyms are also used which are related to the current situation of COVID-19. No doubt, neologisms present colorful portrayals of various social and cultural practices of respective societies the rationale behind them all remains the same. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
The prevalence of ambiguous acronyms make scientific documents harder to understand for humans and machines alike, presenting a need for models that can automatically identify acronyms in text and disambiguate their meaning. We introduce new methods for acronym identification and disambiguation: our acronym identification model projects learned token embeddings onto tag predictions, and our acronym disambiguation model finds training examples with similar sentence embeddings as test examples. Both of our systems achieve significant performance gains over previously suggested methods, and perform competitively on the SDU@AAAI-21 shared task leaderboard. Our models were trained in part on new distantly-supervised datasets for these tasks which we call AuxAI and AuxAD. We also identified a duplication conflict issue in the SciAD dataset, and formed a deduplicated version of SciAD that we call SciAD-dedupe. We publicly released all three of these datasets, and hope that they help the community make further strides in scientific document understanding. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
Abbreviations and acronyms are shortened forms of words or phrases that are commonly used in technical writing. In this study we focus specifically on abbreviations and introduce a corpus-based method for their expansion. The method divides the processing into three key stages: abbreviation identification, full form candidate extraction, and abbreviation disambiguation. First, potential abbreviations are identified by combining pattern matching and named entity recognition. Both acronyms and abbreviations exhibit similar orthographic properties, thus additional processing is required to distinguish between them. To this end, we implement a character-based recurrent neural network (RNN) that analyses the morphology of a given token in order to classify it as an acronym or an abbreviation. A siamese RNN that learns the morphological process of word abbreviation is then used to select a set of full form candidates. Having considerably constrained the search space, we take advantage of the Word Mover’s Distance (WMD) to assess semantic compatibility between an abbreviation and each full form candidate based on their contextual similarity. This step does not require any corpus-based training, thus making the approach highly adaptable to different domains. Unlike the vast majority of existing approaches, our method does not rely on external lexical resources for disambiguation, but with a macro F-measure of 96.27% is comparable to the state-of-the art. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
Acronyms are the short forms of phrases that facilitate conveying lengthy sentences in documents and serve as one of the mainstays of writing. Due to their importance, identifying acronyms and corresponding phrases (i.e., acronym identification (AI)) and finding the correct meaning of each acronym (i.e., acronym disambiguation (AD)) are crucial for text understanding. Despite the recent progress on this task, there are some limitations in the existing datasets which hinder further improvement. More specifically, limited size of manually annotated AI datasets or noises in the automatically created acronym identification datasets obstruct designing advanced high-performing acronym identification models. Moreover, the existing datasets are mostly limited to the medical domain and ignore other domains. In order to address these two limitations, we first create a manually annotated large AI dataset for scientific domain. This dataset contains 17,506 sentences which is substantially larger than previous scientific AI datasets. Next, we prepare an AD dataset for scientific domain with 62,441 samples which is significantly larger than the previous scientific AD dataset. Our experiments show that the existing state-of-the-art models fall far behind human-level performance on both datasets proposed by this work. In addition, we propose a new deep learning model that utilizes the syntactical structure of the sentence to expand an ambiguous acronym in a sentence. The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the new AD dataset, providing a strong baseline for future research on this dataset. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
Nowadays, there is an increasing tendency for using acronyms in technical texts, which has led to ambiguous acronyms with different possible expansions. Diversity of expansions of a single acronym makes recognizing its expansion a challenging task. Replacing acronyms with incorrect expansions will lead to problems in text mining procedures, namely text normalization, summarization, machine translation, and tech-mining. Tech-mining involves exploring and analyzing technical texts to recognize the relations between technologies. This paper is aimed at proposing a method for building a dataset that meets the requirements for training acronym disambiguation models in technical texts. In this paper, challenges in automatic acronym disambiguation are presented. We have proposed a method for building the dataset and the accuracy of the acronym disambiguation model is 86%. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
In biomedical domain, abbreviations are appearing more and more frequently in various data sets, which has caused significant obstacles to biomedical big data analysis. The dictionary-based approach has been adopted to process abbreviations, but it cannot handle ad hoc abbreviations, and it is impossible to cover all abbreviations. To overcome these drawbacks, this paper proposes an automatic abbreviation expansion method called LMAAE (Language Model-based Automatic Abbreviation Expansion). In this method, the abbreviation is firstly divided into blocks; then, expansion candidates are generated by restoring each block; and finally, the expansion candidates are filtered and clustered to acquire the final expansion result according to the language model and clustering method. Through restrict the abbreviation to prefix abbreviation, the search space of expansion is reduced sharply. And then, the search space is continuous reduced by restrained the effective and the length of the partition. In order to validate the effective of the method, two types of experiments are designed. For standard abbreviations, the expansion results include most of the expansion in dictionary. Therefore, it has a high precision. For ad hoc abbreviations, the precisions of schema matching, knowledge fusion are increased by using this method to handle the abbreviations. Although the recall for standard abbreviation needs to be improved, but this does not affect the good complement effect for the dictionary method. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
The adoption of Electronic Health Record (EHR) and other e-health infrastructures over the years has been characterized by an increase in medical errors. This is primarily a result of the widespread usage of medical acronyms and abbreviations with multiple possible senses (i.e., ambiguous acronyms). The advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, specifically Natural Language Processing (NLP), has presented a promising avenue for tackling the intricate issue of automatic sense resolution of acronyms. Notably, the application of Machine Learning (ML) techniques has proven to be highly effective in the development of systems aimed at this objective, garnering significant attention and interest within the research and industry domains in recent years. The significance of automating the resolution of medical acronym senses cannot be overstated, especially in the context of modern healthcare delivery with the widespread use of EHR. However, it is disheartening to note that comprehensive studies examining the global adoption of EHR, assessing the impact of acronym usage on medical errors within EHR systems, and reporting on the latest trends and advancements in ML-based NLP solutions for disambiguating medical acronyms remain severely limited. In this current study, we present a detailed overview on medical error, its origins, unintended effects, and EHR-related errors as a subclass of clinical error. Furthermore, this paper investigates the adoption of EHR systems in developed and developing nations, as well as the review concludes with an examination of various artificial intelligence techniques, particularly machine learning algorithms for medical acronym and abbreviation disambiguation in EHRs. | Acronyms and Abbreviations Detection and Expansion |
The article is focused on automatic development and ranking of a large corpus for Russian paraphrase generation which proves to be the first corpus of such type in Russian computational linguistics. Existing manually annotated paraphrase datasets for Russian are limited to small-sized ParaPhraser corpus and ParaPlag which are suitable for a set of NLP tasks, such as paraphrase and plagiarism detection, sentence similarity and relatedness estimation, etc. Due to size restrictions, these datasets can hardly be applied in end-to-end text generation solutions. Meanwhile, paraphrase generation requires a large amount of training data. In our study we propose a solution to the problem: we collect, rank and evaluate a new publicly available headline paraphrase corpus (ParaPhraser Plus), and then perform text generation experiments with manual evaluation on automatically ranked corpora using the Universal Transformer architecture. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
Paraphrase generation is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. Due to the significant success of transfer learning, the “pre-training → fine-tuning” approach has become the standard. However, popular general pre-training methods typically require extensive datasets and great computational resources, and the available pre-trained models are limited by fixed architecture and size. The authors have proposed a simple and efficient approach to pre-training specifically for paraphrase generation, which noticeably improves the quality of paraphrase generation and ensures substantial enhancement of general-purpose models. They have used existing public data and new data generated by large language models. The authors have investigated how this pre-training procedure impacts neural networks of various architectures and demonstrated its efficiency across all architectures. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
Paraphrasing is a process to restate the meaning of a text or a passage using different words in the same language to give a clearer understanding of the original sentence to the readers. Paraphrasing is important in many natural language processing tasks such as plagiarism detection, information retrieval, and machine translation. In this article, we describe our work in paraphrasing Chinese idioms by using the definitions from dictionaries. The definitions of the idioms will be reworded and then scored to find the best paraphrase candidates to be used for the given context. With the proposed approach to paraphrase Chinse idioms in sentences, the BLEU was 75.69%, compared to the baseline approach that was 66.34%. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
Paraphrase generation is a fundamental and long-standing task in natural language processing. In this paper, we concentrate on two contributions to the task: (1) we propose Retrieval Augmented Prompt Tuning (RAPT) as a parameter-efficient method to adapt large pre-trained language models for paraphrase generation; (2) we propose Novelty Conditioned RAPT (NC-RAPT) as a simple model-agnostic method of using specialized prompt tokens for controlled paraphrase generation with varying levels of lexical novelty. By conducting extensive experiments on four datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approaches for retaining the semantic content of the original text while inducing lexical novelty in the generation. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
A noun compound is a sequence of contiguous nouns that acts as a single noun, although the predicate denoting the semantic relation between its components is dropped. Noun Compound Interpretation is the task of uncovering the relation, in the form of a preposition or a free paraphrase. Prepositional paraphrasing refers to the use of preposition to explain the semantic relation, whereas free paraphrasing refers to invoking an appropriate predicate denoting the semantic relation. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised methodology for these two types of paraphrasing. We use pre-trained contextualized language models to uncover the ‘missing’ words (preposition or predicate). These language models are usually trained to uncover the missing word/words in a given input sentence. Our approach uses templates to prepare the input sequence for the language model. The template uses a special token to indicate the missing predicate. As the model has already been pre-trained to uncover a missing word (or a sequence of words), we exploit it to predict missing words for the input sequence. Our experiments using four datasets show that our unsupervised approach (a) performs comparably to supervised approaches for prepositional paraphrasing, and (b) outperforms supervised approaches for free paraphrasing. Paraphrasing (prepositional or free) using our unsupervised approach is potentially helpful for NLP tasks like machine translation and information extraction. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
This article presents a method extending an existing French corpus of paraphrases of medical terms ANONYMOUS with new data from Web archives created during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our method semi-automatically detects new terms and paraphrase markers introducing paraphrases from these Web archives, followed by a manual annotation step to identify paraphrases and their lexical and semantic properties. The extended large corpus LARGEMED could be used for automatic medical text simplification for patients and their families. To automatise data collection, we propose two experiments. The first experiment uses the new LARGEMED dataset to train a binary classifier aiming to detect new sentences containing possible paraphrases. The second experiment aims to use correct paraphrases to train a model for paraphrase generation, by adapting T5 Language Model to the paraphrase generation task using an adversarial algorithm. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
Inducing diversity in the task of paraphrasing is an important problem in NLP with applications in data augmentation and conversational agents. Previous paraphrasing approaches have mainly focused on the issue of generating semantically similar paraphrases while paying little attention towards diversity. In fact, most of the methods rely solely on top-k beam search sequences to obtain a set of paraphrases. The resulting set, however, contains many structurally similar sentences. In this work, we focus on the task of obtaining highly diverse paraphrases while not compromising on paraphrasing quality. We provide a novel formulation of the problem in terms of monotone submodular function maximization, specifically targeted towards the task of paraphrasing. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for data augmentation on multiple tasks such as intent classification and paraphrase recognition. In order to drive further research, we have made the source code available. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
In this work, we propose TGLS, a novel framework for unsupervised Text Generation by Learning from Search. We start by applying a strong search algorithm (in particular, simulated annealing) towards a heuristically defined objective that (roughly) estimates the quality of sentences. Then, a conditional generative model learns from the search results, and meanwhile smooth out the noise of search. The alternation between search and learning can be repeated for performance bootstrapping. We demonstrate the effectiveness of TGLS on two real-world natural language generation tasks, unsupervised paraphrasing and text formalization. Our model significantly outperforms unsupervised baseline methods in both tasks. Especially, it achieves comparable performance to strong supervised methods for paraphrase generation. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
In phrase generation (PG), a sentence in the natural language is changed into a new one with a different syntactic structure but having the same semantic meaning. The present sequence-to-sequence strategy aims to recall the words and structures from the training dataset rather than learning the words' semantics. As a result, the resulting statements are frequently grammatically accurate but incorrect linguistically. The neural machine translation approach suffers to handle unusual words, domain mismatch, and unfamiliar words, but it takes context well. This work presents a novel model for creating paraphrases that use neural-based statistical machine translation (NSMT). Our approach creates potential paraphrases for any source input, calculates the level of semantic similarity between text segments of any length, and encodes paraphrases in a continuous space. To evaluate the suggested model, Quora Question Pair and Microsoft Common Objects in Context benchmark datasets are used. We demonstrate that the proposed technique achieves cutting-edge performance on both datasets using automatic and human assessments. Experimental findings across tasks and datasets demonstrate that the suggested NSMT-based PG outperforms those achieved with traditional phrase-based techniques. We also show that the proposed technique may be used automatically for the development of paraphrases for a variety of languages. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
Existing methods for Dialogue Response Generation (DRG) in Task-oriented Dialogue Systems (TDSs) can be grouped into two categories: template-based and corpus-based. The former prepare a collection of response templates in advance and fill the slots with system actions to produce system responses at runtime. The latter generate system responses token by token by taking system actions into account. While template-based DRG provides high precision and highly predictable responses, they usually lack in terms of generating diverse and natural responses when compared to (neural) corpus-based approaches. Conversely, while corpus-based DRG methods are able to generate natural responses, we cannot guarantee their precision or predictability. Moreover, the diversity of responses produced by today's corpus-based DRG methods is still limited. We propose to combine the merits of template-based and corpus-based DRGs by introducing a prototype-based, paraphrasing neural network, called P2-Net, which aims to enhance quality of the responses in terms of both precision and diversity. Instead of generating a response from scratch, P2-Net generates system responses by paraphrasing template-based responses. To guarantee the precision of responses, P2-Net learns to separate a response into its semantics, context influence, and paraphrasing noise, and to keep the semantics unchanged during paraphrasing. To introduce diversity, P2-Net randomly samples previous conversational utterances as prototypes, from which the model can then extract speaking style information. We conduct extensive experiments on the MultiWOZ dataset with both automatic and human evaluations. The results show that P2-Net achieves a significant improvement in diversity while preserving the semantics of responses. | Paraphrase and Rephrase Generation |
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