United States

Embeddings of words and concepts capture syntactic and semantic regularities of language; however, they have seen limited use as tools to study characteristics of different corpora and how they relate to one another. We introduce TextEssence, an interactive system designed to enable comparative analysis of corpora using embeddings. TextEssence includes visual, neighbor-based, and similarity-based modes of embedding analysis in a lightweight, web-based interface. We further propose a new measure of embedding confidence based on nearest neighborhood overlap, to assist in identifying high-quality embeddings for corpus analysis. A case study on COVID-19 scientific literature illustrates the utility of the system. TextEssence can be found at https: //textessence.github.io.


NAACL 2021

TextEssence: A Tool for Interactive Analysis of Semantic Shifts Between Corpora

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

technical paper

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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We present NAMER, an open-domain Chinese knowledge base question answering system based on a novel node-based framework that better grasps the structural mapping between questions and KB queries by aligning the nodes in a query with their corresponding mentions in question. Equipped with data augmentation and multitasking techniques, we show that the proposed framework outperforms the previous SoTA on the CCKS CKBQA dataset. Moreover, we develop a novel data annotation strategy that facilitates the node-to-mention alignment, a dataset (https://github.com/ridiculouz/CKBQA) with such strategy is also published to promote further research. An online demo of NAMER (http://kbqademo.gstore.cn) is provided to visualize our framework and supply extra information for users.

NAMER: A Node-Based Multitasking Framework for Multi-Hop Knowledge Base Question Answering

Automated fact-checking on a large-scale is a challenging task that has not been studied systematically until recently. Large noisy document collections like the web or news articles make the task more difficult. In this paper, we describe the components of a three-stage automated fact-checking system, named Quin+. We demonstrate that using dense passage representations increases the evidence recall in a noisy setting. We experiment with two sentence selection approaches, an embedding-based selection using a dense retrieval model, and a sequence labeling approach for context-aware selection. Quin+ is able to verify open-domain claims using a large-scale corpus or web search results.


Improving Evidence Retrieval for Automated Explainable Fact-Checking

We introduce Plotting Agent, a system that enables users to directly manipulate plots using natural language instructions within an interactive programming environment. It maps language to plot updates. We formulate this problem as a slot-based task-oriented dialog problem, which we tackle with a sequence-to-sequence model. Practitioners such as data scientists broadly defined, and researchers interested in Natural Language Interfaces (NLIs) may find our demo useful.


Interactive Plot Manipulation using Natural Language

To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest vast amounts of relevant biomedical knowledge in scientific literature to understand the disease mechanism and related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities and their visual chemical structures, relations, and events) from the scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence.


COVID-19 Literature Knowledge Graph Construction and Drug Repurposing Report Generation

Complex natural language understanding modules in dialog systems have a richer understanding of user utterances, and thus are critical in providing a better user experience. However, these models are often created from scratch, for specific clients and use cases, and require the annotation of large datasets. This encourages the sharing of annotated data across multiple clients. To facilitate this we introduce the idea of intent features: domain and topic agnostic properties of intents that can be learned from the syntactic cues only, and hence can be shared. We introduce a new neural network architecture, the Global-Local model, that shows significant improvement over strong baselines for identifying these features in a deployed, multi-intent natural language understanding module, and, more generally, in a classification setting where a part of an utterance has to be classified utilizing the whole context.


Intent Features for Rich Natural Language Understanding

Contract Understanding is an important task of enterprises towards their compliance, audit, revenue and other business goals, given most of their processes are governed by contracts. This presentation describes a Contract Understanding system from IBM that translates this task as solving a series of NLP problems, using a transparent model design enabled by the contept of 'lingustic logical expressions' (LLEs). LLEs enable development teams in IBMs to systematically improve such transparent models with important guarantees of stability and robustness as well as manage changes to said models in a modular fashion. 


Development of an Enterprise-Grade Contract Understanding System

In this study we demonstrate the viability of deploying BERT-style models to serverless environments in a production setting. Since the freely available pre-trained models are too large to be deployed in this way, we utilize knowledge distillation and fine-tune the models on proprietary datasets for two real-world tasks: sentiment analysis and semantic textual similarity. As a result, we obtain models that are tuned for a specific domain and deployable in serverless environments. The subsequent performance analysis shows that this solution results in latency levels acceptable for production use and that it is also a cost-effective approach for small-to-medium size deployments of BERT models, all without any infrastructure overhead.


Cost-effective Deployment of BERT Models in Serverless Environment

Building automatic technical support system is an important yet challenge task. Conceptually, to answer a user question on a technical forum, a human expert has to first retrieve relevant documents, and then read them carefully to identify the answer snippet. Despite huge success the researchers have achieved in coping with general domain question answering (QA), much less attentions have been paid for investigating technical QA. Specifically, existing methods suffer from several unique challenges (i) the question and answer rarely overlaps substantially and (ii) very limited data size. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of deep transfer learning to effectively address technical QA across tasks and domains. To this end, we present an adjustable joint learning approach for document retrieval and reading comprehension tasks. Our experiments on the TechQA demonstrates superior performance compared with state-of-the-art methods.


Technical Question Answering across Tasks and Domains

Detecting an Out-of-Domain (OOD) utterance is crucial for a robust dialog system. Most dialog systems are trained on a pool of annotated OOD data to achieve this goal. However, collecting the annotated OOD data for a given domain is an expensive process. To mitigate this issue, previous works have proposed generative adversarial networks (GAN) based models to generate OOD data for a given domain automatically. However, these proposed models do not work directly with the text. They work with the text’s latent space instead, enforcing these models to include components responsible for encoding text into latent space and decoding it back, such as auto-encoder. These components increase the model complexity, making it difficult to train.
We propose OodGAN, a sequential generative adversarial network (SeqGAN) based model for OOD data generation. Our proposed model works directly on the text and hence eliminates the need to include an auto-encoder. OOD data generated using OodGAN model outperforms state-of-the-art in OOD detection metrics for ROSTD (67% relative improvement in FPR 0.95) and OSQ datasets (28% relative improvement in FPR 0.95) (Zheng et al., 2020).


OodGAN: Generative Adversarial Network for Out-of-Domain Data Generation

In developing an online question-answering system for the medical domains, natural language inference (NLI) models play a central role in question matching and intention detection. However, which models are best for our datasets? Manually selecting or tuning a model is time-consuming. Thus we experiment with automatically optimizing the model architectures on the task at hand via neural architecture search (NAS). First, we formulate a novel architecture search space based on the previous NAS literature, supporting cross-sentence attention (cross-attn) modeling. Second, we propose to modify the ENAS method to accelerate and stabilize the search results. We conduct extensive experiments on our two medical NLI tasks. Results show that our system can easily outperform the classical baseline models. We compare different NAS methods and demonstrate that our approach provides the best results.


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