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Previous math word problem solvers following the encoder-decoder paradigm fail to explicitly incorporate essential math symbolic constraints, leading to unexplainable and unreasonable predictions. Herein, we propose Neural-Symbolic Solver (NS-Solver) to explicitly and seamlessly incorporate different levels of symbolic constraints by auxiliary tasks. Our NS-Solver consists of a problem reader to encode problems, a programmer to generate symbolic equations, and a symbolic executor to obtain answers. Along with target expression supervision, our solver is also optimized via 4 new auxiliary objectives to enforce different symbolic reasoning: a) self-supervised number prediction task predicting both number quantity and number locations; b) commonsense constant prediction task predicting what prior knowledge (e.g. how many legs
a chicken has) is required; c) program consistency checker computing the semantic loss between predicted equation and target equation to ensure reasonable equation mapping; d) duality exploiting task exploiting the quasi-duality between symbolic equation generation and problem’s part-of-speech generation to enhance the understanding ability of a solver. Besides, to provide a more realistic and challenging benchmark for developing a universal and scalable solver, we also construct a new largescale MWP benchmark CM17K consisting of 4 kinds of MWPs (arithmetic, one-unknown linear, one-unknown non-linear, equation set) with more than 17K samples. Extensive experiments on Math23K and our CM17k demonstrate the superiority of our NS-Solver compared to state-of-the-art methods.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Neural-Symbolic Solver for Math Word Problems with Auxiliary Tasks

auxiliary learning

math word problem solving

new dataset

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poster

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

We introduce a generic seq2seq parsing framework that casts constituency parsing problems (syntactic and discourse parsing) into a series of conditional splitting decisions. Our parsing model estimates the conditional probability distribution of possible splitting points in a given text span and supports efficient top-down decoding, which is linear in number of nodes. The conditional splitting formulation together with efficient beam search inference facilitate structural consistency without relying on expensive structured inference. Crucially, for discourse analysis we show that in our formulation, discourse segmentation can be framed as a special case of parsing which allows us to perform discourse parsing without requiring segmentation as a pre-requisite. Experiments show that our model achieves good results on the standard syntactic parsing tasks under settings with/without pre-trained representations and rivals state-of-the-art (SoTA) methods that are more computationally expensive than ours. In discourse parsing, our method outperforms SoTA by a good margin.

A Conditional Splitting Framework for Efficient Constituency Parsing

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of identifying spans that represent entities in sentences. Whether the entity spans are nested or discontinuous, the NER task can be categorized into the flat NER, nested NER, and discontinuous NER subtasks. These subtasks have been mainly solved by the token-level sequence labelling or span-level classification. However, these solutions can hardly tackle the three kinds of NER subtasks concurrently. To that end, we propose to formulate the NER subtasks as an entity span sequence generation task, which can be solved by a unified sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) framework. Based on our unified framework, we can leverage the pre-trained Seq2Seq model to solve all three kinds of NER subtasks without the special design of the tagging schema or ways to enumerate spans. We exploit three types of entity representations to linearize entities into a sequence. Our proposed framework is easy-to-implement and achieves state-of-the-art (SoTA) or near SoTA performance on eight English NER datasets, including two flat NER datasets, three nested NER datasets, and three discontinuous NER datasets.

A Unified Generative Framework for Various NER Subtasks

Unlike English letters, Chinese characters have rich and specific meanings. Usually, the meaning of a word can be derived from its constituent characters in some way. 
Several previous works on syntactic parsing propose to annotate shallow word-internal structures for better utilizing character-level information. 
This work proposes to model the deep internal structures of Chinese words as dependency trees with 11 labels for distinguishing syntactic relationships. 
First, based on newly compiled annotation guidelines, we manually annotate a word-internal structure treebank (WIST) consisting of over 30K multi-char words from Chinese Penn Treebank. 
To guarantee quality, each word is independently annotated by two annotators and inconsistencies are handled by a third senior annotator. 
Second, we present detailed and interesting analysis on WIST to reveal insights on Chinese word formation. 
Third, we propose word-internal structure parsing as a new task, and conduct benchmark experiments using a competitive dependency parser. 
Finally, we present two simple ways to encode word-internal structures, leading to promising gains on the sentence-level syntactic parsing task.

An In-depth Study on Internal Structure of Chinese Words

Named Entity Recognition (NER) for low-resource languages is a both practical and challenging research problem. This paper addresses zero-shot transfer for cross-lingual NER, especially when the amount of source-language training data is also limited. The paper first proposes a simple but effective labeled sequence translation method to translate source-language training data to target languages and avoids problems such as word order change and entity span determination. With the source-language data as well as the translated data, a generation-based multilingual data augmentation method is introduced to further increase diversity by generating synthetic labeled data in multiple languages. These augmented data enable the language model based NER models to generalize better with both the language-specific features from the target-language synthetic data and the language-independent features from multilingual synthetic data. An extensive set of experiments were conducted to demonstrate encouraging cross-lingual transfer performance of the new research on a wide variety of target languages.

MulDA: A Multilingual Data Augmentation Framework for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual NER

Lexicon information and pre-trained models, such as BERT, have been combined to explore Chinese sequence labeling tasks due to their respective strengths. However, existing methods solely fuse lexicon features via a shallow and random initialized sequence layer and do not integrate them into the bottom layers of BERT. In this paper, we propose Lexicon Enhanced BERT (LEBERT) for Chinese sequence labeling, which integrates external lexicon knowledge into BERT layers directly by a Lexicon Adapter layer. Compared with existing methods, our model facilitates deep lexicon knowledge fusion at the lower layers of BERT. Experiments on ten Chinese datasets of three tasks including Named Entity Recognition, Word Segmentation, and Part-of-Speech Tagging, show that LEBERT achieves state-of-the-art results.

Lexicon Enhanced Chinese Sequence Labeling Using BERT Adapter

In recent years, math word problem solving has received considerable attention and achieved promising results, but previous methods rarely take numerical values into consideration.
Most methods treat the numerical values in the problems as number symbols, and ignore the prominent role of the numerical values in solving the problem.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach called NumS2T, which enhances math word problem solving performance by explicitly incorporating numerical values into a sequence-to-tree network.
In addition, a numerical properties prediction mechanism is used to capture the category and comparison information of numerals and measure their importance in global expressions.
Experimental results on the Math23K and APE datasets demonstrate that our model achieves better performance than existing state-of-the-art models.

Math Word Problem Solving with Explicit Numerical Values

Recent progress in deep learning has primarily been fueled by the availability of large amounts of annotated data that is obtained from highly expensive manual annotating processes. To tackle this issue of availability of annotated data, a lot of research has been done on unsupervised domain adaptation that tries to generate systems for an unlabelled target domain data, given labeled source domain data. However, the availability of annotated or labeled source domain dataset can’t always be guaranteed because of data-privacy issues. This is especially the case with medical data, as it may contain sensitive information of the patients. Source-free domain adaptation (SFDA) aims to resolve this issue by using models trained on the source data instead of using the original annotated source data. In this work, we try to build SFDA systems for semantic processing by specifically focusing on the negation detection subtask of the SemEval 2021 Task 10. We propose two approaches - ProtoAUG and Adapt-ProtoAUG that use the idea of self-entropy to choose reliable and high confidence samples, which are then used for data augmentation and subsequent training of the models. Our methods report an improvement of up to 7% in F1 score over the baseline for the Negation Detection subtask.

IITK at SemEval-2021 Task 10: Source-Free Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Class Prototypes

This paper describes our system participated in Task 6 of SemEval-2021: the task is focused on multimodal propaganda technique classification and it aims to classify given image and text into 22 classes. In this paper, a multi-model architecture for learning representations by using a Transformer encoder to fusion text and vision features is proposed. To increase the diversity of the system, we have tested both grid and region features for the visual input. Furthermore, ERNIE-ViL, a transformer- based model specifically designed for multi-mode, is applied to produce a better representation for both text and image. Besides, as the distribution of the classification labels is very unbalanced, we also make a further attempt on the evaluation function and the experiment result shows that focal loss would perform better than cross-entropy loss. Last we have won first for subtask C in the final competition.

Alpha at SemEval-2021 Tasks 6: Transformer Based Propaganda Classification

The poster describes the winning system in the End-to-end Pipeline phase for the NLPContributionGraph task. Given a paper in NLP domain, the model can automatically construct knowledge graph for this paper. The work aims to help researches read various papers and do their work more efficiently.

Boosting BERT with Sampling and Adversarial Training for Knowledge Extraction

This paper describes our system for verifying statements with tables at SemEval-2021 Task 9. We developed a two-stage verifying system based on the latest table-based pre-trained model GraPPa. Multiple networks are devised to verify different types of statements in the competition dataset and an adaptive model ensembling technique is applied to ensemble models in both stages. A statement-slot-based symbolic operation module is also used in our system to further improve the performance and stability of the system. Our model achieves second place in the 3-way classification and fourth place in the 2-way classification evaluation. Several ablation experiments show the effectiveness of different modules proposed in this paper.

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A Conditional Splitting Framework for Efficient Constituency Parsing

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