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Optical character recognition (OCR) is crucial for a deeper access to historical collections. OCR needs to account for orthographic variations, typefaces, or language evolution (i.e., new letters, word spellings), as the main source of character, word, or word segmentation transcription errors. For digital corpora of historical prints, the errors are further exacerbated due to low scan quality and lack of language standardization.

For the task of OCR post-hoc correction, we propose a neural approach based on a combination of recurrent (RNN) and deep convolutional network (ConvNet) to correct OCR transcription errors. At character level we flexibly capture errors, and decode the corrected output based on a novel attention mechanism. Accounting for the input and output similarity, we propose a new loss function that rewards the model’s correcting behavior.

Evaluation on a historical book corpus in German language shows that our models
are robust in capturing diverse OCR transcription errors and reduce the word error rate of 32.3% by more than 89%.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Neural OCR Post-Hoc Correction of Historical Corpora

german language

historical datasets

post-hoc correction

neural networks

**Welcome to ACL-IJCNLP 2021!**

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP). 

As in previous years, the program of the conference includes a poster session, tutorials, workshops and demonstrations in addition to the main conference.


We were able to keep the registration fees similar to those charged for the virtual ACL 2020. The one fee allows attendance at the main conference and any/all tutorials and workshops. These fees would be $125 Regular Early and $175 Regular Late; $50 Student Early and $75 Student Late. Early registration closes at midnight July 11, 2021 (Eastern Daylight Time).

**Reminder:** It is ACL’s policy that at least one author of each accepted paper (including ACL Finding papers) must register for the conference.

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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).

poster

In this paper we implement and compare 7 different data augmentation strategies for the task of automatic scoring of children's ability to understand others' thoughts, feelings, and desires (or ``mindreading''). 

We recruit in-domain experts to re-annotate augmented samples and determine to what extent each strategy preserves the original rating. We also carry out multiple experiments to measure how much each augmentation strategy improves the performance of automatic scoring systems. To determine the capabilities of automatic systems to generalize to unseen data, we create UK-MIND-20 - a new corpus of children's performance on tests of mindreading, consisting of 10,320 question-answer pairs.

We obtain a new state-of-the-art performance on the MIND-CA corpus, improving macro-F1-score by 6 points. Results indicate that both the number of training examples and the quality of the augmentation strategies affect the performance of the systems. The task-specific augmentations generally outperform task-agnostic augmentations. Automatic augmentations based on vectors (GloVe, FastText) perform the worst. 

We find that systems trained on MIND-CA generalize well to UK-MIND-20. We demonstrate that data augmentation strategies also improve the performance on unseen data.

Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children’s mindreading ability

Reply suggestion models help users process emails and chats faster. Previous work only studies English reply suggestion. Instead, we present MRS, a multilingual reply suggestion dataset with ten languages. MRS can be used to compare two families of models: 1) retrieval models that select the reply from a fixed set and 2) generation models that produce the reply from scratch. Therefore, MRS complements existing cross-lingual generalization benchmarks that focus on classification and sequence labeling tasks. We build a generation model and a retrieval model as baselines for MRS.
The two models have different strengths in the monolingual setting, and they require different strategies to generalize across languages. MRS is publicly available at https://github.com/zhangmozhi/mrs.

A Dataset and Baselines for Multilingual Reply Suggestion

Recent works made significant advances on summarization tasks, facilitated by summarization datasets. Several existing datasets have the form of coherent-paragraph summaries. However, these datasets were curated from academic documents that were written for experts, thus making the essential step of assessing the summarization output through human-evaluation very demanding. 

To overcome these limitations, we present a dataset based on article summaries appearing on the WikiHow website, composed of how-to articles and coherent-paragraph summaries written in plain language. We compare our dataset attributes to existing ones, including readability and world-knowledge, showing our dataset makes human evaluation significantly easier and thus, more effective. A human evaluation conducted on PubMed and the proposed dataset reinforces our findings.

WikiSum: Coherent Summarization Dataset for Efficient Human-Evaluation

Crowdsourcing is widely used to create data for common natural language understanding tasks. Despite the importance of these datasets for measuring and refining model understanding of language, there has been little focus on the crowdsourcing methods used for collecting the datasets. In this paper, we compare the efficacy of interventions that have been proposed in prior work as ways of improving data quality. We use multiple-choice question answering as a testbed and run a randomized trial by assigning crowdworkers to write questions under one of four different data collection protocols. We find that asking workers to write explanations for their examples is an ineffective stand-alone strategy for boosting NLU example difficulty. However, we find that training crowdworkers, and then using an iterative process of collecting data, sending feedback, and qualifying workers based on expert judgments is an effective means of collecting challenging data. But using crowdsourced, instead of expert judgments, to qualify workers and send feedback does not prove to be effective. We observe that the data from the iterative protocol with expert assessments is more challenging by several measures. Notably, the human--model gap on the unanimous agreement portion of this data is, on average, twice as large as the gap for the baseline protocol data.

What Ingredients Make for an Effective Crowdsourcing Protocol for Difficult NLU Data Collection Tasks?

Despite the success of various text generation metrics such as BERTScore, it is still difficult to evaluate the image captions without enough reference captions due to the diversity of the descriptions. In this paper, we introduce a new metric UMIC, an Unreferenced Metric for Image Captioning which does not require reference captions to evaluate image captions. Based on Vision-and-Language BERT, we train UMIC to discriminate negative captions via contrastive learning.
Also, we observe critical problems of the previous benchmark dataset (i.e., human annotations) on image captioning metric, and introduce a new collection of human annotations on the generated captions. We validate UMIC on four datasets, including our new dataset, and show that UMIC has a higher correlation than all previous metrics that require multiple references.

UMIC: An Unreferenced Metric for Image Captioning via Contrastive Learning

Misleading information spreads on the Internet at an incredible speed, which can lead to irreparable consequences in some cases. Therefore, it is becoming essential to develop fake news detection technologies. While substantial work has been done in this direction, one of the limitations of the current approaches is that these models are focused only on one language and do not use multilingual information. In this work, we propose a new technique based on cross-lingual evidence (CE) that can be used for fake news detection and improve existing approaches. The hypothesis of the usage of cross-lingual evidence as a feature for fake news detection is confirmed, firstly, by manual experiment based on a set of known true and fake news. Besides, we compared our fake news classification system based on the proposed feature with several strong baselines on two multi-domain datasets of general-topic news and one newly fake COVID-19 news dataset showing that combining cross-lingual evidence with strong baselines such as RoBERTa yields significant improvements in fake news detection.

Cross-lingual Evidence Improves Monolingual Fake News Detection

While there has been significant progress towards developing NLU resources for Indic languages, syntactic evaluation has been relatively less explored. Unlike English, Indic languages have rich morphosyntax, grammatical genders, free linear word-order, and highly inflectional morphology. In this paper, we introduce Vyakarana: a benchmark of gender-balanced Colorless Green sentences
in Indic languages for syntactic evaluation of multilingual language models. The benchmark comprises four syntax-related tasks: PoS Tagging, Syntax Tree-depth Prediction, Grammatical Case Marking, and Subject-Verb Agreement. We use the datasets from the evaluation tasks to probe five multilingual language models of varying architectures for syntax in Indic languages. Due to its prevalence, we also include a code-switching setting in our experiments. Our results show that the token-level and sentence-level representations from the Indic language models (IndicBERT and MuRIL) do not capture the syntax in Indic languages
as efficiently as the other highly multilingual language models. Further, our layer-wise probing experiments reveal that while mBERT, DistilmBERT, and XLM-R localize the syntax in middle layers, the Indic language models do not show such syntactic localization.

Vyākarana A Colorless Green Benchmark for Syntactic Evaluation in Indic Languages

It is reported that grammatical information is useful for machine translation (MT) task. However, the annotation of grammatical information requires the highly human resources. Furthermore, it is not trivial to adapt grammatical information to MT since grammatical annotation usually adapts tokenization standards which might not be suitable to capture the relation of two languages, and the use of subword tokenization, e.g., Byte-Pair-Encoding, to alleviate out-of-vocabulary problem might not be compatible with those annotations. In this work, we propose two methods to explicitly incorporate grammatical information without supervising annotation; first, latent phrase structure is induced in an unsupervised fashion from a multi-head attention mechanism; second, the induced phrase structures in encoder and decoder are synchronized so that they are compatible with each other using constraints during training. We demonstrate that our approach produces better performance and explainability in two tasks, translation and alignment tasks without extra resources. Although we could not obtain the high quality phrase structure in constituency parsing when evaluated monolingually, we find that the induced phrase structures enhance the explainability of translation through the synchronization constraint.

Neural Machine Translation with Synchronous Latent Phrase Structure

The presence of zero-pronoun (ZP) greatly affects the downstream tasks of NLP in pro-drop languages such as Japanese and Chinese. To tackle the problem, the previous works identified ZPs as sequence labeling on the word sequence or the linearlized tree nodes of the input. We propose a novel approach to ZP identification by casting it as a query-based argument span prediction task. Given a predicate as a query, our model predicts the omission with ZP. In the experiments, our model surpassed the sequence labeling baseline.

Zero Pronouns Identification based on Span Prediction

It is well-known that typical word embedding methods such as Word2Vec and GloVe have the property that the meaning can be composed by adding up the embeddings (additive compositionality). Several theories have been proposed to explain additive compositionality, but the following questions remain unanswered: (Q1) The assumptions of those theories do not hold for the practical word embedding. (Q2) Ordinary additive compositionality can be seen as an AND operation of word meanings, but it is not well understood how other operations, such as OR and NOT, can be computed by the embeddings. We address these issues by the idea of frequency-weighted centering at its core. This paper proposes a post-processing method for bridging the gap between practical word embedding and the assumption of theory about additive compositionality as an answer to (Q1). It also gives a method for taking OR or NOT of the meaning by linear operation of word embedding as an answer to (Q2). Moreover, we confirm experimentally that the accuracy of AND operation, i.e., the ordinary additive compositionality, can be improved by our post-processing method (3.5x improvement in top-100 accuracy) and that OR and NOT operations can be performed correctly.

Neural OCR Post-Hoc Correction of Historical Corpora

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Can vectors read minds better than experts? Comparing data augmentation strategies for the automated scoring of children’s mindreading ability

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