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Short-answer scoring is the task of assessing the correctness of a short text given as response to a question that can come from a variety of educational scenarios. 
As only content, not form, is important, the exact wording including the explicitness of an answer should not matter. However, many state-of-the-art scoring models heavily rely on lexical information, be it word embeddings in a neural network or n-grams in an SVM. Thus, the exact wording of an answer might very well make a difference. We therefore quantify to what extent implicit language phenomena occur in short answer datasets and examine the influence they have on automatic scoring performance. We find that the level of implicitness depends on the individual question, and that some phenomena are very frequent. Resolving implicit wording to explicit formulations indeed tends to improve automatic scoring performance.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

Implicit Phenomena in Short-Answer Scoring Data

implicit language

short answer scoring

annotation

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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).

workshop paper

Early fusion models with cross-attention have shown better-than-human performance on some question answer benchmarks, while it is a poor fit for retrieval since it prevents pre-computation of the answer representations. We present a supervised data mining method using an accurate early fusion model to improve the training of an efficient late fusion retrieval model. We first train an accurate classification model with cross-attention between questions and answers. The cross-attention model is then used to annotate additional passages in order to generate weighted training examples for a neural retrieval model. The resulting retrieval model with additional data significantly outperforms retrieval models directly trained with gold annotations on Precision at N~(P@N) and Mean Reciprocal Rank~(MRR).

Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation

Generating \textit{descriptive} sentences that convey non-trivial, detailed, and salient information about images is an important goal of image captioning. In this paper we propose a novel approach to encourage captioning models to produce more detailed captions using natural language inference, based on the motivation that, among different captions of an image, descriptive captions are more likely to entail less descriptive captions. Specifically, we construct directed inference graphs for reference captions based on natural language inference. A PageRank algorithm is then employed to estimate the descriptiveness score of each node. Built on that, we use reference sampling and weighted designated rewards to guide captioning to generate descriptive captions. The results on MSCOCO show that the proposed method outperforms the baselines significantly on a wide range of conventional and descriptiveness-related evaluation metrics.

Enhancing Descriptive Image Captioning with Natural Language Inference

A common issue in real-world applications of named entity recognition and classification (NERC) is the absence of annotated data for the target entity classes during training. Zero-shot learning approaches address this issue by learning models from classes with training data that can predict classes without it. This paper presents the first approach for zero-shot NERC, introducing novel architectures that leverage the fact that textual descriptions for many entity classes occur naturally. We address the zero-shot NERC specific challenge that the not-an-entity class is not well defined as different entity classes are considered in training and testing.
For evaluation, we adapt two datasets, OntoNotes and MedMentions, emulating the difficulty of real-world zero-shot learning by testing models on the rarest entity classes. Our proposed approach outperforms baselines adapted from machine reading comprehension and zero-shot text classification. Furthermore, we assess the effect of different class descriptions for this task.

Leveraging Type Descriptions for Zero-shot Named Entity Recognition and Classification

Recently, word enhancement has become very popular for Chinese Named Entity Recognition (NER), reducing segmentation errors and increasing the semantic and boundary information of Chinese words. However, these methods tend to ignore the information of the Chinese character structure after integrating the lexical information. Chinese characters have evolved from pictographs since ancient times, and their structure often reflects more information about the characters. This paper presents a novel Multi-metadata Embedding based Cross-Transformer (MECT) to improve the performance of Chinese NER by fusing the structural information of Chinese characters. Specifically, we use multi-metadata embedding in a two-stream Transformer to integrate Chinese character features with the radical-level embedding. With the structural characteristics of Chinese characters, MECT can better capture the semantic information of Chinese characters for NER. The experimental results obtained on several well-known benchmarking datasets demonstrate the merits and superiority of the proposed MECT method.

MECT: Multi-Metadata Embedding based Cross-Transformer for Chinese Named Entity Recognition

We present an instance-based nearest neighbor approach to entity linking. In contrast to most prior entity retrieval systems which represent each entity with a single vector, we build a contextualized mention-encoder that learns to place similar mentions of the same entity closer in vector space than mentions of different entities. This approach allows all mentions of an entity to serve as ``class prototypes'' as inference involves retrieving from the full set of labeled entity mentions in the training set and applying the nearest mention neighbor's entity label. Our model is trained on a large multilingual corpus of mention pairs derived from Wikipedia hyperlinks, and performs nearest neighbor inference on an index of 700 million mentions. It is simpler to train, gives more interpretable predictions, and outperforms all other systems on two multilingual entity linking benchmarks.

MOLEMAN: Mention-Only Linking of Entities with a Mention Annotation Network

Data-to-text generation systems are trained on large datasets, such as WebNLG, RotoWire, E2E or DART. Beyond traditional token-overlap evaluation metrics (BLEU or METEOR), a key concern faced by recent generators is to control 
the factuality of the generated text with respect to the input data specification. We report on our experience when developing an automatic factuality evaluation system for data-to-text generation that we are testing on WebNLG and E2E data. We aim to prepare gold data annotated manually to identify cases where the text communicates more information than is warranted based on the input data (extra) or fails to communicate data that is part of the input (missing). While analyzing reference (data, text) samples, we encountered a range of systematic uncertainties that are related to cases on implicit phenomena in text, and the nature of non-linguistic knowledge we expect to be involved when assessing factuality. 
We derive from our experience a set of evaluation guidelines to reach high inter-annotator agreement on such cases

Evaluation Guidlines to Deal with Implicit Phenomena to Assess Factuality in Data-to-Text Generation

In this report, we describe our Transformers for text classification baseline (TTCB) submissions to a shared task on implicit and underspecified language 2021. We cast the task of predicting revision requirements in collaboratively edited instructions as text classification. We considered Transformer-based models which are the current state-of-the-art methods for text classification. We explored different training schemes, loss functions, and data augmentations. Our best result of 68.45% test
accuracy (68.84% validation accuracy), however, consists of an XLNet model with a linear annealing scheduler and a cross-entropy loss. We do not observe any significant gain on any validation metric based on our various design choices except the MiniLM which has a higher validation F1 score and is faster to train by a half but also a lower validation accuracy score.

TTCB System Description to a Shared Task on Implicit and Underspecified Language 2021

Exploring aspects of sentential meaning that are implicit or underspecified in context is important for sentence understanding. In this poster, we present our architecture based on mentions for revision requirements detection. The goal is to improve understandability, addressing some types of revisions, especially for the Replaced Pronoun type. We show that our mention-based system can predict replaced pronouns well on the mention-level. However, our combined sentence-level system does not improve on the sentence-level BERT baseline. We also present additional contrastive systems, and show results for each type of edit.

A Mention-Based System for Revision Requirements Detection

Some interpersonal verbs can implicitly attribute causality to either their subject or their object and are therefore said to carry an implicit causality (IC) bias. Through this bias, causal links can be inferred from a narrative, aiding language comprehension. We investigate whether pre-trained language models (PLMs) encode IC bias and use it at inference time. We find that to be the case, albeit to different degrees, for three distinct PLM architectures. However, causes do not always need to be implicit---when a cause is explicitly stated in a subordinate clause, an incongruent IC bias associated with the verb in the main clause leads to a delay in human processing. We hypothesize that the temporary challenge humans face in integrating the two contradicting signals, one from the lexical semantics of the verb, one from the sentence-level semantics, would be reflected in higher error rates for models on tasks dependent on causal links. The results of our study lend support to this hypothesis, suggesting that PLMs tend to prioritize lexical patterns over higher-order signals.

John praised Mary because he? Implicit Causality Bias and Its Interaction with Explicit Cues in LMs

CIs have been a long standing issue in theoreticallinguistics and the philosophy of language (Grice,1975; Karttunen and Peters, 1979; Bach, 1999;Potts, 2005, inter alia) and are highly frequent in natural, spontaneous language (Hautli-Janisz andButt, 2016). However, it is so far mostly scalar implicatures (Schuster et al., 2020, inter alia) and implicative verbs (and their veridicality) (Nairnet al., 2006; Ross and Pavlick, 2019, inter alia) that have drawn attention in theNLUcommunity. In this abstract we investigate a broader range ofCI items and constructions, with the ultimate goal of pro-viding a cross-linguistic dataset for modeling the interaction of explicit and implicit content in natural communication.

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Neural Retrieval for Question Answering with Cross-Attention Supervised Data Augmentation

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