Korea, Republic of

Abstractive dialogue summarization aims to convert a long dialogue content into its short form where the salient information is preserved, while the redundant pieces are ignored. Different from the well-structured text, such as news and scientific articles, dialogues often consist of utterances coming from two or more interlocutors, where the conversations are often informal, verbose, and repetitive, sprinkled with false-starts, backchanneling, reconfirmations, hesitations, speaker interruptions and the salient information is often scattered across the whole chat. The above properties of conversations make it difficult to directly concentrate on scattered outstanding utterances and thus present new challenges of summarizing dialogues. In this work, we propose to explicitly have the model perceive the redundant parts of an input dialogue history, so that the model is able to pay more attention to the salient pieces. To be specific, we design two strategies to construct examples without salient pieces as negative cues. Then, the sequence-to-sequence likelihood loss is cooperated with the unlikelihood objective to drive the model focus less on the unimportant information as well as pay more attention to the salient pieces. Extensive experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that our simple method outperforms baselines with regard to both semantic matching and factual consistent based metrics. The human evaluation also proves the performance gains led by our approach.

COLING 2022

Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues

summarization

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### THE CONFERENCE WE KNOW AND WE WANT.
**COLING**, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

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 including tech-startups. COLING provides opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting discovery.

In fall of 2022, COLING will be held in Gyeongju in a hybrid format. All participants can either present at the venue site or join virtually. As more people get vaccinated, we are happy to provide safer environments for our colleagues. We believe that COLING 2022 will be one of the conferences, free from the pandemic. The hybrid format gives presenters and sponsors a valuable opportunity to promote their companies in both an online and in-person venue. For the first time in a long time, customers can interact with their sponsor's products first-hand. The online venue, too, gives sponsors the chance to network with those unable to attend the in-person session.

The hybrid format ultimately lends itself to greater exposure for our sponsors: COLING2022 will let you reach more potential partners and customers than ever before!<br><br><br>

To gain access to this event page you are required to register.<br> Find more information and pay the registration fee on event the organizer’s website **[https://coling2022.org/reg](https://coling2022.org/reg)**

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for the natural language processing and computational linguistics.

poster

Building query graphs from natural language
questions is an important step in complex question answering over knowledge graph (Complex KGQA). In general, a question can be correctly answered if its query graph is built correctly and the right answer is then retrieved by
issuing the query graph against the KG. Therefore, this paper focuses on query graph generation from natural language questions. Existing approaches for query graph generation
ignore the semantic structure of a question, resulting in a large number of noisy query graph
candidates that undermine prediction accuracies. In this paper, we define six semantic
structures from common questions in KGQA
and develop a novel Structure-BERT to predict the semantic structure of a question. By
doing so, we can first filter out noisy candidate query graphs, and then rank the remaining
candidates with a BERT-based ranking model.
Extensive experiments on two popular benchmarks MetaQA and WebQuestionsSP (WSP)
demonstrate the effectiveness of our method as
compared to state-of-the-arts.

Semantic Structure based Query Graph Prediction for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

The International Classification of Diseases (ICD) is the foundation of global health statistics and epidemiology. The ICD is designed to translate health conditions into alphanumeric codes. A number of approaches have been proposed for automatic ICD coding, since manual coding is labor-intensive and there is a global shortage of healthcare workers. However, existing studies did not exploit the discourse structure of clinical notes, which provides rich contextual information for code assignment. In this paper, we exploit the discourse structure by leveraging section type classification and section type embeddings. We also focus on the class-imbalanced problem and the heterogeneous writing style between clinical notes and ICD code definitions. The proposed reconciled embedding approach is able to tackle them simultaneously. Experimental results on the MIMIC dataset show that our model outperforms all previous state-of-the-art models by a large margin.
The source code is available at https://github.com/discnet2022/discnet


Automatic ICD coding exploiting discourse structure and reconciled code embeddings

Unsupervised contrastive sentence embedding models, e.g., unsupervised SimCSE, use the InfoNCE loss function in training. Theoretically, we expect to use larger batches to get more adequate comparisons among samples and avoid overfitting. However, increasing batch size leads to performance degradation when it exceeds a threshold, which is probably due to the introduction of false-negative pairs through statistical observation. To alleviate this problem, we introduce a simple smoothing strategy upon the InfoNCE loss function, termed Gaussian Smoothed InfoNCE (GS-InfoNCE). In other words, we add random Gaussian noise as an extension to the negative pairs without increasing the batch size. Through experiments on the semantic text similarity tasks, though simple, the proposed smoothing strategy brings improvements to unsupervised SimCSE.

Smoothed Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding

We examine the inducement of rare but severe errors in English-Chinese and Chinese-English in-domain neural machine translation by minimal deletion of the source text with character-based models. By deleting a single character, we can induce severe translation errors. We categorize these errors and compare the results of deleting single characters and single words. We also examine the effect of training data size on the number and types of pathological cases induced by these minimal perturbations, finding significant variation. We find that deleting a word hurts overall translation score more than deleting a character, but certain errors are more likely to occur when deleting characters, with language direction also influencing the effect.

Rare but Severe Neural Machine Translation Errors Induced by Minimal Deletion: An Empirical Study on Chinese and English

In-the-Wild Video Question Answering

Entity linking, which aims at aligning ambiguous entity mentions to their referent entities in a knowledge base, plays a key role in multiple natural language processing tasks. Recently, zero-shot entity linking task has become a research hotspot, which links mentions to unseen entities to challenge the generalization ability. For this task, the training set and test set are from different domains, and thus entity linking models tend to be overfitting due to the tendency of memorizing the properties of entities that appear frequently in the training set. We argue that general ultra-fine-grained type information can help the linking models to learn contextual commonality and improve their generalization ability to tackle the overfitting problem. However, in the zero-shot entity linking setting, any type information is not available and entities are only identified by textual descriptions. Thus, we first extract the ultra-fine type information from the entity textual descriptions. Then, we propose a hierarchical multi-task model to improve the high-level zero-shot entity linking candidate generation task by utilizing the entity typing task as an auxiliary low-level task, which introduces extracted ultra-fine type information into the candidate generation task. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing the ultra-fine entity type information and our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance.

Improving Zero-Shot Entity Linking Candidate Generation with Ultra-Fine Entity Type Information

Fact-checking has gained increasing attention due to the widespread of falsified information. Most fact-checking approaches focus on claims made in English only due to the data scarcity issue in other languages. The lack of fact-checking datasets in low-resource languages calls for an effective cross-lingual transfer technique for fact-checking. Additionally, trustworthy information in different languages can be complementary and helpful in verifying facts. To this end, we present the first fact-checking framework augmented with cross-lingual retrieval that aggregates evidence retrieved from multiple languages through a cross-lingual retriever. Given the absence of cross-lingual information retrieval datasets with claim-like queries, we train the retriever with our proposed Cross-lingual Inverse Cloze Task (X-ICT), a self-supervised algorithm that creates training instances by translating the title of a passage. The goal for X-ICT is to learn cross-lingual retrieval in which the model learns to identify the passage corresponding to a given translated title. On the X-Fact dataset, our approach achieves 2.23% absolute F1 improvement in the zero-shot cross-lingual setup over prior systems. The source code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/khuangaf/CONCRETE.

CONCRETE: Improving Cross-lingual Fact-checking with Cross-lingual Retrieval

Patients with low health literacy usually have difficulty understanding medical jargon and the complex structure of professional medical language. Although some studies are proposed to automatically translate expert language into layperson-understandable language, only a few of them focus on both accuracy and readability aspects simultaneously in the clinical domain. Thus, simplification of the clinical language is still a challenging task, but unfortunately, it is not yet fully addressed in previous work. To benchmark this task, we construct a new dataset named MedLane to support the development and evaluation of automated clinical language simplification approaches. Besides, we propose a new model called DECLARE that follows the human annotation procedure and achieves state-of-the-art performance compared with eight strong baselines. To fairly evaluate the performance, we also propose three specific evaluation metrics. Experimental results demonstrate the utility of the annotated MedLane dataset and the effectiveness of the proposed model DECLARE.


Benchmarking Automated Clinical Language Simplification: Dataset, Algorithm, and Evaluation

Procedural text understanding is a challenging language reasoning task that requires models to track entity states across the development of a narrative. A complete procedural understanding solution should combine three core aspects: local and global views of the inputs, and global view of outputs. Prior methods considered a subset of these aspects, resulting in either low precision or low recall. In this paper, we propose Coalescing Global and Local Information (CGLI), a new model that builds entity- and timestep-aware input representations (local input) considering the whole context (global input), and we jointly model the entity states with a structured prediction objective (global output). Thus, CGLI simultaneously optimizes for both precision and recall. We extend CGLI with additional output layers and integrate it into a story reasoning framework. Extensive experiments on a popular procedural text understanding dataset show that our model achieves state-of-the-art results; experiments on a story reasoning benchmark show the positive impact of our model on downstream reasoning.

Coalescing Global and Local Information for Procedural Text Understanding

In the presentation, we present our work "Multi-Layer Pseudo-Siamese Biaffine Model for Dependency Parsing". In this work, we propose a multi-layer architecture for dependency parsing, where the biaffine method plays important roles in both scorer and attention mechanism at the same time in each layer. The presentation contains the following in order: 1) We introduce the task and our motivation. 2) We show the model. 3) We show the experiments for comparison of three aspects. 4) We show the key points of analysis. 5) We show the conclusion.

Summarizing Dialogues with Negative Cues

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Semantic Structure based Query Graph Prediction for Question Answering over Knowledge Graph

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