Korea, Republic of

Automatic medical question summarization can significantly help the system to understand consumer health questions and retrieve correct answers. The Seq2Seq model based on maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) has been
applied in this task, which faces two general problems: the model can not capture well question focus and and the traditional MLE strategy lacks the ability to understand sentence-level semantics. To alleviate these problems, we propose a novel question focus-driven contrastive learning framework (QFCL). Specially, we propose an easy and effective approach to generate hard negative samples based on the question focus, and exploit contrastive learning at both
encoder and decoder to obtain better sentence-level representations. On three medical benchmark datasets, our proposed model achieves new state-of-the-art results, and obtains a performance gain of 5.33, 12.85 and 3.81 points over the baseline BART model on three datasets respectively. Further human judgement and detailed analysis prove that our QFCL model learns better sentence representations with the ability to distinguish different sentence meanings, and generates high-quality summaries by capturing question focus.

COLING 2022

Focus-Driven Contrastive Learning for Medical Question Summarization

contrastive learning

medical

summarization

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IJCNLP-AACL 2021

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

technical paper

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

Moderating user comments and promoting healthy understanding is a challenging task, especially in the context of polarized topics such as climate change. We propose a moderation tool to assist moderators in promoting mutual understanding in regard to this topic. The approach is twofold. First, we train classifiers to label incoming posts for the arguments they entail, with a specific focus on minority arguments. We apply active learning to further supplement the training data with rare arguments. Second, we dive deeper into singular arguments and extract the lexical patterns that distinguish each argument from the others. Our findings indicate that climate change arguments form clearly separable clusters in the embedding space. These classes are characterized by their own unique lexical patterns that provide a quick insight in an argument's key concepts. Additionally, supplementing our training data was necessary for our classifiers to be able to adequately recognize rare arguments. We argue that this detailed rundown of each argument provides insight into where others are coming from. These computational approaches can be part of the toolkit for content moderators and researchers struggling with other polarized debates.

Detecting Minority Arguments for Mutual Understanding: A Moderation Tool for the Online Climate Change Debate

Many recent sentence-level event detection efforts focus on enriching sentence semantics, e.g., via multi-task or prompt-based learning. Despite the promising performance, these methods commonly depend on label-extensive manual annotations or require domain expertise to design sophisticated templates and rules. This paper proposes a new paradigm, named dialogue-based explanation, to enhance sentence semantics for event detection. By saying dialogue-based explanation of an event, we mean explaining it through a consistent information-intensive dialogue, with the original event description as the start utterance. We propose three simple dialogue generation methods, whose outputs are then fed into a hybrid attention mechanism to characterize the complementary event semantics. Extensive experimental results on two event detection datasets verify the effectiveness of our method and suggest promising research opportunities in the dialogue-based explanation paradigm.

DESED: Dialogue-based Explanation for Sentence-level Event Detection

Often questions provided to open-domain question answering systems are ambiguous. Traditional QA systems that provide a single answer are incapable of answering ambiguous questions since the question may be interpreted in several ways and may have multiple distinct answers. In this paper, we address multi-answer retrieval which entails retrieving passages that can capture majority of the diverse answers to the question. We propose a re-ranking based approach using Determinantal point processes utilizing BERT as kernels. Our method jointly considers query-passage relevance and passage-passage correlation to retrieve passages that are both query-relevant and diverse. Results demonstrate that our re-ranking technique outperforms state-of-the-art method on the AmbigQA dataset.

Diverse Multi-Answer Retrieval with Determinantal Point Processes

Lexical substitution, which aims to generate substitutes for a target word given a context, is an important natural language processing task useful in many applications. Due to the paucity of annotated data, existing methods for lexical substitution tend to rely on manually curated lexical resources and contextual word embedding models. Methods based on lexical resources are likely to miss relevant substitutes whereas relying only on contextual word embedding models fails to provide adequate information on the impact of a substitute in the entire context and the overall meaning of the input. We proposed CILex, which uses contextual sentence embeddings along with methods that capture additional Context Information complimenting contextual word embeddings for Lexical substitution. This ensured the semantic consistency of a substitute with the target word while maintaining the overall meaning of the sentence. Our experimental comparisons with previously proposed methods indicated that our solution is now the state-of-the-art on both the widely used LS07 and CoInCo datasets with P@1 scores of 55.96% and 57.25% for lexical substitution. The implementation of the proposed approach is available at https://github.com/sandaruSen/CILex under the MIT license.

CILex: An Investigation of Context Information for Lexical Substitution Methods

We will share the work for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots. Due to the increasing use of service chatbots in E-commerce platforms in recent years, customer satisfaction prediction (CSP) is gaining more and more attention. CSP is dedicated to evaluating subjective customer satisfaction in conversational service and thus helps improve customer service experience. However, previous methods focus on modeling customer-chatbot interaction across different turns, which are hard to represent the important dynamic satisfaction states throughout the customer journey. In this work, we investigate the problem of satisfaction states tracking and its effects on CSP in E-commerce service chatbots. To this end, we propose a dialogue-level classification model named DialogueCSP to track satisfaction states for CSP. In particular, we explore a novel two-step interaction module to represent the dynamic satisfaction states at each turn. In order to capture dialogue-level satisfaction states for CSP, we further introduce dialogue-aware attentions to integrate historical informative cues into the interaction module. To evaluate the proposed approach, we also build a Chinese E-commerce dataset for CSP. Experiment results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms multiple baselines, illustrating the benefits of satisfaction states tracking on CSP.


Tracking Satisfaction States for Customer Satisfaction Prediction in E-commerce Service Chatbots

Multi-Document Summarization (MDS) commonly employs the 2-stage extract-then-abstract paradigm, which first extracts a relatively short meta-document, then feeds it into the deep neural networks to generate an abstract. Previous work usually takes the ROUGE score as the label for training a scoring model to evaluate source documents. However, the trained scoring model is prone to under-fitting for low-resource settings, as it relies on the training data. To extract documents effectively, we construct prompting templates that invoke the underlying knowledge in Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) to calculate the document and keyword's perplexity, which can assess the document's semantic salience. Our unsupervised approach can be applied as a plug-in to boost other metrics for evaluating a document's salience, thus improving the subsequent abstract generation. We get positive results on 2 MDS datasets, 2 data settings, and 2 abstractive backbone models, showing our method's effectiveness.

UPER: Boosting Multi-Document Summarization with an Unsupervised Prompt-based Extractor

We study the problem of integrating cognitive language processing signals (e.g., eye-tracking or EEG data) into pre-trained models like BERT. Existing methods typically fine-tune pre-trained models on cognitive data, ignoring the semantic gap between the texts and cognitive signals. To fill the gap, we propose CogBERT, a framework that can induce fine-grained cognitive features from cognitive data and incorporate cognitive features into BERT by adaptively adjusting the weight of cognitive features for different NLP tasks. Extensive experiments show that: (1) Cognition-guided pre-trained models can consistently perform better than basic pre-trained models on ten NLP tasks. (2) Different cognitive features contribute differently to different NLP tasks. Based on this observation, we give a fine-grained explanation of why cognitive data is helpful for NLP. (3) Different transformer layers of pre-trained models should encode different cognitive features, with word-level cognitive features at the bottom and semantic-level cognitive features at the top. (4) Attention visualization demonstrates that CogBERT can align with human gaze patterns and improves its natural language understanding ability.


CogBERT: Cognition-Guided Pre-trained Language Models

Script knowledge schank1977scripts is useful for a variety of NLP tasks. However, existing resources only cover a small number of activities, limiting its practical usefulness. In this work, we propose a zero-shot learning approach to \textbf{script parsing}, the task of tagging texts with scenario-specific event and participant types, which enables us to acquire script knowledge without domain-specific annotations. We (1) learn representations of potential event and participant mentions by promoting class consistency according to the annotated data; (2) perform clustering on the event / participant candidates from unannotated texts that belongs to an unseen scenario. The model achieves 68.1/74.4 average F1 for event / participant parsing, respectively, outperforming a previous CRF model that, in contrast, has access to scenario-specific supervision. We also evaluate the model by testing on a different corpus, where it achieved 55.5/54.0 average F1 for event / participant parsing.

Zero-shot Script Parsing

We present a manually annotated corpus of 10,000 tweets containing public reports of five COVID-19 events, including positive and negative tests, deaths, denied access to testing, claimed cures and preventions. We designed slot-filling questions for each event type and annotated a total of 28 fine-grained slots, such as the location of events, recent travel, and close contacts. We show that our corpus can support fine-tuning BERT-based classifiers to automatically extract publicly reported events, which can be further collected for building a knowledge base. Our knowledge base is constructed over Twitter data covering two years and currently covers over 4.2M events. It can answer complex queries with high precision, such as "Which organizations have employees that tested positive in Philadelphia?" We believe our proposed methodology could be quickly applied to develop knowledge bases for new domains in response to an emerging crisis, including natural disasters or future disease outbreaks.

Extracting a Knowledge Base of COVID-19 Events from Social Media

Neural topic models have been widely used in discovering the latent semantics from a cor- pus. Recently, there are several researches on hierarchical neural topic models since the re- lationships among topics are valuable for data analysis and exploration. However, the exist- ing hierarchical neural topic models are limited to generate a single topic tree. In this study, we present a nonparametric forest-structured neural topic model by firstly applying the self- attention mechanism to capture parent-child topic relationships, and then build a sparse di- rected acyclic graph to form a topic forest. Ex- periments indicate that our model can automat- ically learn a forest-structured topic hierarchy with indefinite numbers of trees and leaves, and significantly outperforms the baseline models on topic hierarchical rationality and affinity.

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Focus-Driven Contrastive Learning for Medical Question Summarization

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