Korea, Republic of

Coreference resolution is a key step in natural language understanding. Developments in coreference resolution are mainly focused on improving the performance on standard datasets annotated for coreference resolution. However, coreference resolution is an intermediate step for text understanding and it is not clear how these improvements translate into downstream task performance. In this paper, we perform a thorough investigation on the impact of coreference resolvers in multiple settings of community-based question answering task, i.e., answer selection with long answers. Our settings cover multiple text domains and encompass several answer selection methods. We first inspect extrinsic evaluation of coreference resolvers on answer selection by using coreference relations to decontextualize individual sentences of candidate answers, and then annotate a subset of answers with coreference information for intrinsic evaluation. The results of our extrinsic evaluation show that while there is a significant difference between the performance of the rule-based system vs. state-of-the-art neural model on coreference resolution datasets, we do not observe a considerable difference on their impact on downstream models. Our intrinsic evaluation shows that (i) resolving coreference relations on less-formal text genres is more difficult even for trained annotators, and (ii) the values of linguistic-agnostic coreference evaluation metrics do not correlate with the impact on downstream data.

COLING 2022

Evaluating Coreference Resolvers on Community-based Question Answering: From Rule-based to State of the Art

coreference resolution

question answering

evaluation

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

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 and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

workshop paper

[![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/81a3c0317d24f663b49b996875024d45.png)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.coling-1/)



### 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.

The ever growing amount of research publications demands computational assistance for everyone trying to keep track with scientific processes. Topic modeling has become a popular approach for finding scientific topics in static collections of research papers. However, the reality of continuously growing corpora of scholarly documents poses a major challenge for traditional approaches. We introduce RollingLDA for an ongoing monitoring of research topics, which offers the possibility of sequential modeling of dynamically growing corpora with time consistency of time series resulting from the modeled texts. We evaluate its capability to detect research topics and present a Shiny App as an easy-to-use interface. In addition, we illustrate usage scenarios for different user groups such as researchers, students, journalists, or policy-makers.

Finding Scientific Topics in Continuously Growing Text Corpora

Recently introduced transformer-based article encoders (TAEs) designed to produce similar vector representations for mutually related scientific articles have demonstrated strong performance on benchmark datasets for scientific article recommendation. However, the existing benchmark datasets are predominantly focused on single domains and, in some cases, contain easy negatives in small candidate pools. Evaluating representations on such benchmarks might obscure the realistic performance of TAEs in setups with thousands of articles in candidate pools. In this work, we evaluate TAEs on large benchmarks with more challenging candidate pools. We compare the performance of TAEs with a lexical retrieval baseline model BM25 on the task of citation recommendation, where the model produces a list of recommendations for citing in a given input article. We find out that BM25 is still very competitive with the state-of-the-art neural retrievers, a finding which is surprising given the strong performance of TAEs on small benchmarks. As a remedy for the limitations of the existing benchmarks, we propose a new benchmark dataset for evaluating scientific article representations: Multi-Domain Citation Recommendation dataset (MDCR), which covers different scientific fields and contains challenging candidate pools.

Large-scale Evaluation of Transformer-based Article Encoders on the Task of Citation Recommendation

With the help of online tools, unscrupulous authors can today generate a pseudo-scientific article and attempt to publish it. Some of these tools work by replacing or paraphrasing existing texts to produce new content, but they have a tendency to generate nonsensical expressions. A recent study introduced the concept of “tortured phrase", an unexpected odd phrase that appears instead of the fixed expression. E.g. "counterfeit consciousness" instead of "artificial intelligence". The present study aims at investigating how tortured phrases, that are not yet listed, can be detected automatically. We conducted several experiments, including non-neural binary classification, neural binary classification and cosine similarity comparison of the phrase tokens, yielding noticeable results.

Investigating the detection of Tortured Phrases in Scientific Literature

Logical structure recovery in scientific articles associates text with a semantic section of the article. Although previous work has disregarded the surrounding context of a line, we model this important information by employing line-level attention on top of a transformer-based scientific document processing pipeline. With the addition of loss function engineering and data augmentation techniques with semi-supervised learning, our method improves classification performance by 10% compared to a recent state-of-the-art model. Our parsimonious, text-only method achieves a performance comparable to that of other works that use rich document features such as font and spatial position, using less data without sacrificing performance, resulting in a lightweight training pipeline.

Lightweight Contextual Logical Structure Recovery

Recently, there have been numerous research in Natural Language Processing on citation analysis in scientific literature. Studies of citation behavior aim at finding how researchers cited a paper in their work.
In this paper, we are interested in identifying cited papers that are criticized. 
Recent research introduces the concept of Critical citations which provides a useful theoretical framework, making criticism an important part of scientific progress. Indeed, identifying critics could be a way to spot errors and thus encourage self-correction of science.
In this work, we investigate how to automatically classify the critical citation contexts using Natural Language Processing (NLP). Our classification task consists of predicting critical or non-critical labels for citation contexts. 
For this, we experiment and compare different methods, including rule-based and machine learning methods, to classify critical vs. non-critical citation contexts.
Our experiments show that fine-tuning pretrained transformer model RoBERTa achieved the highest performance among all systems.

Citation Context Classification: Critical vs Non-critical

Communicative functions are an important rhetorical feature of scientific writing. Sentence embeddings that contain such features are highly valuable for the argumentative analysis of scientific documents, with applications in document alignment, recommendation, and academic writing assistance. Moreover, embeddings can provide a possible solution to the open-set problem, where models need to generalize to new communicative functions unseen at training time. However, existing sentence representation models are not suited for detecting functional similarity since they only consider lexical or semantic similarities. To remedy this, we propose a combined approach of distant supervision and metric learning to make a representation model more aware of the functional part of a sentence. We first leverage an existing academic phrase database to label sentences automatically with their functions. Then, we train an embedding model to capture similarities and dissimilarities from a rhetorical perspective. The experimental results demonstrate that the embeddings obtained from our model are more advantageous than existing models when retrieving functionally similar sentences. We also provide an extensive analysis of the performance differences between five metric learning objectives, revealing that traditional methods (e.g., softmax cross-entropy loss and triplet loss) outperform state-of-the-art techniques.

Incorporating the Rhetoric of Scientific Language into Sentence Embeddings using Phrase-guided Distant Supervision and Metric Learning

Existing dense retrieval models for scientific documents have been optimized for either retrieval by short queries, or for document similarity, but usually not for both. In this paper we explore the space of combining multiple objectives to achieve a single representation model that presents a good balance between both modes of dense retrieval, combining the relevance judgements from MS MARCO with the citation similarity of SPECTER, and the self-supervised objective of independent cropping. We also consider the addition of training data from document co-citation in a sentence context and domain-specific synthetic data. We show that combining multiple objectives yields models that generalize well across different benchmark tasks, improving up to 73\% over models trained on a single objective.

Multi-objective Representation Learning for Scientific Document Retrieval

Bridging reference resolution is a reference resolution task of finding non-identical antecedents. One challenge of this task is that continuous essentiality between an anaphor and its antecedent is not well-represented in existing datasets.
We propose a crowdsourcing-based annotation method to obtain continuous labels.
Experimental results showed that adding our constructed dataset improves the resolution performance.

Improving Bridging Reference Resolution using Continuous Essentiality from Crowdsourcing

In this paper we present baseline results for Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) in Dutch using gold-standard (i.e non-predicted) event mentions. A newly developed benchmark dataset allows us to properly investigate the possibility of creating ECR systems for both within and cross-document coreference. We give an overview of the state of the art for ECR in other languages, as well as a detailed overview of existing ECR resources. Afterwards, we provide a comparative report on our own dataset. We apply a significant number of approaches that have been shown to attain good results for English ECR including feature-based models, monolingual transformer language models and multilingual language models. The best results were obtained using the monolingual BERTje model. Finally, results for all models are thoroughly analysed and visualised, as to provide insight into the inner workings of ECR and long-distance semantic NLP tasks in general.

Investigating Cross-Document Event Coreference for Dutch

In this paper, we frame the problem of co-reference resolution in dialogue as a dynamic social process in which mentions to people previously known and newly introduced are mixed when people know each other well. We restructured an existing data set for the Friends sitcom as a coreference task that evolves over time, where close friends make reference to other people either part of their common ground (inner circle) or not (outer circle). We expect that awareness of common ground is key in social dialogue in order to resolve references to the inner social circle, whereas local contextual information plays a more important role for outer circle mentions. Our analysis of these references confirms that there are differences in naming and introducing these people. We also experimented with the SpanBERT coreference system with and without fine-tuning to measure whether preceding discourse contexts matter for resolving inner and outer circle mentions. Our results show that more inner circle mentions lead to a decrease in model performance, and that fine-tuning on preceding contexts reduces false negatives for both inner and outer circle mentions but increases the false positives as well, showing that the models overfit on these contexts.


Evaluating Coreference Resolvers on Community-based Question Answering: From Rule-based to State of the Art

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