Spain

Code-switching has long interested linguists, with computational work in particular focusing on speech and social media data (Sitaram et al., 2019). This paper contrasts these informal instances of code-switching to its appearance in more formal registers, by examining the mixture of languages in the Deutsches Textarchiv (DTA), a corpus of 1406 primarily German books from the 17th to 19th centuries. We automatically annotate and manually inspect spans of six embedded languages (Latin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, and Greek) in the corpus. We quantitatively analyze the differences between code-switching patterns in these books and those in more typically studied speech and social media corpora. Furthermore, we address the practical task of predicting code-switching from features of the matrix language alone in the DTA corpus. Such classifiers can help reduce errors when optical character recognition or speech transcription is applied to a large corpus with rare embedded languages.

COLING 2020

Detecting de minimis Code-Switching in Historical German Books

historical text

german

code-switching

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, 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.

technical paper

Emotion detection in conversations (EDC) is to detect the emotion for each utterance in conversations that have multiple speakers.
Different from the traditional non-conversational emotion detection, the model for EDC should be context-sensitive (e.g., understanding the whole conversation rather than one utterance) and speaker-sensitive (e.g., understanding which utterance belongs to which speaker).
In this paper, we propose a transformer-based context- and speaker-sensitive model for EDC, namely HiTrans, which consists of two hierarchical transformers.
We utilize BERT as the low-level transformer to generate local utterance representations, and feed them into another high-level transformer so that utterance representations could be sensitive to the global context of the conversation.
Moreover, we exploit an auxiliary task to make our model speaker-sensitive, called pairwise utterance speaker verification (PUSV), which aims to classify whether two utterances belong to the same speaker.
We evaluate our model on three benchmark datasets, namely EmoryNLP, MELD and IEMOCAP. Results show that our model outperforms previous state-of-the-art models.

HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations

One of the remaining challenges for aspect term extraction in sentiment analysis resides in the extraction of phrase-level aspect terms, which is non-trivial to determine the boundaries of such terms. In this paper, we aim to address this issue by incorporating the span annotations of constituents of a sentence to leverage the syntactic information in neural network models. To this end, we first construct a constituency lattice structure based on the constituents of a constituency
tree. Then, we present two approaches to encoding the constituency lattice using BiLSTM-CRF and BERT as the base models, respectively. We experimented on two benchmark datasets to evaluate the two models, and the results confirm their superiority with respective 3.17 and 1.35 points gained in F1-Measure over the current state of the art. The improvements justify the effectiveness of the constituency lattice for aspect term extraction.

Constituency Lattice Encoding for Aspect Term Extraction

This paper brings together approaches from the fields of NLP and psychometric measurement to address the problem of predicting examinee proficiency from responses to short-answer questions (SAQs). While previous approaches train on manually labeled data to predict the human ratings assigned to SAQ responses, the approach presented here models examinee proficiency directly and does not require manually labeled data to train on. We use data from a large medical exam where experimental SAQ items are embedded alongside 106 scored multiple-choice questions (MCQs). First, the latent trait of examinee proficiency is measured using the scored MCQs and then a model is trained on the experimental SAQ responses as input, aiming to predict proficiency as its target variable. The predicted value is then used as a “score” for the SAQ response and evaluated in terms of its contribution to the precision of proficiency estimation.

Automated Prediction of Examinee Proficiency from Short-Answer Questions

In automatic speech translation (ST), traditional cascade approaches involving separate transcription and translation steps are giving ground to increasingly competitive and more robust direct solutions. In particular, by translating speech audio data without intermediate transcription, direct ST models are able to leverage and preserve essential information present in the input (e.g.speaker’s vocal characteristics) that is otherwise lost in the cascade framework. Although such ability proved to be useful for gender translation, direct ST is nonetheless affected by gender bias just like its cascade counterpart, as well as machine translation and numerous other natural language processing applications. Moreover, direct ST systems that exclusively rely on vocal biometric features as a gender cue can be unsuitable or even potentially problematic for certain users. Going beyond speech signals, in this paper we compare different approaches to inform direct ST models about the speaker’s gender and test their ability to handle gender translation from English into Italian and French. To this aim, we manually annotated large datasets with speak-ers’ gender information and used them for experiments reflecting different possible real-world scenarios. Our results show that gender-aware direct ST solutions can significantly outperform strong – but gender-unaware – direct ST models. In particular, the translation of gender-marked words can increase up to 30 points in accuracy while preserving overall translation quality.

Breeding Gender-aware Direct Speech Translation Systems

Advances in Question Answering (QA) research require additional datasets for new domains, languages, and types of questions, as well as for performance increases. Human creation of a QA dataset like SQuAD, however, is expensive. As an alternative, an unsupervised QA approach has been proposed so that QA training data can be generated automatically. However, the performance of unsupervised QA is much lower than that of supervised QA models. We identify two anomalies in the automatically generated questions and propose how they can be mitigated. We show our approach helps improve unsupervised QA significantly across a number of QA tasks.

Handling Anomalies of Synthetic Questions in Unsupervised Question Answering

Rumors are manufactured with no respect for accuracy, but can circulate quickly and widely by "word-of-post'' through social media conversations. Conversation tree encodes important information indicative of the credibility of rumor. Existing conversation-based techniques for rumor detection either just strictly follow tree edges or treat all the posts fully-connected during feature learning. In this paper, we propose a novel detection model based on tree transformer to better utilize user interactions in the dialogue where post-level self-attention plays the key role for aggregating the intra-/inter-subtree stances. Experimental results on the TWITTER and PHEME datasets show that the proposed approach consistently improves rumor detection performance.

Debunking Rumors on Twitter with Tree Transformer

Deep question generation (DQG) aims to generate complex questions through reasoning over multiple documents. The task is challenging and underexplored. Existing methods mainly focus on enhancing document representations, with little attention paid to the answer information, which may result in the generated question not matching the answer type and being answer irrelevant. In this paper, we propose an Answer-driven Deep Question Generation (ADDQG) model based on the encoder-decoder framework. The model makes better use of the target answer as a guidance to facilitate question generation. First, we propose an answer-aware initialization module with a gated connection layer which introduces both document and answer information to the decoder, thus helping to guide the choice of answer-focused question words. Then a semantic-rich fusion attention mechanism is designed to support the decoding process, which integrates the answer with the document representations to promote the proper handling
of answer information during generation. Moreover, reinforcement learning is applied to integrate both syntactic and semantic metrics as the reward to enhance the training of the ADDQG. Extensive experiments on the HotpotQA dataset show that ADDQG outperforms state-of-the-art models in both automatic and human evaluations.


Answer-driven Deep Question Generation based on Reinforcement
Learning

Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a widely used format for encoding linguistic information in language documentation projects and scholarly papers. The manual production of IGT takes time and requires linguistic expertise. We attempt to address this issue by creating automatic glossing models, using modern multi-source neural models that additionally leverage easy-to-collect translations. We further explore cross-lingual transfer and a simple output length control mechanism, further refining our models. Evaluated on three challenging low-resource scenarios, our approach significantly outperforms a recent, state-of-the-art baseline, particularly improving on overall accuracy as well as lemma and tag recall.

Automatic Interlinear Glossing for Under-Resourced Languages Leveraging Translations

We propose a novel method of automatic sentence alignment from noisy parallel documents. We first formalize the sentence alignment problem as the independent predictions of spans in the target document from sentences in the source document. We then introduce a total optimization method using integer linear programming to prevent span overlapping and obtain non-monotonic alignments. We implement cross-language span prediction by fine-tuning pre-trained multilingual language models based on BERT architecture and train them using pseudo-labeled data obtained from unsupervised sentence alignment method. While the baseline methods use sentence embeddings and assume monotonic alignment, our method can capture the token-to-token interaction between the tokens of source and target text and handle non-monotonic alignments. In sentence alignment experiments on English-Japanese, our method achieved 70.3 F1 scores, which are +8.0 points higher than the baseline method. In particular, our method improved by +53.9 F1 scores for extracting non-parallel sentences. Our method improved the downstream machine translation accuracy by 4.1 BLEU scores when the extracted bilingual sentences are used for fine-tuning a pre-trained Japanese-to-English translation model.

SpanAlign: Sentence Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction and ILP

Active learning is able to significantly reduce the annotation cost for data-driven techniques. However, previous active learning approaches for natural language processing mainly depend on the entropy-based uncertainty criterion, and ignore the characteristics of natural language. In this paper, we propose a pre-trained language model based active learning approach for sentence matching. Differing from previous active learning, it can provide linguistic criteria from the pre-trained language model to measure instances and help select more effective instances for annotation. Experiments demonstrate our approach can achieve greater accuracy with fewer labeled training instances.

Detecting de minimis Code-Switching in Historical German Books

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Schwa-deletion in German noun-noun compounds

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Detecting de minimis Code-Switching in Historical German Books

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Next from COLING 2020

HiTrans: A Transformer-Based Context- and Speaker-Sensitive Model for Emotion Detection in Conversations

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Schwa-deletion in German noun-noun compounds

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