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This paper presents the study of sentiment analysis for Amharic social media texts. As the number of social media users is ever-increasing, social media platforms would like to understand the latent meaning and sentiments of a text to enhance decision-making procedures. However, low-resource languages such as Amharic have received less attention due to several reasons such as lack of well-annotated datasets, unavailability of computing resources, and fewer or no expert researchers in the area. This research addresses three main research questions. We first explore the suitability of existing tools for the sentiment analysis task. Annotation tools are scarce to support large-scale annotation tasks in Amharic. Also, the existing crowdsourcing platforms do not support Amharic text annotation. Hence, we build a social-network-friendly annotation tool called `ASAB&#39; using the Telegram bot. We collect 9.4k tweets, where each tweet is annotated by three Telegram users. Moreover, we explore the suitability of machine learning approaches for Amharic sentiment analysis. The FLAIR deep learning text classifier, based on network embeddings that are computed from a distributional thesaurus, outperforms other supervised classifiers. We further investigate the challenges in building a sentiment analysis system for Amharic and we found that the widespread usage of sarcasm and figurative speech are the main issues in dealing with the problem. To advance the sentiment analysis research in Amharic and other related low-resource languages, we release the dataset, the annotation tool, source code, and models publicly under a permissive.

COLING 2020

Exploring Amharic Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Texts: Building Annotation Tools and Classification Models.

asab annotation tool

amharic sentiment

social media text

sentiment analysis

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.

This paper presents the study of sentiment analysis for Amharic social media texts. As the number of social media users is ever-increasing, social media platforms would like to understand the latent meaning and sentiments of a text to enhance decision-making procedures. However, low-resource languages such as Amharic have received less attention due to several reasons such as lack of well-annotated datasets, unavailability of computing resources, and fewer or no expert researchers in the area. This research addresses three main research questions. We first explore the suitability of existing tools for the sentiment analysis task. Annotation tools are scarce to support large-scale annotation tasks in Amharic. Also, the existing crowdsourcing platforms do not support Amharic text annotation. Hence, we build a social-network-friendly annotation tool called `ASAB' using the Telegram bot. We collect 9.4k tweets, where each tweet is annotated by three Telegram users. Moreover, we explore the suitability of machine learning approaches for Amharic sentiment analysis. The FLAIR deep learning text classifier, based on network embeddings that are computed from a distributional thesaurus, outperforms other supervised classifiers. We further investigate the challenges in building a sentiment analysis system for Amharic and we found that the widespread usage of sarcasm and figurative speech are the main issues in dealing with the problem. To advance the sentiment analysis research in Amharic and other related low-resource languages, we release the dataset, the annotation tool, source code, and models publicly under a permissive.

poster

Few-shot learning addresses the the problem of learning based on a small amount of training data. Although more well-studied in the domain of computer vision, recent work has adapted the Amazon Review Sentiment Classification (ARSC) text dataset for use in the few-shot setting. In this work, we use the ARSC dataset to study a simple application of transfer learning approaches to few-shot classification. We train a single binary classifier to learn all few-shot classes jointly by prefixing class identifiers to the input text. Given the text and class, the model then makes a binary prediction for that text/class pair. Our results show that this simple approach can outperform most published results on this dataset. Surprisingly, we also show that including domain information as part of the task definition only leads to a modest improvement in model accuracy, and zero-shot classification, without further fine tuning on few-shot domains, performs equivalently to few-shot classification. These results suggest that the classes in the ARSC few-shot task, which are defined by the intersection of domain and rating, are actually very similar to each other, and that a more suitable dataset is needed for the study of few-shot text classification.

Effective Few-Shot Classification with Transfer Learning

We introduce MG-PriFair, a multimodal neural-based framework, which generates
personalized reviews with privacy and fairness awareness. We propose a novel
differentially private (dp)-embedding model for training privacy guaranteed
embeddings and an evaluation approach for sentiment fairness in the food-review
domain. Experiments show that MG-PriFair is capable of generating plausibly long
reviews while controlling the amount of exploited user data and using the least
sentiment-biased word embeddings. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to
bring user privacy and sentiment fairness into the review generation task. The dataset and source codes are available at https://github.com/ReML-AI/MG-PriFair.

MG-PRIFAIR: Multimodal Review Generation with Privacy and Fairness Awareness

In this paper, we evaluate the progress of our field toward solving simple factoid questions over a knowledge base, a practically important problem in natural language interface to database.
As in other natural language understanding tasks, a common practice for this task is to train and evaluate a model on a single dataset, and recent studies suggest that SimpleQuestions, the most popular and largest dataset, is nearly solved under this setting.
However, this common setting does not evaluate the robustness of the systems outside of the distribution of the used training data.
We rigorously evaluate such robustness of existing systems using different datasets.
Our analysis, including shifting of training and test datasets and training on a union of the datasets, suggests that our progress in solving SimpleQuestions dataset does not indicate the success of more general simple question answering.
We discuss a possible future direction toward this goal.

An empirical analysis of existing systems and datasets toward general simple question answering

Pre-training sentence encoders is effective in many natural language processing tasks including machine translation (MT) quality estimation (QE), due partly to the scarcity of annotated QE data required for supervised learning. In this paper, we investigate the use of an intermediate self-supervised learning task for sentence encoder aiming at improving QE performances at the sentence and word levels. Our approach is motivated by a problem inherent to QE: mistakes in translation caused by wrongly inserted and deleted tokens. We modify the translation language model (TLM) training objective of the cross-lingual language model (XLM) to orientate the pre-trained model towards the target task. The proposed method does not rely on annotated data and is complementary to QE methods involving pre-trained sentence encoders and domain adaptation. Experiments on English-to-German and English-to-Russian translation directions show that intermediate learning improves over domain adaptated models. Additionally, our method reaches results in par with state-of-the-art QE models without requiring the combination of several approaches and outperforms similar methods based on pre-trained sentence encoders.

Intermediate Self-supervised Learning for Machine Translation Quality Estimation

We analyze the use and interpretation of modal expressions in a corpus of situated human-robot dialogue and ask how to effectively represent these expressions for automatic learning and dynamic interpretation in context. We present a two-level annotation scheme for modality that captures both content and intent, integrating a logic-based, semantic representation and a task-oriented, pragmatic representation that maps to our robot's capabilities. Data from our annotation task reveals that the interpretation of modal expressions in human-robot dialogue is quite diverse, yet highly constrained by the physical environment and asymmetrical speaker/addressee relationship. We sketch a formal model of human-robot common ground in which modality can be grounded and dynamically interpreted relative to speaker role, temporal constraints, and physical environment.

A Two-Level Interpretation of Modality in Human-Robot Dialogue

Current methods of cross-lingual parser transfer focus on predicting the best parser for a low resource target language globally, that is, “at treebank level”. In this work, we propose and argue for a novel cross-lingual transfer paradigm: instance-level parser selection (ILPS), and present a proof-of-concept study focused on instance-level selection in the framework of delexicalized parser transfer. Our work is motivated by an empirical observation that different source parsers are the best choice for different Universal POS-sequences (i.e., UPOS sentences) in the target language. We then propose to predict the best parser at the instance level. To this end, we train a supervised regression model, based on the Transformer architecture, to predict parser accuracies for individual POS-sequences. We compare ILPS against two strong single-best parser selection baselines (SBPS): (1) a model that compares POS n-gram distributions between the source and target languages (KL) and (2) a model that selects the source based on the similarity between manually created language vectors encoding syntactic properties of languages (L2V). The results from our extensive evaluation, coupling 42 source parsers and 20 diverse low-resource test languages, show that ILPS outperforms KL and L2V on 13/20 and 14/20 test languages, respectively. Further, we show that by predicting the best parser “at treebank level” (SBPS), using the aggregation of predictions from our instance-level model, we outperform the same baselines on 17/20 and 16/20 test languages.

Towards Instance-Level Parser Selection for Cross-Lingual Transfer of Dependency Parsers

Table-based fact verification is expected to perform both linguistic reasoning and symbolic reasoning, such as count, argmax, and so on. Existing approaches for fact verification focus on the understanding of natural language, namely, linguistic reasoning, but fail to take advantage of the combination of linguistic information and symbolic information. We propose a heterogeneous graph-based neural network for table-based fact verification named HeterTFV, to learn to combine both types of information.

Learn to Combine Linguistic and Symbolic Information for Table-based Fact Verification

To address the two main challenges in distant supervision relation extraction, one of which is the wrong labeling problem and the other is long-tail relations, we propose a novel Collaborating Relation-augmented Attention framework.

Improving Long-Tail Relation Extraction with Collaborating Relation-Augmented Attention

Models with a large number of parameters are prone to overfitting and often fail to capture the underlying input distribution. We introduce Emix, a data augmentation method that uses interpolations of word embeddings and hidden layer representations to construct virtual examples. We show that Emix shows significant improvements over previously used interpolation-based regularizers and data augmentation techniques. We also demonstrate how our proposed method is more robust to sparsification. We highlight the merits of our proposed methodology by performing thorough quantitative and qualitative assessments.

Augmenting NLP models using Hidden State Interpolations

Math word problem solving is an emerging research topic in Natural Language Processing. Recently, to address the math word problem solving task, researchers have applied the encoder-decoder architecture, which is mainly used in machine translation tasks. The state-of-the-art neural models use hand-crafted features and are based on generation methods. In this paper, we propose the GEO (Generation of Equations by utilizing Operators) model that does not use hand-crafted features and addresses two issues that are present in existing neural models: 1. missing domain-specific knowledge features and 2. losing encoder-level knowledge. To address missing domain-specific feature issue, we designed two auxiliary tasks: operation group difference prediction and implicit pair prediction. To address losing encoder-level knowledge issue, we added an Operation Feature Feed Forward (OP3F) layer. Experimental results showed that the GEO model outperformed existing state-of-the-art models on two datasets, 85.1% in MAWPS, and 62.5% in DRAW-1K, and reached comparable performance of 82.1% in ALG514 dataset.

Exploring Amharic Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Texts: Building Annotation Tools and Classification Models.

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Exploring Amharic Sentiment Analysis from Social Media Texts: Building Annotation Tools and Classification Models.

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Effective Few-Shot Classification with Transfer Learning

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Context in Informational Bias Detection

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