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A prominent problem faced by conversational agents working with large documents (Eg: email based assistants) is the frequent presence of information in the document that is irrelevant to the assistant. This in turn makes it harder for the agent to accurately detect intents, extract entities relevant to those intents and perform the desired action. To address this issue we present a neural model for scoping relevant information for the agent from a large document. We show that when used as the first step in a popularly used email-based assistant for helping users schedule
meetings, our proposed model helps improve the performance of the intent detection and entity extraction tasks required by the agent for correctly scheduling meetings: across a suite of 6 downstream tasks, by using our proposed method, we observe an average gain of 35% in precision without any drop in recall. Additionally, we demonstrate that the same approach can be used for component level analysis in large documents, such as signature block identification.

COLING 2020

ScopeIt: Scoping Task Relevant Sentences from Documents

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

In this paper, we propose and experiment with techniques for extreme compression of neural natural language understanding (NLU) models, making them suitable for execution on resource- constrained devices. We propose a task-aware, end-to-end compression approach that performs word-embedding compression jointly with NLU task learning. We show our results on a large-scale, commercial NLU system trained on a varied set of intents with huge vocabulary sizes. Our approach outperforms a range of baselines and achieves a compression rate of 97.4% with less than 3.7% degradation in predictive performance. Our analysis indicates that the signal from the downstream task is important for effective compression with minimal degradation in performance.

Extreme Model Compression for On-device Natural Language Understanding

Reflexive anaphora present a challenge for semantic interpretation: their meaning varies depending on context in a way that appears to require abstract variables. Past work has raised doubts about the ability of recurrent networks to meet this challenge. In this paper, we explore this question in the context of a fragment of English that incorporates the relevant sort of contextual variability. We consider sequence-to-sequence architectures with recurrent units and show that such networks are capable of learning semantic interpretations for reflexive anaphora which generalize to novel antecedents. We explore the effect of attention mechanisms and different recurrent unit types on the type of training data that is needed for success as measured in two ways: how much lexical support is needed to induce an abstract reflexive meaning (i.e., how many distinct reflexive antecedents must occur during training) and what contexts must a noun phrase occur in to support generalization of reflexive interpretation to this noun phrase?

Sequence-to-Sequence Networks Learn the Meaning of Reflexive Anaphora

As one of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter has become a primary source of information for many people. Unfortunately, both valid information and rumors are propagated on Twitter due to the lack of an automatic information verification system. Twitter users communicate by replying to other users' messages, forming a conversation structure. Using this structure, users can decide whether the information in the source tweet is a rumor by reading the tweet’s replies, which voice other users’ stances on the tweet. The majority of rumor detection researchers process such tweets based on time, ignoring the conversation structure. To reap the benefits of the Twitter conversation structure, we developed a model to detect rumors by modeling conversation structure as a graph. Thus, our model’s improved representation of the conversation structure enhances its rumor detection accuracy. The experimental results on two rumor datasets show that our model outperforms several baseline models, including a state-of-the-art model.

Exploiting Microblog Conversation Structures to Detect Rumors

This paper aims to enhance the few-shot relation classification especially for sentences that jointly describe multiple relations. Due to the fact that some relations usually keep high co-occurrence in the same context, previous few-shot relation classifiers struggle to distinguish them with few annotated instances. To alleviate the above relation confusion problem, we propose tag, a model equipped with two mechanisms to learn to decouple these easily-confused relations. On the one hand, an anEntity-GuidedAttention (EGA) mechanism, which leverages the syntactic relations and relative positions between each word and the specified entity pair, is introduced to guide the attention to filter out information causing confusion. On the other hand, a Confusion-AwareTraining (CAT) method is proposed to explicitly learn to distinguish relations by playing a pushing-away game between classifying a sentence into a true relation and its con-fusing relation. Extensive experiments are conducted on the FewRel dataset, and the results show that our proposed model achieves comparable and even much better results to strong baselines in terms of accuracy. Furthermore, the ablation test and case study verify the effectiveness of our proposed EGA and CAT, especially in addressing the relation confusion problem.

Learning to Decouple Relations: Few-Shot Relation Classification with entity-Guided Attention and Confusion-Aware Training

Recently, spoken language understanding (SLU) has attracted extensive research interests, and various SLU datasets have been proposed to promote the development. However, most of the existing methods focus on a single individual dataset, the efforts to improve the robustness of models and obtain better performance by combining the merits of various datasets are not well studied. In this paper, we argue that if these SLU datasets are considered together, different knowledge from different datasets could be learned jointly, and there are high chances to promote the performance of each dataset. At the same time, we further attempt to prevent data leakage when unifying multiple datasets which, arguably, is more useful in an industry setting. To this end, we propose a federated learning framework, which could unify various types of datasets as well as tasks to learn and fuse various types of knowledge, i.e., text representations, from different datasets and tasks, without the sharing of downstream task data. The fused text representations merge useful features from different SLU datasets and tasks and are thus much more powerful than the original text representations alone in individual tasks. At last, in order to provide multi-granularity text representations for our framework, we propose a novel Multi-view Encoder (MV-Encoder) as the backbone of our federated learning framework. Experiments on two SLU benchmark datasets, including two tasks (intention detection and slot filling) and federated learning settings (horizontal federated learning, vertical federated learning and federated transfer learning), demonstrate the effectiveness and universality of our approach. Specifically, we are able to get 1.53% improvement on the intent detection metric accuracy. And we could also boost the performance of a strong baseline by up to 5.29% on the slot filling metric F1. Furthermore, by leveraging BERT as an additional encoder, we establish new state-of-the-art results on SNIPS and ATIS datasets, where we get 99.33% and 98.28% in terms of accuracy on intent detection task as well as 97.20% and 96.41% in terms of F1 score on slot filling task, respectively.

Federated Learning for Spoken Language Understanding

A number of exciting advances have been made in automated fact-checking thanks to increasingly larger datasets and more powerful systems, leading to improvements in the complexity of claims which can be accurately fact-checked. However, despite these advances, there are still desirable functionalities missing from the fact-checking pipeline. In this survey, we focus on the explanation functionality -- that is fact-checking systems providing reasons for their predictions. We summarize existing methods for explaining the predictions of fact-checking systems and we explore trends in this topic. Further, we consider what makes for good explanations in this specific domain through a comparative analysis of existing fact-checking explanations against some desirable properties. Finally, we propose further research directions for generating fact-checking explanations, and describe how these may lead to improvements in the research area. Further resources are available at https://github.com/neemakot/Fact-Checking-Survey.

Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey

Natural Language Sentence Matching (NLSM) serves as the core of many natural language processing tasks. 1) Most previous work develops a single specific neural model for NLSM tasks. 2) There is no previous work considering adversarial attack to improve the performance of NLSM tasks. 3) Adversarial attack is usually used to generate adversarial samples that can fool neural models. In this paper, we first find a phenomenon that different categories of samples have different vulnerabilities. Vulnerability is the difficulty degree in changing the label of a sample. Considering the phenomenon, we propose a general two-stage training framework to enhance neural models with Vulnerability via Adversarial Attack (VAA). We design criteria to measure the vulnerability which is obtained by adversarial attack. VAA framework can be adapted to various neural models by incorporating the vulnerability. In addition, we prove a theorem and four corollaries to explain the factors influencing vulnerability effectiveness. Experimental results show that VAA significantly improves the performance of neural models on NLSM datasets. The results are also consistent with the theorem and corollaries. The code is released on https://github.com/rzhangpku/VAA.

Enhancing Neural Models with Vulnerability via Adversarial Attack

Pre-trained transformer models have shown enormous success in improving performance on several downstream tasks. However, fine-tuning on a new task still requires large amounts of task-specific labeled data to achieve good performance. We consider this problem of learning to generalize to new tasks with a few examples as a meta-learning problem. While meta-learning has shown tremendous progress in recent years, its application is still limited to simulated problems or problems with limited diversity across tasks. We develop a novel method, LEOPARD, which enables optimization-based meta-learning across tasks with different number of classes, and evaluate different methods on generalization to diverse NLP classification tasks. LEOPARD is trained with the state-of-the-art transformer architecture and shows better generalization to tasks not seen at all during training, with as few as 4 examples per label. Across 17 NLP tasks, including diverse domains of entity typing, natural language inference, sentiment analysis, and several other text classification tasks, we show that LEOPARD learns better initial parameters for few-shot learning than self-supervised pre-training or multi-task training, outperforming many strong baselines, for example, yielding 14.6% average relative gain in accuracy on unseen tasks with only 4 examples per label.

Learning to Few-Shot Learn Across Diverse Natural Language Classification Tasks

The task of concept prerequisite chain learning is to automatically determine the existence of prerequisite relationships among concept pairs. In this paper, we frame learning prerequisite relationships among concepts as an unsupervised task with no access to labeled concept pairs during training. We propose a model called the Relational-Variational Graph AutoEncoder (R-VGAE) to predict concept relations within a graph consisting of concept and resource nodes. Results show that our unsupervised approach outperforms graph-based semi-supervised methods and other baseline methods by up to 9.77% and 10.47% in terms of prerequisite relation prediction accuracy and F1 score. Our method is notably the first graph-based model that attempts to make use of deep learning representations for the task of unsupervised prerequisite learning. We also expand an existing corpus which totals 1,717 English Natural Language Processing (NLP)-related lecture slide files and manual concept pair annotations over 322 topics.

R-VGAE: Relational-variational Graph Autoencoder
for Unsupervised Prerequisite Chain Learning

We tackle implicit discourse relation recognition. Both self-attention and interactive-attention mechanisms have been applied for attention-aware representation learning, which improves the current discourse analysis models. To take advantage of the two attention mechanisms simultaneously, we develop a propagative attention learning model using a cross-coupled two-channel network. We experiment on Penn Discourse Treebank. The test results demonstrate that our model yields substantial improvements over the baselines (BiLSTM and BERT).

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Extreme Model Compression for On-device Natural Language Understanding

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