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Document layout analysis usually relies on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring textual information that is vital to capture. Meanwhile, high quality labeled datasets with both visual and textual information are still insufficient. In this paper, we present DocBank, a benchmark dataset that contains 500K document pages with fine-grained token-level annotations for document layout analysis. DocBank is constructed using a simple yet effective way with weak supervision from the LaTeX documents available on the arXiv.com. With DocBank, models from different modalities can be compared fairly and multi-modal approaches will be further investigated and boost the performance of document layout analysis. We build several strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation. Experiment results show that models trained on DocBank accurately recognize the layout information for a variety of documents. The DocBank dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/doc-analysis/DocBank.

COLING 2020

DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis

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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.

poster

One of the most popular frameworks for domain adaptation is domain-invariant representation learning (DIRL), which aims to learn a distribution-invariant feature representation across domains. However, in this work, we find out that applying DIRL may degrade the cross-domain performance when the label distribution $\rm{P}(\rm{Y})$ changes across domains. To address this problem, we propose a modification to DIRL, obtaining a novel weighted domain-invariant representation learning (WDIRL) framework. We show that it is easy to transfer existing models from the DIRL framework to the WDIRL framework. Empirical studies on extensive cross-domain sentiment analysis tasks verified our statements and showed the effectiveness of our proposed solution.

Weighted Domain-Invariant Representation Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

In biomedical research, the entity linking problem is known as Medical Concept Normalization (MCN). Medical concepts may have different types (e.g., drugs, diseases, or genes/proteins) and may be retrieved from different single-typed ontologies. A recurring problem, which arises with supervised models, is how to reuse trained models for a different purpose; this requires coding to specific terminology. In this work, we seek to answer the following research questions: Do test sets of current benchmarks lead to an overestimation of performance? How do surface characteristics of entity mentions affect the performance of the BERT-based baseline? Does a model trained on one corpus work for the linking of entity mentions of another type or domain in the zero-shot setting?

2088 - Fair Evaluation in Concept Normalization: a Large-scale Comparative Analysis for BERT-based Models

Human use language not just to convey information but also to express their inner feelings and mental states. In this work, we adapt the state-of-the-art language generation models to generate affective (emotional) text. We posit a model capable of generating affect-driven and topic focused sentences without losing grammatical correctness as the affect intensity increases. We propose to incorporate emotion as prior for the probabilistic state-of-the-art text generation model such as GPT-2. The model gives a user the flexibility to control the category and intensity of emotion as well as the topic of the generated text. Previous attempts at modelling fine-grained emotions fall out on grammatical correctness at extreme intensities, but our model is resilient to this and delivers robust results at all intensities. We conduct automated evaluations and human studies to test the performance of our model, and provide a detailed comparison of the results with other models. In all evaluations, our model outperforms existing affective text generation models.

Adapting a Language Model for Controlled Affective Text Generation

State-of-the-art approaches for text classification leverage a transformer architecture with a linear layer on top that outputs a class distribution for a given prediction problem. While effective, this approach suffers from conceptual limitations that affect its utility in few-shot or zero-shot transfer learning scenarios. First, the number of classes to predict needs to be pre-defined. In a transfer learning setting, in which new classes are added to an already trained classifier, all information contained in a linear layer is therefore discarded, and a new layer is trained from scratch. Second, this approach only learns the semantics of classes implicitly from training examples, as opposed to leveraging the explicit semantic information provided by the natural language names of the classes. For instance, a classifier trained to predict the topics of news articles might have classes like “business” or “sports” that themselves carry semantic information. Extending a classifier to predict a new class named “politics” with only a handful of training examples would benefit from both leveraging the semantic information in the name of a new class and using the information contained in the already trained linear layer. This paper presents a novel formulation of text classification that addresses these limitations. It imbues the notion of the task at hand into the transformer model itself by factorizing arbitrary classification problems into a generic binary classification problem. We present experiments in few-shot and zero-shot transfer learning that show that our approach significantly outperforms previous approaches on small training data and can even learn to predict new classes with no training examples at all. The implementation of our model is publicly available at: https://github.com/flairNLP/flair.

Task-Aware Representation of Sentences for Generic Text Classification

We present the winning system for the propaganda Technique Classification (TC) task and the second-placed system for the propaganda Span Identification (SI) task. Both of the developed solutions used semi-supervised learning technique of self-training. Interestingly, although CRF is barely used with transformer-based language models, the SI task was approached with RoBERTa-CRF architecture. An ensemble of RoBERTa-based models was proposed for the TC task, with one of them making use of Span CLS layers we introduce. In addition to describing the submitted systems, an impact of architectural decisions and training schemes will be investigated along with remarks regarding training models of the same or better quality with lower computational budget.

On RoBERTa-CRF, Span CLS and Whether Self-Training Helps Them

Contextualized word representations have become a driving force in NLP, motivating widespread interest in understanding their capabilities and the mechanisms by which they operate. Particularly intriguing is their ability to identify and encode conceptual abstractions. Past work has probed BERT representations (Devlin et al., 2019) for this competence, finding that BERT can correctly retrieve noun hypernyms in cloze tasks. In this work, we ask the question: do probing studies shed light on systematic knowledge in BERT representations? As a case study, we examine hypernymy knowledge encoded in BERT representations. In particular, we demonstrate through a simple consistency probe that the ability to correctly retrieve hypernyms in cloze tasks, as used in prior work, does not correspond to systematic knowledge in BERT. Our main conclusion is cautionary: even if BERT demonstrates high probing accuracy for a particular competence, it does not necessarily follow that BERT‘understands’ a concept, and it cannot be expected to systematically generalize across applicable contexts.

On the Systematicity of Probing Contextualized Word Representations: The Case of Hypernymy in BERT

The 2020 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration tasks participants with regenerating large detailed multi-fact explanations for standardized science exam questions. Given a question, correct answer, and knowledge base, models must rank each fact in the knowledge base such that facts most likely to appear in the explanation are ranked highest. Explanations consist of an average of 6 (and as many as 16) facts that span both core scientific knowledge and world knowledge, and form an explicit lexically-connected "explanation graph" describing how the facts interrelate. In this second iteration of the explanation regeneration shared task, participants are supplied with more than double the training and evaluation data of the first shared task, as well as a knowledge base nearly double in size, both of which expand into more challenging scientific topics that increase the difficulty of the task. In total 10 teams participated, and 5 teams submitted system description papers. The best-performing teams significantly increased state-of-the-art performance both in terms of ranking (mean average precision) and inference speed on this challenge task.

TextGraphs 2020 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration

Languages with large vocabularies pose a challenge for lexical induction especially if they are too low in resources to train sophisticated language models. The situation becomes even more challenging if the language lacks a standard orthography, such that spelling variants cannot be referenced with a standard format for lexical simplification. We propose a simple approach to induce morphological and orthographic forms in low-resourced NLP and prove its potential on a non-standard language as a use case.

Lexical Induction of Orthographic and Morphological forms for Low-Resourced Languages

Conversational voice assistants are rapidly developing from purely transactional systems to social companions with “personality”. UNESCO recently stated that the female and submissive personality of current digital assistants gives rise for concern as it reinforces gender stereotypes. In this work, we present results from a participatory design workshop, wherein we invite people to submit their preferences for what their ideal persona might look like, both in drawings as well as in a multiple choice questionnaire. We find no clear consensus which suggests that one possible solution is to let people configure/personalise their assistants. We then outline a multi-disciplinary project of how we plan to address the complex question of gender and stereotyping in digital assistants.

Conversational Assistants and Gender Stereotypes: Public Perceptions and Desiderata for Voice Personas

Causality represents the most important kind of correlation between events. Extracting causality from text has become a promising hot topic in NLP. However, there is no mature research systems, evaluation rules and datasets for public evaluation. Moreover, there is a lack of unified causal sequence labeling methods, which constitute the key factors that hinder the progress of causality extraction research. We survey the limitations and shortcomings of existing causality
research field comprehensively from the aspects of basic concepts, extraction methods, experimental data, and labeling methods, so as to provide reference for future research on causality extraction. We summarize the existing causality datasets, explore their practicability and extensibility from multiple perspectives. Aiming at the problem of causal sequence labeling, we analyze the existing methods of causal sequence labeling, with a summarizations of its regulation. Multiple candidate causal labeling sequences are put forward according to labeling controversy to explore the optimal labeling method through experiments, and suggestions are provided for selecting labeling method.

DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis

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DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis

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Weighted Domain-Invariant Representation Learning for Cross-Domain Sentiment Analysis

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