We introduce the task of implicit offensive text detection in dialogues, where a statement may have either an offensive or non-offensive interpretation, depending on the listener and context. We argue that reasoning is crucial for understanding this broader class of offensive utterances, and release SLIGHT, a dataset to support research on this task. Experiments using the data show that state-of-the-art methods of offense detection perform poorly when asked to detect implicitly offensive statements, achieving only ∼ 11% accuracy. In contrast to existing offensive text detection datasets, SLIGHT features human-annotated chains of reasoning which describe the mental process by which an offensive interpretation can be reached from each ambiguous statement. We explore the potential for a multi-hop reasoning approach by utilizing existing entailment models to score the probability of these chains, and show that even naive reasoning models can yield improved performance in most situations. Analysis of the chains provides insight into the human interpretation process and emphasizes the importance of incorporating additional commonsense knowledge.

We present an empirical study of gender bias in coreference resolution systems. We first introduce a novel, Winograd schema-style set of minimal pair sentences that differ only by pronoun gender. With these “Winogender schemas,” we evaluate and confirm systematic gender bias in three publicly-available coreference resolution systems, and correlate this bias with real-world and textual gender statistics.

We propose a hypothesis only baseline for diagnosing Natural Language Inference (NLI). Especially when an NLI dataset assumes inference is occurring based purely on the relationship between a context and a hypothesis, it follows that assessing entailment relations while ignoring the provided context is a degenerate solution. Yet, through experiments on 10 distinct NLI datasets, we find that this approach, which we refer to as a hypothesis-only model, is able to significantly outperform a majority-class baseline across a number of NLI datasets. Our analysis suggests that statistical irregularities may allow a model to perform NLI in some datasets beyond what should be achievable without access to the context.

Statistical morphological inflectors are typically trained on fully supervised, type-level data. One remaining open research question is the following: How can we effectively exploit raw, token-level data to improve their performance? To this end, we introduce a novel generative latent-variable model for the semi-supervised learning of inflection generation. To enable posterior inference over the latent variables, we derive an efficient variational inference procedure based on the wake-sleep algorithm. We experiment on 23 languages, using the Universal Dependencies corpora in a simulated low-resource setting, and find improvements of over 10% absolute accuracy in some cases.

Neural architectures are prominent in the construction of language models (LMs). However, word-level prediction is typically agnostic of subword-level information (characters and character sequences) and operates over a closed vocabulary, consisting of a limited word set. Indeed, while subword-aware models boost performance across a variety of NLP tasks, previous work did not evaluate the ability of these models to assist next-word prediction in language modeling tasks. Such subword-level informed models should be particularly effective for morphologically-rich languages (MRLs) that exhibit high type-to-token ratios. In this work, we present a large-scale LM study on 50 typologically diverse languages covering a wide variety of morphological systems, and offer new LM benchmarks to the community, while considering subword-level information. The main technical contribution of our work is a novel method for injecting subword-level information into semantic word vectors, integrated into the neural language modeling training, to facilitate word-level prediction. We conduct experiments in the LM setting where the number of infrequent words is large, and demonstrate strong perplexity gains across our 50 languages, especially for morphologically-rich languages. Our code and data sets are publicly available.

Comprehending lyrics, as found in songs and poems, can pose a challenge to human and machine readers alike. This motivates the need for systems that can understand the ambiguity and jargon found in such creative texts, and provide commentary to aid readers in reaching the correct interpretation. We introduce the task of automated lyric annotation (ALA). Like text simplification, a goal of ALA is to rephrase the original text in a more easily understandable manner. However, in ALA the system must often include additional information to clarify niche terminology and abstract concepts. To stimulate research on this task, we release a large collection of crowdsourced annotations for song lyrics. We analyze the performance of translation and retrieval models on this task, measuring performance with both automated and human evaluation. We find that each model captures a unique type of information important to the task.