Kervy Rivas Rojas


2021

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IAPUCP at SemEval-2021 Task 1: Stacking Fine-Tuned Transformers is Almost All You Need for Lexical Complexity Prediction
Kervy Rivas Rojas | Fernando Alva-Manchego
Proceedings of the 15th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2021)

This paper describes our submission to SemEval-2021 Task 1: predicting the complexity score for single words. Our model leverages standard morphosyntactic and frequency-based features that proved helpful for Complex Word Identification (a related task), and combines them with predictions made by Transformer-based pre-trained models that were fine-tuned on the Shared Task data. Our submission system stacks all previous models with a LightGBM at the top. One novelty of our approach is the use of multi-task learning for fine-tuning a pre-trained model for both Lexical Complexity Prediction and Word Sense Disambiguation. Our analysis shows that all independent models achieve a good performance in the task, but that stacking them obtains a Pearson correlation of 0.7704, merely 0.018 points behind the winning submission.

2020

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Efficient Strategies for Hierarchical Text Classification: External Knowledge and Auxiliary Tasks
Kervy Rivas Rojas | Gina Bustamante | Arturo Oncevay | Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

In hierarchical text classification, we perform a sequence of inference steps to predict the category of a document from top to bottom of a given class taxonomy. Most of the studies have focused on developing novels neural network architectures to deal with the hierarchical structure, but we prefer to look for efficient ways to strengthen a baseline model. We first define the task as a sequence-to-sequence problem. Afterwards, we propose an auxiliary synthetic task of bottom-up-classification. Then, from external dictionaries, we retrieve textual definitions for the classes of all the hierarchy’s layers, and map them into the word vector space. We use the class-definition embeddings as an additional input to condition the prediction of the next layer and in an adapted beam search. Whereas the modified search did not provide large gains, the combination of the auxiliary task and the additional input of class-definitions significantly enhance the classification accuracy. With our efficient approaches, we outperform previous studies, using a drastically reduced number of parameters, in two well-known English datasets.

2019

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Assessing Back-Translation as a Corpus Generation Strategy for non-English Tasks: A Study in Reading Comprehension and Word Sense Disambiguation
Fabricio Monsalve | Kervy Rivas Rojas | Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo | Arturo Oncevay
Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop

Corpora curated by experts have sustained Natural Language Processing mainly in English, but the expensiveness of corpora creation is a barrier for the development in further languages. Thus, we propose a corpus generation strategy that only requires a machine translation system between English and the target language in both directions, where we filter the best translations by computing automatic translation metrics and the task performance score. By studying Reading Comprehension in Spanish and Word Sense Disambiguation in Portuguese, we identified that a more quality-oriented metric has high potential in the corpora selection without degrading the task performance. We conclude that it is possible to systematise the building of quality corpora using machine translation and automatic metrics, besides some prior effort to clean and process the data.