Correct natural language understanding requires computers to distinguish the literal and metaphorical senses of a word. Recent neu- ral models achieve progress on verb metaphor detection by viewing it as sequence labeling. In this paper, we argue that it is appropriate to view this task as relation classification between a verb and its various contexts. We propose the Metaphor-relation BERT (Mr-BERT) model, which explicitly models the relation between a verb and its grammatical, sentential and semantic contexts. We evaluate our method on the VUA, MOH-X and TroFi datasets. Our method gets competitive results compared with state-of-the-art approaches.

Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way. This paper presents a Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess (IFlyEA), targeting on evaluating essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools. IFlyEA provides multi-level and multi-dimension analytical modules for essay assessment. It has state-of-the-art grammar level analysis techniques, and also integrates components for rhetoric and discourse level analysis, which are important for evaluating native speakers’ writing ability, but still challenging and less studied in previous work. Based on the comprehensive analysis, IFlyEA provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization. These services can benefit both teachers and students during the process of writing teaching and learning.

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces our system at NLPTEA-2020 Task: Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED). CGED aims to diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are missing words (M), redundant words (R), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). Our system is built on the model of multi-layer bidirectional transformer encoder and ResNet is integrated into the encoder to improve the performance. We also explore two ensemble strategies including weighted averaging and stepwise ensemble selection from libraries of models to improve the performance of single model. In official evaluation, our system obtains the highest F1 scores at identification level and position level. We also recommend error corrections for specific error types and achieve the second highest F1 score at correction level.

This paper proposes to adapt self-attention to discourse level for modeling discourse elements in argumentative student essays. Specifically, we focus on two issues. First, we propose structural sentence positional encodings to explicitly represent sentence positions. Second, we propose to use inter-sentence attentions to capture sentence interactions and enhance sentence representation. We conduct experiments on two datasets: a Chinese dataset and an English dataset. We find that (i) sentence positional encoding can lead to a large improvement for identifying discourse elements; (ii) a structural relative positional encoding of sentences shows to be most effective; (iii) inter-sentence attention vectors are useful as a kind of sentence representations for identifying discourse elements.

This paper proposes a pre-training based automated Chinese essay scoring method. The method involves three components: weakly supervised pre-training, supervised cross- prompt fine-tuning and supervised target- prompt fine-tuning. An essay scorer is first pre- trained on a large essay dataset covering diverse topics and with coarse ratings, i.e., good and poor, which are used as a kind of weak supervision. The pre-trained essay scorer would be further fine-tuned on previously rated es- says from existing prompts, which have the same score range with the target prompt and provide extra supervision. At last, the scorer is fine-tuned on the target-prompt training data. The evaluation on four prompts shows that this method can improve a state-of-the-art neural essay scorer in terms of effectiveness and domain adaptation ability, while in-depth analysis also reveals its limitations..

Simile is a special type of metaphor, where comparators such as like and as are used to compare two objects. Simile recognition is to recognize simile sentences and extract simile components, i.e., the tenor and the vehicle. This paper presents a study of simile recognition in Chinese. We construct an annotated corpus for this research, which consists of 11.3k sentences that contain a comparator. We propose a neural network framework for jointly optimizing three tasks: simile sentence classification, simile component extraction and language modeling. The experimental results show that the neural network based approaches can outperform all rule-based and feature-based baselines. Both simile sentence classification and simile component extraction can benefit from multitask learning. The former can be solved very well, while the latter is more difficult.

This paper describes our system at NLPTEA-2018 Task #1: Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis. Grammatical Error Diagnosis is one of the most challenging NLP tasks, which is to locate grammar errors and tell error types. Our system is built on the model of bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory with a conditional random field layer (BiLSTM-CRF) but integrates with several new features. First, richer features are considered in the BiLSTM-CRF model; second, a probabilistic ensemble approach is adopted; third, Template Matcher are used during a post-processing to bring in human knowledge. In official evaluation, our system obtains the highest F1 scores at identifying error types and locating error positions, the second highest F1 score at sentence level error detection. We also recommend error corrections for specific error types and achieve the best F1 performance among all participants.

Discourse modes play an important role in writing composition and evaluation. This paper presents a study on the manual and automatic identification of narration,exposition, description, argument and emotion expressing sentences in narrative essays. We annotate a corpus to study the characteristics of discourse modes and describe a neural sequence labeling model for identification. Evaluation results show that discourse modes can be identified automatically with an average F1-score of 0.7. We further demonstrate that discourse modes can be used as features that improve automatic essay scoring (AES). The impacts of discourse modes for AES are also discussed.

Parallelism is an important rhetorical device. We propose a machine learning approach for automated sentence parallelism identification in student essays. We build an essay dataset with sentence level parallelism annotated. We derive features by combining generalized word alignment strategies and the alignment measures between word sequences. The experimental results show that sentence parallelism can be effectively identified with a F1 score of 82% at pair-wise level and 72% at parallelism chunk level.Based on this approach, we automatically identify sentence parallelism in more than 2000 student essays and study the correlation between the use of sentence parallelism and the types and quality of essays.

We introduce a novel task Anecdote Recognition and Recommendation. An anecdote is a story with a point revealing account of an individual person. Recommending proper anecdotes can be used as evidence to support argumentative writing or as a clue for further reading. We represent an anecdote as a structured tuple — < person, story, implication >. Anecdote recognition runs on archived argumentative essays. We extract narratives containing events of a person as the anecdote story. More importantly, we uncover the anecdote implication, which reveals the meaning and topic of an anecdote. Our approach depends on discourse role identification. Discourse roles such as thesis, main ideas and support help us locate stories and their implications in essays. The experiments show that informative and interpretable anecdotes can be recognized. These anecdotes are used for anecdote recommendation. The anecdote recommender can recommend proper anecdotes in response to given topics. The anecdote implication contributes most for bridging user interested topics and relevant anecdotes.