Natural language processing (NLP) has been shown to perform well in various tasks, such as answering questions, ascertaining natural language inference and anomaly detection. However, there are few NLP-related studies that touch upon the moral context conveyed in text. This paper studies whether state-of-the-art, pre-trained language models are capable of passing moral judgments on posts retrieved from a popular Reddit user board. Reddit is a social discussion website and forum where posts are promoted by users through a voting system. In this work, we construct a dataset that can be used for moral judgement tasks by collecting data from the AITA? (Am I the A*******?) subreddit. To model our task, we harnessed the power of pre-trained language models, including BERT, RoBERTa, RoBERTa-large, ALBERT and Longformer. We then fine-tuned these models and evaluated their ability to predict the correct verdict as judged by users for each post in the datasets. RoBERTa showed relative improvements across the three datasets, exhibiting a rate of 87% accuracy and a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.76, while the use of the Longformer model slightly improved the performance when used with longer sequences, achieving 87% accuracy and 0.77 MCC.

Forced labour is the most common type of modern slavery, and it is increasingly gaining the attention of the research and social community. Recent studies suggest that artificial intelligence (AI) holds immense potential for augmenting anti-slavery action. However, AI tools need to be developed transparently in cooperation with different stakeholders. Such tools are contingent on the availability and access to domain-specific data, which are scarce due to the near-invisible nature of forced labour. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first openly accessible English corpus annotated for multi-class and multi-label forced labour detection. The corpus consists of 989 news articles retrieved from specialised data sources and annotated according to risk indicators defined by the International Labour Organization (ILO). Each news article was annotated for two aspects: (1) indicators of forced labour as classification labels and (2) snippets of the text that justify labelling decisions. We hope that our data set can help promote research on explainability for multi-class and multi-label text classification. In this work, we explain our process for collecting the data underpinning the proposed corpus, describe our annotation guidelines and present some statistical analysis of its content. Finally, we summarise the results of baseline experiments based on different variants of the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformer (BERT) model.

The goal of text zoning is to segment a text into zones (i.e., Background, Conclusion) that serve distinct functions. Argumentative zoning, a specific text zoning scheme for the scientific domain, is considered as the antecedent for argument mining by many researchers. Surprisingly, however, little work is concerned with exploiting zoning information to improve the performance of argument mining models, despite the relatedness of the two tasks. In this paper, we propose two transformer-based models to incorporate zoning information into argumentative component identification and classification tasks. One model is for the sentence-level argument mining task and the other is for the token-level task. In particular, we add the zoning labels predicted by an off-the-shelf model to the beginning of each sentence, inspired by the convention commonly used biomedical abstracts. Moreover, we employ multi-head attention to transfer the sentence-level zoning information to each token in a sentence. Based on experiment results, we find a significant improvement in F1-scores for both sentence- and token-level tasks. It is worth mentioning that these zoning labels can be obtained with high accuracy by utilising readily available automated methods. Thus, existing argument mining models can be improved by incorporating zoning information without any additional annotation cost.

Signed Language Processing (SLP) concerns the automated processing of signed languages, the main means of communication of Deaf and hearing impaired individuals. SLP features many different tasks, ranging from sign recognition to translation and production of signed speech, but has been overlooked by the NLP community thus far.In this paper, we bring to attention the task of modelling the phonology of sign languages. We leverage existing resources to construct a large-scale dataset of American Sign Language signs annotated with six different phonological properties. We then conduct an extensive empirical study to investigate whether data-driven end-to-end and feature-based approaches can be optimised to automatically recognise these properties. We find that, despite the inherent challenges of the task, graph-based neural networks that operate over skeleton features extracted from raw videos are able to succeed at the task to a varying degree. Most importantly, we show that this performance pertains even on signs unobserved during training.

An in-depth analysis of the level of language understanding required by existing Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) benchmarks can provide insight into the reading capabilities of machines. In this paper, we propose an ablation-based methodology to assess the extent to which MRC datasets evaluate the understanding of explicit discourse relations. We define seven MRC skills which require the understanding of different discourse relations. We then introduce ablation methods that verify whether these skills are required to succeed on a dataset. By observing the drop in performance of neural MRC models evaluated on the original and the modified dataset, we can measure to what degree the dataset requires these skills, in order to be understood correctly. Experiments on three large-scale datasets with the BERT-base and ALBERT-xxlarge model show that the relative changes for all skills are small (less than 6%). These results imply that most of the answered questions in the examined datasets do not require understanding the discourse structure of the text. To specifically probe for natural language understanding, there is a need to design more challenging benchmarks that can correctly evaluate the intended skills.

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is the task of answering a question over a paragraph of text. While neural MRC systems gain popularity and achieve noticeable performance, issues are being raised with the methodology used to establish their performance, particularly concerning the data design of gold standards that are used to evaluate them. There is but a limited understanding of the challenges present in this data, which makes it hard to draw comparisons and formulate reliable hypotheses. As a first step towards alleviating the problem, this paper proposes a unifying framework to systematically investigate the present linguistic features, required reasoning and background knowledge and factual correctness on one hand, and the presence of lexical cues as a lower bound for the requirement of understanding on the other hand. We propose a qualitative annotation schema for the first and a set of approximative metrics for the latter. In a first application of the framework, we analyse modern MRC gold standards and present our findings: the absence of features that contribute towards lexical ambiguity, the varying factual correctness of the expected answers and the presence of lexical cues, all of which potentially lower the reading comprehension complexity and quality of the evaluation data.

Recent advances in reading comprehension have resulted in models that surpass human performance when the answer is contained in a single, continuous passage of text. However, complex Question Answering (QA) typically requires multi-hop reasoning - i.e. the integration of supporting facts from different sources, to infer the correct answer. This paper proposes Document Graph Network (DGN), a message passing architecture for the identification of supporting facts over a graph-structured representation of text. The evaluation on HotpotQA shows that DGN obtains competitive results when compared to a reading comprehension baseline operating on raw text, confirming the relevance of structured representations for supporting multi-hop reasoning.

This paper describes DBee, a database to support the construction of data-intensive AI applications. DBee provides a unique data model which operates jointly over large-scale knowledge graphs (KGs) and embedding vector spaces (VSs). This model supports queries which exploit the semantic properties of both types of representations (KGs and VSs). Additionally, DBee aims to facilitate the construction of KGs and VSs, by providing a library of generators, which can be used to create, integrate and transform data into KGs and VSs.