Radiology report generation systems have the potential to reduce the workload of radiologists by automatically describing the findings in medical images.To broaden the application of the report generation system, the system should generate reports that are not only factually accurate but also chronologically consistent, describing images that are presented in time order, that is, the correct order.We employ a planning-based radiology report generation system that generates the overall structure of reports as “plans’” prior to generating reports that are accurate and consistent in order.Additionally, we propose a novel reinforcement learning and inference method, Coordinated Planning (CoPlan), that includes a content planner and a text generator to train and infer in a coordinated manner to alleviate the cascading of errors that are often inherent in planning-based models.We conducted experiments with single-phase diagnostic reports in which the factual accuracy is critical and multi-phase diagnostic reports in which the description order is critical.Our proposed CoPlan improves the content order score by 5.1 pt in time series critical scenarios and the clinical factual accuracy F-score by 9.1 pt in time series irrelevant scenarios, compared those of the baseline models without CoPlan.

Neural image-to-text radiology report generation systems offer the potential to improve radiology reporting by reducing the repetitive process of report drafting and identifying possible medical errors. However, existing report generation systems, despite achieving high performances on natural language generation metrics such as CIDEr or BLEU, still suffer from incomplete and inconsistent generations. Here we introduce two new simple rewards to encourage the generation of factually complete and consistent radiology reports: one that encourages the system to generate radiology domain entities consistent with the reference, and one that uses natural language inference to encourage these entities to be described in inferentially consistent ways. We combine these with the novel use of an existing semantic equivalence metric (BERTScore). We further propose a report generation system that optimizes these rewards via reinforcement learning. On two open radiology report datasets, our system substantially improved the F1 score of a clinical information extraction performance by +22.1 (Delta +63.9%). We further show via a human evaluation and a qualitative analysis that our system leads to generations that are more factually complete and consistent compared to the baselines.

We propose Implicit Quote Extractor, an end-to-end unsupervised extractive neural summarization model for conversational texts. When we reply to posts, quotes are used to highlight important part of texts. We aim to extract quoted sentences as summaries. Most replies do not explicitly include quotes, so it is difficult to use quotes as supervision. However, even if it is not explicitly shown, replies always refer to certain parts of texts; we call them implicit quotes. Implicit Quote Extractor aims to extract implicit quotes as summaries. The training task of the model is to predict whether a reply candidate is a true reply to a post. For prediction, the model has to choose a few sentences from the post. To predict accurately, the model learns to extract sentences that replies frequently refer to. We evaluate our model on two email datasets and one social media dataset, and confirm that our model is useful for extractive summarization. We further discuss two topics; one is whether quote extraction is an important factor for summarization, and the other is whether our model can capture salient sentences that conventional methods cannot.

E-commerce sites include advertising slogans along with information regarding an item. Slogans can attract viewers’ attention to increase sales or visits by emphasizing advantages of an item. The aim of this study is to generate a slogan from a description of an item. To generate a slogan, we apply an encoder–decoder model which has shown effectiveness in many kinds of natural language generation tasks, such as abstractive summarization. However, slogan generation task has three characteristics that distinguish it from other natural language generation tasks: distinctiveness, topic emphasis, and style difference. To handle these three characteristics, we propose a compressed representation–based reconstruction model with refer–attention and conversion layers. The results of the experiments indicate that, based on automatic and human evaluation, our method achieves higher performance than conventional methods.

The automated generation of information indicating the characteristics of articles such as headlines, key phrases, summaries and categories helps writers to alleviate their workload. Previous research has tackled these tasks using neural abstractive summarization and classification methods. However, the outputs may be inconsistent if they are generated individually. The purpose of our study is to generate multiple outputs consistently. We introduce a multi-task learning model with a shared encoder and multiple decoders for each task. We propose a novel loss function called hierarchical consistency loss to maintain consistency among the attention weights of the decoders. To evaluate the consistency, we employ a human evaluation. The results show that our model generates more consistent headlines, key phrases and categories. In addition, our model outperforms the baseline model on the ROUGE scores, and generates more adequate and fluent headlines.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are generally used for various NLP tasks. However, as KGs still miss some information, it is necessary to develop Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) methods. Most KGC researches do not focus on the Out-of-KGs entities (Unseen-entities), we need a method that can predict the relation for the entity pairs containing Unseen-entities to automatically add new entities to the KGs. In this study, we focus on relation prediction and propose a method to learn entity representations via a graph structure that uses Seen-entities, Unseen-entities and words as nodes created from the descriptions of all entities. In the experiments, our method shows a significant improvement in the relation prediction for the entity pairs containing Unseen-entities.

We proposed a model that integrates discussion structures with neural networks to classify discourse acts. Several attempts have been made in earlier works to analyze texts that are used in various discussions. The importance of discussion structures has been explored in those works but their methods required a sophisticated design to combine structural features with a classifier. Our model introduces tree learning approaches and a graph learning approach to directly capture discussion structures without structural features. In an evaluation to classify discussion discourse acts in Reddit, the model achieved improvements of 1.5% in accuracy and 2.2 in FB1 score compared to the previous best model. We further analyzed the model using an attention mechanism to inspect interactions among different learning approaches.

Information extraction about an event can be improved by incorporating external evidence. In this study, we propose a joint model for pseudo-relevance feedback based query expansion and information extraction with reinforcement learning. Our model generates an event-specific query to effectively retrieve documents relevant to the event. We demonstrate that our model is comparable or has better performance than the previous model in two publicly available datasets. Furthermore, we analyzed the influences of the retrieval effectiveness in our model on the extraction performance.

We describe here our system and results on the FEVER shared task. We prepared a pipeline system which composes of a document selection, a sentence retrieval, and a recognizing textual entailment (RTE) components. A simple entity linking approach with text match is used as the document selection component, this component identifies relevant documents for a given claim by using mentioned entities as clues. The sentence retrieval component selects relevant sentences as candidate evidence from the documents based on TF-IDF. Finally, the RTE component selects evidence sentences by ranking the sentences and classifies the claim simultaneously. The experimental results show that our system achieved the FEVER score of 0.4016 and outperformed the official baseline system.

We leverage a popularity measure in social media as a distant label for extractive summarization of online conversations. In social media, users can vote, share, or bookmark a post they prefer. The number of these actions is regarded as a measure of popularity. However, popularity is not determined solely by content of a post, e.g., a text or an image it contains, but is highly based on its contexts, e.g., timing, and authority. We propose Disjunctive model that computes the contribution of content and context separately. For evaluation, we build a dataset where the informativeness of comments is annotated. We evaluate the results with ranking metrics, and show that our model outperforms the baseline models which directly use popularity as a measure of informativeness.

We propose a hierarchical neural network model for language variety identification that integrates information from a social network. Recently, language variety identification has enjoyed heightened popularity as an advanced task of language identification. The proposed model uses additional texts from a social network to improve language variety identification from two perspectives. First, they are used to introduce the effects of homophily. Secondly, they are used as expanded training data for shared layers of the proposed model. By introducing information from social networks, the model improved its accuracy by 1.67-5.56. Compared to state-of-the-art baselines, these improved performances are better in English and comparable in Spanish. Furthermore, we analyzed the cases of Portuguese and Arabic when the model showed weak performances, and found that the effect of homophily is likely to be weak due to sparsity and noises compared to languages with the strong performances.

Recently, neural models have shown superior performance over conventional models in NER tasks. These models use CNN to extract sub-word information along with RNN to predict a tag for each word. However, these models have been tested almost entirely on English texts. It remains unclear whether they perform similarly in other languages. We worked on Japanese NER using neural models and discovered two obstacles of the state-of-the-art model. First, CNN is unsuitable for extracting Japanese sub-word information. Secondly, a model predicting a tag for each word cannot extract an entity when a part of a word composes an entity. The contributions of this work are (1) verifying the effectiveness of the state-of-the-art NER model for Japanese, (2) proposing a neural model for predicting a tag for each character using word and character information. Experimentally obtained results demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art neural English NER model in Japanese.

We propose a novel geolocation prediction model using a complex neural network. Geolocation prediction in social media has attracted many researchers to use information of various types. Our model unifies text, metadata, and user network representations with an attention mechanism to overcome previous ensemble approaches. In an evaluation using two open datasets, the proposed model exhibited a maximum 3.8% increase in accuracy and a maximum of 6.6% increase in accuracy@161 against previous models. We further analyzed several intermediate layers of our model, which revealed that their states capture some statistical characteristics of the datasets.

This paper describes a model that we submitted to W-NUT 2016 Shared task #1: Geolocation Prediction in Twitter. Our model classifies a tweet or a user to a city using a simple neural networks structure with fully-connected layers and average pooling processes. From the findings of previous geolocation prediction approaches, we integrated various user metadata along with message texts and trained the model with them. In the test run of the task, the model achieved the accuracy of 40.91% and the median distance error of 69.50 km in message-level prediction and the accuracy of 47.55% and the median distance error of 16.13 km in user-level prediction. These results are moderate performances in terms of accuracy and best performances in terms of distance. The results show a promising extension of neural networks based models for geolocation prediction where recent advances in neural networks can be added to enhance our current simple model.

This paper describes our attempt to build a sentiment analysis system for Indonesian tweets. With this system, we can study and identify sentiments and opinions in a text or document computationally. We used four thousand manually labeled tweets collected in February and March 2016 to build the model. Because of the variety of content in tweets, we analyze tweets into eight groups in total, including pos(itive), neg(ative), and neu(tral). Finally, we obtained 73.2% accuracy with Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) without normalizer.