The DialDoc 2023 shared task has expanded the document-grounded dialogue task to encompass multiple languages, despite having limited annotated data. This paper assesses the effectiveness of both language-agnostic and language-aware paradigms for multilingual pre-trained transformer models in a bi-encoder-based dense passage retriever (DPR), concluding that the language-agnostic approach is superior. Additionally, the study investigates the impact of query rewriting techniques using large language models, such as ChatGPT, on multilingual, document-grounded question-answering systems. The experiments conducted demonstrate that, for the examples examined, query rewriting does not enhance performance compared to the original queries. This failure is due to topic switching in final dialogue turns and irrelevant topics being considered for query rewriting.

In this paper, we present our submission to the DialDoc shared task based on the MultiDoc2Dial dataset. MultiDoc2Dial is a conversational question answering dataset that grounds dialogues in multiple documents. The task involves grounding a user’s query in a document followed by generating an appropriate response. We propose several improvements over the baseline’s retriever-reader architecture to aid in modeling goal-oriented dialogues grounded in multiple documents. Our proposed approach employs sparse representations for passage retrieval, a passage re-ranker, the fusion-in-decoder architecture for generation, and a curriculum learning training paradigm. Our approach shows a 12 point improvement in BLEU score compared to the baseline RAG model.

Code-switched (CS) data is ubiquitous in today’s globalized world, but the dearth of annotated datasets in code-switching poses a significant challenge for learning diverse tasks across different language pairs. Parameter-efficient prompt-tuning approaches conditioned on frozen language models have shown promise for transfer learning in limited-resource setups. In this paper, we propose a novel instance-based prompt composition technique, PRO-CS, for CS tasks that combine language and task knowledge. We compare our approach with prompt-tuning and fine-tuning for code-switched tasks on 10 datasets across 4 language pairs. Our model outperforms the prompt-tuning approach by significant margins across all datasets and outperforms or remains at par with fine-tuning by using just 0.18% of total parameters. We also achieve competitive results when compared with the fine-tuned model in the low-resource cross-lingual and cross-task setting, indicating the effectiveness of our approach to incorporate new code-switched tasks.

We present a task of multilingual linking of events to a knowledge base. We automatically compile a large-scale dataset for this task, comprising of 1.8M mentions across 44 languages referring to over 10.9K events from Wikidata. We propose two variants of the event linking task: 1) multilingual, where event descriptions are from the same language as the mention, and 2) crosslingual, where all event descriptions are in English. On the two proposed tasks, we compare multiple event linking systems including BM25+ (Lv and Zhai, 2011) and multilingual adaptations of the biencoder and crossencoder architectures from BLINK (Wu et al., 2020). In our experiments on the two task variants, we find both biencoder and crossencoder models significantly outperform the BM25+ baseline. Our results also indicate that the crosslingual task is in general more challenging than the multilingual task. To test the out-of-domain generalization of the proposed linking systems, we additionally create a Wikinews-based evaluation set. We present qualitative analysis highlighting various aspects captured by the proposed dataset, including the need for temporal reasoning over context and tackling diverse event descriptions across languages.

People speaking different kinds of languages search for information in a cross-lingual manner. They tend to ask questions in their language and expect the answer to be in the same language, despite the evidence lying in another language. In this paper, we present our approach for this task of cross-lingual open-domain question-answering. Our proposed method employs a passage reranker, the fusion-in-decoder technique for generation, and a wiki data entity-based post-processing system to tackle the inability to generate entities across all languages. Our end-2-end pipeline shows an improvement of 3 and 4.6 points on F1 and EM metrics respectively, when compared with the baseline CORA model on the XOR-TyDi dataset. We also evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed techniques in the zero-shot setting using the MKQA dataset and show an improvement of 5 points in F1 for high-resource and 3 points improvement for low-resource zero-shot languages. Our team, CMUmQA’s submission in the MIA-Shared task ranked 1st in the constrained setup for the dev and 2nd in the test setting.

In this paper, we study the identity of textual events from different documents. While the complex nature of event identity is previously studied (Hovy et al., 2013), the case of events across documents is unclear. Prior work on cross-document event coreference has two main drawbacks. First, they restrict the annotations to a limited set of event types. Second, they insufficiently tackle the concept of event identity. Such annotation setup reduces the pool of event mentions and prevents one from considering the possibility of quasi-identity relations. We propose a dense annotation approach for cross-document event coreference, comprising a rich source of event mentions and a dense annotation effort between related document pairs. To this end, we design a new annotation workflow with careful quality control and an easy-to-use annotation interface. In addition to the links, we further collect overlapping event contexts, including time, location, and participants, to shed some light on the relation between identity decisions and context. We present an open-access dataset for cross-document event coreference, CDEC-WN, collected from English Wikinews and open-source our annotation toolkit to encourage further research on cross-document tasks.

In this paper, we investigate data augmentation for text generation, which we call GenAug. Text generation and language modeling are important tasks within natural language processing, and are especially challenging for low-data regimes. We propose and evaluate various augmentation methods, including some that incorporate external knowledge, for finetuning GPT-2 on a subset of Yelp Reviews. We also examine the relationship between the amount of augmentation and the quality of the generated text. We utilize several metrics that evaluate important aspects of the generated text including its diversity and fluency. Our experiments demonstrate that insertion of character-level synthetic noise and keyword replacement with hypernyms are effective augmentation methods, and that the quality of generations improves to a peak at approximately three times the amount of original data.

Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems in application domains (e.g., healthcare, finance, education) involve interoperation among multiple components, ranging from data ingestion, human annotation, to text retrieval, analysis, generation, and visualization. We establish a unified open-source framework to support fast development of such sophisticated NLP workflows in a composable manner. The framework introduces a uniform data representation to encode heterogeneous results by a wide range of NLP tasks. It offers a large repository of processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, which can be easily assembled with full interoperability under the unified representation. The highly extensible framework allows plugging in custom processors from external off-the-shelf NLP and deep learning libraries. The whole framework is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, namely Forte (for workflow infrastructure and NLP function processors) and Stave (for user interaction, visualization, and annotation).

In this study, we construct a corpus of Japanese local assembly minutes. All speeches in an assembly were transcribed into a local assembly minutes based on the local autonomy law. Therefore, the local assembly minutes form an extremely large amount of text data. Our ultimate objectives were to summarize and present the arguments in the assemblies, and to use the minutes as primary information for arguments in local politics. To achieve this, we structured all statements in assembly minutes. We focused on the structure of the discussion, i.e., the extraction of question and answer pairs. We organized the shared task “QA Lab-PoliInfo” in NTCIR 14. We conducted a “segmentation task” to identify the scope of one question and answer in the minutes as a sub task of the shared task. For the segmentation task, 24 runs from five teams were submitted. Based on the obtained results, the best recall was 1.000, best precision was 0.940, and best F-measure was 0.895.

Parallel deep learning architectures like fine-tuned BERT and MT-DNN, have quickly become the state of the art, bypassing previous deep and shallow learning methods by a large margin. More recently, pre-trained models from large related datasets have been able to perform well on many downstream tasks by just fine-tuning on domain-specific datasets (similar to transfer learning). However, using powerful models on non-trivial tasks, such as ranking and large document classification, still remains a challenge due to input size limitations of parallel architecture and extremely small datasets (insufficient for fine-tuning). In this work, we introduce an end-to-end system, trained in a multi-task setting, to filter and re-rank answers in the medical domain. We use task-specific pre-trained models as deep feature extractors. Our model achieves the highest Spearman’s Rho and Mean Reciprocal Rank of 0.338 and 0.9622 respectively, on the ACL-BioNLP workshop MediQA Question Answering shared-task.

This paper presents the submissions by TeamDr.Quad to the ACL-BioNLP 2019 shared task on Textual Inference and Question Entailment in the Medical Domain. Our system is based on the prior work Liu et al. (2019) which uses a multi-task objective function for textual entailment. In this work, we explore different strategies for generalizing state-of-the-art language understanding models to the specialized medical domain. Our results on the shared task demonstrate that incorporating domain knowledge through data augmentation is a powerful strategy for addressing challenges posed specialized domains such as medicine.

This paper presents a multi-task learning approach to natural language inference (NLI) and question entailment (RQE) in the biomedical domain. Recognizing textual inference relations and question similarity can address the issue of answering new consumer health questions by mapping them to Frequently Asked Questions on reputed websites like the NIH. We show that leveraging information from parallel tasks across domains along with medical knowledge integration allows our model to learn better biomedical feature representations. Our final models for the NLI and RQE tasks achieve the 4th and 2nd rank on the shared-task leaderboard respectively.

The use of machine learning for NLP generally requires resources for training. Tasks performed in a low-resource language usually rely on labeled data in another, typically resource-rich, language. However, there might not be enough labeled data even in a resource-rich language such as English. In such cases, one approach is to use a hand-crafted approach that utilizes only a small bilingual dictionary with minimal manual verification to create distantly supervised data. Another is to explore typical machine learning techniques, for example adversarial training of bilingual word representations. We find that in event-type detection task—the task to classify [parts of] documents into a fixed set of labels—they give about the same performance. We explore ways in which the two methods can be complementary and also see how to best utilize a limited budget for manual annotation to maximize performance gain.

This paper introduces open-domain event detection, a new event detection paradigm to address issues of prior work on restricted domains and event annotation. The goal is to detect all kinds of events regardless of domains. Given the absence of training data, we propose a distant supervision method that is able to generate high-quality training data. Using a manually annotated event corpus as gold standard, our experiments show that despite no direct supervision, the model outperforms supervised models. This result indicates that the distant supervision enables robust event detection in various domains, while obviating the need for human annotation of events.

Events in text documents are interrelated in complex ways. In this paper, we study two types of relation: Event Coreference and Event Sequencing. We show that the popular tree-like decoding structure for automated Event Coreference is not suitable for Event Sequencing. To this end, we propose a graph-based decoding algorithm that is applicable to both tasks. The new decoding algorithm supports flexible feature sets for both tasks. Empirically, our event coreference system has achieved state-of-the-art performance on the TAC-KBP 2015 event coreference task and our event sequencing system beats a strong temporal-based, oracle-informed baseline. We discuss the challenges of studying these event relations.

Identifying the salience (i.e. importance) of discourse units is an important task in language understanding. While events play important roles in text documents, little research exists on analyzing their saliency status. This paper empirically studies Event Salience and proposes two salience detection models based on discourse relations. The first is a feature based salience model that incorporates cohesion among discourse units. The second is a neural model that captures more complex interactions between discourse units. In our new large-scale event salience corpus, both methods significantly outperform the strong frequency baseline, while our neural model further improves the feature based one by a large margin. Our analyses demonstrate that our neural model captures interesting connections between salience and discourse unit relations (e.g., scripts and frame structures).

In this paper, we present a novel Biomedical Question Answering system, BioAMA: “Biomedical Ask Me Anything” on task 5b of the annual BioASQ challenge. In this work, we focus on a wide variety of question types including factoid, list based, summary and yes/no type questions that generate both exact and well-formed ‘ideal’ answers. For summary-type questions, we combine effective IR-based techniques for retrieval and diversification of relevant snippets for a question to create an end-to-end system which achieves a ROUGE-2 score of 0.72 and a ROUGE-SU4 score of 0.71 on ideal answer questions (7% improvement over the previous best model). Additionally, we propose a novel NLI-based framework to answer the yes/no questions. To train the NLI model, we also devise a transfer-learning technique by cross-domain projection of word embeddings. Finally, we present a two-stage approach to address the factoid and list type questions by first generating a candidate set using NER taggers and ranking them using both supervised or unsupervised techniques.

The ever-increasing magnitude of biomedical information sources makes it difficult and time-consuming for a human researcher to find the most relevant documents and pinpointed answers for a specific question or topic when using only a traditional search engine. Biomedical Question Answering systems automatically identify the most relevant documents and pinpointed answers, given an information need expressed as a natural language question. Generating a non-redundant, human-readable summary that satisfies the information need of a given biomedical question is the focus of the Ideal Answer Generation task, part of the BioASQ challenge. This paper presents a system for ideal answer generation (using ontology-based retrieval and a neural learning-to-rank approach, combined with extractive and abstractive summarization techniques) which achieved the highest ROUGE score of 0.659 on the BioASQ 5b batch 2 test.

Recent methods for Event Detection focus on Deep Learning for automatic feature generation and feature ranking. However, most of those approaches fail to exploit rich semantic information, which results in relatively poor recall. This paper is a small & focused contribution, where we introduce an Event Detection and classification system, based on deep semantic information retrieved from a frame-semantic parser. Our experiments show that our system achieves higher recall than state-of-the-art systems. Further, we claim that enhancing our system with deep learning techniques like feature ranking can achieve even better results, as it can benefit from both approaches.

We present a novel approach to automated question generation that improves upon prior work both from a technology perspective and from an assessment perspective. Our system is aimed at engaging language learners by generating multiple-choice questions which utilize specific inference steps over multiple sentences, namely coreference resolution and paraphrase detection. The system also generates correct answers and semantically-motivated phrase-level distractors as answer choices. Evaluation by human annotators indicates that our approach requires a larger number of inference steps, which necessitate deeper semantic understanding of texts than a traditional single-sentence approach.

This paper describes a suite of tools for extracting conventionalized metaphors in English, Spanish, Farsi, and Russian. The method depends on three significant resources for each language: a corpus of conventionalized metaphors, a table of conventionalized conceptual metaphors (CCM table), and a set of extraction rules. Conventionalized metaphors are things like “escape from poverty” and “burden of taxation”. For each metaphor, the CCM table contains the metaphorical source domain word (such as “escape”) the target domain word (such as “poverty”) and the grammatical construction in which they can be found. The extraction rules operate on the output of a dependency parser and identify the grammatical configurations (such as a verb with a prepositional phrase complement) that are likely to contain conventional metaphors. We present results on detection rates for conventional metaphors and analysis of the similarity and differences of source domains for conventional metaphors in the four languages.

Event coreference is an important task for full text analysis. However, previous work uses a variety of approaches, sources and evaluation, making the literature confusing and the results incommensurate. We provide a description of the differences to facilitate future research. Second, we present a supervised method for event coreference resolution that uses a rich feature set and propagates information alternatively between events and their arguments, adapting appropriately for each type of argument.

In the task of event coreference resolution, recent work has shown the need to perform not only full coreference but also partial coreference of events. We show that subevents can form a particular hierarchical event structure. This paper examines a novel two-stage approach to finding and improving subevent structures. First, we introduce a multiclass logistic regression model that can detect subevent relations in addition to full coreference. Second, we propose a method to improve subevent structure based on subevent clusters detected by the model. Using a corpus in the Intelligence Community domain, we show that the method achieves over 3.2 BLANC F1 gain in detecting subevent relations against the logistic regression model.

Recognizing similar or close meaning on different surface form is a common challenge in various Natural Language Processing and Information Access applications. However, we identified multiple limitations in existing resources that can be used for solving the vocabulary mismatch problem. To this end, we will propose the Diversifiable Bootstrapping algorithm that can learn paraphrase patterns with a high lexical coverage. The algorithm works in a lightly-supervised iterative fashion, where instance and pattern acquisition are interleaved, each using information provided by the other. By tweaking a parameter in the algorithm, resulting patterns can be diversifiable with a specific degree one can control.

This paper describes an effort to investigate the incrementally deepening development of an interlingua notation, validated by human annotation of texts in English plus six languages. We begin with deep syntactic annotation, and in this paper present a series of annotation manuals for six different languages at the deep-syntactic level of representation. Many syntactic differences between languages are removed in the proposed syntactic annotation, making them useful resources for multilingual NLP projects with semantic components.

Multilingual Question Answering systems are generally very complex, integrating several sub-modules to achieve their result. Global metrics (such as average precision and recall) are insufficient when evaluating the performance of individual sub-modules and their influence on each other. In this paper, we present a modular approach to error analysis and evaluation; we use manually-constructed, gold-standard input for each module to obtain an upper-bound for the (local) performance of that module. This approach enables us to identify existing problem areas quickly, and to target improvements accordingly.

This paper presents an evaluation of a spoken dialog system for automotive environments. Our overall goal was to measure the impact of user-system interaction on the user’s driving performance, and to determine whether adding context-awareness to the dialog system might reduce the degree of user distraction during driving. To address this issue, we incorporated context-awareness into a spoken dialog system, and implemented three system features using user context, network context and dialog context. A series of experiments were conducted under three different configurations: driving without a dialog system, driving while using a context-aware dialog system, and driving while using a context-unaware dialog system. We measured the differences between the three configurations by comparing the average car speed, the frequency of speed changes and the angle between the car’s direction and the centerline on the road. These results indicate that context-awareness could reduce the degree of user distraction when using a dialog system during driving.

The Keyword Translator is a part of the Question Analyzer module in the JAVELIN Question-Answering system; it translates the keywords, which are used to query documents and extract answers, from one language to another. Much work has been in the area of query translation for CLIR or MLIR, however, many have focused on methods using hard-to-obtain and domain-specific resources, and evaluation is often based on retrieval performance rather than translation correctness. In this paper we will describe methods combining easily accessible, general-purpose MT systems to improve keyword translation correctness. We also describe methods that utilize the question sentence available to a question-answering system to improve translation correctness. We will show that using multiple MT systems and the question sentence to translate keywords from English to Mandarin Chinese can significantly improve keyword translation correctness.

MT systems that use only superficial representations, including the current generation of statistical MT systems, have been successful and useful. However, they will experience a plateau in quality, much like other “silver bullet” approaches to MT. We pursue work on the development of interlingual representations for use in symbolic or hybrid MT systems. In this paper, we describe the creation of an interlingua and the development of a corpus of semantically annotated text, to be validated in six languages and evaluated in several ways. We have established a distributed, well-functioning research methodology, designed a preliminary interlingua notation, created annotation manuals and tools, developed a test collection in six languages with associated English translations, annotated some 150 translations, and designed and applied various annotation metrics. We describe the data sets being annotated and the interlingual (IL) representation language which uses two ontologies and a systematic theta-role list. We present the annotation tools built and outline the annotation process. Following this, we describe our evaluation methodology and conclude with a summary of issues that have arisen.

This paper presents a source language diagnostic system for controlled translation. Diagnostics were designed and implemented to address the most difficult rewrites for authors, based on an empirical analysis of log files containing over 180,000 sentences. The design and implementation of the diagnostic system are presented, along with experimental results from an empirical evaluation of the completed system. We found that the diagnostic system can correctly identify the problem in 90.2% of the cases. In addition, depending on the type of grammar problem, the diagnostic system may offer a rewritten sentence. We found that 89.4% of the rewritten sentences were correctly rewritten. The results suggest that these methods could be used as the basis for an automatic rewriting system in the future.

This paper presents an overview of the tools provided by KANTOO MT system for controlled source language checking, source text analysis, and terminology management. The steps in each process are described, and screen images are provided to illustrate the system architecture and example tool interfaces.

This paper describes a graduate-level machine translation (MT) course taught at the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. Most of the students in the course have a background in computer science. We discuss what we teach (the course syllabus), and how we teach it (lectures, homeworks, and projects). The course has evolved steadily over the past several years to incorporate refinements in the set of course topics, how they are taught, and how students “learn by doing”. The course syllabus has also evolved in response to changes in the field of MT and the role that MT plays in various social contexts.

This paper describes the results of a feasibility study which focused on deriving semantic networks from descriptive texts using controlled language. The KANT system [3,6] was used to analyze input paragraphs, producing sentence-level interlingua representations. The interlinguas were merged to construct a paragraph-level representation, which was used to create a semantic network in Conceptual Graph (CG) [1] format. The interlinguas are also translated (using the KANTOO generator) into OWL statements for entry into the Ontology Works electrical power factbase [9]. The system was extended to allow simple querying in natural language.

We describe the automatic resolution of pronominal anaphora using KANT Controlled English (KCE) and the KANTOO English-to-Spanish MT system. Our algorithm is based on a robust, syntax-based approach that applies a set of restrictions and preferences to select the correct antecedent. We report a success rate of 89.6% on a training corpus with 289 anaphors, and 87.5% on held-out data containing 145 anaphors. Resolution of anaphors is important in translation, due to gender mismatches among languages; our approach translates anaphors to Spanish with 97.2% accuracy.

We describe our experience in adapting an existing high- quality, interlingual, unidirectional machine translation system to a new domain and bidirectional translation for a new language pair (English and Italian). We focus on the interlingua design changes which were necessary to achieve high quality output in view of the language mismatches between English and Italian. The representation we propose contains features that are interpreted differently, depending on the translation direction. This decision simplified the process of creating the interlingua for individual sentences, and allows the system to defer mapping of language-specific features (such as tense and aspect), which are realized when the target syntactic feature structure is created. We also describe a set of problems we encountered in translating modal verbs, and discuss the representation of modality in our interlingua.

In this paper we describe the KANTOO machine translation environment, a set of software services and tools for multilingual document production. KANTOO includes modules for source language analysis, target language generation, source terminology management, target terminology management, and knowledge source development. The KANTOOsystem represents a complete re-design and re-implementation of the KANT machine translation system.

This paper describes the integration of a Turkish generation system with the KANT knowledge-based machine translation system to produce a prototype English-Turkish interlingua-based machine translation system. These two independently constructed systems were successfully integrated within a period of two months, through development of a module which maps KANT interlingua expressions to Turkish syntactic structures. The combined system is able to translate completely and correctly 44 of 52 benchmark sentences in the domain of broadcast news captions. This study is the first known application of knowledge-based machine translation from English to Turkish, and our initial results show promise for future development.

This presentation demonstrates a new multi-engine machine translation system, which combines knowledge-based and example-based machine translation strategies for real-time translation of business news captions from English to German.

Knowledge-based interlingual machine translation systems produce semantically accurate translations, but typically require massive knowledge acquisition. This paper describes KANT, a system that reduces this requirement to produce practical, scalable, and accurate KBMT applications. First, the set of requirements is discussed, then the full KANT architecture is illustrated, and finally results from a fully implemented prototype are presented.

This paper describes the parsing scheme in the 𝛷DmDialog speech-to-speech dialog translation system, with special emphasis on the integration of speech and natural language processing. We propose an integrated architecture for parsing speech inputs based on a parallel marker-passing scheme and attaining dynamic participation of knowledge from the phonological-level to the discourse-level. At the phonological level, we employ a stochastic model using a transition matrix and a confusion matrix and markers which carry a probability measure. At a higher level, syntactic/semantic and discourse processing, we integrate a case-based and constraint-based scheme in a consistent manner so that a priori probability and constraints, which reflect linguistic and discourse factors, are provided to the phonological level of processing. A probability/cost-based scheme in our model enables ambiguity resolution at various levels using one uniform principle.