Dmitry Ustalov


2022

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Proceedings of TextGraphs-16: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing
Dmitry Ustalov | Yanjun Gao | Alexander Panchenko | Marco Valentino | Mokanarangan Thayaparan | Thien Huu Nguyen | Gerald Penn | Arti Ramesh | Abhik Jana
Proceedings of TextGraphs-16: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing

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TextGraphs 2022 Shared Task on Natural Language Premise Selection
Marco Valentino | Deborah Ferreira | Mokanarangan Thayaparan | André Freitas | Dmitry Ustalov
Proceedings of TextGraphs-16: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing

The Shared Task on Natural Language Premise Selection (NLPS) asks participants to retrieve the set of premises that are most likely to be useful for proving a given mathematical statement from a supporting knowledge base. While previous editions of the TextGraphs shared tasks series targeted multi-hop inference for explanation regeneration in the context of science questions (Thayaparan et al., 2021; Jansen and Ustalov, 2020, 2019), NLPS aims to assess the ability of state-of-the-art approaches to operate on a mixture of natural and mathematical language and model complex multi-hop reasoning dependencies between statements. To this end, this edition of the shared task makes use of a large set of approximately 21k mathematical statements extracted from the PS-ProofWiki dataset (Ferreira and Freitas, 2020a). In this summary paper, we present the results of the 1st edition of the NLPS task, providing a description of the evaluation data, and the participating systems. Additionally, we perform a detailed analysis of the results, evaluating various aspects involved in mathematical language processing and multi-hop inference. The best-performing system achieved a MAP of 15.39, improving the performance of a TF-IDF baseline by approximately 3.0 MAP.

2021

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Crowdsourcing Natural Language Data at Scale: A Hands-On Tutorial
Alexey Drutsa | Dmitry Ustalov | Valentina Fedorova | Olga Megorskaya | Daria Baidakova
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Tutorials

In this tutorial, we present a portion of unique industry experience in efficient natural language data annotation via crowdsourcing shared by both leading researchers and engineers from Yandex. We will make an introduction to data labeling via public crowdsourcing marketplaces and will present the key components of efficient label collection. This will be followed by a practical session, where participants address a real-world language resource production task, experiment with selecting settings for the labeling process, and launch their label collection project on one of the largest crowdsourcing marketplaces. The projects will be run on real crowds within the tutorial session and we will present useful quality control techniques and provide the attendees with an opportunity to discuss their own annotation ideas.

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Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-15)
Alexander Panchenko | Fragkiskos D. Malliaros | Varvara Logacheva | Abhik Jana | Dmitry Ustalov | Peter Jansen
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-15)

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TextGraphs 2021 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration
Mokanarangan Thayaparan | Marco Valentino | Peter Jansen | Dmitry Ustalov
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-15)

The Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration asks participants to compose large multi-hop explanations to questions by assembling large chains of facts from a supporting knowledge base. While previous editions of this shared task aimed to evaluate explanatory completeness – finding a set of facts that form a complete inference chain, without gaps, to arrive from question to correct answer, this 2021 instantiation concentrates on the subtask of determining relevance in large multi-hop explanations. To this end, this edition of the shared task makes use of a large set of approximately 250k manual explanatory relevancy ratings that augment the 2020 shared task data. In this summary paper, we describe the details of the explanation regeneration task, the evaluation data, and the participating systems. Additionally, we perform a detailed analysis of participating systems, evaluating various aspects involved in the multi-hop inference process. The best performing system achieved an NDCG of 0.82 on this challenging task, substantially increasing performance over baseline methods by 32%, while also leaving significant room for future improvement.

2020

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Proceedings of the Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs)
Dmitry Ustalov | Swapna Somasundaran | Alexander Panchenko | Fragkiskos D. Malliaros | Ioana Hulpuș | Peter Jansen | Abhik Jana
Proceedings of the Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs)

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TextGraphs 2020 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration
Peter Jansen | Dmitry Ustalov
Proceedings of the Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs)

The 2020 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration tasks participants with regenerating large detailed multi-fact explanations for standardized science exam questions. Given a question, correct answer, and knowledge base, models must rank each fact in the knowledge base such that facts most likely to appear in the explanation are ranked highest. Explanations consist of an average of 6 (and as many as 16) facts that span both core scientific knowledge and world knowledge, and form an explicit lexically-connected “explanation graph” describing how the facts interrelate. In this second iteration of the explanation regeneration shared task, participants are supplied with more than double the training and evaluation data of the first shared task, as well as a knowledge base nearly double in size, both of which expand into more challenging scientific topics that increase the difficulty of the task. In total 10 teams participated, and 5 teams submitted system description papers. The best-performing teams significantly increased state-of-the-art performance both in terms of ranking (mean average precision) and inference speed on this challenge task.

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Word Sense Disambiguation for 158 Languages using Word Embeddings Only
Varvara Logacheva | Denis Teslenko | Artem Shelmanov | Steffen Remus | Dmitry Ustalov | Andrey Kutuzov | Ekaterina Artemova | Chris Biemann | Simone Paolo Ponzetto | Alexander Panchenko
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Disambiguation of word senses in context is easy for humans, but is a major challenge for automatic approaches. Sophisticated supervised and knowledge-based models were developed to solve this task. However, (i) the inherent Zipfian distribution of supervised training instances for a given word and/or (ii) the quality of linguistic knowledge representations motivate the development of completely unsupervised and knowledge-free approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD). They are particularly useful for under-resourced languages which do not have any resources for building either supervised and/or knowledge-based models. In this paper, we present a method that takes as input a standard pre-trained word embedding model and induces a fully-fledged word sense inventory, which can be used for disambiguation in context. We use this method to induce a collection of sense inventories for 158 languages on the basis of the original pre-trained fastText word embeddings by Grave et al., (2018), enabling WSD in these languages. Models and system are available online.

2019

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Watset: Local-Global Graph Clustering with Applications in Sense and Frame Induction
Dmitry Ustalov | Alexander Panchenko | Chris Biemann | Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Computational Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 3 - September 2019

We present a detailed theoretical and computational analysis of the Watset meta-algorithm for fuzzy graph clustering, which has been found to be widely applicable in a variety of domains. This algorithm creates an intermediate representation of the input graph, which reflects the “ambiguity” of its nodes. Then, it uses hard clustering to discover clusters in this “disambiguated” intermediate graph. After outlining the approach and analyzing its computational complexity, we demonstrate that Watset shows competitive results in three applications: unsupervised synset induction from a synonymy graph, unsupervised semantic frame induction from dependency triples, and unsupervised semantic class induction from a distributional thesaurus. Our algorithm is generic and can also be applied to other networks of linguistic data.

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HHMM at SemEval-2019 Task 2: Unsupervised Frame Induction using Contextualized Word Embeddings
Saba Anwar | Dmitry Ustalov | Nikolay Arefyev | Simone Paolo Ponzetto | Chris Biemann | Alexander Panchenko
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

We present our system for semantic frame induction that showed the best performance in Subtask B.1 and finished as the runner-up in Subtask A of the SemEval 2019 Task 2 on unsupervised semantic frame induction (Qasem-iZadeh et al., 2019). Our approach separates this task into two independent steps: verb clustering using word and their context embeddings and role labeling by combining these embeddings with syntactical features. A simple combination of these steps shows very competitive results and can be extended to process other datasets and languages.

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Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-13)
Dmitry Ustalov | Swapna Somasundaran | Peter Jansen | Goran Glavaš | Martin Riedl | Mihai Surdeanu | Michalis Vazirgiannis
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-13)

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TextGraphs 2019 Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration
Peter Jansen | Dmitry Ustalov
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Graph-Based Methods for Natural Language Processing (TextGraphs-13)

While automated question answering systems are increasingly able to retrieve answers to natural language questions, their ability to generate detailed human-readable explanations for their answers is still quite limited. The Shared Task on Multi-Hop Inference for Explanation Regeneration tasks participants with regenerating detailed gold explanations for standardized elementary science exam questions by selecting facts from a knowledge base of semi-structured tables. Each explanation contains between 1 and 16 interconnected facts that form an “explanation graph” spanning core scientific knowledge and detailed world knowledge. It is expected that successfully combining these facts to generate detailed explanations will require advancing methods in multi-hop inference and information combination, and will make use of the supervised training data provided by the WorldTree explanation corpus. The top-performing system achieved a mean average precision (MAP) of 0.56, substantially advancing the state-of-the-art over a baseline information retrieval model. Detailed extended analyses of all submitted systems showed large relative improvements in accessing the most challenging multi-hop inference problems, while absolute performance remains low, highlighting the difficulty of generating detailed explanations through multi-hop reasoning.

2018

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An Unsupervised Word Sense Disambiguation System for Under-Resourced Languages
Dmitry Ustalov | Denis Teslenko | Alexander Panchenko | Mikhail Chernoskutov | Chris Biemann | Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Improving Hypernymy Extraction with Distributional Semantic Classes
Alexander Panchenko | Dmitry Ustalov | Stefano Faralli | Simone P. Ponzetto | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Unsupervised Semantic Frame Induction using Triclustering
Dmitry Ustalov | Alexander Panchenko | Andrey Kutuzov | Chris Biemann | Simone Paolo Ponzetto
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We use dependency triples automatically extracted from a Web-scale corpus to perform unsupervised semantic frame induction. We cast the frame induction problem as a triclustering problem that is a generalization of clustering for triadic data. Our replicable benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed graph-based approach, Triframes, shows state-of-the art results on this task on a FrameNet-derived dataset and performing on par with competitive methods on a verb class clustering task.

2017

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Watset: Automatic Induction of Synsets from a Graph of Synonyms
Dmitry Ustalov | Alexander Panchenko | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

This paper presents a new graph-based approach that induces synsets using synonymy dictionaries and word embeddings. First, we build a weighted graph of synonyms extracted from commonly available resources, such as Wiktionary. Second, we apply word sense induction to deal with ambiguous words. Finally, we cluster the disambiguated version of the ambiguous input graph into synsets. Our meta-clustering approach lets us use an efficient hard clustering algorithm to perform a fuzzy clustering of the graph. Despite its simplicity, our approach shows excellent results, outperforming five competitive state-of-the-art methods in terms of F-score on three gold standard datasets for English and Russian derived from large-scale manually constructed lexical resources.

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Unsupervised, Knowledge-Free, and Interpretable Word Sense Disambiguation
Alexander Panchenko | Fide Marten | Eugen Ruppert | Stefano Faralli | Dmitry Ustalov | Simone Paolo Ponzetto | Chris Biemann
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Interpretability of a predictive model is a powerful feature that gains the trust of users in the correctness of the predictions. In word sense disambiguation (WSD), knowledge-based systems tend to be much more interpretable than knowledge-free counterparts as they rely on the wealth of manually-encoded elements representing word senses, such as hypernyms, usage examples, and images. We present a WSD system that bridges the gap between these two so far disconnected groups of methods. Namely, our system, providing access to several state-of-the-art WSD models, aims to be interpretable as a knowledge-based system while it remains completely unsupervised and knowledge-free. The presented tool features a Web interface for all-word disambiguation of texts that makes the sense predictions human readable by providing interpretable word sense inventories, sense representations, and disambiguation results. We provide a public API, enabling seamless integration.

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Negative Sampling Improves Hypernymy Extraction Based on Projection Learning
Dmitry Ustalov | Nikolay Arefyev | Chris Biemann | Alexander Panchenko
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

We present a new approach to extraction of hypernyms based on projection learning and word embeddings. In contrast to classification-based approaches, projection-based methods require no candidate hyponym-hypernym pairs. While it is natural to use both positive and negative training examples in supervised relation extraction, the impact of positive examples on hypernym prediction was not studied so far. In this paper, we show that explicit negative examples used for regularization of the model significantly improve performance compared to the state-of-the-art approach of Fu et al. (2014) on three datasets from different languages.

2016

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YARN: Spinning-in-Progress
Pavel Braslavski | Dmitry Ustalov | Mikhail Mukhin | Yuri Kiselev
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)

YARN (Yet Another RussNet), a project started in 2013, aims at creating a large open WordNet-like thesaurus for Russian by means of crowdsourcing. The first stage of the project was to create noun synsets. Currently, the resource comprises 48K+ word entries and 44K+ synsets. More than 200 people have taken part in assembling synsets throughout the project. The paper describes the linguistic, technical, and organizational principles of the project, as well as the evaluation results, lessons learned, and the future plans.

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Eliminating Fuzzy Duplicates in Crowdsourced Lexical Resources
Yuri Kiselev | Dmitry Ustalov | Sergey Porshnev
Proceedings of the 8th Global WordNet Conference (GWC)

Collaboratively created lexical resources is a trending approach to creating high quality thesauri in a short time span at a remarkably low price. The key idea is to invite non-expert participants to express and share their knowledge with the aim of constructing a resource. However, this approach tends to be noisy and error-prone, thus making data cleansing a highly topical task to perform. In this paper, we study different techniques for synset deduplication including machine- and crowd-based ones. Eventually, we put forward an approach that can solve the deduplication problem fully automatically, with the quality comparable to the expert-based approach.

2014

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A Spinning Wheel for YARN: User Interface for a Crowdsourced Thesaurus
Pavel Braslavski | Dmitry Ustalov | Mikhail Mukhin
Proceedings of the Demonstrations at the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics