Sociolinguistics is often concerned with how variants of a linguistic item (e.g., nothing vs. nothin’) are used by different groups or in different situations. We introduce the task of inducing lexical variables from code-mixed text: that is, identifying equivalence pairs such as (football, fitba) along with their linguistic code (football→British, fitba→Scottish). We adapt a framework for identifying gender-biased word pairs to this new task, and present results on three different pairs of English dialects, using tweets as the code-mixed text. Our system achieves precision of over 70% for two of these three datasets, and produces useful results even without extensive parameter tuning. Our success in adapting this framework from gender to language variety suggests that it could be used to discover other types of analogous pairs as well.

Automatic geolocation of microblog posts from their text content is particularly difficult because many location-indicative terms are rare terms, notably entity names such as locations, people or local organisations. Their low frequency means that key terms observed in testing are often unseen in training, such that standard classifiers are unable to learn weights for them. We propose a method for reasoning over such terms using a knowledge base, through exploiting their relations with other entities. Our technique uses a graph embedding over the knowledge base, which we couple with a text representation to learn a geolocation classifier, trained end-to-end. We show that our method improves over purely text-based methods, which we ascribe to more robust treatment of low-count and out-of-vocabulary entities.

In this paper, we introduce the first geolocation inference approach for reddit, a social media platform where user pseudonymity has thus far made supervised demographic inference difficult to implement and validate. In particular, we design a text-based heuristic schema to generate ground truth location labels for reddit users in the absence of explicitly geotagged data. After evaluating the accuracy of our labeling procedure, we train and test several geolocation inference models across our reddit data set and three benchmark Twitter geolocation data sets. Ultimately, we show that geolocation models trained and applied on the same domain substantially outperform models attempting to transfer training data across domains, even more so on reddit where platform-specific interest-group metadata can be used to improve inferences.

We describe the Enron People Assignment (EPA) dataset, in which tasks that are described in emails are associated with the person(s) responsible for carrying out these tasks. We identify tasks and the responsible people in the Enron email dataset. We define evaluation methods for this challenge and report scores for our model and naïve baselines. The resulting model enables a user experience operating within a commercial email service: given a person and a task, it determines if the person should be notified of the task.

Run-on sentences are common grammatical mistakes but little research has tackled this problem to date. This work introduces two machine learning models to correct run-on sentences that outperform leading methods for related tasks, punctuation restoration and whole-sentence grammatical error correction. Due to the limited annotated data for this error, we experiment with artificially generating training data from clean newswire text. Our findings suggest artificial training data is viable for this task. We discuss implications for correcting run-ons and other types of mistakes that have low coverage in error-annotated corpora.

There has been very limited work on the adaptation of Part-Of-Speech (POS) tagging to learner English despite the fact that POS tagging is widely used in related tasks. In this paper, we explore how we can adapt POS tagging to learner English efficiently and effectively. Based on the discussion of possible causes of POS tagging errors in learner English, we show that deep neural models are particularly suitable for this. Considering the previous findings and the discussion, we introduce the design of our model based on bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory. In addition, we describe how to adapt it to a wide variety of native languages (potentially, hundreds of them). In the evaluation section, we empirically show that it is effective for POS tagging in learner English, achieving an accuracy of 0.964, which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art POS-tagger. We further investigate the tagging results in detail, revealing which part of the model design does or does not improve the performance.

Building tools for code-mixed data is rapidly gaining popularity in the NLP research community as such data is exponentially rising on social media. Working with code-mixed data contains several challenges, especially due to grammatical inconsistencies and spelling variations in addition to all the previous known challenges for social media scenarios. In this article, we present a novel architecture focusing on normalizing phonetic typing variations, which is commonly seen in code-mixed data. One of the main features of our architecture is that in addition to normalizing, it can also be utilized for back-transliteration and word identification in some cases. Our model achieved an accuracy of 90.27% on the test data.

We suggest a new language-independent architecture of robust word vectors (RoVe). It is designed to alleviate the issue of typos, which are common in almost any user-generated content, and hinder automatic text processing. Our model is morphologically motivated, which allows it to deal with unseen word forms in morphologically rich languages. We present the results on a number of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks and languages for the variety of related architectures and show that proposed architecture is typo-proof.

We perform automatic paraphrase detection on subtitle data from the Opusparcus corpus comprising six European languages: German, English, Finnish, French, Russian, and Swedish. We train two types of supervised sentence embedding models: a word-averaging (WA) model and a gated recurrent averaging network (GRAN) model. We find out that GRAN outperforms WA and is more robust to noisy training data. Better results are obtained with more and noisier data than less and cleaner data. Additionally, we experiment on other datasets, without reaching the same level of performance, because of domain mismatch between training and test data.

This work aims to detect specific attributes of a place (e.g., if it has a romantic atmosphere, or if it offers outdoor seating) from its user reviews via distant supervision: without direct annotation of the review text, we use the crowdsourced attribute labels of the place as labels of the review text. We then use review-level attention to pay more attention to those reviews related to the attributes. The experimental results show that our attention-based model predicts attributes for places from reviews with over 98% accuracy. The attention weights assigned to each review provide explanation of capturing relevant reviews.

We develop a grammatical error correction (GEC) system for German using a small gold GEC corpus augmented with edits extracted from Wikipedia revision history. We extend the automatic error annotation tool ERRANT (Bryant et al., 2017) for German and use it to analyze both gold GEC corrections and Wikipedia edits (Grundkiewicz and Junczys-Dowmunt, 2014) in order to select as additional training data Wikipedia edits containing grammatical corrections similar to those in the gold corpus. Using a multilayer convolutional encoder-decoder neural network GEC approach (Chollampatt and Ng, 2018), we evaluate the contribution of Wikipedia edits and find that carefully selected Wikipedia edits increase performance by over 5%.

Despite the long history of named-entity recognition (NER) task in the natural language processing community, previous work rarely studied the task on conversational texts. Such texts are challenging because they contain a lot of word variations which increase the number of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. The high number of OOV words poses a difficulty for word-based neural models. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence to the effectiveness of character-based neural models in mitigating this OOV problem. We report an empirical evaluation of neural sequence labeling models with character embedding to tackle NER task in Indonesian conversational texts. Our experiments show that (1) character models outperform word embedding-only models by up to 4 F1 points, (2) character models perform better in OOV cases with an improvement of as high as 15 F1 points, and (3) character models are robust against a very high OOV rate.

In text classification, the problem of overfitting arises due to the high dimensionality, making regularization essential. Although classic regularizers provide sparsity, they fail to return highly accurate models. On the contrary, state-of-the-art group-lasso regularizers provide better results at the expense of low sparsity. In this paper, we apply a greedy variable selection algorithm, called Orthogonal Matching Pursuit, for the text classification task. We also extend standard group OMP by introducing overlapping Group OMP to handle overlapping groups of features. Empirical analysis verifies that both OMP and overlapping GOMP constitute powerful regularizers, able to produce effective and very sparse models. Code and data are available online.

Industry datasets used for text classification are rarely created for that purpose. In most cases, the data and target predictions are a by-product of accumulated historical data, typically fraught with noise, present in both the text-based document, as well as in the targeted labels. In this work, we address the question of how well performance metrics computed on noisy, historical data reflect the performance on the intended future machine learning model input. The results demonstrate the utility of dirty training datasets used to build prediction models for cleaner (and different) prediction inputs.

Code-switching (usage of different languages within a single conversation context in an alternative manner) is a highly increasing phenomenon in social media and colloquial usage which poses different challenges for natural language processing. This paper introduces the first study for the detection of Turkish-English code-switching and also a small test data collected from social media in order to smooth the way for further studies. The proposed system using character level n-grams and conditional random fields (CRFs) obtains 95.6% micro-averaged F1-score on the introduced test data set.

An accurate language identification tool is an absolute necessity for building complex NLP systems to be used on code-mixed data. Lot of work has been recently done on the same, but there’s still room for improvement. Inspired from the recent advancements in neural network architectures for computer vision tasks, we have implemented multichannel neural networks combining CNN and LSTM for word level language identification of code-mixed data. Combining this with a Bi-LSTM-CRF context capture module, accuracies of 93.28% and 93.32% is achieved on our two testing sets.

In this paper we investigate the task of modeling how long it would take a student to respond to a tutor question during a tutoring dialogue. Solving such a task has applications in educational settings such as intelligent tutoring systems, as well as in platforms that help busy human tutors to keep students engaged. Knowing how long it would normally take a student to respond to different types of questions could help tutors optimize their own time while answering multiple dialogues concurrently, as well as deciding when to prompt a student again. We study this problem using data from a service that offers tutor support for math, chemistry and physics through an instant messaging platform. We create a dataset of 240K questions. We explore several strong baselines for this task and compare them with human performance.

In this paper, we provide a lexical comparative analysis of the vocabulary used by customers and agents in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) environment and a potential solution to clean the data and extract relevant content for NLP. As a result, we demonstrate that the actual vocabulary for the language that prevails in the ERP conversations is highly divergent from the standardized dictionary and further different from general language usage as extracted from the Common Crawl corpus. Moreover, in specific business communication circumstances, where it is expected to observe a high usage of standardized language, code switching and non-standard expression are predominant, emphasizing once more the discrepancy between the day-to-day use of language and the standardized one.

Community question answering (cQA) forums provide a rich source of data for facilitating non-factoid question answering over many technical domains. Given this, there is considerable interest in answer retrieval from these kinds of forums. However this is a difficult task as the structure of these forums is very rich, and both metadata and text features are important for successful retrieval. While there has recently been a lot of work on solving this problem using deep learning models applied to question/answer text, this work has not looked at how to make use of the rich metadata available in cQA forums. We propose an attention-based model which achieves state-of-the-art results for text-based answer selection alone, and by making use of complementary meta-data, achieves a substantially higher result over two reference datasets novel to this work.

We propose a new word embedding method called word-like character n-gram embedding, which learns distributed representations of words by embedding word-like character n-grams. Our method is an extension of recently proposed segmentation-free word embedding, which directly embeds frequent character n-grams from a raw corpus. However, its n-gram vocabulary tends to contain too many non-word n-grams. We solved this problem by introducing an idea of expected word frequency. Compared to the previously proposed methods, our method can embed more words, along with the words that are not included in a given basic word dictionary. Since our method does not rely on word segmentation with rich word dictionaries, it is especially effective when the text in the corpus is in unsegmented language and contains many neologisms and informal words (e.g., Chinese SNS dataset). Our experimental results on Sina Weibo (a Chinese microblog service) and Twitter show that the proposed method can embed more words and improve the performance of downstream tasks.

We developed a system that automatically extracts “Event-describing Tweets” which include incidents or accidents information for creating news reports. Event-describing Tweets can be classified into “Reported-event Tweets” and “New-information Tweets.” Reported-event Tweets cite news agencies or user generated content sites, and New-information Tweets are other Event-describing Tweets. A system is needed to classify them so that creators of factual TV programs can use them in their productions. Proposing this Tweet classification task is one of the contributions of this paper, because no prior papers have used the same task even though program creators and other events information collectors have to do it to extract required information from social networking sites. To classify Tweets in this task, this paper proposes a method to input and concatenate character and word sequences in Japanese Tweets by using convolutional neural networks. This proposed method is another contribution of this paper. For comparison, character or word input methods and other neural networks are also used. Results show that a system using the proposed method and architectures can classify Tweets with an F1 score of 88 %.

One way to test a person’s knowledge of a domain is to ask them to define domain-specific terms. Here, we investigate the task of automatically generating definitions of technical terms by reading text from the technical domain. Specifically, we learn definitions of software entities from a large corpus built from the user forum Stack Overflow. To model definitions, we train a language model and incorporate additional domain-specific information like word co-occurrence, and ontological category information. Our approach improves previous baselines by 2 BLEU points for the definition generation task. Our experiments also show the additional challenges associated with the task and the short-comings of language-model based architectures for definition generation.

A common need of NLP applications is to extract structured data from text corpora in order to perform analytics or trigger an appropriate action. The ontology defining the structure is typically application dependent and in many cases it is not known a priori. We describe the FrameIt System that provides a workflow for (1) quickly discovering an ontology to model a text corpus and (2) learning an SRL model that extracts the instances of the ontology from sentences in the corpus. FrameIt exploits data that is obtained in the ontology discovery phase as weak supervision data to bootstrap the SRL model and then enables the user to refine the model with active learning. We present empirical results and qualitative analysis of the performance of FrameIt on three corpora of noisy user-generated text.

Many social media classification tasks analyze the content of a message, but do not consider the context of the message. For example, in tweet stance classification – where a tweet is categorized according to a viewpoint it espouses – the expressed viewpoint depends on latent beliefs held by the user. In this paper we investigate whether incorporating knowledge about the author can improve tweet stance classification. Furthermore, since author information and embeddings are often unavailable for labeled training examples, we propose a semi-supervised pretraining method to predict user embeddings. Although the neural stance classifiers we learn are often outperformed by a baseline SVM, author embedding pre-training yields improvements over a non-pre-trained neural network on four out of five domains in the SemEval 2016 6A tweet stance classification task. In a tweet gun control stance classification dataset, improvements from pre-training are only apparent when training data is limited.

Projecting linguistic annotations through word alignments is one of the most prevalent approaches to cross-lingual transfer learning. Conventional wisdom suggests that annotation projection “just works” regardless of the task at hand. We carefully consider multi-source projection for named entity recognition. Our experiment with 17 languages shows that to detect named entities in true low-resource languages, annotation projection may not be the right way to move forward. On a more positive note, we also uncover the conditions that do favor named entity projection from multiple sources. We argue these are infeasible under noisy low-resource constraints.

Typical relation extraction models are trained on a single corpus annotated with a pre-defined relation schema. An individual corpus is often small, and the models may often be biased or overfitted to the corpus. We hypothesize that we can learn a better representation by combining multiple relation datasets. We attempt to use a shared encoder to learn the unified feature representation and to augment it with regularization by adversarial training. The additional corpora feeding the encoder can help to learn a better feature representation layer even though the relation schemas are different. We use ACE05 and ERE datasets as our case study for experiments. The multi-task model obtains significant improvement on both datasets.

While recurrent neural networks (RNNs) are widely used for text classification, they demonstrate poor performance and slow convergence when trained on long sequences. When text is modeled as characters instead of words, the longer sequences make RNNs a poor choice. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs), although somewhat less ubiquitous than RNNs, have an internal structure more appropriate for long-distance character dependencies. To better understand how CNNs and RNNs differ in handling long sequences, we use them for text classification tasks in several character-level social media datasets. The CNN models vastly outperform the RNN models in our experiments, suggesting that CNNs are superior to RNNs at learning to classify character-level data.

In a recipe sharing service, users publish recipe instructions in the form of a series of steps. However, some of the “steps” are not actually part of the cooking process. Specifically, advertisements of recipes themselves (e.g., “introduced on TV”) and comments (e.g., “Thanks for many messages”) may often be included in the step section of the recipe, like the recipe author’s communication tool. However, such fake steps can cause problems when using recipe search indexing or when being spoken by devices such as smart speakers. As presented in this talk, we have constructed a discriminator that distinguishes between such a fake step and the step actually used for cooking. This project includes, but is not limited to, the creation of annotation data by classifying and analyzing recipe steps and the construction of identification models. Our models use only text information to identify the step. In our test, machine learning models achieved higher accuracy than rule-based methods that use manually chosen clue words.

Transcribing handwritten documents to create fully searchable texts is an essential part of the archival process. Traditional text recognition methods, such as optical character recognition (OCR), do not work on handwritten documents due to their frequent noisiness and OCR’s need for individually segmented letters. Crowdsourcing and improved machine models are two modern methods for transcribing handwritten documents.