This paper describes our system for SemEval-2019 Task 4: Hyperpartisan News Detection (Kiesel et al., 2019). We use pretrained BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) architecture and investigate the effect of different fine tuning regimes on the final classification task. We show that additional pretraining on news domain improves the performance on the Hyperpartisan News Detection task. Our system ranked 8th out of 42 teams with 78.3% accuracy on the held-out test dataset.

Human-robot interaction often occurs in the form of instructions given from a human to a robot. For a robot to successfully follow instructions, a common representation of the world and objects in it should be shared between humans and the robot so that the instructions can be grounded. Achieving this representation can be done via learning, where both the world representation and the language grounding are learned simultaneously. However, in robotics this can be a difficult task due to the cost and scarcity of data. In this paper, we tackle the problem by separately learning the world representation of the robot and the language grounding. While this approach can address the challenges in getting sufficient data, it may give rise to inconsistencies between both learned components. Therefore, we further propose Bayesian learning to resolve such inconsistencies between the natural language grounding and a robot’s world representation by exploiting spatio-relational information that is implicitly present in instructions given by a human. Moreover, we demonstrate the feasibility of our approach on a scenario involving a robotic arm in the physical world.

We describe and evaluate a character-level tagger for language-independent Named Entity Recognition (NER). Instead of words, a sentence is represented as a sequence of characters. The model consists of stacked bidirectional LSTMs which inputs characters and outputs tag probabilities for each character. These probabilities are then converted to consistent word level named entity tags using a Viterbi decoder. We are able to achieve close to state-of-the-art NER performance in seven languages with the same basic model using only labeled NER data and no hand-engineered features or other external resources like syntactic taggers or Gazetteers.