Hiroki Ouchi


2022

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N-best Response-based Analysis of Contradiction-awareness in Neural Response Generation Models
Shiki Sato | Reina Akama | Hiroki Ouchi | Ryoko Tokuhisa | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Avoiding the generation of responses that contradict the preceding context is a significant challenge in dialogue response generation. One feasible method is post-processing, such as filtering out contradicting responses from a resulting n-best response list. In this scenario, the quality of the n-best list considerably affects the occurrence of contradictions because the final response is chosen from this n-best list. This study quantitatively analyzes the contextual contradiction-awareness of neural response generation models using the consistency of the n-best lists. Particularly, we used polar questions as stimulus inputs for concise and quantitative analyses. Our tests illustrate the contradiction-awareness of recent neural response generation models and methodologies, followed by a discussion of their properties and limitations.

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Improving Discriminative Learning for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction
Van-Hien Tran | Hiroki Ouchi | Taro Watanabe | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Semiparametric Methods in NLP: Decoupling Logic from Knowledge

Zero-shot relation extraction (ZSRE) aims to predict target relations that cannot be observed during training. While most previous studies have focused on fully supervised relation extraction and achieved considerably high performance, less effort has been made towards ZSRE. This study proposes a new model incorporating discriminative embedding learning for both sentences and semantic relations. In addition, a self-adaptive comparator network is used to judge whether the relationship between a sentence and a relation is consistent. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets showed that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

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Iterative Span Selection: Self-Emergence of Resolving Orders in Semantic Role Labeling
Shuhei Kurita | Hiroki Ouchi | Kentaro Inui | Satoshi Sekine
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is the task of labeling semantic arguments for marked semantic predicates. Semantic arguments and their predicates are related in various distinct manners, of which certain semantic arguments are a necessity while others serve as an auxiliary to their predicates. To consider such roles and relations of the arguments in the labeling order, we introduce iterative argument identification (IAI), which combines global decoding and iterative identification for the semantic arguments. In experiments, we first realize that the model with random argument labeling orders outperforms other heuristic orders such as the conventional left-to-right labeling order. Combined with simple reinforcement learning, the proposed model spontaneously learns the optimized labeling orders that are different from existing heuristic orders. The proposed model with the IAI algorithm achieves competitive or outperforming results from the existing models in the standard benchmark datasets of span-based SRL: CoNLL-2005 and CoNLL-2012.

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JADES: New Text Simplification Dataset in Japanese Targeted at Non-Native Speakers
Akio Hayakawa | Tomoyuki Kajiwara | Hiroki Ouchi | Taro Watanabe
Proceedings of the Workshop on Text Simplification, Accessibility, and Readability (TSAR-2022)

The user-dependency of Text Simplification makes its evaluation obscure. A targeted evaluation dataset clarifies the purpose of simplification, though its specification is hard to define. We built JADES (JApanese Dataset for the Evaluation of Simplification), a text simplification dataset targeted at non-native Japanese speakers, according to public vocabulary and grammar profiles. JADES comprises 3,907 complex-simple sentence pairs annotated by an expert. Analysis of JADES shows that wide and multiple rewriting operations were applied through simplification. Furthermore, we analyzed outputs on JADES from several benchmark systems and automatic and manual scores of them. Results of these analyses highlight differences between English and Japanese in operations and evaluations.

2021

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Pseudo Zero Pronoun Resolution Improves Zero Anaphora Resolution
Ryuto Konno | Shun Kiyono | Yuichiroh Matsubayashi | Hiroki Ouchi | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Masked language models (MLMs) have contributed to drastic performance improvements with regard to zero anaphora resolution (ZAR). To further improve this approach, in this study, we made two proposals. The first is a new pretraining task that trains MLMs on anaphoric relations with explicit supervision, and the second proposal is a new finetuning method that remedies a notorious issue, the pretrain-finetune discrepancy. Our experiments on Japanese ZAR demonstrated that our two proposals boost the state-of-the-art performance, and our detailed analysis provides new insights on the remaining challenges.

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Instance-Based Neural Dependency Parsing
Hiroki Ouchi | Jun Suzuki | Sosuke Kobayashi | Sho Yokoi | Tatsuki Kuribayashi | Masashi Yoshikawa | Kentaro Inui
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

Abstract Interpretable rationales for model predictions are crucial in practical applications. We develop neural models that possess an interpretable inference process for dependency parsing. Our models adopt instance-based inference, where dependency edges are extracted and labeled by comparing them to edges in a training set. The training edges are explicitly used for the predictions; thus, it is easy to grasp the contribution of each edge to the predictions. Our experiments show that our instance-based models achieve competitive accuracy with standard neural models and have the reasonable plausibility of instance-based explanations.

2020

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You May Like This Hotel Because ...: Identifying Evidence for Explainable Recommendations
Shin Kanouchi | Masato Neishi | Yuta Hayashibe | Hiroki Ouchi | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Explainable recommendation is a good way to improve user satisfaction. However, explainable recommendation in dialogue is challenging since it has to handle natural language as both input and output. To tackle the challenge, this paper proposes a novel and practical task to explain evidences in recommending hotels given vague requests expressed freely in natural language. We decompose the process into two subtasks on hotel reviews: Evidence Identification and Evidence Explanation. The former predicts whether or not a sentence contains evidence that expresses why a given request is satisfied. The latter generates a recommendation sentence given a request and an evidence sentence. In order to address these subtasks, we build an Evidence-based Explanation dataset, which is the largest dataset for explaining evidences in recommending hotels for vague requests. The experimental results demonstrate that the BERT model can find evidence sentences with respect to various vague requests and that the LSTM-based model can generate recommendation sentences.

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Evaluating Dialogue Generation Systems via Response Selection
Shiki Sato | Reina Akama | Hiroki Ouchi | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Existing automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue response generation systems correlate poorly with human evaluation. We focus on evaluating response generation systems via response selection. To evaluate systems properly via response selection, we propose a method to construct response selection test sets with well-chosen false candidates. Specifically, we propose to construct test sets filtering out some types of false candidates: (i) those unrelated to the ground-truth response and (ii) those acceptable as appropriate responses. Through experiments, we demonstrate that evaluating systems via response selection with the test set developed by our method correlates more strongly with human evaluation, compared with widely used automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU.

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Instance-Based Learning of Span Representations: A Case Study through Named Entity Recognition
Hiroki Ouchi | Jun Suzuki | Sosuke Kobayashi | Sho Yokoi | Tatsuki Kuribayashi | Ryuto Konno | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Interpretable rationales for model predictions play a critical role in practical applications. In this study, we develop models possessing interpretable inference process for structured prediction. Specifically, we present a method of instance-based learning that learns similarities between spans. At inference time, each span is assigned a class label based on its similar spans in the training set, where it is easy to understand how much each training instance contributes to the predictions. Through empirical analysis on named entity recognition, we demonstrate that our method enables to build models that have high interpretability without sacrificing performance.

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Embeddings of Label Components for Sequence Labeling: A Case Study of Fine-grained Named Entity Recognition
Takuma Kato | Kaori Abe | Hiroki Ouchi | Shumpei Miyawaki | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

In general, the labels used in sequence labeling consist of different types of elements. For example, IOB-format entity labels, such as B-Person and I-Person, can be decomposed into span (B and I) and type information (Person). However, while most sequence labeling models do not consider such label components, the shared components across labels, such as Person, can be beneficial for label prediction. In this work, we propose to integrate label component information as embeddings into models. Through experiments on English and Japanese fine-grained named entity recognition, we demonstrate that the proposed method improves performance, especially for instances with low-frequency labels.

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An Empirical Study of Contextual Data Augmentation for Japanese Zero Anaphora Resolution
Ryuto Konno | Yuichiroh Matsubayashi | Shun Kiyono | Hiroki Ouchi | Ryo Takahashi | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

One critical issue of zero anaphora resolution (ZAR) is the scarcity of labeled data. This study explores how effectively this problem can be alleviated by data augmentation. We adopt a state-of-the-art data augmentation method, called the contextual data augmentation (CDA), that generates labeled training instances using a pretrained language model. The CDA has been reported to work well for several other natural language processing tasks, including text classification and machine translation. This study addresses two underexplored issues on CDA, that is, how to reduce the computational cost of data augmentation and how to ensure the quality of the generated data. We also propose two methods to adapt CDA to ZAR: [MASK]-based augmentation and linguistically-controlled masking. Consequently, the experimental results on Japanese ZAR show that our methods contribute to both the accuracy gainand the computation cost reduction. Our closer analysis reveals that the proposed method can improve the quality of the augmented training data when compared to the conventional CDA.

2019

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Analytic Score Prediction and Justification Identification in Automated Short Answer Scoring
Tomoya Mizumoto | Hiroki Ouchi | Yoriko Isobe | Paul Reisert | Ryo Nagata | Satoshi Sekine | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

This paper provides an analytical assessment of student short answer responses with a view to potential benefits in pedagogical contexts. We first propose and formalize two novel analytical assessment tasks: analytic score prediction and justification identification, and then provide the first dataset created for analytic short answer scoring research. Subsequently, we present a neural baseline model and report our extensive empirical results to demonstrate how our dataset can be used to explore new and intriguing technical challenges in short answer scoring. The dataset is publicly available for research purposes.

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The Sally Smedley Hyperpartisan News Detector at SemEval-2019 Task 4
Kazuaki Hanawa | Shota Sasaki | Hiroki Ouchi | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper describes our system submitted to the formal run of SemEval-2019 Task 4: Hyperpartisan news detection. Our system is based on a linear classifier using several features, i.e., 1) embedding features based on the pre-trained BERT embeddings, 2) article length features, and 3) embedding features of informative phrases extracted from by-publisher dataset. Our system achieved 80.9% accuracy on the test set for the formal run and got the 3rd place out of 42 teams.

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An Empirical Study of Span Representations in Argumentation Structure Parsing
Tatsuki Kuribayashi | Hiroki Ouchi | Naoya Inoue | Paul Reisert | Toshinori Miyoshi | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

For several natural language processing (NLP) tasks, span representation design is attracting considerable attention as a promising new technique; a common basis for an effective design has been established. With such basis, exploring task-dependent extensions for argumentation structure parsing (ASP) becomes an interesting research direction. This study investigates (i) span representation originally developed for other NLP tasks and (ii) a simple task-dependent extension for ASP. Our extensive experiments and analysis show that these representations yield high performance for ASP and provide some challenging types of instances to be parsed.

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Unsupervised Learning of Discourse-Aware Text Representation for Essay Scoring
Farjana Sultana Mim | Naoya Inoue | Paul Reisert | Hiroki Ouchi | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Existing document embedding approaches mainly focus on capturing sequences of words in documents. However, some document classification and regression tasks such as essay scoring need to consider discourse structure of documents. Although some prior approaches consider this issue and utilize discourse structure of text for document classification, these approaches are dependent on computationally expensive parsers. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach to capture discourse structure in terms of coherence and cohesion for document embedding that does not require any expensive parser or annotation. Extrinsic evaluation results show that the document representation obtained from our approach improves the performance of essay Organization scoring and Argument Strength scoring.

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Transductive Learning of Neural Language Models for Syntactic and Semantic Analysis
Hiroki Ouchi | Jun Suzuki | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

In transductive learning, an unlabeled test set is used for model training. Although this setting deviates from the common assumption of a completely unseen test set, it is applicable in many real-world scenarios, wherein the texts to be processed are known in advance. However, despite its practical advantages, transductive learning is underexplored in natural language processing. Here we conduct an empirical study of transductive learning for neural models and demonstrate its utility in syntactic and semantic tasks. Specifically, we fine-tune language models (LMs) on an unlabeled test set to obtain test-set-specific word representations. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that despite its simplicity, transductive LM fine-tuning consistently improves state-of-the-art neural models in in-domain and out-of-domain settings.

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Inject Rubrics into Short Answer Grading System
Tianqi Wang | Naoya Inoue | Hiroki Ouchi | Tomoya Mizumoto | Kentaro Inui
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo 2019)

Short Answer Grading (SAG) is a task of scoring students’ answers in examinations. Most existing SAG systems predict scores based only on the answers, including the model used as base line in this paper, which gives the-state-of-the-art performance. But they ignore important evaluation criteria such as rubrics, which play a crucial role for evaluating answers in real-world situations. In this paper, we present a method to inject information from rubrics into SAG systems. We implement our approach on top of word-level attention mechanism to introduce the rubric information, in order to locate information in each answer that are highly related to the score. Our experimental results demonstrate that injecting rubric information effectively contributes to the performance improvement and that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art SAG model on the widely used ASAP-SAS dataset under low-resource settings.

2018

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Suspicious News Detection Using Micro Blog Text
Tsubasa Tagami | Hiroki Ouchi | Hiroki Asano | Kazuaki Hanawa | Kaori Uchiyama | Kaito Suzuki | Kentaro Inui | Atsushi Komiya | Atsuo Fujimura | Ryo Yamashita | Hitofumi Yanai | Akinori Machino
Proceedings of the 32nd Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation

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Addressee and Response Selection for Multilingual Conversation
Motoki Sato | Hiroki Ouchi | Yuta Tsuboi
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Developing conversational systems that can converse in many languages is an interesting challenge for natural language processing. In this paper, we introduce multilingual addressee and response selection. In this task, a conversational system predicts an appropriate addressee and response for an input message in multiple languages. A key to developing such multilingual responding systems is how to utilize high-resource language data to compensate for low-resource language data. We present several knowledge transfer methods for conversational systems. To evaluate our methods, we create a new multilingual conversation dataset. Experiments on the dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

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A Span Selection Model for Semantic Role Labeling
Hiroki Ouchi | Hiroyuki Shindo | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present a simple and accurate span-based model for semantic role labeling (SRL). Our model directly takes into account all possible argument spans and scores them for each label. At decoding time, we greedily select higher scoring labeled spans. One advantage of our model is to allow us to design and use span-level features, that are difficult to use in token-based BIO tagging approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that our ensemble model achieves the state-of-the-art results, 87.4 F1 and 87.0 F1 on the CoNLL-2005 and 2012 datasets, respectively.

2017

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Neural Modeling of Multi-Predicate Interactions for Japanese Predicate Argument Structure Analysis
Hiroki Ouchi | Hiroyuki Shindo | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The performance of Japanese predicate argument structure (PAS) analysis has improved in recent years thanks to the joint modeling of interactions between multiple predicates. However, this approach relies heavily on syntactic information predicted by parsers, and suffers from errorpropagation. To remedy this problem, we introduce a model that uses grid-type recurrent neural networks. The proposed model automatically induces features sensitive to multi-predicate interactions from the word sequence information of a sentence. Experiments on the NAIST Text Corpus demonstrate that without syntactic information, our model outperforms previous syntax-dependent models.

2016

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Addressee and Response Selection for Multi-Party Conversation
Hiroki Ouchi | Yuta Tsuboi
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2015

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Joint Case Argument Identification for Japanese Predicate Argument Structure Analysis
Hiroki Ouchi | Hiroyuki Shindo | Kevin Duh | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2014

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Improving Dependency Parsers with Supertags
Hiroki Ouchi | Kevin Duh | Yuji Matsumoto
Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, volume 2: Short Papers