2022
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Byte-Level Massively Multilingual Semantic Parsing
Massimo Nicosia
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Francesco Piccinno
Proceedings of the Massively Multilingual Natural Language Understanding Workshop (MMNLU-22)
Token free approaches have been successfully applied to a series of word and span level tasks. In this work, we evaluate a byte-level sequence to sequence model (ByT5) on the 51 languages in the MASSIVE multilingual semantic parsing dataset. We examine multiple experimental settings: (i) zero-shot, (ii) full gold data and (iii) zero-shot with synthetic data. By leveraging a state-of-the-art label projection method for machine translated examples, we are able to reduce the gap in exact match to only 5 points with respect to a model trained on gold data from all the languages. We additionally provide insights on the cross-lingual transfer of ByT5 and show how the model compares with respect to mT5 across all parameter sizes.
2021
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Translate & Fill: Improving Zero-Shot Multilingual Semantic Parsing with Synthetic Data
Massimo Nicosia
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Zhongdi Qu
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Yasemin Altun
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
While multilingual pretrained language models (LMs) fine-tuned on a single language have shown substantial cross-lingual task transfer capabilities, there is still a wide performance gap in semantic parsing tasks when target language supervision is available. In this paper, we propose a novel Translate-and-Fill (TaF) method to produce silver training data for a multilingual semantic parser. This method simplifies the popular Translate-Align-Project (TAP) pipeline and consists of a sequence-to-sequence filler model that constructs a full parse conditioned on an utterance and a view of the same parse. Our filler is trained on English data only but can accurately complete instances in other languages (i.e., translations of the English training utterances), in a zero-shot fashion. Experimental results on three multilingual semantic parsing datasets show that data augmentation with TaF reaches accuracies competitive with similar systems which rely on traditional alignment techniques.
2019
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Answering Conversational Questions on Structured Data without Logical Forms
Thomas Mueller
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Francesco Piccinno
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Peter Shaw
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Massimo Nicosia
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Yasemin Altun
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
We present a novel approach to answering sequential questions based on structured objects such as knowledge bases or tables without using a logical form as an intermediate representation. We encode tables as graphs using a graph neural network model based on the Transformer architecture. The answers are then selected from the encoded graph using a pointer network. This model is appropriate for processing conversations around structured data, where the attention mechanism that selects the answers to a question can also be used to resolve conversational references. We demonstrate the validity of this approach with competitive results on the Sequential Question Answering (SQA) task.
2018
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Semantic Linking in Convolutional Neural Networks for Answer Sentence Selection
Massimo Nicosia
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Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
State-of-the-art networks that model relations between two pieces of text often use complex architectures and attention. In this paper, instead of focusing on architecture engineering, we take advantage of small amounts of labelled data that model semantic phenomena in text to encode matching features directly in the word representations. This greatly boosts the accuracy of our reference network, while keeping the model simple and fast to train. Our approach also beats a tree kernel model that uses similar input encodings, and neural models which use advanced attention and compare-aggregate mechanisms.
2017
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RelTextRank: An Open Source Framework for Building Relational Syntactic-Semantic Text Pair Representations
Kateryna Tymoshenko
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Alessandro Moschitti
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Massimo Nicosia
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Aliaksei Severyn
Proceedings of ACL 2017, System Demonstrations
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Learning Contextual Embeddings for Structural Semantic Similarity using Categorical Information
Massimo Nicosia
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Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)
Tree kernels (TKs) and neural networks are two effective approaches for automatic feature engineering. In this paper, we combine them by modeling context word similarity in semantic TKs. This way, the latter can operate subtree matching by applying neural-based similarity on tree lexical nodes. We study how to learn representations for the words in context such that TKs can exploit more focused information. We found that neural embeddings produced by current methods do not provide a suitable contextual similarity. Thus, we define a new approach based on a Siamese Network, which produces word representations while learning a binary text similarity. We set the latter considering examples in the same category as similar. The experiments on question and sentiment classification show that our semantic TK highly improves previous results.
2015
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QCRI: Answer Selection for Community Question Answering - Experiments for Arabic and English
Massimo Nicosia
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Simone Filice
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Alberto Barrón-Cedeño
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Iman Saleh
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Hamdy Mubarak
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Wei Gao
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Preslav Nakov
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Giovanni Da San Martino
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Alessandro Moschitti
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Kareem Darwish
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Lluís Màrquez
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Shafiq Joty
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Walid Magdy
Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval 2015)
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Distributional Neural Networks for Automatic Resolution of Crossword Puzzles
Aliaksei Severyn
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Massimo Nicosia
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Gianni Barlacchi
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Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)
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SACRY: Syntax-based Automatic Crossword puzzle Resolution sYstem
Alessandro Moschitti
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Massimo Nicosia
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Gianni Barlacchi
Proceedings of ACL-IJCNLP 2015 System Demonstrations
2014
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Learning to Rank Answer Candidates for Automatic Resolution of Crossword Puzzles
Gianni Barlacchi
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Massimo Nicosia
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Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the Eighteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
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Learning to Differentiate Better from Worse Translations
Francisco Guzmán
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Shafiq Joty
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Lluís Màrquez
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Alessandro Moschitti
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Preslav Nakov
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Massimo Nicosia
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
2013
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Learning Adaptable Patterns for Passage Reranking
Aliaksei Severyn
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Massimo Nicosia
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Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the Seventeenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
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iKernels-Core: Tree Kernel Learning for Textual Similarity
Aliaksei Severyn
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Massimo Nicosia
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Alessandro Moschitti
Second Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM), Volume 1: Proceedings of the Main Conference and the Shared Task: Semantic Textual Similarity
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Learning Semantic Textual Similarity with Structural Representations
Aliaksei Severyn
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Massimo Nicosia
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Alessandro Moschitti
Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)