Instructional texts, such as articles in wikiHow, describe the actions necessary to accomplish a certain goal. In wikiHow and other resources, such instructions are subject to revision edits on a regular basis. Do these edits improve instructions only in terms of style and correctness, or do they provide clarifications necessary to follow the instructions and to accomplish the goal? We describe a resource and first studies towards answering this question. Specifically, we create wikiHowToImprove, a collection of revision histories for about 2.7 million sentences from about 246000 wikiHow articles. We describe human annotation studies on categorizing a subset of sentence-level edits and provide baseline models for the task of automatically distinguishing “older” from “newer” revisions of a sentence.

wikiHow is a resource of how-to guidesthat describe the steps necessary to accomplish a goal. Guides in this resource are regularly edited by a community of users, who try to improve instructions in terms of style, clarity and correctness. In this work, we test whether the need for such edits can be predicted automatically. For this task, we extend an existing resource of textual edits with a complementary set of approx. 4 million sentences that remain unedited over time and report on the outcome of two revision modeling experiments.

In recent years, the task of Question Answering over passages, also pitched as a reading comprehension, has evolved into a very active research area. A reading comprehension system extracts a span of text, comprising of named entities, dates, small phrases, etc., which serve as the answer to a given question. However, these spans of text would result in an unnatural reading experience in a conversational system. Usually, dialogue systems solve this issue by using template-based language generation. These systems, though adequate for a domain specific task, are too restrictive and predefined for a domain independent system. In order to present the user with a more conversational experience, we propose a pointer generator based full-length answer generator which can be used with most QA systems. Our system generates a full length answer given a question and the extracted factoid/span answer without relying on the passage from where the answer was extracted. We also present a dataset of 315000 question, factoid answer and full length answer triples. We have evaluated our system using ROUGE-1,2,L and BLEU and achieved 74.05 BLEU score and 86.25 Rogue-L score.

Code-switching is a phenomenon of mixing grammatical structures of two or more languages under varied social constraints. The code-switching data differ so radically from the benchmark corpora used in NLP community that the application of standard technologies to these data degrades their performance sharply. Unlike standard corpora, these data often need to go through additional processes such as language identification, normalization and/or back-transliteration for their efficient processing. In this paper, we investigate these indispensable processes and other problems associated with syntactic parsing of code-switching data and propose methods to mitigate their effects. In particular, we study dependency parsing of code-switching data of Hindi and English multilingual speakers from Twitter. We present a treebank of Hindi-English code-switching tweets under Universal Dependencies scheme and propose a neural stacking model for parsing that efficiently leverages the part-of-speech tag and syntactic tree annotations in the code-switching treebank and the preexisting Hindi and English treebanks. We also present normalization and back-transliteration models with a decoding process tailored for code-switching data. Results show that our neural stacking parser is 1.5% LAS points better than the augmented parsing model and 3.8% LAS points better than the one which uses first-best normalization and/or back-transliteration.

This paper describes our system (SLT-Interactions) for the CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Our system performs three main tasks: word segmentation (only for few treebanks), POS tagging and parsing. While segmentation is learned separately, we use neural stacking for joint learning of POS tagging and parsing tasks. For all the tasks, we employ simple neural network architectures that rely on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for learning task-dependent features. At the basis of our parser, we use an arc-standard algorithm with Swap action for general non-projective parsing. Additionally, we use neural stacking as a knowledge transfer mechanism for cross-domain parsing of low resource domains. Our system shows substantial gains against the UDPipe baseline, with an average improvement of 4.18% in LAS across all languages. Overall, we are placed at the 12th position on the official test sets.

We investigate the problem of parsing conversational data of morphologically-rich languages such as Hindi where argument scrambling occurs frequently. We evaluate a state-of-the-art non-linear transition-based parsing system on a new dataset containing 506 dependency trees for sentences from Bollywood (Hindi) movie scripts and Twitter posts of Hindi monolingual speakers. We show that a dependency parser trained on a newswire treebank is strongly biased towards the canonical structures and degrades when applied to conversational data. Inspired by Transformational Generative Grammar (Chomsky, 1965), we mitigate the sampling bias by generating all theoretically possible alternative word orders of a clause from the existing (kernel) structures in the treebank. Training our parser on canonical and transformed structures improves performance on conversational data by around 9% LAS over the baseline newswire parser.

In this paper, we propose efficient and less resource-intensive strategies for parsing of code-mixed data. These strategies are not constrained by in-domain annotations, rather they leverage pre-existing monolingual annotated resources for training. We show that these methods can produce significantly better results as compared to an informed baseline. Due to lack of an evaluation set for code-mixed structures, we also present a data set of 450 Hindi and English code-mixed tweets of Hindi multilingual speakers for evaluation.

In Computational Linguistics, Hindi and Urdu are not viewed as a monolithic entity and have received separate attention with respect to their text processing. From part-of-speech tagging to machine translation, models are separately trained for both Hindi and Urdu despite the fact that they represent the same language. The reasons mainly are their divergent literary vocabularies and separate orthographies, and probably also their political status and the social perception that they are two separate languages. In this article, we propose a simple but efficient approach to bridge the lexical and orthographic differences between Hindi and Urdu texts. With respect to text processing, addressing the differences between the Hindi and Urdu texts would be beneficial in the following ways: (a) instead of training separate models, their individual resources can be augmented to train single, unified models for better generalization, and (b) their individual text processing applications can be used interchangeably under varied resource conditions. To remove the script barrier, we learn accurate statistical transliteration models which use sentence-level decoding to resolve word ambiguity. Similarly, we learn cross-register word embeddings from the harmonized Hindi and Urdu corpora to nullify their lexical divergences. As a proof of the concept, we evaluate our approach on the Hindi and Urdu dependency parsing under two scenarios: (a) resource sharing, and (b) resource augmentation. We demonstrate that a neural network-based dependency parser trained on augmented, harmonized Hindi and Urdu resources performs significantly better than the parsing models trained separately on the individual resources. We also show that we can achieve near state-of-the-art results when the parsers are used interchangeably.