This paper constructs a Chinese dialogue-based information-seeking question answering dataset CMDQA, which is mainly applied to the scenario of getting Chinese movie related information. It contains 10K QA dialogs (40K turns in total). All questions and background documents are compiled from the Wikipedia via an Internet crawler. The answers to the questions are obtained via extracting the corresponding answer spans within the related text passage. In CMDQA, in addition to searching related documents, pronouns are also added to the question to better mimic the real dialog scenario. This dataset can test the individual performance of the information retrieval, the question answering and the question re-writing modules. This paper also provides a baseline system and shows its performance on this dataset. The experiments elucidate that it still has a big gap to catch the human performance. This dataset thus provides enough challenge for the researcher to conduct related research.

Sentence alignment is an essential step in studying the mapping among different language expressions, and the character trigram overlapping ratio was reported to be the most effective similarity measure in aligning sentences in the text simplification dataset. However, the appropriateness of each similarity measure depends on the characteristics of the corpus to be aligned. This paper studies if the character trigram is still a suitable similarity measure for the task of aligning sentences in a paragraph paraphrasing corpus. We compare several embedding-based and non-embeddings model-agnostic similarity measures, including those that have not been studied previously. The evaluation is conducted on parallel paragraphs sampled from the Webis-CPC-11 corpus, which is a paragraph paraphrasing dataset. Our results show that modern BERT-based measures such as Sentence-BERT or BERTScore can lead to significant improvement in this task.

This study presents a novel QA-based sequence labeling (QASL) approach to naturally tackle both flat and nested Named Entity Recogntion (NER) tasks on a Chinese Electronic Health Records (CEHRs) dataset. This proposed QASL approach parallelly asks a corresponding natural language question for each specific named entity type, and then identifies those associated NEs of the same specified type with the BIO tagging scheme. The associated nested NEs are then formed by overlapping the results of various types. In comparison with those pure sequence-labeling (SL) approaches, since the given question includes significant prior knowledge about the specified entity type and the capability of extracting NEs with different types, the performance for nested NER task is thus improved, obtaining 90.70% of F1-score. Besides, in comparison with the pure QA-based approach, our proposed approach retains the SL features, which could extract multiple NEs with the same types without knowing the exact number of NEs in the same passage in advance. Eventually, experiments on our CEHR dataset demonstrate that QASL-based models greatly outperform the SL-based models by 6.12% to 7.14% of F1-score.

This paper presents a framework to answer the questions that require various kinds of inference mechanisms (such as Extraction, Entailment-Judgement, and Summarization). Most of the previous approaches adopt a rigid framework which handles only one inference mechanism. Only a few of them adopt several answer generation modules for providing different mechanisms; however, they either lack an aggregation mechanism to merge the answers from various modules, or are too complicated to be implemented with neural networks. To alleviate the problems mentioned above, we propose a divide-and-conquer framework, which consists of a set of various answer generation modules, a dispatch module, and an aggregation module. The answer generation modules are designed to provide different inference mechanisms, the dispatch module is used to select a few appropriate answer generation modules to generate answer candidates, and the aggregation module is employed to select the final answer. We test our framework on the 2020 Formosa Grand Challenge Contest dataset. Experiments show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art Roberta-large model by about 11.4%.

Current neural math solvers learn to incorporate commonsense or domain knowledge by utilizing pre-specified constants or formulas. However, as these constants and formulas are mainly human-specified, the generalizability of the solvers is limited. In this paper, we propose to explicitly retrieve the required knowledge from math problemdatasets. In this way, we can determinedly characterize the required knowledge andimprove the explainability of solvers. Our two algorithms take the problem text andthe solution equations as input. Then, they try to deduce the required commonsense and domain knowledge by integrating information from both parts. We construct two math datasets and show the effectiveness of our algorithms that they can retrieve the required knowledge for problem-solving.

This paper empirically studies whether BERT can really learn to conduct natural language inference (NLI) without utilizing hidden dataset bias; and how efficiently it can learn if it could. This is done via creating a simple entailment judgment case which involves only binary predicates in plain English. The results show that the learning process of BERT is very slow. However, the efficiency of learning can be greatly improved (data reduction by a factor of 1,500) if task-related features are added. This suggests that domain knowledge greatly helps when conducting NLI with neural networks.

With the recent advancements in deep learning, neural solvers have gained promising results in solving math word problems. However, these SOTA solvers only generate binary expression trees that contain basic arithmetic operators and do not explicitly use the math formulas. As a result, the expression trees they produce are lengthy and uninterpretable because they need to use multiple operators and constants to represent one single formula. In this paper, we propose sequence-to-general tree (S2G) that learns to generate interpretable and executable operation trees where the nodes can be formulas with an arbitrary number of arguments. With nodes now allowed to be formulas, S2G can learn to incorporate mathematical domain knowledge into problem-solving, making the results more interpretable. Experiments show that S2G can achieve a better performance against strong baselines on problems that require domain knowledge.

We present ASDiv (Academia Sinica Diverse MWP Dataset), a diverse (in terms of both language patterns and problem types) English math word problem (MWP) corpus for evaluating the capability of various MWP solvers. Existing MWP corpora for studying AI progress remain limited either in language usage patterns or in problem types. We thus present a new English MWP corpus with 2,305 MWPs that cover more text patterns and most problem types taught in elementary school. Each MWP is annotated with its problem type and grade level (for indicating the level of difficulty). Furthermore, we propose a metric to measure the lexicon usage diversity of a given MWP corpus, and demonstrate that ASDiv is more diverse than existing corpora. Experiments show that our proposed corpus reflects the true capability of MWP solvers more faithfully.

We introduce MeSys, a meaning-based approach, for solving English math word problems (MWPs) via understanding and reasoning in this paper. It first analyzes the text, transforms both body and question parts into their corresponding logic forms, and then performs inference on them. The associated context of each quantity is represented with proposed role-tags (e.g., nsubj, verb, etc.), which provides the flexibility for annotating an extracted math quantity with its associated context information (i.e., the physical meaning of this quantity). Statistical models are proposed to select the operator and operands. A noisy dataset is designed to assess if a solver solves MWPs mainly via understanding or mechanical pattern matching. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms existing systems on both benchmark datasets and the noisy dataset, which demonstrates that the proposed approach understands the meaning of each quantity in the text more.

This paper proposes to perform natural language inference with Word-Pair-Dependency-Triplets. Most previous DNN-based approaches either ignore syntactic dependency among words, or directly use tree-LSTM to generate sentence representation with irrelevant information. To overcome the problems mentioned above, we adopt Word-Pair-Dependency-Triplets to improve alignment and inference judgment. To be specific, instead of comparing each triplet from one passage with the merged information of another passage, we first propose to perform comparison directly between the triplets of the given passage-pair to make the judgement more interpretable. Experimental results show that the performance of our approach is better than most of the approaches that use tree structures, and is comparable to other state-of-the-art approaches.

We construct a case-based English-to-Chinese semantic constituent parallel Treebank for a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) task by labelling each node of the Deep Syntactic Tree (DST) with our refined semantic cases. Since subtree span-crossing is harmful in tree-based SMT, DST is adopted to alleviate this problem. At the same time, we tailor an existing case set to represent bilingual shallow semantic relations more precisely. This Treebank is a part of a semantic corpus building project, which aims to build a semantic bilingual corpus annotated with syntactic, semantic cases and word senses. Data in our Treebank is from the news domain of Datum corpus. 4,000 sentence pairs are selected to cover various lexicons and part-of-speech (POS) n-gram patterns as much as possible. This paper presents the construction of this case Treebank. Also, we have tested the effect of adopting DST structure in alleviating subtree span-crossing. Our preliminary analysis shows that the compatibility between Chinese and English trees can be significantly increased by transforming the parse-tree into the DST. Furthermore, the human agreement rate in annotation is found to be acceptable (90% in English nodes, 75% in Chinese nodes).

This paper presents a meaning-based statistical math word problem (MWP) solver with understanding, reasoning and explanation. It comprises a web user interface and pipelined modules for analysing the text, transforming both body and question parts into their logic forms, and then performing inference on them. The associated context of each quantity is represented with proposed role-tags (e.g., nsubj, verb, etc.), which provides the flexibility for annotating the extracted math quantity with its associated syntactic and semantic information (which specifies the physical meaning of that quantity). Those role-tags are then used to identify the desired operands and filter out irrelevant quantities (so that the answer can be obtained precisely). Since the physical meaning of each quantity is explicitly represented with those role-tags and used in the inference process, the proposed approach could explain how the answer is obtained in a human comprehensible way.

In this paper, the major problems of the current machine translation systems are first outlined. A new direction, highlighting the system capability to be customizable and self-learnable, is then proposed for attacking the described problems, which are mainly resulted from the very complicated characteristics of natural languages. The proposed solution adopts an unsupervised two-way training mechanism and a parameterized architecture to acquire the required statistical knowledge, such that the system can be easily adapted to different domains and various preferences of individual users.

A brief introduction to the MT research projects in Taiwan is given in this paper. Special attention is given to the more and more popular corpus-based statistics-oriented (CBSO) approaches in MT researches. In particular, the parameterized two-way training philosophy in designing the second generation BehaviorTran, which is the first and the largest operational system in this area, is introduced in this paper.

In a natural language processing system, a large amount of ambiguity and a large branching factor are hindering factors in obtaining the desired analysis for a given sentence in a short time. In this paper, we are proposing a sequential truncation parsing algorithm to reduce the searching space and thus lowering the parsing time. The algorithm is based on a score function which takes the advantages of probabilistic characteristics of syntactic information in the sentences. A preliminary test on this algorithm was conducted with a special version of our machine translation system, the ARCHTRAN, and an encouraging result was observed.