We propose DoTAT, a domain-oriented text annotation tool. The tool designs and implements functions heavily in need in domain-oriented information extraction. Firstly, the tool supports a multi-person collaborative process with automatically merging and review, which can greatly improve the annotation accuracy. Secondly, the tool provides annotation of events, nested event and nested entity, which are frequently required in domain-related text structuring tasks. Finally, DoTAT provides visual annotation specification definition, automatic batch annotation and iterative annotation to improve annotation efficiency. Experiments on the ACE2005 dataset show that DoTAT can reduce the event annotation time by 19.7% compared with existing annotation tools. The accuracy without review is 84.09%, 1.35% higher than Brat and 2.59% higher than Webanno. The accuracy of DoTAT even reaches 93.76% with review. The demonstration video can be accessed from https://ecust-nlp-docker.oss-cn-shanghai.aliyuncs.com/dotat_demo.mp4. A live demo website is available at https://github.com/FXLP/MarkTool.

Recent advances in NLP and information retrieval have given rise to a diverse set of question answering tasks that are of different formats (e.g., extractive, abstractive), require different model architectures (e.g., generative, discriminative), and setups (e.g., with or without retrieval). Despite having a large number of powerful, specialized QA pipelines (which we refer to as Skills) that consider a single domain, model or setup, there exists no framework where users can easily explore and compare such pipelines and can extend them according to their needs. To address this issue, we present UKP-SQuARE, an extensible online QA platform for researchers which allows users to query and analyze a large collection of modern Skills via a user-friendly web interface and integrated behavioural tests. In addition, QA researchers can develop, manage, and share their custom Skills using our microservices that support a wide range of models (Transformers, Adapters, ONNX), datastores and retrieval techniques (e.g., sparse and dense). UKP-SQuARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de

There is a growing need to model interactions between data modalities (e.g., vision, language) — both to improve AI predictions on existing tasks and to enable new applications. In the recent field of multimodal medical AI, integrating multiple modalities has gained widespread popularity as multimodal models have proven to improve performance, robustness, require less training samples and add complementary information. To improve technical reproducibility and transparency for multimodal medical tasks as well as speed up progress across medical AI, we present ViLMedic, a Vision-and-Language medical library. As of 2022, the library contains a dozen reference implementations replicating the state-of-the-art results for problems that range from medical visual question answering and radiology report generation to multimodal representation learning on widely adopted medical datasets. In addition, ViLMedic hosts a model-zoo with more than twenty pretrained models for the above tasks designed to be extensible by researchers but also simple for practitioners. Ultimately, we hope our reproducible pipelines can enable clinical translation and create real impact. The library is available at https://github.com/jbdel/vilmedic.

Pre-trained language models have been prevailed in natural language processing and become the backbones of many NLP tasks, but the demands for computational resources have limited their applications. In this paper, we introduce TextPruner, an open-source model pruning toolkit designed for pre-trained language models, targeting fast and easy model compression. TextPruner offers structured post-training pruning methods, including vocabulary pruning and transformer pruning, and can be applied to various models and tasks. We also propose a self-supervised pruning method that can be applied without the labeled data. Our experiments with several NLP tasks demonstrate the ability of TextPruner to reduce the model size without re-training the model.

Open Information Extraction (OIE) is the task of extracting facts from sentences in the form of relations and their corresponding arguments in schema-free manner. Intrinsic performance of OIE systems is difficult to measure due to the incompleteness of existing OIE benchmarks: ground truth extractions do not group all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact that can be extracted from a sentence. To measure performance of OIE systems more realistically, it is necessary to manually annotate complete facts (i.e., clusters of all acceptable surface realizations of the same fact) from input sentences. We propose AnnIE: an interactive annotation platform that facilitates such challenging annotation tasks and supports creation of complete fact-oriented OIE evaluation benchmarks. AnnIE is modular and flexible in order to support different use case scenarios (i.e., benchmarks covering different types of facts) and different languages. We use AnnIE to build two complete OIE benchmarks: one with verb-mediated facts and another with facts encompassing named entities. We evaluate several OIE systems on our complete benchmarks created with AnnIE. We publicly release AnnIE (and all gold datasets generated with it) under non-restrictive license.

The open-access dissemination of pretrained language models through online repositories has led to a democratization of state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP) research. This also allows people outside of NLP to use such models and adapt them to specific use-cases. However, a certain amount of technical proficiency is still required which is an entry barrier for users who want to apply these models to a certain task but lack the necessary knowledge or resources. In this work, we aim to overcome this gap by providing a tool which allows researchers to leverage pretrained models without writing a single line of code. Built upon the parameter-efficient adapter modules for transfer learning, our AdapterHub Playground provides an intuitive interface, allowing the usage of adapters for prediction, training and analysis of textual data for a variety of NLP tasks. We present the tool’s architecture and demonstrate its advantages with prototypical use-cases, where we show that predictive performance can easily be increased in a few-shot learning scenario. Finally, we evaluate its usability in a user study. We provide the code and a live interface at https://adapter-hub.github.io/playground.

Lyrics generation has been a very popular application of natural language generation. Previous works mainly focused on generating lyrics based on a couple of attributes or keywords, rendering very limited control over the content of the lyrics. In this paper, we demonstrate the QiuNiu, a Chinese lyrics generation system which is conditioned on passage-level text rather than a few attributes or keywords. By using the passage-level text as input, the content of generated lyrics is expected to reflect the nuances of users’ needs. The QiuNiu system supports various forms of passage-level input, such as short stories, essays, poetry. The training of it is conducted under the framework of unsupervised machine translation, due to the lack of aligned passage-level text-to-lyrics corpus. We initialize the parameters of QiuNiu with a custom pretrained Chinese GPT-2 model and adopt a two-step process to finetune the model for better alignment between passage-level text and lyrics. Additionally, a postprocess module is used to filter and rerank the generated lyrics to select the ones of highest quality. The demo video of the system is available at https://youtu.be/OCQNzahqWgM.

A multi-language dictionary is a fundamental tool for language learning, allowing the learner to look up unfamiliar words. Searching an unrecognized word in the dictionary does not usually require deep knowledge of the target language. However, this is not true for sign language, where gestural elements preclude this type of easy lookup. This paper introduces GlossFinder, an online tool supporting 2, 000 signs to assist language learners in determining the meaning of given signs. Unlike alternative systems of complex inputs, our system requires only that learners imitate the sign in front of a standard webcam. A user study conducted among sign language speakers of varying ability compared our system against existing alternatives and the interviews indicated a clear preference for our new system. This implies that GlossFinder can lower the barrier in sign language learning by addressing the common problem of sign finding and make it accessible to the wider community.

PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts. Prompts are functions that map an example from a dataset to a natural language input and target output. Using prompts to train and query language models is an emerging area in NLP that requires new tools that let users develop and refine these prompts collaboratively. PromptSource addresses the emergent challenges in this new setting with (1) a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, (2) an interface that lets users quickly iterate on prompt development by observing outputs of their prompts on many examples, and (3) a community-driven set of guidelines for contributing new prompts to a common pool. Over 2,000 prompts for roughly 170 datasets are already available in PromptSource. PromptSource is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.

Prompt-learning has become a new paradigm in modern natural language processing, which directly adapts pre-trained language models (PLMs) to cloze-style prediction, autoregressive modeling, or sequence to sequence generation, resulting in promising performances on various tasks. However, no standard implementation framework of prompt-learning is proposed yet, and most existing prompt- learning codebases, often unregulated, only provide limited implementations for specific scenarios. Since there are many details such as templating strategy, initializing strategy, verbalizing strategy, etc., that need to be considered in prompt-learning, practitioners face impediments to quickly adapting the de-sired prompt learning methods to their applications. In this paper, we present Open- Prompt, a unified easy-to-use toolkit to conduct prompt-learning over PLMs. OpenPrompt is a research-friendly framework that is equipped with efficiency, modularity, and extendibility, and its combinability allows the freedom to combine different PLMs, task for- mats, and prompting modules in a unified paradigm. Users could expediently deploy prompt-learning frameworks and evaluate the generalization of them on different NLP tasks without constraints.

Collecting data for conversational semantic parsing is a time-consuming and demanding process. In this paper we consider, given an incomplete dataset with only a small amount of data, how to build an AI-powered human-in-the-loop process to enable efficient data collection. A guided K-best selection process is proposed, which (i) generates a set of possible valid candidates; (ii) allows users to quickly traverse the set and filter incorrect parses; and (iii) asks users to select the correct parse, with minimal modification when necessary. We investigate how to best support users in efficiently traversing the candidate set and locating the correct parse, in terms of speed and accuracy. In our user study, consisting of five annotators labeling 300 instances each, we find that combining keyword searching, where keywords can be used to query relevant candidates, and keyword suggestion, where representative keywords are automatically generated, enables fast and accurate annotation.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) ‘s applied nature makes it necessary to select the most effective and robust models. Producing slightly higher performance is insufficient; we want to know whether this advantage will carry over to other data sets. Bootstrapped significance tests can indicate that ability. So while necessary, computing the significance of models’ performance differences has many levels of complexity. It can be tedious, especially when the experimental design has many conditions to compare and several runs of experiments. We present BooStSa, a tool that makes it easy to compute significance levels with the BOOtSTrap SAmpling procedure to evaluate models that predict not only standard hard labels but soft-labels (i.e., probability distributions over different classes) as well.

To tackle the challenge of accurate and timely communication regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, we present a COVID-19 Claim Radar to automatically extract supporting and refuting claims on a daily basis. We provide a comprehensive structured view of claims, including rich claim attributes (such as claimers and claimer affiliations) and associated knowledge elements as claim semantics (such as events, relations and entities), enabling users to explore equivalent, refuting, or supporting claims with structural evidence, such as shared claimers, similar centroid events and arguments. In order to consolidate claim structures at the corpus-level, we leverage Wikidata as the hub to merge coreferential knowledge elements. The system automatically provides users a comprehensive exposure to COVID-19 related claims, their importance, and their interconnections. The system is publicly available at GitHub and DockerHub, with complete documentation.

We introduce TS-ANNO, an open-source web application for manual creation and for evaluation of parallel corpora for text simplification. TS-ANNO can be used for i) sentence–wise alignment, ii) rating alignment pairs (e.g., w.r.t. grammaticality, meaning preservation, ...), iii) annotating alignment pairs w.r.t. simplification transformations (e.g., lexical substitution, sentence splitting, ...), and iv) manual simplification of complex documents. For evaluation, TS-ANNO calculates inter-annotator agreement of alignments (i) and annotations (ii).

The Universal Knowledge Core (UKC) is a large multilingual lexical database with a focus on language diversity and covering over two thousand languages. The aim of the database, as well as its tools and data catalogue, is to make the abstract notion of linguistic diversity visually understandable for humans and formally exploitable by machines. The UKC website lets users explore millions of individual words and their meanings, but also phenomena of cross-lingual convergence and divergence, such as shared interlingual meanings, lexicon similarities, cognate clusters, or lexical gaps. The UKC LiveLanguage Catalogue, in turn, provides access to the underlying lexical data in a computer-processable form, ready to be reused in cross-lingual applications.

In this paper, we propose CogKGE, a knowledge graph embedding (KGE) toolkit, which aims to represent multi-source and heterogeneous knowledge. For multi-source knowledge, unlike existing methods that mainly focus on entity-centric knowledge, CogKGE also supports the representations of event-centric, commonsense and linguistic knowledge. For heterogeneous knowledge, besides structured triple facts, CogKGE leverages additional unstructured information, such as text descriptions, node types and temporal information, to enhance the meaning of embeddings. Designing CogKGE aims to provide a unified programming framework for KGE tasks and a series of knowledge representations for downstream tasks. As a research framework, CogKGE consists of five parts, including core, data, model, knowledge and adapter module. As a knowledge discovery toolkit, CogKGE provides pre-trained embedders to discover new facts, cluster entities and check facts. Furthermore, we construct two benchmark datasets for further research on multi-source heterogeneous KGE tasks: EventKG240K and CogNet360K. We also release an online system to discover knowledge visually. Source code, datasets and pre-trained embeddings are publicly available at GitHub, with a short instruction video.

We introduce Dynatask: an open source system for setting up custom NLP tasks that aims to greatly lower the technical knowledge and effort required for hosting and evaluating state-of-the-art NLP models, as well as for conducting model in the loop data collection with crowdworkers. Dynatask is integrated with Dynabench, a research platform for rethinking benchmarking in AI that facilitates human and model in the loop data collection and evaluation. To create a task, users only need to write a short task configuration file from which the relevant web interfaces and model hosting infrastructure are automatically generated. The system is available at https://dynabench.org/ and the full library can be found at https://github.com/facebookresearch/dynabench.

Despite data’s crucial role in machine learning, most existing tools and research tend to focus on systems on top of existing data rather than how to interpret and manipulate data. In this paper, we propose DataLab, a unified data-oriented platform that not only allows users to interactively analyze the characteristics of data but also provides a standardized interface so that many data processing operations can be provided within a unified interface. Additionally, in view of the ongoing surge in the proliferation of datasets, DataLab has features for dataset recommendation and global vision analysis that help researchers form a better view of the data ecosystem. So far, DataLab covers 1,300 datasets and 3,583 of its transformed version, where 313 datasets support different types of analysis (e.g., with respect to gender bias) with the help of 119M samples annotated by 318 feature functions. DataLab is under active development and will be supported going forward. We have released a web platform, web API, Python SDK, and PyPI published package, which hopefully, can meet the diverse needs of researchers.

Intelligent conversational assistants have become an integral part of our lives for performing simple tasks. However, such agents, for example, Google bots, Alexa and others are yet to have any social impact on minority population, for example, for people with neurological disorders and people with speech, language and social communication disorders, sometimes with locked-in states where speaking or typing is a challenge. Language model technologies can be very powerful tools in enabling these users to carry out daily communication and social interactions. In this work, we present a system that users with varied levels of disabilties can use to interact with the world, supported by eye-tracking, mouse controls and an intelligent agent Cue-bot, that can represent the user in a conversation. The agent provides relevant controllable ‘cues’ to generate desirable responses quickly for an ongoing dialog context. In the context of usage of such systems for people with degenerative disorders, we present automatic and human evaluation of our cue/keyword predictor and the controllable dialog system and show that our models perform significantly better than models without control and can also reduce user effort (fewer keystrokes) and speed up communication (typing time) significantly.

M-SENA is an open-sourced platform for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis. It aims to facilitate advanced research by providing flexible toolkits, reliable benchmarks, and intuitive demonstrations. The platform features a fully modular video sentiment analysis framework consisting of data management, feature extraction, model training, and result analysis modules. In this paper, we first illustrate the overall architecture of the M-SENA platform and then introduce features of the core modules. Reliable baseline results of different modality features and MSA benchmarks are also reported. Moreover, we use model evaluation and analysis tools provided by M-SENA to present intermediate representation visualization, on-the-fly instance test, and generalization ability test results. The source code of the platform is publicly available at https://github.com/thuiar/M-SENA.

We investigate the usage of entity linking (EL)in downstream tasks and present the first modularized EL toolkit for easy task adaptation. Different from the existing EL methods that dealwith all the features simultaneously, we modularize the whole model into separate parts witheach feature. This decoupled design enablesflexibly adding new features without retraining the whole model as well as flow visualization with better interpretability of the ELresult. We release the corresponding toolkit,HOSMEL, for Chinese, with three flexible usage modes, a live demo, and a demonstrationvideo. Experiments on two benchmarks forthe question answering task demonstrate thatHOSMEL achieves much less time and spaceconsumption as well as significantly better accuracy performance compared with existingSOTA EL methods. We hope the release ofHOSMEL will call for more attention to studyEL for downstream tasks in non-English languages.

In recent years, large-scale pre-trained language models (PLMs) containing billions of parameters have achieved promising results on various NLP tasks. Although we can pre-train these big models by stacking computing clusters at any cost, it is impractical to use such huge computing resources to apply big models for each downstream task. To address the computation bottleneck encountered in deploying big models in real-world scenarios, we introduce an open-source toolkit for big model inference and tuning (BMInf), which can support big model inference and tuning at extremely low computation cost. More specifically, at the algorithm level, we introduce model quantization and parameter-efficient tuning for efficient model inference and tuning. At the implementation level, we apply model offloading, model checkpointing, and CPU-GPU scheduling optimization to further reduce the computation and memory cost of big models. Based on above efforts, we can efficiently perform big model inference and tuning with a single GPU (even a consumer-level GPU like GTX 1060) instead of computing clusters, which is difficult for existing distributed learning toolkits for PLMs. BMInf is publicly released at https://github.com/OpenBMB/BMInf.

Events are fundamental building blocks of real-world happenings. In this paper, we present a large-scale, multi-modal event knowledge graph named MMEKG. MMEKG unifies different modalities of knowledge via events, which complement and disambiguate each other. Specifically, MMEKG incorporates (i) over 990 thousand concept events with 644 relation types to cover most types of happenings, and (ii) over 863 million instance events connected through 934 million relations, which provide rich contextual information in texts and/or images. To collect billion-scale instance events and relations among them, we additionally develop an efficient yet effective pipeline for textual/visual knowledge extraction system. We also develop an induction strategy to create million-scale concept events and a schema organizing all events and relations in MMEKG. To this end, we also provide a pipeline enabling our system to seamlessly parse texts/images to event graphs and to retrieve multi-modal knowledge at both concept- and instance-levels.

SOCIOFILLMORE is a multilingual tool which helps to bring to the fore the focus or the perspective that a text expresses in depicting an event. Our tool, whose rationale we also support through a large collection of human judgements, is theoretically grounded on frame semantics and cognitive linguistics, and implemented using the LOME frame semantic parser. We describe SOCIOFILLMORE’s development and functionalities, show how non-NLP researchers can easily interact with the tool, and present some example case studies which are already incorporated in the system, together with the kind of analysis that can be visualised.

Despite its importance, the time variable has been largely neglected in the NLP and language model literature. In this paper, we present TimeLMs, a set of language models specialized on diachronic Twitter data. We show that a continual learning strategy contributes to enhancing Twitter-based language models’ capacity to deal with future and out-of-distribution tweets, while making them competitive with standardized and more monolithic benchmarks. We also perform a number of qualitative analyses showing how they cope with trends and peaks in activity involving specific named entities or concept drift. TimeLMs is available at github.com/cardiffnlp/timelms.

This paper introduces Adaptor library, which transposes traditional model-centric approach composed of pre-training + fine-tuning steps to objective-centric approach, composing the training process by applications of selected objectives. We survey research directions that can benefit from enhanced objective-centric experimentation in multitask training, custom objectives development, dynamic training curricula, or domain adaptation. Adaptor aims to ease reproducibility of these research directions in practice. Finally, we demonstrate the practical applicability of Adaptor in selected unsupervised domain adaptation scenarios.

Acquiring high-quality annotated corpora for complex multi-task information extraction (MT-IE) is an arduous and costly process for human-annotators. Adoption of unsupervised techniques for automated annotation have thus become popular. However, these techniques rely heavily on dictionaries, gazetteers, and knowledge bases. While such resources are abundant for general domains, they are scarce for specialised technical domains. To tackle this challenge, we present QuickGraph, the first collaborative MT-IE annotation tool built with indirect weak supervision and clustering to maximise annotator productivity. QuickGraph’s main contribution is a set of novel features that enable knowledge graph extraction through rapid and consistent complex multi-task entity and relation annotation. In this paper, we discuss these key features and qualitatively compare QuickGraph to existing annotation tools.