Novel Object Captioning is a zero-shot Image Captioning task requiring describing objects not seen in the training captions, but for which information is available from external object detectors. The key challenge is to select and describe all salient detected novel objects in the input images. In this paper, we focus on this challenge and propose the ECOL-R model (Encouraging Copying of Object Labels with Reinforced Learning), a copy-augmented transformer model that is encouraged to accurately describe the novel object labels. This is achieved via a specialised reward function in the SCST reinforcement learning framework (Rennie et al., 2017) that encourages novel object mentions while maintaining the caption quality. We further restrict the SCST training to the images where detected objects are mentioned in reference captions to train the ECOL-R model. We additionally improve our copy mechanism via Abstract Labels, which transfer knowledge from known to novel object types, and a Morphological Selector, which determines the appropriate inflected forms of novel object labels. The resulting model sets new state-of-the-art on the nocaps (Agrawal et al., 2019) and held-out COCO (Hendricks et al., 2016) benchmarks.

This paper focuses on Seq2Seq (S2S) constrained text generation where the text generator is constrained to mention specific words which are inputs to the encoder in the generated outputs. Pre-trained S2S models or a Copy Mechanism are trained to copy the surface tokens from encoders to decoders, but they cannot guarantee constraint satisfaction. Constrained decoding algorithms always produce hypotheses satisfying all constraints. However, they are computationally expensive and can lower the generated text quality. In this paper, we propose Mention Flags (MF), which traces whether lexical constraints are satisfied in the generated outputs in an S2S decoder. The MF models can be trained to generate tokens in a hypothesis until all constraints are satisfied, guaranteeing high constraint satisfaction. Our experiments on the Common Sense Generation task (CommonGen) (Lin et al., 2020), End2end Restaurant Dialog task (E2ENLG) (Duˇsek et al., 2020) and Novel Object Captioning task (nocaps) (Agrawal et al., 2019) show that the MF models maintain higher constraint satisfaction and text quality than the baseline models and other constrained decoding algorithms, achieving state-of-the-art performance on all three tasks. These results are achieved with a much lower run-time than constrained decoding algorithms. We also show that the MF models work well in the low-resource setting.

Relation prediction informed from a combination of text corpora and curated knowledge bases, combining knowledge graph completion with relation extraction, is a relatively little studied task. A system that can perform this task has the ability to extend an arbitrary set of relational database tables with information extracted from a document corpus. OpenKi[1] addresses this task through extraction of named entities and predicates via OpenIE tools then learning relation embeddings from the resulting entity-relation graph for relation prediction, outperforming previous approaches. We present an extension of OpenKi that incorporates embeddings of text-based representations of the entities and the relations. We demonstrate that this results in a substantial performance increase over a system without this information.

Princeton WordNet is one of the most widely-used resources for natural language processing, but is updated only infrequently and cannot keep up with the fast-changing usage of the English language on social media platforms such as Twitter. The Colloquial WordNet aims to provide an open platform whereby anyone can contribute, while still following the structure of WordNet. Many crowd-sourced lexical resources often have significant quality issues, and as such care must be taken in the design of the interface to ensure quality. In this paper, we present the development of a platform that can be opened on the Web to any lexicographer who wishes to contribute to this resource and the lexicographic methodology applied by this interface.

This paper describes the entry NUIG in the WASSA 2017 (8th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis) shared task on emotion recognition. The NUIG system used an SVR (SVM regression) and BLSTM ensemble, utilizing primarily n-grams (for SVR features) and tweet word embeddings (for BLSTM features). Experiments were carried out on several other candidate features, some of which were added to the SVR model. Parameter selection for the SVR model was run as a grid search whilst parameters for the BLSTM model were selected through a non-exhaustive ad-hoc search.