Question-answering (QA) on hybrid scientific tabular and textual data deals with scientific information, and relies on complex numerical reasoning. In recent years, while tabular QA has seen rapid progress, understanding their robustness on scientific information is lacking due to absence of any benchmark dataset. To investigate the robustness of the existing state-of-the-art QA models on scientific hybrid tabular data, we propose a new dataset, “SciTabQA”, consisting of 822 question-answer pairs from scientific tables and their descriptions. With the help of this dataset, we assess the state-of-the-art Tabular QA models based on their ability (i) to use heterogeneous information requiring both structured data (table) and unstructured data (text) and (ii) to perform complex scientific reasoning tasks. In essence, we check the capability of the models to interpret scientific tables and text. Our experiments show that “SciTabQA” is an innovative dataset to study question-answering over scientific heterogeneous data. We benchmark three state-of-the-art Tabular QA models, and find that the best F1 score is only 0.462.

We study the problem of automatically annotating relevant numerals (GAAP metrics) occurring in the financial documents with their corresponding XBRL tags. Different from prior works, we investigate the feasibility of solving this extreme classification problem using a generative paradigm through instruction tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs). To this end, we leverage metric metadata informationto frame our target outputs while proposing a parameter efficient solution for the task using LoRA. We perform experiments on two recently released financial numeric labeling datasets. Our proposed model, **FLAN-FinXC**, achieves new state-of-the-art performances on both the datasets, outperforming several strong baselines. We explain the better scores of our proposed model by demonstrating its capability for zero-shot as well as the least frequently occurring tags. Also, even when we fail to predict the XBRL tags correctly, our generated output has substantial overlap with the ground-truth in majority of the cases.

In this paper, we propose sequence-based pre-training methods to enhance procedural understanding in natural language processing. Procedural text, containing sequential instructions to accomplish a task, is difficult to understand due to the changing attributes of entities in the context. We focus on recipes as they are commonly represented as ordered instructions, and use this order as a supervision signal. Our work is one of the first to compare several ‘order-as-supervision’ transformer pre-training methods, including Permutation Classification, Embedding Regression, and Skip-Clip, and show that these methods give improved results compared to baselines and SoTA LLMs on two downstream Entity-Tracking datasets: NPN-Cooking dataset in recipe domain and ProPara dataset in open domain. Our proposed methods address the non-trivial Entity Tracking Task that requires prediction of entity states across procedure steps, which requires understanding the order of steps. These methods show an improvement over the best baseline by 1.6% and 7-9% on NPN-Cooking and ProPara Datasets respectively across metrics.

Biomedical queries have become increasingly prevalent in web searches, reflecting the growing interest in accessing biomedical literature. Despite recent research on large-language models (LLMs) motivated by endeavors to attain generalized intelligence, their efficacy in replacing task and domain-specific natural language understanding approaches remains questionable. In this paper, we address this question by conducting a comprehensive empirical evaluation of intent detection and named entity recognition (NER) tasks from biomedical text. We show that Supervised Fine Tuned approaches are still relevant and more effective than general-purpose LLMs. Biomedical transformer models such as PubMedBERT can surpass ChatGPT on NER task with only 5 supervised examples.

In this work, we focus on low-resource dependency parsing for multiple languages. Several strategies are tailored to enhance performance in low-resource scenarios. While these are well-known to the community, it is not trivial to select the best-performing combination of these strategies for a low-resource language that we are interested in, and not much attention has been given to measuring the efficacy of these strategies. We experiment with 5 low-resource strategies for our ensembled approach on 7 Universal Dependency (UD) low-resource languages. Our exhaustive experimentation on these languages supports the effective improvements for languages not covered in pretrained models. We show a successful application of the ensembled system on a truly low-resource language Sanskrit. The code and data are available at: https://github.com/Jivnesh/SanDP

We present a neural Sanskrit Natural Language Processing (NLP) toolkit named SanskritShala (a school of Sanskrit) to facilitate computational linguistic analyses for several tasks such as word segmentation, morphological tagging, dependency parsing, and compound type identification. Our systems currently report state-of-the-art performance on available benchmark datasets for all tasks. SanskritShala is deployed as a web-based application, which allows a user to get real-time analysis for the given input. It is built with easy-to-use interactive data annotation features that allow annotators to correct the system predictions when it makes mistakes. We publicly release the source codes of the 4 modules included in the toolkit, 7 word embedding models that have been trained on publicly available Sanskrit corpora and multiple annotated datasets such as word similarity, relatedness, categorization, analogy prediction to assess intrinsic properties of word embeddings. So far as we know, this is the first neural-based Sanskrit NLP toolkit that has a web-based interface and a number of NLP modules. We are sure that the people who are willing to work with Sanskrit will find it useful for pedagogical and annotative purposes. SanskritShala is available at: https://cnerg.iitkgp.ac.in/sanskritshala. The demo video of our platform can be accessed at: https://youtu.be/x0X31Y9k0mw4.

Scarcity of data and technological limitations for resource-poor languages in developing countries like India poses a threat to the development of sophisticated NLU systems for healthcare. To assess the current status of various state-of-the-art language models in healthcare, this paper studies the problem by initially proposing two different Healthcare datasets, Indian Healthcare Query Intent-WebMD and 1mg (IHQID-WebMD and IHQID-1mg) and one real world Indian hospital query data in English and multiple Indic languages (Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Gujarati) which are annotated with the query intents as well as entities. Our aim is to detect query intents and corresponding entities. We perform extensive experiments on a set of models which in various realistic settings and explore two scenarios based on the access to English data only (less costly) and access to target language data (more expensive). We analyze context specific practical relevancy through empirical analysis. The results, expressed in terms of overall F-score show that our approach is practically useful to identify intents and entities.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) mandates all public companies to file periodic financial statements that should contain numerals annotated with a particular label from a taxonomy. In this paper, we formulate the task of automating the assignment of a label to a particular numeral span in a sentence from an extremely large label set. Towards this task, we release a dataset, Financial Numeric Extreme Labelling (FNXL), annotated with 2,794 labels. We benchmark the performance of the FNXL dataset by formulating the task as (a) a sequence labelling problem and (b) a pipeline with span extraction followed by Extreme Classification. Although the two approaches perform comparably, the pipeline solution provides a slight edge for the least frequent labels.

The use of large language models (LLMs) in natural language processing (NLP) tasks is rapidly increasing, leading to changes in how researchers approach problems in the field. To fully utilize these models’ abilities, a better understanding of their behavior for different input protocols is required. With LLMs, users can directly interact with the models through a text-based interface to define and solve various tasks. Hence, understanding the conversational abilities of these LLMs, which may not have been specifically trained for dialog modeling, is also important. This study examines different approaches for building dialog systems using LLMs by considering various aspects of the prompt. As part of prompt tuning, we experiment with various ways of providing instructions, exemplars, current query and additional context. The research also analyzes the representations of dialog history that have the optimal usable-information density. Based on the findings, the paper suggests more compact ways of providing dialog history information while ensuring good performance and reducing model’s inference-API costs. The research contributes to a better understanding of how LLMs can be effectively used for building interactive systems.

In this paper, we propose ***CLMSM***, a domain-specific, continual pre-training framework, that learns from a large set of procedural recipes. ***CLMSM*** uses a Multi-Task Learning Framework to optimize two objectives - a) Contrastive Learning using hard triplets to learn fine-grained differences across entities in the procedures, and b) a novel Mask-Step Modelling objective to learn step-wise context of a procedure. We test the performance of ***CLMSM*** on the downstream tasks of tracking entities and aligning actions between two procedures on three datasets, one of which is an open-domain dataset not conforming with the pre-training dataset. We show that ***CLMSM*** not only outperforms baselines on recipes (in-domain) but is also able to generalize to open-domain procedural NLP tasks.

Existing works on Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) explicitly focus on developing more efficient fine-tuning techniques for the task. Instead, our motivation is to come up with a generic approach that can improve the downstream performances of multiple ABSA tasks simultaneously. Towards this, we present CONTRASTE, a novel pre-training strategy using CONTRastive learning to enhance the ASTE performance. While we primarily focus on ASTE, we also demonstrate the advantage of our proposed technique on other ABSA tasks such as ACOS, TASD, and AESC. Given a sentence and its associated (aspect, opinion, sentiment) triplets, first, we design aspect-based prompts with corresponding sentiments masked. We then (pre)train an encoder-decoder model by applying contrastive learning on the decoder-generated aspect-aware sentiment representations of the masked terms. For fine-tuning the model weights thus obtained, we then propose a novel multi-task approach where the base encoder-decoder model is combined with two complementary modules, a tagging-based Opinion Term Detector, and a regression-based Triplet Count Estimator. Exhaustive experiments on four benchmark datasets and a detailed ablation study establish the importance of each of our proposed components as we achieve new state-of-the-art ASTE results.

Multi-component compounding is a prevalent phenomenon in Sanskrit, and understanding the implicit structure of a compound’s components is crucial for deciphering its meaning. Earlier approaches in Sanskrit have focused on binary compounds and neglected the multi-component compound setting. This work introduces the novel task of nested compound type identification (NeCTI), which aims to identify nested spans of a multi-component compound and decode the implicit semantic relations between them. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in the field of lexical semantics to propose this task. We present 2 newly annotated datasets including an out-of-domain dataset for this task. We also benchmark these datasets by exploring the efficacy of the standard problem formulations such as nested named entity recognition, constituency parsing and seq2seq, etc. We present a novel framework named DepNeCTI: Dependency-based Nested Compound Type Identifier that surpasses the performance of the best baseline with an average absolute improvement of 13.1 points F1-score in terms of Labeled Span Score (LSS) and a 5-fold enhancement in inference efficiency. In line with the previous findings in the binary Sanskrit compound identification task, context provides benefits for the NeCTI task. The codebase and datasets are publicly available at: https://github.com/yaswanth-iitkgp/DepNeCTI

The phenomenon of compounding is ubiquitous in Sanskrit. It serves for achieving brevity in expressing thoughts, while simultaneously enriching the lexical and structural formation of the language. In this work, we focus on the Sanskrit Compound Type Identification (SaCTI) task, where we consider the problem of identifying semantic relations between the components of a compound word. Earlier approaches solely rely on the lexical information obtained from the components and ignore the most crucial contextual and syntactic information useful for SaCTI. However, the SaCTI task is challenging primarily due to the implicitly encoded context-sensitive semantic relation between the compound components. Thus, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture which incorporates the contextual information and enriches the complementary syntactic information using morphological tagging and dependency parsing as two auxiliary tasks. Experiments on the benchmark datasets for SaCTI show 6.1 points (Accuracy) and 7.7 points (F1-score) absolute gain compared to the state-of-the-art system. Further, our multi-lingual experiments demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed architecture in English and Marathi languages.

Few-shot Question Generation (QG) is an important and challenging problem in the Natural Language Generation (NLG) domain. Multilingual BERT (mBERT) has been successfully used in various Natural Language Understanding (NLU) applications. However, the question of how to utilize mBERT for few-shot QG, possibly with cross-lingual transfer, remains. In this paper, we try to explore how mBERT performs in few-shot QG (cross-lingual transfer) and also whether applying meta-learning on mBERT further improves the results. In our setting, we consider mBERT as the base model and fine-tune it using a seq-to-seq language modeling framework in a cross-lingual setting. Further, we apply the model agnostic meta-learning approach to our base model. We evaluate our model for two low-resource Indian languages, Bengali and Telugu, using the TyDi QA dataset. The proposed approach consistently improves the performance of the base model in few-shot settings and even works better than some heavily parameterized models. Human evaluation also confirms the effectiveness of our approach.

Nowadays, the interest in code-mixing has become ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing (NLP); however, not much attention has been given to address this phenomenon for Speech Translation (ST) task. This can be solely attributed to the lack of code-mixed ST task labelled data. Thus, we introduce Prabhupadavani, which is a multilingual code-mixed ST dataset for 25 languages. It is multi-domain, covers ten language families, containing 94 hours of speech by 130+ speakers, manually aligned with corresponding text in the target language. The Prabhupadavani is about Vedic culture and heritage from Indic literature, where code-switching in the case of quotation from literature is important in the context of humanities teaching. To the best of our knowledge, Prabhupadvani is the first multi-lingual code-mixed ST dataset available in the ST literature. This data also can be used for a code-mixed machine translation task. All the dataset can be accessed at: https://github.com/frozentoad9/CMST.

Summarization of legal case judgement documents is a challenging problem in Legal NLP. However, not much analyses exist on how different families of summarization models (e.g., extractive vs. abstractive) perform when applied to legal case documents. This question is particularly important since many recent transformer-based abstractive summarization models have restrictions on the number of input tokens, and legal documents are known to be very long. Also, it is an open question on how best to evaluate legal case document summarization systems. In this paper, we carry out extensive experiments with several extractive and abstractive summarization methods (both supervised and unsupervised) over three legal summarization datasets that we have developed. Our analyses, that includes evaluation by law practitioners, lead to several interesting insights on legal summarization in specific and long document summarization in general.

Systems like Voice-command based conversational agents are characterized by a pre-defined set of skills or intents to perform user specified tasks. In the course of time, newer intents may emerge requiring retraining. However, the newer intents may not be explicitly announced and need to be inferred dynamically. Thus, there are two important tasks at hand (a). identifying emerging new intents, (b). annotating data of the new intents so that the underlying classifier can be retrained efficiently. The tasks become specially challenging when a large number of new intents emerge simultaneously and there is a limited budget of manual annotation. In this paper, we propose MNID (Multiple Novel Intent Detection) which is a cluster based framework to detect multiple novel intents with budgeted human annotation cost. Empirical results on various benchmark datasets (of different sizes) demonstrate that MNID, by intelligently using the budget for annotation, outperforms the baseline methods in terms of accuracy and F1-score.

Most of the existing discourse-level Information Extraction tasks have been modeled to be extractive in nature. However, we argue that extracting information from larger bodies of discourse-like documents requires more natural language understanding and reasoning capabilities. In our work, we propose the novel task of document-level event argument aggregation which generates consolidated event-arguments at a document-level with minimal loss of information. More specifically, we focus on generating precise document-level information frames in a multilingual setting using prompt-based methods. In this paper, we show the effectiveness of u prompt-based text generation approach to generate document-level argument spans in a low-resource and zero-shot setting. We also release the first of its kind multilingual event argument aggregation dataset that can be leveraged in other related multilingual text generation tasks as well: https://github.com/DebanjanaKar/ArgGen.

Sanskrit Word Segmentation (SWS) is essential in making digitized texts available and in deploying downstream tasks. It is, however, non-trivial because of the sandhi phenomenon that modifies the characters at the word boundaries, and needs special treatment. Existing lexicon driven approaches for SWS make use of Sanskrit Heritage Reader, a lexicon-driven shallow parser, to generate the complete candidate solution space, over which various methods are applied to produce the most valid solution. However, these approaches fail while encountering out-of-vocabulary tokens. On the other hand, purely engineering methods for SWS have made use of recent advances in deep learning, but cannot make use of the latent word information on availability. To mitigate the shortcomings of both families of approaches, we propose Transformer based Linguistically Informed Sanskrit Tokenizer (TransLIST) consisting of (1) a module that encodes the character input along with latent-word information, which takes into account the sandhi phenomenon specific to SWS and is apt to work with partial or no candidate solutions, (2) a novel soft-masked attention to prioritize potential candidate words and (3) a novel path ranking algorithm to rectify the corrupted predictions. Experiments on the benchmark datasets for SWS show that TransLIST outperforms the current state-of-the-art system by an average 7.2 points absolute gain in terms of perfect match (PM) metric.

Many e-commerce websites provide Product-related Question Answering (PQA) platform where potential customers can ask questions related to a product, and other consumers can post an answer to that question based on their experience. Recently, there has been a growing interest in providing automated responses to product questions. In this paper, we investigate the suitability of the generative approach for PQA. We use state-of-the-art generative models proposed by Deng et al.(2020) and Lu et al.(2020) for this purpose. On closer examination, we find several drawbacks in this approach: (1) input reviews are not always utilized significantly for answer generation, (2) the performance of the models is abysmal while answering the numerical questions, (3) many of the generated answers contain phrases like “I do not know” which are taken from the reference answer in training data, and these answers do not convey any information to the customer. Although these approaches achieve a high ROUGE score, it does not reflect upon these shortcomings of the generated answers. We hope that our analysis will lead to more rigorous PQA approaches, and future research will focus on addressing these shortcomings in PQA.

Despite tremendous progress in automatic summarization, state-of-the-art methods are predominantly trained to excel in summarizing short newswire articles, or documents with strong layout biases such as scientific articles or government reports. Efficient techniques to summarize financial documents, discussing facts and figures, have largely been unexplored, majorly due to the unavailability of suitable datasets. In this work, we present ECTSum, a new dataset with transcripts of earnings calls (ECTs), hosted by publicly traded companies, as documents, and experts-written short telegram-style bullet point summaries derived from corresponding Reuters articles. ECTs are long unstructured documents without any prescribed length limit or format. We benchmark our dataset with state-of-the-art summarization methods across various metrics evaluating the content quality and factual consistency of the generated summaries. Finally, we present a simple yet effective approach, ECT-BPS, to generate a set of bullet points that precisely capture the important facts discussed in the calls.

Although many pretrained models exist for text or images, there have been relatively fewer attempts to train representations specifically for dialog understanding. Prior works usually relied on finetuned representations based on generic text representation models like BERT or GPT-2. But such language modeling pretraining objectives do not take the structural information of conversational text into consideration. Although generative dialog models can learn structural features too, we argue that the structure-unaware word-by-word generation is not suitable for effective conversation modeling. We empirically demonstrate that such representations do not perform consistently across various dialog understanding tasks. Hence, we propose a structure-aware Mutual Information based loss-function DMI (Discourse Mutual Information) for training dialog-representation models, that additionally captures the inherent uncertainty in response prediction. Extensive evaluation on nine diverse dialog modeling tasks shows that our proposed DMI-based models outperform strong baselines by significant margins.

In the last few years, several attempts have been made on extracting information from material science research domain. Material Science research articles are a rich source of information about various entities related to material science such as names of the materials used for experiments, the computational software used along with its parameters, the method used in the experiments, etc. But the distribution of these entities is not uniform across different sections of research articles. Most of the sentences in the research articles do not contain any entity. In this work, we first use a sentence-level classifier to identify sentences containing at least one entity mention. Next, we apply the information extraction models only on the filtered sentences, to extract various entities of interest. Our experiments for named entity recognition in the material science research articles show that this additional sentence-level classification step helps to improve the F1 score by more than 4%.

Generative models for dialog systems have gained much interest because of the recent success of RNN and Transformer based models in tasks like question answering and summarization. Although the task of dialog response generation is generally seen as a sequence to sequence (Seq2Seq) problem, researchers in the past have found it challenging to train dialog systems using the standard Seq2Seq models. Therefore, to help the model learn meaningful utterance and conversation level features, Sordoni et al. (2015b), Serban et al. (2016) proposed Hierarchical RNN architecture, which was later adopted by several other RNN based dialog systems. With the transformer-based models dominating the seq2seq problems lately, the natural question to ask is the applicability of the notion of hierarchy in transformer-based dialog systems. In this paper, we propose a generalized framework for Hierarchical Transformer Encoders and show how a standard transformer can be morphed into any hierarchical encoder, including HRED and HIBERT like models, by using specially designed attention masks and positional encodings. We demonstrate that Hierarchical Encoding helps achieve better natural language understanding of the contexts in transformer-based models for task-oriented dialog systems through a wide range of experiments.

Identifying the value of product attribute is essential for many e-commerce functions such as product search and product recommendations. Therefore, identifying attribute values from unstructured product descriptions is a critical undertaking for any e-commerce retailer. What makes this problem challenging is the diversity of product types and their attributes and values. Existing methods have typically employed multiple types of machine learning models, each of which handles specific product types or attribute classes. This has limited their scalability and generalization for large scale real world e-commerce applications. Previous approaches for this task have formulated the attribute value extraction as a Named Entity Recognition (NER) task or a Question Answering (QA) task. In this paper we have presented a generative approach to the attribute value extraction problem using language models. We leverage the large-scale pretraining of the GPT-2 and the T5 text-to-text transformer to create fine-tuned models that can effectively perform this task. We show that a single general model is very effective for this task over a broad set of product attribute values with the open world assumption. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for different attribute classes, which has previously required a diverse set of models.

Neural dependency parsing has achieved remarkable performance for many domains and languages. The bottleneck of massive labelled data limits the effectiveness of these approaches for low resource languages. In this work, we focus on dependency parsing for morphological rich languages (MRLs) in a low-resource setting. Although morphological information is essential for the dependency parsing task, the morphological disambiguation and lack of powerful analyzers pose challenges to get this information for MRLs. To address these challenges, we propose simple auxiliary tasks for pretraining. We perform experiments on 10 MRLs in low-resource settings to measure the efficacy of our proposed pretraining method and observe an average absolute gain of 2 points (UAS) and 3.6 points (LAS).

Answering questions asked from instructional corpora such as E-manuals, recipe books, etc., has been far less studied than open-domain factoid context-based question answering. This can be primarily attributed to the absence of standard benchmark datasets. In this paper, we meticulously create a large amount of data connected with E-manuals and develop a suitable algorithm to exploit it. We collect E-Manual Corpus, a huge corpus of 307,957 E-manuals, and pretrain RoBERTa on this large corpus. We create various benchmark QA datasets which include question answer pairs curated by experts based upon two E-manuals, real user questions from Community Question Answering Forum pertaining to E-manuals etc. We introduce EMQAP (E-Manual Question Answering Pipeline) that answers questions pertaining to electronics devices. Built upon the pretrained RoBERTa, it harbors a supervised multi-task learning framework which efficiently performs the dual tasks of identifying the section in the E-manual where the answer can be found and the exact answer span within that section. For E-Manual annotated question-answer pairs, we show an improvement of about 40% in ROUGE-L F1 scores over most competitive baseline. We perform a detailed ablation study and establish the versatility of EMQAP across different circumstances. The code and datasets are shared at https://github.com/abhi1nandy2/EMNLP-2021-Findings, and the corresponding project website is https://sites.google.com/view/emanualqa/home.

Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) deals with extracting opinion triplets, consisting of an opinion target or aspect, its associated sentiment, and the corresponding opinion term/span explaining the rationale behind the sentiment. Existing research efforts are majorly tagging-based. Among the methods taking a sequence tagging approach, some fail to capture the strong interdependence between the three opinion factors, whereas others fall short of identifying triplets with overlapping aspect/opinion spans. A recent grid tagging approach on the other hand fails to capture the span-level semantics while predicting the sentiment between an aspect-opinion pair. Different from these, we present a tagging-free solution for the task, while addressing the limitations of the existing works. We adapt an encoder-decoder architecture with a Pointer Network-based decoding framework that generates an entire opinion triplet at each time step thereby making our solution end-to-end. Interactions between the aspects and opinions are effectively captured by the decoder by considering their entire detected spans while predicting their connecting sentiment. Extensive experiments on several benchmark datasets establish the better efficacy of our proposed approach, especially in recall, and in predicting multiple and aspect/opinion-overlapped triplets from the same review sentence. We report our results both with and without BERT and also demonstrate the utility of domain-specific BERT post-training for the task.

Most of the existing information extraction frameworks (Wadden et al., 2019; Veysehet al., 2020) focus on sentence-level tasks and are hardly able to capture the consolidated information from a given document. In our endeavour to generate precise document-level information frames from lengthy textual records, we introduce the task of Information Aggregation or Argument Aggregation. More specifically, our aim is to filter irrelevant and redundant argument mentions that were extracted at a sentence level and render a document level information frame. Majority of the existing works have been observed to resolve related tasks of document-level event argument extraction (Yang et al., 2018; Zheng et al., 2019) and salient entity identification (Jain et al., 2020) using supervised techniques. To remove dependency from large amounts of labelled data, we explore the task of information aggregation using weakly supervised techniques. In particular, we present an extractive algorithm with multiple sieves which adopts active learning strategies to work efficiently in low-resource settings. For this task, we have annotated our own test dataset comprising of 131 document information frames and have released the code and dataset to further research prospects in this new domain. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to establish baseline results for this task in English. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/DebanjanaKar/ArgFuse.

Morphologically rich languages seem to benefit from joint processing of morphology and syntax, as compared to pipeline architectures. We propose a graph-based model for joint morphological parsing and dependency parsing in Sanskrit. Here, we extend the Energy based model framework (Krishna et al., 2020), proposed for several structured prediction tasks in Sanskrit, in 2 simple yet significant ways. First, the framework’s default input graph generation method is modified to generate a multigraph, which enables the use of an exact search inference. Second, we prune the input search space using a linguistically motivated approach, rooted in the traditional grammatical analysis of Sanskrit. Our experiments show that the morphological parsing from our joint model outperforms standalone morphological parsers. We report state of the art results in morphological parsing, and in dependency parsing, both in standalone (with gold morphological tags) and joint morphosyntactic parsing setting.

Neural sequence labelling approaches have achieved state of the art results in morphological tagging. We evaluate the efficacy of four standard sequence labelling models on Sanskrit, a morphologically rich, fusional Indian language. As its label space can theoretically contain more than 40,000 labels, systems that explicitly model the internal structure of a label are more suited for the task, because of their ability to generalise to labels not seen during training. We find that although some neural models perform better than others, one of the common causes for error for all of these models is mispredictions due to syncretism.

Event Argument extraction refers to the task of extracting structured information from unstructured text for a particular event of interest. The existing works exhibit poor capabilities to extract causal event arguments like Reason and After Effects. Futhermore, most of the existing works model this task at a sentence level, restricting the context to a local scope. While it may be effective for short spans of text, for longer bodies of text such as news articles, it has often been observed that the arguments for an event do not necessarily occur in the same sentence as that containing an event trigger. To tackle the issue of argument scattering across sentences, the use of global context becomes imperative in this task. In our work, we propose an external knowledge aided approach to infuse document level event information to aid the extraction of complex event arguments. We develop a causal network for our event-annotated dataset by extracting relevant event causal structures from ConceptNet and phrases from Wikipedia. We use the extracted event causal features in a bi-directional transformer encoder to effectively capture long-range inter-sentence dependencies. We report the effectiveness of our proposed approach through both qualitative and quantitative analysis. In this task, we establish our findings on an event annotated dataset in 5 Indian languages. This dataset adds further complexity to the task by labeling arguments of entity type (like Time, Place) as well as more complex argument types (like Reason, After-Effect). Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across all the five languages. Since our work does not rely on any language specific features, it can be easily extended to other languages as well.

We propose a framework using energy-based models for multiple structured prediction tasks in Sanskrit. Ours is an arc-factored model, similar to the graph-based parsing approaches, and we consider the tasks of word segmentation, morphological parsing, dependency parsing, syntactic linearization, and prosodification, a “prosody-level” task we introduce in this work. Ours is a search-based structured prediction framework, which expects a graph as input, where relevant linguistic information is encoded in the nodes, and the edges are then used to indicate the association between these nodes. Typically, the state-of-the-art models for morphosyntactic tasks in morphologically rich languages still rely on hand-crafted features for their performance. But here, we automate the learning of the feature function. The feature function so learned, along with the search space we construct, encode relevant linguistic information for the tasks we consider. This enables us to substantially reduce the training data requirements to as low as 10%, as compared to the data requirements for the neural state-of-the-art models. Our experiments in Czech and Sanskrit show the language-agnostic nature of the framework, where we train highly competitive models for both the languages. Moreover, our framework enables us to incorporate language-specific constraints to prune the search space and to filter the candidates during inference. We obtain significant improvements in morphosyntactic tasks for Sanskrit by incorporating language-specific constraints into the model. In all the tasks we discuss for Sanskrit, we either achieve state-of-the-art results or ours is the only data-driven solution for those tasks.

Discriminating lexical relations among distributionally similar words has always been a challenge for natural language processing (NLP) community. In this paper, we investigate whether the network embedding of distributional thesaurus can be effectively utilized to detect co-hyponymy relations. By extensive experiments over three benchmark datasets, we show that the vector representation obtained by applying node2vec on distributional thesaurus outperforms the state-of-the-art models for binary classification of co-hyponymy vs. hypernymy, as well as co-hyponymy vs. meronymy, by huge margins.

We propose a web-based annotation framework, SHR++, for morpho-syntactic annotation of corpora in Sanskrit. SHR++ is designed to generate annotations for the word-segmentation, morphological parsing and dependency analysis tasks in Sanskrit. It incorporates analyses and predictions from various tools designed for processing texts in Sanskrit, and utilise them to ease the cognitive load of the human annotators. Specifically, SHR++ uses Sanskrit Heritage Reader, a lexicon driven shallow parser for enumerating all the phonetically and lexically valid word splits along with their morphological analyses for a given string. This would help the annotators in choosing the solutions, rather than performing the segmentations by themselves. Further, predictions from a word segmentation tool are added as suggestions that can aid the human annotators in their decision making. Our evaluation shows that enabling this segmentation suggestion component reduces the annotation time by 20.15 %. SHR++ can be accessed online at http://vidhyut97.pythonanywhere.com/ and the codebase, for the independent deployment of the system elsewhere, is hosted at https://github.com/iamdsc/smart-sanskrit-annotator.

While buying a product from the e-commerce websites, customers generally have a plethora of questions. From the perspective of both the e-commerce service provider as well as the customers, there must be an effective question answering system to provide immediate answer to the user queries. While certain questions can only be answered after using the product, there are many questions which can be answered from the product specification itself. Our work takes a first step in this direction by finding out the relevant product specifications, that can help answering the user questions. We propose an approach to automatically create a training dataset for this problem. We utilize recently proposed XLNet and BERT architectures for this problem and find that they provide much better performance than the Siamese model, previously applied for this problem. Our model gives a good performance even when trained on one vertical and tested across different verticals.

Automatic Charge Identification (ACI) is the task of identifying the relevant charges given the facts of a situation and the statutory laws that define these charges, and is a crucial aspect of the judicial process. Existing works focus on learning charge-side representations by modeling relationships between the charges, but not much effort has been made in improving fact-side representations. We observe that only a small fraction of sentences in the facts actually indicates the charges. We show that by using a very small subset (< 3%) of fact descriptions annotated with sentence-level charges, we can achieve an improvement across a range of different ACI models, as compared to modeling just the main document-level task on a much larger dataset. Additionally, we propose a novel model that utilizes sentence-level charge labels as an auxiliary task, coupled with the main task of document-level charge identification in a multi-task learning framework. The proposed model comprehensively outperforms a large number of recent baselines for ACI. The improvement in performance is particularly noticeable for the rare charges which are known to be especially challenging to identify.

Entity linking (or Normalization) is an essential task in text mining that maps the entity mentions in the medical text to standard entities in a given Knowledge Base (KB). This task is of great importance in the medical domain. It can also be used for merging different medical and clinical ontologies. In this paper, we center around the problem of disease linking or normalization. This task is executed in two phases: candidate generation and candidate scoring. In this paper, we present an approach to rank the candidate Knowledge Base entries based on their similarity with disease mention. We make use of the Triplet Network for candidate ranking. While the existing methods have used carefully generated sieves and external resources for candidate generation, we introduce a robust and portable candidate generation scheme that does not make use of the hand-crafted rules. Experimental results on the standard benchmark NCBI disease dataset demonstrate that our system outperforms the prior methods by a significant margin.

Recently, biomedical version of embeddings obtained from language models such as BioELMo have shown state-of-the-art results for the textual inference task in the medical domain. In this paper, we explore how to incorporate structured domain knowledge, available in the form of a knowledge graph (UMLS), for the Medical NLI task. Specifically, we experiment with fusing embeddings obtained from knowledge graph with the state-of-the-art approaches for NLI task (ESIM model). We also experiment with fusing the domain-specific sentiment information for the task. Experiments conducted on MedNLI dataset clearly show that this strategy improves the baseline BioELMo architecture for the Medical NLI task.

Relation classification is crucial for inferring semantic relatedness between entities in a piece of text. These systems can be trained given labelled data. However, relation classification is very domain-specific and it takes a lot of effort to label data for a new domain. In this paper, we explore domain adaptation techniques for this task. While past works have focused on single source domain adaptation for bio-medical relation classification, we classify relations in an unlabeled target domain by transferring useful knowledge from one or more related source domains. Our experiments with the model have shown to improve state-of-the-art F1 score on 3 benchmark biomedical corpora for single domain and on 2 out of 3 for multi-domain scenarios. When used with contextualized embeddings, there is further boost in performance outperforming neural-network based domain adaptation baselines for both the cases.

The word ordering in a Sanskrit verse is often not aligned with its corresponding prose order. Conversion of the verse to its corresponding prose helps in better comprehension of the construction. Owing to the resource constraints, we formulate this task as a word ordering (linearisation) task. In doing so, we completely ignore the word arrangement at the verse side. kāvya guru, the approach we propose, essentially consists of a pipeline of two pretraining steps followed by a seq2seq model. The first pretraining step learns task-specific token embeddings from pretrained embeddings. In the next step, we generate multiple possible hypotheses for possible word arrangements of the input %using another pretraining step. We then use them as inputs to a neural seq2seq model for the final prediction. We empirically show that the hypotheses generated by our pretraining step result in predictions that consistently outperform predictions based on the original order in the verse. Overall, kāvya guru outperforms current state of the art models in linearisation for the poetry to prose conversion task in Sanskrit.

The compositionality degree of multiword expressions indicates to what extent the meaning of a phrase can be derived from the meaning of its constituents and their grammatical relations. Prediction of (non)-compositionality is a task that has been frequently addressed with distributional semantic models. We introduce a novel technique to blend hierarchical information with distributional information for predicting compositionality. In particular, we use hypernymy information of the multiword and its constituents encoded in the form of the recently introduced Poincaré embeddings in addition to the distributional information to detect compositionality for noun phrases. Using a weighted average of the distributional similarity and a Poincaré similarity function, we obtain consistent and substantial, statistically significant improvement across three gold standard datasets over state-of-the-art models based on distributional information only. Unlike traditional approaches that solely use an unsupervised setting, we have also framed the problem as a supervised task, obtaining comparable improvements. Further, we publicly release our Poincaré embeddings, which are trained on the output of handcrafted lexical-syntactic patterns on a large corpus.

The configurational information in sentences of a free word order language such as Sanskrit is of limited use. Thus, the context of the entire sentence will be desirable even for basic processing tasks such as word segmentation. We propose a structured prediction framework that jointly solves the word segmentation and morphological tagging tasks in Sanskrit. We build an energy based model where we adopt approaches generally employed in graph based parsing techniques (McDonald et al., 2005a; Carreras, 2007). Our model outperforms the state of the art with an F-Score of 96.92 (percentage improvement of 7.06%) while using less than one tenth of the task-specific training data. We find that the use of a graph based approach instead of a traditional lattice-based sequential labelling approach leads to a percentage gain of 12.6% in F-Score for the segmentation task.

We propose a post-OCR text correction approach for digitising texts in Romanised Sanskrit. Owing to the lack of resources our approach uses OCR models trained for other languages written in Roman. Currently, there exists no dataset available for Romanised Sanskrit OCR. So, we bootstrap a dataset of 430 images, scanned in two different settings and their corresponding ground truth. For training, we synthetically generate training images for both the settings. We find that the use of copying mechanism (Gu et al., 2016) yields a percentage increase of 7.69 in Character Recognition Rate (CRR) than the current state of the art model in solving monotone sequence-to-sequence tasks (Schnober et al., 2016). We find that our system is robust in combating OCR-prone errors, as it obtains a CRR of 87.01% from an OCR output with CRR of 35.76% for one of the dataset settings. A human judgement survey performed on the models shows that our proposed model results in predictions which are faster to comprehend and faster to improve for a human than the other systems.

Distributed representations of words learned from text have proved to be successful in various natural language processing tasks in recent times. While some methods represent words as vectors computed from text using predictive model (Word2vec) or dense count based model (GloVe), others attempt to represent these in a distributional thesaurus network structure where the neighborhood of a word is a set of words having adequate context overlap. Being motivated by recent surge of research in network embedding techniques (DeepWalk, LINE, node2vec etc.), we turn a distributional thesaurus network into dense word vectors and investigate the usefulness of distributional thesaurus embedding in improving overall word representation. This is the first attempt where we show that combining the proposed word representation obtained by distributional thesaurus embedding with the state-of-the-art word representations helps in improving the performance by a significant margin when evaluated against NLP tasks like word similarity and relatedness, synonym detection, analogy detection. Additionally, we show that even without using any handcrafted lexical resources we can come up with representations having comparable performance in the word similarity and relatedness tasks compared to the representations where a lexical resource has been used.

We present CL Scholar, the ACL Anthology knowledge graph miner to facilitate high-quality search and exploration of current research progress in the computational linguistics community. In contrast to previous works, periodically crawling, indexing and processing of new incoming articles is completely automated in the current system. CL Scholar utilizes both textual and network information for knowledge graph construction. As an additional novel initiative, CL Scholar supports more than 1200 scholarly natural language queries along with standard keyword-based search on constructed knowledge graph. It answers binary, statistical and list based natural language queries. The current system is deployed at http://cnerg.iitkgp.ac.in/aclakg. We also provide REST API support along with bulk download facility. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/CLScholar.

The exponential increase in the usage of Wikipedia as a key source of scientific knowledge among the researchers is making it absolutely necessary to metamorphose this knowledge repository into an integral and self-contained source of information for direct utilization. Unfortunately, the references which support the content of each Wikipedia entity page, are far from complete. Why are the reference section ill-formed for most Wikipedia pages? Is this section edited as frequently as the other sections of a page? Can there be appropriate surrogates that can automatically enhance the reference section? In this paper, we propose a novel two step approach – WikiRef – that (i) leverages the wikilinks present in a scientific Wikipedia target page and, thereby, (ii) recommends highly relevant references to be included in that target page appropriately and automatically borrowed from the reference section of the wikilinks. In the first step, we build a classifier to ascertain whether a wikilink is a potential source of reference or not. In the following step, we recommend references to the target page from the reference section of the wikilinks that are classified as potential sources of references in the first step. We perform an extensive evaluation of our approach on datasets from two different domains – Computer Science and Physics. For Computer Science we achieve a notably good performance with a precision@1 of 0.44 for reference recommendation as opposed to 0.38 obtained from the most competitive baseline. For the Physics dataset, we obtain a similar performance boost of 10% with respect to the most competitive baseline.

The last decade saw a surge in digitisation efforts for ancient manuscripts in Sanskrit. Due to various linguistic peculiarities inherent to the language, even the preliminary tasks such as word segmentation are non-trivial in Sanskrit. Elegant models for Word Segmentation in Sanskrit are indispensable for further syntactic and semantic processing of the manuscripts. Current works in word segmentation for Sanskrit, though commendable in their novelty, often have variations in their objective and evaluation criteria. In this work, we set the record straight. We formally define the objectives and the requirements for the word segmentation task. In order to encourage research in the field and to alleviate the time and effort required in pre-processing, we release a dataset of 115,000 sentences for word segmentation. For each sentence in the dataset we include the input character sequence, ground truth segmentation, and additionally lexical and morphological information about all the phonetically possible segments for the given sentence. In this work, we also discuss the linguistic considerations made while generating the candidate space of the possible segments.

Word senses are not static and may have temporal, spatial or corpus-specific scopes. Identifying such scopes might benefit the existing WSD systems largely. In this paper, while studying corpus specific word senses, we adapt three existing predominant and novel-sense discovery algorithms to identify these corpus-specific senses. We make use of text data available in the form of millions of digitized books and newspaper archives as two different sources of corpora and propose automated methods to identify corpus-specific word senses at various time points. We conduct an extensive and thorough human judgement experiment to rigorously evaluate and compare the performance of these approaches. Post adaptation, the output of the three algorithms are in the same format and the accuracy results are also comparable, with roughly 45-60% of the reported corpus-specific senses being judged as genuine.

Derivational nouns are widely used in Sanskrit corpora and represent an important cornerstone of productivity in the language. Currently there exists no analyser that identifies the derivational nouns. We propose a semi supervised approach for identification of derivational nouns in Sanskrit. We not only identify the derivational words, but also link them to their corresponding source words. Our novelty comes in the design of the network structure for the task. The edge weights are featurised based on the phonetic, morphological, syntactic and the semantic similarity shared between the words to be identified. We find that our model is effective for the task, even when we employ a labelled dataset which is only 5 % to that of the entire dataset.

In Sanskrit, the phonemes at the word boundaries undergo changes to form new phonemes through a process called as sandhi. A fused sentence can be segmented into multiple possible segmentations. We propose a word segmentation approach that predicts the most semantically valid segmentation for a given sentence. We treat the problem as a query expansion problem and use the path-constrained random walks framework to predict the correct segments.

This paper proposes OCR++, an open-source framework designed for a variety of information extraction tasks from scholarly articles including metadata (title, author names, affiliation and e-mail), structure (section headings and body text, table and figure headings, URLs and footnotes) and bibliography (citation instances and references). We analyze a diverse set of scientific articles written in English to understand generic writing patterns and formulate rules to develop this hybrid framework. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed framework outperforms the existing state-of-the-art tools by a large margin in structural information extraction along with improved performance in metadata and bibliography extraction tasks, both in terms of accuracy (around 50% improvement) and processing time (around 52% improvement). A user experience study conducted with the help of 30 researchers reveals that the researchers found this system to be very helpful. As an additional objective, we discuss two novel use cases including automatically extracting links to public datasets from the proceedings, which would further accelerate the advancement in digital libraries. The result of the framework can be exported as a whole into structured TEI-encoded documents. Our framework is accessible online at http://www.cnergres.iitkgp.ac.in/OCR++/home/.

We propose a classification framework for semantic type identification of compounds in Sanskrit. We broadly classify the compounds into four different classes namely, Avyayībhāva, Tatpuruṣa, Bahuvrīhi and Dvandva. Our classification is based on the traditional classification system followed by the ancient grammar treatise Adṣṭādhyāyī, proposed by Pāṇini 25 centuries back. We construct an elaborate features space for our system by combining conditional rules from the grammar Adṣṭādhyāyī, semantic relations between the compound components from a lexical database Amarakoṣa and linguistic structures from the data using Adaptor Grammars. Our in-depth analysis of the feature space highlight inadequacy of Adṣṭādhyāyī, a generative grammar, in classifying the data samples. Our experimental results validate the effectiveness of using lexical databases as suggested by Amba Kulkarni and Anil Kumar, and put forward a new research direction by introducing linguistic patterns obtained from Adaptor grammars for effective identification of compound type. We utilise an ensemble based approach, specifically designed for handling skewed datasets and we %and Experimenting with various classification methods, we achieve an overall accuracy of 0.77 using random forest classifiers.

In Cross-Language Information Retrieval, finding the appropriate translation of the source language query has always been a difficult problem to solve. We propose a technique towards solving this problem with the help of multilingual word clusters obtained from multilingual word embeddings. We use word embeddings of the languages projected to a common vector space on which a community-detection algorithm is applied to find clusters such that words that represent the same concept from different languages fall in the same group. We utilize these multilingual word clusters to perform query translation for Cross-Language Information Retrieval for three languages - English, Hindi and Bengali. We have experimented with the FIRE 2012 and Wikipedia datasets and have shown improvements over several standard methods like dictionary-based method, a transliteration-based model and Google Translate.

This paper proposes a graphical framework to extract opinionated sentences which highlight different contexts within a given news article by introducing the concept of diversity in a graphical model for opinion detection. We conduct extensive evaluations and find that the proposed modification leads to impressive improvement in performance and makes the final results of the model much more usable. The proposed method (OP-D) not only performs much better than the other techniques used for opinion detection as well as introducing diversity, but is also able to select opinions from different categories (Asher et al. 2009). By developing a classification model which categorizes the identified sentences into various opinion categories, we find that OP-D is able to push opinions from different categories uniformly among the top opinions.

We propose a new approach for extracting argument structure from natural language texts that contain an underlying argument. Our approach comprises of two phases: Score Assignment and Structure Prediction. The Score Assignment phase trains models to classify relations between argument units (Support, Attack or Neutral). To that end, different training strategies have been explored. We identify different linguistic and lexical features for training the classifiers. Through ablation study, we observe that our novel use of word-embedding features is most effective for this task. The Structure Prediction phase makes use of the scores from the Score Assignment phase to arrive at the optimal structure. We perform experiments on three argumentation datasets, namely, AraucariaDB, Debatepedia and Wikipedia. We also propose two baselines and observe that the proposed approach outperforms baseline systems for the final task of Structure Prediction.