Ranking the user comments posted on a news article is important for online news services because comment visibility directly affects the user experience. Research on ranking comments with different metrics to measure the comment quality has shown “constructiveness” used in argument analysis is promising from a practical standpoint. In this paper, we report a case study in which this constructiveness is examined in the real world. Specifically, we examine an in-house competition to improve the performance of ranking constructive comments and demonstrate the effectiveness of the best obtained model for a commercial service.

The writing process consists of several stages such as drafting, revising, editing, and proofreading. Studies on writing assistance, such as grammatical error correction (GEC), have mainly focused on sentence editing and proofreading, where surface-level issues such as typographical errors, spelling errors, or grammatical errors should be corrected. We broaden this focus to include the earlier revising stage, where sentences require adjustment to the information included or major rewriting and propose Sentence-level Revision (SentRev) as a new writing assistance task. Well-performing systems in this task can help inexperienced authors by producing fluent, complete sentences given their rough, incomplete drafts. We build a new freely available crowdsourced evaluation dataset consisting of incomplete sentences authored by non-native writers paired with their final versions extracted from published academic papers for developing and evaluating SentRev models. We also establish baseline performance on SentRev using our newly built evaluation dataset.

Ranking comments on an online news service is a practically important task for the service provider, and thus there have been many studies on this task. However, most of them considered users’ positive feedback, such as “Like”-button clicks, as a quality measure. In this paper, we address directly evaluating the quality of comments on the basis of “constructiveness,” separately from user feedback. To this end, we create a new dataset including 100K+ Japanese comments with constructiveness scores (C-scores). Our experiments clarify that C-scores are not always related to users’ positive feedback, and the performance of pairwise ranking models tends to be enhanced by the variation of comments rather than articles.

There have been many studies on neural headline generation models trained with a lot of (article, headline) pairs. However, there are few situations for putting such models into practical use in the real world since news articles typically already have corresponding headlines. In this paper, we describe a practical use case of neural headline generation in a news aggregator, where dozens of professional editors constantly select important news articles and manually create their headlines, which are much shorter than the original headlines. Specifically, we show how to deploy our model to an editing support tool and report the results of comparing the behavior of the editors before and after the release.

Ensemble methods, which combine multiple models at decoding time, are now widely known to be effective for text-generation tasks. However, they generally increase computational costs, and thus, there have been many studies on compressing or distilling ensemble models. In this paper, we propose an alternative, simple but effective unsupervised ensemble method, post-ensemble, that combines multiple models by selecting a majority-like output in post-processing. We theoretically prove that our method is closely related to kernel density estimation based on the von Mises-Fisher kernel. Experimental results on a news-headline-generation task show that the proposed method performs better than the current ensemble methods.

The huge cost of creating labeled training data is a common problem for supervised learning tasks such as sentiment classification. Recent studies showed that pretraining with unlabeled data via a language model can improve the performance of classification models. In this paper, we take the concept a step further by using a conditional language model, instead of a language model. Specifically, we address a sentiment classification task for a tweet analysis service as a case study and propose a pretraining strategy with unlabeled dialog data (tweet-reply pairs) via an encoder-decoder model. Experimental results show that our strategy can improve the performance of sentiment classifiers and outperform several state-of-the-art strategies including language model pretraining.

User-generated content such as the questions on community question answering (CQA) forums does not always come with appropriate headlines, in contrast to the news articles used in various headline generation tasks. In such cases, we cannot use paired supervised data, e.g., pairs of articles and headlines, to learn a headline generation model. To overcome this problem, we propose an extractive headline generation method based on learning to rank for CQA that extracts the most informative substring from each question as its headline. Experimental results show that our method outperforms several baselines, including a prefix-based method, which is widely used in real services.

This paper explores an incremental training strategy for the skip-gram model with negative sampling (SGNS) from both empirical and theoretical perspectives. Existing methods of neural word embeddings, including SGNS, are multi-pass algorithms and thus cannot perform incremental model update. To address this problem, we present a simple incremental extension of SGNS and provide a thorough theoretical analysis to demonstrate its validity. Empirical experiments demonstrated the correctness of the theoretical analysis as well as the practical usefulness of the incremental algorithm.