E-commerce websites (e.g. Amazon, Alibaba) have a plethora of structured and unstructured information (text and images) present on the product pages. Sellers often don’t label or mislabel values of the attributes (e.g. color, size etc.) for their products. Automatically identifying these attribute values from an eCommerce product page that contains both text and images is a challenging task, especially when the attribute value is not explicitly mentioned in the catalog. In this paper, we present a scalable solution for this problem where we pose attribute extraction problem as a question-answering task, which we solve using MXT, that consists of three key components: (i) MAG (Multimodal Adaptation Gate), (ii) Xception network, and (iii) T5 encoder-decoder. Our system consists of a generative model that generates attribute-values for a given product by using both textual and visual characteristics (e.g. images) of the product. We show that our system is capable of handling zero-shot attribute prediction (when attribute value is not seen in training data) and value-absent prediction (when attribute value is not mentioned in the text) which are missing in traditional classification-based and NER-based models respectively. We have trained our models using distant supervision, removing dependency on human labeling, thus making them practical for real-world applications. With this framework, we are able to train a single model for 1000s of (product-type, attribute) pairs, thus reducing the overhead of training and maintaining separate models. Extensive experiments on two real world datasets (total 57 attributes) show that our framework improves the absolute recall@90P by 10.16% and 6.9 from the existing state of the art models. In a popular e-commerce store, we have productionized our models that cater to 12K (product-type, attribute) pairs, and have extracted 150MM attribute values.

Product aspect extraction from reviews is a critical task for e-commerce services to understand customer preferences and pain points. While aspect phrases extraction and sentiment analysis have received a lot of attention, clustering of aspect phrases and assigning human readable names to clusters in e-commerce reviews is an extremely important and challenging problem due to the scale of the reviews that makes human review infeasible. In this paper, we propose fully automated methods for clustering aspect words and generating human readable names for the clusters without any manually labeled data. We train transformer based sentence embeddings that are aware of unique e-commerce language characteristics (eg. incomplete sentences, spelling and grammar errors, vernacular etc.). We also train transformer based sequence to sequence models to generate human readable aspect names from clusters. Both the models are trained using heuristic based distant supervision. Additionally, the models are used to improve each other. Extensive empirical testing showed that the clustering model improves the Silhouette Score by 64% when compared to the state-of-the-art baseline and the aspect naming model achieves a high ROUGE-L score of 0.79.

In this paper, we present an overview of the MedVidQA 2022 shared task, collocated with the 21st BioNLP workshop at ACL 2022. The shared task addressed two of the challenges faced by medical video question answering: (I) a video classification task that explores new approaches to medical video understanding (labeling), and (ii) a visual answer localization task. Visual answer localization refers to the identification of the relevant temporal segments (start and end timestamps) in the video where the answer to the medical question is being shown or illustrated. A total of thirteen teams participated in the shared task challenges, with eleven system descriptions submitted to the workshop. The descriptions present monomodal and multi-modal approaches developed for medical video classification and visual answer localization. This paper describes the tasks, the datasets, evaluation metrics, and baseline systems for both tasks. Finally, the paper summarizes the techniques and results of the evaluation of the various approaches explored by the participating teams.

Pre-trained language-vision models have shown remarkable performance on the visual question answering (VQA) task. However, most pre-trained models are trained by only considering monolingual learning, especially the resource-rich language like English. Training such models for multilingual setups demand high computing resources and multilingual language-vision dataset which hinders their application in practice. To alleviate these challenges, we propose a knowledge distillation approach to extend an English language-vision model (teacher) into an equally effective multilingual and code-mixed model (student). Unlike the existing knowledge distillation methods, which only use the output from the last layer of the teacher network for distillation, our student model learns and imitates the teacher from multiple intermediate layers (language and vision encoders) with appropriately designed distillation objectives for incremental knowledge extraction. We also create the large-scale multilingual and code-mixed VQA dataset in eleven different language setups considering the multiple Indian and European languages. Experimental results and in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of the proposed VQA model over the pre-trained language-vision models on eleven diverse language setups.

The growth of online consumer health questions has led to the necessity for reliable and accurate question answering systems. A recent study showed that manual summarization of consumer health questions brings significant improvement in retrieving relevant answers. However, the automatic summarization of long questions is a challenging task due to the lack of training data and the complexity of the related subtasks, such as the question focus and type recognition. In this paper, we introduce a reinforcement learning-based framework for abstractive question summarization. We propose two novel rewards obtained from the downstream tasks of (i) question-type identification and (ii) question-focus recognition to regularize the question generation model. These rewards ensure the generation of semantically valid questions and encourage the inclusion of key medical entities/foci in the question summary. We evaluated our proposed method on two benchmark datasets and achieved higher performance over state-of-the-art models. The manual evaluation of the summaries reveals that the generated questions are more diverse and have fewer factual inconsistencies than the baseline summaries. The source code is available here: https://github.com/shwetanlp/CHQ-Summ.

The quest for seeking health information has swamped the web with consumers’ healthrelated questions, which makes the need for efficient and reliable question answering systems more pressing. The consumers’ questions, however, are very descriptive and contain several peripheral information (like patient’s medical history, demographic information, etc.), that are often not required for answering the question. Furthermore, it contributes to the challenges of understanding natural language questions for automatic answer retrieval. Also, it is crucial to provide the consumers with the exact and relevant answers, rather than the entire pool of answer documents to their question. One of the cardinal tasks in achieving robust consumer health question answering systems is the question summarization and multi-document answer summarization. This paper describes the participation of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) in Consumer Question and Multi-Answer Summarization tasks of the MEDIQA 2021 challenge at NAACL-BioNLP workshop. In this work, we exploited the capabilities of pre-trained transformer models and introduced a transfer learning approach for the abstractive Question Summarization and extractive Multi-Answer Summarization tasks by first pre-training our model on a task-specific summarization dataset followed by fine-tuning it for both the tasks via incorporating medical entities. We achieved the second, sixth and the fourth position for the Question Summarization task in terms ROUGE-1, ROUGE-2 and ROUGE-L scores respectively.

Code-mixing, the interleaving of two or more languages within a sentence or discourse is ubiquitous in multilingual societies. The lack of code-mixed training data is one of the major concerns for the development of end-to-end neural network-based models to be deployed for a variety of natural language processing (NLP) applications. A potential solution is to either manually create or crowd-source the code-mixed labelled data for the task at hand, but that requires much human efforts and often not feasible because of the language specific diversity in the code-mixed text. To circumvent the data scarcity issue, we propose an effective deep learning approach for automatically generating the code-mixed text from English to multiple languages without any parallel data. In order to train the neural network, we create synthetic code-mixed texts from the available parallel corpus by modelling various linguistic properties of code-mixing. Our codemixed text generator is built upon the encoder-decoder framework, where the encoder is augmented with the linguistic and task-agnostic features obtained from the transformer based language model. We also transfer the knowledge from a neural machine translation (NMT) to warm-start the training of code-mixed generator. Experimental results and in-depth analysis show the effectiveness of our proposed code-mixed text generation on eight diverse language pairs.

In this paper, we propose an effective deep learning framework for multilingual and code- mixed visual question answering. The pro- posed model is capable of predicting answers from the questions in Hindi, English or Code- mixed (Hinglish: Hindi-English) languages. The majority of the existing techniques on Vi- sual Question Answering (VQA) focus on En- glish questions only. However, many applica- tions such as medical imaging, tourism, visual assistants require a multilinguality-enabled module for their widespread usages. As there is no available dataset in English-Hindi VQA, we firstly create Hindi and Code-mixed VQA datasets by exploiting the linguistic properties of these languages. We propose a robust tech- nique capable of handling the multilingual and code-mixed question to provide the answer against the visual information (image). To better encode the multilingual and code-mixed questions, we introduce a hierarchy of shared layers. We control the behaviour of these shared layers by an attention-based soft layer sharing mechanism, which learns how shared layers are applied in different ways for the dif- ferent languages of the question. Further, our model uses bi-linear attention with a residual connection to fuse the language and image fea- tures. We perform extensive evaluation and ablation studies for English, Hindi and Code- mixed VQA. The evaluation shows that the proposed multilingual model achieves state-of- the-art performance in all these settings.

Question generation (QG) attempts to solve the inverse of question answering (QA) problem by generating a natural language question given a document and an answer. While sequence to sequence neural models surpass rule-based systems for QG, they are limited in their capacity to focus on more than one supporting fact. For QG, we often require multiple supporting facts to generate high-quality questions. Inspired by recent works on multi-hop reasoning in QA, we take up Multi-hop question generation, which aims at generating relevant questions based on supporting facts in the context. We employ multitask learning with the auxiliary task of answer-aware supporting fact prediction to guide the question generator. In addition, we also proposed a question-aware reward function in a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework to maximize the utilization of the supporting facts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through experiments on the multi-hop question answering dataset, HotPotQA. Empirical evaluation shows our model to outperform the single-hop neural question generation models on both automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE and human evaluation metrics for quality and coverage of the generated questions.

Existing research on question answering (QA) and comprehension reading (RC) are mainly focused on the resource-rich language like English. In recent times, the rapid growth of multi-lingual web content has posed several challenges to the existing QA systems. Code-mixing is one such challenge that makes the task more complex. In this paper, we propose a linguistically motivated technique for code-mixed question generation (CMQG) and a neural network based architecture for code-mixed question answering (CMQA). For evaluation, we manually create the code-mixed questions for Hindi-English language pair. In order to show the effectiveness of our neural network based CMQA technique, we utilize two benchmark datasets, SQuAD and MMQA. Experiments show that our proposed model achieves encouraging performance on CMQG and CMQA.

In this paper, we propose a hybrid technique for semantic question matching. It uses a proposed two-layered taxonomy for English questions by augmenting state-of-the-art deep learning models with question classes obtained from a deep learning based question classifier. Experiments performed on three open-domain datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach. We achieve state-of-the-art results on partial ordering question ranking (POQR) benchmark dataset. Our empirical analysis shows that coupling standard distributional features (provided by the question encoder) with knowledge from taxonomy is more effective than either deep learning or taxonomy-based knowledge alone.

Analyzing customer feedback is the best way to channelize the data into new marketing strategies that benefit entrepreneurs as well as customers. Therefore an automated system which can analyze the customer behavior is in great demand. Users may write feedbacks in any language, and hence mining appropriate information often becomes intractable. Especially in a traditional feature-based supervised model, it is difficult to build a generic system as one has to understand the concerned language for finding the relevant features. In order to overcome this, we propose deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based approaches that do not require handcrafting of features. We evaluate these techniques for analyzing customer feedback sentences on four languages, namely English, French, Japanese and Spanish. Our empirical analysis shows that our models perform well in all the four languages on the setups of IJCNLP Shared Task on Customer Feedback Analysis. Our model achieved the second rank in French, with an accuracy of 71.75% and third ranks for all the other languages.

In this paper we present the system for Answer Selection and Ranking in Community Question Answering, which we build as part of our participation in SemEval-2017 Task 3. We develop a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based system that makes use of textual, domain-specific, word-embedding and topic-modeling features. In addition, we propose a novel method for dialogue chain identification in comment threads. Our primary submission won subtask C, outperforming other systems in all the primary evaluation metrics. We performed well in other English subtasks, ranking third in subtask A and eighth in subtask B. We also developed open source toolkits for all the three English subtasks by the name cQARank [https://github.com/TitasNandi/cQARank].

Divergence is a key aspect of translation between two languages. Divergence occurs when structurally similar sentences of the source language do not translate into sentences that are similar in structures in the target language. Divergence assumes special significance in the domain of Example-Based Machine Translation (EBMT). An EBMT system generates translation of a given sentence by retrieving similar past translation examples from its example base and then adapting them suitably to meet the current translation requirements. Divergence imposes a great challenge to the success of EBMT. The present work provides a technique for identification of divergence without going into the semantic details of the underlying sentences. This identification helps in partitioning the example database into divergence / non-divergence categories, which in turn should facilitate efficient retrieval and adaptation in an EBMT system.