With the ever-increasing pace of research and high volume of scholarly communication, scholars face a daunting task. Not only must they keep up with the growing literature in their own and related fields, scholars increasingly also need to rebut pseudo-science and disinformation. These needs have motivated an increasing focus on computational methods for enhancing search, summarization, and analysis of scholarly documents. However, the various strands of research on scholarly document processing remain fragmented. To reach out to the broader NLP and AI/ML community, pool distributed efforts in this area, and enable shared access to published research, we held the 2nd Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP) at NAACL 2021 as a virtual event (https://sdproc.org/2021/). The SDP workshop consisted of a research track, three invited talks, and three Shared Tasks (LongSumm 2021, SCIVER, and 3C). The program was geared towards the application of NLP, information retrieval, and data mining for scholarly documents, with an emphasis on identifying and providing solutions to open challenges.

Next to keeping up with the growing literature in their own and related fields, scholars increasingly also need to rebut pseudo-science and disinformation. To address these challenges, computational work on enhancing search, summarization, and analysis of scholarly documents has flourished. However, the various strands of research on scholarly document processing remain fragmented. To reach to the broader NLP and AI/ML community, pool distributed efforts and enable shared access to published research, we held the 1st Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing at EMNLP 2020 as a virtual event. The SDP workshop consisted of a research track (including a poster session), two invited talks and three Shared Tasks (CL-SciSumm, Lay-Summ and LongSumm), geared towards easier access to scientific methods and results. Website: https://ornlcda.github.io/SDProc

We present the results of three Shared Tasks held at the Scholarly Document Processing Workshop at EMNLP2020: CL-SciSumm, LaySumm and LongSumm. We report on each of the tasks, which received 18 submissions in total, with some submissions addressing two or three of the tasks. In summary, the quality and quantity of the submissions show that there is ample interest in scholarly document summarization, and the state of the art in this domain is at a midway point between being an impossible task and one that is fully resolved.

Currently, no large-scale training data is available for the task of scientific paper summarization. In this paper, we propose a novel method that automatically generates summaries for scientific papers, by utilizing videos of talks at scientific conferences. We hypothesize that such talks constitute a coherent and concise description of the papers’ content, and can form the basis for good summaries. We collected 1716 papers and their corresponding videos, and created a dataset of paper summaries. A model trained on this dataset achieves similar performance as models trained on a dataset of summaries created manually. In addition, we validated the quality of our summaries by human experts.

Chatbots (i.e., bots) are becoming widely used in multiple domains, along with supporting bot programming platforms. These platforms are equipped with novel testing tools aimed at improving the quality of individual chatbots. Doing so requires an understanding of what sort of bots are being built (captured by their underlying conversation graphs) and how well they perform (derived through analysis of conversation logs). In this paper, we propose a new model, Bot2Vec, that embeds bots to a compact representation based on their structure and usage logs. Then, we utilize Bot2Vec representations to improve the quality of two bot analysis tasks. Using conversation data and graphs of over than 90 bots, we show that Bot2Vec representations improve detection performance by more than 16% for both tasks.

We present a novel system providing summaries for Computer Science publications. Through a qualitative user study, we identified the most valuable scenarios for discovery, exploration and understanding of scientific documents. Based on these findings, we built a system that retrieves and summarizes scientific documents for a given information need, either in form of a free-text query or by choosing categorized values such as scientific tasks, datasets and more. Our system ingested 270,000 papers, and its summarization module aims to generate concise yet detailed summaries. We validated our approach with human experts.

Virtual agents are becoming a prominent channel of interaction in customer service. Not all customer interactions are smooth, however, and some can become almost comically bad. In such instances, a human agent might need to step in and salvage the conversation. Detecting bad conversations is important since disappointing customer service may threaten customer loyalty and impact revenue. In this paper, we outline an approach to detecting such egregious conversations, using behavioral cues from the user, patterns in agent responses, and user-agent interaction. Using logs of two commercial systems, we show that using these features improves the detection F1-score by around 20% over using textual features alone. In addition, we show that those features are common across two quite different domains and, arguably, universal.

We present a neural response generation model that generates responses conditioned on a target personality. The model learns high level features based on the target personality, and uses them to update its hidden state. Our model achieves performance improvements in both perplexity and BLEU scores over a baseline sequence-to-sequence model, and is validated by human judges.