Many sequence-to-sequence tasks in natural language processing are roughly monotonic in the alignment between source and target sequence, and previous work has facilitated or enforced learning of monotonic attention behavior via specialized attention functions or pretraining. In this work, we introduce a monotonicity loss function that is compatible with standard attention mechanisms and test it on several sequence-to-sequence tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, morphological inflection, transliteration, and dialect normalization. Experiments show that we can achieve largely monotonic behavior. Performance is mixed, with larger gains on top of RNN baselines. General monotonicity does not benefit transformer multihead attention, however, we see isolated improvements when only a subset of heads is biased towards monotonic behavior.

We describe our submissions to the 4th edition of the Social Media Mining for Health Applications (SMM4H) shared task. Our team (UZH) participated in two sub-tasks: Automatic classifications of adverse effects mentions in tweets (Task 1) and Generalizable identification of personal health experience mentions (Task 4). For our submissions, we exploited ensembles based on a pre-trained language representation with a neural transformer architecture (BERT) (Tasks 1 and 4) and a CNN-BiLSTM(-CRF) network within a multi-task learning scenario (Task 1). These systems are placed on top of a carefully crafted pipeline of domain-specific preprocessing steps.

We present the results of the VarDial Evaluation Campaign on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, which we organized as part of the fourth edition of the VarDial workshop at EACL’2017. This year, we included four shared tasks: Discriminating between Similar Languages (DSL), Arabic Dialect Identification (ADI), German Dialect Identification (GDI), and Cross-lingual Dependency Parsing (CLP). A total of 19 teams submitted runs across the four tasks, and 15 of them wrote system description papers.