This paper presents our contributions to the SemEval-2020 Task 4 Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE) and includes the experimental results of the two Subtasks B and C of the SemEval-2020 Task 4. Our systems rely on pre-trained language models, i.e., BERT (including its variants) and UniLM, and rank 10th and 7th among 27 and 17 systems on Subtasks B and C, respectively. We analyze the commonsense ability of the existing pretrained language models by testing them on the SemEval-2020 Task 4 ComVE dataset, specifically for Subtasks B and C, the explanation subtasks with multi-choice and sentence generation, respectively.

This paper describes the Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) system for the 2020 shared task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing at the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Among the five frameworks, we address only the abstract meaning representation framework and propose a joint state model for the graph-sequence iterative inference of (Cai and Lam, 2020) for a simplified graph-sequence inference. In our joint state model, we update only a single joint state vector during the graph-sequence inference process instead of keeping the dual state vectors, and all other components are exactly the same as in (Cai and Lam, 2020).

For translation quality estimation at word and sentence levels, this paper presents a novel approach based on BERT that recently has achieved impressive results on various natural language processing tasks. Our proposed model is re-purposed BERT for the translation quality estimation and uses multi-task learning for the sentence-level task and word-level subtasks (i.e., source word, target word, and target gap). Experimental results on Quality Estimation shared task of WMT19 show that our systems show competitive results and provide significant improvements over the baseline.

This paper describes Jeonbuk National University (JBNU)’s system for the 2019 shared task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP 2019) at the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. Of the five frameworks, we address only the DELPH-IN MRS Bi-Lexical Dependencies (DP), Prague Semantic Dependencies (PSD), and Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA) frameworks. We propose a unified parsing model using biaffine attention (Dozat and Manning, 2017), consisting of 1) a BERT-BiLSTM encoder and 2) a biaffine attention decoder. First, the BERT-BiLSTM for sentence encoder uses BERT to compose a sentence’s wordpieces into word-level embeddings and subsequently applies BiLSTM to word-level representations. Second, the biaffine attention decoder determines the scores for an edge’s existence and its labels based on biaffine attention functions between roledependent representations. We also present multi-level biaffine attention models by combining all the role-dependent representations that appear at multiple intermediate layers.

Neural machine translation decoders are usually conditional language models to sequentially generate words for target sentences. This approach is limited to find the best word composition and requires help of explicit methods as beam search. To help learning correct compositional mechanisms in NMTs, we propose concept equalization using direct mapping distributed representations of source and target sentences. In a translation experiment from English to French, the concept equalization significantly improved translation quality by 3.00 BLEU points compared to a state-of-the-art NMT model.