COLING 2024 论文列表

We present the first dataset of fine-grained metaphor annotations for texts from online religious communication, where figurative language plays a particularly important role. In addition to binary labels, metaphors are annotated for deliberateness, that is, whether they are communicated explicitly as metaphors, and we provide indicators for such deliberate use. We further show that cross-genre transfer metaphor detection (from the widely used VUA corpus to our Reddit data) leads to a drop in performance due to the shift in topic and metaphors from source domains that did not occur in the training data. We solve this issue by adding a small amount of in-genre data in fine-tuning, leading to notable performance increases of more than 5 points in F1. Moreover, religious communication has the tendency for extended metaphorical comparisons, which are problematic for current metaphor detection systems. Adding in-genre data had slightly positive effects but we argue that to solve this, architectures that consider larger spans of context are necessary.

Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) is one of the major Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, which aims to help people understand text that is above their reading abilities and comprehension. ATS models reconstruct the text into a simpler format by deletion, substitution, addition or splitting, while preserving the original meaning and maintaining correct grammar. Simplified sentences are usually evaluated by human experts based on three main factors: simplicity, adequacy and fluency or by calculating automatic evaluation metrics. In this paper, we conduct a meta-evaluation of reference-based automatic metrics for English sentence simplification using high-quality, human-annotated dataset, NEWSELA-LIKERT. We study the behavior of several evaluation metrics at sentence level across four different sentence simplification models. All the models were trained on the NEWSELA-AUTO dataset. The correlation between the metrics’ scores and human judgements was analyzed and the results used to recommend the most appropriate metrics for this task.

Declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge are two key parts in meta-cognitive theory, and these two hold significant importance in pre-training and inference of LLMs. However, a comprehensive analysis comparing these two types of knowledge is lacking, primarily due to challenges in definition, probing and quantitative assessment. In this paper, we explore from a new perspective by providing ground-truth knowledge for LLMs and evaluating the effective score. Through extensive experiments with widely-used datasets and models, we get conclusions: (1) In most tasks, benefits from declarative knowledge are greater than those from procedural knowledge. (2) Profits of procedural knowledge are larger than declarative knowledge only in reasoning tasks with simple logic. (3) As pre-training progresses and size increases, model ability to utilize both kinds of knowledge significantly improves, but in different speed. We do detailed analysis for the findings and this can provide primary guidance for evaluation and enhancement of large language models.

Self-supervised models have demonstrated remarkable performance in speech processing by learning latent representations from large amounts of unlabeled data. Although these models yield promising results on low-resource languages, the computational expense of fine-tuning all model parameters is prohibitively high. Adapters offer a solution by incorporating lightweight bottleneck structures into pre-trained models, enabling efficient parameter adaptation for downstream tasks. However, randomly initialized adapters often underperform in low-resource scenarios, limiting their applicability in low-resource languages. To address this issue, we develop the Meta-Adapter for self-supervised models to obtain meta-initialized parameters that facilitate quick adaptation to low-resource languages. Extensive experiments on the Common Voice and FLEURS datasets demonstrate the superior performance of Meta-Adapters on 12 low-resource languages spanning four different language families. Moreover, Meta-adapters show better generalization and extensibility than traditional pretraining methods.

With mental health issues on the rise on the Web, especially among young people, there is a growing need for effective identification and intervention. In this paper, we introduce a new open-sourced corpus for the early detection of mental disorders in Spanish, focusing on eating disorders, depression, and anxiety. It consists of user messages posted on groups within the Telegram message platform and contains over 1,300 subjects with more than 45,000 messages posted in different public Telegram groups. This corpus has been manually annotated via crowdsourcing and is prepared for its use in several Natural Language Processing tasks including text classification and regression tasks. The samples in the corpus include both text and time data. To provide a benchmark for future research, we conduct experiments on text classification and regression by using state-of-the-art transformer-based models.

Early detection of mental health disorders is an essential step in treating and preventing mental health conditions. Computational approaches have been applied to users’ social media profiles in an attempt to identify various mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, schizophrenia, and eating disorders. The interest in this topic has motivated the creation of various depression detection datasets. However, annotating such datasets is expensive and time-consuming, limiting their size and scope. To overcome this limitation, we present MentalHelp, a large-scale semi-supervised mental disorder detection dataset containing 14 million instances. The corpus was collected from Reddit and labeled in a semi-supervised way using an ensemble of three separate models - flan-T5, Disor-BERT, and Mental-BERT.

Transformer-based language models (LMs) track contextual information through large, hard-coded input windows. We introduce MemoryPrompt, a leaner approach in which the LM is complemented by a small auxiliary recurrent network that passes information to the LM by prefixing its regular input with a sequence of vectors, akin to soft prompts, without requiring LM finetuning. Tested on a task designed to probe a LM’s ability to keep track of multiple fact updates, a MemoryPrompt-augmented LM outperforms much larger LMs that have access to the full input history. We also test MemoryPrompt on a long-distance dialogue dataset, where its performance is comparable to that of a model conditioned on the entire conversation history. In both experiments we also observe that, unlike full-finetuning approaches, MemoryPrompt does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting when adapted to new tasks, thus not disrupting the generalist capabilities of the underlying LM.

Vision-language models have become increasingly powerful for tasks that require an understanding of both visual and linguistic elements, bridging the gap between these modalities. In the context of multimodal clinical AI, there is a growing need for models that possess domain-specific knowledge, as existing models often lack the expertise required for medical applications. In this paper, we take brain abnormalities as an example to demonstrate how to automatically collect medical image-text aligned data for pretraining from public resources such as PubMed. In particular, we present a pipeline that streamlines the pre-training process by initially collecting a large brain image-text dataset from case reports and published journals and subsequently constructing a high-performance vision-language model tailored to specific medical tasks. We also investigate the unique challenge of mapping subfigures to subcaptions in the medical domain. We evaluated the resulting model with quantitative and qualitative intrinsic evaluations. The resulting dataset will be released to the community.

Medical entity disambiguation (MED) plays a crucial role in natural language processing and biomedical domains, which is the task of mapping ambiguous medical mentions to structured candidate medical entities from knowledge bases (KBs). However, existing methods for MED often fail to fully utilize the knowledge within medical KBs and overlook essential interactions between medical mentions and candidate entities, resulting in knowledge- and interaction-inefficient modeling and suboptimal disambiguation performance. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel approach, MED with Medical Mention Relation and Fine-grained Entity Knowledge (MMR-FEK). Specifically, MMR-FEK incorporates a mention relation fusion module and an entity knowledge fusion module, followed by an interaction module. The former employs a relation graph convolutional network to fuse mention relation information between medical mentions to enhance mention representations, while the latter leverages an attention mechanism to fuse synonym and type information of candidate entities to enhance entity representations. Afterwards, an interaction module is designed to employ a bidirectional attention mechanism to capture interactions between mentions and entities to generate the matching representation. Extensive experiments on two publicly available real-world datasets demonstrate MMR-FEK’s superiority over state-of-the-art(SOTA) MED baselines across all metrics. Our source code is publicly available.

Considering the rapid improvement of large generative language models, it is important to measure their ability to encode clinical domain knowledge in order to help determine their potential utility in a clinical setting. To this end we present MedQA-SWE – a novel multiple choice, clinical question & answering (Q&A) dataset in Swedish consisting of 3,180 questions. The dataset was created from a series of exams aimed at evaluating doctors’ clinical understanding and decision making and is the first open-source clinical Q&A dataset in Swedish. The exams – originally in PDF format – were parsed and each question manually checked and curated in order to limit errors in the dataset. We provide dataset statistics along with benchmark accuracy scores of seven large generative language models on a representative sample of questions in a zero-shot setting, with some models showing impressive performance given the difficulty of the exam the dataset is based on.

Research on language technology for the development of medical applications is currently a hot topic in Natural Language Understanding and Generation. Thus, a number of large language models (LLMs) have recently been adapted to the medical domain, so that they can be used as a tool for mediating in human-AI interaction. While these LLMs display competitive performance on automated medical texts benchmarks, they have been pre-trained and evaluated with a focus on a single language (English mostly). This is particularly true of text-to-text models, which typically require large amounts of domain-specific pre-training data, often not easily accessible for many languages. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by compiling, to the best of our knowledge, the largest multilingual corpus for the medical domain in four languages, namely English, French, Italian and Spanish. This new corpus has been used to train Medical mT5, the first open-source text-to-text multilingual model for the medical domain. Additionally, we present two new evaluation benchmarks for all four languages with the aim of facilitating multilingual research in this domain. A comprehensive evaluation shows that Medical mT5 outperforms both encoders and similarly sized text-to-text models for the Spanish, French, and Italian benchmarks, while being competitive with current state-of-the-art LLMs in English.

Text segmentation is the task of dividing a sequence of text elements (eg. words, sentences, or paragraphs) into meaningful chunks. Although exciting advances are being made in modern segmentation-based tasks, such as automatically generating podcast chapters, current segmentation similarity metrics share a critical weakness: they are content-agnostic. In this paper, we present a word-embedding-based metric of cross-textual cohesion based on the formal linguistic definition of cohesion and incorporate it into a new segmentation similarity metric, SED. Our similarity metric, SED, is capable of providing fine-grained segmentation similarity scoring for the 3 basic segmentation errors: transposition, insertion, and deletion, as well as mixtures of them, avoiding the limitations of traditional metrics. We discuss the benefits of SED and evaluate its alignment with human judgement for each of the 3 basic error types. We show that our metric aligns with human evaluations significantly more than traditional metrics. We briefly discuss future work, such as the integration of anaphora resolution into our cohesion-based metric, and make our code publicly available.

Stylistic transformation of artistic images is an important part of the current image processing field. In order to access the aesthetic artistic expression of style images, recent research has applied attention mechanisms to the field of style transfer. This approach transforms style images into tokens by calculating attention and then migrating the artistic style of the image through a decoder. Due to the very low semantic similarity between the original image and the style image, this results in many fine-grained style features being discarded. This can lead to discordant artifacts or obvious artifacts. To address this problem, we propose MccSTN, a novel style representation and transfer framework that can be adapted to existing arbitrary image style transfers. Specifically, we first introduce a feature fusion module (Mccformer) to fuse aesthetic features in style images with fine-grained features in content images. Feature maps are obtained through Mccformer. The feature map is then fed into the decoder to get the image we want. In order to lighten the model and train it quickly, we consider the relationship between specific styles and the overall style distribution. We introduce a multi-scale augmented contrast module that learns style representations from a large number of image pairs.

Mathematics is a highly specialized domain with its own unique set of challenges. Despite this, there has been relatively little research on natural language processing for mathematical texts, and there are few mathematical language resources aimed at NLP. In this paper, we aim to provide annotated corpora that can be used to study the language of mathematics in different contexts, ranging from fundamental concepts found in textbooks to advanced research mathematics. We preprocess the corpora with a neural parsing model and some manual intervention to provide part-of-speech tags, lemmas, and dependency trees. In total, we provide 182397 sentences across three corpora. We then aim to test and evaluate several noteworthy natural language processing models using these corpora, to show how well they can adapt to the domain of mathematics and provide useful tools for exploring mathematical language. We evaluate several neural and symbolic models against benchmarks that we extract from the corpus metadata to show that terminology extraction and definition extraction do not easily generalize to mathematics, and that additional work is needed to achieve good performance on these metrics. Finally, we provide a learning assistant that grants access to the content of these corpora in a context-sensitive manner, utilizing text search and entity linking. Though our corpora and benchmarks provide useful metrics for evaluating mathematical language processing, further work is necessary to adapt models to mathematics in order to provide more effective learning assistants and apply NLP methods to different mathematical domains.

The parallel Bible corpus is a uniquely broad multilingual resource, covering over 1400 languages. While this data is potentially highly useful for extending language coverage in both token-based typology research and various low-resource NLP applications, the restricted register and translational nature of the Bible texts has raised concerns as to whether they are sufficiently representative of language use outside of their specific context. In this paper, we analyze the reliability and generalisability of word order statistics extracted from the Bible corpus from two angles: stability across different translations in the same language, and comparability with Universal Dependencies corpora and typological database classifications from URIEL and Grambank. We find that variation between same-language translations is generally low and that agreement with other data sources and previous work is generally high, suggesting that the impact of issues specific to massively parallel texts is smaller than previously posited.

In this paper, we describe the extraction of all the location entries from a prominent Swedish encyclopedia from the early 20th century, the Nordisk Familjebok ‘Nordic Family Book’, focusing on the second edition called Uggleupplagan. This edition comprises 38 volumes and over 182,000 articles, making it one of the most extensive Swedish encyclopedia editions. Using a classifier, we first determined the category of the entities. We found that approximately 22 percent of the encyclopedia entries were locations. We applied a named entity recognition to these entries and we linked them to Wikidata. Wikidata enabled us to extract their precise geographic locations resulting in almost 18,000 valid coordinates. We then analyzed the distribution of these locations and the entry selection process. It showed a concentration within Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The paper sheds light on the selection and representation of geographic information in the Nordisk Familjebok, providing insights into historical and societal perspectives. It also paves the way for future investigations into entry selection in different time periods and comparative analyses among various encyclopedias.

This work addresses the challenge of extracting job tasks from German job postings and mapping them to the fine-grained work activities classification in the O*NET labor market ontology. By utilizing ontological data with a Multiple Negatives Ranking loss and integrating a modest volume of labeled job advertisement data into the training process, our top configuration achieved a notable precision of 70% for the best mapping on the test set, representing a substantial improvement compared to the 33% baseline delivered by a general-domain SBERT. In our experiments the following factors proved to be most effective for improving SBERT models: First, the incorporation of subspan markup, both during training and inference, supports accurate classification, by streamlining varied job ad task formats with structured, uniform ontological work activities. Second, the inclusion of additional occupational information from O*NET into training supported learning by contextualizing hierarchical ontological relationships. Third, the most significant performance improvement was achieved by updating SBERT models with labeled job ad data specifically addressing challenging cases encountered during pre-finetuning, effectively bridging the semantic gap between O*NET and job ad data.

We present pioneering research in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the endangered Manchu language. Recognizing the critical importance of linguistic preservation, we experiment with three language models – BiLSTM-CRF, BERT, and mBERT – for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging tasks. Given the limited digitized Manchu text available, we augment the data using GloVe embeddings for the pre-training of BERT-based models. Remarkably, all models demonstrated outstanding performance, achieving over 90% F1 score in both NER and POS tagging tasks. Our research not only marks the first application of NLP on Manchu and the inaugural use of BERT-based models for the language but also stands as the first endeavor to employ Manchu for NER and POS tagging. To foster further exploration and applications in the field, we make our fine-tuning dataset and models available to the public. Through this research, we aim to underscore the significance of NLP in the protection and revitalization of low-resource languages.

Standard English and Malaysian English exhibit notable differences, posing challenges for natural language processing (NLP) tasks on Malaysian English. An experiment using state-of-the-art Named Entity Recognition (NER) solutions in Malaysian English news articles highlights that they cannot handle morphosyntactic variations in Malaysian English. Unfortunately, most of the existing datasets are mainly based on Standard English, which is not sufficient to enhance NLP tasks in Malaysian English. To the best of our knowledge, there is no annotated dataset that can be used to improve the model. To address this issue, we have constructed a Malaysian English News (MEN) dataset, which contains 200 news articles that are manually annotated with entities and relations. We then fine-tuned the spaCy NER tool and validated that having a dataset tailor-made for Malaysian English could significantly improve the performance of NER in Malaysian English. This paper presents our efforts to acquire data, the annotation methodology, and a detailed analysis of the annotated dataset. To ensure the quality of the annotation, we have measured the Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA), and any disagreements were resolved by a subject matter expert through adjudication. After a rigorous quality check, we have developed a dataset with 6,061 entities and 3,268 relation instances. Finally, we discuss spaCy fine-tuning setup and analysis of NER performance. This unique dataset will contribute significantly to the advancement of NLP research in Malaysian English, allowing researchers to accelerate their progress, particularly in NER and relation extraction.