COLING 2024 论文列表

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) is the task of extracting all semantic relationships from a document. While studies have been conducted on English DocRE, limited attention has been given to DocRE in non-English languages. This work delves into effectively utilizing existing English resources to promote DocRE studies in non-English languages, with Japanese as the representative case. As an initial attempt, we construct a dataset by transferring an English dataset to Japanese. However, models trained on such a dataset are observed to suffer from low recalls. We investigate the error cases and attribute the failure to different surface structures and semantics of documents translated from English and those written by native speakers. We thus switch to explore if the transferred dataset can assist human annotation on Japanese documents. In our proposal, annotators edit relation predictions from a model trained on the transferred dataset. Quantitative analysis shows that relation recommendations suggested by the model help reduce approximately 50% of the human edit steps compared with the previous approach. Experiments quantify the performance of existing DocRE models on our collected dataset, portraying the challenges of Japanese and cross-lingual DocRE.

This paper discusses the Routinicon, a new constructicographic resource for the description of conversational routines. Conversational routines are defined as conventional formulaic expressions that language speakers use in standard extralinguistic situations (cf. Bless you! as a reaction to sneezing or Who’s there? as a typical answer to a knock on the door). The Routinicon’s goal is to accumulate the routines that constitute the inventory of conventional expressions in Russian language and systematically describe them in a way that would enable future cross-linguistic comparison and typological research. Conceptually, the Routinicon is a natural extension of such projects as the Russian Constructicon and Pragmaticon. It inherits their approach to the systematization of phraseological units as well as to the data collection. At the same time, the new project focuses on a fundamentally different domain of units and hence offers a radically new structure of linguistic annotation. Its principles and challenges are addressed in the paper.

Current LLM-based applications are becoming steadily available for everyone with a reliable access to technology and the internet. These applications offer benefits to their users that leave those without access to them at a serious disadvantage. Given the vastly large amount of data needed to train LLMs, the gap between languages with access to such quantity of data and those without it is currently larger than ever. Aimed at saving this gap, the Aina Project was created to provide Catalan with the necessary resources to keep being relevant in the context of AI/NLP applications based on LLMs. We thus present a set of strategies to consider when improving technology support for a mid- or low-resource language, specially addressing sustainability of high-quality data acquisition and the challenges involved in the process. We also introduce a large amount of new annotated data for Catalan. Our hope is that those interested in replicating this work for another language can learn from what worked for us, the challenges that we faced, and the sometimes disheartening truth of working with mid- and low-resource languages.

This paper reports the first release of the UMR (Uniform Meaning Representation) data set. UMR is a graph-based meaning representation formalism consisting of a sentence-level graph and a document-level graph. The sentence-level graph represents predicate-argument structures, named entities, word senses, aspectuality of events, as well as person and number information for entities. The document-level graph represents coreferential, temporal, and modal relations that go beyond sentence boundaries. UMR is designed to capture the commonalities and variations across languages and this is done through the use of a common set of abstract concepts, relations, and attributes as well as concrete concepts derived from words from invidual languages. This UMR release includes annotations for six languages (Arapaho, Chinese, English, Kukama, Navajo, Sanapana) that vary greatly in terms of their linguistic properties and resource availability. We also describe on-going efforts to enlarge this data set and extend it to other genres and modalities. We also briefly describe the available infrastructure (UMR annotation guidelines and tools) that others can use to create similar data sets.

This article introduces a resource-efficient method for developing question-answer (QA) datasets by extracting QA pairs from web-scale data using machine learning (ML). Our method benefits from recent advances in web register (genre) identification and consists of two ML steps with an additional post-processing step. First, using XLM-R and the multilingual CORE web register corpus series with categories such as QA Forum, we train a multilingual classifier to retrieve documents that are likely to contain QA pairs from web-scale data. Second, we develop a NER-style token classifier to identify the QA text spans within these documents. To this end, we experiment with training on a semi-synthetic dataset built on top of the English LFQA, a small set of manually cleaned web QA pairs in English and Finnish, and a Finnish web QA pair dataset cleaned using ChatGPT. The evaluation of our pipeline demonstrates its capability to efficiently retrieve a substantial volume of QA pairs. While the approach is adaptable to any language given the availability of language models and extensive web data, we showcase its efficiency in English and Finnish, developing the first open, non-synthetic and non-machine translated QA dataset for Finnish – Turku WebQA – comprising over 200,000 QA pairs.

In this paper we introduce MUSCLE, a dataset for MUltilingual lexico-Semantic Classification of Links between Entities. The MUSCLE dataset was designed to train and evaluate Lexical Relation Classification (LRC) systems with 27K pairs of universal concepts selected from Wikidata, a large and highly multilingual factual Knowledge Graph (KG). Each pair of concepts includes its lexical forms in 25 languages and is labeled with up to five possible lexico-semantic relations between the concepts: hypernymy, hyponymy, meronymy, holonymy, and antonymy. Inspired by Semantic Map theory, the dataset bridges lexical and conceptual semantics, is more challenging and robust than previous datasets for LRC, avoids lexical memorization, is domain-balanced across entities, and enables enrichment and hierarchical information retrieval.

Temporal knowledge graph forecasting aims to reason over known facts to complete the missing links in the future. Existing methods are highly dependent on the structures of temporal knowledge graphs and commonly utilize recurrent or graph neural networks for forecasting. However, entities that are infrequently observed or have not been seen recently face challenges in learning effective knowledge representations due to insufficient structural contexts. To address the above disadvantages, in this paper, we propose a Contrastive Prompt-based framework with Entity background information for TKG forecasting, which we named CoPET. Specifically, to bring the time-invariant entity background information to time-variant structural information, we employ a dual encoder architecture consisting of a candidate encoder and a query encoder. A contrastive learning framework is used to encourage the query representation to be closer to the candidate representation. We further propose three kinds of trainable time-variant prompts aimed at capturing temporal structural information. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our method is effective and stays competitive in inference with limited structural information. Our code is available at https://github.com/qianxinying/CoPET.

Automated Medical Coding (AMC) is the task of automatically converting free-text medical documents into predefined codes according to a specific medical coding system. Although deep learning has significantly advanced AMC, the class imbalance problem remains a significant challenge. To address this issue, most existing methods consider only a single coding system and disregard the potential benefits of reflecting the relevance between different coding systems. To bridge this gap, we introduce a Joint learning framework for Across Medical coding Systems (JAMS), which jointly learns different coding systems through multi-task learning. It learns various representations using a shared encoder and explicitly captures the relationships across these coding systems using the medical code attention network, a modification of the graph attention network. In the experiments on the MIMIC-IV ICD-9 and MIMIC-IV ICD-10 datasets, connected through General Equivalence Mappings, JAMS improved the performance consistently regardless of the backbone models. This result demonstrates its model-agnostic characteristic, which is not constrained by specific model structures. Notably, JAMS significantly improved the performance of low-frequency codes. Our analysis shows that these performance gains are due to the connections between the codes of the different coding systems.

FEVEROUS is a benchmark and research initiative focused on fact extraction and verification tasks involving unstructured text and structured tabular data. In FEVEROUS, existing works often rely on extensive preprocessing and utilize rule-based transformations of data, leading to potential context loss or misleading encodings. This paper introduces a simple yet powerful model that nullifies the need for modality conversion, thereby preserving the original evidence’s context. By leveraging pre-trained models on diverse text and tabular datasets and by incorporating a lightweight attention-based mechanism, our approach efficiently exploits latent connections between different data types, thereby yielding comprehensive and reliable verdict predictions. The model’s modular structure adeptly manages multi-modal information, ensuring the integrity and authenticity of the original evidence are uncompromised. Comparative analyses reveal that our approach exhibits competitive performance, aligning itself closely with top-tier models on the FEVEROUS benchmark.

OntoLex, the dominant community standard for machine-readable lexical resources in the context of RDF, Linked Data and Semantic Web technologies, is currently extended with a designated module for Frequency, Attestations and Corpus-based Information (OntoLex-FrAC). We propose a novel component for OntoLex-FrAC, addressing the incorporation of corpus queries for (a) linking dictionaries with corpus engines, (b) enabling RDF-based web services to exchange corpus queries and responses data dynamically, and (c) using conventional query languages to formalize the internal structure of collocations, word sketches, and colligations. The primary field of application of the query extension is in digital lexicography and corpus linguistics, and we present a proof-of-principle implementation in backend components of a novel platform designed to support digital lexicography for the Serbian language.

Multimodal sarcasm detection has received considerable attention due to its unique role in social networks. Existing methods often rely on feature concatenation to fuse different modalities or model the inconsistencies among modalities. However, sarcasm is often embodied in local and momentary nuances in a subtle way, which causes difficulty for sarcasm detection. To effectively incorporate these nuances, this paper presents Context-Aware Self-Attention Fusion (CAAF) to integrate local and momentary multimodal information into specific words. Furthermore, due to the instantaneous nature of sarcasm, the connotative meanings of words post-multimodal integration generally deviate from their denotative meanings. Therefore, Word Weight Calculation (WWC) is presented to compute the weight of specific words based on CAAF’s fusion nuances, illustrating the inconsistency between connotation and denotation. We evaluate our method on the MUStARD dataset, achieving an accuracy of 76.9 and an F1 score of 76.1, which surpasses the current state-of-the-art IWAN model by 1.7 and 1.6 respectively.

Text image machine translation (TIMT) aims at translating source language texts in images into another target language, which has been proven successful by bridging text image recognition encoder and text translation decoder. However, it is still an open question of how to incorporate fine-grained knowledge supervision to make it consistent between recognition and translation modules. In this paper, we propose a novel TIMT method named as BabyNet, which is optimized with hierarchical parental supervision to improve translation performance. Inspired by genetic recombination and variation in the field of genetics, the proposed BabyNet is inherited from the recognition and translation parent models with a variation module of which parameters can be updated when training on the TIMT task. Meanwhile, hierarchical and multi-granularity supervision from parent models is introduced to bridge the gap between inherited modules in BabyNet. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world TIMT tests show that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods. Further analyses of various parent model combinations show the good generalization of our method.

Uniform Meaning Representation (UMR) is a semantic labeling system in the AMR family designed to be uniformly applicable to typologically diverse languages. The UMR labeling system is quite thorough and can be time-consuming to execute, especially if annotators are starting from scratch. In this paper, we focus on methods for bootstrapping UMR annotations for a given language from existing resources, and specifically from typical products of language documentation work, such as lexical databases and interlinear glossed text (IGT). Using Arapaho as our test case, we present and evaluate a bootstrapping process that automatically generates UMR subgraphs from IGT. Additionally, we describe and evaluate a method for bootstrapping valency lexicon entries from lexical databases for both the target language and English. We are able to generate enough basic structure in UMR graphs from the existing Arapaho interlinearized texts to automate UMR labeling to a significant extent. Our method thus has the potential to streamline the process of building meaning representations for new languages without existing large-scale computational resources.

Pre-trained language models have been successful in many scenarios. However, their usefulness in task-oriented dialogues is limited due to the intrinsic linguistic differences between general text and task-oriented dialogues. Current task-oriented dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework, which faces challenges such as selecting true positives and hard negatives, as well as lacking diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model called BootTOD. It learns task-oriented dialogue representations via a self-bootstrapping framework. Unlike contrastive counterparts, BootTOD aligns context and context+response representations and dismisses the requirements of contrastive pairs. BootTOD also uses multiple appropriate response targets to model the intrinsic one-to-many diversity of human conversations. Experimental results show that BootTOD outperforms strong TOD baselines on diverse downstream dialogue tasks.

Task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems are commonly designed with the presumption that each utterance represents a single intent. However, this assumption may not accurately reflect real-world situations, where users frequently express multiple intents within a single utterance. While there is an emerging interest in multi-intent detection (MID), existing in-domain datasets such as MixATIS and MixSNIPS have limitations in their formulation. To address these issues, we present BlendX, a suite of refined datasets featuring more diverse patterns than their predecessors, elevating both its complexity and diversity. For dataset construction, we utilize both rule-based heuristics as well as a generative tool—OpenAI’s ChatGPT—which is augmented with a similarity-driven strategy for utterance selection. To ensure the quality of the proposed datasets, we also introduce three novel metrics that assess the statistical properties of an utterance related to word count, conjunction use, and pronoun usage. Extensive experiments on BlendX reveal that state-of-the-art MID models struggle with the challenges posed by the new datasets, highlighting the need to reexamine the current state of the MID field. The dataset is available at https://github.com/HYU-NLP/BlendX.

Neural parsing is very dependent on the underlying language model. However, very little is known about how choices in the language model affect parsing performance, especially in multi-task learning. We investigate questions on how the choice of subwords affects parsing, how subword sharing is responsible for gains or negative transfer in a multi-task setting where each task is parsing of a specific domain of the same language. More specifically, we investigate these issues across four languages: English, German, Italian, and Turkish. We find a general preference for averaged or last subwords across languages and domains. However, specific POS tags may require different subwords, and the distributional overlap between subwords across domains is perhaps a more influential factor in determining positive or negative transfer than discrepancies in the data sizes.

Although biomedical entity linking (BioEL) has made significant progress with pre-trained language models, challenges still exist for fine-grained and long-tailed entities. To address these challenges, we present BioELQA, a novel model that treats Biomedical Entity Linking as Multiple Choice Question Answering. BioELQA first obtains candidate entities with a fast retriever, jointly presents the mention and candidate entities to a generator, and then outputs the predicted symbol associated with its chosen entity. This formulation enables explicit comparison of different candidate entities, thus capturing fine-grained interactions between mentions and entities, as well as among entities themselves. To improve generalization for long-tailed entities, we retrieve similar labeled training instances as clues and concatenate the input with retrieved instances for the generator. Extensive experimental results show that BioELQA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on several datasets.

We present a new manually annotated dataset of PubMed abstracts for concept normalization in Russian. It contains over 23,641 entity mentions in 756 documents linked to 4,544 unique concepts from the UMLS ontology. Compared to existing corpora, we explore two novel annotation characteristics: the nestedness of named entities and the incompleteness of the Russian medical terminology in UMLS. 4,424 entity mentions are linked to 1,535 unique English concepts absent in the Russian part of the UMLS ontology. We present several baselines for normalization over nested named entities obtained with state-of-the-art models such as SapBERT. Our experimental results show that models pre-trained on graph structural data from UMLS achieve superior performance in a zero-shot setting on bilingual terminology.

Native Language Identification (NLI) intends to classify an author’s native language based on their writing in another language. Historically, the task has heavily relied on time-consuming linguistic feature engineering, and NLI transformer models have thus far failed to offer effective, practical alternatives. The current work shows input size is a limiting factor, and that classifiers trained using Big Bird embeddings outperform linguistic feature engineering models (for which we reproduce previous work) by a large margin on the Reddit-L2 dataset. Additionally, we provide further insight into input length dependencies, show consistent out-of-sample (Europe subreddit) and out-of-domain (TOEFL-11) performance, and qualitatively analyze the embedding space. Given the effectiveness and computational efficiency of this method, we believe it offers a promising avenue for future NLI work.