Style is an integral part of natural language. However, evaluation methods for style measures are rare, often task-specific and usually do not control for content. We propose the modular, fine-grained and content-controlled similarity-based STyle Eva
Luation framework (STEL) to test the performance of any model that can compare two sentences on style. We illustrate STEL with two general dimensions of style (formal/informal and simple/complex) as well as two specific characteristics of style (contrac'tion and numb3r substitution). We find that BERT-based methods outperform simple versions of commonly used style measures like 3-grams, punctuation frequency and LIWC-based approaches. We invite the addition of further tasks and task instances to STEL and hope to facilitate the improvement of style-sensitive measures.
Seq2seq models have demonstrated their incredible effectiveness in a large variety of applications. However, recent research has shown that inappropriate language in training samples and well-designed testing cases can induce seq2seq models to output
profanity. These outputs may potentially hurt the usability of seq2seq models and make the end-users feel offended. To address this problem, we propose a training framework with certified robustness to eliminate the causes that trigger the generation of profanity. The proposed training framework leverages merely a short list of profanity examples to prevent seq2seq models from generating a broader spectrum of profanity. The framework is composed of a pattern-eliminating training component to suppress the impact of language patterns with profanity in the training set, and a trigger-resisting training component to provide certified robustness for seq2seq models against intentionally injected profanity-triggering expressions in test samples. In the experiments, we consider two representative NLP tasks that seq2seq can be applied to, i.e., style transfer and dialogue generation. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed training framework can successfully prevent the NLP models from generating profanity.
News recommendation is critical for personalized news access. Most existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of users' historical news click behavior data, which may lead to privacy concerns and hazards. Federated Learning is a
privacy-preserving framework for multiple clients to collaboratively train models without sharing their private data. However, the computation and communication cost of directly learning many existing news recommendation models in a federated way are unacceptable for user clients. In this paper, we propose an efficient federated learning framework for privacy-preserving news recommendation. Instead of training and communicating the whole model, we decompose the news recommendation model into a large news model maintained in the server and a light-weight user model shared on both server and clients, where news representations and user model are communicated between server and clients. More specifically, the clients request the user model and news representations from the server, and send their locally computed gradients to the server for aggregation. The server updates its global user model with the aggregated gradients, and further updates its news model to infer updated news representations. Since the local gradients may contain private information, we propose a secure aggregation method to aggregate gradients in a privacy-preserving way. Experiments on two real-world datasets show that our method can reduce the computation and communication cost on clients while keep promising model performance.
Despite the increasing popularity of NLP in the humanities and social sciences, advances in model performance and complexity have been accompanied by concerns about interpretability and explanatory power for sociocultural analysis. One popular model
that takes a middle road is Word Mover's Distance (WMD). Ostensibly adapted for its interpretability, WMD has nonetheless been used and further developed in ways which frequently discard its most interpretable aspect: namely, the word-level distances required for translating a set of words into another set of words. To address this apparent gap, we introduce WMDecompose: a model and Python library that 1) decomposes document-level distances into their constituent word-level distances, and 2) subsequently clusters words to induce thematic elements, such that useful lexical information is retained and summarized for analysis. To illustrate its potential in a social scientific context, we apply it to a longitudinal social media corpus to explore the interrelationship between conspiracy theories and conservative American discourses. Finally, because of the full WMD model's high time-complexity, we additionally suggest a method of sampling document pairs from large datasets in a reproducible way, with tight bounds that prevent extrapolation of unreliable results due to poor sampling practices.
Neural conversation models have shown great potentials towards generating fluent and informative responses by introducing external background knowledge. Nevertheless, it is laborious to construct such knowledge-grounded dialogues, and existing models
usually perform poorly when transfer to new domains with limited training samples. Therefore, building a knowledge-grounded dialogue system under the low-resource setting is a still crucial issue. In this paper, we propose a novel three-stage learning framework based on weakly supervised learning which benefits from large scale ungrounded dialogues and unstructured knowledge base. To better cooperate with this framework, we devise a variant of Transformer with decoupled decoder which facilitates the disentangled learning of response generation and knowledge incorporation. Evaluation results on two benchmarks indicate that our approach can outperform other state-of-the-art methods with less training data, and even in zero-resource scenario, our approach still performs well.
This paper presents several challenges faced when annotating Turkish treebanks in accordance with the Universal Dependencies (UD) guidelines and proposes solutions to address them. Most of these challenges stem from the lack of adequate support in th
e UD framework to accurately represent null morphemes and complex derivations, which results in a significant loss of information for Turkish. This loss negatively impacts the tools that are developed based on these treebanks. We raised and discussed these issues within the community on the official UD portal. This paper presents these issues and our proposals to more accurately represent morphosyntactic information for Turkish while adhering to guidelines of UD. This work aims to contribute to the representation of Turkish and other agglutinative languages in UD-based treebanks, which in turn aids to develop more accurately annotated datasets for such languages.
We propose a generative framework for simultaneous machine translation. Conventional approaches use a fixed number of source words to translate or learn dynamic policies for the number of source words by reinforcement learning. Here we formulate simu
ltaneous translation as a structural sequence-to-sequence learning problem. A latent variable is introduced to model read or translate actions at every time step, which is then integrated out to consider all the possible translation policies. A re-parameterised Poisson prior is used to regularise the policies which allows the model to explicitly balance translation quality and latency. The experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the generative framework, which achieves the best BLEU scores given different average translation latencies on benchmark datasets.
The next generation of conversational AI systems need to: (1) process language incrementally, token-by-token to be more responsive and enable handling of conversational phenomena such as pauses, restarts and self-corrections; (2) reason incrementally
allowing meaning to be established beyond what is said; (3) be transparent and controllable, allowing designers as well as the system itself to easily establish reasons for particular behaviour and tailor to particular user groups, or domains. In this short paper we present ongoing preliminary work combining Dynamic Syntax (DS) - an incremental, semantic grammar framework - with the Resource Description Framework (RDF). This paves the way for the creation of incremental semantic parsers that progressively output semantic RDF graphs as an utterance unfolds in real-time. We also outline how the parser can be integrated with an incremental reasoning engine through RDF. We argue that this DS-RDF hybrid satisfies the desiderata listed above, yielding semantic infrastructure that can be used to build responsive, real-time, interpretable Conversational AI that can be rapidly customised for specific user groups such as people with dementia.
Statements that are intentionally misstated (or manipulated) are of considerable interest to researchers, government, security, and financial systems. According to deception literature, there are reliable cues for detecting deception and the belief t
hat liars give off cues that may indicate their deception is near-universal. Therefore, given that deceiving actions require advanced cognitive development that honesty simply does not require, as well as people's cognitive mechanisms have promising guidance for deception detection, in this Ph.D. ongoing research, we propose to examine discourse structure patterns in multilingual deceptive news corpora using the Rhetorical Structure Theory framework. Considering that our work is the first to exploit multilingual discourse-aware strategies for fake news detection, the research community currently lacks multilingual deceptive annotated corpora. Accordingly, this paper describes the current progress in this thesis, including (i) the construction of the first multilingual deceptive corpus, which was annotated by specialists according to the Rhetorical Structure Theory framework, and (ii) the introduction of two new proposed rhetorical relations: INTERJECTION and IMPERATIVE, which we assume to be relevant for the fake news detection task.
Machine Translation (MT) systems often fail to preserve different stylistic and pragmatic properties of the source text (e.g. sentiment and emotion and gender traits and etc.) to the target and especially in a low-resource scenario. Such loss can aff
ect the performance of any downstream Natural Language Processing (NLP) task and such as sentiment analysis and that heavily relies on the output of the MT systems. The susceptibility to sentiment polarity loss becomes even more severe when an MT system is employed for translating a source content that lacks a legitimate language structure (e.g. review text). Therefore and we must find ways to minimize the undesirable effects of sentiment loss in translation without compromising with the adequacy. In our current work and we present a deep re-inforcement learning (RL) framework in conjunction with the curriculum learning (as per difficulties of the reward) to fine-tune the parameters of a pre-trained neural MT system so that the generated translation successfully encodes the underlying sentiment of the source without compromising the adequacy unlike previous methods. We evaluate our proposed method on the English--Hindi (product domain) and French--English (restaurant domain) review datasets and and found that our method brings a significant improvement over several baselines in the machine translation and and sentiment classification tasks.
