No Arabic abstract
Humor plays an important role in human languages and it is essential to model humor when building intelligence systems. Among different forms of humor, puns perform wordplay for humorous effects by employing words with double entendre and high phonetic similarity. However, identifying and modeling puns are challenging as puns usually involved implicit semantic or phonological tricks. In this paper, we propose Pronunciation-attentive Contextualized Pun Recognition (PCPR) to perceive human humor, detect if a sentence contains puns and locate them in the sentence. PCPR derives contextualized representation for each word in a sentence by capturing the association between the surrounding context and its corresponding phonetic symbols. Extensive experiments are conducted on two benchmark datasets. Results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in pun detection and location tasks. In-depth analyses verify the effectiveness and robustness of PCPR.
In this paper, we focus on the task of generating a pun sentence given a pair of word senses. A major challenge for pun generation is the lack of large-scale pun corpus to guide the supervised learning. To remedy this, we propose an adversarial generative network for pun generation (Pun-GAN), which does not require any pun corpus. It consists of a generator to produce pun sentences, and a discriminator to distinguish between the generated pun sentences and the real sentences with specific word senses. The output of the discriminator is then used as a reward to train the generator via reinforcement learning, encouraging it to produce pun sentences that can support two word senses simultaneously. Experiments show that the proposed Pun-GAN can generate sentences that are more ambiguous and diverse in both automatic and human evaluation.
Answer selection, which is involved in many natural language processing applications such as dialog systems and question answering (QA), is an important yet challenging task in practice, since conventional methods typically suffer from the issues of ignoring diverse real-world background knowledge. In this paper, we extensively investigate approaches to enhancing the answer selection model with external knowledge from knowledge graph (KG). First, we present a context-knowledge interaction learning framework, Knowledge-aware Neural Network (KNN), which learns the QA sentence representations by considering a tight interaction with the external knowledge from KG and the textual information. Then, we develop two kinds of knowledge-aware attention mechanism to summarize both the context-based and knowledge-based interactions between questions and answers. To handle the diversity and complexity of KG information, we further propose a Contextualized Knowledge-aware Attentive Neural Network (CKANN), which improves the knowledge representation learning with structure information via a customized Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and comprehensively learns context-based and knowledge-based sentence representation via the multi-view knowledge-aware attention mechanism. We evaluate our method on four widely-used benchmark QA datasets, including WikiQA, TREC QA, InsuranceQA and Yahoo QA. Results verify the benefits of incorporating external knowledge from KG, and show the robust superiority and extensive applicability of our method.
Modern deep learning approaches have achieved groundbreaking performance in modeling and classifying sequential data. Specifically, attention networks constitute the state-of-the-art paradigm for capturing long temporal dynamics. This paper examines the efficacy of this paradigm in the challenging task of emotion recognition in dyadic conversations. In contrast to existing approaches, our work introduces a novel attention mechanism capable of inferring the immensity of the effect of each past utterance on the current speaker emotional state. The proposed attention mechanism performs this inference procedure without the need of a decoder network; this is achieved by means of innovative self-attention arguments. Our self-attention networks capture the correlation patterns among consecutive encoder network states, thus allowing to robustly and effectively model temporal dynamics over arbitrary long temporal horizons. Thus, we enable capturing strong affective patterns over the course of long discussions. We exhibit the effectiveness of our approach considering the challenging IEMOCAP benchmark. As we show, our devised methodology outperforms state-of-the-art alternatives and commonly used approaches, giving rise to promising new research directions in the context of Online Social Network (OSN) analysis tasks.
Named entity recognition (NER) models are typically based on the architecture of Bi-directional LSTM (BiLSTM). The constraints of sequential nature and the modeling of single input prevent the full utilization of global information from larger scope, not only in the entire sentence, but also in the entire document (dataset). In this paper, we address these two deficiencies and propose a model augmented with hierarchical contextualized representation: sentence-level representation and document-level representation. In sentence-level, we take different contributions of words in a single sentence into consideration to enhance the sentence representation learned from an independent BiLSTM via label embedding attention mechanism. In document-level, the key-value memory network is adopted to record the document-aware information for each unique word which is sensitive to similarity of context information. Our two-level hierarchical contextualized representations are fused with each input token embedding and corresponding hidden state of BiLSTM, respectively. The experimental results on three benchmark NER datasets (CoNLL-2003 and Ontonotes 5.0 English datasets, CoNLL-2002 Spanish dataset) show that we establish new state-of-the-art results.
The clinical named entity recognition (CNER) task seeks to locate and classify clinical terminologies into predefined categories, such as diagnostic procedure, disease disorder, severity, medication, medication dosage, and sign symptom. CNER facilitates the study of side-effect on medications including identification of novel phenomena and human-focused information extraction. Existing approaches in extracting the entities of interests focus on using static word embeddings to represent each word. However, one word can have different interpretations that depend on the context of the sentences. Evidently, static word embeddings are insufficient to integrate the diverse interpretation of a word. To overcome this challenge, the technique of contextualized word embedding has been introduced to better capture the semantic meaning of each word based on its context. Two of these language models, ELMo and Flair, have been widely used in the field of Natural Language Processing to generate the contextualized word embeddings on domain-generic documents. However, these embeddings are usually too general to capture the proximity among vocabularies of specific domains. To facilitate various downstream applications using clinical case reports (CCRs), we pre-train two deep contextualized language models, Clinical Embeddings from Language Model (C-ELMo) and Clinical Contextual String Embeddings (C-Flair) using the clinical-related corpus from the PubMed Central. Explicit experiments show that our models gain dramatic improvements compared to both static word embeddings and domain-generic language models.