Ayana Niwa


2022

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Interpretability for Language Learners Using Example-Based Grammatical Error Correction
Masahiro Kaneko | Sho Takase | Ayana Niwa | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) should not focus only on high accuracy of corrections but also on interpretability for language learning. However, existing neural-based GEC models mainly aim at improving accuracy, and their interpretability has not been explored.A promising approach for improving interpretability is an example-based method, which uses similar retrieved examples to generate corrections. In addition, examples are beneficial in language learning, helping learners understand the basis of grammatically incorrect/correct texts and improve their confidence in writing. Therefore, we hypothesize that incorporating an example-based method into GEC can improve interpretability as well as support language learners. In this study, we introduce an Example-Based GEC (EB-GEC) that presents examples to language learners as a basis for a correction result. The examples consist of pairs of correct and incorrect sentences similar to a given input and its predicted correction. Experiments demonstrate that the examples presented by EB-GEC help language learners decide to accept or refuse suggestions from the GEC output. Furthermore, the experiments also show that retrieved examples improve the accuracy of corrections.

2021

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Predicting Antonyms in Context using BERT
Ayana Niwa | Keisuke Nishiguchi | Naoaki Okazaki
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We address the task of antonym prediction in a context, which is a fill-in-the-blanks problem. This task setting is unique and practical because it requires contrastiveness to the other word and naturalness as a text in filling a blank. We propose methods for fine-tuning pre-trained masked language models (BERT) for context-aware antonym prediction. The experimental results demonstrate that these methods have positive impacts on the prediction of antonyms within a context. Moreover, human evaluation reveals that more than 85% of predictions using the proposed method are acceptable as antonyms.