Semantic textual similarity (STS) is a fundamental NLP task that measures the semantic similarity between a pair of sentences. In order to reduce the inherent ambiguity posed from the sentences, a recent work called Conditional STS (C-STS) has been proposed to measure the sentences’ similarity conditioned on a certain aspect. Despite the popularity of C-STS, we find that the current C-STS dataset suffers from various issues that could impede proper evaluation on this task. In this paper, we reannotate the C-STS validation set and observe an annotator discrepancy on 55% of the instances resulting from the annotation errors in the original label, ill-defined conditions, and the lack of clarity in the task definition. After a thorough dataset analysis, we improve the C-STS task by leveraging the models’ capability to understand the conditions under a QA task setting. With the generated answers, we present an automatic error identification pipeline that is able to identify annotation errors from the C-STS data with over 80% F1 score. We also propose a new method that largely improves the performance over baselines on the C-STS data by training the models with the answers. Finally we discuss the conditionality annotation based on the typed-feature structure (TFS) of entity types. We show in examples that the TFS is able to provide a linguistic foundation for constructing C-STS data with new conditions.

This paper introduces GLAMR, an Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) interpretation of Generative Lexicon (GL) semantic components. It includes a structured subeventual interpretation of linguistic predicates, and encoding of the opposition structure of property changes of event arguments. Both of these features are recently encoded in VerbNet (VN), and form the scaffolding for the semantic form associated with VN frame files. We develop a new syntax, concepts, and roles for subevent structure based on VN for connecting subevents to atomic predicates. Our proposed extension is compatible with current AMR specification. We also present an approach to automatically augment AMR graphs by inserting subevent structure of the predicates and identifying the subevent arguments from the semantic roles. A pilot annotation of GLAMR graphs of 65 documents (486 sentences), based on procedural texts as a source, is presented as a public dataset. The annotation includes subevents, argument property change, and document-level anaphoric links. Finally, we provide baseline models for converting text to GLAMR and vice versa, along with the application of GLAMR for generating enriched paraphrases with details on subevent transformation and arguments that are not present in the surface form of the texts.

We demonstrate that coreference resolution in procedural texts is significantly improved when performing transformation-based entity linking prior to coreference relation identification. When events in the text introduce changes to the state of participating entities, it is often impossible to accurately link entities in anaphoric and coreference relations without an understanding of the transformations those entities undergo. We show how adding event semantics helps to better model entity coreference. We argue that all transformation predicates, not just creation verbs, introduce a new entity into the discourse, as a kind of generalized Result Role, which is typically not textually mentioned. This allows us to model procedural texts as process graphs and to compute the coreference type for any two entities in the recipe. We present our annotation methodology and the corpus generated as well as describe experiments on coreference resolution of entity mentions under a process-oriented model of events.

Understanding inferences from text requires more than merely recovering surface arguments, adjuncts, or strings associated with the query terms. As humans, we interpret sentences as contextualized components of a narrative or discourse, by both filling in missing information, and reasoning about event consequences. In this paper, we define the process of rewriting a textual expression (lexeme or phrase) such that it reduces ambiguity while also making explicit the underlying semantics that is not (necessarily) expressed in the economy of sentence structure as Dense Paraphrasing (DP). We apply the DP techniques on the English procedural texts from the cooking recipe domain, and provide the scope and design of the application that involves creating a graph representation of events and generating hidden arguments through paraphrasing. We provide insights on how this DP process can enrich a source text by showing that the dense-paraphrased event graph is a good resource to large LLMs such as GPT-3 to generate reliable paraphrases; and by experimenting baselines for automaticDP generation. Finally, we demonstrate the utility of the dataset and event graph structure by providing a case study on the out-of-domain modeling and different DP prompts and GPT models for paraphrasing.

Automatic structuring of electronic medical records is of high demand for clinical workflow solutions to facilitate extraction, storage, and querying of patient care information. However, developing a scalable solution is extremely challenging, specifically for radiology reports, as most healthcare institutes use either no template or department/institute specific templates. Moreover, radiologists’ reporting style varies from one to another as sentences are written in a telegraphic format and do not follow general English grammar rules. In this work, we present an ensemble method that consolidates the predictions of three models, capturing various attributes of textual information for automatic labeling of sentences with section labels. These three models are: 1) Focus Sentence model, capturing context of the target sentence; 2) Surrounding Context model, capturing the neighboring context of the target sentence; and finally, 3) Formatting/Layout model, aimed at learning report formatting cues. We utilize Bi-directional LSTMs, followed by sentence encoders, to acquire the context. Furthermore, we define several features that incorporate the structure of reports. We compare our proposed approach against multiple baselines and state-of-the-art approaches on a proprietary dataset as well as 100 manually annotated radiology notes from the MIMIC-III dataset, which we are making publicly available. Our proposed approach significantly outperforms other approaches by achieving 97.1% accuracy.