This paper introduces a novel framework to harness Large Language Models (LLMs) for Epidemic Intelligence, focusing on identifying and categorizing emergent socio-political phenomena within health crises, with a spotlight on the COVID-19 pandemic. Our approach diverges from traditional methods, such as Topic Models, by providing explicit support to analysts through the identification of distinct thematic areas and the generation of clear, actionable statements for each topic. This supports a Zero-shot Classification mechanism, enabling effective matching of news articles to fine-grain topics without the need for model fine-tuning. The framework is designed to be as transparent as possible, producing linguistically informed insights to make the analysis more accessible to analysts who may not be familiar with every subject matter of inherently emerging phenomena. This process not only enhances the precision and relevance of the extracted Epidemic Intelligence but also fosters a collaborative environment where system linguistic abilities and the analyst’s domain expertise are integrated.

This paper explores Interactive Grounded Language Understanding (IGLU) challenges within Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). In this setting, a robot interprets user commands related to its environment, aiming to discern whether a specific command can be executed. If faced with ambiguities or incomplete data, the robot poses relevant clarification questions. Drawing from the NeurIPS 2022 IGLU competition, we enrich the dataset by introducing our multi-modal data and natural language descriptions in MM-IGLU: Multi-Modal Interactive Grounded Language Understanding. Utilizing a BART-based model that integrates the user’s statement with the environment’s description, and a cutting-edge Multi-Modal Large Language Model that merges both visual and textual data, we offer a valuable resource for ongoing research in the domain. Additionally, we discuss the evaluation methods for such tasks, highlighting potential limitations imposed by traditional string-match-based evaluations on this intricate multi-modal challenge. Moreover, we provide an evaluation benchmark based on human judgment to address the limits and capabilities of such baseline models. This resource is released on a dedicated GitHub repository at https://github.com/crux82/MM-IGLU.

Even if recent Transformer-based architectures, such as BERT, achieved impressive results in semantic processing tasks, their fine-tuning stage still requires large scale training resources. Usually, Data Augmentation (DA) techniques can help to deal with low resource settings. In Text Classification tasks, the objective of DA is the generation of well-formed sentences that i) represent the desired task category and ii) are novel with respect to existing sentences. In this paper, we propose a neural approach to automatically learn to generate new examples using a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model. We first learn a task-oriented similarity function that we use to pair similar examples. Then, we use these example pairs to train a model to generate examples. Experiments in low resource settings show that augmenting the training material with the proposed strategy systematically improves the results on text classification and natural language inference tasks by up to 10% accuracy, outperforming existing DA approaches.

In real scenarios, a multilingual model trained to solve NLP tasks on a set of languages can be required to support new languages over time. Unfortunately, the straightforward retraining on a dataset containing annotated examples for all the languages is both expensive and time-consuming, especially when the number of target languages grows. Moreover, the original annotated material may no longer be available due to storage or business constraints. Re-training only with the new language data will inevitably result in Catastrophic Forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. We propose a Continual Learning strategy that updates a model to support new languages over time, while maintaining consistent results on previously learned languages. We define a Teacher-Student framework where the existing model “teaches” to a student model its knowledge about the languages it supports, while the student is also trained on a new language. We report an experimental evaluation in several tasks including Sentence Classification, Relational Learning and Sequence Labeling.

Recent Transformer-based architectures, e.g., BERT, provide impressive results in many Natural Language Processing tasks. However, most of the adopted benchmarks are made of (sometimes hundreds of) thousands of examples. In many real scenarios, obtaining high- quality annotated data is expensive and time consuming; in contrast, unlabeled examples characterizing the target task can be, in general, easily collected. One promising method to enable semi-supervised learning has been proposed in image processing, based on Semi- Supervised Generative Adversarial Networks. In this paper, we propose GAN-BERT that ex- tends the fine-tuning of BERT-like architectures with unlabeled data in a generative adversarial setting. Experimental results show that the requirement for annotated examples can be drastically reduced (up to only 50-100 annotated examples), still obtaining good performances in several sentence classification tasks.

While NLP systems become more pervasive, their accountability gains value as a focal point of effort. Epistemological opaqueness of nonlinear learning methods, such as deep learning models, can be a major drawback for their adoptions. In this paper, we discuss the application of Layerwise Relevance Propagation over a linguistically motivated neural architecture, the Kernel-based Deep Architecture, in order to trace back connections between linguistic properties of input instances and system decisions. Such connections then guide the construction of argumentations on network’s inferences, i.e., explanations based on real examples, semantically related to the input. We propose here a methodology to evaluate the transparency and coherence of analogy-based explanations modeling an audit stage for the system. Quantitative analysis on two semantic tasks, i.e., question classification and semantic role labeling, show that the explanatory capabilities (native in KDAs) are effective and they pave the way to more complex argumentation methods.

Nonlinear methods such as deep neural networks achieve state-of-the-art performances in several semantic NLP tasks. However epistemologically transparent decisions are not provided as for the limited interpretability of the underlying acquired neural models. In neural-based semantic inference tasks epistemological transparency corresponds to the ability of tracing back causal connections between the linguistic properties of a input instance and the produced classification output. In this paper, we propose the use of a methodology, called Layerwise Relevance Propagation, over linguistically motivated neural architectures, namely Kernel-based Deep Architectures (KDA), to guide argumentations and explanation inferences. In such a way, each decision provided by a KDA can be linked to real examples, linguistically related to the input instance: these can be used to motivate the network output. Quantitative analysis shows that richer explanations about the semantic and syntagmatic structures of the examples characterize more convincing arguments in two tasks, i.e. question classification and semantic role labeling.

Service robots are expected to operate in specific environments, where the presence of humans plays a key role. A major feature of such robotics platforms is thus the ability to react to spoken commands. This requires the understanding of the user utterance with an accuracy able to trigger the robot reaction. Such correct interpretation of linguistic exchanges depends on physical, cognitive and language-dependent aspects related to the environment. In this work, we present the empirical evaluation of an adaptive Spoken Language Understanding chain for robotic commands, that explicitly depends on the operational environment during both the learning and recognition stages. The effectiveness of such a context-sensitive command interpretation is tested against an extension of an already existing corpus of commands, that introduced explicit perceptual knowledge: this enabled deeper measures proving that more accurate disambiguation capabilities can be actually obtained.

Kernel methods enable the direct usage of structured representations of textual data during language learning and inference tasks. Expressive kernels, such as Tree Kernels, achieve excellent performance in NLP. On the other side, deep neural networks have been demonstrated effective in automatically learning feature representations during training. However, their input is tensor data, i.e., they can not manage rich structured information. In this paper, we show that expressive kernels and deep neural networks can be combined in a common framework in order to (i) explicitly model structured information and (ii) learn non-linear decision functions. We show that the input layer of a deep architecture can be pre-trained through the application of the Nystrom low-rank approximation of kernel spaces. The resulting “kernelized” neural network achieves state-of-the-art accuracy in three different tasks.

Sentiment Analysis systems aims at detecting opinions and sentiments that are expressed in texts. Many approaches in literature are based on resources that model the prior polarity of words or multi-word expressions, i.e. a polarity lexicon. Such resources are defined by teams of annotators, i.e. a manual annotation is provided to associate emotional or sentiment facets to the lexicon entries. The development of such lexicons is an expensive and language dependent process, making them often not covering all the linguistic sentiment phenomena. Moreover, once a lexicon is defined it can hardly be adopted in a different language or even a different domain. In this paper, we present several Distributional Polarity Lexicons (DPLs), i.e. large-scale polarity lexicons acquired with an unsupervised methodology based on Distributional Models of Lexical Semantics. Given a set of heuristically annotated sentences from Twitter, we transfer the sentiment information from sentences to words. The approach is mostly unsupervised, and experimental evaluations on Sentiment Analysis tasks in two languages show the benefits of the generated resources. The generated DPLs are publicly available in English and Italian.

Recent years show the development of large scale resources (e.g. FrameNet for the Frame Semantics) that supported the definition of several state-of-the-art approaches in Natural Language Processing. However, the reuse of existing resources in heterogeneous domains such as Human Robot Interaction is not straightforward. The generalization offered by many data driven methods is strongly biased by the employed data, whose performance in out-of-domain conditions exhibit large drops. In this paper, we present the Human Robot Interaction Corpus (HuRIC). It is made of audio files paired with their transcriptions referring to commands for a robot, e.g. in a home environment. The recorded sentences are annotated with different kinds of linguistic information, ranging from morphological and syntactic information to rich semantic information, according to the Frame Semantics, to characterize robot actions, and Spatial Semantics, to capture the robot environment. All texts are represented through the Abstract Meaning Representation, to adopt a simple but expressive representation of commands, that can be easily translated into the internal representation of the robot.

Lexical resources are basic components of many text processing system devoted to information extraction, question answering or dialogue. In paste years many resources have been developed such as FrameNet and WordNet. FrameNet describes prototypical situations (i.e. Frames) while WordNet defines lexical meaning (senses) for the majority of English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. A major difference between FrameNet and WordNet refers to their coverage. Due of this lack of coverage, in recent years some approaches have been studied to make a bridge between this two resources, so a resource is used to extend the coverage of the other one. The nature of these approaches leave from supervised to supervised methods. The major problem is that there is not a standard in evaluation of the mapping. Each different work have tested own approach with a custom gold standard. This work give an extensive evaluation of the model proposed in (De Cao et al., 2008) using gold standard proposed in other works. Moreover this work give an empirical comparison between other available resources. As outcome of this work we also release the full mapping resource made according to the model proposed in (De Cao et al., 2008).