Sign language understanding has made significant strides; however, there is still no viable solution for generating sign sequences directlyfrom entire spoken content, e.g., text or speech. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for continuous sign language production, easing communication between sign and non-sign language users. In particular, a sequence diffusion model, utilizing embeddings extracted from text or speech, is crafted to generate sign predictions step by step. Moreover, by creating a joint embedding space for text, audio, and sign, we bind these modalities and leverage the semantic consistency among them to provide informative feedback for the model training. This embedding-consistency learning strategy minimizes the reliance on sign triplets and ensures continuous model refinement, evenwith a missing audio modality. Experiments on How2Sign and PHOENIX14T datasets demonstrate that our model achieves competitive performance in sign language production.

This paper presents the PALI team’s winning system for SemEval-2021 Task 2: Multilingual and Cross-lingual Word-in-Context Disambiguation. We fine-tune XLM-RoBERTa model to solve the task of word in context disambiguation, i.e., to determine whether the target word in the two contexts contains the same meaning or not. In implementation, we first specifically design an input tag to emphasize the target word in the contexts. Second, we construct a new vector on the fine-tuned embeddings from XLM-RoBERTa and feed it to a fully-connected network to output the probability of whether the target word in the context has the same meaning or not. The new vector is attained by concatenating the embedding of the [CLS] token and the embeddings of the target word in the contexts. In training, we explore several tricks, such as the Ranger optimizer, data augmentation, and adversarial training, to improve the model prediction. Consequently, we attain the first place in all four cross-lingual tasks.

This paper describes MagicPai’s system for SemEval 2021 Task 7, HaHackathon: Detecting and Rating Humor and Offense. This task aims to detect whether the text is humorous and how humorous it is. There are four subtasks in the competition. In this paper, we mainly present our solution, a multi-task learning model based on adversarial examples, for task 1a and 1b. More specifically, we first vectorize the cleaned dataset and add the perturbation to obtain more robust embedding representations. We then correct the loss via the confidence level. Finally, we perform interactive joint learning on multiple tasks to capture the relationship between whether the text is humorous and how humorous it is. The final result shows the effectiveness of our system.

Question answering from semi-structured tables can be seen as a semantic parsing task and is significant and practical for pushing the boundary of natural language understanding. Existing research mainly focuses on understanding contents from unstructured evidence, e.g., news, natural language sentences and documents. The task of verification from structured evidence, such as tables, charts, and databases, is still less-explored. This paper describes sattiy team’s system in SemEval-2021 task 9: Statement Verification and Evidence Finding with Tables (SEM-TAB-FACT)(CITATION). This competition aims to verify statements and to find evidence from tables for scientific articles and to promote proper interpretation of the surrounding article. In this paper we exploited ensemble models of pre-trained language models over tables, TaPas and TaBERT, for Task A and adjust the result based on some rules extracted for Task B. Finally, in the leadboard, we attain the F1 scores of 0.8496 and 0.7732 in Task A for the 2-way and 3-way evaluation, respectively, and the F1 score of 0.4856 in Task B.

Definition Extraction is the task to automatically extract terms and their definitions from text. In recent years, it attracts wide interest from NLP researchers. This paper describes the unixlong team’s system for the SemEval 2020 task6: DeftEval: Extracting term-definition pairs in free text. The goal of this task is to extract definition, word level BIO tags and relations. This task is challenging due to the free style of the text, especially the definitions of the terms range across several sentences and lack explicit verb phrases. We propose a joint model to train the tasks of definition extraction and the word level BIO tagging simultaneously. We design a creative format input of BERT to capture the location information between entity and its definition. Then we adjust the result of BERT with some rules. Finally, we apply TAG_ID, ROOT_ID, BIO tag to predict the relation and achieve macro-averaged F1 score 1.0 which rank first on the official test set in the relation extraction subtask.

This paper describes xsysigma team’s system for SemEval 2020 Task 7: Assessing the Funniness of Edited News Headlines. The target of this task is to assess the funniness changes of news headlines after minor editing and is divided into two subtasks: Subtask 1 is a regression task to detect the humor intensity of the sentence after editing; and Subtask 2 is a classification task to predict funnier of the two edited versions of an original headline. In this paper, we only report our implement of Subtask 2. We first construct sentence pairs with different features for Enhancement Inference BERT(EI-BERT)’s input. We then conduct data augmentation strategy and Pseudo-Label method. After that, we apply feature enhancement interaction on the encoding of each sentence for classification with EI-BERT. Finally, we apply weighted fusion algorithm to the logits results which obtained by different pre-trained models. We achieve 64.5% accuracy in subtask2 and rank the first and the fifth in dev and test dataset 1 , respectively.