Recent advances in NLP have led to a rise in inter-disciplinary and application-oriented research. While this demonstrates the growing real-world impact of the field, research papers frequently feature experiments that do not account for the complexities of realistic data and environments. To explore the extent of this gap, we investigate the relationship between the real-world motivations described in NLP papers and the models and evaluation which comprise the proposed solution. We first survey papers from the NLP Applications track from ACL 2020 and EMNLP 2020, asking which papers have differences between their stated motivation and their experimental setting, and if so, mention them. We find that many papers fall short of considering real-world input and output conditions due to adopting simplified modeling or evaluation settings. As a case study, we then empirically show that the performance of an educational dialog understanding system deteriorates when used in a realistic classroom environment.

In recent decades, there has been a significant push to leverage technology to aid both teachers and students in the classroom. Language processing advancements have been harnessed to provide better tutoring services, automated feedback to teachers, improved peer-to-peer feedback mechanisms, and measures of student comprehension for reading. Automated question generation systems have the potential to significantly reduce teachers’ workload in the latter. In this paper, we compare three differ- ent neural architectures for question generation across two types of reading material: narratives and textbooks. For each architecture, we explore the benefits of including question attributes in the input representation. Our models show that a T5 architecture has the best overall performance, with a RougeL score of 0.536 on a narrative corpus and 0.316 on a textbook corpus. We break down the results by attribute and discover that the attribute can improve the quality of some types of generated questions, including Action and Character, but this is not true for all models.

Extreme multi-label text classification (XMTC) is the task of finding the most relevant subset labels from an extremely large-scale label collection. Recently, some deep learning models have achieved state-of-the-art results in XMTC tasks. These models commonly predict scores for all labels by a fully connected layer as the last layer of the model. However, such models can’t predict a relatively complete and variable-length label subset for each document, because they select positive labels relevant to the document by a fixed threshold or take top k labels in descending order of scores. A less popular type of deep learning models called sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) focus on predicting variable-length positive labels in sequence style. However, the labels in XMTC tasks are essentially an unordered set rather than an ordered sequence, the default order of labels restrains Seq2Seq models in training. To address this limitation in Seq2Seq, we propose an autoregressive sequence-to-set model for XMTC tasks named OTSeq2Set. Our model generates predictions in student-forcing scheme and is trained by a loss function based on bipartite matching which enables permutation-invariance. Meanwhile, we use the optimal transport distance as a measurement to force the model to focus on the closest labels in semantic label space. Experiments show that OTSeq2Set outperforms other competitive baselines on 4 benchmark datasets. Especially, on the Wikipedia dataset with 31k labels, it outperforms the state-of-the-art Seq2Seq method by 16.34% in micro-F1 score. The code is available at https://github.com/caojie54/OTSeq2Set.

Demo: https://youtu.be/WQLL93TPB-cAbstract:We present DeepGen, a system deployed at web scale for automatically creating sponsored search advertisements (ads) for BingAds customers. We leverage state-of-the-art natural language generation (NLG) models to generate fluent ads from advertiser’s web pages in an abstractive fashion and solve practical issues such as factuality and inference speed. In addition, our system creates a customized ad in real-time in response to the user’s search query, therefore highlighting different aspects of the same product based on what the user is looking for. To achieve this, our system generates a diverse choice of smaller pieces of the ad ahead of time and, at query time, selects the most relevant ones to be stitched into a complete ad. We improve generation diversity by training a controllable NLG model to generate multiple ads for the same web page highlighting different selling points. Our system design further improves diversity horizontally by first running an ensemble of generation models trained with different objectives and then using a diversity sampling algorithm to pick a diverse subset of generation results for online selection. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our proposed system design. Our system is currently deployed in production, serving ~4% of global ads served in Bing.

Automatic math problem solving has attracted much attention of NLP researchers recently. However, most of the works focus on the solving of Math Word Problems (MWPs). In this paper, we study on the Geometric Problem Solving based on neural networks. Solving geometric problems requires the integration of text and diagram information as well as the knowledge of the relevant theorems. The lack of high-quality datasets and efficient neural geometric solvers impedes the development of automatic geometric problems solving. Based on GeoQA, we newly annotate 2,518 geometric problems with richer types and greater difficulty to form an augmented benchmark dataset GeoQA+, containing 6,027 problems in training set and 7,528 totally. We further perform data augmentation method to expand the training set to 12,054. Besides, we design a Dual Parallel text Encoder DPE to efficiently encode long and medium-length problem text. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of GeoQA+ and DPE module, and the accuracy of automatic geometric problem solving is improved to 66.09%.

Frame-based state representation is widely used in modern task-oriented dialog systems to model user intentions and slot values. However, a fixed design of domain ontology makes it difficult to extend to new services and APIs. Recent work proposed to use natural language descriptions to define the domain ontology instead of tag names for each intent or slot, thus offering a dynamic set of schema. In this paper, we conduct in-depth comparative studies to understand the use of natural language description for schema in dialog state tracking. Our discussion mainly covers three aspects: encoder architectures, impact of supplementary training, and effective schema description styles. We introduce a set of newly designed bench-marking descriptions and reveal the model robustness on both homogeneous and heterogeneous description styles in training and evaluation.

Rhetoric is a vital element in modern poetry, and plays an essential role in improving its aesthetics. However, to date, it has not been considered in research on automatic poetry generation. In this paper, we propose a rhetorically controlled encoder-decoder for modern Chinese poetry generation. Our model relies on a continuous latent variable as a rhetoric controller to capture various rhetorical patterns in an encoder, and then incorporates rhetoric-based mixtures while generating modern Chinese poetry. For metaphor and personification, an automated evaluation shows that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by a substantial margin, while human evaluation shows that our model generates better poems than baseline methods in terms of fluency, coherence, meaningfulness, and rhetorical aesthetics.

Automatically analyzing dialogue can help understand and guide behavior in domains such as counseling, where interactions are largely mediated by conversation. In this paper, we study modeling behavioral codes used to asses a psychotherapy treatment style called Motivational Interviewing (MI), which is effective for addressing substance abuse and related problems. Specifically, we address the problem of providing real-time guidance to therapists with a dialogue observer that (1) categorizes therapist and client MI behavioral codes and, (2) forecasts codes for upcoming utterances to help guide the conversation and potentially alert the therapist. For both tasks, we define neural network models that build upon recent successes in dialogue modeling. Our experiments demonstrate that our models can outperform several baselines for both tasks. We also report the results of a careful analysis that reveals the impact of the various network design tradeoffs for modeling therapy dialogue.

This paper describes the system submission of our team Amazon to the shared task on Cross Framework Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP) at the 2019 Conference for Computational Language Learning (CoNLL). Via extensive analysis of implicit alignments in AMR, we recategorize five meaning representations (MRs) into two classes: Lexical- Anchoring and Phrasal-Anchoring. Then we propose a unified graph-based parsing framework for the lexical-anchoring MRs, and a phrase-structure parsing for one of the phrasal- anchoring MRs, UCCA. Our system submission ranked 1st in the AMR subtask, and later improvements show promising results on other frameworks as well.