Jon Z. Cai
Also published as: Jon Cai, Zheng Cai
2025
LiDARR: Linking Document AMRs with Referents Resolvers
Jon Z. Cai | Kristin Wright-Bettner | Zekun Zhao | Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Abijith Trichur Ramachandran | Jeffrey Flanigan | Martha Palmer | James Martin
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
Jon Z. Cai | Kristin Wright-Bettner | Zekun Zhao | Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Abijith Trichur Ramachandran | Jeffrey Flanigan | Martha Palmer | James Martin
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)
In this paper, we present LiDARR (**Li**nking **D**ocument **A**MRs with **R**eferents **R**esolvers), a web tool for semantic annotation at the document level using the formalism of Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). LiDARR streamlines the creation of comprehensive knowledge graphs from natural language documents through semantic annotation. The tool features a visualization and interactive user interface, transforming document-level AMR annotation into an models-facilitated verification process. This is achieved through the integration of an AMR-to-surface alignment model and a coreference resolution model. Additionally, we incorporate PropBank rolesets into LiDARR to extend implicit roles in annotated AMR, allowing implicit roles to be linked through the coreference chains via AMRs.
In Search of the Lost Arch in Dialogue: A Dependency Dialogue Acts Corpus for Multi-Party Dialogues
Jon Z. Cai | Brendan King | Peyton Cameron | Susan Windisch Brown | Miriam Eckert | Dananjay Srinivas | George Arthur Baker | V Kate Everson | Martha Palmer | James Martin | Jeffrey Flanigan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Jon Z. Cai | Brendan King | Peyton Cameron | Susan Windisch Brown | Miriam Eckert | Dananjay Srinivas | George Arthur Baker | V Kate Everson | Martha Palmer | James Martin | Jeffrey Flanigan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Understanding the structure of multi-party conversation and the intentions and dialogue acts of each speaker remains a significant challenge in NLP. While a number of corpora annotated using theoretical frameworks of dialogue have been proposed, these typically focus on either utterance-level labeling of speaker intent, missing wider context, or the rhetorical structure of a dialogue, losing fine-grained intents captured in dialogue acts. Recently, the Dependency Dialogue Acts (DDA) framework has been proposed to for modeling both the fine-grained intents of each speaker and the structure of multi-party dialogues. However, there is not yet a corpus annotated with this framework available for the community to study. To address this gap, we introduce a new corpus of 33 dialogues and over 9,000 utterance units, densely annotated using the Dependency Dialogue Acts (DDA) framework.Our dataset spans four genres of multi-party conversations from different modalities: (1) physics classroom discussions, (2) engineering classroom discussions, (3) board game interactions, and (4) written online game chat logs. Each session is doubly annotated and adjudicated to ensure high-quality labeling. We present a description of the dataset and annotation process, an analysis of speaker dynamics enabled by our annotation, and a baseline evaluation of LLMs as DDA parsers. We discuss the implications of this dataset understanding dynamics between speakers and for developing more controllable dialogue agents.
2024
X-AMR Annotation Tool
Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Jon Z. Cai | Martha Palmer | James H. Martin
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Jon Z. Cai | Martha Palmer | James H. Martin
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
This paper presents a novel Cross-document Abstract Meaning Representation (X-AMR) annotation tool designed for annotating key corpus-level event semantics. Leveraging machine assistance through the Prodigy Annotation Tool, we enhance the user experience, ensuring ease and efficiency in the annotation process. Through empirical analyses, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in augmenting an existing event corpus, highlighting its advantages when integrated with GPT-4. Code and annotations: href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/xamr-9ED0}{anonymous.4open.science/r/xamr-9ED0} footnote Demo: {href{https://youtu.be/TuirftxciNE}{https://youtu.be/TuirftxciNE}} footnote Live Link: {href{https://tinyurl.com/mrxmafwh}{https://tinyurl.com/mrxmafwh}}
Adapting Abstract Meaning Representation Parsing to the Clinical Narrative – the SPRING THYME parser
Jon Z. Cai | Kristin Wright-Bettner | Martha Palmer | Guergana Savova | James Martin
Proceedings of the 6th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
Jon Z. Cai | Kristin Wright-Bettner | Martha Palmer | Guergana Savova | James Martin
Proceedings of the 6th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop
This paper is dedicated to the design and evaluation of the first AMR parser tailored for clinical notes. Our objective was to facilitate the precise transformation of the clinical notes into structured AMR expressions, thereby enhancing the interpretability and usability of clinical text data at scale. Leveraging the colon cancer dataset from the Temporal Histories of Your Medical Events (THYME) corpus, we adapted a state-of-the-art AMR parser utilizing continuous training. Our approach incorporates data augmentation techniques to enhance the accuracy of AMR structure predictions. Notably, through this learning strategy, our parser achieved an impressive F1 score of 88% on the THYME corpus’s colon cancer dataset. Moreover, our research delved into the efficacy of data required for domain adaptation within the realm of clinical notes, presenting domain adaptation data requirements for AMR parsing. This exploration not only underscores the parser’s robust performance but also highlights its potential in facilitating a deeper understanding of clinical narratives through structured semantic representations.
2023
CAMRA: Copilot for AMR Annotation
Jon Z. Cai | Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Julia Bonn | Kristin Wright-Bettner | Martha Palmer | James H. Martin
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
Jon Z. Cai | Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Julia Bonn | Kristin Wright-Bettner | Martha Palmer | James H. Martin
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
In this paper, we introduce CAMRA (Copilot for AMR Annotatations), a cutting-edge web-based tool designed for constructing Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) from natural language text. CAMRA offers a novel approach to deep lexical semantics annotation such as AMR, treating AMR annotation akin to coding in programming languages. Leveraging the familiarity of programming paradigms, CAMRA encompasses all essential features of existing AMR editors, including example lookup, while going a step further by integrating Propbank roleset lookup as an autocomplete feature within the tool. Notably, CAMRA incorporates AMR parser models as coding co-pilots, greatly enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of AMR annotators.
Comparing Neural Question Generation Architectures for Reading Comprehension
E. Margaret Perkoff | Abhidip Bhattacharyya | Jon Z. Cai | Jie Cao
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
E. Margaret Perkoff | Abhidip Bhattacharyya | Jon Z. Cai | Jie Cao
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
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.
2020
From Spatial Relations to Spatial Configurations
Soham Dan | Parisa Kordjamshidi | Julia Bonn | Archna Bhatia | Jon Cai | Martha Palmer | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Soham Dan | Parisa Kordjamshidi | Julia Bonn | Archna Bhatia | Jon Cai | Martha Palmer | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Spatial Reasoning from language is essential for natural language understanding. Supporting it requires a representation scheme that can capture spatial phenomena encountered in language as well as in images and videos. Existing spatial representations are not sufficient for describing spatial configurations used in complex tasks. This paper extends the capabilities of existing spatial representation languages and increases coverage of the semantic aspects that are needed to ground spatial meaning of natural language text in the world. Our spatial relation language is able to represent a large, comprehensive set of spatial concepts crucial for reasoning and is designed to support composition of static and dynamic spatial configurations. We integrate this language with the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotation schema and present a corpus annotated by this extended AMR. To exhibit the applicability of our representation scheme, we annotate text taken from diverse datasets and show how we extend the capabilities of existing spatial representation languages with fine-grained decomposition of semantics and blend it seamlessly with AMRs of sentences and discourse representations as a whole.
Spatial AMR: Expanded Spatial Annotation in the Context of a Grounded Minecraft Corpus
Julia Bonn | Martha Palmer | Jon Cai | Kristin Wright-Bettner
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Julia Bonn | Martha Palmer | Jon Cai | Kristin Wright-Bettner
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
This paper presents an expansion to the Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) annotation schema that captures fine-grained semantically and pragmatically derived spatial information in grounded corpora. We describe a new lexical category conceptualization and set of spatial annotation tools built in the context of a multimodal corpus consisting of 170 3D structure-building dialogues between a human architect and human builder in Minecraft. Minecraft provides a particularly beneficial spatial relation-elicitation environment because it automatically tracks locations and orientations of objects and avatars in the space according to an absolute Cartesian coordinate system. Through a two-step process of sentence-level and document-level annotation designed to capture implicit information, we leverage these coordinates and bearings in the AMRs in combination with spatial framework annotation to ground the spatial language in the dialogues to absolute space.
2019
Many Faces of Feature Importance: Comparing Built-in and Post-hoc Feature Importance in Text Classification
Vivian Lai | Zheng Cai | Chenhao Tan
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Vivian Lai | Zheng Cai | Chenhao Tan
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Feature importance is commonly used to explain machine predictions. While feature importance can be derived from a machine learning model with a variety of methods, the consistency of feature importance via different methods remains understudied. In this work, we systematically compare feature importance from built-in mechanisms in a model such as attention values and post-hoc methods that approximate model behavior such as LIME. Using text classification as a testbed, we find that 1) no matter which method we use, important features from traditional models such as SVM and XGBoost are more similar with each other, than with deep learning models; 2) post-hoc methods tend to generate more similar important features for two models than built-in methods. We further demonstrate how such similarity varies across instances. Notably, important features do not always resemble each other better when two models agree on the predicted label than when they disagree.
Towards Near-imperceptible Steganographic Text
Falcon Dai | Zheng Cai
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Falcon Dai | Zheng Cai
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
We show that the imperceptibility of several existing linguistic steganographic systems (Fang et al., 2017; Yang et al., 2018) relies on implicit assumptions on statistical behaviors of fluent text. We formally analyze them and empirically evaluate these assumptions. Furthermore, based on these observations, we propose an encoding algorithm called patient-Huffman with improved near-imperceptible guarantees.
2017
Glyph-aware Embedding of Chinese Characters
Falcon Dai | Zheng Cai
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Subword and Character Level Models in NLP
Falcon Dai | Zheng Cai
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Subword and Character Level Models in NLP
Given the advantage and recent success of English character-level and subword-unit models in several NLP tasks, we consider the equivalent modeling problem for Chinese. Chinese script is logographic and many Chinese logograms are composed of common substructures that provide semantic, phonetic and syntactic hints. In this work, we propose to explicitly incorporate the visual appearance of a character’s glyph in its representation, resulting in a novel glyph-aware embedding of Chinese characters. Being inspired by the success of convolutional neural networks in computer vision, we use them to incorporate the spatio-structural patterns of Chinese glyphs as rendered in raw pixels. In the context of two basic Chinese NLP tasks of language modeling and word segmentation, the model learns to represent each character’s task-relevant semantic and syntactic information in the character-level embedding.
Pay Attention to the Ending:Strong Neural Baselines for the ROC Story Cloze Task
Zheng Cai | Lifu Tu | Kevin Gimpel
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Zheng Cai | Lifu Tu | Kevin Gimpel
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
We consider the ROC story cloze task (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016) and present several findings. We develop a model that uses hierarchical recurrent networks with attention to encode the sentences in the story and score candidate endings. By discarding the large training set and only training on the validation set, we achieve an accuracy of 74.7%. Even when we discard the story plots (sentences before the ending) and only train to choose the better of two endings, we can still reach 72.5%. We then analyze this “ending-only” task setting. We estimate human accuracy to be 78% and find several types of clues that lead to this high accuracy, including those related to sentiment, negation, and general ending likelihood regardless of the story context.
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Co-authors
- Martha Palmer 7
- James H. Martin 5
- Kristin Wright-Bettner 4
- Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed 3
- Julia Bonn 3
- Falcon Dai 2
- Jeffrey Flanigan 2
- George Baker 1
- Archna Bhatia 1
- Abhidip Bhattacharyya 1
- Susan Windisch Brown 1
- Peyton Cameron 1
- Jie Cao 1
- Soham Dan 1
- Miriam Eckert 1
- V Kate Everson 1
- Kevin Gimpel 1
- Brendan King 1
- Parisa Kordjamshidi 1
- Vivian Lai 1
- E. Margaret Perkoff 1
- Abijith Trichur Ramachandran 1
- Dan Roth 1
- Guergana K Savova 1
- Dananjay Srinivas 1
- Chenhao Tan 1
- Lifu Tu 1
- Zekun Zhao 1