Most attempts on Text-to-SQL task using encoder-decoder approach show a big problem of dramatic decline in performance for new databases. For the popular Spider dataset, despite models achieving 70% accuracy on its development or test sets, the same models show a huge decline below 20% accuracy for unseen databases. The root causes for this problem are complex and they cannot be easily fixed by adding more manually created training. In this paper we address the problem and propose a solution that is a hybrid system using automated training-data augmentation technique. Our system consists of a rule-based and a deep learning components that interact to understand crucial information in a given query and produce correct SQL as a result. It achieves double-digit percentage improvement for databases that are not part of the Spider corpus.

Temporal aspect is one of the most challenging areas in Natural Language Interface to Databases (NLIDB). This paper addresses and examines how temporal questions being studied and supported by the research community at both levels: popular annotated dataset (e.g. Spider) and recent advanced models. We present a new dataset with accompanied databases supporting temporal questions in NLIDB. We experiment with two SOTA models (Picard and ValueNet) to investigate how our new dataset helps these models learn and improve performance in temporal aspect.

Business Process Management (BPM) is the discipline which is responsible for management of discovering, analyzing, redesigning, monitoring, and controlling business processes. One of the most crucial tasks of BPM is discovering and modelling business processes from text documents. In this paper, we present our system that resolves an end-to-end problem consisting of 1) recognizing conditional sentences from technical documents, 2) finding boundaries to extract conditional and resultant clauses from each conditional sentence, and 3) categorizing resultant clause as Action or Consequence which later helps to generate new steps in our business process model automatically. We created a new dataset and three models to solve this problem. Our best model achieved very promising results of 83.82, 87.84, and 85.75 for Precision, Recall, and F1, respectively, for extracting Condition, Action, and Consequence clauses using Exact Match metric.

Motion recognition is one of the basic cognitive capabilities of many life forms, however, detecting and understanding motion in text is not a trivial task. In addition, identifying motion entities in natural language is not only challenging but also beneficial for a better natural language understanding. In this paper, we present a Motion Entity Tagging (MET) model to identify entities in motion in a text using the Literal-Motion-in-Text (LiMiT) dataset for training and evaluating the model. Then we propose a new method to split clauses and phrases from complex and long motion sentences to improve the performance of our MET model. We also present results showing that motion features, in particular, entity in motion benefits the Named-Entity Recognition (NER) task. Finally, we present an analysis for the special co-occurrence relation between the person category in NER and animate entities in motion, which significantly improves the classification performance for the person category in NER.

In this paper we present the creation of a corpora annotated with both semantic relatedness (SR) scores and textual entailment (TE) judgments. In building this corpus we aimed at discovering, if any, the relationship between these two tasks for the mutual benefit of resolving one of them by relying on the insights gained from the other. We considered a corpora already annotated with TE judgments and we proceed to the manual annotation with SR scores. The RTE 1-4 corpora used in the PASCAL competition fit our need. The annotators worked independently of one each other and they did not have access to the TE judgment during annotation. The intuition that the two annotations are correlated received major support from this experiment and this finding led to a system that uses this information to revise the initial estimates of SR scores. As semantic relatedness is one of the most general and difficult task in natural language processing we expect that future systems will combine different sources of information in order to solve it. Our work suggests that textual entailment plays a quantifiable role in addressing it.

The goal of this paper is to introduce T-PAS, a resource of typed predicate argument structures for Italian, acquired from corpora by manual clustering of distributional information about Italian verbs, to be used for linguistic analysis and semantic processing tasks. T-PAS is the first resource for Italian in which semantic selection properties and sense-in-context distinctions of verbs are characterized fully on empirical ground. In the paper, we first describe the process of pattern acquisition and corpus annotation (section 2) and its ongoing evaluation (section 3). We then demonstrate the benefits of pattern tagging for NLP purposes (section 4), and discuss current effort to improve the annotation of the corpus (section 5). We conclude by reporting on ongoing experiments using semiautomatic techniques for extending coverage (section 6).

In this paper we present an alignment experiment between patterns of verb use discovered by Corpus Pattern Analysis (CPA; Hanks 2004, 2008, 2012) and verb senses in OntoNotes (ON; Hovy et al. 2006, Weischedel et al. 2011). We present a probabilistic approach for mapping one resource into the other. Firstly we introduce a basic model, based on conditional probabilities, which determines for any given sentence the best CPA pattern match. On the basis of this model, we propose a joint source channel model (JSCM) that computes the probability of compatibility of semantic types between a verb phrase and a pattern, irrespective of whether the verb phrase is a norm or an exploitation. We evaluate the accuracy of the proposed mapping using cluster similarity metrics based on entropy.

While a word in isolation has a high potential of expressing various senses, in certain phrases this potential is restricted up to the point that one and only one sense is possible. A phrase is called sense stable if the senses of all the words compounding it do not change their sense irrespective of the context which could be added to its left or to its right. By comparing sense stable phrases we can extract corpus patterns. These patterns have slots which are filled by semantic types that capture the relevant information for disambiguation. The relationship between slots is such that a chain like disambiguation process is possible. Annotating a corpus with these kinds of patterns is beneficial for NLP, because problems such as data sparseness, noise, learning complexity are alleviated. We evaluate the inter agreement of annotators on examples coming from BNC.