Raphael Schumann


2024

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Text-to-OverpassQL: A Natural Language Interface for Complex Geodata Querying of OpenStreetMap
Michael Staniek | Raphael Schumann | Maike Züfle | Stefan Riezler
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 12

We present Text-to-OverpassQL, a task designed to facilitate a natural language interface for querying geodata from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The Overpass Query Language (OverpassQL) allows users to formulate complex database queries and is widely adopted in the OSM ecosystem. Generating Overpass queries from natural language input serves multiple use-cases. It enables novice users to utilize OverpassQL without prior knowledge, assists experienced users with crafting advanced queries, and enables tool-augmented large language models to access information stored in the OSM database. In order to assess the performance of current sequence generation models on this task, we propose OverpassNL,1 a dataset of 8,352 queries with corresponding natural language inputs. We further introduce task specific evaluation metrics and ground the evaluation of the Text-to-OverpassQL task by executing the queries against the OSM database. We establish strong baselines by finetuning sequence-to-sequence models and adapting large language models with in-context examples. The detailed evaluation reveals strengths and weaknesses of the considered learning strategies, laying the foundations for further research into the Text-to-OverpassQL task.

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Backward Compatibility During Data Updates by Weight Interpolation
Raphael Schumann | Elman Mansimov | Yi-An Lai | Nikolaos Pappas | Xibin Gao | Yi Zhang
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Backward compatibility of model predictions is a desired property when updating a machine learning driven application. It allows to seamlessly improve the underlying model without introducing regression bugs. In classification tasks these bugs occur in the form of negative flips. This means an instance that was correctly classified by the old model is now classified incorrectly by the updated model. This has direct negative impact on the user experience of such systems e.g. a frequently used voice assistant query is suddenly misclassified.A common reason to update the model is when new training data becomes available and needs to be incorporated. Simply retraining the model with the updated data introduces the unwanted negative flips. We study the problem of regression during data updates and propose Backward Compatible Weight Interpolation (BCWI). This method interpolates between the weights of the old and new model and we show in extensive experiments that it reduces negative flips without sacrificing the improved accuracy of the new model. BCWI is straight forward to implement and does not increase inference cost. We also explore the use of importance weighting during interpolation and averaging the weights of multiple new models in order to further reduce negative flips.

2022

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Analyzing Generalization of Vision and Language Navigation to Unseen Outdoor Areas
Raphael Schumann | Stefan Riezler
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Vision and language navigation (VLN) is a challenging visually-grounded language understanding task. Given a natural language navigation instruction, a visual agent interacts with a graph-based environment equipped with panorama images and tries to follow the described route. Most prior work has been conducted in indoor scenarios where best results were obtained for navigation on routes that are similar to the training routes, with sharp drops in performance when testing on unseen environments. We focus on VLN in outdoor scenarios and find that in contrast to indoor VLN, most of the gain in outdoor VLN on unseen data is due to features like junction type embedding or heading delta that are specific to the respective environment graph, while image information plays a very minor role in generalizing VLN to unseen outdoor areas. These findings show a bias to specifics of graph representations of urban environments, demanding that VLN tasks grow in scale and diversity of geographical environments.

2021

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Generating Landmark Navigation Instructions from Maps as a Graph-to-Text Problem
Raphael Schumann | Stefan Riezler
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Car-focused navigation services are based on turns and distances of named streets, whereas navigation instructions naturally used by humans are centered around physical objects called landmarks. We present a neural model that takes OpenStreetMap representations as input and learns to generate navigation instructions that contain visible and salient landmarks from human natural language instructions. Routes on the map are encoded in a location- and rotation-invariant graph representation that is decoded into natural language instructions. Our work is based on a novel dataset of 7,672 crowd-sourced instances that have been verified by human navigation in Street View. Our evaluation shows that the navigation instructions generated by our system have similar properties as human-generated instructions, and lead to successful human navigation in Street View.

2020

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Discrete Optimization for Unsupervised Sentence Summarization with Word-Level Extraction
Raphael Schumann | Lili Mou | Yao Lu | Olga Vechtomova | Katja Markert
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Automatic sentence summarization produces a shorter version of a sentence, while preserving its most important information. A good summary is characterized by language fluency and high information overlap with the source sentence. We model these two aspects in an unsupervised objective function, consisting of language modeling and semantic similarity metrics. We search for a high-scoring summary by discrete optimization. Our proposed method achieves a new state-of-the art for unsupervised sentence summarization according to ROUGE scores. Additionally, we demonstrate that the commonly reported ROUGE F1 metric is sensitive to summary length. Since this is unwillingly exploited in recent work, we emphasize that future evaluation should explicitly group summarization systems by output length brackets.

2019

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Active Learning via Membership Query Synthesis for Semi-Supervised Sentence Classification
Raphael Schumann | Ines Rehbein
Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)

Active learning (AL) is a technique for reducing manual annotation effort during the annotation of training data for machine learning classifiers. For NLP tasks, pool-based and stream-based sampling techniques have been used to select new instances for AL while gen erating new, artificial instances via Membership Query Synthesis was, up to know, considered to be infeasible for NLP problems. We present the first successfull attempt to use Membership Query Synthesis for generating AL queries, using Variational Autoencoders for query generation. We evaluate our approach in a text classification task and demonstrate that query synthesis shows competitive performance to pool-based AL strategies while substantially reducing annotation time

2018

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Scalable Wide and Deep Learning for Computer Assisted Coding
Marilisa Amoia | Frank Diehl | Jesus Gimenez | Joel Pinto | Raphael Schumann | Fabian Stemmer | Paul Vozila | Yi Zhang
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 3 (Industry Papers)

In recent years the use of electronic medical records has accelerated resulting in large volumes of medical data when a patient visits a healthcare facility. As a first step towards reimbursement healthcare institutions need to associate ICD-10 billing codes to these documents. This is done by trained clinical coders who may use a computer assisted solution for shortlisting of codes. In this work, we present our work to build a machine learning based scalable system for predicting ICD-10 codes from electronic medical records. We address data imbalance issues by implementing two system architectures using convolutional neural networks and logistic regression models. We illustrate the pros and cons of those system designs and show that the best performance can be achieved by leveraging the advantages of both using a system combination approach.