Interleaved texts, where posts belonging to different threads occur in a sequence, commonly occur in online chat posts, so that it can be time-consuming to quickly obtain an overview of the discussions. Existing systems first disentangle the posts by threads and then extract summaries from those threads. A major issue with such systems is error propagation from the disentanglement component. While end-to-end trainable summarization system could obviate explicit disentanglement, such systems require a large amount of labeled data. To address this, we propose to pretrain an end-to-end trainable hierarchical encoder-decoder system using synthetic interleaved texts. We show that by fine-tuning on a real-world meeting dataset (AMI), such a system out-performs a traditional two-step system by 22%. We also compare against transformer models and observed that pretraining with synthetic data both the encoder and decoder outperforms the BertSumExtAbs transformer model which pretrains only the encoder on a large dataset.

We address the task of unsupervised Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) by ensembling diverse pre-trained sentence encoders into sentence meta-embeddings. We apply, extend and evaluate different meta-embedding methods from the word embedding literature at the sentence level, including dimensionality reduction (Yin and Schütze, 2016), generalized Canonical Correlation Analysis (Rastogi et al., 2015) and cross-view auto-encoders (Bollegala and Bao, 2018). Our sentence meta-embeddings set a new unsupervised State of The Art (SoTA) on the STS Benchmark and on the STS12-STS16 datasets, with gains of between 3.7% and 6.4% Pearson’s r over single-source systems.

We present a novel way of injecting factual knowledge about entities into the pretrained BERT model (Devlin et al., 2019): We align Wikipedia2Vec entity vectors (Yamada et al., 2016) with BERT’s native wordpiece vector space and use the aligned entity vectors as if they were wordpiece vectors. The resulting entity-enhanced version of BERT (called E-BERT) is similar in spirit to ERNIE (Zhang et al., 2019) and KnowBert (Peters et al., 2019), but it requires no expensive further pre-training of the BERT encoder. We evaluate E-BERT on unsupervised question answering (QA), supervised relation classification (RC) and entity linking (EL). On all three tasks, E-BERT outperforms BERT and other baselines. We also show quantitatively that the original BERT model is overly reliant on the surface form of entity names (e.g., guessing that someone with an Italian-sounding name speaks Italian), and that E-BERT mitigates this problem.

Domain adaptation of Pretrained Language Models (PTLMs) is typically achieved by unsupervised pretraining on target-domain text. While successful, this approach is expensive in terms of hardware, runtime and CO 2 emissions. Here, we propose a cheaper alternative: We train Word2Vec on target-domain text and align the resulting word vectors with the wordpiece vectors of a general-domain PTLM. We evaluate on eight English biomedical Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks and compare against the recently proposed BioBERT model. We cover over 60% of the BioBERT - BERT F1 delta, at 5% of BioBERT’s CO 2 footprint and 2% of its cloud compute cost. We also show how to quickly adapt an existing general-domain Question Answering (QA) model to an emerging domain: the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this work, we define the task of teaser generation and provide an evaluation benchmark and baseline systems for the process of generating teasers. A teaser is a short reading suggestion for an article that is illustrative and includes curiosity-arousing elements to entice potential readers to read particular news items. Teasers are one of the main vehicles for transmitting news to social media users. We compile a novel dataset of teasers by systematically accumulating tweets and selecting those that conform to the teaser definition. We have compared a number of neural abstractive architectures on the task of teaser generation and the overall best performing system is See et al. seq2seq with pointer network.

We address fine-grained entity classification and propose a novel attention-based recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder-decoder that generates paths in the type hierarchy and can be trained end-to-end. We show that our model performs better on fine-grained entity classification than prior work that relies on flat or local classifiers that do not directly model hierarchical structure.

This paper presents Linked Health Answers, a natural language question answering systems that utilizes health data drawn from the Linked Data Cloud. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: Firstly, we review existing state-of-the-art NLP platforms and components, with a special focus on components that allow or support an automatic SPARQL construction. Secondly, we present the implemented architecture of the Linked Health Answers systems. Thirdly, we propose an statistical bootstrap approach for the identification and disambiguation of RDF-based predicates using a machine learning-based classifier. The evaluation focuses on predicate detection in sentence statements, as well as within the scenario of natural language questions.

In this paper, we describe MLSA, a publicly available multi-layered reference corpus for German-language sentiment analysis. The construction of the corpus is based on the manual annotation of 270 German-language sentences considering three different layers of granularity. The sentence-layer annotation, as the most coarse-grained annotation, focuses on aspects of objectivity, subjectivity and the overall polarity of the respective sentences. Layer 2 is concerned with polarity on the word- and phrase-level, annotating both subjective and factual language. The annotations on Layer 3 focus on the expression-level, denoting frames of private states such as objective and direct speech events. These three layers and their respective annotations are intended to be fully independent of each other. At the same time, exploring for and discovering interactions that may exist between different layers should also be possible. The reliability of the respective annotations was assessed using the average pairwise agreement and Fleiss' multi-rater measures. We believe that MLSA is a beneficial resource for sentiment analysis research, algorithms and applications that focus on the German language.

In this paper, we propose GermanPolarityClues, a new publicly available lexical resource for sentiment analysis for the German language. While sentiment analysis and polarity classification has been extensively studied at different document levels (e.g. sentences and phrases), only a few approaches explored the effect of a polarity-based feature selection and subjectivity resources for the German language. This paper evaluates four different English and three different German sentiment resources in a comparative manner by combining a polarity-based feature selection with SVM-based machine learning classifier. Using a semi-automatic translation approach, we were able to construct three different resources for a German sentiment analysis. The manually finalized GermanPolarityClues dictionary offers thereby a number of 10, 141 polarity features, associated to three numerical polarity scores, determining the positive, negative and neutral direction of specific term features. While the results show that the size of dictionaries clearly correlate to polarity-based feature coverage, this property does not correlate to classification accuracy. Using a polarity-based feature selection, considering a minimum amount of prior polarity features, in combination with SVM-based machine learning methods exhibits for both languages the best performance (F1: 0.83-0.88).