Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
OpenUE: An Open Toolkit of Universal Extraction from Text (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Ningyu Zhang, Shumin Deng, Zhen Bi, Haiyang Yu, Jiacheng Yang, Mosha Chen, Fei Huang, Wei Zhang, Huajun Chen
| Challenge: | a large number of natural language processing tasks focus on token-level or sentence-level understandings. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source and extensible toolkit for various extraction tasks . they deploy an online demo with restful APIs to support real-time extraction . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to extract information from text without training and deployment. |
BERTweet: A pre-trained language model for English Tweets (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Experiments show that BERTweet outperforms strong baselines RoBERTa-base and XLM-R-base on three Tweet NLP tasks: Part-of-speech tagging, Named-entity recognition and text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose to train a pre-trained language model for English Tweets using the RoBERTa pre training procedure and use it to train the model. |
| Outcome: | Experiments show that the model outperforms baseline models on three Tweet NLP tasks: Part-of-speech tagging, Named-entity recognition and text classification. |
NeuralQA: A Usable Library for Question Answering (Contextual Query Expansion + BERT) on Large Datasets (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for Question Answering (QA) have challenges that limit their use in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose a library that integrates with existing infrastructure and offers helpful defaults for QA subtasks. |
| Outcome: | NeuralQA integrates well with existing infrastructure and offers helpful defaults for QA subtasks. |
Wikipedia2Vec: An Efficient Toolkit for Learning and Visualizing the Embeddings of Words and Entities from Wikipedia (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Ikuya Yamada, Akari Asai, Jin Sakuma, Hiroyuki Shindo, Hideaki Takeda, Yoshiyasu Takefuji, Yuji Matsumoto
| Challenge: | Existing tools for learning the embeddings of words and entities from Wikipedia are not yet available. |
| Approach: | They propose a Python-based tool for learning Wikipedia embeddings from Wikipedia . they use a Wikipedia dump file as an argument to issue a single command . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool achieves state-of-the-art results on the KORE entity relatedness dataset and competitive results on benchmark datasets. |
ARES: A Reading Comprehension Ensembling Service (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Anthony Ferritto, Lin Pan, Rishav Chakravarti, Salim Roukos, Radu Florian, J. William Murdock, Avi Sil
| Challenge: | ARES is a machine reading comprehension (MRC) demonstration system which utilizes an ensemble of models to increase F1 by 2.3 points. |
| Approach: | They propose a machine reading comprehension (MRC) demonstration system which utilizes an ensemble of models to increase F1 by 2.3 points. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system increases F1 by 2.3 points on a short answer task using an ensemble of models. |
Transformers: State-of-the-Art Natural Language Processing (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Thomas Wolf, Lysandre Debut, Victor Sanh, Julien Chaumond, Clement Delangue, Anthony Moi, Pierric Cistac, Tim Rault, Remi Louf, Morgan Funtowicz, Joe Davison, Sam Shleifer, Patrick von Platen, Clara Ma, Yacine Jernite, Julien Plu, Canwen Xu, Teven Le Scao, Sylvain Gugger, Mariama Drame, Quentin Lhoest, Alexander Rush
| Challenge: | Transformers is an open-source library that aims to open up advances in natural language processing to the wider machine learning community. |
| Approach: | they propose an open-source library that aims to open up advances in machine learning to the wider community. |
| Outcome: | Transformers is an open-source library with the goal of opening up these advances to the wider machine learning community. |
AdapterHub: A Framework for Adapting Transformers (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Jonas Pfeiffer, Andreas Rücklé, Clifton Poth, Aishwarya Kamath, Ivan Vulić, Sebastian Ruder, Kyunghyun Cho, Iryna Gurevych
| Challenge: | AdapterHub framework enables dynamic “stiching-in” of pre-trained adapters for different tasks and languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that allows dynamic "stiching-in" of pre-trained adapters for different tasks and languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows dynamic “stiching-in” of pre-trained adapters for different tasks and languages. |
HUMAN: Hierarchical Universal Modular ANnotator (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | HUMAN is a web-based annotation tool that covers a variety of annotation tasks on textual and image data. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-based annotation tool that covers a variety of annotation tasks on textual and image data. |
| Outcome: | HUMAN covers a variety of annotation tasks on textual and image data and uses an internal deterministic state machine to chain different tasks in an interdependent manner. |
DeezyMatch: A Flexible Deep Learning Approach to Fuzzy String Matching (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | DeezyMatch is a free, open-source software library written in Python for fuzzy string matching and candidate ranking. |
| Approach: | They propose to use DeezyMatch to train new classifiers and fine-tune a pretrained model to generate rich vector representations from string inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithm can be used to find the best matching candidates in large knowledge bases and query sets. |
CoSaTa: A Constraint Satisfaction Solver and Interpreted Language for Semi-Structured Tables of Sentences (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods for inference using multiple facts are unable to combine more than two together. |
| Approach: | They present an intuitive constraint satisfaction solver and interpreted language for knowledge bases of semi-structured tables expressed as text. |
| Outcome: | The solver and interpreter are released as open source . the solver can express complex compositional "inference patterns" |
InVeRo: Making Semantic Role Labeling Accessible with Intelligible Verbs and Roles (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) is dependent on complex linguistic resources and sophisticated neural models, which makes the task difficult to approach for non-experts. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform for semantic role labeling that provides verb sense and semantic role information with an easy to use Web interface and RESTful APIs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides human-readable verb sense and semantic role information with an easy to use Web interface and RESTful APIs. |
Youling: an AI-assisted Lyrics Creation System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Rongsheng Zhang, Xiaoxi Mao, Le Li, Lin Jiang, Lin Chen, Zhiwei Hu, Yadong Xi, Changjie Fan, Minlie Huang
| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on a single pass of lyrics generation with little human intervention. |
| Approach: | They propose an AI-assisted lyrics creation system that supports one pass full-text generation and interactive generation modes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports full-text generation and interactive generation modes . it also provides a revision module which enables users to revise undesired lyrics repeatedly. |
A Technical Question Answering System with Transfer Learning (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | StackOverflow and AskUbuntu are popular open forum communities for technical question-answering, but it is expensive for human experts to provide timely and helpful responses. |
| Approach: | They develop a system that automatically responds to questions from a siamese ALBERT network based on previously answered questions . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system responds automatically to questions based on answers from previous users. |
ENTYFI: A System for Fine-grained Entity Typing in Fictional Texts (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | ENTYFI is a web-based system for fine-grained typing of entity mentions in fictional texts. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-based system for fine-grained typing of entity mentions in fictional texts . entity types are a core building block of current knowledge bases . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system builds on 205 automatically induced high-quality type systems for popular fictional domains and provides recommendations towards reference type systems. |
The Language Interpretability Tool: Extensible, Interactive Visualizations and Analysis for NLP Models (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Ian Tenney, James Wexler, Jasmijn Bastings, Tolga Bolukbasi, Andy Coenen, Sebastian Gehrmann, Ellen Jiang, Mahima Pushkarna, Carey Radebaugh, Emily Reif, Ann Yuan
| Challenge: | Existing tools for modeling and understanding models are limited . existing tools can assist practitioners in understanding and evaluating models . |
| Approach: | They present an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of NLP models. |
| Outcome: | The language interpretability tool (lit) is an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of NLP models. |
TextAttack: A Framework for Adversarial Attacks, Data Augmentation, and Adversarial Training in NLP (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | TextAttack provides implementations of 16 adversarial attacks from the literature and supports a variety of models and datasets. |
| Approach: | They introduce a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarially training in NLP. |
| Outcome: | This paper introduces a Python framework for adversarial attacks, data augmentation, and adversarially training in NLP. |
Easy, Reproducible and Quality-Controlled Data Collection with CROWDAQ (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Qiang Ning, Hao Wu, Pradeep Dasigi, Dheeru Dua, Matt Gardner, Robert L. Logan IV, Ana Marasović, Zhen Nie
| Challenge: | Efficient data collection is important for advancing research and building time-sensitive applications. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source platform that standardizes the data collection pipeline . it includes customizable user interface components, automated annotator qualification, and saved pipelines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform simplifies data annotation significantly on diverse datasets . it can be used by researchers and engineers to improve reproducibility and minimize overhead . |
SciSight: Combining faceted navigation and research group detection for COVID-19 exploratory scientific search (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Tom Hope, Jason Portenoy, Kishore Vasan, Jonathan Borchardt, Eric Horvitz, Daniel Weld, Marti Hearst, Jevin West
| Challenge: | SciSight is a system for exploratory search of COVID-19 literature . it explores associations between biomedical facets extracted from papers . |
| Approach: | They propose a system for exploratory search of COVID-19 literature that integrates two key capabilities: first, exploring associations between biomedical facets automatically extracted from papers; second, combining textual and network information to search and visualize groups of researchers and their ties. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system has served over 15K users with over 42K page views and 13% returns. |
SIMULEVAL: An Evaluation Toolkit for Simultaneous Translation (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | SimulEval is an evaluation toolkit for simultaneous text and speech translation. |
| Approach: | They propose a server-client scheme for simultaneous translation that uses server input and client policies to evaluate models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation toolkit is available for both text and speech translation. |
Agent Assist through Conversation Analysis (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Kshitij Fadnis, Nathaniel Mills, Jatin Ganhotra, Haggai Roitman, Gaurav Pandey, Doron Cohen, Yosi Mass, Shai Erera, Chulaka Gunasekara, Danish Contractor, Siva Patel, Q. Vera Liao, Sachindra Joshi, Luis Lastras, David Konopnicki
| Challenge: | Using conversational approach to information retrieval for agent assistance, customer support agents are a critical part of an organization's customer support team. |
| Approach: | They propose a conversational approach to information retrieval for agent assistance that monitors an evolving conversation and recommends both responses and URLs of documents. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system monitors an evolving conversation and recommends both responses and URLs of documents the agent can use in replies to their client. |
NeuSpell: A Neural Spelling Correction Toolkit (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | a new spelling correction toolkit is available for free. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source toolkit for spelling correction in English . they train neural models using spelling errors in context and using richer contextual representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed spell-checker improves accuracy on synthetic examples and richer representations of the context. |
LibKGE - A knowledge graph embedding library for reproducible research (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Knowledge graph embedding models are trained to predict false triples and high scores for true triples. |
| Approach: | LibKGE is an open-source PyTorch-based library for training, hyperparameter optimization, and evaluation of knowledge graph embedding models for link prediction. |
| Outcome: | LibKGE provides implementations of common knowledge graph embedding models and training methods, and new ones can be easily added. |
WantWords: An Open-source Online Reverse Dictionary System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing reverse dictionary systems only support English reverse dictionary queries . a reverse dictionary can help people who can't remember a word from memory . |
| Approach: | They propose an online reverse dictionary system that outperforms other reverse dictionary systems . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English cross-lingual reverse dictionary queries . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reverse dictionary outperforms other reverse dictionary systems on performance . it supports Chinese and English-Chinese as well as Chinese-English queries . |
BENNERD: A Neural Named Entity Linking System for COVID-19 (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | a biomedical entity linking system is available for COVID-19 research. |
| Approach: | They propose a biomedical entity linking system that detects named enti- ties in text and links them to the UMLS knowledge base. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system detects named enti- ties in text and links them to the unified medical language system (UMS) knowledge base entries. |
RoFT: A Tool for Evaluating Human Detection of Machine-Generated Text (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on how humans perceive machine-generated text are limited due to the prohibitive cost of running human evaluation studies. |
| Approach: | They propose a task to detect the boundary at which a text passage starts off human-written transitions to being machine-generated. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system evaluates machine-generated news articles on a wide range of domains. |
A Data-Centric Framework for Composable NLP Workflows (2020.emnlp-demos)
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Zhengzhong Liu, Guanxiong Ding, Avinash Bukkittu, Mansi Gupta, Pengzhi Gao, Atif Ahmed, Shikun Zhang, Xin Gao, Swapnil Singhavi, Linwei Li, Wei Wei, Zecong Hu, Haoran Shi, Xiaodan Liang, Teruko Mitamura, Eric Xing, Zhiting Hu
| Challenge: | Empirical natural language processing (NLP) systems involve interoperation among multiple components . a wealth of NLP toolkits exist ( 4), such as spaCy, DKPro, CoreNLP. |
| Approach: | They propose a unified open-source framework that supports fast development of NLP workflows . framework includes processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation . |
| Outcome: | The framework offers processors for NLP tasks, visualization, and annotation, and is extensible . it is delivered through two modularized yet integratable open-source projects, Forte and Stave . |
CoRefi: A Crowd Sourcing Suite for Coreference Annotation (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Using a web-based coreference annotation suite, we demonstrate that non-expert annotators can be trained to perform and review coreference resolution tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a web-based coreference annotation suite oriented for crowdsourcing that provides guided onboarding and a novel algorithm for a reviewing phase. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool provides guided onboarding and a novel algorithm for a review phase. |
Langsmith: An Interactive Academic Text Revision System (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Currently, diversity and inclusion initiatives in the academic community are encouraged . however, writing papers in English can be a daunting task . |
| Approach: | They propose a system that helps non-native English speakers to write papers in English . the system can suggest fluent, academic-style sentences based on their rough, incomplete phrases or sentences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can help non-native English speakers write papers in English . the system can suggest fluent, academic-style sentences based on their rough sentences . |
IsOBS: An Information System for Oracle Bone Script (2020.emnlp-demos)
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| Challenge: | Oracle bone script (OBS) documents are the oldest continuously-used writing system in the world and are important for linguistic and historical research. |
| Approach: | They construct an information system for OBS to symbolize, serialize, and store OBS data at the character-level using efficient databases and retrieval modules. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system symbolizes, serializes, and stores OBS data at the character-level, based on efficient databases and retrieval modules. |