Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
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| Challenge: | TexSmart supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) Large-scale fine-granular entity types are expected to provide richer semantic information for downstream NLP applications. |
| Approach: | They introduce TexSmart, a text understanding system that supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functionalities. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system supports fine-grained named entity recognition (NER) and enhanced semantic analysis functions. |
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| Challenge: | Existing computer-aided translation tools require the translator to edit incorrect parts of a document, while ITP tools require fewer edits. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive translation interface with neural models that streamline the post-editing process on machine translation output. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interface can significantly improve translation quality and a user study shows that it speeds up the post-editing process by 52.9% compared to translating from scratch. |
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| Challenge: | Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) is an NLP framework for pre-modern languages . authors say it assumes pre-existing living languages, neglecting important characteristics of non-spoken historical languages despite their existence . |
| Approach: | The paper announces version 1.0 of the Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) it is an NLP framework for pre-modern languages that uses assumptions specific to living languages . authors propose a modular processing pipeline that balances competing demands of algorithmic diversity with pre-configured defaults . |
| Outcome: | The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK) is a new NLP framework for pre-modern languages . the framework is based on the existing frameworks and is available for almost 20 languages - including models . |
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| Challenge: | TextBox is an open-source text generation framework that is modularized and extensible. |
| Approach: | They propose to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible text generation framework that implements 21 text generation models on 9 benchmark datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework implements 21 models on 9 benchmark datasets and is available under the Apache License 2.0 license. |
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| Challenge: | Structured knowledge bases (KBs) are a great way to explain and interpret outputs of systems leveraging the resources. |
| Approach: | They propose a web portal that allows users to understand its construction process and explore its content. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework allows users to understand its construction process, explore its content, and observe its impact in the use case of question answering. |
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| Challenge: | SciConceptMiner is a self-supervised system for the capture of scientific concepts . the system is scalable to the size of documents and the number of topics it can model . |
| Approach: | They propose a self-supervised system for the automatic capture of scientific concepts from academic publications and semi-structured data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves high accuracy (94.7%) with more than 740K scientific concepts. |
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| Challenge: | a toolkit for speech translation is available for free and provides step-by-step recipes for feature extraction, data preprocessing, distributed training, and evaluation. |
| Approach: | They propose to use NeurST to facilitate speech translation research for NLP researchers . they show experimental results for different benchmark datasets which can be regarded as reliable baselines . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides reliable benchmarks for speech translation research. |
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| Challenge: | 7000 languages worldwide are spoken, but most research is focused on English . multilinguality is essential for multilingual research, and is a key component of the process. |
| Approach: | They propose a wordaligned parallel corpus that can be browsed using an online tool . they use the word alignment tools SimAlign and BabelNet to find the alignments . |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can be set up for any parallel corpus and explores its quality and properties. |
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| Challenge: | MT-Telescope is an open source, written in Python, and is built around a user friendly and dynamic web interface. |
| Approach: | They propose a platform to facilitate comparative analysis of the output quality of two Machine Translation (MT) systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform supports fine-grained segment-level analysis and interactive visualisations that expose the fundamental differences in the performance of the compared systems. |
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| Challenge: | Fig. 1 illustrates the major components and workflow of our proposed system to improve the efficiency of complaints investigation for nursing and midwifery regulators. |
| Approach: | They propose a decision support system that uses machine learning and natural language processing techniques to process complaints and predict their risk level. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system uses state-of-the-art machine learning and natural language processing techniques to process complaints and predict risk levels. |
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| Challenge: | CogNet is a knowledge base that integrates three types of knowledge: linguistic knowledge, world knowledge and commonsense knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose an information extraction toolkit called CogIE that is a bridge connecting raw texts and CogNet. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit can ground raw texts to CogNet and leverage different types of knowledge to enrich extracted results. |
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| Challenge: | Recently, the need for Chinese natural language processing (NLP) has a dramatic increase for many downstream applications. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese word segmentation (CWS), Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging, named entity recognition (NER), and dependency parsing to train a multi-task model based on a pruned BERT. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performs better than popular segmentation tools on a non-training corpus. |
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| Challenge: | In the last years, NLP tools are being used in tasks such as textual inference, machine translation, hate speech detection. |
| Approach: | They propose an NLP annotation software that can be used to manually annotate texts and to fix mistakes in NLP pipelines. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can be used to manually annotate texts and fix errors in NLP pipelines, such as Stanford CoreNLP. |
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| Challenge: | Existing literature search systems only present metadata of papers as search results, which requires users to read the entire abstracts to understand the brief contents of the returned papers. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a knowledge graph extracted from abstracts of 23k papers on arXiv’s cs.CL category to augment search results with relevant details and explanations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed platform can accelerate the users’ search process with paper explanations and helps them better explore the landscape of the topics of interest. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for text extraction and web corpus construction are not enough to extract and pre-process web data to meet scientific expectations with respect to text quality. |
| Approach: | They propose a text discovery and extraction tool published under open-source license that allows for main text, comments and metadata extraction while also providing building blocks for web crawling tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool performs significantly better than other open-source solutions on real-world data and in external benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research suggests the key may lie in multi-headed attention mechanism’s ability to learn and represent linguistic information. |
| Approach: | They present an open-source visualization tool to analyze attention mechanisms in transformer-based models with linguistic knowledge. |
| Outcome: | Dodrio analyzes attention mechanisms in transformer-based models with linguistic knowledge. |
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| Challenge: | REM is a tool for the semi-automated real-time moderation of large scale online forums. |
| Approach: | They propose a semi-automated real-time moderation tool for large scale online forums that maximizes the efficiency of manual moderation by targeting only those comments for which human intervention is needed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method maximizes the efficiency of manual moderation by targeting only those comments for which human intervention is needed, e.g. due to high classification uncertainty. |
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| Challenge: | despite advances in abstractive text summarization, the true performance and failure modes of modern neural models are not yet fully understood due to the black-box nature of neural models and unmanageable scale of recent datasets for manual analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source tool for visualizing abstractive summaries that enables fine-grained analysis of models, data, and evaluation metrics associated with text summarization. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool can identify the shortcomings and failure modes of state-of-the-art summarization models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing work on analyzing information extracted from documents has focused on examining the model understanding of complex schemas. |
| Approach: | They propose a curation interface that takes an IE system’s output in a pre-defined format and generates a graphical representation of its elements. |
| Outcome: | The proposed interface can be used to edit and prune schemas for complex events like Improvised Explosive Device (IED) based scenarios. |
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| Challenge: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . currently, many dialogue systems are limited to handle the uncertain open intents . |
| Approach: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated platform for text open intent recognition . it is composed of two main modules: open intent detection and open intent discovery . authors propose a framework to implement a complete process to identify known intents and discover open intents . |
| Outcome: | TEXTOIR is the first integrated and visualized platform for text open intent recognition . it integrates state-of-the-art algorithms and benchmark intent datasets . however, there are still some issues, which bring difficulties for future research . |
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in pre-trained language models have made it possible to generate human-like text. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate an open-ended text adventure game in Chinese, named KuiLeiXi, where players interact with the AI until the plot goals are reached. |
| Outcome: | The proposed game lacks incentives and relies on players to explore on their own. |
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on conversational recommender systems lack a unified and standardized implementation or comparison. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a unified framework and highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework collects 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implements 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models. |
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| Challenge: | Probing (or diagnostic classification) has become a popular strategy for investigating whether a given set of intermediate features is present in the representations of neural models. |
| Approach: | They propose to use an extendable probing framework to automate the application of probing methods to the user’s inputs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework automates the application of probing methods to the user’s inputs. |
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that retrieve tables based on keyword queries and table contents often result in poor quality . a growing demand for natural language questions over tables to be used for QA . |
| Approach: | They propose an end-to-end transformer-based table question answering system that takes natural language questions and massive table corpora as inputs to retrieve the most relevant tables. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system can retrieve relevant tables and locate the correct cells to answer questions. |
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| Challenge: | a domain expert often needs to extract structured information from large corpora. |
| Approach: | They propose a search paradigm called "extractive search" that extends search queries with capture-slots to allow for rapid extraction. |
| Outcome: | The proposed search paradigm can be extended with neural similarity techniques. |
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| Challenge: | Transformer-based models have made tremendous impact in natural language generation, but inference speed is still a bottleneck due to large model size and intensive computing involved in auto-regressive decoding process. |
| Approach: | They propose an attention cache optimization, an efficient algorithm for detecting repeated n-grams, and an asynchronous generation pipeline with parallel I/O to accelerate sequence generation without loss of accuracy. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can accelerate the sequence generation by 4x to 9x with a simple one-line code change for a set of widely used and diverse models. |
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| Challenge: | et al., 2019) have proposed a neuro-symbolic approach for reinforcement learning in non-simultaneous environments. |
| Approach: | They propose an action decision architecture with a neuro-symbolic framework for natural language interaction games. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides an open-source implementation in Python for the reinforcement learning environment to facilitate an experiment for studying neuro-symbolic agents. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for pre-training are not convenient for users to find and set them up. |
| Approach: | They propose to extend ProphetNet into other domains and languages by pre-training models . they pre-train a cross-lingual generation model ProphetNet-Multi and a Chinese generation model . |
| Outcome: | The proposed models achieve new state-of-the-art on 10 benchmarks. |
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| Challenge: | Automated Essay Assessment (AEA) aims to judge students’ writing proficiency in an automatic way. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Chinese AEA system IFlyEssayAssess to evaluate essays written by native Chinese students from primary and junior schools. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system provides application services for essay scoring, review generation, recommendation, and explainable analytical visualization. |
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| Challenge: | Existing models that use the Transformer architecture are lag behind our ability to scale them. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source library for the explainability of Transformer-based NLP models that captures, analyzes, visualizes, and interactively explores the inner mechanics of these models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tools capture, analyze, visualize, and explore the inner workings of Transformer-based language models. |
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| Challenge: | Existing tools for annotation of PDFs are limited to a web browser, allowing users to extract semantically meaningful regions from PDFs. |
| Approach: | They propose an annotation tool specifically designed for Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) PAWLS supports span-based textual annotation, N-ary relations and freeform, non-textual bounding boxes. |
| Outcome: | The proposed tool supports span-based textual annotation, N-ary relations and freeform, non-textual bounding boxes. |
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| Challenge: | Currently, Twitter curates 19,395 tweets from various NLP conferences and general NLP discussions. |
| Approach: | They propose to integrate tweets pertaining to research papers with the NLPExplorer scientific literature search engine to organize Twitter's natural language processing data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system curates 19,395 tweets from various NLP conferences and general discussions. |
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| Challenge: | a new study shows that machine translation models can translate fragments of the source sentence but make major mistakes. |
| Approach: | They propose an online machine translation demonstration system for translation between English and an endangered language Cherokee. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art translation performance and improves quality estimation . the proposed system can translate between English and an endangered language Cherokee . |
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| Challenge: | Using leaderboards, researchers can track the performance of various systems on various NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a new conceptualization and implementation of NLP evaluation using a leaderboard. |
| Outcome: | The ExplainaBoard is an evaluation tool for natural language processing (NLP) it covers more than 400 systems, 50 datasets, 40 languages, and 12 tasks. |
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| Challenge: | a new method to track word usage changes is proposed for text datasets that are collected over a longer period of time. |
| Approach: | They propose a way to track word usage changes via continuously evolving embeddings . they demonstrate an interactive web app that can explore semantic shifts with interactive plots a text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to analyze word usage changes with interactive plots. |
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| Challenge: | Existing text-to-SQL semantic parsers cannot achieve high accuracy in cross-database setting . TURING is a NLDB system that can be used to democratize data-driven insights for non-technical users . |
| Approach: | They propose a TURING system that provides high-precision natural language explanations of SQL queries in a beam. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves 75.1% execution accuracy and 78.3% top-5 beam execution accuracy on the Spider validation set. |
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| Challenge: | Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer . commercial translation systems do not make these models available for transfer to low resource languages . |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual neural machine translation model that can translate from 500 source languages to English. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can translate from 500 source languages to English, or be used as a parent model for low-resource languages. |
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| Challenge: | Currently, researchers use automatic metrics and human evaluation to evaluate dialogue systems. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a Python API to easily evaluate dialogue systems using Amazon Mechanical Turk. |
| Outcome: | The open-source toolkit provides a fast, consistent method for reproducing human evaluation results. |
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| Challenge: | Existing neural semantic parsing methods for knowledge base question answering are lacking . a generic and extensible framework is lacking for KBQA. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural semantic parsing framework for large scale knowledge base question answering . they propose 'retriever-transducer-checker' framework that provides a retriever and a transducer . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is ranked at top1 overall performance on the GrailQA leaderboard and achieves competitive performance on typical WebQuestionsSP benchmark. |
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| Challenge: | skweak is a Python-based toolkit for NLP developers to use weak supervision . labelled data remains a scarce resource in many practical NLP scenarios . |
| Approach: | They present a Python-based toolkit that allows NLP developers to use weak supervision . skweak is designed to facilitate the use of weak supervision for NLP tasks . |
| Outcome: | skweak is a Python-based toolkit that facilitates weak supervision . the toolkit provides a simple interface to apply labels to a large corpus of text data . |
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| Challenge: | Existing approaches to textual robustness evaluation focus on slightly modifying the input data, which maintains the original meaning and results in a different prediction. |
| Approach: | They propose a multilingual robustness evaluation toolkit for NLP that integrates universal text transformations, task-specific transformations and adversarial attack. |
| Outcome: | The toolkit includes universal text transformation, task-specific transformation, adversarial attack, subpopulation, and their combinations to provide comprehensive robustness analyses. |
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| Challenge: | Existing visual storytelling models produce stories with fixed lengths of five sentences and the fix-length stories carry limited details and provide ambiguous textual information to the readers. |
| Approach: | They propose to “stretch” visual storytelling frameworks by adding appropriate knowledge to the model to generate long stories. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides better focus and detail when long stories are generated without deteriorating the quality. |
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| Challenge: | Various attack models are distinct and implemented with different programming frameworks and settings, which hinders quick utilization and fair comparison of attack models. |
| Approach: | They propose an open-source textual adversarial attack toolkit to solve these issues by combining 15 typical attack models into one toolkit. |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit supports all attack types, multilinguality, and parallel processing. |