A Factoid Question Answering System for Vietnamese

In this paper, we describe the development of an end-to-end factoid question answering system for the Vietnamese language. This system combines both statistical models and ontology-based methods in a chain of processing modules to provide high-quality mappings from natural language text to entities. We present the challenges in the development of such an intelligent user interface for an isolating language like Vietnamese and show that techniques developed for inflectional languages cannot be applied "as is". Our question answering system can answer a wide range of general knowledge questions with promising accuracy on a test set.Comment: In the proceedings of the HQA'18 workshop, The Web Conference Companion, Lyon, Franc

The Importance of Automatic Syntactic Features in Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition

This paper presents a state-of-the-art system for Vietnamese Named Entity Recognition (NER). By incorporating automatic syntactic features with word embeddings as input for bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (Bi-LSTM), our system, although simpler than some deep learning architectures, achieves a much better result for Vietnamese NER. The proposed method achieves an overall F1 score of 92.05% on the test set of an evaluation campaign, organized in late 2016 by the Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP) community. Our named entity recognition system outperforms the best previous systems for Vietnamese NER by a large margin.Comment: 7 pages, 9 tables, 3 figures, accepted to PACLIC 201

The Impact of Cross-Lingual Adjustment of Contextual Word Representations on Zero-Shot Transfer

Large multilingual language models such as mBERT or XLM-R enable zero-shot cross-lingual transfer in various IR and NLP tasks. Cao et al. (2020) proposed a data- and compute-efficient method for cross-lingual adjustment of mBERT that uses a small parallel corpus to make embeddings of related words across languages similar to each other. They showed it to be effective in NLI for five European languages. In contrast we experiment with a typologically diverse set of languages (Spanish, Russian, Vietnamese, and Hindi) and extend their original implementations to new tasks (XSR, NER, and QA) and an additional training regime (continual learning). Our study reproduced gains in NLI for four languages, showed improved NER, XSR, and cross-lingual QA results in three languages (though some cross-lingual QA gains were not statistically significant), while mono-lingual QA performance never improved and sometimes degraded. Analysis of distances between contextualized embeddings of related and unrelated words (across languages) showed that fine-tuning leads to "forgetting" some of the cross-lingual alignment information. Based on this observation, we further improved NLI performance using continual learning.Comment: Presented at ECIR 202

Ripple Down Rules for Question Answering

Recent years have witnessed a new trend of building ontology-based question answering systems. These systems use semantic web information to produce more precise answers to users' queries. However, these systems are mostly designed for English. In this paper, we introduce an ontology-based question answering system named KbQAS which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first one made for Vietnamese. KbQAS employs our question analysis approach that systematically constructs a knowledge base of grammar rules to convert each input question into an intermediate representation element. KbQAS then takes the intermediate representation element with respect to a target ontology and applies concept-matching techniques to return an answer. On a wide range of Vietnamese questions, experimental results show that the performance of KbQAS is promising with accuracies of 84.1% and 82.4% for analyzing input questions and retrieving output answers, respectively. Furthermore, our question analysis approach can easily be applied to new domains and new languages, thus saving time and human effort.Comment: V1: 21 pages, 7 figures, 10 tables. V2: 8 figures, 10 tables; shorten section 2; change sections 4.3 and 5.1.2. V3: Accepted for publication in the Semantic Web journal. V4 (Author's manuscript): camera ready version, available from the Semantic Web journal at http://www.semantic-web-journal.ne