Hi, how can I help you?: Automating enterprise IT support help desks

Question answering is one of the primary challenges of natural language understanding. In realizing such a system, providing complex long answers to questions is a challenging task as opposed to factoid answering as the former needs context disambiguation. The different methods explored in the literature can be broadly classified into three categories namely: 1) classification based, 2) knowledge graph based and 3) retrieval based. Individually, none of them address the need of an enterprise wide assistance system for an IT support and maintenance domain. In this domain the variance of answers is large ranging from factoid to structured operating procedures; the knowledge is present across heterogeneous data sources like application specific documentation, ticket management systems and any single technique for a general purpose assistance is unable to scale for such a landscape. To address this, we have built a cognitive platform with capabilities adopted for this domain. Further, we have built a general purpose question answering system leveraging the platform that can be instantiated for multiple products, technologies in the support domain. The system uses a novel hybrid answering model that orchestrates across a deep learning classifier, a knowledge graph based context disambiguation module and a sophisticated bag-of-words search system. This orchestration performs context switching for a provided question and also does a smooth hand-off of the question to a human expert if none of the automated techniques can provide a confident answer. This system has been deployed across 675 internal enterprise IT support and maintenance projects.Comment: To appear in IAAI 201

A Diachronic Analysis of Paradigm Shifts in NLP Research: When, How, and Why?

Understanding the fundamental concepts and trends in a scientific field is crucial for keeping abreast of its continuous advancement. In this study, we propose a systematic framework for analyzing the evolution of research topics in a scientific field using causal discovery and inference techniques. We define three variables to encompass diverse facets of the evolution of research topics within NLP and utilize a causal discovery algorithm to unveil the causal connections among these variables using observational data. Subsequently, we leverage this structure to measure the intensity of these relationships. By conducting extensive experiments on the ACL Anthology corpus, we demonstrate that our framework effectively uncovers evolutionary trends and the underlying causes for a wide range of NLP research topics. Specifically, we show that tasks and methods are primary drivers of research in NLP, with datasets following, while metrics have minimal impact.Comment: accepted at EMNLP 202

A Semi-Supervised Learning Approach to Why-Question Answering

We propose a semi-supervised learning method for improving why-question answering (why-QA). The key of our method is to generate training data (question-answer pairs) from causal relations in texts such as "[Tsunamis are generated](effect) because [the ocean's water mass is displaced by an earthquake](cause)." A naive method for the generation would be to make a question-answer pair by simply converting the effect part of the causal relations into a why-question, like "Why are tsunamis generated?" from the above example, and using the source text of the causal relations as an answer. However, in our preliminary experiments, this naive method actually failed to improve the why-QA performance. The main reason was that the machine-generated questions were often incomprehensible like "Why does (it) happen?", and that the system suffered from overfitting to the results of our automatic causality recognizer. Hence, we developed a novel method that effectively filters out incomprehensible questions and retrieves from texts answers that are likely to be paraphrases of a given causal relation. Through a series of experiments, we showed that our approach significantly improved the precision of the top answer by 8% over the current state-of-the-art system for Japanese why-QA

Low-Resource Event Extraction

The last decade has seen the extraordinary evolution of deep learning in natural language processing leading to the rapid deployment of many natural language processing applications. However, the field of event extraction did not witness a parallel success story due to the inherent challenges associated with its scalability. The task itself is much more complex than other NLP tasks due to the dependency among its subtasks. This interlocking system of tasks requires a full adaptation whenever one attempts to scale to another domain or language, which is too expensive to scale to thousands of domains and languages. This dissertation introduces a holistic method for expanding event extraction to other domains and languages within the limited available tools and resources. First, this study focuses on designing neural network architecture that enables the integration of external syntactic and graph features as well as external knowledge bases to enrich the hidden representations of the events. Second, this study presents network architecture and training methods for efficient learning under minimal supervision. Third, we created brand new multilingual corpora for event relation extraction to facilitate the research of event extraction in low-resource languages. We also introduce a language-agnostic method to tackle multilingual event relation extraction. Our extensive experiment shows the effectiveness of these methods which will significantly speed up the advance of the event extraction field. We anticipate that this research will stimulate the growth of the event detection field in unexplored domains and languages, ultimately leading to the expansion of language technologies into a more extensive range of diaspora