Learning from disagreement: a survey

Many tasks in Natural Language Processing (nlp) and Computer Vision (cv) offer evidence that humans disagree, from objective tasks such as part-of-speech tagging to more subjective tasks such as classifying an image or deciding whether a proposition follows from certain premises. While most learning in artificial intelligence (ai) still relies on the assumption that a single (gold) interpretation exists for each item, a growing body of research aims to develop learning methods that do not rely on this assumption. In this survey, we review the evidence for disagreements on nlp and cv tasks, focusing on tasks for which substantial datasets containing this information have been created. We discuss the most popular approaches to training models from datasets containing multiple judgments potentially in disagreement. We systematically compare these different approaches by training them with each of the available datasets, considering several ways to evaluate the resulting models. Finally, we discuss the results in depth, focusing on four key research questions, and assess how the type of evaluation and the characteristics of a dataset determine the answers to these questions. Our results suggest, first of all, that even if we abandon the assumption of a gold standard, it is still essential to reach a consensus on how to evaluate models. This is because the relative performance of the various training methods is critically affected by the chosen form of evaluation. Secondly, we observed a strong dataset effect. With substantial datasets, providing many judgments by high-quality coders for each item, training directly with soft labels achieved better results than training from aggregated or even gold labels. This result holds for both hard and soft evaluation. But when the above conditions do not hold, leveraging both gold and soft labels generally achieved the best results in the hard evaluation. All datasets and models employed in this paper are freely available as supplementary materials

Coreference in Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank

We present coreference annotation on parallel Czech-English texts of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank (PCEDT). The paper describes innovations made to PCEDT 2.0 concerning coreference, as well as coreference information already present there. We characterize the coreference annotation scheme, give the statistics and compare our annotation with the coreference annotation in Ontonotes and Prague Dependency Treebank for Czech. We also present the experiments made using this corpus to improve the alignment of coreferential expressions, which helps us to collect better statistics of correspondences between types of coreferential relations in Czech and English. The corpus released as PCEDT 2.0 Coref is publicly available

A Survey on Semantic Processing Techniques

Semantic processing is a fundamental research domain in computational linguistics. In the era of powerful pre-trained language models and large language models, the advancement of research in this domain appears to be decelerating. However, the study of semantics is multi-dimensional in linguistics. The research depth and breadth of computational semantic processing can be largely improved with new technologies. In this survey, we analyzed five semantic processing tasks, e.g., word sense disambiguation, anaphora resolution, named entity recognition, concept extraction, and subjectivity detection. We study relevant theoretical research in these fields, advanced methods, and downstream applications. We connect the surveyed tasks with downstream applications because this may inspire future scholars to fuse these low-level semantic processing tasks with high-level natural language processing tasks. The review of theoretical research may also inspire new tasks and technologies in the semantic processing domain. Finally, we compare the different semantic processing techniques and summarize their technical trends, application trends, and future directions.Comment: Published at Information Fusion, Volume 101, 2024, 101988, ISSN 1566-2535. The equal contribution mark is missed in the published version due to the publication policies. Please contact Prof. Erik Cambria for detail

Coreference in Universal Dependencies 0.1 (CorefUD 0.1)

CorefUD is a collection of previously existing datasets annotated with coreference, which we converted into a common annotation scheme. In total, CorefUD in its current version 0.1 consists of 17 datasets for 11 languages. The datasets are enriched with automatic morphological and syntactic annotations that are fully compliant with the standards of the Universal Dependencies project. All the datasets are stored in the CoNLL-U format, with coreference- and bridging-specific information captured by attribute-value pairs located in the MISC column. The collection is divided into a public edition and a non-public (ÚFAL-internal) edition. The publicly available edition is distributed via LINDAT-CLARIAH-CZ and contains 13 datasets for 10 languages (1 dataset for Catalan, 2 for Czech, 2 for English, 1 for French, 2 for German, 1 for Hungarian, 1 for Lithuanian, 1 for Polish, 1 for Russian, and 1 for Spanish), excluding the test data. The non-public edition is available internally to ÚFAL members and contains additional 4 datasets for 2 languages (1 dataset for Dutch, and 3 for English), which we are not allowed to distribute due to their original license limitations. It also contains the test data portions for all datasets. When using any of the harmonized datasets, please get acquainted with its license (placed in the same directory as the data) and cite the original data resource too. References to original resources whose harmonized versions are contained in the public edition of CorefUD 0.1: - Catalan-AnCora: Recasens, M. and Martí, M. A. (2010). AnCora-CO: Coreferentially Annotated Corpora for Spanish and Catalan. Language Resources and Evaluation, 44(4):315–345 - Czech-PCEDT: Nedoluzhko, A., Novák, M., Cinková, S., Mikulová, M., and Mírovský, J. (2016). Coreference in Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 169–176, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association. - Czech-PDT: Hajič, J., Bejček, E., Hlaváčová, J., Mikulová, M., Straka, M., Štěpánek, J., and Štěpánková, B. (2020). Prague Dependency Treebank - Consolidated 1.0. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5208–5218, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association. - English-GUM: Zeldes, A. (2017). The GUM Corpus: Creating Multilayer Resources in the Classroom. Language Resources and Evaluation, 51(3):581–612. - English-ParCorFull: Lapshinova-Koltunski, E., Hardmeier, C., and Krielke, P. (2018). ParCorFull: a Parallel Corpus Annotated with Full Coreference. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association. - French-Democrat: Landragin, F. (2016). Description, modélisation et détection automatique des chaı̂nes de référence (DEMOCRAT). Bulletin de l’Association Française pour l’Intelligence Artificielle, (92):11–15. - German-ParCorFull: Lapshinova-Koltunski, E., Hardmeier, C., and Krielke, P. (2018). ParCorFull: a Parallel Corpus Annotated with Full Coreference. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association - German-PotsdamCC: Bourgonje, P. and Stede, M. (2020). The Potsdam Commentary Corpus 2.2: Extending annotations for shallow discourse parsing. In Proceedings of the 12th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1061–1066, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association. - Hungarian-SzegedKoref: Vincze, V., Hegedűs, K., Sliz-Nagy, A., and Farkas, R. (2018). SzegedKoref: A Hungarian Coreference Corpus. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018), Miyazaki, Japan. European Language Resources Association. - Lithuanian-LCC: Žitkus, V. and Butkienė, R. (2018). Coreference Annotation Scheme and Corpus for Lithuanian Language. In Fifth International Conference on Social Networks Analysis, Management and Security, SNAMS 2018, Valencia, Spain, October 15-18, 2018, pages 243–250. IEEE. - Polish-PCC: Ogrodniczuk, M., Glowińska, K., Kopeć, M., Savary, A., and Zawisławska, M. (2013). Polish coreference corpus. In Human Language Technology. Challenges for Computer Science and Linguistics - 6th Language and Technology Conference, LTC 2013, Poznań, Poland, December 7-9, 2013. Revised Selected Papers, volume 9561 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 215–226. Springer. - Russian-RuCor: Toldova, S., Roytberg, A., Ladygina, A. A., Vasilyeva, M. D., Azerkovich, I. L., Kurzukov,M., Sim, G., Gorshkov, D. V., Ivanova, A., Nedoluzhko, A., and Grishina, Y. (2014). Evaluating Anaphora and Coreference Resolution for Russian. In Komp’juternaja lingvistika i intellektual’nye tehnologii. Po materialam ezhegodnoj Mezhdunarodnoj konferencii Dialog, pages 681–695. - Spanish-AnCora: Recasens, M. and Martí, M. A. (2010). AnCora-CO: Coreferentially Annotated Corpora for Spanish and Catalan. Language Resources and Evaluation, 44(4):315–345 References to original resources whose harmonized versions are contained in the ÚFAL-internal edition of CorefUD 0.1: - Dutch-COREA: Hendrickx, I., Bouma, G., Coppens, F., Daelemans, W., Hoste, V., Kloosterman, G., Mineur, A.-M., Van Der Vloet, J., and Verschelde, J.-L. (2008). A coreference corpus and resolution system for Dutch. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association. - English-ARRAU: Uryupina, O., Artstein, R., Bristot, A., Cavicchio, F., Delogu, F., Rodriguez, K. J., and Poesio, M. (2020). Annotating a broad range of anaphoric phenomena, in a variety of genres: the ARRAU Corpus. Natural Language Engineering, 26(1):95–128. - English-OntoNotes: Weischedel, R., Hovy, E., Marcus, M., Palmer, M., Belvin, R., Pradhan, S., Ramshaw, L., and Xue, N. (2011). Ontonotes: A large training corpus for enhanced processing. In Handbook of Natural Language Processing and Machine Translation: DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploitation, pages 54–63, New York. Springer-Verlag. - English-PCEDT: Nedoluzhko, A., Novák, M., Cinková, S., Mikulová, M., and Mírovský, J. (2016). Coreference in Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), pages 169–176, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association