Unrestricted Bridging Resolution

Anaphora plays a major role in discourse comprehension and accounts for the coherence of a text. In contrast to identity anaphora which indicates that a noun phrase refers back to the same entity introduced by previous descriptions in the discourse, bridging anaphora or associative anaphora links anaphors and antecedents via lexico-semantic, frame or encyclopedic relations. In recent years, various computational approaches have been developed for bridging resolution. However, most of them only consider antecedent selection, assuming that bridging anaphora recognition has been performed. Moreover, they often focus on subproblems, e.g., only part-of bridging or definite noun phrase anaphora. This thesis addresses the problem of unrestricted bridging resolution, i.e., recognizing bridging anaphora and finding links to antecedents where bridging anaphors are not limited to definite noun phrases and semantic relations between anaphors and their antecedents are not restricted to meronymic relations. In this thesis, we solve the problem using a two-stage statistical model. Given all mentions in a document, the first stage predicts bridging anaphors by exploring a cascading collective classification model. We cast bridging anaphora recognition as a subtask of learning fine-grained information status (IS). Each mention in a text gets assigned one IS class, bridging being one possible class. The model combines the binary classifiers for minority categories and a collective classifier for all categories in a cascaded way. It addresses the multi-class imbalance problem (e.g., the wide variation of bridging anaphora and their relative rarity compared to many other IS classes) within a multi-class setting while still keeping the strength of the collective classifier by investigating relational autocorrelation among several IS classes. The second stage finds the antecedents for all predicted bridging anaphors at the same time by exploring a joint inference model. The approach models two mutually supportive tasks (i.e., bridging anaphora resolution and sibling anaphors clustering) jointly, on the basis of the observation that semantically/syntactically related anaphors are likely to be sibling anaphors, and hence share the same antecedent. Both components are based on rich linguistically-motivated features and discriminatively trained on a corpus (ISNotes) where bridging is reliably annotated. Our approaches achieve substantial improvements over the reimplementations of previous systems for all three tasks, i.e., bridging anaphora recognition, bridging anaphora resolution and full bridging resolution. The work is – to our knowledge – the first bridging resolution system that handles the unrestricted phenomenon in a realistic setting. The methods in this dissertation were originally presented in Markert et al. (2012) and Hou et al. (2013a; 2013b; 2014). The thesis gives a detailed exposition, carrying out a thorough corpus analysis of bridging and conducting a detailed comparison of our models to others in the literature, and also presents several extensions of the aforementioned papers

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

TLAD 2010 Proceedings:8th international workshop on teaching, learning and assesment of databases (TLAD)

This is the eighth in the series of highly successful international workshops on the Teaching, Learning and Assessment of Databases (TLAD 2010), which once again is held as a workshop of BNCOD 2010 - the 27th International Information Systems Conference. TLAD 2010 is held on the 28th June at the beautiful Dudhope Castle at the Abertay University, just before BNCOD, and hopes to be just as successful as its predecessors.The teaching of databases is central to all Computing Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems and Information Technology courses, and this year, the workshop aims to continue the tradition of bringing together both database teachers and researchers, in order to share good learning, teaching and assessment practice and experience, and further the growing community amongst database academics. As well as attracting academics from the UK community, the workshop has also been successful in attracting academics from the wider international community, through serving on the programme committee, and attending and presenting papers.This year, the workshop includes an invited talk given by Richard Cooper (of the University of Glasgow) who will present a discussion and some results from the Database Disciplinary Commons which was held in the UK over the academic year. Due to the healthy number of high quality submissions this year, the workshop will also present seven peer reviewed papers, and six refereed poster papers. Of the seven presented papers, three will be presented as full papers and four as short papers. These papers and posters cover a number of themes, including: approaches to teaching databases, e.g. group centered and problem based learning; use of novel case studies, e.g. forensics and XML data; techniques and approaches for improving teaching and student learning processes; assessment techniques, e.g. peer review; methods for improving students abilities to develop database queries and develop E-R diagrams; and e-learning platforms for supporting teaching and learning

Deep learning applied to the assessment of online student programming exercises

Massive online open courses (MOOCs) teaching coding are increasing in number and popularity. They commonly include homework assignments in which the students must write code that is evaluated by functional tests. Functional testing may to some extent be automated however provision of more qualitative evaluation and feedback may be prohibitively labor-intensive. Provision of qualitative evaluation at scale, automatically, is the subject of much research effort. In this thesis, deep learning is applied to the task of performing automatic assessment of source code, with a focus on provision of qualitative feedback. Four tasks: language modeling, detecting idiomatic code, semantic code search, and predicting variable names are considered in detail. First, deep learning models are applied to the task of language modeling source code. A comparison is made between the performance of different deep learning language models, and it is shown how language models can be used for source code auto-completion. It is also demonstrated how language models trained on source code can be used for transfer learning, providing improved performance on other tasks. Next, an analysis is made on how the language models from the previous task can be used to detect idiomatic code. It is shown that these language models are able to locate where a student has deviated from correct code idioms. These locations can be highlighted to the student in order to provide qualitative feedback. Then, results are shown on semantic code search, again comparing the performance across a variety of deep learning models. It is demonstrated how semantic code search can be used to reduce the time taken for qualitative evaluation, by automatically pairing a student submission with an instructor’s hand-written feedback. Finally, it is examined how deep learning can be used to predict variable names within source code. These models can be used in a qualitative evaluation setting where the deep learning models can be used to suggest more appropriate variable names. It is also shown that these models can even be used to predict the presence of functional errors. Novel experimental results show that: fine-tuning a pre-trained language model is an effective way to improve performance across a variety of tasks on source code, improving performance by 5% on average; pre-trained language models can be used as zero-shot learners across a variety of tasks, with the zero-shot performance of some architectures outperforming the fine-tuned performance of others; and that language models can be used to detect both semantic and syntactic errors. Other novel findings include: removing the non-variable tokens within source code has negligible impact on the performance of models, and that these remaining tokens can be shuffled with only a minimal decrease in performance.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) fundin