379 research outputs found
Modeling Empathy and Distress in Reaction to News Stories
Computational detection and understanding of empathy is an important factor
in advancing human-computer interaction. Yet to date, text-based empathy
prediction has the following major limitations: It underestimates the
psychological complexity of the phenomenon, adheres to a weak notion of ground
truth where empathic states are ascribed by third parties, and lacks a shared
corpus. In contrast, this contribution presents the first publicly available
gold standard for empathy prediction. It is constructed using a novel
annotation methodology which reliably captures empathy assessments by the
writer of a statement using multi-item scales. This is also the first
computational work distinguishing between multiple forms of empathy, empathic
concern, and personal distress, as recognized throughout psychology. Finally,
we present experimental results for three different predictive models, of which
a CNN performs the best.Comment: To appear at EMNLP 201
Conception: Multilingually-Enhanced, Human-Readable Concept Vector Representations
To date, the most successful word, word sense, and concept modelling techniques have used large corpora and knowledge resources to produce dense vector representations that capture semantic similarities in a relatively low-dimensional space. Most current approaches, however, suffer from a monolingual bias, with their strength depending on the amount of data available across languages. In this paper we address this issue and propose Conception, a novel technique for building language-independent vector representations of concepts which places multilinguality at its core while retaining explicit relationships between concepts. Our approach results in high-coverage representations that outperform the state of the art in multilingual and cross-lingual Semantic Word Similarity and Word Sense Disambiguation, proving particularly robust on low-resource languages. Conception – its software and the complete set of representations – is available at https://github.com/SapienzaNLP/conception
Automatic Accuracy Prediction for AMR Parsing
Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) represents sentences as directed,
acyclic and rooted graphs, aiming at capturing their meaning in a machine
readable format. AMR parsing converts natural language sentences into such
graphs. However, evaluating a parser on new data by means of comparison to
manually created AMR graphs is very costly. Also, we would like to be able to
detect parses of questionable quality, or preferring results of alternative
systems by selecting the ones for which we can assess good quality. We propose
AMR accuracy prediction as the task of predicting several metrics of
correctness for an automatically generated AMR parse - in absence of the
corresponding gold parse. We develop a neural end-to-end multi-output
regression model and perform three case studies: firstly, we evaluate the
model's capacity of predicting AMR parse accuracies and test whether it can
reliably assign high scores to gold parses. Secondly, we perform parse
selection based on predicted parse accuracies of candidate parses from
alternative systems, with the aim of improving overall results. Finally, we
predict system ranks for submissions from two AMR shared tasks on the basis of
their predicted parse accuracy averages. All experiments are carried out across
two different domains and show that our method is effective.Comment: accepted at *SEM 201
A Survey on Automated Fact-Checking
Fact-checking has become increasingly important due to the speed with which both information and misinformation can spread in the modern media ecosystem. Therefore, researchers have been exploring how factchecking can be automated, using techniques based on natural language processing, machine learning, knowledge representation, and databases to automatically predict the veracity of claims. In this paper, we survey automated fact-checking stemming from natural language processing, and discuss its connections to related tasks and disciplines. In this process, we present an overview of existing datasets and models, aiming to unify the various definitions given and identify common concepts. Finally, we highlight challenges for future research
Embedding Words and Senses Together via Joint Knowledge-Enhanced Training
Word embeddings are widely used in Nat-ural Language Processing, mainly due totheir success in capturing semantic infor-mation from massive corpora. However,their creation process does not allow thedifferent meanings of a word to be auto-matically separated, as it conflates theminto a single vector. We address this issueby proposing a new model which learnsword and sense embeddings jointly. Ourmodel exploits large corpora and knowl-edge from semantic networks in order toproduce a unified vector space of wordand sense embeddings. We evaluate themain features of our approach both qual-itatively and quantitatively in a variety oftasks, highlighting the advantages of theproposed method in comparison to state-of-the-art word- and sense-based models
Through the Lens of Core Competency: Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models
From pre-trained language model (PLM) to large language model (LLM), the
field of natural language processing (NLP) has witnessed steep performance
gains and wide practical uses. The evaluation of a research field guides its
direction of improvement. However, LLMs are extremely hard to thoroughly
evaluate for two reasons. First of all, traditional NLP tasks become inadequate
due to the excellent performance of LLM. Secondly, existing evaluation tasks
are difficult to keep up with the wide range of applications in real-world
scenarios. To tackle these problems, existing works proposed various benchmarks
to better evaluate LLMs. To clarify the numerous evaluation tasks in both
academia and industry, we investigate multiple papers concerning LLM
evaluations. We summarize 4 core competencies of LLM, including reasoning,
knowledge, reliability, and safety. For every competency, we introduce its
definition, corresponding benchmarks, and metrics. Under this competency
architecture, similar tasks are combined to reflect corresponding ability,
while new tasks can also be easily added into the system. Finally, we give our
suggestions on the future direction of LLM's evaluation
A Retrospective Analysis of the Fake News Challenge Stance Detection Task
The 2017 Fake News Challenge Stage 1 (FNC-1) shared task addressed a stance
classification task as a crucial first step towards detecting fake news. To
date, there is no in-depth analysis paper to critically discuss FNC-1's
experimental setup, reproduce the results, and draw conclusions for
next-generation stance classification methods. In this paper, we provide such
an in-depth analysis for the three top-performing systems. We first find that
FNC-1's proposed evaluation metric favors the majority class, which can be
easily classified, and thus overestimates the true discriminative power of the
methods. Therefore, we propose a new F1-based metric yielding a changed system
ranking. Next, we compare the features and architectures used, which leads to a
novel feature-rich stacked LSTM model that performs on par with the best
systems, but is superior in predicting minority classes. To understand the
methods' ability to generalize, we derive a new dataset and perform both
in-domain and cross-domain experiments. Our qualitative and quantitative study
helps interpreting the original FNC-1 scores and understand which features help
improving performance and why. Our new dataset and all source code used during
the reproduction study are publicly available for future research
Noise or music? Investigating the usefulness of normalisation for robust sentiment analysis on social media data
In the past decade, sentiment analysis research has thrived, especially on social media. While this data genre is suitable to extract opinions and sentiment, it is known to be noisy. Complex normalisation methods have been developed to transform noisy text into its standard form, but their effect on tasks like sentiment analysis remains underinvestigated. Sentiment analysis approaches mostly include spell checking or rule-based normalisation as preprocess- ing and rarely investigate its impact on the task performance. We present an optimised sentiment classifier and investigate to what extent its performance can be enhanced by integrating SMT-based normalisation as preprocessing. Experiments on a test set comprising a variety of user-generated content genres revealed that normalisation improves sentiment classification performance on tweets and blog posts, showing the model’s ability to generalise to other data genres
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