Joint Modeling of Content and Discourse Relations in Dialogues

We present a joint modeling approach to identify salient discussion points in spoken meetings as well as to label the discourse relations between speaker turns. A variation of our model is also discussed when discourse relations are treated as latent variables. Experimental results on two popular meeting corpora show that our joint model can outperform state-of-the-art approaches for both phrase-based content selection and discourse relation prediction tasks. We also evaluate our model on predicting the consistency among team members' understanding of their group decisions. Classifiers trained with features constructed from our model achieve significant better predictive performance than the state-of-the-art.Comment: Accepted by ACL 2017. 11 page

Exploring Technical Phrase Frames from Research Paper Titles

This paper proposes a method for exploring technical phrase frames by extracting word n-grams that match our information needs and interests from research paper titles. Technical phrase frames, the outcome of our method, are phrases with wildcards that may be substituted for any technical term. Our method, first of all, extracts word trigrams from research paper titles and constructs a co-occurrence graph of the trigrams. Even by simply applying Page Rank algorithm to the co-occurrence graph, we obtain the trigrams that can be regarded as technical key phrases at the higher ranks in terms of Page Rank score. In contrast, our method assigns weights to the edges of the co-occurrence graph based on Jaccard similarity between trigrams and then apply weighted Page Rank algorithm. Consequently, we obtain widely different but more interesting results. While the top-ranked trigrams obtained by unweighted Page Rank have just a self-contained meaning, those obtained by our method are technical phrase frames, i.e., A word sequence that forms a complete technical phrase only after putting a technical word (or words) before or/and after it. We claim that our method is a useful tool for discovering important phrase logical patterns, which can expand query keywords for improving information retrieval performance and can also work as candidate phrasings in technical writing to make our research papers attractive.29th IEEE International Conference on Advanced Information Networking and Applications Workshops, WAINA 2015; Gwangju; South Korea; 25 March 2015 through 27 March 201

Click-words: learning to predict document keywords from a user perspective

Motivation: Recognizing words that are key to a document is important for ranking relevant scientific documents. Traditionally, important words in a document are either nominated subjectively by authors and indexers or selected objectively by some statistical measures. As an alternative, we propose to use documents' words popularity in user queries to identify click-words, a set of prominent words from the users' perspective. Although they often overlap, click-words differ significantly from other document keywords

A tree based keyphrase extraction technique for academic literature

Automatic keyphrase extraction techniques aim to extract quality keyphrases to summarize a document at a higher level. Among the existing techniques some of them are domain-specific and require application domain knowledge, some of them are based on higher-order statistical methods and are computationally expensive, and some of them require large train data which are rare for many applications. Overcoming these issues, this thesis proposes a new unsupervised automatic keyphrase extraction technique, named TeKET or Tree-based Keyphrase Extraction Technique, which is domain-independent, employs limited statistical knowledge, and requires no train data. The proposed technique also introduces a new variant of the binary tree, called KeyPhrase Extraction (KePhEx) tree to extract final keyphrases from candidate keyphrases. Depending on the candidate keyphrases the KePhEx tree structure is either expanded or shrunk or maintained. In addition, a measure, called Cohesiveness Index or CI, is derived that denotes the degree of cohesiveness of a given node with respect to the root which is used in extracting final keyphrases from a resultant tree in a flexible manner and is utilized in ranking keyphrases alongside Term Frequency. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated using an experimental evaluation on a benchmark corpus, called SemEval-2010 with total 244 train and test articles, and compared with other relevant unsupervised techniques by taking the representatives from both statistical (such as Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and YAKE) and graph-based techniques (PositionRank, CollabRank (SingleRank), TopicRank, and MultipartiteRank) into account. Three evaluation metrics, namely precision, recall and F1 score are taken into consideration during the experiments. The obtained results demonstrate the improved performance of the proposed technique over other similar techniques in terms of precision, recall, and F1 scores

Mehrwert oder Mehrarbeit? : Voraussetzungen und Möglichkeiten des Einsatzes von Normdaten in der Sacherschließung des Bundesarchivs am Beispiel des „Themenportals Wiedergutmachung“ : Transferarbeit des 55. wissenschaftlichen Lehrgangs an der Archivschule Marburg

In der vorliegenden Transferarbeit soll untersucht werden, ob eine Sacherschließung durch Verschlagwortung u. a. mit GND-Sachbegriffen aktuell in Bezug auf Archivgut mit thematischem Schwerpunkt und perspektivisch für das gesamte Archivgut im Bundesarchiv in Frage kommen kann, ob der Mehrwert also den Mehraufwand rechtfertigen oder sogar unter bestimmten Voraussetzungen überwiegen kann. Nach einer eher theoretischen Darstellung zur Relevanz einer Erschließung mit Normdaten im Archivbereich sowie des diesbezüglichen Status-Quos und den Planungen im Bundesarchiv soll der Aufwand einer nachträglichen, normdatenbasierten Verschlagwortung von Archivgut beispielhaft anhand der Erstellung eines Konzepts für eine Teilsystematik für das „Themenportal Wiedergutmachung“ überprüft werden. Geht es hier bereits darum, Voraussetzung und Möglichkeiten einer Reduzierung der Anstrengungen durch ein strukturiertes Vorgehen unter den gegenwärtigen Bedingungen zu beschreiben, sollen im Anschluss heute schon in Ansätzen mögliche bzw. künftige Alternativen einer sich teilweise auf Künstliche Intelligenz stützenden Automatisierung von Datenbereinigung, Verschlagwortung und Normdatenanreicherung in den Blick genommen werden. Das abschließende Fazit wird die Ergebnisse dieses zweigeteilten Lösungsvorschlags zusammentragen und die voranstehende Leitfrage (Mehrwert oder Mehrarbeit?) beantworten

Finding Important Terms for Patients in Their Electronic Health Records: A Learning-to-Rank Approach Using Expert Annotations

BACKGROUND: Many health organizations allow patients to access their own electronic health record (EHR) notes through online patient portals as a way to enhance patient-centered care. However, EHR notes are typically long and contain abundant medical jargon that can be difficult for patients to understand. In addition, many medical terms in patients\u27 notes are not directly related to their health care needs. One way to help patients better comprehend their own notes is to reduce information overload and help them focus on medical terms that matter most to them. Interventions can then be developed by giving them targeted education to improve their EHR comprehension and the quality of care. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop a supervised natural language processing (NLP) system called Finding impOrtant medical Concepts most Useful to patientS (FOCUS) that automatically identifies and ranks medical terms in EHR notes based on their importance to the patients. METHODS: First, we built an expert-annotated corpus. For each EHR note, 2 physicians independently identified medical terms important to the patient. Using the physicians\u27 agreement as the gold standard, we developed and evaluated FOCUS. FOCUS first identifies candidate terms from each EHR note using MetaMap and then ranks the terms using a support vector machine-based learn-to-rank algorithm. We explored rich learning features, including distributed word representation, Unified Medical Language System semantic type, topic features, and features derived from consumer health vocabulary. We compared FOCUS with 2 strong baseline NLP systems. RESULTS: Physicians annotated 90 EHR notes and identified a mean of 9 (SD 5) important terms per note. The Cohen\u27s kappa annotation agreement was .51. The 10-fold cross-validation results show that FOCUS achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) of 0.940 for ranking candidate terms from EHR notes to identify important terms. When including term identification, the performance of FOCUS for identifying important terms from EHR notes was 0.866 AUC-ROC. Both performance scores significantly exceeded the corresponding baseline system scores (P \u3c .001). Rich learning features contributed to FOCUS\u27s performance substantially. CONCLUSIONS: FOCUS can automatically rank terms from EHR notes based on their importance to patients. It may help develop future interventions that improve quality of care

Improving Searchability of Automatically Transcribed Lectures Through Dynamic Language Modelling

Recording university lectures through lecture capture systems is increasingly common. However, a single continuous audio recording is often unhelpful for users, who may wish to navigate quickly to a particular part of a lecture, or locate a specific lecture within a set of recordings. A transcript of the recording can enable faster navigation and searching. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies may be used to create automated transcripts, to avoid the significant time and cost involved in manual transcription. Low accuracy of ASR-generated transcripts may however limit their usefulness. In particular, ASR systems optimized for general speech recognition may not recognize the many technical or discipline-specific words occurring in university lectures. To improve the usefulness of ASR transcripts for the purposes of information retrieval (search) and navigating within recordings, the lexicon and language model used by the ASR engine may be dynamically adapted for the topic of each lecture. A prototype is presented which uses the English Wikipedia as a semantically dense, large language corpus to generate a custom lexicon and language model for each lecture from a small set of keywords. Two strategies for extracting a topic-specific subset of Wikipedia articles are investigated: a naïve crawler which follows all article links from a set of seed articles produced by a Wikipedia search from the initial keywords, and a refinement which follows only links to articles sufficiently similar to the parent article. Pair-wise article similarity is computed from a pre-computed vector space model of Wikipedia article term scores generated using latent semantic indexing. The CMU Sphinx4 ASR engine is used to generate transcripts from thirteen recorded lectures from Open Yale Courses, using the English HUB4 language model as a reference and the two topic-specific language models generated for each lecture from Wikipedia