For many NLP applications, such as question answering and summarization, the goal is to select the best solution from a large space of candidates to meet a particular user’s needs. To address the lack of user or task-specific training data, we propose an interactive text ranking approach that actively selects pairs of candidates, from which the user selects the best. Unlike previous strategies, which attempt to learn a ranking across the whole candidate space, our method uses Bayesian optimization to focus the user’s labeling effort on high quality candidates and integrate prior knowledge to cope better with small data scenarios. We apply our method to community question answering (cQA) and extractive multidocument summarization, finding that it significantly outperforms existing interactive approaches. We also show that the ranking function learned by our method is an effective reward function for reinforcement learning, which improves the state of the art for interactive summarization.

Recent graph-to-text models generate text from graph-based data using either global or local aggregation to learn node representations. Global node encoding allows explicit communication between two distant nodes, thereby neglecting graph topology as all nodes are directly connected. In contrast, local node encoding considers the relations between neighbor nodes capturing the graph structure, but it can fail to capture long-range relations. In this work, we gather both encoding strategies, proposing novel neural models that encode an input graph combining both global and local node contexts, in order to learn better contextualized node embeddings. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our approaches lead to significant improvements on two graph-to-text datasets achieving BLEU scores of 18.01 on the AGENDA dataset, and 63.69 on the WebNLG dataset for seen categories, outperforming state-of-the-art models by 3.7 and 3.1 points, respectively. 1

We introduce a scalable Bayesian preference learning method for identifying convincing arguments in the absence of gold-standard ratings or rankings. In contrast to previous work, we avoid the need for separate methods to perform quality control on training data, predict rankings and perform pairwise classification. Bayesian approaches are an effective solution when faced with sparse or noisy training data, but have not previously been used to identify convincing arguments. One issue is scalability, which we address by developing a stochastic variational inference method for Gaussian process (GP) preference learning. We show how our method can be applied to predict argument convincingness from crowdsourced data, outperforming the previous state-of-the-art, particularly when trained with small amounts of unreliable data. We demonstrate how the Bayesian approach enables more effective active learning, thereby reducing the amount of data required to identify convincing arguments for new users and domains. While word embeddings are principally used with neural networks, our results show that word embeddings in combination with linguistic features also benefit GPs when predicting argument convincingness.

Extracting the information from text when an event happened is challenging. Documents do not only report on current events, but also on past events as well as on future events. Often, the relevant time information for an event is scattered across the document. In this paper we present a novel method to automatically anchor events in time. To our knowledge it is the first approach that takes temporal information from the complete document into account. We created a decision tree that applies neural network based classifiers at its nodes. We use this tree to incrementally infer, in a stepwise manner, at which time frame an event happened. We evaluate the approach on the TimeBank-EventTime Corpus (Reimers et al., 2016) achieving an accuracy of 42.0% compared to an inter-annotator agreement (IAA) of 56.7%. For events that span over a single day we observe an accuracy improvement of 33.1 points compared to the state-of-the-art CAEVO system (Chambers et al., 2014). Without retraining, we apply this model to the SemEval-2015 Task 4 on automatic timeline generation and achieve an improvement of 4.01 points F 1 -score compared to the state-of-the-art. Our code is publically available.

We present a new approach for generating role-labeled training data using Linked Lexical Resources, i.e., integrated lexical resources that combine several resources (e.g., Word-Net, FrameNet, Wiktionary) by linking them on the sense or on the role level. Unlike resource-based supervision in relation extraction, we focus on complex linguistic annotations, more specifically FrameNet senses and roles. The automatically labeled training data ( www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/knowledge-based-srl/ ) are evaluated on four corpora from different domains for the tasks of word sense disambiguation and semantic role classification. Results show that classifiers trained on our generated data equal those resulting from a standard supervised setting.

Language proficiency tests are used to evaluate and compare the progress of language learners. We present an approach for automatic difficulty prediction of C-tests that performs on par with human experts. On the basis of detailed analysis of newly collected data, we develop a model for C-test difficulty introducing four dimensions: solution difficulty, candidate ambiguity, inter-gap dependency, and paragraph difficulty. We show that cues from all four dimensions contribute to C-test difficulty.

In this paper, we present Dijkstra-WSA, a novel graph-based algorithm for word sense alignment. We evaluate it on four different pairs of lexical-semantic resources with different characteristics (WordNet-OmegaWiki, WordNet-Wiktionary, GermaNet-Wiktionary and WordNet-Wikipedia) and show that it achieves competitive performance on 3 out of 4 datasets. Dijkstra-WSA outperforms the state of the art on every dataset if it is combined with a back-off based on gloss similarity. We also demonstrate that Dijkstra-WSA is not only flexibly applicable to different resources but also highly parameterizable to optimize for precision or recall.