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Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations - ACL Anthology

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Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations Heike Adel , Shuming Shi (Editors) Anthology ID: 2021.emnlp-demo Month: November Year: 2021 Address: Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic Venue: EMNLP SIG: Publisher: Association for Computational Linguistics URL: https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo/ DOI: Bib Export formats: BibTeX MODS XML EndNote PDF: https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-demo.pdf PDF (full) Bib TeX Search Show all abstracts Hide all abstracts pdf bib Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations Heike Adel | Shuming Shi pdf bib abs M i SS : An Assistant for Multi-Style Simultaneous Translation Zuchao Li | Kevin Parnow | Masao Utiyama | Eiichiro Sumita | Hai Zhao In this paper, we present MiSS , an assistant for multi-style simultaneous translation. Our proposed translation system has five key features: highly accurate translation, simultaneous translation, translation for multiple text styles, back-translation for translation quality evaluation, and grammatical error correction. With this system, we aim to provide a complete translation experience for machine translation users. Our design goals are high translation accuracy, real-time translation, flexibility, and measurable translation quality. Compared with the free commercial translation systems commonly used, our translation assistance system regards the machine translation application as a more complete and fully-featured tool for users. By incorporating additional features and giving the user better control over their experience, we improve translation efficiency and performance. Additionally, our assistant system combines machine translation, grammatical error correction, and interactive edits, and uses a crowdsourcing mode to collect more data for further training to improve both the machine translation and grammatical error correction models. A short video demonstrating our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGCo7KtRKd8 . pdf bib abs Automatic Construction of Enterprise Knowledge Base Junyi Chai | Yujie He | Homa Hashemi | Bing Li | Daraksha Parveen | Ranganath Kondapally | Wenjin Xu In this paper, we present an automatic knowledge base construction system from large scale enterprise documents with minimal efforts of human intervention. In the design and deployment of such a knowledge mining system for enterprise, we faced several challenges including data distributional shift, performance evaluation, compliance requirements and other practical issues. We leveraged state-of-the-art deep learning models to extract information (named entities and definitions) at per document level, then further applied classical machine learning techniques to process global statistical information to improve the knowledge base. Experimental results are reported on actual enterprise documents. This system is currently serving as part of a Microsoft 365 service. pdf bib abs L ight T ag: Text Annotation Platform Tal Perry Text annotation tools assume that their user’s goal is to create a labeled corpus. However,users view annotation as a necessary evil on the way to deliver business value through NLP.Thus an annotation tool should optimize for the throughput of the global NLP process, not only the productivity of individual annotators. LightTag is a text annotation tool designed and built on that principle. This paper shares our design rationale, data modeling choices, and user interface decisions then illustrates how those choices serve the full NLP lifecycle. pdf bib abs T rans I ns: Document Translation with Markup Reinsertion Jörg Steffen | Josef van Genabith For many use cases, it is required that MT does not just translate raw text, but complex formatted documents (e.g. websites, slides, spreadsheets) and the result of the translation should reflect the formatting. This is challenging, as markup can be nested, apply to spans contiguous in source but non-contiguous in target etc. Here we present TransIns, a system for non-plain text document translation that builds on the Okapi framework and MT models trained with Marian NMT. We develop, implement and evaluate different strategies for reinserting markup into translated sentences using token alignments between source and target sentences. We propose a simple and effective strategy that compiles down all markup to single source tokens and transfers them to aligned target tokens. A first evaluation shows that this strategy yields highly accurate markup in the translated documents that outperforms the markup quality found in documents translated with popular translation services. We release TransIns under the MIT License as open-source software on https://github.com/DFKI-MLT/TransIns . An online demonstrator is available at https://transins.dfki.de . pdf bib abs ET : A Workstation for Querying, Editing and Evaluating Annotated Corpora Elvis de Souza | Cláudia Freitas In this paper we explore the functionalities of ET, a suite designed to support linguistic research and natural language processing tasks using corpora annotated in the CoNLL-U format. These goals are achieved by two integrated environments – Interrogatório, an environment for querying and editing annotated corpora, and Julgamento, an environment for assessing their quality. ET is open-source, built on different Python Web technologies and has Web demonstrations available on-line. ET has been intensively used in our research group for over two years, being the chosen framework for several linguistic and NLP-related studies conducted by its researchers. pdf bib abs N- LTP : An Open-source Neural Language Technology Platform for C hinese Wanxiang Che | Yunlong Feng | Libo Qin | Ting Liu We introduce N-LTP, an open-source neural language technology platform supporting six fundamental Chinese NLP tasks: lexical analysis (Chinese word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging, and named entity recognition), syntactic parsing (dependency parsing), and semantic parsing (semantic dependency parsing and semantic role labeling). Unlike the existing state-of-the-art toolkits, such as Stanza, that adopt an independent model for each task, N-LTP adopts the multi-task framework by using a shared pre-trained model, which has the advantage of capturing the shared knowledge across relevant Chinese tasks. In addition, a knowledge distillation method (Clark et al., 2019) where the single-task model teaches the multi-task model is further introduced to encourage the multi-task model to surpass its single-task teacher. Finally, we provide a collection of easy-to-use APIs and a visualization tool to make users to use and view the processing results more easily and directly. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first toolkit to support six Chinese NLP fundamental tasks. Source code, documentation, and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/HIT-SCIR/ltp . pdf bib abs COMBO : State-of-the-Art Morphosyntactic Analysis Mateusz Klimaszewski | Alina Wróblewska We introduce COMBO – a fully neural NLP system for accurate part-of-speech tagging, morphological analysis, lemmatisation, and (enhanced) dependency parsing. It predicts categorical morphosyntactic features whilst also exposes their vector representations, extracted from hidden layers. COMBO is an easy to install Python package with automatically downloadable pre-trained models for over 40 languages. It maintains a balance between efficiency and quality. As it is an end-to-end system and its modules are jointly trained, its training is competitively fast. As its models are optimised for accuracy, they achieve often better prediction quality than SOTA. The COMBO library is available at: https://gitlab.clarin-pl.eu/syntactic-tools/combo . pdf bib abs E xcavator C ovid: Extracting Events and Relations from Text Corpora for Temporal and Causal Analysis for COVID -19 Bonan Min | Benjamin Rozonoyer | Haoling Qiu | Alexander Zamanian | Nianwen Xue | Jessica MacBride Timely responses from policy makers to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic rely on a comprehensive grasp of events, their causes, and their impacts. These events are reported at such a speed and scale as to be overwhelming. In this paper, we present ExcavatorCovid, a machine reading system that ingests open-source text documents (e.g., news and scientific publications), extracts COVID-19 related events and relations between them, and builds a Temporal and Causal Analysis Graph (TCAG). Excavator will help government agencies alleviate the information overload, understand likely downstream effects of political and economic decisions and events related to the pandemic, and respond in a timely manner to mitigate the impact of COVID-19. We expect the utility of Excavator to outlive the COVID-19 pandemic: analysts and decision makers will be empowered by Excavator to better understand and solve complex problems in the future. A demonstration video is available at https://vimeo.com/528619007 . pdf bib abs KOAS : K orean Text Offensiveness Analysis System San-Hee Park | Kang-Min Kim | Seonhee Cho | Jun-Hyung Park | Hyuntae Park | Hyuna Kim | Seongwon Chung | SangKeun Lee Warning: This manuscript contains a certain level of offensive expression. As communication through social media platforms has grown immensely, the increasing prevalence of offensive language online has become a critical problem. Notably in Korea, one of the countries with the highest Internet usage, automatic detection of offensive expressions has recently been brought to attention. However, morphological richness and complex syntax of Korean causes difficulties in neural model training. Furthermore, most of previous studies mainly focus on the detection of abusive language, disregarding implicit offensiveness and underestimating a different degree of intensity. To tackle these problems, we present KOAS, a system that fully exploits both contextual and linguistic features and estimates an offensiveness score for a text. We carefully designed KOAS with a multi-task learning framework and constructed a Korean dataset for offensive analysis from various domains. Refer for a detailed demonstration. pdf bib abs R ep G raph: Visualising and Analysing Meaning Representation Graphs Jaron Cohen | Roy Cohen | Edan Toledo | Jan Buys We present RepGraph, an open source visualisation and analysis tool for meaning representation graphs. Graph-based meaning representations provide rich semantic annotations, but visualising them clearly is more challenging than for fully lexicalized representations. Our application provides a seamless, unifying interface with which to visualise, manipulate and analyse semantically parsed graph data represented in a JSON-based serialisation format. RepGraph visualises graphs in multiple formats, with an emphasis on showing the relation between nodes and their corresponding token spans, whilst keeping the representation compact. Additionally, the web-based tool provides NLP researchers with a clear, visually intuitive way of interacting with these graphs, and includes a number of graph analysis features. The tool currently supports the DMRS, EDS, PTG, UCCA, and AMR semantic frameworks. A live demo is available at https://repgraph.vercel.app/ . pdf bib abs Thermostat: A Large Collection of NLP Model Explanations and Analysis Tools Nils Feldhus | Robert Schwarzenberg | Sebastian Möller In the language domain, as in other domains, neural explainability takes an ever more important role, with feature attribution methods on the forefront. Many such methods require considerable computational resources and expert knowledge about implementation details and parameter choices. To facilitate research, we present Thermostat which consists of a large collection of model explanations and accompanying analysis tools. Thermostat allows easy access to over 200k explanations for the decisions of prominent state-of-the-art models spanning across different NLP tasks, generated with multiple explainers. The dataset took over 10k GPU hours (> one year) to compile; compute time that the community now saves. The accompanying software tools allow to analyse explanations instance-wise but also accumulatively on corpus level. Users can investigate and compare models, datasets and explainers without the need to orchestrate implementation details. Thermostat is fully open source, democratizes explainability research in the language domain, circumvents redundant computations and increases comparability and replicability. pdf bib abs LM diff: A Visual Diff Tool to Compare Language Models Hendrik Strobelt | Benjamin Hoover | Arvind Satyanaryan | Sebastian Gehrmann While different language models are ubiquitous in NLP, it is hard to contrast their outputs and identify which contexts one can handle better than the other. To address this question, we introduce LMdiff, a tool that visually compares probability distributions of two models that differ, e.g., through finetuning, distillation, or simply training with different parameter sizes. LMdiff allows the generation of hypotheses about model behavior by investigating text instances token by token and further assists in choosing these interesting text instances by identifying the most interesting phrases from large corpora. We showcase the applicability of LMdiff for hypothesis generation across multiple case studies. A demo is available at http://lmdiff.net . pdf bib abs Semantic Context Path Labeling for Semantic Exploration of User Reviews Salah Aït-Mokhtar | Caroline Brun | Yves Hoppenot | Agnes Sandor In this paper we present a prototype demonstrator showcasing a novel method to perform semantic exploration of user reviews. The system enables effective navigation in a rich contextual semantic schema with a large number of structured classes indicating relevant information. In order to identify instances of the structured classes in the reviews, we defined a new Information Extraction task called Semantic Context Path (SCP) labeling, which simultaneously assigns types and semantic roles to entity mentions. Reviews can rapidly be explored based on the fine-grained and structured semantic classes. As a proof-of-concept, we have implemented this system for reviews on Points-of-Interest, in English and Korean. pdf bib abs Beyond Accuracy: A Consolidated Tool for Visual Question Answering Benchmarking Dirk Väth | Pascal Tilli | Ngoc Thang Vu On the way towards general Visual Question Answering (VQA) systems that are able to answer arbitrary questions, the need arises for evaluation beyond single-metric leaderboards for specific datasets. To this end, we propose a browser-based benchmarking tool for researchers and challenge organizers, with an API for easy integration of new models and datasets to keep up with the fast-changing landscape of VQA. Our tool helps test generalization capabilities of

Executive Summary

The Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations, edited by Heike Adel and Shuming Shi, showcases innovative advancements in natural language processing (NLP) technologies. Two notable papers presented at the conference include 'MiSS: An Assistant for Multi-Style Simultaneous Translation' by Zuchao Li et al., which introduces a comprehensive translation system with features such as real-time translation, multi-style translation, back-translation for quality evaluation, and grammatical error correction. Another paper, 'Automatic Construction of Enterprise Knowledge Base' by Junyi Chai et al., details a system for constructing enterprise knowledge bases from large-scale documents with minimal human intervention, leveraging deep learning and classical machine learning techniques to address challenges like data distributional shift and compliance requirements.

Key Points

  • Introduction of MiSS, a multi-style simultaneous translation system with advanced features.
  • Automatic construction of enterprise knowledge bases using deep learning and machine learning techniques.
  • Addressing practical challenges in NLP such as data distributional shift and compliance requirements.

Merits

Innovative Features

The MiSS system integrates multiple advanced features such as real-time translation, multi-style translation, and grammatical error correction, providing a comprehensive tool for users.

Automation and Efficiency

The automatic construction of enterprise knowledge bases minimizes human intervention, leveraging state-of-the-art models to extract and process information efficiently.

Demerits

Implementation Challenges

The practical deployment of such systems may face challenges related to data quality, model accuracy, and compliance with enterprise standards.

Limited Evaluation

While the papers present promising results, further validation and benchmarking against existing systems would strengthen the findings.

Expert Commentary

The Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations highlight significant advancements in NLP technologies, particularly in the realms of machine translation and knowledge management. The MiSS system represents a notable leap forward in providing a comprehensive translation experience, integrating real-time capabilities, multi-style translation, and grammatical error correction. This holistic approach not only enhances translation accuracy but also offers users greater control and flexibility. Similarly, the automatic construction of enterprise knowledge bases demonstrates the potential of combining deep learning with classical machine learning techniques to address practical challenges in enterprise settings. However, the successful implementation of these systems requires careful consideration of data quality, model accuracy, and compliance with enterprise standards. Further validation and benchmarking against existing systems would provide a more robust assessment of their effectiveness. Overall, these advancements underscore the importance of continuous innovation in NLP to meet the evolving needs of users and enterprises.

Recommendations

  • Conduct extensive benchmarking and validation of the MiSS system against existing translation tools to establish its superiority.
  • Develop comprehensive compliance frameworks to ensure the ethical and legal use of automated knowledge base construction systems in enterprise environments.

Sources

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