A Neural Approach to Irony Generation

Ironies can not only express stronger emotions but also show a sense of humor. With the development of social media, ironies are widely used in public. Although many prior research studies have been conducted in irony detection, few studies focus on irony generation. The main challenges for irony generation are the lack of large-scale irony dataset and difficulties in modeling the ironic pattern. In this work, we first systematically define irony generation based on style transfer task. To address the lack of data, we make use of twitter and build a large-scale dataset. We also design a combination of rewards for reinforcement learning to control the generation of ironic sentences. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in terms of irony accuracy, sentiment preservation, and content preservation.

Towards Open-Domain Named Entity Recognition via Neural Correction Models

Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays an important role in a wide range of natural language processing tasks, such as relation extraction, question answering, etc. However, previous studies on NER are limited to a particular genre, using small manually-annotated or large but low-quality datasets. In this work, we propose a semi-supervised annotation framework to make full use of abstracts from Wikipedia and obtain a large and high-quality dataset called AnchorNER. We assume anchored strings in abstracts are named entities and annotate them with entity types mentioned in DBpedia. To improve the coverage, we design a neural correction model trained with a human-annotated NER dataset, DocRED, to correct the false-negative entity labels, and then train a BERT model with the corrected dataset. We evaluate our trained model on six NER datasets and our experimental results show that we have obtained state-of-the-art open-domain performances --- on top of the strong baselines BERT-base and BERT-large, we achieve relative improvements of 4.66% and 3.07% respectively.