Extractive and Abstractive Explanations for Fact-Checking and Evaluation of News

In this paper, we explore the construction of natural language explanations for news claims, with the goal of assisting fact-checking and news evaluation applications. We experiment with two methods: (1) an extractive method based on Biased TextRank -- a resource-effective unsupervised graph-based algorithm for content extraction; and (2) an abstractive method based on the GPT-2 language model. We perform comparative evaluations on two misinformation datasets in the political and health news domains, and find that the extractive method shows the most promise.

Fill-in-the-blank as a Challenging Video Understanding Evaluation Framework

Work to date on language-informed video understanding has primarily addressed two tasks: (1) video question answering using multiple-choice questions, where models perform relatively well because they exploit the fact that candidate answers are readily available; and (2) video captioning, which relies on an open-ended evaluation framework that is often inaccurate because system answers may be perceived as incorrect if they differ in form from the ground truth. In this paper, we propose fill-in-the-blanks as a video understanding evaluation framework that addresses these previous evaluation drawbacks, and more closely reflects real-life settings where no multiple choices are given. The task tests a system understanding of a video by requiring the model to predict a masked noun phrase in the caption of the video, given the video and the surrounding text. We introduce a novel dataset consisting of 28,000 videos and fill-in-the-blank tests. We show that both a multimodal model and a strong language model have a large gap with human performance, thus suggesting that the task is more challenging than current video understanding benchmarks.

Chord Embeddings: Analyzing What They Capture and Their Role for Next Chord Prediction and Artist Attribute Prediction

Natural language processing methods have been applied in a variety of music studies, drawing the connection between music and language. In this paper, we expand those approaches by investigating \textit{chord embeddings}, which we apply in two case studies to address two key questions: (1) what musical information do chord embeddings capture?; and (2) how might musical applications benefit from them? In our analysis, we show that they capture similarities between chords that adhere to important relationships described in music theory. In the first case study, we demonstrate that using chord embeddings in a next chord prediction task yields predictions that more closely match those by experienced musicians. In the second case study, we show the potential benefits of using the representations in tasks related to musical stylometrics.

White Paper: Challenges and Considerations for the Creation of a Large Labelled Repository of Online Videos with Questionable Content

This white paper presents a summary of the discussions regarding critical considerations to develop an extensive repository of online videos annotated with labels indicating questionable content. The main discussion points include: 1) the type of appropriate labels that will result in a valuable repository for the larger AI community; 2) how to design the collection and annotation process, as well as the distribution of the corpus to maximize its potential impact; and, 3) what actions we can take to reduce risk of trauma to annotators.

Recognizing Emotion Cause in Conversations

Recognizing the cause behind emotions in text is a fundamental yet under-explored area of research in NLP. Advances in this area hold the potential to improve interpretability and performance in affect-based models. Identifying emotion causes at the utterance level in conversations is particularly challenging due to the intermingling dynamic among the interlocutors. To this end, we introduce the task of recognizing emotion cause in conversations with an accompanying dataset named RECCON. Furthermore, we define different cause types based on the source of the causes and establish strong transformer-based baselines to address two different sub-tasks of RECCON: 1) Causal Span Extraction and 2) Causal Emotion Entailment. The dataset is available at https://github.com/declare-lab/RECCON.

Improving Zero Shot Learning Baselines with Commonsense Knowledge

Zero shot learning -- the problem of training and testing on a completely disjoint set of classes -- relies greatly on its ability to transfer knowledge from train classes to test classes. Traditionally semantic embeddings consisting of human defined attributes (HA) or distributed word embeddings (DWE) are used to facilitate this transfer by improving the association between visual and semantic embeddings. In this paper, we take advantage of explicit relations between nodes defined in ConceptNet, a commonsense knowledge graph, to generate commonsense embeddings of the class labels by using a graph convolution network-based autoencoder. Our experiments performed on three standard benchmark datasets surpass the strong baselines when we fuse our commonsense embeddings with existing semantic embeddings i.e. HA and DWE.

Exploring the Value of Personalized Word Embeddings

In this paper, we introduce personalized word embeddings, and examine their value for language modeling. We compare the performance of our proposed prediction model when using personalized versus generic word representations, and study how these representations can be leveraged for improved performance. We provide insight into what types of words can be more accurately predicted when building personalized models. Our results show that a subset of words belonging to specific psycholinguistic categories tend to vary more in their representations across users and that combining generic and personalized word embeddings yields the best performance, with a 4.7% relative reduction in perplexity. Additionally, we show that a language model using personalized word embeddings can be effectively used for authorship attribution.

Biased TextRank: Unsupervised Graph-Based Content Extraction

We introduce Biased TextRank, a graph-based content extraction method inspired by the popular TextRank algorithm that ranks text spans according to their importance for language processing tasks and according to their relevance to an input "focus." Biased TextRank enables focused content extraction for text by modifying the random restarts in the execution of TextRank. The random restart probabilities are assigned based on the relevance of the graph nodes to the focus of the task. We present two applications of Biased TextRank: focused summarization and explanation extraction, and show that our algorithm leads to improved performance on two different datasets by significant ROUGE-N score margins. Much like its predecessor, Biased TextRank is unsupervised, easy to implement and orders of magnitude faster and lighter than current state-of-the-art Natural Language Processing methods for similar tasks.

Deep Learning for Text Attribute Transfer: A Survey

Driven by the increasingly larger deep learning models, neural language generation (NLG) has enjoyed unprecedentedly improvement and is now able to generate a diversity of human-like texts on demand, granting itself the capability of serving as a human writing assistant. Text attribute transfer is one of the most important NLG tasks, which aims to control certain attributes that people may expect the texts to possess, such as sentiment, tense, emotion, political position, etc. It has a long history in Natural Language Processing but recently gains much more attention thanks to the promising performance brought by deep learning models. In this article, we present a systematic survey on these works for neural text attribute transfer. We collect all related academic works since the first appearance in 2017. We then select, summarize, discuss, and analyze around 65 representative works in a comprehensive way. Overall, we have covered the task formulation, existing datasets and metrics for model development and evaluation, and all methods developed over the last several years. We reveal that existing methods are indeed based on a combination of several loss functions with each of which serving a certain goal. Such a unique perspective we provide could shed light on the design of new methods. We conclude our survey with a discussion on open issues that need to be resolved for better future development.