Natural Language Processing Research Community Research Articles

Reversal of the Word Sense Disambiguation Task Using a Deep Learning Model

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) remains a persistent challenge in the natural language processing (NLP) community. While various NLP packages exist, the Lesk algorithm in the NLTK library demonstrates suboptimal accuracy. In this research article, we propose an innovative methodology and an open-source framework that effectively addresses the challenges of WSD by optimizing memory usage without compromising accuracy. Our system seamlessly integrates WSD into NLP tasks, offering functionality similar to that provided by the NLTK library. However, we go beyond the existing approaches by introducing a novel idea related to WSD. Specifically, we leverage deep neural networks and consider the language patterns learned by these models as the new gold standard. This approach suggests modifying existing semantic dictionaries, such as WordNet, to align with these patterns. Empirical validation through a series of experiments confirmed the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving state-of-the-art performance across multiple WSD datasets. Notably, our system does not require the installation of additional software beyond the well-known Python libraries. The classification model is saved in a readily usable text format, and the entire framework (model and data) is publicly available on GitHub for the NLP research community.

Enabling Natural Language Processing and AI Research in Low-Resource Languages: Development and Description of an Assamese UPoS Tagged Dataset

This paper describes in detail the Universal Parts of Speech (UPoS) tagged dataset for the Assamese language. PoS tagged dataset in a language is crucial for experimenting and creating resources for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI research. With the growing usage of Universal Dependency standards, tagged dataset with Universal PoS tags are becoming very much essential for contemporary experiments in the NLP community. NLP research in Assamese, and Indo-Aryan language, is relatively new, and the language is considered a Low Resource language. The dataset of UPoS tagged Assamese text is created with an aim of contributing towards enriching this low resource language for NLP and AI tasks. The size of the dataset is 283506 tokens of Assamese vocabulary, against total 20280 sentences, tagged with 17 standard UPoS tags of core lexical categories. The raw data are taken from an open-source corpus originally tagged with BIS tagset. The original size of 453457 tokens against 29504 sentences, after subjected to data filtering, was reduced to this clean resource of 283506 tokens. Lexical categories mapping is done with linguistic expertise, from BIS to UPoS tagsets. Mapped pattern was used for a first-level conversion of BIS tags to UPoS tags. Linguistic validation is also performed with linguistic experts and inter annotator agreement/disagreements were recorded. Second level validation resulted in deciding on the agreement, producing the final version of the dataset. This Assamese UPoS tagged dataset is the first of its kind with UPoS annotations and shall serve a wider Assamese NLP research community for model training using Machine Learning/Deep Learning Techniques.

Exploring deep learning approaches for video captioning: A comprehensive review

While humans can easily describe visual data at varying levels of detail, the same task presents a significant challenge for machines. This challenge becomes even more complex when dealing with video data. The process of understanding a video and generating descriptive text for it is known as video captioning. Video captioning requires not only understanding the visual content but also producing human-like descriptions that accurately capture its semantics. Achieving this level of understanding requires the collaborative efforts of both the computer vision and natural language processing research communities. The captions produced through video captioning serve as valuable resources that can be further leveraged for various applications such as video search, accessibility for visually impaired people, and human-robot interaction. Deep learning strategies have emerged as powerful tools in addressing the complexities of video captioning. By leveraging large scale annotated video caption datasets and sophisticated neural network architectures, deep learning approaches have made significant advances in this challenging task. In the existing literature, numerous techniques, benchmark datasets, and evaluation metrics have been developed, emphasizing the necessity for a comprehensive examination to concentrate research efforts in this rapidly evolving field. This paper provides a survey of deep learning based methods for video captioning, highlighting their key components, challenges, and recent advancements.

Detecting evidence of invasive fungal infections in cytology and histopathology reports enriched with concept-level annotations

Invasive fungal infections (IFIs) are particularly dangerous to high-risk patients with haematological malignancies and are responsible for excessive mortality and delays in cancer therapy. Surveillance of IFI in clinical settings offers an opportunity to identify potential risk factors and evaluate new therapeutic strategies. However, manual surveillance is both time- and resource-intensive. As part of a broader project aimed to develop a system for automated IFI surveillance by leveraging electronic medical records, we present our approach to detecting evidence of IFI in the key diagnostic domain of histopathology. Using natural language processing (NLP), we analysed cytology and histopathology reports to identify IFI-positive reports. We compared a conventional bag-of-words classification model to a method that relies on concept-level annotations. Although the investment to prepare data supporting concept annotations is substantial, extracting targeted information specific to IFI as a pre-processing step increased the performance of the classifier from the PR AUC of 0.84 to 0.92 and enabled model interpretability. We have made publicly available the annotated dataset of 283 reports, the Cytology and Histopathology IFI Reports corpus (CHIFIR), to allow the clinical NLP research community to further build on our results.

Sarcasm detection using news headlines dataset

Sarcasm has been an elusive concept for humans. Due to interesting linguistic properties, sarcasm detection has gained traction of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) research community in the past few years. However, the task of predicting sarcasm in a text remains a difficult one for machines as well, and there are limited insights into what makes a sentence sarcastic. Past studies in sarcasm detection either use large scale datasets collected using tag-based supervision or small scale manually annotated datasets. The former category of datasets are noisy in terms of labels and language, whereas the latter category of datasets do not have enough instances to train deep learning models reliably despite having high-quality labels. To overcome these shortcomings, we introduce a high-quality and relatively larger-scale dataset which is a collection of news headlines from a sarcastic news website and a real news website. We describe the unique aspects of our dataset and compare its various characteristics with other benchmark datasets in sarcasm detection domain. Furthermore, we produce insights into what constitute as sarcasm in a text using a Hybrid Neural Network architecture. First released in 2019, we dedicate a section on how the NLP research community has extensively relied upon our contributions to push the state of the art further in the sarcasm detection domain. Lastly, we make the dataset as well as framework implementation publicly available to facilitate continued research in this domain.

VieCap4H Challenge 2021: A transformer-based method for Healthcare Image Captioning in Vietnamese

The automatic image caption generation is attractive to both Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing research community because it lies in the gap between these two fields. Within the vieCap4H contest organized by VLSP 2021, we participate and present a Transformer-based solution for image captioning in the healthcare domain. In detail, we use grid features as visual presentation and pre-training a BERT-based language model from PhoBERT-base pre-trained model to obtain language presentation used in the Adaptive Decoder module in the RSTNet model. Besides, we indicate a suitable schedule with the self-critical training sequence (SCST) technique to achieve the best results. Through experiments, we achieve an average of 30.3% BLEU score on the public-test round and 28.9% on the private-test round, which ranks 3rd and 4th, respectively. Source code is available at https://github.com/caodoanh2001/uit-vlsp-viecap4h-solution.

BnVec: Towards the Development of Word Embedding for Bangla Language Processing

Progression in machine learning and statistical inference are facilitating the advancement of domains like computer vision, natural language processing (NLP), automation & robotics, and so on. Among the different persuasive improvements in NLP, word embedding is one of the most used and revolutionary techniques. In this paper, we manifest an open-source library for Bangla word extraction systems named BnVec which expects to furnish the Bangla NLP research community by the utilization of some incredible word embedding techniques. The BnVec is splitted up into two parts, the first one is the Bangla suitable defined class to embed words with access to the six most popular word embedding schemes (CountVectorizer, TF-IDF, Hash Vectorizer, Word2vec, fastText, and Glove). The other one is based on the pre-trained distributed word embedding system of Word2vec, fastText, and GloVe. The pre-trained models have been built by collecting content from the newspaper, social media, and Bangla wiki articles. The total number of tokens used to build the models exceeds 395,289,960. The paper additionally depicts the performance of these models by various hyper-parameter tuning and then analyzes the results.

MBA: A Multimodal Bilinear Attention Model with Residual Connection for Abstractive Multimodal Summarization

The combination of vision and natural language modalities has become an important topic in both computer vision and natural language processing research communities. Multimodal summarization has received unprecedented attention with the rapid growth of multimodal information. This paper proposes MBA which consists of pre-trained feature extractors, text encoder, image encoder, multimodal bilinear attention fusion module, and summary decoder to complete abstractive multimodal summarization task. A residual network is added to the model to enhance the textual modality information and alleviate the modality-bias problem. Experiments show that the model is better than the baseline models and performs better than text summarization methods that ignore visual modality.

DFM: A parameter-shared deep fused model for knowledge base question answering

Currently, Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) is an important research topic in the fields of information retrieval (IR) and natural language processing (NLP). The most common questions asked on the Web are simple questions, which can be answered by a single relational fact in a knowledge base (KB). However, answering simple questions automatically remains a challenging task in the IR and NLP research communities. Based on a review of various studies and a detailed analysis, we surmise that these challenges are primarily related to the following concerns: (1) how to effectively access a large-scale KB; and (2) how to effectively reduce the gap between NL questions and the structured semantics in a KB. Most previous studies have considered these as separate and independent subtasks, subject detection and predicate matching. Here, we propose a deep fused model that combines subject detection and predicate matching under a unified framework. Specifically, we employ a subject detection model to recognize the subject entity in a question, and a multilevel semantic model to learn the semantic representations for questions and predicates. These models share parameters, and can be trained jointly. We evaluated the proposed method on both English and Chinese KBQA datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems when applied to both datasets.

Deep Learning for Arabic Error Detection and Correction

Research on tools for automating the proofreading of Arabic text has received much attention in recent years. There is an increasing demand for applications that can detect and correct Arabic spelling and grammatical errors to improve the quality of Arabic text content and application input. Our review of previous studies indicates that few Arabic spell-checking research efforts appropriately address the detection and correction of ill-formed words that do not conform to the Arabic morphology system. Even fewer systems address the detection and correction of erroneous well-formed Arabic words that are either contextually or semantically inconsistent within the text. We introduce an approach that investigates employing deep neural network technology for error detection in Arabic text. We have developed a systematic framework for spelling and grammar error detection, as well as correction at the word level, based on a bidirectional long short-term memory mechanism and word embedding, in which a polynomial network classifier is at the top of the system. To get conclusive results, we have developed the most significant gold standard annotated corpus to date, containing 15 million fully inflected Arabic words. The data were collected from diverse text sources and genres, in which every erroneous and ill-formed word has been annotated, validated, and manually revised by Arabic specialists. This valuable asset is available for the Arabic natural language processing research community. The experimental results confirm that our proposed system significantly outperforms the performance of Microsoft Word 2013 and Open Office Ayaspell 3.4, which have been used in the literature for evaluating similar research.

Multimodal Intelligence: Representation Learning, Information Fusion, and Applications

Deep learning methods have revolutionized speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing since 2010. Each of these tasks involves a single modality in their input signals. However, many applications in the artificial intelligence field involve multiple modalities. Therefore, it is of broad interest to study the more difficult and complex problem of modeling and learning across multiple modalities. In this paper, we provide a technical review of available models and learning methods for multimodal intelligence. The main focus of this review is the combination of vision and natural language modalities, which has become an important topic in both the computer vision and natural language processing research communities. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of recent works on multimodal deep learning from three perspectives: learning multimodal representations, fusing multimodal signals at various levels, and multimodal applications. Regarding multimodal representation learning, we review the key concepts of embedding, which unify multimodal signals into a single vector space and thereby enable cross-modality signal processing. We also review the properties of many types of embeddings that are constructed and learned for general downstream tasks. Regarding multimodal fusion, this review focuses on special architectures for the integration of representations of unimodal signals for a particular task. Regarding applications, selected areas of a broad interest in the current literature are covered, including image-to-text caption generation, text-to-image generation, and visual question answering. We believe that this review will facilitate future studies in the emerging field of multimodal intelligence for related communities.

Recall What You See Continually Using GridLSTM in Image Captioning

The goal of image captioning is to automatically describe an image with a sentence, and the task has attracted research attention from both the computer vision and natural-language processing research communities. The existing encoder–decoder model and its variants, which are the most popular models for image captioning, use the image features in three ways: first, they inject the encoded image features into the decoder only once at the initial step, which does not enable the rich image content to be explored sufficiently while gradually generating a text caption; second, they concatenate the encoded image features with text as extra inputs at every step, which introduces unnecessary noise; and, third, they using an attention mechanism, which increases the computational complexity due to the introduction of extra neural nets to identify the attention regions. Different from the existing methods, in this paper, we propose a novel network, Recall Network, for generating captions that are consistent with the images. The recall network selectively involves the visual features by using a GridLSTM and, thus, is able to recall image contents while generating each word. By importing the visual information as the latent memory along the depth dimension LSTM, the decoder is able to admit the visual features dynamically through the inherent LSTM structure without adding any extra neural nets or parameters. The Recall Network efficiently prevents the decoder from deviating from the original image content. To verify the efficiency of our model, we conducted exhaustive experiments on full and dense image captioning. The experimental results clearly demonstrate that our recall network outperforms the conventional encoder–decoder model by a large margin and that it performs comparably to the state-of-the-art methods.

Using clinical Natural Language Processing for health outcomes research: Overview and actionable suggestions for future advances.

The importance of incorporating Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods in clinical informatics research has been increasingly recognized over the past years, and has led to transformative advances.Typically, clinical NLP systems are developed and evaluated on word, sentence, or document level annotations that model specific attributes and features, such as document content (e.g., patient status, or report type), document section types (e.g., current medications, past medical history, or discharge summary), named entities and concepts (e.g., diagnoses, symptoms, or treatments) or semantic attributes (e.g., negation, severity, or temporality).From a clinical perspective, on the other hand, research studies are typically modelled and evaluated on a patient- or population-level, such as predicting how a patient group might respond to specific treatments or patient monitoring over time. While some NLP tasks consider predictions at the individual or group user level, these tasks still constitute a minority. Owing to the discrepancy between scientific objectives of each field, and because of differences in methodological evaluation priorities, there is no clear alignment between these evaluation approaches.Here we provide a broad summary and outline of the challenging issues involved in defining appropriate intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods for NLP research that is to be used for clinical outcomes research, and vice versa. A particular focus is placed on mental health research, an area still relatively understudied by the clinical NLP research community, but where NLP methods are of notable relevance. Recent advances in clinical NLP method development have been significant, but we propose more emphasis needs to be placed on rigorous evaluation for the field to advance further. To enable this, we provide actionable suggestions, including a minimal protocol that could be used when reporting clinical NLP method development and its evaluation.

AraVec: A set of Arabic Word Embedding Models for use in Arabic NLP

Advancements in neural networks have led to developments in fields like computer vision, speech recognition and natural language processing (NLP). One of the most influential recent developments in NLP is the use of word embeddings, where words are represented as vectors in a continuous space, capturing many syntactic and semantic relations among them. AraVec is a pre-trained distributed word representation (word embedding) open source project which aims to provide the Arabic NLP research community with free to use and powerful word embedding models. The first version of AraVec provides six different word embedding models built on top of three different Arabic content domains; Tweets, World Wide Web pages and Wikipedia Arabic articles. The total number of tokens used to build the models amounts to more than 3,300,000,000. This paper describes the resources used for building the models, the employed data cleaning techniques, the carried out preprocessing step, as well as the details of the employed word embedding creation techniques.

Bi-view semi-supervised active learning for cross-lingual sentiment classification

Recently, sentiment classification has received considerable attention within the natural language processing research community. However, since most recent works regarding sentiment classification have been done in the English language, there are accordingly not enough sentiment resources in other languages. Manual construction of reliable sentiment resources is a very difficult and time-consuming task. Cross-lingual sentiment classification aims to utilize annotated sentiment resources in one language (typically English) for sentiment classification of text documents in another language. Most existing research works rely on automatic machine translation services to directly project information from one language to another. However, different term distribution between original and translated text documents and translation errors are two main problems faced in the case of using only machine translation. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel learning model based on active learning and semi-supervised co-training to incorporate unlabelled data from the target language into the learning process in a bi-view framework. This model attempts to enrich training data by adding the most confident automatically-labelled examples, as well as a few of the most informative manually-labelled examples from unlabelled data in an iterative process. Further, in this model, we consider the density of unlabelled data so as to select more representative unlabelled examples in order to avoid outlier selection in active learning. The proposed model was applied to book review datasets in three different languages. Experiments showed that our model can effectively improve the cross-lingual sentiment classification performance and reduce labelling efforts in comparison with some baseline methods.

Portuguese text generation using factored language models

Abstract As in many other natural language processing (NLP) fields, the use of statistical methods is now part of mainstream natural language generation (NLG). In the development of systems of this kind, however, there is the issue of data sparseness, a problem that is particularly evident in the case of morphologically-rich languages such as Portuguese. This work presents a shallow surface realisation system that makes use of factored language models (FLMs) of Portuguese to overcome some of these difficulties. The system combines FLMs trained on a large corpus with a number of NLP resources that have been made publicly available by the Brazilian NLP research community in recent years, such as corpora, dictionaries, thesauri and others. Our FLM-based approach to surface realisation has been successfully applied to the generation of Brazilian newspapers headlines, and the results are shown to outperform a number of statistical and non-statistical baseline systems alike.