Developed so far, multi-document summarization has reached its bottleneck due to the lack of sufficient training data and diverse categories of documents. Text classification just makes up for these deficiencies. In this paper, we propose a novel summarization system called TCSum, which leverages plentiful text classification data to improve the performance of multi-document summarization. TCSum projects documents onto distributed representations which act as a bridge between text classification and summarization. It also utilizes the classification results to produce summaries of different styles. Extensive experiments on DUC generic multi-document summarization datasets show that, TCSum can achieve the state-of-the-art performance without using any hand-crafted features and has the capability to catch the variations of summary styles with respect to different text categories.

Math word problems provide a natural abstraction to a range of natural language understanding problems that involve reasoning about quantities, such as interpreting election results, news about casualties, and the financial section of a newspaper. Units associated with the quantities often provide information that is essential to support this reasoning. This paper proposes a principled way to capture and reason about units and shows how it can benefit an arithmetic word problem solver. This paper presents the concept of Unit Dependency Graphs (UDGs), which provides a compact representation of the dependencies between units of numbers mentioned in a given problem. Inducing the UDG alleviates the brittleness of the unit extraction system and allows for a natural way to leverage domain knowledge about unit compatibility, for word problem solving. We introduce a decomposed model for inducing UDGs with minimal additional annotations, and use it to augment the expressions used in the arithmetic word problem solver of (Roy and Roth 2015) via a constrained inference framework. We show that introduction of UDGs reduces the error of the solver by over 10 %, surpassing all existing systems for solving arithmetic word problems. In addition, it also makes the system more robust to adaptation to new vocabulary and equation forms .

Fact checking is an essential part of any investigative work. For linguistic, psychological and social reasons, it is an inherently human task. Yet, modern media make it increasingly difficult for experts to keep up with the pace at which information is produced. Hence, we believe there is value in tools to assist them in this process. Much of the effort on Web data research has been focused on coping with incompleteness and uncertainty. Comparatively, dealing with context has received less attention, although it is crucial in judging the validity of a claim. For instance, what holds true in a US state, might not in its neighbors, e.g., due to obsolete or superseded laws. In this work, we address the problem of checking the validity of claims in multiple contexts. We define a language to represent and query facts across different dimensions. The approach is non-intrusive and allows relatively easy modeling, while capturing incompleteness and uncertainty. We describe the syntax and semantics of the language. We present algorithms to demonstrate its feasibility, and we illustrate its usefulness through examples.

We propose Kont, a formal framework for comparing normative multiagent systems (nMASs) by computing tradeoffs among liveness (something good happens) and safety (nothing bad happens). Safety-focused nMASs restrict agents' actions to avoid undesired enactments. However, such restrictions hinder liveness, particularly in situations such as medical emergencies. We formalize tradeoffs using norms, and develop an approach for understanding to what extent an nMAS promotes liveness or safety. We propose patterns to guide the design of an nMAS with respect to liveness and safety, and prove their correctness. We further quantify liveness and safety using heuristic metrics for an emergency healthcare application. We show that the results of the application corroborate our theoretical development.

Math word problems provide a natural abstraction to a range of natural language understanding problems that involve reasoning about quantities, such as interpreting election results, news about casualties, and the financial section of a newspaper. Units associated with the quantities often provide information that is essential to support this reasoning. This paper proposes a principled way to capture and reason about units and shows how it can benefit an arithmetic word problem solver. This paper presents the concept of Unit Dependency Graphs (UDGs), which provides a compact representation of the dependencies between units of numbers mentioned in a given problem. Inducing the UDG alleviates the brittleness of the unit extraction system and allows for a natural way to leverage domain knowledge about unit compatibility, for word problem solving. We introduce a decomposed model for inducing UDGs with minimal additional annotations, and use it to augment the expressions used in the arithmetic word problem solver of (Roy and Roth 2015) via a constrained inference framework. We show that introduction of UDGs reduces the error of the solver by over 10 %, surpassing all existing systems for solving arithmetic word problems. In addition, it also makes the system more robust to adaptation to new vocabulary and equation forms .

Math word problems provide a natural abstraction to a range of natural language understanding problems that involve reasoning about quantities, such as interpreting election results, news about casualties, and the financial section of a newspaper. Units associated with the quantities often provide information that is essential to support this reasoning. This paper proposes a principled way to capture and reason about units and shows how it can benefit an arithmetic word problem solver. This paper presents the concept of Unit Dependency Graphs (UDGs), which provides a compact representation of the dependencies between units of numbers mentioned in a given problem. Inducing the UDG alleviates the brittleness of the unit extraction system and allows for a natural way to leverage domain knowledge about unit compatibility, for word problem solving. We introduce a decomposed model for inducing UDGs with minimal additional annotations, and use it to augment the expressions used in the arithmetic word problem solver of (Roy and Roth 2015) via a constrained inference framework. We show that introduction of UDGs reduces the error of the solver by over 10 %, surpassing all existing systems for solving arithmetic word problems. In addition, it also makes the system more robust to adaptation to new vocabulary and equation forms .

Math word problems provide a natural abstraction to a range of natural language understanding problems that involve reasoning about quantities, such as interpreting election results, news about casualties, and the financial section of a newspaper. Units associated with the quantities often provide information that is essential to support this reasoning. This paper proposes a principled way to capture and reason about units and shows how it can benefit an arithmetic word problem solver. This paper presents the concept of Unit Dependency Graphs (UDGs), which provides a compact representation of the dependencies between units of numbers mentioned in a given problem. Inducing the UDG alleviates the brittleness of the unit extraction system and allows for a natural way to leverage domain knowledge about unit compatibility, for word problem solving. We introduce a decomposed model for inducing UDGs with minimal additional annotations, and use it to augment the expressions used in the arithmetic word problem solver of (Roy and Roth 2015) via a constrained inference framework. We show that introduction of UDGs reduces the error of the solver by over 10 %, surpassing all existing systems for solving arithmetic word problems. In addition, it also makes the system more robust to adaptation to new vocabulary and equation forms .

Math word problems provide a natural abstraction to a range of natural language understanding problems that involve reasoning about quantities, such as interpreting election results, news about casualties, and the financial section of a newspaper. Units associated with the quantities often provide information that is essential to support this reasoning. This paper proposes a principled way to capture and reason about units and shows how it can benefit an arithmetic word problem solver. This paper presents the concept of Unit Dependency Graphs (UDGs), which provides a compact representation of the dependencies between units of numbers mentioned in a given problem. Inducing the UDG alleviates the brittleness of the unit extraction system and allows for a natural way to leverage domain knowledge about unit compatibility, for word problem solving. We introduce a decomposed model for inducing UDGs with minimal additional annotations, and use it to augment the expressions used in the arithmetic word problem solver of (Roy and Roth 2015) via a constrained inference framework. We show that introduction of UDGs reduces the error of the solver by over 10 %, surpassing all existing systems for solving arithmetic word problems. In addition, it also makes the system more robust to adaptation to new vocabulary and equation forms .

Math word problems provide a natural abstraction to a range of natural language understanding problems that involve reasoning about quantities, such as interpreting election results, news about casualties, and the financial section of a newspaper. Units associated with the quantities often provide information that is essential to support this reasoning. This paper proposes a principled way to capture and reason about units and shows how it can benefit an arithmetic word problem solver. This paper presents the concept of Unit Dependency Graphs (UDGs), which provides a compact representation of the dependencies between units of numbers mentioned in a given problem. Inducing the UDG alleviates the brittleness of the unit extraction system and allows for a natural way to leverage domain knowledge about unit compatibility, for word problem solving. We introduce a decomposed model for inducing UDGs with minimal additional annotations, and use it to augment the expressions used in the arithmetic word problem solver of (Roy and Roth 2015) via a constrained inference framework. We show that introduction of UDGs reduces the error of the solver by over 10 %, surpassing all existing systems for solving arithmetic word problems. In addition, it also makes the system more robust to adaptation to new vocabulary and equation forms .

We introduce a new class of mechanisms, robust mechanisms, that is an intermediary between ex-post mechanisms and Bayesian mechanisms. This new class of mechanisms allows the mechanism designer to incorporate imprecise estimates of the distribution over bidder valuations in a way that provides strong guarantees that the mechanism will perform at least as well as ex-post mechanisms, while in many cases performing better. We further extend this class to mechanisms that are with high probability incentive compatible and individually rational, ε-robust mechanisms. Using techniques from automated mechanism design and robust optimization, we provide an algorithm polynomial in the number of bidder types to design robust and ε-robust mechanisms. We show experimentally that this new class of mechanisms can significantly outperform traditional mechanism design techniques when the mechanism designer has an estimate of the distribution and the bidder’s valuation is correlated with an externally verifiable signal.