Question Generation (QG) is fundamentally a simple syntactic transformation; however, many aspects of semantics influence what questions are good to form. We implement this observation by developing Syn-QG, a set of transparent syntactic rules leveraging universal dependencies, shallow semantic parsing, lexical resources, and custom rules which transform declarative sentences into question-answer pairs. We utilize PropBank argument descriptions and VerbNet state predicates to incorporate shallow semantic content, which helps generate questions of a descriptive nature and produce inferential and semantically richer questions than existing systems. In order to improve syntactic fluency and eliminate grammatically incorrect questions, we employ back-translation over the output of these syntactic rules. A set of crowd-sourced evaluations shows that our system can generate a larger number of highly grammatical and relevant questions than previous QG systems and that back-translation drastically improves grammaticality at a slight cost of generating irrelevant questions.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the area of research in Artificial Intelligence focused on processing and using Text and Speech data to create smart machines and create insights. One of nowadays most interesting NLP application is creating machines able to discuss with humans about complex topics. IBM Project Debater represents so far one of the most successful approaches in this area. All of these preprocessing techniques can be easily applied to different types of texts using standard Python NLP libraries such as NLTK and Spacy. Additionally, in order to extrapolate the language syntax and structure of our text, we can make use of techniques such as Parts of Speech (POS) Tagging and Shallow Parsing (Figure 1).

The paper presents the IWCS 2019 shared task on semantic parsing where the goal is to produce Discourse Representation Structures (DRSs) for English sentences. DRSs originate from Discourse Representation Theory and represent scoped meaning representations that capture the semantics of negation, modals, quantification, and presupposition triggers. Additionally, concepts and event-participants in DRSs are described with WordNet synsets and the thematic roles from VerbNet. To measure similarity between two DRSs, they are represented in a clausal form, i.e. as a set of tuples. Participant systems were expected to produce DRSs in this clausal form. Taking into account the rich lexical information, explicit scope marking, a high number of shared variables among clauses, and highly-constrained format of valid DRSs, all these makes the DRS parsing a challenging NLP task. The results of the shared task displayed improvements over the existing state-of-the-art parser.

Multi-hop knowledge based question answering (KBQA) is a complex task for natural language understanding. Many KBQA approaches have been proposed in recent years, and most of them are trained based on labeled reasoning path. This hinders the system's performance as many correct reasoning paths are not labeled as ground truth, and thus they cannot be learned. In this paper, we introduce an end-to-end KBQA system which can leverage multiple reasoning paths' information and only requires labeled answer as supervision. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets containing both single-hop simple questions as well as muti-hop complex questions, including WebQuestionSP (WQSP), ComplexWebQuestion-1.1 (CWQ), and PathQuestion-Large (PQL), and demonstrate strong performance.

This document aims to track the progress in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and give an overview of the state-of-the-art (SOTA) across the most common NLP tasks and their corresponding datasets. It aims to cover both traditional and core NLP tasks such as dependency parsing and part-of-speech tagging as well as more recent ones such as reading comprehension and natural language inference. The main objective is to provide the reader with a quick overview of benchmark datasets and the state-of-the-art for their task of interest, which serves as a stepping stone for further research. To this end, if there is a place where results for a task are already published and regularly maintained, such as a public leaderboard, the reader will be pointed there. If you want to find this document again in the future, just go to nlpprogress.com

This paper presents new state-of-the-art models for three tasks, part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, and semantic parsing, using the cutting-edge contextualized embedding framework known as BERT. For each task, we first replicate and simplify the current state-of-the-art approach to enhance its model efficiency. We then evaluate our simplified approaches on those three tasks using token embeddings generated by BERT. 12 datasets in both English and Chinese are used for our experiments. The BERT models outperform the previously best-performing models by 2.5% on average (7.5% for the most significant case). All models and source codes are available in public so that researchers can improve upon and utilize them to establish strong baselines for the next decade.

Multilingual pre-trained models could leverage the training data from a rich source language (such as English) to improve performance on low resource languages. However, the transfer quality for multilingual Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) is significantly worse than sentence classification tasks mainly due to the requirement of MRC to detect the word level answer boundary. In this paper, we propose two auxiliary tasks in the fine-tuning stage to create additional phrase boundary supervision: (1) A mixed MRC task, which translates the question or passage to other languages and builds cross-lingual question-passage pairs; (2) A language-agnostic knowledge masking task by leveraging knowledge phrases mined from web. Besides, extensive experiments on two cross-lingual MRC datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

It's great to see more research and more datasets on complex QA and reasoning tasks. Whereas last year we saw a surge of multi-hop reading comprehension datasets (e.g., HotpotQA), this year at ICLR there is a strong line-up of papers dedicated to studying compositionality and logical complexity: and here KGs are of big help! Keysers et al study how to measure compositional generalization of QA models, i.e., when train and test splits operate on the same set of entities (broadly, logical atoms), but the composition of such atoms is different. The authors design a new large KGQA dataset CFQ (Compositional Freebase Questions) comprised of about 240K questions of 35K SPARQL query patterns. Several fascinating points 1) the questions are annotated with EL Description Logic (yes, those were the times around 2005 when DL meant mostly Description Logic, not Deep Learning); 2) as the dataset is positioned towards semantic parsing, all questions already have linked Freebase IDs (URIs), so you don't need to plug in your favourite Entity Linking system (like ElasticSearch).

Despite the widely successful applications, bootstrapping and fine-tuning semantic parsers are still a tedious process with challenges such as costly data annotation and privacy risks. In this paper, we suggest an alternative, human-in-the-loop methodology for learning semantic parsers directly from users. A semantic parser should be introspective of its uncertainties and prompt for user demonstration when uncertain. In doing so it also gets to imitate the user behavior and continue improving itself autonomously with the hope that eventually it may become as good as the user in interpreting their questions. To combat the sparsity of demonstration, we propose a novel annotation-efficient imitation learning algorithm, which iteratively collects new datasets by mixing demonstrated states and confident predictions and re-trains the semantic parser in a Dataset Aggregation fashion (Ross et al., 2011). We provide a theoretical analysis of its cost bound and also empirically demonstrate its promising performance on the text-to-SQL problem.

Citation parsing, particularly with deep neural networks, suffers from a lack of training data as available datasets typically contain only a few thousand training instances. Manually labelling citation strings is very time-consuming, hence synthetically created training data could be a solution. However, as of now, it is unknown if synthetically created reference-strings are suitable to train machine learning algorithms for citation parsing. To find out, we train Grobid, which uses Conditional Random Fields, with a) human-labelled reference strings from 'real' bibliographies and b) synthetically created reference strings from the GIANT dataset. We find that both synthetic and organic reference strings are equally suited for training Grobid (F1 = 0.74). We additionally find that retraining Grobid has a notable impact on its performance, for both synthetic and real data (+30% in F1). Having as many types of labelled fields as possible during training also improves effectiveness, even if these fields are not available in the evaluation data (+13.5% F1). We conclude that synthetic data is suitable for training (deep) citation parsing models. We further suggest that in future evaluations of reference parsers both evaluation data similar and dissimilar to the training data should be used for more meaningful evaluations.