In this work, we focus on the task of open-type relation argument extraction (ORAE): given a corpus, a query entity Q, and a knowledge base relation (e.g., “Q authored notable work with title X”), the model has to extract an argument of non-standard entity type (entities that cannot be extracted by a standard named entity tagger, for example, X: the title of a book or a work of art) from the corpus. We develop and compare a wide range of neural models for this task yielding large improvements over a strong baseline obtained with a neural question answering system. The impact of different sentence encoding architectures and answer extraction methods is systematically compared. An encoder based on gated recurrent units combined with a conditional random fields tagger yields the best results. We release a data set to train and evaluate ORAE, based on Wikidata and obtained by distant supervision.

Unlike English and other Western languages, many Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not delimit words by space. Word segmentation and new word detection are therefore key steps in processing these languages. Chinese word segmentation can be considered as a part-of-speech (POS)-tagging problem. We can segment corpus by assigning a label for each character which indicates the position of the character in a word (e.g., “B” for word beginning, and “E” for the end of the word, etc.). Chinese word segmentation seems to be well studied. Machine learning models such as conditional random field (CRF) and bi-directional long short-term memory (LSTM) have shown outstanding performances on this task. However, the segmentation accuracies drop significantly when applying the same approaches to out-domain cases, in which high-quality in-domain training data are not available. An example of out-domain applications is the new word detection in Chinese microblogs for which the availability of high-quality corpus is limited. In this paper, we focus on out-domain Chinese new word detection. We first design a new method Edge Likelihood (EL) for Chinese word boundary detection. Then we propose a domain-independent Chinese new word detector (DICND); each Chinese character is represented as a low-dimensional vector in the proposed framework, and segmentation-related features of the character are used as the values in the vector.

Irony and sarcasm are two complex linguistic phenomena that are widely used in everyday language and especially over the social media, but they represent two serious issues for automated text understanding. Many labeled corpora have been extracted from several sources to accomplish this task, and it seems that sarcasm is conveyed in different ways for different domains. Nonetheless, very little work has been done for comparing different methods among the available corpora. Furthermore, usually, each author collects and uses their own datasets to evaluate his own method. In this paper, we show that sarcasm detection can be tackled by applying classical machine-learning algorithms to input texts sub-symbolically represented in a Latent Semantic space. The main consequence is that our studies establish both reference datasets and baselines for the sarcasm detection problem that could serve the scientific community to test newly proposed methods.

Nowadays, there is an increasing amount of digital data. In the case of the Web, daily, a vast collection of data is generated, whose contents are heterogeneous. A significant portion of this data is available in a natural language format. Open Information Extraction (Open IE) enables the extraction of facts from large quantities of texts written in natural language. In this work, we propose an Open IE method to extract facts from texts written in Portuguese. We developed two new rules that generalize the inference by transitivity and by symmetry. Consequently, this approach increases the number of implicit facts in a sentence. Our novel symmetric inference approach is based on a list of symmetric features. Our results confirmed that our method outstands close works both in precision and number of valid extractions. Considering the number of minimal facts, our approach is equivalent to the most relevant methods in the literature.

This paper presents a study about methods for normalization of historical texts. The aim of these methods is learning relations between historical and contemporary word forms. We have compiled training and test corpora for different languages and scenarios, and we have tried to read the results related to the features of the corpora and languages. Our proposed method, based on weighted finite-state transducers, is compared to previously published ones. Our method learns to map phonological changes using a noisy channel model; it is a simple solution that can use a limited amount of supervision in order to achieve adequate performance. The compiled corpora are ready to be used for other researchers in order to compare results. Concerning the amount of supervision for the task, we investigate how the size of training corpus affects the results and identify some interesting factors to anticipate the difficulty of the task.

General Adversarial Networks are hot. Given Murphy’s Law, it is prudent to be paranoid. Best not to design for the average case. There is a long tradition of designing for the hundred-year flood (and five 9s reliability). What is good enough? Historically, the market hasn’t been willing to pay for five 9s. Hard to justify upfront costs for future benefits that will only payoff under unlikely scenarios, and might not work when needed. If the market isn’t willing to pay for five 9s, can we afford to design for the worst case?