Demand for image editing has been increasing as users' desire for expression is also increasing. However, for most users, image editing tools are not easy to use since the tools require certain expertise in photo effects and have complex interfaces. Hence, users might need someone to help edit their images, but having a personal dedicated human assistant for every user is impossible to scale. For that reason, an automated assistant system for image editing is desirable. Additionally, users want more image sources for diverse image editing works, and integrating an image search functionality into the editing tool is a potential remedy for this demand. Thus, we propose a dataset of an automated Conversational Agent for Image Search and Editing (CAISE). To our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides conversational image search and editing annotations, where the agent holds a grounded conversation with users and helps them to search and edit images according to their requests. To build such a system, we first collect image search and editing conversations between pairs of annotators. The assistant-annotators are equipped with a customized image search and editing tool to address the requests from the user-annotators. The functions that the assistant-annotators conduct with the tool are recorded as executable commands, allowing the trained system to be useful for real-world application execution. We also introduce a generator-extractor baseline model for this task, which can adaptively select the source of the next token (i.e., from the vocabulary or from textual/visual contexts) for the executable command. This serves as a strong starting point while still leaving a large human-machine performance gap for useful future work. Data and code are available: https://github.com/hyounghk/CAISE.

Since the first end-to-end neural coreference resolution model was introduced, many extensions to the model have been proposed, ranging from using higher-order inference to directly optimizing evaluation metrics using reinforcement learning. Despite improving the coreference resolution performance by a large margin, these extensions add substantial extra complexity to the original model. Motivated by this observation and the recent advances in pre-trained Transformer language models, we propose a simple yet effective baseline for coreference resolution. Even though our model is a simplified version of the original neural coreference resolution model, it achieves impressive performance, outperforming all recent extended works on the public English OntoNotes benchmark. Our work provides evidence for the necessity of carefully justifying the complexity of existing or newly proposed models, as introducing a conceptual or practical simplification to an existing model can still yield competitive results.

Hwanhee Lee, Seunghyun Yoon, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Trung Bui, Joongbo Shin, Kyomin Jung. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Meryem M’hamdi, Doo Soon Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Keyphrase extraction is the task of extracting a small set of phrases that best describe a document. Most existing benchmark datasets for the task typically have limited numbers of annotated documents, making it challenging to train increasingly complex neural networks. In contrast, digital libraries store millions of scientific articles online, covering a wide range of topics. While a significant portion of these articles contain keyphrases provided by their authors, most other articles lack such kind of annotations. Therefore, to effectively utilize these large amounts of unlabeled articles, we propose a simple and efficient joint learning approach based on the idea of self-distillation. Experimental results show that our approach consistently improves the performance of baseline models for keyphrase extraction. Furthermore, our best models outperform previous methods for the task, achieving new state-of-the-art results on two public benchmarks: Inspec and SemEval-2017.

The ability to fuse sentences is highly attractive for summarization systems because it is an essential step to produce succinct abstracts. However, to date, summarizers can fail on fusing sentences. They tend to produce few summary sentences by fusion or generate incorrect fusions that lead the summary to fail to retain the original meaning. In this paper, we explore the ability of Transformers to fuse sentences and propose novel algorithms to enhance their ability to perform sentence fusion by leveraging the knowledge of points of correspondence between sentences. Through extensive experiments, we investigate the effects of different design choices on Transformer’s performance. Our findings highlight the importance of modeling points of correspondence between sentences for effective sentence fusion.

Despite the number of currently available datasets on video-question answering, there still remains a need for a dataset involving multi-step and non-factoid answers. Moreover, relying on video transcripts remains an under-explored topic. To adequately address this, we propose a new question answering task on instructional videos, because of their verbose and narrative nature. While previous studies on video question answering have focused on generating a short text as an answer, given a question and video clip, our task aims to identify a span of a video segment as an answer which contains instructional details with various granularities. This work focuses on screencast tutorial videos pertaining to an image editing program. We introduce a dataset, TutorialVQA, consisting of about 6,000 manually collected triples of (video, question, answer span). We also provide experimental results with several baseline algorithms using the video transcripts. The results indicate that the task is challenging and call for the investigation of new algorithms.

Natural Language Image Editing (NLIE) aims to use natural language instructions to edit images. Since novices are inexperienced with image editing techniques, their instructions are often ambiguous and contain high-level abstractions which require complex editing steps. Motivated by this inexperience aspect, we aim to smooth the learning curve by teaching the novices to edit images using low-level command terminologies. Towards this end, we develop a task-oriented dialogue system to investigate low-level instructions for NLIE. Our system grounds language on the level of edit operations, and suggests options for users to choose from. Though compelled to express in low-level terms, user evaluation shows that 25% of users found our system easy-to-use, resonating with our motivation. Analysis shows that users generally adapt to utilizing the proposed low-level language interface. We also identified object segmentation as the key factor to user satisfaction. Our work demonstrates advantages of low-level, direct language-action mapping approach that can be applied to other problem domains beyond image editing such as audio editing or industrial design.

In this study, we propose a novel graph neural network called propagate-selector (PS), which propagates information over sentences to understand information that cannot be inferred when considering sentences in isolation. First, we design a graph structure in which each node represents an individual sentence, and some pairs of nodes are selectively connected based on the text structure. Then, we develop an iterative attentive aggregation and a skip-combine method in which a node interacts with its neighborhood nodes to accumulate the necessary information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, we conduct experiments with the standard HotpotQA dataset. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which obtains the best performances, compared to the widely used answer-selection models that do not consider the intersentential relationship.

When writing a summary, humans tend to choose content from one or two sentences and merge them into a single summary sentence.However, the mechanisms behind the selection of one or multiple source sentences remain poorly understood.Sentence fusion assumes multi-sentence input; yet sentence selection methods only work with single sentences and not combinations of them.There is thus a crucial gap between sentence selection and fusion to support summarizing by both compressing single sentences and fusing pairs.This paper attempts to bridge the gap by ranking sentence singletons and pairs together in a unified space.Our proposed framework attempts to model human methodology by selecting either a single sentence or a pair of sentences, then compressing or fusing the sentence(s) to produce a summary sentence.We conduct extensive experiments on both single-and multidocument summarization datasets and report findings on sentence selection and abstraction.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for a sentence-level answer-selection task that is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. First, we explore the effect of additional information by adopting a pretrained language model to compute the vector representation of the input text and by applying transfer learning from a large-scale corpus. Second, we enhance the compare-aggregate model by proposing a novel latent clustering method to compute additional information within the target corpus and by changing the objective function from listwise to pointwise. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, experiments are performed with the WikiQA and TREC-QA datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which achieve state-of-the-art performance for both datasets.

Aspect extraction is a key task of fine-grained opinion mining. Although it has been studied by many researchers, it remains to be highly challenging. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised approach to make a major improvement. The approach is based on the framework of lifelong learning and is implemented with two forms of recommendations that are based on semantic similarity and aspect associations respectively. Experimental results using eight review datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, we present an approach that jointly infers the boundaries of tokens and their labels to construct dictionaries for Information Extraction. Our approach for joint-inference is based on graph propagation, and extends it in two novel ways. First, we extend the graph representation to capture ambiguities that occur during the token extraction phase. Second, we modify the labeling phase (i.e., label propagation) to utilize this new representation, allowing evidence from labeling to be used for token extraction. Our evaluation shows these extensions (and hence our approach) significantly improve the performance of the outcome dictionaries over pipeline-based approaches by preventing aggressive commitment. Our evaluation also shows that our extensions over a base graph-propagation framework improve the precision without hurting the recall.

One of the grand challenges of AI is to build systems that learn by reading. The ideal system would construct a rich knowledge base capable of automated reasoning. We have built a Learning-by-Reading system and this paper focuses on one aspect of it: the task of integrating together snippets of knowledge drawn from multiple texts to build a single coherent knowledge base. Our evaluation shows that our approach to the knowledge integration is both feasible and promising.