Giannis Bekoulis


2021

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Understanding the Impact of Evidence-Aware Sentence Selection for Fact Checking
Giannis Bekoulis | Christina Papagiannopoulou | Nikos Deligiannis
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on NLP for Internet Freedom: Censorship, Disinformation, and Propaganda

Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) is a recently introduced task that consists of the following subtasks (i) document retrieval, (ii) sentence retrieval, and (iii) claim verification. In this work, we focus on the subtask of sentence retrieval. Specifically, we propose an evidence-aware transformer-based model that outperforms all other models in terms of FEVER score by using a subset of training instances. In addition, we conduct a large experimental study to get a better understanding of the problem, while we summarize our findings by presenting future research challenges.

2020

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Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer with Meta Learning
Farhad Nooralahzadeh | Giannis Bekoulis | Johannes Bjerva | Isabelle Augenstein
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Learning what to share between tasks has become a topic of great importance, as strategic sharing of knowledge has been shown to improve downstream task performance. This is particularly important for multilingual applications, as most languages in the world are under-resourced. Here, we consider the setting of training models on multiple different languages at the same time, when little or no data is available for languages other than English. We show that this challenging setup can be approached using meta-learning: in addition to training a source language model, another model learns to select which training instances are the most beneficial to the first. We experiment using standard supervised, zero-shot cross-lingual, as well as few-shot cross-lingual settings for different natural language understanding tasks (natural language inference, question answering). Our extensive experimental setup demonstrates the consistent effectiveness of meta-learning for a total of 15 languages. We improve upon the state-of-the-art for zero-shot and few-shot NLI (on MultiNLI and XNLI) and QA (on the MLQA dataset). A comprehensive error analysis indicates that the correlation of typological features between languages can partly explain when parameter sharing learned via meta-learning is beneficial.

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imec-ETRO-VUB at W-NUT 2020 Shared Task-3: A multilabel BERT-based system for predicting COVID-19 events
Xiangyu Yang | Giannis Bekoulis | Nikos Deligiannis
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text (W-NUT 2020)

In this paper, we present our system designed to address the W-NUT 2020 shared task for COVID-19 Event Extraction from Twitter. To mitigate the noisy nature of the Twitter stream, our system makes use of the COVID-Twitter-BERT (CT-BERT), which is a language model pre-trained on a large corpus of COVID-19 related Twitter messages. Our system is trained on the COVID-19 Twitter Event Corpus and is able to identify relevant text spans that answer pre-defined questions (i.e., slot types) for five COVID-19 related events (i.e., TESTED POSITIVE, TESTED NEGATIVE, CAN-NOT-TEST, DEATH and CURE & PREVENTION). We have experimented with different architectures; our best performing model relies on a multilabel classifier on top of the CT-BERT model that jointly trains all the slot types for a single event. Our experimental results indicate that our Multilabel-CT-BERT system outperforms the baseline methods by 7 percentage points in terms of micro average F1 score. Our model ranked as 4th in the shared task leaderboard.

2019

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Sub-event detection from twitter streams as a sequence labeling problem
Giannis Bekoulis | Johannes Deleu | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

This paper introduces improved methods for sub-event detection in social media streams, by applying neural sequence models not only on the level of individual posts, but also directly on the stream level. Current approaches to identify sub-events within a given event, such as a goal during a soccer match, essentially do not exploit the sequential nature of social media streams. We address this shortcoming by framing the sub-event detection problem in social media streams as a sequence labeling task and adopt a neural sequence architecture that explicitly accounts for the chronological order of posts. Specifically, we (i) establish a neural baseline that outperforms a graph-based state-of-the-art method for binary sub-event detection (2.7% micro-F1 improvement), as well as (ii) demonstrate superiority of a recurrent neural network model on the posts sequence level for labeled sub-events (2.4% bin-level F1 improvement over non-sequential models).

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Predicting Suicide Risk from Online Postings in Reddit The UGent-IDLab submission to the CLPysch 2019 Shared Task A
Semere Kiros Bitew | Giannis Bekoulis | Johannes Deleu | Lucas Sterckx | Klim Zaporojets | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

This paper describes IDLab’s text classification systems submitted to Task A as part of the CLPsych 2019 shared task. The aim of this shared task was to develop automated systems that predict the degree of suicide risk of people based on their posts on Reddit. Bag-of-words features, emotion features and post level predictions are used to derive user-level predictions. Linear models and ensembles of these models are used to predict final scores. We find that predicting fine-grained risk levels is much more difficult than flagging potentially at-risk users. Furthermore, we do not find clear added value from building richer ensembles compared to simple baselines, given the available training data and the nature of the prediction task.

2018

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Adversarial training for multi-context joint entity and relation extraction
Giannis Bekoulis | Johannes Deleu | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Adversarial training (AT) is a regularization method that can be used to improve the robustness of neural network methods by adding small perturbations in the training data. We show how to use AT for the tasks of entity recognition and relation extraction. In particular, we demonstrate that applying AT to a general purpose baseline model for jointly extracting entities and relations, allows improving the state-of-the-art effectiveness on several datasets in different contexts (i.e., news, biomedical, and real estate data) and for different languages (English and Dutch).

2017

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Reconstructing the house from the ad: Structured prediction on real estate classifieds
Giannis Bekoulis | Johannes Deleu | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

In this paper, we address the (to the best of our knowledge) new problem of extracting a structured description of real estate properties from their natural language descriptions in classifieds. We survey and present several models to (a) identify important entities of a property (e.g.,rooms) from classifieds and (b) structure them into a tree format, with the entities as nodes and edges representing a part-of relation. Experiments show that a graph-based system deriving the tree from an initially fully connected entity graph, outperforms a transition-based system starting from only the entity nodes, since it better reconstructs the tree.