Xingyi Song


2023

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Don’t waste a single annotation: improving single-label classifiers through soft labels
Ben Wu | Yue Li | Yida Mu | Carolina Scarton | Kalina Bontcheva | Xingyi Song
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

In this paper, we address the limitations of the common data annotation and training methods for objective single-label classification tasks. Typically, when annotating such tasks annotators are only asked to provide a single label for each sample and annotator disagreement is discarded when a final hard label is decided through majority voting. We challenge this traditional approach, acknowledging that determining the appropriate label can be difficult due to the ambiguity and lack of context in the data samples. Rather than discarding the information from such ambiguous annotations, our soft label method makes use of them for training. Our findings indicate that additional annotator information, such as confidence, secondary label and disagreement, can be used to effectively generate soft labels. Training classifiers with these soft labels then leads to improved performance and calibration on the hard label test set.

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GATE Teamware 2: An open-source tool for collaborative document classification annotation
David Wilby | Twin Karmakharm | Ian Roberts | Xingyi Song | Kalina Bontcheva
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

We present GATE Teamware 2: an open-source web-based platform for managing teams of annotators working on document classification tasks. GATE Teamware 2 is an entirely re-engineered successor to GATE Teamware, using contemporary web frameworks. The software allows the management of teams of multiple annotators, project managers and administrators - including the management of annotators - across multiple projects. Projects can be configured to control and monitor the annotation statistics and have a highly flexible JSON-configurable annotation display which can include arbitrary HTML. Optionally, documents can be uploaded with pre-existing annotations and documents are served to annotators in a random order by default to reduce bias. Crucially, annotators can be trained on applying the annotation guidelines correctly and then screened for quality assurance purposes, prior to being cleared for independent annotation. GATE Teamware 2 can be self-deployed, including in container orchestration environments, or provided as private, hosted cloud instances.GATE Teamware 2 is an open-source software and can be downloaded from https://github.com/GATENLP/gate-teamware.A demonstration video of the system has also been made available at https://youtu.be/KoXkuhc4fmM.

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Categorising Fine-to-Coarse Grained Misinformation: An Empirical Study of the COVID-19 Infodemic
Ye Jiang | Xingyi Song | Carolina Scarton | Iknoor Singh | Ahmet Aker | Kalina Bontcheva
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

The spread of COVID-19 misinformation on social media became a major challenge for citizens, with negative real-life consequences. Prior research focused on detection and/or analysis of COVID-19 misinformation. However, fine-grained classification of misinformation claims has been largely overlooked. The novel contribution of this paper is in introducing a new dataset which makes fine-grained distinctions between statements that assert, comment or question on false COVID-19 claims. This new dataset not only enables social behaviour analysis but also enables us to address both evidence-based and non-evidence-based misinformation classification tasks. Lastly, through leave claim out cross-validation, we demonstrate that classifier performance on unseen COVID-19 misinformation claims is significantly different, as compared to performance on topics present in the training data.

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Classifying COVID-19 Vaccine Narratives
Yue Li | Carolina Scarton | Xingyi Song | Kalina Bontcheva
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

Vaccine hesitancy is widespread, despite the government’s information campaigns and the efforts of the World Health Organisation (WHO). Categorising the topics within vaccine-related narratives is crucial to understand the concerns expressed in discussions and identify the specific issues that contribute to vaccine hesitancy. This paper addresses the need for monitoring and analysing vaccine narratives online by introducing a novel vaccine narrative classification task, which categorises COVID-19 vaccine claims into one of seven categories. Following a data augmentation approach, we first construct a novel dataset for this new classification task, focusing on the minority classes. We also make use of fact-checker annotated data. The paper also presents a neural vaccine narrative classifier that achieves an accuracy of 84% under cross-validation. The classifier is publicly available for researchers and journalists.

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Classification-Aware Neural Topic Model Combined with Interpretable Analysis - for Conflict Classification
Tianyu Liang | Yida Mu | Soonho Kim | Darline Kuate | Julie Lang | Rob Vos | Xingyi Song
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing

A large number of conflict events are affecting the world all the time. In order to analyse such conflict events effectively, this paper presents a Classification-Aware Neural Topic Model (CANTM-IA) for Conflict Information Classification and Topic Discovery. The model provides a reliable interpretation of classification results and discovered topics by introducing interpretability analysis. At the same time, interpretation is introduced into the model architecture to improve the classification performance of the model and to allow interpretation to focus further on the details of the data. Finally, the model architecture is optimised to reduce the complexity of the model.

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SheffieldVeraAI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Mono and Multilingual Approaches for News Genre, Topic and Persuasion Technique Classification
Ben Wu | Olesya Razuvayevskaya | Freddy Heppell | João A. Leite | Carolina Scarton | Kalina Bontcheva | Xingyi Song
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

This paper describes our approach for SemEval- 2023 Task 3: Detecting the category, the fram- ing, and the persuasion techniques in online news in a multilingual setup. For Subtask 1 (News Genre), we propose an ensemble of fully trained and adapter mBERT models which was ranked joint-first for German, and had the high- est mean rank of multi-language teams. For Subtask 2 (Framing), we achieved first place in 3 languages, and the best average rank across all the languages, by using two separate ensem- bles: a monolingual RoBERTa-MUPPETLARGE and an ensemble of XLM-RoBERTaLARGE with adapters and task adaptive pretraining. For Sub- task 3 (Persuasion Techniques), we trained a monolingual RoBERTa-Base model for English and a multilingual mBERT model for the re- maining languages, which achieved top 10 for all languages, including 2nd for English. For each subtask, we compared monolingual and multilingual approaches, and considered class imbalance techniques.

2020

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Using Deep Neural Networks with Intra- and Inter-Sentence Context to Classify Suicidal Behaviour
Xingyi Song | Johnny Downs | Sumithra Velupillai | Rachel Holden | Maxim Kikoler | Kalina Bontcheva | Rina Dutta | Angus Roberts
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Identifying statements related to suicidal behaviour in psychiatric electronic health records (EHRs) is an important step when modeling that behaviour, and when assessing suicide risk. We apply a deep neural network based classification model with a lightweight context encoder, to classify sentence level suicidal behaviour in EHRs. We show that incorporating information from sentences to left and right of the target sentence significantly improves classification accuracy. Our approach achieved the best performance when classifying suicidal behaviour in Autism Spectrum Disorder patient records. The results could have implications for suicidality research and clinical surveillance.

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RP-DNN: A Tweet Level Propagation Context Based Deep Neural Networks for Early Rumor Detection in Social Media
Jie Gao | Sooji Han | Xingyi Song | Fabio Ciravegna
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Early rumor detection (ERD) on social media platform is very challenging when limited, incomplete and noisy information is available. Most of the existing methods have largely worked on event-level detection that requires the collection of posts relevant to a specific event and relied only on user-generated content. They are not appropriate to detect rumor sources in the very early stages, before an event unfolds and becomes widespread. In this paper, we address the task of ERD at the message level. We present a novel hybrid neural network architecture, which combines a task-specific character-based bidirectional language model and stacked Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks to represent textual contents and social-temporal contexts of input source tweets, for modelling propagation patterns of rumors in the early stages of their development. We apply multi-layered attention models to jointly learn attentive context embeddings over multiple context inputs. Our experiments employ a stringent leave-one-out cross-validation (LOO-CV) evaluation setup on seven publicly available real-life rumor event data sets. Our models achieve state-of-the-art(SoA) performance for detecting unseen rumors on large augmented data which covers more than 12 events and 2,967 rumors. An ablation study is conducted to understand the relative contribution of each component of our proposed model.

2019

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Team Bertha von Suttner at SemEval-2019 Task 4: Hyperpartisan News Detection using ELMo Sentence Representation Convolutional Network
Ye Jiang | Johann Petrak | Xingyi Song | Kalina Bontcheva | Diana Maynard
Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper describes the participation of team “bertha-von-suttner” in the SemEval2019 task 4 Hyperpartisan News Detection task. Our system uses sentence representations from averaged word embeddings generated from the pre-trained ELMo model with Convolutional Neural Networks and Batch Normalization for predicting hyperpartisan news. The final predictions were generated from the averaged predictions of an ensemble of models. With this architecture, our system ranked in first place, based on accuracy, the official scoring metric.

2018

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A Deep Neural Network Sentence Level Classification Method with Context Information
Xingyi Song | Johann Petrak | Angus Roberts
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

In the sentence classification task, context formed from sentences adjacent to the sentence being classified can provide important information for classification. This context is, however, often ignored. Where methods do make use of context, only small amounts are considered, making it difficult to scale. We present a new method for sentence classification, Context-LSTM-CNN, that makes use of potentially large contexts. The method also utilizes long-range dependencies within the sentence being classified, using an LSTM, and short-span features, using a stacked CNN. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach consistently improves over previous methods on two different datasets.

2017

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Comparing Attitudes to Climate Change in the Media using sentiment analysis based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Ye Jiang | Xingyi Song | Jackie Harrison | Shaun Quegan | Diana Maynard
Proceedings of the 2017 EMNLP Workshop: Natural Language Processing meets Journalism

News media typically present biased accounts of news stories, and different publications present different angles on the same event. In this research, we investigate how different publications differ in their approach to stories about climate change, by examining the sentiment and topics presented. To understand these attitudes, we find sentiment targets by combining Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) with SentiWordNet, a general sentiment lexicon. Using LDA, we generate topics containing keywords which represent the sentiment targets, and then annotate the data using SentiWordNet before regrouping the articles based on topic similarity. Preliminary analysis identifies clearly different attitudes on the same issue presented in different news sources. Ongoing work is investigating how systematic these attitudes are between different publications, and how these may change over time.

2016

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Sheffield Systems for the English-Romanian WMT Translation Task
Frédéric Blain | Xingyi Song | Lucia Specia
Proceedings of the First Conference on Machine Translation: Volume 2, Shared Task Papers

2014

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Data selection for discriminative training in statistical machine translation
Xingyi Song | Lucia Specia | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the 17th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation

2011

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Regression and Ranking based Optimisation for Sentence Level MT Evaluation
Xingyi Song | Trevor Cohn
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Statistical Machine Translation