Diego Marcheggiani


2023

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Bias Beyond English: Counterfactual Tests for Bias in Sentiment Analysis in Four Languages
Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant | Adam Lopez | Roi Blanco | Diego Marcheggiani
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Sentiment analysis (SA) systems are used in many products and hundreds of languages. Gender and racial biases are well-studied in English SA systems, but understudied in other languages, with few resources for such studies. To remedy this, we build a counterfactual evaluation corpus for gender and racial/migrant bias in four languages. We demonstrate its usefulness by answering a simple but important question that an engineer might need to answer when deploying a system: What biases do systems import from pre-trained models when compared to a baseline with no pre-training? Our evaluation corpus, by virtue of being counterfactual, not only reveals which models have less bias, but also pinpoints changes in model bias behaviour, which enables more targeted mitigation strategies. We release our code and evaluation corpora to facilitate future research.

2020

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Graph Convolutions over Constituent Trees for Syntax-Aware Semantic Role Labeling
Diego Marcheggiani | Ivan Titov
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is the task of identifying predicates and labeling argument spans with semantic roles. Even though most semantic-role formalisms are built upon constituent syntax, and only syntactic constituents can be labeled as arguments (e.g., FrameNet and PropBank), all the recent work on syntax-aware SRL relies on dependency representations of syntax. In contrast, we show how graph convolutional networks (GCNs) can be used to encode constituent structures and inform an SRL system. Nodes in our SpanGCN correspond to constituents. The computation is done in 3 stages. First, initial node representations are produced by ‘composing’ word representations of the first and last words in the constituent. Second, graph convolutions relying on the constituent tree are performed, yielding syntactically-informed constituent representations. Finally, the constituent representations are ‘decomposed’ back into word representations, which are used as input to the SRL classifier. We evaluate SpanGCN against alternatives, including a model using GCNs over dependency trees, and show its effectiveness on standard English SRL benchmarks CoNLL-2005, CoNLL-2012, and FrameNet.

2019

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You Shall Know a User by the Company It Keeps: Dynamic Representations for Social Media Users in NLP
Marco Del Tredici | Diego Marcheggiani | Sabine Schulte im Walde | Raquel Fernández
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Information about individuals can help to better understand what they say, particularly in social media where texts are short. Current approaches to modelling social media users pay attention to their social connections, but exploit this information in a static way, treating all connections uniformly. This ignores the fact, well known in sociolinguistics, that an individual may be part of several communities which are not equally relevant in all communicative situations. We present a model based on Graph Attention Networks that captures this observation. It dynamically explores the social graph of a user, computes a user representation given the most relevant connections for a target task, and combines it with linguistic information to make a prediction. We apply our model to three different tasks, evaluate it against alternative models, and analyse the results extensively, showing that it significantly outperforms other current methods.

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Book QA: Stories of Challenges and Opportunities
Stefanos Angelidis | Lea Frermann | Diego Marcheggiani | Roi Blanco | Lluís Màrquez
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

We present a system for answering questions based on the full text of books (BookQA), which first selects book passages given a question at hand, and then uses a memory network to reason and predict an answer. To improve generalization, we pretrain our memory network using artificial questions generated from book sentences. We experiment with the recently published NarrativeQA corpus, on the subset of Who questions, which expect book characters as answers. We experimentally show that BERT-based retrieval and pretraining improve over baseline results significantly. At the same time, we confirm that NarrativeQA is a highly challenging data set, and that there is need for novel research in order to achieve high-precision BookQA results. We analyze some of the bottlenecks of the current approach, and we argue that more research is needed on text representation, retrieval of relevant passages, and reasoning, including commonsense knowledge.

2018

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Deep Graph Convolutional Encoders for Structured Data to Text Generation
Diego Marcheggiani | Laura Perez-Beltrachini
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Most previous work on neural text generation from graph-structured data relies on standard sequence-to-sequence methods. These approaches linearise the input graph to be fed to a recurrent neural network. In this paper, we propose an alternative encoder based on graph convolutional networks that directly exploits the input structure. We report results on two graph-to-sequence datasets that empirically show the benefits of explicitly encoding the input graph structure.

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Exploiting Semantics in Neural Machine Translation with Graph Convolutional Networks
Diego Marcheggiani | Jasmijn Bastings | Ivan Titov
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)

Semantic representations have long been argued as potentially useful for enforcing meaning preservation and improving generalization performance of machine translation methods. In this work, we are the first to incorporate information about predicate-argument structure of source sentences (namely, semantic-role representations) into neural machine translation. We use Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) to inject a semantic bias into sentence encoders and achieve improvements in BLEU scores over the linguistic-agnostic and syntax-aware versions on the English–German language pair.

2017

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A Simple and Accurate Syntax-Agnostic Neural Model for Dependency-based Semantic Role Labeling
Diego Marcheggiani | Anton Frolov | Ivan Titov
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

We introduce a simple and accurate neural model for dependency-based semantic role labeling. Our model predicts predicate-argument dependencies relying on states of a bidirectional LSTM encoder. The semantic role labeler achieves competitive performance on English, even without any kind of syntactic information and only using local inference. However, when automatically predicted part-of-speech tags are provided as input, it substantially outperforms all previous local models and approaches the best reported results on the English CoNLL-2009 dataset. We also consider Chinese, Czech and Spanish where our approach also achieves competitive results. Syntactic parsers are unreliable on out-of-domain data, so standard (i.e., syntactically-informed) SRL models are hindered when tested in this setting. Our syntax-agnostic model appears more robust, resulting in the best reported results on standard out-of-domain test sets.

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Encoding Sentences with Graph Convolutional Networks for Semantic Role Labeling
Diego Marcheggiani | Ivan Titov
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Semantic role labeling (SRL) is the task of identifying the predicate-argument structure of a sentence. It is typically regarded as an important step in the standard NLP pipeline. As the semantic representations are closely related to syntactic ones, we exploit syntactic information in our model. We propose a version of graph convolutional networks (GCNs), a recent class of neural networks operating on graphs, suited to model syntactic dependency graphs. GCNs over syntactic dependency trees are used as sentence encoders, producing latent feature representations of words in a sentence. We observe that GCN layers are complementary to LSTM ones: when we stack both GCN and LSTM layers, we obtain a substantial improvement over an already state-of-the-art LSTM SRL model, resulting in the best reported scores on the standard benchmark (CoNLL-2009) both for Chinese and English.

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Graph Convolutional Encoders for Syntax-aware Neural Machine Translation
Jasmijn Bastings | Ivan Titov | Wilker Aziz | Diego Marcheggiani | Khalil Sima’an
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present a simple and effective approach to incorporating syntactic structure into neural attention-based encoder-decoder models for machine translation. We rely on graph-convolutional networks (GCNs), a recent class of neural networks developed for modeling graph-structured data. Our GCNs use predicted syntactic dependency trees of source sentences to produce representations of words (i.e. hidden states of the encoder) that are sensitive to their syntactic neighborhoods. GCNs take word representations as input and produce word representations as output, so they can easily be incorporated as layers into standard encoders (e.g., on top of bidirectional RNNs or convolutional neural networks). We evaluate their effectiveness with English-German and English-Czech translation experiments for different types of encoders and observe substantial improvements over their syntax-agnostic versions in all the considered setups.

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Semantic Role Labeling
Diego Marcheggiani | Michael Roth | Ivan Titov | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

This tutorial describes semantic role labelling (SRL), the task of mapping text to shallow semantic representations of eventualities and their participants. The tutorial introduces the SRL task and discusses recent research directions related to the task. The audience of this tutorial will learn about the linguistic background and motivation for semantic roles, and also about a range of computational models for this task, from early approaches to the current state-of-the-art. We will further discuss recently proposed variations to the traditional SRL task, including topics such as semantic proto-role labeling.We also cover techniques for reducing required annotation effort, such as methods exploiting unlabeled corpora (semi-supervised and unsupervised techniques), model adaptation across languages and domains, and methods for crowdsourcing semantic role annotation (e.g., question-answer driven SRL). Methods based on different machine learning paradigms, including neural networks, generative Bayesian models, graph-based algorithms and bootstrapping style techniques.Beyond sentence-level SRL, we discuss work that involves semantic roles in discourse. In particular, we cover data sets and models related to the task of identifying implicit roles and linking them to discourse antecedents. We introduce different approaches to this task from the literature, including models based on coreference resolution, centering, and selectional preferences. We also review how new insights gained through them can be useful for the traditional SRL task.

2016

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Discrete-State Variational Autoencoders for Joint Discovery and Factorization of Relations
Diego Marcheggiani | Ivan Titov
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 4

We present a method for unsupervised open-domain relation discovery. In contrast to previous (mostly generative and agglomerative clustering) approaches, our model relies on rich contextual features and makes minimal independence assumptions. The model is composed of two parts: a feature-rich relation extractor, which predicts a semantic relation between two entities, and a factorization model, which reconstructs arguments (i.e., the entities) relying on the predicted relation. The two components are estimated jointly so as to minimize errors in recovering arguments. We study factorization models inspired by previous work in relation factorization and selectional preference modeling. Our models substantially outperform the generative and agglomerative-clustering counterparts and achieve state-of-the-art performance.

2015

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A Multi-lingual Annotated Dataset for Aspect-Oriented Opinion Mining
Salud M. Jiménez Zafra | Giacomo Berardi | Andrea Esuli | Diego Marcheggiani | María Teresa Martín-Valdivia | Alejandro Moreo Fernández
Proceedings of the 2015 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2014

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An Experimental Comparison of Active Learning Strategies for Partially Labeled Sequences
Diego Marcheggiani | Thierry Artières
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

2010

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ISTI@SemEval-2 Task 8: Boosting-Based Multiway Relation Classification
Andrea Esuli | Diego Marcheggiani | Fabrizio Sebastiani
Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation