Maria Becker


2021

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COCO-EX: A Tool for Linking Concepts from Texts to ConceptNet
Maria Becker | Katharina Korfhage | Anette Frank
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

In this paper we present COCO-EX, a tool for Extracting Concepts from texts and linking them to the ConceptNet knowledge graph. COCO-EX extracts meaningful concepts from natural language texts and maps them to conjunct concept nodes in ConceptNet, utilizing the maximum of relational information stored in the ConceptNet knowledge graph. COCOEX takes into account the challenging characteristics of ConceptNet, namely that – unlike conventional knowledge graphs – nodes are represented as non-canonicalized, free-form text. This means that i) concepts are not normalized; ii) they often consist of several different, nested phrase types; and iii) many of them are uninformative, over-specific, or misspelled. A commonly used shortcut to circumvent these problems is to apply string matching. We compare COCO-EX to this method and show that COCO-EX enables the extraction of meaningful, important rather than overspecific or uninformative concepts, and allows to assess more relational information stored in the knowledge graph.

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CO-NNECT: A Framework for Revealing Commonsense Knowledge Paths as Explicitations of Implicit Knowledge in Texts
Maria Becker | Katharina Korfhage | Debjit Paul | Anette Frank
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS)

In this work we leverage commonsense knowledge in form of knowledge paths to establish connections between sentences, as a form of explicitation of implicit knowledge. Such connections can be direct (singlehop paths) or require intermediate concepts (multihop paths). To construct such paths we combine two model types in a joint framework we call Co-nnect: a relation classifier that predicts direct connections between concepts; and a target prediction model that generates target or intermediate concepts given a source concept and a relation, which we use to construct multihop paths. Unlike prior work that relies exclusively on static knowledge sources, we leverage language models finetuned on knowledge stored in ConceptNet, to dynamically generate knowledge paths, as explanations of implicit knowledge that connects sentences in texts. As a central contribution we design manual and automatic evaluation settings for assessing the quality of the generated paths. We conduct evaluations on two argumentative datasets and show that a combination of the two model types generates meaningful, high-quality knowledge paths between sentences that reveal implicit knowledge conveyed in text.

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Reconstructing Implicit Knowledge with Language Models
Maria Becker | Siting Liang | Anette Frank
Proceedings of Deep Learning Inside Out (DeeLIO): The 2nd Workshop on Knowledge Extraction and Integration for Deep Learning Architectures

In this work we propose an approach for generating statements that explicate implicit knowledge connecting sentences in text. We make use of pre-trained language models which we refine by fine-tuning them on specifically prepared corpora that we enriched with implicit information, and by constraining them with relevant concepts and connecting commonsense knowledge paths. Manual and automatic evaluation of the generations shows that by refining language models as proposed, we can generate coherent and grammatically sound sentences that explicate implicit knowledge which connects sentence pairs in texts – on both in-domain and out-of-domain test data.

2020

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Implicit Knowledge in Argumentative Texts: An Annotated Corpus
Maria Becker | Katharina Korfhage | Anette Frank
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

When speaking or writing, people omit information that seems clear and evident, such that only part of the message is expressed in words. Especially in argumentative texts it is very common that (important) parts of the argument are implied and omitted. We hypothesize that for argument analysis it will be beneficial to reconstruct this implied information. As a starting point for filling knowledge gaps, we build a corpus consisting of high-quality human annotations of missing and implied information in argumentative texts. To learn more about the characteristics of both the argumentative texts and the added information, we further annotate the data with semantic clause types and commonsense knowledge relations. The outcome of our work is a carefully designed and richly annotated dataset, for which we then provide an in-depth analysis by investigating characteristic distributions and correlations of the assigned labels. We reveal interesting patterns and intersections between the annotation categories and properties of our dataset, which enable insights into the characteristics of both argumentative texts and implicit knowledge in terms of structural features and semantic information. The results of our analysis can help to assist automated argument analysis and can guide the process of revealing implicit information in argumentative texts automatically.

2019

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Assessing the Difficulty of Classifying ConceptNet Relations in a Multi-Label Classification Setting
Maria Becker | Michael Staniek | Vivi Nastase | Anette Frank
RELATIONS - Workshop on meaning relations between phrases and sentences

Commonsense knowledge relations are crucial for advanced NLU tasks. We examine the learnability of such relations as represented in ConceptNet, taking into account their specific properties, which can make relation classification difficult: a given concept pair can be linked by multiple relation types, and relations can have multi-word arguments of diverse semantic types. We explore a neural open world multi-label classification approach that focuses on the evaluation of classification accuracy for individual relations. Based on an in-depth study of the specific properties of the ConceptNet resource, we investigate the impact of different relation representations and model variations. Our analysis reveals that the complexity of argument types and relation ambiguity are the most important challenges to address. We design a customized evaluation method to address the incompleteness of the resource that can be expanded in future work.

2018

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Classifying Semantic Clause Types With Recurrent Neural Networks: Analysis of Attention, Context & Genre Characteristics
Maria Becker | Michael Staniek | Vivi Nastase | Alexis Palmer | Anette Frank
Traitement Automatique des Langues, Volume 59, Numéro 2 : Apprentissage profond pour le traitement automatique des langues [Deep Learning for natural language processing]

2017

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Classifying Semantic Clause Types: Modeling Context and Genre Characteristics with Recurrent Neural Networks and Attention
Maria Becker | Michael Staniek | Vivi Nastase | Alexis Palmer | Anette Frank
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017)

Detecting aspectual properties of clauses in the form of situation entity types has been shown to depend on a combination of syntactic-semantic and contextual features. We explore this task in a deep-learning framework, where tuned word representations capture lexical, syntactic and semantic features. We introduce an attention mechanism that pinpoints relevant context not only for the current instance, but also for the larger context. Apart from implicitly capturing task relevant features, the advantage of our neural model is that it avoids the need to reproduce linguistic features for other languages and is thus more easily transferable. We present experiments for English and German that achieve competitive performance. We present a novel take on modeling and exploiting genre information and showcase the adaptation of our system from one language to another.

2016

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Argumentative texts and clause types
Maria Becker | Alexis Palmer | Anette Frank
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining2016)