Ryan Culkin


2021

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Iterative Paraphrastic Augmentation with Discriminative Span Alignment
Ryan Culkin | J. Edward Hu | Elias Stengel-Eskin | Guanghui Qin | Benjamin Van Durme
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

We introduce a novel paraphrastic augmentation strategy based on sentence-level lexically constrained paraphrasing and discriminative span alignment. Our approach allows for the large-scale expansion of existing datasets or the rapid creation of new datasets using a small, manually produced seed corpus. We demonstrate our approach with experiments on the Berkeley FrameNet Project, a large-scale language understanding effort spanning more than two decades of human labor. With four days of training data collection for a span alignment model and one day of parallel compute, we automatically generate and release to the community 495,300 unique (Frame,Trigger) pairs in diverse sentential contexts, a roughly 50-fold expansion atop FrameNet v1.7. The resulting dataset is intrinsically and extrinsically evaluated in detail, showing positive results on a downstream task.

2020

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Multi-Sentence Argument Linking
Seth Ebner | Patrick Xia | Ryan Culkin | Kyle Rawlins | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

We present a novel document-level model for finding argument spans that fill an event’s roles, connecting related ideas in sentence-level semantic role labeling and coreference resolution. Because existing datasets for cross-sentence linking are small, development of our neural model is supported through the creation of a new resource, Roles Across Multiple Sentences (RAMS), which contains 9,124 annotated events across 139 types. We demonstrate strong performance of our model on RAMS and other event-related datasets.

2019

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Improved Lexically Constrained Decoding for Translation and Monolingual Rewriting
J. Edward Hu | Huda Khayrallah | Ryan Culkin | Patrick Xia | Tongfei Chen | Matt Post | Benjamin Van Durme
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)

Lexically-constrained sequence decoding allows for explicit positive or negative phrase-based constraints to be placed on target output strings in generation tasks such as machine translation or monolingual text rewriting. We describe vectorized dynamic beam allocation, which extends work in lexically-constrained decoding to work with batching, leading to a five-fold improvement in throughput when working with positive constraints. Faster decoding enables faster exploration of constraint strategies: we illustrate this via data augmentation experiments with a monolingual rewriter applied to the tasks of natural language inference, question answering and machine translation, showing improvements in all three.

2018

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Neural-Davidsonian Semantic Proto-role Labeling
Rachel Rudinger | Adam Teichert | Ryan Culkin | Sheng Zhang | Benjamin Van Durme
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present a model for semantic proto-role labeling (SPRL) using an adapted bidirectional LSTM encoding strategy that we call NeuralDavidsonian: predicate-argument structure is represented as pairs of hidden states corresponding to predicate and argument head tokens of the input sequence. We demonstrate: (1) state-of-the-art results in SPRL, and (2) that our network naturally shares parameters between attributes, allowing for learning new attribute types with limited added supervision.