Natural language interfaces (NLIs) for data visualization are becoming increasingly popular both in academic research and in commercial software. Yet, there is a lack of empirical understanding of how people specify visualizations through natural language. To bridge this gap, we conducted an online study with 102 participants. We showed participants a series of ten visualizations for a given dataset and asked them to provide utterances they would pose to generate the displayed charts. The curated list of utterances generated from the study is provided below. This corpus of utterances can be used to evaluate existing NLIs for data visualization as well as for creating new systems and models to generate visualizations from natural language utterances.
The new era of technology has brought us to the point where it is convenient for people to share their opinions over an abundance of platforms. These platforms have a provision for the users to express themselves in multiple forms of representations, including text, images, videos, and audio. This, however, makes it difficult for users to obtain all the key information about a topic, making the task of automatic multi-modal summarization (MMS) essential. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of the existing research in the area of MMS.
Utilizing Visualization-oriented Natural Language Interfaces (V-NLI) as a complementary input modality to direct manipulation for visual analytics can provide an engaging user experience. It enables users to focus on their tasks rather than worrying about operating the interface to visualization tools. In the past two decades, leveraging advanced natural language processing technologies, numerous V-NLI systems have been developed both within academic research and commercial software, especially in recent years. In this article, we conduct a comprehensive review of the existing V-NLIs. In order to classify each paper, we develop categorical dimensions based on a classic information visualization pipeline with the extension of a V-NLI layer. The following seven stages are used: query understanding, data transformation, visual mapping, view transformation, human interaction, context management, and presentation. Finally, we also shed light on several promising directions for future work in the community.
Commonsense knowledge (CSK) about concepts and their properties is useful for AI applications such as robust chatbots. Prior works like ConceptNet, TupleKB and others compiled large CSK collections, but are restricted in their expressiveness to subject-predicate-object (SPO) triples with simple concepts for S and monolithic strings for P and O. Also, these projects have either prioritized precision or recall, but hardly reconcile these complementary goals. This paper presents a methodology, called Ascent, to automatically build a large-scale knowledge base (KB) of CSK assertions, with advanced expressiveness and both better precision and recall than prior works. Ascent goes beyond triples by capturing composite concepts with subgroups and aspects, and by refining assertions with semantic facets. The latter are important to express temporal and spatial validity of assertions and further qualifiers. Ascent combines open information extraction with judicious cleaning using language models. Intrinsic evaluation shows the superior size and quality of the Ascent KB, and an extrinsic evaluation for QA-support tasks underlines the benefits of Ascent.
The field of Text-to-Speech has experienced huge improvements last years benefiting from deep learning techniques. Producing realistic speech becomes possible now. As a consequence, the research on the control of the expressiveness, allowing to generate speech in different styles or manners, has attracted increasing attention lately. Systems able to control style have been developed and show impressive results. However the control parameters often consist of latent variables and remain complex to interpret. In this paper, we analyze and compare different latent spaces and obtain an interpretation of their influence on expressive speech. This will enable the possibility to build controllable speech synthesis systems with an understandable behaviour.
Automatic summarization of natural language is a current topic in computer science research and industry, studied for decades because of its usefulness across multiple domains. For example, summarization is necessary to create reviews such as this one. Research and applications have achieved some success in extractive summarization (where key sentences are curated), however, abstractive summarization (synthesis and re-stating) is a hard problem and generally unsolved in computer science. This literature review contrasts historical progress up through current state of the art, comparing dimensions such as: extractive vs. abstractive, supervised vs. unsupervised, NLP (Natural Language Processing) vs Knowledge-based, deep learning vs algorithms, structured vs. unstructured sources, and measurement metrics such as Rouge and BLEU. Multiple dimensions are contrasted since current research uses combinations of approaches as seen in the review matrix. Throughout this summary, synthesis and critique is provided. This review concludes with insights for improved abstractive summarization measurement, with surprising implications for detecting understanding and comprehension in general.
Consistency is a long standing issue faced by dialogue models. In this paper, we frame the consistency of dialogue agents as natural language inference (NLI) and create a new natural language inference dataset called Dialogue NLI. We propose a method which demonstrates that a model trained on Dialogue NLI can be used to improve the consistency of a dialogue model, and evaluate the method with human evaluation and with automatic metrics on a suite of evaluation sets designed to measure a dialogue model's consistency.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.
Neural word embeddings have been widely used in biomedical Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications since they provide vector representations of words that capture the semantic properties of words and the linguistic relationship between words. Many biomedical applications use different textual sources to train word embeddings and apply these word embeddings to downstream biomedical applications. However, there has been little work on comprehensively evaluating the word embeddings trained from these resources. In this study, we provide a comprehensive empirical evaluation of word embeddings trained from four different resources, namely clinical notes, biomedical publications, Wikepedia, and news. We perform the evaluation qualitatively and quantitatively. In qualitative evaluation, we manually inspect five most similar medical words to a given set of target medical words, and then analyze word embeddings through the visualization of those word embeddings. Quantitative evaluation falls into two categories: extrinsic and intrinsic evaluation. Based on the evaluation results, we can draw the following conclusions. First, EHR and PubMed can capture the semantics of medical terms better than GloVe and Google News and find more relevant similar medical terms. Second, the medical semantic similarity captured by the word embeddings trained on EHR and PubMed are closer to human experts' judgments, compared to these trained on GloVe and Google News. Third, there does not exist a consistent global ranking of word embedding quality for downstream biomedical NLP applications. However, adding word embeddings as extra features will improve results on most downstream tasks. Finally, word embeddings trained from a similar domain corpus do not necessarily have better performance than other word embeddings for any downstream biomedical tasks.
Bar charts are an effective way for humans to convey information to each other, but today's algorithms cannot parse them. Existing methods fail when faced with minor variations in appearance. Here, we present DVQA, a dataset that tests many aspects of bar chart understanding in a question answering framework. Unlike visual question answering (VQA), DVQA requires processing words and answers that are unique to a particular bar chart. State-of-the-art VQA algorithms perform poorly on DVQA, and we propose two strong baselines that perform considerably better. Our work will enable algorithms to automatically extract semantic information from vast quantities of literature in science, business, and other areas.
This paper surveys the current state of the art in Natural Language Generation (NLG), defined as the task of generating text or speech from non-linguistic input. A survey of NLG is timely in view of the changes that the field has undergone over the past decade or so, especially in relation to new (usually data-driven) methods, as well as new applications of NLG technology. This survey therefore aims to (a) give an up-to-date synthesis of research on the core tasks in NLG and the architectures adopted in which such tasks are organised; (b) highlight a number of relatively recent research topics that have arisen partly as a result of growing synergies between NLG and other areas of artificial intelligence; (c) draw attention to the challenges in NLG evaluation, relating them to similar challenges faced in other areas of Natural Language Processing, with an emphasis on different evaluation methods and the relationships between them.