Abstract

Clause recommendation is the problem of recommending a clause to a legal contract, given the context of the contract in question and the clause type to which the clause should belong. With not much prior work being done toward the generation of legal contracts, this problem was proposed as a first step toward the bigger problem of contract generation. As an open-ended text generation prob-lem, the distinguishing characteristics of this problem lie in the nature of legal lan-guage as a sublanguage and the considerable similarity of textual content within the clauses of a specific type. This similarity aspect in legal clauses drives us to investi-gate the importance of similar contracts’ representation for recommending clauses. In our work, we experiment with generating clauses for 15 commonly occurring clause types in contracts expanding upon the previous work on this problem and analyzing clause recommendations in varying settings using information derived from similar contracts.

Abstract

Multiple business scenarios require an automated generation of descriptive human-readable text from structured input data. Hence, fact-to-text generation systems have been developed for various downstream tasks like generating soccer reports, weather and financial reports, medical reports, person biographies, etc. Unfortunately, previous work on fact-to-text (F2T) generation has focused primarily on English mainly due to the high availability of relevant datasets. Only recently, the problem of cross-lingual fact-to-text (XF2T) was proposed for generation across multiple languages alongwith a dataset, XALIGN for eight languages. However, there has been no rigorous work on the actual XF2T generation problem. We extend XALIGN dataset with annotated data for four more languages: Punjabi, Malayalam, Assamese and Oriya. We conduct an extensive study using popular Transformer-based text generation models on our extended multi-lingual dataset, which we call XALIGNV2. Further, we investigate the performance of different text generation strategies: multiple variations of pretraining, fact-aware embeddings and structure-aware input encoding. Our extensive experiments show that a multi-lingual mT5 model which uses fact-aware embeddings with structure-aware input encoding leads to best results on average across the twelve languages. We make our code, dataset and model publicly available, and hope that this will help advance further research in this critical area.

Abstract

This paper describes our system (IREL, ref- fered as himanshu.1007 on Codalab) for Shared Task on Empathy Detection, Emotion Classifi- cation, and Personality Detection at 12th Work- shop on Computational Approaches to Subjec- tivity, Sentiment & Social Media Analysis at ACL 2022. We participated in track 2 for pre- dicting emotion at the essay level. We pro- pose an ensemble approach that leverages the linguistic knowledge of the RoBERTa, BART- large, and RoBERTa model finetuned on the GoEmotions dataset. Each brings in its unique advantage, as we discuss in the paper. Our pro- posed system achieved a Macro F1 score of 0.585 and ranked one out of thirteen teams (the current top team on leaderboard submitted after the deadline). The code can be found here

Abstract

XAlign: Cross-lingual Fact-to-Text Alignment and Generation for Low-Resource Languages Tushar Abhishek, Shivprasad Sagare, Bhavyajeet Singh, Anubhav Sharma, Manish Gupta∗ and Vasudeva Varma Information Retrieval and Extraction Lab, IIIT Hyderabad, India {tushar.abhishek,shivprasad.sagare,bhavyajeet.singh,anubhav.sharma}@research.iiit.ac.in, {manish.gupta,vv}@iiit.ac.in Abstract Multiple critical scenarios (like Wikipedia text generation given English Infoboxes) need au- tomated generation of descriptive text in low resource (LR) languages from English fact triples. Previous work has focused on English fact-to-text (F2T) generation. To the best of our knowledge, there has been no previous at- tempt on cross-lingual alignment or generation for LR languages. Building an effective cross- lingual F2T (XF2T) system requires alignment between English structured facts and LR sen- tences. We propose two unsupervised meth- ods for cross-lingual alignment. We contribute XALIGN, an XF2T dataset with 0.45M pairs across 8 languages, of which 5402 pairs have been manually annotated. We also train strong baseline XF2T generation models on XAlign dataset

Abstract

A system and method for automatically extracting contract data from electronic contracts includes an administrator module configured to provide templates for inputting document patterns and a list of contract data tags for each of a plurality of contract document types. A parser is configured to convert an electronic contract document into a contract text document and reformat the contract text document to provide a pattern for the text contract document. A pattern recognition engine is configured to determine a list of contract document types in the electronic contract by comparing and matching patterns of all known contract document types with the pattern of the contract text document. A contract data extraction engine is configured to extract contract data for each contract document type on the list.

Abstract

Social media platforms have democratized the publication process resulting into easy and viral propagation of information. However, spread of rumors via such media often results into undesired and extremely impactful political, economic, social, psychological and criminal consequences. Several manual as well as automated efforts have been undertaken in the past to solve this critical problem. Existing automated methods are text based, user credibility based or use signals from the tweet propagation tree. We aim at using the text, user, propagation tree and temporal information jointly for rumor detection on Twitter. This involves several challenges like how to handle text variations on Twitter, what signals from user profile could be useful, how to best encode the propagation tree information, and how to incorporate the temporal signal. Our novel architecture, (Text and Temporal Tree Network), leverages deep learning based architectures to encode text, user and tree information in a temporal-aware manner. Our extensive comparisons show that our proposed methods outperform the state-of-the-art techniques by 7 and 6% points respectively on two popular benchmark datasets, and also lead to better early detection results.

Abstract

Sexism, a prejudice that causes enormous suffering, mani- fests in blatant as well as subtle ways. As sexist content towards women is increasingly spread on social networks, the automatic detection and categorization of these tweets/posts can help social scientists and policy- makers in research, thereby combating sexism. In this paper, we explore the problem of detecting whether a Twitter/Gab post is sexist or not. We further discriminate the detected sexist post into one of the fine-grained sexism categories. We propose a neural model for this sexism detec- tion and classification that can combine representations obtained using RoBERTa model and linguistic features such as Empath, Hurtlex, and Perspective API by involving recurrent components. We also leverage the unlabeled sexism data to infuse the domain-specific transformer model into our framework. Our proposed framework also features a knowledge module comprised of emoticon and hashtag representations to infuse the external knowledge-specific features into the learning process. Several proposed methods outperform various baselines across several standard metrics

Abstract

The pairing of natural language sentences with knowledge graph triples is essential for many downstream tasks like data-to-text generation, facts extraction from sentences (semantic parsing), knowledge graph completion, etc. Most existing methods solve these downstream tasks using neural-based end-to-end approaches that require a large amount of well-aligned training data, which is difficult and expensive to acquire. Recently various unsupervised techniques have been proposed to alleviate this alignment step by automatically pairing the structured data (knowledge graph triples) with textual data. However, these approaches are not well suited for low resource languages that provide two major challenges: (1) unavailability of pair of triples and native text with the same content distribution and (2) limited Natural language Processing (NLP) resources. In this paper, we address the unsupervised pairing of knowledge graph triples with sentences for low resource languages, selecting Hindi as the low resource language. We propose cross-lingual pairing of English triples with Hindi sentences to mitigate the unavailability of content overlap. We propose two novel approaches: NER-based filtering with Semantic Similarity and Key-phrase Extraction with Relevance Ranking. We use our best method to create a collection of 29224 well-aligned English triples and Hindi sentence pairs. Additionally, we have also curated 350 human-annotated golden test datasets for evaluation. We make the code and dataset publicly available.

Abstract

Witness testimonies are important constituents of a court case description and play a significant role in the final decision. We propose two techniques to identify sentences representing witness testimonies. The first technique employs linguistic rules whereas the second technique applies distant supervision where training set is constructed automatically using the output of the first technique. We then represent the identified witness testimonies in a more meaningful structure – event verb (predicate) along with its arguments corresponding to semantic roles A0 and A1 [1]. We demonstrate effectiveness of such representation in retrieving semantically similar prior relevant cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper to apply NLP techniques to extract witness information from court judgements and use it for retrieving prior court cases.

Abstract

Sexism, a permeate form of oppression, causes profound sufering through various manifestations. Given the increasing number of experiences of sexism shared online, categorizing these recollections automatically can support the battle against sexism, since it can promote successful evaluations by gender studies researchers and government representatives engaged in policy making. In this paper, we examine the fne-grained, multi-label classifcation of accounts (reports) of sexism. To the best of our knowledge, we consider substantially more categories of sexism than any related prior work through our 23-class problem formulation. Moreover, we present the frst semi-supervised work for the multi-label classifcation of accounts describing any type(s) of sexism. We devise self-training-based techniques tailor-made for the multi-label nature of the problem to utilize unlabeled samples for augmenting the labeled set. We identify high textual diversity with respect to the existing labeled set as a desirable quality for candidate unlabeled instances and develop methods for incorporating it into our approach. We also explore ways of infusing class imbalance alleviation for multi-label classifcation into our semisupervised learning, independently and in conjunction with the method involving diversity. In addition to data augmentation methods, we develop a neural model which combines biLSTM and attention with a domain-adapted BERT model in an endto-end trainable manner. Further, we formulate a multi-level training approach in which models are sequentially trained using