This paper presents the IJCNLP 2017 shared task for Chinese grammatical error diagnosis (CGED) which seeks to identify grammatical error types and their range of occurrence within sentences written by learners of Chinese as foreign language. We describe the task definition, data preparation, performance metrics, and evaluation results. Of the 13 teams registered for this shared task, 5 teams developed the system and submitted a total of 13 runs. We expected this evaluation campaign could lead to the development of more advanced NLP techniques for educational applications, especially for Chinese error detection. All data sets with gold standards and scoring scripts are made publicly available to researchers.

This paper presents the IJCNLP 2017 shared task on Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Chinese Phrases (DSAP) which seeks to identify a real-value sentiment score of Chinese single words and multi-word phrases in the both valence and arousal dimensions. Valence represents the degree of pleasant and unpleasant (or positive and negative) feelings, and arousal represents the degree of excitement and calm. Of the 19 teams registered for this shared task for two-dimensional sentiment analysis, 13 submitted results. We expected that this evaluation campaign could produce more advanced dimensional sentiment analysis techniques, especially for Chinese affective computing. All data sets with gold standards and scoring script are made publicly available to researchers.

Unlike Entity Disambiguation in web search results, Opinion Disambiguation is a relatively unexplored topic. RevOpiD shared task at IJCNLP-2107 aimed to attract attention towards this research problem. In this paper, we summarize the first run of this task and introduce a new dataset that we have annotated for the purpose of evaluating Opinion Mining, Summarization and Disambiguation methods.

This document introduces the IJCNLP 2017 Shared Task on Customer Feedback Analysis. In this shared task we have prepared corpora of customer feedback in four languages, i.e. English, French, Spanish and Japanese. They were annotated in a common meanings categorization, which was improved from an ADAPT-Microsoft pivot study on customer feedback. Twenty teams participated in the shared task and twelve of them have submitted prediction results. The results show that performance of prediction meanings of customer feedback is reasonable well in four languages. Nine system description papers are archived in the shared tasks proceeding.

The IJCNLP-2017 Multi-choice Question Answering(MCQA) task aims at exploring the performance of current Question Answering(QA) techniques via the realworld complex questions collected from Chinese Senior High School Entrance Examination papers and CK12 website1. The questions are all 4-way multi-choice questions writing in Chinese and English respectively that cover a wide range of subjects, e.g. Biology, History, Life Science and etc. And, all questions are restrained within the elementary and middle school level. During the whole procedure of this task, 7 teams submitted 323 runs in total. This paper describes the collected data, the format and size of these questions, formal run statistics and results, overview and performance statistics of different methods

This paper introduces Alibaba NLP team system on IJCNLP 2017 shared task No. 1 Chinese Grammatical Error Diagnosis (CGED). The task is to diagnose four types of grammatical errors which are redundant words (R), missing words (M), bad word selection (S) and disordered words (W). We treat the task as a sequence tagging problem and design some handcraft features to solve it. Our system is mainly based on the LSTM-CRF model and 3 ensemble strategies are applied to improve the performance. At the identification level and the position level our system gets the highest F1 scores. At the position level, which is the most difficult level, we perform best on all metrics.

Predicting valence-arousal ratings for words and phrases is very useful for constructing affective resources for dimensional sentiment analysis. Since the existing valence-arousal resources of Chinese are mainly in word-level and there is a lack of phrase-level ones, the Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Chinese Phrases (DSAP) task aims to predict the valence-arousal ratings for Chinese affective words and phrases automatically. In this task, we propose an approach using a densely connected LSTM network and word features to identify dimensional sentiment on valence and arousal for words and phrases jointly. We use word embedding as major feature and choose part of speech (POS) and word clusters as additional features to train the dense LSTM network. The evaluation results of our submissions (1st and 2nd in average performance) validate the effectiveness of our system to predict valence and arousal dimensions for Chinese words and phrases.

The Review Opinion Diversification (Revopid-2017) shared task focuses on selecting top-k reviews from a set of reviews for a particular product based on a specific criteria. In this paper, we describe our approaches and results for modeling the ranking of reviews based on their usefulness score, this being the first of the three subtasks under this shared task. Instead of posing this as a regression problem, we modeled this as a classification task where we want to identify whether a review is useful or not. We employed a bi-directional LSTM to represent each review and is used with a softmax layer to predict the usefulness score. We chose the review with highest usefulness score, then find its cosine similarity score with rest of the reviews. This is done in order to ensure diversity in the selection of top-k reviews. On the top-5 list prediction, we finished 3rd while in top-10 list one, we are placed 2nd in the shared task. We have discussed the model and the results in detail in the paper.

The ability to automatically and accurately process customer feedback is a necessity in the private sector. Unfortunately, customer feedback can be one of the most difficult types of data to work with due to the sheer volume and variety of services, products, languages, and cultures that comprise the customer experience. In order to address this issue, our team built a suite of classifiers trained on a four-language, multi-label corpus released as part of the shared task on “Customer Feedback Analysis” at IJCNLP 2017. In addition to standard text preprocessing, we translated each dataset into each other language to increase the size of the training datasets. Additionally, we also used word embeddings in our feature engineering step. Ultimately, we trained classifiers using Logistic Regression, Random Forest, and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks. Overall, we achieved a Macro-Average F-score between 48.7% and 56.0% for the four languages and ranked 3/12 for English, 3/7 for Spanish, 1/8 for French, and 2/7 for Japanese.

We describe the work of a team from the ADAPT Centre in Ireland in addressing automatic answer selection for the Multi-choice Question Answering in Examinations shared task. The system is based on a logistic regression over the string similarities between question, answer, and additional text. We obtain the highest grade out of six systems: 48.7% accuracy on a validation set (vs. a baseline of 29.45%) and 45.6% on a test set.

Building a system to detect Chinese grammatical errors is a challenge for natural-language processing researchers. As Chinese learners are increasing, developing such a system can help them study Chinese more easily. This paper introduces a bi-directional long short-term memory (BiLSTM) - conditional random field (CRF) model to produce the sequences that indicate an error type for every position of a sentence, since we regard Chinese grammatical error diagnosis (CGED) as a sequence-labeling problem.

Grammatical error diagnosis is an important task in natural language processing. This paper introduces CVTE Character Checking System in the NLP-TEA-4 shared task for CGED 2017, we use Bi-LSTM to generate the probability of every character, then take two kinds of strategies to decide whether a character is correct or not. This system is probably more suitable to deal with the error type of bad word selection, which is one of four types of errors, and the rest are words re-dundancy, words missing and words disorder. Finally the second strategy achieves better F1 score than the first one at all of detection level, identification level, position level.

Sentiment analysis on Chinese text has intensively studied. The basic task for related research is to construct an affective lexicon and thereby predict emotional scores of different levels. However, finite lexicon resources make it difficult to effectively and automatically distinguish between various types of sentiment information in Chinese texts. This IJCNLP2017-Task2 competition seeks to automatically calculate Valence and Arousal ratings within the hierarchies of vocabulary and phrases in Chinese. We introduce a regression methodology to automatically recognize continuous emotional values, and incorporate a word embedding technique. In our system, the MAE predictive values of Valence and Arousal were 0.811 and 0.996, respectively, for the sentiment dimension prediction of words in Chinese. In phrase prediction, the corresponding results were 0.822 and 0.489, ranking sixth among all teams.

CKIP takes part in solving the Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Chinese Phrases (DSAP) share task of IJCNLP 2017. This task calls for systems that can predict the valence and the arousal of Chinese phrases, which are real values between 1 and 9. To achieve this, functions mapping Chinese character sequences to real numbers are built by regression techniques. In addition, the CKIP phrase Valence-Arousal (VA) predictor depends on knowledge of modifier words and head words. This includes the types of known modifier words, VA of head words, and distributional semantics of both these words. The predictor took the second place out of 13 teams on phrase VA prediction, with 0.444 MAE and 0.935 PCC on valence, and 0.395 MAE and 0.904 PCC on arousal.

Sentiment lexicon is very helpful in dimensional sentiment applications. Because of countless Chinese words, developing a method to predict unseen Chinese words is required. The proposed method can handle both words and phrases by using an ADVWeight List for word prediction, which in turn improves our performance at phrase level. The evaluation results demonstrate that our system is effective in dimensional sentiment analysis for Chinese phrases. The Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Pearson’s Correlation Coefficient (PCC) for Valence are 0.723 and 0.835, respectively, and those for Arousal are 0.914 and 0.756, respectively.

This paper introduces Team Alibaba’s systems participating IJCNLP 2017 shared task No. 2 Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Chinese Phrases (DSAP). The systems mainly utilize a multi-layer neural networks, with multiple features input such as word embedding, part-of-speech-tagging (POST), word clustering, prefix type, character embedding, cross sentiment input, and AdaBoost method for model training. For word level task our best run achieved MAE 0.545 (ranked 2nd), PCC 0.892 (ranked 2nd) in valence prediction and MAE 0.857 (ranked 1st), PCC 0.678 (ranked 2nd) in arousal prediction. For average performance of word and phrase task we achieved MAE 0.5355 (ranked 3rd), PCC 0.8965 (ranked 3rd) in valence prediction and MAE 0.661 (ranked 3rd), PCC 0.766 (ranked 2nd) in arousal prediction. In the final our submitted system achieved 2nd in mean rank.

Categorical sentiment classification has drawn much attention in the field of NLP, while less work has been conducted for dimensional sentiment analysis (DSA). Recent works for DSA utilize either word embedding, knowledge base features, or bilingual language resources. In this paper, we propose our model for IJCNLP 2017 Dimensional Sentiment Analysis for Chinese Phrases shared task. Our model incorporates word embedding as well as image features, attempting to simulate human’s imaging behavior toward sentiment analysis. Though the performance is not comparable to others in the end, we conduct several experiments with possible reasons discussed, and analyze the drawbacks of our model.

This paper presents two vector representations proposed by National Chiayi University (NCYU) about phrased-based sentiment detection which was used to compete in dimensional sentiment analysis for Chinese phrases (DSACP) at IJCNLP 2017. The vector-based sentiment phraselike unit analysis models are proposed in this article. E-HowNet-based clustering is used to obtain the values of valence and arousal for sentiment words first. An out-of-vocabulary function is also defined in this article to measure the dimensional emotion values for unknown words. For predicting the corresponding values of sentiment phrase-like unit, a vectorbased approach is proposed here. According to the experimental results, we can find the proposed approach is efficacious.

This paper introduces Mainiway AI Labs submitted system for the IJCNLP 2017 shared task on Dimensional Sentiment Analysis of Chinese Phrases (DSAP), and related experiments. Our approach consists of deep neural networks with various architectures, and our best system is a voted ensemble of networks. We achieve a Mean Absolute Error of 0.64 in valence prediction and 0.68 in arousal prediction on the test set, both placing us as the 5th ranked team in the competition.

In this paper, a deep phrase embedding approach using bi-directional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) is proposed to predict the valence-arousal ratings of Chinese words and phrases. It adopts a Chinese word segmentation frontend, a local order-aware word, a global phrase embedding representations and a deep regression neural network (DRNN) model. The performance of the proposed method was benchmarked by the IJCNLP 2017 shared task 2. According the official evaluation results, our best system achieved mean rank 6.5 among all 24 submissions.

This paper describes the approaches of sentimental score prediction in the NTOU DSA system participating in DSAP this year. The modules to predict scores for words are adapted from our system last year. The approach to predict scores for phrases is keyword-based machine learning method. The performance of our system is good in predicting scores of phrases.

Review Opinion Diversification (RevOpiD) 2017 is a shared task which is held in International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP). The shared task aims at selecting top-k reviews, as a summary, from a set of re-views. There are three subtasks in RevOpiD: helpfulness ranking, rep-resentativeness ranking, and ex-haustive coverage ranking. This year, our team submitted runs by three models. We focus on ranking reviews based on the helpfulness of the reviews. In the first two models, we use linear regression with two different loss functions. First one is least squares, and second one is cross entropy. The third run is a random baseline. For both k=5 and k=10, our second model gets the best scores in the official evaluation metrics.

IJCNLP-17 Review Opinion Diversification (RevOpiD-2017) task has been designed for ranking the top-k reviews of a product from a set of reviews, which assists in identifying a summarized output to express the opinion of the entire review set. The task is divided into three independent subtasks as subtask-A,subtask-B, and subtask-C. Each of these three subtasks selects the top-k reviews based on helpfulness, representativeness, and exhaustiveness of the opinions expressed in the review set individually. In order to develop the modules and predict the rank of reviews for all three subtasks, we have employed two well-known supervised classifiers namely, Naïve Bayes and Logistic Regression on the top of several extracted features such as the number of nouns, number of verbs, and number of sentiment words etc from the provided datasets. Finally, the organizers have helped to validate the predicted outputs for all three subtasks by using their evaluation metrics. The metrics provide the scores of list size 5 as (0.80 (mth)) for subtask-A, (0.86 (cos), 0.87 (cos d), 0.71 (cpr), 4.98 (a-dcg), and 556.94 (wt)) for subtask B, and (10.94 (unwt) and 0.67 (recall)) for subtask C individually.

We present All-In-1, a simple model for multilingual text classification that does not require any parallel data. It is based on a traditional Support Vector Machine classifier exploiting multilingual word embeddings and character n-grams. Our model is simple, easily extendable yet very effective, overall ranking 1st (out of 12 teams) in the IJCNLP 2017 shared task on customer feedback analysis in four languages: English, French, Japanese and Spanish.

The analysis of customer feedback is useful to provide good customer service. There are a lot of online customer feedback are produced. Manual classification is impractical because the high volume of data. Therefore, the automatic classification of the customer feedback is of importance for the analysis system to identify meanings or intentions that the customer express. The aim of shared Task 4 of IJCNLP 2017 is to classify the customer feedback into six tags categorization. In this paper, we present a system that uses word embeddings to express the feature of the sentence in the corpus and the neural network as the classifier to complete the shared task. And then the ensemble method is used to get final predictive result. The proposed method get ranked first among twelve teams in terms of micro-averaged F1 and second for accura-cy metric.

The IJCNLP 2017 shared task on Customer Feedback Analysis focuses on classifying customer feedback into one of a predefined set of categories or classes. In this paper, we describe our approach to this problem and the results on four languages, i.e. English, French, Japanese and Spanish. Our system implemented a bidirectional LSTM (Graves and Schmidhuber, 2005) using pre-trained glove (Pennington et al., 2014) and fastText (Joulin et al., 2016) embeddings, and SVM (Cortes and Vapnik, 1995) with TF-IDF vectors for classifying the feedback data which is described in the later sections. We also tried different machine learning techniques and compared the results in this paper. Out of the 12 participating teams, our systems obtained 0.65, 0.86, 0.70 and 0.56 exact accuracy score in English, Spanish, French and Japanese respectively. We observed that our systems perform better than the baseline systems in three languages while we match the baseline accuracy for Japanese on our submitted systems. We noticed significant improvements in Japanese in later experiments, matching the highest performing system that was submitted in the shared task, which we will discuss in this paper.

In this age of the digital economy, promoting organisations attempt their best to engage the customers in the feedback provisioning process. With the assistance of customer insights, an organisation can develop a better product and provide a better service to its customer. In this paper, we analyse the real world samples of customer feedback from Microsoft Office customers in four languages, i.e., English, French, Spanish and Japanese and conclude a five-plus-one-classes categorisation (comment, request, bug, complaint, meaningless and undetermined) for meaning classification. The task is to %access multilingual corpora annotated by the proposed meaning categorization scheme and develop a system to determine what class(es) the customer feedback sentences should be annotated as in four languages. We propose following approaches to accomplish this task: (i) a multinomial naive bayes (MNB) approach for multi-label classification, (ii) MNB with one-vs-rest classifier approach, and (iii) the combination of the multilabel classification-based and the sentiment classification-based approach. Our best system produces F-scores of 0.67, 0.83, 0.72 and 0.7 for English, Spanish, French and Japanese, respectively. The results are competitive to the best ones for all languages and secure 3rd and 5th position for Japanese and French, respectively, among all submitted systems.

This paper describes our systems for IJCNLP 2017 Shared Task on Customer Feedback Analysis. We experimented with simple neural architectures that gave competitive performance on certain tasks. This includes shallow CNN and Bi-Directional LSTM architectures with Facebook’s Fasttext as a baseline model. Our best performing model was in the Top 5 systems using the Exact-Accuracy and Micro-Average-F1 metrics for the Spanish (85.28% for both) and French (70% and 73.17% respectively) task, and outperformed all the other models on comment (87.28%) and meaningless (51.85%) tags using Micro Average F1 by Tags metric for the French task.

This paper describes our submission to IJCNLP 2017 shared task 4, for predicting the tags of unseen customer feedback sentences, such as comments, complaints, bugs, requests, and meaningless and undetermined statements. With the use of a neural network, a large number of deep learning methods have been developed, which perform very well on text classification. Our ensemble classification model is based on a bi-directional gated recurrent unit and an attention mechanism which shows a 3.8% improvement in classification accuracy. To enhance the model performance, we also compared it with several word-embedding models. The comparative results show that a combination of both word2vec and GloVe achieves the best performance.

In this paper, we describe a deep learning framework for analyzing the customer feedback as part of our participation in the shared task on Customer Feedback Analysis at the 8th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (IJCNLP 2017). A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based deep neural network model was employed for the customer feedback task. The proposed system was evaluated on two languages, namely, English and French.

Analyzing customer feedback is the best way to channelize the data into new marketing strategies that benefit entrepreneurs as well as customers. Therefore an automated system which can analyze the customer behavior is in great demand. Users may write feedbacks in any language, and hence mining appropriate information often becomes intractable. Especially in a traditional feature-based supervised model, it is difficult to build a generic system as one has to understand the concerned language for finding the relevant features. In order to overcome this, we propose deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based approaches that do not require handcrafting of features. We evaluate these techniques for analyzing customer feedback sentences on four languages, namely English, French, Japanese and Spanish. Our empirical analysis shows that our models perform well in all the four languages on the setups of IJCNLP Shared Task on Customer Feedback Analysis. Our model achieved the second rank in French, with an accuracy of 71.75% and third ranks for all the other languages.

In this paper, we perform convolutional neural networks (CNN) to learn the joint representations of question-answer pairs first, then use the joint representations as the inputs of the long short-term memory (LSTM) with attention to learn the answer sequence of a question for labeling the matching quality of each answer. We also incorporating external knowledge by training Word2Vec on Flashcards data, thus we get more compact embedding. Experimental results show that our method achieves better or comparable performance compared with the baseline system. The proposed approach achieves the accuracy of 0.39, 0.42 in English valid set, test set, respectively.

Multi-choice question answering in exams is a typical QA task. To accomplish this task, we present an answer localization method to locate answers shown in web pages, considering structural information and semantic information both. Using this method as basis, we analyze sentences and paragraphs appeared on web pages to get predictions. With this answer localization system, we get effective results on both validation dataset and test dataset.

In this paper we present MappSent, a textual similarity approach that we applied to the multi-choice question answering in exams shared task. MappSent has initially been proposed for question-to-question similarity hazem2017. In this work, we present the results of two adaptations of MappSent for the question answering task on the English dataset.

A shared task is a typical question answering task that aims to test how accurately the participants can answer the questions in exams. Typically, for each question, there are four candidate answers, and only one of the answers is correct. The existing methods for such a task usually implement a recurrent neural network (RNN) or long short-term memory (LSTM). However, both RNN and LSTM are biased models in which the words in the tail of a sentence are more dominant than the words in the header. In this paper, we propose the use of an attention-based LSTM (AT-LSTM) model for these tasks. By adding an attention mechanism to the standard LSTM, this model can more easily capture long contextual information.

This paper describes the participation of the JU NITM team in IJCNLP-2017 Task 5: “Multi-choice Question Answering in Examinations”. The main aim of this shared task is to choose the correct option for each multi-choice question. Our proposed model includes vector representations as feature and machine learning for classification. At first we represent question and answer in vector space and after that find the cosine similarity between those two vectors. Finally we apply classification approach to find the correct answer. Our system was only developed for the English language, and it obtained an accuracy of 40.07% for test dataset and 40.06% for valid dataset.