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Radu Florian

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5 papers

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AAAI Conference 2023 System Paper

GAAMA 2.0: An Integrated System That Answers Boolean and Extractive Questions

Scott McCarley
Mihaela Bornea
Sara Rosenthal
Anthony Ferritto
Md Arafat Sultan
Avirup Sil
Radu Florian

Recent machine reading comprehension datasets include extractive and boolean questions but current approaches do not offer integrated support for answering both question types. We present a front-end demo to a multilingual machine reading comprehension system that handles boolean and extractive questions. It provides a yes/no answer and highlights the supporting evidence for boolean questions. It provides an answer for extractive questions and highlights the answer in the passage. Our system, GAAMA 2.0, achieved first place on the TyDi QA leaderboard at the time of submission. We contrast two different implementations of our approach: including multiple transformer models for easy deployment, and a shared transformer model utilizing adapters to reduce GPU memory footprint for a resource-constrained environment.

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AAAI Conference 2021 System Paper

KAAPA: Knowledge Aware Answers from PDF Analysis

Nicolas Fauceglia
Mustafa Canim
Alfio Gliozzo
Jennifer J Liang
Nancy Xin Ru Wang
Douglas Burdick
Nandana Mihindukulasooriya
Vittorio Castelli

We present KaaPa (Knowledge Aware Answers from Pdf Analysis), an integrated solution for machine reading comprehension over both text and tables extracted from PDFs. KaaPa enables interactive question refinement using facets generated from an automatically induced Knowledge Graph. In addition it provides a concise summary of the supporting evidence for the provided answers by aggregating information across multiple sources. KaaPa can be applied consistently to any collection of documents in English with zero domain adaptation effort. We showcase the use of KaaPa for QA on scientific literature using the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Multilingual Transfer Learning for QA using Translation as Data Augmentation

Mihaela Bornea
Lin Pan
Sara Rosenthal
Radu Florian
Avirup Sil

Prior work on multilingual question answering has mostly focused on using large multilingual pre-trained language models (LM) to perform zero-shot language-wise learning: train a QA model on English and test on other languages. In this work, we explore strategies that improve cross-lingual transfer by bringing the multilingual embeddings closer in the semantic space. Our first strategy augments the original English training data with machine translation-generated data. This results in a corpus of multilingual silver-labeled QA pairs that is 14 times larger than the original training set. In addition, we propose two novel strategies, language adversarial training and language arbitration framework, which significantly improve the (zero-resource) cross-lingual transfer performance and result in LM embeddings that are less language-variant. Empirically, we show that the proposed models outperform the previous zero-shot baseline on the recently introduced multilingual MLQA and TYDI QA datasets.

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AAAI Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Neural Cross-Lingual Entity Linking

Avirup Sil
Gourab Kundu
Radu Florian
Wael Hamza

A major challenge in Entity Linking (EL) is making effective use of contextual information to disambiguate mentions to Wikipedia that might refer to different entities in different contexts. The problem exacerbates with cross-lingual EL which involves linking mentions written in non-English documents to entries in the English Wikipedia: to compare textual clues across languages we need to compute similarity between textual fragments across languages. In this paper, we propose a neural EL model that trains ﬁne-grained similarities and dissimilarities between the query and candidate document from multiple perspectives, combined with convolution and tensor networks. Further, we show that this English-trained system can be applied, in zero-shot learning, to other languages by making surprisingly effective use of multi-lingual embeddings. The proposed system has strong empirical evidence yielding state-of-the-art results in English as well as cross-lingual: Spanish and Chinese TAC 2015 datasets.

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IJCAI Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Bilateral Multi-Perspective Matching for Natural Language Sentences

Zhiguo Wang
Wael Hamza
Radu Florian

Natural language sentence matching is a fundamental technology for a variety of tasks. Previous approaches either match sentences from a single direction or only apply single granular (word-by-word or sentence-by-sentence) matching. In this work, we propose a bilateral multi-perspective matching (BiMPM) model. Given two sentences P and Q, our model first encodes them with a BiLSTM encoder. Next, we match the two encoded sentences in two directions P against Q and P against Q. In each matching direction, each time step of one sentence is matched against all time-steps of the other sentence from multiple perspectives. Then, another BiLSTM layer is utilized to aggregate the matching results into a fix-length matching vector. Finally, based on the matching vector, a decision is made through a fully connected layer. We evaluate our model on three tasks: paraphrase identification, natural language inference and answer sentence selection. Experimental results on standard benchmark datasets show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance on all tasks.

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