Passage retrieval is the task of identifying text snippets that are valid answers for a natural language posed question. One way to address this problem is to look at it as a metric learning problem, where we want to induce a metric between questions and passages that assign smaller distances to more relevant passages. In this work, we present a novel method for passage retrieval that learns a metric for questions and passages based on their internal semantic interactions. The method uses a similar approach to that of triplet networks, where the training samples are composed of one anchor (the question) and two positive and negative samples (passages). However,and in contrast with triplet networks, the proposed method uses a novel deep architecture that better exploits the particularities of text and takes into consideration complementary relatedness measures. Besides, the paper presents a sampling strategy that selects both easy and hard negative samples which improves the accuracy of the trained model. The method is particularly well suited for domain-specific passage retrieval where it is very important to take into account different sources of information. The proposed approach was evaluated in a biomedical passage retrieval task, the BioASQ challenge, outperforming standard triplet loss substantially by 10%,and state-of-the-art performance by 26%.

An author’s way of presenting a story through his/her writing style has a great impact on whether the story will be liked by readers or not. In this paper, we learn representations for authors of literary texts together with representations for character n-grams annotated with their functional roles. We train a neural character n-gram based language model using an external corpus of literary texts and transfer learned representations for use in downstream tasks. We show that augmenting the knowledge from external works of authors produces results competitive with other style-based methods for book likability prediction, genre classification, and authorship attribution.

Biomedical Question Answering is concerned with the development of methods and systems that automatically find answers to natural language posed questions. In this work, we describe the system used in the BioASQ Challenge task 6b for document retrieval and snippet retrieval (with particular emphasis in this subtask). The proposed model makes use of semantic similarity patterns that are evaluated and measured by a convolutional neural network architecture. Subsequently, the snippet ranking performance is improved with a pseudo-relevance feedback approach in a later step. Based on the preliminary results, we reached the second position in snippet retrieval sub-task.

Likability prediction of books has many uses. Readers, writers, as well as the publishing industry, can all benefit from automatic book likability prediction systems. In order to make reliable decisions, these systems need to assimilate information from different aspects of a book in a sensible way. We propose a novel multimodal neural architecture that incorporates genre supervision to assign weights to individual feature types. Our proposed method is capable of dynamically tailoring weights given to feature types based on the characteristics of each book. Our architecture achieves competitive results and even outperforms state-of-the-art for this task.

The intensive use of e-communications in everyday life has given rise to new threats and risks. When the vulnerable asset is the user, detecting these potential attacks before they cause serious damages is extremely important. This paper proposes a novel document representation to improve the early detection of risks in social media sources. The goal is to effectively identify the potential risk using as few text as possible and with as much anticipation as possible. Accordingly, we devise a Multi-Resolution Representation (MulR), which allows us to generate multiple “views” of the analyzed text. These views capture different semantic meanings for words and documents at different levels of detail, which is very useful in early scenarios to model the variable amounts of evidence. Intuitively, the representation captures better the content of short documents (very early stages) in low resolutions, whereas large documents (medium/large stages) are better modeled with higher resolutions. We evaluate the proposed ideas in two different tasks where anticipation is critical: sexual predator detection and depression detection. The experimental evaluation for these early tasks revealed that the proposed approach outperforms previous methodologies by a considerable margin.

Recognizing named entities in a document is a key task in many NLP applications. Although current state-of-the-art approaches to this task reach a high performance on clean text (e.g. newswire genres), those algorithms dramatically degrade when they are moved to noisy environments such as social media domains. We present two systems that address the challenges of processing social media data using character-level phonetics and phonology, word embeddings, and Part-of-Speech tags as features. The first model is a multitask end-to-end Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM)-Conditional Random Field (CRF) network whose output layer contains two CRF classifiers. The second model uses a multitask BLSTM network as feature extractor that transfers the learning to a CRF classifier for the final prediction. Our systems outperform the current F1 scores of the state of the art on the Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text 2017 dataset by 2.45% and 3.69%, establishing a more suitable approach for social media environments.

Books have the power to make us feel happiness, sadness, pain, surprise, or sorrow. An author’s dexterity in the use of these emotions captivates readers and makes it difficult for them to put the book down. In this paper, we model the flow of emotions over a book using recurrent neural networks and quantify its usefulness in predicting success in books. We obtained the best weighted F1-score of 69% for predicting books’ success in a multitask setting (simultaneously predicting success and genre of books).

We investigate the value of feature engineering and neural network models for predicting successful writing. Similar to previous work, we treat this as a binary classification task and explore new strategies to automatically learn representations from book contents. We evaluate our feature set on two different corpora created from Project Gutenberg books. The first presents a novel approach for generating the gold standard labels for the task and the other is based on prior research. Using a combination of hand-crafted and recurrent neural network learned representations in a dual learning setting, we obtain the best performance of 73.50% weighted F1-score.

We present a model to perform authorship attribution of tweets using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) over character n-grams. We also present a strategy that improves model interpretability by estimating the importance of input text fragments in the predicted classification. The experimental evaluation shows that text CNNs perform competitively and are able to outperform previous methods.