As language models become increasingly integrated into our digital lives, Personalized Text Generation (PTG) has emerged as a pivotal component with a wide range of applications. However, the bias inherent in user written text, often used for PTG model training, can inadvertently associate different levels of linguistic quality with users’ protected attributes. The model can inherit the bias and perpetuate inequality in generating text w.r.t. users’ protected attributes, leading to unfair treatment when serving users. In this work, we investigate fairness of PTG in the context of personalized explanation generation for recommendations. We first discuss the biases in generated explanations and their fairness implications. To promote fairness, we introduce a general framework to achieve measure-specific counterfactual fairness in explanation generation. Extensive experiments and human evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) aims at recognizing the predicate-argument structure of a sentence and can be decomposed into two subtasks: predicate disambiguation and argument labeling. Prior work deals with these two tasks independently, which ignores the semantic connection between the two tasks. In this paper, we propose to use the machine reading comprehension (MRC) framework to bridge this gap. We formalize predicate disambiguation as multiple-choice machine reading comprehension, where the descriptions of candidate senses of a given predicate are used as options to select the correct sense. The chosen predicate sense is then used to determine the semantic roles for that predicate, and these semantic roles are used to construct the query for another MRC model for argument labeling. In this way, we are able to leverage both the predicate semantics and the semantic role semantics for argument labeling. We also propose to select a subset of all the possible semantic roles for computational efficiency. Experiments show that the proposed framework achieves state-of-the-art or comparable results to previous work.

Summarization is an important natural language processing (NLP) task in identifying key information from text. For conversations, the summarization systems need to extract salient contents from spontaneous utterances by multiple speakers. In a special task-oriented scenario, namely medical conversations between patients and doctors, the symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments could be highly important because the nature of such conversation is to find a medical solution to the problem proposed by the patients. Especially consider that current online medical platforms provide millions of public available conversations between real patients and doctors, where the patients propose their medical problems and the registered doctors offer diagnosis and treatment, a conversation in most cases could be too long and the key information is hard to be located. Therefore, summarizations to the patients’ problems and the doctors’ treatments in the conversations can be highly useful, in terms of helping other patients with similar problems have a precise reference for potential medical solutions. In this paper, we focus on medical conversation summarization, using a dataset of medical conversations and corresponding summaries which were crawled from a well-known online healthcare service provider in China. We propose a hierarchical encoder-tagger model (HET) to generate summaries by identifying important utterances (with respect to problem proposing and solving) in the conversations. For the particular dataset used in this study, we show that high-quality summaries can be generated by extracting two types of utterances, namely, problem statements and treatment recommendations. Experimental results demonstrate that HET outperforms strong baselines and models from previous studies, and adding conversation-related features can further improve system performance.

Medical conversation is a central part of medical care. Yet, the current state and quality of medical conversation is far from perfect. Therefore, a substantial amount of research has been done to obtain a better understanding of medical conversation and to address its practical challenges and dilemmas. In line with this stream of research, we have developed a multi-layer structure annotation scheme to analyze medical conversation, and are using the scheme to construct a corpus of naturally occurring medical conversation in Chinese pediatric primary care setting. Some of the preliminary findings are reported regarding 1) how a medical conversation starts, 2) where communication problems tend to occur, and 3) how physicians close a conversation. Challenges and opportunities for research on medical conversation with NLP techniques will be discussed.

This paper describes the COSTA scheme for coding structures and actions in conversation. Informed by Conversation Analysis, the scheme introduces an innovative method for marking multi-layer structural organization of conversation and a structure-informed taxonomy of actions. In addition, we create a corpus of naturally occurring medical conversations, containing 318 video-recorded and manually transcribed pediatric consultations. Based on the annotated corpus, we investigate 1) treatment decision-making process in medical conversations, and 2) effects of physician-caregiver communication behaviors on antibiotic over-prescribing. Although the COSTA annotation scheme is developed based on data from the task-specific domain of pediatric consultations, it can be easily extended to apply to more general domains and other languages.

This paper describes our approach to SemEval-2018 Task 2, which aims to predict the most likely associated emoji, given a tweet in English or Spanish. We normalized text-based tweets during pre-processing, following which we utilized a bi-directional gated recurrent unit with an attention mechanism to build our base model. Multi-models with or without class weights were trained for the ensemble methods. We boosted models without class weights, and only strong boost classifiers were identified. In our system, not only was a boosting method used, but we also took advantage of the voting ensemble method to enhance our final system result. Our method demonstrated an obvious improvement of approximately 3% of the macro F1 score in English and 2% in Spanish.

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.