Semere Kiros Bitew


2023

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Diverse Content Selection for Educational Question Generation
Amir Hadifar | Semere Kiros Bitew | Johannes Deleu | Veronique Hoste | Chris Develder | Thomas Demeester
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

Question Generation (QG) systems have shown promising results in reducing the time and effort required to create questions for students. Typically, a first step in QG is to select the content to design a question for. In an educational setting, it is crucial that the resulting questions cover the most relevant/important pieces of knowledge the student should have acquired. Yet, current QG systems either consider just a single sentence or paragraph (thus do not include a selection step), or do not consider this educational viewpoint of content selection. Aiming to fill this research gap with a solution for educational document level QG, we thus propose to select contents for QG based on relevance and topic diversity. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed content selection strategy for QG on 2 educational datasets. In our performance assessment, we also highlight limitations of existing QG evaluation metrics in light of the content selection problem.

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Learning from Partially Annotated Data: Example-aware Creation of Gap-filling Exercises for Language Learning
Semere Kiros Bitew | Johannes Deleu | A. Seza Doğruöz | Chris Develder | Thomas Demeester
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)

Since performing exercises (including, e.g.,practice tests) forms a crucial component oflearning, and creating such exercises requiresnon-trivial effort from the teacher. There is agreat value in automatic exercise generationin digital tools in education. In this paper, weparticularly focus on automatic creation of gap-filling exercises for language learning, specifi-cally grammar exercises. Since providing anyannotation in this domain requires human ex-pert effort, we aim to avoid it entirely and ex-plore the task of converting existing texts intonew gap-filling exercises, purely based on anexample exercise, without explicit instructionor detailed annotation of the intended gram-mar topics. We contribute (i) a novel neuralnetwork architecture specifically designed foraforementioned gap-filling exercise generationtask, and (ii) a real-world benchmark datasetfor French grammar. We show that our modelfor this French grammar gap-filling exercisegeneration outperforms a competitive baselineclassifier by 8% in F1 percentage points, achiev-ing an average F1 score of 82%. Our model im-plementation and the dataset are made publiclyavailable to foster future research, thus offeringa standardized evaluation and baseline solutionof the proposed partially annotated data predic-tion task in grammar exercise creation.

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CAW-coref: Conjunction-Aware Word-level Coreference Resolution
Karel D’Oosterlinck | Semere Kiros Bitew | Brandon Papineau | Christopher Potts | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of The Sixth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference (CRAC 2023)

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Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Sentiment Classification under Distribution Shift: an Exploratory Study
Maarten De Raedt | Semere Kiros Bitew | Fréderic Godin | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Multi-lingual Representation Learning (MRL)

2021

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Lazy Low-Resource Coreference Resolution: a Study on Leveraging Black-Box Translation Tools
Semere Kiros Bitew | Johannes Deleu | Chris Develder | Thomas Demeester
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Computational Models of Reference, Anaphora and Coreference

Large annotated corpora for coreference resolution are available for few languages. For machine translation, however, strong black-box systems exist for many languages. We empirically explore the appealing idea of leveraging such translation tools for bootstrapping coreference resolution in languages with limited resources. Two scenarios are analyzed, in which a large coreference corpus in a high-resource language is used for coreference predictions in a smaller language, i.e., by machine translating either the training corpus or the test data. In our empirical evaluation of coreference resolution using the two scenarios on several medium-resource languages, we find no improvement over monolingual baseline models. Our analysis of the various sources of error inherent to the studied scenarios, reveals that in fact the quality of contemporary machine translation tools is the main limiting factor.

2019

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Predicting Suicide Risk from Online Postings in Reddit The UGent-IDLab submission to the CLPysch 2019 Shared Task A
Semere Kiros Bitew | Giannis Bekoulis | Johannes Deleu | Lucas Sterckx | Klim Zaporojets | Thomas Demeester | Chris Develder
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

This paper describes IDLab’s text classification systems submitted to Task A as part of the CLPsych 2019 shared task. The aim of this shared task was to develop automated systems that predict the degree of suicide risk of people based on their posts on Reddit. Bag-of-words features, emotion features and post level predictions are used to derive user-level predictions. Linear models and ensembles of these models are used to predict final scores. We find that predicting fine-grained risk levels is much more difficult than flagging potentially at-risk users. Furthermore, we do not find clear added value from building richer ensembles compared to simple baselines, given the available training data and the nature of the prediction task.