Multi-task learning (MTL) and transfer learning (TL) are techniques to overcome the issue of data scarcity when training state-of-the-art neural networks. However, finding beneficial auxiliary datasets for MTL or TL is a time- and resource-consuming trial-and-error approach. We propose new methods to automatically assess the similarity of sequence tagging datasets to identify beneficial auxiliary data for MTL or TL setups. Our methods can compute the similarity between any two sequence tagging datasets, they do not need to be annotated with the same tagset or multiple labels in parallel. Additionally, our methods take tokens and their labels into account, which is more robust than only using either of them as an information source, as conducted in prior work. We empirically show that our similarity measures correlate with the change in test score of neural networks that use the auxiliary dataset for MTL to increase the main task performance. We provide an efficient, open-source implementation.

We present the first approach to automatically building resources for academic writing. The aim is to build a writing aid system that automatically edits a text so that it better adheres to the academic style of writing. On top of existing academic resources, such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) academic Word List, the New Academic Word List, and the Academic Collocation List, we also explore how to dynamically build such resources that would be used to automatically identify informal or non-academic words or phrases. The resources are compiled using different generic approaches that can be extended for different domains and languages. We describe the evaluation of resources with a system implementation. The system consists of an informal word identification (IWI), academic candidate paraphrase generation, and paraphrase ranking components. To generate candidates and rank them in context, we have used the PPDB and WordNet paraphrase resources. We use the Concepts in Context (CoInCO) “All-Words” lexical substitution dataset both for the informal word identification and paraphrase generation experiments. Our informal word identification component achieves an F-1 score of 82%, significantly outperforming a stratified classifier baseline. The main contribution of this work is a domain-independent methodology to build targeted resources for writing aids.

Disambiguation of word senses in context is easy for humans, but is a major challenge for automatic approaches. Sophisticated supervised and knowledge-based models were developed to solve this task. However, (i) the inherent Zipfian distribution of supervised training instances for a given word and/or (ii) the quality of linguistic knowledge representations motivate the development of completely unsupervised and knowledge-free approaches to word sense disambiguation (WSD). They are particularly useful for under-resourced languages which do not have any resources for building either supervised and/or knowledge-based models. In this paper, we present a method that takes as input a standard pre-trained word embedding model and induces a fully-fledged word sense inventory, which can be used for disambiguation in context. We use this method to induce a collection of sense inventories for 158 languages on the basis of the original pre-trained fastText word embeddings by Grave et al., (2018), enabling WSD in these languages. Models and system are available online.