E2E NLG Challenge is a shared task on generating restaurant descriptions from sets of key-value pairs. This paper describes the results of our participation in the challenge. We develop a simple, yet effective neural encoder-decoder model 1 which produces fluent restaurant descriptions and outperforms a strong baseline. We further analyze the data provided by the organizers and conclude that the task can also be approached with a template-based model developed in just a few hours.

Previous models for the assessment of commitment towards a predicate in a sentence (also known as factuality prediction) were trained and tested against a specific annotated dataset, subsequently limiting the generality of their results. In this work we propose an intuitive method for mapping three previously annotated corpora onto a single factuality scale, thereby enabling models to be tested across these corpora. In addition, we design a novel model for factuality prediction by first extending a previous rule-based factuality prediction system and applying it over an abstraction of dependency trees, and then using the output of this system in a supervised classifier. We show that this model outperforms previous methods on all three datasets. We make both the unified factuality corpus and our new model publicly available.

Surface Realization Shared Task 2018 is a workshop on generating sentences from lemmatized sets of dependency triples. This paper describes the results of our participation in the challenge. We develop a data-driven pipeline system which first orders the lemmas and then conjugates the words to finish the surface realization process. Our contribution is a novel sequential method of ordering lemmas, which, despite its simplicity, achieves promising results. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, describe its limitations and outline ways to improve it.

The Story Cloze test (Mostafazadeh et al., 2016) is a recent effort in providing a common test scenario for text understanding systems. As part of the LSDSem 2017 shared task, we present a system based on a deep learning architecture combined with a rich set of manually-crafted linguistic features. The system outperforms all known baselines for the task, suggesting that the chosen approach is promising. We additionally present two methods for generating further training data based on stories from the ROCStories corpus. Our system and generated data are publicly available on GitHub 1 .

In this paper we describe our system we designed and implemented for the crosslingual pronoun prediction task as a part of WMT 2016. The majority of the paper will be dedicated to the system whose outputs we submitted wherein we describe the simplified mathematical model, the details of the components and the working by means of an architecture diagram which also serves as a flowchart. We then discuss the results of the official scores and our observations on the same.

This paper describes our contribution to the SemEval 2016 Workshop. We participated in the Shared Task 8 on Meaning Representation parsing using a transition-based approach, which builds upon the system of Wang et al. (2015a) and Wang et al. (2015b), with additions that utilize a Feedforward Neural Network classifier and an enriched feature set. We observed that exploiting Neural Networks in Abstract Meaning Representation parsing is challenging and we could not benefit from it, while the feature enhancements yielded an improved performance over the baseline model.

End-to-end neural approaches have achieved state-of-the-art performance in many natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Yet, they often lack transparency of the underlying decision-making process, hindering error analysis and certain model improvements. In this work, we revisit the binary linearization approach to surface realization, which exhibits more interpretable behavior, but was falling short in terms of prediction accuracy. We show how enriching the training data to better capture word order constraints almost doubles the performance of the system. We further demonstrate that encoding both local and global prediction contexts yields another considerable performance boost. With the proposed modifications, the system which ranked low in the latest shared task on multilingual surface realization now achieves best results in five out of ten languages, while being on par with the state-of-the-art approaches in others. 1

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