Vahed Qazvinian

The ACL Anthology Network corpus

We introduce the ACL Anthology Network (AAN), a comprehensive manually curated networked database of citations, collaborations, and summaries in the field of Computational Linguistics. We also present a number of statistics about the network including the most cited authors, the most central collaborators, as well as network statistics about the paper citation, author citation, and author collaboration networks.

Using Citations to Generate surveys of Scientific Paradigms

The number of research publications in various disciplines is growing exponentially. Researchers and scientists are increasingly finding themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of technical material. In this paper we present the first steps in producing an automatically generated, readily consumable, technical survey. Specifically we explore the combination of citation information and summarization techniques. Even though prior work (Teufel et al., 2006) argues that citation text is unsuitable for summarization, we show that in the framework of multi-document survey creation, citation texts can play a crucial role.

Clustering memes in social media

The increasing pervasiveness of social media creates new opportunities to study human social behavior, while challenging our capability to analyze their massive data streams. One of the emerging tasks is to distinguish between different kinds of activities, for example engineered misinformation campaigns versus spontaneous communication. Such detection problems require a formal definition of meme, or unit of information that can spread from person to person through the social network. Once a meme is identified, supervised learning methods can be applied to classify different types of communication. The appropriate granularity of a meme, however, is hardly captured from existing entities such as tags and keywords. Here we present a framework for the novel task of detecting memes by clustering messages from large streams of social data. We evaluate various similarity measures that leverage content, metadata, network features, and their combinations. We also explore the idea of pre-clustering on the basis of existing entities. A systematic evaluation is carried out using a manually curated dataset as ground truth. Our analysis shows that pre-clustering and a combination of heterogeneous features yield the best trade-off between number of clusters and their quality, demonstrating that a simple combination based on pairwise maximization of similarity is as effective as a non-trivial optimization of parameters. Our approach is fully automatic, unsupervised, and scalable for real-time detection of memes in streaming data.

Generating extractive summaries of scientific paradigms

Researchers and scientists increasingly find themselves in the position of having to quickly understand large amounts of technical material. Our goal is to effectively serve this need by using bibliometric text mining and summarization techniques to generate summaries of scientific literature. We show how we can use citations to produce automatically generated, readily consumable, technical extractive summaries. We first propose C-LexRank, a model for summarizing single scientific articles based on citations, which employs community detection and extracts salient information-rich sentences. Next, we further extend our experiments to summarize a set of papers, which cover the same scienti fic topic. We generate extractive summaries of a set of Question Answering (QA) and Dependency Parsing (DP) papers, their abstracts, and their citation sentences and show that citations have unique information amenable to creating a summary.

NLP-driven citation analysis for scientometrics

This paper summarizes ongoing research in Natural-Language-Processing-driven citation analysis and describes experiments and motivating examples of how this work can be used to enhance traditional scientometrics analysis that is based on simply treating citations as a ‘vote’ from the citing paper to cited paper. In particular, we describe our dataset for citation polarity and citation purpose, present experimental results on the automatic detection of these indicators, and demonstrate the use of such annotations for studying research dynamics and scientific summarization. We also look at two complementary problems that show up in Natural-Language-Processing-driven citation analysis for a specific target paper. The first problem is extracting citation context, the implicit citation sentences that do not contain explicit anchors to the target paper. The second problem is extracting reference scope, the target relevant segment of a complicated citing sentence that cites multiple papers. We show how these tasks can be helpful in improving sentiment analysis and citation-based summarization.

Hardware acceleration for similarity measurement in natural language processing

The continuation of Moores law scaling, but in the absence of Dennard scaling, motivates an emphasis on energy-efficient accelerator-based designs for future applications. In natural language processing, the conventional approach to automatically analyze vast text collections - using scale-out processing - incurs high energy and hardware costs since the central compute-intensive step of similarity measurement often entails pairwise, all-to-all comparisons. We propose a custom hardware accelerator for similarity measures that leverages data streaming, memory latency hiding, and parallel computation across variable-length threads. We evaluate our design through a combination of architectural simulation and RTL synthesis. When executing the dominant kernel in a semantic indexing application for documents, we demonstrate throughput gains of up to 42× and 58× lower energy per similarity-computation compared to an optimized software implementation, while requiring less than 1.3% of the area of a conventional core.