United States

Natural language inference (NLI) is the task of determining whether a piece of text is entailed, contradicted by or unrelated to another piece of text. In this paper, we investigate how to tease systematic inferences (i.e., items for which people agree on the NLI label) apart from disagreement items (i.e., items which lead to different annotations), which most prior work has overlooked. To distinguish systematic inferences from disagreement items, we propose Artificial Annotators (AAs) to simulate the uncertainty in the annotation process by capturing the modes in annotations. Results on the CommitmentBank, a corpus of naturally occurring discourses in English, confirm that our approach performs statistically significantly better than all baselines. We further show that AAs learn linguistic patterns and context-dependent reasoning.

NAACL 2021

Identifying inherent disagreement in natural language inference

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

Summarization of clinical narratives is a long-standing research problem. Here, we introduce the task of hospital-course summarization. Given the documentation authored throughout a patient's hospitalization, generate a paragraph that tells the story of the patient admission. We construct an English, text-to-text dataset of 109,000 hospitalizations (2M source notes) and their corresponding summary proxy: the clinician-authored ``Brief Hospital Course'' paragraph written as part of a discharge note. Exploratory analyses reveal that the BHC paragraphs are highly abstractive with some long extracted fragments; are concise yet comprehensive; differ in style and content organization from the source notes; exhibit minimal lexical cohesion; and represent silver-standard references. Our analysis identifies multiple implications for modeling this complex, multi-document summarization task.

What's in a Summary? Laying the Groundwork for Advances in Hospital-Course Summarization

Modern summarization models generate highly fluent but often factually unreliable outputs. This motivated a surge of metrics attempting to measure the factuality of automatically generated summaries. Due to the lack of common benchmarks, these metrics cannot be compared. Moreover, all these methods treat factuality as a binary concept and fail to provide deeper insights into the kinds of inconsistencies made by different systems. To address these limitations, we devise a typology of factual errors and use it to collect human annotations of generated summaries from state-of-the-art summarization systems for the CNN/DM and XSum datasets. Through these annotations, we identify the proportion of different categories of factual errors in various summarization models and benchmark factuality metrics, showing their correlation with human judgment as well as their specific strengths and weaknesses.

Understanding Factuality in Abstractive Summarization with FRANK: A Benchmark for Factuality Metrics

Neural abstractive summarization models are flexible and can produce coherent summaries, but they are sometimes unfaithful and can be difficult to control. While previous studies attempt to provide different types of guidance to control the output and increase faithfulness, it is not clear how these strategies compare and contrast to each other. In this paper, we propose a general and extensible guided summarization framework (GSum) that can effectively take different kinds of external guidance as input, and we perform experiments across several different varieties. Experiments demonstrate that this model is effective, achieving state-of-the-art performance according to ROUGE on 4 popular summarization datasets when using highlighted sentences as guidance. In addition, we show that our guided model can generate more faithful summaries and demonstrate how different types of guidance generate qualitatively different summaries, lending a degree of controllability to the learned models.

GSum: A General Framework for Guided Neural Abstractive Summarization

Aspect-based summarization is the task of generating focused summaries based on specific points of interest. Such summaries aid efficient analysis of text, such as quickly understanding reviews or opinions from different angles. However, due to large differences in the type of aspects for different domains (e.g., sentiment, product features), the development of previous models has tended to be domain-specific. In this paper, we propose WikiAsp, a large-scale dataset for multi-domain aspect-based summarization that attempts to spur research in the direction of open-domain aspect-based summarization. Specifically, we build the dataset using Wikipedia articles from 20 different domains, using the section titles and boundaries of each article as a proxy for aspect annotation. We propose several straightforward baseline models for this task and conduct experiments on the dataset. Results highlight key challenges that existing summarization models face in this setting, such as proper pronoun handling of quoted sources and consistent explanation of time-sensitive events.

WikiAsp: A Dataset for Multi-domain Aspect-based Summarization

Multi-label emotion classification is an important task in NLP and is essential to many applications. In this work, we propose a sequence-to-emotion (Seq2Emo) approach, which implicitly models emotion correlations in a bi-directional decoder. Experiments on SemEval'18 and GoEmotions datasets show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods (without using external data). In particular, Seq2Emo outperforms the binary relevance (BR) and classifier chain (CC) approaches in a fair setting.

Seq2Emo: A Sequence to Multi-Label Emotion Classification Model

This paper studies continual learning (CL) of a sequence of aspect sentiment classification (ASC) tasks. Although some CL techniques have been proposed for document sentiment classification, we are not aware of any CL work on ASC. A CL system that incrementally learns a sequence of ASC tasks should address the following two issues: (1) transfer knowledge learned from previous tasks to the new task to help it learn a better model, and (2) maintain the performance of the models for previous tasks so that they are not forgotten. This paper proposes a novel capsule network based model called B-CL to address these issues. B-CL markedly improves the ASC performance on both the new task and the old tasks via forward and backward knowledge transfer. The effectiveness of B-CL is demonstrated through extensive experiments.

Adapting BERT for Continual Learning of a Sequence of Aspect Sentiment Classification Tasks

Stance detection on social media can help to identify and understand slanted news or commentary in

Adversarial Learning for Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media

Detecting stance on Twitter is especially challenging because of the short length of each tweet, the continuous coinage of new terminology and hashtags, and the deviation of sentence structure from standard prose. Finetuned language models using large-scale in-domain data have been shown to be the new state-of-the-art for many NLP tasks, including stance detection. In this paper, we propose a novel BERT-based fine-tuning method that enhances the masked language model for stance detection. Instead of random token masking, we propose using a weighted log-odds-ratio to identify words with high stance distinguishability and then model an attention mechanism that focuses on these words. We show that our proposed approach outperforms the state of the art for stance detection on Twitter data about the 2020 US Presidential election.

Knowledge Enhanced Masked Language Model for Stance Detection

Understanding narrative text requires capturing characters’ motivations, goals, and mental states. This paper proposes an Entity-based Narrative Graph (ENG) to model the internalstates of characters in a story. We explicitly model entities, their interactions and the context in which they appear, and learn rich representations for them. We experiment with different task-adaptive pre-training objectives, in-domain training, and symbolic inference to capture dependencies between different decisions in the output space. We evaluate our model on two narrative understanding tasks:

Modeling Human Mental States with an Entity-based Narrative Graph

Prior studies have found that women self-promote less than men due to gender stereotypes. In this study we built a BERT-based NLP model to predict whether a Congressional tweet shows self-promotion or not and then used this model to examine whether a gender gap in self-promotion exists among Congressional tweets. After analyzing 2 million Congressional tweets from July 2017 to March 2021, controlling for a number of factors that include political party, chamber, age, number of terms in Congress, number of daily tweets, and number of followers, we found that women in Congress actually perform more self-promotion on Twitter, indicating a reversal of traditional gender norms where women self-promote less than men.

Identifying inherent disagreement in natural language inference

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