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Saliency methods are widely used to interpret neural network predictions, but different variants of saliency methods often disagree even on the interpretations of the same prediction made by the same model. In these cases, how do we identify when are these interpretations trustworthy enough to be used in analyses? To address this question, we conduct a comprehensive and quantitative evaluation of saliency methods on a fundamental category of NLP models: neural language models. We evaluate the quality of prediction interpretations from two perspectives that each represents a desirable property of these interpretations: plausibility and faithfulness. Our evaluation is conducted on four different datasets constructed from the existing human annotation of syntactic and semantic agreements, on both sentence-level and document-level. Through our evaluation, we identified various ways saliency methods could yield interpretations of low quality. We recommend that future work deploying such methods to neural language models should carefully validate their interpretations before drawing insights.

NAACL 2021

Evaluating Saliency Methods for Neural Language Models

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

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.

Self Promotion in US Congressional Tweets

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.

Identifying inherent disagreement in natural language inference

Framing involves the positive or negative presentation of an argument or issue depending on the audience and goal of the speaker (Entman, 1983). Differences in lexical framing, the focus of our work, can have large effects on peoples’ opinions and beliefs. To make progress towards reframing arguments for positive effects, we create a dataset and method for this task. We use a lexical resource for connotations to create a parallel corpus and propose a method for argument reframing that combines controllable text generation (positive connotation) with a post decoding entailment component (same denotation). Our results show that our method is effective compared to strong baselines along the dimensions of fluency, meaning, and trustworthiness/reduction of fear.

ENTRUST: Argument Reframing with Language Models and Entailment

The task of long-form question answering (LFQA) involves retrieving documents relevant to a given question and using them to generate a paragraph-length answer. While many models have recently been proposed for LFQA, we show in this paper that the task formulation raises fundamental challenges regarding evaluation and dataset creation that currently preclude meaningful modeling progress. To demonstrate these challenges, we first design a new system that relies on sparse attention and contrastive retriever learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ELI5 LFQA dataset. While our system tops the public leaderboard, a detailed analysis reveals several troubling trends: (1) our system's generated answers are not actually grounded in the documents that it retrieves; (2) ELI5 contains significant train / validation overlap, as at least 81% of ELI5 validation questions occur in paraphrased form in the training set; (3) ROUGE-L is not an informative metric of generated answer quality and can be easily gamed; and (4) human evaluations used for other text generation tasks are unreliable for LFQA. We offer suggestions to mitigate each of these issues, which we hope will lead to more rigorous LFQA research and meaningful progress in the future.

Hurdles to Progress in Long-form Question Answering

Recent years have seen a flourishing of neural keyphrase generation (KPG) works, including the release of several large-scale datasets and a host of new models to tackle them. Model performance on KPG tasks has increased significantly with evolving deep learning research. However, there lacks a comprehensive comparison among different model designs, and a thorough investigation on related factors that may affect a KPG system’s generalization performance. In this empirical study, we aim to fill this gap by providing extensive experimental results and analyzing the most crucial factors impacting the generalizability of KPG models. We hope this study can help clarify some of the uncertainties surrounding the KPG task and facilitate future research on this topic.

An Empirical Study on Neural Keyphrase Generation

Conditioned dialogue generation suffers from the scarcity of labeled responses. In this work, we exploit labeled non-dialogue text data related to the condition, which are much easier to collect. We propose a multi-task learning approach to leverage both labeled dialogue and text data. The 3 tasks jointly optimize the same pre-trained Transformer -- conditioned dialogue generation task on the labeled dialogue data, conditioned language encoding task and conditioned language generation task on the labeled text data. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models by leveraging the labeled texts, and it also obtains larger improvement in performance comparing to the previous methods to leverage text data.

A Simple and Efficient Multi-Task Learning Approach for Conditioned Dialogue Generation

We consider the problem of learning to simplify medical texts. This is important because most reliable, up-to-date information in biomedicine is dense with jargon and thus practically inaccessible to the lay audience. Furthermore, manual simplification does not scale to the rapidly growing body of biomedical literature, motivating the need for automated approaches. Unfortunately, there are no large-scale resources available for this task. In this work we introduce a new corpus of parallel texts in English comprising technical and lay summaries of all published evidence pertaining to different clinical topics. We then propose a new metric based on likelihood scores from a masked language model pretrained on scientific texts. We show that this automated measure better differentiates between technical and lay summaries than existing heuristics. We introduce and evaluate baseline encoder-decoder Transformer models for simplification and propose a novel augmentation to these in which we explicitly penalize the decoder for producing "jargon" terms; we find that this yields improvements over baselines in terms of readability.

Paragraph-level Simplification of Medical Texts

How can we effectively inform content selection in Transformer-based abstractive summarization models?

Attention Head Masking for Inference Time Content Selection in Abstractive Summarization

Petroni et al. (2019) demonstrated that it is possible to retrieve world facts from a pre-trained language model by expressing them as cloze-style prompts and interpret the model's prediction accuracy as a lower bound on the amount of factual information it encodes. Subsequent work has attempted to tighten the estimate by searching for better prompts, using a disjoint set of facts as training data. In this work, we make two complementary contributions to better understand these factual probing techniques. First, we propose OptiPrompt, a novel and efficient method which directly optimizes in continuous embedding space. We find this simple method is able to predict an additional 6.4% of facts in the LAMA benchmark. Second, we raise a more important question: Can we really interpret these probing results as a lower bound? Is it possible that these prompt-search methods learn from the training data too? We find, somewhat surprisingly, that the training data used by these methods contains certain regularities of the underlying fact distribution, and all the existing prompt methods, including ours, are able to exploit them for better fact prediction. We conduct a set of control experiments to disentangle "learning" from "learning to recall", providing a more detailed picture of what different prompts can reveal about pre-trained language models.

Evaluating Saliency Methods for Neural Language Models

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