Thailand

Collecting together microblogs representing opinions about the same topics within the same timeframe is useful to a number of different tasks and practitioners. A major question is how to evaluate the quality of such thematic clusters. Here we create a corpus of microblog clusters from three different domains and time windows and define the task of evaluating thematic coherence. We provide annotation guidelines and human annotations of thematic coherence by journalist experts. We subsequently investigate the efficacy of different automated evaluation metrics for the task. We consider a range of metrics including surface level metrics, ones for topic model coherence and text generation metrics (TGMs). While surface level metrics perform well, outperforming topic coherence metrics, they are not as consistent as TGMs. TGMs are more reliable than all other metrics considered for capturing thematic coherence in microblog clusters due to being less sensitive to the effect of time windows.

IJCNLP-AACL 2021

Evaluation of Thematic Coherence in Microblogs

topic modelling

social media

coherence

evaluation

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The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

technical paper

Geometry problem solving has attracted much attention in the NLP community recently. The task is challenging as it requires abstract problem understanding and symbolic reasoning with axiomatic knowledge. However, current datasets are either small in scale or not publicly available. Thus, we construct a new large-scale benchmark, Geometry3K, consisting of 3,002 geometry problems with dense annotation in formal language. We further propose a novel geometry solving approach with formal language and symbolic reasoning, called Interpretable Geometry Problem Solver (Inter-GPS). Inter-GPS first parses the problem text and diagram into formal language automatically via rule-based text parsing and neural object detecting, respectively. Unlike implicit learning in existing methods, Inter-GPS incorporates theorem knowledge as conditional rules and performs symbolic reasoning step by step. Also, a theorem predictor is designed to infer the theorem application sequence fed to the symbolic solver for the more efficient and reasonable searching path. Extensive experiments on the Geometry3K and GEOS datasets demonstrate that Inter-GPS achieves significant improvements over existing methods. The project with code and data is available at https://lupantech.github.io/inter-gps.

Inter-GPS: Interpretable Geometry Problem Solving with Formal Language and Symbolic Reasoning

Structured information is an important knowledge source for automatic verification of factual claims. Nevertheless, the majority of existing research into this task has focused on textual data, and the few recent inquiries into structured data have been for the closed-domain setting where appropriate evidence for each claim is assumed to have already been retrieved. In this paper, we investigate verification over structured data in the open-domain setting, introducing a joint reranking-and-verification model which fuses evidence documents in the verification component. Our open-domain model achieves performance comparable to the closed-domain state-of-the-art on the TabFact dataset, and demonstrates performance gains from the inclusion of multiple tables as well as a significant improvement over a heuristic retrieval baseline.

Joint Verification and Reranking for Open Fact Checking Over Tables

Social media has become a valuable resource for the study of suicidal ideation and the assessment of suicide risk. Among social media platforms, Reddit has emerged as the most promising one due to its anonymity and its focus on topic-based communities (subreddits) that can be indicative of someone's state of mind or interest regarding mental health disorders such as r/SuicideWatch, r/Anxiety, r/depression. A challenge for previous work on suicide risk assessment has been the small amount of labeled data. We propose an empirical investigation into several classes of weakly-supervised approaches, and show that using pseudo-labeling based on related issues around mental health (e.g., anxiety, depression) helps improve model performance for suicide risk assessment.

Weakly-Supervised Methods for Suicide Risk Assessment: Role of Related Domains

There are concerns that the ability of language models (LMs) to generate high-quality synthetic text can be misused to launch spam, disinformation, or propaganda. Therefore, the research community is actively working on detecting whether a given text is organic or synthetic. While this is a useful first step, it is important to be able to further fingerprint the author LM to attribute its origin. Prior work on fingerprinting LMs is limited to attributing synthetic text generated by a handful (usually <10) of pre-trained LMs. However, LMs such as GPT2 are commonly fine-tuned in a myriad of ways (e.g., on a domain-specific text corpus) before being used to generate synthetic text. Thus, it is challenging to fingerprinting fine-tuned LMs because the universe of fine-tuned LMs is much larger in realistic scenarios. To address this challenge, we study the problem of large-scale fingerprinting of fine-tuned LMs in the wild. Using a real-world dataset of synthetic text generated by 108 different fine-tuned LM, we conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the limitations of existing fingerprinting approaches. Our results show that fine-tuning itself is most effective in attributing the synthetic text generated by fine-tuned LMs.

Fingerprinting Fine-tuned Language Models in the Wild

Medical professionals review clinical narratives to assign medical codes for billing and care management. This manual process is inefficient and error-prone as it involves a nuanced one-to-many mapping. Recent works on automated ICD coding learn mappings between low-dimensional representations of the reports and the codes. While they propose novel neural networks for encoding varied types of information about the codes, it is unclear as to what information in the medical codes is helpful for performance improvement and why. Here, we compare different ways to represent, or embed,
the codes based on their textual, structural and statistical characteristics, using a single deep learning baseline model in quantitative evaluations on discharge reports from the MIMIC-III intensive care unit database. We also qualitatively analyse the nature of the cases that benefit most from the code embeddings and demonstrate that code embeddings are important for predicting ambiguous and oblique codes..

Analyzing Code Embeddings for Coding Clinical Narratives

A sememe is defined as the minimum semantic unit in linguistics. Sememe knowledge bases (SKBs), which comprise words annotated with sememes, enable sememes to be applied to natural language processing. So far a large body of research has showcased the unique advantages and effectiveness of SKBs in various tasks. However, most languages have no SKBs, and manual construction of SKBs is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To tackle this challenge, we propose a simple and fully automatic method of building an SKB via an existing dictionary. We use this method to build an English SKB and a French SKB, and conduct comprehensive evaluations from both intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives. Experimental results demonstrate that the automatically built English SKB is even superior to HowNet, the most widely used SKB that takes decades to build manually. And both the English and French SKBs can bring obvious performance enhancement in multiple downstream tasks. All the code and data of this paper (except the copyrighted dictionaries) can be obtained at https://github.com/thunlp/DictSKB.

Automatic Construction of Sememe Knowledge Bases via Dictionaries

Multi-hop reasoning is an effective and explainable approach to predicting missing facts in Knowledge Graphs (KGs). It usually adopts the Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework and searches over the KG to find an evidential path.
However, due to the large exploration space, the RL-based model struggles with the serious sparse reward problem and needs to make a lot of trials. Moreover, its exploration can be biased towards spurious paths that coincidentally lead to correct answers.
To solve both problems, we propose a simple but effective RL-based method called RARL (Rule-Aware RL). It injects high quality symbolic rules into the model’s reasoning process and employs partially random beam search, which can not only increase the probability of paths getting rewards, but also alleviate the impact of spurious paths. Experimental results show that it outperforms existing multi-hop methods in terms of Hit@1 and MRR.

Rule-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Knowledge Graph Reasoning

While vector-based language representations from pretrained language models have set a new standard for many NLP tasks, there is not yet a complete accounting of their inner workings. In particular, it is not entirely clear what aspects of sentence-level syntax are captured by these representations, nor how (if at all) they are built along the stacked layers of the network. In this paper, we aim to address such questions with a general class of interventional, input perturbation-based analyses of representations from pretrained language models. Importing from computational and cognitive neuroscience the notion of representational invariance, we perform a series of probes designed to test the sensitivity of these representations to several kinds of structure in sentences. Each probe involves swapping words in a sentence and comparing the representations from perturbed sentences against the original. We experiment with three different perturbations: (1) random permutations of n-grams of varying width, to test the scale at which a representation is sensitive to word position; (2) swapping of two spans which do or do not form a syntactic phrase, to test sensitivity to global phrase structure; and (3) swapping of two adjacent words which do or do not break apart a syntactic phrase, to test sensitivity to local phrase structure.
Results from these probes collectively suggest that Transformers build sensitivity to larger parts of the sentence along their layers, and that hierarchical phrase structure plays a role in this process. More broadly, our results also indicate that structured input perturbations widens the scope of analyses that can be performed on often-opaque deep learning systems, and can serve as a complement to existing tools (such as supervised linear probes) for interpreting complex black-box models.

Syntactic Perturbations Reveal Representational Correlates of Hierarchical Phrase Structure in Pretrained Language Models

Learning representations of entities and relations in structured knowledge bases is an active area of research, with much emphasis placed on choosing the appropriate geometry to capture the hierarchical structures exploited in, for example, ISA or HASPART relations. Box embeddings (Vilnis et al., 2018; Li et al., 2019; Dasgupta et al., 2020), which represent concepts as n-dimensional hyperrectangles, are capable of embedding hierarchies when training on a subset of the transitive closure. In (Patel et al., 2020), the authors demonstrate that only the transitive reduction is required and further extend box embeddings to capture joint hierarchies by augmenting the graph with new nodes. While it is possible to represent joint hierarchies with this method, the parameters for each hierarchy are decoupled, making generalization between hierarchies infeasible. In this work, we introduce
a learned box-to-box transformation that respects the structure of each hierarchy. We demonstrate that this not only improves the capability of modeling cross-hierarchy compositional edges but is also capable of generalizing from a subset of the transitive reduction.

Box-to-box transformations for modeling joint hierarchies

Recent advances in NLP systems, notably the pretraining-and-finetuning paradigm, have achieved great success in predictive accuracy. However, these systems are usually not well calibrated for uncertainty out-of-the-box. Many recalibration methods have been proposed in the literature for quantifying predictive uncertainty and calibrating model outputs, with varying degrees of complexity. In this work, we present a systematic study of a few of these methods. Focusing on the text classification task and finetuned large pretrained language models, we first show that many of the finetuned models are not well calibrated out-of-the-box, especially when the data come from out-of-domain settings. Next, we compare the effectiveness of a few widely-used recalibration methods (such as ensembles, temperature scaling). Then, we empirically illustrate a connection between distillation and calibration. We view distillation as a regularization term encouraging the student model to output uncertainties that match those of a teacher model. With this insight, we develop simple recalibration methods based on distillation with no additional inference-time cost. We show on the GLUE benchmark that our simple methods can achieve competitive out-of-domain (OOD) calibration performance w.r.t. more expensive approaches. Finally, we include ablations to understand the usefulness of components of our proposed method and examine the transferability of calibration via distillation.

Evaluation of Thematic Coherence in Microblogs

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