arXiv subjects

Heike Adel

Publications and source records attributed to Heike Adel.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Challenges in Explanation Quality Evaluation

While much research focused on producing explanations, it is still unclear how the produced explanations' quality can be evaluated in a meaningful way. Today's predominant approach is to quantify explanations using proxy scores which compare explanations to (human-annotated) gold explanations. This approach assumes that explanations which reach higher proxy scores will also provide a greater benefit to human users. In this paper, we present problems of this approach. Concretely, we (i) formulate desired characteristics of explanation quality, (ii) describe how current evaluation practices violate them, and (iii) support our argumentation with initial evidence from a crowdsourcing case study in which we investigate the explanation quality of state-of-the-art explainable question answering systems. We find that proxy scores correlate poorly with human quality ratings and, additionally, become less expressive the more often they are used (i.e. following Goodhart's law). Finally, we propose guidelines to enable a meaningful evaluation of explanations to drive the development of systems that provide tangible benefits to human users.

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arXiv2023

SwitchPrompt: Learning Domain-Specific Gated Soft Prompts for Classification in Low-Resource Domains

Prompting pre-trained language models leads to promising results across natural language processing tasks but is less effective when applied in low-resource domains, due to the domain gap between the pre-training data and the downstream task. In this work, we bridge this gap with a novel and lightweight prompting methodology called SwitchPrompt for the adaptation of language models trained on datasets from the general domain to diverse low-resource domains. Using domain-specific keywords with a trainable gated prompt, SwitchPrompt offers domain-oriented prompting, that is, effective guidance on the target domains for general-domain language models. Our few-shot experiments on three text classification benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the general-domain pre-trained language models when used with SwitchPrompt. They often even outperform their domain-specific counterparts trained with baseline state-of-the-art prompting methods by up to 10.7% performance increase in accuracy. This result indicates that SwitchPrompt effectively reduces the need for domain-specific language model pre-training.

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arXiv2023

Multilingual Normalization of Temporal Expressions with Masked Language Models

The detection and normalization of temporal expressions is an important task and preprocessing step for many applications. However, prior work on normalization is rule-based, which severely limits the applicability in real-world multilingual settings, due to the costly creation of new rules. We propose a novel neural method for normalizing temporal expressions based on masked language modeling. Our multilingual method outperforms prior rule-based systems in many languages, and in particular, for low-resource languages with performance improvements of up to 33 F1 on average compared to the state of the art.

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arXiv2022

Human Interpretation of Saliency-based Explanation Over Text

While a lot of research in explainable AI focuses on producing effective explanations, less work is devoted to the question of how people understand and interpret the explanation. In this work, we focus on this question through a study of saliency-based explanations over textual data. Feature-attribution explanations of text models aim to communicate which parts of the input text were more influential than others towards the model decision. Many current explanation methods, such as gradient-based or Shapley value-based methods, provide measures of importance which are well-understood mathematically. But how does a person receiving the explanation (the explainee) comprehend it? And does their understanding match what the explanation attempted to communicate? We empirically investigate the effect of various factors of the input, the feature-attribution explanation, and visualization procedure, on laypeople's interpretation of the explanation. We query crowdworkers for their interpretation on tasks in English and German, and fit a GAMM model to their responses considering the factors of interest. We find that people often mis-interpret the explanations: superficial and unrelated factors, such as word length, influence the explainees' importance assignment despite the explanation communicating importance directly. We then show that some of this distortion can be attenuated: we propose a method to adjust saliencies based on model estimates of over- and under-perception, and explore bar charts as an alternative to heatmap saliency visualization. We find that both approaches can attenuate the distorting effect of specific factors, leading to better-calibrated understanding of the explanation.

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arXiv2022

CLIN-X: pre-trained language models and a study on cross-task transfer for concept extraction in the clinical domain

The field of natural language processing (NLP) has recently seen a large change towards using pre-trained language models for solving almost any task. Despite showing great improvements in benchmark datasets for various tasks, these models often perform sub-optimal in non-standard domains like the clinical domain where a large gap between pre-training documents and target documents is observed. In this paper, we aim at closing this gap with domain-specific training of the language model and we investigate its effect on a diverse set of downstream tasks and settings. We introduce the pre-trained CLIN-X (Clinical XLM-R) language models and show how CLIN-X outperforms other pre-trained transformer models by a large margin for ten clinical concept extraction tasks from two languages. In addition, we demonstrate how the transformer model can be further improved with our proposed task- and language-agnostic model architecture based on ensembles over random splits and cross-sentence context. Our studies in low-resource and transfer settings reveal stable model performance despite a lack of annotated data with improvements of up to 47 F1 points when only 250 labeled sentences are available. Our results highlight the importance of specialized language models as CLIN-X for concept extraction in non-standard domains, but also show that our task-agnostic model architecture is robust across the tested tasks and languages so that domain- or task-specific adaptations are not required.

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arXiv2021

FAME: Feature-Based Adversarial Meta-Embeddings for Robust Input Representations

Combining several embeddings typically improves performance in downstream tasks as different embeddings encode different information. It has been shown that even models using embeddings from transformers still benefit from the inclusion of standard word embeddings. However, the combination of embeddings of different types and dimensions is challenging. As an alternative to attention-based meta-embeddings, we propose feature-based adversarial meta-embeddings (FAME) with an attention function that is guided by features reflecting word-specific properties, such as shape and frequency, and show that this is beneficial to handle subword-based embeddings. In addition, FAME uses adversarial training to optimize the mappings of differently-sized embeddings to the same space. We demonstrate that FAME works effectively across languages and domains for sequence labeling and sentence classification, in particular in low-resource settings. FAME sets the new state of the art for POS tagging in 27 languages, various NER settings and question classification in different domains.

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arXiv2021

To Share or not to Share: Predicting Sets of Sources for Model Transfer Learning

In low-resource settings, model transfer can help to overcome a lack of labeled data for many tasks and domains. However, predicting useful transfer sources is a challenging problem, as even the most similar sources might lead to unexpected negative transfer results. Thus, ranking methods based on task and text similarity -- as suggested in prior work -- may not be sufficient to identify promising sources. To tackle this problem, we propose a new approach to automatically determine which and how many sources should be exploited. For this, we study the effects of model transfer on sequence labeling across various domains and tasks and show that our methods based on model similarity and support vector machines are able to predict promising sources, resulting in performance increases of up to 24 F1 points.

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arXiv2021

Does External Knowledge Help Explainable Natural Language Inference? Automatic Evaluation vs. Human Ratings

Natural language inference (NLI) requires models to learn and apply commonsense knowledge. These reasoning abilities are particularly important for explainable NLI systems that generate a natural language explanation in addition to their label prediction. The integration of external knowledge has been shown to improve NLI systems, here we investigate whether it can also improve their explanation capabilities. For this, we investigate different sources of external knowledge and evaluate the performance of our models on in-domain data as well as on special transfer datasets that are designed to assess fine-grained reasoning capabilities. We find that different sources of knowledge have a different effect on reasoning abilities, for example, implicit knowledge stored in language models can hinder reasoning on numbers and negations. Finally, we conduct the largest and most fine-grained explainable NLI crowdsourcing study to date. It reveals that even large differences in automatic performance scores do neither reflect in human ratings of label, explanation, commonsense nor grammar correctness.

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arXiv2021

Boosting Transformers for Job Expression Extraction and Classification in a Low-Resource Setting

In this paper, we explore possible improvements of transformer models in a low-resource setting. In particular, we present our approaches to tackle the first two of three subtasks of the MEDDOPROF competition, i.e., the extraction and classification of job expressions in Spanish clinical texts. As neither language nor domain experts, we experiment with the multilingual XLM-R transformer model and tackle these low-resource information extraction tasks as sequence-labeling problems. We explore domain- and language-adaptive pretraining, transfer learning and strategic datasplits to boost the transformer model. Our results show strong improvements using these methods by up to 5.3 F1 points compared to a fine-tuned XLM-R model. Our best models achieve 83.2 and 79.3 F1 for the first two tasks, respectively.

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arXiv2021

Enriched Attention for Robust Relation Extraction

The performance of relation extraction models has increased considerably with the rise of neural networks. However, a key issue of neural relation extraction is robustness: the models do not scale well to long sentences with multiple entities and relations. In this work, we address this problem with an enriched attention mechanism. Attention allows the model to focus on parts of the input sentence that are relevant to relation extraction. We propose to enrich the attention function with features modeling knowledge about the relation arguments and the shortest dependency path between them. Thus, for different relation arguments, the model can pay attention to different parts of the sentence. Our model outperforms prior work using comparable setups on two popular benchmarks, and our analysis confirms that it indeed scales to long sentences with many entities.

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arXiv2021

A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios

Deep neural networks and huge language models are becoming omnipresent in natural language applications. As they are known for requiring large amounts of training data, there is a growing body of work to improve the performance in low-resource settings. Motivated by the recent fundamental changes towards neural models and the popular pre-train and fine-tune paradigm, we survey promising approaches for low-resource natural language processing. After a discussion about the different dimensions of data availability, we give a structured overview of methods that enable learning when training data is sparse. This includes mechanisms to create additional labeled data like data augmentation and distant supervision as well as transfer learning settings that reduce the need for target supervision. A goal of our survey is to explain how these methods differ in their requirements as understanding them is essential for choosing a technique suited for a specific low-resource setting. Further key aspects of this work are to highlight open issues and to outline promising directions for future research.

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arXiv2020

NLNDE at CANTEMIST: Neural Sequence Labeling and Parsing Approaches for Clinical Concept Extraction

The recognition and normalization of clinical information, such as tumor morphology mentions, is an important, but complex process consisting of multiple subtasks. In this paper, we describe our system for the CANTEMIST shared task, which is able to extract, normalize and rank ICD codes from Spanish electronic health records using neural sequence labeling and parsing approaches with context-aware embeddings. Our best system achieves 85.3 F1, 76.7 F1, and 77.0 MAP for the three tasks, respectively.

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arXiv2020

An Analysis of Simple Data Augmentation for Named Entity Recognition

Simple yet effective data augmentation techniques have been proposed for sentence-level and sentence-pair natural language processing tasks. Inspired by these efforts, we design and compare data augmentation for named entity recognition, which is usually modeled as a token-level sequence labeling problem. Through experiments on two data sets from the biomedical and materials science domains (i2b2-2010 and MaSciP), we show that simple augmentation can boost performance for both recurrent and transformer-based models, especially for small training sets.

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arXiv2020

F1 is Not Enough! Models and Evaluation Towards User-Centered Explainable Question Answering

Explainable question answering systems predict an answer together with an explanation showing why the answer has been selected. The goal is to enable users to assess the correctness of the system and understand its reasoning process. However, we show that current models and evaluation settings have shortcomings regarding the coupling of answer and explanation which might cause serious issues in user experience. As a remedy, we propose a hierarchical model and a new regularization term to strengthen the answer-explanation coupling as well as two evaluation scores to quantify the coupling. We conduct experiments on the HOTPOTQA benchmark data set and perform a user study. The user study shows that our models increase the ability of the users to judge the correctness of the system and that scores like F1 are not enough to estimate the usefulness of a model in a practical setting with human users. Our scores are better aligned with user experience, making them promising candidates for model selection.

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arXiv2020

NLNDE: The Neither-Language-Nor-Domain-Experts' Way of Spanish Medical Document De-Identification

Natural language processing has huge potential in the medical domain which recently led to a lot of research in this field. However, a prerequisite of secure processing of medical documents, e.g., patient notes and clinical trials, is the proper de-identification of privacy-sensitive information. In this paper, we describe our NLNDE system, with which we participated in the MEDDOCAN competition, the medical document anonymization task of IberLEF 2019. We address the task of detecting and classifying protected health information from Spanish data as a sequence-labeling problem and investigate different embedding methods for our neural network. Despite dealing in a non-standard language and domain setting, the NLNDE system achieves promising results in the competition.

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arXiv2020

NLNDE: Enhancing Neural Sequence Taggers with Attention and Noisy Channel for Robust Pharmacological Entity Detection

Named entity recognition has been extensively studied on English news texts. However, the transfer to other domains and languages is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we describe the system with which we participated in the first subtrack of the PharmaCoNER competition of the BioNLP Open Shared Tasks 2019. Aiming at pharmacological entity detection in Spanish texts, the task provides a non-standard domain and language setting. However, we propose an architecture that requires neither language nor domain expertise. We treat the task as a sequence labeling task and experiment with attention-based embedding selection and the training on automatically annotated data to further improve our system's performance. Our system achieves promising results, especially by combining the different techniques, and reaches up to 88.6% F1 in the competition.

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arXiv2020

The SOFC-Exp Corpus and Neural Approaches to Information Extraction in the Materials Science Domain

This paper presents a new challenging information extraction task in the domain of materials science. We develop an annotation scheme for marking information on experiments related to solid oxide fuel cells in scientific publications, such as involved materials and measurement conditions. With this paper, we publish our annotation guidelines, as well as our SOFC-Exp corpus consisting of 45 open-access scholarly articles annotated by domain experts. A corpus and an inter-annotator agreement study demonstrate the complexity of the suggested named entity recognition and slot filling tasks as well as high annotation quality. We also present strong neural-network based models for a variety of tasks that can be addressed on the basis of our new data set. On all tasks, using BERT embeddings leads to large performance gains, but with increasing task complexity, adding a recurrent neural network on top seems beneficial. Our models will serve as competitive baselines in future work, and analysis of their performance highlights difficult cases when modeling the data and suggests promising research directions.

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arXiv2020

On the Choice of Auxiliary Languages for Improved Sequence Tagging

Recent work showed that embeddings from related languages can improve the performance of sequence tagging, even for monolingual models. In this analysis paper, we investigate whether the best auxiliary language can be predicted based on language distances and show that the most related language is not always the best auxiliary language. Further, we show that attention-based meta-embeddings can effectively combine pre-trained embeddings from different languages for sequence tagging and set new state-of-the-art results for part-of-speech tagging in five languages.

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