arXiv subjects

Noam Slonim

Publications and source records attributed to Noam Slonim.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

VIRATrustData: A Trust-Annotated Corpus of Human-Chatbot Conversations About COVID-19 Vaccines

Public trust in medical information is crucial for successful application of public health policies such as vaccine uptake. This is especially true when the information is offered remotely, by chatbots, which have become increasingly popular in recent years. Here, we explore the challenging task of human-bot turn-level trust classification. We rely on a recently released data of observationally-collected (rather than crowdsourced) dialogs with VIRA chatbot, a COVID-19 Vaccine Information Resource Assistant. These dialogs are centered around questions and concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, where trust is particularly acute. We annotated $3k$ VIRA system-user conversational turns for Low Institutional Trust or Low Agent Trust vs. Neutral or High Trust. We release the labeled dataset, VIRATrustData, the first of its kind to the best of our knowledge. We demonstrate how this task is non-trivial and compare several models that predict the different levels of trust.

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arXiv2022

Multi-Domain Targeted Sentiment Analysis

Targeted Sentiment Analysis (TSA) is a central task for generating insights from consumer reviews. Such content is extremely diverse, with sites like Amazon or Yelp containing reviews on products and businesses from many different domains. A real-world TSA system should gracefully handle that diversity. This can be achieved by a multi-domain model -- one that is robust to the domain of the analyzed texts, and performs well on various domains. To address this scenario, we present a multi-domain TSA system based on augmenting a given training set with diverse weak labels from assorted domains. These are obtained through self-training on the Yelp reviews corpus. Extensive experiments with our approach on three evaluation datasets across different domains demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. We further analyze how restrictions imposed on the available labeled data affect the performance, and compare the proposed method to the costly alternative of manually gathering diverse TSA labeled data. Our results and analysis show that our approach is a promising step towards a practical domain-robust TSA system.

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arXiv2022

Fusing finetuned models for better pretraining

Pretrained models are the standard starting point for training. This approach consistently outperforms the use of a random initialization. However, pretraining is a costly endeavour that few can undertake. In this paper, we create better base models at hardly any cost, by fusing multiple existing fine tuned models into one. Specifically, we fuse by averaging the weights of these models. We show that the fused model results surpass the pretrained model ones. We also show that fusing is often better than intertraining. We find that fusing is less dependent on the target task. Furthermore, weight decay nullifies intertraining effects but not those of fusing.

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arXiv2022

Fortunately, Discourse Markers Can Enhance Language Models for Sentiment Analysis

In recent years, pretrained language models have revolutionized the NLP world, while achieving state of the art performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many cases, these models do not perform well when labeled data is scarce and the model is expected to perform in the zero or few shot setting. Recently, several works have shown that continual pretraining or performing a second phase of pretraining (inter-training) which is better aligned with the downstream task, can lead to improved results, especially in the scarce data setting. Here, we propose to leverage sentiment-carrying discourse markers to generate large-scale weakly-labeled data, which in turn can be used to adapt language models for sentiment analysis. Extensive experimental results show the value of our approach on various benchmark datasets, including the finance domain. Code, models and data are available at https://github.com/ibm/tslm-discourse-markers.

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arXiv2022

Quality Controlled Paraphrase Generation

Paraphrase generation has been widely used in various downstream tasks. Most tasks benefit mainly from high quality paraphrases, namely those that are semantically similar to, yet linguistically diverse from, the original sentence. Generating high-quality paraphrases is challenging as it becomes increasingly hard to preserve meaning as linguistic diversity increases. Recent works achieve nice results by controlling specific aspects of the paraphrase, such as its syntactic tree. However, they do not allow to directly control the quality of the generated paraphrase, and suffer from low flexibility and scalability. Here we propose $QCPG$, a quality-guided controlled paraphrase generation model, that allows directly controlling the quality dimensions. Furthermore, we suggest a method that given a sentence, identifies points in the quality control space that are expected to yield optimal generated paraphrases. We show that our method is able to generate paraphrases which maintain the original meaning while achieving higher diversity than the uncontrolled baseline. The models, the code, and the data can be found in https://github.com/IBM/quality-controlled-paraphrase-generation.

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arXiv2022

Heuristic-based Inter-training to Improve Few-shot Multi-perspective Dialog Summarization

Many organizations require their customer-care agents to manually summarize their conversations with customers. These summaries are vital for decision making purposes of the organizations. The perspective of the summary that is required to be created depends on the application of the summaries. With this work, we study the multi-perspective summarization of customer-care conversations between support agents and customers. We observe that there are different heuristics that are associated with summaries of different perspectives, and explore these heuristics to create weak-labeled data for intermediate training of the models before fine-tuning with scarce human annotated summaries. Most importantly, we show that our approach supports models to generate multi-perspective summaries with a very small amount of annotated data. For example, our approach achieves 94\% of the performance (Rouge-2) of a model trained with the original data, by training only with 7\% of the original data.

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arXiv2022

Cluster & Tune: Boost Cold Start Performance in Text Classification

In real-world scenarios, a text classification task often begins with a cold start, when labeled data is scarce. In such cases, the common practice of fine-tuning pre-trained models, such as BERT, for a target classification task, is prone to produce poor performance. We suggest a method to boost the performance of such models by adding an intermediate unsupervised classification task, between the pre-training and fine-tuning phases. As such an intermediate task, we perform clustering and train the pre-trained model on predicting the cluster labels. We test this hypothesis on various data sets, and show that this additional classification phase can significantly improve performance, mainly for topical classification tasks, when the number of labeled instances available for fine-tuning is only a couple of dozen to a few hundred.

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arXiv2021

Overview of the 2021 Key Point Analysis Shared Task

We describe the 2021 Key Point Analysis (KPA-2021) shared task on key point analysis that we organized as a part of the 8th Workshop on Argument Mining (ArgMining 2021) at EMNLP 2021. We outline various approaches and discuss the results of the shared task. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for researchers working on text summarization and argument mining.

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arXiv2021

Project Debater APIs: Decomposing the AI Grand Challenge

Project Debater was revealed in 2019 as the first AI system that can debate human experts on complex topics. Engaging in a live debate requires a diverse set of skills, and Project Debater has been developed accordingly as a collection of components, each designed to perform a specific subtask. Project Debater APIs provide access to many of these capabilities, as well as to more recently developed ones. This diverse set of web services, publicly available for academic use, includes core NLP services, argument mining and analysis capabilities, and higher-level services for content summarization. We describe these APIs and their performance, and demonstrate how they can be used for building practical solutions. In particular, we will focus on Key Point Analysis, a novel technology that identifies the main points and their prevalence in a collection of texts such as survey responses and user reviews.

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arXiv2021

YASO: A Targeted Sentiment Analysis Evaluation Dataset for Open-Domain Reviews

Current TSA evaluation in a cross-domain setup is restricted to the small set of review domains available in existing datasets. Such an evaluation is limited, and may not reflect true performance on sites like Amazon or Yelp that host diverse reviews from many domains. To address this gap, we present YASO - a new TSA evaluation dataset of open-domain user reviews. YASO contains 2,215 English sentences from dozens of review domains, annotated with target terms and their sentiment. Our analysis verifies the reliability of these annotations, and explores the characteristics of the collected data. Benchmark results using five contemporary TSA systems show there is ample room for improvement on this challenging new dataset. YASO is available at https://github.com/IBM/yaso-tsa.

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arXiv2021

Every Bite Is an Experience: Key Point Analysis of Business Reviews

Previous work on review summarization focused on measuring the sentiment toward the main aspects of the reviewed product or business, or on creating a textual summary. These approaches provide only a partial view of the data: aspect-based sentiment summaries lack sufficient explanation or justification for the aspect rating, while textual summaries do not quantify the significance of each element, and are not well-suited for representing conflicting views. Recently, Key Point Analysis (KPA) has been proposed as a summarization framework that provides both textual and quantitative summary of the main points in the data. We adapt KPA to review data by introducing Collective Key Point Mining for better key point extraction; integrating sentiment analysis into KPA; identifying good key point candidates for review summaries; and leveraging the massive amount of available reviews and their metadata. We show empirically that these novel extensions of KPA substantially improve its performance. We demonstrate that promising results can be achieved without any domain-specific annotation, while human supervision can lead to further improvement.

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arXiv2020

Unsupervised Expressive Rules Provide Explainability and Assist Human Experts Grasping New Domains

Approaching new data can be quite deterrent; you do not know how your categories of interest are realized in it, commonly, there is no labeled data at hand, and the performance of domain adaptation methods is unsatisfactory. Aiming to assist domain experts in their first steps into a new task over a new corpus, we present an unsupervised approach to reveal complex rules which cluster the unexplored corpus by its prominent categories (or facets). These rules are human-readable, thus providing an important ingredient which has become in short supply lately - explainability. Each rule provides an explanation for the commonality of all the texts it clusters together. We present an extensive evaluation of the usefulness of these rules in identifying target categories, as well as a user study which assesses their interpretability.

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arXiv2020

The workweek is the best time to start a family -- A Study of GPT-2 Based Claim Generation

Argument generation is a challenging task whose research is timely considering its potential impact on social media and the dissemination of information. Here we suggest a pipeline based on GPT-2 for generating coherent claims, and explore the types of claims that it produces, and their veracity, using an array of manual and automatic assessments. In addition, we explore the interplay between this task and the task of Claim Retrieval, showing how they can complement one another.

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arXiv2020

Multilingual Argument Mining: Datasets and Analysis

The growing interest in argument mining and computational argumentation brings with it a plethora of Natural Language Understanding (NLU) tasks and corresponding datasets. However, as with many other NLU tasks, the dominant language is English, with resources in other languages being few and far between. In this work, we explore the potential of transfer learning using the multilingual BERT model to address argument mining tasks in non-English languages, based on English datasets and the use of machine translation. We show that such methods are well suited for classifying the stance of arguments and detecting evidence, but less so for assessing the quality of arguments, presumably because quality is harder to preserve under translation. In addition, focusing on the translate-train approach, we show how the choice of languages for translation, and the relations among them, affect the accuracy of the resultant model. Finally, to facilitate evaluation of transfer learning on argument mining tasks, we provide a human-generated dataset with more than 10k arguments in multiple languages, as well as machine translation of the English datasets.

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arXiv2020

Quantitative Argument Summarization and Beyond: Cross-Domain Key Point Analysis

When summarizing a collection of views, arguments or opinions on some topic, it is often desirable not only to extract the most salient points, but also to quantify their prevalence. Work on multi-document summarization has traditionally focused on creating textual summaries, which lack this quantitative aspect. Recent work has proposed to summarize arguments by mapping them to a small set of expert-generated key points, where the salience of each key point corresponds to the number of its matching arguments. The current work advances key point analysis in two important respects: first, we develop a method for automatic extraction of key points, which enables fully automatic analysis, and is shown to achieve performance comparable to a human expert. Second, we demonstrate that the applicability of key point analysis goes well beyond argumentation data. Using models trained on publicly available argumentation datasets, we achieve promising results in two additional domains: municipal surveys and user reviews. An additional contribution is an in-depth evaluation of argument-to-key point matching models, where we substantially outperform previous results.

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arXiv2020

What if we had no Wikipedia? Domain-independent Term Extraction from a Large News Corpus

One of the most impressive human endeavors of the past two decades is the collection and categorization of human knowledge in the free and accessible format that is Wikipedia. In this work we ask what makes a term worthy of entering this edifice of knowledge, and having a page of its own in Wikipedia? To what extent is this a natural product of on-going human discourse and discussion rather than an idiosyncratic choice of Wikipedia editors? Specifically, we aim to identify such "wiki-worthy" terms in a massive news corpus, and see if this can be done with no, or minimal, dependency on actual Wikipedia entries. We suggest a five-step pipeline for doing so, providing baseline results for all five, and the relevant datasets for benchmarking them. Our work sheds new light on the domain-specific Automatic Term Extraction problem, with the problem at hand being a domain-independent variant of it.

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arXiv2020

From Arguments to Key Points: Towards Automatic Argument Summarization

Generating a concise summary from a large collection of arguments on a given topic is an intriguing yet understudied problem. We propose to represent such summaries as a small set of talking points, termed "key points", each scored according to its salience. We show, by analyzing a large dataset of crowd-contributed arguments, that a small number of key points per topic is typically sufficient for covering the vast majority of the arguments. Furthermore, we found that a domain expert can often predict these key points in advance. We study the task of argument-to-key point mapping, and introduce a novel large-scale dataset for this task. We report empirical results for an extensive set of experiments with this dataset, showing promising performance.

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arXiv2020

Out of the Echo Chamber: Detecting Countering Debate Speeches

An educated and informed consumption of media content has become a challenge in modern times. With the shift from traditional news outlets to social media and similar venues, a major concern is that readers are becoming encapsulated in "echo chambers" and may fall prey to fake news and disinformation, lacking easy access to dissenting views. We suggest a novel task aiming to alleviate some of these concerns -- that of detecting articles that most effectively counter the arguments -- and not just the stance -- made in a given text. We study this problem in the context of debate speeches. Given such a speech, we aim to identify, from among a set of speeches on the same topic and with an opposing stance, the ones that directly counter it. We provide a large dataset of 3,685 such speeches (in English), annotated for this relation, which hopefully would be of general interest to the NLP community. We explore several algorithms addressing this task, and while some are successful, all fall short of expert human performance, suggesting room for further research. All data collected during this work is freely available for research.

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