arXiv subjects

Zeming Chen

Publications and source records attributed to Zeming Chen.

25 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

DISCO: Distilling Counterfactuals with Large Language Models

Models trained with counterfactually augmented data learn representations of the causal structure of tasks, enabling robust generalization. However, high-quality counterfactual data is scarce for most tasks and not easily generated at scale. When crowdsourced, such data is typically limited in scale and diversity; when generated using supervised methods, it is computationally expensive to extend to new counterfactual dimensions. In this work, we introduce DISCO (DIStilled COunterfactual Data), a new method for automatically generating high quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters these generations to distill high-quality counterfactual data. While task-agnostic, we apply our pipeline to the task of natural language inference (NLI) and find that on challenging evaluations such as the NLI stress test, comparatively smaller student models trained with DISCO generated counterfactuals are more robust (6% absolute) and generalize better across distributions (2%) compared to models trained without data augmentation. Furthermore, DISCO augmented models are 10% more consistent between counterfactual pairs on three evaluation sets, demonstrating that DISCO augmentation enables models to more reliably learn causal representations. Our repository is available at: https://github.com/eric11eca/disco

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Using a virtual reality interview simulator to explore factors influencing people's behavior

Virtual reality interview simulator (VRIS) provides an effective and manageable approach for candidates prone to being very nervous during interviews, yet, the major anxiety-inducing elements remain unknown. During an interview, the anxiety levels, overall experience, and performance of interviewees might be affected by various circumstances. By analyzing electrodermal activity and questionnaire, we investigated the influence of five variables: (I) \textit{Realism}; (II) \textit{Question type}; (III) \textit{Interviewer attitude}; (IV) \textit{Timing}; and (V) \textit{Preparation}. As such, an orthogonal design $L_8(4^1 \times 2^4)$ with eight experiments ($O A_8$ matrix) was implemented, in which 19 college students took part in the experiments. Considering the anxiety, overall experience, and performance of the interviewees, results indicate that \textit{Question type} plays a major role; secondly, \textit{Realism}, \textit{Preparation}, and \textit{Interviewer attitude} all have some degree of influence; lastly, \textit{Timing} have little to no impact. Specifically, professional interview questions elicited a greater degree of anxiety than personal ones among the categories of interview questions. This work contributes to our understanding of anxiety-stimulating factors during job interviews in virtual reality and provides cues for designing future VRIS.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2022

Curriculum: A Broad-Coverage Benchmark for Linguistic Phenomena in Natural Language Understanding

In the age of large transformer language models, linguistic evaluation play an important role in diagnosing models' abilities and limitations on natural language understanding. However, current evaluation methods show some significant shortcomings. In particular, they do not provide insight into how well a language model captures distinct linguistic skills essential for language understanding and reasoning. Thus they fail to effectively map out the aspects of language understanding that remain challenging to existing models, which makes it hard to discover potential limitations in models and datasets. In this paper, we introduce Curriculum as a new format of NLI benchmark for evaluation of broad-coverage linguistic phenomena. Curriculum contains a collection of datasets that covers 36 types of major linguistic phenomena and an evaluation procedure for diagnosing how well a language model captures reasoning skills for distinct types of linguistic phenomena. We show that this linguistic-phenomena-driven benchmark can serve as an effective tool for diagnosing model behavior and verifying model learning quality. In addition, our experiments provide insight into the limitation of existing benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art models that may encourage future research on re-designing datasets, model architectures, and learning objectives.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Probing Linguistic Information For Logical Inference In Pre-trained Language Models

Progress in pre-trained language models has led to a surge of impressive results on downstream tasks for natural language understanding. Recent work on probing pre-trained language models uncovered a wide range of linguistic properties encoded in their contextualized representations. However, it is unclear whether they encode semantic knowledge that is crucial to symbolic inference methods. We propose a methodology for probing linguistic information for logical inference in pre-trained language model representations. Our probing datasets cover a list of linguistic phenomena required by major symbolic inference systems. We find that (i) pre-trained language models do encode several types of linguistic information for inference, but there are also some types of information that are weakly encoded, (ii) language models can effectively learn missing linguistic information through fine-tuning. Overall, our findings provide insights into which aspects of linguistic information for logical inference do language models and their pre-training procedures capture. Moreover, we have demonstrated language models' potential as semantic and background knowledge bases for supporting symbolic inference methods.

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arXiv2021

NeuralLog: Natural Language Inference with Joint Neural and Logical Reasoning

Deep learning (DL) based language models achieve high performance on various benchmarks for Natural Language Inference (NLI). And at this time, symbolic approaches to NLI are receiving less attention. Both approaches (symbolic and DL) have their advantages and weaknesses. However, currently, no method combines them in a system to solve the task of NLI. To merge symbolic and deep learning methods, we propose an inference framework called NeuralLog, which utilizes both a monotonicity-based logical inference engine and a neural network language model for phrase alignment. Our framework models the NLI task as a classic search problem and uses the beam search algorithm to search for optimal inference paths. Experiments show that our joint logic and neural inference system improves accuracy on the NLI task and can achieve state-of-art accuracy on the SICK and MED datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Monotonicity Marking from Universal Dependency Trees

Dependency parsing is a tool widely used in the field of Natural language processing and computational linguistics. However, there is hardly any work that connects dependency parsing to monotonicity, which is an essential part of logic and linguistic semantics. In this paper, we present a system that automatically annotates monotonicity information based on Universal Dependency parse trees. Our system utilizes surface-level monotonicity facts about quantifiers, lexical items, and token-level polarity information. We compared our system's performance with existing systems in the literature, including NatLog and ccg2mono, on a small evaluation dataset. Results show that our system outperforms NatLog and ccg2mono.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Attentive Tree-structured Network for Monotonicity Reasoning

Many state-of-art neural models designed for monotonicity reasoning perform poorly on downward inference. To address this shortcoming, we developed an attentive tree-structured neural network. It consists of a tree-based long-short-term-memory network (Tree-LSTM) with soft attention. It is designed to model the syntactic parse tree information from the sentence pair of a reasoning task. A self-attentive aggregator is used for aligning the representations of the premise and the hypothesis. We present our model and evaluate it using the Monotonicity Entailment Dataset (MED). We show and attempt to explain that our model outperforms existing models on MED.

cs.CL↗