Predicting the political polarity of news headlines is a challenging task that becomes even more challenging in a multilingual setting with low-resource languages. To deal with this, we propose to utilise the Inferential Commonsense Knowledge via a Translate-Retrieve-Translate strategy to introduce a learning framework. To begin with, we use the method of translation and retrieval to acquire the inferential knowledge in the target language. We then employ an attention mechanism to emphasise important inferences. We finally integrate the attended inferences into a multilingual pre-trained language model for the task of bias prediction. To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we present a dataset of over 62.6K multilingual news headlines in five European languages annotated with their respective political polarities. We evaluate several state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained language models since their performance tends to vary across languages (low/high resource). Evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed framework is effective regardless of the models employed. Overall, the best performing model trained with only headlines show 0.90 accuracy and F1, and 0.83 jaccard score. With attended knowledge in our framework, the same model show an increase in 2.2% accuracy and F1, and 3.6% jaccard score. Extending our experiments to individual languages reveals that the models we analyze for Slovenian perform significantly worse than other languages in our dataset. To investigate this, we assess the effect of translation quality on prediction performance. It indicates that the disparity in performance is most likely due to poor translation quality. We release our dataset and scripts at: //github.com/Swati17293/KG-Multi-Bias for future research. Our framework has the potential to benefit journalists, social scientists, news producers, and consumers.
In recent years, pretrained neural language models (PNLMs) have taken the field of natural language processing by storm, achieving new benchmarks and state-of-the-art performances. These models often rely heavily on annotated data, which may not always be available. Data scarcity are commonly found in specialized domains, such as medical, or in low-resource languages that are underexplored by AI research. In this dissertation, we focus on mitigating data scarcity using data augmentation and neural ensemble learning techniques for neural language models. In both research directions, we implement neural network algorithms and evaluate their impact on assisting neural language models in downstream NLP tasks. Specifically, for data augmentation, we explore two techniques: 1) creating positive training data by moving an answer span around its original context and 2) using text simplification techniques to introduce a variety of writing styles to the original training data. Our results indicate that these simple and effective solutions improve the performance of neural language models considerably in low-resource NLP domains and tasks. For neural ensemble learning, we use a multilabel neural classifier to select the best prediction outcome from a variety of individual pretrained neural language models trained for a low-resource medical text simplification task.
We report on an experiment in legal judgement prediction on European Court of Human Rights cases where our model first learns to predict the convention articles allegedly violated by the state from case facts descriptions, and subsequently utilizes that information to predict a finding of a violation by the court. We assess the dependency between these two tasks at the feature and outcome level. Furthermore, we leverage a hierarchical contrastive loss to pull together article specific representations of cases at the higher level level, leading to distinctive article clusters, and further pulls the cases in each article cluster based on their outcome leading to sub-clusters of cases with similar outcomes. Our experiment results demonstrate that, given a static pre-trained encoder, our models produce a small but consistent improvement in prediction performance over single-task and joint models without contrastive loss.
In current NLP research, large-scale language models and their abilities are widely being discussed. Some recent works have also found notable failures of these models. Often these failure examples involve complex reasoning abilities. This work focuses on a simple commonsense ability, reasoning about when an action (or its effect) is feasible. To this end, we introduce FeasibilityQA, a question-answering dataset involving binary classification (BCQ) and multi-choice multi-correct questions (MCQ) that test understanding of feasibility. We show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-3, GPT-2, and T5 struggle to answer the feasibility questions correctly. Specifically, on MCQ and BCQ questions, GPT-3 achieves an accuracy of just (19%, 62%) and (25%, 64%) in zero-shot and few-shot settings, respectively. We also evaluate models by providing relevant knowledge statements required to answer the question. We find that the additional knowledge leads to a 7% gain in performance, but the overall performance still remains low. These results make one wonder how much commonsense knowledge about action feasibility is encoded in state-of-the-art models and how well they can reason about it.
In this paper, we cast Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) from text on European Court of Human Rights cases as an entailment task, where the case outcome is classified from a combined input of case facts and convention articles. This configuration facilitates the model learning legal reasoning ability in mapping article text to specific fact text. It also provides the opportunity to evaluate the model's ability to generalize to zero-shot settings when asked to classify the case outcome with respect to articles not seen during training. We devise zero-shot LJP experiments and apply domain adaptation methods based on domain discriminator and Wasserstein distance. Our results demonstrate that the entailment architecture outperforms straightforward fact classification. We also find that domain adaptation methods improve zero-shot transfer performance, with article relatedness and encoder pre-training influencing the effect.
In defect prediction community, many defect prediction models have been proposed and indeed more new models are continuously being developed. However, there is no consensus on how to evaluate the performance of a newly proposed model. In this paper, we aim to propose MATTER, a fraMework towArd a consisTenT pErformance compaRison, which makes model performance directly comparable across different studies. We take three actions to build a consistent evaluation framework for defect prediction models. First, we propose a simple and easy-to-use unsupervised baseline model ONE (glObal baseliNe modEl) to provide "a single point of comparison". Second, we propose using the SQA-effort-aligned threshold setting to make a fair comparison. Third, we suggest reporting the evaluation results in a unified way and provide a set of core performance indicators for this purpose, thus enabling an across-study comparison to attain real progress. The experimental results show that MATTER can serve as an effective framework to support a consistent performance evaluation for defect prediction models and hence can help determine whether a newly proposed defect prediction model is practically useful for practitioners and inform the real progress in the road of defect prediction. Furthermore, when applying MATTER to evaluate the representative defect prediction models proposed in recent years, we find that most of them (if not all) are not superior to the simple baseline model ONE in terms of the SQA-effort awareness prediction performance. This reveals that the real progress in defect prediction has been overestimated. We hence recommend that, in future studies, when any new defect prediction model is proposed, MATTER should be used to evaluate its actual usefulness (on the same benchmark test data sets) to advance scientific progress in defect prediction.
Previous work suggests that performance of cross-lingual information retrieval correlates highly with the quality of Machine Translation. However, there may be a threshold beyond which improving query translation quality yields little or no benefit to further improve the retrieval performance. This threshold may depend upon multiple factors including the source and target languages, the existing MT system quality and the search pipeline. In order to identify the benefit of improving an MT system for a given search pipeline, we investigate the sensitivity of retrieval quality to the presence of different levels of MT quality using experimental datasets collected from actual traffic. We systematically improve the performance of our MT systems quality on language pairs as measured by MT evaluation metrics including Bleu and Chrf to determine their impact on search precision metrics and extract signals that help to guide the improvement strategies. Using this information we develop techniques to compare query translations for multiple language pairs and identify the most promising language pairs to invest and improve.
Data in Knowledge Graphs often represents part of the current state of the real world. Thus, to stay up-to-date the graph data needs to be updated frequently. To utilize information from Knowledge Graphs, many state-of-the-art machine learning approaches use embedding techniques. These techniques typically compute an embedding, i.e., vector representations of the nodes as input for the main machine learning algorithm. If a graph update occurs later on -- specifically when nodes are added or removed -- the training has to be done all over again. This is undesirable, because of the time it takes and also because downstream models which were trained with these embeddings have to be retrained if they change significantly. In this paper, we investigate embedding updates that do not require full retraining and evaluate them in combination with various embedding models on real dynamic Knowledge Graphs covering multiple use cases. We study approaches that place newly appearing nodes optimally according to local information, but notice that this does not work well. However, we find that if we continue the training of the old embedding, interleaved with epochs during which we only optimize for the added and removed parts, we obtain good results in terms of typical metrics used in link prediction. This performance is obtained much faster than with a complete retraining and hence makes it possible to maintain embeddings for dynamic Knowledge Graphs.
Deep Learning has revolutionized the fields of computer vision, natural language understanding, speech recognition, information retrieval and more. However, with the progressive improvements in deep learning models, their number of parameters, latency, resources required to train, etc. have all have increased significantly. Consequently, it has become important to pay attention to these footprint metrics of a model as well, not just its quality. We present and motivate the problem of efficiency in deep learning, followed by a thorough survey of the five core areas of model efficiency (spanning modeling techniques, infrastructure, and hardware) and the seminal work there. We also present an experiment-based guide along with code, for practitioners to optimize their model training and deployment. We believe this is the first comprehensive survey in the efficient deep learning space that covers the landscape of model efficiency from modeling techniques to hardware support. Our hope is that this survey would provide the reader with the mental model and the necessary understanding of the field to apply generic efficiency techniques to immediately get significant improvements, and also equip them with ideas for further research and experimentation to achieve additional gains.
Knowledge graph completion aims to predict missing relations between entities in a knowledge graph. While many different methods have been proposed, there is a lack of a unifying framework that would lead to state-of-the-art results. Here we develop PathCon, a knowledge graph completion method that harnesses four novel insights to outperform existing methods. PathCon predicts relations between a pair of entities by: (1) Considering the Relational Context of each entity by capturing the relation types adjacent to the entity and modeled through a novel edge-based message passing scheme; (2) Considering the Relational Paths capturing all paths between the two entities; And, (3) adaptively integrating the Relational Context and Relational Path through a learnable attention mechanism. Importantly, (4) in contrast to conventional node-based representations, PathCon represents context and path only using the relation types, which makes it applicable in an inductive setting. Experimental results on knowledge graph benchmarks as well as our newly proposed dataset show that PathCon outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge graph completion methods by a large margin. Finally, PathCon is able to provide interpretable explanations by identifying relations that provide the context and paths that are important for a given predicted relation.
Sentiment analysis is a widely studied NLP task where the goal is to determine opinions, emotions, and evaluations of users towards a product, an entity or a service that they are reviewing. One of the biggest challenges for sentiment analysis is that it is highly language dependent. Word embeddings, sentiment lexicons, and even annotated data are language specific. Further, optimizing models for each language is very time consuming and labor intensive especially for recurrent neural network models. From a resource perspective, it is very challenging to collect data for different languages. In this paper, we look for an answer to the following research question: can a sentiment analysis model trained on a language be reused for sentiment analysis in other languages, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, and Dutch, where the data is more limited? Our goal is to build a single model in the language with the largest dataset available for the task, and reuse it for languages that have limited resources. For this purpose, we train a sentiment analysis model using recurrent neural networks with reviews in English. We then translate reviews in other languages and reuse this model to evaluate the sentiments. Experimental results show that our robust approach of single model trained on English reviews statistically significantly outperforms the baselines in several different languages.