Reducing Target Group Bias in Hate Speech Detectors

The ubiquity of offensive and hateful content on online fora necessitates the need for automatic solutions that detect such content competently across target groups. In this paper we show that text classification models trained on large publicly available datasets despite having a high overall performance, may significantly under-perform on several protected groups. On the \citet{vidgen2020learning} dataset, we find the accuracy to be 37\% lower on an under annotated Black Women target group and 12\% lower on Immigrants, where hate speech involves a distinct style. To address this, we propose to perform token-level hate sense disambiguation, and utilize tokens' hate sense representations for detection, modeling more general signals. On two publicly available datasets, we observe that the variance in model accuracy across target groups drops by at least 30\%, improving the average target group performance by 4\% and worst case performance by 13\%.

Generating Related Work

Communicating new research ideas involves highlighting similarities and differences with past work. Authors write fluent, often long sections to survey the distinction of a new paper with related work. In this work we model generating related work sections while being cognisant of the motivation behind citing papers. Our content planning model generates a tree of cited papers before a surface realization model lexicalizes this skeleton. Our model outperforms several strong state-of-the-art summarization and multi-document summarization models on generating related work on an ACL Anthology (AA) based dataset which we contribute.

Nutribullets Hybrid: Multi-document Health Summarization

We present a method for generating comparative summaries that highlights similarities and contradictions in input documents. The key challenge in creating such summaries is the lack of large parallel training data required for training typical summarization systems. To this end, we introduce a hybrid generation approach inspired by traditional concept-to-text systems. To enable accurate comparison between different sources, the model first learns to extract pertinent relations from input documents. The content planning component uses deterministic operators to aggregate these relations after identifying a subset for inclusion into a summary. The surface realization component lexicalizes this information using a text-infilling language model. By separately modeling content selection and realization, we can effectively train them with limited annotations. We implemented and tested the model in the domain of nutrition and health -- rife with inconsistencies. Compared to conventional methods, our framework leads to more faithful, relevant and aggregation-sensitive summarization -- while being equally fluent.

Nutri-bullets: Summarizing Health Studies by Composing Segments

We introduce \emph{Nutri-bullets}, a multi-document summarization task for health and nutrition. First, we present two datasets of food and health summaries from multiple scientific studies. Furthermore, we propose a novel \emph{extract-compose} model to solve the problem in the regime of limited parallel data. We explicitly select key spans from several abstracts using a policy network, followed by composing the selected spans to present a summary via a task specific language model. Compared to state-of-the-art methods, our approach leads to more faithful, relevant and diverse summarization -- properties imperative to this application. For instance, on the BreastCancer dataset our approach gets a more than 50\% improvement on relevance and faithfulness.\footnote{Our code and data is available at \url{https://github.com/darsh10/Nutribullets.}}

Capturing Greater Context for Question Generation

Automatic question generation can benefit many applications ranging from dialogue systems to reading comprehension. While questions are often asked with respect to long documents, there are many challenges with modeling such long documents. Many existing techniques generate questions by effectively looking at one sentence at a time, leading to questions that are easy and not reflective of the human process of question generation. Our goal is to incorporate interactions across multiple sentences to generate realistic questions for long documents. In order to link a broad document context to the target answer, we represent the relevant context via a multi-stage attention mechanism, which forms the foundation of a sequence to sequence model. We outperform state-of-the-art methods on question generation on three question-answering datasets -- SQuAD, MS MARCO and NewsQA.

Automatic Fact-guided Sentence Modification

Online encyclopediae like Wikipedia contain large amounts of text that need frequent corrections and updates. The new information may contradict existing content in encyclopediae. In this paper, we focus on rewriting such dynamically changing articles. This is a challenging constrained generation task, as the output must be consistent with the new information and fit into the rest of the existing document. To this end, we propose a two-step solution: (1) We identify and remove the contradicting components in a target text for a given claim, using a neutralizing stance model; (2) We expand the remaining text to be consistent with the given claim, using a novel two-encoder sequence-to-sequence model with copy attention. Applied to a Wikipedia fact update dataset, our method successfully generates updated sentences for new claims, achieving the highest SARI score. Furthermore, we demonstrate that generating synthetic data through such rewritten sentences can successfully augment the FEVER fact-checking training dataset, leading to a relative error reduction of 13%.

Towards Debiasing Fact Verification Models

Fact verification requires validating a claim in the context of evidence. We show, however, that in the popular FEVER dataset this might not necessarily be the case. Claim-only classifiers perform competitively with top evidence-aware models. In this paper, we investigate the cause of this phenomenon, identifying strong cues for predicting labels solely based on the claim, without considering any evidence. We create an evaluation set that avoids those idiosyncrasies. The performance of FEVER-trained models significantly drops when evaluated on this test set. Therefore, we introduce a regularization method which alleviates the effect of bias in the training data, obtaining improvements on the newly created test set. This work is a step towards a more sound evaluation of reasoning capabilities in fact verification models.

Are We Safe Yet? The Limitations of Distributional Features for Fake News Detection

Automatic detection of fake news --- texts that are deceitful and misleading --- is a long outstanding and largely unsolved problem. Worse yet, recent developments in language modeling allow for the automatic generation of such texts. One approach that has recently gained attention detects these fake news using stylometry-based provenance, i.e. tracing a text's writing style back to its producing source and determining whether the source is malicious. This was shown to be highly effective under the assumption that legitimate text is produced by humans, and fake text is produced by a language model. In this work, we identify a fundamental problem with provenance-based approaches against attackers that auto-generate fake news: fake and legitimate texts can originate from nearly identical sources. First, a legitimate text might be auto-generated in a similar process to that of fake text, and second, attackers can automatically corrupt articles originating from legitimate human sources. We demonstrate these issues by simulating attacks in such settings, and find that the provenance approach fails to defend against them. Our findings highlight the importance of assessing the veracity of the text rather than solely relying on its style or source. We also open up a discussion on the types of benchmarks that should be used to evaluate neural fake news detectors.

Robust Zero-Shot Cross-Domain Slot Filling with Example Values

Task-oriented dialog systems increasingly rely on deep learning-based slot filling models, usually needing extensive labeled training data for target domains. Often, however, little to no target domain training data may be available, or the training and target domain schemas may be misaligned, as is common for web forms on similar websites. Prior zero-shot slot filling models use slot descriptions to learn concepts, but are not robust to misaligned schemas. We propose utilizing both the slot description and a small number of examples of slot values, which may be easily available, to learn semantic representations of slots which are transferable across domains and robust to misaligned schemas. Our approach outperforms state-of-the-art models on two multi-domain datasets, especially in the low-data setting.