Document Structure in Long Document Transformers

Long documents often exhibit structure with hierarchically organized elements of different functions, such as section headers and paragraphs. Despite the omnipresence of document structure, its role in natural language processing (NLP) remains opaque. Do long-document Transformer models acquire an internal representation of document structure during pre-training? How can structural information be communicated to a model after pre-training, and how does it influence downstream performance? To answer these questions, we develop a novel suite of probing tasks to assess structure-awareness of long-document Transformers, propose general-purpose structure infusion methods, and evaluate the effects of structure infusion on QASPER and Evidence Inference, two challenging long-document NLP tasks. Results on LED and LongT5 suggest that they acquire implicit understanding of document structure during pre-training, which can be further enhanced by structure infusion, leading to improved end-task performance. To foster research on the role of document structure in NLP modeling, we make our data and code publicly available.

CARE: Collaborative AI-Assisted Reading Environment

Recent years have seen impressive progress in AI-assisted writing, yet the developments in AI-assisted reading are lacking. We propose inline commentary as a natural vehicle for AI-based reading assistance, and present CARE: the first open integrated platform for the study of inline commentary and reading. CARE facilitates data collection for inline commentaries in a commonplace collaborative reading environment, and provides a framework for enhancing reading with NLP-based assistance, such as text classification, generation or question answering. The extensible behavioral logging allows unique insights into the reading and commenting behavior, and flexible configuration makes the platform easy to deploy in new scenarios. To evaluate CARE in action, we apply the platform in a user study dedicated to scholarly peer review. CARE facilitates the data collection and study of inline commentary in NLP, extrinsic evaluation of NLP assistance, and application prototyping. We invite the community to explore and build upon the open source implementation of CARE.

CiteBench: A benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation

The publication rates are skyrocketing across many fields of science, and it is difficult to stay up to date with the latest research. This makes automatically summarizing the latest findings and helping scholars to synthesize related work in a given area an attractive research objective. In this paper we study the problem of citation text generation, where given a set of cited papers and citing context the model should generate a citation text. While citation text generation has been tackled in prior work, existing studies use different datasets and task definitions, which makes it hard to study citation text generation systematically. To address this, we propose CiteBench: a benchmark for citation text generation that unifies the previous datasets and enables standardized evaluation of citation text generation models across task settings and domains. Using the new benchmark, we investigate the performance of multiple strong baselines, test their transferability between the datasets, and deliver new insights into task definition and evaluation to guide the future research in citation text generation. We make CiteBench publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/citebench.

NLPeer: A Unified Resource for the Computational Study of Peer Review

Peer review is a core component of scholarly publishing, yet it is time-consuming, requires considerable expertise, and is prone to error. The applications of NLP for peer reviewing assistance aim to mitigate those issues, but the lack of clearly licensed datasets and multi-domain corpora prevent the systematic study of NLP for peer review. To remedy this, we introduce NLPeer -- the first ethically sourced multidomain corpus of more than 5k papers and 11k review reports from five different venues. In addition to the new datasets of paper drafts, camera-ready versions and peer reviews from the NLP community, we establish a unified data representation, and augment previous peer review datasets to include parsed, structured paper representations, rich metadata and versioning information. Our work paves the path towards systematic, multi-faceted, evidence-based study of peer review in NLP and beyond. We make NLPeer publicly available.

An Inclusive Notion of Text

Natural language processing researchers develop models of grammar, meaning and human communication based on written text. Due to task and data differences, what is considered text can vary substantially across studies. A conceptual framework for systematically capturing these differences is lacking. We argue that clarity on the notion of text is crucial for reproducible and generalizable NLP. Towards that goal, we propose common terminology to discuss the production and transformation of textual data, and introduce a two-tier taxonomy of linguistic and non-linguistic elements that are available in textual sources and can be used in NLP modeling. We apply this taxonomy to survey existing work that extends the notion of text beyond the conservative language-centered view. We outline key desiderata and challenges of the emerging inclusive approach to text in NLP, and suggest systematic community-level reporting as a crucial next step to consolidate the discussion.

Revise and Resubmit: An Intertextual Model of Text-based Collaboration in Peer Review

Peer review is a key component of the publishing process in most fields of science. The increasing submission rates put a strain on reviewing quality and efficiency, motivating the development of applications to support the reviewing and editorial work. While existing NLP studies focus on the analysis of individual texts, editorial assistance often requires modeling interactions between pairs of texts -- yet general frameworks and datasets to support this scenario are missing. Relationships between texts are the core object of the intertextuality theory -- a family of approaches in literary studies not yet operationalized in NLP. Inspired by prior theoretical work, we propose the first intertextual model of text-based collaboration, which encompasses three major phenomena that make up a full iteration of the review-revise-and-resubmit cycle: pragmatic tagging, linking and long-document version alignment. While peer review is used across the fields of science and publication formats, existing datasets solely focus on conference-style review in computer science. Addressing this, we instantiate our proposed model in the first annotated multi-domain corpus in journal-style post-publication open peer review, and provide detailed insights into the practical aspects of intertextual annotation. Our resource is a major step towards multi-domain, fine-grained applications of NLP in editorial support for peer review, and our intertextual framework paves the path for general-purpose modeling of text-based collaboration.

Yes-Yes-Yes: Donation-based Peer Reviewing Data Collection for ACL Rolling Review and Beyond

Peer review is the primary gatekeeper of scientific merit and quality, yet it is prone to bias and suffers from low efficiency. This demands cross-disciplinary scrutiny of the processes that underlie peer reviewing; however, quantitative research is limited by the data availability, as most of the peer reviewing data across research disciplines is never made public. Existing data collection efforts focus on few scientific domains and do not address a range of ethical, license- and confidentiality-related issues associated with peer reviewing data, preventing wide-scale research and application development. While recent methods for peer review analysis and processing show promise, a solid data foundation for computational research in peer review is still missing. To address this, we present an in-depth discussion of peer reviewing data, outline the ethical and legal desiderata for peer reviewing data collection, and propose the first continuous, donation-based data collection workflow that meets these requirements. We report on the ongoing implementation of this workflow at the ACL Rolling Review and deliver the first insights obtained with the newly collected data.

Ranking Scientific Papers Using Preference Learning

Peer review is the main quality control mechanism in academia. Quality of scientific work has many dimensions; coupled with the subjective nature of the reviewing task, this makes final decision making based on the reviews and scores therein very difficult and time-consuming. To assist with this important task, we cast it as a paper ranking problem based on peer review texts and reviewer scores. We introduce a novel, multi-faceted generic evaluation framework for making final decisions based on peer reviews that takes into account effectiveness, efficiency and fairness of the evaluated system. We propose a novel approach to paper ranking based on Gaussian Process Preference Learning (GPPL) and evaluate it on peer review data from the ACL-2018 conference. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of our GPPL-based approach over prior work, while highlighting the importance of using both texts and review scores for paper ranking during peer review aggregation.

A Matter of Framing: The Impact of Linguistic Formalism on Probing Results

Deep pre-trained contextualized encoders like BERT (Delvin et al., 2019) demonstrate remarkable performance on a range of downstream tasks. A recent line of research in probing investigates the linguistic knowledge implicitly learned by these models during pre-training. While most work in probing operates on the task level, linguistic tasks are rarely uniform and can be represented in a variety of formalisms. Any linguistics-based probing study thereby inevitably commits to the formalism used to annotate the underlying data. Can the choice of formalism affect probing results? To investigate, we conduct an in-depth cross-formalism layer probing study in role semantics. We find linguistically meaningful differences in the encoding of semantic role- and proto-role information by BERT depending on the formalism and demonstrate that layer probing can detect subtle differences between the implementations of the same linguistic formalism. Our results suggest that linguistic formalism is an important dimension in probing studies, along with the commonly used cross-task and cross-lingual experimental settings.

Does My Rebuttal Matter? Insights from a Major NLP Conference

Peer review is a core element of the scientific process, particularly in conference-centered fields such as ML and NLP. However, only few studies have evaluated its properties empirically. Aiming to fill this gap, we present a corpus that contains over 4k reviews and 1.2k author responses from ACL-2018. We quantitatively and qualitatively assess the corpus. This includes a pilot study on paper weaknesses given by reviewers and on quality of author responses. We then focus on the role of the rebuttal phase, and propose a novel task to predict after-rebuttal (i.e., final) scores from initial reviews and author responses. Although author responses do have a marginal (and statistically significant) influence on the final scores, especially for borderline papers, our results suggest that a reviewer's final score is largely determined by her initial score and the distance to the other reviewers' initial scores. In this context, we discuss the conformity bias inherent to peer reviewing, a bias that has largely been overlooked in previous research. We hope our analyses will help better assess the usefulness of the rebuttal phase in NLP conferences.