IDIAPers @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Efficient Causal Relation Identification Through a Prompt-based Few-shot Approach

In this paper, we describe our participation in the subtask 1 of CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. We address the Causal Relation Identification (CRI) task by exploiting a set of simple yet complementary techniques for fine-tuning language models (LMs) on a small number of annotated examples (i.e., a few-shot configuration). We follow a prompt-based prediction approach for fine-tuning LMs in which the CRI task is treated as a masked language modeling problem (MLM). This approach allows LMs natively pre-trained on MLM problems to directly generate textual responses to CRI-specific prompts. We compare the performance of this method against ensemble techniques trained on the entire dataset. Our best-performing submission was trained only with 256 instances per class, a small portion of the entire dataset, and yet was able to obtain the second-best precision (0.82), third-best accuracy (0.82), and an F1-score (0.85) very close to what was reported by the winner team (0.86).

IDIAPers @ Causal News Corpus 2022: Extracting Cause-Effect-Signal Triplets via Pre-trained Autoregressive Language Model

In this paper, we describe our shared task submissions for Subtask 2 in CASE-2022, Event Causality Identification with Casual News Corpus. The challenge focused on the automatic detection of all cause-effect-signal spans present in the sentence from news-media. We detect cause-effect-signal spans in a sentence using T5 -- a pre-trained autoregressive language model. We iteratively identify all cause-effect-signal span triplets, always conditioning the prediction of the next triplet on the previously predicted ones. To predict the triplet itself, we consider different causal relationships such as cause$\rightarrow$effect$\rightarrow$signal. Each triplet component is generated via a language model conditioned on the sentence, the previous parts of the current triplet, and previously predicted triplets. Despite training on an extremely small dataset of 160 samples, our approach achieved competitive performance, being placed second in the competition. Furthermore, we show that assuming either cause$\rightarrow$effect or effect$\rightarrow$cause order achieves similar results. Our code and model predictions will be released online.

ALIGNMEET: A Comprehensive Tool for Meeting Annotation, Alignment, and Evaluation

Summarization is a challenging problem, and even more challenging is to manually create, correct, and evaluate the summaries. The severity of the problem grows when the inputs are multi-party dialogues in a meeting setup. To facilitate the research in this area, we present ALIGNMEET, a comprehensive tool for meeting annotation, alignment, and evaluation. The tool aims to provide an efficient and clear interface for fast annotation while mitigating the risk of introducing errors. Moreover, we add an evaluation mode that enables a comprehensive quality evaluation of meeting minutes. To the best of our knowledge, there is no such tool available. We release the tool as open source. It is also directly installable from PyPI.

RerrFact: Reduced Evidence Retrieval Representations for Scientific Claim Verification

Exponential growth in digital information outlets and the race to publish has made scientific misinformation more prevalent than ever. However, the task to fact-verify a given scientific claim is not straightforward even for researchers. Scientific claim verification requires in-depth knowledge and great labor from domain experts to substantiate supporting and refuting evidence from credible scientific sources. The SciFact dataset and corresponding task provide a benchmarking leaderboard to the community to develop automatic scientific claim verification systems via extracting and assimilating relevant evidence rationales from source abstracts. In this work, we propose a modular approach that sequentially carries out binary classification for every prediction subtask as in the SciFact leaderboard. Our simple classifier-based approach uses reduced abstract representations to retrieve relevant abstracts. These are further used to train the relevant rationale-selection model. Finally, we carry out two-step stance predictions that first differentiate non-relevant rationales and then identify supporting or refuting rationales for a given claim. Experimentally, our system RerrFact with no fine-tuning, simple design, and a fraction of model parameters fairs competitively on the leaderboard against large-scale, modular, and joint modeling approaches. We make our codebase available at https://github.com/ashishrana160796/RerrFact.