The state-of-the-art language model-based automatic metrics, e.g. BARTScore, benefiting from large-scale contextualized pre-training, have been successfully used in a wide range of natural language generation (NLG) tasks, including machine translation, text summarization, and data-to-text. Recent studies show that considering both major errors (e.g. mistranslated tokens) and minor errors (e.g. imperfections in fluency) can produce high-quality human judgments. This inspires us to approach the final goal of the evaluation metrics (human-like evaluations) by automatic error analysis. To this end, we augment BARTScore by incorporating the human-like error analysis strategies, namely BARTScore++, where the final score consists of both the evaluations of major errors and minor errors. Experimental results show that BARTScore++ can consistently improve the performance of vanilla BARTScore and outperform existing top-scoring metrics in 20 out of 25 test settings. We hope our technique can also be extended to other pre-trained model-based metrics. We will release our code and scripts to facilitate the community.
We aim to diagnose the potential biases in image classifiers. To this end, prior works manually labeled biased attributes or visualized biased features, which need high annotation costs or are often ambiguous to interpret. Instead, we leverage two types (generative and discriminative) of pre-trained vision-language models to describe the visual bias as a word. Specifically, we propose bias-to-text (B2T), which generates captions of the mispredicted images using a pre-trained captioning model to extract the common keywords that may describe visual biases. Then, we categorize the bias type as spurious correlation or majority bias by checking if it is specific or agnostic to the class, based on the similarity of class-wise mispredicted images and the keyword upon a pre-trained vision-language joint embedding space, e.g., CLIP. We demonstrate that the proposed simple and intuitive scheme can recover well-known gender and background biases, and discover novel ones in real-world datasets. Moreover, we utilize B2T to compare the classifiers using different architectures or training methods. Finally, we show that one can obtain debiased classifiers using the B2T bias keywords and CLIP, in both zero-shot and full-shot manners, without using any human annotation on the bias.
Interactions among humans on social media often convey intentions behind their actions, yielding a psychological language resource for Mental Health Analysis (MHA) of online users. The success of Computational Intelligence Techniques (CIT) for inferring mental illness from such social media resources points to NLP as a lens for causal analysis and perception mining. However, we argue that more consequential and explainable research is required for optimal impact on clinical psychology practice and personalized mental healthcare. To bridge this gap, we posit two significant dimensions: (1) Causal analysis to illustrate a cause and effect relationship in the user generated text; (2) Perception mining to infer psychological perspectives of social effects on online users intentions. Within the scope of Natural Language Processing (NLP), we further explore critical areas of inquiry associated with these two dimensions, specifically through recent advancements in discourse analysis. This position paper guides the community to explore solutions in this space and advance the state of practice in developing conversational agents for inferring mental health from social media. We advocate for a more explainable approach toward modeling computational psychology problems through the lens of language as we observe an increased number of research contributions in dataset and problem formulation for causal relation extraction and perception enhancements while inferring mental states.
Text-Video retrieval is a task of great practical value and has received increasing attention, among which learning spatial-temporal video representation is one of the research hotspots. The video encoders in the state-of-the-art video retrieval models usually directly adopt the pre-trained vision backbones with the network structure fixed, they therefore can not be further improved to produce the fine-grained spatial-temporal video representation. In this paper, we propose Token Shift and Selection Network (TS2-Net), a novel token shift and selection transformer architecture, which dynamically adjusts the token sequence and selects informative tokens in both temporal and spatial dimensions from input video samples. The token shift module temporally shifts the whole token features back-and-forth across adjacent frames, to preserve the complete token representation and capture subtle movements. Then the token selection module selects tokens that contribute most to local spatial semantics. Based on thorough experiments, the proposed TS2-Net achieves state-of-the-art performance on major text-video retrieval benchmarks, including new records on MSRVTT, VATEX, LSMDC, ActivityNet, and DiDeMo.
Since fake news poses a serious threat to society and individuals, numerous studies have been brought by considering text, propagation and user profiles. Due to the data collection problem, these methods based on propagation and user profiles are less applicable in the early stages. A good alternative method is to detect news based on text as soon as they are released, and a lot of text-based methods were proposed, which usually utilized words, sentences or paragraphs as basic units. But, word is a too fine-grained unit to express coherent information well, sentence or paragraph is too coarse to show specific information. Which granularity is better and how to utilize it to enhance text representation for fake news detection are two key problems. In this paper, we introduce Elementary Discourse Unit (EDU) whose granularity is between word and sentence, and propose a multi-EDU-structure awareness model to improve text representation for fake news detection, namely EDU4FD. For the multi-EDU-structure awareness, we build the sequence-based EDU representations and the graph-based EDU representations. The former is gotten by modeling the coherence between consecutive EDUs with TextCNN that reflect the semantic coherence. For the latter, we first extract rhetorical relations to build the EDU dependency graph, which can show the global narrative logic and help deliver the main idea truthfully. Then a Relation Graph Attention Network (RGAT) is set to get the graph-based EDU representation. Finally, the two EDU representations are incorporated as the enhanced text representation for fake news detection, using a gated recursive unit combined with a global attention mechanism. Experiments on four cross-source fake news datasets show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art text-based methods.
Detecting opportunities and threats from massive text data is a challenging task for most. Traditionally, companies would rely mainly on structured data to detect and predict risks, losing a huge amount of information that could be extracted from unstructured text data. Fortunately, artificial intelligence came to remedy this issue by innovating in data extraction and processing techniques, allowing us to understand and make use of Natural Language data and turning it into structures that a machine can process and extract insight from. Uncertainty refers to a state of not knowing what will happen in the future. This paper aims to leverage natural language processing and machine learning techniques to model uncertainties and evaluate the risk level in each uncertainty cluster using massive text data.
Identifying and exploring emerging trends in the news is becoming more essential than ever with many changes occurring worldwide due to the global health crises. However, most of the recent research has focused mainly on detecting trends in social media, thus, benefiting from social features (e.g. likes and retweets on Twitter) which helped the task as they can be used to measure the engagement and diffusion rate of content. Yet, formal text data, unlike short social media posts, comes with a longer, less restricted writing format, and thus, more challenging. In this paper, we focus our study on emerging trends detection in financial news articles about Microsoft, collected before and during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic (July 2019 to July 2020). We make the dataset accessible and propose a strong baseline (Contextual Leap2Trend) for exploring the dynamics of similarities between pairs of keywords based on topic modelling and term frequency. Finally, we evaluate against a gold standard (Google Trends) and present noteworthy real-world scenarios regarding the influence of the pandemic on Microsoft.
While the capabilities of generative models heavily improved in different domains (images, text, graphs, molecules, etc.), their evaluation metrics largely remain based on simplified quantities or manual inspection with limited practicality. To this end, we propose a framework for Multi-level Performance Evaluation of Generative mOdels (MPEGO), which could be employed across different domains. MPEGO aims to quantify generation performance hierarchically, starting from a sub-feature-based low-level evaluation to a global features-based high-level evaluation. MPEGO offers great customizability as the employed features are entirely user-driven and can thus be highly domain/problem-specific while being arbitrarily complex (e.g., outcomes of experimental procedures). We validate MPEGO using multiple generative models across several datasets from the material discovery domain. An ablation study is conducted to study the plausibility of intermediate steps in MPEGO. Results demonstrate that MPEGO provides a flexible, user-driven, and multi-level evaluation framework, with practical insights on the generation quality. The framework, source code, and experiments will be available at https://github.com/GT4SD/mpego.
Long-term OCR services aim to provide high-quality output to their users at competitive costs. It is essential to upgrade the models because of the complex data loaded by the users. The service providers encourage the users who provide data where the OCR model fails by rewarding them based on data complexity, readability, and available budget. Hitherto, the OCR works include preparing the models on standard datasets without considering the end-users. We propose a strategy of consistently upgrading an existing Handwritten Hindi OCR model three times on the dataset of 15 users. We fix the budget of 4 users for each iteration. For the first iteration, the model directly trains on the dataset from the first four users. For the rest iteration, all remaining users write a page each, which service providers later analyze to select the 4 (new) best users based on the quality of predictions on the human-readable words. Selected users write 23 more pages for upgrading the model. We upgrade the model with Curriculum Learning (CL) on the data available in the current iteration and compare the subset from previous iterations. The upgraded model is tested on a held-out set of one page each from all 23 users. We provide insights into our investigations on the effect of CL, user selection, and especially the data from unseen writing styles. Our work can be used for long-term OCR services in crowd-sourcing scenarios for the service providers and end users.
In text summarization and simplification, system outputs must be evaluated along multiple dimensions such as relevance, factual consistency, fluency, and grammaticality, and a wide range of possible outputs could be of high quality. These properties make the development of an adaptable, reference-less evaluation metric both necessary and challenging. We introduce MaskEval, a reference-less metric for text summarization and simplification that operates by performing masked language modeling (MLM) on the concatenation of the candidate and the source texts. It features an attention-like weighting mechanism to modulate the relative importance of each MLM step, which crucially allows MaskEval to be adapted to evaluate different quality dimensions. We demonstrate its effectiveness on English summarization and on multilingual text simplification in terms of correlations with human judgments.