Cristina Garbacea


2021

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The GEM Benchmark: Natural Language Generation, its Evaluation and Metrics
Sebastian Gehrmann | Tosin Adewumi | Karmanya Aggarwal | Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi | Anuoluwapo Aremu | Antoine Bosselut | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Miruna-Adriana Clinciu | Dipanjan Das | Kaustubh Dhole | Wanyu Du | Esin Durmus | Ondřej Dušek | Chris Chinenye Emezue | Varun Gangal | Cristina Garbacea | Tatsunori Hashimoto | Yufang Hou | Yacine Jernite | Harsh Jhamtani | Yangfeng Ji | Shailza Jolly | Mihir Kale | Dhruv Kumar | Faisal Ladhak | Aman Madaan | Mounica Maddela | Khyati Mahajan | Saad Mahamood | Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder | Pedro Henrique Martins | Angelina McMillan-Major | Simon Mille | Emiel van Miltenburg | Moin Nadeem | Shashi Narayan | Vitaly Nikolaev | Andre Niyongabo Rubungo | Salomey Osei | Ankur Parikh | Laura Perez-Beltrachini | Niranjan Ramesh Rao | Vikas Raunak | Juan Diego Rodriguez | Sashank Santhanam | João Sedoc | Thibault Sellam | Samira Shaikh | Anastasia Shimorina | Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo | Hendrik Strobelt | Nishant Subramani | Wei Xu | Diyi Yang | Akhila Yerukola | Jiawei Zhou
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)

We introduce GEM, a living benchmark for natural language Generation (NLG), its Evaluation, and Metrics. Measuring progress in NLG relies on a constantly evolving ecosystem of automated metrics, datasets, and human evaluation standards. Due to this moving target, new models often still evaluate on divergent anglo-centric corpora with well-established, but flawed, metrics. This disconnect makes it challenging to identify the limitations of current models and opportunities for progress. Addressing this limitation, GEM provides an environment in which models can easily be applied to a wide set of tasks and in which evaluation strategies can be tested. Regular updates to the benchmark will help NLG research become more multilingual and evolve the challenge alongside models. This paper serves as the description of the data for the 2021 shared task at the associated GEM Workshop.

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Explainable Prediction of Text Complexity: The Missing Preliminaries for Text Simplification
Cristina Garbacea | Mengtian Guo | Samuel Carton | Qiaozhu Mei
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Text simplification reduces the language complexity of professional content for accessibility purposes. End-to-end neural network models have been widely adopted to directly generate the simplified version of input text, usually functioning as a blackbox. We show that text simplification can be decomposed into a compact pipeline of tasks to ensure the transparency and explainability of the process. The first two steps in this pipeline are often neglected: 1) to predict whether a given piece of text needs to be simplified, and 2) if yes, to identify complex parts of the text. The two tasks can be solved separately using either lexical or deep learning methods, or solved jointly. Simply applying explainable complexity prediction as a preliminary step, the out-of-sample text simplification performance of the state-of-the-art, black-box simplification models can be improved by a large margin.

2020

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UMSIForeseer at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection by Fine-Tuning BERT with Resampling and Ensemble Learning
Yunzhe Jiang | Cristina Garbacea | Qiaozhu Mei
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

We describe our participation at the SemEval 2020 “Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles” - Techniques Classification (TC) task, designed to categorize textual fragments into one of the 14 given propaganda techniques. Our solution leverages pre-trained BERT models. We present our model implementations, evaluation results and analysis of these results. We also investigate the potential of combining language models with resampling and ensemble learning methods to deal with data imbalance and improve performance.

2019

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Judge the Judges: A Large-Scale Evaluation Study of Neural Language Models for Online Review Generation
Cristina Garbacea | Samuel Carton | Shiyan Yan | Qiaozhu Mei
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We conduct a large-scale, systematic study to evaluate the existing evaluation methods for natural language generation in the context of generating online product reviews. We compare human-based evaluators with a variety of automated evaluation procedures, including discriminative evaluators that measure how well machine-generated text can be distinguished from human-written text, as well as word overlap metrics that assess how similar the generated text compares to human-written references. We determine to what extent these different evaluators agree on the ranking of a dozen of state-of-the-art generators for online product reviews. We find that human evaluators do not correlate well with discriminative evaluators, leaving a bigger question of whether adversarial accuracy is the correct objective for natural language generation. In general, distinguishing machine-generated text is challenging even for human evaluators, and human decisions correlate better with lexical overlaps. We find lexical diversity an intriguing metric that is indicative of the assessments of different evaluators. A post-experiment survey of participants provides insights into how to evaluate and improve the quality of natural language generation systems.