Rajiv Jain


2022

pdf
MACRONYM: A Large-Scale Dataset for Multilingual and Multi-Domain Acronym Extraction
Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh | Nicole Meister | Seunghyun Yoon | Rajiv Jain | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Huu Nguyen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Acronym extraction is the task of identifying acronyms and their expanded forms in texts that is necessary for various NLP applications. Despite major progress for this task in recent years, one limitation of existing AE research is that they are limited to the English language and certain domains (i.e., scientific and biomedical). Challenges of AE in other languages and domains are mainly unexplored. As such, lacking annotated datasets in multiple languages and domains has been a major issue to prevent research in this direction. To address this limitation, we propose a new dataset for multilingual and multi-domain AE. Specifically, 27,200 sentences in 6 different languages and 2 new domains, i.e., legal and scientific, are manually annotated for AE. Our experiments on the dataset show that AE in different languages and learning settings has unique challenges, emphasizing the necessity of further research on multilingual and multi-domain AE.

pdf
Keyphrase Prediction from Video Transcripts: New Dataset and Directions
Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh | Quan Hung Tran | Seunghyun Yoon | Varun Manjunatha | Hanieh Deilamsalehy | Rajiv Jain | Trung Bui | Walter W. Chang | Franck Dernoncourt | Thien Huu Nguyen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Keyphrase Prediction (KP) is an established NLP task, aiming to yield representative phrases to summarize the main content of a given document. Despite major progress in recent years, existing works on KP have mainly focused on formal texts such as scientific papers or weblogs. The challenges of KP in informal-text domains are not yet fully studied. To this end, this work studies new challenges of KP in transcripts of videos, an understudied domain for KP that involves informal texts and non-cohesive presentation styles. A bottleneck for KP research in this domain involves the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated data that hinders the development of advanced KP models. To address this issue, we introduce a large-scale manually-annotated KP dataset in the domain of live-stream video transcripts obtained by automatic speech recognition tools. Concretely, transcripts of 500+ hours of videos streamed on the behance.net platform are manually labeled with important keyphrases. Our analysis of the dataset reveals the challenging nature of KP in transcripts. Moreover, for the first time in KP, we demonstrate the idea of improving KP for long documents (i.e., transcripts) by feeding models with paragraph-level keyphrases, i.e., hierarchical extraction. To foster future research, we will publicly release the dataset and code.

pdf
DocTime: A Document-level Temporal Dependency Graph Parser
Puneet Mathur | Vlad Morariu | Verena Kaynig-Fittkau | Jiuxiang Gu | Franck Dernoncourt | Quan Tran | Ani Nenkova | Dinesh Manocha | Rajiv Jain
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We introduce DocTime - a novel temporal dependency graph (TDG) parser that takes as input a text document and produces a temporal dependency graph. It outperforms previous BERT-based solutions by a relative 4-8% on three datasets from modeling the problem as a graph network with path-prediction loss to incorporate longer range dependencies. This work also demonstrates how the TDG graph can be used to improve the downstream tasks of temporal questions answering and NLI by a relative 4-10% with a new framework that incorporates the temporal dependency graph into the self-attention layer of Transformer models (Time-transformer). Finally, we develop and evaluate on a new temporal dependency graph dataset for the domain of contractual documents, which has not been previously explored in this setting.

2021

pdf
Towards Interpreting and Mitigating Shortcut Learning Behavior of NLU models
Mengnan Du | Varun Manjunatha | Rajiv Jain | Ruchi Deshpande | Franck Dernoncourt | Jiuxiang Gu | Tong Sun | Xia Hu
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Recent studies indicate that NLU models are prone to rely on shortcut features for prediction, without achieving true language understanding. As a result, these models fail to generalize to real-world out-of-distribution data. In this work, we show that the words in the NLU training set can be modeled as a long-tailed distribution. There are two findings: 1) NLU models have strong preference for features located at the head of the long-tailed distribution, and 2) Shortcut features are picked up during very early few iterations of the model training. These two observations are further employed to formulate a measurement which can quantify the shortcut degree of each training sample. Based on this shortcut measurement, we propose a shortcut mitigation framework LGTR, to suppress the model from making overconfident predictions for samples with large shortcut degree. Experimental results on three NLU benchmarks demonstrate that our long-tailed distribution explanation accurately reflects the shortcut learning behavior of NLU models. Experimental analysis further indicates that LGTR can improve the generalization accuracy on OOD data, while preserving the accuracy on in-distribution data.

pdf
Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks
Joe Barrow | Rajiv Jain | Nedim Lipka | Franck Dernoncourt | Vlad Morariu | Varun Manjunatha | Douglas Oard | Philip Resnik | Henning Wachsmuth
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)

Approaches to computational argumentation tasks such as stance detection and aspect detection have largely focused on the text of independent claims, losing out on potentially valuable context provided by the rest of the collection. We introduce a general approach to these tasks motivated by syntopical reading, a reading process that emphasizes comparing and contrasting viewpoints in order to improve topic understanding. To capture collection-level context, we introduce the syntopical graph, a data structure for linking claims within a collection. A syntopical graph is a typed multi-graph where nodes represent claims and edges represent different possible pairwise relationships, such as entailment, paraphrase, or support. Experiments applying syntopical graphs to the problems of detecting stance and aspects demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in each domain, significantly outperforming approaches that do not utilize collection-level information.

pdf
TIMERS: Document-level Temporal Relation Extraction
Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Jain | Franck Dernoncourt | Vlad Morariu | Quan Hung Tran | Dinesh Manocha
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We present TIMERS - a TIME, Rhetorical and Syntactic-aware model for document-level temporal relation classification in the English language. Our proposed method leverages rhetorical discourse features and temporal arguments from semantic role labels, in addition to traditional local syntactic features, trained through a Gated Relational-GCN. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods by 5-18% on the TDDiscourse, TimeBank-Dense, and MATRES datasets due to our discourse-level modeling.

pdf
IGA: An Intent-Guided Authoring Assistant
Simeng Sun | Wenlong Zhao | Varun Manjunatha | Rajiv Jain | Vlad Morariu | Franck Dernoncourt | Balaji Vasan Srinivasan | Mohit Iyyer
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While large-scale pretrained language models have significantly improved writing assistance functionalities such as autocomplete, more complex and controllable writing assistants have yet to be explored. We leverage advances in language modeling to build an interactive writing assistant that generates and rephrases text according to fine-grained author specifications. Users provide input to our Intent-Guided Assistant (IGA) in the form of text interspersed with tags that correspond to specific rhetorical directives (e.g., adding description or contrast, or rephrasing a particular sentence). We fine-tune a language model on a dataset heuristically-labeled with author intent, which allows IGA to fill in these tags with generated text that users can subsequently edit to their liking. A series of automatic and crowdsourced evaluations confirm the quality of IGA’s generated outputs, while a small-scale user study demonstrates author preference for IGA over baseline methods in a creative writing task. We release our dataset, code, and demo to spur further research into AI-assisted writing.

pdf
ClauseRec: A Clause Recommendation Framework for AI-aided Contract Authoring
Vinay Aggarwal | Aparna Garimella | Balaji Vasan Srinivasan | Anandhavelu N | Rajiv Jain
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Contracts are a common type of legal document that frequent in several day-to-day business workflows. However, there has been very limited NLP research in processing such documents, and even lesser in generating them. These contracts are made up of clauses, and the unique nature of these clauses calls for specific methods to understand and generate such documents. In this paper, we introduce the task of clause recommendation, as a first step to aid and accelerate the authoring of contract documents. We propose a two-staged pipeline to first predict if a specific clause type is relevant to be added in a contract, and then recommend the top clauses for the given type based on the contract context. We pre-train BERT on an existing library of clauses with two additional tasks and use it for our prediction and recommendation. We experiment with classification methods and similarity-based heuristics for clause relevance prediction, and generation-based methods for clause recommendation, and evaluate the results from various methods on several clause types. We provide analyses on the results, and further outline the limitations and future directions of this line of research.

2020

pdf
A Joint Model for Document Segmentation and Segment Labeling
Joe Barrow | Rajiv Jain | Vlad Morariu | Varun Manjunatha | Douglas Oard | Philip Resnik
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Text segmentation aims to uncover latent structure by dividing text from a document into coherent sections. Where previous work on text segmentation considers the tasks of document segmentation and segment labeling separately, we show that the tasks contain complementary information and are best addressed jointly. We introduce Segment Pooling LSTM (S-LSTM), which is capable of jointly segmenting a document and labeling segments. In support of joint training, we develop a method for teaching the model to recover from errors by aligning the predicted and ground truth segments. We show that S-LSTM reduces segmentation error by 30% on average, while also improving segment labeling.