Sebastian Gehrmann


2024

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Academics Can Contribute to Domain-Specialized Language Models
Mark Dredze | Genta Indra Winata | Prabhanjan Kambadur | Shijie Wu | Ozan Irsoy | Steven Lu | Vadim Dabravolski | David S Rosenberg | Sebastian Gehrmann
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Commercially available models dominate academic leaderboards. While impressive, this has concentrated research on creating and adapting general-purpose models to improve NLP leaderboard standings for large language models. However, leaderboards collect many individual tasks and general-purpose models often underperform in specialized domains; domain-specific or adapted models yield superior results. This focus on large general-purpose models excludes many academics and draws attention away from areas where they can make important contributions. We advocate for a renewed focus on developing and evaluating domain- and task-specific models, and highlight the unique role of academics in this endeavor.

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Do LLMs Plan Like Human Writers? Comparing Journalist Coverage of Press Releases with LLMs
Alexander Spangher | Nanyun Peng | Sebastian Gehrmann | Mark Dredze
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Journalists engage in multiple steps in the news writing process that depend on human creativity, like exploring different “angles” (i.e. the specific perspectives a reporter takes). These can potentially be aided by large language models (LLMs). By affecting planning decisions, such interventions can have an outsize impact on creative output. We advocate a careful approach to evaluating these interventions to ensure alignment with human values.In a case study of journalistic coverage of press releases, we assemble a large dataset of 250k press releases and 650k articles covering them. We develop methods to identify news articles that _challenge and contextualize_ press releases. Finally, we evaluate suggestions made by LLMs for these articles and compare these with decisions made by human journalists. Our findings are three-fold: (1) Human-written news articles that challenge and contextualize press releases more take more creative angles and use more informational sources. (2) LLMs align better with humans when recommending angles, compared with informational sources. (3) Both the angles and sources LLMs suggest are significantly less creative than humans.

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On the Role of Summary Content Units in Text Summarization Evaluation
Marcel Nawrath | Agnieszka Nowak | Tristan Ratz | Danilo Walenta | Juri Opitz | Leonardo Ribeiro | João Sedoc | Daniel Deutsch | Simon Mille | Yixin Liu | Sebastian Gehrmann | Lining Zhang | Saad Mahamood | Miruna Clinciu | Khyathi Chandu | Yufang Hou
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)

At the heart of the Pyramid evaluation method for text summarization lie human written summary content units (SCUs). These SCUs areconcise sentences that decompose a summary into small facts. Such SCUs can be used to judge the quality of a candidate summary, possibly partially automated via natural language inference (NLI) systems. Interestingly, with the aim to fully automate the Pyramid evaluation, Zhang and Bansal (2021) show that SCUs can be approximated by automatically generated semantic role triplets (STUs). However, several questions currently lack answers, in particular: i) Are there other ways of approximating SCUs that can offer advantages?ii) Under which conditions are SCUs (or their approximations) offering the most value? In this work, we examine two novel strategiesto approximate SCUs: generating SCU approximations from AMR meaning representations (SMUs) and from large language models (SGUs), respectively. We find that while STUs and SMUs are competitive, the best approximation quality is achieved by SGUs. We also show through a simple sentence-decomposition baseline (SSUs) that SCUs (and their approximations) offer the most value when rankingshort summaries, but may not help as much when ranking systems or longer summaries.

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Can We Statically Locate Knowledge in Large Language Models? Financial Domain and Toxicity Reduction Case Studies
Jordi Armengol-Estapé | Lingyu Li | Sebastian Gehrmann | Achintya Gopal | David S Rosenberg | Gideon S. Mann | Mark Dredze
Proceedings of the 7th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Current large language model (LLM) evaluations rely on benchmarks to assess model capabilities and their encoded knowledge. However, these evaluations cannot reveal where a model encodes its knowledge, and thus little is known about which weights contain specific information. We propose a method to statically (without forward or backward passes) locate topical knowledge in the weight space of an LLM, building on a prior insight that parameters can be decoded into interpretable tokens. If parameters can be mapped into the embedding space, it should be possible to directly search for knowledge via embedding similarity. We study the validity of this assumption across several LLMs for a variety of concepts in the financial domain and a toxicity detection setup. Our analysis yields an improved understanding of the promises and limitations of static knowledge location in real-world scenarios.

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Aya Dataset: An Open-Access Collection for Multilingual Instruction Tuning
Shivalika Singh | Freddie Vargus | Daniel D’souza | Börje Karlsson | Abinaya Mahendiran | Wei-Yin Ko | Herumb Shandilya | Jay Patel | Deividas Mataciunas | Laura O’Mahony | Mike Zhang | Ramith Hettiarachchi | Joseph Wilson | Marina Machado | Luisa Moura | Dominik Krzemiński | Hakimeh Fadaei | Irem Ergun | Ifeoma Okoh | Aisha Alaagib | Oshan Mudannayake | Zaid Alyafeai | Vu Chien | Sebastian Ruder | Surya Guthikonda | Emad Alghamdi | Sebastian Gehrmann | Niklas Muennighoff | Max Bartolo | Julia Kreutzer | Ahmet Üstün | Marzieh Fadaee | Sara Hooker
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Datasets are foundational to many breakthroughs in modern artificial intelligence. Many recent achievements in the space of natural language processing (NLP) can be attributed to the fine-tuning of pre-trained models on a diverse set of tasks that enables a large language model (LLM) to respond to instructions. Instruction fine-tuning (IFT) requires specifically constructed and annotated datasets. However, existing datasets are almost all in the English language. In this work, our primary goal is to bridge the language gap by building a human-curated instruction-following dataset spanning 65 languages. We worked with fluent speakers of languages from around the world to collect natural instances of instructions and completions. Furthermore, we create the most extensive multilingual collection to date, comprising 513 million instances through templating and augmenting existing datasets across 114 languages. In total, we contribute three key resources: we develop and open-source the Aya Dataset, the Aya Collection, and the Aya Evaluation Suite. The Aya initiative also serves as a valuable case study in participatory research, involving collaborators from 119 countries. We see this as an important framework for future research collaborations that aim to bridge gaps in resources.

2023

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Dialect-robust Evaluation of Generated Text
Jiao Sun | Thibault Sellam | Elizabeth Clark | Tu Vu | Timothy Dozat | Dan Garrette | Aditya Siddhant | Jacob Eisenstein | Sebastian Gehrmann
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Text generation metrics that are not robust to dialect variation make it impossible to tell how well systems perform for many groups of users, and can even penalize systems for producing text in lower-resource dialects. In this paper, we introduce a suite of methods to assess whether metrics are dialect robust. These methods show that state-of-the-art metrics are not dialect robust: they often prioritize dialect similarity over semantics, preferring outputs that are semantically incorrect over outputs that match the semantics of the reference but contain dialect differences. As a step towards dialect-robust metrics for text generation, we propose NANO, which introduces regional and language information to the metric’s pretraining. NANO significantly improves dialect robustness while preserving the correlation between automated metrics and human ratings. It also enables a more ambitious approach to evaluation, dialect awareness, in which system outputs are scored by both semantic match to the reference and appropriateness in any specified dialect.

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Benchmarking Large Language Model Capabilities for Conditional Generation
Joshua Maynez | Priyanka Agrawal | Sebastian Gehrmann
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pre-trained large language models (PLMs) underly most new developments in natural language processing. They have shifted the field from application-specific model pipelines to a single model that is adapted to a wide range of tasks. Autoregressive PLMs like GPT-3 or PaLM and associated techniques like fewshot learning, have additionally shifted the output modality to generation instead of classification or regression. Despite their ubiquitous use, the generation quality of language models is rarely evaluated when these models are introduced. Additionally, it is unclear how existing generation tasks–while they can be used to compare systems at a high level–relate to the real world use cases for which people have been adopting them. In this work, we discuss how to adapt existing application-specific generation benchmarks to PLMs and provide an in-depth, empirical study of the limitations and capabilities of PLMs in natural language generation tasks along dimensions such as scale, architecture, input and output language. Our results show that PLMs differ in their applicability to different data regimes and their generalization to multiple languages. They further inform practitioners as to which PLMs to use for a given generation task setup. We share best practices to be taken into consideration when benchmarking generation capabilities during the development of upcoming PLMs.

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A Needle in a Haystack: An Analysis of High-Agreement Workers on MTurk for Summarization
Lining Zhang | Simon Mille | Yufang Hou | Daniel Deutsch | Elizabeth Clark | Yixin Liu | Saad Mahamood | Sebastian Gehrmann | Miruna Clinciu | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | João Sedoc
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

To prevent the costly and inefficient use of resources on low-quality annotations, we want a method for creating a pool of dependable annotators who can effectively complete difficult tasks, such as evaluating automatic summarization. Thus, we investigate the recruitment of high-quality Amazon Mechanical Turk workers via a two-step pipeline. We show that we can successfully filter out subpar workers before they carry out the evaluations and obtain high-agreement annotations with similar constraints on resources. Although our workers demonstrate a strong consensus among themselves and CloudResearch workers, their alignment with expert judgments on a subset of the data is not as expected and needs further training in correctness. This paper still serves as a best practice for the recruitment of qualified annotators in other challenging annotation tasks.

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Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them
Mirac Suzgun | Nathan Scales | Nathanael Schärli | Sebastian Gehrmann | Yi Tay | Hyung Won Chung | Aakanksha Chowdhery | Quoc Le | Ed Chi | Denny Zhou | Jason Wei
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

BIG-Bench (Srivastava et al., 2022) is a diverse evaluation suite that focuses on tasks believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. Language models have already made good progress on this benchmark, with the best model in the BIG-Bench paper outperforming average reported human-rater results on 65% of the BIG-Bench tasks via few-shot prompting. But on what tasks do language models fall short of average human-rater performance, and are those tasks actually unsolvable by current language models? In this work, we focus on a suite of 23 challenging BIG-Bench tasks which we call BIG-Bench Hard (BBH). These are the tasks for which prior language model evaluations did not outperform the average human-rater. We find that applying chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting to BBH tasks enables PaLM to surpass the average human-rater performance on 10 of the 23 tasks, and Codex (code-davinci-002) to surpass the average human-rater performance on 17 of the 23 tasks. Since many tasks in BBH require multi-step reasoning, few-shot prompting without CoT, as done in the BIG-Bench evaluations (Srivastava et al., 2022), substantially underestimates the best performance and capabilities of language models, which is better captured via CoT prompting. As further analysis, we explore the interaction between CoT and model scale on BBH, finding that CoT enables emergent task performance on several BBH tasks with otherwise flat scaling curves.

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TaTA: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages
Sebastian Gehrmann | Sebastian Ruder | Vitaly Nikolaev | Jan Botha | Michael Chavinda | Ankur Parikh | Clara Rivera
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTA), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African languages. We created TaTA by transcribing figures and accompanying text in bilingual reports by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, followed by professional translation to make the dataset fully parallel. TaTA includes 8,700 examples in nine languages including four African languages (Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yorùbá) and a zero-shot test language (Russian). We additionally release screenshots of the original figures for future research on multilingual multi-modal approaches. Through an in-depth human evaluation, we show that TaTA is challenging for current models and that less than half the outputs from an mT5-XXL-based model are understandable and attributable to the source data. Our results highlight a) the need for validating metrics; and b) the importance of domain-specific metrics.

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SEAHORSE: A Multilingual, Multifaceted Dataset for Summarization Evaluation
Elizabeth Clark | Shruti Rijhwani | Sebastian Gehrmann | Joshua Maynez | Roee Aharoni | Vitaly Nikolaev | Thibault Sellam | Aditya Siddhant | Dipanjan Das | Ankur Parikh
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Reliable automatic evaluation of summarization systems is challenging due to the multifaceted and subjective nature of the task. This is especially the case for languages other than English, where human evaluations are scarce. In this work, we introduce SEAHORSE, a dataset for multilingual, multifaceted summarization evaluation. SEAHORSE consists of 96K summaries with human ratings along 6 dimensions of text quality: comprehensibility, repetition, grammar, attribution, main ideas, and conciseness, covering 6 languages, 9 systems, and 4 datasets. As a result of its size and scope, SEAHORSE can serve both as a benchmark to evaluate learnt metrics, as well as a large-scale resource for training such metrics. We show that metrics trained with SEAHORSE achieve strong performance on the out-of-domain meta-evaluation benchmarks TRUE (Honovich et al., 2022) and mFACE (Aharoni et al., 2022). We make the SEAHORSE dataset and metrics publicly available for future research on multilingual and multifaceted summarization evaluation.

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NL-Augmenter: A Framework for Task-Sensitive Natural Language Augmentation
Kaustubh Dhole | Varun Gangal | Sebastian Gehrmann | Aadesh Gupta | Zhenhao Li | Saad Mahamood | Abinaya Mahadiran | Simon Mille | Ashish Shrivastava | Samson Tan | Tongshang Wu | Jascha Sohl-Dickstein | Jinho Choi | Eduard Hovy | Ondřej Dušek | Sebastian Ruder | Sajant Anand | Nagender Aneja | Rabin Banjade | Lisa Barthe | Hanna Behnke | Ian Berlot-Attwell | Connor Boyle | Caroline Brun | Marco Antonio Sobrevilla Cabezudo | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Emile Chapuis | Wanxiang Che | Mukund Choudhary | Christian Clauss | Pierre Colombo | Filip Cornell | Gautier Dagan | Mayukh Das | Tanay Dixit | Thomas Dopierre | Paul-Alexis Dray | Suchitra Dubey | Tatiana Ekeinhor | Marco Di Giovanni | Tanya Goyal | Rishabh Gupta | Louanes Hamla | Sang Han | Fabrice Harel-Canada | Antoine Honoré | Ishan Jindal | Przemysław Joniak | Denis Kleyko | Venelin Kovatchev | Kalpesh Krishna | Ashutosh Kumar | Stefan Langer | Seungjae Ryan Lee | Corey James Levinson | Hualou Liang | Kaizhao Liang | Zhexiong Liu | Andrey Lukyanenko | Vukosi Marivate | Gerard de Melo | Simon Meoni | Maxine Meyer | Afnan Mir | Nafise Sadat Moosavi | Niklas Meunnighoff | Timothy Sum Hon Mun | Kenton Murray | Marcin Namysl | Maria Obedkova | Priti Oli | Nivranshu Pasricha | Jan Pfister | Richard Plant | Vinay Prabhu | Vasile Pais | Libo Qin | Shahab Raji | Pawan Kumar Rajpoot | Vikas Raunak | Roy Rinberg | Nicholas Roberts | Juan Diego Rodriguez | Claude Roux | Vasconcellos Samus | Ananya Sai | Robin Schmidt | Thomas Scialom | Tshephisho Sefara | Saqib Shamsi | Xudong Shen | Yiwen Shi | Haoyue Shi | Anna Shvets | Nick Siegel | Damien Sileo | Jamie Simon | Chandan Singh | Roman Sitelew | Priyank Soni | Taylor Sorensen | William Soto | Aman Srivastava | Aditya Srivatsa | Tony Sun | Mukund Varma | A Tabassum | Fiona Tan | Ryan Teehan | Mo Tiwari | Marie Tolkiehn | Athena Wang | Zijian Wang | Zijie Wang | Gloria Wang | Fuxuan Wei | Bryan Wilie | Genta Indra Winata | Xinyu Wu | Witold Wydmanski | Tianbao Xie | Usama Yaseen | Michael Yee | Jing Zhang | Yue Zhang
Northern European Journal of Language Technology, Volume 9

Data augmentation is an important method for evaluating the robustness of and enhancing the diversity of training data for natural language processing (NLP) models. In this paper, we present NL-Augmenter, a new participatory Python-based natural language (NL) augmentation framework which supports the creation of transformations (modifications to the data) and filters (data splits according to specific features). We describe the framework and an initial set of 117 transformations and 23 filters for a variety of NL tasks annotated with noisy descriptive tags. The transformations incorporate noise, intentional and accidental human mistakes, socio-linguistic variation, semantically-valid style, syntax changes, as well as artificial constructs that are unambiguous to humans. We demonstrate the efficacy of NL-Augmenter by using its transformations to analyze the robustness of popular language models. We find different models to be differently challenged on different tasks, with quasi-systematic score decreases. The infrastructure, datacards, and robustness evaluation results are publicly available on GitHub for the benefit of researchers working on paraphrase generation, robustness analysis, and low-resource NLP.

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Sebastian Gehrmann | Alex Wang | João Sedoc | Elizabeth Clark | Kaustubh Dhole | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Enrico Santus | Hooman Sedghamiz
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)

2022

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)
Antoine Bosselut | Khyathi Chandu | Kaustubh Dhole | Varun Gangal | Sebastian Gehrmann | Yacine Jernite | Jekaterina Novikova | Laura Perez-Beltrachini
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)

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Intriguing Properties of Compression on Multilingual Models
Kelechi Ogueji | Orevaoghene Ahia | Gbemileke Onilude | Sebastian Gehrmann | Sara Hooker | Julia Kreutzer
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Multilingual models are often particularly dependent on scaling to generalize to a growing number of languages. Compression techniques are widely relied upon to reconcile the growth in model size with real world resource constraints, but compression can have a disparate effect on model performance for low-resource languages. It is thus crucial to understand the trade-offs between scale, multilingualism, and compression. In this work, we propose an experimental framework to characterize the impact of sparsifying multilingual pre-trained language models during fine-tuning.Applying this framework to mBERT named entity recognition models across 40 languages, we find that compression confers several intriguing and previously unknown generalization properties. In contrast to prior findings, we find that compression may improve model robustness over dense models. We additionally observe that under certain sparsification regimes compression may aid, rather than disproportionately impact the performance of low-resource languages.

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GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code
Sebastian Gehrmann | Abhik Bhattacharjee | Abinaya Mahendiran | Alex Wang | Alexandros Papangelis | Aman Madaan | Angelina Mcmillan-major | Anna Shvets | Ashish Upadhyay | Bernd Bohnet | Bingsheng Yao | Bryan Wilie | Chandra Bhagavatula | Chaobin You | Craig Thomson | Cristina Garbacea | Dakuo Wang | Daniel Deutsch | Deyi Xiong | Di Jin | Dimitra Gkatzia | Dragomir Radev | Elizabeth Clark | Esin Durmus | Faisal Ladhak | Filip Ginter | Genta Indra Winata | Hendrik Strobelt | Hiroaki Hayashi | Jekaterina Novikova | Jenna Kanerva | Jenny Chim | Jiawei Zhou | Jordan Clive | Joshua Maynez | João Sedoc | Juraj Juraska | Kaustubh Dhole | Khyathi Raghavi Chandu | Laura Perez Beltrachini | Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro | Lewis Tunstall | Li Zhang | Mahim Pushkarna | Mathias Creutz | Michael White | Mihir Sanjay Kale | Moussa Kamal Eddine | Nico Daheim | Nishant Subramani | Ondrej Dusek | Paul Pu Liang | Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi | Qi Zhu | Ratish Puduppully | Reno Kriz | Rifat Shahriyar | Ronald Cardenas | Saad Mahamood | Salomey Osei | Samuel Cahyawijaya | Sanja Štajner | Sebastien Montella | Shailza Jolly | Simon Mille | Tahmid Hasan | Tianhao Shen | Tosin Adewumi | Vikas Raunak | Vipul Raheja | Vitaly Nikolaev | Vivian Tsai | Yacine Jernite | Ying Xu | Yisi Sang | Yixin Liu | Yufang Hou
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. The compatibility, often facilitated through leaderboards, thus leads to outdated but standardized evaluation practices. We pose that the standardization is taking place in the wrong spot. Evaluation infrastructure should enable researchers to use the latest methods and what should be standardized instead is how to incorporate these new evaluation advances. We introduce GEMv2, the new version of the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark which uses a modular infrastructure for dataset, model, and metric developers to benefit from each other’s work. GEMv2 supports 40 documented datasets in 51 languages, ongoing online evaluation for all datasets, and our interactive tools make it easier to add new datasets to the living benchmark.

2021

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Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Mechanisms in Neural Language Models
Matthew Finlayson | Aaron Mueller | Sebastian Gehrmann | Stuart Shieber | Tal Linzen | Yonatan Belinkov
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)

Targeted syntactic evaluations have demonstrated the ability of language models to perform subject-verb agreement given difficult contexts. To elucidate the mechanisms by which the models accomplish this behavior, this study applies causal mediation analysis to pre-trained neural language models. We investigate the magnitude of models’ preferences for grammatical inflections, as well as whether neurons process subject-verb agreement similarly across sentences with different syntactic structures. We uncover similarities and differences across architectures and model sizes—notably, that larger models do not necessarily learn stronger preferences. We also observe two distinct mechanisms for producing subject-verb agreement depending on the syntactic structure of the input sentence. Finally, we find that language models rely on similar sets of neurons when given sentences with similar syntactic structure.

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)
Antoine Bosselut | Esin Durmus | Varun Prashant Gangal | Sebastian Gehrmann | Yacine Jernite | Laura Perez-Beltrachini | Samira Shaikh | Wei Xu
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 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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Reusable Templates and Guides For Documenting Datasets and Models for Natural Language Processing and Generation: A Case Study of the HuggingFace and GEM Data and Model Cards
Angelina McMillan-Major | Salomey Osei | Juan Diego Rodriguez | Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi | Sebastian Gehrmann | Yacine Jernite
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM 2021)

Developing documentation guidelines and easy-to-use templates for datasets and models is a challenging task, especially given the variety of backgrounds, skills, and incentives of the people involved in the building of natural language processing (NLP) tools. Nevertheless, the adoption of standard documentation practices across the field of NLP promotes more accessible and detailed descriptions of NLP datasets and models, while supporting researchers and developers in reflecting on their work. To help with the standardization of documentation, we present two case studies of efforts that aim to develop reusable documentation templates – the HuggingFace data card, a general purpose card for datasets in NLP, and the GEM benchmark data and model cards with a focus on natural language generation. We describe our process for developing these templates, including the identification of relevant stakeholder groups, the definition of a set of guiding principles, the use of existing templates as our foundation, and iterative revisions based on feedback.

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Learning Compact Metrics for MT
Amy Pu | Hyung Won Chung | Ankur Parikh | Sebastian Gehrmann | Thibault Sellam
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent developments in machine translation and multilingual text generation have led researchers to adopt trained metrics such as COMET or BLEURT, which treat evaluation as a regression problem and use representations from multilingual pre-trained models such as XLM-RoBERTa or mBERT. Yet studies on related tasks suggest that these models are most efficient when they are large, which is costly and impractical for evaluation. We investigate the trade-off between multilinguality and model capacity with RemBERT, a state-of-the-art multilingual language model, using data from the WMT Metrics Shared Task. We present a series of experiments which show that model size is indeed a bottleneck for cross-lingual transfer, then demonstrate how distillation can help addressing this bottleneck, by leveraging synthetic data generation and transferring knowledge from one teacher to multiple students trained on related languages. Our method yields up to 10.5% improvement over vanilla fine-tuning and reaches 92.6% of RemBERT’s performance using only a third of its parameters.

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LMdiff: A Visual Diff Tool to Compare Language Models
Hendrik Strobelt | Benjamin Hoover | Arvind Satyanaryan | Sebastian Gehrmann
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

While different language models are ubiquitous in NLP, it is hard to contrast their outputs and identify which contexts one can handle better than the other. To address this question, we introduce LMdiff, a tool that visually compares probability distributions of two models that differ, e.g., through finetuning, distillation, or simply training with different parameter sizes. LMdiff allows the generation of hypotheses about model behavior by investigating text instances token by token and further assists in choosing these interesting text instances by identifying the most interesting phrases from large corpora. We showcase the applicability of LMdiff for hypothesis generation across multiple case studies. A demo is available at http://lmdiff.net .

2020

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Learning to Evaluate Translation Beyond English: BLEURT Submissions to the WMT Metrics 2020 Shared Task
Thibault Sellam | Amy Pu | Hyung Won Chung | Sebastian Gehrmann | Qijun Tan | Markus Freitag | Dipanjan Das | Ankur Parikh
Proceedings of the Fifth Conference on Machine Translation

The quality of machine translation systems has dramatically improved over the last decade, and as a result, evaluation has become an increasingly challenging problem. This paper describes our contribution to the WMT 2020 Metrics Shared Task, the main benchmark for automatic evaluation of translation. We make several submissions based on BLEURT, a previously published which uses transfer learning. We extend the metric beyond English and evaluate it on 14 language pairs for which fine-tuning data is available, as well as 4 “zero-shot” language pairs, for which we have no labelled examples. Additionally, we focus on English to German and demonstrate how to combine BLEURT’s predictions with those of YiSi and use alternative reference translations to enhance the performance. Empirical results show that the models achieve competitive results on the WMT Metrics 2019 Shared Task, indicating their promise for the 2020 edition.

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluating NLG Evaluation
Shubham Agarwal | Ondřej Dušek | Sebastian Gehrmann | Dimitra Gkatzia | Ioannis Konstas | Emiel Van Miltenburg | Sashank Santhanam
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Evaluating NLG Evaluation

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A Corpus for Detecting High-Context Medical Conditions in Intensive Care Patient Notes Focusing on Frequently Readmitted Patients
Edward T. Moseley | Joy T. Wu | Jonathan Welt | John Foote | Patrick D. Tyler | David W. Grant | Eric T. Carlson | Sebastian Gehrmann | Franck Dernoncourt | Leo Anthony Celi
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

A crucial step within secondary analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) is to identify the patient cohort under investigation. While EHRs contain medical billing codes that aim to represent the conditions and treatments patients may have, much of the information is only present in the patient notes. Therefore, it is critical to develop robust algorithms to infer patients’ conditions and treatments from their written notes. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for patient phenotyping, a task that is defined as the identification of whether a patient has a given medical condition (also referred to as clinical indication or phenotype) based on their patient note. Nursing Progress Notes and Discharge Summaries from the Intensive Care Unit of a large tertiary care hospital were manually annotated for the presence of several high-context phenotypes relevant to treatment and risk of re-hospitalization. This dataset contains 1102 Discharge Summaries and 1000 Nursing Progress Notes. Each Discharge Summary and Progress Note has been annotated by at least two expert human annotators (one clinical researcher and one resident physician). Annotated phenotypes include treatment non-adherence, chronic pain, advanced/metastatic cancer, as well as 10 other phenotypes. This dataset can be utilized for academic and industrial research in medicine and computer science, particularly within the field of medical natural language processing.

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exBERT: A Visual Analysis Tool to Explore Learned Representations in Transformer Models
Benjamin Hoover | Hendrik Strobelt | Sebastian Gehrmann
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Large Transformer-based language models can route and reshape complex information via their multi-headed attention mechanism. Although the attention never receives explicit supervision, it can exhibit recognizable patterns following linguistic or positional information. Analyzing the learned representations and attentions is paramount to furthering our understanding of the inner workings of these models. However, analyses have to catch up with the rapid release of new models and the growing diversity of investigation techniques. To support analysis for a wide variety of models, we introduce exBERT, a tool to help humans conduct flexible, interactive investigations and formulate hypotheses for the model-internal reasoning process. exBERT provides insights into the meaning of the contextual representations and attention by matching a human-specified input to similar contexts in large annotated datasets. By aggregating the annotations of the matched contexts, exBERT can quickly replicate findings from literature and extend them to previously not analyzed models.

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Interpretability and Analysis in Neural NLP
Yonatan Belinkov | Sebastian Gehrmann | Ellie Pavlick
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

While deep learning has transformed the natural language processing (NLP) field and impacted the larger computational linguistics community, the rise of neural networks is stained by their opaque nature: It is challenging to interpret the inner workings of neural network models, and explicate their behavior. Therefore, in the last few years, an increasingly large body of work has been devoted to the analysis and interpretation of neural network models in NLP. This body of work is so far lacking a common framework and methodology. Moreover, approaching the analysis of modern neural networks can be difficult for newcomers to the field. This tutorial aims to fill this gap and introduce the nascent field of interpretability and analysis of neural networks in NLP. The tutorial will cover the main lines of analysis work, such as structural analyses using probing classifiers, behavioral studies and test suites, and interactive visualizations. We will highlight not only the most commonly applied analysis methods, but also the specific limitations and shortcomings of current approaches, in order to inform participants where to focus future efforts.

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ToTTo: A Controlled Table-To-Text Generation Dataset
Ankur Parikh | Xuezhi Wang | Sebastian Gehrmann | Manaal Faruqui | Bhuwan Dhingra | Diyi Yang | Dipanjan Das
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We present ToTTo, an open-domain English table-to-text dataset with over 120,000 training examples that proposes a controlled generation task: given a Wikipedia table and a set of highlighted table cells, produce a one-sentence description. To obtain generated targets that are natural but also faithful to the source table, we introduce a dataset construction process where annotators directly revise existing candidate sentences from Wikipedia. We present systematic analyses of our dataset and annotation process as well as results achieved by several state-of-the-art baselines. While usually fluent, existing methods often hallucinate phrases that are not supported by the table, suggesting that this dataset can serve as a useful research benchmark for high-precision conditional text generation.

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The Language Interpretability Tool: Extensible, Interactive Visualizations and Analysis for NLP Models
Ian Tenney | James Wexler | Jasmijn Bastings | Tolga Bolukbasi | Andy Coenen | Sebastian Gehrmann | Ellen Jiang | Mahima Pushkarna | Carey Radebaugh | Emily Reif | Ann Yuan
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present the Language Interpretability Tool (LIT), an open-source platform for visualization and understanding of NLP models. We focus on core questions about model behavior: Why did my model make this prediction? When does it perform poorly? What happens under a controlled change in the input? LIT integrates local explanations, aggregate analysis, and counterfactual generation into a streamlined, browser-based interface to enable rapid exploration and error analysis. We include case studies for a diverse set of workflows, including exploring counterfactuals for sentiment analysis, measuring gender bias in coreference systems, and exploring local behavior in text generation. LIT supports a wide range of models—including classification, seq2seq, and structured prediction—and is highly extensible through a declarative, framework-agnostic API. LIT is under active development, with code and full documentation available at https://github.com/pair-code/lit.

2019

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GLTR: Statistical Detection and Visualization of Generated Text
Sebastian Gehrmann | Hendrik Strobelt | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

The rapid improvement of language models has raised the specter of abuse of text generation systems. This progress motivates the development of simple methods for detecting generated text that can be used by non-experts. In this work, we introduce GLTR, a tool to support humans in detecting whether a text was generated by a model. GLTR applies a suite of baseline statistical methods that can detect generation artifacts across multiple sampling schemes. In a human-subjects study, we show that the annotation scheme provided by GLTR improves the human detection-rate of fake text from 54% to 72% without any prior training. GLTR is open-source and publicly deployed, and has already been widely used to detect generated outputs.

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Improving Human Text Comprehension through Semi-Markov CRF-based Neural Section Title Generation
Sebastian Gehrmann | Steven Layne | Franck Dernoncourt
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Titles of short sections within long documents support readers by guiding their focus towards relevant passages and by providing anchor-points that help to understand the progression of the document. The positive effects of section titles are even more pronounced when measured on readers with less developed reading abilities, for example in communities with limited labeled text resources. We, therefore, aim to develop techniques to generate section titles in low-resource environments. In particular, we present an extractive pipeline for section title generation by first selecting the most salient sentence and then applying deletion-based compression. Our compression approach is based on a Semi-Markov Conditional Random Field that leverages unsupervised word-representations such as ELMo or BERT, eliminating the need for a complex encoder-decoder architecture. The results show that this approach leads to competitive performance with sequence-to-sequence models with high resources, while strongly outperforming it with low resources. In a human-subject study across subjects with varying reading abilities, we find that our section titles improve the speed of completing comprehension tasks while retaining similar accuracy.

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LSTM Networks Can Perform Dynamic Counting
Mirac Suzgun | Yonatan Belinkov | Stuart Shieber | Sebastian Gehrmann
Proceedings of the Workshop on Deep Learning and Formal Languages: Building Bridges

In this paper, we systematically assess the ability of standard recurrent networks to perform dynamic counting and to encode hierarchical representations. All the neural models in our experiments are designed to be small-sized networks both to prevent them from memorizing the training sets and to visualize and interpret their behaviour at test time. Our results demonstrate that the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks can learn to recognize the well-balanced parenthesis language (Dyck-1) and the shuffles of multiple Dyck-1 languages, each defined over different parenthesis-pairs, by emulating simple real-time k-counter machines. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first study to introduce the shuffle languages to analyze the computational power of neural networks. We also show that a single-layer LSTM with only one hidden unit is practically sufficient for recognizing the Dyck-1 language. However, none of our recurrent networks was able to yield a good performance on the Dyck-2 language learning task, which requires a model to have a stack-like mechanism for recognition.

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Margin Call: an Accessible Web-based Text Viewer with Generated Paragraph Summaries in the Margin
Naba Rizvi | Sebastian Gehrmann | Lidan Wang | Franck Dernoncourt
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

We present Margin Call, a web-based text viewer that automatically generates short summaries for each paragraph of the text and displays the summaries in the margin of the text next to the corresponding paragraph. On the back-end, the summarizer first identifies the most important sentence for each paragraph in the text file uploaded by the user. The selected sentence is then automatically compressed to produce the short summary. The resulting summary is a few words long. The displayed summaries can help the user understand and retrieve information faster from the text, while increasing the retention of information.

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Generating Abstractive Summaries with Finetuned Language Models
Sebastian Gehrmann | Zachary Ziegler | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Neural abstractive document summarization is commonly approached by models that exhibit a mostly extractive behavior. This behavior is facilitated by a copy-attention which allows models to copy words from a source document. While models in the mostly extractive news summarization domain benefit from this inductive bias, they commonly fail to paraphrase or compress information from the source document. Recent advances in transfer-learning from large pretrained language models give rise to alternative approaches that do not rely on copy-attention and instead learn to generate concise and abstractive summaries. In this paper, as part of the TL;DR challenge, we compare the abstractiveness of summaries from different summarization approaches and show that transfer-learning can be efficiently utilized without any changes to the model architecture. We demonstrate that the approach leads to a higher level of abstraction for a similar performance on the TL;DR challenge tasks, enabling true natural language compression.

2018

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Debugging Sequence-to-Sequence Models with Seq2Seq-Vis
Hendrik Strobelt | Sebastian Gehrmann | Michael Behrisch | Adam Perer | Hanspeter Pfister | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Neural attention-based sequence-to-sequence models (seq2seq) (Sutskever et al., 2014; Bahdanau et al., 2014) have proven to be accurate and robust for many sequence prediction tasks. They have become the standard approach for automatic translation of text, at the cost of increased model complexity and uncertainty. End-to-end trained neural models act as a black box, which makes it difficult to examine model decisions and attribute errors to a specific part of a model. The highly connected and high-dimensional internal representations pose a challenge for analysis and visualization tools. The development of methods to understand seq2seq predictions is crucial for systems in production settings, as mistakes involving language are often very apparent to human readers. For instance, a widely publicized incident resulted from a translation system mistakenly translating “good morning” into “attack them” leading to a wrongful arrest (Hern, 2017).

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End-to-End Content and Plan Selection for Data-to-Text Generation
Sebastian Gehrmann | Falcon Dai | Henry Elder | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

Learning to generate fluent natural language from structured data with neural networks has become an common approach for NLG. This problem can be challenging when the form of the structured data varies between examples. This paper presents a survey of several extensions to sequence-to-sequence models to account for the latent content selection process, particularly variants of copy attention and coverage decoding. We further propose a training method based on diverse ensembling to encourage models to learn distinct sentence templates during training. An empirical evaluation of these techniques shows an increase in the quality of generated text across five automated metrics, as well as human evaluation.

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E2E NLG Challenge Submission: Towards Controllable Generation of Diverse Natural Language
Henry Elder | Sebastian Gehrmann | Alexander O’Connor | Qun Liu
Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Natural Language Generation

In natural language generation (NLG), the task is to generate utterances from a more abstract input, such as structured data. An added challenge is to generate utterances that contain an accurate representation of the input, while reflecting the fluency and variety of human-generated text. In this paper, we report experiments with NLG models that can be used in task oriented dialogue systems. We explore the use of additional input to the model to encourage diversity and control of outputs. While our submission does not rank highly using automated metrics, qualitative investigation of generated utterances suggests the use of additional information in neural network NLG systems to be a promising research direction.

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Bottom-Up Abstractive Summarization
Sebastian Gehrmann | Yuntian Deng | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Neural summarization produces outputs that are fluent and readable, but which can be poor at content selection, for instance often copying full sentences from the source document. This work explores the use of data-efficient content selectors to over-determine phrases in a source document that should be part of the summary. We use this selector as a bottom-up attention step to constrain the model to likely phrases. We show that this approach improves the ability to compress text, while still generating fluent summaries. This two-step process is both simpler and higher performing than other end-to-end content selection models, leading to significant improvements on ROUGE for both the CNN-DM and NYT corpus. Furthermore, the content selector can be trained with as little as 1,000 sentences making it easy to transfer a trained summarizer to a new domain.
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