Fereshte Khani


2023

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Targeted Data Generation: Finding and Fixing Model Weaknesses
Zexue He | Marco Tulio Ribeiro | Fereshte Khani
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Even when aggregate accuracy is high, state-of-the-art NLP models often fail systematically on specific subgroups of data, resulting in unfair outcomes and eroding user trust. Additional data collection may not help in addressing these weaknesses, as such challenging subgroups may be unknown to users, and underrepresented in the existing and new data. We propose Targeted Data Generation (TDG), a framework that automatically identifies challenging subgroups, and generates new data for those subgroups using large language models (LLMs) with a human in the loop. TDG estimates the expected benefit and potential harm of data augmentation for each subgroup, and selects the ones most likely to improve within-group performance without hurting overall performance. In our experiments, TDG significantly improves the accuracy on challenging subgroups for state-of-the-art sentiment analysis and natural language inference models, while also improving overall test accuracy.

2018

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Planning, Inference and Pragmatics in Sequential Language Games
Fereshte Khani | Noah D. Goodman | Percy Liang
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 6

We study sequential language games in which two players, each with private information, communicate to achieve a common goal. In such games, a successful player must (i) infer the partner’s private information from the partner’s messages, (ii) generate messages that are most likely to help with the goal, and (iii) reason pragmatically about the partner’s strategy. We propose a model that captures all three characteristics and demonstrate their importance in capturing human behavior on a new goal-oriented dataset we collected using crowdsourcing.

2016

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Unanimous Prediction for 100% Precision with Application to Learning Semantic Mappings
Fereshte Khani | Martin Rinard | Percy Liang
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)