Neset Tan


2023

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Multi2Claim: Generating Scientific Claims from Multi-Choice Questions for Scientific Fact-Checking
Neset Tan | Trung Nguyen | Josh Bensemann | Alex Peng | Qiming Bao | Yang Chen | Mark Gahegan | Michael Witbrock
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Training machine learning models to successfully perform scientific fact-checking tasks is challenging due to the expertise bottleneck that limits the availability of appropriate training datasets. In this task, models use textual evidence to confirm scientific claims, which requires data that contains extensive domain-expert annotation. Consequently, the number of existing scientific-fact-checking datasets and the sizes of those datasets are limited. However, these limitations do not apply to multiple-choice question datasets because of the necessity of domain exams in the modern education system. As one of the first steps towards addressing the fact-checking dataset scarcity problem in scientific domains, we propose a pipeline for automatically converting multiple-choice questions into fact-checking data, which we call Multi2Claim. By applying the proposed pipeline, we generated two large-scale datasets for scientific-fact-checking tasks: Med-Fact and Gsci-Fact for the medical and general science domains, respectively. These two datasets are among the first examples of large-scale scientific-fact-checking datasets. We developed baseline models for the verdict prediction task using each dataset. Additionally, we demonstrated that the datasets could be used to improve performance with respect to the F 1 weighted metric on existing fact-checking datasets such as SciFact, HEALTHVER, COVID-Fact, and CLIMATE-FEVER. In some cases, the improvement in performance was up to a 26% increase.

2022

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Eye Gaze and Self-attention: How Humans and Transformers Attend Words in Sentences
Joshua Bensemann | Alex Peng | Diana Benavides-Prado | Yang Chen | Neset Tan | Paul Michael Corballis | Patricia Riddle | Michael Witbrock
Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics

Attention describes cognitive processes that are important to many human phenomena including reading. The term is also used to describe the way in which transformer neural networks perform natural language processing. While attention appears to be very different under these two contexts, this paper presents an analysis of the correlations between transformer attention and overt human attention during reading tasks. An extensive analysis of human eye tracking datasets showed that the dwell times of human eye movements were strongly correlated with the attention patterns occurring in the early layers of pre-trained transformers such as BERT. Additionally, the strength of a correlation was not related to the number of parameters within a transformer. This suggests that something about the transformers’ architecture determined how closely the two measures were correlated.