Good datasets are a foundation of NLP research, and form the basis for training and evaluating models of language use. While creating datasets, the standard practice is to verify the annotation consistency using a committee of human annotators. This norm assumes that multiple annotators are available, which is not the case for highly specialized tasks or low-resource languages. In this paper, we ask: Can we evaluate the quality of a dataset constructed by a single human annotator? To address this question, we propose four weak verifiers to help estimate dataset quality, and outline when each may be employed. We instantiate these strategies for the task of semantic analysis of adpositions in Gujarati, a low-resource language, and show that our weak verifiers concur with a double-annotation study. As an added contribution, we also release the first dataset with semantic annotations in Gujarati along with several model baselines.
There are many different forms of psychotherapy. Itemized inventories of psychotherapeutic interventions provide a mechanism for evaluating the quality of care received by clients and for conducting research on how psychotherapy helps. However, evaluations such as these are slow, expensive, and are rarely used outside of well-funded research studies. Natural language processing research has progressed to allow automating such tasks. Yet, NLP work in this area has been restricted to evaluating a single approach to treatment, when prior research indicates therapists used a wide variety of interventions with their clients, often in the same session. In this paper, we frame this scenario as a multi-label classification task, and develop a group of models aimed at predicting a wide variety of therapist talk-turn level orientations. Our models achieve F1 macro scores of 0.5, with the class F1 ranging from 0.36 to 0.67. We present analyses which offer insights into the capability of such models to capture psychotherapy approaches, and which may complement human judgment.
In this paper, we observe that semi-structured tabulated text is ubiquitous; understanding them requires not only comprehending the meaning of text fragments, but also implicit relationships between them. We argue that such data can prove as a testing ground for understanding how we reason about information. To study this, we introduce a new dataset called INFOTABS, comprising of human-written textual hypotheses based on premises that are tables extracted from Wikipedia info-boxes. Our analysis shows that the semi-structured, multi-domain and heterogeneous nature of the premises admits complex, multi-faceted reasoning. Experiments reveal that, while human annotators agree on the relationships between a table-hypothesis pair, several standard modeling strategies are unsuccessful at the task, suggesting that reasoning about tables can pose a difficult modeling challenge.
Various natural language processing tasks are structured prediction problems where outputs are constructed with multiple interdependent decisions. Past work has shown that domain knowledge, framed as constraints over the output space, can help improve predictive accuracy. However, designing good constraints often relies on domain expertise. In this paper, we study the problem of learning such constraints. We frame the problem as that of training a two-layer rectifier network to identify valid structures or substructures, and show a construction for converting a trained network into a system of linear constraints over the inference variables. Our experiments on several NLP tasks show that the learned constraints can improve the prediction accuracy, especially when the number of training examples is small.
While neural models show remarkable accuracy on individual predictions, their internal beliefs can be inconsistent across examples. In this paper, we formalize such inconsistency as a generalization of prediction error. We propose a learning framework for constraining models using logic rules to regularize them away from inconsistency. Our framework can leverage both labeled and unlabeled examples and is directly compatible with off-the-shelf learning schemes without model redesign. We instantiate our framework on natural language inference, where experiments show that enforcing invariants stated in logic can help make the predictions of neural models both accurate and consistent.