Björn Ross


2022

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A Robust Bias Mitigation Procedure Based on the Stereotype Content Model
Eddie Ungless | Amy Rafferty | Hrichika Nag | Björn Ross
Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Natural Language Processing and Computational Social Science (NLP+CSS)

The Stereotype Content model (SCM) states that we tend to perceive minority groups as cold, incompetent or both. In this paper we adapt existing work to demonstrate that the Stereotype Content model holds for contextualised word embeddings, then use these results to evaluate a fine-tuning process designed to drive a language model away from stereotyped portrayals of minority groups. We find the SCM terms are better able to capture bias than demographic agnostic terms related to pleasantness. Further, we were able to reduce the presence of stereotypes in the model through a simple fine-tuning procedure that required minimal human and computer resources, without harming downstream performance. We present this work as a prototype of a debiasing procedure that aims to remove the need for a priori knowledge of the specifics of bias in the model.

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KEViN: A Knowledge Enhanced Validity and Novelty Classifier for Arguments
Ameer Saadat-Yazdi | Xue Li | Sandrine Chausson | Vaishak Belle | Björn Ross | Jeff Z. Pan | Nadin Kökciyan
Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Argument Mining

The ArgMining 2022 Shared Task is concerned with predicting the validity and novelty of an inference for a given premise and conclusion pair. We propose two feed-forward network based models (KEViN1 and KEViN2), which combine features generated from several pretrained transformers and the WikiData knowledge graph. The transformers are used to predict entailment and semantic similarity, while WikiData is used to provide a semantic measure between concepts in the premise-conclusion pair. Our proposed models show significant improvement over RoBERTa, with KEViN1 outperforming KEViN2 and obtaining second rank on both subtasks (A and B) of the ArgMining 2022 Shared Task.

2017

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GraWiTas: a Grammar-based Wikipedia Talk Page Parser
Benjamin Cabrera | Laura Steinert | Björn Ross
Proceedings of the Software Demonstrations of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Wikipedia offers researchers unique insights into the collaboration and communication patterns of a large self-regulating community of editors. The main medium of direct communication between editors of an article is the article’s talk page. However, a talk page file is unstructured and therefore difficult to analyse automatically. A few parsers exist that enable its transformation into a structured data format. However, they are rarely open source, support only a limited subset of the talk page syntax – resulting in the loss of content – and usually support only one export format. Together with this article we offer a very fast, lightweight, open source parser with support for various output formats. In a preliminary evaluation it achieved a high accuracy. The parser uses a grammar-based approach – offering a transparent implementation and easy extensibility.