Francesca Toni


2022

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A Graph-Based Method for Unsupervised Knowledge Discovery from Financial Texts
Joel Oksanen | Abhilash Majumder | Kumar Saunack | Francesca Toni | Arun Dhondiyal
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The need for manual review of various financial texts, such as company filings and news, presents a major bottleneck in financial analysts’ work. Thus, there is great potential for the application of NLP methods, tools and resources to fulfil a genuine industrial need in finance. In this paper, we show how this potential can be fulfilled by presenting an end-to-end, fully unsupervised method for knowledge discovery from financial texts. Our method creatively integrates existing resources to construct automatically a knowledge graph of companies and related entities as well as to carry out unsupervised analysis of the resulting graph to provide quantifiable and explainable insights from the produced knowledge. The graph construction integrates entity processing and semantic expansion, before carrying out open relation extraction. We illustrate our method by calculating automatically the environmental rating for companies in the S&P 500, based on company filings with the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). We then show the usefulness of our method in this setting by providing an assessment of our method’s outputs with an independent MSCI source.

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GrASP: A Library for Extracting and Exploring Human-Interpretable Textual Patterns
Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn | Leshem Choshen | Eyal Shnarch | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Data exploration is an important step of every data science and machine learning project, including those involving textual data. We provide a novel language tool, in the form of a publicly available Python library for extracting patterns from textual data. The library integrates a first public implementation of the existing GrASP algorithm. It allows users to extract patterns using a number of general-purpose built-in linguistic attributes (such as hypernyms, part-of-speech tags, and syntactic dependency tags), as envisaged for the original algorithm, as well as domain-specific custom attributes which can be incorporated into the library by implementing two functions. The library is equipped with a web-based interface empowering human users to conveniently explore data via the extracted patterns, using complementary pattern-centric and example-centric views: the former includes a reading in natural language and statistics of each extracted pattern; the latter shows applications of each extracted pattern to training examples. We demonstrate the usefulness of the library in classification (spam detection and argument mining), model analysis (machine translation), and artifact discovery in datasets (SNLI and 20Newsgroups).

2021

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Explanation-Based Human Debugging of NLP Models: A Survey
Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn | Francesca Toni
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

Abstract Debugging a machine learning model is hard since the bug usually involves the training data and the learning process. This becomes even harder for an opaque deep learning model if we have no clue about how the model actually works. In this survey, we review papers that exploit explanations to enable humans to give feedback and debug NLP models. We call this problem explanation-based human debugging (EBHD). In particular, we categorize and discuss existing work along three dimensions of EBHD (the bug context, the workflow, and the experimental setting), compile findings on how EBHD components affect the feedback providers, and highlight open problems that could be future research directions.

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HILDIF: Interactive Debugging of NLI Models Using Influence Functions
Hugo Zylberajch | Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Interactive Learning for Natural Language Processing

Biases and artifacts in training data can cause unwelcome behavior in text classifiers (such as shallow pattern matching), leading to lack of generalizability. One solution to this problem is to include users in the loop and leverage their feedback to improve models. We propose a novel explanatory debugging pipeline called HILDIF, enabling humans to improve deep text classifiers using influence functions as an explanation method. We experiment on the Natural Language Inference (NLI) task, showing that HILDIF can effectively alleviate artifact problems in fine-tuned BERT models and result in increased model generalizability.

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Graph Reasoning with Context-Aware Linearization for Interpretable Fact Extraction and Verification
Neema Kotonya | Thomas Spooner | Daniele Magazzeni | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER)

This paper presents an end-to-end system for fact extraction and verification using textual and tabular evidence, the performance of which we demonstrate on the FEVEROUS dataset. We experiment with both a multi-task learning paradigm to jointly train a graph attention network for both the task of evidence extraction and veracity prediction, as well as a single objective graph model for solely learning veracity prediction and separate evidence extraction. In both instances, we employ a framework for per-cell linearization of tabular evidence, thus allowing us to treat evidence from tables as sequences. The templates we employ for linearizing tables capture the context as well as the content of table data. We furthermore provide a case study to show the interpretability our approach. Our best performing system achieves a FEVEROUS score of 0.23 and 53% label accuracy on the blind test data.

2020

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Explainable Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey
Neema Kotonya | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

A number of exciting advances have been made in automated fact-checking thanks to increasingly larger datasets and more powerful systems, leading to improvements in the complexity of claims which can be accurately fact-checked. However, despite these advances, there are still desirable functionalities missing from the fact-checking pipeline. In this survey, we focus on the explanation functionality – that is fact-checking systems providing reasons for their predictions. We summarize existing methods for explaining the predictions of fact-checking systems and we explore trends in this topic. Further, we consider what makes for good explanations in this specific domain through a comparative analysis of existing fact-checking explanations against some desirable properties. Finally, we propose further research directions for generating fact-checking explanations, and describe how these may lead to improvements in the research area.

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FIND: Human-in-the-Loop Debugging Deep Text Classifiers
Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn | Lucia Specia | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Since obtaining a perfect training dataset (i.e., a dataset which is considerably large, unbiased, and well-representative of unseen cases) is hardly possible, many real-world text classifiers are trained on the available, yet imperfect, datasets. These classifiers are thus likely to have undesirable properties. For instance, they may have biases against some sub-populations or may not work effectively in the wild due to overfitting. In this paper, we propose FIND – a framework which enables humans to debug deep learning text classifiers by disabling irrelevant hidden features. Experiments show that by using FIND, humans can improve CNN text classifiers which were trained under different types of imperfect datasets (including datasets with biases and datasets with dissimilar train-test distributions).

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Explainable Automated Fact-Checking for Public Health Claims
Neema Kotonya | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Fact-checking is the task of verifying the veracity of claims by assessing their assertions against credible evidence. The vast majority of fact-checking studies focus exclusively on political claims. Very little research explores fact-checking for other topics, specifically subject matters for which expertise is required. We present the first study of explainable fact-checking for claims which require specific expertise. For our case study we choose the setting of public health. To support this case study we construct a new dataset PUBHEALTH of 11.8K claims accompanied by journalist crafted, gold standard explanations (i.e., judgments) to support the fact-check labels for claims. We explore two tasks: veracity prediction and explanation generation. We also define and evaluate, with humans and computationally, three coherence properties of explanation quality. Our results indicate that, by training on in-domain data, gains can be made in explainable, automated fact-checking for claims which require specific expertise.

2019

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Gradual Argumentation Evaluation for Stance Aggregation in Automated Fake News Detection
Neema Kotonya | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Argument Mining

Stance detection plays a pivot role in fake news detection. The task involves determining the point of view or stance – for or against – a text takes towards a claim. One very important stage in employing stance detection for fake news detection is the aggregation of multiple stance labels from different text sources in order to compute a prediction for the veracity of a claim. Typically, aggregation is treated as a credibility-weighted average of stance predictions. In this work, we take the novel approach of applying, for aggregation, a gradual argumentation semantics to bipolar argumentation frameworks mined using stance detection. Our empirical evaluation shows that our method results in more accurate veracity predictions.

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Human-grounded Evaluations of Explanation Methods for Text Classification
Piyawat Lertvittayakumjorn | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Due to the black-box nature of deep learning models, methods for explaining the models’ results are crucial to gain trust from humans and support collaboration between AIs and humans. In this paper, we consider several model-agnostic and model-specific explanation methods for CNNs for text classification and conduct three human-grounded evaluations, focusing on different purposes of explanations: (1) revealing model behavior, (2) justifying model predictions, and (3) helping humans investigate uncertain predictions. The results highlight dissimilar qualities of the various explanation methods we consider and show the degree to which these methods could serve for each purpose.

2018

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Combining Deep Learning and Argumentative Reasoning for the Analysis of Social Media Textual Content Using Small Data Sets
Oana Cocarascu | Francesca Toni
Computational Linguistics, Volume 44, Issue 4 - December 2018

The use of social media has become a regular habit for many and has changed the way people interact with each other. In this article, we focus on analyzing whether news headlines support tweets and whether reviews are deceptive by analyzing the interaction or the influence that these texts have on the others, thus exploiting contextual information. Concretely, we define a deep learning method for relation–based argument mining to extract argumentative relations of attack and support. We then use this method for determining whether news articles support tweets, a useful task in fact-checking settings, where determining agreement toward a statement is a useful step toward determining its truthfulness. Furthermore, we use our method for extracting bipolar argumentation frameworks from reviews to help detect whether they are deceptive. We show experimentally that our method performs well in both settings. In particular, in the case of deception detection, our method contributes a novel argumentative feature that, when used in combination with other features in standard supervised classifiers, outperforms the latter even on small data sets.

2017

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Identifying attack and support argumentative relations using deep learning
Oana Cocarascu | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We propose a deep learning architecture to capture argumentative relations of attack and support from one piece of text to another, of the kind that naturally occur in a debate. The architecture uses two (unidirectional or bidirectional) Long Short-Term Memory networks and (trained or non-trained) word embeddings, and allows to considerably improve upon existing techniques that use syntactic features and supervised classifiers for the same form of (relation-based) argument mining.

2015

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Towards relation based Argumentation Mining
Lucas Carstens | Francesca Toni
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Argumentation Mining