Jon Ander Campos


2020

pdf
Automatic Evaluation vs. User Preference in Neural Textual QuestionAnswering over COVID-19 Scientific Literature
Arantxa Otegi | Jon Ander Campos | Gorka Azkune | Aitor Soroa | Eneko Agirre
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on NLP for COVID-19 (Part 2) at EMNLP 2020

We present a Question Answering (QA) system that won one of the tasks of the Kaggle CORD-19 Challenge, according to the qualitative evaluation of experts. The system is a combination of an Information Retrieval module and a reading comprehension module that finds the answers in the retrieved passages. In this paper we present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the system. The quantitative evaluation using manually annotated datasets contradicted some of our design choices, e.g. the fact that using QuAC for fine-tuning provided better answers over just using SQuAD. We analyzed this mismatch with an additional A/B test which showed that the system using QuAC was indeed preferred by users, confirming our intuition. Our analysis puts in question the suitability of automatic metrics and its correlation to user preferences. We also show that automatic metrics are highly dependent on the characteristics of the gold standard, such as the average length of the answers.

pdf
DoQA - Accessing Domain-Specific FAQs via Conversational QA
Jon Ander Campos | Arantxa Otegi | Aitor Soroa | Jan Deriu | Mark Cieliebak | Eneko Agirre
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The goal of this work is to build conversational Question Answering (QA) interfaces for the large body of domain-specific information available in FAQ sites. We present DoQA, a dataset with 2,437 dialogues and 10,917 QA pairs. The dialogues are collected from three Stack Exchange sites using the Wizard of Oz method with crowdsourcing. Compared to previous work, DoQA comprises well-defined information needs, leading to more coherent and natural conversations with less factoid questions and is multi-domain. In addition, we introduce a more realistic information retrieval (IR) scenario where the system needs to find the answer in any of the FAQ documents. The results of an existing, strong, system show that, thanks to transfer learning from a Wikipedia QA dataset and fine tuning on a single FAQ domain, it is possible to build high quality conversational QA systems for FAQs without in-domain training data. The good results carry over into the more challenging IR scenario. In both cases, there is still ample room for improvement, as indicated by the higher human upperbound.

pdf
Conversational Question Answering in Low Resource Scenarios: A Dataset and Case Study for Basque
Arantxa Otegi | Aitor Agirre | Jon Ander Campos | Aitor Soroa | Eneko Agirre
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Conversational Question Answering (CQA) systems meet user information needs by having conversations with them, where answers to the questions are retrieved from text. There exist a variety of datasets for English, with tens of thousands of training examples, and pre-trained language models have allowed to obtain impressive results. The goal of our research is to test the performance of CQA systems under low-resource conditions which are common for most non-English languages: small amounts of native annotations and other limitations linked to low resource languages, like lack of crowdworkers or smaller wikipedias. We focus on the Basque language, and present the first non-English CQA dataset and results. Our experiments show that it is possible to obtain good results with low amounts of native data thanks to cross-lingual transfer, with quality comparable to those obtained for English. We also discovered that dialogue history models are not directly transferable to another language, calling for further research. The dataset is publicly available.

pdf
Give your Text Representation Models some Love: the Case for Basque
Rodrigo Agerri | Iñaki San Vicente | Jon Ander Campos | Ander Barrena | Xabier Saralegi | Aitor Soroa | Eneko Agirre
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Word embeddings and pre-trained language models allow to build rich representations of text and have enabled improvements across most NLP tasks. Unfortunately they are very expensive to train, and many small companies and research groups tend to use models that have been pre-trained and made available by third parties, rather than building their own. This is suboptimal as, for many languages, the models have been trained on smaller (or lower quality) corpora. In addition, monolingual pre-trained models for non-English languages are not always available. At best, models for those languages are included in multilingual versions, where each language shares the quota of substrings and parameters with the rest of the languages. This is particularly true for smaller languages such as Basque. In this paper we show that a number of monolingual models (FastText word embeddings, FLAIR and BERT language models) trained with larger Basque corpora produce much better results than publicly available versions in downstream NLP tasks, including topic classification, sentiment classification, PoS tagging and NER. This work sets a new state-of-the-art in those tasks for Basque. All benchmarks and models used in this work are publicly available.

pdf
Improving Conversational Question Answering Systems after Deployment using Feedback-Weighted Learning
Jon Ander Campos | Kyunghyun Cho | Arantxa Otegi | Aitor Soroa | Eneko Agirre | Gorka Azkune
Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

The interaction of conversational systems with users poses an exciting opportunity for improving them after deployment, but little evidence has been provided of its feasibility. In most applications, users are not able to provide the correct answer to the system, but they are able to provide binary (correct, incorrect) feedback. In this paper we propose feedback-weighted learning based on importance sampling to improve upon an initial supervised system using binary user feedback. We perform simulated experiments on document classification (for development) and Conversational Question Answering datasets like QuAC and DoQA, where binary user feedback is derived from gold annotations. The results show that our method is able to improve over the initial supervised system, getting close to a fully-supervised system that has access to the same labeled examples in in-domain experiments (QuAC), and even matching in out-of-domain experiments (DoQA). Our work opens the prospect to exploit interactions with real users and improve conversational systems after deployment.

pdf
Spot The Bot: A Robust and Efficient Framework for the Evaluation of Conversational Dialogue Systems
Jan Deriu | Don Tuggener | Pius von Däniken | Jon Ander Campos | Alvaro Rodrigo | Thiziri Belkacem | Aitor Soroa | Eneko Agirre | Mark Cieliebak
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The lack of time efficient and reliable evalu-ation methods is hampering the development of conversational dialogue systems (chat bots). Evaluations that require humans to converse with chat bots are time and cost intensive, put high cognitive demands on the human judges, and tend to yield low quality results. In this work, we introduce Spot The Bot, a cost-efficient and robust evaluation framework that replaces human-bot conversations with conversations between bots. Human judges then only annotate for each entity in a conversation whether they think it is human or not (assuming there are humans participants in these conversations). These annotations then allow us to rank chat bots regarding their ability to mimic conversational behaviour of humans. Since we expect that all bots are eventually recognized as such, we incorporate a metric that measures which chat bot is able to uphold human-like be-havior the longest, i.e.Survival Analysis. This metric has the ability to correlate a bot’s performance to certain of its characteristics (e.g.fluency or sensibleness), yielding interpretable results. The comparably low cost of our frame-work allows for frequent evaluations of chatbots during their evaluation cycle. We empirically validate our claims by applying Spot The Bot to three domains, evaluating several state-of-the-art chat bots, and drawing comparisonsto related work. The framework is released asa ready-to-use tool.