Kexin Wang


2022

pdf
GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrieval
Kexin Wang | Nandan Thakur | Nils Reimers | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Dense retrieval approaches can overcome the lexical gap and lead to significantly improved search results. However, they require large amounts of training data which is not available for most domains. As shown in previous work (Thakur et al., 2021b), the performance of dense retrievers severely degrades under a domain shift. This limits the usage of dense retrieval approaches to only a few domains with large training datasets. In this paper, we propose the novel unsupervised domain adaptation method Generative Pseudo Labeling (GPL), which combines a query generator with pseudo labeling from a cross-encoder. On six representative domain-specialized datasets, we find the proposed GPL can outperform an out-of-the-box state-of-the-art dense retrieval approach by up to 9.3 points nDCG@10. GPL requires less (unlabeled) data from the target domain and is more robust in its training than previous methods. We further investigate the role of six recent pre-training methods in the scenario of domain adaptation for retrieval tasks, where only three could yield improved results. The best approach, TSDAE (Wang et al., 2021) can be combined with GPL, yielding another average improvement of 1.4 points nDCG@10 across the six tasks. The code and the models are available at https://github.com/UKPLab/gpl.

pdf bib
UKP-SQUARE: An Online Platform for Question Answering Research
Tim Baumgärtner | Kexin Wang | Rachneet Sachdeva | Gregor Geigle | Max Eichler | Clifton Poth | Hannah Sterz | Haritz Puerto | Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro | Jonas Pfeiffer | Nils Reimers | Gözde Şahin | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

Recent advances in NLP and information retrieval have given rise to a diverse set of question answering tasks that are of different formats (e.g., extractive, abstractive), require different model architectures (e.g., generative, discriminative), and setups (e.g., with or without retrieval). Despite having a large number of powerful, specialized QA pipelines (which we refer to as Skills) that consider a single domain, model or setup, there exists no framework where users can easily explore and compare such pipelines and can extend them according to their needs. To address this issue, we present UKP-SQuARE, an extensible online QA platform for researchers which allows users to query and analyze a large collection of modern Skills via a user-friendly web interface and integrated behavioural tests. In addition, QA researchers can develop, manage, and share their custom Skills using our microservices that support a wide range of models (Transformers, Adapters, ONNX), datastores and retrieval techniques (e.g., sparse and dense). UKP-SQuARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de

pdf
UKP-SQuARE v2: Explainability and Adversarial Attacks for Trustworthy QA
Rachneet Sachdeva | Haritz Puerto | Tim Baumgärtner | Sewin Tariverdian | Hao Zhang | Kexin Wang | Hossain Shaikh Saadi | Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro | Iryna Gurevych
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Question Answering (QA) systems are increasingly deployed in applications where they support real-world decisions. However, state-of-the-art models rely on deep neural networks, which are difficult to interpret by humans. Inherently interpretable models or post hoc explainability methods can help users to comprehend how a model arrives at its prediction and, if successful, increase their trust in the system. Furthermore, researchers can leverage these insights to develop new methods that are more accurate and less biased. In this paper, we introduce SQuARE v2, the new version of SQuARE, to provide an explainability infrastructure for comparing models based on methods such as saliency maps and graph-based explanations. While saliency maps are useful to inspect the importance of each input token for the model’s prediction, graph-based explanations from external Knowledge Graphs enable the users to verify the reasoning behind the model prediction. In addition, we provide multiple adversarial attacks to compare the robustness of QA models. With these explainability methods and adversarial attacks, we aim to ease the research on trustworthy QA models. SQuARE is available on https://square.ukp-lab.de.

2021

pdf
TSDAE: Using Transformer-based Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoderfor Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Learning
Kexin Wang | Nils Reimers | Iryna Gurevych
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Learning sentence embeddings often requires a large amount of labeled data. However, for most tasks and domains, labeled data is seldom available and creating it is expensive. In this work, we present a new state-of-the-art unsupervised method based on pre-trained Transformers and Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoder (TSDAE) which outperforms previous approaches by up to 6.4 points. It can achieve up to 93.1% of the performance of in-domain supervised approaches. Further, we show that TSDAE is a strong domain adaptation and pre-training method for sentence embeddings, significantly outperforming other approaches like Masked Language Model. A crucial shortcoming of previous studies is the narrow evaluation: Most work mainly evaluates on the single task of Semantic Textual Similarity (STS), which does not require any domain knowledge. It is unclear if these proposed methods generalize to other domains and tasks. We fill this gap and evaluate TSDAE and other recent approaches on four different datasets from heterogeneous domains.