Liat Ein Dor

Also published as: Liat Ein-Dor


2022

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Quality Controlled Paraphrase Generation
Elron Bandel | Ranit Aharonov | Michal Shmueli-Scheuer | Ilya Shnayderman | Noam Slonim | Liat Ein-Dor
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Paraphrase generation has been widely used in various downstream tasks. Most tasks benefit mainly from high quality paraphrases, namely those that are semantically similar to, yet linguistically diverse from, the original sentence. Generating high-quality paraphrases is challenging as it becomes increasingly hard to preserve meaning as linguistic diversity increases. Recent works achieve nice results by controlling specific aspects of the paraphrase, such as its syntactic tree. However, they do not allow to directly control the quality of the generated paraphrase, and suffer from low flexibility and scalability. Here we propose QCPG, a quality-guided controlled paraphrase generation model, that allows directly controlling the quality dimensions. Furthermore, we suggest a method that given a sentence, identifies points in the quality control space that are expected to yield optimal generated paraphrases. We show that our method is able to generate paraphrases which maintain the original meaning while achieving higher diversity than the uncontrolled baseline. The models, the code, and the data can be found in https://github.com/IBM/quality-controlled-paraphrase-generation.

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Zero-Shot Text Classification with Self-Training
Ariel Gera | Alon Halfon | Eyal Shnarch | Yotam Perlitz | Liat Ein-Dor | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent advances in large pretrained language models have increased attention to zero-shot text classification. In particular, models finetuned on natural language inference datasets have been widely adopted as zero-shot classifiers due to their promising results and off-the-shelf availability. However, the fact that such models are unfamiliar with the target task can lead to instability and performance issues. We propose a plug-and-play method to bridge this gap using a simple self-training approach, requiring only the class names along with an unlabeled dataset, and without the need for domain expertise or trial and error. We show that fine-tuning the zero-shot classifier on its most confident predictions leads to significant performance gains across a wide range of text classification tasks, presumably since self-training adapts the zero-shot model to the task at hand.

2021

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Advances in Debating Technologies: Building AI That Can Debate Humans
Roy Bar-Haim | Liat Ein-Dor | Matan Orbach | Elad Venezian | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Tutorial Abstracts

The tutorial focuses on Debating Technologies, a sub-field of computational argumentation defined as “computational technologies developed directly to enhance, support, and engage with human debating” (Gurevych et al., 2016). A recent milestone in this field is Project Debater, which was revealed in 2019 as the first AI system that can debate human experts on complex topics. Project Debater is the third in the series of IBM Research AI’s grand challenges, following Deep Blue and Watson. It has been developed for over six years by a large team of researchers and engineers, and its live demonstration in February 2019 received massive media attention. This research effort has resulted in more than 50 scientific papers to date, and many datasets freely available for research purposes. We discuss the scientific challenges that arise when building such a system, including argument mining, argument quality assessment, stance classification, principled argument detection, narrative generation, and rebutting a human opponent. Many of the underlying capabilities of Project Debater have been made freely available for academic research, and the tutorial will include a detailed explanation of how to use and leverage these tools. In addition to discussing individual components, the tutorial also provides a holistic view of a debating system. Such a view is largely missing in the academic literature, where each paper typically addresses a specific problem in isolation. We present a complete pipeline of a debating system, and discuss the information flow and the interaction between the various components. Finally, we discuss practical applications and future challenges of debating technologies.

2020

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Active Learning for BERT: An Empirical Study
Liat Ein-Dor | Alon Halfon | Ariel Gera | Eyal Shnarch | Lena Dankin | Leshem Choshen | Marina Danilevsky | Ranit Aharonov | Yoav Katz | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Real world scenarios present a challenge for text classification, since labels are usually expensive and the data is often characterized by class imbalance. Active Learning (AL) is a ubiquitous paradigm to cope with data scarcity. Recently, pre-trained NLP models, and BERT in particular, are receiving massive attention due to their outstanding performance in various NLP tasks. However, the use of AL with deep pre-trained models has so far received little consideration. Here, we present a large-scale empirical study on active learning techniques for BERT-based classification, addressing a diverse set of AL strategies and datasets. We focus on practical scenarios of binary text classification, where the annotation budget is very small, and the data is often skewed. Our results demonstrate that AL can boost BERT performance, especially in the most realistic scenario in which the initial set of labeled examples is created using keyword-based queries, resulting in a biased sample of the minority class. We release our research framework, aiming to facilitate future research along the lines explored here.

2019

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Financial Event Extraction Using Wikipedia-Based Weak Supervision
Liat Ein-Dor | Ariel Gera | Orith Toledo-Ronen | Alon Halfon | Benjamin Sznajder | Lena Dankin | Yonatan Bilu | Yoav Katz | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Economics and Natural Language Processing

Extraction of financial and economic events from text has previously been done mostly using rule-based methods, with more recent works employing machine learning techniques. This work is in line with this latter approach, leveraging relevant Wikipedia sections to extract weak labels for sentences describing economic events. Whereas previous weakly supervised approaches required a knowledge-base of such events, or corresponding financial figures, our approach requires no such additional data, and can be employed to extract economic events related to companies which are not even mentioned in the training data.

2018

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Semantic Relatedness of Wikipedia Concepts – Benchmark Data and a Working Solution
Liat Ein Dor | Alon Halfon | Yoav Kantor | Ran Levy | Yosi Mass | Ruty Rinott | Eyal Shnarch | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

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Learning Thematic Similarity Metric from Article Sections Using Triplet Networks
Liat Ein Dor | Yosi Mass | Alon Halfon | Elad Venezian | Ilya Shnayderman | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In this paper we suggest to leverage the partition of articles into sections, in order to learn thematic similarity metric between sentences. We assume that a sentence is thematically closer to sentences within its section than to sentences from other sections. Based on this assumption, we use Wikipedia articles to automatically create a large dataset of weakly labeled sentence triplets, composed of a pivot sentence, one sentence from the same section and one from another section. We train a triplet network to embed sentences from the same section closer. To test the performance of the learned embeddings, we create and release a sentence clustering benchmark. We show that the triplet network learns useful thematic metrics, that significantly outperform state-of-the-art semantic similarity methods and multipurpose embeddings on the task of thematic clustering of sentences. We also show that the learned embeddings perform well on the task of sentence semantic similarity prediction.

2015

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TR9856: A Multi-word Term Relatedness Benchmark
Ran Levy | Liat Ein-Dor | Shay Hummel | Ruty Rinott | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)