Noura Al Moubayed


2022

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Generating Textual Explanations for Machine Learning Models Performance: A Table-to-Text Task
Isaac Ampomah | James Burton | Amir Enshaei | Noura Al Moubayed
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Numerical tables are widely employed to communicate or report the classification performance of machine learning (ML) models with respect to a set of evaluation metrics. For non-experts, domain knowledge is required to fully understand and interpret the information presented by numerical tables. This paper proposes a new natural language generation (NLG) task where neural models are trained to generate textual explanations, analytically describing the classification performance of ML models based on the metrics’ scores reported in the tables. Presenting the generated texts along with the numerical tables will allow for a better understanding of the classification performance of ML models. We constructed a dataset comprising numerical tables paired with their corresponding textual explanations written by experts to facilitate this NLG task. Experiments on the dataset are conducted by fine-tuning pre-trained language models (T5 and BART) to generate analytical textual explanations conditioned on the information in the tables. Furthermore, we propose a neural module, Metrics Processing Unit (MPU), to improve the performance of the baselines in terms of correctly verbalising the information in the corresponding table. Evaluation and analysis conducted indicate, that exploring pre-trained models for data-to-text generation leads to better generalisation performance and can produce high-quality textual explanations.

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MuLD: The Multitask Long Document Benchmark
George Hudson | Noura Al Moubayed
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

The impressive progress in NLP techniques has been driven by the development of multi-task benchmarks such as GLUE and SuperGLUE. While these benchmarks focus on tasks for one or two input sentences, there has been exciting work in designing efficient techniques for processing much longer inputs. In this paper, we present MuLD: a new long document benchmark consisting of only documents over 10,000 tokens. By modifying existing NLP tasks, we create a diverse benchmark which requires models to successfully model long-term dependencies in the text. We evaluate how existing models perform, and find that our benchmark is much more challenging than their ‘short document’ equivalents. Furthermore, by evaluating both regular and efficient transformers, we show that models with increased context length are better able to solve the tasks presented, suggesting that future improvements in these models are vital for solving similar long document problems. We release the data and code for baselines to encourage further research on efficient NLP models.

2021

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Towards Equal Gender Representation in the Annotations of Toxic Language Detection
Elizabeth Excell | Noura Al Moubayed
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing

Classifiers tend to propagate biases present in the data on which they are trained. Hence, it is important to understand how the demographic identities of the annotators of comments affect the fairness of the resulting model. In this paper, we focus on the differences in the ways men and women annotate comments for toxicity, investigating how these differences result in models that amplify the opinions of male annotators. We find that the BERT model associates toxic comments containing offensive words with male annotators, causing the model to predict 67.7% of toxic comments as having been annotated by men. We show that this disparity between gender predictions can be mitigated by removing offensive words and highly toxic comments from the training data. We then apply the learned associations between gender and language to toxic language classifiers, finding that models trained exclusively on female-annotated data perform 1.8% better than those trained solely on male-annotated data, and that training models on data after removing all offensive words reduces bias in the model by 55.5% while increasing the sensitivity by 0.4%.