Nuan Wen


2024

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Can Language Model Moderators Improve the Health of Online Discourse?
Hyundong Cho | Shuai Liu | Taiwei Shi | Darpan Jain | Basem Rizk | Yuyang Huang | Zixun Lu | Nuan Wen | Jonathan Gratch | Emilio Ferrara | Jonathan May
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Conversational moderation of online communities is crucial to maintaining civility for a constructive environment, but it is challenging to scale and harmful to moderators. The inclusion of sophisticated natural language generation modules as a force multiplier to aid human moderators is a tantalizing prospect, but adequate evaluation approaches have so far been elusive. In this paper, we establish a systematic definition of conversational moderation effectiveness grounded on moderation literature and establish design criteria for conducting realistic yet safe evaluation. We then propose a comprehensive evaluation framework to assess models’ moderation capabilities independently of human intervention. With our framework, we conduct the first known study of language models as conversational moderators, finding that appropriately prompted models that incorporate insights from social science can provide specific and fair feedback on toxic behavior but struggle to influence users to increase their levels of respect and cooperation.

2022

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DEAM: Dialogue Coherence Evaluation using AMR-based Semantic Manipulations
Sarik Ghazarian | Nuan Wen | Aram Galstyan | Nanyun Peng
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Automatic evaluation metrics are essential for the rapid development of open-domain dialogue systems as they facilitate hyper-parameter tuning and comparison between models. Although recently proposed trainable conversation-level metrics have shown encouraging results, the quality of the metrics is strongly dependent on the quality of training data. Prior works mainly resort to heuristic text-level manipulations (e.g. utterances shuffling) to bootstrap incoherent conversations (negative examples) from coherent dialogues (positive examples). Such approaches are insufficient to appropriately reflect the incoherence that occurs in interactions between advanced dialogue models and humans. To tackle this problem, we propose DEAM, a Dialogue coherence Evaluation metric that relies on Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) to apply semantic-level Manipulations for incoherent (negative) data generation. AMRs naturally facilitate the injection of various types of incoherence sources, such as coreference inconsistency, irrelevancy, contradictions, and decrease engagement, at the semantic level, thus resulting in more natural incoherent samples. Our experiments show that DEAM achieves higher correlations with human judgments compared to baseline methods on several dialog datasets by significant margins. We also show that DEAM can distinguish between coherent and incoherent dialogues generated by baseline manipulations, whereas those baseline models cannot detect incoherent examples generated by DEAM. Our results demonstrate the potential of AMR-based semantic manipulations for natural negative example generation.

2021

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COM2SENSE: A Commonsense Reasoning Benchmark with Complementary Sentences
Shikhar Singh | Nuan Wen | Yu Hou | Pegah Alipoormolabashi | Te-lin Wu | Xuezhe Ma | Nanyun Peng
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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EventPlus: A Temporal Event Understanding Pipeline
Mingyu Derek Ma | Jiao Sun | Mu Yang | Kung-Hsiang Huang | Nuan Wen | Shikhar Singh | Rujun Han | Nanyun Peng
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies: Demonstrations

We present EventPlus, a temporal event understanding pipeline that integrates various state-of-the-art event understanding components including event trigger and type detection, event argument detection, event duration and temporal relation extraction. Event information, especially event temporal knowledge, is a type of common sense knowledge that helps people understand how stories evolve and provides predictive hints for future events. EventPlus as the first comprehensive temporal event understanding pipeline provides a convenient tool for users to quickly obtain annotations about events and their temporal information for any user-provided document. Furthermore, we show EventPlus can be easily adapted to other domains (e.g., biomedical domain). We make EventPlus publicly available to facilitate event-related information extraction and downstream applications.