2024
pdf
abs
Does the Generator Mind Its Contexts? An Analysis of Generative Model Faithfulness under Context Transfer
Xinshuo Hu
|
Dongfang Li
|
Xiaoguang Li
|
Yuxiang Wu
|
Lifeng Shang
|
Baotian Hu
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
he present study introduces the knowledge-augmented generator, which is specifically designed to produce information that remains grounded in contextual knowledge, regardless of alterations in the context. Previous research has predominantly focused on examining hallucinations stemming from static input, such as in the domains of summarization or machine translation. However, our investigation delves into the faithfulness of generative question answering in the presence of dynamic knowledge. Our objective is to explore the existence of hallucinations arising from parametric memory when contextual knowledge undergoes changes, while also analyzing the underlying causes for their occurrence. In order to efficiently address this issue, we propose a straightforward yet effective measure for detecting such hallucinations. Intriguingly, our investigation uncovers that all models exhibit a tendency to generate previous answers as hallucinations. To gain deeper insights into the underlying causes of this phenomenon, we conduct a series of experiments that verify the critical role played by context in hallucination, both during training and testing, from various perspectives.
2023
pdf
Enhancing Open-Domain Table Question Answering via Syntax- and Structure-aware Dense Retrieval
Nengzheng Jin
|
Dongfang Li
|
Junying Chen
|
Joanna Siebert
|
Qingcai Chen
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
pdf
bib
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Dongfang Li
|
Rahmad Mahendra
|
Zilu Peter Tang
|
Hyeju Jang
|
Yugo Murawaki
|
Derek Fai Wong
Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 3rd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
pdf
abs
ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination
Dongfang Li
|
Jindi Yu
|
Baotian Hu
|
Zhenran Xu
|
Min Zhang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
In the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their effectiveness across a wide range of tasks. However, a critical area that requires further investigation is the interpretability of these models, particularly the ability to generate rational explanations for their decisions. Most existing explanation datasets are limited to the English language and the general domain, which leads to a scarcity of linguistic diversity and a lack of resources in specialized domains, such as medical. To mitigate this, we propose ExplainCPE, a challenging medical dataset consisting of over 7K problems from Chinese Pharmacist Examination, specifically tailored to assess the model-generated explanations. From the overall results, only GPT-4 passes the pharmacist examination with a 75.7% accuracy, while other models like ChatGPT fail. Further detailed analysis of LLM-generated explanations reveals the limitations of LLMs in understanding medical text and executing computational reasoning. With the increasing importance of AI safety and trustworthiness, ExplainCPE takes a step towards improving and evaluating the interpretability of LLMs in the medical domain.
pdf
bib
abs
Towards Faithful Explanations for Text Classification with Robustness Improvement and Explanation Guided Training
Dongfang Li
|
Baotian Hu
|
Qingcai Chen
|
Shan He
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Trustworthy Natural Language Processing (TrustNLP 2023)
Feature attribution methods highlight the important input tokens as explanations to model predictions, which have been widely applied to deep neural networks towards trustworthy AI. However, recent works show that explanations provided by these methods face challenges of being faithful and robust. In this paper, we propose a method with Robustness improvement and Explanation Guided training towards more faithful EXplanations (REGEX) for text classification. First, we improve model robustness by input gradient regularization technique and virtual adversarial training. Secondly, we use salient ranking to mask noisy tokens and maximize the similarity between model attention and feature attribution, which can be seen as a self-training procedure without importing other external information. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets with five attribution methods, and also evaluate the faithfulness in the out-of-domain setting. The results show that REGEX improves fidelity metrics of explanations in all settings and further achieves consistent gains based on two randomization tests. Moreover, we show that using highlight explanations produced by REGEX to train select-then-predict models results in comparable task performance to the end-to-end method.
2022
pdf
abs
Calibration Meets Explanation: A Simple and Effective Approach for Model Confidence Estimates
Dongfang Li
|
Baotian Hu
|
Qingcai Chen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Calibration strengthens the trustworthiness of black-box models by producing better accurate confidence estimates on given examples. However, little is known about if model explanations can help confidence calibration. Intuitively, humans look at important features attributions and decide whether the model is trustworthy. Similarly, the explanations may tell us when the model might know and when it does not. Inspired by this, we propose a method named CME that leverages model explanations to make the model less confident with non-inductive attributions. The idea is that when the model is not highly confident, it is difficult to identify strong indications of any class, and the tokens accordingly do not have high attribution scores for any class and vice versa. We conduct extensive experiments on six datasets with two popular pre-trained language models in the in-domain and out-of-domain settings. The results show that CME improves calibration performance in all settings. The expected calibration errors are further reduced when combined with temperature scaling. Our findings highlight that model explanations can help calibrate posterior estimates.
pdf
abs
Prompt-based Text Entailment for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition
Dongfang Li
|
Baotian Hu
|
Qingcai Chen
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have been applied in NLP tasks and achieve promising results. Nevertheless, the fine-tuning procedure needs labeled data of the target domain, making it difficult to learn in low-resource and non-trivial labeled scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose Prompt-based Text Entailment (PTE) for low-resource named entity recognition, which better leverages knowledge in the PLMs. We first reformulate named entity recognition as the text entailment task. The original sentence with entity type-specific prompts is fed into PLMs to get entailment scores for each candidate. The entity type with the top score is then selected as final label. Then, we inject tagging labels into prompts and treat words as basic units instead of n-gram spans to reduce time complexity in generating candidates by n-grams enumeration. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method PTE achieves competitive performance on the CoNLL03 dataset, and better than fine-tuned counterparts on the MIT Movie and Few-NERD dataset in low-resource settings.
2020
pdf
abs
Towards Medical Machine Reading Comprehension with Structural Knowledge and Plain Text
Dongfang Li
|
Baotian Hu
|
Qingcai Chen
|
Weihua Peng
|
Anqi Wang
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Machine reading comprehension (MRC) has achieved significant progress on the open domain in recent years, mainly due to large-scale pre-trained language models. However, it performs much worse in specific domains such as the medical field due to the lack of extensive training data and professional structural knowledge neglect. As an effort, we first collect a large scale medical multi-choice question dataset (more than 21k instances) for the National Licensed Pharmacist Examination in China. It is a challenging medical examination with a passing rate of less than 14.2% in 2018. Then we propose a novel reading comprehension model KMQA, which can fully exploit the structural medical knowledge (i.e., medical knowledge graph) and the reference medical plain text (i.e., text snippets retrieved from reference books). The experimental results indicate that the KMQA outperforms existing competitive models with a large margin and passes the exam with 61.8% accuracy rate on the test set.
2019
pdf
abs
Trigger Word Detection and Thematic Role Identification via BERT and Multitask Learning
Dongfang Li
|
Ying Xiong
|
Baotian Hu
|
Hanyang Du
|
Buzhou Tang
|
Qingcai Chen
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on BioNLP Open Shared Tasks
The prediction of the relationship between the disease with genes and its mutations is a very important knowledge extraction task that can potentially help drug discovery. In this paper, we present our approaches for trigger word detection (task 1) and the identification of its thematic role (task 2) in AGAC track of BioNLP Open Shared Task 2019. Task 1 can be regarded as the traditional name entity recognition (NER), which cultivates molecular phenomena related to gene mutation. Task 2 can be regarded as relation extraction which captures the thematic roles between entities. For two tasks, we exploit the pre-trained biomedical language representation model (i.e., BERT) in the pipe of information extraction for the collection of mutation-disease knowledge from PubMed. And also, we design a fine-tuning technique and extra features by using multi-task learning. The experiment results show that our proposed approaches achieve 0.60 (ranks 1) and 0.25 (ranks 2) on task 1 and task 2 respectively in terms of F1 metric.
2018
pdf
abs
LCQMC:A Large-scale Chinese Question Matching Corpus
Xin Liu
|
Qingcai Chen
|
Chong Deng
|
Huajun Zeng
|
Jing Chen
|
Dongfang Li
|
Buzhou Tang
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics
The lack of large-scale question matching corpora greatly limits the development of matching methods in question answering (QA) system, especially for non-English languages. To ameliorate this situation, in this paper, we introduce a large-scale Chinese question matching corpus (named LCQMC), which is released to the public1. LCQMC is more general than paraphrase corpus as it focuses on intent matching rather than paraphrase. How to collect a large number of question pairs in variant linguistic forms, which may present the same intent, is the key point for such corpus construction. In this paper, we first use a search engine to collect large-scale question pairs related to high-frequency words from various domains, then filter irrelevant pairs by the Wasserstein distance, and finally recruit three annotators to manually check the left pairs. After this process, a question matching corpus that contains 260,068 question pairs is constructed. In order to verify the LCQMC corpus, we split it into three parts, i.e., a training set containing 238,766 question pairs, a development set with 8,802 question pairs, and a test set with 12,500 question pairs, and test several well-known sentence matching methods on it. The experimental results not only demonstrate the good quality of LCQMC but also provide solid baseline performance for further researches on this corpus.