Dhara Mungra


2021

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Comparing Test Sets with Item Response Theory
Clara Vania | Phu Mon Htut | William Huang | Dhara Mungra | Richard Yuanzhe Pang | Jason Phang | Haokun Liu | Kyunghyun Cho | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent years have seen numerous NLP datasets introduced to evaluate the performance of fine-tuned models on natural language understanding tasks. Recent results from large pretrained models, though, show that many of these datasets are largely saturated and unlikely to be able to detect further progress. What kind of datasets are still effective at discriminating among strong models, and what kind of datasets should we expect to be able to detect future improvements? To measure this uniformly across datasets, we draw on Item Response Theory and evaluate 29 datasets using predictions from 18 pretrained Transformer models on individual test examples. We find that Quoref, HellaSwag, and MC-TACO are best suited for distinguishing among state-of-the-art models, while SNLI, MNLI, and CommitmentBank seem to be saturated for current strong models. We also observe span selection task format, which is used for QA datasets like QAMR or SQuAD2.0, is effective in differentiating between strong and weak models.

2020

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Precise Task Formalization Matters in Winograd Schema Evaluations
Haokun Liu | William Huang | Dhara Mungra | Samuel R. Bowman
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC), a respected English commonsense reasoning benchmark, recently rocketed from chance accuracy to 89% on the SuperGLUE leaderboard, with relatively little corroborating evidence of a correspondingly large improvement in reasoning ability. We hypothesize that much of this improvement comes from recent changes in task formalization—the combination of input specification, loss function, and reuse of pretrained parameters—by users of the dataset, rather than improvements in the pretrained model’s reasoning ability. We perform an ablation on two Winograd Schema datasets that interpolates between the formalizations used before and after this surge, and find (i) framing the task as multiple choice improves performance dramatically and (ii)several additional techniques, including the reuse of a pretrained language modeling head, can mitigate the model’s extreme sensitivity to hyperparameters. We urge future benchmark creators to impose additional structure to minimize the impact of formalization decisions on reported results.