The demonstration presents ClaimIt — a tool for extracting views that support a user-provided claim. Such views can assist users in finding evidence of phenomena of interest, criticizing given claims by proposing opposing viewpoints, inspecting the robustness of statements with respect to subpopulations, and so on. To be useful, the view should constitute a "natural" characterization of a significant subpopulation. In a recently published work, we focused on claims that compare groups by an aggregate query, and explored the measurement of naturalness as well as the algorithmic challenge of handling the plenitude of possible views. ClaimIt realizes the framework as an interactive system that enables users to phrase their claims in a convenient user interface, extract supporting views, sort them by different measures of naturalness, and control the weights of individual measures in a global ranking function. In the demonstration of ClaimIt, the audience will be able to suggest and analyze different claims on various datasets. A companion video for this submission is available at https://youtu.be/k2KxyeHzRq8.

Recent studies investigated the challenge of assessing the strength of a given claim extracted from a dataset, particularly the claim's potential of being misleading and cherry-picked. We focus on claims that compare answers to an aggregate query posed on a view that selects tuples. The strength of a claim amounts to the question of how likely it is that the view is carefully chosen to support the claim, whereas less careful choices would lead to contradictory claims. We embark on the study of the reverse task that offers a complementary angle in the critical assessment of data-based claims: given a claim, find useful supporting views. The goal of this task is twofold. On the one hand, we aim to assist users in finding significant evidence of phenomena of interest. On the other hand, we wish to provide them with machinery to criticize or counter given claims by extracting evidence of opposing statements. To be effective, the supporting sub-population should be significant and defined by a "natural" view. We discuss several measures of naturalness and propose ways of extracting the best views under each measure (and combinations thereof). The main challenge is the computational cost, as naïve search is infeasible. We devise anytime algorithms that deploy two main steps: (1) a preliminary construction of a ranked list of attribute combinations that are assessed using fast-to-compute features, and (2) an efficient search for the actual views based on each attribute combination. We present a thorough experimental study that shows the effectiveness of our algorithms in terms of quality and execution cost. We also present a user study to assess the usefulness of the naturalness measures.

In e-commerce sites, customer questions on the product details-page express the customers' information needs about the product. The answers to these questions often provide the necessary information. In this work, we present and address the novel task of generating product insights from community questions and answers (Q&A). These insights can be presented to customers to assist them in their shopping journey. Our method first generates concise, self-contained sentences based on the information in the Q&A. Then insights are selected based on the prominence of their associated questions. Empirical evaluation attests to the effectiveness of our approach in generating well-formed, objective, and helpful insights that are often not available in the product description or in summaries of customer reviews.

OBJECTIVE: To analyze gender bias in clinical trials, to design an algorithm that mitigates the effects of biases of gender representation on natural-language (NLP) systems trained on text drawn from clinical trials, and to evaluate its performance. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We analyze gender bias in clinical trials described by 16 772 PubMed abstracts (2008-2018). We present a method to augment word embeddings, the core building block of NLP-centric representations, by weighting abstracts by the number of women participants in the trial. We evaluate the resulting gender-sensitive embeddings performance on several clinical prediction tasks: comorbidity classification, hospital length of stay prediction, and intensive care unit (ICU) readmission prediction. RESULTS: For female patients, the gender-sensitive model area under the receiver-operator characteristic (AUROC) is 0.86 versus the baseline of 0.81 for comorbidity classification, mean absolute error 4.59 versus the baseline of 4.66 for length of stay prediction, and AUROC 0.69 versus 0.67 for ICU readmission. All results are statistically significant. DISCUSSION: Women have been underrepresented in clinical trials. Thus, using the broad clinical trials literature as training data for statistical language models could result in biased models, with deficits in knowledge about women. The method presented enables gender-sensitive use of publications as training data for word embeddings. In experiments, the gender-sensitive embeddings show better performance than baseline embeddings for the clinical tasks studied. The results highlight opportunities for recognizing and addressing gender and other representational biases in the clinical trials literature. CONCLUSION: Addressing representational biases in data for training NLP embeddings can lead to better results on downstream tasks for underrepresented populations.

No abstract available.