Psychological Insulin Resistance (PIR) is described as the reluctance towards initiation and adherence of insulin-based treatments due to psychological barriers in diabetic patients. Though studies have shown that timely initiation with lifestyle changes are known to be crucial in sugar control and prevention of chronic conditions in Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) patients, many patients often have deep-rooted fears and misgivings related to insulin which hinder them from adapting to an insulin-based treatment regimen when recommended by healthcare specialists. Therefore, it is vitally important to address and allay these fallacious beliefs in T2D patients and persuade them to consider insulin as a treatment option. In this paper, we describe the design of PIRsuader, a persuasive chatbot for mitigating PIR in T2D patients. In PIRsuader, we effectively harness the conversation generation capabilities of state-of-the-art Large Language Models via a context-specific persuasive dialog act schema. We design reward functions that capture dialog act preferences for persuading reluctant patients and apply reinforcement learning to learn a dialog act prediction model. Our experiments using a collection of real doctor-diabetic patient conversations indicate that PIRsuader is able to improve the willingness in patients to try insulin as well as address specific concerns they have in an empathetic manner.

Peer-counseling is essential in online mental health communities to provide relatable support to those seeking help, but the peer-counselors often lack professional training in therapeutic counseling to produce the desired cognitive changes. In this paper, we present STEPS, an AI-powered assistive dialog tool for peer-counseling. Unlike other existing tools, STEPS assists peer-counselors in facilitating cognitive change in online counseling settings. Towards this goal, we emulate two key phases in a Schema Therapy-based in-person counseling session–(1) Schema Assessment to uncover the deep-seated irrational beliefs underlying an individual’s mental health problems, and (2) Cognitive Change to reframe these beliefs into healthier alternatives. In both phases, we employ Socratic questioning techniques to effectively elicit critical introspection and guide cognitive change. We describe STEPS and present expert evaluation studies on its counseling conversations on real-world mental health forum posts. Our results indicate that STEPS significantly outperforms competitive baselines on all key metrics related to schema assessment, cognitive change strategies, and critical thinking, achieving an impressive average rating of 5 out of 6, highlighting its strong potential as a transformative tool for online peer-counseling.

State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities for general Question Answering (QA) tasks. However, their practical use for answering mental health questions has been limited due to the missing link between LLM-generated answer responses and well-established theories and guiding principles from Psychology and Counseling. We present a first step in this direction with STeer, an AI-based method that supports Schema Therapy-enabled responses for mental health questions on community QA forums. STeer uses Early Maladaptive Schemas (EMSs), a fundamental concept from Schema Therapy that characterizes “self-defeating, unhealthy patterns of thought and behavior” in individuals, to effectively prompt state-of-the-art LLMs to generate specific, theoretically-grounded, empathetic counseling responses to mental health questions. We present EMSRank, a novel method based on the Personalized PageRank algorithm, to automatically predict the EMSs from mental health forum question texts. We show that EMSRank is computationally scalable and can be further combined with textual entailment to obtain high precision, explainable EMS labels for mental health forum questions. To address the current lack of annotated datasets, we also leveraged on EMSRank to create a first-of-its-kind, large dataset of about 23K EMS-annotated mental health questions from three diverse, currently operating, peer-support community forums for mental health. With the global rise in mental health issues, our work is a timely step towards enabling the use of AI-based assistive tools for counseling support on mental health community forums.

Human guides in museums and galleries are professionally trained to stimulate informal learning in visitors by asking low-risk, open-ended reflective questions that enable them to focus on specific features of artifacts, relate to prior experiences, and elicit curiosity as well as further thought. We present ArtMuse, our AI-powered chatbot for asking reflective questions in context of paintings. Our reflective question generation model in ArtMuse was trained by applying a novel combination of existing models for extractive question answering and open-domain chitchat. User evaluation studies indicate that we are able to generate fluent and specific reflective questions for paintings that are highly-engaging.

Socratic questioning is a form of reflective inquiry often employed in education to encourage critical thinking in students, or to elicit awareness of beliefs and perspectives in a subject during therapeutic counseling.Specific types of Socratic questions are employed for enabling reasoning and alternate views against the context of individual personal opinions on a topic.Socratic contexts are different from traditional question generation contexts where "answer-seeking" questions are generated against a given formal passage on a topic, narrative stories or conversations.We present SocratiQ, the first large dataset of 110K (question, context) pairs for enabling studies on Socratic Question Generation (SoQG ).We provide an in-depth study on the various types of Socratic questions and present models for generating Socratic questions against a given context through prompt tuning.Our automated and human evaluation results demonstrate that our SoQG models can produce realistic, type-sensitive, human-like Socratic questions enabling potential applications in counseling and coaching.

Medical claims on social media, if left unchecked, have the potential to directly affect the well-being of consumers of online health information. However, existing studies on claim detection do not specifically focus on medical cure aspects, neither do they address if a cure claim is “checkworthy", an indicator of whether a claim is potentially beneficial or harmful, if unchecked. In this paper, we address these limitations by compiling CW-CURE, a novel dataset of CURE tweets, namely tweets containing claims on prevention, diagnoses, risks, treatments, and cures of medical conditions. CW-CURE contains tweets on four major health conditions, namely, Alzheimer’s disease, Cancer, Diabetes, and Depression annotated for claims, their “checkworthiness", as well as the different types of claims such as quantitative claim, correlation/causation, personal experience, and future prediction. We describe our processing pipeline for compiling CW-CURE and present classification results on CURE tweets using transformer-based models. In particular, we harness claim-type information obtained with zero-shot learning to show significant improvements in checkworthiness identification. Through CW-CURE, we hope to enable research on models for effective identification and flagging of impactful CURE content, to safeguard the public’s consumption of medical content online.

We propose PaintTeR, our Paintings TextRank algorithm for extracting art-related text spans from passages on paintings. PaintTeR combines a lexicon of painting words curated automatically through distant supervision with random walks on a large-scale word co-occurrence graph for ranking passage spans for artistic characteristics. The spans extracted with PaintTeR are used in state-of-the-art Question Generation and Reading Comprehension models for designing an interactive aid that enables gallery and museum visitors focus on the artistic elements of paintings. We provide experiments on two datasets of expert-written passages on paintings to showcase the effectiveness of PaintTeR. Evaluations by both gallery experts as well as crowdworkers indicate that our proposed algorithm can be used to select relevant and interesting art-centered questions. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first work to effectively fine-tune question generation models using minimal supervision for a low-resource, specialized context such as gallery visits.

While question generation (QG) has received significant focus in conversation modeling and text generation research, the problems of comparing questions and evaluation of QG models have remained inadequately addressed. Indeed, QG models continue to be evaluated using traditional measures such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE scores which were designed for other text generation problems. We propose QSTS, a novel Question-Sensitive Text Similarity measure for comparing two questions by characterizing their target intent based on question class, named-entity, and semantic similarity information from the two questions. We show that QSTS addresses several shortcomings of existing measures that depend on n-gram overlap scores and obtains superior results compared to traditional measures on publicly-available QG datasets. We also collect a novel dataset SimQG, for enabling question similarity research in QG contexts. SimQG contains questions generated by state-of-the-art QG models along with human judgements on their relevance with respect to the passage context they were generated for as well as when compared to the given reference question. Using SimQG, we showcase the key aspect of QSTS that differentiates it from all existing measures. QSTS is not only able to characterize similarity between two questions, but is also able to score questions with respect to passage contexts. Thus QSTS is, to our knowledge, the first metric that enables the measurement of QG performance in a reference-free manner.

Keyphrases that efficiently summarize a document’s content are used in various document processing and retrieval tasks. Current state-of-the-art techniques for keyphrase extraction operate at a phrase-level and involve scoring candidate phrases based on features of their component words.In this paper, we learn keyphrase taggers for research papers using token-based features incorporating linguistic, surface-form, and document-structure information through sequence labeling. We experimentally illustrate that using within document features alone, our tagger trained with ConditionalRandom Fields performs on-par with existing state-of-the-art systems that rely on information from Wikipedia and citation networks. In addition, we are also able to harness recent work on feature labeling to seamlessly incorporate expert knowledge and predictions from existing systems to enhance the extraction performance further. We highlight the modeling advantages of our keyphrase taggers and show significant performance improvements on two recently-compiled datasets of keyphrases from Computer Science research papers.

Traditional supervised keyphrase extraction models depend on the features of labelled keyphrases while prevailing unsupervised models mainly rely on structure of the word graph, with candidate words as nodes and edges capturing the co-occurrence information between words. However, systematically integrating all these multidimensional heterogeneous information into a unified model is relatively unexplored. In this paper, we focus on how to effectively exploit multidimensional information to improve the keyphrase extraction performance (MIKE). Specifically, we propose a random-walk parametric model, MIKE, that learns the latent representation for a candidate keyphrase that captures the mutual influences among all information, and simultaneously optimizes the parameters and ranking scores of candidates in the word graph. We use the gradient-descent algorithm to optimize our model and show the comprehensive experiments with two publicly-available WWW and KDD datasets in Computer Science. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art graph-based keyphrase extraction approaches.

Online digital libraries make it easier for researchers to search for scientific information. They have been proven as powerful resources in many data mining, machine learning and information retrieval applications that require high-quality data. The quality of the data highly depends on the accuracy of classifiers that identify the types of documents that are crawled from the Web, e.g., as research papers, slides, books, etc., for appropriate indexing. These classifiers in turn depend on the choice of the feature representation. We propose novel features that result in high-accuracy classifiers for document type classification. Experimental results on several datasets show that our classifiers outperform models that are employed in current systems.

Multi-Task Learning (MTL) can enhance the classifier's generalization performance by learning multiple related tasks simultaneously. Conventional MTL works under the offline or batch learning setting and suffers from the expensive training cost together with the poor scalability. To address such inefficiency issues, online learning technique has been applied to solve MTL problems. However, most existing algorithms for online MTL constrain task relatedness into a presumed structure via a single weight matrix, a strict restriction that does not always hold in practice. In this paper, we propose a general online MTL framework that overcomes this restriction by decomposing the weight matrix into two components: the first component captures the correlative structure among tasks in a low-rank subspace, and the second component identifies the personalized patterns for the outlier tasks. A projected gradient scheme is devised to learn such components adaptively. Theoretical analysis shows that the proposed algorithm can achieve a sub-linear regret with respect to the best linear model in hindsight. Experimental investigation on a number of real-world datasets also verifies the efficacy of our approach.

The conferences ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) and EMNLP (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing) rank among the premier venues that track the research developments in Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics.In this paper, we present a study on the research papers of approximately two decades from these two NLP conferences.We apply keyphrase extraction and corpus analysis tools to the proceedings from these venues and propose probabilistic and vector-based representations to represent the topics published in a venue for a given year.Next, similarity metrics are studied over pairs of venue representations to capture the progress of the two venues with respect to each other and over time.

A classifier that determines if a webpage is relevant to a specified set of topics comprises a key component for focused crawling. Can a classifier that is tuned to perform well on training datasets continue to filter out irrelevant pages in the face of changing content on the Web? We investigate this question in the context of identifying researcher homepages. We show experimentally that classifiers trained on existing datasets of academic homepages underperform on “non-homepages” present on current-day academic websites. As an alternative to obtaining labeled datasets to retrain classifiers for the new content, in this article we ask the following question: “How can we effectively use the unlabeled data readily available from academic websites to improve researcher homepage classification?” We design novel URL-based features and use them in conjunction with content-based features for representing homepages. Within the co-training framework, these sets of features can be treated as complementary views enabling us to effectively use unlabeled data and obtain remarkable improvements in homepage identification on the current-day academic websites. We also propose a novel technique for “learning a conforming pair of classifiers” that mimics co-training. Our algorithm seeks to minimize a loss (objective) function quantifying the difference in predictions from the two views afforded by co-training. We argue that this loss formulation provides insights for understanding co-training and can be used even in the absence of a validation dataset. Our next set of findings pertains to the evaluation of other state-of-the-art techniques for classifying homepages. First, we apply feature selection (FS) and feature hashing (FH) techniques independently and in conjunction with co-training to academic homepages. FS is a well-known technique for removing redundant and unnecessary features from the data representation, whereas FH is a technique that uses hash functions for efficient encoding of features. We show that FS can be effectively combined with co-training to obtain further improvements in identifying homepages. However, using hashed feature representations, a performance degradation is observed possibly due to feature collisions. Finally, we evaluate other semisupervised algorithms for homepage classification. We show that although several algorithms are effective in using information from the unlabeled instances, co-training that explicitly harnesses the feature split in the underlying instances outperforms approaches that combine content and URL features into a single view.

Keyphrases for a document concisely describe the document using a small set of phrases. Keyphrases were previously shown to improve several document processing and retrieval tasks. In this work, we study keyphrase extraction from research papers by leveraging citation networks. We propose CiteTextRank for keyphrase extraction from research articles, a graph-based algorithm that incorporates evidence from both a document's content as well as the contexts in which the document is referenced within a citation network. Our model obtains significant improvements over the state-of-the-art models for this task. Specifically, on several datasets of research papers, CiteTextRank improves precision at rank 1 by as much as 9-20% over state-of-the-art baselines.

Given the large amounts of online textual documents available these days, e.g., news articles, weblogs, and scientific papers, effective methods for extracting keyphrases, which provide a high-level topic description of a document, are greatly needed.In this paper, we propose a supervised model for keyphrase extraction from research papers, which are embedded in citation networks.To this end, we design novel features based on citation network information and use them in conjunction with traditional features for keyphrase extraction to obtain remarkable improvements in performance over strong baselines.

Professional homepages of researchers contain metadata that provides crucial evidence in several digital library tasks such as academic network extraction, record linkage and expertise search. Due to inherent diversity in values for certain metadata fields (e.g., affiliation) supervised algorithms require a large number of labeled examples for accurately identifying values for these fields. We address this issue with feature labeling, a recent semi-supervised machine learning technique. We apply feature labeling to researcher metadata extraction from homepages by combining a small set of expert-provided feature distributions with few fully-labeled examples. We study two types of labeled features: (1) Dictionary features provide unigram hints related to specific metadata fields, whereas, (2) Proximity features capture the layout information between metadata fields on a homepage in a second stage. We experimentally show that this two-stage approach along with labeled features provides significant improvements in the tagging performance. In one experiment with only ten labeled homepages and 22 expert-specified labeled features, we obtained a 45% relative increase in the F1 value for the affiliation field, while the overall F1 improves by 9%.

Academic search engines and digital libraries provide convenient online search and access facilities for scientific publications. However, most existing systems do not include books in their collections although several books are freely available online. Academic books are different from papers in terms of their length, contents and structure. We argue that accounting for academic books is important in understanding and assessing scientific impact. We introduce an open-book search engine that extracts and indexes metadata, contents, and bibliography from online PDF book documents. To the best of our knowledge, no previous work gives a systematical study on building a search engine for books.

A classifier that determines if a webpage is relevant to a specified set of topics comprises a key component for focused crawling. Can a classifier that is tuned to perform well on training datasets continue to filter out irrelevant pages in the face of changed content on the Web? We investigate this question in the context of researcher homepage crawling.

We introduce a new, powerful class of text proximity queries: find an instance of a given "answer type" (person, place, distance) near "selector" tokens matching given literals or satisfying given ground predicates. An example query is type=distance NEAR Hamburg Munich. Nearness is defined as a flexible, trainable parameterized aggregation function of the selectors, their frequency in the corpus, and their distance from the candidate answer. Such queries provide a key data reduction step for information extraction, data integration, question answering, and other text-processing applications. We describe the architecture of a next-generation information retrieval engine for such applications, and investigate two key technical problems faced in building it. First, we propose a new algorithm that estimates a scoring function from past logs of queries and answer spans. Plugging the scoring function into the query processor gives high accuracy: typically, an answer is found at rank 2-4. Second, we exploit the skew in the distribution over types seen in query logs to optimize the space required by the new index structures required by our system. Extensive performance studies with a 10GB, 2-million document TREC corpus and several hundred TREC queries show both the accuracy and the efficiency of our system. From an initial 4.3GB index using 18,000 types from WordNet, we can discard 88% of the space, while inflating query times by a factor of only 1.9. Our final index overhead is only 20% of the total index space needed.