While vision-language models (VLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks combining textual and visual information, they continue to struggle with fine-grained visual perception tasks that require detailed pixel-level analysis. Effectively eliciting comprehensive reasoning from VLMs on such intricate visual elements remains an open challenge. In this paper, we present VipAct, an agent framework that enhances VLMs by integrating multi-agent collaboration and vision expert models, enabling more precise visual understanding and comprehensive reasoning. VipAct consists of an orchestrator agent, which manages task requirement analysis, planning, and coordination, along with specialized agents that handle specific tasks such as image captioning and vision expert models that provide high-precision perceptual information. This multi-agent approach allows VLMs to better perform fine-grained visual perception tasks by synergizing planning, reasoning, and tool use. We evaluate VipAct on benchmarks featuring a diverse set of visual perception tasks, with experimental results demonstrating significant performance improvements over state-of-the-art baselines across all tasks. Furthermore, comprehensive ablation studies reveal the critical role of multi-agent collaboration in eliciting more detailed System-2 reasoning and highlight the importance of image input for task planning. Additionally, our error analysis identifies patterns of VLMs' inherent limitations in visual perception, providing insights into potential future improvements. VipAct offers a flexible and extensible framework, paving the way for more advanced visual perception systems across various real-world applications.

Jiyeon Kim, Hyunji Lee, Dylan Zhou, Sue Hyun Park, Seunghyun Yoon, Trung Bui, Franck Dernoncourt, Sungmin Cha, Minjoon Seo. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Learning robust representations of authorial style is crucial for authorship attribution and AI-generated text detection.However, existing methods often struggle with content-style entanglement, where models learn spurious correlations between authors' writing styles and topics, leading to poor generalization across domains.To address this challenge, we propose Explainable Authorship Variational Autoencoder (EAVAE), a novel framework that explicitly disentangles style from content through architectural separation-by-design. EAVAE first pretrains style encoders using supervised contrastive learning on diverse authorship data, then finetunes with a Variational Autoencoder (VEA) architecture using separate encoders for style and content representations.Disentanglement is enforced through a novel discriminator that not only distinguishes whether pairs of style/content representations belong to the same or different authors/content sources, but also generates natural language explanation for their decision, simultaneously mitigating confounding information and enhancing interpretability.Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EAVAE.On authorship attribution, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on various datasets, including Amazon Reviews, PAN21, and HRS.For AI-generated text detection, EAVAE excels in few-shot learning over the M4 dataset.Code and data repositories are available online 1 2 .

Chien Van Nguyen, Huy Huu Nguyen, Ruiyi Zhang, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Puneet Mathur, Viet Dac Lai, Haoliang Wang, Jayakumar Subramanian, Ryan A. Rossi, Trung Bui, Nikos Vlassis, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Chien Van Nguyen, Ryan A. Rossi, Linh Ngo Van, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2026.

Generative AI (GenAI) holds significant promise for automating everyday image editing tasks, especially following the recent release of GPT-4o on March 25, 2025. However, what subjects do people most often want edited? What kinds of editing actions do they want to perform (e.g., removing or stylizing the subject)? Do people prefer precise edits with predictable outcomes, or highly creative ones? By understanding the characteristics of real-world requests and the corresponding edits made by freelance photo-editing wizards, can we draw lessons for improving AI-based editors and determine which types of requests can currently be handled successfully by AI editors? In this paper, we present a unique study addressing these questions by analyzing 83k requests with their associated 305k edits from the recent 12 years on the /r/PhotoshopRequest Reddit community. According to human ratings, approximately only 33% of requests can be fulfilled by the best AI editors (including , , ). Interestingly, AI editors perform worse on low-creativity requests that require precise editing than on more open-ended requests. They often struggle to preserve the identity of people and animals, and frequently make non-requested touch-ups. On the other side of the table, VLM judges (e.g., o1) perform differently than human judges and may prefer AI edits over human edits. Code and qualitative examples are available at: https://psrdataset.github.io/.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly studied as neural knowledge bases for supporting knowledge-intensive applications such as question answering and fact checking. However, the structural organization of their knowledge remains unexplored. Inspired by cognitive neuroscience findings, such as semantic clustering and priming, where knowing one fact increases the likelihood of recalling related facts, we investigate an analogous knowledge homophily pattern in LLMs. To this end, we map LLM knowledge into a graph representation through knowledge checking at both the triplet and entity levels. After that, we analyze the knowledgeability relationship between an entity and its neighbors, discovering that LLMs tend to possess a similar level of knowledge about entities positioned closer in the graph. Motivated by this homophily principle, we propose a Graph Neural Network (GNN) regression model to estimate entity-level knowledgeability scores for triplets by leveraging their neighborhood scores. The predicted knowledgeability enables us to prioritize checking less well-known triplets, thereby maximizing knowledge coverage under the same labeling budget. This not only improves the efficiency of active labeling for fine-tuning to inject knowledge into LLMs but also enhances multi-hop path retrieval in reasoning-intensive question answering.

Manan Suri, Puneet Mathur, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Ryan A. Rossi, Dinesh Manocha. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Yu Xia, Subhojyoti Mukherjee, Zhouhang Xie, Junda Wu, Xintong Li, Ryan Aponte, Hanjia Lyu, Joe Barrow, Hongjie Chen, Franck Dernoncourt, Branislav Kveton, Tong Yu, Ruiyi Zhang, Jiuxiang Gu, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Yu Wang, Xiang Chen, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Sungchul Kim, Zhengmian Hu, Yue Zhao, Nedim Lipka, Seunghyun Yoon, Ting-Hao Kenneth Huang, Zichao Wang, Puneet Mathur, Soumyabrata Pal, Koyel Mukherjee, Zhehao Zhang, Namyong Park, Thien Huu Nguyen, Jiebo Luo, Ryan A. Rossi, Julian McAuley. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

"While editing directly from life, photographers have found it too difficult to see simultaneously both the blue and the sky."John Szarkowski, William Eggleston’s Guide1Photographer and curator, Szarkowski insightfully revealed one of the notable gaps between general and aesthetic visual understanding: while the former focuses on identifying the factual element in an image (sky), the latter transcends such object identification, viewing it instead as an aesthetic component—a pure color block (blue). Such fundamental distinctions between general (detection, localization, etc.) and aesthetic (color, lighting, composition, etc.) visual understanding present a significant challenge for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). Although some recent works have made initial explorations, they are often limited to general and basic aesthetic commonsense. As a result, they frequently fall short in real-world scenarios (Fig. 1), which require extensive expertise—including photographic techniques, photo pre/post-processing knowledge, and more, to provide a detailed analysis and description. To fundamentally enhance the aesthetics understanding of MLLMs, we first introduce a novel dataset, PhotoCritique, derived from extensive discussions among professional photographers and enthusiasts, and characterized by the large scale, expertise, and diversity. Then, to better learn visual aesthetics from PhotoCritique, we furthur propose a novel model, PhotoEye, featuring a language-guided multi-view vision fusion mechanism to understand image aesthetics from multiple perspectives. Finally, we present a novel benchmark, PhotoBench, a comprehensive and professional benchmark for aesthetic visual understanding. On existing benchmarks and PhotoBench, our model demonstrates clear advantages over existing models.

Flowcharts are a critical tool for visualizing decision-making processes.However, their non-linear structure and complex visual-textual relationships make it challenging to interpret them using LLMs, as vision-language models frequently hallucinate nonexistent connections and decision paths when analyzing these diagrams.This leads to compromised reliability for automated flowchart processing in critical domains such as logistics, health, and engineering.We introduce the task of Fine-grained Flowchart Attribution, which traces specific components grounding a flowchart referring LLM response.Flowchart Attribution ensures the verifiability of LLM predictions and improves explainability by linking generated responses to the flowchart's structure.We propose FlowPathAgent, a neurosymbolic agent that performs fine-grained post hoc attribution through graph-based reasoning.It first segments the flowchart, then converts it into a structured symbolic graph, and then employs an agentic approach to dynamically interact with the graph, to generate attribution paths.Additionally, we present FlowExplainBench, a novel benchmark for evaluating flowchart attributions across diverse styles, domains, and question types.Experimental results show that FlowPathAgent mitigates visual hallucinations in LLM answers over flowchart QA, outperforming strong baselines by 10-14% on our proposed FlowExplainBench dataset.

Large Generative Models (LGMs) such as GPT, Stable Diffusion, Sora, and Suno are trained on a huge amount of texts, images, videos, and audio that are extremely diverse from numerous domains. This large-scale training paradigm on diverse well-curated data enhances the creativity and diversity of the generated content. However, all previous graph-generative models (e.g., GraphRNN, MDVAE, MoFlow, GDSS, and DiGress) have been trained only on one dataset each time, which cannot replicate the revolutionary success achieved by LGMs in other fields. To remedy this crucial gap, we propose a large-scale training paradigm that uses a large corpus of graphs (over 5000 graphs) from 13 domains, leading to the development of large graph generative models (LGGMs). We empirically demonstrate that the pre-trained LGGMs have superior zero-shot generative capability to existing graph generative models. Furthermore, our pre-trained LGGMs can be easily fine-tuned with graphs from target domains and demonstrate even better performance than those directly trained from scratch, behaving as a solid starting point for real-world customization. Inspired by Stable Diffusion, we further equip LGGMs with the Text-to-Graph generation capability, such as providing the description of the network name and domain (i.e., "The power-1138-bus graph represents a network of buses in a power distribution system.") and network statistics (i.e., "The graph has a low average degree, suitable for modeling social media interactions."). This Text-to-Graph capability integrates the extensive world knowledge in the underlying language model, offering users fine-grained control of the generated graphs. We release the code, the model checkpoint, and the datasets at https://github.com/KINDLab-Fly/LGGM.

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have recently shown great progress in text-rich image understanding, yet they still struggle with complex, multi-page visually-rich documents. Traditional methods using document parsers for retrieval-augmented generation suffer from performance and efficiency limitations, while directly presenting all pages to MLLMs leads to inefficiencies, especially with lengthy ones. In this work, we present a novel framework named **S**elf-**V**isual **R**etrieval-**A**ugmented **G**eneration (SV-RAG), which can broaden horizons of *any* MLLM to support long-document understanding. We demonstrate that **MLLMs themselves can be an effective multimodal retriever** to fetch relevant pages and then answer user questions based on these pages. SV-RAG is implemented with two specific MLLM adapters, one for evidence page retrieval and the other for question answering. Empirical results show state-of-the-art performance on public benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness of SV-RAG.

Recent large language models (LLMs) support long contexts ranging from 128K to 1M tokens. A popular method for evaluating these capabilities is the needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) test, which involves retrieving a "needle" (relevant information) from a "haystack" (long irrelevant context). Extensions of this approach include increasing distractors, fact chaining, and in-context reasoning. However, in these benchmarks, models can exploit existing literal matches between the needle and haystack to simplify the task. To address this, we introduce NoLiMa, a benchmark extending NIAH with a carefully designed needle set, where questions and needles have minimal lexical overlap, requiring models to infer latent associations to locate the needle within the haystack. We evaluate 13 popular LLMs that claim to support contexts of at least 128K tokens. While they perform well in short contexts ($<$1K), performance degrades significantly as context length increases. At 32K, for instance, 11 models drop below 50% of their strong short-length baselines. Even GPT-4o, one of the top-performing exceptions, experiences a reduction from an almost-perfect baseline of 99.3% to 69.7%. Our analysis suggests these declines stem from the increased difficulty the attention mechanism faces in longer contexts when literal matches are absent, making it harder to retrieve relevant information. Even models enhanced with reasoning capabilities or CoT prompting struggle to maintain performance in long contexts. We publicly release the dataset and evaluation code at https://github.com/adobe-research/NoLiMa.

Nishant Balepur, Alexa Siu, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Tong Sun, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, Puneet Mathur. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Hyunji Lee, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Seunghyun Yoon. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Manan Suri, Puneet Mathur, Franck Dernoncourt, Kanika Goswami, Ryan A. Rossi, Dinesh Manocha. Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2025.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) based embedding models have established new state-of-the-art benchmarks for text embedding tasks, particularly in dense vector-based retrieval. However, these models predominantly focus on English, leaving multilingual embedding capabilities largely unexplored. To address this limitation, we present LUSIFER, a novel zero-shot approach that adapts LLM-based embedding models for multilingual tasks without requiring multilingual supervision. LUSIFER's architecture combines a multilingual encoder, serving as a language-universal learner, with an LLM-based embedding model optimized for embedding-specific tasks. These components are seamlessly integrated through a minimal set of trainable parameters that act as a connector, effectively transferring the multilingual encoder's language understanding capabilities to the specialized embedding model. Additionally, to comprehensively evaluate multilingual embedding performance, we introduce a new benchmark encompassing 5 primary embedding tasks, 123 diverse datasets, and coverage across 14 languages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that LUSIFER significantly enhances the multilingual performance across various embedding tasks, particularly for medium and low-resource languages, without requiring explicit multilingual training data. The code and dataset for training are available at: https://github.com/hieum98/lusifer

To understand event structures of documents, event causality identification (ECI) emerges as a crucial task, aiming to discern causal relationships among event mentions. The latest approach for ECI has introduced advanced deep learning models where transformer-based encoding models, complemented by enriching components, are typically leveraged to learn effective event context representations for causality prediction. As such, an important step for ECI models is to transform the event context representations into causal label representations to perform logits score computation for training and inference purposes. Within this framework, event context representations might encapsulate numerous complicated and noisy structures due to the potential long context between the input events while causal label representations are intended to capture pure information about the causal relations to facilitate score estimation. Nonetheless, a notable drawback of existing ECI models stems from their reliance on simple feed-forward networks to handle the complex context-to-label representation transformation process, which might require drastic changes in the representations to hinder the learning process. To overcome this issue, our work introduces a novel method for ECI where, instead abrupt transformations, event context representations are gradually updated to achieve effective label representations. This process will be done incrementally to allow filtering of irrelevant structures at varying levels of granularity for causal relations. To realize this, we present a diffusion model to learn gradual representation transition processes between context and causal labels. It operates through a forward pass for causal label representation noising and a reverse pass for reconstructing label representations from random noise. Our experiments on different datasets across multiple languages demonstrate the advantages of the diffusion model with state-of-the-art performance for ECI.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) delves into understanding sentiments specific to distinct elements within a user-generated review. It aims to analyze user-generated reviews to determine a) the target entity being reviewed, b) the high-level aspect to which it belongs, c) the sentiment words used to express the opinion, and d) the sentiment expressed toward the targets and the aspects. While various benchmark datasets have fostered advancements in ABSA, they often come with domain limitations and data granularity challenges. Addressing these, we introduce the OATS dataset, which encompasses three fresh domains and consists of 27,470 sentence-level quadruples and 17,092 review-level tuples. Our initiative seeks to bridge specific observed gaps in existing datasets: the recurrent focus on familiar domains like restaurants and laptops, limited data for intricate quadruple extraction tasks, and an occasional oversight of the synergy between sentence and review-level sentiments. Moreover, to elucidate OATS’s potential and shed light on various ABSA subtasks that OATS can solve, we conducted experiments, establishing initial baselines. We hope the OATS dataset augments current resources, paving the way for an encompassing exploration of ABSA (https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/OATS-ABSA).

We study the problem of Event Causality Identification (ECI) that seeks to predict causal relation between event mentions in the text. In contrast to previous classification-based models, a few recent ECI methods have explored generative models to deliver state-of-the-art performance. However, such generative models cannot handle document-level ECI where long context between event mentions must be encoded to secure correct predictions. In addition, previous generative ECI methods tend to rely on external toolkits or human annotation to obtain necessary training signals. To address these limitations, we propose a novel generative framework that leverages Optimal Transport (OT) to automatically select the most important sentences and words from full documents. Specifically, we introduce hierarchical OT alignments between event pairs and the document to extract pertinent contexts. The selected sentences and words are provided as input and output to a T5 encoder-decoder model which is trained to generate both the causal relation label and salient contexts. This allows richer supervision without external tools. We conduct extensive evaluations on different datasets with multiple languages to demonstrate the benefits and state-of-the-art performance of ECI.

We present a novel task of document-level script event prediction, which aims to predict the next event given a candidate list of narrative events in long-form documents. To enable this, we introduce DocSEP, a challenging dataset in two new domains - contractual documents and Wikipedia articles, where timeline events may be paragraphs apart and may require multi-hop temporal and causal reasoning. We benchmark existing baselines and present a novel architecture called DocScript to learn sequential ordering between events at the document scale. Our experimental results on the DocSEP dataset demonstrate that learning longer-range dependencies between events is a key challenge and show that contemporary LLMs such as ChatGPT and FlanT5 struggle to solve this task, indicating their lack of reasoning abilities for understanding causal relationships and temporal sequences within long texts.

Extensive training datasets represent one of the important factors for the impressive learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, these training datasets for current LLMs, especially the recent state-of-the-art models, are often not fully disclosed. Creating training data for high-performing LLMs involves extensive cleaning and deduplication to ensure the necessary level of quality. The lack of transparency for training data has thus hampered research on attributing and addressing hallucination and bias issues in LLMs, hindering replication efforts and further advancements in the community. These challenges become even more pronounced in multilingual learning scenarios, where the available multilingual text datasets are often inadequately collected and cleaned. Consequently, there is a lack of open-source and readily usable dataset to effectively train LLMs in multiple languages. To overcome this issue, we present CulturaX, a substantial multilingual dataset with 6.3 trillion tokens in 167 languages, tailored for LLM development. Our dataset undergoes meticulous cleaning and deduplication through a rigorous pipeline of multiple stages to accomplish the best quality for model training, including language identification, URL-based filtering, metric-based cleaning, document refinement, and data deduplication. CulturaX is released in Hugging Face facilitate research and advancements in multilingual LLMs: https://huggingface.co/datasets/uonlp/CulturaX.

Long-form video content constitutes a significant portion of internet traffic, making automated video summarization an essential research problem. However, existing video summarization datasets are notably limited in their size, constraining the effectiveness of state-of-the-art methods for generalization. Our work aims to overcome this limitation by capitalizing on the abundance of long-form videos with dense speech-to-video alignment and the remarkable capabilities of recent large language models (LLMs) in summarizing long text. We introduce an automated and scalable pipeline for generating a large-scale video summarization dataset using LLMs as Oracle summarizers. By leveraging the generated dataset, we analyze the limitations of existing approaches and propose a new video summarization model that effectively addresses them. To facilitate further research in the field, our work also presents a new benchmark dataset that contains 1200 long videos each with high-quality summaries annotated by professionals. Extensive experiments clearly indicate that our proposed approach sets a new state-of-the-art in video summarization across several benchmarks.

FActScore has gained popularity as a metric to estimate the factuality of long-form texts generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) in English.However, there has not been any work in studying the behavior of FActScore in other languages.This paper studies the limitations of each component in the fourcomponent pipeline of FActScore in the multilingual setting.We introduce a new dataset for FActScore on texts generated by strong multilingual LLMs.Our evaluation shows that LLMs exhibit distinct behaviors in both fact extraction and fact scoring tasks.No LLM produces consistent and reliable FActScore across languages with varying levels of resources.We also find that the knowledge source plays an important role in the quality of the estimated FActScore.Using Wikipedia as the knowledge source may hinder the true FActScore of longform text due to its limited coverage in mediumand low-resource languages.We also incorporate three mitigations to our knowledge source that ultimately improve FActScore estimation across all languages.

Extractive summarization plays a pivotal role in natural language processing due to its widerange applications in summarizing diverse content efficiently, while also being faithful to the original content.Despite significant advancement achieved in extractive summarization by Large Language Models (LLMs), these summaries frequently exhibit incoherence.An important aspect of the coherent summary is its readability for intended users.Although there have been many datasets and benchmarks proposed for creating coherent extractive summaries, none of them currently incorporate user intent to improve coherence in extractive summarization.Motivated by this, we propose a systematically created human-annotated dataset consisting of coherent summaries for five publicly available datasets and natural language user feedback, offering valuable insights into how to improve coherence in extractive summaries.We utilize this dataset for aligning LLMs through supervised fine-tuning with natural language human feedback to enhance the coherence of their generated summaries.Preliminary experiments with Falcon-40B and Llama-2-13B show significant performance improvements (∼ 10% Rouge-L) in terms of producing coherent summaries.We further utilize human feedback to benchmark results over instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 which resulted in several interesting findings 1 .

Manan Suri, Puneet Mathur, Franck Dernoncourt, Rajiv Jain, Vlad I Morariu, Ramit Sawhney, Preslav Nakov, Dinesh Manocha. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2024.

Most real-world networks are noisy and incomplete samples from an unknown target distribution. Refining them by correcting corruptions or inferring unobserved regions typically improves downstream performance. Inspired by the impressive generative capabilities that have been used to correct corruptions in images, and the similarities between "in-painting" and filling in missing nodes and edges conditioned on the observed graph, we propose a novel graph generative framework, SGDM, which is based on subgraph diffusion. Our framework not only improves the scalability and fidelity of graph diffusion models, but also leverages the reverse process to perform novel, conditional generation tasks. In particular, through extensive empirical analysis and a set of novel metrics, we demonstrate that our proposed model effectively supports the following refinement tasks for partially observable networks: (T1) denoising extraneous subgraphs, (T2) expanding existing subgraphs and (T3) performing ``style" transfer by regenerating a particular subgraph to match the characteristics of a different node or subgraph.

Multilingual semantic retrieval involves retrieving semantically relevant content to a query irrespective of the language. Compared to monolingual and bilingual semantic retrieval, multilingual semantic retrieval requires a stronger alignment approach to pull the contents to be retrieved close to the representation of their corresponding queries, no matter their language combinations. Traditionally, this is achieved through more supervision in the form of multilingual parallel resources, which are expensive to obtain, especially for low-resource languages. In this work, on top of an optimization-based Model-Agnostic Meta-Learner (MAML), we propose a data-efficient meta-distillation approach: MAML-Align,1 specifically for low-resource multilingual semantic retrieval. Our approach simulates a gradual feedback loop from monolingual to bilingual and from bilingual to multilingual semantic retrieval. We systematically compare multilingual meta-distillation learning to different baselines and conduct ablation studies on the role of different sampling approaches in the meta-task construction. We show that MAML-Align's gradual feedback loop boosts the generalization to different languages, including zero-shot ones, better than naive fine-tuning and vanilla MAML.

Abstract Rapid advancements of large language models (LLMs) have enabled the processing, understanding, and generation of human-like text, with increasing integration into systems that touch our social sphere. Despite this success, these models can learn, perpetuate, and amplify harmful social biases. In this article, we present a comprehensive survey of bias evaluation and mitigation techniques for LLMs. We first consolidate, formalize, and expand notions of social bias and fairness in natural language processing, defining distinct facets of harm and introducing several desiderata to operationalize fairness for LLMs. We then unify the literature by proposing three intuitive taxonomies, two for bias evaluation, namely, metrics and datasets, and one for mitigation. Our first taxonomy of metrics for bias evaluation disambiguates the relationship between metrics and evaluation datasets, and organizes metrics by the different levels at which they operate in a model: embeddings, probabilities, and generated text. Our second taxonomy of datasets for bias evaluation categorizes datasets by their structure as counterfactual inputs or prompts, and identifies the targeted harms and social groups; we also release a consolidation of publicly available datasets for improved access. Our third taxonomy of techniques for bias mitigation classifies methods by their intervention during pre-processing, in-training, intra-processing, and post-processing, with granular subcategories that elucidate research trends. Finally, we identify open problems and challenges for future work. Synthesizing a wide range of recent research, we aim to provide a clear guide of the existing literature that empowers researchers and practitioners to better understand and prevent the propagation of bias in LLMs.

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become increasingly important due to their representational power and state-of-the-art predictive performance on many fundamental learning tasks. Despite this success, GNNs suffer from fairness issues that arise as a result of the underlying graph data and the fundamental aggregation mechanism that lies at the heart of the large class of GNN models. In this article, we examine and categorize fairness techniques for improving the fairness of GNNs. We categorize these techniques by whether they focus on improving fairness in the pre-processing, in-processing (during training), or post-processing phases. We discuss how such techniques can be used together whenever appropriate and highlight the advantages and intuition as well. We also introduce an intuitive taxonomy for fairness evaluation metrics, including graph-level fairness, neighborhood-level fairness, embedding-level fairness, and prediction-level fairness metrics. In addition, graph datasets that are useful for benchmarking the fairness of GNN models are summarized succinctly. Finally, we highlight key open problems and challenges that remain to be addressed.

Professional document editing tools require a certain level of expertise to perform complex edit operations. To make editing tools accessible to increasingly novice users, we investigate intelligent document assistant systems that can make or suggest edits based on a user's natural language request. Such a system should be able to understand the user's ambiguous requests and contextualize them to the visual cues and textual content found in a document image to edit localized unstructured text and structured layouts. To this end, we propose a new task of language-guided localized document editing, where the user provides a document and an open vocabulary editing request, and the intelligent system produces a command that can be used to automate edits in real-world document editing software. In support of this task, we curate the DocEdit dataset, a collection of approximately 28K instances of user edit requests over PDF and design templates along with their corresponding ground truth software executable commands. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides a diverse mix of edit operations with direct and indirect references to the embedded text and visual objects such as paragraphs, lists, tables, etc. We also propose DocEditor, a Transformer-based localization-aware multimodal (textual, spatial, and visual) model that performs the new task. The model attends to both document objects and related text contents which may be referred to in a user edit request, generating a multimodal embedding that is used to predict an edit command and associated bounding box localizing it. Our proposed model empirically outperforms other baseline deep learning approaches by 15-18%, providing a strong starting point for future work.

In this paper, we address the Event Detection task under a zero-shot cross-lingual setting where a model is trained on a source language but evaluated on a distinct target language for which there is no labeled data available.Most recent efforts in this field follow a direct transfer approach in which the model is trained using language-invariant features and then directly applied to the target language.However, we argue that these methods fail to take advantage of the benefits of the data transfer approach where a cross-lingual model is trained on targetlanguage data and is able to learn task-specific information from syntactical features or wordlabel relations in the target language.As such, we propose a hybrid knowledge-transfer approach that leverages a teacher-student framework where the teacher and student networks are trained following the direct and data transfer approaches, respectively.Our method is complemented by a hierarchical training-sample selection scheme designed to address the issue of noisy labels being generated by the teacher model.Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on 9 morphologically-diverse target languages across 3 distinct datasets, highlighting the importance of exploiting the benefits of hybrid transfer.

Yebowen Hu, Timothy Ganter, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Franck Dernoncourt, Hassan Foroosh, Fei Liu. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Archiki Prasad, Trung Bui, Seunghyun Yoon, Hanieh Deilamsalehy, Franck Dernoncourt, Mohit Bansal. Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Aspect-based meeting transcript summarization aims to produce multiple summaries, each focusing on one aspect of content in a meeting transcript. It is challenging as sentences related to different aspects can mingle together, and those relevant to a specific aspect can be scattered throughout the long transcript of a meeting. The traditional summarization methods produce one summary mixing information of all aspects, which cannot deal with the above challenges of aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. In this paper, we propose a two-stage method for aspect-based meeting transcript summarization. To select the input content related to specific aspects, we train a sentence classifier on a dataset constructed from the AMI corpus with pseudo-labeling. Then we merge the sentences selected for a specific aspect as the input for the summarizer to produce the aspect-based summary. Experimental results on the AMI corpus outperform many strong baselines, which verifies the effectiveness of our proposed method.

We propose a margin-based loss for tuning joint vision-language models so that their gradient-based explanations are consistent with region-level annotations provided by humans for relatively smaller grounding datasets. We refer to this objective as Attention Mask Consistency (AMC) and demonstrate that it produces superior visual grounding results than previous methods that rely on using vision-language models to score the outputs of object detectors. Particularly, a model trained with AMC on top of standard vision-language modeling objectives obtains a state-of-the-art accuracy of 86.49% in the Flickr30k visual grounding benchmark, an absolute improvement of 5.38% when compared to the best previous model trained under the same level of supervision. Our approach also performs exceedingly well on established benchmarks for referring expression comprehension where it obtains 80.34% accuracy in the easy test of RefCOCO+, and 64.55% in the difficult split. AMC is effective, easy to implement, and is general as it can be adopted by any vision-language model, and can use any type of region annotations.

Tutorial videos play an increasingly important role in professional development and self-directed education. For users to realise the full benefits of this medium, tutorial videos must be efficiently searchable. In this work, we focus on the task of moment detection, in which the goal is to localise the temporal window where a given event occurs within a given tutorial video. Prior work on moment detection has focused primarily on short videos (typically on videos shorter than three minutes). However, many tutorial videos are substantially longer (stretching to hours in duration), presenting significant challenges for existing moment detection approaches.To study this problem, we propose the first dataset of untrimmed, long-form tutorial videos for the task of Moment Detection called the Behance Moment Detection (BMD) dataset. BMD videos have an average duration of over one hour and are characterised by slowly evolving visual content and wide-ranging dialogue. To meet the unique challenges of this dataset, we propose a new framework, LongMoment-Detr, and demonstrate that it outperforms strong baselines. Additionally, we introduce a variation of the dataset that contains YouTube Chapter annotations and show that the features obtained by our framework can be successfully used to boost the performance on the task of chapter detection. Code and data can be found at https://github.com/ioanacroi/longmoment-detr.

Being able to perceive the semantics and the spatial structure of the environment is essential for visual navigation of a household robot. However, most existing works only employ visual backbones pre-trained either with independent images for classification or with self-supervised learning methods to adapt to the indoor navigation domain, neglecting the spatial relationships that are essential to the learning of navigation. Inspired by the behavior that humans naturally build semantically and spatially meaningful cognitive maps in their brains during navigation, in this paper, we propose a novel navigational-specific visual representation learning method by contrasting the agent’s egocentric views and semantic maps (Ego2-Map). We apply the visual transformer as the backbone encoder and train the model with data collected from the large-scale HabitatMatterport3D environments. Ego2-Map learning transfers the compact and rich information from a map, such as objects, structure and transition, to the agent’s egocentric representations for navigation. Experiments show that agents using our learned representations on object-goal navigation outperform recent visual pre-training methods. Moreover, our representations significantly improve vision-and-language navigation in continuous environments for both high-level and low-level action spaces, achieving new state-of-the-art results of 47% SR and 41% SPL on the test server.

Siva Uday Sampreeth Chebolu, Franck Dernoncourt, Nedim Lipka, Thamar Solorio. 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 1: Long Papers). 2023.

Story ideation is a critical part of the story-writing process. It is challenging to support computationally due to its exploratory and subjective nature. Tropes, which are recurring narrative elements across stories, are essential in stories as they shape the structure of narratives and our understanding of them. In this paper, we propose to use tropes as an intermediate representation of stories to approach story ideation. We present TaleStream, a canvas system that uses tropes as building blocks of stories while providing steerable suggestions of story ideas in the form of tropes. Our trope suggestion methods leverage data from the tvtropes.org wiki. We find that 97% of the time, trope suggestions generated by our methods provide better story ideation materials than random tropes. Our system evaluation suggests that TaleStream can support writers’ creative flow and greatly facilitates story development. Tropes, as a rich lexicon of narratives with available examples, play a key role in TaleStream and hold promise for story-creation support systems.

Digital documents often contain images and scanned text. Parsing such visually-rich documents is a core task for work-flow automation, but it remains challenging since most documents do not encode explicit layout information, e.g., how characters and words are grouped into boxes and ordered into larger semantic entities. Current state-of-the-art layout extraction methods are challenged by such documents as they rely on word sequences to have correct reading order and do not exploit their hierarchical structure. We propose LayerDoc, an approach that uses visual features, textual semantics, and spatial coordinates along with constraint inference to extract the hierarchical layout structure of documents in a bottom-up layer-wise fashion. LayerDoc recursively groups smaller regions into larger semantic elements in 2D to infer complex nested hierarchies. Experiments show that our approach outperforms competitive baselines by 10-15% on three diverse datasets of forms and mobile app screen layouts for the tasks of spatial region classification, higher-order group identification, layout hierarchy extraction, reading order detection, and word grouping.

Livestream videos have become a significant part of online learning, where design, digital marketing, creative painting, and other skills are taught by experienced experts in the sessions, making them valuable materials. However, Livestream tutorial videos are usually hours long, recorded, and uploaded to the Internet directly after the live sessions, making it hard for other people to catch up quickly. An outline will be a beneficial solution, which requires the video to be temporally segmented according to topics. In this work, we introduced a large Livestream video dataset named MultiLive, and formulated the temporal segmentation of the long Livestream videos (TSLLV) task. We propose LiveSeg, an unsupervised Livestream video temporal Segmentation solution, which takes advantage of multimodal features from different domains. Our method achieved a 16.8% F1-score performance improvement compared with the state-of-the-art method.

Demand for image editing has been increasing as users' desire for expression is also increasing. However, for most users, image editing tools are not easy to use since the tools require certain expertise in photo effects and have complex interfaces. Hence, users might need someone to help edit their images, but having a personal dedicated human assistant for every user is impossible to scale. For that reason, an automated assistant system for image editing is desirable. Additionally, users want more image sources for diverse image editing works, and integrating an image search functionality into the editing tool is a potential remedy for this demand. Thus, we propose a dataset of an automated Conversational Agent for Image Search and Editing (CAISE). To our knowledge, this is the first dataset that provides conversational image search and editing annotations, where the agent holds a grounded conversation with users and helps them to search and edit images according to their requests. To build such a system, we first collect image search and editing conversations between pairs of annotators. The assistant-annotators are equipped with a customized image search and editing tool to address the requests from the user-annotators. The functions that the assistant-annotators conduct with the tool are recorded as executable commands, allowing the trained system to be useful for real-world application execution. We also introduce a generator-extractor baseline model for this task, which can adaptively select the source of the next token (i.e., from the vocabulary or from textual/visual contexts) for the executable command. This serves as a strong starting point while still leaving a large human-machine performance gap for useful future work. Data and code are available: https://github.com/hyounghk/CAISE.

In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of user-entity differential privacy (UeDP) to provide formal privacy protection simultaneously to both sensitive entities in textual data and data owners in learning natural language models (NLMs). To preserve UeDP, we developed a novel algorithm, called UeDP-Alg, optimizing the trade-off between privacy loss and model utility with a tight sensitivity bound derived from seamlessly combining user and sensitive entity sampling processes. An extensive theoretical analysis and evaluation show that our UeDP-Alg outperforms baseline approaches in model utility under the same privacy budget consumption on several NLM tasks, using benchmark datasets.

Event Causality Identification (ECI) is the task of detecting causal relations between events mentioned in the text. Although this task has been extensively studied for English materials, it is under-explored for many other languages. A major reason for this issue is the lack of multilingual datasets that provide consistent annotations for event causality relations in multiple non-English languages. To address this issue, we introduce a new multilingual dataset for ECI, called MECI. The dataset employs consistent annotation guidelines for five typologically different languages, i.e., English, Danish, Spanish, Turkish, and Urdu. Our dataset thus enable a new research direction on cross-lingual transfer learning for ECI. Our extensive experiments demonstrate high quality for MECI that can provide ample research challenges and directions for future research. We will publicly release MECI to promote research on multilingual ECI.

Current medical question answering systems have difficulty processing long, detailed and informally worded questions submitted by patients, called Consumer Health Questions (CHQs). To address this issue, we introduce a medical question understanding and answering system with knowledge grounding and semantic self-supervision. Our system is a pipeline that first summarizes a long, medical, user-written question, using a supervised summarization loss. Then, our system performs a two-step retrieval to return answers. The system first matches the summarized user question with an FAQ from a trusted medical knowledge base, and then retrieves a fixed number of relevant sentences from the corresponding answer document. In the absence of labels for question matching or answer relevance, we design 3 novel, self-supervised and semantically-guided losses. We evaluate our model against two strong retrieval-based question answering baselines. Evaluators ask their own questions and rate the answers retrieved by our baselines and own system according to their relevance. They find that our system retrieves more relevant answers, while achieving speeds 20 times faster. Our self-supervised losses also help the summarizer achieve higher scores in ROUGE, as well as in human evaluation metrics.

The prevalent use of offensive content in social media has become an important reason for concern for online platforms (customer service chat-boxes, social media platforms, etc). Classifying offensive and hate-speech content in online settings is an essential task in many applications that needs to be addressed accordingly. However, online text from online platforms can contain code-switching, a combination of more than one language. The non-availability of labeled code-switched data for low-resourced code-switching combinations adds difficulty to this problem. To overcome this, we release a real-world dataset containing around 10k samples for testing for three language combinations en-fr, en-es, and en-de, and a synthetic code-switched textual dataset containing ~30k samples for training In this paper, we describe the process for gathering the human-generated data and our algorithm for creating synthetic code-switched offensive content data. We also introduce the results of a keyword classification baseline and a multi-lingual transformer-based classification model.

Domain-specific documents cover terminologies and specialized knowledge. This has been the main challenge of domain-specific document retrieval systems. Previous approaches propose domain-adaptation and transfer learning methods to alleviate this problem. However, these approaches still follow the same document representation method in previous approaches; a document is embedded into a single vector. In this study, we propose VKGDR. VKGDR represents a given corpus into a graph of entities and their relations (known as a virtual knowledge graph) and computes the relevance between queries and documents based on the graph representation. We conduct three experiments 1) domain-specific document retrieval, 2) comparison of our virtual knowledge graph construction method with previous approaches, and 3) ablation study on each component of our virtual knowledge graph. From the results, we see that unsupervised VKGDR outperforms baselines in a zero-shot setting and even outperforms fully-supervised bi-encoder. We also verify that our virtual knowledge graph construction method results in better retrieval performance than previous approaches.

Event extraction (EE) is one of the fundamental tasks for information extraction whose goal is to identify mentions of events and their participants in text. Due to its importance, different methods and datasets have been introduced for EE. However, existing EE datasets are limited to formally written documents such as news articles or scientific papers. As such, the challenges of EE in informal and noisy texts are not adequately studied. In particular, video transcripts constitute an important domain that can benefit tremendously from EE systems (e.g., video retrieval), but has not been studied in EE literature due to the lack of necessary datasets. To address this limitation, we propose the first large-scale EE dataset obtained for transcripts of streamed videos on the video hosting platform Behance to promote future research in this area. In addition, we extensively evaluate existing state-of-the-art EE methods on our new dataset. We demonstrate that such systems cannot achieve adequate performance on the proposed dataset, revealing challenges and opportunities for further research effort.

Acronym extraction is the task of identifying acronyms and their expanded forms in texts that is necessary for various NLP applications. Despite major progress for this task in recent years, one limitation of existing AE research is that they are limited to the English language and certain domains (i.e., scientific and biomedical). Challenges of AE in other languages and domains are mainly unexplored. As such, lacking annotated datasets in multiple languages and domains has been a major issue to prevent research in this direction. To address this limitation, we propose a new dataset for multilingual and multi-domain AE. Specifically, 27,200 sentences in 6 different languages and 2 new domains, i.e., legal and scientific, are manually annotated for AE. Our experiments on the dataset show that AE in different languages and learning settings has unique challenges, emphasizing the necessity of further research on multilingual and multi-domain AE.

Keyphrase Prediction (KP) is an established NLP task, aiming to yield representative phrases to summarize the main content of a given document. Despite major progress in recent years, existing works on KP have mainly focused on formal texts such as scientific papers or weblogs. The challenges of KP in informal-text domains are not yet fully studied. To this end, this work studies new challenges of KP in transcripts of videos, an understudied domain for KP that involves informal texts and non-cohesive presentation styles. A bottleneck for KP research in this domain involves the lack of high-quality and large-scale annotated data that hinders the development of advanced KP models. To address this issue, we introduce a large-scale manually-annotated KP dataset in the domain of live-stream video transcripts obtained by automatic speech recognition tools. Concretely, transcripts of 500+ hours of videos streamed on the behance.net platform are manually labeled with important keyphrases. Our analysis of the dataset reveals the challenging nature of KP in transcripts. Moreover, for the first time in KP, we demonstrate the idea of improving KP for long documents (i.e., transcripts) by feeding models with paragraph-level keyphrases, i.e., hierarchical extraction. To foster future research, we will publicly release the dataset and code.

Extracting entities, events, event arguments, and relations (i.e., task instances) from text represents four main challenging tasks in information extraction (IE), which have been solved jointly (JointIE) to boost the overall performance for IE.As such, previous work often leverages two types of dependencies between the tasks, i.e., cross-instance and cross-type dependencies representing relatedness between task instances and correlations between information types of the tasks.However, the crosstask dependencies in prior work are not optimal as they are only designed manually according to some task heuristics.To address this issue, we propose a novel model for JointIE that aims to learn cross-task dependencies from data.In particular, we treat each task instance as a node in a dependency graph where edges between the instances are inferred through information from different layers of a pretrained language model (e.g., BERT).Furthermore, we utilize the Chow-Liu algorithm to learn a dependency tree between information types for JointIE by seeking to approximate the joint distribution of the types from data.Finally, the Chow-Liu dependency tree is used to generate cross-type patterns, serving as anchor knowledge to guide the learning of representations and dependencies between instances for JointIE.Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms strong JointIE baselines over four datasets with different languages.

Event Extraction (EE) is one of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction (IE) that aims to recognize event mentions and their arguments (i.e., participants) from text.Due to its importance, extensive methods and resources have been developed for Event Extraction.However, one limitation of current research for EE involves the under-exploration for non-English languages in which the lack of high-quality multilingual EE datasets for model training and evaluation has been the main hindrance.To address this limitation, we propose a novel Multilingual Event Extraction dataset (MEE) that provides annotation for more than 50K event mentions in 8 typologically different languages.MEE comprehensively annotates data for entity mentions, event triggers and event arguments.We conduct extensive experiments on the proposed dataset to reveal challenges and opportunities for multilingual EE.

Livestreaming videos have become an effective broadcasting method for both video sharing and educational purposes. However, livestreaming videos contain a considerable amount of off-topic content (i.e., up to 50%) which introduces significant noises and data load to downstream applications. This paper presents BehanceCC, a new human-annotated benchmark dataset for off-topic detection (also called chitchat detection) in livestreaming video transcripts. In addition to describing the challenges of the dataset, our extensive experiments of various baselines reveal the complexity of chitchat detection for livestreaming videos and suggest potential future research directions for this task. The dataset will be made publicly available to foster research in this area.

Question-Answer (QA) is one of the effective methods for storing knowledge which can be used for future retrieval. As such, identifying mentions of questions and their answers in text is necessary for a knowledge construction and retrieval systems. In the literature, QA identification has been well studied in the NLP community. However, most of the prior works are restricted to formal written documents such as papers or websites. As such, Questions and Answers that are presented in informal/noisy documents have not been adequately studied. One of the domains that can significantly benefit from QA identification is the domain of livestreaming video transcripts that involve abundant QA pairs to provide valuable knowledge for future users and services. Since video transcripts are often transcribed automatically for scale, they are prone to errors. Combined with the informal nature of discussion in a video, prior QA identification systems might not be able to perform well in this domain. To enable comprehensive research in this domain, we present a large-scale QA identification dataset annotated by human over transcripts of 500 hours of streamed videos. We employ Behance.net to collect the videos and their automatically obtained transcripts. Furthermore, we conduct extensive analysis on the annotated dataset to understand the complexity of QA identification for livestreaming video transcripts. Our experiments show that the annotated dataset presents unique challenges for existing methods and more research is necessary to explore more effective methods. The dataset and the models developed in this work will be publicly released for future research.

Risk prediction and price movement classification are essential tasks in financial markets. Monetary policy calls (MPC) provide important insights into the actions taken by a country's central bank on economic goals related to inflation, employment, prices, and interest rates. Analyzing visual, vocal, and textual cues from MPC calls can help analysts and policymakers evaluate the economic risks and make sound investment decisions. To aid the analysis of MPC calls, we curate the Monopoly dataset, a collection of public conference call videos along with their corresponding audio recordings and text transcripts released by six international banks between 2009 and 2022. Our dataset is the first attempt to explore the benefits of visual cues in addition to audio and textual signals for financial prediction tasks. We introduce MPCNet, a competitive baseline architecture that takes advantage of the cross-modal transformer blocks and modality-specific attention fusion to forecast the financial risk and price movement associated with the MPC calls. Empirical results prove that the task is challenging, with the proposed architecture performing 5-18% better than strong Transformer-based baselines. We release the MPC dataset and benchmark models to motivate future research in this new challenging domain.

Puneet Mathur, Vlad Morariu, Verena Kaynig-Fittkau, Jiuxiang Gu, Franck Dernoncourt, Quan Tran, Ani Nenkova, Dinesh Manocha, Rajiv Jain. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

Minh Van Nguyen, Bonan Min, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Nguyen. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Minh Van Nguyen, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Nguyen. Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2022.

Joe Barrow, Rajiv Jain, Nedim Lipka, Franck Dernoncourt, Vlad Morariu, Varun Manjunatha, Douglas Oard, Philip Resnik, Henning Wachsmuth. 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). 2021.

Khalil Mrini, Franck Dernoncourt, Seunghyun Yoon, Trung Bui, Walter Chang, Emilia Farcas, Ndapa Nakashole. 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). 2021.

Amir Pouran Ben Veyseh, Viet Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Thien Huu Nguyen. 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). 2021.

Search engines for domain-specific media collections often rely on rich metadata being available for the content items. The annotations may not be complete or rich enough to support an adequate retrieval effectiveness. As a result, some search queries receive only a small result set (low recall) and others might suffer from reduced relevance (low precision). To alleviate this, we present a framework that exploits external knowledge to provide entity-oriented reformulation suggestions for queries that contain entities. We propose that queries be added as surrogate nodes to an external Knowledge Graph (KG) via the use of state-of-the-art entity linking algorithms. Embedding methods are invoked on the augmented graph, which contains additional edges between surrogate nodes and KG entities. We introduce a new evaluation setting to evaluate the quality of these embeddings. Experimental results on seven datasets confirm the effectiveness of the approach.

Recently, language-guided global image editing draws increasing attention with growing application potentials. However, previous GAN-based methods are not only confined to domain-specific, low-resolution data but also lacking in interpretability. To overcome the collective difficulties, we develop a text-to-operation model to map the vague editing language request into a series of editing operations, e.g., change contrast, brightness, and saturation. Each operation is interpretable and differentiable. Furthermore, the only supervision in the task is the target image, which is insufficient for a stable training of sequential decisions. Hence, we propose a novel operation planning algorithm to generate possible editing sequences from the target image as pseudo ground truth. Comparison experiments on the newly collected MA5k-Req dataset and GIER dataset show the advantages of our methods. Code is available at https://github.com/jshi31/T2ONet.

Sangwoo Cho, Franck Dernoncourt, Tim Ganter, Trung Bui, Nedim Lipka, Walter Chang, Hailin Jin, Jonathan Brandt, Hassan Foroosh, Fei Liu. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.

We address the sampling bias and outlier issues in few-shot learning for event detection, a subtask of information extraction.We propose to model the relations between training tasks in episodic few-shot learning by introducing cross-task prototypes.We further propose to enforce prediction consistency among classifiers across tasks to make the model more robust to outliers.Our extensive experiment shows a consistent improvement on three fewshot learning datasets.The findings suggest that our model is more robust when labeled data of novel event types is limited.

Simeng Sun, Wenlong Zhao, Varun Manjunatha, Rajiv Jain, Vlad Morariu, Franck Dernoncourt, Balaji Vasan Srinivasan, Mohit Iyyer. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2021.

Mengnan Du, Varun Manjunatha, Rajiv Jain, Ruchi Deshpande, Franck Dernoncourt, Jiuxiang Gu, Tong Sun, Xia Hu. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Tuan Lai, Heng Ji, Trung Bui, Quan Hung Tran, Franck Dernoncourt, Walter Chang. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Hwanhee Lee, Seunghyun Yoon, Franck Dernoncourt, Doo Soon Kim, Trung Bui, Joongbo Shin, Kyomin Jung. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

Meryem M’hamdi, Doo Soon Kim, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui, Xiang Ren, Jonathan May. Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies. 2021.

We address the poor generalization of few-shot learning models for event detection (ED) using transfer learning and representation regularization. In particular, we propose to transfer knowledge from open-domain word sense disambiguation into few-shot learning models for ED to improve their generalization to new event types. We also propose a novel training signal derived from dependency graphs to regularize the representation learning for ED. Moreover, we evaluate few-shot learning models for ED with a large-scale human-annotated ED dataset to obtain more reliable insights for this problem. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art baseline models in the few-shot learning and supervised learning settings for ED. Code and data splits are available at https://github.com/laiviet/ed-fsl.

Definition Extraction (DE) is one of the well-known topics in Information Extraction that aims to identify terms and their corresponding definitions in unstructured texts. This task can be formalized either as a sentence classification task (i.e., containing term-definition pairs or not) or a sequential labeling task (i.e., identifying the boundaries of the terms and definitions). The previous works for DE have only focused on one of the two approaches, failing to model the inter-dependencies between the two tasks. In this work, we propose a novel model for DE that simultaneously performs the two tasks in a single framework to benefit from their inter-dependencies. Our model features deep learning architectures to exploit the global structures of the input sentences as well as the semantic consistencies between the terms and the definitions, thereby improving the quality of the representation vectors for DE. Besides the joint inference between sentence classification and sequential labeling, the proposed model is fundamentally different from the prior work for DE in that the prior work has only employed the local structures of the input sentences (i.e., word-to-word relations), and not yet considered the semantic consistencies between terms and definitions. In order to implement these novel ideas, our model presents a multi-task learning framework that employs graph convolutional neural networks and predicts the dependency paths between the terms and the definitions. We also seek to enforce the consistency between the representations of the terms and definitions both globally (i.e., increasing semantic consistency between the representations of the entire sentences and the terms/definitions) and locally (i.e., promoting the similarity between the representations of the terms and the definitions). The extensive experiments on three benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.1

Relation Extraction (RE) is one of the fundamental tasks in Information Extraction. The goal of this task is to find the semantic relations between entity mentions in text. It has been shown in many previous work that the structure of the sentences (i.e., dependency trees) can provide important information/features for the RE models. However, the common limitation of the previous work on RE is the reliance on some external parsers to obtain the syntactic trees for the sentence structures. On the one hand, it is not guaranteed that the independent external parsers can offer the optimal sentence structures for RE and the customized structures for RE might help to further improve the performance. On the other hand, the quality of the external parsers might suffer when applied to different domains, thus also affecting the performance of the RE models on such domains. In order to overcome this issue, we introduce a novel method for RE that simultaneously induces the structures and predicts the relations for the input sentences, thus avoiding the external parsers and potentially leading to better sentence structures for RE. Our general strategy to learn the RE-specific structures is to apply two different methods to infer the structures for the input sentences (i.e., two views). We then introduce several mechanisms to encourage the structure and semantic consistencies between these two views so the effective structure and semantic representations for RE can emerge. We perform extensive experiments on the ACE 2005 and SemEval 2010 datasets to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on such datasets.

In this paper, we aim to learn associations between visual attributes of fonts and the verbal context of the texts they are typically applied to. Compared to related work leveraging the surrounding visual context, we choose to focus only on the input text as this can enable new applications for which the text is the only visual element in the document. We introduce a new dataset, containing examples of different topics in social media posts and ads, labeled through crowd-sourcing. Due to the subjective nature of the task, multiple fonts might be perceived as acceptable for an input text, which makes this problem challenging. To this end, we investigate different end-to-end models to learn label distributions on crowd-sourced data and capture inter-subjectivity across all annotations.

This paper studies the task of Relation Extraction (RE) that aims to identify the semantic relations between two entity mentions in text.In the deep learning models for RE, it has been beneficial to incorporate the syntactic structures from the dependency trees of the input sentences.In such models, the dependency trees are often used to directly structure the network architectures or to obtain the dependency relations between the word pairs to inject the syntactic information into the models via multi-task learning.The major problems with these approaches are the lack of generalization beyond the syntactic structures in the training data or the failure to capture the syntactic importance of the words for RE.In order to overcome these issues, we propose a novel deep learning model for RE that uses the dependency trees to extract the syntax-based importance scores for the words, serving as a tree representation to introduce syntactic information into the models with greater generalization.In particular, we leverage Ordered-Neuron Long-Short Term Memory Networks (ON-LSTM) to infer the model-based importance scores for RE for every word in the sentences that are then regulated to be consistent with the syntax-based scores to enable syntactic information injection.We perform extensive experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, leading to the state-of-the-art performance on three RE benchmark datasets.

Interpretability and explainability of deep neural networks are challenging due to their scale, complexity, and the agreeable notions on which the explaining process rests.Previous work, in particular, has focused on representing internal components of neural networks through humanfriendly visuals and concepts.On the other hand, in real life, when making a decision, human tends to rely on similar situations and/or associations in the past.Hence arguably, a promising approach to make the model transparent is to design it in a way such that the model explicitly connects the current sample with the seen ones, and bases its decision on these samples.Grounded on that principle, we propose in this paper an explainable, evidence-based memory network architecture, which learns to summarize the dataset and extract supporting evidences to make its decision.Our model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two popular question answering datasets (i.e.TrecQA and WikiQA).Via further analysis, we show that this model can reliably trace the errors it has made in the validation step to the training instances that might have caused these errors.We believe that this error-tracing capability provides significant benefit in improving dataset quality in many applications.

Acronyms are the short forms of phrases that facilitate conveying lengthy sentences in documents and serve as one of the mainstays of writing.Due to their importance, identifying acronyms and corresponding phrases (i.e., acronym identification (AI)) and finding the correct meaning of each acronym (i.e., acronym disambiguation (AD)) are crucial for text understanding.Despite the recent progress on this task, there are some limitations in the existing datasets which hinder further improvement.More specifically, limited size of manually annotated AI datasets or noises in the automatically created acronym identification datasets obstruct designing advanced highperforming acronym identification models.Moreover, the existing datasets are mostly limited to the medical domain and ignore other domains.In order to address these two limitations, we first create a manually annotated large AI dataset for scientific domain.This dataset contains 17,506 sentences which is substantially larger than previous scientific AI datasets.Next, we prepare an AD dataset for scientific domain with 62,441 samples which is significantly larger than previous scientific AD dataset.Our experiments show that the existing state-of-the-art models fall far behind human-level performance on both datasets proposed by this work.In addition, we propose a new deep learning model which utilizes the syntactical structure of the sentence to expand an ambiguous acronym in a sentence.The proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models on the new AD dataset, providing a strong baseline for future research on this dataset 1 .

The ability to fuse sentences is highly attractive for summarization systems because it is an essential step to produce succinct abstracts. However, to date, summarizers can fail on fusing sentences. They tend to produce few summary sentences by fusion or generate incorrect fusions that lead the summary to fail to retain the original meaning. In this paper, we explore the ability of Transformers to fuse sentences and propose novel algorithms to enhance their ability to perform sentence fusion by leveraging the knowledge of points of correspondence between sentences. Through extensive experiments, we investigate the effects of different design choices on Transformer’s performance. Our findings highlight the importance of modeling points of correspondence between sentences for effective sentence fusion.

Targeted opinion word extraction (TOWE) is a sub-task of aspect based sentiment analysis (ABSA) which aims to find the opinion words for a given aspect-term in a sentence.Despite their success for TOWE, the current deep learning models fail to exploit the syntactic information of the sentences that have been proved to be useful for TOWE in the prior research.In this work, we propose to incorporate the syntactic structures of the sentences into the deep learning models for TOWE, leveraging the syntax-based opinion possibility scores and the syntactic connections between the words.We also introduce a novel regularization technique to improve the performance of the deep learning models based on the representation distinctions between the words in TOWE.The proposed model is extensively analyzed and achieves the state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets.

Recent works have shown that generative data augmentation, where synthetic samples generated from deep generative models complement the training dataset, benefit NLP tasks.In this work, we extend this approach to the task of dialog state tracking for goaloriented dialogs.Due to the inherent hierarchical structure of goal-oriented dialogs over utterances and related annotations, the deep generative model must be capable of capturing the coherence among different hierarchies and types of dialog features.We propose the Variational Hierarchical Dialog Autoencoder (VHDA) for modeling the complete aspects of goal-oriented dialogs, including linguistic features and underlying structured annotations, namely speaker information, dialog acts, and goals.The proposed architecture is designed to model each aspect of goal-oriented dialogs using inter-connected latent variables and learns to generate coherent goal-oriented dialogs from the latent spaces.To overcome training issues that arise from training complex variational models, we propose appropriate training strategies.Experiments on various dialog datasets show that our model improves the downstream dialog trackers' robustness via generative data augmentation.We also discover additional benefits of our unified approach to modeling goal-oriented dialogsdialog response generation and user simulation, where our model outperforms previous strong baselines.

Despite the number of currently available datasets on video-question answering, there still remains a need for a dataset involving multi-step and non-factoid answers. Moreover, relying on video transcripts remains an under-explored topic. To adequately address this, we propose a new question answering task on instructional videos, because of their verbose and narrative nature. While previous studies on video question answering have focused on generating a short text as an answer, given a question and video clip, our task aims to identify a span of a video segment as an answer which contains instructional details with various granularities. This work focuses on screencast tutorial videos pertaining to an image editing program. We introduce a dataset, TutorialVQA, consisting of about 6,000 manually collected triples of (video, question, answer span). We also provide experimental results with several baseline algorithms using the video transcripts. The results indicate that the task is challenging and call for the investigation of new algorithms.

Existing research on fairness evaluation of document classification models mainly uses synthetic monolingual data without ground truth for author demographic attributes. In this work, we assemble and publish a multilingual Twitter corpus for the task of hate speech detection with inferred four author demographic factors: age, country, gender and race/ethnicity. The corpus covers five languages: English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. We evaluate the inferred demographic labels with a crowdsourcing platform, Figure Eight. To examine factors that can cause biases, we take an empirical analysis of demographic predictability on the English corpus. We measure the performance of four popular document classifiers and evaluate the fairness and bias of the baseline classifiers on the author-level demographic attributes.

A crucial step within secondary analysis of electronic health records (EHRs) is to identify the patient cohort under investigation. While EHRs contain medical billing codes that aim to represent the conditions and treatments patients may have, much of the information is only present in the patient notes. Therefore, it is critical to develop robust algorithms to infer patients’ conditions and treatments from their written notes. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for patient phenotyping, a task that is defined as the identification of whether a patient has a given medical condition (also referred to as clinical indication or phenotype) based on their patient note. Nursing Progress Notes and Discharge Summaries from the Intensive Care Unit of a large tertiary care hospital were manually annotated for the presence of several high-context phenotypes relevant to treatment and risk of re-hospitalization. This dataset contains 1102 Discharge Summaries and 1000 Nursing Progress Notes. Each Discharge Summary and Progress Note has been annotated by at least two expert human annotators (one clinical researcher and one resident physician). Annotated phenotypes include treatment non-adherence, chronic pain, advanced/metastatic cancer, as well as 10 other phenotypes. This dataset can be utilized for academic and industrial research in medicine and computer science, particularly within the field of medical natural language processing.

In this study, we propose a novel graph neural network called propagate-selector (PS), which propagates information over sentences to understand information that cannot be inferred when considering sentences in isolation. First, we design a graph structure in which each node represents an individual sentence, and some pairs of nodes are selectively connected based on the text structure. Then, we develop an iterative attentive aggregation and a skip-combine method in which a node interacts with its neighborhood nodes to accumulate the necessary information. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, we conduct experiments with the standard HotpotQA dataset. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which obtains the best performances, compared to the widely used answer-selection models that do not consider the intersentential relationship.

When writing a summary, humans tend to choose content from one or two sentences and merge them into a single summary sentence.However, the mechanisms behind the selection of one or multiple source sentences remain poorly understood.Sentence fusion assumes multi-sentence input; yet sentence selection methods only work with single sentences and not combinations of them.There is thus a crucial gap between sentence selection and fusion to support summarizing by both compressing single sentences and fusing pairs.This paper attempts to bridge the gap by ranking sentence singletons and pairs together in a unified space.Our proposed framework attempts to model human methodology by selecting either a single sentence or a pair of sentences, then compressing or fusing the sentence(s) to produce a summary sentence.We conduct extensive experiments on both single-and multidocument summarization datasets and report findings on sentence selection and abstraction.

Amirreza Shirani, Franck Dernoncourt, Paul Asente, Nedim Lipka, Seokhwan Kim, Jose Echevarria, Thamar Solorio. Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. 2019.

Describing images with text is a fundamental problem in vision-language research. Current studies in this domain mostly focus on single image captioning. However, in various real applications (e.g., image editing, difference interpretation, and retrieval), generating relational captions for two images, can also be very useful. This important problem has not been explored mostly due to lack of datasets and effective models. To push forward the research in this direction, we first introduce a new language-guided image editing dataset that contains a large number of real image pairs with corresponding editing instructions. We then propose a new relational speaker model based on an encoder-decoder architecture with static relational attention and sequential multi-head attention. We also extend the model with dynamic relational attention, which calculates visual alignment while decoding. Our models are evaluated on our newly collected and two public datasets consisting of image pairs annotated with relationship sentences. Experimental results, based on both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate that our model outperforms all baselines and existing methods on all the datasets.

In this paper, we propose a novel method for a sentence-level answer-selection task that is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. First, we explore the effect of additional information by adopting a pretrained language model to compute the vector representation of the input text and by applying transfer learning from a large-scale corpus. Second, we enhance the compare-aggregate model by proposing a novel latent clustering method to compute additional information within the target corpus and by changing the objective function from listwise to pointwise. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, experiments are performed with the WikiQA and TREC-QA datasets. The empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach, which achieve state-of-the-art performance for both datasets.

We present Margin Call, an accessible webbased text viewer that automatically generates short summaries for each paragraph of the text and displays the summaries in the margin of the text next to the corresponding paragraph.On the back-end, the summarizer first identifies the most important sentence for each paragraph in the text file uploaded by the user.The selected sentence is then automatically compressed to produce the short summary.The resulting summary is a few words long.The displayed summaries can help the user understand and retrieve information faster from the text, while increasing the retention of information.

In this paper, we explore various approaches for semi supervised learning in an end to end automatic speech recognition (ASR) framework. The first step in our approach involves training a seed model on the limited amount of labelled data. Additional unlabelled speech data is employed through a data selection mechanism to obtain the best hypothesized output, further used to retrain the seed model. However, uncertainties of the model may not be well captured with a single hypothesis. As opposed to this technique, we apply a dropout mechanism to capture the uncertainty by obtaining multiple hypothesized text transcripts of an speech recording. We assume that the diversity of automatically generated transcripts for an utterance will implicitly increase the reliability of the model. Finally, the data selection process is also applied on these hypothesized transcripts to reduce the uncertainty. Experiments on freely available TEDLIUM corpus and proprietary Adobe's internal dataset show that the proposed approach significantly reduces ASR errors, compared to the baseline model.

OBJECTIVE: Patient notes in electronic health records (EHRs) may contain critical information for medical investigations. However, the vast majority of medical investigators can only access de-identified notes, in order to protect the confidentiality of patients. In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) defines 18 types of protected health information that needs to be removed to de-identify patient notes. Manual de-identification is impractical given the size of electronic health record databases, the limited number of researchers with access to non-de-identified notes, and the frequent mistakes of human annotators. A reliable automated de-identification system would consequently be of high value. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We introduce the first de-identification system based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which requires no handcrafted features or rules, unlike existing systems. We compare the performance of the system with state-of-the-art systems on two datasets: the i2b2 2014 de-identification challenge dataset, which is the largest publicly available de-identification dataset, and the MIMIC de-identification dataset, which we assembled and is twice as large as the i2b2 2014 dataset. RESULTS: Our ANN model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems. It yields an F1-score of 97.85 on the i2b2 2014 dataset, with a recall of 97.38 and a precision of 98.32, and an F1-score of 99.23 on the MIMIC de-identification dataset, with a recall of 99.25 and a precision of 99.21. CONCLUSION: Our findings support the use of ANNs for de-identification of patient notes, as they show better performance than previously published systems while requiring no manual feature engineering.

Recent approaches based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) have shown promising results for short-text classification. However, many short texts occur in sequences (e.g., sentences in a document or utterances in a dialog), and most existing ANN-based systems do not leverage the preceding short texts when classifying a subsequent one. In this work, we present a model based on recurrent neural networks and convolutional neural networks that incorporates the preceding short texts. Our model achieves state-of-the-art results on three different datasets for dialog act prediction.

Systems based on artificial neural networks (ANNs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in many natural language processing tasks. Although ANNs do not require manually engineered features, ANNs have many hyperparameters to be optimized. The choice of hyperparameters significantly impacts models' performances. However, the ANN hyperparameters are typically chosen by manual, grid, or random search, which either requires expert experiences or is computationally expensive. Recent approaches based on Bayesian optimization using Gaussian processes (GPs) is a more systematic way to automatically pinpoint optimal or near-optimal machine learning hyperparameters. Using a previously published ANN model yielding state-of-the-art results for dialog act classification, we demonstrate that optimizing hyperparameters using GP further improves the results, and reduces the computational time by a factor of 4 compared to a random search. Therefore it is a useful technique for tuning ANN models to yield the best performances for NLP tasks.

Physiological signals such as blood pressure might contain key information to predict a medical condition, but are challenging to mine. Wavelets possess the ability to unveil location-specific features within signals but there exists no principled method to choose the optimal scales and time shifts. We present a scalable, robust system to find the best wavelet parameters using Gaussian processes (GPs). We demonstrate our system by assessing wavelets as predictors for the occurrence of acute hypotensive episodes (AHEs) using over 1 billion blood pressure beats. We obtain an AUROC of 0.79 with wavelet features only, and the false positive rate when the true positive rate is fixed at 0.90 is reduced by 14% when the wavelet feature is used in conjunction with other statistical features. Furthermore, the use of GPs reduces the selection effort by a factor of 3 compared with a naive grid search.