Key Point Analysis (KPA) has been recently proposed for deriving fine-grained insights from collections of textual comments.KPA extracts the main points in the data as a list of concise sentences or phrases, termed key points, and quantifies their prevalence.While key points are more expressive than word clouds and key phrases, making sense of a long, flat list of key points, which often express related ideas in varying levels of granularity, may still be challenging.To address this limitation of KPA, we introduce the task of organizing a given set of key points into a hierarchy, according to their specificity.Such hierarchies may be viewed as a novel type of Textual Entailment Graph.We develop THINKP, a high quality benchmark dataset of key point hierarchies for business and product reviews, obtained by consolidating multiple annotations.We compare different methods for predicting pairwise relations between key points, and for inferring a hierarchy from these pairwise predictions.In particular, for the task of computing pairwise key point relations, we achieve significant gains over existing strong baselines by applying directional distributional similarity methods to a novel distributional representation of key points, and further boost performance via weak supervision.

Data privacy, security and compliance concerns prevent many enterprises from migrating their critical applications to public cloud infrastructure. To address this, cloud providers offer specialized clouds for heavily regulated industries, which implement prescribed security standards. A critical step in the migration process is to ensure that the customer's security requirements are fully met by the cloud provider. With a few hundreds of services in a typical cloud provider's infrastructure, this becomes a non-trivial task. Few tens to hundreds of security checks exposed by each applicable service need to be matched with several hundreds to thousands of security controls from the customer. Mapping customer's controls to cloud provider's control set is done manually by experts, a process that often takes months to complete, and needs to be repeated with every new customer. Moreover, these mappings have to be re-evaluated following regulatory or business changes, as well as cloud infrastructure upgrades. We present an AI-assisted system for mapping security controls, which drastically reduces the number of candidates a human expert needs to consider, allowing substantial speed-up of the mapping process. We empirically compare several controls mapping models, and show that hierarchical classification using fine-tuned Transformer networks works best. Overall, our empirical results demonstrate that the system performs well on real-world data.

Roy Bar-Haim, Lilach Eden, Yoav Kantor, Roni Friedman, Noam Slonim. 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.

Generating a concise summary from a large collection of arguments on a given topic is an intriguing yet understudied problem.We propose to represent such summaries as a small set of talking points, termed key points, each scored according to its salience.We show, by analyzing a large dataset of crowd-contributed arguments, that a small number of key points per topic is typically sufficient for covering the vast majority of the arguments.Furthermore, we found that a domain expert can often predict these key points in advance.We study the task of argument-to-key point mapping, and introduce a novel large-scale dataset for this task.We report empirical results for an extensive set of experiments with this dataset, showing promising performance.

When summarizing a collection of views, arguments or opinions on some topic, it is often desirable not only to extract the most salient points, but also to quantify their prevalence.Work on multi-document summarization has traditionally focused on creating textual summaries, which lack this quantitative aspect.Recent work has proposed to summarize arguments by mapping them to a small set of expert-generated key points, where the salience of each key point corresponds to the number of its matching arguments.The current work advances key point analysis in two important respects: first, we develop a method for automatic extraction of key points, which enables fully automatic analysis, and is shown to achieve performance comparable to a human expert.Second, we demonstrate that the applicability of key point analysis goes well beyond argumentation data.Using models trained on publicly available argumentation datasets, we achieve promising results in two additional domains: municipal surveys and user reviews.An additional contribution is an in-depth evaluation of argument-to-key point matching models, where we substantially outperform previous results.

Matan Orbach, Yonatan Bilu, Ariel Gera, Yoav Kantor, Lena Dankin, Tamar Lavee, Lili Kotlerman, Shachar Mirkin, Michal Jacovi, Ranit Aharonov, Noam Slonim. Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP). 2019.

Shachar Mirkin, Guy Moshkowich, Matan Orbach, Lili Kotlerman, Yoav Kantor, Tamar Lavee, Michal Jacovi, Yonatan Bilu, Ranit Aharonov, Noam Slonim. Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2018.

This paper introduces a new family of redundancy schemes for distributed storage systems, called replicated erasure codes (REC), which combine the storage-space efficiency of erasure codes and the repair-traffic efficiency of replication. A formal model for analyzing the storage and repair-traffic costs under availability and persistency constraints is also developed. It is shown that under parameters that characterize common P2P environments, REC generally achieves better results than each of the two methods separately.