A Unified Evaluation Framework for Novelty Detection and Accommodation in NLP with an Instantiation in Authorship Attribution

Neeraj Varshney, Himanshu Gupta, Eric Robertson, Bing Liu, Chitta Baral


Abstract
State-of-the-art natural language processing models have been shown to achieve remarkable performance in ‘closed-world’ settings where all the labels in the evaluation set are known at training time. However, in real-world settings, ‘novel’ instances that do not belong to any known class are often observed. This renders the ability to deal with novelties crucial. To initiate a systematic research in this important area of ‘dealing with novelties’, we introduce NoveltyTask, a multi-stage task to evaluate a system’s performance on pipelined novelty ‘detection’ and ‘accommodation’ tasks. We provide mathematical formulation of NoveltyTask and instantiate it with the authorship attribution task that pertains to identifying the correct author of a given text. We use amazon reviews corpus and compile a large dataset (consisting of 250k instances across 200 authors/labels) for NoveltyTask. We conduct comprehensive experiments and explore several baseline methods for the task. Our results show that the methods achieve considerably low performance making the task challenging and leaving sufficient room for improvement. Finally, we believe our work will encourage research in this underexplored area of dealing with novelties, an important step en route to developing robust systems.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.113
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1794–1818
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.113
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.113
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Neeraj Varshney, Himanshu Gupta, Eric Robertson, Bing Liu, and Chitta Baral. 2023. A Unified Evaluation Framework for Novelty Detection and Accommodation in NLP with an Instantiation in Authorship Attribution. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 1794–1818, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Unified Evaluation Framework for Novelty Detection and Accommodation in NLP with an Instantiation in Authorship Attribution (Varshney et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.113.pdf