Alexander Scarlatos


2023

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Tree-Based Representation and Generation of Natural and Mathematical Language
Alexander Scarlatos | Andrew Lan
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Mathematical language in scientific communications and educational scenarios is important yet relatively understudied compared to natural languages. Recent works on mathematical language focus either on representing stand-alone mathematical expressions, especially in their natural tree format, or mathematical reasoning in pre-trained natural language models. Existing works on jointly modeling and generating natural and mathematical languages simply treat mathematical expressions as text, without accounting for the rigid structural properties of mathematical expressions. In this paper, we propose a series of modifications to existing language models to jointly represent and generate text and math: representing mathematical expressions as sequences of node tokens in their operator tree format, using math symbol and tree position embeddings to preserve the semantic and structural properties of mathematical expressions, and using a constrained decoding method to generate mathematically valid expressions. We ground our modifications in GPT-2, resulting in a model MathGPT, and demonstrate that it outperforms baselines on mathematical expression generation tasks.

2022

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UMass PCL at SemEval-2022 Task 4: Pre-trained Language Model Ensembles for Detecting Patronizing and Condescending Language
David Koleczek | Alexander Scarlatos | Preshma Linet Pereira | Siddha Makarand Karkare
Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2022)

Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is everywhere, but rarely is the focus on its use by media towards vulnerable communities. Accurately detecting PCL of this form is a difficult task due to limited labeled data and how subtle it can be. In this paper, we describe our system for detecting such language which was submitted to SemEval 2022 Task 4: Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection. Our approach uses an ensemble of pre-trained language models, data augmentation, and optimizing the threshold for detection. Experimental results on the evaluation dataset released by the competition hosts show that our work is reliably able to detect PCL, achieving an F1 score of 55.47% on the binary classification task and a macro F1 score of 36.25% on the fine-grained, multi-label detection task.