David Chen


2021

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Error-Sensitive Evaluation for Ordinal Target Variables
David Chen | Maury Courtland | Adam Faulkner | Aysu Ezen-Can
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Evaluation and Comparison of NLP Systems

Product reviews and satisfaction surveys seek customer feedback in the form of ranked scales. In these settings, widely used evaluation metrics including F1 and accuracy ignore the rank in the responses (e.g., ‘very likely’ is closer to ‘likely’ than ‘not at all’). In this paper, we hypothesize that the order of class values is important for evaluating classifiers on ordinal target variables and should not be disregarded. To test this hypothesis, we compared Multi-class Classification (MC) and Ordinal Regression (OR) by applying OR and MC to benchmark tasks involving ordinal target variables using the same underlying model architecture. Experimental results show that while MC outperformed OR for some datasets in accuracy and F1, OR is significantly better than MC for minimizing the error between prediction and target for all benchmarks, as revealed by error-sensitive metrics, e.g. mean-squared error (MSE) and Spearman correlation. Our findings motivate the need to establish consistent, error-sensitive metrics for evaluating benchmarks with ordinal target variables, and we hope that it stimulates interest in exploring alternative losses for ordinal problems.

2018

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Phrase2VecGLM: Neural generalized language model–based semantic tagging for complex query reformulation in medical IR
Manirupa Das | Eric Fosler-Lussier | Simon Lin | Soheil Moosavinasab | David Chen | Steve Rust | Yungui Huang | Rajiv Ramnath
Proceedings of the BioNLP 2018 workshop

In this work, we develop a novel, completely unsupervised, neural language model-based document ranking approach to semantic tagging of documents, using the document to be tagged as a query into the GLM to retrieve candidate phrases from top-ranked related documents, thus associating every document with novel related concepts extracted from the text. For this we extend the word embedding-based general language model due to Ganguly et al 2015, to employ phrasal embeddings, and use the semantic tags thus obtained for downstream query expansion, both directly and in feedback loop settings. Our method, evaluated using the TREC 2016 clinical decision support challenge dataset, shows statistically significant improvement not only over various baselines that use standard MeSH terms and UMLS concepts for query expansion, but also over baselines using human expert–assigned concept tags for the queries, run on top of a standard Okapi BM25–based document retrieval system.

2012

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Fast Online Lexicon Learning for Grounded Language Acquisition
David Chen
Proceedings of the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2011

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Collecting Highly Parallel Data for Paraphrase Evaluation
David Chen | William Dolan
Proceedings of the 49th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies