Ian Berlot-Attwell


2022

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Relevance in Dialogue: Is Less More? An Empirical Comparison of Existing Metrics, and a Novel Simple Metric
Ian Berlot-Attwell | Frank Rudzicz
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on NLP for Conversational AI

In this work, we evaluate various existing dialogue relevance metrics, find strong dependency on the dataset, often with poor correlation with human scores of relevance, and propose modifications to reduce data requirements and domain sensitivity while improving correlation. Our proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art performance on the HUMOD dataset while reducing measured sensitivity to dataset by 37%-66%. We achieve this without fine-tuning a pretrained language model, and using only 3,750 unannotated human dialogues and a single negative example. Despite these limitations, we demonstrate competitive performance on four datasets from different domains. Our code, including our metric and experiments, is open sourced.

2020

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Exploring Text Specific and Blackbox Fairness Algorithms in Multimodal Clinical NLP
John Chen | Ian Berlot-Attwell | Xindi Wang | Safwan Hossain | Frank Rudzicz
Proceedings of the 3rd Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

Clinical machine learning is increasingly multimodal, collected in both structured tabular formats and unstructured forms such as free text. We propose a novel task of exploring fairness on a multimodal clinical dataset, adopting equalized odds for the downstream medical prediction tasks. To this end, we investigate a modality-agnostic fairness algorithm - equalized odds post processing - and compare it to a text-specific fairness algorithm: debiased clinical word embeddings. Despite the fact that debiased word embeddings do not explicitly address equalized odds of protected groups, we show that a text-specific approach to fairness may simultaneously achieve a good balance of performance classical notions of fairness. Our work opens the door for future work at the critical intersection of clinical NLP and fairness.