Humanitarian organizations can enhance their effectiveness by analyzing data to discover trends, gather aggregated insights, manage their security risks, support decision-making, and inform advocacy and funding proposals. However, data about violent incidents with direct impact and relevance for humanitarian aid operations is not readily available. An automatic data collection and NLP-backed classification framework aligned with humanitarian perspectives can help bridge this gap. In this paper, we present HumVI – a dataset comprising news articles in three languages (English, French, Arabic) containing instances of different types of violent incidents categorized by the humanitarian sector they impact, e.g., aid security, education, food security, health, and protection. Reliable labels were obtained for the dataset by partnering with a data-backed humanitarian organization, Insecurity Insight. We provide multiple benchmarks for the dataset, employing various deep learning architectures and techniques, including data augmentation and mask loss, to address different task-related challenges, e.g., domain expansion. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/dataminr-ai/humvi-dataset.

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., indicate lower faithfulness as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) unlike non-pair-based datasets, BUMP can be used to measure the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, and 3) unlike datasets containing generated summaries with multiple errors, BUMP enables the measurement of metrics’ performance on individual error types.

Recent work on Event Extraction has reframed the task as Question Answering (QA), with promising results. The advantage of this approach is that it addresses the error propagation issue found in traditional token-based classification approaches by directly predicting event arguments without extracting candidates first. However, the questions are typically based on fixed templates and they rarely leverage contextual information such as relevant arguments. In addition, prior QA-based approaches have difficulty handling cases where there are multiple arguments for the same role. In this paper, we propose QGA-EE, which enables a Question Generation (QG) model to generate questions that incorporate rich contextual information instead of using fixed templates. We also propose dynamic templates to assist the training of QG model. Experiments show that QGA-EE outperforms all prior single-task-based models on the ACE05 English dataset.

In this paper, we present MuFaSSa (Multi-view Faithfulness Scoring via Source Ablation), a metric for evaluating faithfulness of abstractive summaries, and for guiding training of more faithful summarizers. For evaluation, MuFaSSa employs different strategies (e.g., masking entity mentions) to first remove information from the source document to form multiple ablated views. Then, the faithfulness level of each token in a generated summary is measured by the difference between the token generation probabilities when given the original document and the ablated document as inputs to trained summarizers. For training, MuFaSSa uses a novel word truncation objective that drops unfaithful tokens located by MuFaSSa in both the decoder input and output. Alignments with human-annotated faithfulness labels on AggreFact show that MuFaSSa is comparable to or better than existing metrics built on classifiers or QA models pre-trained on other tasks. In experiments on summarization with XSum and CNN/DailyMail, models trained with word truncation using MuFaSSa outperform competitive methods according to both automatic faithfulness metrics and human assessments.

The ability to conduct retrospective analyses of attacks on human rights defenders over time and by location is important for humanitarian organizations to better understand historical or ongoing human rights violations and thus better manage the global impact of such events. We hypothesize that NLP can support such efforts by quickly processing large collections of news articles to detect and summarize the characteristics of attacks on human rights defenders. To that end, we propose a new dataset for detecting Attacks on Human Rights Defenders (HRDsAttack) consisting of crowdsourced annotations on 500 online news articles. The annotations include fine-grained information about the type and location of the attacks, as well as information about the victim(s). We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by using it to train and evaluate baseline models on several sub-tasks to predict the annotated characteristics.

To explore how humans can best leverage LLMs for writing and how interacting with these models affects feelings of ownership and trust in the writing process, we compared common human-AI interaction types (e.g., guiding system, selecting from system outputs, post-editing outputs) in the context of LLM-assisted news headline generation. While LLMs alone can generate satisfactory news headlines, on average, human control is needed to fix undesirable model outputs. Of the interaction methods, guiding and selecting model output added the most benefit with the lowest cost (in time and effort). Further, AI assistance did not harm participants’ perception of control compared to freeform editing.

The recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history. This has resulted in concerns that the field will become homogenized and resource-intensive. This new status quo has put many academic researchers, especially PhD students, at a disadvantage. This paper aims to define a new NLP playground by proposing 20+ PhD-dissertation-worthy research directions, covering theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications.

We report our efforts in identifying a set of previous human evaluations in NLP that would be suitable for a coordinated study examining what makes human evaluations in NLP more/less reproducible. We present our results and findings, which include that just 13% of papers had (i) sufficiently low barriers to reproduction, and (ii) enough obtainable information, to be considered for reproduction, and that all but one of the experiments we selected for reproduction was discovered to have flaws that made the meaningfulness of conducting a reproduction questionable. As a result, we had to change our coordinated study design from a reproduce approach to a standardise-then-reproduce-twice approach. Our overall (negative) finding that the great majority of human evaluations in NLP is not repeatable and/or not reproducible and/or too flawed to justify reproduction, paints a dire picture, but presents an opportunity for a rethink about how to design and report human evaluations in NLP.

This paper describes and analyzes our participation in the 2023 Eval4NLP shared task, which focuses on assessing the effectiveness of prompt-based techniques to empower Large Language Models to handle the task of quality estimation, particularly in the context of evaluating machine translations and summaries. We conducted systematic experiments with various prompting techniques, including standard prompting, prompts informed by annotator instructions, and innovative chain-of-thought prompting. In addition, we integrated these approaches with zero-shot and one-shot learning methods to maximize the efficacy of our evaluation procedures. Our work reveals that combining these approaches using a “small”, open source model (orca_mini_v3_7B) yields competitive results.

Automatic text summarization systems commonly involve humans for preparing data or evaluating model performance, yet, there lacks a systematic understanding of humans’ roles, experience, and needs when interacting with or being assisted by AI. From a human-centered perspective, we map the design opportunities and considerations for human-AI interaction in text summarization and broader text generation tasks. We first conducted a systematic literature review of 70 papers, developing a taxonomy of five interactions in AI-assisted text generation and relevant design dimensions. We designed text summarization prototypes for each interaction. We then interviewed 16 users, aided by the prototypes, to understand their expectations, experience, and needs regarding efficiency, control, and trust with AI in text summarization and propose design considerations accordingly.

Automatic summarization methods are efficient but can suffer from low quality. In comparison, manual summarization is expensive but produces higher quality. Can humans and AI collaborate to improve summarization performance? In similar text generation tasks (e.g., machine translation), human-AI collaboration in the form of “post-editing” AI-generated text reduces human workload and improves the quality of AI output. Therefore, we explored whether post-editing offers advantages in text summarization. Specifically, we conducted an experiment with 72 participants, comparing post-editing provided summaries with manual summarization for summary quality, human efficiency, and user experience on formal (XSum news) and informal (Reddit posts) text. This study sheds valuable insights on when post-editing is useful for text summarization: it helped in some cases (e.g., when participants lacked domain knowledge) but not in others (e.g., when provided summaries include inaccurate information). Participants’ different editing strategies and needs for assistance offer implications for future human-AI summarization systems.

Temporal Expression Extraction (TEE) is essential for understanding time in natural language. It has applications in Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as question answering, information retrieval, and causal inference. To date, work in this area has mostly focused on English as there is a scarcity of labeled data for other languages. We propose XLTime, a novel framework for multilingual TEE. XLTime works on top of pre-trained language models and leverages multi-task learning to prompt cross-language knowledge transfer both from English and within the non-English languages. XLTime alleviates problems caused by a shortage of data in the target language. We apply XLTime with different language models and show that it outperforms the previous automatic SOTA methods on French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Basque, by large margins. XLTime also closes the gap considerably on the handcrafted HeidelTime method.

Social media has increasingly played a key role in emergency response: first responders can use public posts to better react to ongoing crisis events and deploy the necessary resources where they are most needed. Timeline extraction and abstractive summarization are critical technical tasks to leverage large numbers of social media posts about events. Unfortunately, there are few datasets for benchmarking technical approaches for those tasks. This paper presents , the largest dataset of local crisis event timelines available to date. contains 1,000 crisis event timelines across four domains: wildfires, local fires, traffic, and storms. We built using a semi-automated cluster-then-refine approach to collect data from the public Twitter stream. Our initial experiments indicate a significant gap between the performance of strong baselines compared to the human performance on both tasks.Our dataset, code, and models are publicly available (https://github.com/CrisisLTLSum/CrisisTimelines).

Social media is an essential tool to share information about crisis events, such as natural disasters. Event Detection aims at extracting information in the form of an event, but considers each event in isolation, without combining information across sentences or events. Many posts in Crisis NLP contain repetitive or complementary information which needs to be aggregated (e.g., the number of trapped people and their location) for disaster response. Although previous approaches in Crisis NLP aggregate information across posts, they only use shallow representations of the content (e.g., keywords), which cannot adequately represent the semantics of a crisis event and its sub-events. In this work, we propose a novel framework to extract critical sub-events from a large-scale crisis event by combining important information across relevant tweets. Our framework first converts all the tweets from a crisis event into a temporally-ordered set of graphs. Then it extracts sub-graphs that represent semantic relationships connecting verbs and nouns in 3 to 6 node sub-graphs. It does this by learning edge weights via Dynamic Graph Convolutional Networks (DGCNs) and extracting smaller, relevant sub-graphs. Our experiments show that our extracted structures (1) are semantically meaningful sub-events and (2) contain information important for the large crisis-event. Furthermore, we show that our approach significantly outperforms event detection baselines, highlighting the importance of aggregating information across tweets for our task.

We take the first step towards multilingual style transfer by creating and releasing XFORMAL, a benchmark of multiple formal reformulations of informal text in Brazilian Portuguese, French, and Italian. Results on XFORMAL suggest that state-of-the-art style transfer approaches perform close to simple baselines, indicating that style transfer is even more challenging when moving multilingual.

Recent works show that the graph structure of sentences, generated from dependency parsers, has potential for improving event detection. However, they often only leverage the edges (dependencies) between words, and discard the dependency labels (e.g., nominal-subject), treating the underlying graph edges as homogeneous. In this work, we propose a novel framework for incorporating both dependencies and their labels using a recently proposed technique called Graph Transformer Network (GTN). We integrate GTN to leverage dependency relations on two existing homogeneous-graph-based models and demonstrate an improvement in the F1 score on the ACE dataset.

This paper reviews and summarizes human evaluation practices described in 97 style transfer papers with respect to three main evaluation aspects: style transfer, meaning preservation, and fluency. In principle, evaluations by human raters should be the most reliable. However, in style transfer papers, we find that protocols for human evaluations are often underspecified and not standardized, which hampers the reproducibility of research in this field and progress toward better human and automatic evaluation methods.

While the field of style transfer (ST) has been growing rapidly, it has been hampered by a lack of standardized practices for automatic evaluation. In this paper, we evaluate leading automatic metrics on the oft-researched task of formality style transfer. Unlike previous evaluations, which focus solely on English, we expand our focus to Brazilian-Portuguese, French, and Italian, making this work the first multilingual evaluation of metrics in ST. We outline best practices for automatic evaluation in (formality) style transfer and identify several models that correlate well with human judgments and are robust across languages. We hope that this work will help accelerate development in ST, where human evaluation is often challenging to collect.

The task of news article image captioning aims to generate descriptive and informative captions for news article images. Unlike conventional image captions that simply describe the content of the image in general terms, news image captions follow journalistic guidelines and rely heavily on named entities to describe the image content, often drawing context from the whole article they are associated with. In this work, we propose a new approach to this task, motivated by caption guidelines that journalists follow. Our approach, Journalistic Guidelines Aware News Image Captioning (JoGANIC), leverages the structure of captions to improve the generation quality and guide our representation design. Experimental results, including detailed ablation studies, on two large-scale publicly available datasets show that JoGANIC substantially outperforms state-of-the-art methods both on caption generation and named entity related metrics.

News articles, image captions, product reviews and many other texts mention people and organizations whose name recognition could vary for different audiences. In such cases, background information about the named entities could be provided in the form of an appositive noun phrase, either written by a human or generated automatically. We expand on the previous work in appositive generation with a new, more realistic, end-to-end definition of the task, instantiated by a dataset that spans four languages (English, Spanish, German and Polish), two entity types (person and organization) and two domains (Wikipedia and News). We carry out an extensive analysis of the data and the task, pointing to the various modeling challenges it poses. The results we obtain with standard language generation methods show that the task is indeed non-trivial, and leaves plenty of room for improvement.

Though preceding work in computational argument quality (AQ) mostly focuses on assessing overall AQ, researchers agree that writers would benefit from feedback targeting individual dimensions of argumentation theory. However, a large-scale theory-based corpus and corresponding computational models are missing. We fill this gap by conducting an extensive analysis covering three diverse domains of online argumentative writing and presenting GAQCorpus: the first large-scale English multi-domain (community Q&A forums, debate forums, review forums) corpus annotated with theory-based AQ scores. We then propose the first computational approaches to theory-based assessment, which can serve as strong baselines for future work. We demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale AQ annotation, show that exploiting relations between dimensions yields performance improvements, and explore the synergies between theory-based prediction and practical AQ assessment.

Computational models of argument quality (AQ) have focused primarily on assessing the overall quality or just one specific characteristic of an argument, such as its convincingness or its clarity. However, previous work has claimed that assessment based on theoretical dimensions of argumentation could benefit writers, but developing such models has been limited by the lack of annotated data. In this work, we describe GAQCorpus, the first large, domain-diverse annotated corpus of theory-based AQ. We discuss how we designed the annotation task to reliably collect a large number of judgments with crowdsourcing, formulating theory-based guidelines that helped make subjective judgments of AQ more objective. We demonstrate how to identify arguments and adapt the annotation task for three diverse domains. Our work will inform research on theory-based argumentation annotation and enable the creation of more diverse corpora to support computational AQ assessment.

Given the overwhelming number of emails, an effective subject line becomes essential to better inform the recipient of the email’s content. In this paper, we propose and study the task of email subject line generation: automatically generating an email subject line from the email body. We create the first dataset for this task and find that email subject line generation favor extremely abstractive summary which differentiates it from news headline generation or news single document summarization. We then develop a novel deep learning method and compare it to several baselines as well as recent state-of-the-art text summarization systems. We also investigate the efficacy of several automatic metrics based on correlations with human judgments and propose a new automatic evaluation metric. Our system outperforms competitive baselines given both automatic and human evaluations. To our knowledge, this is the first work to tackle the problem of effective email subject line generation.

Until now, grammatical error correction (GEC) has been primarily evaluated on text written by non-native English speakers, with a focus on student essays. This paper enables GEC development on text written by native speakers by providing a new data set and metric. We present a multiple-reference test corpus for GEC that includes 4,000 sentences in two new domains (formal and informal writing by native English speakers) and 2,000 sentences from a diverse set of non-native student writing. We also collect human judgments of several GEC systems on this new test set and perform a meta-evaluation, assessing how reliable automatic metrics are across these domains. We find that commonly used GEC metrics have inconsistent performance across domains, and therefore we propose a new ensemble metric that is robust on all three domains of text.

Recent work in Dialogue Act classification has treated the task as a sequence labeling problem using hierarchical deep neural networks. We build on this prior work by leveraging the effectiveness of a context-aware self-attention mechanism coupled with a hierarchical recurrent neural network. We conduct extensive evaluations on standard Dialogue Act classification datasets and show significant improvement over state-of-the-art results on the Switchboard Dialogue Act (SwDA) Corpus. We also investigate the impact of different utterance-level representation learning methods and show that our method is effective at capturing utterance-level semantic text representations while maintaining high accuracy.

Grammar error correction (GEC) systems have become ubiquitous in a variety of software applications, and have started to approach human-level performance for some datasets. However, very little is known about how to efficiently personalize these systems to the user’s characteristics, such as their proficiency level and first language, or to emerging domains of text. We present the first results on adapting a general purpose neural GEC system to both the proficiency level and the first language of a writer, using only a few thousand annotated sentences. Our study is the broadest of its kind, covering five proficiency levels and twelve different languages, and comparing three different adaptation scenarios: adapting to the proficiency level only, to the first language only, or to both aspects simultaneously. We show that tailoring to both scenarios achieves the largest performance improvement (3.6 F0.5) relative to a strong baseline.

In this paper, we investigate the impact of using 4 recent neural models for generating artificial errors to help train the neural grammatical error correction models. We conduct a battery of experiments on the effect of data size, models, and comparison with a rule-based approach.

Style transfer is the task of automatically transforming a piece of text in one particular style into another. A major barrier to progress in this field has been a lack of training and evaluation datasets, as well as benchmarks and automatic metrics. In this work, we create the largest corpus for a particular stylistic transfer (formality) and show that techniques from the machine translation community can serve as strong baselines for future work. We also discuss challenges of using automatic metrics.

To date there has been very little work on assessing discourse coherence methods on real-world data. To address this, we present a new corpus of real-world texts (GCDC) as well as the first large-scale evaluation of leading discourse coherence algorithms. We show that neural models, including two that we introduce here (SentAvg and ParSeq), tend to perform best. We analyze these performance differences and discuss patterns we observed in low coherence texts in four domains.

Run-on sentences are common grammatical mistakes but little research has tackled this problem to date. This work introduces two machine learning models to correct run-on sentences that outperform leading methods for related tasks, punctuation restoration and whole-sentence grammatical error correction. Due to the limited annotated data for this error, we experiment with artificially generating training data from clean newswire text. Our findings suggest artificial training data is viable for this task. We discuss implications for correcting run-ons and other types of mistakes that have low coverage in error-annotated corpora.

We present a new parallel corpus, JHU FLuency-Extended GUG corpus (JFLEG) for developing and evaluating grammatical error correction (GEC). Unlike other corpora, it represents a broad range of language proficiency levels and uses holistic fluency edits to not only correct grammatical errors but also make the original text more native sounding. We describe the types of corrections made and benchmark four leading GEC systems on this corpus, identifying specific areas in which they do well and how they can improve. JFLEG fulfills the need for a new gold standard to properly assess the current state of GEC.

This work presents a dataset and annotation scheme for the new task of identifying “good” conversations that occur online, which we call ERICs: Engaging, Respectful, and/or Informative Conversations. We develop a taxonomy to reflect features of entire threads and individual comments which we believe contribute to identifying ERICs; code a novel dataset of Yahoo News comment threads (2.4k threads and 10k comments) and 1k threads from the Internet Argument Corpus; and analyze the features characteristic of ERICs. This is one of the largest annotated corpora of online human dialogues, with the most detailed set of annotations. It will be valuable for identifying ERICs and other aspects of argumentation, dialogue, and discourse.

Native Language Identification (NLI) is the task of automatically identifying the native language (L1) of an individual based on their language production in a learned language. It is typically framed as a classification task where the set of L1s is known a priori. Two previous shared tasks on NLI have been organized where the aim was to identify the L1 of learners of English based on essays (2013) and spoken responses (2016) they provided during a standardized assessment of academic English proficiency. The 2017 shared task combines the inputs from the two prior tasks for the first time. There are three tracks: NLI on the essay only, NLI on the spoken response only (based on a transcription of the response and i-vector acoustic features), and NLI using both responses. We believe this makes for a more interesting shared task while building on the methods and results from the previous two shared tasks. In this paper, we report the results of the shared task. A total of 19 teams competed across the three different sub-tasks. The fusion track showed that combining the written and spoken responses provides a large boost in prediction accuracy. Multiple classifier systems (e.g. ensembles and meta-classifiers) were the most effective in all tasks, with most based on traditional classifiers (e.g. SVMs) with lexical/syntactic features.

The field of grammatical error correction (GEC) has made tremendous bounds in the last ten years, but new questions and obstacles are revealing themselves. In this position paper, we discuss the issues that need to be addressed and provide recommendations for the field to continue to make progress, and propose a new shared task. We invite suggestions and critiques from the audience to make the new shared task a community-driven venture.

This paper presents an empirical study of linguistic formality. We perform an analysis of humans’ perceptions of formality in four different genres. These findings are used to develop a statistical model for predicting formality, which is evaluated under different feature settings and genres. We apply our model to an investigation of formality in online discussion forums, and present findings consistent with theories of formality and linguistic coordination.

The field of grammatical error correction (GEC) has grown substantially in recent years, with research directed at both evaluation metrics and improved system performance against those metrics. One unvisited assumption, however, is the reliance of GEC evaluation on error-coded corpora, which contain specific labeled corrections. We examine current practices and show that GEC’s reliance on such corpora unnaturally constrains annotation and automatic evaluation, resulting in (a) sentences that do not sound acceptable to native speakers and (b) system rankings that do not correlate with human judgments. In light of this, we propose an alternate approach that jettisons costly error coding in favor of unannotated, whole-sentence rewrites. We compare the performance of existing metrics over different gold-standard annotations, and show that automatic evaluation with our new annotation scheme has very strong correlation with expert rankings (ρ = 0.82). As a result, we advocate for a fundamental and necessary shift in the goal of GEC, from correcting small, labeled error types, to producing text that has native fluency.

The New Yorker publishes a weekly captionless cartoon. More than 5,000 readers submit captions for it. The editors select three of them and ask the readers to pick the funniest one. We describe an experiment that compares a dozen automatic methods for selecting the funniest caption. We show that negative sentiment, human-centeredness, and lexical centrality most strongly match the funniest captions, followed by positive sentiment. These results are useful for understanding humor and also in the design of more engaging conversational agents in text and multimodal (vision+text) systems. As part of this work, a large set of cartoons and captions is being made available to the community.

This paper presents research on building a model of grammatical error correction, for preposition errors in particular, in English text produced by language learners. Unlike most previous work which trains a statistical classifier exclusively on well-formed text written by native speakers, we train a classifier on a large-scale, error-tagged corpus of English essays written by ESL learners, relying on contextual and grammatical features surrounding preposition usage. First, we show that such a model can achieve high performance values: 93.3% precision and 14.8% recall for error detection and 81.7% precision and 13.2% recall for error detection and correction when tested on preposition replacement errors. Second, we show that this model outperforms models trained on well-edited text produced by native speakers of English. We discuss the implications of our approach in the area of language error modeling and the issues stemming from working with a noisy data set whose error annotations are not exhaustive.