Long Mai


2023

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I already said that! Degenerating redundant questions in open-domain dialogue systems.
Long Mai | Julie Carson-berndsen
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)

Neural text generation models have achieved remarkable success in carrying on short open-domain conversations. However, their performance degrades significantly in the long term, especially in their ability to ask coherent questions. A significant issue is the generation of redundant questions where the answer has already been provided by the user. We adapt and evaluate different methods, including negative training, decoding, and classification, to mitigate the redundancy problem. We also propose a simple yet effective method for generating training data without the need for crowdsourcing human-human or human-bot conversations. Experiments with the BlenderBot model show that our combined method significantly reduces the rate of redundant questions from 27.2% to 8.7%, while improving the quality of the original model. The code, dataset, and trained models can be found at our repository.

2022

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Double Trouble: How to not Explain a Text Classifier’s Decisions Using Counterfactuals Synthesized by Masked Language Models?
Thang Pham | Trung Bui | Long Mai | Anh Nguyen
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

A principle behind dozens of attribution methods is to take the prediction difference between before-and-after an input feature (here, a token) is removed as its attribution. A popular Input Marginalization (IM) method (Kim et al., 2020) uses BERT to replace a token, yielding more plausible counterfactuals. While Kim et al., 2020 reported that IM is effective, we find this conclusion not convincing as the Deletion-BERT metric used in their paper is biased towards IM. Importantly, this bias exists in Deletion-based metrics, including Insertion, Sufficiency, and Comprehensiveness. Furthermore, our rigorous evaluation using 6 metrics and 3 datasets finds no evidence that IM is better than a Leave-One-Out (LOO) baseline. We find two reasons why IM is not better than LOO: (1) deleting a single word from the input only marginally reduces a classifier’s accuracy; and (2) a highly predictable word is always given near-zero attribution, regardless of its true importance to the classifier. In contrast, making LIME samples more natural via BERT consistently improves LIME accuracy under several ROAR metrics.

2021

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Out of Order: How important is the sequential order of words in a sentence in Natural Language Understanding tasks?
Thang Pham | Trung Bui | Long Mai | Anh Nguyen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021