Miriam Anschütz


2023

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This is not correct! Negation-aware Evaluation of Language Generation Systems
Miriam Anschütz | Diego Miguel Lozano | Georg Groh
Proceedings of the 16th International Natural Language Generation Conference

Large language models underestimate the impact of negations on how much they change the meaning of a sentence. Therefore, learned evaluation metrics based on these models are insensitive to negations. In this paper, we propose NegBLEURT, a negation-aware version of the BLEURT evaluation metric. For that, we designed a rule-based sentence negation tool and used it to create the CANNOT negation evaluation dataset. Based on this dataset, we fine-tuned a sentence transformer and an evaluation metric to improve their negation sensitivity. Evaluating these models on existing benchmarks shows that our fine-tuned models outperform existing metrics on the negated sentences by far while preserving their base models’ performances on other perturbations.

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Language Models for German Text Simplification: Overcoming Parallel Data Scarcity through Style-specific Pre-training
Miriam Anschütz | Joshua Oehms | Thomas Wimmer | Bartłomiej Jezierski | Georg Groh
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Automatic text simplification systems help to reduce textual information barriers on the internet. However, for languages other than English, only few parallel data to train these systems exists. We propose a two-step approach to overcome this data scarcity issue. First, we fine-tuned language models on a corpus of German Easy Language, a specific style of German. Then, we used these models as decoders in a sequence-to-sequence simplification task. We show that the language models adapt to the style characteristics of Easy Language and output more accessible texts. Moreover, with the style-specific pre-training, we reduced the number of trainable parameters in text simplification models. Hence, less parallel data is sufficient for training. Our results indicate that pre-training on unaligned data can reduce the required parallel data while improving the performance on downstream tasks.

2022

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TUM Social Computing at GermEval 2022: Towards the Significance of Text Statistics and Neural Embeddings in Text Complexity Prediction
Miriam Anschütz | Georg Groh
Proceedings of the GermEval 2022 Workshop on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text

In this paper, we describe our submission to the GermEval 2022 Shared Task on Text Complexity Assessment of German Text. It addresses the problem of predicting the complexity of German sentences on a continuous scale. While many related works still rely on handcrafted statistical features, neural networks have emerged as state-of-the-art in other natural language processing tasks. Therefore, we investigate how both can complement each other and which features are most relevant for text complexity prediction in German. We propose a fine-tuned German DistilBERT model enriched with statistical text features that achieved fourth place in the shared task with a RMSE of 0.481 on the competition’s test data.