Socratic questioning is a form of reflective inquiry often employed in education to encourage critical thinking in students, and to elicit awareness of beliefs and perspectives in a subject during therapeutic counseling. Specific types of Socratic questions are employed for enabling reasoning and alternate views against the context of individual personal opinions on a topic. Socratic contexts are different from traditional question generation contexts where “answer-seeking” questions are generated against a given formal passage on a topic, narrative stories or conversations. We present SocratiQ, the first large dataset of 110K (question, context) pairs for enabling studies on Socratic Question Generation (SoQG). We provide an in-depth study on the various types of Socratic questions and present models for generating Socratic questions against a given context through prompt tuning. Our automated and human evaluation results demonstrate that our SoQG models can produce realistic, type-sensitive, human-like Socratic questions enabling potential applications in counseling and coaching.

We describe our models for the Pragmatic Tagging of Peer Reviews Shared Task at the 10th Workshop on Argument Mining at EMNLP-2023. We trained multiple sentence classification models for the above competition task by employing various state-of-the-art transformer models that can be fine-tuned either in the traditional way or through instruction-based fine-tuning. Multiple model predictions on unlabeled data are combined to tentatively label unlabeled instances and augment the dataset to further improve performance on the prediction task. In particular, on the F1000RD corpus, we perform on-par with models trained on 100% of the training data while using only 10% of the data. Overall, on the competition datasets, we rank among the top-2 performers for the different data conditions.

While question generation (QG) has received significant focus in conversation modeling and text generation research, the problems of comparing questions and evaluation of QG models have remained inadequately addressed. Indeed, QG models continue to be evaluated using traditional measures such as BLEU, METEOR, and ROUGE scores which were designed for other text generation problems. We propose QSTS, a novel Question-Sensitive Text Similarity measure for comparing two questions by characterizing their target intent based on question class, named-entity, and semantic similarity information from the two questions. We show that QSTS addresses several shortcomings of existing measures that depend on n-gram overlap scores and obtains superior results compared to traditional measures on publicly-available QG datasets. We also collect a novel dataset SimQG, for enabling question similarity research in QG contexts. SimQG contains questions generated by state-of-the-art QG models along with human judgements on their relevance with respect to the passage context they were generated for as well as when compared to the given reference question. Using SimQG, we showcase the key aspect of QSTS that differentiates it from all existing measures. QSTS is not only able to characterize similarity between two questions, but is also able to score questions with respect to passage contexts. Thus QSTS is, to our knowledge, the first metric that enables the measurement of QG performance in a reference-free manner.

To fully model human-like ability to ask questions, automatic question generation (QG) models must be able to produce multiple expressions of the same question with different levels of detail. Unfortunately, existing datasets available for learning QG do not include paraphrases or question variations affecting a model’s ability to learn this capability. We present FIRS, a dataset containing human-generated fact-infused rewrites of questions from the widely-used SQuAD dataset to address this limitation. Questions in FIRS were obtained by combining a given question with facts of entities referenced in the question. We study a double encoder-decoder model, Fact-Infused Question Generator (FIQG), for learning to generate fact-infused questions from a given question. Experimental results show that FIQG effectively incorporates information from facts to add more detail to a given question. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first study to present fact-infusion as a novel form of question paraphrasing.

Event Sentence Coreference Identification (ESCI) aims to cluster event sentences that refer to the same event together for information extraction. We describe our ESCI solution developed for the ACL-CASE 2021 shared tasks on the detection and classification of socio-political and crisis event information in a multilingual setting. For a given article, our proposed pipeline comprises of an accurate sentence pair classifier that identifies coreferent sentence pairs and subsequently uses these predicted probabilities to cluster sentences into groups. Sentence pair representations are constructed from fine-tuned BERT embeddings plus POS embeddings fed through a BiLSTM model, and combined with linguistic-based lexical and semantic similarities between sentences. Our best models ranked 2nd, 1st and 2nd and obtained CoNLL F1 scores of 81.20%, 93.03%, 83.15% for the English, Portuguese and Spanish test sets respectively in the ACL-CASE 2021 competition.

We describe our system for identifying users at-risk for suicide based on their tweets developed for the CLPsych 2021 Shared Task. Based on research in mental health studies linking self-harm tendencies with suicide, in our system, we attempt to characterize self-harm aspects expressed in user tweets over a period of time. To this end, we design SHTM, a Self-Harm Topic Model that combines Latent Dirichlet Allocation with a self-harm dictionary for modeling daily tweets of users. Next, differences in moods and topics over time are captured as features to train a deep learning model for suicide prediction.

Despite the advancements in search engine features, ranking methods, technologies, and the availability of programmable APIs, current-day open-access digital libraries still rely on crawl-based approaches for acquiring their underlying document collections. In this paper, we propose a novel search-driven framework for acquiring documents for such scientific portals. Within our framework, publicly-available research paper titles and author names are used as queries to a Web search engine. We were able to obtain ~267,000 unique research papers through our fully-automated framework using ~76,000 queries, resulting in almost 200,000 more papers than the number of queries. Moreover, through a combination of title and author name search, we were able to recover 78% of the original searched titles.

Accurate detection of emotions in user- generated text was shown to have several applications for e-commerce, public well-being, and disaster management. Currently, the state-of-the-art performance for emotion detection in text is obtained using complex, deep learning models trained on domain-specific, labeled data. In this paper, we propose ESTeR , an unsupervised model for identifying emotions using a novel similarity function based on random walks on graphs. Our model combines large-scale word co-occurrence information with word-associations from lexicons avoiding not only the dependence on labeled datasets, but also an explicit mapping of words to latent spaces used in emotion-enriched word embeddings. Our similarity function can also be computed efficiently. We study a range of datasets including recent tweets related to COVID-19 to illustrate the superior performance of our model and report insights on public emotions during the on-going pandemic.