Yogarshi Vyas


2023

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Simple Yet Effective Synthetic Dataset Construction for Unsupervised Opinion Summarization
Ming Shen | Jie Ma | Shuai Wang | Yogarshi Vyas | Kalpit Dixit | Miguel Ballesteros | Yassine Benajiba
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2023

Opinion summarization provides an important solution for summarizing opinions expressed among a large number of reviews. However, generating aspect-specific and general summaries is challenging due to the lack of annotated data. In this work, we propose two simple yet effective unsupervised approaches to generate both aspect-specific and general opinion summaries by training on synthetic datasets constructed with aspect-related review contents. Our first approach, Seed Words Based Leave-One-Out (SW-LOO), identifies aspect-related portions of reviews simply by exact-matching aspect seed words and outperforms existing methods by 3.4 ROUGE-L points on Space and 0.5 ROUGE-1 point on Oposum+ for aspect-specific opinion summarization. Our second approach, Natural Language Inference Based Leave-One-Out (NLI-LOO) identifies aspect-related sentences utilizing an NLI model in a more general setting without using seed words and outperforms existing approaches by 1.2 ROUGE-L points on Space for aspect-specific opinion summarization and remains competitive on other metrics.

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Contrastive Training Improves Zero-Shot Classification of Semi-structured Documents
Muhammad Khalifa | Yogarshi Vyas | Shuai Wang | Graham Horwood | Sunil Mallya | Miguel Ballesteros
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

We investigate semi-structured document classification in a zero-shot setting. Classification of semi-structured documents is more challenging than that of standard unstructured documents, as positional, layout, and style information play a vital role in interpreting such documents. The standard classification setting where categories are fixed during both training and testing falls short in dynamic environments where new classification categories could potentially emerge. We focus exclusively on the zero-shot learning setting where inference is done on new unseen classes. To address this task, we propose a matching-based approach that relies on a pairwise contrastive objective for both pretraining and fine-tuning. Our results show a significant boost in Macro F1 from the proposed pretraining step and comparable performance of the contrastive fine-tuning to a standard prediction objective in both supervised and unsupervised zero-shot settings.

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A Multi-Modal Multilingual Benchmark for Document Image Classification
Yoshinari Fujinuma | Siddharth Varia | Nishant Sankaran | Srikar Appalaraju | Bonan Min | Yogarshi Vyas
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Document image classification is different from plain-text document classification and consists of classifying a document by understanding the content and structure of documents such as forms, emails, and other such documents. We show that the only existing dataset for this task (Lewis et al., 2006) has several limitations and we introduce two newly curated multilingual datasets WIKI-DOC and MULTIEURLEX-DOC that overcome these limitations. We further undertake a comprehensive study of popular visually-rich document understanding or Document AI models in previously untested setting in document image classification such as 1) multi-label classification, and 2) zero-shot cross-lingual transfer setup. Experimental results show limitations of multilingual Document AI models on cross-lingual transfer across typologically distant languages. Our datasets and findings open the door for future research into improving Document AI models.

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Taxonomy Expansion for Named Entity Recognition
Karthikeyan K | Yogarshi Vyas | Jie Ma | Giovanni Paolini | Neha John | Shuai Wang | Yassine Benajiba | Vittorio Castelli | Dan Roth | Miguel Ballesteros
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Training a Named Entity Recognition (NER) model often involves fixing a taxonomy of entity types. However, requirements evolve and we might need the NER model to recognize additional entity types. A simple approach is to re-annotate entire dataset with both existing and additional entity types and then train the model on the re-annotated dataset. However, this is an extremely laborious task. To remedy this, we propose a novel approach called Partial Label Model (PLM) that uses only partially annotated datasets. We experiment with 6 diverse datasets and show that PLM consistently performs better than most other approaches (0.5 - 2.5 F1), including in novel settings for taxonomy expansion not considered in prior work. The gap between PLM and all other approaches is especially large in settings where there is limited data available for the additional entity types (as much as 11 F1), thus suggesting a more cost effective approaches to taxonomy expansion.

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Comparing Biases and the Impact of Multilingual Training across Multiple Languages
Sharon Levy | Neha John | Ling Liu | Yogarshi Vyas | Jie Ma | Yoshinari Fujinuma | Miguel Ballesteros | Vittorio Castelli | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Studies in bias and fairness in natural language processing have primarily examined social biases within a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across various languages for individual attributes. As a result, it is critical to examine biases within each language and attribute. Of equal importance is to study how these biases compare across languages and how the biases are affected when training a model on multilingual data versus monolingual data. We present a bias analysis across Italian, Chinese, English, Hebrew, and Spanish on the downstream sentiment analysis task to observe whether specific demographics are viewed more positively. We study bias similarities and differences across these languages and investigate the impact of multilingual vs. monolingual training data. We adapt existing sentiment bias templates in English to Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish for four attributes: race, religion, nationality, and gender. Our results reveal similarities in bias expression such as favoritism of groups that are dominant in each language’s culture (e.g. majority religions and nationalities). Additionally, we find an increased variation in predictions across protected groups, indicating bias amplification, after multilingual finetuning in comparison to multilingual pretraining.

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Dynamic Benchmarking of Masked Language Models on Temporal Concept Drift with Multiple Views
Katerina Margatina | Shuai Wang | Yogarshi Vyas | Neha Anna John | Yassine Benajiba | Miguel Ballesteros
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Temporal concept drift refers to the problem of data changing over time. In the field of NLP, that would entail that language (e.g. new expressions, meaning shifts) and factual knowledge (e.g. new concepts, updated facts) evolve over time. Focusing on the latter, we benchmark 11 pretrained masked language models (MLMs) on a series of tests designed to evaluate the effect of temporal concept drift, as it is crucial that widely used language models remain up-to-date with the ever-evolving factual updates of the real world. Specifically, we provide a holistic framework that (1) dynamically creates temporal test sets of any time granularity (e.g. month, quarter, year) of factual data from Wikidata, (2) constructs fine-grained splits of tests (e.g. updated, new, unchanged facts) to ensure comprehensive analysis, and (3) evaluates MLMs in three distinct ways (single-token probing, multi-token generation, MLM scoring). In contrast to prior work, our framework aims to unveil how robust an MLM is over time and thus to provide a signal in case it has become outdated, by leveraging multiple views of evaluation.

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Characterizing and Measuring Linguistic Dataset Drift
Tyler Chang | Kishaloy Halder | Neha Anna John | Yogarshi Vyas | Yassine Benajiba | Miguel Ballesteros | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

NLP models often degrade in performance when real world data distributions differ markedly from training data. However, existing dataset drift metrics in NLP have generally not considered specific dimensions of linguistic drift that affect model performance, and they have not been validated in their ability to predict model performance at the individual example level, where such metrics are often used in practice. In this paper, we propose three dimensions of linguistic dataset drift: vocabulary, structural, and semantic drift. These dimensions correspond to content word frequency divergences, syntactic divergences, and meaning changes not captured by word frequencies (e.g. lexical semantic change). We propose interpretable metrics for all three drift dimensions, and we modify past performance prediction methods to predict model performance at both the example and dataset level for English sentiment classification and natural language inference. We find that our drift metrics are more effective than previous metrics at predicting out-of-domain model accuracies (mean 16.8% root mean square error decrease), particularly when compared to popular fine-tuned embedding distances (mean 47.7% error decrease). Fine-tuned embedding distances are much more effective at ranking individual examples by expected performance, but decomposing into vocabulary, structural, and semantic drift produces the best example rankings of all considered model-agnostic drift metrics (mean 6.7% ROC AUC increase).

2022

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Efficient Classification of Long Documents Using Transformers
Hyunji Park | Yogarshi Vyas | Kashif Shah
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Several methods have been proposed for classifying long textual documents using Transformers. However, there is a lack of consensus on a benchmark to enable a fair comparison among different approaches. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive evaluation of the relative efficacy measured against various baselines and diverse datasets — both in terms of accuracy as well as time and space overheads. Our datasets cover binary, multi-class, and multi-label classification tasks and represent various ways information is organized in a long text (e.g. information that is critical to making the classification decision is at the beginning or towards the end of the document). Our results show that more complex models often fail to outperform simple baselines and yield inconsistent performance across datasets. These findings emphasize the need for future studies to consider comprehensive baselines and datasets that better represent the task of long document classification to develop robust models.

2021

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Linking Entities to Unseen Knowledge Bases with Arbitrary Schemas
Yogarshi Vyas | Miguel Ballesteros
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In entity linking, mentions of named entities in raw text are disambiguated against a knowledge base (KB). This work focuses on linking to unseen KBs that do not have training data and whose schema is unknown during training. Our approach relies on methods to flexibly convert entities with several attribute-value pairs from arbitrary KBs into flat strings, which we use in conjunction with state-of-the-art models for zero-shot linking. We further improve the generalization of our model using two regularization schemes based on shuffling of entity attributes and handling of unseen attributes. Experiments on English datasets where models are trained on the CoNLL dataset, and tested on the TAC-KBP 2010 dataset show that our models are 12% (absolute) more accurate than baseline models that simply flatten entities from the target KB. Unlike prior work, our approach also allows for seamlessly combining multiple training datasets. We test this ability by adding both a completely different dataset (Wikia), as well as increasing amount of training data from the TAC-KBP 2010 training set. Our models are more accurate across the board compared to baselines.

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Quantifying Social Biases in NLP: A Generalization and Empirical Comparison of Extrinsic Fairness Metrics
Paula Czarnowska | Yogarshi Vyas | Kashif Shah
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

Measuring bias is key for better understanding and addressing unfairness in NLP/ML models. This is often done via fairness metrics, which quantify the differences in a model’s behaviour across a range of demographic groups. In this work, we shed more light on the differences and similarities between the fairness metrics used in NLP. First, we unify a broad range of existing metrics under three generalized fairness metrics, revealing the connections between them. Next, we carry out an extensive empirical comparison of existing metrics and demonstrate that the observed differences in bias measurement can be systematically explained via differences in parameter choices for our generalized metrics.

2020

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Severing the Edge Between Before and After: Neural Architectures for Temporal Ordering of Events
Miguel Ballesteros | Rishita Anubhai | Shuai Wang | Nima Pourdamghani | Yogarshi Vyas | Jie Ma | Parminder Bhatia | Kathleen McKeown | Yaser Al-Onaizan
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

In this paper, we propose a neural architecture and a set of training methods for ordering events by predicting temporal relations. Our proposed models receive a pair of events within a span of text as input and they identify temporal relations (Before, After, Equal, Vague) between them. Given that a key challenge with this task is the scarcity of annotated data, our models rely on either pretrained representations (i.e. RoBERTa, BERT or ELMo), transfer and multi-task learning (by leveraging complementary datasets), and self-training techniques. Experiments on the MATRES dataset of English documents establish a new state-of-the-art on this task.

2019

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Weakly Supervised Cross-lingual Semantic Relation Classification via Knowledge Distillation
Yogarshi Vyas | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Words in different languages rarely cover the exact same semantic space. This work characterizes differences in meaning between words across languages using semantic relations that have been used to relate the meaning of English words. However, because of translation ambiguity, semantic relations are not always preserved by translation. We introduce a cross-lingual relation classifier trained only with English examples and a bilingual dictionary. Our classifier relies on a novel attention-based distillation approach to account for translation ambiguity when transferring knowledge from English to cross-lingual settings. On new English-Chinese and English-Hindi test sets, the resulting models largely outperform baselines that more naively rely on bilingual embeddings or dictionaries for cross-lingual transfer, and approach the performance of fully supervised systems on English tasks.

2018

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Robust Cross-Lingual Hypernymy Detection Using Dependency Context
Shyam Upadhyay | Yogarshi Vyas | Marine Carpuat | Dan Roth
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Cross-lingual Hypernymy Detection involves determining if a word in one language (“fruit”) is a hypernym of a word in another language (“pomme” i.e. apple in French). The ability to detect hypernymy cross-lingually can aid in solving cross-lingual versions of tasks such as textual entailment and event coreference. We propose BiSparse-Dep, a family of unsupervised approaches for cross-lingual hypernymy detection, which learns sparse, bilingual word embeddings based on dependency contexts. We show that BiSparse-Dep can significantly improve performance on this task, compared to approaches based only on lexical context. Our approach is also robust, showing promise for low-resource settings: our dependency-based embeddings can be learned using a parser trained on related languages, with negligible loss in performance. We also crowd-source a challenging dataset for this task on four languages – Russian, French, Arabic, and Chinese. Our embeddings and datasets are publicly available.

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Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations
Yogarshi Vyas | Xing Niu | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)

Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for neural machine translation.

2017

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Detecting Cross-Lingual Semantic Divergence for Neural Machine Translation
Marine Carpuat | Yogarshi Vyas | Xing Niu
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Neural Machine Translation

Parallel corpora are often not as parallel as one might assume: non-literal translations and noisy translations abound, even in curated corpora routinely used for training and evaluation. We use a cross-lingual textual entailment system to distinguish sentence pairs that are parallel in meaning from those that are not, and show that filtering out divergent examples from training improves translation quality.

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Detecting Asymmetric Semantic Relations in Context: A Case-Study on Hypernymy Detection
Yogarshi Vyas | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 6th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2017)

We introduce WHiC, a challenging testbed for detecting hypernymy, an asymmetric relation between words. While previous work has focused on detecting hypernymy between word types, we ground the meaning of words in specific contexts drawn from WordNet examples, and require predictions to be sensitive to changes in contexts. WHiC lets us analyze complementary properties of two approaches of inducing vector representations of word meaning in context. We show that such contextualized word representations also improve detection of a wider range of semantic relations in context.

2016

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Sparse Bilingual Word Representations for Cross-lingual Lexical Entailment
Yogarshi Vyas | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

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CLIP@UMD at SemEval-2016 Task 8: Parser for Abstract Meaning Representation using Learning to Search
Sudha Rao | Yogarshi Vyas | Hal Daumé III | Philip Resnik
Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2016)

2015

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Class-based N-gram language difference models for data selection
Amittai Axelrod | Yogarshi Vyas | Marianna Martindale | Marine Carpuat
Proceedings of the 12th International Workshop on Spoken Language Translation: Papers

2014

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Word-level Language Identification using CRF: Code-switching Shared Task Report of MSR India System
Gokul Chittaranjan | Yogarshi Vyas | Kalika Bali | Monojit Choudhury
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching

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I am borrowing ya mixing ?" An Analysis of English-Hindi Code Mixing in Facebook
Kalika Bali | Jatin Sharma | Monojit Choudhury | Yogarshi Vyas
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching

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POS Tagging of English-Hindi Code-Mixed Social Media Content
Yogarshi Vyas | Spandana Gella | Jatin Sharma | Kalika Bali | Monojit Choudhury
Proceedings of the 2014 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)