Data-driven scientific discovery requires the iterative integration of scientific domain knowledge, statistical expertise, and an understanding of data semantics to make nuanced analytical decisions, e.g., about which variables, transformations, and statistical models to consider. LM-based agents equipped with planning, memory, and code execution capabilities have the potential to support data-driven science. However, evaluating agents on such open-ended tasks is challenging due to multiple valid approaches, partially correct steps, and different ways to express the same decisions. To address these challenges, we present BLADE, a benchmark to automatically evaluate agents’ multifaceted approaches to open-ended research questions. BLADE consists of 12 datasets and research questions drawn from existing scientific literature, with ground truth collected from independent analyses by expert data scientists and researchers. To automatically evaluate agent responses, we developed corresponding computational methods to match different representations of analyses to this ground truth. Though language models possess considerable world knowledge, our evaluation shows that they are often limited to basic analyses. However, agents capable of interacting with the underlying data demonstrate improved, but still non-optimal, diversity in their analytical decision making. Our work enables the evaluation of agents for data-driven science and provides researchers deeper insights into agents’ analysis approaches.
Inspired by the concept of the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) in literature and media studies, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification—the extent to which a text portrays female individuals as objects of visual pleasure. Our framework measures female objectification along two axes. First, we compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities. Next, by analyzing the word embedding space induced by a text (Caliskan et al., 2017), we compute an appearance bias score that indicates whether female entities are more closely associated with appearance-related words than male entities. Applying our framework to 19th and 20th century novels reveals evidence of female objectification in literature: we find that novels written from a male perspective systematically objectify female characters, while novels written from a female perspective do not exhibit statistically significant objectification of any gender.
Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks aim to extract sentiment tuples from a sentence. Recent generative methods such as Seq2Seq models have achieved good performance by formulating the output as a sequence of sentiment tuples. However, the orders between the sentiment tuples do not naturally exist and the generation of the current tuple should not condition on the previous ones. In this paper, we propose Seq2Path to generate sentiment tuples as paths of a tree. A tree can represent “1-to-n” relations (e.g., an aspect term may correspond to multiple opinion terms) and the paths of a tree are independent and do not have orders. For training, we treat each path as an independent target, and we calculate the average loss of the ordinary Seq2Seq model over paths. For inference, we apply beam search with constrained decoding. By introducing an additional discriminative token and applying a data augmentation technique, valid paths can be automatically selected. We conduct experiments on five tasks including AOPE, ASTE, TASD, UABSA, ACOS. We evaluate our method on four common benchmark datasets including Laptop14, Rest14, Rest15, Rest16. Our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art results in almost all cases.