Zeming Chen


2024

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Discovering Knowledge-Critical Subnetworks in Pretrained Language Models
Deniz Bayazit | Negar Foroutan | Zeming Chen | Gail Weiss | Antoine Bosselut
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Pretrained language models (LMs) encode implicit representations of knowledge in their parameters. However, localizing these representations and disentangling them from each other remains an open problem. In this work, we investigate whether pretrained language models contain various *knowledge-critical* subnetworks: particular sparse computational subgraphs that can, if removed, precisely suppress specific knowledge the model has memorized. We propose a multi-objective differentiable masking scheme that can be applied to both weights and neurons to discover such subnetworks and show that we can use them to precisely remove specific knowledge from models while minimizing adverse effects on the behavior of the original model. We demonstrate our method on multiple GPT2 variants, uncovering highly sparse subnetworks (98%+ sparsity) that are critical for expressing specific collections of relational knowledge. When these subnetworks are removed, the remaining network maintains most of its initial abilities but struggles to represent the suppressed knowledge.

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Complex Reasoning over Logical Queries on Commonsense Knowledge Graphs
Tianqing Fang | Zeming Chen | Yangqiu Song | Antoine Bosselut
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Event commonsense reasoning requires the ability to reason about the relationship between events, as well as infer implicit contextunderlying that relationship. However, data scarcity makes it challenging for language models to learn to generate commonsense infer-ences for contexts and questions involving interactions between complex events. To address this demand, we present COM2 (COMplexCOMmonsense), a new dataset created by sampling multi-hop logical queries (e.g., the joint effect or cause of both event A and B, or theeffect of the effect of event C) from an existing commonsense knowledge graph (CSKG), and verbalizing them using handcrafted rules andlarge language models into multiple-choice and text generation questions. Our experiments show that language models trained on COM2 exhibit significant improve ments in complex reasoning ability, resulting in enhanced zero-shot performance in both in-domain and out-of-domain tasks for question answering and generative commonsense reasoning, without expensive human annotations

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EPFL-MAKE at “Discharge Me!”: An LLM System for Automatically Generating Discharge Summaries of Clinical Electronic Health Record
Haotian Wu | Paul Boulenger | Antonin Faure | Berta Céspedes | Farouk Boukil | Nastasia Morel | Zeming Chen | Antoine Bosselut
Proceedings of the 23rd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing

This paper presents our contribution to the Streamlining Discharge Documentation shared task organized as part of the ACL’24 workshop. We propose MEDISCHARGE (Meditron-7B Based Medical Summary Generation System for Discharge Me), an LLM-based system to generate Brief Hospital Course and Discharge Instruction summaries based on a patient’s Electronic Health Record. Our system is build on a Meditron-7B with context window extension, ensuring the system can handle cases of variable lengths with high quality. When the length of the input exceeds the system input limitation, we use a dynamic information selection framework to automatically extract important sections from the full discharge text. Then, extracted sections are removed in increasing order of importance until the input length requirement is met. We demonstrate our approach outperforms tripling the size of the context window of the model. Our system obtains a 0.289 overall score in the leaderboard, an improvement of 183% compared to the baseline, and a ROUGE-1 score of 0.444, achieving a second place performance in the shared task.

2023

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DISCO: Distilling Counterfactuals with Large Language Models
Zeming Chen | Qiyue Gao | Antoine Bosselut | Ashish Sabharwal | Kyle Richardson
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Models trained with counterfactually augmented data learn representations of the causal structure of tasks, enabling robust generalization. However, high-quality counterfactual data is scarce for most tasks and not easily generated at scale. When crowdsourced, such data is typically limited in scale and diversity; when generated using supervised methods, it is computationally expensive to extend to new counterfactual dimensions. In this work, we introduce DISCO (DIStilled COunterfactual Data), a new method for automatically generating high-quality counterfactual data at scale. DISCO engineers prompts to generate phrasal perturbations with a large general language model. Then, a task-specific teacher model filters these generations to distill high-quality counterfactual data. While task-agnostic, we apply our pipeline to the task of natural language inference (NLI) and find that on challenging evaluations such as the NLI stress test, comparatively smaller student models trained with DISCO generated counterfactuals are more robust (6% absolute) and generalize better across distributions (2%) compared to models trained without data augmentation. Furthermore, DISCO augmented models are 10% more consistent between counterfactual pairs on three evaluation sets, demonstrating that DISCO augmentation enables models to more reliably learn causal representations. Our repository are available at: https://github.com/eric11eca/disco

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Mitigating Label Biases for In-context Learning
Yu Fei | Yifan Hou | Zeming Chen | Antoine Bosselut
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Various design settings for in-context learning (ICL), such as the choice and order of the in-context examples, can bias the model’s predictions. While many studies discuss these design choices, there have been few systematic investigations into categorizing them and mitigating their impact. In this work, we define a typology for three types of label biases in ICL for text classification: vanilla-label bias, context-label bias, and domain-label bias (which we conceptualize and detect for the first time). Our analysis demonstrates that prior label bias calibration methods fall short of addressing all three types of biases. Specifically, domain-label bias restricts LLMs to random-level performance on many tasks regardless of the choice of in-context examples. To mitigate the effect of these biases, we propose a simple bias calibration method that estimates a language model’s label bias using random in-domain words from the task corpus. After controlling for this estimated bias when making predictions, our novel domain-context calibration significantly improves the ICL performance of GPT-J and GPT-3 on a wide range of tasks. The gain is substantial on tasks with large domain-label bias (up to 37% in Macro-F1). Furthermore, our results generalize to models with different scales, pretraining methods, and manually-designed task instructions, showing the prevalence of label biases in ICL.

2022

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Curriculum: A Broad-Coverage Benchmark for Linguistic Phenomena in Natural Language Understanding
Zeming Chen | Qiyue Gao
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In the age of large transformer language models, linguistic evaluation play an important role in diagnosing models’ abilities and limitations on natural language understanding. However, current evaluation methods show some significant shortcomings. In particular, they do not provide insight into how well a language model captures distinct linguistic skills essential for language understanding and reasoning. Thus they fail to effectively map out the aspects of language understanding that remain challenging to existing models, which makes it hard to discover potential limitations in models and datasets. In this paper, we introduce Curriculum as a new format of NLI benchmark for evaluation of broad-coverage linguistic phenomena. Curriculum contains a collection of datasets that covers 36 types of major linguistic phenomena and an evaluation procedure for diagnosing how well a language model captures reasoning skills for distinct types of linguistic phenomena. We show that this linguistic-phenomena-driven benchmark can serve as an effective tool for diagnosing model behavior and verifying model learning quality. In addition, our experiments provide insight into the limitation of existing benchmark datasets and state-of-the-art models that may encourage future research on re-designing datasets, model architectures, and learning objectives.

2021

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NeuralLog: Natural Language Inference with Joint Neural and Logical Reasoning
Zeming Chen | Qiyue Gao | Lawrence S. Moss
Proceedings of *SEM 2021: The Tenth Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics

Deep learning (DL) based language models achieve high performance on various benchmarks for Natural Language Inference (NLI). And at this time, symbolic approaches to NLI are receiving less attention. Both approaches (symbolic and DL) have their advantages and weaknesses. However, currently, no method combines them in a system to solve the task of NLI. To merge symbolic and deep learning methods, we propose an inference framework called NeuralLog, which utilizes both a monotonicity-based logical inference engine and a neural network language model for phrase alignment. Our framework models the NLI task as a classic search problem and uses the beam search algorithm to search for optimal inference paths. Experiments show that our joint logic and neural inference system improves accuracy on the NLI task and can achieve state-of-art accuracy on the SICK and MED datasets.

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Attentive Tree-structured Network for Monotonicity Reasoning
Zeming Chen
Proceedings of the 1st and 2nd Workshops on Natural Logic Meets Machine Learning (NALOMA)

Many state-of-art neural models designed for monotonicity reasoning perform poorly on downward inference. To address this shortcoming, we developed an attentive tree-structured neural network. It consists of a tree-based long-short-term-memory network (Tree-LSTM) with soft attention. It is designed to model the syntactic parse tree information from the sentence pair of a reasoning task. A self-attentive aggregator is used for aligning the representations of the premise and the hypothesis. We present our model and evaluate it using the Monotonicity Entailment Dataset (MED). We show and attempt to explain that our model outperforms existing models on MED.

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Monotonicity Marking from Universal Dependency Trees
Zeming Chen | Qiyue Gao
Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS)

Dependency parsing is a tool widely used in the field of Natural language processing and computational linguistics. However, there is hardly any work that connects dependency parsing to monotonicity, which is an essential part of logic and linguistic semantics. In this paper, we present a system that automatically annotates monotonicity information based on Universal Dependency parse trees. Our system utilizes surface-level monotonicity facts about quantifiers, lexical items, and token-level polarity information. We compared our system’s performance with existing systems in the literature, including NatLog and ccg2mono, on a small evaluation dataset. Results show that our system outperforms NatLog and ccg2mono.