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Recent work has shown that fine-tuning large networks is surprisingly sensitive to changes in random seed(s). We explore the implications of this phenomenon for model fairness across demographic groups in clinical prediction tasks over electronic health records (EHR) in MIMIC-III ––– the standard dataset in clinical NLP research. Apparent subgroup performance varies substantially for seeds that yield similar overall performance, although there is no evidence of a trade-off between overall and subgroup performance. However, we also find that the small sample sizes inherent to looking at intersections of minority groups and somewhat rare conditions limit our ability to accurately estimate disparities. Further, we find that jointly optimizing for high overall performance and low disparities does not yield statistically significant improvements. Our results suggest that fairness work using MIMIC-III should carefully account for variations in apparent differences that may arise from stochasticity and small sample size


NAACL 2021

On the Impact of Random Seeds on the Fairness of Clinical Classifiers

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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technical paper

Limerick generation exemplifies some of the most difficult challenges faced in poetry generation, as the poems must tell a story in only five lines, with constraints on rhyme, stress, and meter. To address these challenges, we introduce LimGen, a novel and fully automated system for limerick generation that outperforms state-of-the-art neural network-based poetry models, as well as prior rule-based poetry models. LimGen con-sists of three important pieces: the Adaptive Multi-Templated Constraint algorithm that constrains our search to the space of realistic poems, the Multi-Templated Beam Search algorithm which searches efficiently through the space, and the probabilistic Storyline algorithm that provides coherent storylines related to a user-provided prompt word. The resulting limericks satisfy poetic constraints and have thematically coherent storylines, which are sometimes even funny (when we are lucky).


There Once Was a Really Bad Poet, It Was Automated but You Didn't Know It

Multilingual models, such as M-BERT and XLM-R, have gained increasing popularity, due to their zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning capabilities. However, their generalization ability is still inconsistent for typologically diverse languages and across different benchmarks. Recently, meta-learning has garnered attention as a promising technique for enhancing transfer learning under low-resource scenarios: particularly for cross-lingual transfer in Natural Language Understanding (NLU).

In this work, we propose X-METRA-ADA, a cross-lingual MEta-TRAnsfer learning ADAptation approach for NLU. Our approach adapts MAML, an optimization-based meta-learning approach, to learn to adapt to new languages. We extensively evaluate our framework on two challenging cross-lingual NLU tasks: multilingual task-oriented dialog and typologically diverse question answering. We show that our approach outperforms naive fine-tuning, reaching competitive performance on both tasks for most languages. Our analysis reveals that X-METRA-ADA can leverage limited data for faster adaptation.


X-METRA-ADA: Cross-lingual Meta-Transfer learning Adaptation to Natural Language Understanding and Question Answering

Multilingual models have demonstrated impressive cross-lingual transfer performance. However, test sets like XNLI are monolingual at the example level. In multilingual communities, it is common for polyglots to code-mix when conversing with each other. Inspired by this phenomenon, we present two strong black-box adversarial attacks (one word-level, one phrase-level) for multilingual models that push their ability to handle code-mixed sentences to the limit. The former uses bilingual dictionaries to propose perturbations and translations of the clean example for sense disambiguation. The latter directly aligns the clean example with its translations before extracting phrases as perturbations. Our phrase-level attack has a success rate of 89.75% against XLM-R-large, bringing its average accuracy of 79.85 down to 8.18 on XNLI. Finally, we propose an efficient adversarial training scheme that trains in the same number of steps as the original model and show that it improves model accuracy. 


Code-Mixing on Sesame Street: Dawn of the Adversarial Polyglots

In this work, we present an information-theoretic framework that formulates cross-lingual language model pre-training as maximizing mutual information between multilingual-multi-granularity texts. The unified view helps us to better understand the existing methods for learning cross-lingual representations. More importantly, inspired by the framework, we propose a new pre-training task based on contrastive learning. Specifically, we regard a bilingual sentence pair as two views of the same meaning and encourage their encoded representations to be more similar than the negative examples. By leveraging both monolingual and parallel corpora, we jointly train the pretext tasks to improve the cross-lingual transferability of pre-trained models. Experimental results on several benchmarks show that our approach achieves considerably better performance.


InfoXLM: An Information-Theoretic Framework for Cross-Lingual Language Model Pre-Training

Pre-trained cross-lingual encoders such as mBERT (Devlin et al., 2019) and XLMR (Conneau et al., 2020) have proven to be impressively effective at enabling transfer-learning of NLP systems from high-resource languages to low-resource languages. This success comes despite the fact that there is no explicit objective to align the contextual embeddings of words/sentences with similar meanings across languages together in the same space. In this paper, we present a new method for learning multilingual encoders, AMBER (Aligned Multilingual Bidirectional EncodeR). AMBER is trained on additional parallel data using two explicit alignment objectives that align the multilingual representations at different granularities. We conduct experiments on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning for different tasks including sequence tagging, sentence retrieval and sentence classification. Experimental results show that AMBER obtains gains of up to 1.1 average F1 score on sequence tagging and up to 27.3 average accuracy on retrieval over the XLMR-large model which has 3.2x the parameters of AMBER. Our code and models are available at http://github.com/junjiehu/amber.


Explicit Alignment Objectives for Multilingual Bidirectional Encoders

Most existing research on visual question answering (VQA) is limited to information explicitly present in an image or a video. In this paper, we take visual understanding to a higher level where systems are challenged to answer questions that involve mentally simulating the hypothetical consequences of performing specific actions in a given scenario. Towards that end, we formulate a vision-language question answering task based on the CLEVR (Johnson et. al., 2017) dataset. We then modify the best existing VQA methods and propose baseline solvers for this task. Finally, we motivate the development of better vision-language models by providing insights about the capability of diverse architectures to perform joint reasoning over image-text modality. 


CLEVR_HYP: A Dataset and Baselines for Visual Question Answering with Hypothetical Actions over Images

We focus on a type of linguistic formal reasoning where the goal is to reason over explicit knowledge in the form of natural language facts and rules (Clark et al. 2020). A recent work, named PRover (Saha et al. 2020), performs such reasoning by answering a question and also generating a proof graph that explains the answer. However, compositional reasoning is not always unique and there may be multiple ways of reaching the correct answer. Thus, in our work, we address a new and challenging problem of generating multiple proof graphs for reasoning over natural language rule-bases. Each proof provides a different rationale for the answer, thereby improving the interpretability of such reasoning systems. In order to jointly learn from all proof graphs and exploit the correlations between multiple proofs for a question, we pose this task as a set generation problem over structured output spaces where each proof is represented as a directed graph. We propose two variants of a proof-set generation model, multiPRover. Our first model, Multilabel-multiPRover, generates a set of proofs via multi-label classification and implicit conditioning between the proofs; while the second model, Iterative-multiPRover, generates proofs iteratively by explicitly conditioning on the previously generated proofs. Experiments on multiple synthetic, zero-shot, and human-paraphrased datasets reveal that both multiPRover models significantly outperform PRover on datasets containing multiple gold proofs. Iterative-multiPRover obtains state-of-the-art proof F1 in zero-shot scenarios where all examples have single correct proofs. It also generalizes better to questions requiring higher depths of reasoning where multiple proofs are more frequent.



multiPRover: Generating Multiple Proofs for Improved Interpretability in Rule Reasoning

Targeted syntactic evaluation of subject-verb number agreement in English (TSE) evaluates language models’ syntactic knowledge using hand-crafted minimal pairs of sentences that differ only in the main verb’s conjugation. The method evaluates whether language models rate each grammatical sentence as more likely than its ungrammatical counterpart. We identify two distinct goals for TSE. First, evaluating the systematicity of a language model’s syntactic knowledge: given a sentence, can it conjugate arbitrary verbs correctly? Second, evaluating a model’s likely behavior: given a sentence, does the model concentrate its probability mass on correctly conjugated verbs, even if only on a subset of the possible verbs? We argue that current implementations of TSE do not directly capture either of these goals, and propose new metrics to capture each goal separately. Under our metrics, we find that TSE overestimates systematicity of language models, but that models score up to 40% better on verbs that they predict are likely in context.


Refining Targeted Syntactic Evaluation of Language Models

Past research has demonstrated that large neural language models (LMs) 
encode surprising amounts of factual information: however, augmenting or modifying this information requires modifying a corpus and retraining, which is computationally expensive.
To address this problem, we develop a neural LM that includes an interpretable neuro-symbolic KB in the form of a ``fact memory''.
Each element of the fact memory is formed from a triple of vectors, where each vector corresponds to a KB entity or relation. Our LM improves performance on knowledge-intensive question-answering tasks, sometimes dramatically, including a 27 point increase in one setting of WebQuestionsSP over a state-of-the-art open-book model, despite using 5% of the parameters. Most interestingly, we demonstrate that the model can be modified, without \emph{any} re-training, by updating the fact memory. 


Adaptable and Interpretable Neural MemoryOver Symbolic Knowledge

Recent work has demonstrated the vulnerability of modern text classifiers to universal adversarial attacks, which are input-agnostic sequences of words added to text processed by classifiers. Despite being successful, the word sequences produced in such attacks are often ungrammatical and can be easily distinguished from natural text. We develop adversarial attacks that appear closer to natural English phrases and yet confuse classification systems when added to benign inputs. We leverage an adversarially regularized autoencoder to generate triggers and propose a gradient-based search that aims to maximize the downstream classifier’s prediction loss. Our attacks effectively reduce model accuracy on classification tasks while being less identifiable than prior models as per automatic detection metrics and human-subject studies. Our aim is to demonstrate that adversarial attacks can be made harder to detect than previously thought and to enable the development of appropriate defenses.


On the Impact of Random Seeds on the Fairness of Clinical Classifiers

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