United Arab Emirates

This paper presents FairLib , an open-source Python library for assessing and improving model fairness. It provides a systematic framework for quickly accessing benchmark datasets, reproducing existing debiasing baseline models, developing new methods, evaluating models with different metrics, and isualizing their results. Its modularity and extensibility enable the framework to be used for diverse types of inputs, including natural language, images, and audio. It incorporates 14 debiasing methods, including pre-processing, at-training-time, and post-processing approaches. The built-in metrics cover the most commonly acknowledged fairness criteria, and can be further generalized and customized for fairness evaluation.

EMNLP 2022

FairLib: A Unified Framework for Assessing and Improving Fairness

debiasing

fairness

evaluation

demo

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EMNLP 2022 will take place in Abu Dhabi from December 7th to December 11th, 2022. And it will be held in hybrid mode, both online and offline.


Current evaluation schemes for large language models often fail to consider the impact of the overlap between pretraining corpus and test data on model performance statistics. Snoopy is an online interface that allows researchers to study this impact in few-shot learning settings. Our demo provides term frequency statistics for the Pile, which is an 800GB corpus, ac- companied by the precomputed performance of EleutherAI/GPT models on more than 20 NLP benchmarks, including numerical, common- sense reasoning, natural language understand- ing, and question-answering tasks. Snoopy al- lows a user to interactively align specific terms in test instances with their frequency in the Pile, enabling exploratory analysis of how term frequency is related to the accuracy of the mod- els, which are hard to discover through au- tomated means. A user can look at correla- tions over various model sizes and numbers of in-context examples and visualize the re- sult across multiple (potentially aggregated) datasets. Using Snoopy, we show that a re- searcher can quickly replicate prior analyses for numerical tasks, while simultaneously allowing for much more expansive exploration that was previously challenging. Snoopy is available at https://nlp.ics.uci.edu/snoopy.

Snoopy: An Online Interface for Exploring the Effect of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot LM Performance

We present Azimuth, an open-source and easy-to-use tool to perform error analysis for text classification. Compared to other stages of the ML development cycle, such as model training and hyper-parameter tuning, the process and tooling for the error analysis stage are less mature. However, this stage is critical for the development of reliable and trustworthy AI systems. To make error analysis more systematic, we propose an approach comprising dataset analysis and model quality assessment, which Azimuth facilitates. We aim to help AI practitioners discover and address areas where the model does not generalize by leveraging and integrating a range of ML techniques, such as saliency maps, similarity, uncertainty, and behavioral analyses, all in one tool. Our code and documentation are available at github.com/servicenow/azimuth.

Azimuth: Systematic Error Analysis for Text Classification

Term extraction is an information extraction task at the root of knowledge discovery platforms. Developing term extractors that are able to generalize across very diverse and potentially highly technical domains is challenging, as annotations for domains requiring in-depth expertise are scarce and expensive to obtain. In this paper, we describe the term extraction subsystem of a commercial knowledge discovery platform that targets highly technical fields such as pharma, medical, and material science. To be able to generalize across domains, we introduce a fully unsupervised annotator (UA). It extracts terms by combining novel morphological signals from sub-word tokenization with term-to-topic and intra-term similarity metrics, computed using general-domain pre-trained sentence-encoders. The annotator is used to implement a weakly-supervised setup, where transformer-models are fine-tuned (or pre-trained) over the training data generated by running the UA over large unlabeled corpora. Our experiments demonstrate that our setup can improve the predictive performance while decreasing the inference latency on both CPUs and GPUs. Our annotators provide a very competitive baseline for all the cases where annotations are not available.

Unsupervised Term Extraction for Highly Technical Domains

Medical literature is a vast and constantly expanding source of information about diseases, their diagnoses and treatments. 
One of the ways to extract insights from this type of data is through mining association rules between such entities.
However, existing solutions do not take into account the semantics of sentences from which entity co-occurrences are extracted. We propose a scalable solution for the automated discovery of semantic associations between different entities such as diseases and their symptoms. Our approach employs the UMLS semantic network and a binary relation classification model trained with distant supervision to validate and help ranking the most likely entity associations pairs extracted with frequency-based association rule mining algorithms. We evaluate the proposed system on the task of extracting disease-symptom associations from a collection of over 14M PubMed abstracts and validate our results against a publicly available known list of disease-symptom pairs.

Accelerating the Discovery of Semantic Associations from Medical Literature: Mining Relations Between Diseases and Symptoms

Previous work suggests that performance of cross-lingual information retrieval correlates highly with the quality of Machine Translation. However, there may be a threshold beyond which improving query translation quality yields little or no benefit to further improve the retrieval performance. This threshold may depend upon multiple factors including the source and target languages, the existing MT system quality and the search pipeline. In order to identify the benefit of improving an MT system for a given search pipeline, we investigate the sensitivity of retrieval quality to the presence of different levels of MT quality using experimental datasets collected from actual traffic. We systematically improve the performance of our MT systems quality on language pairs as measured by MT evaluation metrics including Bleu and Chrf to determine their impact on search precision metrics and extract signals that help to guide the improvement strategies. Using this information we develop techniques to compare query translations for multiple language pairs and identify the most promising language pairs to invest and improve.

Machine translation impact in E-commerce multilingual search

Code-switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in regions with various co-existing languages. Since CS is such a frequent habit in informal communications, both spoken and written, it also arises naturally in Human-Machine Interactions. Therefore, in order for natural language understanding (NLU) not to be degraded, CS must be taken into account when developing chatbots. The co-existence of multiple languages in a single NLU model has become feasible with multilingual language representation models such as mBERT. In this paper, the efficacy of zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning with mBERT for NLU is evaluated on a Basque-Spanish CS chatbot corpus, comparing the performance of NLU models trained using in-domain chatbot utterances in Basque and/or Spanish without CS. The results obtained indicate that training joint multi-intent classification and entity recognition models on both languages simultaneously achieves best performance, better capturing the CS patterns.

Exploiting In-Domain Bilingual Corpora for Zero-Shot Transfer Learning in NLU of Intra-Sentential Code-Switching Chatbot Interactions

Imbalanced data distribution is a practical and common challenge in building production-level machine learning (ML) models in industry, where data usually exhibits long-tail distributions. For instance, in virtual AI Assistants, such as Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa and Apple Siri, the "play music" or "set timer" utterance is exposed to an order of magnitude more traffic than other skills. This can easily cause trained models to overfit to the majority classes, categories or intents, lead to model miscalibration. The uncalibrated models output unreliable (mostly overconfident) predictions, which are at high risk of affecting downstream decision-making systems. 
In this work, we study the calibration of production models in the industry use-case of predicting product return reason codes in customer service conversations of an online retail store; The returns reasons also exhibit class imbalance.
To alleviate the resulting miscalibration in the production ML model, we streamline the model development and deployment using focal loss~\cite{lin2017focal}.
We empirically show the effectiveness of model training with focal loss in learning better calibrated models, as compared to standard cross-entropy loss. Better calibration, in turn, enables better control of the precision-recall trade-off for the models deployed in production.

Calibrating Imbalanced Classifiers with Focal Loss: An Empirical Study

One of the major challenges of training Natural Language Understanding (NLU) production models lies in the discrepancy between the distributions of the offline training data and of the online live data, due to, e.g., biased sampling scheme, cyclic seasonality shifts, annotated training data coming from a variety of different sources, and a changing pool of users. Consequently, the model trained by the offline data is biased. We often observe this problem especially in task-oriented conversational systems, where topics of interest and the characteristics of users using the system change over time. In this paper we propose an unsupervised approach to mitigate the offline training data sampling bias in multiple NLU tasks. We show that a local distribution approximation in the pre-trained embedding space enables the estimation of importance weights for training samples guiding re-sampling for an effective bias mitigation. We illustrate our novel approach using multiple NLU datasets and show improvements obtained without additional annotation, making this a general approach for mitigating effects of sampling bias.

Unsupervised training data re-weighting for natural language understanding with local distribution approximation

Matching a seller listed item to an appropriate product is an important step for an e-commerce platform. With the recent advancement in deep learning, there are different encoder based approaches being proposed as solution. When textual data for two products are available, cross-encoder approaches encode them jointly while bi-encoder approaches encode them separately. Since cross-encoders are computationally heavy, approaches based on bi-encoders are a common practice for this challenge. In this paper, we propose cross-encoder data annotation; a technique to annotate or refine human annotated training data for bi-encoder models using a cross-encoder model. This technique enables us to build a robust model without annotation on newly collected training data or further improve model performance on annotated training data. We evaluate the cross-encoder data annotation on the product matching task using a real-world e-commerce dataset containing 104 million products. Experimental results show that the cross-encoder data annotation improves 4% absolute accuracy when no annotation for training data is available, and 2% absolute accuracy when annotation for training data is available.

Cross-Encoder Data Annotation for Bi-Encoder Based Product Matching

Business-specific Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) retrieval in task-oriented dialog systems poses unique challenges vis à vis community based FAQs. Each FAQ question represents an intent which is usually an umbrella term for many related user queries. We evaluate performance for such Business FAQs both with standard FAQ retrieval techniques using query-Question (q-Q) similarity and few-shot intent detection techniques. Implementing a real-world solution for FAQ retrieval in order to support multiple tenants (FAQ sets) entails optimizing speed, accuracy and cost. We propose a novel approach to scale multi-tenant FAQ applications in real-world context by contrastive fine-tuning of the last layer in sentence Bi-Encoders along with tenant-specific weight switching.

FairLib: A Unified Framework for Assessing and Improving Fairness

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Snoopy: An Online Interface for Exploring the Effect of Pretraining Term Frequencies on Few-Shot LM Performance

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