United Arab Emirates

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging. We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity. The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences. To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set. We illustrate the framework&#39;s feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.

EMNLP 2022

Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

questions

news

question generation

There are many potential benefits to news readers accessing diverse sources. Modern news aggregators do the hard work of organizing the news, offering readers a plethora of source options, but choosing which source to read remains challenging. We propose a new framework to assist readers in identifying source differences and gaining an understanding of news coverage diversity. The framework is based on the generation of Discord Questions: questions with a diverse answer pool, explicitly illustrating source differences. To assemble a prototype of the framework, we focus on two components: (1) discord question generation, the task of generating questions answered differently by sources, for which we propose an automatic scoring method, and create a model that improves performance from current question generation (QG) methods by 5%, (2) answer consolidation, the task of grouping answers to a question that are semantically similar, for which we collect data and repurpose a method that achieves 81% balanced accuracy on our realistic test set. We illustrate the framework's feasibility through a prototype interface. Even though model performance at discord QG still lags human performance by more than 15%, generated questions are judged to be more interesting than factoid questions and can reveal differences in the level of detail, sentiment, and reasoning of sources in news coverage. Code is available at https://github.com/Salesforce/discord_questions.

workshop paper

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This paper describes a framework to automatically generate a spoken question answering (QA) dataset. The framework consists of a question generation (QG) module to generate questions automatically from given text documents, a text-to-speech (TTS) module to convert the text documents into spoken form and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) module to transcribe the spoken content. The final dataset contains question-answer pairs for both the reference text and ASR transcriptions as well as the audio files corresponding to each reference text. For QG and ASR systems we used pre-trained multilingual encoder-decoder transformer models and fine-tuned these models using a limited amount of manually generated QA data and TTS-based speech data, respectively. As a proof of concept, we investigated the proposed framework for Turkish and generated the Turkish Question Answering (TurQuAse) dataset using Wikipedia articles. Manual evaluation of the automatically generated question- answer pairs and QA performance evaluation with state of-the-art models on TurQuAse show that the proposed framework is efficient for automatically generating spoken QA datasets. To the best of our knowledge, TurQuAse is the first publicly available spoken question answering dataset for Turkish. The proposed framework can be easily extended to other languages where a limited amount of QA data is available.

A Framework for Automatic Generation of Spoken Question-Answering Data

A recurring challenge of crowdsourcing NLP datasets at scale is that human writers often rely on repetitive patterns when crafting examples, leading to a lack of linguistic diversity. We introduce a novel approach for dataset creation based on worker and AI collaboration, which brings together the generative strength of language models and the evaluative strength of humans. Starting with an existing dataset, MultiNLI for natural language inference (NLI), our approach uses dataset cartography to automatically identify examples that demonstrate challenging reasoning patterns, and instructs GPT-3 to compose new examples with similar patterns. Machine generated examples are then automatically filtered, and finally revised and labeled by human crowdworkers. The resulting dataset, WANLI, consists of 107,885 NLI examples and presents unique empirical strengths over existing NLI datasets. Remarkably, training a model on WANLI improves performance on eight out-of-domain test sets we consider, including by 11% on HANS and 9% on Adversarial NLI, compared to training on the 4x larger MultiNLI. Moreover, it continues to be more effective than MultiNLI augmented with other NLI datasets. Our results demonstrate the promise of leveraging natural language generation techniques and re-imagining the role of humans in the dataset creation process.

WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creation

Current abstractive summarization systems present important weaknesses which prevent their deployment in real-world applications, such as the omission of relevant information and the generation of factual inconsistencies (also known as hallucinations). At the same time, automatic evaluation metrics such as CTC scores (Deng et al., 2021) have been recently proposed that exhibit a higher correlation with human judgments than traditional lexical-overlap metrics such as ROUGE. In this work, we intend to close the loop by leveraging the recent advances in summarization metrics to create quality-aware abstractive summarizers. Namely, we propose an energy-based model that learns to re-rank summaries according to one or a combination of these metrics. We experiment using several metrics to train our energy-based re-ranker and show that it consistently improves the scores achieved by the predicted summaries. Nonetheless, human evaluation results show that the re-ranking approach should be used with care for highly abstractive summaries, as the available metrics are not yet sufficiently reliable for this purpose.

Improving abstractive summarization with energy-based re-ranking

Answering how-to questions remains a major challenge in question answering research. A vast number of narrow, long-tail questions cannot be readily answered using a search engine. Moreover, there is little to no annotated data available to develop such systems. This paper makes a first attempt at generating coherent, long-form answers for how-to questions. We propose new architectures, consisting of passage retrieval, subtopic planning and narrative generation, to consolidate multiple relevant passages into a coherent, explanatory answer. Our subtopic planning module aims to produce a set of relevant, diverse subtopics that serve as the backbone for answer generation to improve topic coherence. We present extensive experiments on a WikiHow dataset repurposed for long-form question answering. Empirical results demonstrate that generating narratives to answer how-to questions is a challenging task. Nevertheless, our architecture incorporated with subtopic planning can produce high-quality, diverse narratives evaluated using automatic metrics and human assessment.

Generating Coherent Narratives with Subtopic Planning to Answer How-to Questions

We explore the task of automated generation of technical interview questions from a given textbook. Such questions are different from those for reading comprehension studied in question generation literature. We curate a context based interview questions data set for Machine Learning and Deep Learning from two popular textbooks. We first explore the possibility of using a large generative language model (GPT-3) for this task in a zero shot setting. We then evaluate the performance of smaller generative models such as BART fine-tuned on weakly supervised data obtained using GPT-3 and hand-crafted templates. We deploy an automatic question importance assignment technique to figure out suitability of a question in a technical interview. It improves the evaluation results in many dimensions. We dissect the performance of these models for this task and also scrutinize the suitability of questions generated by them for use in technical interviews.

Weakly Supervised Context-based Interview Question Generation

Despite the recent success of multi-task learning and pre-finetuning for natural language understanding, few works have studied the effects of task families on abstractive text summarization. Task families are a form of task grouping during the pre-finetuning stage to learn common skills, such as reading comprehension. To close this gap, we analyze the influence of multi-task learning strategies using task families for the English abstractive text summarization task. We group tasks into one of three strategies, i.e., sequential, simultaneous, and continual multi-task learning, and evaluate trained models through two downstream tasks. We find that certain combinations of task families (e.g., advanced reading comprehension and natural language inference) positively impact downstream performance. Further, we find that choice and combinations of task families influence downstream performance more than the training scheme, supporting the use of task families for abstractive text

Analyzing Multi-Task Learning for Abstractive Text Summarization

One of the biggest challenges of natural language generation (NLG) is the proper handling of named entities. Named entities are a common source of grammar mistakes such as wrong prepositions, wrong article handling, or incorrect entity inflection. Without factoring linguistic representation, such errors are often underrepresented when evaluating on a small set of arbitrarily picked argument values, or when translating a dataset from a linguistically simpler language, like English, to a linguistically complex language, like Russian. However, for some applications, broadly precise grammatical correctness is critical -- native speakers may find entity-related grammar errors silly, jarring, or even offensive. To enable the creation of more linguistically diverse NLG datasets, we release a Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities~(CLSE) annotated by linguist experts. The corpus includes 34 languages and covers 74 different semantic types to support various applications from airline ticketing to video games. To demonstrate one possible use of CLSE, we produce an augmented version of the Schema-Guided Dialog Dataset, SGD-CLSE. Using the CLSE's entities and a small number of human translations, we create a linguistically representative NLG evaluation benchmark in three languages: French (high-resource), Marathi (low-resource), and Russian (highly inflected language). We establish quality baselines for neural, template-based, and hybrid NLG systems and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.

CLSE: Corpus of Linguistically Significant Entities

Scoring the factuality of a generated summary involves measuring the degree to which a target text contains factual information using the input document as support. Given the similarities in the problem formulation, previous work has shown that Natural Language Inference models can be effectively repurposed to perform this task. As these models are trained to score entailment at a sentence level, several recent studies have shown that decomposing either the input document or the summary into sentences helps with factuality scoring. But is fine-grained decomposition always a winning strategy? In this paper we systematically compare different granularities of decomposition - from document to sub-sentence level, and we show that the answer is no. Our results show that incorporating additional context can yield improvement, but that this does not necessarily apply to all datasets. We also show that small changes to previously proposed entailment-based scoring methods can result in better performance, highlighting the need for caution in model and methodology selection for downstream tasks.

Revisiting text decomposition methods for NLI-based factuality scoring of summaries

In this work, we use sentence similarity as a lens through which to investigate the representation of meaning in graphs vs. vectors. On semantic textual similarity data, we examine how similarity metrics based on vectors alone (SENTENCE-BERT and BERTSCORE) fare compared to metrics based on AMR graphs (SMATCH and S2MATCH). Quantitative and qualitative analyses show that the AMR-based metrics can better capture meanings dependent on sentence structures, but can also be distracted by structural differences—whereas the BERT-based metrics represent finer-grained meanings of individual words, but often fail to capture the ordering effect of words within sentences and suffer from interpretability problems. These findings contribute to our understanding of each approach to semantic representation and motivate distinct use cases for graph and vector-based representations.

Semantic Similarity as a Window into Vector- and Graph-Based Metrics

Reflection is an essential counselling strategy, where the therapist listens actively and responds with their own interpretation of the client's words. Recent work leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) to approach reflection generation as a promising tool to aid counsellor training. However, those studies used limited dialogue context for modelling and simplistic error analysis for human evaluation. In this work, we take the first step towards addressing those limitations. First, we fine-tune PLMs on longer dialogue contexts for reflection generation. Then, we collect free-text error descriptions from non-experts about generated reflections, identify common patterns among them, and accordingly establish discrete error categories using thematic analysis. Based on this scheme, we plan for future work a mass non-expert error annotation phase for generated reflections followed by an expert-based validation phase, namely "whether a coherent and consistent response is a good reflection".

Discord Questions: A Computational Approach To Diversity Analysis in News Coverage

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A Framework for Automatic Generation of Spoken Question-Answering Data

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