Fabian Suchanek

Also published as: Fabian M. Suchanek


2024

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Learning High-Quality and General-Purpose Phrase Representations
Lihu Chen | Gael Varoquaux | Fabian Suchanek
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Phrase representations play an important role in data science and natural language processing, benefiting various tasks like Entity Alignment, Record Linkage, Fuzzy Joins, and Paraphrase Classification.The current state-of-the-art method involves fine-tuning pre-trained language models for phrasal embeddings using contrastive learning. However, we have identified areas for improvement. First, these pre-trained models tend to be unnecessarily complex and require to be pre-trained on a corpus with context sentences.Second, leveraging the phrase type and morphology gives phrase representations that are both more precise and more flexible.We propose an improved framework to learn phrase representations in a context-free fashion.The framework employs phrase type classification as an auxiliary task and incorporates character-level information more effectively into the phrase representation.Furthermore, we design three granularities of data augmentation to increase the diversity of training samples.Our experiments across a wide range of tasks reveal that our approach generates superior phrase embeddings compared to previous methods while requiring a smaller model size.

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A Survey of Meaning Representations – From Theory to Practical Utility
Zacchary Sadeddine | Juri Opitz | Fabian Suchanek
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Symbolic meaning representations of natural language text have been studied since at least the 1960s. With the availability of large annotated corpora, and more powerful machine learning tools, the field has recently seen several new developments. In this survey, we study today’s most prominent Meaning Representation Frameworks. We shed light on their theoretical properties, as well as on their practical research environment, i.e., on datasets, parsers, applications, and future challenges.

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MAFALDA: A Benchmark and Comprehensive Study of Fallacy Detection and Classification
Chadi Helwe | Tom Calamai | Pierre-Henri Paris | Chloé Clavel | Fabian Suchanek
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We introduce MAFALDA, a benchmark for fallacy classification that merges and unites previous fallacy datasets. It comes with a taxonomy that aligns, refines, and unifies existing classifications of fallacies. We further provide a manual annotation of a part of the dataset together with manual explanations for each annotation. We propose a new annotation scheme tailored for subjective NLP tasks, and a new evaluation method designed to handle subjectivity. We then evaluate several language models under a zero-shot learning setting and human performances on MAFALDA to assess their capability to detect and classify fallacies.

2023

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The Locality and Symmetry of Positional Encodings
Lihu Chen | Gael Varoquaux | Fabian Suchanek
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Positional Encodings (PEs) are used to inject word-order information into transformer-based language models. While they can significantly enhance the quality of sentence representations, their specific contribution to language models is not fully understood, especially given recent findings that various positional encodings are insensitive to word order. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of positional encodings in Bidirectional Masked Language Models (BERT-style) , which complements existing work in three aspects: (1) We uncover the core function of PEs by identifying two common properties, Locality and Symmetry; (2) We show that the two properties are closely correlated with the performances of downstream tasks; (3) We quantify the weakness of current PEs by introducing two new probing tasks, on which current PEs perform poorly. We believe that these results are the basis for developing better PEs for transformer-based language models.

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GLADIS: A General and Large Acronym Disambiguation Benchmark
Lihu Chen | Gael Varoquaux | Fabian M. Suchanek
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Acronym Disambiguation (AD) is crucial for natural language understanding on various sources, including biomedical reports, scientific papers, and search engine queries. However, existing acronym disambiguationbenchmarks and tools are limited to specific domains, and the size of prior benchmarks is rather small. To accelerate the research on acronym disambiguation, we construct a new benchmark with three components: (1) a much larger acronym dictionary with 1.5M acronyms and 6.4M long forms; (2) a pre-training corpus with 160 million sentences;(3) three datasets that cover thegeneral, scientific, and biomedical domains. We then pre-train a language model, AcroBERT, on our constructed corpus for general acronym disambiguation, and show the challenges and values of our new benchmark.

2022

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Imputing Out-of-Vocabulary Embeddings with LOVE Makes LanguageModels Robust with Little Cost
Lihu Chen | Gael Varoquaux | Fabian Suchanek
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

State-of-the-art NLP systems represent inputs with word embeddings, but these are brittle when faced with Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) words. To address this issue, we follow the principle of mimick-like models to generate vectors for unseen words, by learning the behavior of pre-trained embeddings using only the surface form of words. We present a simple contrastive learning framework, LOVE, which extends the word representation of an existing pre-trained language model (such as BERT) and makes it robust to OOV with few additional parameters. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that our lightweight model achieves similar or even better performances than prior competitors, both on original datasets and on corrupted variants. Moreover, it can be used in a plug-and-play fashion with FastText and BERT, where it significantly improves their robustness.

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LogiTorch: A PyTorch-based library for logical reasoning on natural language
Chadi Helwe | Chloé Clavel | Fabian Suchanek
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Logical reasoning on natural language is one of the most challenging tasks for deep learning models. There has been an increasing interest in developing new benchmarks to evaluate the reasoning capabilities of language models such as BERT. In parallel, new models based on transformers have emerged to achieve ever better performance on these datasets. However, there is currently no library for logical reasoning that includes such benchmarks and models. This paper introduces LogiTorch, a PyTorch-based library that includes different logical reasoning benchmarks, different models, as well as utility functions such as co-reference resolution. This makes it easy to directly use the preprocessed datasets, to run the models, or to finetune them with different hyperparameters. LogiTorch is open source and can be found on GitHub.

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TINA: Textual Inference with Negation Augmentation
Chadi Helwe | Simon Coumes | Chloé Clavel | Fabian Suchanek
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Transformer-based language models achieve state-of-the-art results on several natural language processing tasks. One of these is textual entailment, i.e., the task of determining whether a premise logically entails a hypothesis. However, the models perform poorly on this task when the examples contain negations. In this paper, we propose a new definition of textual entailment that captures also negation. This allows us to develop TINA (Textual Inference with Negation Augmentation), a principled technique for negated data augmentation that can be combined with the unlikelihood loss function.Our experiments with different transformer-based models show that our method can significantly improve the performance of the models on textual entailment datasets with negation – without sacrificing performance on datasets without negation.

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Using a Knowledge Base to Automatically Annotate Speech Corpora and to Identify Sociolinguistic Variation
Yaru Wu | Fabian Suchanek | Ioana Vasilescu | Lori Lamel | Martine Adda-Decker
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Speech characteristics vary from speaker to speaker. While some variation phenomena are due to the overall communication setting, others are due to diastratic factors such as gender, provenance, age, and social background. The analysis of these factors, although relevant for both linguistic and speech technology communities, is hampered by the need to annotate existing corpora or to recruit, categorise, and record volunteers as a function of targeted profiles. This paper presents a methodology that uses a knowledge base to provide speaker-specific information. This can facilitate the enrichment of existing corpora with new annotations extracted from the knowledge base. The method also helps the large scale analysis by automatically extracting instances of speech variation to correlate with diastratic features. We apply our method to an over 120-hour corpus of broadcast speech in French and investigate variation patterns linked to reduction phenomena and/or specific to connected speech such as disfluencies. We find significant differences in speech rate, the use of filler words, and the rate of non-canonical realisations of frequent segments as a function of different professional categories and age groups.

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Of Human Criteria and Automatic Metrics: A Benchmark of the Evaluation of Story Generation
Cyril Chhun | Pierre Colombo | Fabian M. Suchanek | Chloé Clavel
Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Research on Automatic Story Generation (ASG) relies heavily on human and automatic evaluation. However, there is no consensus on which human evaluation criteria to use, and no analysis of how well automatic criteria correlate with them. In this paper, we propose to re-evaluate ASG evaluation. We introduce a set of 6 orthogonal and comprehensive human criteria, carefully motivated by the social sciences literature. We also present HANNA, an annotated dataset of 1,056 stories produced by 10 different ASG systems. HANNA allows us to quantitatively evaluate the correlations of 72 automatic metrics with human criteria. Our analysis highlights the weaknesses of current metrics for ASG and allows us to formulate practical recommendations for ASG evaluation.

2016

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But What Do We Actually Know?
Simon Razniewski | Fabian Suchanek | Werner Nutt
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Automated Knowledge Base Construction

2012

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Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction and Web-scale Knowledge Extraction (AKBC-WEKEX)
James Fan | Raphael Hoffman | Aditya Kalyanpur | Sebastian Riedel | Fabian Suchanek | Partha Pratim Talukdar
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Automatic Knowledge Base Construction and Web-scale Knowledge Extraction (AKBC-WEKEX)

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PATTY: A Taxonomy of Relational Patterns with Semantic Types
Ndapandula Nakashole | Gerhard Weikum | Fabian Suchanek
Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

2006

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LEILA: Learning to Extract Information by Linguistic Analysis
Fabian M. Suchanek | Georgiana Ifrim | Gerhard Weikum
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Ontology Learning and Population: Bridging the Gap between Text and Knowledge