Matthew Lease


2024

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Benchmark Transparency: Measuring the Impact of Data on Evaluation
Venelin Kovatchev | Matthew Lease
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

In this paper we present an exploratory research on quantifying the impact that data distribution has on the performance and evaluation of NLP models. We propose an automated framework that measures the data point distribution across 6 different dimensions: ambiguity, difficulty, discriminability, length, noise, and perplexity.We use disproportional stratified sampling to measure how much the data distribution affects absolute (Acc/F1) and relative (Rank) model performance. We experiment on 2 different datasets (SQUAD and MNLI) and test a total of 135 different models (125 on SQUAD and 10 on MNLI). We demonstrate that without explicit control of the data distribution, standard evaluation frameworks are inconsistent and unreliable. We find that the impact of the data is statistically significant and is often larger than the impact of changing the metric. In a second set of experiments, we demonstrate that the impact of data on evaluation is not just observable, but also predictable. We propose to use benchmark transparency as a method for comparing datasets and quantifying the similarity between them. We find that the “dataset similarity vector” can be used to predict how well a model generalizes out of distribution.

2022

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ProtoTEx: Explaining Model Decisions with Prototype Tensors
Anubrata Das | Chitrank Gupta | Venelin Kovatchev | Matthew Lease | Junyi Jessy Li
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present ProtoTEx, a novel white-box NLP classification architecture based on prototype networks (Li et al., 2018). ProtoTEx faithfully explains model decisions based on prototype tensors that encode latent clusters of training examples. At inference time, classification decisions are based on the distances between the input text and the prototype tensors, explained via the training examples most similar to the most influential prototypes. We also describe a novel interleaved training algorithm that effectively handles classes characterized by ProtoTEx indicative features. On a propaganda detection task, ProtoTEx accuracy matches BART-large and exceeds BERTlarge with the added benefit of providing faithful explanations. A user study also shows that prototype-based explanations help non-experts to better recognize propaganda in online news.

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longhorns at DADC 2022: How many linguists does it take to fool a Question Answering model? A systematic approach to adversarial attacks.
Venelin Kovatchev | Trina Chatterjee | Venkata S Govindarajan | Jifan Chen | Eunsol Choi | Gabriella Chronis | Anubrata Das | Katrin Erk | Matthew Lease | Junyi Jessy Li | Yating Wu | Kyle Mahowald
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection

Developing methods to adversarially challenge NLP systems is a promising avenue for improving both model performance and interpretability. Here, we describe the approach of the team “longhorns” on Task 1 of the The First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC), which asked teams to manually fool a model on an Extractive Question Answering task. Our team finished first (pending validation), with a model error rate of 62%. We advocate for a systematic, linguistically informed approach to formulating adversarial questions, and we describe the results of our pilot experiments, as well as our official submission.

2017

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Aggregating and Predicting Sequence Labels from Crowd Annotations
An Thanh Nguyen | Byron Wallace | Junyi Jessy Li | Ani Nenkova | Matthew Lease
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite sequences being core to NLP, scant work has considered how to handle noisy sequence labels from multiple annotators for the same text. Given such annotations, we consider two complementary tasks: (1) aggregating sequential crowd labels to infer a best single set of consensus annotations; and (2) using crowd annotations as training data for a model that can predict sequences in unannotated text. For aggregation, we propose a novel Hidden Markov Model variant. To predict sequences in unannotated text, we propose a neural approach using Long Short Term Memory. We evaluate a suite of methods across two different applications and text genres: Named-Entity Recognition in news articles and Information Extraction from biomedical abstracts. Results show improvement over strong baselines. Our source code and data are available online.

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Exploiting Domain Knowledge via Grouped Weight Sharing with Application to Text Categorization
Ye Zhang | Matthew Lease | Byron C. Wallace
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

A fundamental advantage of neural models for NLP is their ability to learn representations from scratch. However, in practice this often means ignoring existing external linguistic resources, e.g., WordNet or domain specific ontologies such as the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS). We propose a general, novel method for exploiting such resources via weight sharing. Prior work on weight sharing in neural networks has considered it largely as a means of model compression. In contrast, we treat weight sharing as a flexible mechanism for incorporating prior knowledge into neural models. We show that this approach consistently yields improved performance on classification tasks compared to baseline strategies that do not exploit weight sharing.

2010

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Crowdsourcing Document Relevance Assessment with Mechanical Turk
Catherine Grady | Matthew Lease
Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Creating Speech and Language Data with Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

2006

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PCFGs with Syntactic and Prosodic Indicators of Speech Repairs
John Hale | Izhak Shafran | Lisa Yung | Bonnie J. Dorr | Mary Harper | Anna Krasnyanskaya | Matthew Lease | Yang Liu | Brian Roark | Matthew Snover | Robin Stewart
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

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Early Deletion of Fillers In Processing Conversational Speech
Matthew Lease | Mark Johnson
Proceedings of the Human Language Technology Conference of the NAACL, Companion Volume: Short Papers

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SParseval: Evaluation Metrics for Parsing Speech
Brian Roark | Mary Harper | Eugene Charniak | Bonnie Dorr | Mark Johnson | Jeremy Kahn | Yang Liu | Mari Ostendorf | John Hale | Anna Krasnyanskaya | Matthew Lease | Izhak Shafran | Matthew Snover | Robin Stewart | Lisa Yung
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

While both spoken and written language processing stand to benefit from parsing, the standard Parseval metrics (Black et al., 1991) and their canonical implementation (Sekine and Collins, 1997) are only useful for text. The Parseval metrics are undefined when the words input to the parser do not match the words in the gold standard parse tree exactly, and word errors are unavoidable with automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. To fill this gap, we have developed a publicly available tool for scoring parses that implements a variety of metrics which can handle mismatches in words and segmentations, including: alignment-based bracket evaluation, alignment-based dependency evaluation, and a dependency evaluation that does not require alignment. We describe the different metrics, how to use the tool, and the outcome of an extensive set of experiments on the sensitivity.

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Linguistic Resources for Speech Parsing
Ann Bies | Stephanie Strassel | Haejoong Lee | Kazuaki Maeda | Seth Kulick | Yang Liu | Mary Harper | Matthew Lease
Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’06)

We report on the success of a two-pass approach to annotating metadata, speech effects and syntactic structure in English conversational speech: separately annotating transcribed speech for structural metadata, or structural events, (fillers, speech repairs ( or edit dysfluencies) and SUs, or syntactic/semantic units) and for syntactic structure (treebanking constituent structure and shallow argument structure). The two annotations were then combined into a single representation. Certain alignment issues between the two types of annotation led to the discovery and correction of annotation errors in each, resulting in a more accurate and useful resource. The development of this corpus was motivated by the need to have both metadata and syntactic structure annotated in order to support synergistic work on speech parsing and structural event detection. Automatic detection of these speech phenomena would simultaneously improve parsing accuracy and provide a mechanism for cleaning up transcriptions for downstream text processing. Similarly, constraints imposed by text processing systems such as parsers can be used to help improve identification of disfluencies and sentence boundaries. This paper reports on our efforts to develop a linguistic resource providing both spoken metadata and syntactic structure information, and describes the resulting corpus of English conversational speech.

2005

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Parsing Biomedical Literature
Matthew Lease | Eugene Charniak
Second International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing: Full Papers

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Effective Use of Prosody in Parsing Conversational Speech
Jeremy G. Kahn | Matthew Lease | Eugene Charniak | Mark Johnson | Mari Ostendorf
Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing