Vlad Morariu


2024

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Self-Cleaning: Improving a Named Entity Recognizer Trained on Noisy Data with a Few Clean Instances
Zhendong Chu | Ruiyi Zhang | Tong Yu | Rajiv Jain | Vlad Morariu | Jiuxiang Gu | Ani Nenkova
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

To achieve state-of-the-art performance, one still needs to train NER models on large-scale, high-quality annotated data, an asset that is both costly and time-intensive to accumulate. In contrast, real-world applications often resort to massive low-quality labeled data through non-expert annotators via crowdsourcing and external knowledge bases via distant supervision as a cost-effective alternative. However, these annotation methods result in noisy labels, which in turn lead to a notable decline in performance. Hence, we propose to denoise the noisy NER data with guidance from a small set of clean instances. Along with the main NER model we train a discriminator model and use its outputs to recalibrate the sample weights. The discriminator is capable of detecting both span and category errors with different discriminative prompts. Results on public crowdsourcing and distant supervision datasets show that the proposed method can consistently improve performance with a small guidance set.

2023

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A Critical Analysis of Document Out-of-Distribution Detection
Jiuxiang Gu | Yifei Ming | Yi Zhou | Jason Kuen | Vlad Morariu | Handong Zhao | Ruiyi Zhang | Nikolaos Barmpalios | Anqi Liu | Yixuan Li | Tong Sun | Ani Nenkova
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Large-scale pre-training is widely used in recent document understanding tasks. During deployment, one may expect that models should trigger a conservative fallback policy when encountering out-of-distribution (OOD) samples, which highlights the importance of OOD detection. However, most existing OOD detection methods focus on single-modal inputs such as images or texts. While documents are multi-modal in nature, it is underexplored if and how multi-modal information in documents can be exploited for OOD detection. In this work, we first provide a systematic and in-depth analysis on OOD detection for document understanding models. We study the effects of model modality, pre-training, and fine-tuning across various types of OOD inputs. In particular, we find that spatial information is critical for document OOD detection. To better exploit spatial information, we propose a spatial-aware adapter, which serves as a parameter-efficient add-on module to adapt transformer-based language models to the document domain. Extensive experiments show that adding the spatial-aware adapter significantly improves the OOD detection performance compared to directly using the language model and achieves superior performance compared to competitive baselines.

2022

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MGDoc: Pre-training with Multi-granular Hierarchy for Document Image Understanding
Zilong Wang | Jiuxiang Gu | Chris Tensmeyer | Nikolaos Barmpalios | Ani Nenkova | Tong Sun | Jingbo Shang | Vlad Morariu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Document images are a ubiquitous source of data where the text is organized in a complex hierarchical structure ranging from fine granularity (e.g., words), medium granularity (e.g., regions such as paragraphs or figures), to coarse granularity (e.g., the whole page). The spatial hierarchical relationships between content at different levels of granularity are crucial for document image understanding tasks. Existing methods learn features from either word-level or region-level but fail to consider both simultaneously. Word-level models are restricted by the fact that they originate from pure-text language models, which only encode the word-level context. In contrast, region-level models attempt to encode regions corresponding to paragraphs or text blocks into a single embedding, but they perform worse with additional word-level features. To deal with these issues, we propose MGDoc, a new multi-modal multi-granular pre-training framework that encodes page-level, region-level, and word-level information at the same time. MGDoc uses a unified text-visual encoder to obtain multi-modal features across different granularities, which makes it possible to project the multi-granular features into the same hyperspace. To model the region-word correlation, we design a cross-granular attention mechanism and specific pre-training tasks for our model to reinforce the model of learning the hierarchy between regions and words. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed model can learn better features that perform well across granularities and lead to improvements in downstream tasks.

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Learning Adaptive Axis Attentions in Fine-tuning: Beyond Fixed Sparse Attention Patterns
Zihan Wang | Jiuxiang Gu | Jason Kuen | Handong Zhao | Vlad Morariu | Ruiyi Zhang | Ani Nenkova | Tong Sun | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

We present a comprehensive study of sparse attention patterns in Transformer models. We first question the need for pre-training with sparse attention and present experiments showing that an efficient fine-tuning only approach yields a slightly worse but still competitive model. Then we compare the widely used local attention pattern and the less-well-studied global attention pattern, demonstrating that global patterns have several unique advantages. We also demonstrate that a flexible approach to attention, with different patterns across different layers of the model, is beneficial for some tasks. Drawing on this insight, we propose a novel Adaptive Axis Attention method, which learns—during fine-tuning—different attention patterns for each Transformer layer depending on the downstream task. Rather than choosing a fixed attention pattern, the adaptive axis attention method identifies important tokens—for each task and model layer—and focuses attention on those. It does not require pre-training to accommodate the sparse patterns and demonstrates competitive and sometimes better performance against fixed sparse attention patterns that require resource-intensive pre-training.

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DocTime: A Document-level Temporal Dependency Graph Parser
Puneet Mathur | Vlad Morariu | Verena Kaynig-Fittkau | Jiuxiang Gu | Franck Dernoncourt | Quan Tran | Ani Nenkova | Dinesh Manocha | Rajiv Jain
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We introduce DocTime - a novel temporal dependency graph (TDG) parser that takes as input a text document and produces a temporal dependency graph. It outperforms previous BERT-based solutions by a relative 4-8% on three datasets from modeling the problem as a graph network with path-prediction loss to incorporate longer range dependencies. This work also demonstrates how the TDG graph can be used to improve the downstream tasks of temporal questions answering and NLI by a relative 4-10% with a new framework that incorporates the temporal dependency graph into the self-attention layer of Transformer models (Time-transformer). Finally, we develop and evaluate on a new temporal dependency graph dataset for the domain of contractual documents, which has not been previously explored in this setting.

2021

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IGA: An Intent-Guided Authoring Assistant
Simeng Sun | Wenlong Zhao | Varun Manjunatha | Rajiv Jain | Vlad Morariu | Franck Dernoncourt | Balaji Vasan Srinivasan | Mohit Iyyer
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While large-scale pretrained language models have significantly improved writing assistance functionalities such as autocomplete, more complex and controllable writing assistants have yet to be explored. We leverage advances in language modeling to build an interactive writing assistant that generates and rephrases text according to fine-grained author specifications. Users provide input to our Intent-Guided Assistant (IGA) in the form of text interspersed with tags that correspond to specific rhetorical directives (e.g., adding description or contrast, or rephrasing a particular sentence). We fine-tune a language model on a dataset heuristically-labeled with author intent, which allows IGA to fill in these tags with generated text that users can subsequently edit to their liking. A series of automatic and crowdsourced evaluations confirm the quality of IGA’s generated outputs, while a small-scale user study demonstrates author preference for IGA over baseline methods in a creative writing task. We release our dataset, code, and demo to spur further research into AI-assisted writing.

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Syntopical Graphs for Computational Argumentation Tasks
Joe Barrow | Rajiv Jain | Nedim Lipka | Franck Dernoncourt | Vlad Morariu | Varun Manjunatha | Douglas Oard | Philip Resnik | Henning Wachsmuth
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Approaches to computational argumentation tasks such as stance detection and aspect detection have largely focused on the text of independent claims, losing out on potentially valuable context provided by the rest of the collection. We introduce a general approach to these tasks motivated by syntopical reading, a reading process that emphasizes comparing and contrasting viewpoints in order to improve topic understanding. To capture collection-level context, we introduce the syntopical graph, a data structure for linking claims within a collection. A syntopical graph is a typed multi-graph where nodes represent claims and edges represent different possible pairwise relationships, such as entailment, paraphrase, or support. Experiments applying syntopical graphs to the problems of detecting stance and aspects demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in each domain, significantly outperforming approaches that do not utilize collection-level information.

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TIMERS: Document-level Temporal Relation Extraction
Puneet Mathur | Rajiv Jain | Franck Dernoncourt | Vlad Morariu | Quan Hung Tran | Dinesh Manocha
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We present TIMERS - a TIME, Rhetorical and Syntactic-aware model for document-level temporal relation classification in the English language. Our proposed method leverages rhetorical discourse features and temporal arguments from semantic role labels, in addition to traditional local syntactic features, trained through a Gated Relational-GCN. Extensive experiments show that the proposed model outperforms previous methods by 5-18% on the TDDiscourse, TimeBank-Dense, and MATRES datasets due to our discourse-level modeling.

2020

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A Joint Model for Document Segmentation and Segment Labeling
Joe Barrow | Rajiv Jain | Vlad Morariu | Varun Manjunatha | Douglas Oard | Philip Resnik
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Text segmentation aims to uncover latent structure by dividing text from a document into coherent sections. Where previous work on text segmentation considers the tasks of document segmentation and segment labeling separately, we show that the tasks contain complementary information and are best addressed jointly. We introduce Segment Pooling LSTM (S-LSTM), which is capable of jointly segmenting a document and labeling segments. In support of joint training, we develop a method for teaching the model to recover from errors by aligning the predicted and ground truth segments. We show that S-LSTM reduces segmentation error by 30% on average, while also improving segment labeling.

2019

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Referring to Objects in Videos Using Spatio-Temporal Identifying Descriptions
Peratham Wiriyathammabhum | Abhinav Shrivastava | Vlad Morariu | Larry Davis
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Shortcomings in Vision and Language

This paper presents a new task, the grounding of spatio-temporal identifying descriptions in videos. Previous work suggests potential bias in existing datasets and emphasizes the need for a new data creation schema to better model linguistic structure. We introduce a new data collection scheme based on grammatical constraints for surface realization to enable us to investigate the problem of grounding spatio-temporal identifying descriptions in videos. We then propose a two-stream modular attention network that learns and grounds spatio-temporal identifying descriptions based on appearance and motion. We show that motion modules help to ground motion-related words and also help to learn in appearance modules because modular neural networks resolve task interference between modules. Finally, we propose a future challenge and a need for a robust system arising from replacing ground truth visual annotations with automatic video object detector and temporal event localization.