Showing 1–50 of 75 results for author: Eisenstein, J

Cost-Optimal Active AI Model Evaluation

Authors: Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Jacob Eisenstein, Jonathan Berant, Alekh Agarwal, Adam Fisch

Abstract: The development lifecycle of generative AI systems requires continual evaluation, data acquisition, and annotation, which is costly in both resources and time. In practice, rapid iteration often makes it necessary to rely on synthetic annotation data because of the low cost, despite the potential for substantial bias. In this paper, we develop novel, cost-aware methods for actively balancing the u… ▽ More The development lifecycle of generative AI systems requires continual evaluation, data acquisition, and annotation, which is costly in both resources and time. In practice, rapid iteration often makes it necessary to rely on synthetic annotation data because of the low cost, despite the potential for substantial bias. In this paper, we develop novel, cost-aware methods for actively balancing the use of a cheap, but often inaccurate, weak rater -- such as a model-based autorater that is designed to automatically assess the quality of generated content -- with a more expensive, but also more accurate, strong rater alternative such as a human. More specifically, the goal of our approach is to produce a low variance, unbiased estimate of the mean of the target "strong" rating, subject to some total annotation budget. Building on recent work in active and prediction-powered statistical inference, we derive a family of cost-optimal policies for allocating a given annotation budget between weak and strong raters so as to maximize statistical efficiency. Using synthetic and real-world data, we empirically characterize the conditions under which these policies yield improvements over prior methods. We find that, especially in tasks where there is high variability in the difficulty of examples, our policies can achieve the same estimation precision at a far lower total annotation budget than standard evaluation methods. △ Less

Submitted 9 June, 2025; originally announced June 2025.

Don't lie to your friends: Learning what you know from collaborative self-play

Authors: Jacob Eisenstein, Reza Aghajani, Adam Fisch, Dheeru Dua, Fantine Huot, Mirella Lapata, Vicky Zayats, Jonathan Berant

Abstract: To be helpful assistants, AI agents must be aware of their own capabilities and limitations. This includes knowing when to answer from parametric knowledge versus using tools, when to trust tool outputs, and when to abstain or hedge. Such capabilities are hard to teach through supervised fine-tuning because they require constructing examples that reflect the agent's specific capabilities. We there… ▽ More To be helpful assistants, AI agents must be aware of their own capabilities and limitations. This includes knowing when to answer from parametric knowledge versus using tools, when to trust tool outputs, and when to abstain or hedge. Such capabilities are hard to teach through supervised fine-tuning because they require constructing examples that reflect the agent's specific capabilities. We therefore propose a radically new approach to teaching agents what they know: \emph{collaborative self-play}. We construct multi-agent collaborations in which the group is rewarded for collectively arriving at correct answers. The desired meta-knowledge emerges from the incentives built into the structure of the interaction. We focus on small societies of agents that have access to heterogeneous tools (corpus-specific retrieval), and therefore must collaborate to maximize their success while minimizing their effort. Experiments show that group-level rewards for multi-agent communities can induce policies that \emph{transfer} to improve tool use and selective prediction in settings where individual agents are deployed in isolation. △ Less

Submitted 31 March, 2025; v1 submitted 18 March, 2025; originally announced March 2025.

InfAlign: Inference-aware language model alignment

Authors: Ananth Balashankar, Ziteng Sun, Jonathan Berant, Jacob Eisenstein, Michael Collins, Adrian Hutter, Jong Lee, Chirag Nagpal, Flavien Prost, Aradhana Sinha, Ananda Theertha Suresh, Ahmad Beirami

Abstract: Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time algorithms (e.g., Best-of-N, controlled decoding, tree search) to decode from language models rather than standard sampling. We show that this train/test mismatch m… ▽ More Language model alignment is a critical step in training modern generative language models. Alignment targets to improve win rate of a sample from the aligned model against the base model. Today, we are increasingly using inference-time algorithms (e.g., Best-of-N, controlled decoding, tree search) to decode from language models rather than standard sampling. We show that this train/test mismatch makes standard RLHF framework sub-optimal in view of such inference-time methods. To this end, we propose a framework for inference-aware alignment (InfAlign), which aims to optimize inference-time win rate of the aligned policy against the base model. We prove that for any inference-time decoding procedure, the optimal aligned policy is the solution to the standard RLHF problem with a transformation of the reward. This motivates us to provide the calibrate-and-transform RL (InfAlign-CTRL) algorithm to solve this problem, which involves a reward calibration step and a KL-regularized reward maximization step with a transformation of the calibrated reward. For best-of-N sampling and best-of-N jailbreaking, we propose specific transformations offering up to 3-8% improvement on inference-time win rates. Finally, we also show that our proposed reward calibration method is a strong baseline for optimizing standard win rate. △ Less

Submitted 6 February, 2025; v1 submitted 27 December, 2024; originally announced December 2024.

ALTA: Compiler-Based Analysis of Transformers

Authors: Peter Shaw, James Cohan, Jacob Eisenstein, Kenton Lee, Jonathan Berant, Kristina Toutanova

Abstract: We propose a new programming language called ALTA and a compiler that can map ALTA programs to Transformer weights. ALTA is inspired by RASP, a language proposed by Weiss et al. (2021), and Tracr (Lindner et al., 2023), a compiler from RASP programs to Transformer weights. ALTA complements and extends this prior work, offering the ability to express loops and to compile programs to Universal Trans… ▽ More We propose a new programming language called ALTA and a compiler that can map ALTA programs to Transformer weights. ALTA is inspired by RASP, a language proposed by Weiss et al. (2021), and Tracr (Lindner et al., 2023), a compiler from RASP programs to Transformer weights. ALTA complements and extends this prior work, offering the ability to express loops and to compile programs to Universal Transformers, among other advantages. ALTA allows us to constructively show how Transformers can represent length-invariant algorithms for computing parity and addition, as well as a solution to the SCAN benchmark of compositional generalization tasks, without requiring intermediate scratchpad decoding steps. We also propose tools to analyze cases where the expressibility of an algorithm is established, but end-to-end training on a given training set fails to induce behavior consistent with the desired algorithm. To this end, we explore training from ALTA execution traces as a more fine-grained supervision signal. This enables additional experiments and theoretical analyses relating the learnability of various algorithms to data availability and modeling decisions, such as positional encodings. We make the ALTA framework -- language specification, symbolic interpreter, and weight compiler -- available to the community to enable further applications and insights. △ Less

Submitted 19 June, 2025; v1 submitted 23 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Comments: TMLR 2025

Rewarding Progress: Scaling Automated Process Verifiers for LLM Reasoning

Authors: Amrith Setlur, Chirag Nagpal, Adam Fisch, Xinyang Geng, Jacob Eisenstein, Rishabh Agarwal, Alekh Agarwal, Jonathan Berant, Aviral Kumar

Abstract: A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward models (ORMs) that only provide feedback at the final step. However, collecting dense, per-step human labels is not scalable, and training PRMs from automatically… ▽ More A promising approach for improving reasoning in large language models is to use process reward models (PRMs). PRMs provide feedback at each step of a multi-step reasoning trace, potentially improving credit assignment over outcome reward models (ORMs) that only provide feedback at the final step. However, collecting dense, per-step human labels is not scalable, and training PRMs from automatically-labeled data has thus far led to limited gains. To improve a base policy by running search against a PRM or using it as dense rewards for reinforcement learning (RL), we ask: "How should we design process rewards?". Our key insight is that, to be effective, the process reward for a step should measure progress: a change in the likelihood of producing a correct response in the future, before and after taking the step, corresponding to the notion of step-level advantages in RL. Crucially, this progress should be measured under a prover policy distinct from the base policy. We theoretically characterize the set of good provers and our results show that optimizing process rewards from such provers improves exploration during test-time search and online RL. In fact, our characterization shows that weak prover policies can substantially improve a stronger base policy, which we also observe empirically. We validate our claims by training process advantage verifiers (PAVs) to predict progress under such provers, and show that compared to ORMs, test-time search against PAVs is $>8\%$ more accurate, and $1.5-5\times$ more compute-efficient. Online RL with dense rewards from PAVs enables one of the first results with $5-6\times$ gain in sample efficiency, and $>6\%$ gain in accuracy, over ORMs. △ Less

Submitted 10 October, 2024; originally announced October 2024.

Predicting the Target Word of Game-playing Conversations using a Low-Rank Dialect Adapter for Decoder Models

Authors: Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Dialect adapters that improve the performance of LLMs for NLU tasks on certain sociolects/dialects/national varieties ('dialects' for the sake of brevity) have been reported for encoder models. In this paper, we extend the idea of dialect adapters to decoder models in our architecture called LoRDD. Using MD-3, a publicly available dataset of word game-playing conversations between dialectal speake… ▽ More Dialect adapters that improve the performance of LLMs for NLU tasks on certain sociolects/dialects/national varieties ('dialects' for the sake of brevity) have been reported for encoder models. In this paper, we extend the idea of dialect adapters to decoder models in our architecture called LoRDD. Using MD-3, a publicly available dataset of word game-playing conversations between dialectal speakers, our task is Target Word Prediction (TWP) from a masked conversation. LoRDD combines task adapters and dialect adapters where the latter employ contrastive learning on pseudo-parallel conversations from MD-3. Our experiments on Indian English and Nigerian English conversations with two models (Mistral and Gemma) demonstrate that LoRDD outperforms four baselines on TWP. Additionally, it significantly reduces the performance gap with American English, narrowing it to 12% and 5.8% for word similarity, and 25% and 4.5% for accuracy, respectively. The focused contribution of LoRDD is in its promise for dialect adaptation of decoder models using TWP, a simplified version of the commonly used next-word prediction task. △ Less

Submitted 31 January, 2025; v1 submitted 31 August, 2024; originally announced September 2024.

Comments: Accepted to NAACL 2025

Robust Preference Optimization through Reward Model Distillation

Authors: Adam Fisch, Jacob Eisenstein, Vicky Zayats, Alekh Agarwal, Ahmad Beirami, Chirag Nagpal, Pete Shaw, Jonathan Berant

Abstract: Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on preference data without the need to train a reward model or apply reinforcement learning. However, the empirical evidence suggests that DPO typically assigns im… ▽ More Language model (LM) post-training (or alignment) involves maximizing a reward function that is derived from preference annotations. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) is a popular offline alignment method that trains a policy directly on preference data without the need to train a reward model or apply reinforcement learning. However, the empirical evidence suggests that DPO typically assigns implicit rewards that overfit, and trend towards infinite magnitude. This frequently leads to degenerate policies, sometimes causing even the probabilities of the preferred generations to go to zero. In this work, we analyze this phenomenon and use distillation to get a better proxy for the true preference distribution over generation pairs: we train the LM such that its induced implicit reward, i.e., the scaled log-likelihood ratio of the model to the reference model, matches an explicit reward model trained on the preference data. Moreover, to account for uncertainty in the reward model we are distilling from, we optimize against a family of reward models that, as a whole, is likely to include at least one reasonable proxy for the preference distribution. Our results show that distilling from such a family of reward models leads to improved robustness to distribution shift in preference annotations, while preserving the simple supervised nature of DPO. △ Less

Submitted 3 March, 2025; v1 submitted 29 May, 2024; originally announced May 2024.

Reuse Your Rewards: Reward Model Transfer for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Alignment

Authors: Zhaofeng Wu, Ananth Balashankar, Yoon Kim, Jacob Eisenstein, Ahmad Beirami

Abstract: Aligning language models (LMs) based on human-annotated preference data is a crucial step in obtaining practical and performant LM-based systems. However, multilingual human preference data are difficult to obtain at scale, making it challenging to extend this framework to diverse languages. In this work, we evaluate a simple approach for zero-shot cross-lingual alignment, where a reward model is… ▽ More Aligning language models (LMs) based on human-annotated preference data is a crucial step in obtaining practical and performant LM-based systems. However, multilingual human preference data are difficult to obtain at scale, making it challenging to extend this framework to diverse languages. In this work, we evaluate a simple approach for zero-shot cross-lingual alignment, where a reward model is trained on preference data in one source language and directly applied to other target languages. On summarization and open-ended dialog generation, we show that this method is consistently successful under comprehensive evaluation settings, including human evaluation: cross-lingually aligned models are preferred by humans over unaligned models on up to >70% of evaluation instances. We moreover find that a different-language reward model sometimes yields better aligned models than a same-language reward model. We also identify best practices when there is no language-specific data for even supervised finetuning, another component in alignment. △ Less

Submitted 14 October, 2024; v1 submitted 18 April, 2024; originally announced April 2024.

Comments: EMNLP 2024

Transforming and Combining Rewards for Aligning Large Language Models

Authors: Zihao Wang, Chirag Nagpal, Jonathan Berant, Jacob Eisenstein, Alex D'Amour, Sanmi Koyejo, Victor Veitch

Abstract: A common approach for aligning language models to human preferences is to first learn a reward model from preference data, and then use this reward model to update the language model. We study two closely related problems that arise in this approach. First, any monotone transformation of the reward model preserves preference ranking; is there a choice that is ``better'' than others? Second, we oft… ▽ More A common approach for aligning language models to human preferences is to first learn a reward model from preference data, and then use this reward model to update the language model. We study two closely related problems that arise in this approach. First, any monotone transformation of the reward model preserves preference ranking; is there a choice that is ``better'' than others? Second, we often wish to align language models to multiple properties: how should we combine multiple reward models? Using a probabilistic interpretation of the alignment procedure, we identify a natural choice for transformation for (the common case of) rewards learned from Bradley-Terry preference models. The derived transformation is straightforward: we apply a log-sigmoid function to the centered rewards, a method we term ``LSC-transformation'' (log-sigmoid-centered transformation). This transformation has two important properties. First, it emphasizes improving poorly-performing outputs, rather than outputs that already score well. This mitigates both underfitting (where some prompts are not improved) and reward hacking (where the model learns to exploit misspecification of the reward model). Second, it enables principled aggregation of rewards by linking summation to logical conjunction: the sum of transformed rewards corresponds to the probability that the output is ``good'' in all measured properties, in a sense we make precise. Experiments aligning language models to be both helpful and harmless using RLHF show substantial improvements over the baseline (non-transformed) approach. △ Less

Submitted 19 July, 2024; v1 submitted 1 February, 2024; originally announced February 2024.

MSC Class: 68T50 ACM Class: I.2

Theoretical guarantees on the best-of-n alignment policy

Authors: Ahmad Beirami, Alekh Agarwal, Jonathan Berant, Alexander D'Amour, Jacob Eisenstein, Chirag Nagpal, Ananda Theertha Suresh

Abstract: A simple and effective method for the inference-time alignment and scaling test-time compute of generative models is best-of-$n$ sampling, where $n$ samples are drawn from a reference policy, ranked based on a reward function, and the highest ranking one is selected. A commonly used analytical expression in the literature claims that the KL divergence between the best-of-$n$ policy and the referen… ▽ More A simple and effective method for the inference-time alignment and scaling test-time compute of generative models is best-of-$n$ sampling, where $n$ samples are drawn from a reference policy, ranked based on a reward function, and the highest ranking one is selected. A commonly used analytical expression in the literature claims that the KL divergence between the best-of-$n$ policy and the reference policy is equal to $\log (n) - (n-1)/n.$ We disprove the validity of this claim, and show that it is an upper bound on the actual KL divergence. We also explore the tightness of this upper bound in different regimes, and propose a new estimator for the KL divergence and empirically show that it provides a tight approximation. We also show that the win rate of the best-of-$n$ policy against the reference policy is upper bounded by $n/(n+1)$ and derive bounds on the tightness of this characterization. We conclude with analyzing the tradeoffs between win rate and KL divergence of the best-of-$n$ alignment policy, which demonstrate that very good tradeoffs are achievable with $n < 1000$. △ Less

Submitted 28 May, 2025; v1 submitted 3 January, 2024; originally announced January 2024.

Comments: ICML 2025

Helping or Herding? Reward Model Ensembles Mitigate but do not Eliminate Reward Hacking

Authors: Jacob Eisenstein, Chirag Nagpal, Alekh Agarwal, Ahmad Beirami, Alex D'Amour, DJ Dvijotham, Adam Fisch, Katherine Heller, Stephen Pfohl, Deepak Ramachandran, Peter Shaw, Jonathan Berant

Abstract: Reward models play a key role in aligning language model applications towards human preferences. However, this setup creates an incentive for the language model to exploit errors in the reward model to achieve high estimated reward, a phenomenon often termed \emph{reward hacking}. A natural mitigation is to train an ensemble of reward models, aggregating over model outputs to obtain a more robust… ▽ More Reward models play a key role in aligning language model applications towards human preferences. However, this setup creates an incentive for the language model to exploit errors in the reward model to achieve high estimated reward, a phenomenon often termed \emph{reward hacking}. A natural mitigation is to train an ensemble of reward models, aggregating over model outputs to obtain a more robust reward estimate. We explore the application of reward ensembles to alignment at both training time (through reinforcement learning) and inference time (through reranking). First, we show that reward models are \emph{underspecified}: reward models that perform similarly in-distribution can yield very different rewards when used in alignment, due to distribution shift. Second, underspecification results in overoptimization, where alignment to one reward model does not improve reward as measured by another reward model trained on the same data. Third, overoptimization is mitigated by the use of reward ensembles, and ensembles that vary by their \emph{pretraining} seeds lead to better generalization than ensembles that differ only by their \emph{fine-tuning} seeds, with both outperforming individual reward models. However, even pretrain reward ensembles do not eliminate reward hacking: we show several qualitative reward hacking phenomena that are not mitigated by ensembling because all reward models in the ensemble exhibit similar error patterns. △ Less

Submitted 16 August, 2024; v1 submitted 14 December, 2023; originally announced December 2023.

Comments: Published at the 2024 Conference on Language Modeling (CoLM)

Selectively Answering Ambiguous Questions

Authors: Jeremy R. Cole, Michael J. Q. Zhang, Daniel Gillick, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Bhuwan Dhingra, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is clear and the answer is unambiguous but possibly unknown, but the answer to a question can also be unclear due to uncertainty of the questioner's intent or con… ▽ More Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is clear and the answer is unambiguous but possibly unknown, but the answer to a question can also be unclear due to uncertainty of the questioner's intent or context. We investigate question answering from this perspective, focusing on answering a subset of questions with a high degree of accuracy, from a set of questions in which many are inherently ambiguous. In this setting, we find that the most reliable approach to decide when to abstain involves quantifying repetition within sampled model outputs, rather than the model's likelihood or self-verification as used in prior work. We find this to be the case across different types of uncertainty and model scales,and with or without instruction tuning. Our results suggest that sampling-based confidence scores help calibrate answers to relatively unambiguous questions, with more dramatic improvements on ambiguous questions. △ Less

Submitted 14 November, 2023; v1 submitted 23 May, 2023; originally announced May 2023.

Comments: To appear in EMNLP 2023. 9 pages, 5 figures, 2 pages of appendix

MD3: The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues

Authors: Jacob Eisenstein, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Clara Rivera, Dorottya Demszky, Devyani Sharma

Abstract: We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal comparison, while av… ▽ More We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal comparison, while avoiding the imposition of a restrictive task structure that might inhibit the expression of dialect features. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals significant differences in syntax and in the use of discourse markers. The dataset, which will be made publicly available with the publication of this paper, includes more than 20 hours of audio and more than 200,000 orthographically-transcribed tokens. △ Less

Submitted 18 May, 2023; originally announced May 2023.

Comments: InterSpeech 2023

Attributed Question Answering: Evaluation and Modeling for Attributed Large Language Models

Authors: Bernd Bohnet, Vinh Q. Tran, Pat Verga, Roee Aharoni, Daniel Andor, Livio Baldini Soares, Massimiliano Ciaramita, Jacob Eisenstein, Kuzman Ganchev, Jonathan Herzig, Kai Hui, Tom Kwiatkowski, Ji Ma, Jianmo Ni, Lierni Sestorain Saralegui, Tal Schuster, William W. Cohen, Michael Collins, Dipanjan Das, Donald Metzler, Slav Petrov, Kellie Webster

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial in this setting. We formulate and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of… ▽ More Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive results while requiring little or no direct supervision. Further, there is mounting evidence that LLMs may have potential in information-seeking scenarios. We believe the ability of an LLM to attribute the text that it generates is likely to be crucial in this setting. We formulate and study Attributed QA as a key first step in the development of attributed LLMs. We propose a reproducible evaluation framework for the task and benchmark a broad set of architectures. We take human annotations as a gold standard and show that a correlated automatic metric is suitable for development. Our experimental work gives concrete answers to two key questions (How to measure attribution?, and How well do current state-of-the-art methods perform on attribution?), and give some hints as to how to address a third (How to build LLMs with attribution?). △ Less

Submitted 10 February, 2023; v1 submitted 15 December, 2022; originally announced December 2022.

Dialect-robust Evaluation of Generated Text

Authors: Jiao Sun, Thibault Sellam, Elizabeth Clark, Tu Vu, Timothy Dozat, Dan Garrette, Aditya Siddhant, Jacob Eisenstein, Sebastian Gehrmann

Abstract: Evaluation metrics that are not robust to dialect variation make it impossible to tell how well systems perform for many groups of users, and can even penalize systems for producing text in lower-resource dialects. However, currently, there exists no way to quantify how metrics respond to change in the dialect of a generated utterance. We thus formalize dialect robustness and dialect awareness as… ▽ More Evaluation metrics that are not robust to dialect variation make it impossible to tell how well systems perform for many groups of users, and can even penalize systems for producing text in lower-resource dialects. However, currently, there exists no way to quantify how metrics respond to change in the dialect of a generated utterance. We thus formalize dialect robustness and dialect awareness as goals for NLG evaluation metrics. We introduce a suite of methods and corresponding statistical tests one can use to assess metrics in light of the two goals. Applying the suite to current state-of-the-art metrics, we demonstrate that they are not dialect-robust and that semantic perturbations frequently lead to smaller decreases in a metric than the introduction of dialect features. As a first step to overcome this limitation, we propose a training schema, NANO, which introduces regional and language information to the pretraining process of a metric. We demonstrate that NANO provides a size-efficient way for models to improve the dialect robustness while simultaneously improving their performance on the standard metric benchmark. △ Less

Submitted 2 November, 2022; originally announced November 2022.

Predicting Long-Term Citations from Short-Term Linguistic Influence

Authors: Sandeep Soni, David Bamman, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count offers limited information about the extent to which a paper affected the content of subsequent publications. We therefore propose a novel method to quantify linguistic influence in timestamped document collections. There are two main steps:… ▽ More A standard measure of the influence of a research paper is the number of times it is cited. However, papers may be cited for many reasons, and citation count offers limited information about the extent to which a paper affected the content of subsequent publications. We therefore propose a novel method to quantify linguistic influence in timestamped document collections. There are two main steps: first, identify lexical and semantic changes using contextual embeddings and word frequencies; second, aggregate information about these changes into per-document influence scores by estimating a high-dimensional Hawkes process with a low-rank parameter matrix. We show that this measure of linguistic influence is predictive of $\textit{future}$ citations: the estimate of linguistic influence from the two years after a paper's publication is correlated with and predictive of its citation count in the following three years. This is demonstrated using an online evaluation with incremental temporal training/test splits, in comparison with a strong baseline that includes predictors for initial citation counts, topics, and lexical features. △ Less

Submitted 24 October, 2022; originally announced October 2022.

Comments: 17 pages, 3 figures, to appear in the Findings of EMNLP 2022

Pre-trained Sentence Embeddings for Implicit Discourse Relation Classification

Authors: Murali Raghu Babu Balusu, Yangfeng Ji, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Implicit discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. Automatic sense prediction for implicit relations is hard, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. Furthermore, annotated datasets contain relatively few labeled examples, due to the scale of the phenomenon: on average each discourse relation encompasses several dozen words. In this pap… ▽ More Implicit discourse relations bind smaller linguistic units into coherent texts. Automatic sense prediction for implicit relations is hard, because it requires understanding the semantics of the linked arguments. Furthermore, annotated datasets contain relatively few labeled examples, due to the scale of the phenomenon: on average each discourse relation encompasses several dozen words. In this paper, we explore the utility of pre-trained sentence embeddings as base representations in a neural network for implicit discourse relation sense classification. We present a series of experiments using both supervised end-to-end trained models and pre-trained sentence encoding techniques - SkipThought, Sent2vec and Infersent. The pre-trained embeddings are competitive with the end-to-end model, and the approaches are complementary, with combined models yielding significant performance improvements on two of the three evaluations. △ Less

Submitted 20 October, 2022; originally announced October 2022.

Comments: 6 pages

Honest Students from Untrusted Teachers: Learning an Interpretable Question-Answering Pipeline from a Pretrained Language Model

Authors: Jacob Eisenstein, Daniel Andor, Bernd Bohnet, Michael Collins, David Mimno

Abstract: Explainable question answering systems should produce not only accurate answers but also rationales that justify their reasoning and allow humans to check their work. But what sorts of rationales are useful and how can we train systems to produce them? We propose a new style of rationale for open-book question answering, called \emph{markup-and-mask}, which combines aspects of extractive and free-… ▽ More Explainable question answering systems should produce not only accurate answers but also rationales that justify their reasoning and allow humans to check their work. But what sorts of rationales are useful and how can we train systems to produce them? We propose a new style of rationale for open-book question answering, called \emph{markup-and-mask}, which combines aspects of extractive and free-text explanations. In the markup phase, the passage is augmented with free-text markup that enables each sentence to stand on its own outside the discourse context. In the masking phase, a sub-span of the marked-up passage is selected. To train a system to produce markup-and-mask rationales without annotations, we leverage in-context learning. Specifically, we generate silver annotated data by sending a series of prompts to a frozen pretrained language model, which acts as a teacher. We then fine-tune a smaller student model by training on the subset of rationales that led to correct answers. The student is "honest" in the sense that it is a pipeline: the rationale acts as a bottleneck between the passage and the answer, while the "untrusted" teacher operates under no such constraints. Thus, we offer a new way to build trustworthy pipeline systems from a combination of end-task annotations and frozen pretrained language models. △ Less

Submitted 24 April, 2024; v1 submitted 5 October, 2022; originally announced October 2022.

Comments: added details about a human evaluation

Informativeness and Invariance: Two Perspectives on Spurious Correlations in Natural Language

Authors: Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Spurious correlations are a threat to the trustworthiness of natural language processing systems, motivating research into methods for identifying and eliminating them. However, addressing the problem of spurious correlations requires more clarity on what they are and how they arise in language data. Gardner et al (2021) argue that the compositional nature of language implies that \emph{all} corre… ▽ More Spurious correlations are a threat to the trustworthiness of natural language processing systems, motivating research into methods for identifying and eliminating them. However, addressing the problem of spurious correlations requires more clarity on what they are and how they arise in language data. Gardner et al (2021) argue that the compositional nature of language implies that \emph{all} correlations between labels and individual "input features" are spurious. This paper analyzes this proposal in the context of a toy example, demonstrating three distinct conditions that can give rise to feature-label correlations in a simple PCFG. Linking the toy example to a structured causal model shows that (1) feature-label correlations can arise even when the label is invariant to interventions on the feature, and (2) feature-label correlations may be absent even when the label is sensitive to interventions on the feature. Because input features will be individually correlated with labels in all but very rare circumstances, domain knowledge must be applied to identify spurious correlations that pose genuine robustness threats. △ Less

Submitted 3 May, 2022; v1 submitted 9 April, 2022; originally announced April 2022.

Comments: NAACL 2022

Causal Inference in Natural Language Processing: Estimation, Prediction, Interpretation and Beyond

Authors: Amir Feder, Katherine A. Keith, Emaad Manzoor, Reid Pryzant, Dhanya Sridhar, Zach Wood-Doughty, Jacob Eisenstein, Justin Grimmer, Roi Reichart, Margaret E. Roberts, Brandon M. Stewart, Victor Veitch, Diyi Yang

Abstract: A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the conver… ▽ More A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has traditionally placed more emphasis on predictive tasks. This distinction is beginning to fade, with an emerging area of interdisciplinary research at the convergence of causal inference and language processing. Still, research on causality in NLP remains scattered across domains without unified definitions, benchmark datasets and clear articulations of the challenges and opportunities in the application of causal inference to the textual domain, with its unique properties. In this survey, we consolidate research across academic areas and situate it in the broader NLP landscape. We introduce the statistical challenge of estimating causal effects with text, encompassing settings where text is used as an outcome, treatment, or to address confounding. In addition, we explore potential uses of causal inference to improve the robustness, fairness, and interpretability of NLP models. We thus provide a unified overview of causal inference for the NLP community. △ Less

Submitted 30 July, 2022; v1 submitted 2 September, 2021; originally announced September 2021.

Comments: Accepted to Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (TACL)

Learning to Look Inside: Augmenting Token-Based Encoders with Character-Level Information

Authors: Yuval Pinter, Amanda Stent, Mark Dredze, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Commonly-used transformer language models depend on a tokenization schema which sets an unchangeable subword vocabulary prior to pre-training, destined to be applied to all downstream tasks regardless of domain shift, novel word formations, or other sources of vocabulary mismatch. Recent work has shown that "token-free" models can be trained directly on characters or bytes, but training these mode… ▽ More Commonly-used transformer language models depend on a tokenization schema which sets an unchangeable subword vocabulary prior to pre-training, destined to be applied to all downstream tasks regardless of domain shift, novel word formations, or other sources of vocabulary mismatch. Recent work has shown that "token-free" models can be trained directly on characters or bytes, but training these models from scratch requires substantial computational resources, and this implies discarding the many domain-specific models that were trained on tokens. In this paper, we present XRayEmb, a method for retrofitting existing token-based models with character-level information. XRayEmb is composed of a character-level "encoder" that computes vector representations of character sequences, and a generative component that decodes from the internal representation to a character sequence. We show that incorporating XRayEmb's learned vectors into sequences of pre-trained token embeddings helps performance on both autoregressive and masked pre-trained transformer architectures and on both sequence-level and sequence tagging tasks, particularly on non-standard English text. △ Less

Submitted 1 August, 2021; originally announced August 2021.

Revisiting the Primacy of English in Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer

Authors: Iulia Turc, Kenton Lee, Jacob Eisenstein, Ming-Wei Chang, Kristina Toutanova

Abstract: Despite their success, large pre-trained multilingual models have not completely alleviated the need for labeled data, which is cumbersome to collect for all target languages. Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is emerging as a practical solution: pre-trained models later fine-tuned on one transfer language exhibit surprising performance when tested on many target languages. English is the dominant… ▽ More Despite their success, large pre-trained multilingual models have not completely alleviated the need for labeled data, which is cumbersome to collect for all target languages. Zero-shot cross-lingual transfer is emerging as a practical solution: pre-trained models later fine-tuned on one transfer language exhibit surprising performance when tested on many target languages. English is the dominant source language for transfer, as reinforced by popular zero-shot benchmarks. However, this default choice has not been systematically vetted. In our study, we compare English against other transfer languages for fine-tuning, on two pre-trained multilingual models (mBERT and mT5) and multiple classification and question answering tasks. We find that other high-resource languages such as German and Russian often transfer more effectively, especially when the set of target languages is diverse or unknown a priori. Unexpectedly, this can be true even when the training sets were automatically translated from English. This finding can have immediate impact on multilingual zero-shot systems, and should inform future benchmark designs. △ Less

Submitted 30 June, 2021; originally announced June 2021.

The MultiBERTs: BERT Reproductions for Robustness Analysis

Authors: Thibault Sellam, Steve Yadlowsky, Jason Wei, Naomi Saphra, Alexander D'Amour, Tal Linzen, Jasmijn Bastings, Iulia Turc, Jacob Eisenstein, Dipanjan Das, Ian Tenney, Ellie Pavlick

Abstract: Experiments with pre-trained models such as BERT are often based on a single checkpoint. While the conclusions drawn apply to the artifact tested in the experiment (i.e., the particular instance of the model), it is not always clear whether they hold for the more general procedure which includes the architecture, training data, initialization scheme, and loss function. Recent work has shown that r… ▽ More Experiments with pre-trained models such as BERT are often based on a single checkpoint. While the conclusions drawn apply to the artifact tested in the experiment (i.e., the particular instance of the model), it is not always clear whether they hold for the more general procedure which includes the architecture, training data, initialization scheme, and loss function. Recent work has shown that repeating the pre-training process can lead to substantially different performance, suggesting that an alternate strategy is needed to make principled statements about procedures. To enable researchers to draw more robust conclusions, we introduce the MultiBERTs, a set of 25 BERT-Base checkpoints, trained with similar hyper-parameters as the original BERT model but differing in random weight initialization and shuffling of training data. We also define the Multi-Bootstrap, a non-parametric bootstrap method for statistical inference designed for settings where there are multiple pre-trained models and limited test data. To illustrate our approach, we present a case study of gender bias in coreference resolution, in which the Multi-Bootstrap lets us measure effects that may not be detected with a single checkpoint. We release our models and statistical library along with an additional set of 140 intermediate checkpoints captured during pre-training to facilitate research on learning dynamics. △ Less

Submitted 21 March, 2022; v1 submitted 30 June, 2021; originally announced June 2021.

Comments: Accepted at ICLR'22. Checkpoints and example analyses: http://goo.gle/multiberts

Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Bases

Authors: Bhuwan Dhingra, Jeremy R. Cole, Julian Martin Eisenschlos, Daniel Gillick, Jacob Eisenstein, William W. Cohen

Abstract: Many facts come with an expiration date, from the name of the President to the basketball team Lebron James plays for. But language models (LMs) are trained on snapshots of data collected at a specific moment in time, and this can limit their utility, especially in the closed-book setting where the pretraining corpus must contain the facts the model should memorize. We introduce a diagnostic datas… ▽ More Many facts come with an expiration date, from the name of the President to the basketball team Lebron James plays for. But language models (LMs) are trained on snapshots of data collected at a specific moment in time, and this can limit their utility, especially in the closed-book setting where the pretraining corpus must contain the facts the model should memorize. We introduce a diagnostic dataset aimed at probing LMs for factual knowledge that changes over time and highlight problems with LMs at either end of the spectrum -- those trained on specific slices of temporal data, as well as those trained on a wide range of temporal data. To mitigate these problems, we propose a simple technique for jointly modeling text with its timestamp. This improves memorization of seen facts from the training time period, as well as calibration on predictions about unseen facts from future time periods. We also show that models trained with temporal context can be efficiently "refreshed" as new data arrives, without the need for retraining from scratch. △ Less

Submitted 23 April, 2022; v1 submitted 29 June, 2021; originally announced June 2021.

Comments: Version accepted to TACL

Journal ref: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2022; 10 257-273

Counterfactual Invariance to Spurious Correlations: Why and How to Pass Stress Tests

Authors: Victor Veitch, Alexander D'Amour, Steve Yadlowsky, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Informally, a 'spurious correlation' is the dependence of a model on some aspect of the input data that an analyst thinks shouldn't matter. In machine learning, these have a know-it-when-you-see-it character; e.g., changing the gender of a sentence's subject changes a sentiment predictor's output. To check for spurious correlations, we can 'stress test' models by perturbing irrelevant parts of inp… ▽ More Informally, a 'spurious correlation' is the dependence of a model on some aspect of the input data that an analyst thinks shouldn't matter. In machine learning, these have a know-it-when-you-see-it character; e.g., changing the gender of a sentence's subject changes a sentiment predictor's output. To check for spurious correlations, we can 'stress test' models by perturbing irrelevant parts of input data and seeing if model predictions change. In this paper, we study stress testing using the tools of causal inference. We introduce counterfactual invariance as a formalization of the requirement that changing irrelevant parts of the input shouldn't change model predictions. We connect counterfactual invariance to out-of-domain model performance, and provide practical schemes for learning (approximately) counterfactual invariant predictors (without access to counterfactual examples). It turns out that both the means and implications of counterfactual invariance depend fundamentally on the true underlying causal structure of the data -- in particular, whether the label causes the features or the features cause the label. Distinct causal structures require distinct regularization schemes to induce counterfactual invariance. Similarly, counterfactual invariance implies different domain shift guarantees depending on the underlying causal structure. This theory is supported by empirical results on text classification. △ Less

Submitted 2 November, 2021; v1 submitted 31 May, 2021; originally announced June 2021.

Comments: Published at NeurIPS 2021 (spotlight)

Abolitionist Networks: Modeling Language Change in Nineteenth-Century Activist Newspapers

Authors: Sandeep Soni, Lauren Klein, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States remains among the most significant social and political movements in US history. Abolitionist newspapers played a crucial role in spreading information and shaping public opinion around a range of issues relating to the abolition of slavery. These newspapers also serve as a primary source of information about the movement for schola… ▽ More The abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States remains among the most significant social and political movements in US history. Abolitionist newspapers played a crucial role in spreading information and shaping public opinion around a range of issues relating to the abolition of slavery. These newspapers also serve as a primary source of information about the movement for scholars today, resulting in powerful new accounts of the movement and its leaders. This paper supplements recent qualitative work on the role of women in abolition's vanguard, as well as the role of the Black press, with a quantitative text modeling approach. Using diachronic word embeddings, we identify which newspapers tended to lead lexical semantic innovations -- the introduction of new usages of specific words -- and which newspapers tended to follow. We then aggregate the evidence across hundreds of changes into a weighted network with the newspapers as nodes; directed edge weights represent the frequency with which each newspaper led the other in the adoption of a lexical semantic change. Analysis of this network reveals pathways of lexical semantic influence, distinguishing leaders from followers, as well as others who stood apart from the semantic changes that swept through this period. More specifically, we find that two newspapers edited by women -- THE PROVINCIAL FREEMAN and THE LILY -- led a large number of semantic changes in our corpus, lending additional credence to the argument that a multiracial coalition of women led the abolitionist movement in terms of both thought and action. It also contributes additional complexity to the scholarship that has sought to tease apart the relation of the abolitionist movement to the women's suffrage movement, and the vexed racial politics that characterized their relation. △ Less

Submitted 12 March, 2021; originally announced March 2021.

Comments: 23 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables

Journal ref: Journal of Cultural Analytics (2021)

Checkpointing with cp: the POSIX Shared Memory System

Authors: Lehman H. Garrison, Daniel J. Eisenstein, Nina A. Maksimova

Abstract: We present the checkpointing scheme of Abacus, an $N$-body simulation code that allocates all persistent state in POSIX shared memory, or ramdisk. Checkpointing becomes as simple as copying files from ramdisk to external storage. The main simulation executable is invoked once per time step, memory mapping the input state, computing the output state directly into ramdisk, and unmapping the input st… ▽ More We present the checkpointing scheme of Abacus, an $N$-body simulation code that allocates all persistent state in POSIX shared memory, or ramdisk. Checkpointing becomes as simple as copying files from ramdisk to external storage. The main simulation executable is invoked once per time step, memory mapping the input state, computing the output state directly into ramdisk, and unmapping the input state. The main executable remains unaware of the concept of checkpointing, with the top-level driver code launching a file-system copy between executable invocations when a checkpoint is needed. Since the only information flow is through files on ramdisk, the checkpoint must be correct so long as the simulation is correct. However, we find that with multi-GB of state, there is a significant overhead to unmapping the shared memory. This can be partially mitigated with multithreading, but ultimately, we do not recommend shared memory for use with a large state. △ Less

Submitted 25 February, 2021; originally announced February 2021.

Comments: 3 pages, 1 figure. Extended abstract accepted by SuperCheck21. Symposium presentation at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1q63kk1TCyOuh15Lu47bUJ8K7iZ-pYP9U/view

Tuiteamos o pongamos un tuit? Investigating the Social Constraints of Loanword Integration in Spanish Social Media

Authors: Ian Stewart, Diyi Yang, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Speakers of non-English languages often adopt loanwords from English to express new or unusual concepts. While these loanwords may be borrowed unchanged, speakers may also integrate the words to fit the constraints of their native language, e.g. creating Spanish "tuitear" from English "tweet." Linguists have often considered the process of loanword integration to be more dependent on language-inte… ▽ More Speakers of non-English languages often adopt loanwords from English to express new or unusual concepts. While these loanwords may be borrowed unchanged, speakers may also integrate the words to fit the constraints of their native language, e.g. creating Spanish "tuitear" from English "tweet." Linguists have often considered the process of loanword integration to be more dependent on language-internal constraints, but sociolinguistic constraints such as speaker background remain only qualitatively understood. We investigate the role of social context and speaker background in Spanish speakers' use of integrated loanwords on social media. We find first that newspaper authors use the integrated forms of loanwords and native words more often than social media authors, showing that integration is associated with formal domains. In social media, we find that speaker background and expectations of formality explain loanword and native word integration, such that authors who use more Spanish and who write to a wider audience tend to use integrated verb forms more often. This study shows that loanword integration reflects not only language-internal constraints but also social expectations that vary by conversation and speaker. △ Less

Submitted 15 January, 2021; originally announced January 2021.

ACM Class: I.2.7

Journal ref: Society for Computation in Linguistics, 2021

Underspecification Presents Challenges for Credibility in Modern Machine Learning

Authors: Alexander D'Amour, Katherine Heller, Dan Moldovan, Ben Adlam, Babak Alipanahi, Alex Beutel, Christina Chen, Jonathan Deaton, Jacob Eisenstein, Matthew D. Hoffman, Farhad Hormozdiari, Neil Houlsby, Shaobo Hou, Ghassen Jerfel, Alan Karthikesalingam, Mario Lucic, Yian Ma, Cory McLean, Diana Mincu, Akinori Mitani, Andrea Montanari, Zachary Nado, Vivek Natarajan, Christopher Nielson, Thomas F. Osborne , et al. (15 additional authors not shown)

Abstract: ML models often exhibit unexpectedly poor behavior when they are deployed in real-world domains. We identify underspecification as a key reason for these failures. An ML pipeline is underspecified when it can return many predictors with equivalently strong held-out performance in the training domain. Underspecification is common in modern ML pipelines, such as those based on deep learning. Predict… ▽ More ML models often exhibit unexpectedly poor behavior when they are deployed in real-world domains. We identify underspecification as a key reason for these failures. An ML pipeline is underspecified when it can return many predictors with equivalently strong held-out performance in the training domain. Underspecification is common in modern ML pipelines, such as those based on deep learning. Predictors returned by underspecified pipelines are often treated as equivalent based on their training domain performance, but we show here that such predictors can behave very differently in deployment domains. This ambiguity can lead to instability and poor model behavior in practice, and is a distinct failure mode from previously identified issues arising from structural mismatch between training and deployment domains. We show that this problem appears in a wide variety of practical ML pipelines, using examples from computer vision, medical imaging, natural language processing, clinical risk prediction based on electronic health records, and medical genomics. Our results show the need to explicitly account for underspecification in modeling pipelines that are intended for real-world deployment in any domain. △ Less

Submitted 24 November, 2020; v1 submitted 6 November, 2020; originally announced November 2020.

Comments: Updates: Updated statistical analysis in Section 6; Additional citations

Learning to Recognize Dialect Features

Authors: Dorottya Demszky, Devyani Sharma, Jonathan H. Clark, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Building NLP systems that serve everyone requires accounting for dialect differences. But dialects are not monolithic entities: rather, distinctions between and within dialects are captured by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of dialect features in speech and text, such as the deletion of the copula in "He {} running". In this paper, we introduce the task of dialect feature detection… ▽ More Building NLP systems that serve everyone requires accounting for dialect differences. But dialects are not monolithic entities: rather, distinctions between and within dialects are captured by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of dialect features in speech and text, such as the deletion of the copula in "He {} running". In this paper, we introduce the task of dialect feature detection, and present two multitask learning approaches, both based on pretrained transformers. For most dialects, large-scale annotated corpora for these features are unavailable, making it difficult to train recognizers. We train our models on a small number of minimal pairs, building on how linguists typically define dialect features. Evaluation on a test set of 22 dialect features of Indian English demonstrates that these models learn to recognize many features with high accuracy, and that a few minimal pairs can be as effective for training as thousands of labeled examples. We also demonstrate the downstream applicability of dialect feature detection both as a measure of dialect density and as a dialect classifier. △ Less

Submitted 6 May, 2021; v1 submitted 23 October, 2020; originally announced October 2020.

Comments: NAACL camera-ready

Will it Unblend?

Authors: Yuval Pinter, Cassandra L. Jacobs, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Natural language processing systems often struggle with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms, which do not appear in training data. Blends, such as "innoventor", are one particularly challenging class of OOV, as they are formed by fusing together two or more bases that relate to the intended meaning in unpredictable manners and degrees. In this work, we run experiments on a novel dataset of English OOV b… ▽ More Natural language processing systems often struggle with out-of-vocabulary (OOV) terms, which do not appear in training data. Blends, such as "innoventor", are one particularly challenging class of OOV, as they are formed by fusing together two or more bases that relate to the intended meaning in unpredictable manners and degrees. In this work, we run experiments on a novel dataset of English OOV blends to quantify the difficulty of interpreting the meanings of blends by large-scale contextual language models such as BERT. We first show that BERT's processing of these blends does not fully access the component meanings, leaving their contextual representations semantically impoverished. We find this is mostly due to the loss of characters resulting from blend formation. Then, we assess how easily different models can recognize the structure and recover the origin of blends, and find that context-aware embedding systems outperform character-level and context-free embeddings, although their results are still far from satisfactory. △ Less

Submitted 18 September, 2020; originally announced September 2020.

Comments: Findings of EMNLP 2020

AdvAug: Robust Adversarial Augmentation for Neural Machine Translation

Authors: Yong Cheng, Lu Jiang, Wolfgang Macherey, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a new adversarial augmentation method for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The main idea is to minimize the vicinal risk over virtual sentences sampled from two vicinity distributions, of which the crucial one is a novel vicinity distribution for adversarial sentences that describes a smooth interpolated embedding space centered around observed training sentence pairs. W… ▽ More In this paper, we propose a new adversarial augmentation method for Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The main idea is to minimize the vicinal risk over virtual sentences sampled from two vicinity distributions, of which the crucial one is a novel vicinity distribution for adversarial sentences that describes a smooth interpolated embedding space centered around observed training sentence pairs. We then discuss our approach, AdvAug, to train NMT models using the embeddings of virtual sentences in sequence-to-sequence learning. Experiments on Chinese-English, English-French, and English-German translation benchmarks show that AdvAug achieves significant improvements over the Transformer (up to 4.9 BLEU points), and substantially outperforms other data augmentation techniques (e.g. back-translation) without using extra corpora. △ Less

Submitted 2 July, 2020; v1 submitted 21 June, 2020; originally announced June 2020.

Comments: published at ACL2020

Sparse, Dense, and Attentional Representations for Text Retrieval

Authors: Yi Luan, Jacob Eisenstein, Kristina Toutanova, Michael Collins

Abstract: Dual encoders perform retrieval by encoding documents and queries into dense lowdimensional vectors, scoring each document by its inner product with the query. We investigate the capacity of this architecture relative to sparse bag-of-words models and attentional neural networks. Using both theoretical and empirical analysis, we establish connections between the encoding dimension, the margin betw… ▽ More Dual encoders perform retrieval by encoding documents and queries into dense lowdimensional vectors, scoring each document by its inner product with the query. We investigate the capacity of this architecture relative to sparse bag-of-words models and attentional neural networks. Using both theoretical and empirical analysis, we establish connections between the encoding dimension, the margin between gold and lower-ranked documents, and the document length, suggesting limitations in the capacity of fixed-length encodings to support precise retrieval of long documents. Building on these insights, we propose a simple neural model that combines the efficiency of dual encoders with some of the expressiveness of more costly attentional architectures, and explore sparse-dense hybrids to capitalize on the precision of sparse retrieval. These models outperform strong alternatives in large-scale retrieval. △ Less

Submitted 16 February, 2021; v1 submitted 30 April, 2020; originally announced May 2020.

Comments: To appear in TACL 2020. The arXiv version is a pre-MIT Press publication version

Characterizing Collective Attention via Descriptor Context: A Case Study of Public Discussions of Crisis Events

Authors: Ian Stewart, Diyi Yang, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Social media datasets make it possible to rapidly quantify collective attention to emerging topics and breaking news, such as crisis events. Collective attention is typically measured by aggregate counts, such as the number of posts that mention a name or hashtag. But according to rationalist models of natural language communication, the collective salience of each entity will be expressed not onl… ▽ More Social media datasets make it possible to rapidly quantify collective attention to emerging topics and breaking news, such as crisis events. Collective attention is typically measured by aggregate counts, such as the number of posts that mention a name or hashtag. But according to rationalist models of natural language communication, the collective salience of each entity will be expressed not only in how often it is mentioned, but in the form that those mentions take. This is because natural language communication is premised on (and customized to) the expectations that speakers and writers have about how their messages will be interpreted by the intended audience. We test this idea by conducting a large-scale analysis of public online discussions of breaking news events on Facebook and Twitter, focusing on five recent crisis events. We examine how people refer to locations, focusing specifically on contextual descriptors, such as "San Juan" versus "San Juan, Puerto Rico." Rationalist accounts of natural language communication predict that such descriptors will be unnecessary (and therefore omitted) when the named entity is expected to have high prior salience to the reader. We find that the use of contextual descriptors is indeed associated with proxies for social and informational expectations, including macro-level factors like the location's global salience and micro-level factors like audience engagement. We also find a consistent decrease in descriptor context use over the lifespan of each crisis event. These findings provide evidence about how social media users communicate with their audiences, and point towards more fine-grained models of collective attention that may help researchers and crisis response organizations to better understand public perception of unfolding crisis events. △ Less

Submitted 31 March, 2020; v1 submitted 18 September, 2019; originally announced September 2019.

Comments: ICWSM 2020

ACM Class: H.5.3; I.2.7

Follow the Leader: Documents on the Leading Edge of Semantic Change Get More Citations

Authors: Sandeep Soni, Kristina Lerman, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Diachronic word embeddings -- vector representations of words over time -- offer remarkable insights into the evolution of language and provide a tool for quantifying sociocultural change from text documents. Prior work has used such embeddings to identify shifts in the meaning of individual words. However, simply knowing that a word has changed in meaning is insufficient to identify the instances… ▽ More Diachronic word embeddings -- vector representations of words over time -- offer remarkable insights into the evolution of language and provide a tool for quantifying sociocultural change from text documents. Prior work has used such embeddings to identify shifts in the meaning of individual words. However, simply knowing that a word has changed in meaning is insufficient to identify the instances of word usage that convey the historical or the newer meaning. In this paper, we link diachronic word embeddings to documents, by situating those documents as leaders or laggards with respect to ongoing semantic changes. Specifically, we propose a novel method to quantify the degree of semantic progressiveness in each word usage, and then show how these usages can be aggregated to obtain scores for each document. We analyze two large collections of documents, representing legal opinions and scientific articles. Documents that are scored as semantically progressive receive a larger number of citations, indicating that they are especially influential. Our work thus provides a new technique for identifying lexical semantic leaders and demonstrates a new link between progressive use of language and influence in a citation network. △ Less

Submitted 1 October, 2020; v1 submitted 9 September, 2019; originally announced September 2019.

Comments: 25 pages, 3 figures, To appear in the Journal of the Association of Information Sciences and Technology

How we do things with words: Analyzing text as social and cultural data

Authors: Dong Nguyen, Maria Liakata, Simon DeDeo, Jacob Eisenstein, David Mimno, Rebekah Tromble, Jane Winters

Abstract: In this article we describe our experiences with computational text analysis. We hope to achieve three primary goals. First, we aim to shed light on thorny issues not always at the forefront of discussions about computational text analysis methods. Second, we hope to provide a set of best practices for working with thick social and cultural concepts. Our guidance is based on our own experiences an… ▽ More In this article we describe our experiences with computational text analysis. We hope to achieve three primary goals. First, we aim to shed light on thorny issues not always at the forefront of discussions about computational text analysis methods. Second, we hope to provide a set of best practices for working with thick social and cultural concepts. Our guidance is based on our own experiences and is therefore inherently imperfect. Still, given our diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and research practices, we hope to capture a range of ideas and identify commonalities that will resonate for many. And this leads to our final goal: to help promote interdisciplinary collaborations. Interdisciplinary insights and partnerships are essential for realizing the full potential of any computational text analysis that involves social and cultural concepts, and the more we are able to bridge these divides, the more fruitful we believe our work will be. △ Less

Submitted 2 July, 2019; originally announced July 2019.

Journal ref: Front. Artif. Intell. 3:62 (2020)

Clinical Concept Extraction for Document-Level Coding

Authors: Sarah Wiegreffe, Edward Choi, Sherry Yan, Jimeng Sun, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: The text of clinical notes can be a valuable source of patient information and clinical assessments. Historically, the primary approach for exploiting clinical notes has been information extraction: linking spans of text to concepts in a detailed domain ontology. However, recent work has demonstrated the potential of supervised machine learning to extract document-level codes directly from the raw… ▽ More The text of clinical notes can be a valuable source of patient information and clinical assessments. Historically, the primary approach for exploiting clinical notes has been information extraction: linking spans of text to concepts in a detailed domain ontology. However, recent work has demonstrated the potential of supervised machine learning to extract document-level codes directly from the raw text of clinical notes. We propose to bridge the gap between the two approaches with two novel syntheses: (1) treating extracted concepts as features, which are used to supplement or replace the text of the note; (2) treating extracted concepts as labels, which are used to learn a better representation of the text. Unfortunately, the resulting concepts do not yield performance gains on the document-level clinical coding task. We explore possible explanations and future research directions. △ Less

Submitted 7 June, 2019; originally announced June 2019.

Comments: ACL BioNLP workshop (2019)

Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Contextualized Embeddings for Sequence Labeling

Authors: Xiaochuang Han, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Contextualized word embeddings such as ELMo and BERT provide a foundation for strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks by pretraining on large corpora of unlabeled text. However, the applicability of this approach is unknown when the target domain varies substantially from the pretraining corpus. We are specifically interested in the scenario in which labeled dat… ▽ More Contextualized word embeddings such as ELMo and BERT provide a foundation for strong performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks by pretraining on large corpora of unlabeled text. However, the applicability of this approach is unknown when the target domain varies substantially from the pretraining corpus. We are specifically interested in the scenario in which labeled data is available in only a canonical source domain such as newstext, and the target domain is distinct from both the labeled and pretraining texts. To address this scenario, we propose domain-adaptive fine-tuning, in which the contextualized embeddings are adapted by masked language modeling on text from the target domain. We test this approach on sequence labeling in two challenging domains: Early Modern English and Twitter. Both domains differ substantially from existing pretraining corpora, and domain-adaptive fine-tuning yields substantial improvements over strong BERT baselines, with particularly impressive results on out-of-vocabulary words. We conclude that domain-adaptive fine-tuning offers a simple and effective approach for the unsupervised adaptation of sequence labeling to difficult new domains. △ Less

Submitted 4 September, 2019; v1 submitted 4 April, 2019; originally announced April 2019.

Comments: EMNLP 2019

Character Eyes: Seeing Language through Character-Level Taggers

Authors: Yuval Pinter, Marc Marone, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Character-level models have been used extensively in recent years in NLP tasks as both supplements and replacements for closed-vocabulary token-level word representations. In one popular architecture, character-level LSTMs are used to feed token representations into a sequence tagger predicting token-level annotations such as part-of-speech (POS) tags. In this work, we examine the behavior of POS… ▽ More Character-level models have been used extensively in recent years in NLP tasks as both supplements and replacements for closed-vocabulary token-level word representations. In one popular architecture, character-level LSTMs are used to feed token representations into a sequence tagger predicting token-level annotations such as part-of-speech (POS) tags. In this work, we examine the behavior of POS taggers across languages from the perspective of individual hidden units within the character LSTM. We aggregate the behavior of these units into language-level metrics which quantify the challenges that taggers face on languages with different morphological properties, and identify links between synthesis and affixation preference and emergent behavior of the hidden tagger layer. In a comparative experiment, we show how modifying the balance between forward and backward hidden units affects model arrangement and performance in these types of languages. △ Less

Submitted 12 March, 2019; originally announced March 2019.

The Referential Reader: A Recurrent Entity Network for Anaphora Resolution

Authors: Fei Liu, Luke Zettlemoyer, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: We present a new architecture for storing and accessing entity mentions during online text processing. While reading the text, entity references are identified, and may be stored by either updating or overwriting a cell in a fixed-length memory. The update operation implies coreference with the other mentions that are stored in the same cell; the overwrite operation causes these mentions to be for… ▽ More We present a new architecture for storing and accessing entity mentions during online text processing. While reading the text, entity references are identified, and may be stored by either updating or overwriting a cell in a fixed-length memory. The update operation implies coreference with the other mentions that are stored in the same cell; the overwrite operation causes these mentions to be forgotten. By encoding the memory operations as differentiable gates, it is possible to train the model end-to-end, using both a supervised anaphora resolution objective as well as a supplementary language modeling objective. Evaluation on a dataset of pronoun-name anaphora demonstrates strong performance with purely incremental text processing. △ Less

Submitted 9 July, 2019; v1 submitted 4 February, 2019; originally announced February 2019.

Comments: Published at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) 2019. Source code available at: https://github.com/liufly/refreader

Training on Synthetic Noise Improves Robustness to Natural Noise in Machine Translation

Authors: Vladimir Karpukhin, Omer Levy, Jacob Eisenstein, Marjan Ghazvininejad

Abstract: We consider the problem of making machine translation more robust to character-level variation at the source side, such as typos. Existing methods achieve greater coverage by applying subword models such as byte-pair encoding (BPE) and character-level encoders, but these methods are highly sensitive to spelling mistakes. We show how training on a mild amount of random synthetic noise can dramatica… ▽ More We consider the problem of making machine translation more robust to character-level variation at the source side, such as typos. Existing methods achieve greater coverage by applying subword models such as byte-pair encoding (BPE) and character-level encoders, but these methods are highly sensitive to spelling mistakes. We show how training on a mild amount of random synthetic noise can dramatically improve robustness to these variations, without diminishing performance on clean text. We focus on translation performance on natural noise, as captured by frequent corrections in Wikipedia edit logs, and show that robustness to such noise can be achieved using a balanced diet of simple synthetic noises at training time, without access to the natural noise data or distribution. △ Less

Submitted 4 February, 2019; originally announced February 2019.

Mind Your POV: Convergence of Articles and Editors Towards Wikipedia's Neutrality Norm

Authors: Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Xiaochuang Han, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Wikipedia has a strong norm of writing in a 'neutral point of view' (NPOV). Articles that violate this norm are tagged, and editors are encouraged to make corrections. But the impact of this tagging system has not been quantitatively measured. Does NPOV tagging help articles to converge to the desired style? Do NPOV corrections encourage editors to adopt this style? We study these questions using… ▽ More Wikipedia has a strong norm of writing in a 'neutral point of view' (NPOV). Articles that violate this norm are tagged, and editors are encouraged to make corrections. But the impact of this tagging system has not been quantitatively measured. Does NPOV tagging help articles to converge to the desired style? Do NPOV corrections encourage editors to adopt this style? We study these questions using a corpus of NPOV-tagged articles and a set of lexicons associated with biased language. An interrupted time series analysis shows that after an article is tagged for NPOV, there is a significant decrease in biased language in the article, as measured by several lexicons. However, for individual editors, NPOV corrections and talk page discussions yield no significant change in the usage of words in most of these lexicons, including Wikipedia's own list of 'words to watch.' This suggests that NPOV tagging and discussion does improve content, but has less success enculturating editors to the site's linguistic norms. △ Less

Submitted 18 September, 2018; originally announced September 2018.

Comments: ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW), 2018

Journal ref: Umashanthi Pavalanathan, Xiaochuang Han, and Jacob Eisenstein. 2018. Mind Your POV: Convergence of Articles and Editors Towards Wikipedia's Neutrality Norm. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 137 (November 2018)

Predicting Semantic Relations using Global Graph Properties

Authors: Yuval Pinter, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Semantic graphs, such as WordNet, are resources which curate natural language on two distinguishable layers. On the local level, individual relations between synsets (semantic building blocks) such as hypernymy and meronymy enhance our understanding of the words used to express their meanings. Globally, analysis of graph-theoretic properties of the entire net sheds light on the structure of human… ▽ More Semantic graphs, such as WordNet, are resources which curate natural language on two distinguishable layers. On the local level, individual relations between synsets (semantic building blocks) such as hypernymy and meronymy enhance our understanding of the words used to express their meanings. Globally, analysis of graph-theoretic properties of the entire net sheds light on the structure of human language as a whole. In this paper, we combine global and local properties of semantic graphs through the framework of Max-Margin Markov Graph Models (M3GM), a novel extension of Exponential Random Graph Model (ERGM) that scales to large multi-relational graphs. We demonstrate how such global modeling improves performance on the local task of predicting semantic relations between synsets, yielding new state-of-the-art results on the WN18RR dataset, a challenging version of WordNet link prediction in which "easy" reciprocal cases are removed. In addition, the M3GM model identifies multirelational motifs that are characteristic of well-formed lexical semantic ontologies. △ Less

Submitted 26 August, 2018; originally announced August 2018.

Comments: EMNLP 2018

Stylistic Variation in Social Media Part-of-Speech Tagging

Authors: Murali Raghu Babu Balusu, Taha Merghani, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more readily-available social network metadata. In this paper, we report new evidence on the link between language and social networks in the task of part-of-speech tagg… ▽ More Social media features substantial stylistic variation, raising new challenges for syntactic analysis of online writing. However, this variation is often aligned with author attributes such as age, gender, and geography, as well as more readily-available social network metadata. In this paper, we report new evidence on the link between language and social networks in the task of part-of-speech tagging. We find that tagger error rates are correlated with network structure, with high accuracy in some parts of the network, and lower accuracy elsewhere. As a result, tagger accuracy depends on training from a balanced sample of the network, rather than training on texts from a narrow subcommunity. We also describe our attempts to add robustness to stylistic variation, by building a mixture-of-experts model in which each expert is associated with a region of the social network. While prior work found that similar approaches yield performance improvements in sentiment analysis and entity linking, we were unable to obtain performance improvements in part-of-speech tagging, despite strong evidence for the link between part-of-speech error rates and social network structure. △ Less

Submitted 19 April, 2018; originally announced April 2018.

Comments: 9 pages, Published in Proceedings of NAACL workshop on stylistic variation (2018)

Sí o no, què penses? Catalonian Independence and Linguistic Identity on Social Media

Authors: Ian Stewart, Yuval Pinter, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Political identity is often manifested in language variation, but the relationship between the two is still relatively unexplored from a quantitative perspective. This study examines the use of Catalan, a language local to the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia in Spain, on Twitter in discourse related to the 2017 independence referendum. We corroborate prior findings that pro-independence tweets… ▽ More Political identity is often manifested in language variation, but the relationship between the two is still relatively unexplored from a quantitative perspective. This study examines the use of Catalan, a language local to the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia in Spain, on Twitter in discourse related to the 2017 independence referendum. We corroborate prior findings that pro-independence tweets are more likely to include the local language than anti-independence tweets. We also find that Catalan is used more often in referendum-related discourse than in other contexts, contrary to prior findings on language variation. This suggests a strong role for the Catalan language in the expression of Catalonian political identity. △ Less

Submitted 13 April, 2018; originally announced April 2018.

Comments: NAACL 2018

Detecting Social Influence in Event Cascades by Comparing Discriminative Rankers

Authors: Sandeep Soni, Shawn Ling Ramirez, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: The global dynamics of event cascades are often governed by the local dynamics of peer influence. However, detecting social influence from observational data is challenging due to confounds like homophily and practical issues like missing data. We propose a simple discriminative method to detect influence from observational data. The core of the approach is to train a ranking algorithm to predict… ▽ More The global dynamics of event cascades are often governed by the local dynamics of peer influence. However, detecting social influence from observational data is challenging due to confounds like homophily and practical issues like missing data. We propose a simple discriminative method to detect influence from observational data. The core of the approach is to train a ranking algorithm to predict the source of the next event in a cascade, and compare its out-of-sample accuracy against a competitive baseline which lacks access to features corresponding to social influence. We analyze synthetically generated data to show that this method correctly identifies influence in the presence of confounds, and is robust to both missing data and misspecification --- unlike well-known alternatives. We apply the method to two real-world datasets: (1) the co-sponsorship of legislation in the U.S. House of Representatives on a social network of shared campaign donors; (2) rumors about the Higgs boson discovery on a follower network of $10^5$ Twitter accounts. Our model identifies the role of social influence in these scenarios and uses it to make more accurate predictions about the future trajectory of cascades. △ Less

Submitted 19 July, 2019; v1 submitted 16 February, 2018; originally announced February 2018.

Comments: Accepted to the SIGKDD Workshop on Causal Discovery, 2019

Explainable Prediction of Medical Codes from Clinical Text

Authors: James Mullenbach, Sarah Wiegreffe, Jon Duke, Jimeng Sun, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Clinical notes are text documents that are created by clinicians for each patient encounter. They are typically accompanied by medical codes, which describe the diagnosis and treatment. Annotating these codes is labor intensive and error prone; furthermore, the connection between the codes and the text is not annotated, obscuring the reasons and details behind specific diagnoses and treatments. We… ▽ More Clinical notes are text documents that are created by clinicians for each patient encounter. They are typically accompanied by medical codes, which describe the diagnosis and treatment. Annotating these codes is labor intensive and error prone; furthermore, the connection between the codes and the text is not annotated, obscuring the reasons and details behind specific diagnoses and treatments. We present an attentional convolutional network that predicts medical codes from clinical text. Our method aggregates information across the document using a convolutional neural network, and uses an attention mechanism to select the most relevant segments for each of the thousands of possible codes. The method is accurate, achieving precision@8 of 0.71 and a Micro-F1 of 0.54, which are both better than the prior state of the art. Furthermore, through an interpretability evaluation by a physician, we show that the attention mechanism identifies meaningful explanations for each code assignment △ Less

Submitted 16 April, 2018; v1 submitted 15 February, 2018; originally announced February 2018.

Comments: NAACL 2018

Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline

Authors: Ian Stewart, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between… ▽ More In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of nonstandard word growth in the online community Reddit. We find that dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a sign of growth: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. We also find that social dissemination likely plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized. △ Less

Submitted 13 February, 2018; v1 submitted 9 February, 2018; originally announced February 2018.

Comments: replaced by arXiv:1709.00345

ACM Class: I.2.7

#anorexia, #anarexia, #anarexyia: Characterizing Online Community Practices with Orthographic Variation

Authors: Ian Stewart, Stevie Chancellor, Munmun De Choudhury, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: Distinctive linguistic practices help communities build solidarity and differentiate themselves from outsiders. In an online community, one such practice is variation in orthography, which includes spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Using a dataset of over two million Instagram posts, we investigate orthographic variation in a community that shares pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) content. We… ▽ More Distinctive linguistic practices help communities build solidarity and differentiate themselves from outsiders. In an online community, one such practice is variation in orthography, which includes spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Using a dataset of over two million Instagram posts, we investigate orthographic variation in a community that shares pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) content. We find that not only does orthographic variation grow more frequent over time, it also becomes more profound or deep, with variants becoming increasingly distant from the original: as, for example, #anarexyia is more distant than #anarexia from the original spelling #anorexia. These changes are driven by newcomers, who adopt the most extreme linguistic practices as they enter the community. Moreover, this behavior correlates with engagement: the newcomers who adopt deeper orthographic variants tend to remain active for longer in the community, and the posts that contain deeper variation receive more positive feedback in the form of "likes." Previous work has linked community membership change with language change, and our work casts this connection in a new light, with newcomers driving an evolving practice, rather than adapting to it. We also demonstrate the utility of orthographic variation as a new lens to study sociolinguistic change in online communities, particularly when the change results from an exogenous force such as a content ban. △ Less

Submitted 4 December, 2017; originally announced December 2017.

Making "fetch" happen: The influence of social and linguistic context on nonstandard word growth and decline

Authors: Ian Stewart, Jacob Eisenstein

Abstract: In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between… ▽ More In an online community, new words come and go: today's "haha" may be replaced by tomorrow's "lol." Changes in online writing are usually studied as a social process, with innovations diffusing through a network of individuals in a speech community. But unlike other types of innovation, language change is shaped and constrained by the system in which it takes part. To investigate the links between social and structural factors in language change, we undertake a large-scale analysis of nonstandard word growth in the online community Reddit. We find that dissemination across many linguistic contexts is a sign of growth: words that appear in more linguistic contexts grow faster and survive longer. We also find that social dissemination likely plays a less important role in explaining word growth and decline than previously hypothesized. △ Less

Submitted 31 August, 2018; v1 submitted 1 September, 2017; originally announced September 2017.

ACM Class: I.2.7

Journal ref: EMNLP 2018