Milagro Teruel


2024

pdf bib
Improving Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment by Interacting with Agents Through Help Feedback
Nikhil Mehta | Milagro Teruel | Xin Deng | Sergio Figueroa Sanz | Ahmed Awadallah | Julia Kiseleva
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

Many approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks often treat them as single-step problems, where an agent receives an instruction, executes it, and is evaluated based on the final outcome. However, language is inherently interactive, as evidenced by the back-and-forth nature of human conversations. In light of this, we posit that human-AI collaboration should also be interactive, with humans monitoring the work of AI agents and providing feedback that the agent can understand and utilize. Further, the AI agent should be able to detect when it needs additional information and proactively ask for help. Enabling this scenario would lead to more natural, efficient, and engaging human-AI collaboration.In this paper, we investigate these directions using the challenging task established by the IGLU competition, an interactive grounded language understanding task in a MineCraft-like world. We delve into multiple types of help players can give to the AI to guide it and analyze the impact of this help on behavior, resulting in performance improvements and an end-to-end interactive system.

2023

pdf bib
On Improving Summarization Factual Consistency from Natural Language Feedback
Yixin Liu | Budhaditya Deb | Milagro Teruel | Aaron Halfaker | Dragomir Radev | Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite the recent progress in language generation models, their outputs may not always meet user expectations. In this work, we study whether informational feedback in natural language can be leveraged to improve generation quality and user preference alignment. To this end, we consider factual consistency in summarization, the quality that the summary should only contain information supported by the input documents, as the user-expected preference. We collect a high-quality dataset, DeFacto, containing human demonstrations and informational natural language feedback consisting of corrective instructions, edited summaries, and explanations with respect to the factual consistency of the summary. Using our dataset, we study three natural language generation tasks: (1) editing a summary by following the human feedback, (2) generating human feedback for editing the original summary, and (3) revising the initial summary to correct factual errors by generating both the human feedback and edited summary. We show that DeFacto can provide factually consistent human-edited summaries and further insights into summarization factual consistency thanks to its informational natural language feedback. We further demonstrate that fine-tuned language models can leverage our dataset to improve the summary factual consistency, while large language models lack the zero-shot learning ability in our proposed tasks that require controllable text generation.

2018

pdf bib
Increasing Argument Annotation Reproducibility by Using Inter-annotator Agreement to Improve Guidelines
Milagro Teruel | Cristian Cardellino | Fernando Cardellino | Laura Alonso Alemany | Serena Villata
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

pdf bib
Legal NERC with ontologies, Wikipedia and curriculum learning
Cristian Cardellino | Milagro Teruel | Laura Alonso Alemany | Serena Villata
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

In this paper, we present a Wikipedia-based approach to develop resources for the legal domain. We establish a mapping between a legal domain ontology, LKIF (Hoekstra et al. 2007), and a Wikipedia-based ontology, YAGO (Suchanek et al. 2007), and through that we populate LKIF. Moreover, we use the mentions of those entities in Wikipedia text to train a specific Named Entity Recognizer and Classifier. We find that this classifier works well in the Wikipedia, but, as could be expected, performance decreases in a corpus of judgments of the European Court of Human Rights. However, this tool will be used as a preprocess for human annotation. We resort to a technique called “curriculum learning” aimed to overcome problems of overfitting by learning increasingly more complex concepts. However, we find that in this particular setting, the method works best by learning from most specific to most general concepts, not the other way round.