Ran Levy


2023

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Re-Examining Summarization Evaluation across Multiple Quality Criteria
Ori Ernst | Ori Shapira | Ido Dagan | Ran Levy
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

The common practice for assessing automatic evaluation metrics is to measure the correlation between their induced system rankings and those obtained by reliable human evaluation, where a higher correlation indicates a better metric. Yet, an intricate setting arises when an NLP task is evaluated by multiple Quality Criteria (QCs), like for text summarization where prominent criteria including relevance, consistency, fluency and coherence. In this paper, we challenge the soundness of this methodology when multiple QCs are involved, concretely for the summarization case. First, we show that the allegedly best metrics for certain QCs actually do not perform well, failing to detect even drastic summary corruptions with respect to the considered QC. To explain this, we show that some of the high correlations obtained in the multi-QC setup are spurious. Finally, we propose a procedure that may help detecting this effect. Overall, our findings highlight the need for further investigating metric evaluation methodologies for the multiple-QC case.

2022

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McPhraSy: Multi-Context Phrase Similarity and Clustering
Amir Cohen | Hila Gonen | Ori Shapira | Ran Levy | Yoav Goldberg
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Phrase similarity is a key component of many NLP applications. Current phrase similarity methods focus on embedding the phrase itself and use the phrase context only during training of the pretrained model. To better leverage the information in the context, we propose McPhraSy (Multi-context Phrase Similarity), a novel algorithm for estimating the similarity of phrases based on multiple contexts. At inference time, McPhraSy represents each phrase by considering multiple contexts in which it appears and computes the similarity of two phrases by aggregating the pairwise similarities between the contexts of the phrases. Incorporating context during inference enables McPhraSy to outperform current state-of-the-art models on two phrase similarity datasets by up to 13.3%. Finally, we also present a new downstream task that relies on phrase similarity – keyphrase clustering – and create a new benchmark for it in the product reviews domain. We show that McPhraSy surpasses all other baselines for this task.

2021

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Identifying Helpful Sentences in Product Reviews
Iftah Gamzu | Hila Gonen | Gilad Kutiel | Ran Levy | Eugene Agichtein
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

In recent years online shopping has gained momentum and became an important venue for customers wishing to save time and simplify their shopping process. A key advantage of shopping online is the ability to read what other customers are saying about products of interest. In this work, we aim to maintain this advantage in situations where extreme brevity is needed, for example, when shopping by voice. We suggest a novel task of extracting a single representative helpful sentence from a set of reviews for a given product. The selected sentence should meet two conditions: first, it should be helpful for a purchase decision and second, the opinion it expresses should be supported by multiple reviewers. This task is closely related to the task of Multi Document Summarization in the product reviews domain but differs in its objective and its level of conciseness. We collect a dataset in English of sentence helpfulness scores via crowd-sourcing and demonstrate its reliability despite the inherent subjectivity involved. Next, we describe a complete model that extracts representative helpful sentences with positive and negative sentiment towards the product and demonstrate that it outperforms several baselines.

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PASS: Perturb-and-Select Summarizer for Product Reviews
Nadav Oved | Ran Levy
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The product reviews summarization task aims to automatically produce a short summary for a set of reviews of a given product. Such summaries are expected to aggregate a range of different opinions in a concise, coherent and informative manner. This challenging task gives rise to two shortcomings in existing work. First, summarizers tend to favor generic content that appears in reviews for many different products, resulting in template-like, less informative summaries. Second, as reviewers often disagree on the pros and cons of a given product, summarizers sometimes yield inconsistent, self-contradicting summaries. We propose the PASS system (Perturb-and-Select Summarizer) that employs a large pre-trained Transformer-based model (T5 in our case), which follows a few-shot fine-tuning scheme. A key component of the PASS system relies on applying systematic perturbations to the model’s input during inference, which allows it to generate multiple different summaries per product. We develop a method for ranking these summaries according to desired criteria, coherence in our case, enabling our system to almost entirely avoid the problem of self-contradiction. We compare our system against strong baselines on publicly available datasets, and show that it produces summaries which are more informative, diverse and coherent.

2018

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Towards an argumentative content search engine using weak supervision
Ran Levy | Ben Bogin | Shai Gretz | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Searching for sentences containing claims in a large text corpus is a key component in developing an argumentative content search engine. Previous works focused on detecting claims in a small set of documents or within documents enriched with argumentative content. However, pinpointing relevant claims in massive unstructured corpora, received little attention. A step in this direction was taken in (Levy et al. 2017), where the authors suggested using a weak signal to develop a relatively strict query for claim–sentence detection. Here, we leverage this work to define weak signals for training DNNs to obtain significantly greater performance. This approach allows to relax the query and increase the potential coverage. Our results clearly indicate that the system is able to successfully generalize from the weak signal, outperforming previously reported results in terms of both precision and coverage. Finally, we adapt our system to solve a recent argument mining task of identifying argumentative sentences in Web texts retrieved from heterogeneous sources, and obtain F1 scores comparable to the supervised baseline.

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Semantic Relatedness of Wikipedia Concepts – Benchmark Data and a Working Solution
Liat Ein Dor | Alon Halfon | Yoav Kantor | Ran Levy | Yosi Mass | Ruty Rinott | Eyal Shnarch | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2017

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Unsupervised corpus–wide claim detection
Ran Levy | Shai Gretz | Benjamin Sznajder | Shay Hummel | Ranit Aharonov | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Argument Mining

Automatic claim detection is a fundamental argument mining task that aims to automatically mine claims regarding a topic of consideration. Previous works on mining argumentative content have assumed that a set of relevant documents is given in advance. Here, we present a first corpus– wide claim detection framework, that can be directly applied to massive corpora. Using simple and intuitive empirical observations, we derive a claim sentence query by which we are able to directly retrieve sentences in which the prior probability to include topic-relevant claims is greatly enhanced. Next, we employ simple heuristics to rank the sentences, leading to an unsupervised corpus–wide claim detection system, with precision that outperforms previously reported results on the task of claim detection given relevant documents and labeled data.

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GRASP: Rich Patterns for Argumentation Mining
Eyal Shnarch | Ran Levy | Vikas Raykar | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

GRASP (GReedy Augmented Sequential Patterns) is an algorithm for automatically extracting patterns that characterize subtle linguistic phenomena. To that end, GRASP augments each term of input text with multiple layers of linguistic information. These different facets of the text terms are systematically combined to reveal rich patterns. We report highly promising experimental results in several challenging text analysis tasks within the field of Argumentation Mining. We believe that GRASP is general enough to be useful for other domains too. For example, each of the following sentences includes a claim for a [topic]: 1. Opponents often argue that the open primary is unconstitutional. [Open Primaries] 2. Prof. Smith suggested that affirmative action devalues the accomplishments of the chosen. [Affirmative Action] 3. The majority stated that the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to offend others. [Freedom of Speech] These sentences share almost no words in common, however, they are similar at a more abstract level. A human observer may notice the following underlying common structure, or pattern: [someone][argue/suggest/state][that][topic term][sentiment term]. GRASP aims to automatically capture such underlying structures of the given data. For the above examples it finds the pattern [noun][express][that][noun,topic][sentiment], where [express] stands for all its (in)direct hyponyms, and [noun,topic] means a noun which is also related to the topic.

2015

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TR9856: A Multi-word Term Relatedness Benchmark
Ran Levy | Liat Ein-Dor | Shay Hummel | Ruty Rinott | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

2014

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A Benchmark Dataset for Automatic Detection of Claims and Evidence in the Context of Controversial Topics
Ehud Aharoni | Anatoly Polnarov | Tamar Lavee | Daniel Hershcovich | Ran Levy | Ruty Rinott | Dan Gutfreund | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Argumentation Mining

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Context Dependent Claim Detection
Ran Levy | Yonatan Bilu | Daniel Hershcovich | Ehud Aharoni | Noam Slonim
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

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Claims on demand – an initial demonstration of a system for automatic detection and polarity identification of context dependent claims in massive corpora
Noam Slonim | Ehud Aharoni | Carlos Alzate | Roy Bar-Haim | Yonatan Bilu | Lena Dankin | Iris Eiron | Daniel Hershcovich | Shay Hummel | Mitesh Khapra | Tamar Lavee | Ran Levy | Paul Matchen | Anatoly Polnarov | Vikas Raykar | Ruty Rinott | Amrita Saha | Naama Zwerdling | David Konopnicki | Dan Gutfreund
Proceedings of COLING 2014, the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations