Christina Lioma


2023

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Faithfulness Tests for Natural Language Explanations
Pepa Atanasova | Oana-Maria Camburu | Christina Lioma | Thomas Lukasiewicz | Jakob Grue Simonsen | Isabelle Augenstein
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Explanations of neural models aim to reveal a model’s decision-making process for its predictions. However, recent work shows that current methods giving explanations such as saliency maps or counterfactuals can be misleading, as they are prone to present reasons that are unfaithful to the model’s inner workings. This work explores the challenging question of evaluating the faithfulness of natural language explanations (NLEs). To this end, we present two tests. First, we propose a counterfactual input editor for inserting reasons that lead to counterfactual predictions but are not reflected by the NLEs. Second, we reconstruct inputs from the reasons stated in the generated NLEs and check how often they lead to the same predictions. Our tests can evaluate emerging NLE models, proving a fundamental tool in the development of faithful NLEs.

2022

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Fact Checking with Insufficient Evidence
Pepa Atanasova | Jakob Grue Simonsen | Christina Lioma | Isabelle Augenstein
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

Automating the fact checking (FC) process relies on information obtained from external sources. In this work, we posit that it is crucial for FC models to make veracity predictions only when there is sufficient evidence and otherwise indicate when it is not enough. To this end, we are the first to study what information FC models consider sufficient by introducing a novel task and advancing it with three main contributions. First, we conduct an in-depth empirical analysis of the task with a new fluency-preserving method for omitting information from the evidence at the constituent and sentence level. We identify when models consider the remaining evidence (in)sufficient for FC, based on three trained models with different Transformer architectures and three FC datasets. Second, we ask annotators whether the omitted evidence was important for FC, resulting in a novel diagnostic dataset, SufficientFacts1, for FC with omitted evidence. We find that models are least successful in detecting missing evidence when adverbial modifiers are omitted (21% accuracy), whereas it is easiest for omitted date modifiers (63% accuracy). Finally, we propose a novel data augmentation strategy for contrastive self-learning of missing evidence by employing the proposed omission method combined with tri-training. It improves performance for Evidence Sufficiency Prediction by up to 17.8 F1 score, which in turn improves FC performance by up to 2.6 F1 score.

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Template-based Contact Email Generation for Job Recommendation
Qiuchi Li | Christina Lioma
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Natural Language Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics (GEM)

Text generation has long been a popular research topic in NLP. However, the task of generating contact emails from recruiters to candidates in the job recommendation scenario has received little attention by the research community. This work aims at defining the topic of automatic email generation for job recommendation, identifying the challenges, and providing a baseline template-based solution for Danish jobs. Evaluation by human experts shows that our method is effective. We wrap up by discussing the future research directions for better solving this task.

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Beyond Emotion: A Multi-Modal Dataset for Human Desire Understanding
Ao Jia | Yu He | Yazhou Zhang | Sagar Uprety | Dawei Song | Christina Lioma
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Desire is a strong wish to do or have something, which involves not only a linguistic expression, but also underlying cognitive phenomena driving human feelings. As the most primitive and basic human instinct, conscious desire is often accompanied by a range of emotional responses. As a strikingly understudied task, it is difficult for machines to model and understand desire due to the unavailability of benchmarking datasets with desire and emotion labels. To bridge this gap, we present MSED, the first multi-modal and multi-task sentiment, emotion and desire dataset, which contains 9,190 text-image pairs, with English text. Each multi-modal sample is annotated with six desires, three sentiments and six emotions. We also propose the state-of-the-art baselines to evaluate the potential of MSED and show the importance of multi-task and multi-modal clues for desire understanding. We hope this study provides a benchmark for human desire analysis. MSED will be publicly available for research.

2020

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A Diagnostic Study of Explainability Techniques for Text Classification
Pepa Atanasova | Jakob Grue Simonsen | Christina Lioma | Isabelle Augenstein
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recent developments in machine learning have introduced models that approach human performance at the cost of increased architectural complexity. Efforts to make the rationales behind the models’ predictions transparent have inspired an abundance of new explainability techniques. Provided with an already trained model, they compute saliency scores for the words of an input instance. However, there exists no definitive guide on (i) how to choose such a technique given a particular application task and model architecture, and (ii) the benefits and drawbacks of using each such technique. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive list of diagnostic properties for evaluating existing explainability techniques. We then employ the proposed list to compare a set of diverse explainability techniques on downstream text classification tasks and neural network architectures. We also compare the saliency scores assigned by the explainability techniques with human annotations of salient input regions to find relations between a model’s performance and the agreement of its rationales with human ones. Overall, we find that the gradient-based explanations perform best across tasks and model architectures, and we present further insights into the properties of the reviewed explainability techniques.

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Generating Fact Checking Explanations
Pepa Atanasova | Jakob Grue Simonsen | Christina Lioma | Isabelle Augenstein
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Most existing work on automated fact checking is concerned with predicting the veracity of claims based on metadata, social network spread, language used in claims, and, more recently, evidence supporting or denying claims. A crucial piece of the puzzle that is still missing is to understand how to automate the most elaborate part of the process – generating justifications for verdicts on claims. This paper provides the first study of how these explanations can be generated automatically based on available claim context, and how this task can be modelled jointly with veracity prediction. Our results indicate that optimising both objectives at the same time, rather than training them separately, improves the performance of a fact checking system. The results of a manual evaluation further suggest that the informativeness, coverage and overall quality of the generated explanations are also improved in the multi-task model.

2019

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MultiFC: A Real-World Multi-Domain Dataset for Evidence-Based Fact Checking of Claims
Isabelle Augenstein | Christina Lioma | Dongsheng Wang | Lucas Chaves Lima | Casper Hansen | Christian Hansen | Jakob Grue Simonsen
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

We contribute the largest publicly available dataset of naturally occurring factual claims for the purpose of automatic claim verification. It is collected from 26 fact checking websites in English, paired with textual sources and rich metadata, and labelled for veracity by human expert journalists. We present an in-depth analysis of the dataset, highlighting characteristics and challenges. Further, we present results for automatic veracity prediction, both with established baselines and with a novel method for joint ranking of evidence pages and predicting veracity that outperforms all baselines. Significant performance increases are achieved by encoding evidence, and by modelling metadata. Our best-performing model achieves a Macro F1 of 49.2%, showing that this is a challenging testbed for claim veracity prediction.

2011

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A Cascaded Classification Approach to Semantic Head Recognition
Lukas Michelbacher | Alok Kothari | Martin Forst | Christina Lioma | Hinrich Schütze
Proceedings of the 2011 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2006

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Examining the Content Load of Part of Speech Blocks for Information Retrieval
Christina Lioma | Iadh Ounis
Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Main Conference Poster Sessions

2005

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Deploying Part-of-Speech Patterns to Enhance Statistical Phrase-Based Machine Translation Resources
Christina Lioma | Iadh Ounis
Proceedings of the ACL Workshop on Building and Using Parallel Texts