Eunsol Choi


2023

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Quantifying Train-Evaluation Overlap with Nearest Neighbors
Gauri Kambhatla | Thuy Nguyen | Eunsol Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

Characterizing benchmark datasets is crucial to interpreting model performance. In this work, we study train-evaluation overlap as a measure of an individual dataset’s adequacy to evaluate model generalization over a wide range of datasets. We quantify the overlap with a simple novel metric based on a nearest neighbors approach between the training and evaluation sets. We identify nearest training examples for each evaluation example by mapping instances with generic and task-specific embedding methods. Our study on eleven classification and extractive QA tasks reveals a wide range of train-evaluation overlap, and we show that the data collection method of the dataset and the difficulty of the task may play a role in the amount of overlap. Lastly, we use our nearest neighbor analysis to identify challenging or potentially mislabeled examples. Our analysis quantifies train-evaluation overlap, providing insights for constructing datasets to study generalization.

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Continually Improving Extractive QA via Human Feedback
Ge Gao | Hung-Ting Chen | Yoav Artzi | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We study continually improving an extractive question answering (QA) system via human user feedback. We design and deploy an iterative approach, where information-seeking users ask questions, receive model-predicted answers, and provide feedback. We conduct experiments involving thousands of user interactions under diverse setups to broaden the understanding of learning from feedback over time. Our experiments show effective improvement from user feedback of extractive QA models over time across different data regimes, including significant potential for domain adaptation.

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Mitigating Temporal Misalignment by Discarding Outdated Facts
Michael Zhang | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While large language models are able to retain vast amounts of world knowledge seen during pretraining, such knowledge is prone to going out of date and is nontrivial to update. Furthermore, these models are often used under temporal misalignment, tasked with answering questions about the present, despite having only been trained on data collected in the past. To mitigate the effects of temporal misalignment, we propose fact duration prediction: the task of predicting how long a given fact will remain true. In our experiments, we demonstrate that identifying which facts are prone to rapid change can help models avoid reciting outdated information and determine which predictions require seeking out up-to-date knowledge sources. We also show how modeling fact duration improves calibration for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-retrieval question answering, under temporal misalignment, by discarding volatile facts.

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DiffQG: Generating Questions to Summarize Factual Changes
Jeremy R. Cole | Palak Jain | Julian Martin Eisenschlos | Michael J.Q. Zhang | Eunsol Choi | Bhuwan Dhingra
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Identifying the difference between two versions of the same article is useful to update knowledge bases and to understand how articles evolve. Paired texts occur naturally in diverse situations: reporters write similar news stories and maintainers of authoritative websites must keep their information up to date. We propose representing factual changes between paired documents as question-answer pairs, where the answer to the same question differs between two versions. We find that question-answer pairs can flexibly and concisely capture the updated contents. Provided with paired documents, annotators identify questions that are answered by one passage but answered differently or cannot be answered by the other. We release DiffQG which consists of 759 QA pairs and 1153 examples of paired passages with no factual change. These questions are intended to be both unambiguous and information-seeking and involve complex edits, pushing beyond the capabilities of current question generation and factual change detection systems. Our dataset summarizes the changes between two versions of the document as questions and answers, studying automatic update summarization in a novel way.

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A Critical Evaluation of Evaluations for Long-form Question Answering
Fangyuan Xu | Yixiao Song | Mohit Iyyer | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Long-form question answering (LFQA) enables answering a wide range of questions, but its flexibility poses enormous challenges for evaluation. We perform the first targeted study of the evaluation of long-form answers, covering both human and automatic evaluation practices. We hire domain experts in seven areas to provide preference judgments over pairs of answers, along with free-form justifications for their choices. We present a careful analysis of experts’ evaluation, which focuses on new aspects such as the comprehensiveness of the answer. Next, we examine automatic text generation metrics, finding that no existing metrics are predictive of human preference judgments. However, some metrics correlate with fine-grained aspects of answers (e.g., coherence). We encourage future work to move away from a single “overall score” of the answer and adopt a multi-faceted evaluation, targeting aspects such as factuality and completeness. We publicly release all of our annotations and code to spur future work into LFQA evaluation.

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Can LMs Learn New Entities from Descriptions? Challenges in Propagating Injected Knowledge
Yasumasa Onoe | Michael Zhang | Shankar Padmanabhan | Greg Durrett | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Pre-trained language models (LMs) are used for knowledge intensive tasks like question answering, but their knowledge gets continuously outdated as the world changes. Prior work has studied targeted updates to LMs, injecting individual facts and evaluating whether the model learns these facts while not changing predictions on other contexts. We take a step forward and study LMs’ abilities to make inferences based on injected facts (or propagate those facts): for example, after learning that something is a TV show, does an LM predict that you can watch it? We study this with two cloze-style tasks: an existing dataset of real-world sentences about novel entities (ECBD) as well as a new controlled benchmark with manually designed templates requiring varying levels of inference about injected knowledge. Surprisingly, we find that existing methods for updating knowledge (gradient-based fine-tuning and modifications of this approach) show little propagation of injected knowledge. These methods improve performance on cloze instances only when there is lexical overlap between injected facts and target inferences. Yet, prepending entity definitions in an LM’s context improves performance across all settings, suggesting that there is substantial headroom for parameter-updating approaches for knowledge injection.

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Concise Answers to Complex Questions: Summarization of Long-form Answers
Abhilash Potluri | Fangyuan Xu | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Long-form question answering systems provide rich information by presenting paragraph-level answers, often containing optional background or auxiliary information. While such comprehensive answers are helpful, not all information is required to answer the question (e.g. users with domain knowledge do not need an explanation of background). Can we provide a concise version of the answer by summarizing it, while still addressing the question? We conduct a user study on summarized answers generated from state-of-the-art models and our newly proposed extract-and-decontextualize approach. We find a large proportion of long-form answers (over 90%) in the ELI5 domain can be adequately summarized by at least one system, while complex and implicit answers are challenging to compress. We observe that decontextualization improves the quality of the extractive summary, exemplifying its potential in the summarization task. To promote future work, we provide an extractive summarization dataset covering 1K long-form answers and our user study annotations. Together, we present the first study on summarizing long-form answers, taking a step forward for QA agents that can provide answers at multiple granularities.

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When to Use Efficient Self Attention? Profiling Text, Speech and Image Transformer Variants
Anuj Diwan | Eunsol Choi | David Harwath
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

We present the first unified study of the efficiency of self-attention-based Transformer variants spanning text, speech and vision. We identify input length thresholds (tipping points) at which efficient Transformer variants become more efficient than vanilla models, using a variety of efficiency metrics (latency, throughput, and memory). To conduct this analysis for speech, we introduce L-HuBERT, a novel local-attention variant of a self-supervised speech model. We observe that these thresholds are (a) much higher than typical dataset sequence lengths and (b) dependent on the metric and modality, showing that choosing the right model depends on modality, task type (long-form vs. typical context) and resource constraints (time vs. memory). By visualising the breakdown of the computational costs for transformer components, we also show that non-self-attention components exhibit significant computational costs. We release our profiling toolkit at https://github.com/ajd12342/profiling-transformers .

2022

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Entity Cloze By Date: What LMs Know About Unseen Entities
Yasumasa Onoe | Michael Zhang | Eunsol Choi | Greg Durrett
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Language models (LMs) are typically trained once on a large-scale corpus and used for years without being updated. However, in a dynamic world, new entities constantly arise. We propose a framework to analyze what LMs can infer about new entities that did not exist when the LMs were pretrained. We derive a dataset of entities indexed by their origination date and paired with their English Wikipedia articles, from which we can find sentences about each entity. We evaluate LMs’ perplexity on masked spans within these sentences. We show that models more informed about the entities, such as those with access to a textual definition of them, achieve lower perplexity on this benchmark. Our experimental results demonstrate that making inferences about new entities remains difficult for LMs. Given its wide coverage on entity knowledge and temporal indexing, our dataset can be used to evaluate LMs and techniques designed to modify or extend their knowledge. Our automatic data collection pipeline can be easily used to continually update our benchmark.

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Beyond Counting Datasets: A Survey of Multilingual Dataset Construction and Necessary Resources
Xinyan Yu | Trina Chatterjee | Akari Asai | Junjie Hu | Eunsol Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

While the NLP community is generally aware of resource disparities among languages, we lack research that quantifies the extent and types of such disparity. Prior surveys estimating the availability of resources based on the number of datasets can be misleading as dataset quality varies: many datasets are automatically induced or translated from English data. To provide a more comprehensive picture of language resources, we examine the characteristics of 156 publicly available NLP datasets. We manually annotate how they are created, including input text and label sources and tools used to build them, and what they study, tasks they address and motivations for their creation. After quantifying the qualitative NLP resource gap across languages, we discuss how to improve data collection in low-resource languages. We survey language-proficient NLP researchers and crowd workers per language, finding that their estimated availability correlates with dataset availability. Through crowdsourcing experiments, we identify strategies for collecting high-quality multilingual data on the Mechanical Turk platform. We conclude by making macro and micro-level suggestions to the NLP community and individual researchers for future multilingual data development.

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TyDiP: A Dataset for Politeness Classification in Nine Typologically Diverse Languages
Anirudh Srinivasan | Eunsol Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

We study politeness phenomena in nine typologically diverse languages. Politeness is an important facet of communication and is sometimes argued to be cultural-specific, yet existing computational linguistic study is limited to English. We create TyDiP, a dataset containing three-way politeness annotations for 500 examples in each language, totaling 4.5K examples. We evaluate how well multilingual models can identify politeness levels – they show a fairly robust zero-shot transfer ability, yet fall short of estimated human accuracy significantly. We further study mapping the English politeness strategy lexicon into nine languages via automatic translation and lexicon induction, analyzing whether each strategy’s impact stays consistent across languages. Lastly, we empirically study the complicated relationship between formality and politeness through transfer experiments. We hope our dataset will support various research questions and applications, from evaluating multilingual models to constructing polite multilingual agents.

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)
Akari Asai | Eunsol Choi | Jonathan H. Clark | Junjie Hu | Chia-Hsuan Lee | Jungo Kasai | Shayne Longpre | Ikuya Yamada | Rui Zhang
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)

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MIA 2022 Shared Task: Evaluating Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering for 16 Diverse Languages
Akari Asai | Shayne Longpre | Jungo Kasai | Chia-Hsuan Lee | Rui Zhang | Junjie Hu | Ikuya Yamada | Jonathan H. Clark | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA)

We present the results of the Workshop on Multilingual Information Access (MIA) 2022 Shared Task, evaluating cross-lingual open-retrieval question answering (QA) systems in 16 typologically diverse languages. In this task, we adapted two large-scale cross-lingual open-retrieval QA datasets in 14 typologically diverse languages, and newly annotated open-retrieval QA data in 2 underrepresented languages: Tagalog and Tamil. Four teams submitted their systems. The best constrained system uses entity-aware contextualized representations for document retrieval, thereby achieving an average F1 score of 31.6, which is 4.1 F1 absolute higher than the challenging baseline. The best system obtains particularly significant improvements in Tamil (20.8 F1), whereas most of the other systems yield nearly zero scores. The best unconstrained system achieves 32.2 F1, outperforming our baseline by 4.5 points.

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longhorns at DADC 2022: How many linguists does it take to fool a Question Answering model? A systematic approach to adversarial attacks.
Venelin Kovatchev | Trina Chatterjee | Venkata S Govindarajan | Jifan Chen | Eunsol Choi | Gabriella Chronis | Anubrata Das | Katrin Erk | Matthew Lease | Junyi Jessy Li | Yating Wu | Kyle Mahowald
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection

Developing methods to adversarially challenge NLP systems is a promising avenue for improving both model performance and interpretability. Here, we describe the approach of the team “longhorns” on Task 1 of the The First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection (DADC), which asked teams to manually fool a model on an Extractive Question Answering task. Our team finished first (pending validation), with a model error rate of 62%. We advocate for a systematic, linguistically informed approach to formulating adversarial questions, and we describe the results of our pilot experiments, as well as our official submission.

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Misinfo Reaction Frames: Reasoning about Readers’ Reactions to News Headlines
Saadia Gabriel | Skyler Hallinan | Maarten Sap | Pemi Nguyen | Franziska Roesner | Eunsol Choi | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Even to a simple and short news headline, readers react in a multitude of ways: cognitively (e.g. inferring the writer’s intent), emotionally (e.g. feeling distrust), and behaviorally (e.g. sharing the news with their friends). Such reactions are instantaneous and yet complex, as they rely on factors that go beyond interpreting factual content of news. We propose Misinfo Reaction Frames (MRF), a pragmatic formalism for modeling how readers might react to a news headline. In contrast to categorical schema, our free-text dimensions provide a more nuanced way of understanding intent beyond being benign or malicious. We also introduce a Misinfo Reaction Frames corpus, a crowdsourced dataset of reactions to over 25k news headlines focusing on global crises: the Covid-19 pandemic, climate change, and cancer. Empirical results confirm that it is indeed possible for neural models to predict the prominent patterns of readers’ reactions to previously unseen news headlines. Additionally, our user study shows that displaying machine-generated MRF implications alongside news headlines to readers can increase their trust in real news while decreasing their trust in misinformation. Our work demonstrates the feasibility and importance of pragmatic inferences on news headlines to help enhance AI-guided misinformation detection and mitigation.

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How Do We Answer Complex Questions: Discourse Structure of Long-form Answers
Fangyuan Xu | Junyi Jessy Li | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Long-form answers, consisting of multiple sentences, can provide nuanced and comprehensive answers to a broader set of questions. To better understand this complex and understudied task, we study the functional structure of long-form answers collected from three datasets, ELI5, WebGPT and Natural Questions. Our main goal is to understand how humans organize information to craft complex answers. We develop an ontology of six sentence-level functional roles for long-form answers, and annotate 3.9k sentences in 640 answer paragraphs. Different answer collection methods manifest in different discourse structures. We further analyze model-generated answers – finding that annotators agree less with each other when annotating model-generated answers compared to annotating human-written answers. Our annotated data enables training a strong classifier that can be used for automatic analysis. We hope our work can inspire future research on discourse-level modeling and evaluation of long-form QA systems.

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Simulating Bandit Learning from User Feedback for Extractive Question Answering
Ge Gao | Eunsol Choi | Yoav Artzi
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We study learning from user feedback for extractive question answering by simulating feedback using supervised data. We cast the problem as contextual bandit learning, and analyze the characteristics of several learning scenarios with focus on reducing data annotation. We show that systems initially trained on few examples can dramatically improve given feedback from users on model-predicted answers, and that one can use existing datasets to deploy systems in new domains without any annotation effort, but instead improving the system on-the-fly via user feedback.

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Modeling Exemplification in Long-form Question Answering via Retrieval
Shufan Wang | Fangyuan Xu | Laure Thompson | Eunsol Choi | Mohit Iyyer
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Exemplification is a process by which writers explain or clarify a concept by providing an example. While common in all forms of writing, exemplification is particularly useful in the task of long-form question answering (LFQA), where a complicated answer can be made more understandable through simple examples. In this paper, we provide the first computational study of exemplification in QA, performing a fine-grained annotation of different types of examples (e.g., hypotheticals, anecdotes) in three corpora. We show that not only do state-of-the-art LFQA models struggle to generate relevant examples, but also that standard evaluation metrics such as ROUGE are insufficient to judge exemplification quality. We propose to treat exemplification as a retrieval problem in which a partially-written answer is used to query a large set of human-written examples extracted from a corpus. Our approach allows a reliable ranking-type automatic metrics that correlates well with human evaluation. A human evaluation shows that our model’s retrieved examples are more relevant than examples generated from a state-of-the-art LFQA model.

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Why is Winoground Hard? Investigating Failures in Visuolinguistic Compositionality
Anuj Diwan | Layne Berry | Eunsol Choi | David Harwath | Kyle Mahowald
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Recent visuolinguistic pre-trained models show promising progress on various end tasks such as image retrieval and video captioning. Yet, they fail miserably on the recently proposed Winoground dataset, which challenges models to match paired images and English captions, with items constructed to overlap lexically but differ in meaning (e.g., “there is a mug in some grass” vs. “there is some grass in a mug”). By annotating the dataset using new fine-grained tags, we show that solving the Winoground task requires not just compositional language understanding, but a host of other abilities like commonsense reasoning or locating small, out-of-focus objects in low-resolution images. In this paper, we identify the dataset’s main challenges through a suite of experiments on related tasks (probing task, image retrieval task), data augmentation, and manual inspection of the dataset. Our analysis suggests that a main challenge in visuolinguistic models may lie in fusing visual and textual representations, rather than in compositional language understanding. We release our annotation and code at https://github.com/ajd12342/why-winoground-hard.

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Rich Knowledge Sources Bring Complex Knowledge Conflicts: Recalibrating Models to Reflect Conflicting Evidence
Hung-Ting Chen | Michael Zhang | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Question answering models can use rich knowledge sources — up to one hundred retrieved passages and parametric knowledge in the large-scale language model (LM). Prior work assumes information in such knowledge sources is consistent with each other, paying little attention to how models blend information stored in their LM parameters with that from retrieved evidence documents. In this paper, we simulate knowledge conflicts (i.e., where parametric knowledge suggests one answer and different passages suggest different answers) and examine model behaviors. We find retrieval performance heavily impacts which sources models rely on, and current models mostly rely on non-parametric knowledgein their best-performing settings. We discover a troubling trend that contradictions among knowledge sources affect model confidence only marginally. To address this issue, we present a new calibration study, where models are discouraged from presenting any single answer when presented with multiple conflicting answer candidates in retrieved evidences.

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Generating Literal and Implied Subquestions to Fact-check Complex Claims
Jifan Chen | Aniruddh Sriram | Eunsol Choi | Greg Durrett
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Verifying political claims is a challenging task, as politicians can use various tactics to subtly misrepresent the facts for their agenda. Existing automatic fact-checking systems fall short here, and their predictions like “half-true” are not very useful in isolation, since it is unclear which parts of a claim are true and which are not. In this work, we focus on decomposing a complex claim into a comprehensive set of yes-no subquestions whose answers influence the veracity of the claim. We present CLAIMDECOMP, a dataset of decompositions for over 1000 claims. Given a claim and its verification paragraph written by fact-checkers, our trained annotators write subquestions covering both explicit propositions of the original claim and its implicit facets, such as asking about additional political context that changes our view of the claim’s veracity. We study whether state-of-the-art models can generate such subquestions, showing that these models generate reasonable questions to ask, but predicting the comprehensive set of subquestions from the original claim without evidence remains challenging. We further show that these subquestions can help identify relevant evidence to fact-check the full claim and derive the veracity through their answers, suggesting that they can be useful pieces of a fact-checking pipeline.

2021

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Knowing More About Questions Can Help: Improving Calibration in Question Answering
Shujian Zhang | Chengyue Gong | Eunsol Choi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL-IJCNLP 2021

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Can NLI Models Verify QA Systems’ Predictions?
Jifan Chen | Eunsol Choi | Greg Durrett
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

To build robust question answering systems, we need the ability to verify whether answers to questions are truly correct, not just “good enough” in the context of imperfect QA datasets. We explore the use of natural language inference (NLI) as a way to achieve this goal, as NLI inherently requires the premise (document context) to contain all necessary information to support the hypothesis (proposed answer to the question). We leverage large pre-trained models and recent prior datasets to construct powerful question conversion and decontextualization modules, which can reformulate QA instances as premise-hypothesis pairs with very high reliability. Then, by combining standard NLI datasets with NLI examples automatically derived from QA training data, we can train NLI models to evaluate QA models’ proposed answers. We show that our approach improves the confidence estimation of a QA model across different domains, evaluated in a selective QA setting. Careful manual analysis over the predictions of our NLI model shows that it can further identify cases where the QA model produces the right answer for the wrong reason, i.e., when the answer sentence cannot address all aspects of the question.

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SituatedQA: Incorporating Extra-Linguistic Contexts into QA
Michael Zhang | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Answers to the same question may change depending on the extra-linguistic contexts (when and where the question was asked). To study this challenge, we introduce SituatedQA, an open-retrieval QA dataset where systems must produce the correct answer to a question given the temporal or geographical context. To construct SituatedQA, we first identify such questions in existing QA datasets. We find that a significant proportion of information seeking questions have context-dependent answers (e.g. roughly 16.5% of NQ-Open). For such context-dependent questions, we then crowdsource alternative contexts and their corresponding answers. Our study shows that existing models struggle with producing answers that are frequently updated or from uncommon locations. We further quantify how existing models, which are trained on data collected in the past, fail to generalize to answering questions asked in the present, even when provided with an updated evidence corpus (a roughly 15 point drop in accuracy). Our analysis suggests that open-retrieval QA benchmarks should incorporate extra-linguistic context to stay relevant globally and in the future. Our data, code, and datasheet are available at https://situatedqa.github.io/.

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Learning with Different Amounts of Annotation: From Zero to Many Labels
Shujian Zhang | Chengyue Gong | Eunsol Choi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Training NLP systems typically assumes access to annotated data that has a single human label per example. Given imperfect labeling from annotators and inherent ambiguity of language, we hypothesize that single label is not sufficient to learn the spectrum of language interpretation. We explore new annotation distribution schemes, assigning multiple labels per example for a small subset of training examples. Introducing such multi label examples at the cost of annotating fewer examples brings clear gains on natural language inference task and entity typing task, even when we simply first train with a single label data and then fine tune with multi label examples. Extending a MixUp data augmentation framework, we propose a learning algorithm that can learn from training examples with different amount of annotation (with zero, one, or multiple labels). This algorithm efficiently combines signals from uneven training data and brings additional gains in low annotation budget and cross domain settings. Together, our method achieves consistent gains in two tasks, suggesting distributing labels unevenly among training examples can be beneficial for many NLP tasks.

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XOR QA: Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering
Akari Asai | Jungo Kasai | Jonathan Clark | Kenton Lee | Eunsol Choi | Hannaneh Hajishirzi
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Multilingual question answering tasks typically assume that answers exist in the same language as the question. Yet in practice, many languages face both information scarcity—where languages have few reference articles—and information asymmetry—where questions reference concepts from other cultures. This work extends open-retrieval question answering to a cross-lingual setting enabling questions from one language to be answered via answer content from another language. We construct a large-scale dataset built on 40K information-seeking questions across 7 diverse non-English languages that TyDi QA could not find same-language answers for. Based on this dataset, we introduce a task framework, called Cross-lingual Open-Retrieval Question Answering (XOR QA), that consists of three new tasks involving cross-lingual document retrieval from multilingual and English resources. We establish baselines with state-of-the-art machine translation systems and cross-lingual pretrained models. Experimental results suggest that XOR QA is a challenging task that will facilitate the development of novel techniques for multilingual question answering. Our data and code are available at https://nlp.cs.washington.edu/xorqa/.

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Challenges in Information-Seeking QA: Unanswerable Questions and Paragraph Retrieval
Akari Asai | Eunsol Choi
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)

Recent pretrained language models “solved” many reading comprehension benchmarks, where questions are written with access to the evidence document. However, datasets containing information-seeking queries where evidence documents are provided after the queries are written independently remain challenging. We analyze why answering information-seeking queries is more challenging and where their prevalent unanswerabilities arise, on Natural Questions and TyDi QA. Our controlled experiments suggest two headrooms – paragraph selection and answerability prediction, i.e. whether the paired evidence document contains the answer to the query or not. When provided with a gold paragraph and knowing when to abstain from answering, existing models easily outperform a human annotator. However, predicting answerability itself remains challenging. We manually annotate 800 unanswerable examples across six languages on what makes them challenging to answer. With this new data, we conduct per-category answerability prediction, revealing issues in the current dataset collection as well as task formulation. Together, our study points to avenues for future research in information-seeking question answering, both for dataset creation and model development. Our code and annotated data is publicly available at https://github.com/AkariAsai/unanswerable_qa.

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Decontextualization: Making Sentences Stand-Alone
Eunsol Choi | Jennimaria Palomaki | Matthew Lamm | Tom Kwiatkowski | Dipanjan Das | Michael Collins
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

Models for question answering, dialogue agents, and summarization often interpret the meaning of a sentence in a rich context and use that meaning in a new context. Taking excerpts of text can be problematic, as key pieces may not be explicit in a local window. We isolate and define the problem of sentence decontextualization: taking a sentence together with its context and rewriting it to be interpretable out of context, while preserving its meaning. We describe an annotation procedure, collect data on the Wikipedia corpus, and use the data to train models to automatically decontextualize sentences. We present preliminary studies that show the value of sentence decontextualization in a user-facing task, and as preprocessing for systems that perform document understanding. We argue that decontextualization is an important subtask in many downstream applications, and that the definitions and resources provided can benefit tasks that operate on sentences that occur in a richer context.

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QED: A Framework and Dataset for Explanations in Question Answering
Matthew Lamm | Jennimaria Palomaki | Chris Alberti | Daniel Andor | Eunsol Choi | Livio Baldini Soares | Michael Collins
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 9

A question answering system that in addition to providing an answer provides an explanation of the reasoning that leads to that answer has potential advantages in terms of debuggability, extensibility, and trust. To this end, we propose QED, a linguistically informed, extensible framework for explanations in question answering. A QED explanation specifies the relationship between a question and answer according to formal semantic notions such as referential equality, sentencehood, and entailment. We describe and publicly release an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations built upon a subset of the Google Natural Questions dataset, and report baseline models on two tasks—post- hoc explanation generation given an answer, and joint question answering and explanation generation. In the joint setting, a promising result suggests that training on a relatively small amount of QED data can improve question answering. In addition to describing the formal, language-theoretic motivations for the QED approach, we describe a large user study showing that the presence of QED explanations significantly improves the ability of untrained raters to spot errors made by a strong neural QA baseline.

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Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering
Adam Fisch | Alon Talmor | Danqi Chen | Eunsol Choi | Minjoon Seo | Patrick Lewis | Robin Jia | Sewon Min
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

2020

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Entities as Experts: Sparse Memory Access with Entity Supervision
Thibault Févry | Livio Baldini Soares | Nicholas FitzGerald | Eunsol Choi | Tom Kwiatkowski
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We focus on the problem of capturing declarative knowledge about entities in the learned parameters of a language model. We introduce a new model—Entities as Experts (EaE)—that can access distinct memories of the entities mentioned in a piece of text. Unlike previous efforts to integrate entity knowledge into sequence models, EaE’s entity representations are learned directly from text. We show that EaE’s learned representations capture sufficient knowledge to answer TriviaQA questions such as “Which Dr. Who villain has been played by Roger Delgado, Anthony Ainley, Eric Roberts?”, outperforming an encoder-generator Transformer model with 10x the parameters on this task. According to the Lama knowledge probes, EaE contains more factual knowledge than a similar sized Bert, as well as previous approaches that integrate external sources of entity knowledge. Because EaE associates parameters with specific entities, it only needs to access a fraction of its parameters at inference time, and we show that the correct identification and representation of entities is essential to EaE’s performance.

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TyDi QA: A Benchmark for Information-Seeking Question Answering in Typologically Diverse Languages
Jonathan H. Clark | Eunsol Choi | Michael Collins | Dan Garrette | Tom Kwiatkowski | Vitaly Nikolaev | Jennimaria Palomaki
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 8

Confidently making progress on multilingual modeling requires challenging, trustworthy evaluations. We present TyDi QA—a question answering dataset covering 11 typologically diverse languages with 204K question-answer pairs. The languages of TyDi QA are diverse with regard to their typology—the set of linguistic features each language expresses—such that we expect models performing well on this set to generalize across a large number of the world’s languages. We present a quantitative analysis of the data quality and example-level qualitative linguistic analyses of observed language phenomena that would not be found in English-only corpora. To provide a realistic information-seeking task and avoid priming effects, questions are written by people who want to know the answer, but don’t know the answer yet, and the data is collected directly in each language without the use of translation.

2019

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Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Fernando Alva-Manchego | Eunsol Choi | Daniel Khashabi
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

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No Permanent Friends or Enemies: Tracking Relationships between Nations from News
Xiaochuang Han | Eunsol Choi | Chenhao Tan
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Understanding the dynamics of international politics is important yet challenging for civilians. In this work, we explore unsupervised neural models to infer relations between nations from news articles. We extend existing models by incorporating shallow linguistics information and propose a new automatic evaluation metric that aligns relationship dynamics with manually annotated key events. As understanding international relations requires carefully analyzing complex relationships, we conduct in-person human evaluations with three groups of participants. Overall, humans prefer the outputs of our model and give insightful feedback that suggests future directions for human-centered models. Furthermore, our model reveals interesting regional differences in news coverage. For instance, with respect to US-China relations, Singaporean media focus more on “strengthening” and “purchasing”, while US media focus more on “criticizing” and “denouncing”.

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pair2vec: Compositional Word-Pair Embeddings for Cross-Sentence Inference
Mandar Joshi | Eunsol Choi | Omer Levy | Daniel Weld | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

Reasoning about implied relationships (e.g. paraphrastic, common sense, encyclopedic) between pairs of words is crucial for many cross-sentence inference problems. This paper proposes new methods for learning and using embeddings of word pairs that implicitly represent background knowledge about such relationships. Our pairwise embeddings are computed as a compositional function of each word’s representation, which is learned by maximizing the pointwise mutual information (PMI) with the contexts in which the the two words co-occur. We add these representations to the cross-sentence attention layer of existing inference models (e.g. BiDAF for QA, ESIM for NLI), instead of extending or replacing existing word embeddings. Experiments show a gain of 2.7% on the recently released SQuAD 2.0 and 1.3% on MultiNLI. Our representations also aid in better generalization with gains of around 6-7% on adversarial SQuAD datasets, and 8.8% on the adversarial entailment test set by Glockner et al. (2018).

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Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering
Adam Fisch | Alon Talmor | Robin Jia | Minjoon Seo | Eunsol Choi | Danqi Chen
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

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MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension
Adam Fisch | Alon Talmor | Robin Jia | Minjoon Seo | Eunsol Choi | Danqi Chen
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

We present the results of the Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA) 2019 shared task on evaluating the generalization capabilities of reading comprehension systems. In this task, we adapted and unified 18 distinct question answering datasets into the same format. Among them, six datasets were made available for training, six datasets were made available for development, and the rest were hidden for final evaluation. Ten teams submitted systems, which explored various ideas including data sampling, multi-task learning, adversarial training and ensembling. The best system achieved an average F1 score of 72.5 on the 12 held-out datasets, 10.7 absolute points higher than our initial baseline based on BERT.

2018

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering
Eunsol Choi | Minjoon Seo | Danqi Chen | Robin Jia | Jonathan Berant
Proceedings of the Workshop on Machine Reading for Question Answering

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Neural Metaphor Detection in Context
Ge Gao | Eunsol Choi | Yejin Choi | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present end-to-end neural models for detecting metaphorical word use in context. We show that relatively standard BiLSTM models which operate on complete sentences work well in this setting, in comparison to previous work that used more restricted forms of linguistic context. These models establish a new state-of-the-art on existing verb metaphor detection benchmarks, and show strong performance on jointly predicting the metaphoricity of all words in a running text.

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QuAC: Question Answering in Context
Eunsol Choi | He He | Mohit Iyyer | Mark Yatskar | Wen-tau Yih | Yejin Choi | Percy Liang | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present QuAC, a dataset for Question Answering in Context that contains 14K information-seeking QA dialogs (100K questions in total). The dialogs involve two crowd workers: (1) a student who poses a sequence of freeform questions to learn as much as possible about a hidden Wikipedia text, and (2) a teacher who answers the questions by providing short excerpts from the text. QuAC introduces challenges not found in existing machine comprehension datasets: its questions are often more open-ended, unanswerable, or only meaningful within the dialog context, as we show in a detailed qualitative evaluation. We also report results for a number of reference models, including a recently state-of-the-art reading comprehension architecture extended to model dialog context. Our best model underperforms humans by 20 F1, suggesting that there is significant room for future work on this data. Dataset, baseline, and leaderboard available at http://quac.ai.

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Ultra-Fine Entity Typing
Eunsol Choi | Omer Levy | Yejin Choi | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We introduce a new entity typing task: given a sentence with an entity mention, the goal is to predict a set of free-form phrases (e.g. skyscraper, songwriter, or criminal) that describe appropriate types for the target entity. This formulation allows us to use a new type of distant supervision at large scale: head words, which indicate the type of the noun phrases they appear in. We show that these ultra-fine types can be crowd-sourced, and introduce new evaluation sets that are much more diverse and fine-grained than existing benchmarks. We present a model that can predict ultra-fine types, and is trained using a multitask objective that pools our new head-word supervision with prior supervision from entity linking. Experimental results demonstrate that our model is effective in predicting entity types at varying granularity; it achieves state of the art performance on an existing fine-grained entity typing benchmark, and sets baselines for our newly-introduced datasets.

2017

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Coarse-to-Fine Question Answering for Long Documents
Eunsol Choi | Daniel Hewlett | Jakob Uszkoreit | Illia Polosukhin | Alexandre Lacoste | Jonathan Berant
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present a framework for question answering that can efficiently scale to longer documents while maintaining or even improving performance of state-of-the-art models. While most successful approaches for reading comprehension rely on recurrent neural networks (RNNs), running them over long documents is prohibitively slow because it is difficult to parallelize over sequences. Inspired by how people first skim the document, identify relevant parts, and carefully read these parts to produce an answer, we combine a coarse, fast model for selecting relevant sentences and a more expensive RNN for producing the answer from those sentences. We treat sentence selection as a latent variable trained jointly from the answer only using reinforcement learning. Experiments demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on a challenging subset of the WikiReading dataset and on a new dataset, while speeding up the model by 3.5x-6.7x.

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TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension
Mandar Joshi | Eunsol Choi | Daniel Weld | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

We present TriviaQA, a challenging reading comprehension dataset containing over 650K question-answer-evidence triples. TriviaQA includes 95K question-answer pairs authored by trivia enthusiasts and independently gathered evidence documents, six per question on average, that provide high quality distant supervision for answering the questions. We show that, in comparison to other recently introduced large-scale datasets, TriviaQA (1) has relatively complex, compositional questions, (2) has considerable syntactic and lexical variability between questions and corresponding answer-evidence sentences, and (3) requires more cross sentence reasoning to find answers. We also present two baseline algorithms: a feature-based classifier and a state-of-the-art neural network, that performs well on SQuAD reading comprehension. Neither approach comes close to human performance (23% and 40% vs. 80%), suggesting that TriviaQA is a challenging testbed that is worth significant future study.

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Zero-Shot Relation Extraction via Reading Comprehension
Omer Levy | Minjoon Seo | Eunsol Choi | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2017)

We show that relation extraction can be reduced to answering simple reading comprehension questions, by associating one or more natural-language questions with each relation slot. This reduction has several advantages: we can (1) learn relation-extraction models by extending recent neural reading-comprehension techniques, (2) build very large training sets for those models by combining relation-specific crowd-sourced questions with distant supervision, and even (3) do zero-shot learning by extracting new relation types that are only specified at test-time, for which we have no labeled training examples. Experiments on a Wikipedia slot-filling task demonstrate that the approach can generalize to new questions for known relation types with high accuracy, and that zero-shot generalization to unseen relation types is possible, at lower accuracy levels, setting the bar for future work on this task.

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Truth of Varying Shades: Analyzing Language in Fake News and Political Fact-Checking
Hannah Rashkin | Eunsol Choi | Jin Yea Jang | Svitlana Volkova | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We present an analytic study on the language of news media in the context of political fact-checking and fake news detection. We compare the language of real news with that of satire, hoaxes, and propaganda to find linguistic characteristics of untrustworthy text. To probe the feasibility of automatic political fact-checking, we also present a case study based on PolitiFact.com using their factuality judgments on a 6-point scale. Experiments show that while media fact-checking remains to be an open research question, stylistic cues can help determine the truthfulness of text.

2016

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Extracting Structured Scholarly Information from the Machine Translation Literature
Eunsol Choi | Matic Horvat | Jonathan May | Kevin Knight | Daniel Marcu
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

Understanding the experimental results of a scientific paper is crucial to understanding its contribution and to comparing it with related work. We introduce a structured, queryable representation for experimental results and a baseline system that automatically populates this representation. The representation can answer compositional questions such as: “Which are the best published results reported on the NIST 09 Chinese to English dataset?” and “What are the most important methods for speeding up phrase-based decoding?” Answering such questions usually involves lengthy literature surveys. Current machine reading for academic papers does not usually consider the actual experiments, but mostly focuses on understanding abstracts. We describe annotation work to create an initial hscientific paper; experimental results representationi corpus. The corpus is composed of 67 papers which were manually annotated with a structured representation of experimental results by domain experts. Additionally, we present a baseline algorithm that characterizes the difficulty of the inference task.

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Proceedings of the NAACL Student Research Workshop
Jacob Andreas | Eunsol Choi | Angeliki Lazaridou
Proceedings of the NAACL Student Research Workshop

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Document-level Sentiment Inference with Social, Faction, and Discourse Context
Eunsol Choi | Hannah Rashkin | Luke Zettlemoyer | Yejin Choi
Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2015

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Scalable Semantic Parsing with Partial Ontologies
Eunsol Choi | Tom Kwiatkowski | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

2013

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Scaling Semantic Parsers with On-the-Fly Ontology Matching
Tom Kwiatkowski | Eunsol Choi | Yoav Artzi | Luke Zettlemoyer
Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

2012

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Hedge Detection as a Lens on Framing in the GMO Debates: A Position Paper
Eunsol Choi | Chenhao Tan | Lillian Lee | Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil | Jennifer Spindel
Proceedings of the Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning in Computational Linguistics

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