Haim Dubossarsky


2024

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(Chat)GPT v BERT Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection
Francesco Periti | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024

In the universe of Natural Language Processing, Transformer-based language models like BERT and (Chat)GPT have emerged as lexical superheroes with great power to solve open research problems. In this paper, we specifically focus on the temporal problem of semantic change, and evaluate their ability to solve two diachronic extensions of the Word-in-Context (WiC) task: TempoWiC and HistoWiC. In particular, we investigate the potential of a novel, off-the-shelf technology like ChatGPT (and GPT) 3.5 compared to BERT, which represents a family of models that currently stand as the state-of-the-art for modeling semantic change. Our experiments represent the first attempt to assess the use of (Chat)GPT for studying semantic change. Our results indicate that ChatGPT performs significantly worse than the foundational GPT version. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that (Chat)GPT achieves slightly lower performance than BERT in detecting long-term changes but performs significantly worse in detecting short-term changes.

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Toward Sentiment Aware Semantic Change Analysis
Roksana Goworek | Haim Dubossarsky
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

This student paper explores the potential of augmenting computational models of semantic change with sentiment information. It tests the efficacy of this approach on the English SemEval of Lexical Semantic Change and its associated historical corpora. We first establish the feasibility of our approach by demonstrating that existing models extract reliable sentiment information from historical corpora, and then validate that words that underwent semantic change also show greater sentiment change in comparison to historically stable words. We then integrate sentiment information into standard models of semantic change for individual words, and test if this can improve the overall performance of the latter, showing mixed results. This research contributes to our understanding of language change by providing the first attempt to enrich standard models of semantic change with additional information. It taps into the multifaceted nature of language change, that should not be reduced only to binary or scalar report of change, but adds additional dimensions to this change, sentiment being only one of these. As such, this student paper suggests novel directions for future work in integrating additional, more nuanced information of change and interpretation for finer-grained semantic change analysis.

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Computational modeling of semantic change
Pierluigi Cassotti | Francesco Periti | Stefano de Pascale | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

Languages change constantly over time, influenced by social, technological, cultural and political factors that affect how people express themselves. In particular, words can undergo the process of semantic change, which can be subtle and significantly impact the interpretation of texts. For example, the word terrific used to mean ‘causing terror’ and was as such synonymous to terrifying. Nowadays, speakers use the word in the sense of ‘excessive’ and even ‘amazing’. In Historical Linguistics, tools and methods have been developed to analyse this phenomenon, including systematic categorisations of the types of change, the causes and the mechanisms underlying the different types of change. However, traditional linguistic methods, while informative, are often based on small, carefully curated samples. Thanks to the availability of both large diachronic corpora, the computational means to model word meaning unsupervised, and evaluation benchmarks, we are seeing an increasing interest in the computational modelling of semantic change. This is evidenced by the increasing number of publications in this new domain as well as the organisation of initiatives and events related to this topic, such as four editions of the International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change LChange1, and several evaluation campaigns (Schlechtweg et al., 2020a; Basile et al., 2020b; Kutuzov et al.; Zamora-Reina et al., 2022).

2023

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Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Nina Tahmasebi | Syrielle Montariol | Haim Dubossarsky | Andrey Kutuzov | Simon Hengchen | David Alfter | Francesco Periti | Pierluigi Cassotti
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

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The Finer They Get: Combining Fine-Tuned Models For Better Semantic Change Detection
Wei Zhou | Nina Tahmasebi | Haim Dubossarsky
Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)

In this work we investigate the hypothesis that enriching contextualized models using fine-tuning tasks can improve theircapacity to detect lexical semantic change (LSC). We include tasks aimed to capture both low-level linguistic information like part-of-speech tagging, as well as higher level (semantic) information. Through a series of analyses we demonstrate that certain combinations of fine-tuning tasks, like sentiment, syntactic information, and logical inference, bring large improvements to standard LSC models that are based only on standard language modeling. We test on the binary classification and ranking tasks of SemEval-2020 Task 1 and evaluate using both permutation tests and under transfer-learningscenarios.

2022

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Logical Reasoning with Span-Level Predictions for Interpretable and Robust NLI Models
Joe Stacey | Pasquale Minervini | Haim Dubossarsky | Marek Rei
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Current Natural Language Inference (NLI) models achieve impressive results, sometimes outperforming humans when evaluating on in-distribution test sets. However, as these models are known to learn from annotation artefacts and dataset biases, it is unclear to what extent the models are learning the task of NLI instead of learning from shallow heuristics in their training data. We address this issue by introducing a logical reasoning framework for NLI, creating highly transparent model decisions that are based on logical rules. Unlike prior work, we show that improved interpretability can be achieved without decreasing the predictive accuracy. We almost fully retain performance on SNLI, while also identifying the exact hypothesis spans that are responsible for each model prediction. Using the e-SNLI human explanations, we verify that our model makes sensible decisions at a span level, despite not using any span labels during training. We can further improve model performance and the span-level decisions by using the e-SNLI explanations during training. Finally, our model is more robust in a reduced data setting. When training with only 1,000 examples, out-of-distribution performance improves on the MNLI matched and mismatched validation sets by 13% and 16% relative to the baseline. Training with fewer observations yields further improvements, both in-distribution and out-of-distribution.

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Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change
Nina Tahmasebi | Syrielle Montariol | Andrey Kutuzov | Simon Hengchen | Haim Dubossarsky | Lars Borin
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

2021

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DWUG: A large Resource of Diachronic Word Usage Graphs in Four Languages
Dominik Schlechtweg | Nina Tahmasebi | Simon Hengchen | Haim Dubossarsky | Barbara McGillivray
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Word meaning is notoriously difficult to capture, both synchronically and diachronically. In this paper, we describe the creation of the largest resource of graded contextualized, diachronic word meaning annotation in four different languages, based on 100,000 human semantic proximity judgments. We describe in detail the multi-round incremental annotation process, the choice for a clustering algorithm to group usages into senses, and possible – diachronic and synchronic – uses for this dataset.

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Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021
Nina Tahmasebi | Adam Jatowt | Yang Xu | Simon Hengchen | Syrielle Montariol | Haim Dubossarsky
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021

2020

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Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Research in Linguistic Typology
Ekaterina Vylomova | Edoardo M. Ponti | Eitan Grossman | Arya D. McCarthy | Yevgeni Berzak | Haim Dubossarsky | Ivan Vulić | Roi Reichart | Anna Korhonen | Ryan Cotterell
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Research in Linguistic Typology

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The Secret is in the Spectra: Predicting Cross-lingual Task Performance with Spectral Similarity Measures
Haim Dubossarsky | Ivan Vulić | Roi Reichart | Anna Korhonen
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Performance in cross-lingual NLP tasks is impacted by the (dis)similarity of languages at hand: e.g., previous work has suggested there is a connection between the expected success of bilingual lexicon induction (BLI) and the assumption of (approximate) isomorphism between monolingual embedding spaces. In this work we present a large-scale study focused on the correlations between monolingual embedding space similarity and task performance, covering thousands of language pairs and four different tasks: BLI, parsing, POS tagging and MT. We hypothesize that statistics of the spectrum of each monolingual embedding space indicate how well they can be aligned. We then introduce several isomorphism measures between two embedding spaces, based on the relevant statistics of their individual spectra. We empirically show that (1) language similarity scores derived from such spectral isomorphism measures are strongly associated with performance observed in different cross-lingual tasks, and (2) our spectral-based measures consistently outperform previous standard isomorphism measures, while being computationally more tractable and easier to interpret. Finally, our measures capture complementary information to typologically driven language distance measures, and the combination of measures from the two families yields even higher task performance correlations.

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Avoiding the Hypothesis-Only Bias in Natural Language Inference via Ensemble Adversarial Training
Joe Stacey | Pasquale Minervini | Haim Dubossarsky | Sebastian Riedel | Tim Rocktäschel
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Natural Language Inference (NLI) datasets contain annotation artefacts resulting in spurious correlations between the natural language utterances and their respective entailment classes. These artefacts are exploited by neural networks even when only considering the hypothesis and ignoring the premise, leading to unwanted biases. Belinkov et al. (2019b) proposed tackling this problem via adversarial training, but this can lead to learned sentence representations that still suffer from the same biases. We show that the bias can be reduced in the sentence representations by using an ensemble of adversaries, encouraging the model to jointly decrease the accuracy of these different adversaries while fitting the data. This approach produces more robust NLI models, outperforming previous de-biasing efforts when generalised to 12 other NLI datasets (Belinkov et al., 2019a; Mahabadi et al., 2020). In addition, we find that the optimal number of adversarial classifiers depends on the dimensionality of the sentence representations, with larger sentence representations being more difficult to de-bias while benefiting from using a greater number of adversaries.

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SemEval-2020 Task 1: Unsupervised Lexical Semantic Change Detection
Dominik Schlechtweg | Barbara McGillivray | Simon Hengchen | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

Lexical Semantic Change detection, i.e., the task of identifying words that change meaning over time, is a very active research area, with applications in NLP, lexicography, and linguistics. Evaluation is currently the most pressing problem in Lexical Semantic Change detection, as no gold standards are available to the community, which hinders progress. We present the results of the first shared task that addresses this gap by providing researchers with an evaluation framework and manually annotated, high-quality datasets for English, German, Latin, and Swedish. 33 teams submitted 186 systems, which were evaluated on two subtasks.

2019

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Time-Out: Temporal Referencing for Robust Modeling of Lexical Semantic Change
Haim Dubossarsky | Simon Hengchen | Nina Tahmasebi | Dominik Schlechtweg
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

State-of-the-art models of lexical semantic change detection suffer from noise stemming from vector space alignment. We have empirically tested the Temporal Referencing method for lexical semantic change and show that, by avoiding alignment, it is less affected by this noise. We show that, trained on a diachronic corpus, the skip-gram with negative sampling architecture with temporal referencing outperforms alignment models on a synthetic task as well as a manual testset. We introduce a principled way to simulate lexical semantic change and systematically control for possible biases.

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Proceedings of TyP-NLP: The First Workshop on Typology for Polyglot NLP
Haim Dubossarsky | Arya D. McCarthy | Edoardo Maria Ponti | Ivan Vulić | Ekaterina Vylomova | Yevgeni Berzak | Ryan Cotterell | Manaal Faruqui | Anna Korhonen | Roi Reichart
Proceedings of TyP-NLP: The First Workshop on Typology for Polyglot NLP

2018

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Coming to Your Senses: on Controls and Evaluation Sets in Polysemy Research
Haim Dubossarsky | Eitan Grossman | Daphna Weinshall
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The point of departure of this article is the claim that sense-specific vectors provide an advantage over normal vectors due to the polysemy that they presumably represent. This claim is based on performance gains observed in gold standard evaluation tests such as word similarity tasks. We demonstrate that this claim, at least as it is instantiated in prior art, is unfounded in two ways. Furthermore, we provide empirical data and an analytic discussion that may account for the previously reported improved performance. First, we show that ground-truth polysemy degrades performance in word similarity tasks. Therefore word similarity tasks are not suitable as an evaluation test for polysemy representation. Second, random assignment of words to senses is shown to improve performance in the same task. This and additional results point to the conclusion that performance gains as reported in previous work may be an artifact of random sense assignment, which is equivalent to sub-sampling and multiple estimation of word vector representations. Theoretical analysis shows that this may on its own be beneficial for the estimation of word similarity, by reducing the bias in the estimation of the cosine distance.

2017

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Outta Control: Laws of Semantic Change and Inherent Biases in Word Representation Models
Haim Dubossarsky | Daphna Weinshall | Eitan Grossman
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

This article evaluates three proposed laws of semantic change. Our claim is that in order to validate a putative law of semantic change, the effect should be observed in the genuine condition but absent or reduced in a suitably matched control condition, in which no change can possibly have taken place. Our analysis shows that the effects reported in recent literature must be substantially revised: (i) the proposed negative correlation between meaning change and word frequency is shown to be largely an artefact of the models of word representation used; (ii) the proposed negative correlation between meaning change and prototypicality is shown to be much weaker than what has been claimed in prior art; and (iii) the proposed positive correlation between meaning change and polysemy is largely an artefact of word frequency. These empirical observations are corroborated by analytical proofs that show that count representations introduce an inherent dependence on word frequency, and thus word frequency cannot be evaluated as an independent factor with these representations.