NLP models are susceptible to learning spurious biases (i.e., bugs) that work on some datasets but do not properly reflect the underlying task. Explanation-based model debugging aims to resolve spurious biases by showing human users explanations of model behavior, asking users to give feedback on the behavior, then using the feedback to update the model. While existing model debugging methods have shown promise, their prototype-level implementations provide limited practical utility. Thus, we propose XMD: the first open-source, end-to-end framework for explanation-based model debugging. Given task- or instance-level explanations, users can flexibly provide various forms of feedback via an intuitive, web-based UI. After receiving user feedback, XMD automatically updates the model in real time, by regularizing the model so that its explanations align with the user feedback. The new model can then be easily deployed into real-world applications via Hugging Face. Using XMD, we can improve the model's OOD performance on text classification tasks by up to 18%.

Research on Korean grammatical error correction (GEC) is limited compared to other major languages such as English and Chinese. We attribute this problematic circumstance to the lack of a carefully designed evaluation benchmark for Korean. Thus, in this work, we first collect three datasets from different sources (Kor-Lang8, Kor-Native, and Kor-Learner) to cover a wide range of error types and annotate them using our newly proposed tool called Korean Automatic Grammatical error Annotation System (KAGAS). KAGAS is a carefully designed edit alignment & classification tool that considers the nature of Korean on generating an alignment between a source sentence and a target sentence, and identifies error types on each aligned edit. We also present baseline models fine-tuned over our datasets. We show that the model trained with our datasets significantly outperforms the public statistical GEC system (Hanspell) on a wider range of error types, demonstrating the diversity and usefulness of the datasets.

Recent directions for offensive language detection are hierarchical modeling, identifying the type and the target of offensive language, and interpretability with offensive span annotation and prediction. These improvements are focused on English and do not transfer well to other languages because of cultural and linguistic differences. In this paper, we present the Korean Offensive Language Dataset (KOLD) comprising 40,429 comments, which are annotated hierarchically with the type and the target of offensive language, accompanied by annotations of the corresponding text spans. We collect the comments from NAVER news and YouTube platform and provide the titles of the articles and videos as the context information for the annotation process. We use these annotated comments as training data for Korean BERT and RoBERTa models and find that they are effective at offensiveness detection, target classification, and target span detection while having room for improvement for target group classification and offensive span detection. We discover that the target group distribution differs drastically from the existing English datasets, and observe that providing the context information improves the model performance in offensiveness detection (+0.3), target classification (+1.5), and target group classification (+13.1). We publicly release the dataset and baseline models.

Previous approaches to detecting toxic language and norm violations in online conversations are primarily based on asynchronous settings, such as online forums and social media, and they are less effective as they overlook unique characteristics of conversations taking place in the synchronous setting, i.e. real-time conversations. In this work, we share our progress in the first NLP study on detecting norm violations in real-time conversations. We collect 500 moderated comments and their corresponding context from Twitch live streams and annotate them with reasons for moderation. Then, we analyze the unique nature of real-time conversations that distinguish them from asynchronous communication and examine the importance of various contexts in detecting norm violations in real-time conversations. Lastly, we discuss modeling approaches that leverage our findings. In our experiments, we observe that existing models on asynchronous communication perform poorly in detecting norm violations in real-time conversations. We also find that previous chat context in live streaming chat helps detect norm violations.

Recent advances in prompt-based learning have shown strong results on few-shot text classification by using cloze-style templates.Similar attempts have been made on named entity recognition (NER) which manually design templates to predict entity types for every text span in a sentence. However, such methods may suffer from error propagation induced by entity span detection, high cost due to enumeration of all possible text spans, and omission of inter-dependencies among token labels in a sentence. Here we present a simple demonstration-based learning method for NER, which lets the input be prefaced by task demonstrations for in-context learning. We perform a systematic study on demonstration strategy regarding what to include (entity examples, with or without surrounding context), how to select the examples, and what templates to use. Results on in-domain learning and domain adaptation show that the model’s performance in low-resource settings can be largely improved with a suitable demonstration strategy (e.g., a 4-17% improvement on 25 train instances). We also find that good demonstration can save many labeled examples and consistency in demonstration contributes to better performance.

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 442 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

We present a model to predict fine-grained emotions along the continuous dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) with a corpus with categorical emotion annotations. Our model is trained by minimizing the EMD (Earth Mover’s Distance) loss between the predicted VAD score distribution and the categorical emotion distributions sorted along VAD, and it can simultaneously classify the emotion categories and predict the VAD scores for a given sentence. We use pre-trained RoBERTa-Large and fine-tune on three different corpora with categorical labels and evaluate on EmoBank corpus with VAD scores. We show that our approach reaches comparable performance to that of the state-of-the-art classifiers in categorical emotion classification and shows significant positive correlations with the ground truth VAD scores. Also, further training with supervision of VAD labels leads to improved performance especially when dataset is small. We also present examples of predictions of appropriate emotion words that are not part of the original annotations.

Toxic comments in online platforms are an unavoidable social issue under the cloak of anonymity. Hate speech detection has been actively done for languages such as English, German, or Italian, where manually labeled corpus has been released. In this work, we first present 9.4K manually labeled entertainment news comments for identifying Korean toxic speech, collected from a widely used online news platform in Korea. The comments are annotated regarding social bias and hate speech since both aspects are correlated. The inter-annotator agreement Krippendorff’s alpha score is 0.492 and 0.496, respectively. We provide benchmarks using CharCNN, BiLSTM, and BERT, where BERT achieves the highest score on all tasks. The models generally display better performance on bias identification, since the hate speech detection is a more subjective issue. Additionally, when BERT is trained with bias label for hate speech detection, the prediction score increases, implying that bias and hate are intertwined. We make our dataset publicly available and open competitions with the corpus and benchmarks.

Deep neural models for low-resource named entity recognition (NER) have shown impressive results by leveraging distant super-vision or other meta-level information (e.g. explanation). However, the costs of acquiring such additional information are generally prohibitive, especially in domains where existing resources (e.g. databases to be used for distant supervision) may not exist. In this paper, we present a novel two-stage framework (AutoTriggER) to improve NER performance by automatically generating and leveraging "entity triggers" which are essentially human-readable clues in the text that can help guide the model to make better decisions. Thus, the framework is able to both create and leverage auxiliary supervision by itself. Through experiments on three well-studied NER datasets, we show that our automatically extracted triggers are well-matched to human triggers, and AutoTriggER improves performance over a RoBERTa-CRFarchitecture by nearly 0.5 F1 points on average and much more in a low resource setting.

Pre-trained language models are still far from human performance in tasks that need understanding of properties (e.g. appearance, measurable quantity) and affordances of everyday objects in the real world since the text lacks such information due to reporting bias.In this work, we study whether integrating visual knowledge into a language model can fill the gap.We investigate two types of knowledge transfer: (1) text knowledge transfer using image captions that may contain enriched visual knowledge and (2) cross-modal knowledge transfer using both images and captions with vision-language training objectives.On 5 downstream tasks that may need visual knowledge to solve the problem, we perform extensive empirical comparisons over the presented objectives.Our experiments show that visual knowledge transfer can improve performance in both low-resource and fully supervised settings.

Pretrained language models (PTLM) have achieved impressive results in a range of natural language understanding (NLU) and generation (NLG) tasks that require a syntactic and semantic understanding of the text. However, current pre-training objectives such as masked token prediction (for BERT-style PTLMs) and masked span infilling (for T5-style PTLMs) do not explicitly model the relational and compositional commonsense knowledge about everyday concepts, which is crucial to many downstream tasks requiring commonsense reasoning. To augment PTLMs with common sense, we propose generative and contrastive objectives as intermediate self-supervised pre-training tasks between general pre-training and downstream task-specific fine-tuning. We also propose a joint training framework to unify generative and contrastive objectives so that these objectives can be more effective. Our proposed objectives can pack more commonsense knowledge into the parameters of a pre-trained text-to-text transformer without relying on external knowledge bases, yielding better performance on both NLU and NLG tasks. We apply our method on a pre-trained T5 model in an intermediate task transfer learning fashion to train a concept-aware language model (CALM) and experiment with five commonsense benchmarks (four NLU tasks and one NLG task). Experimental results show that CALM outperforms baseline methods by a consistent margin.

Recent advances in prompt-based learning have shown strong results on few-shot text classification by using cloze-style templates.Similar attempts have been made on named entity recognition (NER) which manually design templates to predict entity types for every text span in a sentence. However, such methods may suffer from error propagation induced by entity span detection, high cost due to enumeration of all possible text spans, and omission of inter-dependencies among token labels in a sentence. Here we present a simple demonstration-based learning method for NER, which lets the input be prefaced by task demonstrations for in-context learning. We perform a systematic study on demonstration strategy regarding what to include (entity examples, with or without surrounding context), how to select the examples, and what templates to use. Results on in-domain learning and domain adaptation show that the model’s performance in low-resource settings can be largely improved with a suitable demonstration strategy (e.g., a 4-17% improvement on 25 train instances). We also find that good demonstration can save many labeled examples and consistency in demonstration contributes to better performance.

We introduce an open-source web-based data annotation framework (AlpacaTag) for sequence tagging tasks such as named-entity recognition (NER). The distinctive advantages of AlpacaTag are three-fold. 1) Active intelligent recommendation: dynamically suggesting annotations and sampling the most informative unlabeled instances with a back-end active learned model; 2) Automatic crowd consolidation: enhancing real-time inter-annotator agreement by merging inconsistent labels from multiple annotators; 3) Real-time model deployment: users can deploy their models in downstream systems while new annotations are being made. AlpacaTag is a comprehensive solution for sequence labeling tasks, ranging from rapid tagging with recommendations powered by active learning and auto-consolidation of crowd annotations to real-time model deployment.

Successfully training a deep neural network demands a huge corpus of labeled data. However, each label only provides limited information to learn from, and collecting the requisite number of labels involves massive human effort. In this work, we introduce LEAN-LIFE, a web-based, Label-Efficient AnnotatioN framework for sequence labeling and classification tasks, with an easy-to-use UI that not only allows an annotator to provide the needed labels for a task but also enables LearnIng From Explanations for each labeling decision. Such explanations enable us to generate useful additional labeled data from unlabeled instances, bolstering the pool of available training data. On three popular NLP tasks (named entity recognition, relation extraction, sentiment analysis), we find that using this enhanced supervision allows our models to surpass competitive baseline F1 scores by more than 5-10 percentage points, while using 2X times fewer labeled instances. Our framework is the first to utilize this enhanced supervision technique and does so for three important tasks – thus providing improved annotation recommendations to users and an ability to build datasets of (data, label, explanation) triples instead of the regular (data, label) pair.

Training neural models for named entity recognition (NER) in a new domain often requires additional human annotations (e.g., tens of thousands of labeled instances) that are usually expensive and time-consuming to collect. Thus, a crucial research question is how to obtain supervision in a cost-effective way. In this paper, we introduce “entity triggers,” an effective proxy of human explanations for facilitating label-efficient learning of NER models. An entity trigger is defined as a group of words in a sentence that helps to explain why humans would recognize an entity in the sentence. We crowd-sourced 14k entity triggers for two well-studied NER datasets. Our proposed model, Trigger Matching Network, jointly learns trigger representations and soft matching module with self-attention such that can generalize to unseen sentences easily for tagging. Our framework is significantly more cost-effective than the traditional neural NER frameworks. Experiments show that using only 20% of the trigger-annotated sentences results in a comparable performance as using 70% of conventional annotated sentences.

We introduce Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) benchmark. KLUE is a collection of eight Korean natural language understanding (NLU) tasks, including Topic Classification, Semantic Textual Similarity, Natural Language Inference, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction, Dependency Parsing, Machine Reading Comprehension, and Dialogue State Tracking. We create all of the datasets from scratch in a principled way. We design the tasks to have diverse formats and each task to be built upon various source corpora that respect copyrights. Also, we propose suitable evaluation metrics and organize annotation protocols in a way to ensure quality. To prevent ethical risks in KLUE, we proactively remove examples reflecting social biases, containing toxic content or personally identifiable information (PII). Along with the benchmark datasets, we release pretrained language models (PLM) for Korean, KLUE-BERT and KLUERoBERTa, and find KLUE-RoBERTaLARGE outperforms other baselines including multilingual PLMs and existing open-source Korean PLMs. The fine-tuning recipes and the creation of similar resources for other languages. KLUE is available at https://klue-benchmark.com/.

We present a model to predict fine-grained emotions along the continuous dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) with a corpus with categorical emotion annotations. Our model is trained by minimizing the EMD (Earth Mover’s Distance) loss between the predicted VAD score distribution and the categorical emotion distributions sorted along VAD, and it can simultaneously classify the emotion categories and predict the VAD scores for a given sentence. We use pre-trained RoBERTa-Large and fine-tune on three different corpora with categorical labels and evaluate on EmoBank corpus with VAD scores. We show that our approach reaches comparable performance to that of the state-of-the-art classifiers in categorical emotion classification and shows significant positive correlations with the ground truth VAD scores. Also, further training with supervision of VAD labels leads to improved performance especially when dataset is small. We also present examples of predictions of appropriate emotion words that are not part of the original annotations.

We analyze social media for detecting the suicidal risk of military personnel, which is especially crucial for countries with compulsory military service such as the Republic of Korea. From a widely-used Korean social Q&A site, we collect posts containing military-relevant content written by active-duty military personnel. We then annotate the posts with two groups of experts: military experts and mental health experts. Our dataset includes 2,791 posts with 13,955 corresponding expert annotations of suicidal risk levels, and this dataset is available to researchers who consent to research ethics agreement. Using various fine-tuned state-of-the-art language models, we predict the level of suicide risk, reaching .88 F1 score for classifying the risks.

The recent surge of text-based online counseling applications enables us to collect and analyze interactions between counselors and clients. A dataset of those interactions can be used to learn to automatically classify the client utterances into categories that help counselors in diagnosing client status and predicting counseling outcome. With proper anonymization, we collect counselor-client dialogues, define meaningful categories of client utterances with professional counselors, and develop a novel neural network model for classifying the client utterances. The central idea of our model, ConvMFiT, is a pre-trained conversation model which consists of a general language model built from an out-of-domain corpus and two role-specific language models built from unlabeled in-domain dialogues. The classification result shows that ConvMFiT outperforms state-of-the-art comparison models. Further, the attention weights in the learned model confirm that the model finds expected linguistic patterns for each category.

Research on distributed word representations is focused on widely-used languages such as English. Although the same methods can be used for other languages, language-specific knowledge can enhance the accuracy and richness of word vector representations. In this paper, we look at improving distributed word representations for Korean using knowledge about the unique linguistic structure of Korean. Specifically, we decompose Korean words into the jamo-level, beyond the character-level, allowing a systematic use of subword information. To evaluate the vectors, we develop Korean test sets for word similarity and analogy and make them publicly available. The results show that our simple method outperforms word2vec and character-level Skip-Grams on semantic and syntactic similarity and analogy tasks and contributes positively toward downstream NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis.

Vector representation of words improves performance in various NLP tasks, but the high dimensional word vectors are very difficult to interpret. We apply several rotation algorithms to the vector representation of words to improve the interpretability. Unlike previous approaches that induce sparsity, the rotated vectors are interpretable while preserving the expressive performance of the original vectors. Furthermore, any prebuilt word vector representation can be rotated for improved interpretability. We apply rotation to skipgrams and glove and compare the expressive power and interpretability with the original vectors and the sparse overcomplete vectors. The results show that the rotated vectors outperform the original and the sparse overcomplete vectors for interpretability and expressiveness tasks.