31.8CLApr 24, 2022
An Item Response Theory Framework for PersuasionAnastassia Kornilova, Daniel Argyle, Vladimir Eidelman
In this paper, we apply Item Response Theory, popular in education and political science research, to the analysis of argument persuasiveness in language. We empirically evaluate the model's performance on three datasets, including a novel dataset in the area of political advocacy. We show the advantages of separating these components under several style and content representations, including evaluating the ability of the speaker embeddings generated by the model to parallel real-world observations about persuadability.
20.3AIJun 12
Every Eval Ever: A Unifying Schema and Community Repository for AI Evaluation ResultsJan Batzner, Sree Harsha Nelaturu, Anastassia Kornilova et al.
AI evaluations are widely used for testing and understanding progress. However, the diverse evaluators bring with them inconsistencies that challenge analysis and comparison. First, results are saved in incompatible formats, scattered across leaderboards, papers, blog posts, evaluation harness logs, and custom repositories. Second, results are created by different evaluation frameworks, which produce divergent scores for nominally identical evaluations and record metadata inconsistently, hindering comparison, cross-community evaluation science, cost reduction, and reuse. We introduce Every Eval Ever, the first shared schema and community-crowdsourced repository for AI evaluation results. The schema standardizes how evaluations are represented in a unified, single JSON document. It is source-agnostic by design, ingesting results from evaluation harnesses and papers alike, and optionally stores per-instance outputs for fine-grained analysis. We contribute: (i) a community-governed metadata schema with a companion instance-level schema, the first standardization effort of its kind; (ii) automatic converters from popular formats, evaluation harnesses, and leaderboards to the unified schema; and (iii) a crowdsourced community database hosted on Hugging Face, currently spanning to date 22,235 models, 2,273 unique benchmarks, and 31 evaluation formats.
32.0CLJun 13, 2018
How Predictable is Your State? Leveraging Lexical and Contextual Information for Predicting Legislative Floor Action at the State LevelVlad Eidelman, Anastassia Kornilova, Daniel Argyle
Modeling U.S. Congressional legislation and roll-call votes has received significant attention in previous literature. However, while legislators across 50 state governments and D.C. propose over 100,000 bills each year, and on average enact over 30% of them, state level analysis has received relatively less attention due in part to the difficulty in obtaining the necessary data. Since each state legislature is guided by their own procedures, politics and issues, however, it is difficult to qualitatively asses the factors that affect the likelihood of a legislative initiative succeeding. Herein, we present several methods for modeling the likelihood of a bill receiving floor action across all 50 states and D.C. We utilize the lexical content of over 1 million bills, along with contextual legislature and legislator derived features to build our predictive models, allowing a comparison of the factors that are important to the lawmaking process. Furthermore, we show that these signals hold complementary predictive power, together achieving an average improvement in accuracy of 18% over state specific baselines.
32.0CLMay 21, 2018
Party Matters: Enhancing Legislative Embeddings with Author Attributes for Vote PredictionAnastassia Kornilova, Daniel Argyle, Vlad Eidelman
Predicting how Congressional legislators will vote is important for understanding their past and future behavior. However, previous work on roll-call prediction has been limited to single session settings, thus did not consider generalization across sessions. In this paper, we show that metadata is crucial for modeling voting outcomes in new contexts, as changes between sessions lead to changes in the underlying data generation process. We show how augmenting bill text with the sponsors' ideologies in a neural network model can achieve an average of a 4% boost in accuracy over the previous state-of-the-art.