Tanay Komarlu

Priyanka Kargupta, Tanay Komarlu, Susik Yoon et al.

Text classification is essential for organizing unstructured text. Traditional methods rely on human annotations or, more recently, a set of class seed words for supervision, which can be costly, particularly for specialized or emerging domains. To address this, using class surface names alone as extremely weak supervision has been proposed. However, existing approaches treat different levels of text granularity (documents, sentences, or words) independently, disregarding inter-granularity class disagreements and the context identifiable exclusively through joint extraction. In order to tackle these issues, we introduce MEGClass, an extremely weakly-supervised text classification method that leverages Mutually-Enhancing Text Granularities. MEGClass utilizes coarse- and fine-grained context signals obtained by jointly considering a document's most class-indicative words and sentences. This approach enables the learning of a contextualized document representation that captures the most discriminative class indicators. By preserving the heterogeneity of potential classes, MEGClass can select the most informative class-indicative documents as iterative feedback to enhance the initial word-based class representations and ultimately fine-tune a pre-trained text classifier. Extensive experiments on seven benchmark datasets demonstrate that MEGClass outperforms other weakly and extremely weakly supervised methods.

Carlos Alves Pereira, Tanay Komarlu, Wael Mobeirek

The development of Natural Language Generation models has led to the creation of powerful Artificial Intelligence-assisted writing tools. These tools are capable of predicting users' needs and actively providing suggestions as they write. In this work, we conduct a comparative user-study between such tools from an information retrieval lens: pull and push. Specifically, we investigate the user demand of AI-assisted writing, the impact of the two paradigms on quality, ownership of the writing product, and efficiency and enjoyment of the writing process. We also seek to understand the impact of bias of AI-assisted writing. Our findings show that users welcome seamless assistance of AI in their writing. Furthermore, AI helped users to diversify the ideas in their writing while keeping it clear and concise more quickly. Users also enjoyed the collaboration with AI-assisted writing tools and did not feel a lack of ownership. Finally, although participants did not experience bias in our experiments, they still expressed explicit and clear concerns that should be addressed in future AI-assisted writing tools.

Tanay Komarlu, Minhao Jiang, Xuan Wang et al.

Fine-grained entity typing (FET), which assigns entities in text with context-sensitive, fine-grained semantic types, is a basic but important task for knowledge extraction from unstructured text. FET has been studied extensively in natural language processing and typically relies on human-annotated corpora for training, which is costly and difficult to scale. Recent studies explore the utilization of pre-trained language models (PLMs) as a knowledge base to generate rich and context-aware weak supervision for FET. However, a PLM still requires direction and guidance to serve as a knowledge base as they often generate a mixture of rough and fine-grained types, or tokens unsuitable for typing. In this study, we vision that an ontology provides a semantics-rich, hierarchical structure, which will help select the best results generated by multiple PLM models and head words. Specifically, we propose a novel annotation-free, ontology-guided FET method, OntoType, which follows a type ontological structure, from coarse to fine, ensembles multiple PLM prompting results to generate a set of type candidates, and refines its type resolution, under the local context with a natural language inference model. Our experiments on the Ontonotes, FIGER, and NYT datasets using their associated ontological structures demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art zero-shot fine-grained entity typing methods as well as a typical LLM method, ChatGPT. Our error analysis shows that refinement of the existing ontology structures will further improve fine-grained entity typing.