Erfan Sadeqi Azer

Daniel Khashabi, Arman Cohan, Siamak Shakeri et al.

Despite the progress made in recent years in addressing natural language understanding (NLU) challenges, the majority of this progress remains to be concentrated on resource-rich languages like English. This work focuses on Persian language, one of the widely spoken languages in the world, and yet there are few NLU datasets available for this rich language. The availability of high-quality evaluation datasets is a necessity for reliable assessment of the progress on different NLU tasks and domains. We introduce ParsiNLU, the first benchmark in Persian language that includes a range of high-level tasks -- Reading Comprehension, Textual Entailment, etc. These datasets are collected in a multitude of ways, often involving manual annotations by native speakers. This results in over 14.5$k$ new instances across 6 distinct NLU tasks. Besides, we present the first results on state-of-the-art monolingual and multi-lingual pre-trained language-models on this benchmark and compare them with human performance, which provides valuable insights into our ability to tackle natural language understanding challenges in Persian. We hope ParsiNLU fosters further research and advances in Persian language understanding.

Erfan Sadeqi Azer, Daniel Khashabi, Ashish Sabharwal et al.

Empirical research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has adopted a narrow set of principles for assessing hypotheses, relying mainly on p-value computation, which suffers from several known issues. While alternative proposals have been well-debated and adopted in other fields, they remain rarely discussed or used within the NLP community. We address this gap by contrasting various hypothesis assessment techniques, especially those not commonly used in the field (such as evaluations based on Bayesian inference). Since these statistical techniques differ in the hypotheses they can support, we argue that practitioners should first decide their target hypothesis before choosing an assessment method. This is crucial because common fallacies, misconceptions, and misinterpretation surrounding hypothesis assessment methods often stem from a discrepancy between what one would like to claim versus what the method used actually assesses. Our survey reveals that these issues are omnipresent in the NLP research community. As a step forward, we provide best practices and guidelines tailored to NLP research, as well as an easy-to-use package called 'HyBayes' for Bayesian assessment of hypotheses, complementing existing tools.

Daniel Khashabi, Erfan Sadeqi Azer, Tushar Khot et al.

Systems for language understanding have become remarkably strong at overcoming linguistic imperfections in tasks involving phrase matching or simple reasoning. Yet, their accuracy drops dramatically as the number of reasoning steps increases. We present the first formal framework to study such empirical observations. It allows one to quantify the amount and effect of ambiguity, redundancy, incompleteness, and inaccuracy that the use of language introduces when representing a hidden conceptual space. The idea is to consider two interrelated spaces: a conceptual meaning space that is unambiguous and complete but hidden, and a linguistic space that captures a noisy grounding of the meaning space in the words of a language---the level at which all systems, whether neural or symbolic, operate. Applying this framework to a special class of multi-hop reasoning, namely the connectivity problem in graphs of relationships between concepts, we derive rigorous intuitions and impossibility results even under this simplified setting. For instance, if a query requires a moderately large (logarithmic) number of hops in the meaning graph, no reasoning system operating over a noisy graph grounded in language is likely to correctly answer it. This highlights a fundamental barrier that extends to a broader class of reasoning problems and systems, and suggests an alternative path forward: focusing on aligning the two spaces via richer representations, before investing in reasoning with many hops.

Jiecao Chen, Erfan Sadeqi Azer, Qin Zhang

We study the classic $k$-means/median clustering, which are fundamental problems in unsupervised learning, in the setting where data are partitioned across multiple sites, and where we are allowed to discard a small portion of the data by labeling them as outliers. We propose a simple approach based on constructing small summary for the original dataset. The proposed method is time and communication efficient, has good approximation guarantees, and can identify the global outliers effectively. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first practical algorithm with theoretical guarantees for distributed clustering with outliers. Our experiments on both real and synthetic data have demonstrated the clear superiority of our algorithm against all the baseline algorithms in almost all metrics.

Yangchen Pan, Erfan Sadeqi Azer, Martha White

High-dimensional representations, such as radial basis function networks or tile coding, are common choices for policy evaluation in reinforcement learning. Learning with such high-dimensional representations, however, can be expensive, particularly for matrix methods, such as least-squares temporal difference learning or quasi-Newton methods that approximate matrix step-sizes. In this work, we explore the utility of sketching for these two classes of algorithms. We highlight issues with sketching the high-dimensional features directly, which can incur significant bias. As a remedy, we demonstrate how to use sketching more sparingly, with only a left-sided sketch, that can still enable significant computational gains and the use of these matrix-based learning algorithms that are less sensitive to parameters. We empirically investigate these algorithms, in four domains with a variety of representations. Our aim is to provide insights into effective use of sketching in practice.