Ruihong Huang

Pei Chen, Soumajyoti Sarkar, Leonard Lausen et al.

Language models pretrained on large collections of tabular data have demonstrated their effectiveness in several downstream tasks. However, many of these models do not take into account the row/column permutation invariances, hierarchical structure, etc. that exist in tabular data. To alleviate these limitations, we propose HYTREL, a tabular language model, that captures the permutation invariances and three more structural properties of tabular data by using hypergraphs - where the table cells make up the nodes and the cells occurring jointly together in each row, column, and the entire table are used to form three different types of hyperedges. We show that HYTREL is maximally invariant under certain conditions for tabular data, i.e., two tables obtain the same representations via HYTREL iff the two tables are identical up to permutations. Our empirical results demonstrate that HYTREL consistently outperforms other competitive baselines on four downstream tasks with minimal pretraining, illustrating the advantages of incorporating the inductive biases associated with tabular data into the representations. Finally, our qualitative analyses showcase that HYTREL can assimilate the table structures to generate robust representations for the cells, rows, columns, and the entire table.

Yujian Liu, Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Kaijian Zou et al.

Public opinion is shaped by the information news media provide, and that information in turn may be shaped by the ideological preferences of media outlets. But while much attention has been devoted to media bias via overt ideological language or topic selection, a more unobtrusive way in which the media shape opinion is via the strategic inclusion or omission of partisan events that may support one side or the other. We develop a latent variable-based framework to predict the ideology of news articles by comparing multiple articles on the same story and identifying partisan events whose inclusion or omission reveals ideology. Our experiments first validate the existence of partisan event selection, and then show that article alignment and cross-document comparison detect partisan events and article ideology better than competitive baselines. Our results reveal the high-level form of media bias, which is present even among mainstream media with strong norms of objectivity and nonpartisanship. Our codebase and dataset are available at https://github.com/launchnlp/ATC.

Sachin J. Chanchani, Ruihong Huang

Vector representations of natural language are ubiquitous in search applications. Recently, various methods based on contrastive learning have been proposed to learn textual representations from unlabelled data; by maximizing alignment between minimally-perturbed embeddings of the same text, and encouraging a uniform distribution of embeddings across a broader corpus. Differently, we propose maximizing alignment between texts and a composition of their phrasal constituents. We consider several realizations of this objective and elaborate the impact on representations in each case. Experimental results on semantic textual similarity tasks show improvements over baselines that are comparable with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, this work is the first to do so without incurring costs in auxiliary training objectives or additional network parameters.

Kangda Wei, Aayush Gautam, Ruihong Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in a wide array of natural language processing tasks. However, its effectiveness over discourse-level event relation extraction (ERE) tasks remains unexplored. In this paper, we assess the effectiveness of LLMs in addressing discourse-level ERE tasks characterized by lengthy documents and intricate relations encompassing coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent types. Evaluation is conducted using an commercial model, GPT-3.5, and an open-source model, LLaMA-2. Our study reveals a notable underperformance of LLMs compared to the baseline established through supervised learning. Although Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) can improve LLMs performance, it does not scale well compared to the smaller supervised baseline model. Our quantitative and qualitative analysis shows that LLMs have several weaknesses when applied for extracting event relations, including a tendency to fabricate event mentions, and failures to capture transitivity rules among relations, detect long distance relations, or comprehend contexts with dense event mentions. Code available at: https://github.com/WeiKangda/LLM-ERE.git.

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang

We propose to leverage news discourse profiling to model document-level temporal structures for building temporal dependency graphs. Our key observation is that the functional roles of sentences used for profiling news discourse signify different time frames relevant to a news story and can, therefore, help to recover the global temporal structure of a document. Our analyses and experiments with the widely used knowledge distillation technique show that discourse profiling effectively identifies distant inter-sentence event and (or) time expression pairs that are temporally related and otherwise difficult to locate.

Ming Li, Ruihong Huang

News Discourse Profiling seeks to scrutinize the event-related role of each sentence in a news article and has been proven useful across various downstream applications. Specifically, within the context of a given news discourse, each sentence is assigned to a pre-defined category contingent upon its depiction of the news event structure. However, existing approaches suffer from an inadequacy of available human-annotated data, due to the laborious and time-intensive nature of generating discourse-level annotations. In this paper, we present a novel approach, denoted as Intra-document Contrastive Learning with Distillation (ICLD), for addressing the news discourse profiling task, capitalizing on its unique structural characteristics. Notably, we are the first to apply a semi-supervised methodology within this task paradigm, and evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the presented approach.

Ming Li, Ruihong Huang

Rhetorical Structure Theory based Discourse Parsing (RST-DP) explores how clauses, sentences, and large text spans compose a whole discourse and presents the rhetorical structure as a hierarchical tree. Existing RST parsing pipelines construct rhetorical structures without the knowledge of document-level content structures, which causes relatively low performance when predicting the discourse relations for large text spans. Recognizing the value of high-level content-related information in facilitating discourse relation recognition, we propose a novel pipeline for RST-DP that incorporates structure-aware news content sentence representations derived from the task of News Discourse Profiling. By incorporating only a few additional layers, this enhanced pipeline exhibits promising performance across various RST parsing metrics.

Ming Li, Ruihong Huang

Complex feature extractors are widely employed for text representation building. However, these complex feature extractors make the NLP systems prone to overfitting especially when the downstream training datasets are relatively small, which is the case for several discourse parsing tasks. Thus, we propose an alternative lightweight neural architecture that removes multiple complex feature extractors and only utilizes learnable self-attention modules to indirectly exploit pretrained neural language models, in order to maximally preserve the generalizability of pre-trained language models. Experiments on three common discourse parsing tasks show that powered by recent pretrained language models, the lightweight architecture consisting of only two self-attention layers obtains much better generalizability and robustness. Meanwhile, it achieves comparable or even better system performance with fewer learnable parameters and less processing time.

Yuanyuan Lei, Ruihong Huang

Conspiracy theories, as a type of misinformation, are narratives that explains an event or situation in an irrational or malicious manner. While most previous work examined conspiracy theory in social media short texts, limited attention was put on such misinformation in long news documents. In this paper, we aim to identify whether a news article contains conspiracy theories. We observe that a conspiracy story can be made up by mixing uncorrelated events together, or by presenting an unusual distribution of relations between events. Achieving a contextualized understanding of events in a story is essential for detecting conspiracy theories. Thus, we propose to incorporate an event relation graph for each article, in which events are nodes, and four common types of event relations, coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations, are considered as edges. Then, we integrate the event relation graph into conspiracy theory identification in two ways: an event-aware language model is developed to augment the basic language model with the knowledge of events and event relations via soft labels; further, a heterogeneous graph attention network is designed to derive a graph embedding based on hard labels. Experiments on a large benchmark dataset show that our approach based on event relation graph improves both precision and recall of conspiracy theory identification, and generalizes well for new unseen media sources.

Divij Bajaj, Yuanyuan Lei, Jonathan Tong et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in a multitude of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models are still not immune to limitations such as social biases, especially gender bias. This work investigates whether current closed and open-source LLMs possess gender bias, especially when asked to give moral opinions. To evaluate these models, we curate and introduce a new dataset GenMO (Gender-bias in Morality Opinions) comprising parallel short stories featuring male and female characters respectively. Specifically, we test models from the GPT family (GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct, GPT-4-turbo), Llama 3 and 3.1 families (8B/70B), Mistral-7B and Claude 3 families (Sonnet and Opus). Surprisingly, despite employing safety checks, all production-standard models we tested display significant gender bias with GPT-3.5-turbo giving biased opinions in 24% of the samples. Additionally, all models consistently favour female characters, with GPT showing bias in 68-85% of cases and Llama 3 in around 81-85% instances. Additionally, our study investigates the impact of model parameters on gender bias and explores real-world situations where LLMs reveal biases in moral decision-making.

Yuanyuan Lei, Ruihong Huang

Propaganda is a form of deceptive narratives that instigate or mislead the public, usually with a political purpose. In this paper, we aim to identify propaganda in political news at two fine-grained levels: sentence-level and token-level. We observe that propaganda content is more likely to be embedded in sentences that attribute causality or assert contrast to nearby sentences, as well as seen in opinionated evaluation, speculation and discussions of future expectation. Hence, we propose to incorporate both local and global discourse structures for propaganda discovery and construct two teacher models for identifying PDTB-style discourse relations between nearby sentences and common discourse roles of sentences in a news article respectively. We further devise two methods to incorporate the two types of discourse structures for propaganda identification by either using teacher predicted probabilities as additional features or soliciting guidance in a knowledge distillation framework. Experiments on the benchmark dataset demonstrate that leveraging guidance from discourse structures can significantly improve both precision and recall of propaganda content identification.

Md Messal Monem Miah, Adrita Anika, Xi Shi et al.

Detecting deception in an increasingly digital world is both a critical and challenging task. In this study, we present a comprehensive evaluation of the automated deception detection capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) across diverse domains. We assess the performance of both open-source and commercial LLMs on three distinct datasets: real life trial interviews (RLTD), instructed deception in interpersonal scenarios (MU3D), and deceptive reviews (OpSpam). We systematically analyze the effectiveness of different experimental setups for deception detection, including zero-shot and few-shot approaches with random or similarity-based in-context example selection. Our results show that fine-tuned LLMs achieve state-of-the-art performance on textual deception detection tasks, while LMMs struggle to fully leverage cross-modal cues. Additionally, we analyze the impact of auxiliary features, such as non-verbal gestures and video summaries, and examine the effectiveness of different prompting strategies, including direct label generation and chain-of-thought reasoning. Our findings provide key insights into how LLMs process and interpret deceptive cues across modalities, highlighting their potential and limitations in real-world deception detection applications.

Kangda Wei, Hasnat Md Abdullah, Ruihong Huang

Large Language Models (LLMs) often exhibit gender bias, resulting in unequal treatment of male and female subjects across different contexts. To address this issue, we propose a novel data generation framework that fosters exploratory thinking in LLMs. Our approach prompts models to generate story pairs featuring male and female protagonists in structurally identical, morally ambiguous scenarios, then elicits and compares their moral judgments. When inconsistencies arise, the model is guided to produce balanced, gender-neutral judgments. These story-judgment pairs are used to fine-tune or optimize the models via Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Experimental results show that our method significantly reduces gender bias while preserving or even enhancing general model capabilities. We will release the code and generated data. We release the code and generated data at: https://github.com/WeiKangda/LLMs-Exploratory-Bias-Mitigation/tree/main.

Kangda Wei, Xi Shi, Jonathan Tong et al.

Recognizing events and their coreferential mentions in a document is essential for understanding semantic meanings of text. The existing research on event coreference resolution is mostly limited to news articles. In this paper, we present the first dataset for the legal domain, LegalCore, which has been annotated with comprehensive event and event coreference information. The legal contract documents we annotated in this dataset are several times longer than news articles, with an average length of around 25k tokens per document. The annotations show that legal documents have dense event mentions and feature both short-distance and super long-distance coreference links between event mentions. We further benchmark mainstream Large Language Models (LLMs) on this dataset for both event detection and event coreference resolution tasks, and find that this dataset poses significant challenges for state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs, which perform significantly worse than a supervised baseline. We will publish the dataset as well as the code.

Kangda Wei, Ruihong Huang

Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard approach for training mathematical reasoning models; however, its reliance on multiple completions per prompt makes training computationally expensive. Although recent work has reduced the number of training steps required to reach peak performance, the overall wall-clock training time often remains unchanged or even increases due to higher per-step cost. We propose MMR-GRPO, which integrates Maximal Marginal Relevance to reweigh rewards based on completion diversity. Our key insight is that semantically redundant completions contribute limited marginal learning signal; prioritizing diverse solutions yields more informative updates and accelerates convergence. Extensive evaluations across three model sizes (1.5B, 7B, 8B), three GRPO variants, and five mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that MMR-GRPO achieves comparable peak performance while requiring on average 47.9% fewer training steps and 70.2% less wall-clock time. These gains are consistent across models, methods, and benchmarks. We will release our code, trained models, and experimental protocols.

Yuanyuan Lei, Md Messal Monem Miah, Ayesha Qamar et al.

Most previous research on moral frames has focused on social media short texts, little work has explored moral sentiment within news articles. In news articles, authors often express their opinions or political stance through moral judgment towards events, specifically whether the event is right or wrong according to social moral rules. This paper initiates a new task to understand moral opinions towards events in news articles. We have created a new dataset, EMONA, and annotated event-level moral opinions in news articles. This dataset consists of 400 news articles containing over 10k sentences and 45k events, among which 9,613 events received moral foundation labels. Extracting event morality is a challenging task, as moral judgment towards events can be very implicit. Baseline models were built for event moral identification and classification. In addition, we also conduct extrinsic evaluations to integrate event-level moral opinions into three downstream tasks. The statistical analysis and experiments show that moral opinions of events can serve as informative features for identifying ideological bias or subjective events.

Yuanyuan Lei, Ruihong Huang

Logical fallacy uses invalid or faulty reasoning in the construction of a statement. Despite the prevalence and harmfulness of logical fallacies, detecting and classifying logical fallacies still remains a challenging task. We observe that logical fallacies often use connective words to indicate an intended logical relation between two arguments, while the argument semantics does not actually support the logical relation. Inspired by this observation, we propose to build a logical structure tree to explicitly represent and track the hierarchical logic flow among relation connectives and their arguments in a statement. Specifically, this logical structure tree is constructed in an unsupervised manner guided by the constituency tree and a taxonomy of connectives for ten common logical relations, with relation connectives as non-terminal nodes and textual arguments as terminal nodes, and the latter are mostly elementary discourse units. We further develop two strategies to incorporate the logical structure tree into LLMs for fallacy reasoning. Firstly, we transform the tree into natural language descriptions and feed the textualized tree into LLMs as a part of the hard text prompt. Secondly, we derive a relation-aware tree embedding and insert the tree embedding into LLMs as a soft prompt. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach based on logical structure tree significantly improves precision and recall for both fallacy detection and fallacy classification.

Yuanyuan Lei, Ruihong Huang

Media outlets are becoming more partisan and polarized nowadays. In this paper, we identify media bias at the sentence level, and pinpoint bias sentences that intend to sway readers' opinions. As bias sentences are often expressed in a neutral and factual way, considering broader context outside a sentence can help reveal the bias. In particular, we observe that events in a bias sentence need to be understood in associations with other events in the document. Therefore, we propose to construct an event relation graph to explicitly reason about event-event relations for sentence-level bias identification. The designed event relation graph consists of events as nodes and four common types of event relations: coreference, temporal, causal, and subevent relations. Then, we incorporate event relation graph for bias sentences identification in two steps: an event-aware language model is built to inject the events and event relations knowledge into the basic language model via soft labels; further, a relation-aware graph attention network is designed to update sentence embedding with events and event relations information based on hard labels. Experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach with the aid of event relation graph improves both precision and recall of bias sentence identification.

Kangda Wei, Zhengyu Zhou, Bingqing Wang et al.

In recent years, online lecture videos have become an increasingly popular resource for acquiring new knowledge. Systems capable of effectively understanding/indexing lecture videos are thus highly desirable, enabling downstream tasks like question answering to help users efficiently locate specific information within videos. This work proposes PreMind, a novel multi-agent multimodal framework that leverages various large models for advanced understanding/indexing of presentation-style videos. PreMind first segments videos into slide-presentation segments using a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to enhance modern shot-detection techniques. Each segment is then analyzed to generate multimodal indexes through three key steps: (1) extracting slide visual content, (2) transcribing speech narratives, and (3) consolidating these visual and speech contents into an integrated understanding. Three innovative mechanisms are also proposed to improve performance: leveraging prior lecture knowledge to refine visual understanding, detecting/correcting speech transcription errors using a VLM, and utilizing a critic agent for dynamic iterative self-reflection in vision analysis. Compared to traditional video indexing methods, PreMind captures rich, reliable multimodal information, allowing users to search for details like abbreviations shown only on slides. Systematic evaluations on the public LPM dataset and an internal enterprise dataset are conducted to validate PreMind's effectiveness, supported by detailed analyses.

Ajit Jain, Andruid Kerne, Nic Lupfer et al.

We investigate how to use AI-based analytics to support design education. The analytics at hand measure multiscale design, that is, students' use of space and scale to visually and conceptually organize their design work. With the goal of making the analytics intelligible to instructors, we developed a research artifact integrating a design analytics dashboard with design instances, and the design environment that students use to create them. We theorize about how Suchman's notion of mutual intelligibility requires contextualized investigation of AI in order to develop findings about how analytics work for people. We studied the research artifact in 5 situated course contexts, in 3 departments. A total of 236 students used the multiscale design environment. The 9 instructors who taught those students experienced the analytics via the new research artifact. We derive findings from a qualitative analysis of interviews with instructors regarding their experiences. Instructors reflected on how the analytics and their presentation in the dashboard have the potential to affect design education. We develop research implications addressing: (1) how indexing design analytics in the dashboard to actual design work instances helps design instructors reflect on what they mean and, more broadly, is a technique for how AI-based design analytics can support instructors' assessment and feedback experiences in situated course contexts; and (2) how multiscale design analytics, in particular, have the potential to support design education. By indexing, we mean linking which provides context, here connecting the numbers of the analytics with visually annotated design work instances.

Yuanyuan Lei, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho et al. · tencent-ai

Opinion summarization is automatically generating summaries from a variety of subjective information, such as product reviews or political opinions. The challenge of opinions summarization lies in presenting divergent or even conflicting opinions. We conduct an analysis of previous summarization models, which reveals their inclination to amplify the polarity bias, emphasizing the majority opinions while ignoring the minority opinions. To address this issue and make the summarizer express both sides of opinions, we introduce the concept of polarity calibration, which aims to align the polarity of output summary with that of input text. Specifically, we develop a reinforcement training approach for polarity calibration. This approach feeds the polarity distance between output summary and input text as reward into the summarizer, and also balance polarity calibration with content preservation and language naturality. We evaluate our Polarity Calibration model (PoCa) on two types of opinions summarization tasks: summarizing product reviews and political opinions articles. Automatic and human evaluation demonstrate that our approach can mitigate the polarity mismatch between output summary and input text, as well as maintain the content semantic and language quality.

Yuanyuan Lei, Ruihong Huang

Media outlets are becoming more partisan and polarized nowadays. Most previous work focused on detecting media bias. In this paper, we aim to mitigate media bias by generating a neutralized summary given multiple articles presenting different ideological views. Motivated by the critical role of events and event relations in media bias detection, we propose to increase awareness of bias in LLMs via multi-document events reasoning and use a multi-document event relation graph to guide the summarization process. This graph contains rich event information useful to reveal bias: four common types of in-doc event relations to reflect content framing bias, cross-doc event coreference relation to reveal content selection bias, and event-level moral opinions to highlight opinionated framing bias. We further develop two strategies to incorporate the multi-document event relation graph for neutralized summarization. Firstly, we convert a graph into natural language descriptions and feed the textualized graph into LLMs as a part of a hard text prompt. Secondly, we encode the graph with graph attention network and insert the graph embedding into LLMs as a soft prompt. Both automatic evaluation and human evaluation confirm that our approach effectively mitigates both lexical and informational media bias, and meanwhile improves content preservation.

Abhilekh Borah, Hasnat Md Abdullah, Kangda Wei et al.

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has raised questions about their ability to understand climate-related contexts. Though climate change dominates social media, analyzing its multimodal expressions is understudied, and current tools have failed to determine whether LLMs amplify credible solutions or spread unsubstantiated claims. To address this, we introduce CliME (Climate Change Multimodal Evaluation), a first-of-its-kind multimodal dataset, comprising 2579 Twitter and Reddit posts. The benchmark features a diverse collection of humorous memes and skeptical posts, capturing how these formats distill complex issues into viral narratives that shape public opinion and policy discussions. To systematically evaluate LLM performance, we present the Climate Alignment Quotient (CAQ), a novel metric comprising five distinct dimensions: Articulation, Evidence, Resonance, Transition, and Specificity. Additionally, we propose three analytical lenses: Actionability, Criticality, and Justice, to guide the assessment of LLM-generated climate discourse using CAQ. Our findings, based on the CAQ metric, indicate that while most evaluated LLMs perform relatively well in Criticality and Justice, they consistently underperform on the Actionability axis. Among the models evaluated, Claude 3.7 Sonnet achieves the highest overall performance. We publicly release our CliME dataset and code to foster further research in this domain.

Jiangshu Du, Yibo Wang, Wenting Zhao et al.

This work is motivated by two key trends. On one hand, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable versatility in various generative tasks such as writing, drawing, and question answering, significantly reducing the time required for many routine tasks. On the other hand, researchers, whose work is not only time-consuming but also highly expertise-demanding, face increasing challenges as they have to spend more time reading, writing, and reviewing papers. This raises the question: how can LLMs potentially assist researchers in alleviating their heavy workload? This study focuses on the topic of LLMs assist NLP Researchers, particularly examining the effectiveness of LLM in assisting paper (meta-)reviewing and its recognizability. To address this, we constructed the ReviewCritique dataset, which includes two types of information: (i) NLP papers (initial submissions rather than camera-ready) with both human-written and LLM-generated reviews, and (ii) each review comes with "deficiency" labels and corresponding explanations for individual segments, annotated by experts. Using ReviewCritique, this study explores two threads of research questions: (i) "LLMs as Reviewers", how do reviews generated by LLMs compare with those written by humans in terms of quality and distinguishability? (ii) "LLMs as Metareviewers", how effectively can LLMs identify potential issues, such as Deficient or unprofessional review segments, within individual paper reviews? To our knowledge, this is the first work to provide such a comprehensive analysis.

Siwei Cui, Gang Zhao, Zeyu Dai et al.

Python type inference is challenging in practice. Due to its dynamic properties and extensive dependencies on third-party libraries without type annotations, the performance of traditional static analysis techniques is limited. Although semantics in source code can help manifest intended usage for variables (thus help infer types), they are usually ignored by existing tools. In this paper, we propose PYInfer, an end-to-end learning-based type inference tool that automatically generates type annotations for Python variables. The key insight is that contextual code semantics is critical in inferring the type for a variable. For each use of a variable, we collect a few tokens within its contextual scope, and design a neural network to predict its type. One challenge is that it is difficult to collect a high-quality human-labeled training dataset for this purpose. To address this issue, we apply an existing static analyzer to generate the ground truth for variables in source code. Our main contribution is a novel approach to statically infer variable types effectively and efficiently. Formulating the type inference as a classification problem, we can handle user-defined types and predict type probabilities for each variable. Our model achieves 91.2% accuracy on classifying 11 basic types in Python and 81.2% accuracy on classifying 500 most common types. Our results substantially outperform the state-of-the-art type annotators. Moreover, PYInfer achieves 5.2X more code coverage and is 187X faster than a state-of-the-art learning-based tool. With similar time consumption, our model annotates 5X more variables than a state-of-the-art static analysis tool. Our model also outperforms a learning-based function-level annotator on annotating types for variables and function arguments. All our tools and datasets are publicly available to facilitate future research in this direction.

Yun He, Zhuoer Wang, Yin Zhang et al.

We present a new benchmark dataset called PARADE for paraphrase identification that requires specialized domain knowledge. PARADE contains paraphrases that overlap very little at the lexical and syntactic level but are semantically equivalent based on computer science domain knowledge, as well as non-paraphrases that overlap greatly at the lexical and syntactic level but are not semantically equivalent based on this domain knowledge. Experiments show that both state-of-the-art neural models and non-expert human annotators have poor performance on PARADE. For example, BERT after fine-tuning achieves an F1 score of 0.709, which is much lower than its performance on other paraphrase identification datasets. PARADE can serve as a resource for researchers interested in testing models that incorporate domain knowledge. We make our data and code freely available.

Wenlin Yao, Cheng Zhang, Shiva Saravanan et al.

People increasingly use social media to report emergencies, seek help or share information during disasters, which makes social networks an important tool for disaster management. To meet these time-critical needs, we present a weakly supervised approach for rapidly building high-quality classifiers that label each individual Twitter message with fine-grained event categories. Most importantly, we propose a novel method to create high-quality labeled data in a timely manner that automatically clusters tweets containing an event keyword and asks a domain expert to disambiguate event word senses and label clusters quickly. In addition, to process extremely noisy and often rather short user-generated messages, we enrich tweet representations using preceding context tweets and reply tweets in building event recognition classifiers. The evaluation on two hurricanes, Harvey and Florence, shows that using only 1-2 person-hours of human supervision, the rapidly trained weakly supervised classifiers outperform supervised classifiers trained using more than ten thousand annotated tweets created in over 50 person-hours.

Lisa Fan, Marshall White, Eva Sharma et al.

The increasing prevalence of political bias in news media calls for greater public awareness of it, as well as robust methods for its detection. While prior work in NLP has primarily focused on the lexical bias captured by linguistic attributes such as word choice and syntax, other types of bias stem from the actual content selected for inclusion in the text. In this work, we investigate the effects of informational bias: factual content that can nevertheless be deployed to sway reader opinion. We first produce a new dataset, BASIL, of 300 news articles annotated with 1,727 bias spans and find evidence that informational bias appears in news articles more frequently than lexical bias. We further study our annotations to observe how informational bias surfaces in news articles by different media outlets. Lastly, a baseline model for informational bias prediction is presented by fine-tuning BERT on our labeled data, indicating the challenges of the task and future directions.

Sanuj Sharma, Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang

A typical conversation comprises of multiple turns between participants where they go back-and-forth between different topics. At each user turn, dialogue state tracking (DST) aims to estimate user's goal by processing the current utterance. However, in many turns, users implicitly refer to the previous goal, necessitating the use of relevant dialogue history. Nonetheless, distinguishing relevant history is challenging and a popular method of using dialogue recency for that is inefficient. We, therefore, propose a novel framework for DST that identifies relevant historical context by referring to the past utterances where a particular slot-value changes and uses that together with weighted system utterance to identify the relevant context. Specifically, we use the current user utterance and the most recent system utterance to determine the relevance of a system utterance. Empirical analyses show that our method improves joint goal accuracy by 2.75% and 2.36% on WoZ 2.0 and MultiWoZ 2.0 restaurant domain datasets respectively over the previous state-of-the-art GLAD model.

Zeyu Dai, Ruihong Huang

Capabilities to categorize a clause based on the type of situation entity (e.g., events, states and generic statements) the clause introduces to the discourse can benefit many NLP applications. Observing that the situation entity type of a clause depends on discourse functions the clause plays in a paragraph and the interpretation of discourse functions depends heavily on paragraph-wide contexts, we propose to build context-aware clause representations for predicting situation entity types of clauses. Specifically, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network model to read a whole paragraph at a time and jointly learn representations for all the clauses in the paragraph by extensively modeling context influences and inter-dependencies of clauses. Experimental results show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for clause-level situation entity classification on the genre-rich MASC+Wiki corpus, which approaches human-level performance.

Wenlin Yao, Ruihong Huang

Inspired by the double temporality characteristic of narrative texts, we propose a novel approach for acquiring rich temporal "before/after" event knowledge across sentences in narrative stories. The double temporality states that a narrative story often describes a sequence of events following the chronological order and therefore, the temporal order of events matches with their textual order. We explored narratology principles and built a weakly supervised approach that identifies 287k narrative paragraphs from three large text corpora. We then extracted rich temporal event knowledge from these narrative paragraphs. Such event knowledge is shown useful to improve temporal relation classification and outperform several recent neural network models on the narrative cloze task.

Zeyu Dai, Ruihong Huang

We argue that semantic meanings of a sentence or clause can not be interpreted independently from the rest of a paragraph, or independently from all discourse relations and the overall paragraph-level discourse structure. With the goal of improving implicit discourse relation classification, we introduce a paragraph-level neural networks that model inter-dependencies between discourse units as well as discourse relation continuity and patterns, and predict a sequence of discourse relations in a paragraph. Experimental results show that our model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art systems on the benchmark corpus of PDTB.

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang

In this paper, we describe TAMU's system submitted to the TAC KBP 2017 event nugget detection and coreference resolution task. Our system builds on the statistical and empirical observations made on training and development data. We found that modifiers of event nuggets tend to have unique syntactic distribution. Their parts-of-speech tags and dependency relations provides them essential characteristics that are useful in identifying their span and also defining their types and realis status. We further found that the joint modeling of event span detection and realis status identification performs better than the individual models for both tasks. Our simple system designed using minimal features achieved the micro-average F1 scores of 57.72, 44.27 and 42.47 for event span detection, type identification and realis status classification tasks respectively. Also, our system achieved the CoNLL F1 score of 27.20 in event coreference resolution task.

Lei Gao, Ruihong Huang

In the wake of a polarizing election, the cyber world is laden with hate speech. Context accompanying a hate speech text is useful for identifying hate speech, which however has been largely overlooked in existing datasets and hate speech detection models. In this paper, we provide an annotated corpus of hate speech with context information well kept. Then we propose two types of hate speech detection models that incorporate context information, a logistic regression model with context features and a neural network model with learning components for context. Our evaluation shows that both models outperform a strong baseline by around 3% to 4% in F1 score and combining these two models further improve the performance by another 7% in F1 score.

Lei Gao, Alexis Kuppersmith, Ruihong Huang

In the wake of a polarizing election, social media is laden with hateful content. To address various limitations of supervised hate speech classification methods including corpus bias and huge cost of annotation, we propose a weakly supervised two-path bootstrapping approach for an online hate speech detection model leveraging large-scale unlabeled data. This system significantly outperforms hate speech detection systems that are trained in a supervised manner using manually annotated data. Applying this model on a large quantity of tweets collected before, after, and on election day reveals motivations and patterns of inflammatory language.

Zeyu Dai, Wenlin Yao, Ruihong Huang

Focusing on the task of identifying event temporal status, we find that events directly or indirectly governing the target event in a dependency tree are most important contexts. Therefore, we extract dependency chains containing context events and use them as input in neural network models, which consistently outperform previous models using local context words as input. Visualization verifies that the dependency chain representation can effectively capture the context events which are closely related to the target event and play key roles in predicting event temporal status.

Wenlin Yao, Saipravallika Nettyam, Ruihong Huang

Capabilities of detecting temporal relations between two events can benefit many applications. Most of existing temporal relation classifiers were trained in a supervised manner. Instead, we explore the observation that regular event pairs show a consistent temporal relation despite of their various contexts, and these rich contexts can be used to train a contextual temporal relation classifier, which can further recognize new temporal relation contexts and identify new regular event pairs. We focus on detecting after and before temporal relations and design a weakly supervised learning approach that extracts thousands of regular event pairs and learns a contextual temporal relation classifier simultaneously. Evaluation shows that the acquired regular event pairs are of high quality and contain rich commonsense knowledge and domain specific knowledge. In addition, the weakly supervised trained temporal relation classifier achieves comparable performance with the state-of-the-art supervised systems.

Wenlin Yao, Zeyu Dai, Ruihong Huang et al.

The lack of large realistic datasets presents a bottleneck in online deception detection studies. In this paper, we apply a data collection method based on social network analysis to quickly identify high-quality deceptive and truthful online reviews from Amazon. The dataset contains more than 10,000 deceptive reviews and is diverse in product domains and reviewers. Using this dataset, we explore effective general features for online deception detection that perform well across domains. We demonstrate that with generalized features - advertising speak and writing complexity scores - deception detection performance can be further improved by adding additional deceptive reviews from assorted domains in training. Finally, reviewer level evaluation gives an interesting insight into different deceptive reviewers' writing styles.

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang

We introduce a novel iterative approach for event coreference resolution that gradually builds event clusters by exploiting inter-dependencies among event mentions within the same chain as well as across event chains. Among event mentions in the same chain, we distinguish within- and cross-document event coreference links by using two distinct pairwise classifiers, trained separately to capture differences in feature distributions of within- and cross-document event clusters. Our event coreference approach alternates between WD and CD clustering and combines arguments from both event clusters after every merge, continuing till no more merge can be made. And then it performs further merging between event chains that are both closely related to a set of other chains of events. Experiments on the ECB+ corpus show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in joint task of WD and CD event coreference resolution.

Prafulla Kumar Choubey, Ruihong Huang

We present a sequential model for temporal relation classification between intra-sentence events. The key observation is that the overall syntactic structure and compositional meanings of the multi-word context between events are important for distinguishing among fine-grained temporal relations. Specifically, our approach first extracts a sequence of context words that indicates the temporal relation between two events, which well align with the dependency path between two event mentions. The context word sequence, together with a parts-of-speech tag sequence and a dependency relation sequence that are generated corresponding to the word sequence, are then provided as input to bidirectional recurrent neural network (LSTM) models. The neural nets learn compositional syntactic and semantic representations of contexts surrounding the two events and predict the temporal relation between them. Evaluation of the proposed approach on TimeBank corpus shows that sequential modeling is capable of accurately recognizing temporal relations between events, which outperforms a neural net model using various discrete features as input that imitates previous feature based models.