María Leonor Pacheco

Organizers Of QueerInAI, Anaelia Ovalle, Arjun Subramonian et al. · allen-ai, cmu

We present Queer in AI as a case study for community-led participatory design in AI. We examine how participatory design and intersectional tenets started and shaped this community's programs over the years. We discuss different challenges that emerged in the process, look at ways this organization has fallen short of operationalizing participatory and intersectional principles, and then assess the organization's impact. Queer in AI provides important lessons and insights for practitioners and theorists of participatory methods broadly through its rejection of hierarchy in favor of decentralization, success at building aid and programs by and for the queer community, and effort to change actors and institutions outside of the queer community. Finally, we theorize how communities like Queer in AI contribute to the participatory design in AI more broadly by fostering cultures of participation in AI, welcoming and empowering marginalized participants, critiquing poor or exploitative participatory practices, and bringing participation to institutions outside of individual research projects. Queer in AI's work serves as a case study of grassroots activism and participatory methods within AI, demonstrating the potential of community-led participatory methods and intersectional praxis, while also providing challenges, case studies, and nuanced insights to researchers developing and using participatory methods.

Maria Leonor Pacheco, Tunazzina Islam, Monal Mahajan et al.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to infodemic of low quality information leading to poor health decisions. Combating the outcomes of this infodemic is not only a question of identifying false claims, but also reasoning about the decisions individuals make. In this work we propose a holistic analysis framework connecting stance and reason analysis, and fine-grained entity level moral sentiment analysis. We study how to model the dependencies between the different level of analysis and incorporate human insights into the learning process. Experiments show that our framework provides reliable predictions even in the low-supervision settings.

Chloe Eggleston, Abram Handler, Maria Leonor Pacheco

YouTube is central to contemporary mass media. However, the official YouTube API does not provide access to the full set of creators or creator metadata on the platform. This lack of basic visibility into the YouTube ecosystem hinders understanding of the platform's creator economy. Researchers currently have no easy, transparent, or replicable way to construct large-scale datasets of YouTube creators and their audiences over time. This makes it challenging to study vital social questions, such as how changes to the YouTube recommendation algorithm shape creator incentives and by extension the mass media on the platform. We address this gap with TubeCensus, a large-scale longitudinal dataset of YouTube creators and subscriber counts, constructed by collecting, linking, and organizing nearly two decades of YouTube page captures from the Internet Archive. This approach is transparent and replicable and does not require interaction with the YouTube API, whose output can change over time. We validate the coverage of TubeCensus against prior estimates of YouTube's size and find that our resource includes creators responsible for at least 30-36% of all YouTube content. We also find that TubeCensus provides good coverage of prominent creators. To support future research, we hide the substantial complexities of the YouTube identifier system and Internet Archive capture system by distributing our dataset via an easy-to-use pip package. Finally, we use our resource to complete basic exploratory analysis of YouTube channel content and the mechanisms associated with YouTube channel growth.

Rohan Das, Advait Deshmukh, Alexandria Leto et al.

Media narratives wield tremendous power in shaping public opinion, yet computational approaches struggle to capture the nuanced storytelling structures that communication theory emphasizes as central to how meaning is constructed. Existing approaches either miss subtle narrative patterns through coarse-grained analysis or require domain-specific taxonomies that limit scalability. To bridge this gap, we present a framework for inducing rich narrative schemas by jointly modeling events and characters via structured clustering. Our approach produces explainable narrative schemas that align with established framing theory while scaling to large corpora without exhaustive manual annotation.

Dananjay Srinivas, Rohan Das, Saeid Tizpaz-Niari et al.

Due to the ever-increasing complexity of income tax laws in the United States, the number of US taxpayers filing their taxes using tax preparation software (henceforth, tax software) continues to increase. According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), in FY22, nearly 50% of taxpayers filed their individual income taxes using tax software. Given the legal consequences of incorrectly filing taxes for the taxpayer, ensuring the correctness of tax software is of paramount importance. Metamorphic testing has emerged as a leading solution to test and debug legal-critical tax software due to the absence of correctness requirements and trustworthy datasets. The key idea behind metamorphic testing is to express the properties of a system in terms of the relationship between one input and its slightly metamorphosed twinned input. Extracting metamorphic properties from IRS tax publications is a tedious and time-consuming process. As a response, this paper formulates the task of generating metamorphic specifications as a translation task between properties extracted from tax documents - expressed in natural language - to a contrastive first-order logic form. We perform a systematic analysis on the potential and limitations of in-context learning with Large Language Models(LLMs) for this task, and outline a research agenda towards automating the generation of metamorphic specifications for tax preparation software.

Bagyasree Sudharsan, Alexandria Leto, Maria Leonor Pacheco

With the rising popularity of interdisciplinary work and increasing institutional incentives in this direction, there is a growing need to understand how resulting publications incorporate ideas from multiple disciplines. Existing computational approaches, such as affiliation diversity, keywords, and citation patterns, do not account for how individual citations are used to advance the citing work. Although, in line with addressing this gap, prior studies have proposed taxonomies to classify citation purpose, these frameworks are not well-suited to interdisciplinary research and do not provide quantitative measures of citation engagement quality. To address these limitations, we propose a framework for the evaluation of citation engagement in interdisciplinary Natural Language Processing (NLP) publications. Our approach introduces a citation purpose taxonomy tailored to interdisciplinary work, supported by an annotation study. We demonstrate the utility of this framework through a thorough analysis of publications at the intersection of NLP and Computational Social Science.

Alvin Po-Chun Chen, Rohan Das, Dananjay Srinivas et al.

NLP-assisted solutions have gained considerable traction to support qualitative data analysis. However, no unified evaluation framework exists which can account for the many different settings in which qualitative researchers may employ them. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework to study the way collaboration settings may produce different outcomes across a variety of interactive systems. Specifically, we study the impact of synchronous vs. asynchronous collaboration using three different NLP-assisted qualitative research tools and present a comprehensive analysis of significant differences in the consistency, cohesiveness, and correctness of their outputs.

Aaron Gluck, Katharina von der Wense, Maria Leonor Pacheco

Automated definition generation systems have been proposed to support vocabulary expansion for language learners. The main barrier to the success of these systems is that learners often struggle to understand definitions due to the presence of potentially unfamiliar words and grammar, particularly when non-standard language is involved. To address these challenges, we propose CLIX, the task of Cross-Lingual explanations of Idiomatic eXpressions. We explore the capabilities of current NLP models for this task, and observe that while it remains challenging, large language models show promise. Finally, we perform a detailed error analysis to highlight the key challenges that need to be addressed before we can reliably incorporate these systems into educational tools.

Ankush Raut, Xiaofeng Zhu, Maria Leonor Pacheco

This paper evaluates the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage contextual information in the form of structured linguistic representations. Specifically, we examine the impact of encoding both short and long contexts using Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structures across a diverse set of language tasks. We perform our analysis using 8-bit quantized and instruction-tuned versions of Llama 3.1 (8B), Phi-3, and Mistral 7B. Our results indicate that, for tasks involving short contexts, augmenting the prompt with the AMR of the original language context often degrades the performance of the underlying LLM. However, for tasks that involve long contexts, such as dialogue summarization in the SAMSum dataset, this enhancement improves LLM performance, for example, by increasing the zero-shot cosine similarity score of Llama 3.1 from 66% to 76%. This improvement is more evident in the newer and larger LLMs, but does not extend to the older or smaller ones. In addition, we observe that LLMs can effectively reconstruct the original text from a linearized AMR, achieving a cosine similarity of 81% in the best-case scenario.

Alexandria Leto, Elliot Pickens, Coen D. Needell et al.

The mainstream media has much leeway in what it chooses to cover and how it covers it. These choices have real-world consequences on what people know and their subsequent behaviors. However, the lack of objective measures to evaluate editorial choices makes research in this area particularly difficult. In this paper, we argue that there are newsworthy topics where objective measures exist in the form of supporting data and propose a computational framework to analyze editorial choices in this setup. We focus on the economy because the reporting of economic indicators presents us with a relatively easy way to determine both the selection and framing of various publications. Their values provide a ground truth of how the economy is doing relative to how the publications choose to cover it. To do this, we define frame prediction as a set of interdependent tasks. At the article level, we learn to identify the reported stance towards the general state of the economy. Then, for every numerical quantity reported in the article, we learn to identify whether it corresponds to an economic indicator and whether it is being reported in a positive or negative way. To perform our analysis, we track six American publishers and each article that appeared in the top 10 slots of their landing page between 2015 and 2023.

Maria Leonor Pacheco, Fabio Somenzi, Dananjay Srinivas et al.

We propose a neurosymbolic approach to the explanation of complex sequences of decisions that combines the strengths of decision procedures and Large Language Models (LLMs). We demonstrate this approach by producing explanations for the solutions of Hitori puzzles. The rules of Hitori include local constraints that are effectively explained by short resolution proofs. However, they also include a connectivity constraint that is more suitable for visual explanations. Hence, Hitori provides an excellent testing ground for a flexible combination of SAT solvers and LLMs. We have implemented a tool that assists humans in solving Hitori puzzles, and we present experimental evidence of its effectiveness.

John Komp, Dananjay Srinivas, Maria Pacheco et al.

An (artificial cardiac) pacemaker is an implantable electronic device that sends electrical impulses to the heart to regulate the heartbeat. As the number of pacemaker users continues to rise, so does the demand for features with additional sensors, adaptability, and improved battery performance. Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently been proposed as a performant algorithm for creative design space exploration, adaptation, and statistical verification of cardiac pacemakers. The design of correct reward functions, expressed as a reward machine, is a key programming activity in this process. In 2007, Boston Scientific published a detailed description of their pacemaker specifications. This document has since formed the basis for several formal characterizations of pacemaker specifications using real-time automata and logic. However, because these translations are done manually, they are challenging to verify. Moreover, capturing requirements in automata or logic is notoriously difficult. We posit that it is significantly easier for domain experts, such as electrophysiologists, to observe and identify abnormalities in electrocardiograms that correspond to patient-pacemaker interactions. Therefore, we explore the possibility of learning correctness specifications from such labeled demonstrations in the form of a reward machine and training an RL agent to synthesize a cardiac pacemaker based on the resulting reward machine. We leverage advances in machine learning to extract signals from labeled demonstrations as reward machines using recurrent neural networks and transformer architectures. These reward machines are then used to design a simple pacemaker with RL. Finally, we validate the resulting pacemaker using properties extracted from the Boston Scientific document.

Advait Deshmukh, Ashwin Umadi, Dananjay Srinivas et al.

Due to their capacity to acquire world knowledge from large corpora, pre-trained language models (PLMs) are extensively used in ultra-fine entity typing tasks where the space of labels is extremely large. In this work, we explore the limitations of the knowledge acquired by PLMs by proposing a novel heuristic to approximate the pre-training distribution of entities when the pre-training data is unknown. Then, we systematically demonstrate that entity-typing approaches that rely solely on the parametric knowledge of PLMs struggle significantly with entities at the long tail of the pre-training distribution, and that knowledge-infused approaches can account for some of these shortcomings. Our findings suggest that we need to go beyond PLMs to produce solutions that perform well for infrequent entities.

Maria Leonor Pacheco, Tunazzina Islam, Lyle Ungar et al.

Experts across diverse disciplines are often interested in making sense of large text collections. Traditionally, this challenge is approached either by noisy unsupervised techniques such as topic models, or by following a manual theme discovery process. In this paper, we expand the definition of a theme to account for more than just a word distribution, and include generalized concepts deemed relevant by domain experts. Then, we propose an interactive framework that receives and encodes expert feedback at different levels of abstraction. Our framework strikes a balance between automation and manual coding, allowing experts to maintain control of their study while reducing the manual effort required.

Maria Leonor Pacheco, Max von Hippel, Ben Weintraub et al.

Automated attack discovery techniques, such as attacker synthesis or model-based fuzzing, provide powerful ways to ensure network protocols operate correctly and securely. Such techniques, in general, require a formal representation of the protocol, often in the form of a finite state machine (FSM). Unfortunately, many protocols are only described in English prose, and implementing even a simple network protocol as an FSM is time-consuming and prone to subtle logical errors. Automatically extracting protocol FSMs from documentation can significantly contribute to increased use of these techniques and result in more robust and secure protocol implementations. In this work we focus on attacker synthesis as a representative technique for protocol security, and on RFCs as a representative format for protocol prose description. Unlike other works that rely on rule-based approaches or use off-the-shelf NLP tools directly, we suggest a data-driven approach for extracting FSMs from RFC documents. Specifically, we use a hybrid approach consisting of three key steps: (1) large-scale word-representation learning for technical language, (2) focused zero-shot learning for mapping protocol text to a protocol-independent information language, and (3) rule-based mapping from protocol-independent information to a specific protocol FSM. We show the generalizability of our FSM extraction by using the RFCs for six different protocols: BGPv4, DCCP, LTP, PPTP, SCTP and TCP. We demonstrate how automated extraction of an FSM from an RFC can be applied to the synthesis of attacks, with TCP and DCCP as case-studies. Our approach shows that it is possible to automate attacker synthesis against protocols by using textual specifications such as RFCs.

Shamik Roy, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Dan Goldwasser

Extracting moral sentiment from text is a vital component in understanding public opinion, social movements, and policy decisions. The Moral Foundation Theory identifies five moral foundations, each associated with a positive and negative polarity. However, moral sentiment is often motivated by its targets, which can correspond to individuals or collective entities. In this paper, we introduce morality frames, a representation framework for organizing moral attitudes directed at different entities, and come up with a novel and high-quality annotated dataset of tweets written by US politicians. Then, we propose a relational learning model to predict moral attitudes towards entities and moral foundations jointly. We do qualitative and quantitative evaluations, showing that moral sentiment towards entities differs highly across political ideologies.

I-Ta Lee, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Dan Goldwasser

Understanding narrative text requires capturing characters' motivations, goals, and mental states. This paper proposes an Entity-based Narrative Graph (ENG) to model the internal-states of characters in a story. We explicitly model entities, their interactions and the context in which they appear, and learn rich representations for them. We experiment with different task-adaptive pre-training objectives, in-domain training, and symbolic inference to capture dependencies between different decisions in the output space. We evaluate our model on two narrative understanding tasks: predicting character mental states, and desire fulfillment, and conduct a qualitative analysis.

Manuel Widmoser, Maria Leonor Pacheco, Jean Honorio et al.

Expressive text encoders such as RNNs and Transformer Networks have been at the center of NLP models in recent work. Most of the effort has focused on sentence-level tasks, capturing the dependencies between words in a single sentence, or pairs of sentences. However, certain tasks, such as argumentation mining, require accounting for longer texts and complicated structural dependencies between them. Deep structured prediction is a general framework to combine the complementary strengths of expressive neural encoders and structured inference for highly structured domains. Nevertheless, when the need arises to go beyond sentences, most work relies on combining the output scores of independently trained classifiers. One of the main reasons for this is that constrained inference comes at a high computational cost. In this paper, we explore the use of randomized inference to alleviate this concern and show that we can efficiently leverage deep structured prediction and expressive neural encoders for a set of tasks involving complicated argumentative structures.