Aakanksha Naik

Kyle Lo, Joseph Chee Chang, Andrew Head et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Scholarly publications are key to the transfer of knowledge from scholars to others. However, research papers are information-dense, and as the volume of the scientific literature grows, the need for new technology to support the reading process grows. In contrast to the process of finding papers, which has been transformed by Internet technology, the experience of reading research papers has changed little in decades. The PDF format for sharing research papers is widely used due to its portability, but it has significant downsides including: static content, poor accessibility for low-vision readers, and difficulty reading on mobile devices. This paper explores the question "Can recent advances in AI and HCI power intelligent, interactive, and accessible reading interfaces -- even for legacy PDFs?" We describe the Semantic Reader Project, a collaborative effort across multiple institutions to explore automatic creation of dynamic reading interfaces for research papers. Through this project, we've developed ten research prototype interfaces and conducted usability studies with more than 300 participants and real-world users showing improved reading experiences for scholars. We've also released a production reading interface for research papers that will incorporate the best features as they mature. We structure this paper around challenges scholars and the public face when reading research papers -- Discovery, Efficiency, Comprehension, Synthesis, and Accessibility -- and present an overview of our progress and remaining open challenges.

Carl Edwards, Aakanksha Naik, Tushar Khot et al. · cmu

Predicting synergistic drug combinations can help accelerate discovery of cancer treatments, particularly therapies personalized to a patient's specific tumor via biopsied cells. In this paper, we propose a novel setting and models for in-context drug synergy learning. We are given a small "personalized dataset" of 10-20 drug synergy relationships in the context of specific cancer cell targets. Our goal is to predict additional drug synergy relationships in that context. Inspired by recent work that pre-trains a GPT language model (LM) to "in-context learn" common function classes, we devise novel pre-training schemes that enable a GPT model to in-context learn "drug synergy functions". Our model -- which does not use any textual corpora, molecular fingerprints, protein interaction or any other domain-specific knowledge -- is able to achieve competitive results. We further integrate our in-context approach with a genetic algorithm to optimize model prompts and select synergy candidates to test after conducting a patient biopsy. Finally, we explore a novel task of inverse drug design which can potentially enable the design of drugs that synergize specifically to target a given patient's "personalized dataset". Our findings can potentially have an important impact on precision cancer medicine, and also raise intriguing questions on non-textual pre-training for LMs.

Hao-Ren Yao, Luke Breitfeller, Aakanksha Naik et al. · cmu

Event Temporal Relation Extraction (ETRE) is paramount but challenging. Within a discourse, event pairs are situated at different distances or the so-called proximity bands. The temporal ordering communicated about event pairs where at more remote (i.e., ``long'') or less remote (i.e., ``short'') proximity bands are encoded differently. SOTA models have tended to perform well on events situated at either short or long proximity bands, but not both. Nonetheless, real-world, natural texts contain all types of temporal event-pairs. In this paper, we present MulCo: Distilling Multi-Scale Knowledge via Contrastive Learning, a knowledge co-distillation approach that shares knowledge across multiple event pair proximity bands to improve performance on all types of temporal datasets. Our experimental results show that MulCo successfully integrates linguistic cues pertaining to temporal reasoning across both short and long proximity bands and achieves new state-of-the-art results on several ETRE benchmark datasets.

Yuze Lou, Bailey Kuehl, Erin Bransom et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Entity linking (EL) is the task of linking a textual mention to its corresponding entry in a knowledge base, and is critical for many knowledge-intensive NLP applications. When applied to tables in scientific papers, EL is a step toward large-scale scientific knowledge bases that could enable advanced scientific question answering and analytics. We present the first dataset for EL in scientific tables. EL for scientific tables is especially challenging because scientific knowledge bases can be very incomplete, and disambiguating table mentions typically requires understanding the papers's tet in addition to the table. Our dataset, S2abEL, focuses on EL in machine learning results tables and includes hand-labeled cell types, attributed sources, and entity links from the PaperswithCode taxonomy for 8,429 cells from 732 tables. We introduce a neural baseline method designed for EL on scientific tables containing many out-of-knowledge-base mentions, and show that it significantly outperforms a state-of-the-art generic table EL method. The best baselines fall below human performance, and our analysis highlights avenues for improvement.

Mihir Parmar, Aakanksha Naik, Himanshu Gupta et al.

Many large language models (LLMs) for medicine have largely been evaluated on short texts, and their ability to handle longer sequences such as a complete electronic health record (EHR) has not been systematically explored. Assessing these models on long sequences is crucial since prior work in the general domain has demonstrated performance degradation of LLMs on longer texts. Motivated by this, we introduce LongBoX, a collection of seven medical datasets in text-to-text format, designed to investigate model performance on long sequences. Preliminary experiments reveal that both medical LLMs (e.g., BioGPT) and strong general domain LLMs (e.g., FLAN-T5) struggle on this benchmark. We further evaluate two techniques designed for long-sequence handling: (i) local-global attention, and (ii) Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD). Our results demonstrate mixed results with long-sequence handling - while scores on some datasets increase, there is substantial room for improvement. We hope that LongBoX facilitates the development of more effective long-sequence techniques for the medical domain. Data and source code are available at https://github.com/Mihir3009/LongBoX.

Chao-Chun Hsu, Erin Bransom, Jenna Sparks et al. · allen-ai, uw

Literature review requires researchers to synthesize a large amount of information and is increasingly challenging as the scientific literature expands. In this work, we investigate the potential of LLMs for producing hierarchical organizations of scientific studies to assist researchers with literature review. We define hierarchical organizations as tree structures where nodes refer to topical categories and every node is linked to the studies assigned to that category. Our naive LLM-based pipeline for hierarchy generation from a set of studies produces promising yet imperfect hierarchies, motivating us to collect CHIME, an expert-curated dataset for this task focused on biomedicine. Given the challenging and time-consuming nature of building hierarchies from scratch, we use a human-in-the-loop process in which experts correct errors (both links between categories and study assignment) in LLM-generated hierarchies. CHIME contains 2,174 LLM-generated hierarchies covering 472 topics, and expert-corrected hierarchies for a subset of 100 topics. Expert corrections allow us to quantify LLM performance, and we find that while they are quite good at generating and organizing categories, their assignment of studies to categories could be improved. We attempt to train a corrector model with human feedback which improves study assignment by 12.6 F1 points. We release our dataset and models to encourage research on developing better assistive tools for literature review.

Aakanksha Naik, Bailey Kuehl, Erin Bransom et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Extracting fine-grained experimental findings from literature can provide dramatic utility for scientific applications. Prior work has developed annotation schemas and datasets for limited aspects of this problem, failing to capture the real-world complexity and nuance required. Focusing on biomedicine, this work presents CARE -- a new IE dataset for the task of extracting clinical findings. We develop a new annotation schema capturing fine-grained findings as n-ary relations between entities and attributes, which unifies phenomena challenging for current IE systems such as discontinuous entity spans, nested relations, variable arity n-ary relations and numeric results in a single schema. We collect extensive annotations for 700 abstracts from two sources: clinical trials and case reports. We also demonstrate the generalizability of our schema to the computer science and materials science domains. We benchmark state-of-the-art IE systems on CARE, showing that even models such as GPT4 struggle. We release our resources to advance research on extracting and aggregating literature findings.

Nishant Balepur, Malachi Hamada, Varsha Kishore et al. · allen-ai

Deep Research (DR) tools (e.g. OpenAI DR) help researchers cope with ballooning publishing counts. Such tools can synthesize scientific papers to answer researchers' queries, but lack understanding of their users. We change that in MyScholarQA (MySQA), a personalized DR tool that: 1) infers a profile of a user's research interests; 2) proposes personalized actions for a user's input query; and 3) writes a multi-section report for the query that follows user-approved actions. We first test MySQA with NLP's standard protocol: we design a benchmark of synthetic users and LLM judges, where MySQA beats baselines in citation metrics and personalized action-following. However, we suspect this process does not cover all aspects of personalized DR users value, so we interview users in an online version of MySQA to unmask them. We reveal nine nuanced errors of personalized DR undetectable by our LLM judges, and we study qualitative feedback to form lessons for future DR design. In all, we argue for a pillar of personalization that easy-to-use LLM judges can lead NLP to overlook: real progress in personalization is only possible with real users.

Luca Soldaini, Rodney Kinney, Akshita Bhagia et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Information about pretraining corpora used to train the current best-performing language models is seldom discussed: commercial models rarely detail their data, and even open models are often released without accompanying training data or recipes to reproduce them. As a result, it is challenging to conduct and advance scientific research on language modeling, such as understanding how training data impacts model capabilities and limitations. To facilitate scientific research on language model pretraining, we curate and release Dolma, a three-trillion-token English corpus, built from a diverse mixture of web content, scientific papers, code, public-domain books, social media, and encyclopedic materials. We extensively document Dolma, including its design principles, details about its construction, and a summary of its contents. We present analyses and experimental results on intermediate states of Dolma to share what we have learned about important data curation practices. Finally, we open-source our data curation toolkit to enable reproduction of our work as well as support further research in large-scale data curation.

Hita Kambhamettu, Bhavana Dalvi Mishra, Andrew Head et al.

Developing a novel research idea is hard. It must be distinct enough from prior work to claim a contribution while also building on it. This requires iteratively reviewing literature and refining an idea based on what a researcher reads; yet when an idea changes, the literature that matters often changes with it. Most tools offer limited support for this interplay: literature tools help researchers understand a fixed body of work, while ideation tools evaluate ideas against a static, pre-curated set of papers. We introduce literature-initiated pivots, a mechanism where engagement with literature prompts revision to a developing idea, and where that revision changes which literature is relevant. We operationalize this in LitPivot, where researchers concurrently draft and vet an idea. LitPivot dynamically retrieves clusters of papers relevant to a selected part of the idea and proposes literature-informed critiques for how to revise it. A lab study ($n{=}17$) shows researchers produced higher-rated ideas with stronger self-reported understanding of the literature space; an open-ended study ($n{=}5$) reveals how researchers use LitPivot to iteratively evolve their own ideas.

Xinran Zhao, Aakanksha Naik, Jay DeYoung et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to generate comprehensive, knowledge-intensive reports. However, while these models are trained on diverse academic papers and reports, they are not exposed to the reasoning processes and intents that guide authors in crafting these documents. We hypothesize that enhancing a model's intent awareness can significantly improve the quality of generated long-form reports. We develop and employ structured, tag-based schemes to better elicit underlying implicit intents to write or cite. We demonstrate that these extracted intents enhance both zero-shot generation capabilities in LLMs and enable the creation of high-quality synthetic data for fine-tuning smaller models. Our experiments reveal improved performance across various challenging scientific report generation tasks, with an average improvement of +2.9 and +12.3 absolute points for large and small models over baselines, respectively. Furthermore, our analysis illuminates how intent awareness enhances model citation usage and substantially improves report readability.

Monica Munnangi, Sergey Feldman, Byron C Wallace et al. · cmu

Despite their general capabilities, LLMs still struggle on biomedical NER tasks, which are difficult due to the presence of specialized terminology and lack of training data. In this work we set out to improve LLM performance on biomedical NER in limited data settings via a new knowledge augmentation approach which incorporates definitions of relevant concepts on-the-fly. During this process, to provide a test bed for knowledge augmentation, we perform a comprehensive exploration of prompting strategies. Our experiments show that definition augmentation is useful for both open source and closed LLMs. For example, it leads to a relative improvement of 15\% (on average) in GPT-4 performance (F1) across all (six) of our test datasets. We conduct extensive ablations and analyses to demonstrate that our performance improvements stem from adding relevant definitional knowledge. We find that careful prompting strategies also improve LLM performance, allowing them to outperform fine-tuned language models in few-shot settings. To facilitate future research in this direction, we release our code at https://github.com/allenai/beacon.

Amanpreet Singh, Joseph Chee Chang, Chloe Anastasiades et al. · allen-ai

Retrieval-augmented generation is increasingly effective in answering scientific questions from literature, but many state-of-the-art systems are expensive and closed-source. We introduce Ai2 Scholar QA, a free online scientific question answering application. To facilitate research, we make our entire pipeline public: as a customizable open-source Python package and interactive web app, along with paper indexes accessible through public APIs and downloadable datasets. We describe our system in detail and present experiments analyzing its key design decisions. In an evaluation on a recent scientific QA benchmark, we find that Ai2 Scholar QA outperforms competing systems.

Nishant Balepur, Malachi Hamada, Varsha Kishore et al.

Scientific Deep Research (DR) agents answer user queries by synthesizing research papers into multi-section reports. User feedback can improve their utility, but existing protocols only score the final report, making it hard to study and learn which intermediate actions DR agents should take to improve reports. We collect DRACULA, the first dataset with user feedback on intermediate actions for DR. Over five weeks, nineteen expert CS researchers ask queries to a DR system that proposes actions (e.g., "Add a section on datasets"). Our users select actions they prefer, then judge whether an output report applied their selections successfully, yielding 8,103 action preferences and 5,230 execution judgments. After confirming a DR agent can execute DRACULA's actions, we study the predictability of user-preferred actions via simulation-how well LLMs predict the actions users select-a step toward learning to generate useful actions. We discover: (1) LLM judges initially struggle to predict action selections, but improve most when using a user's full selection history, rather than self-reported or extrapolated user context signals; (2) Users' selections for the same query differ based on unstated goals, bottlenecking simulation and motivating affordances that let users steer reports; and (3) Our simulation results inform an online intervention that generates new actions based on the user's past interactions, which users pick most often in follow-up studies. Overall, while work extensively studies execution, DRACULA reveals a key challenge is deciding which actions to execute in the first place. We open-source DRACULA's study design, user feedback, and simulation tasks to spur future work on action feedback for long-horizon agents.

Dirk Groeneveld, Iz Beltagy, Pete Walsh et al. · allen-ai, cmu

Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. To this end, we have built OLMo, a competitive, truly Open Language Model, to enable the scientific study of language models. Unlike most prior efforts that have only released model weights and inference code, we release OLMo alongside open training data and training and evaluation code. We hope this release will empower the open research community and inspire a new wave of innovation.

Maria Antoniak, Aakanksha Naik, Carla S. Alvarado et al. · allen-ai, uw

Ethical frameworks for the use of natural language processing (NLP) are urgently needed to shape how large language models (LLMs) and similar tools are used for healthcare applications. Healthcare faces existing challenges including the balance of power in clinician-patient relationships, systemic health disparities, historical injustices, and economic constraints. Drawing directly from the voices of those most affected, and focusing on a case study of a specific healthcare setting, we propose a set of guiding principles for the use of NLP in maternal healthcare. We led an interactive session centered on an LLM-based chatbot demonstration during a full-day workshop with 39 participants, and additionally surveyed 30 healthcare workers and 30 birthing people about their values, needs, and perceptions of NLP tools in the context of maternal health. We conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses of the survey results and interactive discussions to consolidate our findings into a set of guiding principles. We propose nine principles for ethical use of NLP for maternal healthcare, grouped into three themes: (i) recognizing contextual significance (ii) holistic measurements, and (iii) who/what is valued. For each principle, we describe its underlying rationale and provide practical advice. This set of principles can provide a methodological pattern for other researchers and serve as a resource to practitioners working on maternal health and other healthcare fields to emphasize the importance of technical nuance, historical context, and inclusive design when developing NLP technologies for clinical use.

Benjamin Newman, Yoonjoo Lee, Aakanksha Naik et al. · allen-ai, uw

When conducting literature reviews, scientists often create literature review tables - tables whose rows are publications and whose columns constitute a schema, a set of aspects used to compare and contrast the papers. Can we automatically generate these tables using language models (LMs)? In this work, we introduce a framework that leverages LMs to perform this task by decomposing it into separate schema and value generation steps. To enable experimentation, we address two main challenges: First, we overcome a lack of high-quality datasets to benchmark table generation by curating and releasing arxivDIGESTables, a new dataset of 2,228 literature review tables extracted from ArXiv papers that synthesize a total of 7,542 research papers. Second, to support scalable evaluation of model generations against human-authored reference tables, we develop DecontextEval, an automatic evaluation method that aligns elements of tables with the same underlying aspects despite differing surface forms. Given these tools, we evaluate LMs' abilities to reconstruct reference tables, finding this task benefits from additional context to ground the generation (e.g. table captions, in-text references). Finally, through a human evaluation study we find that even when LMs fail to fully reconstruct a reference table, their generated novel aspects can still be useful.

Vishakh Padmakumar, Joseph Chee Chang, Kyle Lo et al.

The increasing volume of academic literature makes it essential for researchers to organize, compare, and contrast collections of documents. Large language models (LLMs) can support this process by generating schemas defining shared aspects along which to compare papers. However, progress on schema generation has been slow due to: (i) ambiguity in reference-based evaluations, and (ii) lack of editing/refinement methods. Our work is the first to address both issues. First, we present an approach for augmenting unannotated table corpora with \emph{synthesized intents}, and apply it to create a dataset for studying schema generation conditioned on a given information need, thus reducing ambiguity. With this dataset, we show how incorporating table intents significantly improves baseline performance in reconstructing reference schemas. We start by comprehensively benchmarking several single-shot schema generation methods, including prompted LLM workflows and fine-tuned models, showing that smaller, open-weight models can be fine-tuned to be competitive with state-of-the-art prompted LLMs. Next, we propose several LLM-based schema refinement techniques and show that these can further improve schemas generated by these methods.

Jonathan Bragg, Mike D'Arcy, Nishant Balepur et al. · allen-ai

AI agents hold the potential to revolutionize scientific productivity by automating literature reviews, replicating experiments, analyzing data, and even proposing new directions of inquiry; indeed, there are now many such agents, ranging from general-purpose "deep research" systems to specialized science-specific agents, such as AI Scientist and AIGS. Rigorous evaluation of these agents is critical for progress. Yet existing benchmarks fall short on several fronts: they (1) fail to provide holistic, product-informed measures of real-world use cases such as science research; (2) lack reproducible agent tools necessary for a controlled comparison of core agentic capabilities; (3) do not account for confounding variables such as model cost and tool access; (4) do not provide standardized interfaces for quick agent prototyping and evaluation; and (5) lack comprehensive baseline agents necessary to identify true advances. In response, we define principles and tooling for more rigorously benchmarking agents. Using these, we present AstaBench, a suite that provides the first holistic measure of agentic ability to perform scientific research, comprising 2400+ problems spanning the entire scientific discovery process and multiple scientific domains, and including many problems inspired by actual user requests to deployed Asta agents. Our suite comes with the first scientific research environment with production-grade search tools that enable controlled, reproducible evaluation, better accounting for confounders. Alongside, we provide a comprehensive suite of nine science-optimized classes of Asta agents and numerous baselines. Our extensive evaluation of 57 agents across 22 agent classes reveals several interesting findings, most importantly that despite meaningful progress on certain individual aspects, AI remains far from solving the challenge of science research assistance.

Elizabeth Remfry, Rafael Henkin, Michael R Barnes et al.

Electronic healthcare records (EHR) contain a huge wealth of data that can support the prediction of clinical outcomes. EHR data is often stored and analysed using clinical codes (ICD10, SNOMED), however these can differ across registries and healthcare providers. Integrating data across systems involves mapping between different clinical ontologies requiring domain expertise, and at times resulting in data loss. To overcome this, code-agnostic models have been proposed. We assess the effectiveness of a code-agnostic representation approach on the task of long-term microvascular complication prediction for individuals living with Type 2 Diabetes. Our method encodes individual EHRs as text using fine-tuned, pretrained clinical language models. Leveraging large-scale EHR data from the UK, we employ a multi-label approach to simultaneously predict the risk of microvascular complications across 1-, 5-, and 10-year windows. We demonstrate that a code-agnostic approach outperforms a code-based model and illustrate that performance is better with longer prediction windows but is biased to the first occurring complication. Overall, we highlight that context length is vitally important for model performance. This study highlights the possibility of including data from across different clinical ontologies and is a starting point for generalisable clinical models.

David Wadden, Kejian Shi, Jacob Morrison et al.

We present SciRIFF (Scientific Resource for Instruction-Following and Finetuning), a dataset of 137K instruction-following instances for training and evaluation, covering 54 tasks. These tasks span five core scientific literature understanding capabilities: information extraction, summarization, question answering, claim verification, and classification. SciRIFF is unique in being entirely expert-written, high-quality instruction-following dataset for extracting and synthesizing information from research literature across diverse scientific fields. It features complex instructions with long input contexts, detailed task descriptions, and structured outputs. To demonstrate its utility, we finetune a series of large language models (LLMs) using a mix of general-domain and SciRIFF instructions. On nine out-of-distribution held-out tasks (referred to as SciRIFF-Eval), LLMs finetuned on SciRIFF achieve 70.6% average improvement over baselines trained only on general-domain instructions. SciRIFF facilitates the development and evaluation of LLMs to help researchers navigate the rapidly growing body of scientific literature.

Aakanksha Naik, Sravanthi Parasa, Sergey Feldman et al.

We present BEEP (Biomedical Evidence-Enhanced Predictions), a novel approach for clinical outcome prediction that retrieves patient-specific medical literature and incorporates it into predictive models. Based on each individual patient's clinical notes, we train language models (LMs) to find relevant papers and fuse them with information from notes to predict outcomes such as in-hospital mortality. We develop methods to retrieve literature based on noisy, information-dense patient notes, and to augment existing outcome prediction models with retrieved papers in a manner that maximizes predictive accuracy. Our approach boosts predictive performance on three important clinical tasks in comparison to strong recent LM baselines, increasing F1 by up to 5 points and precision@Top-K by a large margin of over 25%.

Aakanksha Naik, Jill Lehman, Carolyn Rose

Natural language understanding (NLU) has made massive progress driven by large benchmarks, but benchmarks often leave a long tail of infrequent phenomena underrepresented. We reflect on the question: have transfer learning methods sufficiently addressed the poor performance of benchmark-trained models on the long tail? We conceptualize the long tail using macro-level dimensions (e.g., underrepresented genres, topics, etc.), and perform a qualitative meta-analysis of 100 representative papers on transfer learning research for NLU. Our analysis asks three questions: (i) Which long tail dimensions do transfer learning studies target? (ii) Which properties of adaptation methods help improve performance on the long tail? (iii) Which methodological gaps have greatest negative impact on long tail performance? Our answers highlight major avenues for future research in transfer learning for the long tail. Lastly, using our meta-analysis framework, we perform a case study comparing the performance of various adaptation methods on clinical narratives, which provides interesting insights that may enable us to make progress along these future avenues.

Luke Breitfeller, Aakanksha Naik, Carolyn Rose

Despite achieving state-of-the-art accuracy on temporal ordering of events, neural models showcase significant gaps in performance. Our work seeks to fill one of these gaps by leveraging an under-explored dimension of textual semantics: rich semantic information provided by explicit textual time cues. We develop STAGE, a system that consists of a novel temporal framework and a parser that can automatically extract time cues and convert them into representations suitable for integration with neural models. We demonstrate the utility of extracted cues by integrating them with an event ordering model using a joint BiLSTM and ILP constraint architecture. We outline the functionality of the 3-part STAGE processing approach, and show two methods of integrating its representations with the BiLSTM-ILP model: (i) incorporating semantic cues as additional features, and (ii) generating new constraints from semantic cues to be enforced in the ILP. We demonstrate promising results on two event ordering datasets, and highlight important issues in semantic cue representation and integration for future research.

Aakanksha Naik, Jill Lehman, Carolyn Rose

We tackle the task of adapting event extractors to new domains without labeled data, by aligning the marginal distributions of source and target domains. As a testbed, we create two new event extraction datasets using English texts from two medical domains: (i) clinical notes, and (ii) doctor-patient conversations. We test the efficacy of three marginal alignment techniques: (i) adversarial domain adaptation (ADA), (ii) domain adaptive fine-tuning (DAFT), and (iii) a novel instance weighting technique based on language model likelihood scores (LIW). LIW and DAFT improve over a no-transfer BERT baseline on both domains, but ADA only improves on clinical notes. Deeper analysis of performance under different types of shifts (e.g., lexical shift, semantic shift) reveals interesting variations among models. Our best-performing models reach F1 scores of 70.0 and 72.9 on notes and conversations respectively, using no labeled data from target domains.

Aakanksha Naik, Carolyn Rosé

We tackle the task of building supervised event trigger identification models which can generalize better across domains. Our work leverages the adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) framework to introduce domain-invariance. ADA uses adversarial training to construct representations that are predictive for trigger identification, but not predictive of the example's domain. It requires no labeled data from the target domain, making it completely unsupervised. Experiments with two domains (English literature and news) show that ADA leads to an average F1 score improvement of 3.9 on out-of-domain data. Our best performing model (BERT-A) reaches 44-49 F1 across both domains, using no labeled target data. Preliminary experiments reveal that finetuning on 1% labeled data, followed by self-training leads to substantial improvement, reaching 51.5 and 67.2 F1 on literature and news respectively.

Abhilasha Ravichander, Aakanksha Naik, Carolyn Rose et al.

Quantitative reasoning is a higher-order reasoning skill that any intelligent natural language understanding system can reasonably be expected to handle. We present EQUATE (Evaluating Quantitative Understanding Aptitude in Textual Entailment), a new framework for quantitative reasoning in textual entailment. We benchmark the performance of 9 published NLI models on EQUATE, and find that on average, state-of-the-art methods do not achieve an absolute improvement over a majority-class baseline, suggesting that they do not implicitly learn to reason with quantities. We establish a new baseline Q-REAS that manipulates quantities symbolically. In comparison to the best performing NLI model, it achieves success on numerical reasoning tests (+24.2%), but has limited verbal reasoning capabilities (-8.1%). We hope our evaluation framework will support the development of models of quantitative reasoning in language understanding.

Aakanksha Naik, Abhilasha Ravichander, Norman Sadeh et al.

Natural language inference (NLI) is the task of determining if a natural language hypothesis can be inferred from a given premise in a justifiable manner. NLI was proposed as a benchmark task for natural language understanding. Existing models perform well at standard datasets for NLI, achieving impressive results across different genres of text. However, the extent to which these models understand the semantic content of sentences is unclear. In this work, we propose an evaluation methodology consisting of automatically constructed "stress tests" that allow us to examine whether systems have the ability to make real inferential decisions. Our evaluation of six sentence-encoder models on these stress tests reveals strengths and weaknesses of these models with respect to challenging linguistic phenomena, and suggests important directions for future work in this area.