Vid Kocijan


2023

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Counter-GAP: Counterfactual Bias Evaluation through Gendered Ambiguous Pronouns
Zhongbin Xie | Vid Kocijan | Thomas Lukasiewicz | Oana-Maria Camburu
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Bias-measuring datasets play a critical role in detecting biased behavior of language models and in evaluating progress of bias mitigation methods. In this work, we focus on evaluating gender bias through coreference resolution, where previous datasets are either hand-crafted or fail to reliably measure an explicitly defined bias. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a novel method to collect diverse, natural, and minimally distant text pairs via counterfactual generation, and construct Counter-GAP, an annotated dataset consisting of 4008 instances grouped into 1002 quadruples. We further identify a bias cancellation problem in previous group-level metrics on Counter-GAP, and propose to use the difference between inconsistency across genders and within genders to measure bias at a quadruple level. Our results show that four pre-trained language models are significantly more inconsistent across different gender groups than within each group, and that a name-based counterfactual data augmentation method is more effective to mitigate such bias than an anonymization-based method.

2022

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Few-Shot Out-of-Domain Transfer Learning of Natural Language Explanations in a Label-Abundant Setup
Yordan Yordanov | Vid Kocijan | Thomas Lukasiewicz | Oana-Maria Camburu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Training a model to provide natural language explanations (NLEs) for its predictions usually requires the acquisition of task-specific NLEs, which is time- and resource-consuming. A potential solution is the few-shot out-of-domain transfer of NLEs from a parent task with many NLEs to a child task.In this work, we examine the setup in which the child task has few NLEs but abundant labels. We establish four few-shot transfer learning methods that cover the possible fine-tuning combinations of the labels and NLEs for the parent and child tasks. We transfer explainability from a large natural language inference dataset (e-SNLI) separately to two child tasks: (1) hard cases of pronoun resolution, where we introduce the small-e-WinoGrande dataset of NLEs on top of the WinoGrande dataset, and (2) commonsense validation (ComVE). Our results demonstrate that the parent task helps with NLE generation and we establish the best methods for this setup.

2021

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Knowledge Base Completion Meets Transfer Learning
Vid Kocijan | Thomas Lukasiewicz
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The aim of knowledge base completion is to predict unseen facts from existing facts in knowledge bases. In this work, we introduce the first approach for transfer of knowledge from one collection of facts to another without the need for entity or relation matching. The method works for both canonicalized knowledge bases and uncanonicalized or open knowledge bases, i.e., knowledge bases where more than one copy of a real-world entity or relation may exist. Such knowledge bases are a natural output of automated information extraction tools that extract structured data from unstructured text. Our main contribution is a method that can make use of a large-scale pretraining on facts, collected from unstructured text, to improve predictions on structured data from a specific domain. The introduced method is the most impactful on small datasets such as ReVerb20K, where we obtained a 6% absolute increase of mean reciprocal rank and 65% relative decrease of mean rank over the previously best method, despite not relying on large pre-trained models like BERT.

2020

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Does the Objective Matter? Comparing Training Objectives for Pronoun Resolution
Yordan Yordanov | Oana-Maria Camburu | Vid Kocijan | Thomas Lukasiewicz
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Hard cases of pronoun resolution have been used as a long-standing benchmark for commonsense reasoning. In the recent literature, pre-trained language models have been used to obtain state-of-the-art results on pronoun resolution. Overall, four categories of training and evaluation objectives have been introduced. The variety of training datasets and pre-trained language models used in these works makes it unclear whether the choice of training objective is critical. In this work, we make a fair comparison of the performance and seed-wise stability of four models that represent the four categories of objectives. Our experiments show that the objective of sequence ranking performs the best in-domain, while the objective of semantic similarity between candidates and pronoun performs the best out-of-domain. We also observe a seed-wise instability of the model using sequence ranking, which is not the case when the other objectives are used.

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Systematic Comparison of Neural Architectures and Training Approaches for Open Information Extraction
Patrick Hohenecker | Frank Mtumbuka | Vid Kocijan | Thomas Lukasiewicz
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

The goal of open information extraction (OIE) is to extract facts from natural language text, and to represent them as structured triples of the form <subject,predicate, object>. For example, given the sentence “Beethoven composed the Ode to Joy.”, we are expected to extract the triple <Beethoven, composed, Ode to Joy>. In this work, we systematically compare different neural network architectures and training approaches, and improve the performance of the currently best models on the OIE16 benchmark (Stanovsky and Dagan, 2016) by 0.421 F1 score and 0.420 AUC-PR, respectively, in our experiments (i.e., by more than 200% in both cases). Furthermore, we show that appropriate problem and loss formulations often affect the performance more than the network architecture.

2019

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A Surprisingly Robust Trick for the Winograd Schema Challenge
Vid Kocijan | Ana-Maria Cretu | Oana-Maria Camburu | Yordan Yordanov | Thomas Lukasiewicz
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) dataset WSC273 and its inference counterpart WNLI are popular benchmarks for natural language understanding and commonsense reasoning. In this paper, we show that the performance of three language models on WSC273 consistently and robustly improves when fine-tuned on a similar pronoun disambiguation problem dataset (denoted WSCR). We additionally generate a large unsupervised WSC-like dataset. By fine-tuning the BERT language model both on the introduced and on the WSCR dataset, we achieve overall accuracies of 72.5% and 74.7% on WSC273 and WNLI, improving the previous state-of-the-art solutions by 8.8% and 9.6%, respectively. Furthermore, our fine-tuned models are also consistently more accurate on the “complex” subsets of WSC273, introduced by Trichelair et al. (2018).

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WikiCREM: A Large Unsupervised Corpus for Coreference Resolution
Vid Kocijan | Oana-Maria Camburu | Ana-Maria Cretu | Yordan Yordanov | Phil Blunsom | Thomas Lukasiewicz
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Pronoun resolution is a major area of natural language understanding. However, large-scale training sets are still scarce, since manually labelling data is costly. In this work, we introduce WikiCREM (Wikipedia CoREferences Masked) a large-scale, yet accurate dataset of pronoun disambiguation instances. We use a language-model-based approach for pronoun resolution in combination with our WikiCREM dataset. We compare a series of models on a collection of diverse and challenging coreference resolution problems, where we match or outperform previous state-of-the-art approaches on 6 out of 7 datasets, such as GAP, DPR, WNLI, PDP, WinoBias, and WinoGender. We release our model to be used off-the-shelf for solving pronoun disambiguation.