Related papers: Drawing Causal Inferences About Performance Effect…
A fundamental goal of scientific research is to learn about causal relationships. However, despite its critical role in the life and social sciences, causality has not had the same importance in Natural Language Processing (NLP), which has…
Given the complexity of combinations of tasks, languages, and domains in natural language processing (NLP) research, it is computationally prohibitive to exhaustively test newly proposed models on each possible experimental setting. In this…
The NLP community typically relies on performance of a model on a held-out test set to assess generalization. Performance drops observed in datasets outside of official test sets are generally attributed to "out-of-distribution" effects.…
Assessing instruction quality is a fundamental component of any improvement efforts in the education system. However, traditional manual assessments are expensive, subjective, and heavily dependent on observers' expertise and idiosyncratic…
An increasing number of works in natural language processing have addressed the effect of bias on the predicted outcomes, introducing mitigation techniques that act on different parts of the standard NLP pipeline (data and models). However,…
Performance prediction, the task of estimating a system's performance without performing experiments, allows us to reduce the experimental burden caused by the combinatorial explosion of different datasets, languages, tasks, and models. In…
Standard evaluation in NLP typically indicates that system A is better on average than system B, but it provides little info on how to improve performance and, what is worse, it should not come as a surprise if B ends up being better than A…
Public datasets are often used to evaluate the efficacy and generalizability of state-of-the-art methods for many tasks in natural language processing (NLP). However, the presence of overlap between the train and test datasets can lead to…
Causal inference is the process of estimating the effect or impact of a treatment on an outcome with other covariates as potential confounders (and mediators) that may need to be controlled. The vast majority of existing methods and systems…
Large amounts of training data are one of the major reasons for the high performance of state-of-the-art NLP models. But what exactly in the training data causes a model to make a certain prediction? We seek to answer this question by…
Empirical research in Natural Language Processing (NLP) has adopted a narrow set of principles for assessing hypotheses, relying mainly on p-value computation, which suffers from several known issues. While alternative proposals have been…
Training a model with access to human explanations can improve data efficiency and model performance on in- and out-of-domain data. Adding to these empirical findings, similarity with the process of human learning makes learning from…
The dominating NLP paradigm of training a strong neural predictor to perform one task on a specific dataset has led to state-of-the-art performance in a variety of applications (eg. sentiment classification, span-prediction based question…
The capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models have been sketched out in great detail in recent years, providing an intriguing yet conflicting picture. On the one hand, LLMs demonstrate a general ability to solve problems. On the…
Many models in natural language processing define probabilistic distributions over linguistic structures. We argue that (1) the quality of a model' s posterior distribution can and should be directly evaluated, as to whether probabilities…
Natural language processing (NLP) systems have become a central technology in communication, education, medicine, artificial intelligence, and many other domains of research and development. While the performance of NLP methods has grown…
Natural language processing for programming aims to use NLP techniques to assist programming. It is increasingly prevalent for its effectiveness in improving productivity. Distinct from natural language, a programming language is highly…
Over the past decade, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to the extraction of information from textual process descriptions. Despite the remarkable progress witnessed in natural language processing (NLP), information extraction…
NLP models have progressed drastically in recent years, according to numerous datasets proposed to evaluate performance. Questions remain, however, about how particular dataset design choices may impact the conclusions we draw about model…
Current legal outcome prediction models - a staple of legal NLP - do not explain their reasoning. However, to employ these models in the real world, human legal actors need to be able to understand the model's decisions. In the case of…