Related papers: I Bet You Did Not Mean That: Testing Semantic Impo…
Statistical significance testing of differences in values of metrics like recall, precision and balanced F-score is a necessary part of empirical natural language processing. Unfortunately, we find in a set of experiments that many commonly…
The established language for statistical testing --- significance levels, power, and p-values --- is overly complicated and deceptively conclusive. Even teachers of statistics and scientists who use statistics misinterpret the results of…
Concept Bottleneck Models (CBMs) are regarded as inherently interpretable because they first predict a set of human-defined concepts which are used to predict a task label. For inherent interpretability to be fully realised, and ensure…
A popular approach to significance testing proposes to decide whether the given hypothesized statistical model is likely to be true (or false). Statistical decision theory provides a basis for this approach by requiring every significance…
Many NLP tasks require to automatically identify the most significant words in a text. In this work, we derive word significance from models trained to solve semantic task: Natural Language Inference and Paraphrase Identification. Using an…
We study the problems of sequential nonparametric two-sample and independence testing. Sequential tests process data online and allow using observed data to decide whether to stop and reject the null hypothesis or to collect more data,…
A lot of Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) research is of an empirical nature. Nevertheless, statistical significance testing (SST) is still not widely used. This endangers true progress, as seeming improvements over a baseline…
Independence testing is a classical statistical problem that has been extensively studied in the batch setting when one fixes the sample size before collecting data. However, practitioners often prefer procedures that adapt to the…
An exciting recent development is the uptake of deep neural networks in many scientific fields, where the main objective is outcome prediction with the black-box nature. Significance testing is promising to address the black-box issue and…
Detecting lexical semantic change in smaller data sets, e.g. in historical linguistics and digital humanities, is challenging due to a lack of statistical power. This issue is exacerbated by non-contextual embedding models that produce one…
Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong performance across many tasks but suffer from high inference latency due to autoregressive decoding. The issue is exacerbated in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs), which generate lengthy chains of…
Probabilistic program analysis aims to quantify the probability that a given program satisfies a required property. It has many potential applications, from program understanding and debugging to computing program reliability, compiler…
We introduce a testing-by-betting framework that leverages predictions on unlabeled data to enhance the power of sequential hypothesis testing. Given limited samples from the joint distribution of $(X,Y)$, and additional unlabeled samples…
To address the challenge of quantifying uncertainty in the outputs generated by language models, we propose a novel measure of semantic uncertainty, semantic spectral entropy, that is statistically consistent under mild assumptions. This…
Null hypothesis significance testing remains popular despite decades of concern about misuse and misinterpretation. We believe that much of the problem is due to language: significance testing has little to do with other meanings of the…
Sentiment Analysis is the task of classifying documents based on the sentiments expressed in textual form, this can be achieved by using lexical and semantic methods. The purpose of this study is to investigate the use of semantics to…
This paper offers a commentary on the use of notions of statistical significance in choice modelling. We review the reasons for uncertainty in parameter estimates, provide a precise discussion on the computation of measures of uncertainty…
Feature importance scores are ubiquitous tools for understanding the predictions of machine learning models. However, many popular attribution methods suffer from high instability due to random sampling. Leveraging novel ideas from…
Statistical significance testing is used in natural language processing (NLP) to determine whether the results of a study or experiment are likely to be due to chance or if they reflect a genuine relationship. A key step in significance…
We propose a novel symbolic modeling framework for decision-making under risk that merges interpretability with the core insights of Prospect Theory. Our approach replaces opaque utility curves and probability weighting functions with…