Linzi Xing


2023

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Tracing Influence at Scale: A Contrastive Learning Approach to Linking Public Comments and Regulator Responses
Linzi Xing | Brad Hackinen | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the Natural Legal Language Processing Workshop 2023

U.S. Federal Regulators receive over one million comment letters each year from businesses, interest groups, and members of the public, all advocating for changes to proposed regulations. These comments are believed to have wide-ranging impacts on public policy. However, measuring the impact of specific comments is challenging because regulators are required to respond to comments but they do not have to specify which comments they are addressing. In this paper, we propose a simple yet effective solution to this problem by using an iterative contrastive method to train a neural model aiming for matching text from public comments to responses written by regulators. We demonstrate that our proposal substantially outperforms a set of selected text-matching baselines on a human-annotated test set. Furthermore, it delivers performance comparable to the most advanced gigantic language model (i.e., GPT-4), and is more cost-effective when handling comments and regulator responses matching in larger scale.

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Diversity-Aware Coherence Loss for Improving Neural Topic Models
Raymond Li | Felipe Gonzalez-Pizarro | Linzi Xing | Gabriel Murray | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

The standard approach for neural topic modeling uses a variational autoencoder (VAE) framework that jointly minimizes the KL divergence between the estimated posterior and prior, in addition to the reconstruction loss. Since neural topic models are trained by recreating individual input documents, they do not explicitly capture the coherence between words on the corpus level. In this work, we propose a novel diversity-aware coherence loss that encourages the model to learn corpus-level coherence scores while maintaining high diversity between topics. Experimental results on multiple datasets show that our method significantly improves the performance of neural topic models without requiring any pretraining or additional parameters.

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LaTeX2Solver: a Hierarchical Semantic Parsing of LaTeX Document into Code for an Assistive Optimization Modeling Application
Rindra Ramamonjison | Timothy Yu | Linzi Xing | Mahdi Mostajabdaveh | Xiaorui Li | Xiaojin Fu | Xiongwei Han | Yuanzhe Chen | Ren Li | Kun Mao | Yong Zhang
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 3: System Demonstrations)

We demonstrate an interactive system to help operations research (OR) practitioners convert the mathematical formulation of optimization problems from TeX document format into the solver modeling language. In practice, a manual translation is cumbersome and time-consuming. Moreover, it requires an in-depth understanding of the problem description and a technical expertise to produce the modeling code. Thus, our proposed system TeX2Solver helps partially automate this conversion and help the users build optimization models more efficiently. In this paper, we describe its interface and the components of the hierarchical parsing system. A video demo walk-through is available online at http://bit.ly/3kuOm3x

2022

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Improving Topic Segmentation by Injecting Discourse Dependencies
Linzi Xing | Patrick Huber | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse

Recent neural supervised topic segmentation models achieve distinguished superior effectiveness over unsupervised methods, with the availability of large-scale training corpora sampled from Wikipedia. These models may, however, suffer from limited robustness and transferability caused by exploiting simple linguistic cues for prediction, but overlooking more important inter-sentential topical consistency. To address this issue, we present a discourse-aware neural topic segmentation model with the injection of above-sentence discourse dependency structures to encourage the model make topic boundary prediction based more on the topical consistency between sentences. Our empirical study on English evaluation datasets shows that injecting above-sentence discourse structures to a neural topic segmenter with our proposed strategy can substantially improve its performances on intra-domain and out-of-domain data, with little increase of model’s complexity.

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Human Guided Exploitation of Interpretable Attention Patterns in Summarization and Topic Segmentation
Raymond Li | Wen Xiao | Linzi Xing | Lanjun Wang | Gabriel Murray | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

The multi-head self-attention mechanism of the transformer model has been thoroughly investigated recently. In one vein of study, researchers are interested in understanding why and how transformers work. In another vein, researchers propose new attention augmentation methods to make transformers more accurate, efficient and interpretable. In this paper, we combine these two lines of research in a human-in-the-loop pipeline to first discover important task-specific attention patterns. Then those patterns are injected, not only to smaller models, but also to the original model. The benefits of our pipeline and discovered patterns are demonstrated in two case studies with extractive summarization and topic segmentation. After discovering interpretable patterns in BERT-based models fine-tuned for the two downstream tasks, experiments indicate that when we inject the patterns into attention heads, the models show considerable improvements in accuracy and efficiency.

2021

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Improving Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation with Utterance-Pair Coherence Scoring
Linzi Xing | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue

Dialogue topic segmentation is critical in several dialogue modeling problems. However, popular unsupervised approaches only exploit surface features in assessing topical coherence among utterances. In this work, we address this limitation by leveraging supervisory signals from the utterance-pair coherence scoring task. First, we present a simple yet effective strategy to generate a training corpus for utterance-pair coherence scoring. Then, we train a BERT-based neural utterance-pair coherence model with the obtained training corpus. Finally, such model is used to measure the topical relevance between utterances, acting as the basis of the segmentation inference. Experiments on three public datasets in English and Chinese demonstrate that our proposal outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.

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Demoting the Lead Bias in News Summarization via Alternating Adversarial Learning
Linzi Xing | Wen Xiao | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers)

In news articles the lead bias is a common phenomenon that usually dominates the learning signals for neural extractive summarizers, severely limiting their performance on data with different or even no bias. In this paper, we introduce a novel technique to demote lead bias and make the summarizer focus more on the content semantics. Experiments on two news corpora with different degrees of lead bias show that our method can effectively demote the model’s learned lead bias and improve its generality on out-of-distribution data, with little to no performance loss on in-distribution data.

2020

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Improving Context Modeling in Neural Topic Segmentation
Linzi Xing | Brad Hackinen | Giuseppe Carenini | Francesco Trebbi
Proceedings of the 1st Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 10th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing

Topic segmentation is critical in key NLP tasks and recent works favor highly effective neural supervised approaches. However, current neural solutions are arguably limited in how they model context. In this paper, we enhance a segmenter based on a hierarchical attention BiLSTM network to better model context, by adding a coherence-related auxiliary task and restricted self-attention. Our optimized segmenter outperforms SOTA approaches when trained and tested on three datasets. We also the robustness of our proposed model in domain transfer setting by training a model on a large-scale dataset and testing it on four challenging real-world benchmarks. Furthermore, we apply our proposed strategy to two other languages (German and Chinese), and show its effectiveness in multilingual scenarios.

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Multilingual Twitter Corpus and Baselines for Evaluating Demographic Bias in Hate Speech Recognition
Xiaolei Huang | Linzi Xing | Franck Dernoncourt | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Existing research on fairness evaluation of document classification models mainly uses synthetic monolingual data without ground truth for author demographic attributes. In this work, we assemble and publish a multilingual Twitter corpus for the task of hate speech detection with inferred four author demographic factors: age, country, gender and race/ethnicity. The corpus covers five languages: English, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish. We evaluate the inferred demographic labels with a crowdsourcing platform, Figure Eight. To examine factors that can cause biases, we take an empirical analysis of demographic predictability on the English corpus. We measure the performance of four popular document classifiers and evaluate the fairness and bias of the baseline classifiers on the author-level demographic attributes.

2019

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Evaluating Topic Quality with Posterior Variability
Linzi Xing | Michael J. Paul | Giuseppe Carenini
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Probabilistic topic models such as latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) are popularly used with Bayesian inference methods such as Gibbs sampling to learn posterior distributions over topic model parameters. We derive a novel measure of LDA topic quality using the variability of the posterior distributions. Compared to several existing baselines for automatic topic evaluation, the proposed metric achieves state-of-the-art correlations with human judgments of topic quality in experiments on three corpora. We additionally demonstrate that topic quality estimation can be further improved using a supervised estimator that combines multiple metrics.

2017

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Incorporating Metadata into Content-Based User Embeddings
Linzi Xing | Michael J. Paul
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Noisy User-generated Text

Low-dimensional vector representations of social media users can benefit applications like recommendation systems and user attribute inference. Recent work has shown that user embeddings can be improved by combining different types of information, such as text and network data. We propose a data augmentation method that allows novel feature types to be used within off-the-shelf embedding models. Experimenting with the task of friend recommendation on a dataset of 5,019 Twitter users, we show that our approach can lead to substantial performance gains with the simple addition of network and geographic features.