Publications

2023

1. Rule By Example: Harnessing Logical Rules for Explainable Hate Speech Detection

   Christopher Clarke, Matthew Hall , Gaurav Mittal , and 4 more authors

   In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) , Jul 2023

   Abs PDF

   Classic approaches to content moderation typically apply a rule-based heuristic approach to flag content. While rules are easily customizable and intuitive for humans to interpret, they are inherently fragile and lack the flexibility or robustness needed to moderate the vast amount of undesirable content found online today. Recent advances in deep learning have demonstrated the promise of using highly effective deep neural models to overcome these challenges. However, despite the improved performance, these data-driven models lack transparency and explainability, often leading to mistrust from everyday users and a lack of adoption by many platforms. In this paper, we present Rule By Example (RBE): a novel exemplar-based contrastive learning approach for learning from logical rules for the task of textual content moderation. RBE is capable of providing rule-grounded predictions, allowing for more explainable and customizable predictions compared to typical deep learning-based approaches. We demonstrate that our approach is capable of learning rich rule embedding representations using only a few data examples. Experimental results on 3 popular hate speech classification datasets show that RBE is able to outperform state-of-the-art deep learning classifiers as well as the use of rules in both supervised and unsupervised settings while providing explainable model predictions via rule-grounding.

2. Label Agnostic Pre-training for Zero-shot Text Classification

   Christopher Clarke, Yuzhao Heng , Yiping Kang , and 3 more authors

   Jul 2023

   Abs arXiv PDF

   Conventional approaches to text classification typically assume the existence of a fixed set of predefined labels to which a given text can be classified. However, in real-world applications, there exists an infinite label space for describing a given text. In addition, depending on the aspect (sentiment, topic, etc.) and domain of the text (finance, legal, etc.), the interpretation of the label can vary greatly. This makes the task of text classification, particularly in the zero-shot scenario, extremely challenging. In this paper, we investigate the task of zero-shot text classification with the aim of improving the ability of pre-trained language models (PLMs) to generalize to both seen and unseen data across varying aspects and domains. To solve this we introduce two new simple yet effective pre-training strategies, Implicit and Explicit pre-training. These methods inject aspect-level understanding into the model at train time with the goal of conditioning the model to build task-level understanding. To evaluate this, we construct and release UTCD, a new benchmark dataset for evaluating text classification in zero-shot settings. Experimental results on UTCD show that our approach achieves improved zero-shot generalization on a suite of challenging datasets across an array of zero-shot formalizations.

2022

1. ACL

   One Agent To Rule Them All: Towards Multi-agent Conversational AI

   Christopher Clarke, Joseph Joshua Peper , Karthik Krishnamurthy , and 6 more authors

   Jul 2022

   Abs arXiv PDF

   The increasing volume of commercially available conversational agents (CAs) on the market has resulted in users being burdened with learning and adopting multiple agents to accomplish their tasks. Though prior work has explored supporting a multitude of domains within the design of a single agent, the interaction experience suffers due to the large action space of desired capabilities. To address these problems, we introduce a new task BBAI: Black-Box Agent Integration, focusing on combining the capabilities of multiple black-box CAs at scale. We explore two techniques: question agent pairing and question response pairing aimed at resolving this task. Leveraging these techniques, we design One For All (OFA), a scalable system that provides a unified interface to interact with multiple CAs. Additionally, we introduce MARS: Multi-Agent Response Selection, a new encoder model for question response pairing that jointly encodes user question and agent response pairs. We demonstrate that OFA is able to automatically and accurately integrate an ensemble of commercially available CAs spanning disparate domains. Specifically, using the MARS encoder we achieve the highest accuracy on our BBAI task, outperforming strong baselines.

2. ARXIV

   Towards Personalized Intelligence at Scale

   Yiping Kang , Ashish Mahendra , Christopher Clarke, and 2 more authors

   Jul 2022

   Abs arXiv PDF

   Personalized Intelligence (PI) is the problem of providing customized AI experiences tailored to each individual user. In many applications, PI is preferred or even required. Existing personalization approaches involve fine-tuning pre-trained models to create new customized models. However, these approaches require a significant amount of computation to train, scaling with model size and the number of users, inhibiting PI to be realized widely. In this work, we introduce a novel model architecture and training/inference framework to enable Personalized Intelligence at scale. We achieve this by attaching a Personalization Head (PH) to pre-trained language models (LM). During training, the base LMs are frozen and only the parameters in PH are updated and are unique per user. This results in significantly smaller overall model sizes and training cost than traditional fine-tuning approaches when scaled across many users. We evaluate PHs on academia and industry-focused datasets and show that the PHs outperform zeroshot baseline in F1 score and are significantly more scalable than traditional fine-tuning approaches. We identify key factors required for effective PH design and training.

2019

1. EMNLP

   An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction

   Stefan Larson , Anish Mahendran , Joseph J. Peper , and 8 more authors

   In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP) , Nov 2019

   Abs arXiv PDF

   Task-oriented dialog systems need to know when a query falls outside their range of supported intents, but current text classification corpora only define label sets that cover every example. We introduce a new dataset that includes queries that are out-of-scope—i.e., queries that do not fall into any of the system’s supported intents. This poses a new challenge because models cannot assume that every query at inference time belongs to a system-supported intent class. Our dataset also covers 150 intent classes over 10 domains, capturing the breadth that a production task-oriented agent must handle. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers on our dataset along with several different out-of-scope identification schemes. We find that while the classifiers perform well on in-scope intent classification, they struggle to identify out-of-scope queries. Our dataset and evaluation fill an important gap in the field, offering a way of more rigorously and realistically benchmarking text classification in task-driven dialog systems.

1967

1. 

   Letters on wave mechanics

   Albert Einstein , Erwin Schrödinger, Max Planck, and 2 more authors

   Nov 1967

   Bib

   @book{przibram1967letters,
     title = {Letters on wave mechanics},
     author = {Einstein, Albert and Schrödinger, Erwin and Planck, Max and Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon and Przibram, Karl},
     year = {1967},
     publisher = {Vision},
   }