Papers by Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
Multi-Source Cross-Lingual Model Transfer: Learning What to Share (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Cross-lingual transfer learning (CLTL) is a viable method for building NLP models for a low-resource target language . however, many languages lack the labeled training data necessary for training deep neural nets for varying NLP tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual transfer learning method that leverages annotated data from other languages to build NLP models for a target language. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves significant performance gains over prior art over multiple text classification and sequence tagging tasks including a large-scale industry dataset. |
Say ‘YES’ to Positivity: Detecting Toxic Language in Workplace Communications (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Toxic workplace communication is subtle, hidden or shows human biases . lack of corpus, sparsity of toxicity in enterprise emails hinder study . |
| Approach: | They propose a taxonomy to study toxic language at the workplace and a dataset to study it. |
| Outcome: | The proposed taxonomy provides a general and computationally viable taxonomies for studying toxic language at the workplace and analyzes why offensive language and hate-speech datasets are not suitable to detect workplace toxicity. |
Robustness Challenges in Model Distillation and Pruning for Natural Language Understanding (2023.eacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies have focused on compressing pre-trained language models (PLMs) however, few studies have examined the impact of compression on generalizability and robustness of compressed models for out-of-distribution data. |
| Approach: | They propose to use knowledge distillation and pruning to reduce model generalization and generalization on out-of-distribution data. |
| Outcome: | The proposed compression techniques overfit on shortcut samples and generalize poorly on hard ones. |
AutoMoE: Heterogeneous Mixture-of-Experts with Adaptive Computation for Efficient Neural Machine Translation (2023.findings-acl)
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Ganesh Jawahar, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Young Jin Kim, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks Lakshmanan, V.S., Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Sebastien Bubeck, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing MoE designs do not consider computational constraints (e.g., FLOPs, latency) Existing works in MoE consider homogeneous design where the same number of experts of the same size are placed uniformly throughout the network. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for designing heterogeneous MoEs under computational constraints. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework achieves 4x inference speedup and FLOPs reduction over manual models and within 1 BLEU point of MoE SwitchTransformer over benchmark datasets for NMT. |
A Conditional Generative Matching Model for Multi-lingual Reply Suggestion (2021.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for multilingual RS are limited by capacity and data distribution skew . we propose Conditional Generative Matching models (CGM) to overcome these challenges . |
| Approach: | They propose Conditional Generative Matching models to address multilingual RS challenges . they use expressive message conditional priors, mixture densities and latent alignment . results exceed ROUGE scores by 10% on average, and 16% for low resource languages . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exceeds baselines in relevance by 10% on average and 16% for low resource languages. |
Explorer: Scaling Exploration-driven Web Trajectory Synthesis for Multimodal Web Agents (2025.findings-acl)
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Vardaan Pahuja, Yadong Lu, Corby Rosset, Boyu Gou, Arindam Mitra, Spencer Whitehead, Yu Su, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
| Challenge: | Recent success in large multimodal models (LMMs) has sparked promising applications of agents capable of autonomously completing complex web tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a scalable recipe to synthesize the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model synthesizes the largest and most diverse trajectory-level dataset to date, with 94K successful multimodal web trajectories, 720K screenshots, and 33M web elements. |
An Exploratory Study on Long Dialogue Summarization: What Works and What’s Next (2021.findings-emnlp)
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Yusen Zhang, Ansong Ni, Tao Yu, Rui Zhang, Chenguang Zhu, Budhaditya Deb, Asli Celikyilmaz, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing models for dialogue summarization focus on extracting the main events of short conversations, but real-world dialogues are difficult to train. |
| Approach: | They propose three strategies to deal with the lengthy input problem and locate relevant information using long dialogue datasets. |
| Outcome: | The retrieve-then-summarize pipeline models yield the best performance on three long dialogue datasets. |
Self-Training with Weak Supervision (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | State-of-the-art deep neural networks require large amounts of labeled training data that is expensive to obtain or not available for many tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose a weak supervision framework that leverages all available data for a given task . they leverage task-specific unlabeled data through self-training with a model that predicts pseudo-labels for instances that may not be covered by weak rules . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves on state-of-the-art datasets on six benchmark tasks. |
NL-EDIT: Correcting Semantic Parse Errors through Natural Language Interaction (2021.naacl-main)
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Ahmed Elgohary, Christopher Meek, Matthew Richardson, Adam Fourney, Gonzalo Ramos, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
| Challenge: | Existing systems frame semantic parsing as a one-shot translation from a natural language question to the logical form. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that uses natural language feedback to correct parsers . they show that NL-EDIT can boost the accuracy of existing parser by 20% . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can boost parsers' accuracy by 20% with just one turn of correction. |
Leveraging Locality in Abstractive Text Summarization (2022.emnlp-main)
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Yixin Liu, Ansong Ni, Linyong Nan, Budhaditya Deb, Chenguang Zhu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Neural attention models have improved on many natural language processing tasks, but their quadratic memory complexity hinders their applications in long text summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a restricted context to study locality in text summarization . they propose to employ a quadratic memory growth with respect to the input length . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model has better performance than baseline models with efficient attention modules. |
Leveraging Structured Metadata for Improving Question Answering on the Web (2020.aacl-main)
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| Challenge: | Using metadata information from web pages can improve the performance of answer passage selection/reranking models. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural passage selection model that leverages metadata information with a fine-grained encoding strategy to learn the representation for metadata predicates in a hierarchical way. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the MS MARCO and Recipe-MARCO datasets and shows that it is more accurate than baseline models. |
Logical Transformers: Infusing Logical Structures into Pre-Trained Language Models (2023.findings-acl)
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Borui Wang, Qiuyuan Huang, Budhaditya Deb, Aaron Halfaker, Liqun Shao, Daniel McDuff, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Existing pre-trained language models that ignore the logical structures underlying natural language text often lack the ability to capture and encode key logical information in the input sequences. |
| Approach: | They propose to construct logic-aware input embeddings for transformer language models through logic detection, logic mapping and hierarchical logical projections and then develop a new modeling paradigm that can upgrade existing transformer language model into logical transformers to boost their performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can achieve superior performance on four important and challenging tasks. |
On Improving Summarization Factual Consistency from Natural Language Feedback (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that language generation models can make errors on fine-grained qualities such as factual consistency. |
| Approach: | They propose to use natural language feedback to improve generation quality and user preference alignment. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can provide factual consistency in human-edited summaries and further insights into summarization factual consistentness. |
Boosting Natural Language Generation from Instructions with Meta-Learning (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work shows that language models trained with multi-task instructional learning (MTIL) can solve diverse NLP tasks in zero-shot settings with improved performance compared to prompt tuning. |
| Approach: | They propose to adapt meta-learning to MTIL in three directions: 1) Model Agnostic Meta Learning (MAML), 2) Hyper-Network adaptation to generate task specific parameters conditioned on instructions. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approaches improve over strong baselines in zero-shot settings and are most impactful when the test tasks are strictly zero- shot and are "hard" |
Structure-Grounded Pretraining for Text-to-SQL (2021.naacl-main)
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Xiang Deng, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Christopher Meek, Oleksandr Polozov, Huan Sun, Matthew Richardson
| Challenge: | STRUG is a weakly supervised structure-based pretraining framework for text-to-SQL . it can be used to learn to capture text-table alignment in a given database schema . |
| Approach: | They propose a weakly supervised structure-grounded pretraining framework for text-to-SQL that can effectively learn to capture text-table alignment based on a parallel text-tab corpus. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms BERTLARGE and BERTLAGE on all text-to-SQL alignment settings. |
SummerTime: Text Summarization Toolkit for Non-experts (2021.emnlp-demo)
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Ansong Ni, Zhangir Azerbayev, Mutethia Mutuma, Troy Feng, Yusen Zhang, Tao Yu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Recent advances in summarization provide models that can generate high quality summaries . a new toolkit for summarizing text is being developed to make it easier for non-experts to keep track of them. |
| Approach: | They develop a toolkit for text summarization that integrates with libraries designed for NLP researchers. |
| Outcome: | SummerTime is a toolkit for text summarization, including models, datasets, and evaluation metrics. |
QMSum: A New Benchmark for Query-based Multi-domain Meeting Summarization (2021.naacl-main)
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Ming Zhong, Da Yin, Tao Yu, Ahmad Zaidi, Mutethia Mutuma, Rahul Jha, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Asli Celikyilmaz, Yang Liu, Xipeng Qiu, Dragomir Radev
| Challenge: | Existing work on meeting summarization tasks is limited to short summaries that cover all the content of a meeting. |
| Approach: | They propose a query-based multi-domain meeting summarization task that generates a single short summary of meetings based on a transcript. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task is based on 1,808 query-summary pairs over 232 meetings in multiple domains. |
DSEE: Dually Sparsity-embedded Efficient Tuning of Pre-trained Language Models (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Conventional fine-tuning works through updating all of the parameters in the pre-trained model, but as the size of pre-train models grows, it can be time-consuming and computationally expensive. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for resource- and parameter-efficient fine-tuning by leveraging the sparsity prior in both weight updates and the final model weights. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework saves 25% inference FLOPs while maintaining competitive downstream performance. |
A Dataset and Baselines for Multilingual Reply Suggestion (2021.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Reply suggestion models help users process emails and chats faster. |
| Approach: | They present a multilingual reply suggestion dataset with ten languages . they build a generation model and a retrieval model as baselines for MRS . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model complements existing benchmarks for cross-lingual generalization . the model has different strengths in the English monolingual setting and requires different strategies to generalize across languages. |
PREME: Preference-based Meeting Exploration through an Interactive Questionnaire (2023.findings-eacl)
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Negar Arabzadeh, Ali Ahmadvand, Julia Kiseleva, Yang Liu, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Ming Zhong, Milad Shokouhi
| Challenge: | Recent studies show that providing meeting summaries does not align with current approaches to document summarization. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for generating questionnaires for preference-based meeting exploration . they measure how much questions are answerable to ensure factual correctness . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework provides a list of suggested questions reflecting user preferences . it measures how much questions are answerable to ensure factual correctness . |
AdaMix: Mixture-of-Adaptations for Parameter-efficient Model Tuning (2022.emnlp-main)
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Yaqing Wang, Sahaj Agarwal, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Xiaodong Liu, Jing Gao, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah, Jianfeng Gao
| Challenge: | Standard fine-tuning of large pre-trained language models requires updating hundreds of millions to billions of parameters and storing a large copy of the PLM weights for every task. |
| Approach: | They propose a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique where small trainable components are injected into the PLM and updated during fine-uning. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms SOTA parameter-efficient fine-tuning and full model fine-uning on GLUE development set with RoBERTa-large encoder. |
MetaXL: Meta Representation Transformation for Low-resource Cross-lingual Learning (2021.naacl-main)
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Mengzhou Xia, Guoqing Zheng, Subhabrata Mukherjee, Milad Shokouhi, Graham Neubig, Ahmed Hassan Awadallah
| Challenge: | Recent work shows that multilingual representations are disjointed across languages, bringing additional challenges for transfer onto extremely low-resource languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a meta-learning based framework that learns to transform representations judiciously from auxiliary languages to a target one and brings their representation spaces closer for effective transfer. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework learns to transform representations from auxiliary languages to a target language and brings their representation spaces closer for effective transfer. |