Papers by Alon Halfon
Cluster & Tune: Boost Cold Start Performance in Text Classification (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to fine-tune pre-trained models for text classification are poor in practice. |
| Approach: | They propose to add an intermediate unsupervised classification task between pre-training and fine-tuning phases to boost performance of pre-trained models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves performance on topical classification tasks when labeled data is scarce. |
Label Sleuth: From Unlabeled Text to a Classifier in a Few Hours (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Eyal Shnarch, Alon Halfon, Ariel Gera, Marina Danilevsky, Yannis Katsis, Leshem Choshen, Martin Santillan Cooper, Dina Epelboim, Zheng Zhang, Dakuo Wang
| Challenge: | Label Sleuth is an open source system for labeling and creating text classifiers which does not require coding skills nor machine learning knowledge. |
| Approach: | *Label Sleuth* is an open source system for labeling and creating text classifiers which does not require coding skills nor machine learning knowledge. |
| Outcome: | *Label Sleuth* is an open source system for labeling and creating text classifiers. |
From Surrogacy to Adoption; From Bitcoin to Cryptocurrency: Debate Topic Expansion (P19-1)
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Roy Bar-Haim, Dalia Krieger, Orith Toledo-Ronen, Lilach Edelstein, Yonatan Bilu, Alon Halfon, Yoav Katz, Amir Menczel, Ranit Aharonov, Noam Slonim
| Challenge: | Recent advances in argumentation mining have left much of the relevant argumentative content out of reach. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of Debate Topic Expansion to find related topics for a given debate topic, along with an annotated dataset for the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed algorithms differ from well-studied lexical-semantic relations and show they work well in argumentation mining. |
Learning Thematic Similarity Metric from Article Sections Using Triplet Networks (P18-2)
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| Challenge: | In this paper, we use Wikipedia articles to learn thematic similarity metric between sentences. |
| Approach: | They propose to leverage the partition of articles into sections to learn thematic similarity metric between sentences. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art embeddings on the task of thematic clustering of sentences. |
Financial Event Extraction Using Wikipedia-Based Weak Supervision (D19-51)
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Liat Ein-Dor, Ariel Gera, Orith Toledo-Ronen, Alon Halfon, Benjamin Sznajder, Lena Dankin, Yonatan Bilu, Yoav Katz, Noam Slonim
| Challenge: | Existing methods for detecting financial and economic events from text have relied on a knowledge-base of financial events, or corresponding financial figures. |
| Approach: | They propose to use Wikipedia sections to extract weak labels for sentences describing economic events from text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can extract weak labels for sentences describing economic events from Wikipedia sentences. |
Zero-shot Topical Text Classification with LLMs - an Experimental Study (2023.findings-emnlp)
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Shai Gretz, Alon Halfon, Ilya Shnayderman, Orith Toledo-Ronen, Artem Spector, Lena Dankin, Yannis Katsis, Ofir Arviv, Yoav Katz, Noam Slonim, Liat Ein-Dor
| Challenge: | Topical text classification is an ancient, yet timely research area in natural language processing. |
| Approach: | They compare the zero-shot performance of a variety of LMs over a large dataset of 23 publicly available TTC datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform their counterparts over a large dataset and show that they perform better in a zero-shot scenario. |
Semantic Relatedness of Wikipedia Concepts – Benchmark Data and a Working Solution (L18-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to measure relatedness between Wikipedia concepts are lacking. |
| Approach: | They propose a new type of concept relatedness dataset, WORD, which is annotated by a human . they use this dataset to assess relatedness between Wikipedia concepts using supervised methods. |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset outperforms existing methods for measuring relatedness between Wikipedia concepts. |
Zero-Shot Text Classification with Self-Training (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent advances in large pretrained language models have increased attention to zero-shot text classification. |
| Approach: | They propose a plug-and-play method to bridge this gap by requiring only class names along with an unlabeled dataset. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be trained on a natural language inference dataset and performs on dozens of unseen tasks without the need for domain expertise or trial and error. |
Learning Sentiment Composition from Sentiment Lexicons (C18-1)
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Orith Toledo-Ronen, Roy Bar-Haim, Alon Halfon, Charles Jochim, Amir Menczel, Ranit Aharonov, Noam Slonim
| Challenge: | Sentiment composition is a fundamental problem in sentiment analysis. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for learning sentiment composition from a large, unlabeled corpus . they automatically generate large sentiment lexicons of bigrams and unigrams . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is validated through manual annotation and sentiment classification experiments with phrase-level and sentence-level benchmarks. |
Active Learning for BERT: An Empirical Study (2020.emnlp-main)
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Liat Ein-Dor, Alon Halfon, Ariel Gera, Eyal Shnarch, Lena Dankin, Leshem Choshen, Marina Danilevsky, Ranit Aharonov, Yoav Katz, Noam Slonim
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to deal with data scarcity are active learning (AL) and pre-trained models are not being considered. |
| Approach: | They propose to use active learning techniques to cope with data scarcity in binary text classification scenarios where the annotation budget is very small and the data is often skewed. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve BERT performance in binary text classification scenarios where the annotation budget is very small and the data is often skewed. |