Papers by Chris Alberti
Corpora Generation for Grammatical Error Correction (N19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) is a computational task that requires large amounts of data to solve. |
| Approach: | They propose two approaches to generate large parallel datasets for GEC using publicly available Wikipedia edit histories using minimal filtration heuristics and round-trip translation through bridge languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods yield similar sized parallel corpora with around 4B tokens and are far ahead of the state-of-the-art on the CoNLL ‘14 benchmark and the JFLEG task. |
Coreference Resolution through a seq2seq Transition-Based System (2023.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent coreference resolution systems use search algorithms to identify mentions and resolve coreference. |
| Approach: | They propose a text-to-text coreference resolution system that uses a semantic paradigm to predict mentions and links jointly. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on CoNLL-2012 datasets with 83.3 F1-score for English, 68.5 F1 score for Arabic, and 74.3 F1 scores for Chinese. |
Synthetic QA Corpora Generation with Roundtrip Consistency (P19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Existing methods for generating synthetic question answering corpora are not suitable for QA, but can be constructed from widely available natural text. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for generating synthetic question answering corpora by combining question generation and answer extraction models and filtering the results to ensure roundtrip consistency. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves exact match and F1 at less than 0.1% and 0.4% from human performance on SQuAD2 and NQ. |
Dolomites: Domain-Specific Long-Form Methodical Tasks (2025.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Chaitanya Malaviya, Priyanka Agrawal, Kuzman Ganchev, Pranesh Srinivasan, Fantine Huot, Jonathan Berant, Mark Yatskar, Dipanjan Das, Mirella Lapata, Chris Alberti
| Challenge: | Experts in various fields perform methodical writing tasks to plan, organize, and report their work. |
| Approach: | They propose a benchmark with specifications for 519 methodical writing tasks . they use expert revisions of up to 10 model-generated examples to evaluate contemporary language models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark includes specifications for 519 methodical writing tasks . it includes examples with input and output examples, and is available at https://dolomites-benchmark.github.io/ . |
QED: A Framework and Dataset for Explanations in Question Answering (2021.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
Matthew Lamm, Jennimaria Palomaki, Chris Alberti, Daniel Andor, Eunsol Choi, Livio Baldini Soares, Michael Collins
| Challenge: | Existing question answering systems provide no explanation of reasoning that leads to answer . linguistically informed, extensible framework provides explanations in question answering . |
| Approach: | They propose a linguistically informed, extensible framework for explanations in question answering . they propose an expert-annotated dataset of QED explanations built upon a subset of the Natural Questions dataset . |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves the ability of untrained raters to spot errors in QA datasets. |
Data Weighted Training Strategies for Grammatical Error Correction (2020.tacl-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent advances in the task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) have been driven by addressing data sparsity, both through new methods for generating large and noisy pretraining data and through the publication of small and higher-quality finetuning data in the BEA-2019 shared task. |
| Approach: | They propose to incorporate delta-log-perplexity, a type of example scoring, into a training schedule for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) they perform experiments that shed light on the function and applicability of delta- log-perplicity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods incorporate delta-log-perplexity, a type of example scoring, into a training schedule for the task. |
𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge (2024.eacl-long)
Copied to clipboard
Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata
| Challenge: | Recent advances in abstractive summarization have focused on English, but more recently, with the advent of large pre-trained models, the task is becoming more complex. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-linguistic bridge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art in terms of informativeness and faithfulness on the XWikis dataset. |
ETC: Encoding Long and Structured Inputs in Transformers (2020.emnlp-main)
Copied to clipboard
Joshua Ainslie, Santiago Ontanon, Chris Alberti, Vaclav Cvicek, Zachary Fisher, Philip Pham, Anirudh Ravula, Sumit Sanghai, Qifan Wang, Li Yang
| Challenge: | Existing models for natural language processing (NLP) have been challenging to scale attention to longer inputs. |
| Approach: | They propose an extended Transformer construction architecture that scales attention to longer inputs by combining global-local attention with relative position encodings and a "Contrastive Predictive Coding" objective. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture scales attention to longer inputs and encodes structured inputs. |
Fusion of Detected Objects in Text for Visual Question Answering (D19-1)
Copied to clipboard
| Challenge: | Recent neural architectures such as Transformer and BERT allow for multimodal context, which may help model the meaning of words in general and also sharpen its understanding of instances of words. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural architecture that combines vision and natural language to advance models of multimodal context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed architecture achieves the highest performance on the Visual Commonsense Reasoning benchmark and the best performance to date on the public leaderboard. |