Papers by Eric Ma
Texar: A Modularized, Versatile, and Extensible Toolkit for Text Generation (P19-3)
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Zhiting Hu, Haoran Shi, Bowen Tan, Wentao Wang, Zichao Yang, Tiancheng Zhao, Junxian He, Lianhui Qin, Di Wang, Xuezhe Ma, Zhengzhong Liu, Xiaodan Liang, Wanrong Zhu, Devendra Sachan, Eric Xing
| Challenge: | Texar is an open-source text generation toolkit that supports a broad set of text generation tasks. |
| Approach: | They introduce Texar, an open-source text generation toolkit that supports text generation tasks. |
| Outcome: | Texar supports machine translation, summarization, dialog, content manipulation, and more. |
Bend but Don’t Break? Multi-Challenge Stress Test for QA Models (D19-58)
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| Challenge: | a gap remains in reasoning ability compared to a human, and performance tends to degrade when models are exposed to less-constrained tasks. |
| Approach: | They conduct extensive qualitative and quantitative analyses on the results of four models across four datasets . they relate common errors to model capabilities and discuss a way forward . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model performance is based on the results of four models across four datasets. |
Coalescing Global and Local Information for Procedural Text Understanding (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for procedural text understanding have low precision or low recall . et al., 2012, pp. 106-106. |
| Approach: | They propose a model that builds entity- and timestep-aware input representations . they extend the model with additional output layers and integrate it into a story reasoning framework . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art on a popular procedural text understanding dataset and on 'story reasoning benchmark' it integrates the model with additional output layers and improves on the previous models. |
Exploring Strategies for Generalizable Commonsense Reasoning with Pre-trained Models (2021.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Recent work proposes lightweight updates to improve commonsense reasoning models . fine-tuning can cause models to overfit to task-specific data and forget knowledge gained during training . |
| Approach: | They propose to use lightweight models to update pre-trained language models to learn commonsense background knowledge. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models learn from commonsense reasoning datasets, but they are overfitted and limited generalized. |
Semantic Novelty Detection and Characterization in Factual Text Involving Named Entities (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Existing topic-based novelty detection methods do not perform semantic reasoning involving relations between named entities in text and their background knowledge. |
| Approach: | They propose a model to detect whether a text is novel or not . they propose to use a factual text to characterize novelty. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms 10 baselines by large margins on the novelty detection task. |
Chain-of-Skills: A Configurable Model for Open-Domain Question Answering (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Using customized retrieval models, model transferability and scalability are limited. |
| Approach: | They propose a modular retrieval model where individual modules correspond to key skills that can be reused across datasets. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms self-supervised retrievers in zero-shot evaluations and achieves state-of-the-art fine-tuned retrieval performance on NQ, HotpotQA and OTT-QA. |
Open-domain Question Answering via Chain of Reasoning over Heterogeneous Knowledge (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing open-domain question answering methods rely on the retriever to gather all evidence in isolation, but our approach uses an intermediary module to perform a chain of reasoning over the retrieved set. |
| Approach: | They propose a new open-domain question answering framework that integrates an intermediary module into the current retriever-reader pipeline and integrates it into the model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art on two OTT-QA datasets with an exact match score of 47.3 (45% relative gain). |
Semantic Novelty Detection in Natural Language Descriptions (2021.emnlp-main)
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Nianzu Ma, Alexander Politowicz, Sahisnu Mazumder, Jiahua Chen, Bing Liu, Eric Robertson, Scott Grigsby
| Challenge: | Existing novelty detection algorithms are coarse-grained, working at the document or topic level. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a fine-grained semantic novelty detection problem to solve a novel novel scene problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baseline models on the proposed task by large margins. |
Towards Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Systems for Commonsense Question Answering (D19-60)
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| Challenge: | Recent approaches on non-extractive commonsense QA show increased performance . attention-based injection seems to be preferable for knowledge integration . |
| Approach: | They propose to use attention-based injection to integrate knowledge into commonsense QA models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods show that attention-based injection is preferable for knowledge integration, and that the degree of domain overlap plays a crucial role in determining model success. |
Generating and Evaluating Tests for K-12 Students with Language Model Simulations: A Case Study on Sentence Reading Efficiency (2023.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | Developing an educational test can be expensive and time-consuming, as each item must be written by experts and then evaluated by collecting hundreds of student responses. |
| Approach: | They propose to fine-tune large language models to simulate how previous students would have responded to unseen items to generate high-quality parallel tests. |
| Outcome: | The proposed test forms are designed to be content-equivalent and produce identical individual scores as the original test form. |
Open Domain Question Answering with A Unified Knowledge Interface (2022.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | a retriever-reader framework is popular for open domain question answering . however, accessing heterogeneous knowledge sources through a unified interface remains unknown . |
| Approach: | They propose a retriever-reader framework that uses explicit knowledge to access heterogeneous knowledge sources through a unified interface. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework can benefit from the expanded knowledge index, the authors show . their approach sets the single-model state-of-the-art on Natural Questions . |
Leveraging Large Language Models for Learning Complex Legal Concepts through Storytelling (2024.acl-long)
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Hang Jiang, Xiajie Zhang, Robert Mahari, Daniel Kessler, Eric Ma, Tal August, Irene Li, Alex Pentland, Yoon Kim, Deb Roy, Jad Kabbara
| Challenge: | a novel application of large language models (LLMs) to legal education helps non-experts learn complex legal concepts . authors find storytelling helps nonexperts understand complex legal terms and concepts compared to definitions . |
| Approach: | They propose a novel application of large language models to legal education . they use LLMs to generate legal stories explaining complex legal concepts . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves comprehension and interest among non-native speakers compared to definitions . the novel method also shows that non-experts retain more stories . |