Papers by Josef Valvoda
An Ordinal Latent Variable Model of Conflict Intensity (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Advances in automated event extraction yield massive data sets of “who did what to whom” micro-records that enable data-driven approaches to monitoring conflict. |
| Approach: | They propose a probabilistic generative model that assumes each observed event is associated with a latent intensity class. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model obtains comparatively good held-out predictive performance on a conflictual to cooperative scale. |
A Tale of a Probe and a Parser (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | researchers train supervised models to extract linguistic structure from output of another model . supervised model can be used to perform tasks such as part-of-speech tags or dependency trees . |
| Approach: | They compare a structural probe to a more traditional parser with a lightweight parameterisation. |
| Outcome: | The structural probe outperforms a traditional parser on seven of nine languages . the researchers found that the model outperformed the parsers by 11.1 points . |
Towards Explainability in Legal Outcome Prediction Models (2024.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Current legal outcome prediction models do not explain their reasoning in the real world, but human legal actors need to understand the model’s decisions. |
| Approach: | They propose a method for identifying the precedent employed by legal outcome prediction models and a taxonomy of legal precedent to compare human judges and neural models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns to predict outcomes reasonably well, but its use of precedent is unlike that of human judges. |
On the Role of Negative Precedent in Legal Outcome Prediction (2023.tacl-1)
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| Challenge: | Legal outcome prediction is an increasingly popular task in AI. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the dynamics of a court process to develop two new models inspired by the dynamics. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves positive outcome prediction score to 77.15 F1 and doubles negative outcome prediction performance to 24.01 F1. |
On the Machine Learning of Ethical Judgments from Natural Language (2022.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study examines the morality of NLP models that can take in arbitrary text and output a moral judgment . a Delphi project is a popular system for moral prediction, but it has received criticism . |
| Approach: | They propose to critique NLP methods for automating ethical decision-making . they examine a nascent task of predicting moral and ethical decisions from text . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model is unsafe at any accuracy, the authors argue . they argue that the proposed model could be useful in NLP, but not in AI. |
A Probability–Quality Trade-off in Aligned Language Models and its Relation to Sampling Adaptors (2024.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a relationship exists between the quality of a string and its probability, p(y), under a language model, and the quality and quality of the string. |
| Approach: | They examine the probability-quality relationship in language models aligned to human preferences through reinforcement learning through human feedback. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves the quality of text sampled from a language model by skewing the model towards high-probability strings. |
Benchmarking Compositionality with Formal Languages (2022.coling-1)
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| Challenge: | Compositionality is a hallmark of human language, but it is not yet fully understood . recombining known primitive concepts into larger novel combinations is elusive . |
| Approach: | They use finite-state transducers to make a dataset with controllable compositionality . they find that the models either learn the relations completely or not at all . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model learns the relation completely or not at all on large datasets. |
Information-Theoretic Probing for Linguistic Structure (2020.acl-main)
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| Challenge: | Neural networks are the backbone of modern stateof-the-art natural language processing systems. |
| Approach: | They propose an information-theoretic operationalization of probing as estimating mutual information that contradicts received wisdom . they evaluate on a set of ten typologically diverse languages often underrepresented in NLP research—plus English—totalling eleven languages. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms existing models on ten typologically diverse languages and English on 11 languages. |
The Architectural Bottleneck Principle (2022.emnlp-main)
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| Challenge: | a recent study examined how much information a model's representations contain . a new approach to probing is to look exactly like the component . |
| Approach: | They propose a new probing principle that aims to estimate how much information a model could extract from its representations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed probes extract syntactic information from the representations of a neural network . the proposed probe is based on the architectural bottleneck principle . |
UniMorph 4.0: Universal Morphology (2022.lrec-1)
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Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Omer Goldman, Salam Khalifa, Nizar Habash, Witold Kieraś, Gábor Bella, Brian Leonard, Garrett Nicolai, Kyle Gorman, Yustinus Ghanggo Ate, Maria Ryskina, Sabrina Mielke, Elena Budianskaya, Charbel El-Khaissi, Tiago Pimentel, Michael Gasser, William Abbott Lane, Mohit Raj, Matt Coler, Jaime Rafael Montoya Samame, Delio Siticonatzi Camaiteri, Esaú Zumaeta Rojas, Didier López Francis, Arturo Oncevay, Juan López Bautista, Gema Celeste Silva Villegas, Lucas Torroba Hennigen, Adam Ek, David Guriel, Peter Dirix, Jean-Philippe Bernardy, Andrey Scherbakov, Aziyana Bayyr-ool, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Roberto Zariquiey, Karina Sheifer, Sofya Ganieva, Hilaria Cruz, Ritván Karahóǧa, Stella Markantonatou, George Pavlidis, Matvey Plugaryov, Elena Klyachko, Ali Salehi, Candy Angulo, Jatayu Baxi, Andrew Krizhanovsky, Natalia Krizhanovskaya, Elizabeth Salesky, Clara Vania, Sardana Ivanova, Jennifer White, Rowan Hall Maudslay, Josef Valvoda, Ran Zmigrod, Paula Czarnowska, Irene Nikkarinen, Aelita Salchak, Brijesh Bhatt, Christopher Straughn, Zoey Liu, Jonathan North Washington, Yuval Pinter, Duygu Ataman, Marcin Wolinski, Totok Suhardijanto, Anna Yablonskaya, Niklas Stoehr, Hossep Dolatian, Zahroh Nuriah, Shyam Ratan, Francis M. Tyers, Edoardo M. Ponti, Grant Aiton, Aryaman Arora, Richard J. Hatcher, Ritesh Kumar, Jeremiah Young, Daria Rodionova, Anastasia Yemelina, Taras Andrushko, Igor Marchenko, Polina Mashkovtseva, Alexandra Serova, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Maria Nepomniashchaya, Fausto Giunchiglia, Eleanor Chodroff, Mans Hulden, Miikka Silfverberg, Arya D. McCarthy, David Yarowsky, Ryan Cotterell, Reut Tsarfaty, Ekaterina Vylomova
| Challenge: | The Universal Morphology project provides broad-coverage instantiated morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. |
| Outcome: | The proposed schema has added 66 new languages, including 24 endangered languages. |
What About the Precedent: An Information-Theoretic Analysis of Common Law (2021.naacl-main)
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| Challenge: | In common law, the outcome of a new case is determined mostly by precedent cases, rather than by existing statutes. |
| Approach: | They propose to model the argumentation of precedent cases and compare them to a case out-come classification task to determine how the precedent influences the outcome of a new case. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method compared arguments of two longstanding jurisprudential views on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the precedent cases. |
Anchoring the Cache: Mitigating Contextual Hallucination in KV-Compressed Long-Context Summarization (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Recent studies show that KV cache compression can increase hallucination scores in LLMs . modern LLM models support extremely long sequences, but their impact on model hallucinosity remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-phase strategy that selectively removes generated KV pairs from retrieval heads responsible for retrieving critical information from source context. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method reduces hallucination across multiple models and datasets while preserving computational efficiency. |