Papers by Michael White
Best Practices for Data-Efficient Modeling in NLG:How to Train Production-Ready Neural Models with Less Data (2020.coling-industry)
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Ankit Arun, Soumya Batra, Vikas Bhardwaj, Ashwini Challa, Pinar Donmez, Peyman Heidari, Hakan Inan, Shashank Jain, Anuj Kumar, Shawn Mei, Karthik Mohan, Michael White
| Challenge: | Natural language generation (NLG) is a critical component in conversational systems . Traditionally, NLG components have been deployed using template-based solutions . however, deployment of such model-based systems has been challenging due to high latency and data needs. |
| Approach: | They propose a family of techniques to deploy data-efficient neural solutions for NLG in conversational systems to production. |
| Outcome: | The proposed techniques achieve production quality with light-weight neural network models using fraction of the data needed otherwise. |
MS-LaTTE: A Dataset of Where and When To-do Tasks are Completed (2022.lrec-1)
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| Challenge: | Tasks are a fundamental unit of work in the daily lives of people, who are increasingly using digital means to keep track of, organize, triage, and act on them. |
| Approach: | They compile and release a large-scale dataset that captures location and time for tasks and a BERT-fine-tuned model that predicts task co-occurrence. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework captures location and time, and predicts task co-occurrence with a BERT fine-tuned model outperforming baselines. |
Towards Transparent Interactive Semantic Parsing via Step-by-Step Correction (2022.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | Existing studies on semantic parsing focus on mapping a natural-language utterance to a logical form (LF) but natural language may contain ambiguity and variability, making this challenge difficult. |
| Approach: | They propose an interactive semantic parsing framework that explains the predicted LF step by step in natural language and enables the user to make corrections through natural-language feedback for individual steps. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves parsing accuracy and transparency in a crowdsourced dialogue dataset. |
The OSU/Facebook Realizer for SRST 2019: Seq2Seq Inflection and Serialized Tree2Tree Linearization (D19-63)
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| Challenge: | Existing linearization methods for shallow surface realization tasks are not available for all languages. |
| Approach: | They propose a system that implements morphological inflection with a baseline linearizer for a shallow surface realization task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed system is competitive across languages, but poor on longer sentences. |
Beyond Length: Context-Aware Expansion and Independence as Developmentally Sensitive Evaluation in Child Utterances (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Common proxies such as Mean Length of Utterance (MLU), lexical diversity (vocd-D), and readability indices are dominated by length and ignore conversational context, missing aspects of response quality such as reasoning depth, topic maintenance, and discourse planning. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework that classifies the Previous Adult Utterance Type and scores the child’s response along two axes: Expansion (contextual elaboration and inferential depth) and Independence (the child’ s contribution to advancing the discourse). |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework assesses the child's response along two axes: Expansion (contextual elaboration and inferential depth) and Independence (the child’s contribution to advancing the discourse). |
When is Tree Search Useful for LLM Planning? It Depends on the Discriminator (2024.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing methods to build language agents that can plan efficiently and accurately have not met the needs of advanced planning methods to achieve such improvements. |
| Approach: | They propose to use iterative correction and tree search to solve multi-step problems in a language agent framework with three components: a generator, a discriminator, and a planning method. |
| Outcome: | The proposed methods improve performance on two tasks, text-to-SQL parsing and mathematical reasoning, while using discriminators with 90% accuracy. |
Madly Ambiguous: A Game for Learning about Structural Ambiguity and Why It’s Hard for Computers (N18-5)
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| Challenge: | the game is an open source, in-browser game aimed at teaching audiences of all ages about structural ambiguity and the difficulties it poses for natural language processing. |
| Approach: | the game is an open source, in-browser game aimed at teaching audiences of all ages about structural ambiguity and the difficulties it poses for natural language processing. |
| Outcome: | the game is an open source, in-browser game aimed at teaching audiences of all ages about structural ambiguity and the difficulties it poses for natural language processing. |
GEMv2: Multilingual NLG Benchmarking in a Single Line of Code (2022.emnlp-demos)
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Sebastian Gehrmann, Abhik Bhattacharjee, Abinaya Mahendiran, Alex Wang, Alexandros Papangelis, Aman Madaan, Angelina Mcmillan-major, Anna Shvets, Ashish Upadhyay, Bernd Bohnet, Bingsheng Yao, Bryan Wilie, Chandra Bhagavatula, Chaobin You, Craig Thomson, Cristina Garbacea, Dakuo Wang, Daniel Deutsch, Deyi Xiong, Di Jin, Dimitra Gkatzia, Dragomir Radev, Elizabeth Clark, Esin Durmus, Faisal Ladhak, Filip Ginter, Genta Indra Winata, Hendrik Strobelt, Hiroaki Hayashi, Jekaterina Novikova, Jenna Kanerva, Jenny Chim, Jiawei Zhou, Jordan Clive, Joshua Maynez, João Sedoc, Juraj Juraska, Kaustubh Dhole, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu, Laura Perez Beltrachini, Leonardo F . R. Ribeiro, Lewis Tunstall, Li Zhang, Mahim Pushkarna, Mathias Creutz, Michael White, Mihir Sanjay Kale, Moussa Kamal Eddine, Nico Daheim, Nishant Subramani, Ondrej Dusek, Paul Pu Liang, Pawan Sasanka Ammanamanchi, Qi Zhu, Ratish Puduppully, Reno Kriz, Rifat Shahriyar, Ronald Cardenas, Saad Mahamood, Salomey Osei, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Sanja Štajner, Sebastien Montella, Shailza Jolly, Simon Mille, Tahmid Hasan, Tianhao Shen, Tosin Adewumi, Vikas Raunak, Vipul Raheja, Vitaly Nikolaev, Vivian Tsai, Yacine Jernite, Ying Xu, Yisi Sang, Yixin Liu, Yufang Hou
| Challenge: | Evaluations in machine learning rarely use the latest metrics, datasets, or human evaluation in favor of remaining compatible with prior work. |
| Approach: | They propose to use the Generation, Evaluation, and Metrics Benchmark to integrate new evaluation methods into existing evaluations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation infrastructure bridges the gap between the advantages of leaderboards and in-depth and evolving evaluations by allowing model developers to benefit from each other's work. |
Text-to-SQL Error Correction with Language Models of Code (2023.acl-short)
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Ziru Chen, Shijie Chen, Michael White, Raymond Mooney, Ali Payani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Yu Su, Huan Sun
| Challenge: | Existing semantic parsers are not accurate enough for use in text-to-SQL parsing tasks. |
| Approach: | They propose to build clause-level edit models to correct SQL queries instead of token-level ones. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves the exact set match accuracy of different parsers by 2.4-6.5 and obtains up to 4.3 point absolute improvement over two strong baselines. |
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. |
Building Adaptive Acceptability Classifiers for Neural NLG (2021.emnlp-main)
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Soumya Batra, Shashank Jain, Peyman Heidari, Ankit Arun, Catharine Youngs, Xintong Li, Pinar Donmez, Shawn Mei, Shiunzu Kuo, Vikas Bhardwaj, Anuj Kumar, Michael White
| Challenge: | Existing approaches to generate synthetic data using simple sentence transformations and/or model-based techniques may not generate realistic error samples with respect to the NLG models. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework to train models to classify acceptability of responses generated by natural language generation models using a 2-stage approach . they use existing sentence transformations to generate samples that better resemble the output of the generation models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach outperforms existing techniques and can be used in few-shot settings using self-training. |
VISTA: Verification In Sequential Turn-based Assessment (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing metrics evaluate isolated responses or treat unverifiable content as errors, limiting their use for multi-turn dialogue. |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for evaluating conversational factuality via claim-level verification and sequential consistency tracking. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework improves hallucination detection over existing benchmarks and models. |
Constrained Decoding for Neural NLG from Compositional Representations in Task-Oriented Dialogue (P19-1)
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| Challenge: | Generating fluent natural language responses from structured semantic representations is a critical step in task-oriented conversational systems. |
| Approach: | They propose using tree-structured semantic representations for better discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning and introduce a challenging dataset using this representation for the weather domain. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves discourse-level structuring and sentence-level planning on a weather domain and can be decoded to improve semantic correctness. |