Title: Incremental Neural Lexical Coherence Modeling (Oral, 10 mins)
Speaker: Sungho Jeon (HITS)
Abstract
Pretrained language models, neural models pretrained on massive amounts of data, have established the state of the art in a range of NLP tasks. They are based on a modern machine-learning technique, the Transformer which relates all items simultaneously to capture semantic relations in sequences. However, it differs from what humans do. Humans read sentences one-by-one, incrementally. Can neural models benefit by interpreting texts incrementally as humans do? We investigate this question in coherence modeling. We propose a coherence model which interprets sentences incrementally to capture lexical relations between them. We compare the state of the art in each task, simple neural models relying on a pretrained language model, and our model in two downstream tasks. Our findings suggest that interpreting texts incrementally as humans could be useful to design more advanced models.
Title: Context in Informational Bias Detection (Poster)
Speaker: Esther Van den Berg (ICL)
Abstract
Informational bias is bias conveyed through sentences or clauses that provide tangential, speculative or background information that can sway readers' opinions towards entities. By nature, informational bias is context-dependent, but previous work on informational bias detection has not explored the role of context beyond the sentence. We present experiments with four kinds of context for informational bias in English news articles: neighboring sentences, the
full article, articles on the same event from other news publishers, and articles from the same domain (but potentially different events). We find that integrating event context improves classification performance over a very strong baseline. In addition, we perform the first error analysis of models on this task. We find that the est-performing context-inclusive model outperforms the baseline on longer sentences, and sentences from politically centrist articles.
