Identifying Semantic Divergences in Parallel Text without Annotations

Recognizing that even correct translations are not always semantically equivalent, we automatically detect meaning divergences in parallel sentence pairs with a deep neural model of bilingual semantic similarity which can be trained for any parallel corpus without any manual annotation. We show that our semantic model detects divergences more accurately than models based on surface features derived from word alignments, and that these divergences matter for neural machine translation.Comment: Accepted as a full paper to NAACL 201

How To Control Text Simplification? An Empirical Study of Control Tokens for Meaning Preserving Controlled Simplification

Text simplification rewrites text to be more readable for a specific audience, while preserving its meaning. However, determining what makes a text easy to read depends on who are the intended readers. Recent work has introduced a wealth of techniques to control output simplicity, ranging from specifying the desired reading grade level to providing control tokens that directly encode low-level simplification edit operations. However, it remains unclear how to set the input parameters that control simplification in practice. Existing approaches set them at the corpus level, disregarding the complexity of individual source text, and do not directly evaluate them at the instance level. In this work, we conduct an empirical study to understand how different control mechanisms impact the adequacy and simplicity of model outputs. Based on these insights, we introduce a simple method for predicting control tokens at the sentence level to enhance the quality of the simplified text. Predicting control token values using features extracted from the original complex text and a user-specified degree of complexity improves the quality of the simplified outputs over corpus-level search-based heuristics.Comment: work in progres

Towards Conceptualization of "Fair Explanation": Disparate Impacts of anti-Asian Hate Speech Explanations on Content Moderators

Recent research at the intersection of AI explainability and fairness has focused on how explanations can improve human-plus-AI task performance as assessed by fairness measures. We propose to characterize what constitutes an explanation that is itself "fair" -- an explanation that does not adversely impact specific populations. We formulate a novel evaluation method of "fair explanations" using not just accuracy and label time, but also psychological impact of explanations on different user groups across many metrics (mental discomfort, stereotype activation, and perceived workload). We apply this method in the context of content moderation of potential hate speech, and its differential impact on Asian vs. non-Asian proxy moderators, across explanation approaches (saliency map and counterfactual explanation). We find that saliency maps generally perform better and show less evidence of disparate impact (group) and individual unfairness than counterfactual explanations. Content warning: This paper contains examples of hate speech and racially discriminatory language. The authors do not support such content. Please consider your risk of discomfort carefully before continuing reading!Comment: EMNLP 2023 Main Conference (Long Paper