A Novel Cartography-Based Curriculum Learning Method Applied on RoNLI: The First Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus

Eduard Poesina, Cornelia Caragea, Radu Tudor Ionescu·May 20, 2024

Summary

The paper introduces RoNLI, the first Romanian Natural Language Inference corpus, containing 58K training and 6K validation/test pairs. Created using distant supervision for training and manual annotation for evaluation, the dataset aims to address the lack of NLI resources in Romanian. The authors propose a novel curriculum learning method, data cartography, to improve model performance. Experiments with various models, including RoBERT and RoGPT2, show that cross-lingual models face challenges, and the dataset is made publicly available for further research. The study highlights the importance of language-specific resources and the need to address spurious correlations in under-resourced languages.

Key findings

1

Paper digest

What problem does the paper attempt to solve? Is this a new problem?

The paper aims to address the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), which involves recognizing the entailment relationship in sentence pairs, determining if the premise entails, contradicts, or is neutral to the hypothesis . This is not a new problem as NLI has been intensively studied in various languages, including English, Chinese, Turkish, Portuguese, and Indonesian, as well as in multi-lingual scenarios . The significance of NLI is well recognized, as it serves as a foundational task for various natural language processing systems and benchmarks like GLUE and SuperGLUE .


What scientific hypothesis does this paper seek to validate?

This paper seeks to validate a novel cartography-based curriculum learning method applied on the RoNLI dataset, which is the first Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus. The study aims to establish competitive baselines for future research by conducting experiments with various machine learning methods based on distant learning, including transformer-based neural networks, to improve natural language inference (NLI) tasks . The research focuses on analyzing the effect of spurious correlations and harnessing data cartography to develop curriculum learning strategies for NLI .


What new ideas, methods, or models does the paper propose? What are the characteristics and advantages compared to previous methods?

The paper introduces a novel curriculum learning method based on data cartography and stratified sampling to enhance the performance of Ro-BERT in the Romanian Natural Language Inference (RoNLI) task . This method significantly boosts the overall micro and macro F1 scores of Ro-BERT by 2% and 3%, respectively . By utilizing data cartography, the paper establishes groups of useful samples and develops curriculum learning strategies, demonstrating statistically significant improvements in the model's performance .

Furthermore, the study compares different models on the SciNLI dataset, including BERT, BERT+Length-CL, and BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++ . The results show that the curriculum learning method proposed in the paper achieves the best performance among these models on the SciNLI dataset . Specifically, BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++ outperforms other models, showcasing the effectiveness of the novel curriculum learning approach .

Additionally, the paper discusses the use of linking phrases to automatically label training samples in the NLI task . The study argues against relying solely on obvious cues like linking phrases to achieve human-level capabilities in NLI, emphasizing the importance of designing tasks that challenge models to focus on various clues beyond explicit indicators . An experiment in the paper shows that including linking phrases significantly improves the performance of Ro-BERT, indicating the impact of different task designs on model performance . The novel curriculum learning method proposed in the paper introduces data cartography and stratified sampling to enhance the performance of Ro-BERT in the Romanian Natural Language Inference (RoNLI) task . By utilizing data cartography, the method establishes groups of useful samples and develops curriculum learning strategies, resulting in a significant boost in the overall micro and macro F1 scores of Ro-BERT by 2% and 3%, respectively . This improvement is statistically significant and demonstrates the effectiveness of the novel approach .

Compared to previous methods, the paper's curriculum learning strategy based on data cartography and stratified sampling outperforms other models on the SciNLI dataset, including BERT and BERT+Length-CL . The proposed method achieves the best performance among these models, showcasing its superiority in enhancing the model's performance . Additionally, statistical tests such as Cochran’s Q and Mann-Whitney U confirm that the proposed Ro-BERT + Cart-Stra-CL++ model is significantly better than the baseline Ro-BERT based on oversampling .

Furthermore, the paper addresses the limitations of previous methods by emphasizing the importance of designing tasks that challenge models to focus on various clues beyond explicit indicators like linking phrases . The study argues against relying solely on obvious cues to achieve human-level capabilities in NLI, highlighting the need for more robust and accurate models . The inclusion of linking phrases significantly improves the performance of Ro-BERT, indicating the impact of different task designs on model performance .


Do any related researches exist? Who are the noteworthy researchers on this topic in this field?What is the key to the solution mentioned in the paper?

Several related research efforts exist in the field of Natural Language Inference (NLI). Noteworthy researchers in this area include Marco Marelli, Stefano Menini, Marco Baroni, Luisa Bentivogli, Raffaella Bernardi, Roberto Zamparelli, Puneet Mathur, Gautam Kunapuli, and many others . These researchers have contributed to various aspects of NLI, such as dataset creation, evaluation methods, and model development.

The key to the solution mentioned in the paper is the utilization of a novel Cartography-Based Curriculum Learning method applied on the RoNLI dataset. This method involves a curriculum learning approach that leverages the RoNLI dataset to enhance the performance of Natural Language Inference models . By incorporating this innovative learning strategy, the researchers aim to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of NLI systems.


How were the experiments in the paper designed?

The experiments in the paper were designed to evaluate the performance of different machine learning methods on the SciNLI dataset and RoNLI dataset. The experiments involved comparing various models, such as BERT, BERT+Length-CL, and BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++, on the SciNLI test set to assess their micro and macro F1 scores . Additionally, the experiments included statistical testing using Cochran’s Q test and Mann-Whitney U test to compare the performance of different models, such as Ro-BERT with oversampling and Ro-BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++, to determine the significance of the proposed model over the baseline . The experiments also focused on assessing the generalization capacity of the novel learning method (Cart-Stra-CL++) by extending the evaluation to an additional dataset, SciNLI, and comparing the performance of different models on this dataset .


What is the dataset used for quantitative evaluation? Is the code open source?

The dataset used for quantitative evaluation in the study is the RoNLI dataset . The code used in the research is released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, making it open source .


Do the experiments and results in the paper provide good support for the scientific hypotheses that need to be verified? Please analyze.

The experiments and results presented in the paper provide strong support for the scientific hypotheses that needed to be verified. The study introduces a novel curriculum learning method applied to the Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus (RoNLI) and evaluates its performance against various models and datasets . The results demonstrate that the proposed Ro-BERT + Cart-Stra-CL++ model significantly outperforms the baseline Ro-BERT model based on oversampling, as confirmed by statistical tests such as Cochran’s Q and Mann-Whitney U tests . Additionally, the study extends the evaluation to other datasets like SciNLI, showing that the curriculum learning method achieves the best performance among the tested models . These findings indicate that the designed task and the developed models are effective in enhancing natural language inference tasks, supporting the scientific hypotheses put forth in the paper.


What are the contributions of this paper?

The paper makes several contributions, including:

  • Introducing a novel cartography-based curriculum learning method applied to RoNLI, the First Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus .
  • Proposing the use of DocInfer for document-level Natural Language Inference using Optimal Evidence Selection .
  • Enhancing self-consistency and performance of pre-trained language models through natural language inference .
  • Providing insights into entailment semantics extracted from an ideal language model .
  • Presenting a method for capturing human disagreement distributions by calibrated networks for natural language inference .

What work can be continued in depth?

Further research in the field of Natural Language Inference (NLI) can be expanded in several directions based on the existing work:

  • Exploring NLI in low-resource languages: While NLI has been extensively studied in languages like English and Chinese, there is a need to focus on developing NLI models for low-resource languages such as Romanian .
  • Enhancing NLI models for specific applications: NLI serves as a foundational task for various natural language processing systems, including language modeling, conversational agents, zero-shot text classification, image captioning, and text summarization. Future research can focus on improving NLI models tailored for these specific applications .
  • Investigating multi-source active learning: Research on utilizing multi-source active learning for NLI can be further explored to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of pre-training language models .
  • Curriculum learning strategies: The use of curriculum learning strategies, such as data cartography, has shown promise in improving NLI models. Further exploration of innovative curriculum learning methods can contribute to advancing NLI research .
  • Addressing challenges in NLI: Researchers can delve deeper into addressing challenges in NLI, such as handling structural constraints, incorporating natural language inference for end-to-end flowchart grounded dialog response generation, and exploring adversarial NLI benchmarks for improved natural language understanding .
  • Cross-lingual NLI: Given the importance of cross-lingual representations, future work can focus on evaluating and enhancing cross-lingual sentence representations for NLI tasks .

Introduction
Background
[1] Lack of NLI resources in Romanian language
[2] Importance of language-specific datasets
Objective
[3] Development of RoNLI corpus
[4] Proposal of data cartography for improved model performance
Method
Data Collection
Distant Supervision
[5] Creation using RoBERTa or similar models
[6] Transfer learning from English NLI datasets
Data Annotation
[7] Manual annotation for evaluation
[8] Validation and test sets (58K training, 6K validation/test pairs)
Curriculum Learning: Data Cartography
Approach
[9] Novel method to address data imbalance
[10] Gradual difficulty increase for model training
Implementation
[11] Selection of challenging and diverse examples
[12] Evaluation of its impact on model performance
Experiments
Model Evaluation
[13] RoBERT and RoGPT2 performance comparison
[14] Cross-lingual model challenges
Public Availability
[15] Release of the RoNLI corpus for research community
Discussion
Spurious Correlations
[16] Addressing issues in under-resourced languages
[17] Limitations and potential biases
Future Directions
[18] Call for more Romanian NLP resources
[19] Opportunities for fine-tuning and adaptation
Conclusion
[20] Summary of findings and contributions
[21] Importance of RoNLI for Romanian NLP research and development
Basic info
papers
computation and language
machine learning
artificial intelligence
Advanced features
Insights
What is the primary contribution of the introduced RoNLI corpus?
How was the RoNLI dataset created, and what was its purpose?
What method did the authors propose to enhance model performance on the Romanian NLI task?
How do cross-lingual models perform on the RoNLI dataset, and what does this indicate?

A Novel Cartography-Based Curriculum Learning Method Applied on RoNLI: The First Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus

Eduard Poesina, Cornelia Caragea, Radu Tudor Ionescu·May 20, 2024

Summary

The paper introduces RoNLI, the first Romanian Natural Language Inference corpus, containing 58K training and 6K validation/test pairs. Created using distant supervision for training and manual annotation for evaluation, the dataset aims to address the lack of NLI resources in Romanian. The authors propose a novel curriculum learning method, data cartography, to improve model performance. Experiments with various models, including RoBERT and RoGPT2, show that cross-lingual models face challenges, and the dataset is made publicly available for further research. The study highlights the importance of language-specific resources and the need to address spurious correlations in under-resourced languages.
Mind map
[6] Transfer learning from English NLI datasets
[5] Creation using RoBERTa or similar models
[19] Opportunities for fine-tuning and adaptation
[18] Call for more Romanian NLP resources
[17] Limitations and potential biases
[16] Addressing issues in under-resourced languages
[15] Release of the RoNLI corpus for research community
[14] Cross-lingual model challenges
[13] RoBERT and RoGPT2 performance comparison
[12] Evaluation of its impact on model performance
[11] Selection of challenging and diverse examples
[10] Gradual difficulty increase for model training
[9] Novel method to address data imbalance
[8] Validation and test sets (58K training, 6K validation/test pairs)
[7] Manual annotation for evaluation
Distant Supervision
[4] Proposal of data cartography for improved model performance
[3] Development of RoNLI corpus
[2] Importance of language-specific datasets
[1] Lack of NLI resources in Romanian language
[21] Importance of RoNLI for Romanian NLP research and development
[20] Summary of findings and contributions
Future Directions
Spurious Correlations
Public Availability
Model Evaluation
Implementation
Approach
Data Annotation
Data Collection
Objective
Background
Conclusion
Discussion
Experiments
Curriculum Learning: Data Cartography
Method
Introduction
Outline
Introduction
Background
[1] Lack of NLI resources in Romanian language
[2] Importance of language-specific datasets
Objective
[3] Development of RoNLI corpus
[4] Proposal of data cartography for improved model performance
Method
Data Collection
Distant Supervision
[5] Creation using RoBERTa or similar models
[6] Transfer learning from English NLI datasets
Data Annotation
[7] Manual annotation for evaluation
[8] Validation and test sets (58K training, 6K validation/test pairs)
Curriculum Learning: Data Cartography
Approach
[9] Novel method to address data imbalance
[10] Gradual difficulty increase for model training
Implementation
[11] Selection of challenging and diverse examples
[12] Evaluation of its impact on model performance
Experiments
Model Evaluation
[13] RoBERT and RoGPT2 performance comparison
[14] Cross-lingual model challenges
Public Availability
[15] Release of the RoNLI corpus for research community
Discussion
Spurious Correlations
[16] Addressing issues in under-resourced languages
[17] Limitations and potential biases
Future Directions
[18] Call for more Romanian NLP resources
[19] Opportunities for fine-tuning and adaptation
Conclusion
[20] Summary of findings and contributions
[21] Importance of RoNLI for Romanian NLP research and development
Key findings
1

Paper digest

What problem does the paper attempt to solve? Is this a new problem?

The paper aims to address the task of Natural Language Inference (NLI), which involves recognizing the entailment relationship in sentence pairs, determining if the premise entails, contradicts, or is neutral to the hypothesis . This is not a new problem as NLI has been intensively studied in various languages, including English, Chinese, Turkish, Portuguese, and Indonesian, as well as in multi-lingual scenarios . The significance of NLI is well recognized, as it serves as a foundational task for various natural language processing systems and benchmarks like GLUE and SuperGLUE .


What scientific hypothesis does this paper seek to validate?

This paper seeks to validate a novel cartography-based curriculum learning method applied on the RoNLI dataset, which is the first Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus. The study aims to establish competitive baselines for future research by conducting experiments with various machine learning methods based on distant learning, including transformer-based neural networks, to improve natural language inference (NLI) tasks . The research focuses on analyzing the effect of spurious correlations and harnessing data cartography to develop curriculum learning strategies for NLI .


What new ideas, methods, or models does the paper propose? What are the characteristics and advantages compared to previous methods?

The paper introduces a novel curriculum learning method based on data cartography and stratified sampling to enhance the performance of Ro-BERT in the Romanian Natural Language Inference (RoNLI) task . This method significantly boosts the overall micro and macro F1 scores of Ro-BERT by 2% and 3%, respectively . By utilizing data cartography, the paper establishes groups of useful samples and develops curriculum learning strategies, demonstrating statistically significant improvements in the model's performance .

Furthermore, the study compares different models on the SciNLI dataset, including BERT, BERT+Length-CL, and BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++ . The results show that the curriculum learning method proposed in the paper achieves the best performance among these models on the SciNLI dataset . Specifically, BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++ outperforms other models, showcasing the effectiveness of the novel curriculum learning approach .

Additionally, the paper discusses the use of linking phrases to automatically label training samples in the NLI task . The study argues against relying solely on obvious cues like linking phrases to achieve human-level capabilities in NLI, emphasizing the importance of designing tasks that challenge models to focus on various clues beyond explicit indicators . An experiment in the paper shows that including linking phrases significantly improves the performance of Ro-BERT, indicating the impact of different task designs on model performance . The novel curriculum learning method proposed in the paper introduces data cartography and stratified sampling to enhance the performance of Ro-BERT in the Romanian Natural Language Inference (RoNLI) task . By utilizing data cartography, the method establishes groups of useful samples and develops curriculum learning strategies, resulting in a significant boost in the overall micro and macro F1 scores of Ro-BERT by 2% and 3%, respectively . This improvement is statistically significant and demonstrates the effectiveness of the novel approach .

Compared to previous methods, the paper's curriculum learning strategy based on data cartography and stratified sampling outperforms other models on the SciNLI dataset, including BERT and BERT+Length-CL . The proposed method achieves the best performance among these models, showcasing its superiority in enhancing the model's performance . Additionally, statistical tests such as Cochran’s Q and Mann-Whitney U confirm that the proposed Ro-BERT + Cart-Stra-CL++ model is significantly better than the baseline Ro-BERT based on oversampling .

Furthermore, the paper addresses the limitations of previous methods by emphasizing the importance of designing tasks that challenge models to focus on various clues beyond explicit indicators like linking phrases . The study argues against relying solely on obvious cues to achieve human-level capabilities in NLI, highlighting the need for more robust and accurate models . The inclusion of linking phrases significantly improves the performance of Ro-BERT, indicating the impact of different task designs on model performance .


Do any related researches exist? Who are the noteworthy researchers on this topic in this field?What is the key to the solution mentioned in the paper?

Several related research efforts exist in the field of Natural Language Inference (NLI). Noteworthy researchers in this area include Marco Marelli, Stefano Menini, Marco Baroni, Luisa Bentivogli, Raffaella Bernardi, Roberto Zamparelli, Puneet Mathur, Gautam Kunapuli, and many others . These researchers have contributed to various aspects of NLI, such as dataset creation, evaluation methods, and model development.

The key to the solution mentioned in the paper is the utilization of a novel Cartography-Based Curriculum Learning method applied on the RoNLI dataset. This method involves a curriculum learning approach that leverages the RoNLI dataset to enhance the performance of Natural Language Inference models . By incorporating this innovative learning strategy, the researchers aim to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of NLI systems.


How were the experiments in the paper designed?

The experiments in the paper were designed to evaluate the performance of different machine learning methods on the SciNLI dataset and RoNLI dataset. The experiments involved comparing various models, such as BERT, BERT+Length-CL, and BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++, on the SciNLI test set to assess their micro and macro F1 scores . Additionally, the experiments included statistical testing using Cochran’s Q test and Mann-Whitney U test to compare the performance of different models, such as Ro-BERT with oversampling and Ro-BERT+Cart-Stra-CL++, to determine the significance of the proposed model over the baseline . The experiments also focused on assessing the generalization capacity of the novel learning method (Cart-Stra-CL++) by extending the evaluation to an additional dataset, SciNLI, and comparing the performance of different models on this dataset .


What is the dataset used for quantitative evaluation? Is the code open source?

The dataset used for quantitative evaluation in the study is the RoNLI dataset . The code used in the research is released under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license, making it open source .


Do the experiments and results in the paper provide good support for the scientific hypotheses that need to be verified? Please analyze.

The experiments and results presented in the paper provide strong support for the scientific hypotheses that needed to be verified. The study introduces a novel curriculum learning method applied to the Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus (RoNLI) and evaluates its performance against various models and datasets . The results demonstrate that the proposed Ro-BERT + Cart-Stra-CL++ model significantly outperforms the baseline Ro-BERT model based on oversampling, as confirmed by statistical tests such as Cochran’s Q and Mann-Whitney U tests . Additionally, the study extends the evaluation to other datasets like SciNLI, showing that the curriculum learning method achieves the best performance among the tested models . These findings indicate that the designed task and the developed models are effective in enhancing natural language inference tasks, supporting the scientific hypotheses put forth in the paper.


What are the contributions of this paper?

The paper makes several contributions, including:

  • Introducing a novel cartography-based curriculum learning method applied to RoNLI, the First Romanian Natural Language Inference Corpus .
  • Proposing the use of DocInfer for document-level Natural Language Inference using Optimal Evidence Selection .
  • Enhancing self-consistency and performance of pre-trained language models through natural language inference .
  • Providing insights into entailment semantics extracted from an ideal language model .
  • Presenting a method for capturing human disagreement distributions by calibrated networks for natural language inference .

What work can be continued in depth?

Further research in the field of Natural Language Inference (NLI) can be expanded in several directions based on the existing work:

  • Exploring NLI in low-resource languages: While NLI has been extensively studied in languages like English and Chinese, there is a need to focus on developing NLI models for low-resource languages such as Romanian .
  • Enhancing NLI models for specific applications: NLI serves as a foundational task for various natural language processing systems, including language modeling, conversational agents, zero-shot text classification, image captioning, and text summarization. Future research can focus on improving NLI models tailored for these specific applications .
  • Investigating multi-source active learning: Research on utilizing multi-source active learning for NLI can be further explored to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of pre-training language models .
  • Curriculum learning strategies: The use of curriculum learning strategies, such as data cartography, has shown promise in improving NLI models. Further exploration of innovative curriculum learning methods can contribute to advancing NLI research .
  • Addressing challenges in NLI: Researchers can delve deeper into addressing challenges in NLI, such as handling structural constraints, incorporating natural language inference for end-to-end flowchart grounded dialog response generation, and exploring adversarial NLI benchmarks for improved natural language understanding .
  • Cross-lingual NLI: Given the importance of cross-lingual representations, future work can focus on evaluating and enhancing cross-lingual sentence representations for NLI tasks .
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