Andrew Lee


2024

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A Comparative Multidimensional Analysis of Empathetic Systems
Andrew Lee | Jonathan Kummerfeld | Larry Ann | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, empathetic dialogue systems have received significant attention.While some researchers have noted limitations, e.g., that these systems tend to generate generic utterances, no study has systematically verified these issues. We survey 21 systems, asking what progress has been made on the task. We observe multiple limitations of current evaluation procedures. Most critically, studies tend to rely on a single non-reproducible empathy score, which inadequately reflects the multidimensional nature of empathy. To better understand the differences between systems, we comprehensively analyze each system with automated methods that are grounded in a variety of aspects of empathy. We find that recent systems lack three important aspects of empathy: specificity, reflection levels, and diversity. Based on our results, we discuss problematic behaviors that may have gone undetected in prior evaluations, and offer guidance for developing future systems.

2023

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Empathy Identification Systems are not Accurately Accounting for Context
Andrew Lee | Jonathan K. Kummerfeld | Larry An | Rada Mihalcea
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Understanding empathy in text dialogue data is a difficult, yet critical, skill for effective human-machine interaction. In this work, we ask whether systems are making meaningful progress on this challenge. We consider a simple model that checks if an input utterance is similar to a small set of empathetic examples. Crucially, the model does not look at what the utterance is a response to, i.e., the dialogue context. This model performs comparably to other work on standard benchmarks and even outperforms state-of-the-art models for empathetic rationale extraction by 16.7 points on T-F1 and 4.3 on IOU-F1. This indicates that current systems rely on the surface form of the response, rather than whether it is suitable in context. To confirm this, we create examples with dialogue contexts that change the interpretation of the response and show that current systems continue to label utterances as empathetic. We discuss the implications of our findings, including improvements for empathetic benchmarks and how our model can be an informative baseline.

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Emergent Linear Representations in World Models of Self-Supervised Sequence Models
Neel Nanda | Andrew Lee | Martin Wattenberg
Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

How do sequence models represent their decision-making process? Prior work suggests that Othello-playing neural network learned nonlinear models of the board state (Li et al., 2023a). In this work, we provide evidence of a closely related linear representation of the board. In particular, we show that probing for “my colour” vs. “opponent’s colour” may be a simple yet powerful way to interpret the model’s internal state. This precise understanding of the internal representations allows us to control the model’s behaviour with simple vector arithmetic. Linear representations enable significant interpretability progress, which we demonstrate with further exploration of how the world model is computed.

2022

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Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology
Ayah Zirikly | Dana Atzil-Slonim | Maria Liakata | Steven Bedrick | Bart Desmet | Molly Ireland | Andrew Lee | Sean MacAvaney | Matthew Purver | Rebecca Resnik | Andrew Yates
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology

2021

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Micromodels for Efficient, Explainable, and Reusable Systems: A Case Study on Mental Health
Andrew Lee | Jonathan K. Kummerfeld | Larry An | Rada Mihalcea
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

Many statistical models have high accuracy on test benchmarks, but are not explainable, struggle in low-resource scenarios, cannot be reused for multiple tasks, and cannot easily integrate domain expertise. These factors limit their use, particularly in settings such as mental health, where it is difficult to annotate datasets and model outputs have significant impact. We introduce a micromodel architecture to address these challenges. Our approach allows researchers to build interpretable representations that embed domain knowledge and provide explanations throughout the model’s decision process. We demonstrate the idea on multiple mental health tasks: depression classification, PTSD classification, and suicidal risk assessment. Our systems consistently produce strong results, even in low-resource scenarios, and are more interpretable than alternative methods.

2019

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Outlier Detection for Improved Data Quality and Diversity in Dialog Systems
Stefan Larson | Anish Mahendran | Andrew Lee | Jonathan K. Kummerfeld | Parker Hill | Michael A. Laurenzano | Johann Hauswald | Lingjia Tang | Jason Mars
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)

In a corpus of data, outliers are either errors: mistakes in the data that are counterproductive, or are unique: informative samples that improve model robustness. Identifying outliers can lead to better datasets by (1) removing noise in datasets and (2) guiding collection of additional data to fill gaps. However, the problem of detecting both outlier types has received relatively little attention in NLP, particularly for dialog systems. We introduce a simple and effective technique for detecting both erroneous and unique samples in a corpus of short texts using neural sentence embeddings combined with distance-based outlier detection. We also present a novel data collection pipeline built atop our detection technique to automatically and iteratively mine unique data samples while discarding erroneous samples. Experiments show that our outlier detection technique is effective at finding errors while our data collection pipeline yields highly diverse corpora that in turn produce more robust intent classification and slot-filling models.

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An Evaluation Dataset for Intent Classification and Out-of-Scope Prediction
Stefan Larson | Anish Mahendran | Joseph J. Peper | Christopher Clarke | Andrew Lee | Parker Hill | Jonathan K. Kummerfeld | Kevin Leach | Michael A. Laurenzano | Lingjia Tang | Jason Mars
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)

Task-oriented dialog systems need to know when a query falls outside their range of supported intents, but current text classification corpora only define label sets that cover every example. We introduce a new dataset that includes queries that are out-of-scope—i.e., queries that do not fall into any of the system’s supported intents. This poses a new challenge because models cannot assume that every query at inference time belongs to a system-supported intent class. Our dataset also covers 150 intent classes over 10 domains, capturing the breadth that a production task-oriented agent must handle. We evaluate a range of benchmark classifiers on our dataset along with several different out-of-scope identification schemes. We find that while the classifiers perform well on in-scope intent classification, they struggle to identify out-of-scope queries. Our dataset and evaluation fill an important gap in the field, offering a way of more rigorously and realistically benchmarking text classification in task-driven dialog systems.