PerSphere: A Comprehensive Framework for Multi-Faceted Perspective Retrieval and Summarization

As online platforms and recommendation algorithms evolve, people are increasingly trapped in echo chambers, leading to biased understandings of various issues. To combat this issue, we have introduced PerSphere, a benchmark designed to facilitate multi-faceted perspective retrieval and summarization, thus breaking free from these information silos. For each query within PerSphere, there are two opposing claims, each supported by distinct, non-overlapping perspectives drawn from one or more documents. Our goal is to accurately summarize these documents, aligning the summaries with the respective claims and their underlying perspectives. This task is structured as a two-step end-to-end pipeline that includes comprehensive document retrieval and multi-faceted summarization. Furthermore, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the comprehensiveness of the retrieval and summarization content. Experimental results on various counterparts for the pipeline show that recent models struggle with such a complex task. Analysis shows that the main challenge lies in long context and perspective extraction, and we propose a simple but effective multi-agent summarization system, offering a promising solution to enhance performance on PerSphere.

XAL: EXplainable Active Learning Makes Classifiers Better Low-resource Learners

Active learning aims to construct an effective training set by iteratively curating the most informative unlabeled data for annotation, which is practical in low-resource tasks. Most active learning techniques in classification rely on the model's uncertainty or disagreement to choose unlabeled data. However, previous work indicates that existing models are poor at quantifying predictive uncertainty, which can lead to over-confidence in superficial patterns and a lack of exploration. Inspired by the cognitive processes in which humans deduce and predict through causal information, we propose a novel Explainable Active Learning framework (XAL) for low-resource text classification, which aims to encourage classifiers to justify their inferences and delve into unlabeled data for which they cannot provide reasonable explanations. Specifically, besides using a pre-trained bi-directional encoder for classification, we employ a pre-trained uni-directional decoder to generate and score the explanation. A ranking loss is proposed to enhance the decoder's capability in scoring explanations. During the selection of unlabeled data, we combine the predictive uncertainty of the encoder and the explanation score of the decoder to acquire informative data for annotation. As XAL is a general framework for text classification, we test our methods on six different classification tasks. Extensive experiments show that XAL achieves substantial improvement on all six tasks over previous AL methods. Ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component, and human evaluation shows that the model trained in XAL performs surprisingly well in explaining its prediction.