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1. Question-Generating Datasets: Facilitating Data Transformation of Official Statistics for Broad Citizenry Decision- Making

   https://doi.org/10.4995/carma2020.2020.11920  

   Yadav, Rahul; Herzog, Patricia Snell; Bolchini, Davide (July 2020, International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics)

   Domenech, Josep; Vicente, María Rosalía (Ed.)

   Citizenry decision-making relies on data for informed actions, and official statistics provide many of the relevant data needed for these decisions. However, the wide, distributed, and diverse datasets available from official statistics remain hard to access, scrutinise and manipulate, especially for non-experts. As a result, the complexities involved in official statistical databases create barriers to broader access to these data, often rendering the data non-actionable or irrelevant for the speed at which decisions are made in social and public life. To address this problem, this paper proposes an approach to automatically generating basic, factual questions from an existing dataset of official statistics. The question generating process, now specifically instantiated for geospatial data, starts from a raw dataset and gradually builds toward formulating and presenting users with examples of questions that the dataset can answer, and for which geographic units. This approach exemplifies a novel paradigm of question-first data rendering, where questions, rather than data tables, are used as a human-centred and relevant access points to explore, manipulate, navigate and cross-link data to support decision making. This approach can automate time-consuming aspects of data transformation and facilitate broader access to data. 

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2. Correcting Diverse Factual Errors in Abstractive Summarization via Post-Editing and Language Model Infilling

   Balachandran, Vidhisha; Hajishirzi, Hannaneh; Cohen, William; Tsvetkov, Yulia (December 2022, Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Abstractive summarization models often generate inconsistent summaries containing factual errors or hallucinated content. Recent works focus on correcting factual errors in generated summaries via post-editing. Such correction models are trained using adversarial non-factual summaries constructed using heuristic rules for injecting errors. However, generating non-factual summaries using heuristics often does not generalize well to actual model errors. In this work, we propose to generate hard, representative synthetic examples of non-factual summaries through infilling language models. With this data, we train a more robust fact-correction model to post-edit the summaries to improve factual consistency. Through quantitative and qualitative experiments on two popular summarization datasets— CNN/DM and XSum—we show that our approach vastly outperforms prior methods in correcting erroneous summaries. Our model—FactEdit—improves factuality scores by over ~11 points on CNN/DM and over ~31 points on XSum on average across multiple summarization models, producing more factual summaries while maintaining competitive summarization quality. 

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3. SQuALITY: Building a Long-Document Summarization Dataset the Hard Way

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.75  

   Wang, Alex; Yuanzhe Pang, Richard; Chen, Angelica; Phang, Jason; Bowman, Samuel R. (May 2022, Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

   Summarization datasets are often assembled either by scraping naturally occurring public-domain summaries -- which are nearly always in difficult-to-work-with technical domains -- or by using approximate heuristics to extract them from everyday text -- which frequently yields unfaithful summaries. In this work, we turn to a slower but more straightforward approach to developing summarization benchmark data: We hire highly-qualified contractors to read stories and write original summaries from scratch. To amortize reading time, we collect five summaries per document, with the first giving an overview and the subsequent four addressing specific questions. We use this protocol to collect SQuALITY, a dataset of question-focused summaries built on the same public-domain short stories as the multiple-choice dataset QuALITY (Pang et al., 2021). Experiments with state-of-the-art summarization systems show that our dataset is challenging and that existing automatic evaluation metrics are weak indicators of quality. 

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4. Learning to Automate Follow-up Question Generation using Process Knowledge for Depression Triage on Reddit Posts

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2022.clpsych-1.12  

   Gupta, Shrey; Agarwal, Anmol; Gaur, Manas; Roy, Kaushik; Narayanan, Vignesh; Kumaraguru, Ponnurangam; Sheth, Amit (January 2022, Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology)

   Conversational Agents (CAs) powered with deep language models (DLMs) have shown tremendous promise in the domain of mental health. Prominently, the CAs have been used to provide informational or therapeutic services (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy) to patients. However, the utility of CAs to assist in mental health triaging has not been explored in the existing work as it requires a controlled generation of follow-up questions (FQs), which are often initiated and guided by the mental health professionals (MHPs) in clinical settings. In the context of ‘depression’, our experiments show that DLMs coupled with process knowledge in a mental health questionnaire generate 12.54% and 9.37% better FQs based on similarity and longest common subsequence matches to questions in the PHQ-9 dataset respectively, when compared with DLMs without process knowledge support.Despite coupling with process knowledge, we find that DLMs are still prone to hallucination, i.e., generating redundant, irrelevant, and unsafe FQs. We demonstrate the challenge of using existing datasets to train a DLM for generating FQs that adhere to clinical process knowledge. To address this limitation, we prepared an extended PHQ-9 based dataset, PRIMATE, in collaboration with MHPs. PRIMATE contains annotations regarding whether a particular question in the PHQ-9 dataset has already been answered in the user’s initial description of the mental health condition. We used PRIMATE to train a DLM in a supervised setting to identify which of the PHQ-9 questions can be answered directly from the user’s post and which ones would require more information from the user. Using performance analysis based on MCC scores, we show that PRIMATE is appropriate for identifying questions in PHQ-9 that could guide generative DLMs towards controlled FQ generation (with minimal hallucination) suitable for aiding triaging. The dataset created as a part of this research can be obtained from https://github.com/primate-mh/Primate2022 

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5. What We Talk About When We Talk About Logs: Understanding the Effects of Dataset Quality on Endpoint Threat Detection Research

   https://doi.org/10.1109/SP61157.2025.00112  

   Liu, Jason; Inam, Muhammad Adil; Goyal, Akul; Riddle, Andy; Westfall, Kim; Bates, Adam (May 2025, IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy)

   Endpoint threat detection research hinges on the availability of worthwhile evaluation benchmarks, but experimenters' understanding of the contents of benchmark datasets is often limited. Typically, attention is only paid to the realism of attack behaviors, which comprises only a small percentage of the audit logs in the dataset, while other characteristics of the data are inscrutable and unknown. We propose a new set of questions for what to talk about when we talk about logs (i.e., datasets): What activities are in the dataset? We introduce a novel visualization that succinctly represents the totality of 100+ GB datasets by plotting the occurrence of provenance graph neighborhoods in a time series. How synthetic is the background activity? We perform autocorrelation analysis of provenance neighborhoods in the training split to identify process behaviors that occur at predictable intervals in the test split. Finally, How conspicuous is the malicious activity? We quantify the proportion of attack behaviors that are observed as benign neighborhoods in the training split as compared to previously-unseen attack neighborhoods. We then validate these questions by profiling the classification performance of state-of-the-art intrusion detection systems (R-CAID, FLASH, KAIROS, GNN) against a battery of public benchmark datasets (DARPA Transparent Computing and OpTC, ATLAS, ATLASv2). We demonstrate that synthetic background activities dramatically inflate True Negative Rates, while conspicuous malicious activities artificially boost True Positive Rates. Further, by explicitly controlling for these factors, we provide a more holistic picture of classifier performance. This work will elevate the dialogue surrounding threat detection datasets and will increase the rigor of threat detection experiments. 

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