prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How does proposed qualitative annotation schema looks like?
Context 1: Introduction
There is a recent spark of interest in the task of Question Answering (QA) over unstructured textual data, also referred to as Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC)  This is mostly due to wide-spread success of advances in various facets of deep learning related research, such as novel architectures BIBREF0, BIBREF1 that allow for efficient optimisation of neural networks consisting of multiple layers, hardware designed for deep learning purposes and software frameworks BIBREF2, BIBREF3 that allow efficient development and testing of novel approaches  These factors enable researchers to produce models that are pre-trained on large scale corpora and provide contextualised word representations BIBREF4 that are shown to be a vital component towards solutions for a variety of natural language understanding tasks, including MRC BIBREF5  Another important factor that led to the recent success in MRC-related tasks is the widespread availability of various large datasets, e g , SQuAD BIBREF6, that provide sufficient examples for optimising statistical models  The combination of these factors yields notable results, even surpassing human performance BIBREF7 
MRC is a generic task format that can be used to probe for various natural language understanding capabilities BIBREF8  Therefore it is crucially important to establish a rigorous evaluation methodology in order to be able to draw reliable conclusions from conducted experiments  While increasing effort is put into the evaluation of novel architectures, such as keeping the evaluation data from public access to prevent unintentional overfitting to test data, performing ablation and error studies and introducing novel metrics BIBREF9, surprisingly little is done to establish the quality of the data itself  Additionally, recent research arrived at worrisome findings: the data of those gold standards, which is usually gathered involving a crowd-sourcing step, suffers from flaws in design BIBREF10 or contains overly specific keywords BIBREF11  Furthermore, these gold standards contain “annotation artefacts”, cues that lead models into focusing on superficial aspects of text, such as lexical overlap and word order, instead of actual language understanding BIBREF12, BIBREF13  These weaknesses cast some doubt on whether the data can reliably evaluate the reading comprehension performance of the models they evaluate, i e  if the models are indeed being assessed for their capability to read 
Figure FIGREF3 shows an example from HotpotQA BIBREF14, a dataset that exhibits the last kind of weakness mentioned above, i e , the presence of unique keywords in both the question and the passage (in close proximity to the expected answer) 
An evaluation methodology is vital to the fine-grained understanding of challenges associated with a single gold standard, in order to understand in greater detail which capabilities of MRC models it evaluates  More importantly, it allows to draw comparisons between multiple gold standards and between the results of respective state-of-the-art models that are evaluated on them 
In this work, we take a step back and propose a framework to systematically analyse MRC evaluation data, typically a set of questions and expected answers to be derived from accompanying passages  Concretely, we introduce a methodology to categorise the linguistic complexity of the textual data and the reasoning and potential external knowledge required to obtain the expected answer  Additionally we propose to take a closer look at the factual correctness of the expected answers, a quality dimension that appears under-explored in literature 
We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed framework by applying it to precisely describe and compare six contemporary MRC datasets  Our findings reveal concerns about their factual correctness, the presence of lexical cues that simplify the task of reading comprehension and the lack of semantic altering grammatical modifiers  We release the raw data comprised of 300 paragraphs, questions and answers richly annotated under the proposed framework as a resource for researchers developing natural language understanding models and datasets to utilise further 
To the best of our knowledge this is the first attempt to introduce a common evaluation methodology for MRC gold standards and the first across-the-board qualitative evaluation of MRC datasets with respect to the proposed categories 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Problem definition
We define the task of machine reading comprehension, the target application of the proposed methodology as follows: Given a paragraph $P$ that consists of tokens (words) $p_1, \ldots , p_{n_P}$ and a question $Q$ that consists of tokens $q_1 \ldots q_{n_Q}$, the goal is to retrieve an answer $A$ with tokens $a_1 \ldots a_{n_A}$  $A$ is commonly constrained to be one of the following cases BIBREF15, illustrated in Figure FIGREF9:
Multiple choice, where the goal is to predict $A$ from a given set of choices $\mathcal {A}$ 
Cloze-style, where $S$ is a sentence, and $A$ and $Q$ are obtained by removing a sequence of words such that $Q = S - A$  The task is to fill in the resulting gap in $Q$ with the expected answer $A$ to form $S$ 
Span, where is a continuous subsequence of tokens from the paragraph ($A \subseteq P$)  Flavours include multiple spans as the correct answer or $A \subseteq Q$ 
Free form, where $A$ is an unconstrained natural language string 
A gold standard $G$ is composed of $m$ entries $(Q_i, A_i, P_i)_{i\in \lbrace 1,\ldots , m\rbrace }$ 
The performance of an approach is established by comparing its answer predictions $A^*_{i}$ on the given input $(Q_i, T_i)$ (and $\mathcal {A}_i$ for the multiple choice setting) against the expected answer $A_i$ for all $i\in \lbrace 1,\ldots , m\rbrace $ under a performance metric  Typical performance metrics are exact match (EM) or accuracy, i e  the percentage of exactly predicted answers, and the F1 score – the harmonic mean between the precision and the recall of the predicted tokens compared to expected answer tokens  The overall F1 score can either be computed by averaging the F1 scores for every instance or by first averaging the precision and recall and then computing the F1 score from those averages (macro F1)  Free-text answers, meanwhile, are evaluated by means of text generation and summarisation metrics such as BLEU BIBREF16 or ROUGE-L BIBREF17 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest
In this section we describe a methodology to categorise gold standards according to linguistic complexity, required reasoning and background knowledge, and their factual correctness  Specifically, we use those dimensions as high-level categories of a qualitative annotation schema for annotating question, expected answer and the corresponding context  We further enrich the qualitative annotations by a metric based on lexical cues in order to approximate a lower bound for the complexity of the reading comprehension task  By sampling entries from each gold standard and annotating them, we obtain measurable results and thus are able to make observations about the challenges present in that gold standard data 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Problem setting
We are interested in different types of the expected answer  We differentiate between Span, where an answer is a continuous span taken from the passage, Paraphrasing, where the answer is a paraphrase of a text span, Unanswerable, where there is no answer present in the context, and Generated, if it does not fall into any of the other categories  It is not sufficient for an answer to restate the question or combine multiple Span or Paraphrasing answers to be annotated as Generated  It is worth mentioning that we focus our investigations on answerable questions  For a complementary qualitative analysis that categorises unanswerable questions, the reader is referred to Yatskar2019 
Furthermore, we mark a sentence as Supporting Fact if it contains evidence required to produce the expected answer, as they are used further in the complexity analysis 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Factual Correctness
An important factor for the quality of a benchmark is its factual correctness, because on the one hand, the presence of factually wrong or debatable examples introduces an upper bound for the achievable performance of models on those gold standards  On the other hand, it is hard to draw conclusions about the correctness of answers produced by a model that is evaluated on partially incorrect data 
One way by which developers of modern crowd-sourced gold standards ensure quality is by having the same entry annotated by multiple workers BIBREF18 and keeping only those with high agreement  We investigate whether this method is enough to establish a sound ground truth answer that is unambiguously correct  Concretely we annotate an answer as Debatable when the passage features multiple plausible answers, when multiple expected answers contradict each other, or an answer is not specific enough with respect to the question and a more specific answer is present  We annotate an answer as Wrong when it is factually wrong and a correct answer is present in the context 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Required Reasoning
It is important to understand what types of reasoning the benchmark evaluates, in order to be able to accredit various reasoning capabilities to the models it evaluates  Our proposed reasoning categories are inspired by those found in scientific question answering literature BIBREF19, BIBREF20, as research in this area focuses on understanding the required reasoning capabilities  We include reasoning about the Temporal succession of events, Spatial reasoning about directions and environment, and Causal reasoning about the cause-effect relationship between events  We further annotate (multiple-choice) answers that can only be answered By Exclusion of every other alternative 
We further extend the reasoning categories by operational logic, similar to those required in semantic parsing tasks BIBREF21, as solving those tasks typically requires “multi-hop” reasoning BIBREF14, BIBREF22  When an answer can only be obtained by combining information from different sentences joined by mentioning a common entity, concept, date, fact or event (from here on called entity), we annotate it as Bridge  We further annotate the cases, when the answer is a concrete entity that satisfies a Constraint specified in the question, when it is required to draw a Comparison of multiple entities' properties or when the expected answer is an Intersection of their properties (e g  “What do Person A and Person B have in common?”)
We are interested in the linguistic reasoning capabilities probed by a gold standard, therefore we include the appropriate category used by Wang2019  Specifically, we annotate occurrences that require understanding of Negation, Quantifiers (such as “every”, “some”, or “all”), Conditional (“if    then”) statements and the logical implications of Con-/Disjunction (i e  “and” and “or”) in order to derive the expected answer 
Finally, we investigate whether arithmetic reasoning requirements emerge in MRC gold standards as this can probe for reasoning that is not evaluated by simple answer retrieval BIBREF23  To this end, we annotate the presence of of Addition and Subtraction, answers that require Ordering of numerical values, Counting and Other occurrences of simple mathematical operations 
An example can exhibit multiple forms of reasoning  Notably, we do not annotate any of the categories mentioned above if the expected answer is directly stated in the passage  For example, if the question asks “How many total points were scored in the game?” and the passage contains a sentence similar to “The total score of the game was 51 points”, it does not require any reasoning, in which case we annotate it as Retrieval 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Knowledge
Worthwhile knowing is whether the information presented in the context is sufficient to answer the question, as there is an increase of benchmarks deliberately designed to probe a model's reliance on some sort of background knowledge BIBREF24  We seek to categorise the type of knowledge required  Similar to Wang2019, on the one hand we annotate the reliance on factual knowledge, that is (Geo)political/Legal, Cultural/Historic, Technical/Scientific and Other Domain Specific knowledge about the world that can be expressed as a set of facts  On the other hand, we denote Intuitive knowledge requirements, which is challenging to express as a set of facts, such as the knowledge that a parenthetic numerical expression next to a person's name in a biography usually denotes his life span 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Linguistic Complexity
Another dimension of interest is the evaluation of various linguistic capabilities of MRC models BIBREF25, BIBREF26, BIBREF27  We aim to establish which linguistic phenomena are probed by gold standards and to which degree  To that end, we draw inspiration from the annotation schema used by Wang2019, and adapt it around lexical semantics and syntax 
More specifically, we annotate features that introduce variance between the supporting facts and the question  With regard to lexical semantics, we focus on the use of redundant words that do not alter the meaning of a sentence for the task of retrieving the expected answer (Redundancy), requirements on the understanding of words' semantic fields (Lexical Entailment) and the use of Synonyms and Paraphrases with respect to the question wording  Furthermore we annotate cases where supporting facts contain Abbreviations of concepts introduced in the question (and vice versa) and when a Dative case substitutes the use of a preposition (e g  “I bought her a gift” vs “I bought a gift for her”)  Regarding syntax, we annotate changes from passive to active Voice, the substitution of a Genitive case with a preposition (e g  “of”) and changes from nominal to verbal style and vice versa (Nominalisation) 
We recognise features that add ambiguity to the supporting facts, for example when information is only expressed implicitly by using an Ellipsis  As opposed to redundant words, we annotate Restrictivity and Factivity modifiers, words and phrases whose presence does change the meaning of a sentence with regard to the expected answer, and occurrences of intra- or inter-sentence Coreference in supporting facts (that is relevant to the question)  Lastly, we mark ambiguous syntactic features, when their resolution is required in order to obtain the answer  Concretely, we mark argument collection with con- and disjunctions (Listing) and ambiguous Prepositions, Coordination Scope and Relative clauses/Adverbial phrases/Appositions 
Framework for MRC Gold Standard Analysis ::: Dimensions of Interest ::: Complexity
Finally, we want to approximate the presence of lexical cues that might simplify the reading required in order to arrive at the answer  Quantifying this allows for more reliable statements about and comparison of the complexity of gold standards, particularly regarding the evaluation of comprehension that goes beyond simple lexical matching  We propose the use of coarse metrics based on lexical overlap between question and context sentences  Intuitively, we aim to quantify how much supporting facts “stand out” from their surrounding passage context  This can be used as proxy for the capability to retrieve the answer BIBREF10  Specifically, we measure (i) the number of words jointly occurring in a question and a sentence, (ii) the length of the longest n-gram shared by question and sentence and (iii) whether a word or n-gram from the question uniquely appears in a sentence 
The resulting taxonomy of the framework is shown in Figure FIGREF10  The full catalogue of features, their description, detailed annotation guideline as well as illustrating examples can be found in Appendix  
Application of the Framework ::: Candidate Datasets
We select contemporary MRC benchmarks to represent all four commonly used problem definitions BIBREF15  In selecting relevant datasets, we do not consider those that are considered “solved”, i e  where the state of the art performance surpasses human performance, as is the case with SQuAD BIBREF28, BIBREF7  Concretely, we selected gold standards that fit our problem definition and were published in the years 2016 to 2019, have at least $(2019 - publication\ year) \times 20$ citations, and bucket them according to the answer selection styles as described in Section SECREF4 We randomly draw one from each bucket and add two randomly drawn datasets from the candidate pool  This leaves us with the datasets described in Table TABREF19  For a more detailed description, we refer to Appendix  
Application of the Framework ::: Annotation Task
We randomly select 50 distinct question, answer and passage triples from the publicly available development sets of the described datasets  Training, development and the (hidden) test set are drawn from the same distribution defined by the data collection method of the respective dataset  For those collections that contain multiple questions over a single passage, we ensure that we are sampling unique paragraphs in order to increase the variety of investigated texts 
The samples were annotated by the first author of this paper, using the proposed schema  In order to validate our findings, we further take 20% of the annotated samples and present them to a second annotator (second author)  Since at its core, the annotation is a multi-label task, we report the inter-annotator agreement by computing the (micro-averaged) F1 score, where we treat the first annotator's labels as gold  Table TABREF21 reports the agreement scores, the overall (micro) average F1 score of the annotations is 0 82, which means that on average, more than two thirds of the overall annotated labels were agreed on by both annotators  We deem this satisfactory, given the complexity of the annotation schema 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis
We present a concise view of the annotation results in Figure FIGREF23  The full annotation results can be found in Appendix   We centre our discussion around the following main points:
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Linguistic Features
As observed in Figure FIGREF23 the gold standards feature a high degree of Redundancy, peaking at 76% of the annotated HotpotQA samples and synonyms and paraphrases (labelled Synonym), with ReCoRd samples containing 58% of them, likely to be attributed to the elaborating type of discourse of the dataset sources (encyclopedia and newswire)  This is, however, not surprising, as it is fairly well understood in the literature that current state-of-the-art models perform well on distinguishing relevant words and phrases from redundant ones BIBREF32  Additionally, the representational capability of synonym relationships of word embeddings has been investigated and is well known BIBREF33  Finally, we observe the presence of syntactic features, such as ambiguous relative clauses, appositions and adverbial phrases, (RelAdvApp 40% in HotpotQA and ReCoRd) and those introducing variance, concretely switching between verbal and nominal styles (e g  Nominalisation 10% in HotpotQA) and from passive to active voice (Voice, 8% in HotpotQA) 
Syntactic features contributing to variety and ambiguity that we did not observe in our samples are the exploitation of verb symmetry, the use of dative and genitive cases or ambiguous prepositions and coordination scope (respectively Symmetry, Dative, Genitive, Prepositions, Scope)  Therefore we cannot establish whether models are capable of dealing with those features by evaluating them on those gold standards 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Factual Correctness
We identify three common sources that surface in different problems regarding an answer's factual correctness, as reported in Figure FIGREF23 and illustrate their instantiations in Table TABREF31:
Design Constraints: Choosing the task design and the data collection method introduces some constraints that lead to factually debatable examples  For example, a span might have been arbitrarily selected from multiple spans that potentially answer a question, but only a single continuous answer span per question is allowed by design, as observed in the NewsQA and MsMarco samples (32% and 34% examples annotated as Debatable with 16% and 53% thereof exhibiting arbitrary selection, respectively)  Sometimes, when additional passages are added after the annotation step, they can by chance contain passages that answer the question more precisely than the original span, as seen in HotpotQA (16% Debatable samples, 25% of them due to arbitrary selection)  In the case of MultiRC it appears to be inconsistent, whether multiple correct answer choices are expected to be correct in isolation or in conjunction (28% Debatable with 29% of them exhibiting this problem)  This might provide an explanation to its relatively weak human baseline performance of 84% F1 score BIBREF31 
Weak Quality assurance: When the (typically crowd-sourced) annotations are not appropriately validated, incorrect examples will find their way into the gold standards  This typically results in factually wrong expected answers (i e  when a more correct answer is present in the context) or a question is expected to be Unanswerable, but is actually answerable from the provided context  The latter is observed in MsMarco (83% of examples annotated as Wrong) and NewsQA, where 60% of the examples annotated as Wrong are Unanswerable with an answer present 
Arbitrary Precision: There appears to be no clear guideline on how precise the answer is expected to be, when the passage expresses the answer in varying granularities  We annotated instances as Debatable when the expected answer was not the most precise given the context (44% and 29% of Debatable instances in NewsQA and MultiRC, respectively) 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Semantics-altering grammatical modifiers
We took interest in whether any of the benchmarks contain what we call distracting lexical features (or distractors): grammatical modifiers that alter the semantics of a sentence for the final task of answering the given question while preserving a similar lexical form  An example of such features are cues for (double) Negation (e g , “no”, “not”), which when introduced in a sentence, reverse its meaning  Other examples include modifiers denoting Restrictivity, Factivity and Reasoning (such as Monotonicity and Conditional cues)  Examples of question-answer pairs containing a distractor are shown in Table FIGREF37 
We posit that the presence of such distractors would allow for evaluating reading comprehension beyond potential simple word matching  However, we observe no presence of such features in the benchmarks (beyond Negation in DROP, ReCoRd and HotpotQA, with 4%, 4% and 2% respectively)  This results in gold standards that clearly express the evidence required to obtain the answer, lacking more challenging, i e , distracting, sentences that can assess whether a model can truly understand meaning 
Application of the Framework ::: Qualitative Analysis ::: Other
In the Figure FIGREF23 we observe that Operational and Arithmetic reasoning moderately (6% to 8% combined) appears “in the wild”, i e  when not enforced by the data design as is the case with HotpotQA (80% Operations combined) or DROP (68% Arithmetic combined)  Causal reasoning is (exclusively) present in MultiRC (32%), whereas Temporal and Spatial reasoning requirements seem to not naturally emerge in gold standards  In ReCoRd, a fraction of 38% questions can only be answered By Exclusion of every other candidate, due to the design choice of allowing questions where the required information to answer them is not fully expressed in the accompanying paragraph 
Therefore, it is also a little surprising to observe that ReCoRd requires external resources with regard to knowledge, as seen in Figure FIGREF23  MultiRC requires technical or more precisely basic scientific knowledge (6% Technical/Scientific), as a portion of paragraphs is extracted from elementary school science textbooks BIBREF31  Other benchmarks moderately probe for factual knowledge (0% to 4% across all categories), while Intuitive knowledge is required to derive answers in each gold standard 
It is also worth pointing out, as done in Figure FIGREF23, that although MultiRC and MsMarco are not modelled as a span selection problem, their samples still contain 50% and 66% of answers that are directly taken from the context  DROP contains the biggest fraction of generated answers (60%), due to the requirement of arithmetic operations 
To conclude our analysis, we observe similar distributions of linguistic features and reasoning patterns, except where there are constraints enforced by dataset design, annotation guidelines or source text choice  Furthermore, careful consideration of design choices (such as single-span answers) is required, to avoid impairing the factual correctness of datasets, as pure crowd-worker agreement seems not sufficient in multiple cases 
Application of the Framework ::: Quantitative Results ::: Lexical overlap
We used the scores assigned by our proposed set of metrics (discussed in Section SECREF11 Dimensions of Interest: Complexity) to predict the supporting facts in the gold standard samples (that we included in our manual annotation)  Concretely, we used the following five features capturing lexical overlap: (i) the number of words occurring in sentence and question, (ii) the length of the longest n-gram shared by sentence and question, whether a (iii) uni- and (iv) bigram from the question is unique to a sentence, and (v) the sentence index, as input to a logistic regression classifier  We optimised on each sample leaving one example for evaluation  We compute the average Precision, Recall and F1 score by means of leave-one-out validation with every sample entry  The averaged results after 5 runs are reported in Table TABREF41 
We observe that even by using only our five features based lexical overlap, the simple logistic regression baseline is able to separate out the supporting facts from the context to a varying degree  This is in line with the lack of semantics-altering grammatical modifiers discussed in the qualitative analysis section above  The classifier performs best on DROP (66% F1) and MultiRC (40% F1), which means that lexical cues can considerably facilitate the search for the answer in those gold standards  On MultiRC, yadav2019quick come to a similar conclusion, by using a more sophisticated approach based on overlap between question, sentence and answer choices 
Surprisingly, the classifier is able to pick up a signal from supporting facts even on data that has been pruned against lexical overlap heuristics by populating the context with additional documents that have high overlap scores with the question  This results in significantly higher scores than when guessing randomly (HotpotQA 26% F1, and MsMarco 11% F1)  We observe similar results in the case the length of the question leaves few candidates to compute overlap with $6 3$ and $7 3$ tokens on average for MsMarco and NewsQA (26% F1), compared to $16 9$ tokens on average for the remaining four dataset samples 
Finally, it is worth mentioning that although the queries in ReCoRd are explicitly independent from the passage, the linear classifier is still capable of achieving 34% F1 score in predicting the supporting facts 
However, neural networks perform significantly better than our admittedly crude baseline (e g  66% F1 for supporting facts classification on HotpotQA BIBREF14), albeit utilising more training examples, and a richer sentence representation  This facts implies that those neural models are capable of solving more challenging problems than simple “text matching” as performed by the logistic regression baseline  However, they still circumvent actual reading comprehension as the respective gold standards are of limited suitability to evaluate this BIBREF34, BIBREF35  This suggests an exciting future research direction, that is categorising the scale between text matching and reading comprehension more precisely and respectively positioning state-of-the-art models thereon 
Related Work
Although not as prominent as the research on novel architecture, there has been steady progress in critically investigating the data and evaluation aspects of NLP and machine learning in general and MRC in particular 
Related Work ::: Adversarial Evaluation
The authors of the AddSent algorithm BIBREF11 show that MRC models trained and evaluated on the SQuAD dataset pay too little attention to details that might change the semantics of a sentence, and propose a crowd-sourcing based method to generate adversary examples to exploit that weakness  This method was further adapted to be fully automated BIBREF36 and applied to different gold standards BIBREF35  Our proposed approach differs in that we aim to provide qualitative justifications for those quantitatively measured issues 
Related Work ::: Sanity Baselines
Another line of research establishes sane baselines to provide more meaningful context to the raw performance scores of evaluated models  When removing integral parts of the task formulation such as question, the textual passage or parts thereof BIBREF37 or restricting model complexity by design in order to suppress some required form of reasoning BIBREF38, models are still able to perform comparably to the state-of-the-art  This raises concerns about the perceived benchmark complexity and is related to our work in a broader sense as one of our goals is to estimate the complexity of benchmarks 
Related Work ::: Benchmark evaluation in NLP
Beyond MRC, efforts similar to ours that pursue the goal of analysing the evaluation of established datasets exist in Natural Language Inference BIBREF13, BIBREF12  Their analyses reveal the existence of biases in training and evaluation data that can be approximated with simple majority-based heuristics  Because of these biases, trained models fail to extract the semantics that are required for the correct inference  Furthermore, a fair share of work was done to reveal gender bias in coreference resolution datasets and models BIBREF39, BIBREF40, BIBREF41 
Related Work ::: Annotation Taxonomies
Finally, related to our framework are works that introduce annotation categories for gold standards evaluation  Concretely, we build our annotation framework around linguistic features that were introduced in the GLUE suite BIBREF42 and the reasoning categories introduced in the WorldTree dataset BIBREF19  A qualitative analysis complementary to ours, with focus on the unanswerability patterns in datasets that feature unanswerable questions was done by Yatskar2019 
Conclusion
In this paper, we introduce a novel framework to characterise machine reading comprehension gold standards  This framework has potential applications when comparing different gold standards, considering the design choices for a new gold standard and performing qualitative error analyses for a proposed approach 
Furthermore we applied the framework to analyse popular state-of-the-art gold standards for machine reading comprehension: We reveal issues with their factual correctness, show the presence of lexical cues and we observe that semantics-altering grammatical modifiers are missing in all of the investigated gold standards  Studying how to introduce those modifiers into gold standards and observing whether state-of-the-art MRC models are capable of performing reading comprehension on text containing them, is a future research goal 
A future line of research is to extend the framework to be able to identify the different types of exploitable cues such as question or entity typing and concrete overlap patterns  This will allow the framework to serve as an interpretable estimate of reading comprehension complexity of gold standards  Finally, investigating gold standards under this framework where MRC models outperform the human baseline (e g  SQuAD) will contribute to a deeper understanding of the seemingly superb performance of deep learning approaches on them 
Context 2: Introduction
During the first two decades of the 21st century, the sharing and processing of vast amounts of data has become pervasive  This expansion of data sharing and processing capabilities is both a blessing and a curse  Data helps build better information systems for the digital era and enables further research for advanced data management that benefits the society in general  But the use of this very data containing sensitive information conflicts with private data protection, both from an ethical and a legal perspective 
There are several application domains on which this situation is particularly acute  This is the case of the medical domain BIBREF0  There are plenty of potential applications for advanced medical data management that can only be researched and developed using real data; yet, the use of medical data is severely limited –when not entirely prohibited– due to data privacy protection policies 
One way of circumventing this problem is to anonymise the data by removing, replacing or obfuscating the personal information mentioned, as exemplified in Table TABREF1  This task can be done by hand, having people read and anonymise the documents one by one  Despite being a reliable and simple solution, this approach is tedious, expensive, time consuming and difficult to scale to the potentially thousands or millions of documents that need to be anonymised 
For this reason, numerous of systems and approaches have been developed during the last decades to attempt to automate the anonymisation of sensitive content, starting with the automatic detection and classification of sensitive information  Some of these systems rely on rules, patterns and dictionaries, while others use more advanced techniques related to machine learning and, more recently, deep learning 
Given that this paper is concerned with text documents (e g  medical records), the involved techniques are related to Natural Language Processing (NLP)  When using NLP approaches, it is common to pose the problem of document anonymisation as a sequence labelling problem, i e  classifying each token within a sequence as being sensitive information or not  Further, depending on the objective of the anonymisation task, it is also important to determine the type of sensitive information (names of individuals, addresses, age, sex, etc ) 
The anonymisation systems based on NLP techniques perform reasonably well, but are far from perfect  Depending on the difficulty posed by each dataset or the amount of available data for training machine learning models, the performance achieved by these methods is not enough to fully rely on them in certain situations BIBREF0  However, in the last two years, the NLP community has reached an important milestone thanks to the appearance of the so-called Transformers neural network architectures BIBREF1  In this paper, we conduct several experiments in sensitive information detection and classification on Spanish clinical text using BERT (from `Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers') BIBREF2 as the base for a sequence labelling approach  The experiments are carried out on two datasets: the MEDDOCAN: Medical Document Anonymization shared task dataset BIBREF3, and NUBes BIBREF4, a corpus of real medical reports in Spanish  In these experiments, we compare the performance of BERT with other machine-learning-based systems, some of which use language-specific features  Our aim is to evaluate how good a BERT-based model performs without language nor domain specialisation apart from the training data labelled for the task at hand 
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: the next section describes related work about data anonymisation in general and clinical data anonymisation in particular; it also provides a more detailed explanation and background about the Transformers architecture and BERT  Section SECREF3 describes the data involved in the experiments and the systems evaluated in this paper, including the BERT-based system; finally, it details the experimental design  Section SECREF4 introduces the results for each set of experiments  Finally, Section SECREF5 contains the conclusions and future lines of work 
Related Work
The state of the art in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has reached an important milestone in the last couple of years thanks to deep-learning architectures, increasing in several points the performance of new models for almost any text processing task 
The major change started with the Transformers model proposed by vaswani2017attention  It substituted the widely used recurrent and convolutional neural network architectures by another approach based solely on self-attention, obtaining an impressive performance gain  The original proposal was focused on an encoder-decoder architecture for machine translation, but soon the use of Transformers was made more general BIBREF1  There are several other popular models that use Transformers, such as Open AI's GPT and GPT2 BIBREF5, RoBERTa BIBREF6 and the most recent XLNet BIBREF7; still, BERT BIBREF2 is one of the most widespread Transformer-based models 
BERT trains its unsupervised language model using a Masked Language Model and Next Sentence Prediction  A common problem in NLP is the lack of enough training data  BERT can be pre-trained to learn general or specific language models using very large amounts of unlabelled text (e g  web content, Wikipedia, etc ), and this knowledge can be transferred to a different downstream task in a process that receives the name fine-tuning 
devlin2018bert have used fine-tuning to achieve state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of challenging natural language tasks, such as text classification, Question Answering (QA) and Named Entity Recognition and Classification (NERC)  BERT has also been used successfully by other community practitioners for a wide range of NLP-related tasks BIBREF8, BIBREF9 
Regarding the task of data anonymisation in particular, anonymisation systems may follow different approaches and pursue different objectives (Cormode and Srivastava, 2009)  The first objective of these systems is to detect and classify the sensitive information contained in the documents to be anonymised  In order to achieve that, they use rule-based approaches, Machine Learning (ML) approaches, or a combination of both 
Although most of these efforts are for English texts –see, among others, the i2b2 de-identification challenges BIBREF10, BIBREF11, dernon2016deep, or khin2018deep–, other languages are also attracting growing interest  Some examples are mamede2016automated for Portuguese and tveit2004anonymization for Norwegian  With respect to the anonymisation of text written in Spanish, recent studies include medina2018building, hassan2018anonimizacion and garcia2018automating  Most notably, in 2019 the first community challenge about anonymisation of medical documents in Spanish, MEDDOCAN BIBREF3, was held as part of the IberLEF initiative  The winners of the challenge –the Neither-Language-nor-Domain-Experts (NLNDE) BIBREF12– achieved F1-scores as high as 0 975 in the task of sensitive information detection and categorisation by using recurrent neural networks with Conditional Random Field (CRF) output layers 
At the same challenge, mao2019hadoken occupied the 8th position among 18 participants using BERT  According to the description of the system, the authors used BERT-Base Multilingual Cased and an output CRF layer  However, their system is $\sim $3 F1-score points below our implementation without the CRF layer 
Materials and Methods
The aim of this paper is to evaluate BERT's multilingual model and compare it to other established machine-learning algorithms in a specific task: sensitive data detection and classification in Spanish clinical free text  This section describes the data involved in the experiments and the systems evaluated  Finally, we introduce the experimental setup 
Materials and Methods ::: Data
Two datasets are exploited in this article  Both datasets consist of plain text containing clinical narrative written in Spanish, and their respective manual annotations of sensitive information in BRAT BIBREF13 standoff format  In order to feed the data to the different algorithms presented in Section SECREF7, these datasets were transformed to comply with the commonly used BIO sequence representation scheme BIBREF14 
Materials and Methods ::: Data ::: NUBes-PHI
NUBes BIBREF4 is a corpus of around 7,000 real medical reports written in Spanish and annotated with negation and uncertainty information  Before being published, sensitive information had to be manually annotated and replaced for the corpus to be safely shared  In this article, we work with the NUBes version prior to its anonymisation, that is, with the manual annotations of sensitive information  It follows that the version we work with is not publicly available and, due to contractual restrictions, we cannot reveal the provenance of the data  In order to avoid confusion between the two corpus versions, we henceforth refer to the version relevant in this paper as NUBes-PHI (from `NUBes with Personal Health Information') 
NUBes-PHI consists of 32,055 sentences annotated for 11 different sensitive information categories  Overall, it contains 7,818 annotations  The corpus has been randomly split into train (72%), development (8%) and test (20%) sets to conduct the experiments described in this paper  The size of each split and the distribution of the annotations can be consulted in Tables and , respectively 
The majority of sensitive information in NUBes-PHI are temporal expressions (`Date' and `Time'), followed by healthcare facility mentions (`Hospital'), and the age of the patient  Mentions of people are not that frequent, with physician names (`Doctor') occurring much more often than patient names (`Patient')  The least frequent sensitive information types, which account for $\sim $10% of the remaining annotations, consist of the patient's sex, job, and kinship, and locations other than healthcare facilities (`Location')  Finally, the tag `Other' includes, for instance, mentions to institutions unrelated to healthcare and whether the patient is right- or left-handed  It occurs just 36 times 
Materials and Methods ::: Data ::: The MEDDOCAN corpus
The organisers of the MEDDOCAN shared task BIBREF3 curated a synthetic corpus of clinical cases enriched with sensitive information by health documentalists  In this regard, the MEDDOCAN evaluation scenario could be said to be somewhat far from the real use case the technology developed for the shared task is supposed to be applied in  However, at the moment it also provides the only public means for a rigorous comparison between systems for sensitive health information detection in Spanish texts 
The size of the MEDDOCAN corpus is shown in Table   Compared to NUBes-PHI (Table ), this corpus contains more sensitive information annotations, both in absolute and relative terms 
The sensitive annotation categories considered in MEDDOCAN differ in part from those in NUBes-PHI  Most notably, it contains finer-grained labels for location-related mentions –namely, `Address', `Territory', and `Country'–, and other sensitive information categories that we did not encounter in NUBes-PHI (e g , identifiers, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc )  In total, the MEDDOCAN corpus has 21 sensitive information categories  We refer the reader to the organisers' article BIBREF3 for more detailed information about this corpus 
Materials and Methods ::: Systems
Apart from experimenting with a pre-trained BERT model, we have run experiments with other systems and baselines, to compare them and obtain a better perspective about BERT's performance in these datasets 
Materials and Methods ::: Systems ::: Baseline
As the simplest baseline, a sensitive data recogniser and classifier has been developed that consists of regular-expressions and dictionary look-ups  For each category to detect a specific method has been implemented  For instance, the Date, Age, Time and Doctor detectors are based on regular-expressions; Hospital, Sex, Kinship, Location, Patient and Job are looked up in dictionaries  The dictionaries are hand-crafted from the training data available, except for the Patient's case, for which the possible candidates considered are the 100 most common female and male names in Spain according to the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE; Spanish Statistical Office) 
Materials and Methods ::: Systems ::: CRF
Conditional Random Fields (CRF) BIBREF15 have been extensively used for tasks of sequential nature  In this paper, we propose as one of the competitive baselines a CRF classifier trained with sklearn-crfsuite for Python 3 5 and the following configuration: algorithm = lbfgs; maximum iterations = 100; c1 = c2 = 0 1; all transitions = true; optimise = false  The features extracted from each token are as follows:
[noitemsep]
prefixes and suffixes of 2 and 3 characters;
the length of the token in characters and the length of the sentence in tokens;
whether the token is all-letters, a number, or a sequence of punctuation marks;
whether the token contains the character `@';
whether the token is the start or end of the sentence;
the token's casing and the ratio of uppercase characters, digits, and punctuation marks to its length;
and, the lemma, part-of-speech tag, and named-entity tag given by ixa-pipes BIBREF16 upon analysing the sentence the token belongs to 
Noticeably, none of the features used to train the CRF classifier is domain-dependent  However, the latter group of features is language dependent 
Materials and Methods ::: Systems ::: spaCy
spaCy is a widely used NLP library that implements state-of-the-art text processing pipelines, including a sequence-labelling pipeline similar to the one described by strubell2017fast  spaCy offers several pre-trained models in Spanish, which perform basic NLP tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER)  In this paper, we have trained a new NER model to detect NUBes-PHI labels  For this purpose, the new model uses all the labels of the training corpus coded with its context at sentence level  The network optimisation parameters and dropout values are the ones recommended in the documentation for small datasets  Finally, the model is trained using batches of size 64  No more features are included, so the classifier is language-dependent but not domain-dependent 
Materials and Methods ::: Systems ::: BERT
As introduced earlier, BERT has shown an outstanding performance in NERC-like tasks, improving the start-of-the-art results for almost every dataset and language  We take the same approach here, by using the model BERT-Base Multilingual Cased with a Fully Connected (FC) layer on top to perform a fine-tuning of the whole model for an anonymisation task in Spanish clinical data  Our implementation is built on PyTorch and the PyTorch-Transformers library BIBREF1  The training phase consists in the following steps (roughly depicted in Figure ):
Pre-processing: since we are relying on a pre-trained BERT model, we must match the same configuration by using a specific tokenisation and vocabulary  BERT also needs that the inputs contains special tokens to signal the beginning and the end of each sequence 
Fine-tuning: the pre-processed sequence is fed into the model  BERT outputs the contextual embeddings that encode each of the inputted tokens  This embedding representation for each token is fed into the FC linear layer after a dropout layer (with a 0 1 dropout probability), which in turn outputs the logits for each possible class  The cross-entropy loss function is calculated comparing the logits and the gold labels, and the error is back-propagated to adjust the model parameters 
We have trained the model using an AdamW optimiser BIBREF17 with the learning rate set to 3e-5, as recommended by devlin2018bert, and with a gradient clipping of 1 0  We also applied a learning-rate scheduler that warms up the learning rate from zero to its maximum value as the training progresses, which is also a common practice  For each experiment set proposed below, the training was run with an early-stopping patience of 15 epochs  Then, the model that performed best against the development set was used to produce the reported results 
The experiments were run on a 64-core server with operating system Ubuntu 16 04, 250GB of RAM memory, and 4 GeForce RTX 2080 GPUs with 11GB of memory  The maximum sequence length was set at 500 and the batch size at 12  In this setting, each epoch –a full pass through all the training data– required about 10 minutes to complete 
Materials and Methods ::: Experimental design
We have conducted experiments with BERT in the two datasets of Spanish clinical narrative presented in Section SECREF3 The first experiment set uses NUBes-PHI, a corpus of real medical reports manually annotated with sensitive information  Because this corpus is not publicly available, and in order to compare the BERT-based model to other related published systems, the second set of experiments uses the MEDDOCAN 2019 shared task competition dataset  The following sections provide greater detail about the two experimental setups 
Materials and Methods ::: Experimental design ::: Experiment A: NUBes-PHI
In this experiment set, we evaluate all the systems presented in Section SECREF7, namely, the rule-based baseline, the CRF classifier, the spaCy entity tagger, and BERT  The evaluation comprises three scenarios of increasing difficulty:
[noitemsep]
- Evaluates the performance of the systems at predicting whether each token is sensitive or non-sensitive; that is, the measurements only take into account whether a sensitive token has been recognised or not, regardless of the BIO label and the category assigned  This scenario shows how good a system would be at obfuscating sensitive data (e g , by replacing sensitive tokens with asterisks) 
- We measure the performance of the systems at predicting the sensitive information type of each token –i e , the 11 categories presented in Section SECREF5 or `out'  Detecting entity types correctly is important if a system is going to be used to replace sensitive data by fake data of the same type (e g , random people names) 
- This is the strictest evaluation, as it takes into account both the BIO label and the category assigned to each individual token  Being able to discern between two contiguous sensitive entities of the same type is relevant not only because it is helpful when producing fake replacements, but because it also yields more accurate statistics of the sensitive information present in a given document collection 
The systems are evaluated in terms of micro-average precision, recall and F1-score in all the scenarios 
In addition to the scenarios proposed, a subject worth being studied is the need of labelled data  Manually labelled data is an scarce and expensive resource, which for some application domains or languages is difficult to come by  In order to obtain an estimation of the dependency of each system on the available amount of training data, we have retrained all the compared models using decreasing amounts of data –from 100% of the available training instances to just 1%  The same data subsets have been used to train all the systems  Due to the knowledge transferred from the pre-trained BERT model, the BERT-based model is expected to be more robust to data scarcity than those that start their training from scratch 
Materials and Methods ::: Experimental design ::: Experiment B: MEDDOCAN
In this experiment set, our BERT implementation is compared to several systems that participated in the MEDDOCAN challenge: a CRF classifier BIBREF18, a spaCy entity recogniser BIBREF18, and NLNDE BIBREF12, the winner of the shared task and current state of the art for sensitive information detection and classification in Spanish clinical text  Specifically, we include the results of a domain-independent NLNDE model (S2), and the results of a model enriched with domain-specific embeddings (S3)  Finally, we include the results obtained by mao2019hadoken with a CRF output layer on top of BERT embeddings  MEDDOCAN consists of two scenarios:
[noitemsep]
- This evaluation measures how good a system is at detecting sensitive text spans, regardless of the category assigned to them 
- In this scenario, systems are required to match exactly not only the boundaries of each sensitive span, but also the category assigned 
The systems are evaluated in terms of micro-averaged precision, recall and F-1 score  Note that, in contrast to the evaluation in Experiment A, MEDDOCAN measurements are entity-based instead of tokenwise  An exhaustive explanation of the MEDDOCAN evaluation procedure is available online, as well as the official evaluation script, which we used to obtain the reported results 
Results
This section describes the results obtained in the two sets of experiments: NUBes-PHI and MEDDOCAN 
Results ::: Experiment A: NUBes-PHI
Table shows the results of the conducted experiments in NUBes-PHI for all the compared systems  The included baseline serves to give a quick insight about how challenging the data is  With simple regular expressions and gazetteers a precision of 0 853 is obtained  On the other hand, the recall, which directly depends on the coverage provided by the rules and resources, drops to 0 469  Hence, this task is unlikely to be solved without the generalisation capabilities provided by machine-learning and deep-learning models 
Regarding the detection scenario –that is, the scenario concerned with a binary classification to determine whether each individual token conveys sensitive information or not–, it can be observed that BERT outperforms its competitors  A fact worth highlighting is that, according to these results, BERT achieves a precision lower than the rest of the systems (i e , it makes more false positive predictions); in exchange, it obtains a remarkably higher recall  Noticeably, it reaches a recall of 0 979, improving by more than 4 points the second-best system, spaCy 
The table also shows the results for the relaxed metric that only takes into account the entity type detected, regardless of the BIO label (i e , ignoring whether the token is at the beginning or in the middle of a sensitive sequence of tokens)  The conclusions are very similar to those extracted previously, with BERT gaining 2 1 points of F1-score over the CRF based approach  The confusion matrices of the predictions made by CRF, spaCy, and BERT in this scenario are shown in Table   As can bee seen, BERT has less difficulty in predicting correctly less frequent categories, such as `Location', `Job', and `Patient'  One of the most common mistakes according to the confusion matrices is classifying hospital names as `Location' instead of the more accurate `Hospital'; this is hardly a harmful error, given that a hospital is actually a location  Last, the category `Other' is completely leaked by all the compared systems, most likely due to its almost total lack of support in both training and evaluation datasets 
To finish with this experiment set, Table also shows the strict classification precision, recall and F1-score for the compared systems  Despite the fact that, in general, the systems obtain high values, BERT outperforms them again  BERT's F1-score is 1 9 points higher than the next most competitive result in the comparison  More remarkably, the recall obtained by BERT is about 5 points above 
Upon manual inspection of the errors committed by the BERT-based model, we discovered that it has a slight tendency towards producing ill-formed BIO sequences (e g, starting a sensitive span with `Inside' instead of `Begin'; see Table )  We could expect that complementing the BERT-based model with a CRF layer on top would help enforce the emission of valid sequences, alleviating this kind of errors and further improving its results 
Finally, Figure shows the impact of decreasing the amount of training data in the detection scenario  It shows the difference in precision, recall, and F1-score with respect to that obtained using 100% of the training data  A general downward trend can be observed, as one would expect: less training data leads to less accurate predictions  However, the BERT-based model is the most robust to training-data reduction, showing an steadily low performance loss  With 1% of the dataset (230 training instances), the BERT-based model only suffers a striking 7-point F1-score loss, in contrast to the 32 and 39 points lost by the CRF and spaCy models, respectively  This steep performance drop stems to a larger extent from recall decline, which is not that marked in the case of BERT  Overall, these results indicate that the transfer-learning achieved through the BERT multilingual pre-trained model not only helps obtain better results, but also lowers the need of manually labelled data for this application domain 
Results ::: Experiment B: MEDDOCAN
The results of the two MEDDOCAN scenarios –detection and classification– are shown in Table   These results follow the same pattern as in the previous experiments, with the CRF classifier being the most precise of all, and BERT outperforming both the CRF and spaCy classifiers thanks to its greater recall  We also show the results of mao2019hadoken who, despite of having used a BERT-based system, achieve lower scores than our models  The reason why it should be so remain unclear 
With regard to the winner of the MEDDOCAN shared task, the BERT-based model has not improved the scores obtained by neither the domain-dependent (S3) nor the domain-independent (S2) NLNDE model  However, attending to the obtained results, BERT remains only 0 3 F1-score points behind, and would have achieved the second position among all the MEDDOCAN shared task competitors  Taking into account that only 3% of the gold labels remain incorrectly annotated, the task can be considered almost solved, and it is not clear if the differences among the systems are actually significant, or whether they stem from minor variations in initialisation or a long-tail of minor labelling inconsistencies 
Conclusions and Future Work
In this work we have briefly introduced the problems related to data privacy protection in clinical domain  We have also described some of the groundbreaking advances on the Natural Language Processing field due to the appearance of Transformers-based deep-learning architectures and transfer learning from very large general-domain multilingual corpora, focusing our attention in one of its most representative examples, Google's BERT model 
In order to assess the performance of BERT for Spanish clinical data anonymisation, we have conducted several experiments with a BERT-based sequence labelling approach using the pre-trained multilingual BERT model shared by Google as the starting point for the model training  We have compared this BERT-based sequence labelling against other methods and systems  One of the experiments uses the MEDDOCAN 2019 shared task dataset, while the other uses a novel Spanish clinical reports dataset called NUBes-PHI 
The results of the experiments show that, in NUBes-PHI, the BERT-based model outperforms the other systems without requiring any adaptation or domain-specific feature engineering, just by being trained on the provided labelled data  Interestingly, the BERT-based model obtains a remarkably higher recall than the other systems  High recall is a desirable outcome because, when anonymising sensible documents, the accidental leak of sensible data is likely to be more dangerous than the unintended over-obfuscation of non-sensitive text 
Further, we have conducted an additional experiment on this dataset by progressively reducing the training data for all the compared systems  The BERT-based model shows the highest robustness to training-data scarcity, loosing only 7 points of F1-score when trained on 230 instances instead of 21,371  These observation are in line with the results obtained by the NLP community using BERT for other tasks 
The experiments with the MEDDOCAN 2019 shared task dataset follow the same pattern  In this case, the BERT-based model falls 0 3 F1-score points behind the shared task winning system, but it would have achieved the second position in the competition with no further refinement 
Since we have used a pre-trained multilingual BERT model, the same approach is likely to work for other languages just by providing some labelled training data  Further, this is the simplest fine-tuning that can be performed based on BERT  More sophisticated fine-tuning layers could help improve the results  For example, it could be expected that a CRF layer helped enforce better BIO tagging sequence predictions  Precisely, mao2019hadoken participated in the MEDDOCAN competition using a BERT+CRF architecture, but their reported scores are about 3 points lower than our implementation  From the description of their work, it is unclear what the source of this score difference could be 
Further, at the time of writing this paper, new multilingual pre-trained models and Transformer architectures have become available  It would not come as a surprise that these new resources and systems –e g , XLM-RoBERTa BIBREF19 or BETO BIBREF20, a BERT model fully pre-trained on Spanish texts– further advanced the state of the art in this task 
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by Vicomtech and partially funded by the project DeepReading (RTI2018-096846-B-C21, MCIU/AEI/FEDER,UE) 
Context 3: Introduction
In recent years, gender has become a hot topic within the political, societal and research spheres  Numerous studies have been conducted in order to evaluate the presence of women in media, often revealing their under-representation, such as the Global Media Monitoring Project BIBREF0  In the French context, the CSA BIBREF1 produces a report on gender representation in media on a yearly basis  The 2017 report shows that women represent 40% of French media speakers, with a significant drop during high-audience hours (6:00-8:00pm) reaching a value of only 29%  Another large scale study confirmed this trend with an automatic analysis of gender in French audiovisuals streams, highlighting a huge variation across type of shows BIBREF2 
Besides the social impact of gender representation, broadcast recordings are also a valuable source of data for the speech processing community  Indeed, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems require large amount of annotated speech data to be efficiently trained, which leaves us facing the emerging concern about the fact that "AI artifacts tend to reflect the goals, knowledge and experience of their creators" BIBREF3  Since we know that women are under-represented in media and that the AI discipline has retained a male-oriented focus BIBREF4, we can legitimately wonder about the impact of using such data as a training set for ASR technologies  This concern is strengthened by the recent works uncovering gender bias in several natural language processing (NLP) tools such as BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8 
In this paper, we first highlight the importance of TV and radio broadcast as a source of data for ASR, and the potential impact it can have  We then perform a statistical analysis of gender representation in a data set composed of four state-of-the-art corpora of French broadcast, widely used within the speech community  Finally we question the impact of such a representation on the systems developed on this data, through the perspective of an ASR system 
From gender representation in data to gender bias in AI ::: On the importance of data
The ever growing use of machine learning in science has been enabled by several progresses among which the exponential growth of data available  The quality of a system now depends mostly on the quality and quantity of the data it has been trained on  If it does not discard the importance of an appropriate architecture, it reaffirms the fact that rich and large corpora are a valuable resource  Corpora are research contributions which do not only allow to save and observe certain phenomena or validate a hypothesis or model, but are also a mandatory part of the technology development  This trend is notably observable within the NLP field, where industrial technologies, such as Apple, Amazon or Google vocal assistants now reach high performance level partly due to the amount of data possessed by these companies BIBREF9 
Surprisingly, as data is said to be “the new oil", few data sets are available for ASR systems  The best known are corpora like TIMIT BIBREF10, Switchboard BIBREF11 or Fisher BIBREF12 which date back to the early 1990s  The scarceness of available corpora is justified by the fact that gathering and annotating audio data is costly both in terms of money and time  Telephone conversations and broadcast recordings have been the primary source of spontaneous speech used  Out of all the 130 audio resources proposed by LDC to train automatic speech recognition systems in English, approximately 14% of them are based on broadcast news and conversation  For French speech technologies, four corpora containing radio and TV broadcast are the most widely used: ESTER1 BIBREF13, ESTER2 BIBREF14, ETAPE BIBREF15 and REPERE BIBREF16  These four corpora have been built alongside evaluation campaigns and are still, to our knowledge, the largest French ones of their type available to date 
From gender representation in data to gender bias in AI ::: From data to bias
The gender issue has returned to the forefront of the media scene in recent years and with the emergence of AI technologies in our daily lives, gender bias has become a scientific topic that researchers are just beginning to address  Several studies revealed the existence of gender bias in AI technologies such as face recognition (GenderShades BIBREF17), NLP (word embeddings BIBREF5 and semantics BIBREF6) and machine translation (BIBREF18, BIBREF7)  The impact of the training data used within these deep-learning algorithms is therefore questioned 
Bias can be found at different levels as pointed out by BIBREF19  BIBREF20 defines bias as a skew that produces a type of harm  She distinguishes two types of harms that are allocation harm and representation harm  The allocation harm occurs when a system is performing better or worse for a certain group while representational harm contributes to the perpetuation of stereotypes  Both types of harm are the results of bias in machine learning that often comes from the data systems are trained on  Disparities in representation in our social structures is captured and reflected by the training data, through statistical patterns  The GenderShades study is a striking example of what data disparity and lack of representation can produce: the authors tested several gender recognition modules used by facial recognition tools and found difference in error-rate as high as 34 percentage points between recognition of white male and black female faces  The scarce presence of women and colored people in training set resulted in bias in performance towards these two categories, with a strong intersectional bias  As written by BIBREF21 "A data set may have many millions of pieces of data, but this does not mean it is random or representative  To make statistical claims about a data set, we need to know where data is coming from; it is similarly important to know and account for the weaknesses in that data " (p 668) 
Regarding ASR technology, little work has explored the presence of gender bias within the systems and no consensus has been reached  BIBREF22 found that speech recognizers perform better on female voice on a broadcast news and telephone corpus  They proposed several explanations to this observation, such as the larger presence of non-professional male speech in the broadcast data, implying a less prepared speech for these speakers or a more normative language and standard pronunciation for women linked to the traditional role of women in language acquisition and education  The same trend was observed by BIBREF23  More recently, BIBREF24 discovered a gender bias within YouTube's automatic captioning system but this bias was not observed in a second study evaluating Bing Speech system and YouTube Automatic Captions on a larger data set BIBREF8  However race and dialect bias were found  General American speakers and white speakers had the lowest error rate for both systems  If the better performance on General American speakers could be explained by the fact that they are all voice professionals, producing clear and articulated speech, but no explanation is provided for biases towards non-white speakers 
Gender bias in ASR technology is still an open research question as no clear answer has been reached so far  It seems that many parameters are to take into account to achieve a general agreement  As we established the importance of TV and radio broadcast as a source of data for ASR, and the potential impact it can have, the following content of this paper is structured as this: we first describe statistically the gender representation of a data set composed of four state-of-the-art corpora of French broadcast, widely used within the speech community, introducing the notion of speaker's role to refine our analysis in terms of voice professionalism  We then question the impact of such a representation on a ASR system trained on these data  BIBREF25
Methodology
This section is organized as follows: we first present the data we are working on  In a second time we explain how we proceed to describe the gender representation in our corpus and introduce the notion of speaker's role  The third subsection introduces the ASR system and metrics used to evaluate gender bias in performance 
Methodology ::: Data presentation
Our data consists of two sets used to train and evaluate our automatic speech recognition system  Four major evaluation campaigns have enabled the creation of wide corpora of French broadcast speech: ESTER1 BIBREF13, ESTER2 BIBREF14, ETAPE BIBREF15 and REPERE BIBREF16  These four collections contain radio and/or TV broadcasts aired between 1998 and 2013 which are used by most academic researchers in ASR  Show duration varies between 10min and an hour  As years went by and speech processing research was progressing, the difficulty of the tasks augmented and the content of these evaluation corpora changed  ESTER1 and ESTER2 mainly contain prepared speech such as broadcast news, whereas ETAPE and REPERE consists also of debates and entertainment shows, spontaneous speech introducing more difficulty in its recognition 
Our training set contains 27,085 speech utterances produced by 2,506 speakers, accounting for approximately 100 hours of speech  Our evaluation set contains 74,064 speech utterances produced by 1,268 speakers for a total of 70 hours of speech  Training data by show, medium and speech type is summarized in Table and evaluation data in Table   Evaluation data has a higher variety of shows with both prepared (P) and spontaneous (S) speech type (accented speech from African radio broadcast is also included in the evaluation set) 
Methodology ::: Methodology for descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data
We first describe the gender representation in training data  Gender representation is measured in terms of number of speakers, number of utterances (or speech turns), and turn lengths (descriptive statistics are given in Section SECREF16)  Each speech turn was mapped to its speaker in order to associate it with a gender 
As pointed out by the CSA report BIBREF1, women presence tends to be marginal within the high-audience hours, showing that women are represented but less than men and within certain given conditions  It is clear that a small number of speakers is responsible for a large number of speech turns  Most of these speakers are journalists, politicians, presenters and such, who are representative of a show  Therefore, we introduce the notion of speaker's role to refine our exploration of gender disparity, following studies which quantified women's presence in terms of role  Within our work, we define the notion of speaker role by two criteria specifying the speaker's on-air presence, namely the number of speech turns and the cumulative duration of his or her speaking time in a show  Based on the available speech transcriptions and meta-data, we compute for each speaker the number of speech turns uttered as well as their total length  We then use the following criteria to define speaker's role: a speaker is considered as speaking often (respectively seldom) if he/she accumulates a total of turns higher (respectively lower) than 1% of the total number of speech turns in a given show  The same process is applied to identify speakers talking for a long period from those who do not  We end up with two salient roles called Anchors and Punctual speakers:
the Anchor speakers (A) are above the threshold of 1% for both criteria, meaning they are intervening often and for a long time thus holding an important place in interaction;
the Punctual speakers (PS) on the contrary are below the threshold of 1% for both the total number of turns and the total speech time 
These roles are defined at the show level  They could be roughly assimilated to the categorization “host/guest” in radio and TV shows  Anchors could be described as professional speakers, producing mostly prepared speech, whereas Punctual speakers are more likely to be “everyday people"  The concept of speaker's role makes sense at both sociological and technical levels  An Anchor speaker is more likely to be known from the audience (society), but he or she will also likely have a professional (clear) way of speaking (as mentioned by BIBREF22 and BIBREF8), as well as a high number of utterances, augmenting the amount of data available for a given gender category 
Methodology ::: Gender bias evaluation procedure of an ASR system performance ::: ASR system
The ASR system used in this work is described in BIBREF25  It uses the KALDI toolkit BIBREF26, following a standard Kaldi recipe  The acoustic model is based on a hybrid HMM-DNN architecture and trained on the data summarized in Table   Acoustic training data correspond to 100h of non-spontaneous speech type (mostly broadcast news) coming from both radio and TV shows  A 5-gram language model is trained from several French corpora (3,323M words in total) using SRILM toolkit BIBREF27  The pronunciation model is developed using the lexical resource BDLEX BIBREF28 as well as automatic grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) transcription to find pronunciation variants of our vocabulary (limited to 80K)  It is important to re-specify here, for further analysis, that our Kaldi pipeline follows speaker adaptive training (SAT) where we train and decode using speaker adapted features (fMLLR-adapted features) in per-speaker mode  It is well known that speaker adaptation acts as an effective procedure to reduce mismatch between training and evaluation conditions BIBREF29, BIBREF26 
Methodology ::: Gender bias evaluation procedure of an ASR system performance ::: Evaluation
Word Error Rate (WER) is a common metric to evaluate ASR performance  It is measured as the sum of errors (insertions, deletions and substitutions) divided by the total number of words in the reference transcription  As we are investigating the impact on performance of speaker's gender and role, we computed the WER for each speaker at the episode (show occurrence) level  Analyzing at such granularity allows us to avoid large WER variation that could be observed at utterance level (especially for short speech turns) but also makes possible to get several WER values for a given speaker, one for each occurrence of a show in which he/she appears on  Speaker's gender was provided by the meta-data and role was obtained using the criteria from Section SECREF6 computed for each show  This enables us to analyze our results across gender and role categories which was done using Wilcoxon rank sum tests also called Mann-Whitney U test (with $\alpha $= 0 001) BIBREF30  The choice of a Wilcoxon rank sum test and not the commonly used t-test is motivated by the non-normality of our data 
Results ::: Descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data ::: Gender representation
As expected, we observe a disparity in terms of gender representation in our data (see Table )  Women represent 33 16% of the speakers, confirming the figures given by the GMMP report BIBREF0  However, it is worth noticing that women account for only 22 57% of the total speech time, which leads us to conclude that women also speak less than men 
Results ::: Descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data ::: Speaker's role representation
Table presents roles' representation in training data and shows that despite the small number of Anchor speakers in our data (3 79%), they nevertheless concentrate 35 71 % of the total speech time 
Results ::: Descriptive analysis of gender representation in training data ::: Role and gender interaction
When crossing both parameters, we can observe that the gender distribution is not constant throughout roles  Women represent 29 47% of the speakers within the Anchor category, even less than among the Punctual speakers  Their percentage of speech is also smaller  When calculating the average speech time uttered by a female Anchor, we obtain a value of 15 9 min against 25 2 min for a male Anchor, which suggests that even within the Anchor category men tend to speak more  This confirms the existence of gender disparities within French media  It corroborates with the analysis of the CSA BIBREF1, which shows that women were less present during high-audience hours  Our study shows that they are also less present in important roles  These results legitimate our initial questioning on the impact of gender balance on ASR performance trained on broadcast recordings 
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Impact of gender on WER
As explained in Section SECREF13, WER is the sum of errors divided by the number of words in the transcription reference  The higher the WER, the poorer the system performance  Our 70h evaluation data contains a large amount of spontaneous speech and is very challenging for the ASR system trained on prepared speech: we observe an overall average WER of 42 9% for women and 34 3% for men  This difference of WER between men and women is statistically significant (med(M) = 25%; med(F) = 29%; U = 709040; p-value < 0 001) 
However, when observing gender differences across shows, no clear trend can be identified, as shown in Figure FIGREF21  For shows like Africa1 Infos or La Place du Village, we find an average WER lower for women than for men, while the trend is reversed for shows such as Un Temps de Pauchon or Le Masque et la Plume  The disparity of the results depending on the show leads us to believe that other factors may be entangled within the observed phenomenon 
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Impact of role on WER
Speaker's role seems to have an impact on WER: we obtain an average WER of 30 8% for the Anchor speakers and 42 23% for the Punctual speakers  This difference is statistically significant with a p-value smaller than $10^{-14}$ (med(A) = 21%; med(P) = 31%; U = 540,430; p-value < 0 001)  
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Role and gender interaction
Figure FIGREF25 presents the WER distribution (WER being obtained for each speaker in a show occurrence) according to the speaker's role and gender  It is worth noticing that the gender difference is only significant within the Punctual speakers group  The average WER is of 49 04% for the women and 38 56% for the men with a p-value smaller than $10^{-6}$ (med(F) = 39%; med(M) = 29%; U = 251,450; p-value < 0 001), whereas it is just a trend between male and female Anchors (med(F) = 21%; med(M) = 21%; U = 116,230; p-value = 0 173)  This could be explained by the quantity of data available per speaker 
Results ::: Performance (WER) analysis on evaluation data ::: Speech type as a third entangled factor?
In order to try to explain the observed variation in our results depending on shows and gender (Figure FIGREF21), we add the notion of speech type to shed some light on our results  BIBREF22 and BIBREF24 suggested that the speaker professionalism, associated with clear and hyper-articulated speech could be an explaining factor for better performance 
Based on our categorization in prepared speech (mostly news reports) and spontaneous speech (mostly debates and entertainment shows), we cross this parameter in our performance analysis  As shown on Figure FIGREF26, these results confirm the inherent challenge of spontaneous speech compared to prepared speech  WER scores are similar between men and women when considering prepared speech (med(F) = 18%; med(M) = 21%; U = 217,160; p-value = 0 005) whereas they are worse for women (61 29%) than for men (46 51%) with p-value smaller than $10^{-14}$ for the spontaneous speech type (med(F) = 61%; med(M) = 37%; U = 153,580; p-value < 0 001) 
Discussion
We find a clear disparity in terms of women presence and speech quantity in French media  Our data being recorded between 1998 and 2013, we can expect this disparity to be smaller on more recent broadcast recordings, especially since the French government displays efforts toward parity in media representation  One can also argue that even if our analysis was conducted on a large amount of data it does not reach the exhaustiveness of large-scale studies such as the one of BIBREF2  Nonetheless it does not affect the relevance of our findings, because if real-world gender representation might be more balanced today, these corpora are still used as training data for AI systems 
The performance difference across gender we observed corroborates (on a larger quantity and variety of language data produced by more than 2400 speakers) the results obtained by BIBREF24 on isolated words recognition  However the following study on read speech does not replicate these results  Yet a performance degradation is observed across dialect and race BIBREF8  BIBREF22 found lower WER for women than men on broadcast news and conversational telephone speech for both English and French  The authors suggest that gender stereotypes associated with women role in education and language acquisition induce a more normative elocution  We observed that the higher the degree of normativity of speech the smaller the gender difference  No significant gender bias is observed for prepared speech nor within the Anchor category  Even if we do not find similar results with lower WER for women than men, we obtained a median WER smaller for women on prepared speech and equal to the male median WER for the Anchor speakers 
Another explanation could be the use of adaptation within the pipeline  Most broadcast programs transcription systems have a speaker adaptation step within their decoding pipeline, which is the case for our system  An Anchor speaker intervening more often would have a larger quantity of data to realize such adaptation of the acoustic model  On the contrary, Punctual speakers who appear scarcely in the data are not provided with the same amount of adaptation data  Hence we can hypothesize that gender performance difference observed for Punctual speakers is due to the fact that female speech is further from the (initial non-adapted) acoustic model as it was trained on unbalanced data (as shown in Table )  Considering that Punctual speakers represent 92 78% of the speakers, this explains why gender difference is significant over our entire data set  A way to confirm our hypothesis would be to reproduce our analysis on WER values obtained without using speaker adapted features at the decoding step 
When decoding prepared speech (hence similar to the training data), no significant difference is found in WER between men and women, revealing that the speaker adaptation step could be sufficient to reach same performance for both genders  But when decoding more spontaneous speech, there is a mismatch with the initial acoustic model (trained on prepared speech)  Consequently, the speaker adaptation step might not be enough to recover good ASR performance, especially for women for whom less adaptation data is available (see Section 4 2 3) 
Conclusion
This paper has investigated gender bias in ASR performance through the following research questions: i) what is the proportion of men and women in French radio and TV media data ? ii) what is the impact of the observed disparity on ASR performance ? iii) is this as simple as a problem of gender proportion in the training data or are other factors entangled ? Our contributions are the following:
Descriptive analysis of the broadcast data used to train our ASR system confirms the already known disparity, where 65% of the speakers are men, speaking more than 75% of the time 
When investigating WER scores according to gender, speaker's role and speech type, huge variations are observed  We conclude that gender is clearly a factor of variation in ASR performance, with a WER increase of 24% for women compared to men, exhibiting a clear gender bias 
Gender bias varies across speaker's role and speech spontaneity level  Performance for Punctual speakers respectively spontaneous speech seems to reinforce this gender bias with a WER increase of 27 2% respectively 31 8% between male and female speakers 
We found that an ASR system trained on unbalanced data regarding gender produces gender bias performance  Therefore, in order to create fair systems it is necessary to take into account the representation problems in society that are going to be encapsulated in the data  Understanding how women under-representation in broadcast data can lead to bias in ASR performances is the key to prevent re-implementing and reinforcing discrimination already existing in our societies  This is in line with the concept of “Fairness by Design" proposed by BIBREF31 
Gender, race, religion, nationality are all characteristics that we deem unfair to classify on, and these ethical standpoints needs to be taken into account in systems' design  Characteristics that are not considered as relevant in a given task can be encapsulated in data nonetheless, and lead to bias performance  Being aware of the demographic skews our data set might contain is a first step to track the life cycle of a training data set and a necessary step to control the tools we develop 

ground_truth: The resulting taxonomy of the framework is shown in Figure FIGREF10

FIGREF10

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. What are the clinical datasets used in the paper?
Context 4: Introduction
Data annotation is a major bottleneck for the application of supervised learning approaches to many problems  As a result, unsupervised methods that learn directly from unlabeled data are increasingly important  For tasks related to unsupervised syntactic analysis, discrete generative models have dominated in recent years – for example, for both part-of-speech (POS) induction BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 and unsupervised dependency parsing BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 , BIBREF4   While similar models have had success on a range of unsupervised tasks, they have mostly ignored the apparent utility of continuous word representations evident from supervised NLP applications BIBREF5 , BIBREF6   In this work, we focus on leveraging and explicitly representing continuous word embeddings within unsupervised models of syntactic structure 
Pre-trained word embeddings from massive unlabeled corpora offer a compact way of injecting a prior notion of word similarity into models that would otherwise treat words as discrete, isolated categories  However, the specific properties of language captured by any particular embedding scheme can be difficult to control, and, further, may not be ideally suited to the task at hand  For example, pre-trained skip-gram embeddings BIBREF7 with small context window size are found to capture the syntactic properties of language well BIBREF8 , BIBREF9   However, if our goal is to separate syntactic categories, this embedding space is not ideal – POS categories correspond to overlapping interspersed regions in the embedding space, evident in Figure SECREF4  
In our approach, we propose to learn a new latent embedding space as a projection of pre-trained embeddings (depicted in Figure SECREF5 ), while jointly learning latent syntactic structure – for example, POS categories or syntactic dependencies  To this end, we introduce a new generative model (shown in Figure FIGREF6 ) that first generates a latent syntactic representation (e g  a dependency parse) from a discrete structured prior (which we also call the “syntax model”), then, conditioned on this representation, generates a sequence of latent embedding random variables corresponding to each word, and finally produces the observed (pre-trained) word embeddings by projecting these latent vectors through a parameterized non-linear function  The latent embeddings can be jointly learned with the structured syntax model in a completely unsupervised fashion 
By choosing an invertible neural network as our non-linear projector, and then parameterizing our model in terms of the projection's inverse, we are able to derive tractable exact inference and marginal likelihood computation procedures so long as inference is tractable in the underlying syntax model  In sec:learn-with-inv we show that this derivation corresponds to an alternate view of our approach whereby we jointly learn a mapping of observed word embeddings to a new embedding space that is more suitable for the syntax model, but include an additional Jacobian regularization term to prevent information loss 
Recent work has sought to take advantage of word embeddings in unsupervised generative models with alternate approaches BIBREF9 , BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , BIBREF12   BIBREF9 build an HMM with Gaussian emissions on observed word embeddings, but they do not attempt to learn new embeddings  BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , and BIBREF12 extend HMM or dependency model with valence (DMV) BIBREF2 with multinomials that use word (or tag) embeddings in their parameterization  However, they do not represent the embeddings as latent variables 
In experiments, we instantiate our approach using both a Markov-structured syntax model and a tree-structured syntax model – specifically, the DMV  We evaluate on two tasks: part-of-speech (POS) induction and unsupervised dependency parsing without gold POS tags  Experimental results on the Penn Treebank BIBREF13 demonstrate that our approach improves the basic HMM and DMV by a large margin, leading to the state-of-the-art results on POS induction, and state-of-the-art results on unsupervised dependency parsing in the difficult training scenario where neither gold POS annotation nor punctuation-based constraints are available 
Model
As an illustrative example, we first present a baseline model for Markov syntactic structure (POS induction) that treats a sequence of pre-trained word embeddings as observations  Then, we propose our novel approach, again using Markov structure, that introduces latent word embedding variables and a neural projector  Lastly, we extend our approach to more general syntactic structures 
Example: Gaussian HMM
We start by describing the Gaussian hidden Markov model introduced by BIBREF9 , which is a locally normalized model with multinomial transitions and Gaussian emissions  Given a sentence of length INLINEFORM0 , we denote the latent POS tags as INLINEFORM1 , observed (pre-trained) word embeddings as INLINEFORM2 , transition parameters as INLINEFORM3 , and Gaussian emission parameters as INLINEFORM4   The joint distribution of data and latent variables factors as:
DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 is the multinomial transition probability and INLINEFORM1 is the multivariate Gaussian emission probability 
While the observed word embeddings do inform this model with a notion of word similarity – lacking in the basic multinomial HMM – the Gaussian emissions may not be sufficiently flexible to separate some syntactic categories in the complex pre-trained embedding space – for example the skip-gram embedding space as visualized in Figure SECREF4 where different POS categories overlap  Next we introduce a new approach that adds flexibility to the emission distribution by incorporating new latent embedding variables 
Markov Structure with Neural Projector
To flexibly model observed embeddings and yield a new representation space that is more suitable for the syntax model, we propose to cascade a neural network as a projection function, deterministically transforming the simple space defined by the Gaussian HMM to the observed embedding space  We denote the latent embedding of the INLINEFORM0 word in a sentence as INLINEFORM1 , and the neural projection function as INLINEFORM2 , parameterized by INLINEFORM3   In the case of sequential Markov structure, our new model corresponds to the following generative process:
For each time step INLINEFORM0 ,
[noitemsep, leftmargin=*]
Draw the latent state INLINEFORM0
Draw the latent embedding INLINEFORM0
Deterministically produce embedding
INLINEFORM0
The graphical model is depicted in Figure FIGREF6   The deterministic projection can also be viewed as sampling each observation from a point mass at INLINEFORM0   The joint distribution of our model is: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 is a conditional Gaussian distribution, and INLINEFORM1 is the Dirac delta function centered at INLINEFORM2 : DISPLAYFORM0
General Structure with Neural Projector
Our approach can be applied to a broad family of structured syntax models  We denote latent embedding variables as INLINEFORM0 , discrete latent variables in the syntax model as INLINEFORM1 ( INLINEFORM2 ), where INLINEFORM3 are conditioned to generate INLINEFORM4   The joint probability of our model factors as:
DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 represents the probability of the syntax model, and can encode any syntactic structure – though, its factorization structure will determine whether inference is tractable in our full model  As shown in Figure FIGREF6 , we focus on two syntax models for syntactic analysis in this paper  The first is Markov-structured, which we use for POS induction, and the second is DMV-structured, which we use to learn dependency parses without supervision 
The marginal data likelihood of our model is: DISPLAYFORM0
While the discrete variables INLINEFORM0 can be marginalized out with dynamic program in many cases, it is generally intractable to marginalize out the latent continuous variables, INLINEFORM1 , for an arbitrary projection INLINEFORM2 in Eq  ( EQREF17 ), which means inference and learning may be difficult  In sec:opt, we address this issue by constraining INLINEFORM3 to be invertible, and show that this constraint enables tractable exact inference and marginal likelihood computation 
Learning & Inference
In this section, we introduce an invertibility condition for our neural projector to tackle the optimization challenge  Specifically, we constrain our neural projector with two requirements: (1) INLINEFORM0 and (2) INLINEFORM1 exists  Invertible transformations have been explored before in independent components analysis BIBREF14 , gaussianization BIBREF15 , and deep density models BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF18 , for unstructured data  Here, we generalize this style of approach to structured learning, and augment it with discrete latent variables ( INLINEFORM2 )  Under the invertibility condition, we derive a learning algorithm and give another view of our approach revealed by the objective function  Then, we present the architecture of a neural projector we use in experiments: a volume-preserving invertible neural network proposed by BIBREF16 for independent components estimation 
Learning with Invertibility
For ease of exposition, we explain the learning algorithm in terms of Markov structure without loss of generality  As shown in Eq  ( EQREF17 ), the optimization challenge in our approach comes from the intractability of the marginalized emission factor INLINEFORM0   If we can marginalize out INLINEFORM1 and compute INLINEFORM2 , then the posterior and marginal likelihood of our Markov-structured model can be computed with the forward-backward algorithm  We can apply Eq  ( EQREF14 ) and obtain : INLINEFORM3
By using the change of variable rule to the integration, which allows the integration variable INLINEFORM0 to be replaced by INLINEFORM1 , the marginal emission factor can be computed in closed-form when the invertibility condition is satisfied: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 is a conditional Gaussian distribution, INLINEFORM1 is the Jacobian matrix of function INLINEFORM2 at INLINEFORM3 , and INLINEFORM4 represents the absolute value of its determinant  This Jacobian term is nonzero and differentiable if and only if INLINEFORM5 exists 
Eq  ( EQREF19 ) shows that we can directly calculate the marginal emission distribution INLINEFORM0   Denote the marginal data likelihood of Gaussian HMM as INLINEFORM1 , then the log marginal data likelihood of our model can be directly written as: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 represents the new sequence of embeddings after applying INLINEFORM1 to each INLINEFORM2   Eq  ( EQREF20 ) shows that the training objective of our model is simply the Gaussian HMM log likelihood with an additional Jacobian regularization term  From this view, our approach can be seen as equivalent to reversely projecting the data through INLINEFORM3 to another manifold INLINEFORM4 that is directly modeled by the Gaussian HMM, with a regularization term  Intuitively, we optimize the reverse projection INLINEFORM5 to modify the INLINEFORM6 space, making it more appropriate for the syntax model  The Jacobian regularization term accounts for the volume expansion or contraction behavior of the projection  Maximizing it can be thought of as preventing information loss  In the extreme case, the Jacobian determinant is equal to zero, which means the projection is non-invertible and thus information is being lost through the projection  Such “information preserving” regularization is crucial during optimization, otherwise the trivial solution of always projecting data to the same single point to maximize likelihood is viable 
More generally, for an arbitrary syntax model the data likelihood of our approach is: DISPLAYFORM0
If the syntax model itself allows for tractable inference and marginal likelihood computation, the same dynamic program can be used to marginalize out INLINEFORM0   Therefore, our joint model inherits the tractability of the underlying syntax model 
Invertible Volume-Preserving Neural Net
For the projection we can use an arbitrary invertible function, and given the representational power of neural networks they seem a natural choice  However, calculating the inverse and Jacobian of an arbitrary neural network can be difficult, as it requires that all component functions be invertible and also requires storage of large Jacobian matrices, which is memory intensive  To address this issue, several recent papers propose specially designed invertible networks that are easily trainable yet still powerful BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 , BIBREF19   Inspired by these works, we use the invertible transformation proposed by BIBREF16 , which consists of a series of “coupling layers”  This architecture is specially designed to guarantee a unit Jacobian determinant (and thus the invertibility property) 
From Eq  ( EQREF22 ) we know that only INLINEFORM0 is required for accomplishing learning and inference; we never need to explicitly construct INLINEFORM1   Thus, we directly define the architecture of INLINEFORM2   As shown in Figure FIGREF24 , the nonlinear transformation from the observed embedding INLINEFORM3 to INLINEFORM4 represents the first coupling layer  The input in this layer is partitioned into left and right halves of dimensions, INLINEFORM5 and INLINEFORM6 , respectively  A single coupling layer is defined as: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 is the coupling function and can be any nonlinear form  This transformation satisfies INLINEFORM1 , and BIBREF16 show that its Jacobian matrix is triangular with all ones on the main diagonal  Thus the Jacobian determinant is always equal to one (i e  volume-preserving) and the invertibility condition is naturally satisfied 
To be sufficiently expressive, we compose multiple coupling layers as suggested in BIBREF16   Specifically, we exchange the role of left and right half vectors at each layer as shown in Figure FIGREF24   For instance, from INLINEFORM0 to INLINEFORM1 the left subset INLINEFORM2 is unchanged, while from INLINEFORM3 to INLINEFORM4 the right subset INLINEFORM5 remains the same  Also note that composing multiple coupling layers does not change the volume-preserving and invertibility properties  Such a sequence of invertible transformations from the data space INLINEFORM6 to INLINEFORM7 is also called normalizing flow BIBREF20  
Experiments
In this section, we first describe our datasets and experimental setup  We then instantiate our approach with Markov and DMV-structured syntax models, and report results on POS tagging and dependency grammar induction respectively  Lastly, we analyze the learned latent embeddings 
Data
For both POS tagging and dependency parsing, we run experiments on the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) portion of the Penn Treebank  To create the observed data embeddings, we train skip-gram word embeddings BIBREF7 that are found to capture syntactic properties well when trained with small context window BIBREF8 , BIBREF9   Following BIBREF9 , the dimensionality INLINEFORM0 is set to 100, and the training context window size is set to 1 to encode more syntactic information  The skip-gram embeddings are trained on the one billion word language modeling benchmark dataset BIBREF21 in addition to the WSJ corpus 
General Experimental Setup
For the neural projector, we employ rectified networks as coupling function INLINEFORM0 following BIBREF16   We use a rectified network with an input layer, one hidden layer, and linear output units, the number of hidden units is set to the same as the number of input units  The number of coupling layers are varied as 4, 8, 16 for both tasks

ground_truth: MEDDOCAN, NUBes-PHI

MEDDOCAN, NUBes 

prompt_front: You are given a scientific article and a question. Answer the question as concisely as you can, using a single phrase or sentence if possible. If the question cannot be answered based on the information in the article, write "unanswerable". If the question is a yes/no question, answer "yes", "no", or "unanswerable". Do not provide any explanation.

Please answer the questions based on the text provided below. How big is imbalance in analyzed corpora?
Context 4:  We optimize marginal data likelihood directly using Adam BIBREF22   For both tasks in the fully unsupervised setting, we do not tune the hyper-parameters using supervised data 
Unsupervised POS tagging
For unsupervised POS tagging, we use a Markov-structured syntax model in our approach, which is a popular structure for unsupervised tagging tasks BIBREF9 , BIBREF10  
Following existing literature, we train and test on the entire WSJ corpus (49208 sentences, 1M tokens)  We use 45 tag clusters, the number of POS tags that appear in WSJ corpus  We train the discrete HMM and the Gaussian HMM BIBREF9 as baselines  For the Gaussian HMM, mean vectors of Gaussian emissions are initialized with the empirical mean of all word vectors with an additive noise  We assume diagonal covariance matrix for INLINEFORM0 and initialize it with the empirical variance of the word vectors  Following BIBREF9 , the covariance matrix is fixed during training  The multinomial probabilities are initialized as INLINEFORM1 , where INLINEFORM2   For our approach, we initialize the syntax model and Gaussian parameters with the pre-trained Gaussian HMM  The weights of layers in the rectified network are initialized from a uniform distribution with mean zero and a standard deviation of INLINEFORM3 , where INLINEFORM4 is the input dimension  We evaluate the performance of POS tagging with both Many-to-One (M-1) accuracy BIBREF23 and V-Measure (VM) BIBREF24   Given a model we found that the tagging performance is well-correlated with the training data likelihood, thus we use training data likelihood as a unsupervised criterion to select the trained model over 10 random restarts after training 50 epochs  We repeat this process 5 times and report the mean and standard deviation of performance 
We compare our approach with basic HMM, Gaussian HMM, and several state-of-the-art systems, including sophisticated HMM variants and clustering techniques with hand-engineered features  The results are presented in Table TABREF32   Through the introduced latent embeddings and additional neural projection, our approach improves over the Gaussian HMM by 5 4 points in M-1 and 5 6 points in VM  Neural HMM (NHMM) BIBREF10 is a baseline that also learns word representation jointly  Both their basic model and extended Conv version does not outperform the Gaussian HMM  Their best model incorporates another LSTM to model long distance dependency and breaks the Markov assumption, yet our approach still achieves substantial improvement over it without considering more context information  Moreover, our method outperforms the best published result that benefits from hand-engineered features BIBREF27 by 2 0 points on VM 
We found that most tagging errors happen in noun subcategories  Therefore, we do the one-to-one mapping between gold POS tags and induced clusters and plot the normalized confusion matrix of noun subcategories in Figure FIGREF35   The Gaussian HMM fails to identify “NN” and “NNS” correctly for most cases, and it often recognizes “NNPS” as “NNP”  In contrast, our approach corrects these errors well 
Unsupervised Dependency Parsing without gold POS tags
For the task of unsupervised dependency parse induction, we employ the Dependency Model with Valence (DMV) BIBREF2 as the syntax model in our approach  DMV is a generative model that defines a probability distribution over dependency parse trees and syntactic categories, generating tokens and dependencies in a head-outward fashion  While, traditionally, DMV is trained using gold POS tags as observed syntactic categories, in our approach, we treat each tag as a latent variable, as described in sec:general-neural 
Most existing approaches to this task are not fully unsupervised since they rely on gold POS tags following the original experimental setup for DMV  This is partially because automatically parsing from words is difficult even when using unsupervised syntactic categories BIBREF29   However, inducing dependencies from words alone represents a more realistic experimental condition since gold POS tags are often unavailable in practice  Previous work that has trained from words alone often requires additional linguistic constraints (like sentence internal boundaries) BIBREF29 , BIBREF30 , BIBREF31 , BIBREF32 , acoustic cues BIBREF33 , additional training data BIBREF4 , or annotated data from related languages BIBREF34   Our approach is naturally designed to train on word embeddings directly, thus we attempt to induce dependencies without using gold POS tags or other extra linguistic information 
Like previous work we use sections 02-21 of WSJ corpus as training data and evaluate on section 23, we remove punctuations and train the models on sentences of length INLINEFORM0 , “head-percolation” rules BIBREF39 are applied to obtain gold dependencies for evaluation  We train basic DMV, extended DMV (E-DMV) BIBREF35 and Gaussian DMV (which treats POS tag as unknown latent variables and generates observed word embeddings directly conditioned on them following Gaussian distribution) as baselines  Basic DMV and E-DMV are trained with Viterbi EM BIBREF40 on unsupervised POS tags induced from our Markov-structured model described in sec:pos  Multinomial parameters of the syntax model in both Gaussian DMV and our model are initialized with the pre-trained DMV baseline  Other parameters are initialized in the same way as in the POS tagging experiment  The directed dependency accuracy (DDA) is used for evaluation and we report accuracy on sentences of length INLINEFORM1 and all lengths  We train the parser until training data likelihood converges, and report the mean and standard deviation over 20 random restarts 
Our model directly observes word embeddings and does not require gold POS tags during training  Thus, results from related work trained on gold tags are not directly comparable  However, to measure how these systems might perform without gold tags, we run three recent state-of-the-art systems in our experimental setting: UR-A E-DMV BIBREF36 , Neural E-DMV BIBREF11 , and CRF Autoencoder (CRFAE) BIBREF37   We use unsupervised POS tags (induced from our Markov-structured model) in place of gold tags  We also train basic DMV on gold tags and include several state-of-the-art results on gold tags as reference points 
As shown in Table TABREF39 , our approach is able to improve over the Gaussian DMV by 4 8 points on length INLINEFORM0 and 4 8 points on all lengths, which suggests the additional latent embedding layer and neural projector are helpful  The proposed approach yields, to the best of our knowledge, state-of-the-art performance without gold POS annotation and without sentence-internal boundary information  DMV, UR-A E-DMV, Neural E-DMV, and CRFAE suffer a large decrease in performance when trained on unsupervised tags – an effect also seen in previous work BIBREF29 , BIBREF34   Since our approach induces latent POS tags jointly with dependency trees, it may be able to learn POS clusters that are more amenable to grammar induction than the unsupervised tags  We observe that CRFAE underperforms its gold-tag counterpart substantially  This may largely be a result of the model's reliance on prior linguistic rules that become unavailable when gold POS tag types are unknown  Many extensions to DMV can be considered orthogonal to our approach – they essentially focus on improving the syntax model  It is possible that incorporating these more sophisticated syntax models into our approach may lead to further improvements 
Sensitivity Analysis
In the above experiments we initialize the structured syntax components with the pre-trained Gaussian or discrete baseline, which is shown as a useful technique to help train our deep models  We further study the results with fully random initialization  In the POS tagging experiment, we report the results in Table TABREF48   While the performance with 4 layers is comparable to the pre-trained Gaussian initialization, deeper projections (8 or 16 layers) result in a dramatic drop in performance  This suggests that the structured syntax model with very deep projections is difficult to train from scratch, and a simpler projection might be a good compromise in the random initialization setting 
Different from the Markov prior in POS tagging experiments, our parsing model seems to be quite sensitive to the initialization  For example, directed accuracy of our approach on sentences of length INLINEFORM0 is below 40 0 with random initialization  This is consistent with previous work that has noted the importance of careful initialization for DMV-based models such as the commonly used harmonic initializer BIBREF2   However, it is not straightforward to apply the harmonic initializer for DMV directly in our model without using some kind of pre-training since we do not observe gold POS 
We investigate the effect of the choice of pre-trained embedding on performance while using our approach  To this end, we additionally include results using fastText embeddings BIBREF41 – which, in contrast with skip-gram embeddings, include character-level information  We set the context windows size to 1 and the dimension size to 100 as in the skip-gram training, while keeping other parameters set to their defaults  These results are summarized in Table TABREF50 and Table TABREF51   While fastText embeddings lead to reduced performance with our model, our approach still yields an improvement over the Gaussian baseline with the new observed embeddings space 
Qualitative Analysis of Embeddings
We perform qualitative analysis to understand how the latent embeddings help induce syntactic structures  First we filter out low-frequency words and punctuations in WSJ, and visualize the rest words (10k) with t-SNE BIBREF42 under different embeddings  We assign each word with its most likely gold POS tags in WSJ and color them according to the gold POS tags 
For our Markov-structured model, we have displayed the embedding space in Figure SECREF5 , where the gold POS clusters are well-formed  Further, we present five example target words and their five nearest neighbors in terms of cosine similarity  As shown in Table TABREF53 , the skip-gram embedding captures both semantic and syntactic aspects to some degree, yet our embeddings are able to focus especially on the syntactic aspects of words, in an unsupervised fashion without using any extra morphological information 
In Figure FIGREF54 we depict the learned latent embeddings with the DMV-structured syntax model  Unlike the Markov structure, the DMV structure maps a large subset of singular and plural nouns to the same overlapping region  However, two clusters of singular and plural nouns are actually separated  We inspect the two clusters and the overlapping region in Figure FIGREF54 , it turns out that the nouns in the separated clusters are words that can appear as subjects and, therefore, for which verb agreement is important to model  In contrast, the nouns in the overlapping region are typically objects  This demonstrates that the latent embeddings are focusing on aspects of language that are specifically important for modeling dependency without ever having seen examples of dependency parses  Some previous work has deliberately created embeddings to capture different notions of similarity BIBREF43 , BIBREF44 , while they use extra morphology or dependency annotations to guide the embedding learning, our approach provides a potential alternative to create new embeddings that are guided by structured syntax model, only using unlabeled text corpora 
Related Work
Our approach is related to flow-based generative models, which are first described in NICE BIBREF16 and have recently received more attention BIBREF17 , BIBREF19 , BIBREF18   This relevant work mostly adopts simple (e g  Gaussian) and fixed priors and does not attempt to learn interpretable latent structures  Another related generative model class is variational auto-encoders (VAEs) BIBREF45 that optimize a lower bound on the marginal data likelihood, and can be extended to learn latent structures BIBREF46 , BIBREF47   Against the flow-based models, VAEs remove the invertibility constraint but sacrifice the merits of exact inference and exact log likelihood computation, which potentially results in optimization challenges BIBREF48   Our approach can also be viewed in connection with generative adversarial networks (GANs) BIBREF49 that is a likelihood-free framework to learn implicit generative models  However, it is non-trivial for a gradient-based method like GANs to propagate gradients through discrete structures 
Conclusion
In this work, we define a novel generative approach to leverage continuous word representations for unsupervised learning of syntactic structure  Experiments on both POS induction and unsupervised dependency parsing tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach  Future work might explore more sophisticated invertible projections, or recurrent projections that jointly transform the entire input sequence 

ground_truth: Women represent 33.16% of the speakers