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. Which component is the least impactful?
Context 1: Introduction
The concept of message passing over graphs has been around for many years BIBREF0, BIBREF1, as well as that of graph neural networks (GNNs) BIBREF2, BIBREF3  However, GNNs have only recently started to be closely investigated, following the advent of deep learning  Some notable examples include BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10, BIBREF11, BIBREF12  These approaches are known as spectral  Their similarity with message passing (MP) was observed by BIBREF9 and formalized by BIBREF13 and BIBREF14 
The MP framework is based on the core idea of recursive neighborhood aggregation  That is, at every iteration, the representation of each vertex is updated based on messages received from its neighbors  All spectral GNNs can be described in terms of the MP framework 
GNNs have been applied with great success to bioinformatics and social network data, for node classification, link prediction, and graph classification  However, a few studies only have focused on the application of the MP framework to representation learning on text  This paper proposes one such application  More precisely, we represent documents as word co-occurrence networks, and develop an expressive MP GNN tailored to document understanding, the Message Passing Attention network for Document understanding (MPAD)  We also propose several hierarchical variants of MPAD  Evaluation on 10 document classification datasets show that our architectures learn representations that are competitive with the state-of-the-art  Furthermore, ablation experiments shed light on the impact of various architectural choices 
In what follows, we first provide some background about the MP framework (in sec  SECREF2), thoroughly describe and explain MPAD (sec  SECREF3), present our experimental framework (sec  SECREF4), report and interpret our results (sec  SECREF5), and provide a review of the relevant literature (sec  SECREF6) 
Message Passing Neural Networks
BIBREF13 proposed a MP framework under which many of the recently introduced GNNs can be reformulated  MP consists in an aggregation phase followed by a combination phase BIBREF14  More precisely, let $G(V,E)$ be a graph, and let us consider $v \in V$  At time $t+1$, a message vector $\mathbf {m}_v^{t+1}$ is computed from the representations of the neighbors $\mathcal {N}(v)$ of $v$:
The new representation $\mathbf {h}^{t+1}_v$ of $v$ is then computed by combining its current feature vector $\mathbf {h}^{t}_v$ with the message vector $\mathbf {m}_v^{t+1}$:
Messages are passed for $T$ time steps  Each step is implemented by a different layer of the MP network  Hence, iterations correspond to network depth  The final feature vector $\mathbf {h}_v^T$ of $v$ is based on messages propagated from all the nodes in the subtree of height $T$ rooted at $v$  It captures both the topology of the neighborhood of $v$ and the distribution of the vertex representations in it 
If a graph-level feature vector is needed, e g , for classification or regression, a READOUT pooling function, that must be invariant to permutations, is applied:
Next, we present the MP network we developed for document understanding 
Message Passing Attention network for Document understanding (MPAD) ::: Word co-occurrence networks
We represent a document as a statistical word co-occurrence network BIBREF18, BIBREF19 with a sliding window of size 2 overspanning sentences  Let us denote that graph $G(V,E)$  Each unique word in the preprocessed document is represented by a node in $G$, and an edge is added between two nodes if they are found together in at least one instantiation of the window  $G$ is directed and weighted: edge directions and weights respectively capture text flow and co-occurrence counts 
$G$ is a compact representation of its document  In $G$, immediate neighbors are consecutive words in the same sentence  That is, paths of length 2 correspond to bigrams  Paths of length more than 2 can correspond either to traditional $n$-grams or to relaxed $n$-grams, that is, words that never appear in the same sentence but co-occur with the same word(s)  Such nodes are linked through common neighbors 
Master node  Inspired by BIBREF3, our $G$ also includes a special document node, linked to all other nodes via unit weight bi-directional edges  In what follows, let us denote by $n$ the number of nodes in $G$, including the master node 
Message Passing Attention network for Document understanding (MPAD) ::: Message passing
We formulate our AGGREGATE function as:
where $\mathbf {H}^t \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$ contains node features ($d$ is a hyperparameter), and $\mathbf {A} \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times n}$ is the adjacency matrix of $G$  Since $G$ is directed, $\mathbf {A}$ is asymmetric  Also, $\mathbf {A}$ has zero diagonal as we choose not to consider the feature of the node itself, only that of its incoming neighbors, when updating its representation  Since $G$ is weighted, the $i^{th}$ row of $A$ contains the weights of the edges incoming on node $v_i$  $\mathbf {D} \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times n}$ is the diagonal in-degree matrix of $G$  MLP denotes a multi-layer perceptron, and $\mathbf {M}^{t+1} \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$ is the message matrix 
The use of a MLP was motivated by the observation that for graph classification, MP neural nets with 1-layer perceptrons are inferior to their MLP counterparts BIBREF14  Indeed, 1-layer perceptrons are not universal approximators of multiset functions  Note that like in BIBREF14, we use a different MLP at each layer 
Renormalization  The rows of $\mathbf {D}^{-1}\mathbf {A}$ sum to 1  This is equivalent to the renormalization trick of BIBREF9, but using only the in-degrees  That is, instead of computing a weighted sum of the incoming neighbors' feature vectors, we compute a weighted average of them  The coefficients are proportional to the strength of co-occurrence between words  One should note that by averaging, we lose the ability to distinguish between different neighborhood structures in some special cases, that is, we lose injectivity  Such cases include neighborhoods in which all nodes have the same representations, and neighborhoods of different sizes containing various representations in equal proportions BIBREF14  As suggested by the results of an ablation experiment, averaging is better than summing in our application (see subsection SECREF30)  Note that instead of simply summing/averaging, we also tried using GAT-like attention BIBREF11 in early experiments, without obtaining better results 
As far as our COMBINE function, we use the Gated Recurrent Unit BIBREF20, BIBREF21:
Omitting biases for readability, we have:
where the $\mathbf {W}$ and $\mathbf {U}$ matrices are trainable weight matrices not shared across time steps, $\sigma (\mathbf {x}) = 1/(1+\exp (-\mathbf {x}))$ is the sigmoid function, and $\mathbf {R}$ and $\mathbf {Z}$ are the parameters of the reset and update gates  The reset gate controls the amount of information from the previous time step (in $\mathbf {H}^t$) that should propagate to the candidate representations, $\tilde{\mathbf {H}}^{t+1}$  The new representations $\mathbf {H}^{t+1}$ are finally obtained by linearly interpolating between the previous and the candidate ones, using the coefficients returned by the update gate 
Interpretation  Updating node representations through a GRU should in principle allow nodes to encode a combination of local and global signals (low and high values of $t$, resp ), by allowing them to remember about past iterations  In addition, we also explicitly consider node representations at all iterations when reading out (see Eq  DISPLAY_FORM18) 
Message Passing Attention network for Document understanding (MPAD) ::: Readout
After passing messages and performing updates for $T$ iterations, we obtain a matrix $\mathbf {H}^T \in \mathbb {R}^{n \times d}$ containing the final vertex representations  Let $\hat{G}$ be graph $G$ without the special document node, and matrix $\mathbf {\hat{H}}^T \in \mathbb {R}^{(n-1) \times d}$ be the corresponding representation matrix (i e , $\mathbf {H}^T$ without the row of the document node) 
We use as our READOUT function the concatenation of self-attention applied to $\mathbf {\hat{H}}^T$ with the final document node representation  More precisely, we apply a global self-attention mechanism BIBREF22 to the rows of $\mathbf {\hat{H}}^T$  As shown in Eq  DISPLAY_FORM17, $\mathbf {\hat{H}}^T$ is first passed to a dense layer parameterized by matrix $\mathbf {W}_A^T \in \mathbb {R}^{d \times d}$  An alignment vector $\mathbf {a}$ is then derived by comparing, via dot products, the rows of the output of the dense layer $\mathbf {Y}^T \in \mathbb {R}^{(n-1) \times d}$ with a trainable vector $\mathbf {v}^T \in \mathbb {R}^d$ (initialized randomly) and normalizing with a softmax  The normalized alignment coefficients are finally used to compute the attentional vector $\mathbf {u}^T \in \mathbb {R}^d$ as a weighted sum of the final representations $\mathbf {\hat{H}}^T$ 
Note that we tried with multiple context vectors, i e , with a matrix $\mathbf {V}^T$ instead of a vector $\mathbf {v}^T$, like in BIBREF22, but results were not convincing, even when adding a regularization term to the loss to favor diversity among the rows of $\mathbf {V}^T$ 
Master node skip connection  $\mathbf {h}_G^T \in \mathbb {R}^{2d}$ is obtained by concatenating $\mathbf {u}^T$ and the final master node representation  That is, the master node vector bypasses the attention mechanism  This is equivalent to a skip or shortcut connection BIBREF23  The reason behind this choice is that we expect the special document node to learn a high-level summary about the document, such as its size, vocabulary, etc  (more details are given in subsection SECREF30)  Therefore, by making the master node bypass the attention layer, we directly inject global information about the document into its final representation 
Multi-readout  BIBREF14, inspired by Jumping Knowledge Networks BIBREF12, recommend to not only use the final representations when performing readout, but also that of the earlier steps  Indeed, as one iterates, node features capture more and more global information  However, retaining more local, intermediary information might be useful too  Thus, instead of applying the readout function only to $t=T$, we apply it to all time steps and concatenate the results, finally obtaining $\mathbf {h}_G \in \mathbb {R}^{T \times 2d}$ :
In effect, with this modification, we take into account features based on information aggregated from subtrees of different heights (from 1 to $T$), corresponding to local and global features 
Message Passing Attention network for Document understanding (MPAD) ::: Hierarchical variants of MPAD
Through the successive MP iterations, it could be argued that MPAD implicitly captures some soft notion of the hierarchical structure of documents (words $\rightarrow $ bigrams $\rightarrow $ compositions of bigrams, etc )  However, it might be beneficial to explicitly capture document hierarchy  Hierarchical architectures have brought significant improvements to many NLP tasks, such as language modeling and generation BIBREF24, BIBREF25, sentiment and topic classification BIBREF26, BIBREF27, and spoken language understanding BIBREF28, BIBREF29  Inspired by this line of research, we propose several hierarchical variants of MPAD, detailed in what follows  In all of them, we represent each sentence in the document as a word co-occurrence network, and obtain an embedding for it by applying MPAD as previously described 
MPAD-sentence-att  Here, the sentence embeddings are simply combined through self-attention 
MPAD-clique  In this variant, we build a complete graph where each node represents a sentence  We then feed that graph to MPAD, where the feature vectors of the nodes are initialized with the sentence embeddings previously obtained 
MPAD-path  This variant is similar to the clique one, except that instead of a complete graph, we build a path according to the natural flow of the text  That is, two nodes are linked by a directed edge if the two sentences they represent follow each other in the document 
Experiments ::: Datasets
We evaluate the quality of the document embeddings learned by MPAD on 10 document classification datasets, covering the topic identification, coarse and fine sentiment analysis and opinion mining, and subjectivity detection tasks  We briefly introduce the datasets next  Their statistics are reported in Table TABREF21 
(1) Reuters  This dataset contains stories collected from the Reuters news agency in 1987  Following common practice, we used the ModApte split and considered only the 10 classes with the highest number of positive training examples  We also removed documents belonging to more than one class and then classes left with no document (2 classes) 
(2) BBCSport BIBREF30 contains documents from the BBC Sport website corresponding to 2004-2005 sports news articles 
(3) Polarity BIBREF31 features positive and negative labeled snippets from Rotten Tomatoes 
(4) Subjectivity BIBREF32 contains movie review snippets from Rotten Tomatoes (subjective sentences), and Internet Movie Database plot summaries (objective sentences) 
(5) MPQA BIBREF33 is made of positive and negative phrases, annotated as part of the summer 2002 NRRC Workshop on Multi-Perspective Question Answering 
(6) IMDB BIBREF34 is a collection of highly polarized movie reviews from IMDB (positive and negative)  There are at most 30 reviews for each movie 
(7) TREC BIBREF35 consists of questions that are classified into 6 different categories 
(8) SST-1 BIBREF36 contains the same snippets as Polarity  The authors used the Stanford Parser to parse the snippets and split them into multiple sentences  They then used Amazon Mechanical Turk to annotate the resulting phrases according to their polarity (very negative, negative, neutral, positive, very positive) 
(9) SST-2 BIBREF36 is the same as SST-1 but with neutral reviews removed and snippets classified as positive or negative 
(10) Yelp2013 BIBREF26 features reviews obtained from the 2013 Yelp Dataset Challenge 
Experiments ::: Baselines
We evaluate MPAD against multiple state-of-the-art baseline models, including hierarchical ones, to enable fair comparison with the hierarchical MPAD variants 
doc2vec BIBREF37  Doc2vec (or paragraph vector) is an extension of word2vec that learns vectors for documents in a fully unsupervised manner  Document embeddings are then fed to a logistic regression classifier 
CNN BIBREF38  The convolutional neural network architecture, well-known in computer vision, is applied to text  There is one spatial dimension and the word embeddings are used as channels (depth dimensions) 
DAN BIBREF39  The Deep Averaging Network passes the unweighted average of the embeddings of the input words through multiple dense layers and a final softmax 
Tree-LSTM BIBREF40 is a generalization of the standard LSTM architecture to constituency and dependency parse trees 
DRNN BIBREF41  Recursive neural networks are stacked and applied to parse trees 
LSTMN BIBREF42 is an extension of the LSTM model where the memory cell is replaced by a memory network which stores word representations 
C-LSTM BIBREF43 combines convolutional and recurrent neural networks  The region embeddings provided by a CNN are fed to a LSTM 
SPGK BIBREF44 also models documents as word co-occurrence networks  It computes a graph kernel that compares shortest paths extracted from the word co-occurrence networks and then uses a SVM to categorize documents 
WMD BIBREF45 is an application of the well-known Earth Mover's Distance to text  A k-nearest neighbor classifier is used 
S-WMD BIBREF46 is a supervised extension of the Word Mover's Distance 
Semantic-CNN BIBREF47  Here, a CNN is applied to semantic units obtained by clustering words in the embedding space 
LSTM-GRNN BIBREF26 is a hierarchical model where sentence embeddings are obtained with a CNN and a GRU-RNN is fed the sentence representations to obtain a document vector 
HN-ATT BIBREF27 is another hierarchical model, where the same encoder architecture (a bidirectional GRU-RNN) is used for both sentences and documents, with different parameters  A self-attention mechanism is applied to the RNN annotations at each level 
Experiments ::: Model configuration and training
We preprocess all datasets using the code of BIBREF38  On Yelp2013, we also replace all tokens appearing strictly less than 6 times with a special UNK token, like in BIBREF27  We then build a directed word co-occurrence network from each document, with a window of size 2 
We use two MP iterations ($T$=2) for the basic MPAD, and two MP iterations at each level, for the hierarchical variants  We set $d$ to 64, except on IMDB and Yelp on which $d=128$, and use a two-layer MLP  The final graph representations are passed through a softmax for classification  We train MPAD in an end-to-end fashion by minimizing the cross-entropy loss function with the Adam optimizer BIBREF48 and an initial learning rate of 0 001 
To regulate potential differences in magnitude, we apply batch normalization after concatenating the feature vector of the master node with the self-attentional vector, that is, after the skip connection (see subsection SECREF16)  To prevent overfitting, we use dropout BIBREF49 with a rate of 0 5  We select the best epoch, capped at 200, based on the validation accuracy  When cross-validation is used (see 3rd column of Table TABREF21), we construct a validation set by randomly sampling 10% of the training set of each fold 
On all datasets except Yelp2013, we use the publicly available 300-dimensional pre-trained Google News vectors ($D$=300) BIBREF50 to initialize the node representations $\mathbf {H}^0$  On Yelp2013, we follow BIBREF27 and learn our own word vectors from the training and validation sets with the gensim implementation of word2vec BIBREF51 
MPAD was implemented in Python 3 6 using the PyTorch library BIBREF52  All experiments were run on a single machine consisting of a 3 4 GHz Intel Core i7 CPU with 16 GB of RAM and an NVidia GeForce Titan Xp GPU 
Results and ablations ::: Results
Experimental results are shown in Table TABREF28  For the baselines, the best scores reported in each original paper are shown  MPAD reaches best performance on 7 out of 10 datasets, and is close second elsewhere  Moreover, the 7 datasets on which MPAD ranks first widely differ in training set size, number of categories, and prediction task (topic, sentiment, subjectivity), which indicates that MPAD can perform well in different settings 
MPAD vs  hierarchical variants  On 9 datasets out of 10, one or more of the hierarchical variants outperform the vanilla MPAD architecture, highlighting the benefit of explicitly modeling the hierarchical nature of documents 
However, on Subjectivity, standard MPAD outperforms all hierarchical variants  On TREC, it reaches the same accuracy  We hypothesize that in some cases, using a different graph to separately encode each sentence might be worse than using one single graph to directly encode the document  Indeed, in the single document graph, some words that never appear in the same sentence can be connected through common neighbors, as was explained in subsection SECREF7  So, this way, some notion of cross-sentence context is captured while learning representations of words, bigrams, etc  at each MP iteration  This creates better informed representations, resulting in a better document embedding  With the hierarchical variants, on the other hand, each sentence vector is produced in isolation, without any contextual information about the other sentences in the document  Therefore, the final sentence embeddings might be of lower quality, and as a group might also contain redundant/repeated information  When the sentence vectors are finally combined into a document representation, it is too late to take context into account 
Results and ablations ::: Ablation studies
To understand the impact of some hyperparameters on performance, we conducted additional experiments on the Reuters, Polarity, and IMDB datasets, with the non-hierarchical version of MPAD  Results are shown in Table TABREF29 
Number of MP iterations  First, we varied the number of message passing iterations from 1 to 4  We can clearly see in Table TABREF29 that having more iterations improves performance  We attribute this to the fact that we are reading out at each iteration from 1 to $T$ (see Eq  DISPLAY_FORM18), which enables the final graph representation to encode a mixture of low-level and high-level features  Indeed, in initial experiments involving readout at $t$=$T$ only, setting $T\ge 2$ was always decreasing performance, despite the GRU-based updates (Eq  DISPLAY_FORM14)  These results were consistent with that of BIBREF53 and BIBREF9, who both are reading out only at $t$=$T$ too  We hypothesize that node features at $T\ge 2$ are too diffuse to be entirely relied upon during readout  More precisely, initially at $t$=0, node representations capture information about words, at $t$=1, about their 1-hop neighborhood (bigrams), at $t$=2, about compositions of bigrams, etc  Thus, pretty quickly, node features become general and diffuse  In such cases, considering also the lower-level, more precise features of the earlier iterations when reading out may be necessary 
Undirected edges  On Reuters, using an undirected graph leads to better performance, while on Polarity and IMDB, it is the opposite  This can be explained by the fact that Reuters is a topic classification task, for which the presence or absence of some patterns is important, but not necessarily the order in which they appear, while Polarity and IMDB are sentiment analysis tasks  To capture sentiment, modeling word order is crucial, e g , in detecting negation 
No master node  Removing the master node deteriorates performance across all datasets, clearly showing the value of having such a node  We hypothesize that since the special document node is connected to all other nodes, it is able to encode during message passing a summary of the document 
No renormalization  Here, we do not use the renormalization trick of BIBREF9 during MP (see subsection SECREF10)  That is, Eq  DISPLAY_FORM11 becomes $\mathbf {M}^{t+1} = \textsc {MLP}^{t+1}\big (\mathbf {A}\mathbf {H}^{t}\big )$  In other words, instead of computing a weighted average of the incoming neighbors' feature vectors, we compute a weighted sum of them  Unlike the mean, which captures distributions, the sum captures structural information BIBREF14  As shown in Table TABREF29, using sum instead of mean decreases performance everywhere, suggesting that in our application, capturing the distribution of neighbor representations is more important that capturing their structure  We hypothesize that this is the case because statistical word co-occurrence networks tend to have similar structural properties, regardless of the topic, polarity, sentiment, etc  of the corresponding documents 
Neighbors-only  In this experiment, we replaced the GRU combine function (see Eq  DISPLAY_FORM14) with the identity function  That is, we simply have $\mathbf {H}^{t+1}$=$\mathbf {M}^{t+1}$  Since $\mathbf {A}$ has zero diagonal, by doing so, we completely ignore the previous feature of the node itself when updating its representation  That is, the update is based entirely on its neighbors  Except on Reuters (almost no change), performance always suffers, stressing the need to take into account the root node during updates, not only its neighborhood 
Related work
In what follows, we offer a brief review of relevant studies, ranked by increasing order of similarity with our work 
BIBREF9, BIBREF54, BIBREF11, BIBREF10 conduct some node classification experiments on citation networks, where nodes are scientific papers, i e , textual data  However, text is only used to derive node feature vectors  The external graph structure, which plays a central role in determining node labels, is completely unrelated to text 
On the other hand, BIBREF55, BIBREF7 experiment on traditional document classification tasks  They both build $k$-nearest neighbor similarity graphs based on the Gaussian diffusion kernel  More precisely, BIBREF55 build one single graph where nodes are documents and distance is computed in the BoW space  Node features are then used for classification  Closer to our work, BIBREF7 represent each document as a graph  All document graphs are derived from the same underlying structure  Only node features, corresponding to the entries of the documents' BoW vectors, vary  The underlying, shared structure is that of a $k$-NN graph where nodes are vocabulary terms and similarity is the cosine of the word embedding vectors  BIBREF7 then perform graph classification  However they found performance to be lower than that of a naive Bayes classifier 
BIBREF56 use a GNN for hierarchical classification into a large taxonomy of topics  This task differs from traditional document classification  The authors represent documents as unweighted, undirected word co-occurrence networks with word embeddings as node features  They then use the spatial GNN of BIBREF15 to perform graph classification 
The work closest to ours is probably that of BIBREF53  The authors adopt the semi-supervised node classification approach of BIBREF9  They build one single undirected graph from the entire dataset, with both word and document nodes  Document-word edges are weighted by TF-IDF and word-word edges are weighted by pointwise mutual information derived from co-occurrence within a sliding window  There are no document-document edges  The GNN is trained based on the cross-entropy loss computed only for the labeled nodes, that is, the documents in the training set  When the final node representations are obtained, one can use that of the test documents to classify them and evaluate prediction performance 
There are significant differences between BIBREF53 and our work  First, our approach is inductive, not transductive  Indeed, while the node classification approach of BIBREF53 requires all test documents at training time, our graph classification model is able to perform inference on new, never-seen documents  The downside of representing documents as separate graphs, however, is that we lose the ability to capture corpus-level dependencies  Also, our directed graphs capture word ordering, which is ignored by BIBREF53  Finally, the approach of BIBREF53 requires computing the PMI for every word pair in the vocabulary, which may be prohibitive on datasets with very large vocabularies  On the other hand, the complexity of MPAD does not depend on vocabulary size 
Conclusion
We have proposed an application of the message passing framework to NLP, the Message Passing Attention network for Document understanding (MPAD)  Experiments conducted on 10 standard text classification datasets show that our architecture is competitive with the state-of-the-art  By processing weighted, directed word co-occurrence networks, MPAD is sensitive to word order and word-word relationship strength  To explicitly capture the hierarchical structure of documents, we also propose three hierarchical variants of MPAD, that we show bring improvements over the vanilla architecture 
Acknowledgments
We thank the NVidia corporation for the donation of a GPU as part of their GPU grant program 
Context 2: Introduction
Privacy policies are the documents which disclose the ways in which a company gathers, uses, shares and manages a user's data  As legal documents, they function using the principle of notice and choice BIBREF0, where companies post their policies, and theoretically, users read the policies and decide to use a company's products or services only if they find the conditions outlined in its privacy policy acceptable  Many legal jurisdictions around the world accept this framework, including the United States and the European Union BIBREF1, BIBREF2  However, the legitimacy of this framework depends upon users actually reading and understanding privacy policies to determine whether company practices are acceptable to them BIBREF3  In practice this is seldom the case BIBREF4, BIBREF5, BIBREF6, BIBREF7, BIBREF8, BIBREF9, BIBREF10  This is further complicated by the highly individual and nuanced compromises that users are willing to make with their data BIBREF11, discouraging a `one-size-fits-all' approach to notice of data practices in privacy documents 
With devices constantly monitoring our environment, including our personal space and our bodies, lack of awareness of how our data is being used easily leads to problematic situations where users are outraged by information misuse, but companies insist that users have consented  The discovery of increasingly egregious uses of data by companies, such as the scandals involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica BIBREF12, have further brought public attention to the privacy concerns of the internet and ubiquitous computing  This makes privacy a well-motivated application domain for NLP researchers, where advances in enabling users to quickly identify the privacy issues most salient to them can potentially have large real-world impact 
[1]https://play google com/store/apps/details?id=com gotokeep keep intl [2]https://play google com/store/apps/details?id=com viber voip [3]A question might not have any supporting evidence for an answer within the privacy policy 
Motivated by this need, we contribute PrivacyQA, a corpus consisting of 1750 questions about the contents of privacy policies, paired with over 3500 expert annotations  The goal of this effort is to kickstart the development of question-answering methods for this domain, to address the (unrealistic) expectation that a large population should be reading many policies per day  In doing so, we identify several understudied challenges to our ability to answer these questions, with broad implications for systems seeking to serve users' information-seeking intent  By releasing this resource, we hope to provide an impetus to develop systems capable of language understanding in this increasingly important domain 
Related Work
Prior work has aimed to make privacy policies easier to understand  Prescriptive approaches towards communicating privacy information BIBREF21, BIBREF22, BIBREF23 have not been widely adopted by industry  Recently, there have been significant research effort devoted to understanding privacy policies by leveraging NLP techniques BIBREF24, BIBREF25, BIBREF26, BIBREF27, BIBREF28, especially by identifying specific data practices within a privacy policy  We adopt a personalized approach to understanding privacy policies, that allows users to query a document and selectively explore content salient to them  Most similar is the PolisisQA corpus BIBREF29, which examines questions users ask corporations on Twitter  Our approach differs in several ways: 1) The PrivacyQA dataset is larger, containing 10x as many questions and answers  2) Answers are formulated by domain experts with legal training  3) PrivacyQA includes diverse question types, including unanswerable and subjective questions 
Our work is also related to reading comprehension in the open domain, which is frequently based upon Wikipedia passages BIBREF16, BIBREF17, BIBREF15, BIBREF30 and news articles BIBREF20, BIBREF31, BIBREF32  Table TABREF4 presents the desirable attributes our dataset shares with past approaches  This work is also tied into research in applying NLP approaches to legal documents BIBREF33, BIBREF34, BIBREF35, BIBREF36, BIBREF37, BIBREF38, BIBREF39  While privacy policies have legal implications, their intended audience consists of the general public rather than individuals with legal expertise  This arrangement is problematic because the entities that write privacy policies often have different goals than the audience  feng2015applying, tan-EtAl:2016:P16-1 examine question answering in the insurance domain, another specialized domain similar to privacy, where the intended audience is the general public 
Data Collection
We describe the data collection methodology used to construct PrivacyQA  With the goal of achieving broad coverage across application types, we collect privacy policies from 35 mobile applications representing a number of different categories in the Google Play Store  One of our goals is to include both policies from well-known applications, which are likely to have carefully-constructed privacy policies, and lesser-known applications with smaller install bases, whose policies might be considerably less sophisticated  Thus, setting 5 million installs as a threshold, we ensure each category includes applications with installs on both sides of this threshold  All policies included in the corpus are in English, and were collected before April 1, 2018, predating many companies' GDPR-focused BIBREF41 updates  We leave it to future studies BIBREF42 to look at the impact of the GDPR (e g , to what extent GDPR requirements contribute to making it possible to provide users with more informative answers, and to what extent their disclosures continue to omit issues that matter to users) 
Data Collection ::: Crowdsourced Question Elicitation
The intended audience for privacy policies consists of the general public  This informs the decision to elicit questions from crowdworkers on the contents of privacy policies  We choose not to show the contents of privacy policies to crowdworkers, a procedure motivated by a desire to avoid inadvertent biases BIBREF43, BIBREF44, BIBREF45, BIBREF46, BIBREF47, and encourage crowdworkers to ask a variety of questions beyond only asking questions based on practices described in the document 
Instead, crowdworkers are presented with public information about a mobile application available on the Google Play Store including its name, description and navigable screenshots  Figure FIGREF9 shows an example of our user interface  Crowdworkers are asked to imagine they have access to a trusted third-party privacy assistant, to whom they can ask any privacy question about a given mobile application  We use the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform and recruit crowdworkers who have been conferred “master” status and are located within the United States of America  Turkers are asked to provide five questions per mobile application, and are paid $2 per assignment, taking ~eight minutes to complete the task 
Data Collection ::: Answer Selection
To identify legally sound answers, we recruit seven experts with legal training to construct answers to Turker questions  Experts identify relevant evidence within the privacy policy, as well as provide meta-annotation on the question's relevance, subjectivity, OPP-115 category BIBREF49, and how likely any privacy policy is to contain the answer to the question asked 
Data Collection ::: Analysis
Table TABREF17 presents aggregate statistics of the PrivacyQA dataset  1750 questions are posed to our imaginary privacy assistant over 35 mobile applications and their associated privacy documents  As an initial step, we formulate the problem of answering user questions as an extractive sentence selection task, ignoring for now background knowledge, statistical data and legal expertise that could otherwise be brought to bear  The dataset is partitioned into a training set featuring 27 mobile applications and 1350 questions, and a test set consisting of 400 questions over 8 policy documents  This ensures that documents in training and test splits are mutually exclusive  Every question is answered by at least one expert  In addition, in order to estimate annotation reliability and provide for better evaluation, every question in the test set is answered by at least two additional experts 
Table TABREF14 describes the distribution over first words of questions posed by crowdworkers  We also observe low redundancy in the questions posed by crowdworkers over each policy, with each policy receiving ~49 94 unique questions despite crowdworkers independently posing questions  Questions are on average 8 4 words long  As declining to answer a question can be a legally sound response but is seldom practically useful, answers to questions where a minority of experts abstain to answer are filtered from the dataset  Privacy policies are ~3000 words long on average  The answers to the question asked by the users typically have ~100 words of evidence in the privacy policy document 
Data Collection ::: Analysis ::: Categories of Questions
Questions are organized under nine categories from the OPP-115 Corpus annotation scheme BIBREF49:
First Party Collection/Use: What, why and how information is collected by the service provider
Third Party Sharing/Collection: What, why and how information shared with or collected by third parties
Data Security: Protection measures for user information
Data Retention: How long user information will be stored
User Choice/Control: Control options available to users
User Access, Edit and Deletion: If/how users can access, edit or delete information
Policy Change: Informing users if policy information has been changed
International and Specific Audiences: Practices pertaining to a specific group of users
Other: General text, contact information or practices not covered by other categories 
For each question, domain experts indicate one or more relevant OPP-115 categories  We mark a category as relevant to a question if it is identified as such by at least two annotators  If no such category exists, the category is marked as `Other' if atleast one annotator has identified the `Other' category to be relevant  If neither of these conditions is satisfied, we label the question as having no agreement  The distribution of questions in the corpus across OPP-115 categories is as shown in Table TABREF16  First party and third party related questions are the largest categories, forming nearly 66 4% of all questions asked to the privacy assistant 
Data Collection ::: Analysis ::: Answer Validation
When do experts disagree? We would like to analyze the reasons for potential disagreement on the annotation task, to ensure disagreements arise due to valid differences in opinion rather than lack of adequate specification in annotation guidelines  It is important to note that the annotators are experts rather than crowdworkers  Accordingly, their judgements can be considered valid, legally-informed opinions even when their perspectives differ  For the sake of this question we randomly sample 100 instances in the test data and analyze them for likely reasons for disagreements  We consider a disagreement to have occurred when more than one expert does not agree with the majority consensus  By disagreement we mean there is no overlap between the text identified as relevant by one expert and another 
We find that the annotators agree on the answer for 74% of the questions, even if the supporting evidence they identify is not identical i e full overlap  They disagree on the remaining 26%  Sources of apparent disagreement correspond to situations when different experts: have differing interpretations of question intent (11%) (for example, when a user asks 'who can contact me through the app', the questions admits multiple interpretations, including seeking information about the features of the app, asking about first party collection/use of data or asking about third party collection/use of data), identify different sources of evidence for questions that ask if a practice is performed or not (4%), have differing interpretations of policy content (3%), identify a partial answer to a question in the privacy policy (2%) (for example, when the user asks `who is allowed to use the app' a majority of our annotators decline to answer, but the remaining annotators highlight partial evidence in the privacy policy which states that children under the age of 13 are not allowed to use the app), and other legitimate sources of disagreement (6%) which include personal subjective views of the annotators (for example, when the user asks `is my DNA information used in any way other than what is specified', some experts consider the boilerplate text of the privacy policy which states that it abides to practices described in the policy document as sufficient evidence to answer this question, whereas others do not) 
Experimental Setup
We evaluate the ability of machine learning methods to identify relevant evidence for questions in the privacy domain  We establish baselines for the subtask of deciding on the answerability (§SECREF33) of a question, as well as the overall task of identifying evidence for questions from policies (§SECREF37)  We describe aspects of the question that can render it unanswerable within the privacy domain (§SECREF41) 
Experimental Setup ::: Answerability Identification Baselines
We define answerability identification as a binary classification task, evaluating model ability to predict if a question can be answered, given a question in isolation  This can serve as a prior for downstream question-answering  We describe three baselines on the answerability task, and find they considerably improve performance over a majority-class baseline 
SVM: We define 3 sets of features to characterize each question  The first is a simple bag-of-words set of features over the question (SVM-BOW), the second is bag-of-words features of the question as well as length of the question in words (SVM-BOW + LEN), and lastly we extract bag-of-words features, length of the question in words as well as part-of-speech tags for the question (SVM-BOW + LEN + POS)  This results in vectors of 200, 201 and 228 dimensions respectively, which are provided to an SVM with a linear kernel 
CNN: We utilize a CNN neural encoder for answerability prediction  We use GloVe word embeddings BIBREF50, and a filter size of 5 with 64 filters to encode questions 
BERT: BERT BIBREF51 is a bidirectional transformer-based language-model BIBREF52  We fine-tune BERT-base on our binary answerability identification task with a learning rate of 2e-5 for 3 epochs, with a maximum sequence length of 128 
Experimental Setup ::: Privacy Question Answering
Our goal is to identify evidence within a privacy policy for questions asked by a user  This is framed as an answer sentence selection task, where models identify a set of evidence sentences from all candidate sentences in each policy 
Experimental Setup ::: Privacy Question Answering ::: Evaluation Metric
Our evaluation metric for answer-sentence selection is sentence-level F1, implemented similar to BIBREF30, BIBREF16  Precision and recall are implemented by measuring the overlap between predicted sentences and sets of gold-reference sentences  We report the average of the maximum F1 from each n$-$1 subset, in relation to the heldout reference 
Experimental Setup ::: Privacy Question Answering ::: Baselines
We describe baselines on this task, including a human performance baseline 
No-Answer Baseline (NA) : Most of the questions we receive are difficult to answer in a legally-sound way on the basis of information present in the privacy policy  We establish a simple baseline to quantify the effect of identifying every question as unanswerable 
Word Count Baseline : To quantify the effect of using simple lexical matching to answer the questions, we retrieve the top candidate policy sentences for each question using a word count baseline BIBREF53, which counts the number of question words that also appear in a sentence  We include the top 2, 3 and 5 candidates as baselines 
BERT: We implement two BERT-based baselines BIBREF51 for evidence identification  First, we train BERT on each query-policy sentence pair as a binary classification task to identify if the sentence is evidence for the question or not (Bert)  We also experiment with a two-stage classifier, where we separately train the model on questions only to predict answerability  At inference time, if the answerable classifier predicts the question is answerable, the evidence identification classifier produces a set of candidate sentences (Bert + Unanswerable) 
Human Performance: We pick each reference answer provided by an annotator, and compute the F1 with respect to the remaining references, as described in section 4 2 1  Each reference answer is treated as the prediction, and the remaining n-1 answers are treated as the gold reference  The average of the maximum F1 across all reference answers is computed as the human baseline 
Results and Discussion
The results of the answerability baselines are presented in Table TABREF31, and on answer sentence selection in Table TABREF32  We observe that bert exhibits the best performance on a binary answerability identification task  However, most baselines considerably exceed the performance of a majority-class baseline  This suggests considerable information in the question, indicating it's possible answerability within this domain 
Table TABREF32 describes the performance of our baselines on the answer sentence selection task  The No-answer (NA) baseline performs at 28 F1, providing a lower bound on performance at this task  We observe that our best-performing baseline, Bert + Unanswerable achieves an F1 of 39 8  This suggest that bert is capable of making some progress towards answering questions in this difficult domain, while still leaving considerable headroom for improvement to reach human performance  Bert + Unanswerable performance suggests that incorporating information about answerability can help in this difficult domain  We examine this challenging phenomena of unanswerability further in Section  
Results and Discussion ::: Error Analysis
Disagreements are analyzed based on the OPP-115 categories of each question (Table TABREF34)  We compare our best performing BERT variant against the NA model and human performance  We observe significant room for improvement across all categories of questions but especially for first party, third party and data retention categories 
We analyze the performance of our strongest BERT variant, to identify classes of errors and directions for future improvement (Table 8)  We observe that a majority of answerability mistakes made by the BERT model are questions which are in fact answerable, but are identified as unanswerable by BERT  We observe that BERT makes 124 such mistakes on the test set  We collect expert judgments on relevance, subjectivity , silence and information about how likely the question is to be answered from the privacy policy from our experts  We find that most of these mistakes are relevant questions  However many of them were identified as subjective by the annotators, and at least one annotator marked 19 of these questions as having no answer within the privacy policy  However, only 6 of these questions were unexpected or do not usually have an answer in privacy policies  These findings suggest that a more nuanced understanding of answerability might help improve model performance in his challenging domain 
Results and Discussion ::: What makes Questions Unanswerable?
We further ask legal experts to identify potential causes of unanswerability of questions  This analysis has considerable implications  While past work BIBREF17 has treated unanswerable questions as homogeneous, a question answering system might wish to have different treatments for different categories of `unanswerable' questions  The following factors were identified to play a role in unanswerability:
Incomprehensibility: If a question is incomprehensible to the extent that its meaning is not intelligible 
Relevance: Is this question in the scope of what could be answered by reading the privacy policy 
Ill-formedness: Is this question ambiguous or vague  An ambiguous statement will typically contain expressions that can refer to multiple potential explanations, whereas a vague statement carries a concept with an unclear or soft definition 
Silence: Other policies answer this type of question but this one does not 
Atypicality: The question is of a nature such that it is unlikely for any policy policy to have an answer to the question 
Our experts attempt to identify the different `unanswerable' factors for all 573 such questions in the corpus  4 18% of the questions were identified as being incomprehensible (for example, `any difficulties to occupy the privacy assistant')  Amongst the comprehendable questions, 50% were identified as likely to have an answer within the privacy policy, 33 1% were identified as being privacy-related questions but not within the scope of a privacy policy (e g , 'has Viber had any privacy breaches in the past?') and 16 9% of questions were identified as completely out-of-scope (e g , `'will the app consume much space?')  In the questions identified as relevant, 32% were ill-formed questions that were phrased by the user in a manner considered vague or ambiguous  Of the questions that were both relevant as well as `well-formed', 95 7% of the questions were not answered by the policy in question but it was reasonable to expect that a privacy policy would contain an answer  The remaining 4 3% were described as reasonable questions, but of a nature generally not discussed in privacy policies  This suggests that the answerability of questions over privacy policies is a complex issue, and future systems should consider each of these factors when serving user's information seeking intent 
We examine a large-scale dataset of “natural” unanswerable questions BIBREF54 based on real user search engine queries to identify if similar unanswerability factors exist  It is important to note that these questions have previously been filtered, according to a criteria for bad questions defined as “(questions that are) ambiguous, incomprehensible, dependent on clear false presuppositions, opinion-seeking, or not clearly a request for factual information ” Annotators made the decision based on the content of the question without viewing the equivalent Wikipedia page  We randomly sample 100 questions from the development set which were identified as unanswerable, and find that 20% of the questions are not questions (e g , “all I want for christmas is you mariah carey tour”)  12% of questions are unlikely to ever contain an answer on Wikipedia, corresponding closely to our atypicality category  3% of questions are unlikely to have an answer anywhere (e g , `what guides Santa home after he has delivered presents?')  7% of questions are incomplete or open-ended (e g , `the south west wind blows across nigeria between')  3% of questions have an unresolvable coreference (e g , `how do i get to Warsaw Missouri from here')  4% of questions are vague, and a further 7% have unknown sources of error  2% still contain false presuppositions (e g , `what is the only fruit that does not have seeds?') and the remaining 42% do not have an answer within the document  This reinforces our belief that though they have been understudied in past work, any question answering system interacting with real users should expect to receive such unanticipated and unanswerable questions 
Conclusion
We present PrivacyQA, the first significant corpus of privacy policy questions and more than 3500 expert annotations of relevant answers  The goal of this work is to promote question-answering research in the specialized privacy domain, where it can have large real-world impact  Strong neural baselines on PrivacyQA achieve a performance of only 39 8 F1 on this corpus, indicating considerable room for future research  Further, we shed light on several important considerations that affect the answerability of questions  We hope this contribution leads to multidisciplinary efforts to precisely understand user intent and reconcile it with information in policy documents, from both the privacy and NLP communities 
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation Secure and Trustworthy Computing program (CNS-1330596, CNS-1330214, CNS-15-13957, CNS-1801316, CNS-1914486, CNS-1914444) and a DARPA Brandeis grant on Personalized Privacy Assistants (FA8750-15-2-0277)  The US Government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Governmental purposes not withstanding any copyright notation  The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either expressed or implied, of the NSF, DARPA, or the US Government  The authors would like to extend their gratitude to Elias Wright, Gian Mascioli, Kiara Pillay, Harrison Kay, Eliel Talo, Alexander Fagella and N  Cameron Russell for providing their valuable expertise and insight to this effort  The authors are also grateful to Eduard Hovy, Lorrie Cranor, Florian Schaub, Joel Reidenberg, Aditya Potukuchi and Igor Shalyminov for helpful discussions related to this work, and to the three anonymous reviewers of this draft for their constructive feedback  Finally, the authors would like to thank all crowdworkers who consented to participate in this study 

ground_truth: Based on table results provided changing directed to undirected edges had least impact - max abs difference of 0.33 points on all three datasets.

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. Who were the experts used for annotation?
Context 3: Problem Statement
Spoken conversations still remain the most natural and effortless means of human communication  Thus a lot of valuable information is conveyed and exchanged in such an unstructured form  In telehealth settings, nurses might call discharged patients who have returned home to continue to monitor their health status  Human language technology that can efficiently and effectively extract key information from such conversations is clinically useful, as it can help streamline workflow processes and digitally document patient medical information to increase staff productivity  In this work, we design and prototype a dialogue comprehension system in the question-answering manner, which is able to comprehend spoken conversations between nurses and patients to extract clinical information 
Motivation of Approach
Machine comprehension of written passages has made tremendous progress recently  Large quantities of supervised training data for reading comprehension (e g  SQuAD BIBREF0 ), the wide adoption and intense experimentation of neural modeling BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , and the advancements in vector representations of word embeddings BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 all contribute significantly to the achievements obtained so far  The first factor, the availability of large scale datasets, empowers the latter two factors  To date, there is still very limited well-annotated large-scale data suitable for modeling human-human spoken dialogues  Therefore, it is not straightforward to directly port over the recent endeavors in reading comprehension to dialogue comprehension tasks 
In healthcare, conversation data is even scarcer due to privacy issues  Crowd-sourcing is an efficient way to annotate large quantities of data, but less suitable for healthcare scenarios, where domain knowledge is required to guarantee data quality  To demonstrate the feasibility of a dialogue comprehension system used for extracting key clinical information from symptom monitoring conversations, we developed a framework to construct a simulated human-human dialogue dataset to bootstrap such a prototype  Similar efforts have been conducted for human-machine dialogues for restaurant or movie reservations BIBREF5   To the best of our knowledge, no one to date has done so for human-human conversations in healthcare 
Human-human Spoken Conversations
Human-human spoken conversations are a dynamic and interactive flow of information exchange  While developing technology to comprehend such spoken conversations presents similar technical challenges as machine comprehension of written passages BIBREF6 , the challenges are further complicated by the interactive nature of human-human spoken conversations:
(1) Zero anaphora is more common: Co-reference resolution of spoken utterances from multiple speakers is needed  For example, in Figure FIGREF5 (a) headaches, the pain, it, head bulging all refer to the patient's headache symptom, but they were uttered by different speakers and across multiple utterances and turns  In addition, anaphors are more likely to be omitted (see Figure FIGREF5 (a) A4) as this does not affect the human listener’s understanding, but it might be challenging for computational models 
(2) Thinking aloud more commonly occurs: Since it is more effortless to speak than to type, one is more likely to reveal her running thoughts when talking  In addition, one cannot retract what has been uttered, while in text communications, one is more likely to confirm the accuracy of the information in a written response and revise if necessary before sending it out  Thinking aloud can lead to self-contradiction, requiring more context to fully understand the dialogue; e g , in A6 in Figure FIGREF5 (a), the patient at first says he has none of the symptoms asked, but later revises his response saying that he does get dizzy after running 
(3) Topic drift is more common and harder to detect in spoken conversations: An example is shown in Figure FIGREF5 (a) in A3, where No is actually referring to cough in the previous question, and then the topic is shifted to headache  In spoken conversations, utterances are often incomplete sentences so traditional linguistic features used in written passages such as punctuation marks indicating syntactic boundaries or conjunction words suggesting discourse relations might no longer exist 
Dialogue Comprehension Task
Figure FIGREF5 (b) illustrates the proposed dialogue comprehension task using a question answering (QA) model  The input are a multi-turn symptom checking dialogue INLINEFORM0 and a query INLINEFORM1 specifying a symptom with one of its attributes; the output is the extracted answer INLINEFORM2 from the given dialogue  A training or test sample is defined as INLINEFORM3   Five attributes, specifying certain details of clinical significance, are defined to characterize the answer types of INLINEFORM4 : (1) the time the patient has been experiencing the symptom, (2) activities that trigger the symptom (to occur or worsen), (3) the extent of seriousness, (4) the frequency occurrence of the symptom, and (5) the location of symptom  For each symptom/attribute, it can take on different linguistic expressions, defined as entities  Note that if the queried symptom or attribute is not mentioned in the dialogue, the groundtruth output is “No Answer”, as in BIBREF6  
Reading Comprehension
Large-scale reading comprehension tasks like SQuAD BIBREF0 and MARCO BIBREF7 provide question-answer pairs from a vast range of written passages, covering different kinds of factual answers involving entities such as location and numerical values  Furthermore, HotpotQA BIBREF8 requires multi-step inference and provides numerous answer types  CoQA BIBREF9 and QuAC BIBREF10 are designed to mimic multi-turn information-seeking discussions of the given material  In these tasks, contextual reasoning like coreference resolution is necessary to grasp rich linguistic patterns, encouraging semantic modeling beyond naive lexical matching  Neural networks contribute to impressive progress in semantic modeling: distributional semantic word embeddings BIBREF3 , contextual sequence encoding BIBREF11 , BIBREF12 and the attention mechanism BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 are widely adopted in state-of-the-art comprehension models BIBREF1 , BIBREF2 , BIBREF4  
While language understanding tasks in dialogue such as domain identification BIBREF15 , slot filling BIBREF16 and user intent detection BIBREF17 have attracted much research interest, work in dialogue comprehension is still limited, if any  It is labor-intensive and time-consuming to obtain a critical mass of annotated conversation data for computational modeling  Some propose to collect text data from human-machine or machine-machine dialogues BIBREF18 , BIBREF5   In such cases, as human speakers are aware of current limitations of dialogue systems or due to pre-defined assumptions of user simulators, there are fewer cases of zero anaphora, thinking aloud, and topic drift, which occur more often in human-human spoken interactions 
NLP for Healthcare
There is emerging interest in research and development activities at the intersection of machine learning and healthcare , of which much of the NLP related work are centered around social media or online forums (e g , BIBREF19 , BIBREF20 ), partially due to the world wide web as a readily available source of information  Other work in this area uses public data sources such as MIMIC in electronic health records: text classification approaches have been applied to analyze unstructured clinical notes for ICD code assignment BIBREF21 and automatic intensive emergency prediction BIBREF22   Sequence-to-sequence textual generation has been used for readable notes based on medical and demographic recordings BIBREF23   For mental health, there has been more focus on analyzing dialogues  For example, sequential modeling of audio and text have helped detect depression from human-machine interviews BIBREF24   However, few studies have examined human-human spoken conversations in healthcare settings 
Data Preparation
We used recordings of nurse-initiated telephone conversations for congestive heart failure patients undergoing telemonitoring, post-discharge from the hospital  The clinical data was acquired by the Health Management Unit at Changi General Hospital  This research study was approved by the SingHealth Centralised Institutional Review Board (Protocol 1556561515)  The patients were recruited during 2014-2016 as part of their routine care delivery, and enrolled into the telemonitoring health management program with consent for use of anonymized versions of their data for research 
The dataset comprises a total of 353 conversations from 40 speakers (11 nurses, 16 patients, and 13 caregivers) with consent to the use of anonymized data for research  The speakers are 38 to 88 years old, equally distributed across gender, and comprise a range of ethnic groups (55% Chinese, 17% Malay, 14% Indian, 3% Eurasian, and 11% unspecified)  The conversations cover 11 topics (e g , medication compliance, symptom checking, education, greeting) and 9 symptoms (e g , chest pain, cough) and amount to 41 hours 
Data preprocessing and anonymization were performed by a data preparation team, separate from the data analysis team to maintain data confidentiality  The data preparation team followed standard speech recognition transcription guidelines, where words are transcribed verbatim to include false starts, disfluencies, mispronunciations, and private self-talk  Confidential information were marked and clipped off from the audio and transcribed with predefined tags in the annotation  Conversation topics and clinical symptoms were also annotated and clinically validated by certified telehealth nurses 
Linguistic Characterization on Seed Data
To analyze the linguistic structure of the inquiry-response pairs in the entire 41-hour dataset, we randomly sampled a seed dataset consisting of 1,200 turns and manually categorized them to different types, which are summarized in Table TABREF14 along with the corresponding occurrence frequency statistics  Note that each given utterance could be categorized to more than one type  We elaborate on each utterance type below 
Open-ended Inquiry: Inquiries about general well-being or a particular symptom; e g , “How are you feeling?” and “Do you cough?”
Detailed Inquiry: Inquiries with specific details that prompt yes/no answers or clarifications; e g , “Do you cough at night?”
Multi-Intent Inquiry: Inquiring more than one symptom in a question; e g , “Any cough, chest pain, or headache?”
Reconfirmation Inquiry: The nurse reconfirms particular details; e g , “Really? At night?” and “Serious or mild?”  This case is usually related to explicit or implicit coreferencing 
Inquiry with Transitional Clauses: During spoken conversations, one might repeat what the other party said, but it is unrelated to the main clause of the question  This is usually due to private self-talk while thinking aloud, and such utterances form a transitional clause before the speaker starts a new topic; e g , “Chest pain    no chest pain, I see    any cough?” 
Yes/No Response: Yes/No responses seem straightforward, but sometimes lead to misunderstanding if one does not interpret the context appropriately  One case is tag questions: A:“You don't cough at night, do you?” B:`Yes, yes” A:“cough at night?” B:“No, no cough”  Usually when the answer is unclear, clarifying inquiries will be asked for reconfirmation purposes 
Detailed Response: Responses that contain specific information of one symptom, like “I felt tightness in my chest” 
Response with Revision: Revision is infrequent but can affect comprehension significantly  One cause is thinking aloud so a later response overrules the previous one; e g , “No dizziness, oh wait    last week I felt a bit dizzy when biking” 
Response with Topic Drift: When a symptom/topic like headache is inquired, the response might be: “Only some chest pain at night”, not referring to the original symptom (headache) at all 
Response with Transitional Clauses: Repeating some of the previous content, but often unrelated to critical clinical information and usually followed by topic drift  For example, “Swelling    swelling    I don't cough at night” 
Simulating Symptom Monitoring Dataset for Training
We divide the construction of data simulation into two stages  In Section SECREF16 , we build templates and expression pools using linguistic analysis followed by manual verification  In Section SECREF20 , we present our proposed framework for generating simulated training data  The templates and framework are verified for logical correctness and clinical soundness 
Template Construction
Each utterance in the seed data is categorized according to Table TABREF14 and then abstracted into templates by replacing entity phrases like cough and often with respective placeholders “#symptom#” and “#frequency#”  The templates are refined through verifying logical correctness and injecting expression diversity by linguistically trained researchers  As these replacements do not alter the syntactic structure, we interchange such placeholders with various verbal expressions to enlarge the simulated training set in Section SECREF20   Clinical validation was also conducted by certified telehealth nurses 
For the 9 symptoms (e g  chest pain, cough) and 5 attributes (e g , extent, frequency), we collect various expressions from the seed data, and expand them through synonym replacement  Some attributes are unique to a particular symptom; e g , “left leg” in #location# is only suitable to describe the symptom swelling, but not the symptom headache  Therefore, we only reuse general expressions like “slight” in #extent# across different symptoms to diversify linguistic expressions 
Two linguistically trained researchers constructed expression pools for each symptom and each attribute to account for different types of paraphrasing and descriptions  These expression pools are used in Section SECREF20 (c) 
Simulated Data Generation Framework
Figure FIGREF15 shows the five steps we use to generate multi-turn symptom monitoring dialogue samples 
(a) Topic Selection: While nurses might prefer to inquire the symptoms in different orders depending on the patient's history, our preliminary analysis shows that modeling results do not differ noticeably if topics are of equal prior probabilities  Thus we adopt this assumption for simplicity 
(b) Template Selection: For each selected topic, one inquiry template and one response template are randomly chosen to compose a turn  To minimize adverse effects of underfitting, we redistributed the frequency distribution in Table TABREF14 : For utterance types that are below 15%, we boosted them to 15%, and the overall relative distribution ranking is balanced and consistent with Table TABREF14  
(c) Enriching Linguistic Expressions: The placeholders in the selected templates are substituted with diverse expressions from the expression pools in Section UID19 to characterize the symptoms and their corresponding attributes 
(d) Multi-Turn Dialogue State Tracking: A greedy algorithm is applied to complete conversations  A “completed symptoms” list and a “to-do symptoms” list are used for symptom topic tracking  We also track the “completed attributes" and “to-do attributes"  For each symptom, all related attributes are iterated  A dialogue ends only when all possible entities are exhausted, generating a multi-turn dialogue sample, which encourages the model to learn from the entire discussion flow rather than a single turn to comprehend contextual dependency  The average length of a simulated dialogue is 184 words, which happens to be twice as long as an average dialogue from the real-world evaluation set  Moreover, to model the roles of the respondents, we set the ratio between patients and caregivers to 2:1; this statistic is inspired by the real scenarios in the seed dataset  For both the caregivers and patients, we assume equal probability of both genders  The corresponding pronouns in the conversations are thus determined by the role and gender of these settings 
(e) Multi-Turn Sample Annotation: For each multi-turn dialogue, a query is specified by a symptom and an attribute  The groundtruth output of the QA system is automatically labeled based on the template generation rules, but also manually verified to ensure annotation quality  Moreover, we adopt the unanswerable design in BIBREF6 : when the patient does not mention a particular symptom, the answer is defined as “No Answer”  This process is repeated until all logical permutations of symptoms and attributes are exhausted 
Experiments
Model Design
We implemented an established model in reading comprehension, a bi-directional attention pointer network BIBREF1 , and equipped it with an answerable classifier, as depicted in Figure FIGREF21   First, tokens in the given dialogue INLINEFORM0 and query INLINEFORM1 are converted into embedding vectors  Then the dialogue embeddings are fed to a bi-directional LSTM encoding layer, generating a sequence of contextual hidden states  Next, the hidden states and query embeddings are processed by a bi-directional attention layer, fusing attention information in both context-to-query and query-to-context directions  The following two bi-directional LSTM modeling layers read the contextual sequence with attention  Finally, two respective linear layers with softmax functions are used to estimate token INLINEFORM2 's INLINEFORM3 and INLINEFORM4 probability of the answer span INLINEFORM5  
In addition, we add a special tag “[SEQ]” at the head of INLINEFORM0 to account for the case of “No answer” BIBREF4 and adopt an answerable classifier as in BIBREF25   More specifically, when the queried symptom or attribute is not mentioned in the dialogue, the answer span should point to the tag “[SEQ]” and answerable probability should be predicted as 0 
Implementation Details
The model was trained via gradient backpropagation with the cross-entropy loss function of answer span prediction and answerable classification, optimized by Adam algorithm BIBREF26 with initial learning rate of INLINEFORM0   Pre-trained GloVe BIBREF3 embeddings (size INLINEFORM1 ) were used  We re-shuffled training samples at each epoch (batch size INLINEFORM2 )  Out-of-vocabulary words ( INLINEFORM3 ) were replaced with a fixed random vector  L2 regularization and dropout (rate INLINEFORM4 ) were used to alleviate overfitting BIBREF27  
Evaluation Setup
To evaluate the effectiveness of our linguistically-inspired simulation approach, the model is trained on the simulated data (see Section SECREF20 )  We designed 3 evaluation sets: (1) Base Set (1,264 samples) held out from the simulated data  (2) Augmented Set (1,280 samples) built by adding two out-of-distribution symptoms, with corresponding dialogue contents and queries, to the Base Set (“bleeding” and “cold”, which never appeared in training data)  (3) Real-World Set (944 samples) manually delineated from the the symptom checking portions (approximately 4 hours) of real-world dialogues, and annotated as evaluation samples 
Results
Evaluation results are in Table TABREF25 with exact match (EM) and F1 score in BIBREF0 metrics  To distinguish the correct answer span from the plausible ones which contain the same words, we measure the scores on the position indices of tokens  Our results show that both EM and F1 score increase with training sample size growing and the optimal size in our setting is 100k  The best-trained model performs well on both the Base Set and the Augmented Set, indicating that out-of-distribution symptoms do not affect the comprehension of existing symptoms and outputs reasonable answers for both in- and out-of-distribution symptoms  On the Real-World Set, we obtained 78 23 EM score and 80 18 F1 score respectively 
Error analysis suggests the performance drop from the simulated test sets is due to the following: 1) sparsity issues resulting from the expression pools excluding various valid but sporadic expressions  2) nurses and patients occasionally chit-chat in the Real-World Set, which is not simulated in the training set  At times, these chit-chats make the conversations overly lengthy, causing the information density to be lower  These issues could potentially distract and confuse the comprehension model  3) an interesting type of infrequent error source, caused by patients elaborating on possible causal relations of two symptoms  For example, a patient might say “My giddiness may be due to all this cough”  We are currently investigating how to close this performance gap efficiently 
Ablation Analysis
To assess the effectiveness of bi-directional attention, we bypassed the bi-attention layer by directly feeding the contextual hidden states and query embeddings to the modeling layer  To evaluate the pre-trained GloVe embeddings, we randomly initialized and trained the embeddings from scratch  These two procedures lead to 10% and 18% performance degradation on the Augmented Set and Real-World Set, respectively (see Table TABREF27 ) 
Conclusion
We formulated a dialogue comprehension task motivated by the need in telehealth settings to extract key clinical information from spoken conversations between nurses and patients  We analyzed linguistic characteristics of real-world human-human symptom checking dialogues, constructed a simulated dataset based on linguistically inspired and clinically validated templates, and prototyped a QA system  The model works effectively on a simulated test set using symptoms excluded during training and on real-world conversations between nurses and patients  We are currently improving the model's dialogue comprehension capability in complex reasoning and context understanding and also applying the QA model to summarization and virtual nurse applications 
Acknowledgements
Research efforts were supported by funding for Digital Health and Deep Learning I2R (DL2 SSF Project No: A1718g0045) and the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC Project No: A1818g0044), A*STAR, Singapore  In addition, this work was conducted using resources and infrastructure provided by the Human Language Technology unit at I2R  The telehealth data acquisition was funded by the Economic Development Board (EDB), Singapore Living Lab Fund and Philips Electronics – Hospital to Home Pilot Project (EDB grant reference number: S14-1035-RF-LLF H and W) 
We acknowledge valuable support and assistance from Yulong Lin, Yuanxin Xiang, and Ai Ti Aw at the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R); Weiliang Huang at the Changi General Hospital (CGH) Department of Cardiology, Hong Choon Oh at CGH Health Services Research, and Edris Atikah Bte Ahmad, Chiu Yan Ang, and Mei Foon Yap of the CGH Integrated Care Department 
We also thank Eduard Hovy and Bonnie Webber for insightful discussions and the anonymous reviewers for their precious feedback to help improve and extend this piece of work 

ground_truth: Individuals with legal training

Yes

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 labels do they create on their dataset?
Context 4:  The weight matrix INLINEFORM1 is then normalized using: DISPLAYFORM0
Obviously, the normalized weight matrix INLINEFORM0 satisfies that INLINEFORM1 and further ensures the lipschitz continuity of the INLINEFORM2 network BIBREF9   To reduce the high cost of computing spectral norm INLINEFORM3 using singular value decomposition at each iteration, we follow BIBREF10 and employ the power iteration method to estimate INLINEFORM4 instead  With this substitution, the spectral norm can be estimated with very small additional computational time 
Objective and Training Procedure
The real document INLINEFORM0 and fake document INLINEFORM1 shown in Figure FIGREF4 could be viewed as random samples from two distributions INLINEFORM2 and INLINEFORM3 , and each of them is a joint distribution constituted by four Dirichlet distributions (corresponding to entity distribution, location distribution, keyword distribution and date distribution)  The training objective of AEM is to let the distribution INLINEFORM4 (produced by INLINEFORM5 network) to approximate the real data distribution INLINEFORM6 as much as possible 
To compare the different GAN losses, Kurach kurach2018gan takes a sober view of the current state of GAN and suggests that the Jansen-Shannon divergence used in BIBREF3 performs more stable than variant objectives  Besides, Kurach also advocates that the gradient penalty (GP) regularization devised in BIBREF8 will further improve the stability of the model  Thus, the objective function of the proposed AEM is defined as: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 denotes the discriminator loss, INLINEFORM1 represents the gradient penalty regularization loss, INLINEFORM2 is the gradient penalty coefficient which trade-off the two components of objective, INLINEFORM3 could be obtained by sampling uniformly along a straight line between INLINEFORM4 and INLINEFORM5 , INLINEFORM6 denotes the corresponding distribution 
The training procedure of AEM is presented in Algorithm SECREF15 , where INLINEFORM0 is the event number, INLINEFORM1 denotes the number of discriminator iterations per generator iteration, INLINEFORM2 is the batch size, INLINEFORM3 represents the learning rate, INLINEFORM4 and INLINEFORM5 are hyper-parameters of Adam BIBREF11 , INLINEFORM6 denotes INLINEFORM7   In this paper, we set INLINEFORM8 , INLINEFORM9 , INLINEFORM10   Moreover, INLINEFORM11 , INLINEFORM12 and INLINEFORM13 are set as 0 0002, 0 5 and 0 999 
[!h] Training procedure for AEM [1] INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 , INLINEFORM2 , INLINEFORM3 , INLINEFORM4 , INLINEFORM5 , INLINEFORM6 the trained INLINEFORM7 and INLINEFORM8   Initial INLINEFORM9 parameters INLINEFORM10 and INLINEFORM11 parameter INLINEFORM12 INLINEFORM13 has not converged INLINEFORM14 INLINEFORM15 Sample INLINEFORM16 , Sample a random INLINEFORM17 Sample a random number INLINEFORM18 INLINEFORM19 INLINEFORM20 INLINEFORM21 INLINEFORM22 INLINEFORM23 INLINEFORM24 Sample INLINEFORM25 noise INLINEFORM26 INLINEFORM27
Event Generation
After the model training, the generator INLINEFORM0 learns the mapping function between the document-event distribution and the document-level event-related word distributions (entity, location, keyword and date)  In other words, with an event distribution INLINEFORM1 as input, INLINEFORM2 could generate the corresponding entity distribution, location distribution, keyword distribution and date distribution 
In AEM, we employ event seed INLINEFORM0 , an INLINEFORM1 -dimensional vector with one-hot encoding, to generate the event related word distributions  For example, in ten event setting, INLINEFORM2 represents the event seed of the first event  With the event seed INLINEFORM3 as input, the corresponding distributions could be generated by INLINEFORM4 based on the equation below: DISPLAYFORM0
where INLINEFORM0 , INLINEFORM1 , INLINEFORM2 and INLINEFORM3 denote the entity distribution, location distribution, keyword distribution and date distribution of the first event respectively 
Experiments
In this section, we firstly describe the datasets and baseline approaches used in our experiments and then present the experimental results 
Experimental Setup
To validate the effectiveness of AEM for extracting events from social media (e g  Twitter) and news media sites (e g  Google news), three datasets (FSD BIBREF12 , Twitter, and Google datasets) are employed  Details are summarized below:
FSD dataset (social media) is the first story detection dataset containing 2,499 tweets  We filter out events mentioned in less than 15 tweets since events mentioned in very few tweets are less likely to be significant  The final dataset contains 2,453 tweets annotated with 20 events 
Twitter dataset (social media) is collected from tweets published in the month of December in 2010 using Twitter streaming API  It contains 1,000 tweets annotated with 20 events 
Google dataset (news article) is a subset of GDELT Event Database INLINEFORM0 , documents are retrieved by event related words  For example, documents which contain `malaysia', `airline', `search' and `plane' are retrieved for event MH370  By combining 30 events related documents, the dataset contains 11,909 news articles 
We choose the following three models as the baselines:
K-means is a well known data clustering algorithm, we implement the algorithm using sklearn toolbox, and represent documents using bag-of-words weighted by TF-IDF 
LEM BIBREF13 is a Bayesian modeling approach for open-domain event extraction  It treats an event as a latent variable and models the generation of an event as a joint distribution of its individual event elements  We implement the algorithm with the default configuration 
DPEMM BIBREF14 is a non-parametric mixture model for event extraction  It addresses the limitation of LEM that the number of events should be known beforehand  We implement the model with the default configuration 
For social media text corpus (FSD and Twitter), a named entity tagger specifically built for Twitter is used to extract named entities including locations from tweets  A Twitter Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger BIBREF15 is used for POS tagging and only words tagged with nouns, verbs and adjectives are retained as keywords  For the Google dataset, we use the Stanford Named Entity Recognizer to identify the named entities (organization, location and person)  Due to the `date' information not being provided in the Google dataset, we further divide the non-location named entities into two categories (`person' and `organization') and employ a quadruple <organization, location, person, keyword> to denote an event in news articles  We also remove common stopwords and only keep the recognized named entities and the tokens which are verbs, nouns or adjectives 
Experimental Results
To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, we use the evaluation metrics such as precision, recall and F-measure  Precision is defined as the proportion of the correctly identified events out of the model generated events  Recall is defined as the proportion of correctly identified true events  For calculating the precision of the 4-tuple, we use following criteria:
(1) Do the entity/organization, location, date/person and keyword that we have extracted refer to the same event?
(2) If the extracted representation contains keywords, are they informative enough to tell us what happened?
Table TABREF35 shows the event extraction results on the three datasets  The statistics are obtained with the default parameter setting that INLINEFORM0 is set to 5, number of hidden units INLINEFORM1 is set to 200, and INLINEFORM2 contains three fully-connected layers  The event number INLINEFORM3 for three datasets are set to 25, 25 and 35, respectively  The examples of extracted events are shown in Table  TABREF36  
It can be observed that K-means performs the worst over all three datasets  On the social media datasets, AEM outpoerforms both LEM and DPEMM by 6 5% and 1 7% respectively in F-measure on the FSD dataset, and 4 4% and 3 7% in F-measure on the Twitter dataset  We can also observe that apart from K-means, all the approaches perform worse on the Twitter dataset compared to FSD, possibly due to the limited size of the Twitter dataset  Moreover, on the Google dataset, the proposed AEM performs significantly better than LEM and DPEMM  It improves upon LEM by 15 5% and upon DPEMM by more than 30% in F-measure  This is because: (1) the assumption made by LEM and DPEMM that all words in a document are generated from a single event is not suitable for long text such as news articles; (2) DPEMM generates too many irrelevant events which leads to a very low precision score  Overall, we see the superior performance of AEM across all datasets, with more significant improvement on the for Google datasets (long text) 
We next visualize the detected events based on the discriminative features learned by the trained INLINEFORM0 network in AEM  The t-SNE BIBREF16 visualization results on the datasets are shown in Figure FIGREF19   For clarity, each subplot is plotted on a subset of the dataset containing ten randomly selected events  It can be observed that documents describing the same event have been grouped into the same cluster 
To further evaluate if a variation of the parameters INLINEFORM0 (the number of discriminator iterations per generator iteration), INLINEFORM1 (the number of units in hidden layer) and the structure of generator INLINEFORM2 will impact the extraction performance, additional experiments have been conducted on the Google dataset, with INLINEFORM3 set to 5, 7 and 10, INLINEFORM4 set to 100, 150 and 200, and three INLINEFORM5 structures (3, 4 and 5 layers)  The comparison results on precision, recall and F-measure are shown in Figure FIGREF20   From the results, it could be observed that AEM with the 5-layer generator performs the best and achieves 96 7% in F-measure, and the worst F-measure obtained by AEM is 85 7%  Overall, the AEM outperforms all compared approaches acorss various parameter settings, showing relatively stable performance 
Finally, we compare in Figure FIGREF37 the training time required for each model, excluding the constant time required by each model to load the data  We could observe that K-means runs fastest among all four approaches  Both LEM and DPEMM need to sample the event allocation for each document and update the relevant counts during Gibbs sampling which are time consuming  AEM only requires a fraction of the training time compared to LEM and DPEMM  Moreover, on a larger dataset such as the Google dataset, AEM appears to be far more efficient compared to LEM and DPEMM 
Conclusions and Future Work
In this paper, we have proposed a novel approach based on adversarial training to extract the structured representation of events from online text  The experimental comparison with the state-of-the-art methods shows that AEM achieves improved extraction performance, especially on long text corpora with an improvement of 15% observed in F-measure  AEM only requires a fraction of training time compared to existing Bayesian graphical modeling approaches  In future work, we will explore incorporating external knowledge (e g  word relatedness contained in word embeddings) into the learning framework for event extraction  Besides, exploring nonparametric neural event extraction approaches and detecting the evolution of events over time from news articles are other promising future directions 
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and helpful suggestions  This work was funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFC1306704), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61772132), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province of China (BK20161430) 

ground_truth: (1) the time the patient has been experiencing the symptom, (2) activities that trigger the symptom (to occur or worsen), (3) the extent of seriousness, (4) the frequency occurrence of the symptom, and (5) the location of symptom, No Answer

the time the patient has been experiencing the symptom, activities that trigger the symptom, the extent of seriousness, the frequency occurrence of the symptom, the location of symptom, 9 symptoms