In community question-answering platforms, tags play essential roles in effective information organization and retrieval, better question routing, faster response to questions, and assessment of topic popularity. Hence, automatic assistance for predicting and suggesting tags for posts is of high utility to users of such platforms. To develop better tag prediction across diverse communities and domains, we performed a thorough analysis of users' tagging behavior in 17 StackExchange communities. We found various common inherent properties of this behavior in those diverse domains. We used the findings to develop a flexible neural tag prediction architecture, which predicts both popular tags and more granular tags for each question. Our extensive experiments and obtained performance show the effectiveness of our model

Event detection refers to identifying event occurrences in a text and comprises of two subtasks; event identification and classification. We present EDM3, a novel approach for Event Detection that formulates three generative tasks: identification, classification, and combined detection. We show that EDM3 helps to learn transferable knowledge that can be leveraged to perform Event Detection and its subtasks concurrently, mitigating the error propagation inherent in pipelined approaches. Unlike previous dataset- or domain-specific approaches, EDM3 utilizes the existing knowledge of language models, allowing it to be trained over any classification schema. We evaluate EDM3 on multiple event detection datasets: RAMS, WikiEvents, MAVEN, and MLEE, showing that EDM3 outperforms 1) single-task performance by 8.4% on average and 2) multi-task performance without instructional prompts by 2.4% on average. We obtain SOTA results on RAMS (71.3% vs. 65.1% F-1) and competitive performance on other datasets. We analyze our approach to demonstrate its efficacy in low-resource and multi-sentence settings. We also show the effectiveness of this approach on non-standard event configurations such as multi-word and multi-class event triggers. Overall, our results show that EDM3 is a promising approach for Event Detection that has the potential for real-world applications.

With recent trends indicating cyber crimes increasing in both frequency and cost, it is imperative to develop new methods that leverage data-rich hacker forums to assist in combating ever evolving cyber threats. Defining interactions within these forums is critical as it facilitates identifying highly skilled users, which can improve prediction of novel threats and future cyber attacks. We propose a method called Next Paragraph Prediction with Instructional Prompting (NPP-IP) to predict thread structures while grounded on the context around posts. This is the first time to apply an instructional prompting approach to the cybersecurity domain. We evaluate our NPP-IP with the Reddit dataset and Hacker Forums dataset that has posts and thread structures of real hacker forums' threads, and compare our method's performance with existing methods. The experimental evaluation shows that our proposed method can predict the thread structure significantly better than existing methods allowing for better social network prediction based on forum interactions.

With the increase in cybersecurity vulnerabilities of software systems, the ways to exploit them are also increasing. Besides these, malware threats, irregular network interactions, and discussions about exploits in public forums are also on the rise. To identify these threats faster, to detect potentially relevant entities from any texts, and to be aware of software vulnerabilities, automated approaches are necessary. Application of natural language processing (NLP) techniques in the Cybersecurity domain can help in achieving this. However, there are challenges such as the diverse nature of texts involved in the cybersecurity domain, the unavailability of large-scale publicly available datasets, and the significant cost of hiring subject matter experts for annotations. One of the solutions is building multi-task models that can be trained jointly with limited data. In this work, we introduce a generative multi-task model, Unified Text-to-Text Cybersecurity (UTS), trained on malware reports, phishing site URLs, programming code constructs, social media data, blogs, news articles, and public forum posts. We show UTS improves the performance of some cybersecurity datasets. We also show that with a few examples, UTS can be adapted to novel unseen tasks and the nature of data

In current NLP research, large-scale language models and their abilities are widely being discussed. Some recent works have also found notable failures of these models. Often these failure examples involve complex reasoning abilities. This work focuses on a simple commonsense ability, reasoning about when an action (or its effect) is feasible. To this end, we introduce FeasibilityQA, a question-answering dataset involving binary classification (BCQ) and multi-choice multi-correct questions (MCQ) that test understanding of feasibility. We show that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-3, GPT-2, and T5 struggle to answer the feasibility questions correctly. Specifically, on MCQ and BCQ questions, GPT-3 achieves an accuracy of just (19%, 62%) and (25%, 64%) in zero-shot and few-shot settings, respectively. We also evaluate models by providing relevant knowledge statements required to answer the question. We find that the additional knowledge leads to a 7% gain in performance, but the overall performance still remains low. These results make one wonder how much commonsense knowledge about action feasibility is encoded in state-of-the-art models and how well they can reason about it.

The transformer-based pre-trained language models have been tremendously successful in most of the conventional NLP tasks. But they often struggle in those tasks where numerical understanding is required. Some possible reasons can be the tokenizers and pre-training objectives which are not specifically designed to learn and preserve numeracy. Here we investigate the ability of text-to-text transfer learning model (T5), which has outperformed its predecessors in the conventional NLP tasks, to learn numeracy. We consider four numeracy tasks: numeration, magnitude order prediction, finding minimum and maximum in a series, and sorting. We find that, although T5 models perform reasonably well in the interpolation setting, they struggle considerably in the extrapolation setting across all four tasks.

Following procedural texts written in natural languages is challenging. We must read the whole text to identify the relevant information or identify the instruction flows to complete a task, which is prone to failures. If such texts are structured, we can readily visualize instruction-flows, reason or infer a particular step, or even build automated systems to help novice agents achieve a goal. However, this structure recovery task is a challenge because of such texts' diverse nature. This paper proposes to identify relevant information from such texts and generate information flows between sentences. We built a large annotated procedural text dataset (CTFW) in the cybersecurity domain (3154 documents). This dataset contains valuable instructions regarding software vulnerability analysis experiences. We performed extensive experiments on CTFW with our LM-GNN model variants in multiple settings. To show the generalizability of both this task and our method, we also experimented with procedural texts from two other domains (Maintenance Manual and Cooking), which are substantially different from cybersecurity. Our experiments show that Graph Convolution Network with BERT sentence embeddings outperforms BERT in all three domains

Open book question answering is a type of natural language based QA (NLQA) where questions are expected to be answered with respect to a given set of open book facts, and common knowledge about a topic. Recently a challenge involving such QA, OpenBookQA, has been proposed. Unlike most other NLQA tasks that focus on linguistic understanding, Open-BookQA requires deeper reasoning involving linguistic understanding as well as reasoning with common knowledge. In this paper we address QA with respect to the OpenBookQA dataset and combine state of the art language models with abductive information retrieval (IR), information gain based re-ranking, passage selection and weighted scoring to achieve 72.0% accuracy, an 11.6% improvement over the current state of the art.