0xshre/acl-2024-long-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MERA: A Comprehensive LLM Evaluation in Russian - ACL Anthology

Over the past few years, one of the most notable advancements in AI research has been in foundation models (FMs), headlined by the rise of language models (LMs). However, despite researchers’ attention and the rapid growth in LM application, the capabilities, limitations, and associated risks still need to be better understood. To address these issues, we introduce a new instruction benchmark, MERA, oriented towards the FMs’ performance on the Russian language. The benchmark encompasses 21 evaluation tasks for generative models covering 10 skills and is supplied with private answer scoring to prevent data leakage. The paper introduces a methodology to evaluate FMs and LMs in fixed zero- and few-shot instruction settings that can be extended to other modalities. We propose an evaluation methodology, an open-source code base for the MERA assessment, and a leaderboard with a submission system. We evaluate open LMs as baselines and find they are still far behind the human level. We publicly release MERA to guide forthcoming research, anticipate groundbreaking model features, standardize the evaluation procedure, and address potential ethical concerns and drawbacks.
SC2: Towards Enhancing Content Preservation and Style Consistency in Long Text Style Transfer - ACL Anthology

Text style transfer (TST) aims to vary the style polarity of text while preserving the semantic content. Although recent advancements have demonstrated remarkable progress in short TST, it remains a relatively straightforward task with limited practical applications. The more comprehensive long TST task presents two challenges: (1) existing methods encounter difficulties in accurately evaluating content attributes in multiple words, leading to content degradation; (2) the conventional vanilla style classifier loss encounters obstacles in maintaining consistent style across multiple generated sentences.In this paper, we propose a novel method SC2, where a multilayer Joint Style-Content Weighed (JSCW) module and a Style Consistency loss are designed to address the two issues. The JSCW simultaneously assesses the amounts of style and content attributes within a token, aiming to acquire a lossless content representation and thereby enhancing content preservation. The multiple JSCW layers further progressively refine content representations. We design a style consistency loss to ensure the generated multiple sentences consistently reflect the target style polarity. Moreover, we incorporate a denoising non-autoregressive decoder to accelerate the training. We conduct plentiful experiments and the results show significant improvements of SC2 over competitive baselines. Our code: https://github.com/jiezhao6/SC2.
Dodo: Dynamic Contextual Compression for Decoder-only LMs - ACL Anthology

Transformer-based language models (LMs) are inefficient in long contexts. We propose Dodo, a solution for context compression. Instead of one vector per token in a standard transformer model, Dodo represents text with a dynamic number of hidden states at each layer, reducing the cost of self-attention to a fraction of typical time and space. Moreover, off-the-shelf models such as LLaMA can be adapted to Dodo by efficient parameter tuning methods such as LoRA. In use, Dodo can act as either an autoregressive LM or a context compressor for downstream tasks. We demonstrate through experiments in language modeling, question answering, and summarization that Dodo retains capabilities in these tasks, while drastically reducing the overhead during decoding. For example, in the autoencoding task, Dodo shrinks context at a 20x compression ratio with a BLEU score of 98% for reconstruction, achieving nearly lossless encoding.
POMP: Probability-driven Meta-graph Prompter for LLMs in Low-resource Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation - ACL Anthology

Low-resource languages (LRLs) face challenges in supervised neural machine translation (NMT) due to limited parallel data, prompting research in unsupervised NMT.Unsupervised NMT (UNMT), without requiring ground truth, provides solutions for LRL translations using synthetic pseudo-parallel data and parallel data from auxiliary language pairs. However, they usually encounter translation errors, including errors from synthetic data and from auxiliary language pairs with linguistic biases.We argue that large language models (LLMs) mitigate UNMT’s translation errors by dynamically organizing auxiliary languages in prompts to improve LRL translations. In this paper, we propose P r O bability-driven M eta-graph P rompter (POMP), an approach employing a dynamic graph to organize multiple auxiliary languages, to prompt LLMs in LRL translations. POMP proposes a language-specific meta-graph that dynamically samples multiple translation paths to organize auxiliary languages in constructing prompts. Following the path, POMP prompts LLMs to translate with a mixture of auxiliary languages. We achieve the meta-graph’s evolution by back-propagating evaluation scores to update probabilities on the graph.Our experimental improvements show POMP’s effectiveness on LRLs’ translation.
NewsBench: A Systematic Evaluation Framework for Assessing Editorial Capabilities of Large Language Models in Chinese Journalism - ACL Anthology

We present NewsBench, a novel evaluation framework to systematically assess the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for editorial capabilities in Chinese journalism. Our constructed benchmark dataset is focused on four facets of writing proficiency and six facets of safety adherence, and it comprises manually and carefully designed 1,267 test samples in the types of multiple choice questions and short answer questions for five editorial tasks in 24 news domains. To measure performances, we propose different GPT-4 based automatic evaluation protocols to assess LLM generations for short answer questions in terms of writing proficiency and safety adherence, and both are validated by the high correlations with human evaluations. Based on the systematic evaluation framework, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of eleven popular LLMs which can handle Chinese. The experimental results highlight GPT-4 and ERNIE Bot as top performers, yet reveal a relative deficiency in journalistic safety adherence in creative writing tasks. Our findings also underscore the need for enhanced ethical guidance in machine-generated journalistic content, marking a step forward in aligning LLMs with journalistic standards and safety considerations. The evaluation framework and experimental results are expected to provide an in-depth understanding of the editorial capabilities of LLMs and speed up the development of LLMs in journalism.
MAPO: Advancing Multilingual Reasoning through Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization - ACL Anthology

Intuitively, reasoning abilities are considered language-agnostic. However, existing LLMs exhibit inconsistent reasoning abilities across different languages, e.g., reasoning in the dominant language like English is superior to other languages due to the imbalance of multilingual training data. To enhance reasoning abilities in non-dominant languages, we propose a Multilingual-Alignment-as-Preference Optimization framework (MAPO) to align the reasoning processes in other languages with the dominant language. Specifically, we harness an off-the-shelf translation model for the consistency between answers in non-dominant and dominant languages, which we adopt as the preference for optimization, e.g., Direct Preference Optimization(DPO) or Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO). Experiments show that MAPO stably achieves significant improvements in the multilingual reasoning of various models on all three benchmarks (MSVAMP +16.2%, MGSM +6.1%, and MNumGLUESub +13.3%), with improved reasoning consistency across languages. The project is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/MAPO.
Enhancing Noise Robustness of Retrieval-Augmented Language Models with Adaptive Adversarial Training - ACL Anthology

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit substantial capabilities yet encounter challenges including hallucination, outdated knowledge, and untraceable reasoning processes. Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution, integrating knowledge from external databases to mitigate these challenges. However, inappropriate retrieved passages can potentially hinder the LLMs’ capacity to generate comprehensive and high-quality responses. Prior RAG studies on the robustness of retrieval noises often confine themselves to a limited set of noise types, deviating from real-world retrieval environments and limiting practical applicability. In this study, we initially investigate retrieval noises and categorize them into three distinct types, reflecting real-world environments. We analyze the impact of these various retrieval noises on the robustness of LLMs. Subsequently, we propose a novel RAG approach known as Retrieval-augmented Adaptive Adversarial Training (RAAT). RAAT leverages adaptive adversarial training to dynamically adjust the model’s training process in response to retrieval noises. Concurrently, it employs multi-task learning to ensure the model’s capacity to internally recognize noisy contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the LLaMA-2 7B model trained using RAAT exhibits significant improvements in F1 and EM scores under diverse noise conditions. For reproducibility, we will release our code and data upon acceptance.
Predicting Text Preference Via Structured Comparative Reasoning - ACL Anthology

Comparative reasoning plays a crucial role in predicting text preferences; however, large language models (LLMs) often demonstrate inconsistencies in their reasoning, leading to incorrect preference predictions. While approaches like Chain-of-Thought improve accuracy in many settings, they struggle to consistently distinguish the similarities and differences of complex texts. We introduce SC 2 , a model that prompts LLMs to predict text preferences by generating structured intermediate comparisons. SC 2 begins by proposing aspects for comparison, followed by generating textual comparisons under each aspect. We select consistent comparisons with a pairwise comparator that ensures each comparison of a given aspect clearly distinguishes differences between texts, significantly reducing hallucination and improving consistency. Our empirical studies across various NLP tasks, including summarization, retrieval, and automatic rating, demonstrate that SC 2 ‘s enhanced performance in text preference prediction is significant.
CoELM: Construction-Enhanced Language Modeling - ACL Anthology

Recent studies have shown that integrating constructional information can improve the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in natural language understanding. However, exploration into leveraging constructional information to enhance generative language models for natural language generation has been limited. Additionally, probing studies indicate that PLMs primarily grasp the syntactic structure of constructions but struggle to capture their semantics. In this work, we encode constructions as inductive biases to explicitly embed constructional semantics and guide the generation process. We begin by presenting a construction grammar induction framework designed to automatically identify constructions from corpora. Subsequently, we propose the Construction-Enhanced Language Model (CoELM). It introduces a construction-guided language modeling approach that employs a dynamic sequence reassembly strategy during pre-training. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the superiority of CoELM across various benchmarks.
Uni-Dubbing: Zero-Shot Speech Synthesis from Visual Articulation - ACL Anthology

In the field of speech synthesis, there is a growing emphasis on employing multimodal speech to enhance robustness. A key challenge in this area is the scarcity of datasets that pair audio with corresponding video. We employ a methodology that incorporates modality alignment during the pre-training phase on multimodal datasets, uniquely facilitating zero-shot generalization through the process of freezing the video modality feature extraction component and the encoder module within the pretrained weights, thereby enabling effective cross-modal and cross-lingual transfer. We have named this method ‘Uni-Dubbing’. Our method finely tunes with both multimodal and single-modality audio data. In multimodal scenarios, it achieves a reduced word error rate (WER) of 31.73%, surpassing the previous best of 33.9%. It also excels in metrics like tone quality and synchronization. With single-modality audio, it achieves a WER of 36.08%, demonstrating adaptability to limited data. Its domain generalization capabilities are proven across various language tasks in video translation and audio generation. Trained on 433 hours of audio data, it surpasses techniques using 200 hours of audiovisual data. The code and demo are available at https://diracer.github.io/unidubbing.
On the Impact of Calibration Data in Post-training Quantization and Pruning - ACL Anthology

Quantization and pruning form the foundation of compression for neural networks, enabling efficient inference for large language models (LLMs). Recently, various quantization and pruning techniques have demonstrated remarkable performance in a post-training setting. They rely upon calibration data, a small set of unlabeled examples that are used to generate layer activations. However, no prior work has systematically investigated how the calibration data impacts the effectiveness of model compression methods. In this paper, we present the first extensive empirical study on the effect of calibration data upon LLM performance. We trial a variety of quantization and pruning methods, datasets, tasks, and models. Surprisingly, we find substantial variations in downstream task performance, contrasting existing work that suggests a greater level of robustness to the calibration data. Finally, we make a series of recommendations for the effective use of calibration data in LLM quantization and pruning.
SymKGQA: Few-Shot Knowledge Graph Question Answering via Symbolic Program Generation and Execution - ACL Anthology

Semantic Parsing of natural language questions into their executable logical form (LF) has shown state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). However, these methods are not applicable for real-world applications, due to lack of KG-specific training data. Recent advances in the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led towards generating low-level LFs such as SPARQL and S-Expression in a few-shot setting. Unfortunately, these methods: (1) are limited to the knowledge of underlying LLM about the LF, (2) performs inferior for the harder complex benchmarks such as KQA Pro, (3) suffers while grounding the generated LF to a specific Knowledge Graph. Recently, a new LF called KoPL has been introduced that explicitly models complex reasoning process step-by-step in a symbolic manner and has shown SOTA on KQA Pro in fully-supervised setting. Inspired by this, we propose SymKGQA framework that generates step-by-step Symbolic LF i.e., KoPL in a few-shot in-context learning setting using LLM. Our framework is not dependent on pre-trained information of LLM about KoPL. We further build a Retrieval-Augmented Generation based Question-Aware Contextual KoPL (QUACK) resolver to ground the generated LF. Our experiments with different LLMs and few-shot settings demonstrate that SymKGQA outperforms all other few-shot and even many of the fully-supervised KGQA approaches.
Meta-Task Prompting Elicits Embeddings from Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

We introduce a new unsupervised text embedding method, Meta-Task Prompting with Explicit One-Word Limitation (MetaEOL), for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for model fine-tuning. Leveraging meta-task prompting, MetaEOL guides LLMs to produce embeddings through a series of carefully designed prompts that address multiple representational aspects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that embeddings averaged from various meta-tasks are versatile embeddings that yield competitive performance on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks and excel in downstream tasks, surpassing contrastive-trained models. Our findings suggest a new scaling law, offering a versatile and resource-efficient approach for embedding generation across diverse scenarios.
A Sentiment Consolidation Framework for Meta-Review Generation - ACL Anthology

Modern natural language generation systems with Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit the capability to generate a plausible summary of multiple documents; however, it is uncertain if they truly possess the capability of information consolidation to generate summaries, especially on documents with opinionated information. We focus on meta-review generation, a form of sentiment summarisation for the scientific domain. To make scientific sentiment summarization more grounded, we hypothesize that human meta-reviewers follow a three-layer framework of sentiment consolidation to write meta-reviews. Based on the framework, we propose novel prompting methods for LLMs to generate meta-reviews and evaluation metrics to assess the quality of generated meta-reviews. Our framework is validated empirically as we find that prompting LLMs based on the framework — compared with prompting them with simple instructions — generates better meta-reviews.
Revisiting Structured Sentiment Analysis as Latent Dependency Graph Parsing - ACL Anthology

Structured Sentiment Analysis (SSA) was cast as a problem of bi-lexical dependency graph parsing by prior studies.Multiple formulations have been proposed to construct the graph, which share several intrinsic drawbacks:(1) The internal structures of spans are neglected, thus only the boundary tokens of spans are used for relation prediction and span recognition, thus hindering the model’s expressiveness;(2) Long spans occupy a significant proportion in the SSA datasets, which further exacerbates the problem of internal structure neglect.In this paper, we treat the SSA task as a dependency parsing task on partially-observed dependency trees, regarding flat spans without determined tree annotations as latent subtrees to consider internal structures of spans.We propose a two-stage parsing method and leverage TreeCRFs with a novel constrained inside algorithm to model latent structures explicitly, which also takes advantages of joint scoring graph arcs and headed spans for global optimization and inference. Results of extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets reveal that our method performs significantly better than all previous bi-lexical methods, achieving new state-of-the-art.
OWSM-CTC: An Open Encoder-Only Speech Foundation Model for Speech Recognition, Translation, and Language Identification - ACL Anthology

There has been an increasing interest in large speech models that can perform multiple tasks in a single model. Such models usually adopt an encoder-decoder or decoder-only architecture due to their popularity and good performance in many domains. However, autoregressive models can be slower during inference compared to non-autoregressive models and also have potential risks of hallucination. Though prior studies observed promising results of non-autoregressive models for certain tasks at small scales, it remains unclear if they can be scaled to speech-to-text generation in diverse languages and tasks. Inspired by the Open Whisper-style Speech Model (OWSM) project, we propose OWSM-CTC, a novel encoder-only speech foundation model based on Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). It is trained on 180k hours of public audio data for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), speech translation (ST), and language identification (LID). Compared to encoder-decoder OWSM, our OWSM-CTC achieves competitive results on ASR and up to 24% relative improvement on ST, while it is more robust and 3 to 4 times faster for inference. OWSM-CTC also improves the long-form ASR result with 20x speed-up.We will publicly release our code, pre-trained model, and training logs to promote open science in speech foundation models.
Do Large Language Models Latently Perform Multi-Hop Reasoning? - ACL Anthology

We study whether Large Language Models (LLMs) latently perform multi-hop reasoning with complex prompts such as “The mother of the singer of ‘Superstition’ is”. We look for evidence of a latent reasoning pathway where an LLM (1) latently identifies “the singer of ‘Superstition’” as Stevie Wonder, the bridge entity, and (2) uses its knowledge of Stevie Wonder’s mother to complete the prompt. We analyze these two hops individually and consider their co-occurrence as indicative of latent multi-hop reasoning. For the first hop, we test if changing the prompt to indirectly mention the bridge entity instead of any other entity increases the LLM’s internal recall of the bridge entity. For the second hop, we test if increasing this recall causes the LLM to better utilize what it knows about the bridge entity. We find strong evidence of latent multi-hop reasoning for the prompts of certain relation types, with the reasoning pathway used in more than 80% of the prompts. However, the utilization is highly contextual, varying across different types of prompts. Also, on average, the evidence for the second hop and the full multi-hop traversal is rather moderate and only substantial for the first hop. Moreover, we find a clear scaling trend with increasing model size for the first hop of reasoning but not for the second hop. Our experimental findings suggest potential challenges and opportunities for future development and applications of LLMs.
MuggleMath: Assessing the Impact of Query and Response Augmentation on Math Reasoning - ACL Anthology

In math reasoning with large language models (LLMs), fine-tuning data augmentation by query evolution and diverse reasoning paths is empirically verified effective, profoundly narrowing the gap between open-sourced LLMs and cutting-edge proprietary LLMs. In this paper, we conduct an investigation for such data augmentation in math reasoning and are intended to answer: (1) What strategies of data augmentation are more effective; (2) What is the scaling relationship between the amount of augmented data and model performance; and (3) Can data augmentation incentivize generalization to out-of-domain mathematical reasoning tasks?To this end, we create two new dataset AugGSM8K and AugMATH, by complicating and diversifying the queries and sampling multiple reasoning paths from GSM8K and MATH.We obtained a series of LLMs called MuggleMath by fine-tuning LLaMA models on AugGSM8K and AugMATH. MuggleMath substantially achieves new state-of-the-art on GSM8K and MATH.A log-linear relationship and a segmented log-linear are presented between MuggleMath’s performance and the amount of augmented data on GSM8K and MATH, respectively.We also find that it is weak in out-of-domain math reasoning generalization from AugGSM8K to MATH and from AugMATH to GSM8K, which suggests that augmenting queries that cover a broader range of subjects is more beneficial for generalization.