0xshre/acl-2024-long-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Structured Tree Alignment for Evaluation of (Speech) Constituency Parsing - ACL Anthology

We present the structured average intersection-over-union ratio (STRUCT-IOU), an evaluation metric that compares a constituency parse tree over automatically recognized spoken word boundaries with the ground-truth parse tree over written words. To compute the metric, we (1) project the ground-truth parse tree to the speech domain by forced alignment, (2) align the projected ground-truth constituents with the predicted ones under certain structured constraints, and (3) calculate the average IOU score across all aligned constituent pairs. STRUCT-IOU takes word boundaries into account and overcomes the challenge that the predicted words and ground truth may not have perfect one-to-one correspondence. Extending to the evaluation of text constituency parsing, we demonstrate that STRUCT-IOU shows higher tolerance to syntactically plausible parses than PARSEVAL (Black et al., 1991).
ViSAGe: A Global-Scale Analysis of Visual Stereotypes in Text-to-Image Generation - ACL Anthology

Recent studies have shown that Text-to-Image (T2I) model generations can reflect social stereotypes present in the real world. However, existing approaches for evaluating stereotypes have a noticeable lack of coverage of global identity groups and their associated stereotypes. To address this gap, we introduce the ViSAGe (Visual Stereotypes Around the Globe) dataset to enable the evaluation of known nationality-based stereotypes in T2I models, across 135 nationalities. We enrich an existing textual stereotype resource by distinguishing between stereotypical associations that are more likely to have visual depictions, such as ‘sombrero’, from those that are less visually concrete, such as ‘attractive’. We demonstrate ViSAGe’s utility through a multi-faceted evaluation of T2I generations. First, we show that stereotypical attributes in ViSAGe are thrice as likely to be present in generated images of corresponding identities as compared to other attributes, and that the offensiveness of these depictions is especially higher for identities from Africa, South America, and South East Asia. Second, we assess the ‘stereotypical pull’ of visual depictions of identity groups, which reveals how the ‘default’ representations of all identity groups in ViSAGe have a pull towards stereotypical depictions, and that this pull is even more prominent for identity groups from the Global South. CONTENT WARNING: Some examples contain offensive stereotypes.
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking - ACL Anthology

This paper proposes PiNose, which trains a probing model on offline self-consistency checking results, thereby circumventing the need for human-annotated data and achieving transferability across diverse data distributions. As the consistency check process is offline, PiNose reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification. Additionally, it examines various aspects of internal states prior to response decoding, contributing to more effective detection of factual inaccuracies. Experiment results on both factuality detection and question answering benchmarks show that PiNose achieves surpassing results than existing factuality detection methods.
What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis. - ACL Anthology

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering the theories underpinning ICL. One popular hypothesis explains ICL by task selection. LLMs identify the task based on the demonstration and generalize it to the prompt. Another popular hypothesis is that ICL is a form of meta-learning, i.e., the models learn a learning algorithm at pre-training time and apply it to the demonstration. Finally, a third hypothesis argues that LLMs use the demonstration to select a composition of tasks learned during pre-training to perform ICL. In this paper, we empirically explore these three hypotheses that explain LLMs’ ability to learn in context with a suite of experiments derived from common text classification tasks. We invalidate the first two hypotheses with counterexamples and provide evidence in support of the last hypothesis. Our results suggest an LLM could learn a novel task in context via composing tasks learned during pre-training.
Agent Lumos: Unified and Modular Training for Open-Source Language Agents - ACL Anthology

Closed-source agents suffer from several issues such as a lack of affordability, transparency, and reproducibility, particularly on complex interactive tasks. This motivates the development of open-source alternatives. We introduce Lumos, one of the first frameworks for training open-source LLM-based agents. Lumos features a learnable, unified and modular architecture with a planning module that learns high-level subgoal generation, and a grounding module trained to translate these into the actions using various tools in the execution module. The design allows for modular upgrades and wider applicability to diverse interactive tasks. To foster generalizable agent learning, we collect large-scale, unified, and high-quality training annotations derived from diverse ground-truth reasoning rationales across various complex interactive tasks. On 9 datasets, Lumos exhibits several key advantages: (1) Lumos excels multiple larger open-source agents on the held-out datasets (unused for training) for each task type. Lumos even surpasses GPT agents on QA and web tasks; (2) Lumos outperforms open-source agents produced by chain-of-thoughts and unmodularized integrated training; and (3) Lumos effectively generalizes to unseen tasks, outperforming 33B-scale agents and domain-specific agents. Code and data will be released.
Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions—firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.
More Victories, Less Cooperation: Assessing Cicero’s Diplomacy Play - ACL Anthology

The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI’s difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.
VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild - ACL Anthology

We introduce VoiceCraft, a token infilling neural codec language model, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both speech editing and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) on audiobooks, internet videos, and podcasts. VoiceCraft employs a Transformer decoder architecture and introduces a token rearrangement procedure that combines causal masking and delayed stacking to enable generation within an existing sequence. On speech editing tasks, VoiceCraft produces edited speech that is nearly indistinguishable from unedited recordings in terms of naturalness, as evaluated by humans; for zero-shot TTS, our model outperforms prior SotA models including VALL-E and the popular commercial model XTTS v2. Crucially, the models are evaluated on challenging and realistic datasets, that consist of diverse accents, speaking styles, recording conditions, and background noise and music, and our model performs consistently well compared to other models and real recordings. In particular, for speech editing evaluation, we introduce a high quality, challenging, and realistic dataset named . We encourage readers to listen to the demos at https://jasonppy.github.io/VoiceCraft_web. Data, code, and model weights are available at https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft
RAID: A Shared Benchmark for Robust Evaluation of Machine-Generated Text Detectors - ACL Anthology

Many commercial and open-source models claim to detect machine-generated text with extremely high accuracy (99% or more). However, very few of these detectors are evaluated on shared benchmark datasets and even when they are, the datasets used for evaluation are insufficiently challenging—lacking variations in sampling strategy, adversarial attacks, and open-source generative models. In this work we present RAID: the largest and most challenging benchmark dataset for machine-generated text detection. RAID includes over 6 million generations spanning 11 models, 8 domains, 11 adversarial attacks and 4 decoding strategies. Using RAID, we evaluate the out-of-domain and adversarial robustness of 8 open- and 4 closed-source detectors and find that current detectors are easily fooled by adversarial attacks, variations in sampling strategies, repetition penalties, and unseen generative models. We release our data along with a leaderboard to encourage future research.
Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles - ACL Anthology

A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability. In this paper, we present an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leverage this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of dog whistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the largest dataset of disambiguated dog whistle usage, created for applications in hate speech detection, neology, and political science.
On the Representational Capacity of Neural Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning - ACL Anthology

The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this improvement is that CoT reasoning extends an LM’s computational power, as RNNs and transformers with additional scratch space are known to be Turing complete. Comparing LMs to Turing machines, however, introduces a category error—Turing machines decide language membership, whereas LMs define distributions over strings. To bridge this gap, we formalize CoT reasoning in a probabilistic setting. We present several results on the representational capacity of recurrent and transformer LMs with CoT reasoning, showing that they can represent the same family of distributions over strings as probabilistic Turing machines.
Analyzing LLM Behavior in Dialogue Summarization: Unveiling Circumstantial Hallucination Trends - ACL Anthology

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the capabilities of summarization systems.However, they continue to face a persistent challenge: hallucination. While prior work has extensively examined LLMs in news domains, evaluation of dialogue summarization has primarily focused on BART-based models, resulting in a notable gap in understanding LLM effectiveness.Our work seeks to address this gap by benchmarking LLMs for dialogue summarization faithfulness using human annotations,focusing on identifying and categorizing span-level inconsistencies.Specifically, we evaluate two prominent LLMs: GPT-4 and Alpaca-13B.Our evaluation reveals that LLMs often generate plausible, but not fully supported inferences based on conversation contextual cues, a trait absent in older models. As a result, we propose a refined taxonomy of errors, introducing a novel category termed “Contextual Inference” to address this aspect of LLM behavior. Using our taxonomy, we compare the behavioral differences between LLMs and older fine-tuned models. Additionally, we systematically assess the efficacy of automatic error detection methods on LLM summaries and find that they struggle to detect these nuanced errors effectively. To address this, we introduce two prompt-based approaches for fine-grained error detection. Our methods outperform existing metrics, particularly in identifying the novel “Contextual Inference” error type.
LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory - ACL Anthology

Large language models (LLMs) are central to modern natural language processing, delivering exceptional performance in various tasks. However, their substantial computational and memory requirements present challenges, especially for devices with limited DRAM capacity. This paper tackles the challenge of efficiently running LLMs that exceed the available DRAM capacity by storing the model parameters in flash memory, but bringing them on demand to DRAM. Our method involves constructing an inference cost model that takes into account the characteristics of flash memory, guiding us to optimize in two critical areas: reducing the volume of data transferred from flash and reading data in larger, more contiguous chunks. Within this hardware-informed framework, we introduce two principal techniques. First, “windowing” strategically reduces data transfer by reusing previously activated neurons, and second, “row-column bundling”, tailored to the sequential data access strengths of flash memory, increases the size of data chunks read from flash memory. These methods collectively enable running models up to twice the size of the available DRAM, with a 4-5x and 20-25x increase in inference speed compared to naive loading approaches in CPU and GPU, respectively. Our integration of sparsity awareness, context-adaptive loading, and a hardware-oriented design paves the way for effective inference of LLMs on devices with limited memory.
Video-ChatGPT: Towards Detailed Video Understanding via Large Vision and Language Models - ACL Anthology

Conversation agents fueled by Large Language Models (LLMs) are providing a new way to interact with visual data. While there have been initial attempts for image-based conversation models, this work addresses the under-explored field of video-based conversation by introducing Video-ChatGPT. It is a multimodal model that merges a video-adapted visual encoder with an LLM. The resulting model is capable of understanding and generating detailed conversations about videos. We introduce a new dataset of 100,000 video-instruction pairs used to train Video-ChatGPT acquired via manual and semi-automated pipeline that is easily scalable and robust to label noise. We also develop a quantitative evaluation framework for video-based dialogue models to objectively analyze the strengths and weaknesses of video-based dialogue models. Code: https://github.com/mbzuai-oryx/Video-ChatGPT.
To Distill or Not to Distill? On the Robustness of Robust Knowledge Distillation - ACL Anthology

Arabic is known to present unique challengesfor Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Onone hand, its rich linguistic diversity andwide range of dialects complicate the de-velopment of robust, inclusive models. Onthe other, current multilingual ASR modelsare compute-intensive and lack proper com-prehensive evaluations. In light of thesechallenges, we distill knowledge from largeteacher models into smaller student variantsthat more efficient. We also introduce a novelhuman-annotated dataset covering five under-represented Arabic dialects for evaluation. Wefurther evaluate both our models and existingSoTA multilingual models on both standardavailable benchmarks and our new dialectaldata. Our best-distilled model’s overall perfor-mance (45.0% WER) surpasses that of a SoTAmodel twice its size (SeamlessM4T-large-v2,WER=47.0%) and its teacher model (Whisper-large-v2, WER=55.1%), and its average perfor-mance on our new dialectal data (56.9% WER)outperforms all other models. To gain more in-sight into the poor performance of these modelson dialectal data, we conduct an error analysisand report the main types of errors the differentmodels tend to make. The GitHub repositoryfor the project is available at https://github.com/UBC-NLP/distill-whisper-ar.
LayerSkip: Enabling Early Exit Inference and Self-Speculative Decoding - ACL Anthology

We present LayerSkip, an end-to-end solution to speed-up inference of large language models (LLMs). First, during training we apply layer dropout, with low dropout rates for earlier layers and higher dropout rates for later layers, and an early exit loss where all transformer layers share the same exit. Second, during inference, we show that this training recipe increases the accuracy of early exit at earlier layers, without adding any auxiliary layers or modules to the model. Third, we present a novel self-speculative decoding solution where we exit at early layers and verify and correct with remaining layers of the model. Our proposed self-speculative decoding approach has less memory footprint than other speculative decoding approaches and benefits from shared compute and activations of the draft and verification stages. We run experiments on different Llama model sizes on different types of training: pretraining from scratch, continual pretraining, finetuning on specific data domain, and finetuning on specific task. We implement our inference solution and show speedups of up to 2.16x on summarization for CNN/DM documents, 1.82x on coding, and 2.0x on TOPv2 semantic parsing task. We open source our code at https://github.com/facebookresearch/LayerSkip.
Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP - ACL Anthology

The field of sociolinguistics has studied factors affecting language use for the last century. Labov (1964) and Bernstein (1960) showed that socioeconomic class strongly influences our accents, syntax and lexicon. However, despite growing concerns surrounding fairness and bias in Natural Language Processing (NLP), there is a dearth of studies delving into the effects it may have on NLP systems. We show empirically that NLP systems’ performance is affected by speakers’ SES, potentially disadvantaging less-privileged socioeconomic groups. We annotate a corpus of 95K utterances from movies with social class, ethnicity and geographical language variety and measure the performance of NLP systems on three tasks: language modelling, automatic speech recognition, and grammar error correction. We find significant performance disparities that can be attributed to socioeconomic status as well as ethnicity and geographical differences. With NLP technologies becoming ever more ubiquitous and quotidian, they must accommodate all language varieties to avoid disadvantaging already marginalised groups. We argue for the inclusion of socioeconomic class in future language technologies.
ActionIE: Action Extraction from Scientific Literature with Programming Languages - ACL Anthology

Extraction of experimental procedures from human language in scientific literature and patents into actionable sequences in robotics language holds immense significance in scientific domains. Such an action extraction task is particularly challenging given the intricate details and context-dependent nature of the instructions, especially in fields like chemistry where reproducibility is paramount. In this paper, we introduce ActionIE, a method that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to bridge this divide by converting actions written in natural language into executable Python code. This enables us to capture the entities of interest, and the relationship between each action, given the features of Programming Languages. Utilizing linguistic cues identified by frequent patterns, ActionIE provides an improved mechanism to discern entities of interest. While our method is broadly applicable, we exemplify its power in the domain of chemical literature, wherein we focus on extracting experimental procedures for chemical synthesis. The code generated by our method can be easily transformed into robotics language which is in high demand in scientific fields. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method. In addition, we propose a graph-based metric to more accurately reflect the precision of extraction. We also develop a dataset to address the scarcity of scientific literature occurred in existing datasets.
A Community-Centric Perspective for Characterizing and Detecting Anti-Asian Violence-Provoking Speech - ACL Anthology

Violence-provoking speech – speech that implicitly or explicitly promotes violence against the members of the targeted community, contributed to a massive surge in anti-Asian crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic. While previous works have characterized and built tools for detecting other forms of harmful speech, like fear speech and hate speech, our work takes a community-centric approach to studying anti-Asian violence-provoking speech. Using data from ~420k Twitter posts spanning a 3-year duration (January 1, 2020 to February 1, 2023), we develop a codebook to characterize anti-Asian violence-provoking speech and collect a community-crowdsourced dataset to facilitate its large-scale detection using state-of-the-art classifiers. We contrast the capabilities of natural language processing classifiers, ranging from BERT-based to LLM-based classifiers, in detecting violence-provoking speech with their capabilities to detect anti-Asian hateful speech. In contrast to prior work that has demonstrated the effectiveness of such classifiers in detecting hateful speech ( F 1 = 0.89), our work shows that accurate and reliable detection of violence-provoking speech is a challenging task ( F 1 = 0.69). We discuss the implications of our findings, particularly the need for proactive interventions to support Asian communities during public health crises.