0xshre/acl-2024-long-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Navigating the Dual Facets: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Sequential Memory Editing in Large Language Models - ACL Anthology

Memory Editing (ME) has emerged as an efficient method to modify erroneous facts or inject new facts into Large Language Models (LLMs). Two mainstream ME methods exist: parameter-modifying ME and parameter-preserving ME (integrating extra modules while preserving original parameters). Regrettably, previous studies on ME evaluation have two critical limitations: (i) evaluating LLMs with single edit only, neglecting the need for continuous editing, and (ii) evaluations focusing solely on basic factual triples, overlooking broader LLM capabilities like logical reasoning and reading understanding. This study addresses these limitations with contributions threefold: (i) We explore how ME affects a wide range of fundamental capabilities of LLMs under sequential editing. Experimental results reveal an intriguing phenomenon: Most parameter-modifying ME consistently degrade performance across all tasks after a few sequential edits. In contrast, parameter-preserving ME effectively maintains LLMs’ fundamental capabilities but struggles to accurately recall edited knowledge presented in a different format. (ii) We extend our evaluation to different editing settings, such as layers to edit, model size, instruction tuning, etc. Experimental findings indicate several strategies that can potentially mitigate the adverse effects of ME. (iii) We further explain why parameter-modifying damages LLMs from three dimensions: parameter changes after editing, language modeling capability, and the in-context learning capability. Our in-depth study advocates more careful use of ME in real-world scenarios.
REFINESUMM: Self-Refining MLLM for Generating a Multimodal Summarization Dataset - ACL Anthology

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) excel at synthesizing key information from diverse sources. However, generating accurate and faithful multimodal summaries is challenging, primarily due to the lack of appropriate multimodal datasets for fine-tuning that meaningfully integrate textual and visual modalities. To address this gap, we present a new dataset designed specifically for image-text multimodal summarization, harnessing the capabilities of state-of-the-art MLLMs. We generate summaries from Wikipedia sections and corresponding images and evaluate them across text-based, visual and multimodal dimensions, employing reference-free metrics. To refine the dataset, we: (1) Filter the MLLM-generated summaries by training a critic model on human annotations and using its predictions to remove low-quality summaries; (2) Fine-tune the MLLM with the filtered high-quality summaries; (3) Use the fine-tuned model in turn to regenerate the summaries. This self-refinement process significantly improves summary quality, as measured by human judgements and automatic multimodal metrics, resulting in a valuable dataset for multimodal summarization research. The dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/amazon-science/refinesumm.
When Benchmarks are Targets: Revealing the Sensitivity of Large Language Model Leaderboards - ACL Anthology

Large Language Model (LLM) leaderboards based on benchmark rankings are regularly used to guide practitioners in model selection. Often, the published leaderboard rankings are taken at face value — we show this is a (potentially costly) mistake. Under existing leaderboards, the relative performance of LLMs is highly sensitive to (often minute) details. We show that for popular multiple-choice question benchmarks (e.g., MMLU), minor perturbations to the benchmark, such as changing the order of choices or the method of answer selection, result in changes in rankings up to 8 positions. We explain this phenomenon by conducting systematic experiments over three broad categories of benchmark perturbations and identifying the sources of this behavior. Our analysis results in several best-practice recommendations, including the advantage of a *hybrid* scoring method for answer selection. Our study highlights the dangers of relying on simple benchmark evaluations and charts the path for more robust evaluation schemes on the existing benchmarks. The code for this paper is available at [https://github.com/National-Center-for-AI-Saudi-Arabia/lm-evaluation-harness](https://github.com/National-Center-for-AI-Saudi-Arabia/lm-evaluation-harness).
LLM-Rubric: A Multidimensional, Calibrated Approach to Automated Evaluation of Natural Language Texts - ACL Anthology

This paper introduces a framework for the automated evaluation of natural language texts. A manually constructed rubric describes how to assess multiple dimensions of interest. To evaluate a text, a large language model (LLM) is prompted with each rubric question and produces a distribution over potential responses. The LLM predictions often fail to agree well with human judges—indeed, the humans do not fully agree with one another. However, the multiple LLM distributions can be _combined_ to _predict_ each human judge’s annotations on all questions, including a summary question that assesses overall quality or relevance. LLM-Rubric accomplishes this by training a small feed-forward neural network that includes both judge-specific and judge-independent parameters. When evaluating dialogue systems in a human-AI information-seeking task, we find that LLM-Rubric with 9 questions (assessing dimensions such as naturalness, conciseness, and citation quality) predicts human judges’ assessment of overall user satisfaction, on a scale of 1–4, with RMS error < 0.5, a 2× improvement over the uncalibrated baseline.
LIEDER: Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition - ACL Anthology

Discourse Entity (DE) recognition is the task of identifying novel and known entities introduced within a text. While previous work has found that large language models have basic, if imperfect, DE recognition abilities (Schuster and Linzen, 2022), it remains largely unassessed which of the fundamental semantic properties that govern the introduction and subsequent reference to DEs they have knowledge of. We propose the Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition (LIEDER) dataset that allows for a detailed examination of language models’ knowledge of four crucial semantic properties: existence, uniqueness, plurality, and novelty. We find evidence that state-of-the-art large language models exhibit sensitivity to all of these properties except novelty, which demonstrates that they have yet to reach human-level language understanding abilities.
Evaluating Very Long-Term Conversational Memory of LLM Agents - ACL Anthology

Existing works on long-term open-domain dialogues focus on evaluating model responses within contexts spanning no more than five chat sessions. Despite advancements in long-context large language models (LLMs) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) techniques, their efficacy in very long-term dialogues remains unexplored. To address this research gap, we introduce a machine-human pipeline to generate high-quality, very long-term dialogues by leveraging LLM-based agent architectures and grounding their dialogues on personas and temporal event graphs. Moreover, we equip each agent with the capability of sharing and reacting to images. The generated conversations are verified and edited by human annotators for long-range consistency and grounding to the event graphs. Using this pipeline, we collect LoCoMo, a dataset of very long-term conversations, each encompassing 600 turns and 16K tokens on avg., over up to 32 sessions. Based on LoCoMo, we present a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to measure long-term memory in models, encompassing question answering, event summarization, and multi-modal dialogue generation tasks. Our experimental results indicate that LLMs exhibit challenges in understanding lengthy conversations and comprehending long-range temporal and causal dynamics within dialogues. Employing strategies like long-context LLMs or RAG can offer improvements but these models still substantially lag behind human performance.
Prototypical Reward Network for Data-Efficient Model Alignment - ACL Anthology

The reward model for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper explores enhancing RLHF with Prototypical Networks to improve reward models. We propose a framework utilizing Prototypical Networks to enhance reward models under limited human feedback, enabling more stable and reliable structural learning from fewer samples. This enhances the model’s adaptability and accuracy in interpreting human preferences. Our experiments demonstrate that this approach significantly improves the performance of reward models and LLMs in human feedback tasks, surpassing traditional methods, especially in data-limited scenarios.
NEO-BENCH: Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models with Neologisms - ACL Anthology

The performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) degrades from the temporal drift between data used for model training and newer text seen during inference. One understudied avenue of language change causing data drift is the emergence of neologisms – new word forms – over time. We create a diverse resource of recent English neologisms by using several popular collection methods. We analyze temporal drift using neologisms by comparing sentences containing new words with near-identical sentences that replace neologisms with existing substitute words. Model performance is nearly halved in machine translation when a single neologism is introduced in a sentence. Motivated by these results, we construct a benchmark to evaluate LLMs’ ability to generalize to neologisms with various natural language understanding tasks and model perplexity. Models with later knowledge cutoff dates yield lower perplexities and perform better in downstream tasks. LLMs are also affected differently based on the linguistic origins of words, indicating that neologisms are complex for static LLMs to address. We will release our benchmark and code for reproducing our experiments.
Impacts of Misspelled Queries on Translation and Product Search - ACL Anthology

Machine translation is used in e-commerce to translate second-language queries into the primary language of the store, to be matched by the search system against the product catalog. However, many queries contain spelling mistakes. We first present an analysis of the spelling-robustness of a population of MT systems, quantifying how spelling variations affect MT output, the list of returned products, and ultimately user behavior. We then present two sets of practical experiments illustrating how spelling-robustness may be specifically improved. For MT, reducing the number of BPE operations significantly improves spelling-robustness in six language pairs. In end-to-end e-commerce, the inclusion of a dedicated spelling correction model, and the augmentation of that model’s training data with language-relevant phenomena, each improve robustness and consistency of search results.
Skin-in-the-Game: Decision Making via Multi-Stakeholder Alignment in LLMs - ACL Anthology

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in tasks such as summarization, arithmetic reasoning, and question answering. However, they encounter significant challenges in the domain of moral reasoning and ethical decision-making, especially in complex scenarios with multiple stakeholders. This paper introduces the Skin-in-the-Game (SKIG) framework, aimed at enhancing moral reasoning in LLMs by exploring decisions’ consequences from multiple stakeholder perspectives. The core components of the framework consist of simulating accountability for decisions, conducting empathy exercises on different stakeholders, and evaluating the risks associated with the impacts of potential actions. We study SKIG’s performance across various moral reasoning benchmarks with proprietary and open-source LLMs, and investigate its crucial components through extensive ablation analyses. Our framework exhibits marked improvements in performance compared to baselines across different language models and benchmarks.
The MERSA Dataset and a Transformer-Based Approach for Speech Emotion Recognition - ACL Anthology

Research in the field of speech emotion recognition (SER) relies on the availability of comprehensive datasets to make it possible to design accurate emotion detection models. This study introduces the Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Sentiment Analysis (MERSA) dataset, which includes both natural and scripted speech recordings, transcribed text, physiological data, and self-reported emotional surveys from 150 participants collected over a two-week period. This work also presents a novel emotion recognition approach that uses a transformer-based model, integrating pre-trained wav2vec 2.0 and BERT for feature extractions and additional LSTM layers to learn hidden representations from fused representations from speech and text. Our model predicts emotions on dimensions of arousal, valence, and dominance. We trained and evaluated the model on the MSP-PODCAST dataset and achieved competitive results from the best-performing model regarding the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC). Further, this paper demonstrates the effectiveness of this model through cross-domain evaluations on both IEMOCAP and MERSA datasets.
Transparent and Scrutable Recommendations Using Natural Language User Profiles - ACL Anthology

Recent state-of-the-art recommender systems predominantly rely on either implicit or explicit feedback from users to suggest new items. While effective in recommending novel options, many recommender systems often use uninterpretable embeddings to represent user preferences. This lack of transparency not only limits user understanding of why certain items are suggested but also reduces the user’s ability to scrutinize and modify their preferences, thereby affecting their ability to receive a list of preferred recommendations. Given the recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), we investigate how a properly crafted prompt can be used to summarize a user’s preferences from past reviews and recommend items based only on language-based preferences. In particular, we study how LLMs can be prompted to generate a natural language (NL) user profile that holistically describe a user’s preferences. These NL profiles can then be leveraged to fine-tune a LLM using only NL profiles to make transparent and scrutable recommendations. Furthermore, we validate the scrutability of our user profile-based recommender by investigating the impact on recommendation changes after editing NL user profiles. According to our evaluations of the model’s rating prediction performance on two benchmarking rating prediction datasets, we observe that this novel approach maintains a performance level on par with established recommender systems in a warm-start setting. With a systematic analysis into the effect of updating user profiles and system prompts, we show the advantage of our approach in easier adjustment of user preferences and a greater autonomy over users’ received recommendations.
Fora: A corpus and framework for the study of facilitated dialogue - ACL Anthology

Facilitated dialogue is increasingly popular as a method of civic engagement and as a method for gathering social insight, but resources for its study are scant. We present Fora, a unique collection of annotated facilitated dialogues. We compile 262 facilitated conversations that were hosted with partner organizations seeking to engage their members and surface insights regarding issues like education, elections, and public health, primarily through the sharing of personal experience. Alongside this corpus of 39,911 speaker turns, we present a framework for the analysis of facilitated dialogue. We taxonomize key personal sharing behaviors and facilitation strategies in the corpus, annotate a 25% sample (10,000+ speaker turns) of the data accordingly, and evaluate and establish baselines on a number of tasks essential to the identification of these phenomena in dialogue. We describe the data, and relate facilitator behavior to turn-taking and participant sharing. We outline how this research can inform future work in understanding and improving facilitated dialogue, parsing spoken conversation, and improving the behavior of dialogue agents.
Explanation-aware Soft Ensemble Empowers Large Language Model In-context Learning - ACL Anthology

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in various natural language understanding tasks with a few demonstration examples via in-context learning. Common strategies to boost such “in-context” learning ability are to ensemble multiple model decoded results and require the model to generate an explanation along with the prediction. However, these models often treat different class predictions equally and neglect the potential discrepancy between the explanations and predictions. To fully unleash the power of explanations, we propose EASE, an Explanation-Aware Soft Ensemble framework to empower in-context learning with LLMs. We design two techniques, explanation-guided ensemble, and soft probability aggregation, to mitigate the effect of unreliable explanations and improve the consistency between explanations and final predictions. Experiments on seven natural language understanding tasks and four varying-size LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework.
What is the Best Way for ChatGPT to Translate Poetry? - ACL Anthology

Machine translation (MT) has historically faced significant challenges when applied to literary works, particularly in the domain of poetry translation. The advent of Large Language Models such as ChatGPT holds potential for innovation in this field. This study examines ChatGPT’s capabilities in English-Chinese poetry translation tasks, utilizing targeted prompts and small sample scenarios to ascertain optimal performance. Despite promising outcomes, our analysis reveals persistent issues in the translations generated by ChatGPT that warrant attention. To address these shortcomings, we propose an Explanation-Assisted Poetry Machine Translation (EAPMT) method, which leverages monolingual poetry explanation as a guiding information for the translation process. Furthermore, we refine existing evaluation criteria to better suit the nuances of modern poetry translation. We engaged a panel of professional poets for assessments, complemented evaluations by using GPT-4. The results from both human and machine evaluations demonstrate that our EAPMT method outperforms traditional translation methods of ChatGPT and the existing online systems. This paper validates the efficacy of our method and contributes a novel perspective to machine-assisted literary translation.
Rephrasing the Web: A Recipe for Compute and Data-Efficient Language Modeling - ACL Anthology

Large language models are trained on massive scrapes of the web, which are often unstructured, noisy, and poorly phrased. Current scaling laws show that learning from such data requires an abundance of both compute and data, which grows with the size of the model being trained. This is infeasible both because of the large compute costs and duration associated with pre-training, and the impending scarcity of high-quality data on the web. In this work, we propose Web Rephrase Augmented Pre-training (WRAP) that uses an off-the-shelf instruction-tuned model prompted to paraphrase documents on the web in specific styles such as “like Wikipedia” or in “question-answer format” to jointly pre-train LLMs on real and synthetic rephrases. First, we show that using WRAP on the C4 dataset, which is naturally noisy, speeds up pre-training by ~3x. At the same pre-training compute budget, it improves perplexity by more than 50% on average across different subsets of the Pile, and improves zero-shot question answer accuracy across 13 tasks by more than 2%. Second, we investigate the impact of the re-phrasing style on the performance of the model, offering insights into how the composition of the training data can impact the performance of LLMs in OOD settings. Our gains are attributed to the fact that re-phrased synthetic data has higher utility than just real data because it (i) incorporates style diversity that closely reflects downstream evaluation style, and (ii) has higher ‘quality’ than web-scraped data.
DeCoT: Debiasing Chain-of-Thought for Knowledge-Intensive Tasks in Large Language Models via Causal Intervention - ACL Anthology

Large language models (LLMs) often require task-relevant knowledge to augment their internal knowledge through prompts. However, simply injecting external knowledge into prompts does not guarantee that LLMs can identify and use relevant information in the prompts to conduct chain-of-thought reasoning, especially when the LLM’s internal knowledge is derived from biased information on the pretraining data. In this paper, we propose a novel causal view to formally explain the internal knowledge bias of LLMs via a Structural Causal Model (SCM). We review the chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting from a causal perspective and discover that the biased information from pretrained models can impair LLMs’ reasoning abilities. When the CoT reasoning paths are misled by irrelevant information from prompts and are logically incorrect, simply editing factual information is insufficient to reach the correct answer. To estimate the confounding effect on CoT reasoning in LLMs, we use external knowledge as an instrumental variable. We further introduce CoT as a mediator to conduct front-door adjustment and generate logically correct CoTs where the spurious correlation between LLMs’ pretrained knowledge and task queries is reduced. With extensive experiments, we validate that our approach enables more accurate CoT reasoning and enhances LLM generation on knowledge-intensive tasks.
Representation Learning with Conditional Information Flow Maximization - ACL Anthology

This paper proposes an information-theoretic representation learning framework, named conditional information flow maximization, to extract noise-invariant sufficient representations for the input data and target task. It promotes the learned representations have good feature uniformity and sufficient predictive ability, which can enhance the generalization of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for the target task. Firstly, an information flow maximization principle is proposed to learn more sufficient representations for the input and target by simultaneously maximizing both input-representation and representation-label mutual information. Unlike the information bottleneck, we handle the input-representation information in an opposite way to avoid the over-compression issue of latent representations. Besides, to mitigate the negative effect of potential redundant features from the input, we design a conditional information minimization principle to eliminate negative redundant features while preserve noise-invariant features. Experiments on 13 language understanding benchmarks demonstrate that our method effectively improves the performance of PLMs for classification and regression. Extensive experiments show that the learned representations are more sufficient, robust and transferable.