GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
On the token distance modeling ability of higher RoPE attention dimension
Authors: Xiangyu Hong; Che Jiang; Biqing Qi; Fandong Meng; Mo Yu; Bowen Zhou; Jie Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Length extrapolation algorithms based on Rotary position embedding (RoPE) have shown promising results in extending the context length of language models. However, understanding how position embedding can capture longer-range contextual information remains elusive. Based on the intuition that different dimensions correspond to different frequency of changes in RoPE encoding, we conducted a dimension-level analysis to investigate the correlation between a hidden dimension of an attention head and its contribution to capturing long-distance dependencies. Using our correlation metric, we identified a particular type of attention heads, which we named Positional Heads, from various length-extrapolated models. These heads exhibit a strong focus on long-range information interaction and play a pivotal role in long input processing, as evidence by our ablation. We further demonstrate the correlation between the efficiency of length extrapolation and the extension of the high-dimensional attention allocation of these heads. The identification of Positional Heads provides insights for future research in long-text comprehension.
Enhancing Byzantine-Resistant Aggregations with Client Embedding
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhang; Hao Zhou; Fandong Meng; Jie Zhou; Xu Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Byzantine-resistant aggregations detect poisonous clients and discard them to ensure that the global model is not poisoned or attacked by malicious clients. However, these aggregations are mainly conducted on the parameter space, and the parameter distances cannot reflect the data distribution divergences between clients. Therefore, existing Byzantine-resistant aggregations cannot defend against backdoor injection by malicious attackers in federated natural language tasks. In this paper, we propose the client embedding for malicious client detection to enhance Byzantine-resistant aggregations. The distances between client embeddings are required to reflect the data distribution divergences of the corresponding clients. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed client embeddings.
Exploiting Careful Design of SVM Solution for Aspect-term Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Hanfeng Liu; Minping Chen; Zhenya Zheng; Zeyi Wen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Aspect-term sentiment analysis (ATSA) identifies fine-grained sentiments towards specific aspects of the text. While pre-trained language models (PLMs) have set the state-of-the-art (SOTA) for ATSA, they are resource-intensive due to their large model sizes, restricting their wide applications to resource-constrained scenarios. Conversely, conventional machine learning methods, such as Support Vector Machines (SVMs), offer the benefit of less resource requirement but have lower predictive accuracy. This paper introduces an innovative pipeline, termed SVM-ATSA, which bridges the gap between the accuracy of SVM-based methods and the efficiency of PLM-based methods. To improve the feature expression of SVMs and better adapt to the ATSA task, SVM-ATSA decomposes the learning problem into multiple view subproblems, and dynamically selects as well as constructs features with reinforcement learning. The experimental results demonstrate that SVM-ATSA surpasses SOTA PLM-based methods in predictive accuracy while maintaining a faster inference speed and significantly reducing the number of model parameters.
Learning to Generate Rules for Realistic Few-Shot Relation Classification: An Encoder-Decoder Approach
Authors: Mayank Singh; Eduardo Blanco
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: We propose a neuro-symbolic approach for realistic few-shot relation classification via rules. Instead of building neural models to predict relations, we design them to output straightforward rules that can be used to extract relations. The rules are generated using custom T5-style Encoder-Decoder Language Models. Crucially, our rules are fully interpretable and pliable (i.e., humans can easily modify them to boost performance). Through a combination of rules generated by these models along with a very effective, novel baseline, we demonstrate a few-shot relation-classification performance that is comparable to or stronger than the state of the art on the Few-Shot TACRED and NYT29 benchmarks while increasing interpretability and maintaining pliability.
Plot Twist: Multimodal Models Don’t Comprehend Simple Chart Details
Authors: Yasaman Razeghi; Ishita Dasgupta; Fangyu Liu; Vinay Venkatesh Ramasesh; Sameer Singh
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Recent advances in multimodal models show remarkable performance in real-world benchmarks for chart and figure understanding like ChartQA that involve interpreting trends, comparing data points, and extracting insights from visuals.In this paper, we investigate the extent to which these models truly comprehend the underlying information in charts by posing direct, elementary questions about simple features such as axes ranges and values to examine their fundamental visual understanding abilities in the context of charts.Our questions are applied to two sets of figures: synthetic and real-world.The empirical evaluation of 5 popular multimodal models on our dataset reveals shortfalls in understanding charts and figures, contrary to what their performance on complex benchmarks might suggest.For instance, Gemini Pro Vision only achieves 57.9% accuracy on our elementary set of questions on real-world plots, while other popular multimodal models showed similar or less performance.This work highlights an important limitation of current multimodal models, and cautions against overly optimistic interpretations of their abilities based on results of canonical evaluations.
HateCOT: An Explanation-Enhanced Dataset for Generalizable Offensive Speech Detection via Large Language Models
Authors: Huy Nghiem; Hal Daumé Iii
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The widespread use of social media necessitates reliable and efficient detection of offensive content to mitigate harmful effects. Although sophisticated models perform well on individual datasets, they often fail to generalize due to varying definitions and labeling of “offensive content.” In this paper, we introduce HateCOT, an English dataset with over 52,000 samples from diverse sources, featuring explanations generated by GPT-3.5Turbo and curated by humans. We demonstrate that pretraining on HateCOT significantly enhances the performance of open-source Large Language Models on three benchmark datasets for offensive content detection in both zero-shot and few-shot settings, despite differences in domain and task. Additionally, HateCOT facilitates effective K-shot fine-tuning of LLMs with limited data and improves the quality of their explanations, as confirmed by our human evaluation.
Giving Control Back to Models: Enabling Offensive Language Detection Models to Autonomously Identify and Mitigate Biases
Authors: Jiapeng Liu; Weijie Li; Xiaochao Fan; Wenjun Deng; Liang Yang; Yong Li; Yufeng Diao
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The rapid development of social media has led to an increase in online harassment and offensive speech, posing significant challenges for effective content moderation. Existing automated detection models often exhibit a bias towards predicting offensive speech based on specific vocabulary, which not only compromises model fairness but also potentially exacerbates biases against vulnerable and minority groups. Addressing these issues, this paper proposes a bias self-awareness and data self-iteration framework for mitigating model biases. This framework aims to “giving control back to models: enabling offensive language detection models to autonomously identify and mitigate biases” through bias self-awareness algorithms and self-iterative data augmentation method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively reduces the false positive rate of models in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tests, enhances model accuracy and fairness, and shows promising performance improvements in detecting offensive speech on larger-scale datasets.
Toolken+: Improving LLM Tool Usage with Reranking and a Reject Option
Authors: Konstantin Yakovlev; Sergey Nikolenko; Andrey Bout
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The recently proposed ToolkenGPT tool learning paradigm demonstrates promising performance but suffers from two major issues: first, it cannot benefit from tool documentation, and second, it often makes mistakes in whether to use a tool at all. We introduce Toolken+ that mitigates the first problem by reranking top-k tools selected by ToolkenGPT and the second problem with a special REJECT option such that the model will generate a vocabulary token if REJECT is ranked first. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Toolken+ on multistep numerical reasoning and tool selection tasks.
SecureSQL: Evaluating Data Leakage of Large Language Models as Natural Language Interfaces to Databases
Authors: Yanqi Song; Ruiheng Liu; Shu Chen; Qianhao Ren; Yu Zhang; Yongqi Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: With the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Interfaces to Databases (NLIDBs), concerns about security issues in NLIDBs have been increasing gradually. However, research on sensitive data leakage in NLIDBs is relatively limited. Therefore, we propose a benchmark to assess the potential of language models to leak sensitive data when generating SQL queries. This benchmark covers 932 samples from 34 different domains, including medical, legal, financial, and political aspects. We evaluate 15 models from six LLM families, and the results show that the model with the best performance has an accuracy of 61.7%, whereas humans achieve an accuracy of 94%. Most models perform close to or even below the level of random selection. We also evaluate two common attack methods, namely prompt injection and inference attacks, as well as a defense method based on chain-of-thoughts (COT) prompting. Experimental results show that both attack methods significantly impact the model, while the defense method based on COT prompting dose not significantly improve accuracy, further highlighting the severity of sensitive data leakage issues in NLIDBs. We hope this research will draw more attention and further study from the researchers on this issue.
Llama SLayer 8B: Shallow Layers Hold the Key to Knowledge Injection
Authors: Tianxiang Chen; Zhentao Tan; Tao Gong; Yue Wu; Qi Chu; Bin Liu; Jieping Ye; Nenghai Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: As a manner to augment pretrained large language models (LLM), knowledge injection is critical to develop vertical domain large models and has been widely studied. While most current approaches, including parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and block expansion methods, uniformly apply knowledge across all LLM layers, it raises the question: are all layers equally crucial for knowledge injection? We embark upon evaluating the importance of each layer to locate the optimal layer range for knowledge injection. Intuitively, more important layers should play more critical roles in knowledge injection and deserve denser injection. We observe performance dips in question-answering benchmarks after the removal or expansion of the shallow layers, and the degradation shrinks as the layer gets deeper, indicating that the shallow layers hold the key to knowledge injection. This insight leads us to propose the S strategy, a post-pretraining strategy of selectively enhancing shallow layers while pruning the less effective deep ones. Based on this strategy, we introduce Llama Slayer 8B. We experimented on the corpus of code & math and demonstrated the effectiveness of our strategy. Further experiments across different LLM, Mistral-7B, and a legal corpus confirmed the approach’s general applicability, underscoring its wide-ranging efficacy.
Entity or Relation Embeddings? An Analysis of Encoding Strategies for Relation Extraction
Authors: Frank Martin Mtumbuka; Steven Schockaert
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Existing approaches to relation extraction obtain relation embeddings by concatenating embeddings of the head and tail entities. Despite the popularity of this approach, we find that such representations mostly capture the types of the entities involved, leading to false positives and confusion between relations that involve entities of the same type. Another possibility is to use a prompt with a [MASK] token to directly learn relation embeddings, but this approach tends to perform poorly. We show that this underperformance comes from the fact that information about entity types is insufficiently captured by the [MASK] embeddings. We therefore propose a simple model, which combines such [MASK] embeddings with entity embeddings. Despite its simplicity, our model consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art across several benchmarks, even when the entity embeddings are obtained from a pre-trained entity typing model. We also experiment with a self-supervised pre-training strategy which further improves the results.
Distilling Instruction-following Abilities of Large Language Models with Task-aware Curriculum Planning
Authors: Yuanhao Yue; Chengyu Wang; Jun Huang; Peng Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Instruction tuning aims to align large language models (LLMs) with open-domain instructions and human-preferred responses. While several studies have explored autonomous approaches to distilling and annotating instructions from powerful proprietary LLMs, such as ChatGPT, they often neglect the impact of the distributions and characteristics of tasks, together with the varying difficulty of instructions in training sets. This oversight can lead to imbalanced knowledge capabilities and poor generalization powers of student LLMs. To address these challenges, we introduce Task-Aware Curriculum Planning for Instruction Refinement (TAPIR), a multi-round distillation framework that utilizes an oracle LLM to select instructions that are difficult for a student LLM to follow. To balance the student’s capabilities, task distributions in training sets are adjusted with responses automatically refined according to their corresponding tasks. In addition, by incorporating curriculum planning, our approach systematically escalates the difficulty levels of tasks, progressively enhancing the student LLM’s capabilities. We rigorously evaluate TAPIR using several widely recognized benchmarks (such as AlpacaEval 2.0, MT-Bench, etc.) and multiple student LLMs. Empirical results demonstrate that student LLMs, trained with our method and less training data, outperform larger instruction-tuned models and strong distillation baselines.
On Creating an English-Thai Code-switched Machine Translation in Medical Domain
Authors: Parinthapat Pengpun; Krittamate Tiankanon; Amrest Chinkamol; Jiramet Kinchagawat; Pitchaya Chairuengjitjaras; Pasit Supholkhan; Pubordee Aussavavirojekul; Chiraphat Boonnag; Kanyakorn Veerakanjana; Hirunkul Phimsiri; Boonthicha Sae-jia; Nattawach Sataudom; Piyalitt Ittichaiwong; Peerat Limkonchotiwat
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Machine translation (MT) in the medical domain plays a pivotal role in enhancing healthcare quality and disseminating medical knowledge. Despite advancements in English-Thai MT technology, common MT approaches often underperform in the medical field due to their inability to precisely translate medical terminologies. Our research prioritizes not merely improving translation accuracy but also maintaining medical terminology in English within the translated text through code-switched (CS) translation. We developed a method to produce CS medical translation data, fine-tuned a CS translation model with this data, and evaluated its performance against strong baselines, such as Google Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and GPT-3.5/GPT-4. Our model demonstrated competitive performance in automatic metrics and was highly favored in human preference evaluations. Our evaluation result also shows that medical professionals significantly prefer CS translations that maintain critical English terms accurately, even if it slightly compromises fluency. Our code and test set are publicly available https://github.com/preceptorai-org/NLLB_CS_EM_NLP2024.
CogGPT: Unleashing the Power of Cognitive Dynamics on Large Language Models
Authors: Yaojia Lv; Haojie Pan; Zekun Wang; Jiafeng Liang; Yuanxing Liu; Ruiji Fu; Ming Liu; Zhongyuan Wang; Bing Qin
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Cognitive dynamics, which refer to the evolution in human cognitive processes, are pivotal to advance human understanding of the world. Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) highlight their potential for cognitive simulation. However, these LLM-based cognitive studies primarily focus on replicating human cognition in specific contexts, overlooking the inherently dynamic nature of cognition. To bridge this gap, we explore the cognitive dynamics of LLMs and present a corresponding task inspired by longitudinal studies. Toward the task, we develop CogBench, a novel benchmark to assess the cognitive dynamics of LLMs and validate it through participant surveys. We also design two evaluation metrics for CogBench, including Authenticity and Rationality. Recognizing the inherent static nature of LLMs, we further introduce CogGPT for the task, which features an innovative iterative cognitive mechanism to develop lifelong cognitive dynamics. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of CogGPT over several existing methods, particularly in its ability to facilitate role-specific cognitive dynamics under continuous information flows. We will release the code and data to enable further research.
Can LLMs Recognize Toxicity? A Structured Investigation Framework and Toxicity Metric
Authors: Hyukhun Koh; Dohyung Kim; Minwoo Lee; Kyomin Jung
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: In the pursuit of developing Large Language Models (LLMs) that adhere to societal standards, it is imperative to detect the toxicity in the generated text. The majority of existing toxicity metrics rely on encoder models trained on specific toxicity datasets, which are susceptible to out-of-distribution (OOD) problems and depend on the dataset’s definition of toxicity. In this paper, we introduce a robust metric grounded on LLMs to flexibly measure toxicity according to the given definition. We first analyze the toxicity factors, followed by an examination of the intrinsic toxic attributes of LLMs to ascertain their suitability as evaluators. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our metric with detailed analysis. Our empirical results demonstrate outstanding performance in measuring toxicity within verified factors, improving on conventional metrics by 12 points in the F1 score. Our findings also indicate that upstream toxicity significantly influences downstream metrics, suggesting that LLMs are unsuitable for toxicity evaluations within unverified factors.
Toeing the Party Line: Election Manifestos as a Key to Understand Political Discourse on Twitter
Authors: Maximilian Maurer; Tanise Ceron; Sebastian Padó; Gabriella Lapesa
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Political discourse on Twitter is a moving target: politicians continuously make statements about their positions. It is therefore crucial to track their discourse on social media to understand their ideological positions and goals. However, Twitter data is also challenging to work with since it is ambiguous and often dependent on social context, and consequently, recent work on political positioning has tended to focus strongly on manifestos (parties’ electoral programs) rather than social media.In this paper, we extend recently proposed methods to predict pairwise positional similarities between parties from the manifesto case to the Twitter case, using hashtags as a signal to fine-tune text representations, without the need for manual annotation. We verify the efficacy of fine-tuning and conduct a series of experiments that assess the robustness of our method for low-resource scenarios. We find that our method yields stable positionings reflective of manifesto positionings, both in scenarios with all tweets of candidates across years available and when only smaller subsets from shorter time periods are available. This indicates that it is possible to reliably analyze the relative positioning of actors without the need for manual annotation, even in the noisier context of social media.
UniTabNet: Bridging Vision and Language Models for Enhanced Table Structure Recognition
Authors: Zhenrong Zhang; Shuhang Liu; Pengfei Hu; Jiefeng Ma; Jun Du; Jianshu Zhang; Yu Hu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: In the digital era, table structure recognition technology is a critical tool for processing and analyzing large volumes of tabular data. Previous methods primarily focus on visual aspects of table structure recovery but often fail to effectively comprehend the textual semantics within tables, particularly for descriptive textual cells. In this paper, we introduce UniTabNet, a novel framework for table structure parsing based on the image-to-text model. UniTabNet employs a “divide-and-conquer” strategy, utilizing an image-to-text model to decouple table cells and integrating both physical and logical decoders to reconstruct the complete table structure. We further enhance our framework with the Vision Guider, which directs the model’s focus towards pertinent areas, thereby boosting prediction accuracy. Additionally, we introduce the Language Guider to refine the model’s capability to understand textual semantics in table images. Evaluated on prominent table structure datasets such as PubTabNet, PubTables1M, WTW, and iFLYTAB, UniTabNet achieves a new state-of-the-art performance, demonstrating the efficacy of our approach. The code will also be made publicly available.