GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
CLIMATELI: Evaluating Entity Linking on Climate Change Data
Authors: Shijia Zhou; Siyao Peng; Barbara Plank
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024))

Abstract: Climate Change (CC) is a pressing topic of global importance, attracting increasing attention across research fields, from social sciences to Natural Language Processing (NLP). CC is also discussed in various settings and communication platforms, from academic publications to social media forums. Understanding who and what is mentioned in such data is a first critical step to gaining new insights into CC. We present CLIMATELI (CLIMATe Entity LInking), the first manually annotated CC dataset that links 3,087 entity spans to Wikipedia. Using CLIMATELI (CLIMATe Entity LInking), we evaluate existing entity linking (EL) systems on the CC topic across various genres and propose automated filtering methods for CC entities. We find that the performance of EL models notably lags behind humans at both token and entity levels. Testing within the scope of retaining or excluding non-nominal and/or non-CC entities particularly impacts the models’ performances.
Aligning Unstructured Paris Agreement Climate Plans with Sustainable Development Goals
Authors: Daniel Spokoyny; Janelle Cai; Tom Corringham; Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024))

Abstract: Aligning unstructured climate policy documents according to a particular classification taxonomy with little to no labeled examples is challenging and requires manual effort of climate policy researchers. In this work we examine whether large language models (LLMs) can act as an effective substitute or assist in the annotation process. Utilizing a large set of text spans from Paris Agreement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) linked to United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and targets contained in the Climate Watch dataset from the World Resources Institute in combination with our own annotated data, we validate our approaches and establish a benchmark for model performance evaluation on this task. With our evaluation benchmarking we quantify the effectiveness of using zero-shot or few-shot prompted LLMs to align these documents.
Granular Analysis of Social Media Users’ Truthfulness Stances Toward Climate Change Factual Claims
Authors: Haiqi Zhang; Zhengyuan Zhu; Zeyu Zhang; Jacob Devasier; Chengkai Li
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024))

Abstract: Climate change poses an urgent global problem that requires efficient data analysis mechanisms to provide insights into climate-related discussions on social media platforms. This paper presents a framework aimed at understanding social media users’ perceptions of various climate change topics and uncovering the insights behind these perceptions. Our framework employs large language model to develop a taxonomy of factual claims related to climate change and build a classification model that detects the truthfulness stance of tweets toward the factual claims. The findings reveal two key conclusions: (1) The public tends to believe the claims are true, regardless of the actual claim veracity; (2) The public shows a lack of discernment between facts and misinformation across different topics, particularly in areas related to politics, economy, and environment.
SDG target detection in environmental reports using Retrieval-augmented Generation with LLMs
Authors: Dario Garigliotti
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024))

Abstract: With the consolidation of Large Language Models (LLM) as a dominant component in approaches for multiple linguistic tasks, the interest in these technologies has greatly increased within a variety of areas and domains. A particular scenario of information needs where to exploit these approaches is climate-aware NLP. Paradigmatically, the vast manual labour of inspecting long, heterogeneous documents to find environment-relevant expressions and claims suits well within a recently established Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) framework. In this paper, we tackle two dual problems within environment analysis dealing with the common goal of detecting a Sustainable Developmental Goal (SDG) target being addressed in a textual passage of an environmental assessment report.We develop relevant test collections, and propose and evaluate a series of methods within the general RAG pipeline, in order to assess the current capabilities of LLMs for the tasks of SDG target evidence identification and SDG target detection.
Assessing the Effectiveness of GPT-4o in Climate Change Evidence Synthesis and Systematic Assessments: Preliminary Insights
Authors: Elphin Joe; Sai Koneru; Christine Kirchhoff
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024))

Abstract: In this research short, we examine the potential of using GPT-4o, a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) to undertake evidence synthesis and systematic assessment tasks. Traditional workflows for such tasks involve large groups of domain experts who manually review and synthesize vast amounts of literature. The exponential growth of scientific literature and recent advances in LLMs provide an opportunity to complementing these traditional workflows with new age tools. We assess the efficacy of GPT-4o to do these tasks on a sample from the dataset created by the Global Adaptation Mapping Initiative (GAMI) where we check the accuracy of climate change adaptation related feature extraction from the scientific literature across three levels of expertise. Our results indicate that while GPT-4o can achieve high accuracy in low-expertise tasks like geographic location identification, their performance in intermediate and high-expertise tasks, such as stakeholder identification and assessment of depth of the adaptation response, is less reliable. The findings motivate the need for designing assessment workflows that utilize the strengths of models like GPT-4o while also providing refinements to improve their performance on these tasks.
BAMBINO-LM: (Bilingual-)Human-Inspired Continual Pre-training of BabyLM
Authors: Zhewen Shen; Aditya Joshi; Ruey-Cheng Chen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Children from bilingual backgrounds benefit from interactions with parents and teachers to re-acquire their heritage language. In this paper, we investigate how this insight from behavioral study can be incorporated into the learning of small-scale language models. We introduce BAMBINO-LM, a continual pre-training strategy for BabyLM that uses a novel combination of alternation and PPO-based perplexity reward induced from a parent Italian model. Upon evaluation on zero-shot classification tasks for English and Italian, BAMBINO-LM improves the Italian language capability of a BabyLM baseline. Our ablation analysis demonstrates that employing both the alternation strategy and PPO-based modeling is key to this effectiveness gain. We also show that, as a side effect, the proposed method leads to a similar degradation in L1 effectiveness as human children would have had in an equivalent learning scenario. Through its modeling and findings, BAMBINO-LM makes a focused contribution to the pre-training of small-scale language models by first developing a human-inspired strategy for pre-training and then showing that it results in behaviours similar to that of humans.
Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Bistable Images
Authors: Artemis Panagopoulou; Coby Melkin; Chris Callison-Burch
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Bistable images, also known as ambiguous or reversible images, present visual stimuli that can be seen in two distinct interpretations, though not simultaneously, by the observer. In this study, we conduct the most extensive examination of vision-language models using bistable images to date. We manually gathered a dataset of 29 bistable images, along with their associated labels, and subjected them to 121 different manipulations in brightness, resolution, tint, and rotation. We evaluated twelve different models in both classification and generative tasks across six model architectures. Our findings reveal that, with the exception of models from the Idefics family and LLaVA1.5-13b, there is a pronounced preference for one interpretation over another among the models, and minimal variance under image manipulations, with few exceptions on image rotations. Additionally, we compared the models’ preferences with humans, noting that the models do not exhibit the same continuity biases as humans and often diverge from human initial interpretations. We also investigated the influence of variations in prompts and the use of synonymous labels, discovering that these factors significantly affect model interpretations more than image manipulations showing a higher influence of the language priors on bistable image interpretations compared to image-text training data. All code and data is open sourced.
Locally Biased Transformers Better Align with Human Reading Times
Authors: Andrea De Varda; Marco Marelli
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Recent psycholinguistic theories emphasize the interdependence between linguistic expectations and memory limitations in human language processing. We modify the self-attention mechanism of a transformer model to simulate a lossy context representation, biasing the model’s predictions to give additional weight to the local linguistic context. We show that surprisal estimates from our locally-biased model generally provide a better fit to human psychometric data, underscoring the sensitivity of the human parser to local linguistic information.
Do large language models resemble humans in language use?
Authors: Zhenguang Cai; Xufeng Duan; David Haslett; Shuqi Wang; Martin Pickering
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: It is unclear whether large language models (LLMs) develop humanlike characteristics in language use. We subjected ChatGPT and Vicuna to 12 pre-registered psycholinguistic experiments ranging from sounds to dialogue. ChatGPT and Vicuna replicated the human pattern of language use in 10 and 7 out of the 12 experiments, respectively. The models associated unfamiliar words with different meanings depending on their forms, continued to access recently encountered meanings of ambiguous words, reused recent sentence structures, attributed causality as a function of verb semantics, and accessed different meanings and retrieved different words depending on an interlocutor’s identity. In addition, ChatGPT, but not Vicuna, nonliterally interpreted implausible sentences that were likely to have been corrupted by noise, drew reasonable inferences, and overlooked semantic fallacies in a sentence. Finally, unlike humans, neither model preferred using shorter words to convey less informative content, nor did they use context to resolve syntactic ambiguities. We discuss how these convergences and divergences may result from the transformer architecture. Overall, these experiments demonstrate that LLMs such as ChatGPT (and Vicuna to a lesser extent) are humanlike in many aspects of human language processing.
The Curious Case of Representational Alignment: Unravelling Visio-Linguistic Tasks in Emergent Communication
Authors: Tom Kouwenhoven; Max Peeperkorn; Bram Van Dijk; Tessa Verhoef
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Natural language has the universal properties of being compositional and grounded in reality. The emergence of linguistic properties is often investigated through simulations of emergent communication in referential games. However, these experiments have yielded mixed results compared to similar experiments addressing linguistic properties of human language. Here we address representational alignment as a potential contributing factor to these results. Specifically, we assess the representational alignment between agent image representations and between agent representations and input images. Doing so, we confirm that the emergent language does not appear to encode human-like conceptual visual features, since agent image representations drift away from inputs whilst inter-agent alignment increases. We moreover identify a strong relationship between inter-agent alignment and topographic similarity, a common metric for compositionality, and address its consequences. To address these issues, we introduce an alignment penalty that prevents representational drift but interestingly does not improve performance on a compositional discrimination task. Together, our findings emphasise the key role representational alignment plays in simulations of language emergence.
Hierarchical syntactic structure in human-like language models
Authors: Michael Wolfman; Donald Dunagan; Jonathan Brennan; John Hale
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Language models (LMs) are a meeting point for cognitive modeling and computational linguistics. How should they be designed to serve as adequate cognitive models? To address this question, this study contrasts two Transformer-based LMs that share the same architecture. Only one of them analyzes sentences in terms of explicit hierarchical structure. Evaluating the two LMs against fMRI time series via the surprisal complexity metric, the results implicate the superior temporal gyrus. These findings underline the need for hierarchical sentence structures in word-by-word models of human language comprehension.
Do LLMs Agree with Humans on Emotional Associations to Nonsense Words?
Authors: Yui Miyakawa; Chihaya Matsuhira; Hirotaka Kato; Takatsugu Hirayama; Takahiro Komamizu; Ichiro Ide
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Understanding human perception of nonsense words is helpful to devise product and character names that match their characteristics. Previous studies have suggested the usefulness of Large Language Models (LLMs) for estimating such human perception, but they did not focus on its emotional aspects. Hence, this study aims to elucidate the relationship of emotions evoked by nonsense words between humans and LLMs. Using a representative LLM, GPT-4, we reproduce the procedure of an existing study to analyze evoked emotions of humans for nonsense words. A positive correlation of 0.40 was found between the emotion intensity scores reproduced by GPT-4 and those manually annotated by humans. Although the correlation is not very high, this demonstrates that GPT-4 may agree with humans on emotional associations to nonsense words. Considering that the previous study reported that the correlation among human annotators was about 0.68 on average and that between a regression model trained on the annotations for real words and humans was 0.17, GPT-4’s agreement with humans is notably strong.
Large language models fail to derive atypicality inferences in a human-like manner
Authors: Charlotte Kurch; Margarita Ryzhova; Vera Demberg
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Recent studies have claimed that large language models (LLMs) are capable of drawing pragmatic inferences (Qiu et al., 2023; Hu et al., 2022; Barattieri di San Pietro et al., 2023). The present paper sets out to test LLM’s abilities on atypicality inferences, a type of pragmatic inference that is triggered through informational redundancy. We test several state-of-the-art LLMs in a zero-shot setting and find that LLMs fail to systematically fail to derive atypicality inferences. Our robustness analysis indicates that when inferences are seemingly derived in a few-shot settings, these results can be attributed to shallow pattern matching and not pragmatic inferencing. We also analyse the performance of the LLMs at the different derivation steps required for drawing atypicality inferences – our results show that models have access to script knowledge and can use it to identify redundancies and accommodate the atypicality inference. The failure instead seems to stem from not reacting to the subtle maxim of quantity violations introduced by the informationally redundant utterances.
Predict but Also Integrate: an Analysis of Sentence Processing Models for English and Hindi
Authors: Nina Delcaro; Luca Onnis; Raquel Alhama
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Fluent speakers make implicit predictions about forthcoming linguistic items while processing sentences, possibly to increase efficiency in real-time comprehension. However, the extent to which prediction is the primary mode of processing human language is widely debated. The human language processor may also gain efficiency by integrating new linguistic information with prior knowledge and the preceding context, without actively predicting. At present, the role of probabilistic integration, as well as its computational foundation, remains relatively understudied. Here, we explored whether a Delayed Recurrent Neural Network (d-RNN, Turek et al., 2020), as an implementation of both prediction and integration, can explain patterns of human language processing over and above the contribution of a purely predictive RNN model. We found that incorporating integration contributes to explaining variability in eye-tracking data for English and Hindi.
Transformer Attention vs Human Attention in Anaphora Resolution
Authors: Anastasia Kozlova; Albina Akhmetgareeva; Aigul Khanova; Semen Kudriavtsev; Alena Fenogenova
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Motivated by human cognitive processes, attention mechanism within transformer architecture has been developed to assist neural networks in allocating focus to specific aspects within input data. Despite claims regarding the interpretability achieved by attention mechanisms, the extent of correlation and similarity between machine and human attention remains a subject requiring further investigation.In this paper, we conduct a quantitative analysis of human attention compared to neural attention mechanisms in the context of the anaphora resolution task. We collect an eye-tracking dataset based on the Winograd schema challenge task for the Russian language. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct an extensive analysis of the correlations between human and machine attention maps across various transformer architectures, network layers of pre-trained and fine-tuned models. Our aim is to investigate whether insights from human attention mechanisms can be used to enhance the performance of neural networks in tasks such as anaphora resolution. The results reveal distinctions in anaphora resolution processing, offering promising prospects for improving the performance of neural networks and understanding the cognitive nuances of human perception.
Evaluating Lexical Aspect with Large Language Models
Authors: Bolei Ma
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: In this study, we explore the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in understanding two key lexical aspects: duration (durative/stative) and telicity (telic/atelic). Through experiments on datasets featuring sentences, verbs, and verb positions, we prompt the LLMs to identify aspectual features of verbs in sentences. Our findings reveal that certain LLMs, particularly those closed-source ones, are able to capture information on duration and telicity, albeit with some performance variations and weaker results compared to the baseline. By employing prompts at three levels (sentence-only, sentence with verb, and sentence with verb and its position), we demonstrate that integrating verb information generally enhances performance in aspectual feature recognition, though it introduces instability. We call for future research to look deeper into methods aimed at optimizing LLMs for aspectual feature comprehension.
Daily auditory environments in French-speaking infants: A longitudinal dataset
Authors: Estelle Hervé; Clément François; Laurent Prevot
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Babies’ daily auditory environment plays a crucial role in language development. Most previous research estimating the quantitative and qualitative aspects of early speech inputs has predominantly focused on English- and Spanish-speaking families. In addition, validation studies for daylong recordings’ analysis tools are scarce on French data sets.In this paper, we present a French corpus of daylong audio recordings longitudinally collected with the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) system from infants aged 3 to 24 months. We conduct a thorough exploration of this data set, which serves as a quality check for both the data and the analysis tools.We evaluate the reliability of LENA metrics by systematically comparing them with those obtained from the ChildProject set of tools and by checking the known dynamics of the metrics with age. These metrics are also used to replicate, on our data set, findings from (Warlaumont et al, 2014) about the increase of infants’ speech vocalizations and temporal contingencies between infants and caregivers with age.
Analysing and Validating Language Complexity Metrics Across South American Indigenous Languages
Authors: Felipe Serras; Miguel Carpi; Matheus Branco; Marcelo Finger
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Language complexity is an emerging concept critical for NLP and for quantitative and cognitive approaches to linguistics. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of a set of compression-based language complexity metrics when applied to a large set of native South American languages. Our goal is to validate the desirable properties of such metrics against a more diverse set of languages, guaranteeing the universality of the techniques developed on the basis of this type of theoretical artifact. Our analysis confirmed with statistical confidence most propositions about the metrics studied, affirming their robustness, despite showing less stability than when the same metrics were applied to Indo-European languages. We also observed that the trade-off between morphological and syntactic complexities is strongly related to language phylogeny.
How can large language models become more human?
Authors: Daphne Wang; Mehrnoosh Sadrzadeh; Miloš Stanojević; Wing-Yee Chow; Richard Breheny
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics)

Abstract: Psycholinguistic experiments reveal that efficiency of human language use is founded on predictions at both syntactic and lexical levels. Previous models of human prediction exploiting LLMs have used an information theoretic measure called surprisal, with success on naturalistic text in a wide variety of languages, but under-performance on challenging text such as garden path sentences. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines the lexical predictions of an LLM with the syntactic structures provided by a dependency parser. The framework gives rise to an Incompatibility Fraction. When tested on two garden path datasets, it correlated well with human reading times, distinguished between easy and hard garden path, and outperformed surprisal.