GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
A Simple Baseline for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering
Authors: Alexandros Xenos; Themos Stafylakis; Ioannis Patras; Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper is on the problem of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA). Recent works have emphasized the significance of incorporating both explicit (through external databases) and implicit (through LLMs) knowledge to answer questions requiring external knowledge effectively. A common limitation of such approaches is that they consist of relatively complicated pipelines and often heavily rely on accessing GPT-3 API. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a much simpler and readily reproducible pipeline which, in a nutshell, is based on efficient in-context learning by prompting LLaMA (1 and 2) using question-informative captions as contextual information. Contrary to recent approaches, our method is training-free, does not require access to external databases or APIs, and yet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the OK-VQA and A-OK-VQA datasets. Finally, we perform several ablation studies to understand important aspects of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/alexandrosXe/ASimple-Baseline-For-Knowledge-Based-VQA
Unveiling the Essence of Poetry: Introducing a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Poem Summarization
Authors: Ridwan Mahbub; Ifrad Khan; Samiha Anuva; Md Shihab Shahriar; Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar; Sabbir Ahmed
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While research in natural language processing has progressed significantly in creative language generation, the question of whether language models can interpret the intended meaning of creative language largely remains unanswered. Poetry as a creative art form has existed for generations, and summarization of such content requires deciphering the figurative patterns to find out the actual intent and message of the poet. This task can provide the researchers an opportunity to evaluate the creative language interpretation capacity of the language models. Unlike typical text, summarization of poems is a challenging task as poems carry a deeper meaning, which can be easily lost if only the literal meaning is considered. That being said, we propose a new task in the field of natural language understanding called ‘Poem Summarization’. As a starting, we propose the first-ever dataset for this task, named ‘PoemSum’, consisting of 3011 samples of poetry and its corresponding summarized interpretation in the English language. We have benchmarked the performance of different state-of-the-art summarization models and provided observations on their limitations. The dataset and all relevant code used in this work have been made publicly available.
Privacy Implications of Retrieval-Based Language Models
Authors: Yangsibo Huang; Samyak Gupta; Zexuan Zhong; Kai Li; Danqi Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Retrieval-based language models (LMs) have demonstrated improved interpretability, factuality, and adaptability compared to their parametric counterparts by incorporating retrieved text from external datastores. While it is well known that parametric models are prone to leaking private data, it remains unclear how the addition of a retrieval datastore impacts model privacy. In this work, we present the first study of privacy risks in retrieval-based LMs, particularly kNN-LMs. Our goal is to explore the optimal design and training procedure in domains where privacy is of concern, aiming to strike a balance between utility and privacy. Crucially, we find that kNN-LMs are more susceptible to leaking private information from their private datastore than parametric models. We further explore mitigations of privacy risks: When privacy information is targeted and readily detected in the text, we find that a simple sanitization step would eliminate the risks while decoupling query and key encoders achieves an even better utility-privacy trade-off. Otherwise, we consider strategies of mixing public and private data in both datastore and encoder training. While these methods offer modest improvements, they leave considerable room for future work. Together, our findings provide insights for practitioners to better understand and mitigate privacy risks in retrieval-based LMs.
IMTLab: An Open-Source Platform for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Interactive Machine Translation Systems
Authors: Xu Huang; Zhirui Zhang; Ruize Gao; Yichao Du; Lemao Liu; Guoping Huang; Shuming Shi; Jiajun Chen; Shujian Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We present IMTLab, an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation (IMT) system platform that enables researchers to quickly build IMT systems with state-of-the-art models, perform an end-to-end evaluation, and diagnose the weakness of systems. IMTLab treats the whole interactive translation process as a task-oriented dialogue with a human-in-the-loop setting, in which human interventions can be explicitly incorporated to produce high-quality, error-free translations. To this end, a general communication interface is designed to support the flexible IMT architectures and user policies. Based on the proposed design, we construct a simulated and real interactive environment to achieve end-to-end evaluation and leverage the framework to systematically evaluate previous IMT systems. Our simulated and manual experiments show that the prefix-constrained decoding approach still gains the lowest editing cost in the end-to-end evaluation, while BiTIIMT achieves comparable editing cost with a better interactive experience.
Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents
Authors: Weiwei Sun; Lingyong Yan; Xinyu Ma; Shuaiqiang Wang; Pengjie Ren; Zhumin Chen; Dawei Yin; Zhaochun Ren
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization across various language-related tasks, including search engines. However, existing work utilizes the generative ability of LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. The discrepancy between the pre-training objectives of LLMs and the ranking objective poses another challenge. In this paper, we first investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that properly instructed LLMs can deliver competitive, even superior results to state-of-the-art supervised methods on popular IR benchmarks. Furthermore, to address concerns about data contamination of LLMs, we collect a new test set called NovelEval, based on the latest knowledge and aiming to verify the model’s ability to rank unknown knowledge. Finally, to improve efficiency in real-world applications, we delve into the potential for distilling the ranking capabilities of ChatGPT into small specialized models using a permutation distillation scheme. Our evaluation results turn out that a distilled 440M model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark. The code to reproduce our results is available at www.github.com/sunnweiwei/RankGPT.
DiNeR: A Large Realistic Dataset for Evaluating Compositional Generalization
Authors: Chengang Hu; Xiao Liu; Yansong Feng
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Most of the existing compositional generalization datasets are synthetically-generated, resulting in a lack of natural language variation. While there have been recent attempts to introduce non-synthetic datasets for compositional generalization, they suffer from either limited data scale or a lack of diversity in the forms of combinations. To better investigate compositional generalization with more linguistic phenomena and compositional diversity, we propose the DIsh NamE Recognition (DiNeR) task and create a large realistic Chinese dataset. Given a recipe instruction, models are required to recognize the dish name composed of diverse combinations of food, actions, and flavors. Our dataset consists of 3,811 dishes and 228,114 recipes, and involves plenty of linguistic phenomena such as anaphora, omission and ambiguity. We provide two strong baselines based on T5 and large language models (LLMs). This work contributes a challenging task, baseline methods to tackle the task, and insights into compositional generalization in the context of dish name recognition.
Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?
Authors: Yang Chen; Hexiang Hu; Yi Luan; Haitian Sun; Soravit Changpinyo; Alan Ritter; Ming-Wei Chang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Pre-trained vision and language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities over existing tasks involving images and texts, including visual question answering. However, it remains unclear whether these models possess the capability to answer questions that are not only querying visual content but knowledge-intensive and information-seeking. In this study, we introduce InfoSeek, a visual question answering dataset tailored for information-seeking questions that cannot be answered with only common sense knowledge. Using InfoSeek, we analyze various pre-trained visual question answering models and gain insights into their characteristics. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art pre-trained multi-modal models (e.g., PaLI-X, BLIP2, InstructBLIP) face challenges in answering visual information-seeking questions, but fine-tuning on the InfoSeek dataset elicits models to use fine-grained knowledge that was learned during pre-training. Furthermore, we show that accurate visual entity recognition can be used to improve performance on InfoSeek by retrieving relevant documents, showing a significant space for improvement.
EDeR: Towards Understanding Dependency Relations Between Events
Authors: Ruiqi Li; Patrik Haslum; Leyang Cui
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Relation extraction is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). Previous work on event relation extraction mainly focuses on hierarchical, temporal and causal relations. Such relationships consider two events to be independent in terms of syntax and semantics, but they fail to recognize the interdependence between events. To bridge this gap, we introduce a human-annotated Event Dependency Relation dataset (EDeR). The annotation is done on a sample of documents from the OntoNotes dataset, which has the additional benefit that it integrates with existing, orthogonal, annotations of this dataset. We investigate baseline approaches for EDeR’s event dependency relation prediction. We show that recognizing such event dependency relations can further benefit critical NLP tasks, including semantic role labelling and co-reference resolution.
It Ain’t Over: A Multi-aspect Diverse Math Word Problem Dataset
Authors: Jiwoo Kim; Youngbin Kim; Ilwoong Baek; JinYeong Bak; Jongwuk Lee
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The math word problem (MWP) is a complex task that requires natural language understanding and logical reasoning to extract key knowledge from natural language narratives. Previous studies have provided various MWP datasets but lack diversity in problem types, lexical usage patterns, languages, and annotations for intermediate solutions. To address these limitations, we introduce a new MWP dataset, named DMath (Diverse Math Word Problems), offering a wide range of diversity in problem types, lexical usage patterns, languages, and intermediate solutions. The problems are available in English and Korean and include an expression tree and Python code as intermediate solutions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the DMath dataset provides a new opportunity to evaluate the capability of large language models, i.e., GPT-4 only achieves about 75% accuracy on the DMath dataset.
Dr ChatGPT tell me what I want to hear: How different prompts impact health answer correctness
Authors: Bevan Koopman; Guido Zuccon
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper investigates the significant impact different prompts have on the behaviour of ChatGPT when used for health information seeking. As people more and more depend on generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, it is critical to understand model behaviour under different conditions, especially for domains where incorrect answers can have serious consequences such as health. Using the TREC Misinformation dataset, we empirically evaluate ChatGPT to show not just its effectiveness but reveal that knowledge passed in the prompt can bias the model to the detriment of answer correctness. We show this occurs both for retrieve-then-generate pipelines and based on how a user phrases their question as well as the question type. This work has important implications for the development of more robust and transparent question-answering systems based on generative large language models. Prompts, raw result files and manual analysis are made publicly available at https://github.com/ielab/drchatgpt-health_prompting.
kNN-LM Does Not Improve Open-ended Text Generation
Authors: Shufan Wang; Yixiao Song; Andrew Drozdov; Aparna Garimella; Varun Manjunatha; Mohit Iyyer
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In this paper, we study the generation quality of interpolation-based retrieval-augmented language models (LMs). These methods, best exemplified by the kNN-LM, interpolate the LM’s predicted distribution of the next word with a distribution formed from the most relevant retrievals for a given prefix. While the kNN-LM and related methods yield impressive decreases in perplexity, we discover that they do not exhibit corresponding improvements in open-ended generation quality, as measured by both automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., MAUVE) and human evaluations. Digging deeper, we find that interpolating with a retrieval distribution actually increases perplexity compared to a baseline LM for the majority of tokens in the WikiText-103 test set, even though the overall perplexity is lower due to a smaller number of tokens for which perplexity dramatically decreases after interpolation. However, when decoding a long sequence at inference time, significant improvements on this smaller subset of tokens are washed out by slightly worse predictions on most tokens. Furthermore, we discover that the entropy of the retrieval distribution increases faster than that of the base LM as the generated sequence becomes longer, which indicates that retrieval is less reliable when using model-generated text as queries (i.e., is subject to exposure bias). We hope that our analysis spurs future work on improved decoding algorithms and interpolation strategies for retrieval-augmented language models.
Towards A Unified View of Sparse Feed-Forward Network in Pretraining Large Language Model
Authors: Leo Z. Liu; Tim Dettmers; Xi Victoria Lin; Veselin Stoyanov; Xian Li
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large and sparse feed-forward layers (S-FFN) such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have proven effective in scaling up Transformers model size for pretraining large language models. By only activating part of the FFN parameters conditioning on input, S-FFN improves generalization performance while keeping training and inference costs (in FLOPs) fixed. In this work, we analyzed two major design choices of S-FFN: the memory block (a.k.a. expert) size and the memory block selection method under a general conceptual framework of sparse neural memory. Using this unified framework, we compare several S-FFN architectures for language modeling and provide insights into their relative efficacy and efficiency. We found a simpler selection method — Avg-K that selects blocks through their mean aggregated hidden states, achieving lower perplexity in language model pretraining compared to existing MoE architectures including Switch Transformer (Fedus et al., 2021) and HashLayer (Roller et al., 2021).
Exploring the Impact of Model Scaling on Parameter-Efficient Tuning
Authors: Yusheng Su; Chi-Min Chan; Jiali Cheng; Yujia Qin; Yankai Lin; Shengding Hu; Zonghan Yang; Ning Ding; Xingzhi Sun; Guotong Xie; Zhiyuan Liu; Maosong Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can effectively drive extremely large pre-trained language models (PLMs) by training only minimal parameters. Different PET methods utilize different manually designed tunable modules. In small PLMs, there are usually noticeable performance differences among PET methods. Nevertheless, as the model scale increases, the performance differences become marginal. Hence, we hypothesize that model scaling mitigates the impact of design differences on PET methods. To investigate this hypothesis, we introduce a more flexible PET method called Arbitrary PET (APET) method. The APET method is compatible with a tunable module, which consists of any number of parameters distributed in arbitrary positions. Then, we utilize it and conduct experiments on 11 NLP tasks across 3 representative PLMs. Our investigations reveal that model scaling (1) mitigates the effects of the positions of tunable parameters on performance, and (2) enables tuning methods to achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning by optimizing fewer tunable parameters. Intriguingly, we also observe that tuning methods optimize the similar number of tunable parameters to exceed random guess performance on different tasks. We collectively discuss this phenomenon and the two aforementioned findings from an optimization perspective to understand the underlying mechanisms. These conclusions enhance our understanding of the impact of model scaling on PET and assist in designing more effective and efficient PET methods for PLMs of different scales. The source code can be obtained from this GitHub repository: https://github.com/yushengsu-thu/PET_Scaling.
STAIR: Learning Sparse Text and Image Representation in Grounded Tokens
Authors: Chen Chen; Bowen Zhang; Liangliang Cao; Jiguang Shen; Tom Gunter; Albin Jose; Alexander Toshev; Yantao Zheng; Jonathon Shlens; Ruoming Pang; Yinfei Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Image and text retrieval is one of the foundational tasks in the vision and language domain with multiple real-world applications. State-of-the-art contrastive approaches, e.g. CLIP, ALIGN, represent images and texts as dense embeddings and calculate the similarity in the dense embedding space as the matching score. On the other hand, sparse semantic features like bag-of-words models are more interpretable, but believed to suffer from inferior accuracy than dense representations. In this work, we show that it is possible to build a sparse semantic representation that is as powerful as, or even better than, dense presentations. We extend the CLIP model and build a sparse text and image representation (STAIR), where the image and text are mapped to a sparse token space. Each token in the space is a (sub-)word in the vocabulary, which is not only interpretable but also easy to integrate with existing information retrieval systems. STAIR model significantly outperforms a CLIP model with +4.9% and +4.3% absolute Recall@1 improvement on COCO-5k text→image and image→text retrieval respectively. It also achieved better performance on both of ImageNet zero-shot and linear probing compared to CLIP.
Crossing the Threshold: Idiomatic Machine Translation through Retrieval Augmentation and Loss Weighting
Authors: Emmy Liu; Aditi Chaudhary; Graham Neubig
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Idioms are common in everyday language, but often pose a challenge to translators because their meanings do not follow from the meanings of their parts. Despite significant advances, machine translation systems still struggle to translate idiomatic expressions. We provide a simple characterization of idiomatic translation and related issues. This allows us to conduct a synthetic experiment revealing a tipping point at which transformer-based machine translation models correctly default to idiomatic translations. To expand multilingual resources, we compile a dataset of ~4k natural sentences containing idiomatic expressions in French, Finnish, and Japanese. To improve translation of natural idioms, we introduce two straightforward yet effective techniques: the strategic upweighting of training loss on potentially idiomatic sentences, and using retrieval-augmented models. This not only improves the accuracy of a strong pretrained MT model on idiomatic sentences by up to 13% in absolute accuracy, but also holds potential benefits for non-idiomatic sentences.
CoRec: An Easy Approach for Coordination Recognition
Authors: Qing Wang; Haojie Jia; Wenfei Song; Qi Li
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In this paper, we observe and address the challenges of the coordination recognition task. Most existing methods rely on syntactic parsers to identify the coordinators in a sentence and detect the coordination boundaries. However, state-of-the-art syntactic parsers are slow and suffer from errors, especially for long and complicated sentences. To better solve the problems, we propose a pipeline model COordination RECognizer (CoRec). It consists of two components: coordinator identifier and conjunct boundary detector. The experimental results on datasets from various domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Further experiments show that CoRec positively impacts downstream tasks, improving the yield of state-of-the-art Open IE models.
A linear time approximation of Wasserstein distance with word embedding selection
Authors: Sho Otao; Makoto Yamada
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Wasserstein distance, which can be computed by solving the optimal transport problem, is a powerful method for measuring the dissimilarity between documents. In the NLP community, it is referred to as word mover’s distance (WMD). One of the key challenges of Wasserstein distance is its computational cost since it needs cubic time. Although the Sinkhorn algorithm is a powerful tool to speed up to compute the Wasserstein distance, it still requires square time. Recently, a linear time approximation of the Wasserstein distance including the sliced Wasserstein and the tree-Wasserstein distance (TWD) has been proposed. However, a linear time approximation method suffers when the dimensionality of word vectors is high. In this study, we propose a method to combine feature selection and tree approximation of Wasserstein distance to handle high-dimensional problems. More specifically, we use multiple word embeddings and automatically select useful word embeddings in a tree approximation of Wasserstein distance. To this end, we approximate Wasserstein distance for each word vector by tree approximation technique, and select the discriminative (i.e., large Wasserstein distance) word embeddings by solving an entropic regularized maximization problem. Through our experiments on document classification, our proposed method achieved high performance.