GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
DAGCN: Distance-based and Aspect-oriented Graph Convolutional Network for Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Zhihao Wang; Bo Zhang; Ru Yang; Chang Guo; Maozhen Li
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) is a task that aims to determine the sentiment polarity of aspects by identifying opinion words. Recent advancements have predominantly been rooted either in semantic or syntactic methods. However, both of them tend to interference from local factors such as irrelevant words and edges, hindering the precise identification of opinion words. In this paper, we present Distance-based and Aspect-oriented Graph Convolutional Network (DAGCN) to address the aforementioned issue. Firstly, we introduce the Distance-based Syntactic Weight (DSW). It focuses on the local scope of aspects in the pruned dependency trees, thereby reducing the candidate pool of opinion words. Additionally, we propose Aspect-Fusion Attention (AF) to further filter opinion words within the local context and consider cases where opinion words are distant from the aspect. With the combination of DSW and AF, we achieve precise identification of corresponding opinion words. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms state-of-the-art models and verify the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
Connecting the Dots: Inferring Patent Phrase Similarity with Retrieved Phrase Graphs
Authors: Zhuoyi Peng; Yi Yang
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: We study the patent phrase similarity inference task, which measures the semantic similarity between two patent phrases. As patent documents employ legal and highly technical language, existing semantic textual similarity methods that use localized contextual information do not perform satisfactorily in inferring patent phrase similarity. To address this, we introduce a graph-augmented approach to amplify the global contextual information of the patent phrases. For each patent phrase, we construct a phrase graph that links to its focal patents and a list of patents that are either cited by or cite these focal patents. The augmented phrase embedding is then derived from combining its localized contextual embedding with its global embedding within the phrase graph. We further propose a self-supervised learning objective that capitalizes on the retrieved topology to refine both the contextualized embedding and the graph parameters in an end-to-end manner. Experimental results from a unique patent phrase similarity dataset demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the representation of patent phrases, resulting in marked improvements in similarity inference in a self-supervised fashion. Substantial improvements are also observed in the supervised setting, underscoring the potential benefits of leveraging retrieved phrase graph augmentation.
Self-Regulated Sample Diversity in Large Language Models
Authors: Mingyue Liu; Jonathan Frawley; Sarah Wyer; Hubert P. H. Shum; Sara Uckelman; Sue Black; Chris Willcocks
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Sample diversity depends on the task; within mathematics, precision and determinism are paramount, while storytelling thrives on creativity and surprise. This paper presents a simple self-regulating approach where we adjust sample diversity inference parameters dynamically based on the input prompt—in contrast to existing methods that require expensive and inflexible setups, or maintain static values during inference. Capturing a broad spectrum of sample diversities can be formulated as a straightforward self-supervised inference task, which we find significantly improves the quality of responses generically without model retraining or fine-tuning. In particular, our method demonstrates significant improvement in all supercategories of the MMLU multitask benchmark (GPT-3.5: +4.4%, GPT-4: +1.5%), which captures a large variety of difficult tasks covering STEM, the humanities and social sciences.
Methods, Applications, and Directions of Learning-to-Rank in NLP Research
Authors: Justin Lee; Gabriel Bernier-Colborne; Tegan Maharaj; Sowmya Vajjala
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Learning-to-rank (LTR) algorithms aim to order a set of items according to some criteria. They are at the core of applications such as web search and social media recommendations, and are an area of rapidly increasing interest, with the rise of large language models (LLMs) and the widespread impact of these technologies on society. In this paper, we survey the diverse use cases of LTR methods in natural language processing (NLP) research, looking at previously under-studied aspects such as multilingualism in LTR applications and statistical significance testing for LTR problems. We also consider how large language models are changing the LTR landscape. This survey is aimed at NLP researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the formalisms and best practices regarding the application of LTR approaches in their research.
When Quantization Affects Confidence of Large Language Models?
Authors: Irina Proskurina; Luc Brun; Guillaume Metzler; Julien Velcin
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Recent studies introduced effective compression techniques for Large Language Models (LLMs) via post-training quantization or low-bit weight representation. Although quantized weights offer storage efficiency and allow for faster inference, existing works have indicated that quantization might compromise performance and exacerbate biases in LLMs.This study investigates the confidence and calibration of quantized models, considering factors such as language model type and scale as contributors to quantization loss.Firstly, we reveal that quantization with GPTQ to 4-bit results in a decrease in confidence regarding true labels, with varying impacts observed among different language models. Secondly, we observe fluctuations in the impact on confidence across different scales. Finally, we propose an explanation for quantization loss based on confidence levels, indicating that quantization disproportionately affects samples where the full model exhibited low confidence levels in the first place.We make our code and quantized models publicly available.
MedCycle: Unpaired Medical Report Generation via Cycle-Consistency
Authors: Elad Hirsch; Gefen Dawidowicz; Ayellet Tal
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Generating medical reports for X-ray images presents a significant challenge, particularly in unpaired scenarios where access to paired image-report data for training is unavailable. Previous works have typically learned a joint embedding space for images and reports, necessitating a specific labeling schema for both. We introduce an innovative approach that eliminates the need for consistent labeling schemas, thereby enhancing data accessibility and enabling the use of incompatible datasets. This approach is based on cycle-consistent mapping functions that transform image embeddings into report embeddings, coupled with report auto encoding for medical report generation. Our model and objectives consider intricate local details and the overarching semantic context within images and reports. This approach facilitates the learning of effective mapping functions, resulting in the generation of coherent reports. It outperforms state-of-the-art results in unpaired chest X-ray report generation, demonstrating improvements in both language and clinical metrics.
Beta-LR: Interpretable Logical Reasoning based on Beta Distribution
Authors: Yizhuo Ma; Ke Qin; Shuang Liang
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: The logical information contained in text isof significant importance for logical reasoning.Previous approaches have relied on embeddingtext into a low-dimensional vector to capturelogical information and perform reasoning inEuclidean space. These methods involve constructing special graph architectures that matchlogical relations or designing data augmentation frameworks by extending texts based onsymbolic logic. However, it presents two obvious problems. 1) The logical informationreflected in the text exhibits uncertainty that isdifficult to represent using a vector. 2) Integrating logical information requires modeling logical operations (such as ∪, ∩, and ¬), while onlysimple arithmetic operations can be performedin Euclidean space. To address both the problems, we propose Beta-LR, a probabilistic embedding method to capture logical information.Specifically, we embed texts into beta distribution on each dimension to eliminate logical uncertainty. We also define neural operators thatenable interpretability and perform logical operations based on the characteristics of the betadistribution. We conduct experiments on twodatasets, ReClor and LogiQA, and our Beta-LRachieves competitive results. The experimentsdemonstrate that our method effectively captures the logical information in text for reasoning purposes. The source code is available athttps://github.com/myz12138/Beta-LR.
Applications of BERT Models Towards Automation of Clinical Coding in Icelandic
Authors: Haraldur Orri Hauksson; Hafsteinn Einarsson
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: This study explores the potential of automating clinical coding in Icelandic, a language with limited digital resources, by leveraging over 25 years of electronic health records (EHR) from the Landspitali University Hospital. Traditionally a manual and error-prone task, clinical coding is essential for patient care, billing, and research. Our research delves into the effectiveness of Transformer-based models in automating this process. We investigate various model training strategies, including continued pretraining and model adaptation, under a constrained computational budget. Our findings reveal that the best-performing model achieves competitive results in both micro and macro F1 scores, with label attention contributing significantly to its success. The study also explores the possibility of training on unlabeled data. Our research provides valuable insights into the possibilities of using NLP for clinical coding in low-resource languages, demonstrating that small countries with unique languages and well-segmented healthcare records can achieve results comparable to those in higher-resourced languages.
“Tell me who you are and I tell you how you argue”: Predicting Stances and Arguments for Stakeholder Groups
Authors: Philipp Heinisch; Lorik Dumani; Philipp Cimiano; Ralf Schenkel
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Argument mining has focused so far mainly on the identification, extraction, and formalization of arguments. An important yet unaddressedtask consists in the prediction of the argumentative behavior of stakeholders in a debate. Predicting the argumentative behavior in advance can support foreseeing issues in public policy making or help recognize potential disagreements early on and help to resolve them. In this paper, we consider the novel task of predicting the argumentative behavior of individual stakeholders. We present ARGENST, a framework that relies on a recommender-based architecture to predict the stance and the argumentative main point on a specific controversial topic for a given stakeholder, which is described in terms of a profile including properties related to demographic attributes, religious and political orientation, socio-economic background, etc. We evaluate our approach on the well-known debate.org dataset in terms of accuracy for predicting stance as well as in terms of similarity of the generated arguments to the ground truth arguments using BERTScore. As part of a case study, we show how juries of members representing different stakeholder groups and perspectives can be assembled to simulate the public opinion on a given topic.
Psychometric Predictive Power of Large Language Models
Authors: Tatsuki Kuribayashi; Yohei Oseki; Timothy Baldwin
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Instruction tuning aligns the response of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.Despite such efforts in human–LLM alignment, we find that instruction tuning does not always make LLMs human-like from a cognitive modeling perspective. More specifically, next-word probabilities estimated by instruction-tuned LLMs are often worse at simulating human reading behavior than those estimated by base LLMs.In addition, we explore prompting methodologies for simulating human reading behavior with LLMs. Our results show that prompts reflecting a particular linguistic hypothesis improve psychometric predictive power, but are still inferior to small base models.These findings highlight that recent advancements in LLMs, i.e., instruction tuning and prompting, do not offer better estimates than direct probability measurements from base LLMs in cognitive modeling. In other words, pure next-word probability remains a strong predictor for human reading behavior, even in the age of LLMs.
Large Language Models Sensitivity to The Order of Options in Multiple-Choice Questions
Authors: Pouya Pezeshkpour; Estevam Hruschka
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in various NLP tasks. However, previous works have shown these models are sensitive towards prompt wording, and few-shot demonstrations and their order, posing challenges to fair assessment of these models. As these models become more powerful, it becomes imperative to understand and address these limitations. In this paper, we focus on LLMs robustness on the task of multiple-choice questions—commonly adopted task to study reasoning and fact-retrieving capability of LLMs. Investigating the sensitivity of LLMs towards the order of options in multiple-choice questions, we demonstrate a considerable performance gap of approximately 13% to 85% in LLMs on different benchmarks, when answer options are reordered, even when using demonstrations in a few-shot setting. Through a detailed analysis, we conjecture that this sensitivity arises when LLMs are uncertain about the prediction between the top-2/3 choices, and specific options placements may favor certain prediction between those top choices depending on the question caused by positional bias. We also identify patterns in top-2 choices that amplify or mitigate the model’s bias toward option placement. We found that for amplifying bias, the optimal strategy involves positioning the top two choices as the first and last options. Conversely, to mitigate bias, we recommend placing these choices among the adjacent options. To validate our conjecture, we conduct various experiments and adopt two approaches to calibrate LLMs’ predictions, leading to up to 8 percentage points improvement across different models and benchmarks.
PEEB: Part-based Image Classifiers with an Explainable and Editable Language Bottleneck
Authors: Thang Pham; Peijie Chen; Tin Nguyen; Seunghyun Yoon; Trung Bui; Anh Nguyen
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: CLIP-based classifiers rely on the prompt containing a class name that is known to the text encoder. Therefore, they perform poorly on new classes or the classes whose names rarely appear on the Internet (e.g., scientific names of birds). For fine-grained classification, we propose PEEB – an explainable and editable classifier to (1) express the class name into a set of text descriptors that describe the visual parts of that class; and (2) match the embeddings of the detected parts to their textual descriptors in each class to compute a logit score for classification. In a zero-shot setting where the class names are unknown, PEEB outperforms CLIP by a huge margin (∼10× in top-1 accuracy). Compared to part-based classifiers, PEEB is not only the state-of-the-art (SOTA) on the supervised-learning setting (88.80% and 92.20% accuracy on CUB-200 and Stanford Dogs-120, respectively) but also the first to enable users to edit the text descriptors to form a new classifier without any re-training. Compared to concept bottleneck models, PEEB is also the SOTA in both zero-shot and supervised-learning settings.
Ethos: Rectifying Language Models in Orthogonal Parameter Space
Authors: Lei Gao; Yue Niu; Tingting Tang; Salman Avestimehr; Murali Annavaram
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Language models (LMs) have greatly propelled the research on natural language processing. However, LMs also raise concerns regarding the generation of biased or toxic content and the potential disclosure of private information from the training dataset. In this work, we present a new efficient approach, Ethos, that rectifies LMs to mitigate toxicity and bias in outputs and avoid privacy leakage. Ethos is built on task arithmetic. However, unlike current task arithmetic algorithms, Ethos distinguishes general beneficial and undesired knowledge when reconstructing task vectors. Specifically, Ethos first obtains a set of principal components from the pre-trained models using singular value decomposition. Then, by projecting the task vector onto principal components, Ethos separates the principal components that encode general from those associated with undesired knowledge. Ethos performs forgetting or unlearning by only negating the task vector with undesired knowledge, thereby minimizing collateral damage on general model utility. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on three different tasks: bias, toxicity, and memorization unlearning. Evaluations show Ethos is more effective in removing undesired knowledge while maintaining the overall model performance compared to current task arithmetic methods.
Crafting In-context Examples according to LMs’ Parametric Knowledge
Authors: Yoonsang Lee; Pranav Atreya; Xi Ye; Eunsol Choi
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: In-context learning can improve the performances of knowledge-rich tasks such as question answering. In such scenarios, in-context examples trigger a language model (LM) to surface information stored in its parametric knowledge. We study how to better construct in-context example sets, based on whether the model is aware of the in-context examples. We identify ‘known’ examples, where models can correctly answer from their parametric knowledge, and ‘unknown’ ones. Our experiments show that prompting with ‘unknown’ examples decreases the performance, potentially as it encourages hallucination rather than searching for its parametric knowledge. Constructing an in-context example set that presents both known and unknown information performs the best across diverse settings. We perform analysis on three multi-answer question answering datasets, which allows us to further study answer set ordering strategies based on the LM’s knowledge of each answer. Together, our study sheds light on how to best construct in-context example sets for knowledge-rich tasks.
ICXML: An In-Context Learning Framework for Zero-Shot Extreme Multi-Label Classification
Authors: Yaxin Zhu; Hamed Zamani
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: This paper focuses on the task of Extreme Multi-Label Classification (XMC) whose goal is to predict multiple labels for each instance from an extremely large label space. While existing research has primarily focused on fully supervised XMC, real-world scenarios often lack supervision signals, highlighting the importance of zero-shot settings. Given the large label space, utilizing in-context learning approaches is not trivial. We address this issue by introducing In-Context Extreme Multi-label Learning (ICXML), a two-stage framework that cuts down the search space by generating a set of candidate labels through in-context learning and then reranks them. Extensive experiments suggest that ICXML advances the state of the art on two diverse public benchmarks.
CLGSI: A Multimodal Sentiment Analysis Framework based on Contrastive Learning Guided by Sentiment Intensity
Authors: Yang Yang; Xunde Dong; Yupeng Qiang
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: Recently, contrastive learning has begun to gain popularity in multimodal sentiment analysis (MSA). However, most of existing MSA methods based on contrastive learning lacks more detailed learning of the distribution of sample pairs with different sentiment intensity differences in the contrastive learning representation space. In addition, limited research has been conducted on the fusion of each modality representation obtained by contrastive learning training.In this paper, we propose a novel framework for multimodal sentiment analysis based on Contrastive Learning Guided by Sentiment Intensity (CLGSI). Firstly, the proposed contrastive learning guided by sentiment intensity selects positive and negative sample pairs based on the difference in sentiment intensity and assigns corresponding weights accordingly.Subsequently, we propose a new multimodal representation fusion mechanism, called Global-Local-Fine-Knowledge (GLFK), which extracts common features between different modalities’ representations. At the same time, each unimodal encoder output is separately processed by a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to extract specific features of each modality. Finally, joint learning of the common and specific features is used to predict sentiment intensity. The effectiveness of CLGSI is assessed on two English datasets, MOSI and MOSEI, as well as one Chinese dataset, SIMS. We achieve competitive experimental results, which attest to the strong generalization performance of our approach. The code for our approach will be released in https://github.com/AZYoung233/CLGSI
Interpreting Answers to Yes-No Questions in Dialogues from Multiple Domains
Authors: Zijie Wang; Farzana Rashid; Eduardo Blanco
Venue: NAACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024)

Abstract: People often answer yes-no questions without explicitly saying yes, no, or similar polar key-words. Figuring out the meaning of indirectanswers is challenging, even for large language models. In this paper, we investigate this problem working with dialogues from multiple domains. We present new benchmarks in three diverse domains: movie scripts, tennis interviews, and airline customer service. We present an approach grounded on distant supervision and blended training to quickly adapt to a new dialogue domain. Experimental results show that our approach is never detrimental and yields F1 improvements as high as 11-34%.