GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
DISCERN: Decoding Systematic Errors in Natural Language for Text Classifiers
Authors: Rakesh R Menon; Shashank Srivastava
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Despite their high predictive accuracies, current machine learning systems often exhibit systematic biases stemming from annotation artifacts or insufficient support for certain classes in the dataset. Recent work proposes automatic methods for identifying and explaining systematic biases using keywords. We introduce DISCERN, a framework for interpreting systematic biases in text classifiers using language explanations. DISCERN iteratively generates precise natural language descriptions of systematic errors by employing an interactive loop between two large language models. Finally, we use the descriptions to improve classifiers by augmenting classifier training sets with synthetically generated instances or annotated examples via active learning. On three text-classification datasets, we demonstrate that language explanations from our framework induce consistent performance improvements that go beyond what is achievable with exemplars of systematic bias. Finally, in human evaluations, we show that users can interpret systematic biases more effectively (by over 25% relative) and efficiently when described through language explanations as opposed to cluster exemplars.
IntCoOp: Interpretability-Aware Vision-Language Prompt Tuning
Authors: Soumya Suvra Ghosal; Samyadeep Basu; Soheil Feizi; Dinesh Manocha
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Image-text contrastive models such as CLIP learn transferable and robust representations for zero-shot transfer to a variety of downstream tasks. However, to obtain strong downstream performances, prompts need to be carefully curated, which can be a tedious engineering task. To address the issue of manual prompt engineering, prompt-tuning is used where a set of contextual vectors are learned by leveraging information from the training data. Despite their effectiveness, existing prompt-tuning frameworks often lack interpretability, thus limiting their ability to understand the compositional nature of images. In this work, we first identify that incorporating compositional attributes (e.g., a “green” tree frog) in the design of manual prompts can significantly enhance image-text alignment scores. Building upon this observation, we propose a novel and interpretable prompt-tuning method named IntCoOp, which learns to jointly align attribute-level inductive biases and class embeddings during prompt-tuning. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we evaluate IntCoOp across two representative tasks in a few-shot learning setup: generalization to novel classes, and unseen domain shifts. Through extensive experiments across 10 downstream datasets on CLIP, we find that introducing attribute-level inductive biases leads to superior performance against state-of-art prompt tuning frameworks. Notably, in a 16-shot setup, IntCoOp improves CoOp by 7.35% in average performance across 10 diverse datasets.
Scope-enhanced Compositional Semantic Parsing for DRT
Authors: Xiulin Yang; Jonas Groschwitz; Alexander Koller; Johan Bos
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) distinguishes itself from other semantic representation frameworks by its ability to model complex semantic and discourse phenomena through structural nesting and variable binding. While seq2seq models hold the state of the art on DRT parsing, their accuracy degrades with the complexity of the sentence, and they sometimes struggle to produce well-formed DRT representations. We introduce the AMS parser, a compositional, neurosymbolic semantic parser for DRT. It rests on a novel mechanism for predicting quantifier scope. We show that the AMS parser reliably produces well-formed outputs and performs well on DRT parsing, especially on complex sentences.
The Generation Gap: Exploring Age Bias in the Value Systems of Large Language Models
Authors: Siyang Liu; Trisha Maturi; Bowen Yi; Siqi Shen; Rada Mihalcea
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We explore the alignment of values in Large Language Models (LLMs) with specific age groups, leveraging data from the World Value Survey across thirteen categories. Through a diverse set of prompts tailored to ensure response robustness, we find a general inclination of LLM values towards younger demographics, especially when compared to the US population. Although a general inclination can be observed, we also found that this inclination toward younger groups can be different across different value categories. Additionally, we explore the impact of incorporating age identity information in prompts and observe challenges in mitigating value discrepancies with different age cohorts. Our findings highlight the age bias in LLMs and provide insights for future work. Materials for our analysis will be available via https://github.com/anonymous
TempoFormer: A Transformer for Temporally-aware Representations in Change Detection
Authors: Talia Tseriotou; Adam Tsakalidis; Maria Liakata
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Dynamic representation learning plays a pivotal role in understanding the evolution of linguistic content over time. On this front both context and time dynamics as well as their interplay are of prime importance. Current approaches model context via pre-trained representations, which are typically temporally agnostic. Previous work on modelling context and temporal dynamics has used recurrent methods, which are slow and prone to overfitting. Here we introduce TempoFormer, the first task-agnostic transformer-based and temporally-aware model for dynamic representation learning. Our approach is jointly trained on inter and intra context dynamics and introduces a novel temporal variation of rotary positional embeddings. The architecture is flexible and can be used as the temporal representation foundation of other models or applied to different transformer-based architectures. We show new SOTA performance on three different real-time change detection tasks.
Pron vs Prompt: Can Large Language Models already Challenge a World-Class Fiction Author at Creative Text Writing?
Authors: Guillermo Marco; Julio Gonzalo; M.Teresa Mateo-Girona; Ramón Del Castillo Santos
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Are LLMs ready to compete in creative writing skills with a top (rather than average) novelist? To provide an initial answer for this question, we have carried out a contest between Patricio Pron (an awarded novelist, considered one of the best of his generation) and GPT-4 (one of the top performing LLMs), in the spirit of AI-human duels such as DeepBlue vs Kasparov and AlphaGo vs Lee Sidol. We asked Pron and GPT-4 to provide thirty titles each, and then to write short stories for both their titles and their opponent’s. Then, we prepared an evaluation rubric inspired by Boden’s definition of creativity, and we collected several detailed expert assessments of the texts, provided by literature critics and scholars. The results of our experimentation indicate that LLMs are still far from challenging a top human creative writer. We also observed that GPT-4 writes more creatively using Pron’s titles than its own titles (which is an indication of the potential for human-machine co-creation). Additionally, we found that GPT-4 has a more creative writing style in English than in Spanish.
Evaluating Diversity in Automatic Poetry Generation
Authors: Yanran Chen; Hannes Gröner; Sina Zarrieß; Steffen Eger
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Natural Language Generation (NLG), and more generally generative AI, are among the currently most impactful research fields. Creative NLG, such as automatic poetry generation, is a fascinating niche in this area. While most previous research has focused on forms of the Turing test when evaluating automatic poetry generation — can humans distinguish between automatic and human generated poetry — we evaluate the diversity of automatically generated poetry (with a focus on quatrains), by comparing distributions of generated poetry to distributions of human poetry along structural, lexical, semantic and stylistic dimensions, assessing different model types (word vs. character-level, general purpose LLMs vs. poetry-specific models), including the very recent LLaMA3-8B, and types of fine-tuning (conditioned vs. unconditioned). We find that current automatic poetry systems are considerably underdiverse along multiple dimensions — they often do not rhyme sufficiently, are semantically too uniform and even do not match the length distribution of human poetry. Our experiments reveal, however, that style-conditioning and character-level modeling clearly increases diversity across virtually all dimensions we explore. Our identified limitations may serve as the basis for more genuinely diverse future poetry generation models.
Evaluating Short-Term Temporal Fluctuations of Social Biases in Social Media Data and Masked Language Models
Authors: Yi Zhou; Danushka Bollegala; Jose Camacho-Collados
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Social biases such as gender or racial biases have been reported in language models (LMs), including Masked Language Models (MLMs). Given that MLMs are continuously trained with increasing amounts of additional data collected over time, an important yet unanswered question is how the social biases encoded with MLMs vary over time. In particular, the number of social media users continues to grow at an exponential rate, and it is a valid concern for the MLMs trained specifically on social media data whether their social biases (if any) would also amplify over time. To empirically analyse this problem, we use a series of MLMs pretrained on chronologically ordered temporal snapshots of corpora. Our analysis reveals that, although social biases are present in all MLMs, most types of social bias remain relatively stable over time (with a few exceptions). To further understand the mechanisms that influence social biases in MLMs, we analyse the temporal corpora used to train the MLMs. Our findings show that some demographic groups, such as male, obtain higher preference over the other, such as female on the training corpora constantly.
Delving into Qualitative Implications of Synthetic Data for Hate Speech Detection
Authors: Camilla Casula; Sebastiano Vecellio Salto; Alan Ramponi; Sara Tonelli
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The use of synthetic data for training models for a variety of NLP tasks is now widespread. However, previous work reports mixed results with regards to its effectiveness on highly subjective tasks such as hate speech detection. In this paper, we present an in-depth qualitative analysis of the potential and specific pitfalls of synthetic data for hate speech detection in English, with 3,500 manually annotated examples. We show that, across different models, synthetic data created through paraphrasing gold texts can improve out-of-distribution robustness from a computational standpoint. However, this comes at a cost: synthetic data fails to reliably reflect the characteristics of real-world data on a number of linguistic dimensions, it results in drastically different class distributions, and it heavily reduces the representation of both specific identity groups and intersectional hate.
Grounding Language in Multi-Perspective Referential Communication
Authors: Zineng Tang; Lingjun Mao; Alane Suhr
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We introduce a task and dataset for referring expression generation and comprehension in multi-agent embodied environments.In this task, two agents in a shared scene must take into account one another’s visual perspective, which may be different from their own, to both produce and understand references to objects in a scene and the spatial relations between them.We collect a dataset of 2,970 human-written referring expressions, each paired with human comprehension judgments, and evaluate the performance of automated models as speakers and listeners paired with human partners, finding that model performance in both reference generation and comprehension lags behind that of pairs of human agents.Finally, we experiment training an open-weight speaker model with evidence of communicative success when paired with a listener, resulting in an improvement from 58.9 to 69.3% in communicative success and even outperforming the strongest proprietary model.
Threshold-driven Pruning with Segmented Maximum Term Weights for Approximate Cluster-based Sparse Retrieval
Authors: Yifan Qiao; Parker Carlson; Shanxiu He; Yingrui Yang; Tao Yang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper revisits dynamic pruning through rank score thresholding in cluster-based sparse retrieval to skip the index partially at cluster and document levels during inference. It proposes a two-parameter pruning control scheme called ASC with a probabilistic guarantee on rank-safeness competitiveness. ASC uses cluster-level maximum weight segmentation to improve accuracy of rank score bound estimation and threshold-driven pruning, and is targeted for speeding up retrieval applications requiring high relevance competitiveness. The experiments with MS MARCO and BEIR show that ASC improves the accuracy and safeness of pruning for better relevance while delivering a low latency on a single-threaded CPU.
Error Analysis of Multilingual Language Models in Machine Translation: A Case Study of English-Amharic Translation
Authors: Hizkiel Mitiku Alemayehu; Hamada M Zahera; Axel-Cyrille Ngonga Ngomo
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multilingual large language models (mLLMs) have significantly advanced machine translation, yet challenges remain for low-resource languages like Amharic. This study evaluates the performance of state-of-the-art mLLMs, specifically NLLB-200 (NLLB3.3, NLLB1.3 Distilled1.3, NLB600) and M2M (M2M1.2B, M2M418), in English-Amharic bidirectional translation using the Lesan AI dataset. We employed both automatic and human evaluation methods to analyze translation errors. Automatic evaluation used BLEU, METEOR, chrF, and TER metrics, while human evaluation assessed translation quality at both word and sentence levels. Sentence-level accuracy was rated by annotators on a scale from 0 to 5, and word-level quality was evaluated using Multidimensional Quality Metrics. Our findings indicate that the NLLB3.3B model consistently outperformed other mLLMs across all evaluation methods. Common error included mistranslation, omission, untranslated segments, and additions, with mistranslation being particularly common. Punctuation and spelling errors were rare in our experiment.
MIPD: Exploring Manipulation and Intention In a Novel Corpus of Polish Disinformation
Authors: Arkadiusz Modzelewski; Giovanni Da San Martino; Pavel Savov; Magdalena Anna Wilczyńska; Adam Wierzbicki
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This study presents a novel corpus of 15,356 Polish web articles, including articles identified as containing disinformation. Our dataset enables a multifaceted understanding of disinformation. We present a distinctive multilayered methodology for annotating disinformation in texts. What sets our corpus apart is its focus on uncovering hidden intent and manipulation in disinformative content. A team of experts annotated each article with multiple labels indicating both disinformation creators’ intents and the manipulation techniques employed. Additionally, we set new baselines for binary disinformation detection and two multiclass multilabel classification tasks: manipulation techniques and intention types classification.
Unsupervised Discrete Representations of American Sign Language
Authors: Artem Abzaliev; Rada Mihalcea
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Many modalities are naturally represented as continuous signals, making it difficult to use them with models that expect discrete units, such as LLMs. In this paper, we explore the use of audio compression techniques for the discrete representation of the gestures used in sign language. We train a tokenizer for American Sign Language (ASL) fingerspelling, which discretizes sequences of fingerspelling signs into tokens. We also propose a loss function to improve the interpretability of these tokens such that they preserve both the semantic and the visual information of the signal. We show that the proposed method improves the performance of the discretized sequence on downstream tasks.
Perceptions to Beliefs: Exploring Precursory Inferences for Theory of Mind in Large Language Models
Authors: Chani Jung; Dongkwan Kim; Jiho Jin; Jiseon Kim; Yeon Seonwoo; Yejin Choi; Alice Oh; Hyunwoo Kim
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While humans naturally develop theory of mind (ToM), the capability to understand other people’s mental states and beliefs, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) underperform on simple ToM benchmarks. We posit that we can extend our understanding of LLMs’ ToM abilities by evaluating key human ToM precursors-perception inference and perception-to-belief inference-in LLMs. We introduce two datasets, Percept-ToMi and Percept-FANToM, to evaluate these precursory inferences for ToM in LLMs by annotating characters’ perceptions on ToMi and FANToM, respectively.Our evaluation of eight state-of-the-art LLMs reveals that the models generally perform well in perception inference while exhibiting limited capability in perception-to-belief inference (e.g., lack of inhibitory control).Based on these results, we present PercepToM, a novel ToM method leveraging LLMs’ strong perception inference capability while supplementing their limited perception-to-belief inference. Experimental results demonstrate that PercepToM significantly enhances LLM’s performance, especially in false belief scenarios.
Towards Enhancing Coherence in Extractive Summarization: Dataset and Experiments with LLMs
Authors: Mihir Parmar; Hanieh Deilamsalehy; Franck Dernoncourt; Seunghyun Yoon; Ryan A. Rossi; Trung Bui
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Extractive summarization plays a pivotal role in natural language processing due to its wide-range applications in summarizing diverse content efficiently, while also being faithful to the original content. Despite significant advancement achieved in extractive summarization by Large Language Models (LLMs), these summaries frequently exhibit incoherence. An important aspect of the coherent summary is its readability for intended users. Although there have been many datasets and benchmarks proposed for creating coherent extractive summaries, none of them currently incorporate user intent to improve coherence in extractive summarization. Motivated by this, we propose a systematically created human-annotated dataset consisting of coherent summaries for five publicly available datasets and natural language user feedback, offering valuable insights into how to improve coherence in extractive summaries. We utilize this dataset for aligning LLMs through supervised fine-tuning with natural language human feedback to enhance the coherence of their generated summaries. Preliminary experiments with Falcon-40B and Llama-2-13B show significant performance improvements (~10% Rouge-L) in terms of producing coherent summaries. We further utilize human feedback to benchmark results over instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 which resulted in several interesting findings.
Jump Starting Bandits with LLM-Generated Prior Knowledge
Authors: Parand A. Alamdari; Yanshuai Cao; Kevin H. Wilson
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We present substantial evidence demonstrating the benefits of integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with a Contextual Multi-Armed Bandit framework. Contextual bandits have been widely used in recommendation systems to generate personalized suggestions based on user-specific contexts. We show that LLMs, pre-trained on extensive corpora rich in human knowledge and preferences, can simulate human behaviours well enough to jump-start contextual multi-armed bandits to reduce online learning regret. We propose an initialization algorithm for contextual bandits by prompting LLMs to produce a pre-training dataset of approximate human preferences for the bandit. This significantly reduces online learning regret and data-gathering costs for training such models. Our approach is validated empirically through two sets of experiments with different bandit setups: one which utilizes LLMs to serve as an oracle and a real-world experiment utilizing data from a conjoint survey experiment.
Adaptation Odyssey in LLMs: Why Does Additional Pretraining Sometimes Fail to Improve?
Authors: Fırat Öncel; Matthias Bethge; Beyza Ermis; Mirco Ravanelli; Cem Subakan; Çağatay Yıldız
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In the last decade, the generalization and adaptation abilities of deep learning models were typically evaluated on fixed training and test distributions. Contrary to traditional deep learning, large language models (LLMs) are (i) even more overparameterized, (ii) trained on unlabeled text corpora curated from the Internet with minimal human intervention, and (iii) trained in an online fashion. These stark contrasts prevent researchers from transferring lessons learned on model generalization and adaptation in deep learning contexts to LLMs.To this end, our short paper introduces empirical observations that aim to shed light on further training of already pretrained language models. Specifically, we demonstrate that training a model on a text domain could degrade its perplexity on the test portion of the same domain. We observe with our subsequent analysis that the performance degradation is positively correlated with the similarity between the additional and the original pretraining dataset of the LLM. Our further token-level perplexity analysis reveals that the perplexity degradation is due to a handful of tokens that are not informative about the domain. We hope these findings will guide us in determining when to adapt a model vs when to rely on its foundational capabilities.