GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
M3-Embedding: Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, Multi-Granularity Text Embeddings Through Self-Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Jianlyu Chen; Shitao Xiao; Peitian Zhang; Kun Luo; Defu Lian; Zheng Liu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce a new embedding model called M3-Embedding, which is distinguished for its versatility in Multi-Linguality, Multi-Functionality, and Multi-Granularity. It provides a uniform support for the semantic retrieval of more than 100 working languages. It can simultaneously accomplish the three common retrieval functionalities: dense retrieval, multi-vector retrieval, and sparse retrieval. Besides, it is also capable of processing inputs of different granularities, spanning from short sentences to long documents of up to 8,192 tokens. The effective training of M3-Embedding presents a series of technical contributions. Notably, we propose a novel self-knowledge distillation approach, where the relevance scores from different retrieval functionalities can be integrated as the teacher signal to enhance the training quality. We also optimize the batching strategy, which enables a large batch size and high training throughput to improve the discriminativeness of embeddings. M3-Embedding exhibits a superior performance in our experiment, leading to new state-of-the-art results on multilingual, cross-lingual, and long-document retrieval benchmarks.
Iterative Refinement of Project-Level Code Context for Precise Code Generation with Compiler Feedback
Authors: Zhangqian Bi; Yao Wan; Zheng Wang; Hongyu Zhang; Batu Guan; Fangxin Lu; Zili Zhang; Yulei Sui; Hai Jin; Xuanhua Shi
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable progress in automated code generation. Yet, LLM-generated code may contain errors in API usage, class, data structure, or missing project-specific information. As much of this project-specific context cannot fit into the prompts of LLMs, we must find ways to allow the model to explore the project-level code context. We present CoCoGen, a new code generation approach that uses compiler feedback to improve the LLM-generated code. CoCoGen first leverages static analysis to identify mismatches between the generated code and the project’s context. It then iteratively aligns and fixes the identified errors using information extracted from the code repository. We integrate CoCoGen with two representative LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5-Turbo and Code Llama (13B), and apply it to Python code generation. Experimental results show that CoCoGen significantly improves the vanilla LLMs by over 80% in generating code dependent on the project context and consistently outperforms the existing retrieval-based code generation baselines.
An Element is Worth a Thousand Words: Enhancing Legal Case Retrieval by Incorporating Legal Elements
Authors: Chenlong Deng; Zhicheng Dou; Yujia Zhou; Peitian Zhang; Kelong Mao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Legal case retrieval plays an important role in promoting judicial justice and fairness. One of its greatest challenges is that the definition of relevance goes far beyond the common semantic relevance as in ad-hoc retrieval. In this paper, we reveal that the legal elements, which typically comprise key facts in a specialized legal context, can largely improve the relevance matching of legal case retrieval. To facilitate the use of legal elements, we construct a Chinese legal element dataset called LeCaRD-Elem based on the widely-used LeCaRD dataset, through a two-stage semi-automatic method with a minimized reliance on human labor. Meanwhile, we introduce two new models to enhance legal search using legal elements. The first, Elem4LCR-E, is a two-stage model that explicitly predicts legal elements from texts and then leverages them for improved ranking. Recognizing the potential benefits of more seamless integration, we further propose an end-to-end model called Elem4LCR-I, which internalizes the legal element knowledge into its model parameters using a tailored teacher-student training framework. Extensive experiments underscore the significant value of legal elements and demonstrate the superiority of our two proposed models in enhancing legal search over existing methods.
SoMeLVLM: A Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing
Authors: Xinnong Zhang; Haoyu Kuang; Xinyi Mou; Hanjia Lyu; Kun Wu; Siming Chen; Jiebo Luo; Xuanjing Huang; Zhongyu Wei
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The growth of social media, characterized by its multimodal nature, has led to the emergence of diverse phenomena and challenges, which calls for an effective approach to uniformly solve automated tasks. The powerful Large Vision Language Models make it possible to handle a variety of tasks simultaneously, but even with carefully designed prompting methods, the general domain models often fall short in aligning with the unique speaking style and context of social media tasks. In this paper, we introduce a Large Vision Language Model for Social Media Processing (SoMeLVLM), which is a cognitive framework equipped with five key capabilities including knowledge & comprehension, application, analysis, evaluation, and creation. SoMeLVLM is designed to understand and generate realistic social media behavior. We have developed a 654k multimodal social media instruction-tuning dataset to support our cognitive framework and fine-tune our model. Our experiments demonstrate that SoMeLVLM achieves state-of-the-art performance in multiple social media tasks. Further analysis shows its significant advantages over baselines in terms of cognitive abilities.
KoCommonGEN v2: A Benchmark for Navigating Korean Commonsense Reasoning Challenges in Large Language Models
Authors: Jaehyung Seo; Jaewook Lee; Chanjun Park; SeongTae Hong; Seungjun Lee; Heuiseok Lim
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The evolution of large language models (LLMs) has culminated in a multitask model paradigm where prompts drive the generation of user-specific outputs. However, this advancement has revealed a critical challenge: LLMs frequently produce outputs against socially acceptable commonsense standards in various scenarios. To address this gap in commonsense reasoning, we present KoCommonGEN v2, a fine-grained benchmark dataset focused on Korean commonsense reasoning. This dataset, enriched with human annotations, comprises multiple-choice questions across seven error categories. These categories include commonsense memorization, numerical commonsense, toxic speech, and more, which are vulnerable to undermining the reliability of LLMs’ commonsense reasoning capabilities. The empirical results present that LLMs struggle with Korean commonsense reasoning. With human accuracy benchmarked at approximately 85%, GPT-4’s performance lags at about 74%, and other LLMs demonstrate an average accuracy of around 42%. Our findings emphasize the need for targeted improvements in Korean commonsense reasoning within LLMs, paving the way for more socially and contextually sensitive AI models.
NeuroPrune: A Neuro-inspired Topological Sparse Training Algorithm for Large Language Models
Authors: Amit Dhurandhar; Tejaswini Pedapati; Ronny Luss; Soham Dan; Aurelie Lozano; Payel Das; Georgios Kollias
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Transformer-based Language Models have become ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their impressive performance on various tasks. However, expensive training as well as inference remains a significant impediment to their widespread applicability. While enforcing sparsity at various levels of the model architecture has found promise in addressing scaling and efficiency issues, there remains a disconnect between how sparsity affects network topology. Inspired by brain neuronal networks, we explore sparsity approaches through the lens of network topology. Specifically, we exploit mechanisms seen in biological networks, such as preferential attachment and redundant synapse pruning, and show that principled, model-agnostic sparsity approaches are performant and efficient across diverse NLP tasks, spanning both classification (such as natural language inference) and generation (summarization, machine translation), despite our sole objective not being optimizing performance. NeuroPrune is competitive with (or sometimes superior to) baselines on performance and can be up to 10x faster in terms of training time for a given level of sparsity, simultaneously exhibiting measurable improvements in inference time in many cases.
Ranking Large Language Models without Ground Truth
Authors: Amit Dhurandhar; Rahul Nair; Moninder Singh; Elizabeth Daly; Karthikeyan Natesan Ramamurthy
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Evaluation and ranking of large language models (LLMs) has become an important problem with the proliferation of these models and their impact. Evaluation methods either require human responses which are expensive to acquire or use pairs of LLMs to evaluate each other which can be unreliable. In this paper, we provide a novel perspective where, given a dataset of prompts (viz. questions, instructions, etc.) and a set of LLMs, we rank them without access to any ground truth or reference responses. Inspired by real life where both an expert and a knowledgeable person can identify a novice our main idea is to consider triplets of models, where each one of them evaluates the other two, correctly identifying the worst model in the triplet with high probability. We also analyze our idea and provide sufficient conditions for it to succeed. Applying this idea repeatedly we propose two methods to rank LLMs. In experiments on different generative tasks (summarization, multiple-choice, and dialog), our methods reliably recover true rankings without reference data. This points to a viable low-resource mechanism for practical use.
Integrating Physician Diagnostic Logic into Large Language Models: Preference Learning from Process Feedback
Authors: Chengfeng Dou; Ying Zhang; Zhi Jin; Wenpin Jiao; Haiyan Zhao; Yongqiang Zhao; Zhengwei Tao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The utilization of large language models for medical dialogue generation has attracted considerable attention due to its potential to enhance response richness and coherence. While previous studies have made strides in optimizing model performance, there is a pressing need to bolster the model’s capacity for diagnostic logic to ensure patient safety. In response to this need, we propose an approach termed preference learning from process feedback (PLPF), which involves integrating the doctor’s diagnostic logic into LLMs. PLPF encompasses three key components: rule modeling, preference data generation, and preference alignment. These components collectively serve to train the model to adhere to the diagnostic process. Our experimental results, utilizing Standardized Patient Testing, demonstrate that PLPF enhances the diagnostic accuracy of the baseline model in medical conversations by 17.6%, surpassing the performance of traditional approaches. Moreover, PLPF exhibits effectiveness in both multi-round and single-round dialogue tasks, thereby highlighting its potential in improving medical dialogue generation. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/Chengfeng-Dou/SpTesting.
LM-Cocktail: Resilient Tuning of Language Models via Model Merging
Authors: Shitao Xiao; Zheng Liu; Peitian Zhang; Xingrun Xing
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The pre-trained language models are continually fine-tuned to better support downstream applications. However, this operation may result in significant performance degeneration on general tasks beyond the targeted domain. To overcome this problem, we propose LM-Cocktail which enables the fine-tuned model to stay resilient in general perspectives. Our method is conducted in the form of model merging, where the fine-tuned language model is merged with the pre-trained base model or the peer models from other domains through weighted average. Despite simplicity, LM-Cocktail is surprisingly effective: the resulted model is able to achieve a strong empirical performance in the whole scope of general tasks while preserving a superior capacity in its targeted domain.
Episodic Memory Retrieval from LLMs: A Neuromorphic Mechanism to Generate Commonsense Counterfactuals for Relation Extraction
Authors: Xin Miao; Yongqi Li; Shen Zhou; Tieyun Qian
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved satisfactory performance in counterfactual generation. However, confined by the stochastic generation process of LLMs, there often are misalignments between LLMs and humans which hinder LLMs from handling complex tasks like relation extraction. As a result, LLMs may generate commonsense-violated counterfactuals like ‘eggs were produced by a box’. To bridge this gap, we propose to mimick the episodic memory retrieval, the working mechanism of human hippocampus, to align LLMs’ generation process with that of humans. In this way, LLMs can derive experience from their extensive memory, which keeps in line with the way humans gain commonsense. We then implement two central functions in the hippocampus, i.e., pattern separation and pattern completion, to retrieve the episodic memory from LLMs and generate commonsense counterfactuals for relation extraction. Experimental results demonstrate the improvements of our framework over existing methods in terms of the quality of counterfactuals.
SemRel2024: A Collection of Semantic Textual Relatedness Datasets for 13 Languages
Authors: Nedjma Ousidhoum; Shamsuddeen Muhammad; Mohamed Abdalla; Idris Abdulmumin; Ibrahim Ahmad; Sanchit Ahuja; Alham Aji; Vladimir Araujo; Abinew Ayele; Pavan Baswani; Meriem Beloucif; Chris Biemann; Sofia Bourhim; Christine Kock; Genet Dekebo; Oumaima Hourrane; Gopichand Kanumolu; Lokesh Madasu; Samuel Rutunda; Manish Shrivastava; Thamar Solorio; Nirmal Surange; Hailegnaw Tilaye; Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla; Genta Winata; Seid Yimam; Saif Mohammad
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Exploring and quantifying semantic relatedness is central to representing language and holds significant implications across various NLP tasks. While earlier NLP research primarily focused on semantic similarity, often within the English language context, we instead investigate the broader phenomenon of semantic relatedness. In this paper, we present SemRel, a new semantic relatedness dataset collection annotated by native speakers across 13 languages: Afrikaans, Algerian Arabic, Amharic, English, Hausa, Hindi, Indonesian, Kinyarwanda, Marathi, Moroccan Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic, Spanish, and Telugu. These languages originate from five distinct language families and are predominantly spoken in Africa and Asia – regions characterised by a relatively limited availability of NLP resources. Each instance in the SemRel datasets is a sentence pair associated with a score that represents the degree of semantic textual relatedness between the two sentences. The scores are obtained using a comparative annotation framework. We describe the data collection and annotation processes, challenges when building the datasets, baseline experiments, and their impact and utility in NLP.
Alirector: Alignment-Enhanced Chinese Grammatical Error Corrector
Authors: Haihui Yang; Xiaojun Quan
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) faces serious overcorrection challenges when employing autoregressive generative models such as sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) models and decoder-only large language models (LLMs). While previous methods aim to address overcorrection in Seq2Seq models, they are difficult to adapt to decoder-only LLMs. In this paper, we propose an alignment-enhanced corrector for the overcorrection problem that applies to both Seq2Seq models and decoder-only LLMs. Our method first trains a correction model to generate an initial correction of the source sentence. Then, we combine the source sentence with the initial correction and feed it through an alignment model for another round of correction, aiming to enforce the alignment model to focus on potential overcorrection. Moreover, to enhance the model’s ability to identify nuances, we further explore the reverse alignment of the source sentence and the initial correction. Finally, we transfer the alignment knowledge from two alignment models to the correction model, instructing it on how to avoid overcorrection. Experimental results on three CGEC datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in alleviating overcorrection and improving overall performance. Our code has been made publicly available.
VISPool: Enhancing Transformer Encoders with Vector Visibility Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Tuna Alikaşifoğlu; Arda Aras; Aykut Koc
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The emergence of transformers has revolutionized natural language processing (NLP), as evidenced in various NLP tasks. While graph neural networks (GNNs) show recent promise in NLP, they are not standalone replacements for transformers. Rather, recent research explores combining transformers and GNNs. Existing GNN-based approaches rely on static graph construction methods requiring excessive text processing, and most of them are not scalable with the increasing document and word counts. We address these limitations by proposing a novel dynamic graph construction method for text documents based on vector visibility graphs (VVGs) generated from transformer output. Then, we introduce visibility pooler (VISPool), a scalable model architecture that seamlessly integrates VVG convolutional networks into transformer pipelines. We evaluate the proposed model on the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) benchmark datasets. VISPool outperforms the baselines with less trainable parameters, demonstrating the viability of the visibility-based graph construction method for enhancing transformers with GNNs.
The Emotion Dynamics of Literary Novels
Authors: Krishnapriya Vishnubhotla; Adam Hammond; Graeme Hirst; Saif Mohammad
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Stories are rich in the emotions they exhibit in their narratives and evoke in the readers. The emotional journeys of the various characters within a story are central to their appeal. Computational analysis of the emotions of novels, however, has rarely examined the variation in the emotional trajectories of the different characters within them, instead considering the entire novel to represent a single story arc. In this work, we use character dialogue to distinguish between the emotion arcs of the narration and the various characters. We analyze the emotion arcs of the various characters in a dataset of English literary novels using the framework of Utterance Emotion Dynamics. Our findings show that the narration and the dialogue largely express disparate emotions through the course of a novel, and that the commonalities or differences in the emotional arcs of stories are more accurately captured by those associated with individual characters.
Accurate and Nuanced Open-QA Evaluation Through Textual Entailment
Authors: Peiran Yao; Denilson Barbosa
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Open-domain question answering (Open-QA) is a common task for evaluating large language models (LLMs). However, current Open-QA evaluations are criticized for the ambiguity in questions and the lack of semantic understanding in evaluators. Complex evaluators, powered by foundation models or LLMs and pertaining to semantic equivalence, still deviate from human judgments by a large margin. We propose to study the entailment relations of answers to identify more informative and more general system answers, offering a much closer evaluation to human judgment on both NaturalQuestions and TriviaQA while being learning-free. The entailment-based evaluation we propose allows the assignment of bonus or partial marks by quantifying the inference gap between answers, enabling a nuanced ranking of answer correctness that has higher AUC than current methods.
Dictionary-Aided Translation for Handling Multi-Word Expressions in Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Antonios Dimakis; Stella Markantonatou; Antonios Anastasopoulos
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Multi-word expressions (MWEs) present unique challenges in natural language processing (NLP), particularly within the context of translation systems, due to their inherent scarcity, non-compositional nature, and other distinct lexical and morphosyntactic characteristics, issues that are exacerbated in low-resource settings.In this study, we elucidate and attempt to address these challenges by leveraging a substantial corpus of human-annotated Greek MWEs. To address the complexity of translating such phrases, we propose a novel method leveraging an available out-of-context lexicon.We assess the translation capabilities of current state-of-the-art systems on this task, employing both automated metrics and human evaluators.We find that by using our method when applicable, the performance of current systems can be significantly improved, however these models are still unable to produce translations comparable to those of a human speaker.
LANS: A Layout-Aware Neural Solver for Plane Geometry Problem
Authors: Zhong-Zhi Li; Ming-Liang Zhang; Fei Yin; Cheng-Lin Liu
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Geometry problem solving (GPS) is a challenging mathematical reasoning task requiring multi-modal understanding, fusion, and reasoning. Existing neural solvers take GPS as a vision-language task but are short in the representation of geometry diagrams that carry rich and complex layout information. In this paper, we propose a layout-aware neural solver named LANS, integrated with two new modules: multimodal layout-aware pre-trained language module (MLA-PLM) and layout-aware fusion attention (LA-FA). MLA-PLM adopts structural-semantic pre-training (SSP) to implement global relationship modeling, and point-match pre-training (PMP) to achieve alignment between visual points and textual points. LA-FA employs a layout-aware attention mask to realize point-guided cross-modal fusion for further boosting layout awareness of LANS. Extensive experiments on datasets Geometry3K and PGPS9K validate the effectiveness of the layout-aware modules and superior problem-solving performance of our LANS solver, over existing symbolic and neural solvers. We have made our code and data publicly available.