GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
The Art of Defending: A Systematic Evaluation and Analysis of LLM Defense Strategies on Safety and Over-Defensiveness
Authors: Neeraj Varshney; Pavel Dolin; Agastya Seth; Chitta Baral
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) play an increasingly pivotal role in natural language processing applications, their safety concerns become critical areas of NLP research. This has resulted in the development of various LLM defense strategies. Unfortunately, despite the shared goal of improving the safety of LLMs, the evaluation suites across various research works are disjoint and lack diverse inputs to ensure accurate and precise evaluation estimates. Furthermore, the important factor of ‘over-defensiveness’ on the safe inputs has largely remained overlooked. Addressing these limitations, this paper presents a systematic evaluation, comparison, and analysis of various LLM defense strategies over both ‘safety’ and ‘over-defensiveness’. To this end, we compile a large and diverse collection of safe and unsafe prompts, design precise evaluation methodology, and study the efficacy of various LLM defense strategies on multiple state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work reveals a number of crucial findings that we believe will pave the way and also facilitate further research in the critical area of improving the safety of LLMs.
PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering
Authors: Jannat Meem; Muhammad Rashid; Yue Dong; Vagelis Hristidis
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Existing work on Temporal Question Answering (TQA) has predominantly focused on questions anchored to specific timestamps or events (e.g. ‘Who was the US president in 1970?’). Little work has studied questions whose temporal context is relative to the present time (e.g. ‘Who was the previous US president?’). We refer to this problem as Present-Anchored Temporal QA (PATQA). PATQA poses unique challenges: (1) large language models (LLMs) may have outdated knowledge, (2) complex temporal relationships (e.g. ‘before’, ‘previous’) are hard to reason, (3) multi-hop reasoning may be required, and (4) the gold answers of benchmarks must be continuously updated. To address these challenges, we introduce the PAT-Questions benchmark, which includes single and multi-hop temporal questions. The answers in PAT-Questions can be automatically refreshed by re-running SPARQL queries on a knowledge graph, if available. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs and a SOTA temporal reasoning model (TEMPREASON-T5) on PAT-Questions through direct prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The results highlight the limitations of existing solutions in PATQA and motivate the need for new methods to improve PATQA reasoning capabilities.
Extracting Polymer Nanocomposite Samples from Full-Length Documents
Authors: Ghazal Khalighinejad; Defne Circi; L. Brinson; Bhuwan Dhingra
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: This paper investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for extracting sample lists of polymer nanocomposites (PNCs) from full-length materials science research papers. The challenge lies in the complex nature of PNC samples, which have numerous attributes scattered throughout the text. The complexity of annotating detailed information on PNCs limits the availability of data, making conventional document-level relation extraction techniques impractical due to the challenge in creating comprehensive named entity span annotations.To address this, we introduce a new benchmark and an evaluation technique for this task and explore different prompting strategies in a zero-shot manner. We also incorporate self-consistency to improve the performance. Our findings show that even advanced LLMs struggle to extract all of the samples from an article. Finally, we analyze the errors encountered in this process, categorizing them into three main challenges, and discuss potential strategies for future research to overcome them.
Toucan: Many-to-Many Translation for 150 African Language Pairs
Authors: AbdelRahim Elmadany; Ife Adebara; Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: We address a notable gap in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by introducing a collection of resources designed to improve Machine Translation (MT) for low-resource languages, with a specific focus on African languages. First, We introduce two language models (LMs), Cheetah-1.2B and Cheetah-3.7B, with 1.2 billion and 3.7 billion parameters respectively. Next, we finetune the aforementioned models to create Toucan, an Afrocentric machine translation model designed to support 156 African language pairs. To evaluate Toucan, we carefully develop an extensive machine translation benchmark, dubbed Afro-Lingu-MT, tailored for evaluating machine translation. Toucan significantly outperforms other models, showcasing its remarkable performance on MT for African languages. Finally, we train a new model, spBLEU-1K, to enhance translation evaluation metrics, covering 1K languages, including African languages. This work aims to advance the field of NLP, fostering cross-cultural understanding and knowledge exchange, particularly in regions with limited language resources such as Africa.
Few-shot Dialogue Strategy Learning for Motivational Interviewing via Inductive Reasoning
Authors: Zhouhang Xie; Bodhisattwa Prasad Majumder; Mengjie Zhao; Yoshinori Maeda; Keiichi Yamada; Hiromi Wakaki; Julian McAuley
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: We consider the task of building a dialogue system that can motivate users to adopt positive lifestyle changes, Motivational Interviewing (MI). Addressing such a task requires a system that could infer how to motivate the user effectively. We propose DIIR, a framework that is capable of learning and applying conversation strategies in the form of natural language inductive rules from expert demonstrations. Automatic and human evaluation on instruction-following large language models show natural language strategies descriptions discovered by DIIR can improve active listening skills, reduce unsolicited advice, and promote more collaborative and less authoritative conversations, outperforming in-context demonstrations that are over 50 times longer.
Evaluating Structural Generalization in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Ryoma Kumon; Daiki Matsuoka; Hitomi Yanaka
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Compositional generalization refers to the ability to generalize to novel combinations of previously observed words and syntactic structures.Since it is regarded as a desired property of neural models, recent work has assessed compositional generalization in machine translation as well as semantic parsing.However, previous evaluations with machine translation have focused mostly on lexical generalization (i.e., generalization to unseen combinations of known words).Thus, it remains unclear to what extent models can translate sentences that require structural generalization (i.e., generalization to different sorts of syntactic structures).To address this question, we construct SGET, a machine translation dataset covering various types of compositional generalization with control of words and sentence structures.We evaluate neural machine translation models on SGET and show that they struggle more in structural generalization than in lexical generalization.We also find different performance trends in semantic parsing and machine translation, which indicates the importance of evaluations across various tasks.
Figuratively Speaking: Authorship Attribution via Multi-Task Figurative Language Modeling
Authors: Gregorios Katsios; Ning Sa; Tomek Strzalkowski
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The identification of Figurative Language (FL) features in text is crucial for various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, where understanding of the author’s intended meaning and its nuances is key for successful communication. At the same time, the use of a specific blend of various FL forms most accurately reflects a writer’s style, rather than the use of any single construct, such as just metaphors or irony. Thus, we postulate that FL features could play an important role in Authorship Attribution (AA) tasks. We believe that our is the first computational study of AA based on FL use. Accordingly, we propose a Multi-task Figurative Language Model (MFLM) that learns to detect multiple FL features in text at once. We demonstrate, through detailed evaluation across multiple test sets, that the our model tends to perform equally or outperform specialized binary models in FL detection. Subsequently, we evaluate the predictive capability of joint FL features towards the AA task on three datasets, observing improved AA performance through the integration of MFLM embeddings.
CHAMP: A Competition-level Dataset for Fine-Grained Analyses of LLMs’ Mathematical Reasoning Capabilities
Authors: Yujun Mao; Yoon Kim; Yilun Zhou
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown indications of mathematical reasoning ability on challenging competition-level problems, especially with self-generated verbalizations of intermediate reasoning steps (i.e., chain-of-thought prompting). However, current evaluations mainly focus on the end-to-end final answer correctness, and it is unclear whether LLMs can make use of helpful side information such as problem-specific hints. In this paper, we propose a challenging benchmark dataset for enabling such analyses. The Concept and Hint-Annotated Math Problems (CHAMP) consists of high school math competition problems, annotated with concepts, or general math facts, and hints, or problem-specific tricks. These annotations allow us to explore the effects of additional information, such as relevant hints, misleading concepts, or related problems. This benchmark is difficult, with the best model only scoring 58.1% in standard settings. With concepts and hints, performance sometimes improves, indicating that some models can make use of such side information. Furthermore, we annotate model-generated solutions for their correctness. Using this corpus, we find that models often arrive at the correct final answer through wrong reasoning steps. In addition, we test whether models are able to verify these solutions, and find that most models struggle.
Improving Machine Translation with Large Language Models: A Preliminary Study with Cooperative Decoding
Authors: Jiali Zeng; Fandong Meng; Yongjing Yin; Jie Zhou
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Contemporary translation engines based on the encoder-decoder framework have made significant strides in development.However, the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has disrupted their position by presenting the potential for achieving superior translation quality.To uncover the circumstances in which LLMs excel and explore how their strengths can be harnessed to enhance translation quality,we first conduct a comprehensive analysis to assess the strengths and limitations of various commercial NMT systems and MT-oriented LLMs. Our findings indicate that neither NMT nor MT-oriented LLMs alone can effectively address all the translation issues, but MT-oriented LLMs show promise as a complementary solution to NMT systems.Building upon these insights, we propose Cooperative Decoding (CoDec), which treats NMT systems as a pretranslation model and MT-oriented LLMs as a supplemental solution to handle complex scenarios beyond the capability of NMT alone.Experimental results on the WMT22 test sets and a newly collected test set WebCrawl demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of CoDec, highlighting its potential as a robust solution for combining NMT systems with MT-oriented LLMs in the field of machine translation.
Integrating Pre-Trained Speech and Language Models for End-to-End Speech Recognition
Authors: Yukiya Hono; Koh Mitsuda; Tianyu Zhao; Kentaro Mitsui; Toshiaki Wakatsuki; Kei Sawada
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Advances in machine learning have made it possible to perform various text and speech processing tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), in an end-to-end (E2E) manner. E2E approaches utilizing pre-trained models are gaining attention for conserving training data and resources. However, most of their applications in ASR involve only one of either a pre-trained speech or a language model. This paper proposes integrating a pre-trained speech representation model and a large language model (LLM) for E2E ASR. The proposed model enables the optimization of the entire ASR process, including acoustic feature extraction and acoustic and language modeling, by combining pre-trained models with a bridge network and also enables the application of remarkable developments in LLM utilization, such as parameter-efficient domain adaptation and inference optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a performance comparable to that of modern E2E ASR models by utilizing powerful pre-training models with the proposed integrated approach.
Proving membership in LLM pretraining data via data watermarks
Authors: Johnny Wei; Ryan Wang; Robin Jia
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Detecting whether copyright holders’ works were used in LLM pretraining is poised to be an important problem. This work proposes using data watermarks to enable principled detection with only black-box model access, provided that the rightholder contributed multiple training documents and watermarked them before public release. By applying a randomly sampled data watermark, detection can be framed as hypothesis testing, which provides guarantees on the false detection rate. We study two watermarks: one that inserts random sequences, and another that randomly substitutes characters with Unicode lookalikes. We first show how three aspects of watermark design - watermark length, number of duplications, and interference - affect the power of the hypothesis test. Next, we study how a watermark’s detection strength changes under model and dataset scaling: while increasing the dataset size decreases the strength of the watermark, watermarks remain strong if the model size also increases. Finally, we view SHA hashes as natural watermarks and show that we can robustly detect hashes from BLOOM-176B’s training data, as long as they occurred at least 90 times. Together, our results point towards a promising future for data watermarks in real world use.
Enhancing Hallucination Detection through Perturbation-Based Synthetic Data Generation in System Responses
Authors: Dongxu Zhang; Varun Gangal; Barrett Lattimer; Yi Yang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Detecting hallucinations in large language model (LLM) outputs is pivotal, yet traditional fine-tuning for this classification task is impeded by the expensive and quickly outdated annotation process, especially across numerous vertical domains and in the face of rapid LLM advancements. In this study, we introduce an approach that automatically generates both faithful and hallucinated outputs by rewriting system responses. Experimental findings demonstrate that a T5-base model, fine-tuned on our generated dataset, surpasses state-of-the-art zero-shot detectors and existing synthetic generation methods in both accuracy and latency, indicating efficacy of our approach.
Raccoon: Prompt Extraction Benchmark of LLM-Integrated Applications
Authors: Junlin Wang; Tianyi Yang; Roy Xie; Bhuwan Dhingra
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: With the proliferation of LLM-integrated applications such as GPT-s, millions are deployed, offering valuable services through proprietary instruction prompts. These systems, however, are prone to prompt extraction attacks through meticulously designed queries. To help mitigate this problem, we introduce the Raccoon benchmark which comprehensively evaluates a model’s susceptibility to prompt extraction attacks. Our novel evaluation method assesses models under both defenseless and defended scenarios, employing a dual approach to evaluate the effectiveness of existing defenses and the resilience of the models. The benchmark encompasses 14 categories of prompt extraction attacks, with additional compounded attacks that closely mimic the strategies of potential attackers, alongside a diverse collection of defense templates. This array is, to our knowledge, the most extensive compilation of prompt theft attacks and defense mechanisms to date. Our findings highlight universal susceptibility to prompt theft in the absence of defenses, with OpenAI models demonstrating notable resilience when protected. This paper aims to establish a more systematic benchmark for assessing LLM robustness against prompt extraction attacks, offering insights into their causes and potential countermeasures.
History-Aware Conversational Dense Retrieval
Authors: Fengran Mo; Chen Qu; Kelong Mao; Tianyu Zhu; Zhan Su; Kaiyu Huang; Jian-Yun Nie
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Conversational search facilitates complex information retrieval by enabling multi-turn interactions between users and the system. Supporting such interactions requires a comprehensive understanding of the conversational inputs to formulate a good search query based on historical information. In particular, the search query should include the relevant information from the previous conversation turns.However, current approaches for conversational dense retrieval primarily rely on fine-tuning a pre-trained ad-hoc retriever using the whole conversational search session, which can be lengthy and noisy. Moreover, existing approaches are limited by the amount of manual supervision signals in the existing datasets.To address the aforementioned issues, we propose a **H**istory-**A**ware **Conv**ersational **D**ense **R**etrieval (HAConvDR) system, which incorporates two ideas: context-denoised query reformulation and automatic mining of supervision signals based on the actual impact of historical turns.Experiments on two public conversational search datasets demonstrate the improved history modeling capability of HAConvDR, in particular for long conversations with topic shifts.
Light Up the Shadows: Enhance Long-Tailed Entity Grounding with Concept-Guided Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yikai Zhang; Qianyu He; Xintao Wang; Siyu Yuan; Jiaqing Liang; Yanghua Xiao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Multi-Modal Knowledge Graphs (MMKGs) have proven valuable for various downstream tasks. However, scaling them up is challenging because building large-scale MMKGs often introduces mismatched images (i.e., noise). Most entities in KGs belong to the long tail, meaning there are few images of them available online. This scarcity makes it difficult to determine whether a found image matches the entity. To address this, we draw on the Triangle of Reference Theory and suggest enhancing vision-language models with concept guidance. Specifically, we introduce COG, a two-stage framework with COncept-Guided vision-language models. The framework comprises a Concept Integration module, which effectively identifies image-text pairs of long-tailed entities, and an Evidence Fusion module, which offers explainability and enables human verification. To demonstrate the effectiveness of COG, we create a dataset of 25k image-text pairs of long-tailed entities. Our comprehensive experiments show that COG not only improves the accuracy of recognizing long-tailed image-text pairs compared to baselines but also offers flexibility and explainability.
ZeroStance: Leveraging ChatGPT for Open-Domain Stance Detection via Dataset Generation
Authors: Chenye Zhao; Yingjie Li; Cornelia Caragea; Yue Zhang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Zero-shot stance detection that aims to detect the stance (typically against, favor, or neutral) towards unseen targets has attracted considerable attention. However, most previous studies only focus on targets from a single or limited text domains (e.g., financial domain), and thus zero-shot models cannot generalize well to unseen targets of diverse domains (e.g., political domain). In this paper, we consider a more realistic task, i.e., open-domain stance detection, which aims at training a model that is able to generalize well to unseen targets across multiple domains of interest. Particularly, we propose a novel dataset generation method ZeroStance, which leverages ChatGPT to construct a synthetic open-domain dataset CHATStance that covers a wide range of domains. We then train an open-domain model on our synthetic dataset after proper data filtering. Extensive results indicate that our model, when trained on this synthetic dataset, shows superior generalization to unseen targets of diverse domains over baselines on most benchmarks. Our method requires only a task description in the form of a prompt and is much more cost-effective and data-efficient than previous methods. We will release our code and data to facilitate future research.
Boosting Zero-Shot Crosslingual Performance using LLM-Based Augmentations with Effective Data Selection
Authors: Barah Fazili; Ashish Agrawal; Preethi Jyothi
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are very proficient text generators. We leverage this capability of LLMs to generate task-specific data via zero-shot prompting and promote cross-lingual transfer for low-resource target languages. Given task-specific data in a source language and a teacher model trained on this data, we propose using this teacher to label LLM generations and employ a set of simple data selection strategies that use the teacher’s label probabilities. Our data selection strategies help us identify a representative subset of diverse generations that help boost zero-shot accuracies while being efficient, in comparison to using all the LLM generations (without any subset selection). We also highlight other important design choices that affect cross-lingual performance such as the use of translations of source data and what labels are best to use for the LLM generations. We observe significant performance gains across sentiment analysis and natural language inference tasks (of up to a maximum of 7.13 absolute points and 1.5 absolute points on average) across a number of target languages (Hindi, Marathi, Urdu, Swahili) and domains.