GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
JobFair: A Framework for Benchmarking Gender Hiring Bias in Large Language Models
Authors: Ze Wang; Zekun Wu; Xin Guan; Michael Thaler; Adriano Koshiyama; Skylar Lu; Sachin Beepath; Ediz Ertekin; Maria Perez-Ortiz
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in hiring has led to legislative actions to protect vulnerable demographic groups. This paper presents a novel framework for benchmarking hierarchical gender hiring bias in Large Language Models (LLMs) for resume scoring, revealing significant issues of reverse gender hiring bias and overdebiasing. Our contributions are fourfold: Firstly, we introduce a new construct grounded in labour economics, legal principles, and critiques of current bias benchmarks: hiring bias can be categorized into two types: Level bias (difference in the average outcomes between demographic counterfactual groups) and Spread bias (difference in the variance of outcomes between demographic counterfactual groups); Level bias can be further subdivided into statistical bias (i.e. changing with non-demographic content) and taste-based bias (i.e. consistent regardless of non-demographic content). Secondly, the framework includes rigorous statistical and computational hiring bias metrics, such as Rank After Scoring (RAS), Rank-based Impact Ratio, Permutation Test, and Fixed Effects Model. Thirdly, we analyze gender hiring biases in ten state-of-the-art LLMs. Seven out of ten LLMs show significant biases against males in at least one industry. An industry-effect regression reveals that the healthcare industry is the most biased against males. Moreover, we found that the bias performance remains invariant with resume content for eight out of ten LLMs. This indicates that the bias performance measured in this paper might apply to other resume datasets with different resume qualities. Fourthly, we provide a user-friendly demo and resume dataset to support the adoption and practical use of the framework, which can be generalized to other social traits and tasks.
Contrastive Token Learning with Similarity Decay for Repetition Suppression in Machine Translation
Authors: Huangyu Dai; Ben Chen; Kaidi Chen; Ying Han; Zihan Liang; Wen Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: For crosslingual conversation and trade, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is pivotal yet faces persistent challenges with monotony and repetition in generated content. Traditional solutions that rely on penalizing text redundancy or token reoccurrence have shown limited efficacy, particularly for lengthy article and e-commerce descriptions with inherent redundancy, even with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). This paper investigates the underlying causes of textual repetition through the lens of information entropy, attributing the phenomenon to the elevated uncertainty within the input text. To address this, a novel algorithm named Contrastive Token Learning with Similarity Decay (CTSD) is introduced, which modulates the suppression of tokens dynamically, informed by varying attention weights and inter-token distances. Furthermore, an e-commerce dataset comprised of title texts of online real items is compiled and released susceptible to hallucination translations to benchmark the algorithm. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that CTSD significantly outperforms existing approaches in precision and generalizability. Additional online A/B testing underscores its practical value, showing marked improvements in user engagement and conversion. Notably, this method has been implemented with full traffic on eight multilingual sites of alibaba.com, the largest B2B e-commerce platform in the world.
Tending Towards Stability: Convergence Challenges in Small Language Models
Authors: Richard Diehl Martinez; Pietro Lesci; Paula Buttery
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Increasing the number of parameters in language models is a common strategy to enhance their performance. However, smaller language models remain valuable due to their lower operational costs. Despite their advantages, smaller models frequently underperform compared to their larger counterparts, even when provided with equivalent data and computational resources. Specifically, their performance tends to degrade in the late pretraining phase. This is anecdotally attributed to their reduced representational capacity. Yet, the exact causes of this performance degradation remain unclear. We use the Pythia model suite to analyse the training dynamics that underlie this phenomenon. Across different model sizes, we investigate the convergence of the Attention and MLP activations to their final state and examine how the effective rank of their parameters influences this process. We find that nearly all layers in larger models stabilise early in training - within the first 20% - whereas layers in smaller models exhibit slower and less stable convergence, especially when their parameters have lower effective rank. By linking the convergence of layers’ activations to their parameters’ effective rank, our analyses can guide future work to address inefficiencies in the learning dynamics of small models.
Be a Multitude to Itself: A Prompt Evolution Framework for Red Teaming
Authors: Rui Li; Peiyi Wang; Jingyuan Ma; Di Zhang; Lei Sha; Zhifang Sui
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained increasing attention for their remarkable capacity, alongside concerns about safety arising from their potential to produce harmful content. Red teaming aims to find prompts that could elicit harmful responses from LLMs, and is essential to discover and mitigate safety risks before real-world deployment. However, manual red teaming is both time-consuming and expensive, rendering it unscalable. In this paper, we propose RTPE, a scalable evolution framework to evolve red teaming prompts across both breadth and depth dimensions, facilitating the automatic generation of numerous high-quality and diverse red teaming prompts. Specifically, in-breadth evolving employs a novel enhanced in-context learning method to create a multitude of quality prompts, whereas in-depth evolving applies customized transformation operations to enhance both content and form of prompts, thereby increasing diversity. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RTPE surpasses existing representative automatic red teaming methods on both attack success rate and diversity. In addition, based on 4,800 red teaming prompts created by RTPE, we further provide a systematic analysis of 8 representative LLMs across 8 sensitive topics.
Modeling News Interactions and Influence for Financial Market Prediction
Authors: Mengyu Wang; Shay B. Cohen; Tiejun Ma
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The diffusion of financial news into market prices is a complex process, making it challenging to evaluate the connections between news events and market movements. This paper introduces FININ (Financial Interconnected News Influence Network), a novel market prediction model that captures not only the links between news and prices but also the interactions among news items themselves. FININ effectively integrates multi-modal information from both market data and news articles. We conduct extensive experiments on two datasets, encompassing the S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 indices over a 15-year period and over 2.7 million news articles. The results demonstrate FININ’s effectiveness, outperforming advanced market prediction models with an improvement of 0.429 and 0.341 in the daily Sharpe ratio for the two markets respectively. Moreover, our results reveal insights into the financial news, including the delayed market pricing of news, the long memory effect of news, and the limitations of financial sentiment analysis in fully extracting predictive power from news data.
Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation: Addressing Long-Tail Challenges in Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Yuhang Zhou; Jing Zhu; Paiheng Xu; Xiaoyu Liu; Xiyao Wang; Danai Koutra; Wei Ai; Furong Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced various natural language processing tasks, but deploying them remains computationally expensive. Knowledge distillation (KD) is a promising solution, enabling the transfer of capabilities from larger teacher LLMs to more compact student models. Particularly, sequence-level KD, which distills rationale-based reasoning processes instead of merely final outcomes, shows great potential in enhancing students’ reasoning capabilities. However, current methods struggle with sequence-level KD under long-tailed data distributions, adversely affecting generalization on sparsely represented domains. We introduce the Multi-Stage Balanced Distillation (BalDistill) framework, which iteratively balances training data within a fixed computational budget. By dynamically selecting representative head domain examples and synthesizing tail domain examples, BalDistill achieves state-of-the-art performance across diverse long-tailed datasets, enhancing both the efficiency and efficacy of the distilled models.
Are Large Vision Language Models up to the Challenge of Chart Comprehension and Reasoning
Authors: Mohammed Saidul Islam; Raian Rahman; Ahmed Masry; Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar; Mir Tafseer Nayeem; Enamul Hoque
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Natural language is a powerful complementary modality of communication for data visualizations, such as bar and line charts. To facilitate chart-based reasoning using natural language, various downstream tasks have been introduced recently such as chart question answering, chart summarization, and fact-checking with charts. These tasks pose a unique challenge, demanding both vision-language reasoning and a nuanced understanding of chart data tables, visual encodings, and natural language instructions. Despite the recent success of Large Language Models (LLMs) across diverse NLP tasks, their abilities and limitations in the realm of data visualization remain under-explored, possibly due to their lack of multi-modal capabilities. To bridge the gap, this paper presents one of the first comprehensive evaluations of the recently developed large vision language models (LVLMs) for chart understanding and reasoning tasks. Our evaluation includes a comprehensive assessment of both closed and open-sourced LVLMs across five major chart reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we perform a qualitative evaluation of LVLMs’ performance on a diverse range of charts, aiming to provide a thorough analysis. Our findings reveal that while LVLMs demonstrate impressive abilities in generating fluent texts covering high-level data insights, they also encounter common problems like hallucinations, factual errors, and data bias. We highlight the key strengths and limitations of LVLMs in chart comprehension tasks, offering insights for future research
HoneyComb: A Flexible LLM-Based Agent System for Materials Science
Authors: Huan Zhang; Yu Song; Ziyu Hou; Santiago Miret; Bang Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The emergence of specialized large language models (LLMs) has shown promise in addressing complex tasks in materials science. Many LLMs, however, often struggle with the distinct complexities of materials science tasks, such as computational challenges, and rely heavily on outdated implicit knowledge, leading to inaccuracies and hallucinations. To address these challenges, we introduce HoneyComb, the first LLM-based agent system specifically designed for materials science. HoneyComb leverages a reliable, high-quality materials science knowledge base (MatSciKB) and a sophisticated tool hub (ToolHub) tailored specifically for materials science to enhance its reasoning and computational capabilities. MatSciKB is a curated, structured knowledge collection based on reliable literature, while ToolHub employs an Inductive Tool Construction method to generate, decompose, and refine API tools for materials science. Additionally, HoneyComb leverages a retriever module that adaptively selects the appropriate knowledge source or tools for specific tasks, thereby ensuring accuracy and relevance. Our results demonstrate that HoneyComb significantly outperforms baseline models across various tasks in materials science, effectively bridging the gap between current LLM capabilities and the specialized needs of this domain. Furthermore, our adaptable framework can be easily extended to other scientific domains, highlighting its potential for broad applicability in advancing scientific research and applications.
Revealing COVID-19’s Social Dynamics: Diachronic Semantic Analysis of Vaccine and Symptom Discourse on Twitter
Authors: Zeqiang Wang; Jiageng Wu; Yuqi Wang; Wei Wang; Jie Yang; Jon Johnson; Nishanth Sastry; Suparna De
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Social media is recognized as an important source for deriving insights into public opinion dynamics and social impacts due to the vast textual data generated daily and the ‘unconstrained’ behavior of people interacting on these platforms. However, such analyses prove challenging due to the semantic shift phenomenon, where word meanings evolve over time. This paper proposes an unsupervised dynamic word embedding method to capture longitudinal semantic shifts in social media data without predefined anchor words. The method leverages word co-occurrence statistics and dynamic updating to adapt embeddings over time, addressing the challenges of data sparseness, imbalanced distributions, and synergistic semantic effects. Evaluated on a large COVID-19 Twitter dataset, the method reveals semantic evolution patterns of vaccine- and symptom-related entities across different pandemic stages, and their potential correlations with real-world statistics. Our key contributions include the dynamic embedding technique, empirical analysis of COVID-19 semantic shifts, and discussions on enhancing semantic shift modeling for computational social science research. This study enables capturing longitudinal semantic dynamics on social media to understand public discourse and collective phenomena.
Divide and Conquer: Legal Concept-guided Criminal Court View Generation
Authors: Qi Xu; Xiao Wei; Hang Yu; Qian Liu; Hao Fei
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The Criminal Court View Generation task aims to produce explanations that inform judicial decisions. This necessitates a nuanced understanding of diverse legal concepts, such as Recidivism, Confess, and Robbery, which often coexist within cases, complicating holistic analysis. However, existing methods mainly rely on the generation capability of language models, without paying enough attention to the important legal concepts.To enhance the precision and depth of such explanations, we introduce Legal Concept-guided Criminal Court Views Generation (LeGen), a three-stage approach designed for iterative reasoning tailored to individual legal constructs.Specifically, in the first stage, we design a decomposer to divide the court views into focused sub-views, each anchored around a distinct legal concept. Next, a concept reasoning module generates targeted rationales by intertwining the deconstructed facts with their corresponding legal frameworks, ensuring contextually relevant interpretations.Finally, a verifier and a generator are employed to align the rationale with the case fact and obtain synthesized comprehensive and legally sound final court views, respectively.We evaluate LeGen by conducting extensive experiments on a real-world dataset and experimental results validate the effectiveness of our proposed model. Our codes are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/LeGen-5625.
Data Diversity Matters for Robust Instruction Tuning
Authors: Alexander Bukharin; Shiyang Li; Zhengyang Wang; Jingfeng Yang; Bing Yin; Xian Li; Chao Zhang; Tuo Zhao; Haoming Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Recent works have shown that by curating high quality and diverse instruction tuning datasets, we can significantly improve instruction-following capabilities. However, creating such datasets is difficult and most works rely on manual curation or proprietary language models. Automatic data curation is difficult as it is still not clear how we can define diversity for instruction tuning, how diversity and quality depend on one other, and how we can optimize dataset quality and diversity. To resolve these issue, we propose a new algorithm, Quality-Diversity Instruction Tuning (QDIT). QDIT provides a simple method to simultaneously control dataset diversity and quality, allowing us to conduct an in-depth study on the effect of diversity and quality on instruction tuning performance. From this study we draw two key insights (1) there is a natural tradeoff between data diversity and quality and (2) increasing data diversity significantly improves the worst case instruction following performance, therefore improving robustness. We validate the performance of QDIT on several large scale instruction tuning datasets, where we find it can substantially improve worst and average case performance compared to quality-driven data selection.
GE2PE: Persian End-to-End Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion
Authors: Elnaz Rahmati; Hossein Sameti
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems have made significant strides, enabling the generation of speech from grapheme sequences. However, for low-resource languages, these models still struggle to produce natural and intelligible speech. Grapheme-to-Phoneme conversion (G2P) addresses this challenge by enhancing the input sequence with phonetic information. Despite these advancements, existing G2P systems face limitations when dealing with Persian texts due to the complexity of Persian transcription. In this study, we focus on enriching resources for the Persian language. To achieve this, we introduce two novel G2P training datasets: one manually labeled and the other machine-generated. These datasets comprise over five million sentences alongside their corresponding phoneme sequences. Additionally, we propose two evaluation datasets tailored for Persian sub-tasks, including Kasre-Ezafe detection, homograph disambiguation, and handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. To tackle the unique challenges of the Persian language, we develop a new sentence-level End-to-End (E2E) model leveraging a two-step training approach, as outlined in our paper, to maximize the impact of manually labeled data. The results show that our model surpasses the state-of-the-art performance by 1.86% in word error rate, 4.03% in Kasre-Ezafe detection recall, and 3.42% in homograph disambiguation accuracy.
Characterizing LLM Abstention Behavior in Science QA with Context Perturbations
Authors: Bingbing Wen; Bill Howe; Lucy Lu Wang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The correct model response in the face of uncertainty is to abstain from answering a question so as not to mislead the user. In this work, we study the ability of LLMs to abstain from answering context-dependent science questions when provided insufficient or incorrect context. We probe model sensitivity in several settings: removing gold context, replacing gold context with irrelevant context, and providing additional context beyond what is given. In experiments on four QA datasets with six LLMs, we show that performance varies greatly across models, across the type of context provided, and also by question type; in particular, many LLMs seem unable to abstain from answering boolean questions using standard QA prompts. Our analysis also highlights the unexpected impact of abstention performance on QA task accuracy. Counter-intuitively, in some settings, replacing gold context with irrelevant context or adding irrelevant context to gold context can improve abstention performance in a way that results in improvements in task performance. Our results imply that changes are needed in QA dataset design and evaluation to more effectively assess the correctness and downstream impacts of model abstention.
Plausibly Problematic Questions in Multiple-Choice Benchmarks for Commonsense Reasoning
Authors: Shramay Palta; Nishant Balepur; Peter Rankel; Sarah Wiegreffe; Marine Carpuat; Rachel Rudinger
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Questions involving commonsense reasoning about everyday situations often admit many possible or plausible answers. In contrast, multiple-choice question (MCQ) benchmarks for commonsense reasoning require a hard selection of a single correct answer, which, in principle, should represent the most plausible answer choice. On 250 MCQ items sampled from two commonsense reasoning benchmarks, we collect 5,000 independent plausibility judgments on answer choices. We find that for over 20% of the sampled MCQS, the answer choice rated most plausible does not match the benchmark gold answers; upon manual inspection, we confirm that this subset exhibits higher rates of problems like ambiguity or semantic mismatch between question and answer choices. Experiments with LLMs reveal low accuracyand high variation in performance on the subset, suggesting our plausibility criterion may be helpful in identifying more reliable benchmark items for commonsense evaluation.
Cost-Efficient Subjective Task Annotation and Modeling through Few-Shot Annotator Adaptation
Authors: Preni Golazizian; Alireza Salkhordeh Ziabari; Ali Omrani; Morteza Dehghani
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: In subjective NLP tasks, where a single ground truth does not exist, the inclusion of diverse annotators becomes crucial as their unique perspectives significantly influence the annotations. In realistic scenarios, the annotation budget often becomes the main determinant of the number of perspectives (i.e., annotators) included in the data and subsequent modeling. We introduce a novel framework for annotation collection and modeling in subjective tasks that aims to minimize the annotation budget while maximizing the predictive performance for each annotator. Our framework has a two-stage design: first, we rely on a small set of annotators to build a multitask model, and second, we augment the model for a new perspective by strategically annotating a few samples per annotator. To test our framework at scale, we introduce and release a unique dataset, Moral Foundations Subjective Corpus, of 2000 Reddit posts annotated by 24 annotators for moral sentiment. We demonstrate that our framework surpasses the previous SOTA in capturing the annotators’ individual perspectives with as little as 25% of the original annotation budget on two datasets. Furthermore, our framework results in more equitable models, reducing the performance disparity among annotators.