GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
ContextBLIP: Doubly Contextual Alignment for Contrastive Image Retrieval from Linguistically Complex Descriptions
Authors: Honglin Lin; Siyu Li; Guoshun Nan; Chaoyue Tang; Xueting Wang; Jingxin Xu; Yankai Rong; Zhili Zhou; Yutong Gao; Qimei Cui; Xiaofeng Tao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Image retrieval from contextual descriptions (IRCD) aims to identify an image within a set of minimally contrastive candidates based on linguistically complex text. Despite the success of VLMs, they still significantly lag behind human performance in IRCD. The main challenges lie in aligning key contextual cues in two modalities, where these subtle cues are concealed in tiny areas of multiple contrastive images and within the complex linguistics of textual descriptions. This motivates us to propose ContextBLIP, a simple yet effective method that relies on a doubly contextual alignment scheme for challenging IRCD. Specifically, 1) our model comprises a multi-scale adapter, a matching loss, and a text-guided masking loss. The adapter learns to capture fine-grained visual cues. The two losses enable iterative supervision for the adapter, gradually highlighting the focal patches of a single image to the key textual cues. We term such a way as intra-contextual alignment. 2) Then, ContextBLIP further employs an inter-context encoder to learn dependencies among candidates, facilitating alignment between the text to multiple images. We term this step as inter-contextual alignment. Consequently, the nuanced cues concealed in each modality can be effectively aligned. Experiments on two benchmarks show the superiority of our method. We observe that ContextBLIP can yield comparable results with GPT-4V, despite involving about 7,500 times fewer parameters.
PuzzleVQA: Diagnosing Multimodal Reasoning Challenges of Language Models with Abstract Visual Patterns
Authors: Yew Ken Chia; Vernon Toh; Deepanway Ghosal; Lidong Bing; Soujanya Poria
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Large multimodal models extend the impressive capabilities of large language models by integrating multimodal understanding abilities. However, it is not clear how they can emulate the general intelligence and reasoning ability of humans. As recognizing patterns and abstracting concepts are key to general intelligence, we introduce PuzzleVQA, a collection of 2000 puzzle instances based on abstract patterns. With this dataset, we evaluate large multimodal models with abstract patterns based on fundamental concepts, including colors, numbers, sizes, and shapes. Through our experiments on state-of-the-art large multimodal models, we find that they are not able to generalize well to simple abstract patterns. Notably, GPT-4V achieves a score of 46.4% on single-concept puzzles, which shows that state-of-the-art models struggle on our dataset. To diagnose the reasoning challenges in large multimodal models, we progressively guide the models with our ground truth reasoning explanations for visual perception, inductive reasoning, and deductive reasoning. Our systematic analysis finds that the main bottlenecks of GPT-4V are weaker visual perception and inductive reasoning abilities. Through this work, we hope to shed light on the limitations of large multimodal models and how they can better emulate human cognitive processes in the future.
How Do Moral Emotions Shape Political Participation? A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Online Petitions Using Language Models
Authors: Jaehong Kim; Chaeyoon Jeong; Seongchan Park; Meeyoung Cha; Wonjae Lee
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Understanding the interplay between emotions in language and user behaviors is critical. We study how moral emotions shape the political participation of users based on cross-cultural online petition data. To quantify moral emotions, we employ a context-aware NLP model that is designed to capture the subtle nuances of emotions across cultures. For model training, we construct and share a moral emotion dataset comprising nearly 50,000 petition sentences in Korean and English each, along with emotion labels annotated by a fine-tuned LLM. We examine two distinct types of user participation: general support (i.e., registered signatures of petitions) and active support (i.e., sharing petitions on social media). We discover that moral emotions like other-suffering increase both forms of participation and help petitions go viral, while self-conscious have the opposite effect. The most prominent moral emotion, other-condemning, led to polarizing responses among the audience. In contrast, other-praising was perceived differently by culture; it led to a rise in active support in Korea but a decline in the UK. Our findings suggest that both moral emotions embedded in language and cultural perceptions are critical to shaping the public’s political discourse.
VillagerAgent: A Graph-Based Multi-Agent Framework for Coordinating Complex Task Dependencies in Minecraft
Authors: Yubo Dong; Xukun Zhu; Zhengzhe Pan; Linchao Zhu; Yi Yang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In this paper, we aim to evaluate multi-agent systems against complex dependencies, including spatial, causal, and temporal constraints. First, we construct a new benchmark, named VillagerBench, within the Minecraft environment. VillagerBench comprises diverse tasks crafted to test various aspects of multi-agent collaboration, from workload distribution to dynamic adaptation and synchronized task execution. Second, we introduce a Directed Acyclic Graph Multi-Agent Framework (VillagerAgent) to resolve complex inter-agent dependencies and enhance collaborative efficiency. This solution incorporates a task decomposer that creates a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for structured task management, an agent controller for task distribution, and a state manager for tracking environmental and agent data.Our empirical evaluation on VillagerBench demonstrates that VillagerAgentoutperforms the existing AgentVerse model, reducing hallucinations and improving task decomposition efficacy. The results underscore VillagerAgent’s potential in advancing multi-agent collaboration, offering a scalable and generalizable solution in dynamic environments. Source code is open-source on GitHub.
CF-TCIR: A Compositor-Free Framework for Hierarchical Text-Conditioned Image Retrieval
Authors: Yuchen Yang; Yu Wang; Yanfeng Wang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In text-conditioned image retrieval (TCIR), the combination of a reference image and modification text forms a query tuple, aiming to locate the most congruent target image within a dataset. The advantages of rich image semantic information and text flexibility are combined in this manner for more accurate retrieval. While traditional techniques often employ attention-driven compositors to craft a unified image-text representation, our paper introduces a compositor-free framework, CF-TCIR, which eschews the standard compositor. Compositor-based methods are designed to learn a joint representation of images and text, but they struggle to directly capture the correlations between attributes across the image and text modalities. Instead, we reformulate the retrieval process as a cross-modal interaction between a synthesized image feature and its corresponding text descriptor. This novel methodology offers advantages in terms of computational efficiency, scalability, and superior performance. To optimize the retrieval performance, we advocate a tiered retrieval mechanism, blending both coarse-grain and fine-grain paradigms. Moreover, to enrich the contextual relationship within the query tuple, we integrate a generative cross-modal alignment technique, ensuring synchronization of sequential attributes between image and text data.
DMIN: A Discourse-specific Multi-granularity Integration Network for Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis
Authors: Peijie Huang; Xisheng Xiao; Yuhong Xu; Jiawei Chen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Conversational Aspect-based Sentiment Quadruple Analysis (DiaASQ) aims to extract fine-grained sentiment quadruples from dialogues. Previous research has primarily concentrated on enhancing token-level interactions, still lacking in sufficient modeling of the discourse structure information in dialogue. Firstly, it does not incorporate interactions among different utterances in the encoding stage, resulting in a limited token-level context understanding for subsequent modules. Secondly, it ignores the critical fact that discourse information is naturally organized at the utterance level and learning it solely at the token level is incomplete. In this work, we strengthen the token-level encoder by utilizing a discourse structure called “thread” and graph convolutional networks to enhance the token interaction among different utterances. Moreover, we propose an utterance-level encoder to learn the structured speaker and reply information, providing a macro understanding of dialogue discourse. Furthermore, we introduce a novel Multi-granularities Integrator to integrate token-level and utterance-level representations, resulting in a comprehensive and cohesive dialogue contextual understanding. Experiments on two datasets demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/SIGSDSscau/DMIN.
Are Decoder-Only Language Models Better than Encoder-Only Language Models in Understanding Word Meaning?
Authors: Muhammad Reza Qorib; Geonsik Moon; Hwee Tou Ng
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The natural language processing field has been evolving around language models for the past few years, from the usage of n-gram language models for re-ranking, to transfer learning with encoder-only (BERT-like) language models, and finally to large language models (LLMs) as general solvers. LLMs are dominated by the decoder-only type, and they are popular for their efficacy in numerous tasks. LLMs are regarded as having strong comprehension abilities and strong capabilities to solve new unseen tasks. As such, people may quickly assume that decoder-only LLMs always perform better than the encoder-only ones, especially for understanding word meaning. In this paper, we demonstrate that decoder-only LLMs perform worse on word meaning comprehension than an encoder-only language model that has vastly fewer parameters.
FragRel: Exploiting Fragment-level Relations in the External Memory of Large Language Models
Authors: Xihang Yue; Linchao Zhu; Yi Yang
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: To process contexts with unlimited length using Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies explore hierarchically managing the long text. Only several text fragments are taken from the external memory and passed into the temporary working memory, i.e., LLM’s context window. However, existing approaches isolatedly handle the text fragments without considering their structural connections, thereby suffering limited capability on texts with intensive inter-relations, e.g., coherent stories and code repositories. This work attempts to resolve this by exploiting the fragment-level relations in external memory. First, we formulate the fragment-level relations and present several instantiations for different text types. Next, we introduce a relation-aware fragment assessment criteria upon previous independent fragment assessment. Finally, we present the fragment-connected Hierarchical Memory based LLM. We validate the benefits of involving these relations on long story understanding, repository-level code generation, and long-term chatting.
On the Robustness of Document-Level Relation Extraction Models to Entity Name Variations
Authors: Shiao Meng; Xuming Hu; Aiwei Liu; Fukun Ma; Yawen Yang; Shuang Li; Lijie Wen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Driven by the demand for cross-sentence and large-scale relation extraction, document-level relation extraction (DocRE) has attracted increasing research interest. Despite the continuous improvement in performance, we find that existing DocRE models which initially perform well may make more mistakes when merely changing the entity names in the document, hindering the generalization to novel entity names. To this end, we systematically investigate the robustness of DocRE models to entity name variations in this work. We first propose a principled pipeline to generate entity-renamed documents by replacing the original entity names with names from Wikidata. By applying the pipeline to DocRED and Re-DocRED datasets, we construct two novel benchmarks named Env-DocRED and Env-Re-DocRED for robustness evaluation. Experimental results show that both three representative DocRE models and two in-context learned large language models consistently lack sufficient robustness to entity name variations, particularly on cross-sentence relation instances and documents with more entities. Finally, we propose an entity variation robust training method which not only improves the robustness of DocRE models but also enhances their understanding and reasoning capabilities. We further verify that the basic idea of this method can be effectively transferred to in-context learning for DocRE as well.
RESEMO: A Benchmark Chinese Dataset for Studying Responsive Emotion from Social Media Content
Authors: Bo Hu; Meng Zhang; Chenfei Xie; Yuanhe Tian; Yan Song; Zhendong Mao
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: On social media platforms, users’ emotions are triggered when they encounter particular content from other users,where such emotions are different from those that spontaneously emerged, owing to the “responsive” nature. Analyzing the aforementioned responsive emotions from user interactions is a task of significant importance for understanding human cognition, the mechanisms of emotion generation, and behavior on the Internet, etc. Performing the task with artificial intelligence generally requires human-annotated data to help train a well-performing system, while existing data resources do not cover this specific area, with none of them focusing on responsive emotion analysis. In this paper, we propose a Chinese dataset named ResEmo for responsive emotion analysis, including 3813 posts with 68,781 comments collected from Weibo, the largest social media platform in China. ResEmo contains three types of human annotations with respect to responsive emotions, namely, responsive relationship, responsive emotion cause, and responsive emotion category. Moreover, to test this dataset, we build large language model (LLM) baseline methods for responsive relation extraction, responsive emotion cause extraction, and responsive emotion detection, which show the potential of the proposed ResEmo being a benchmark for future studies on responsive emotions.
EHR-SeqSQL : A Sequential Text-to-SQL Dataset For Interactively Exploring Electronic Health Records
Authors: Jaehee Ryu; Seonhee Cho; Gyubok Lee; Edward Choi
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce EHR-SeqSQL, a novel sequential text-to-SQL dataset for Electronic Health Record (EHR) databases. EHR-SeqSQL is designed to address critical yet underexplored aspects in text-to-SQL parsing: interactivity, compositionality, and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, EHR-SeqSQL is not only the largest but also the first medical text-to-SQL dataset benchmark to include sequential and contextual questions. We provide a data split and the new test set designed to assess compositional generalization ability. Our experiments demonstrate the superiority of a multi-turn approach over a single-turn approach in learning compositionality. Additionally, our dataset integrates specially crafted tokens into SQL queries to improve execution efficiency. With EHR-SeqSQL, we aim to bridge the gap between practical needs and academic research in the text-to-SQL domain.
KEEP CHATTING! An Attractive Dataset for Continuous Conversation Agents
Authors: Yihe Wang; Jin Liu; Yao Wan; Yitong Li; Zifeng Liu; Weipeng Chen
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Ongoing chatting is an important step for conversational agents to build long-term connections with people. However, people tend to quickly lose interest in chatting if the conversational agent’s words are not engaging enough. In this paper, we present a novel task of increasing users’ willingness to continue talking to the agent.We collect a dataset named ContinuousChat by: (i) collecting personas and revising them, and then expanding the personas to detailed-personas through experiences, daily life, future plans, or interesting stories; (ii) expanding detailed-personas into the dialogues, and inject emotions and feelings into them; (iii) rewriting the dialogues in specific styles through few-shot prompt, conditioning on handwritten style-specific examples.We benchmark LLMs on ContinuousChat Dataset using both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. Experiments over publicly available models demonstrate that although there is substantial room for improvement in generating style-specific dialogues, our ContinuousChat dataset is valuable in guiding conversational agents to generate more attractive dialogues and increase users’ willingness to continue the conversations.
RePair: Automated Program Repair with Process-based Feedback
Authors: Yuze Zhao; Zhenya Huang; Yixiao Ma; Rui Li; Kai Zhang; Hao Jiang; Qi Liu; Linbo Zhu; Yu Su
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: The gap between the trepidation of program reliability and the expense of repairs underscore the indispensability for Automated Program Repair (APR). APR is instrumental in transforming vulnerable programs into more robust ones, bolstering program reliability while simultaneously diminishing the financial burden of manual repairs. Commercial-scale language models (LM) have taken APR to unprecedented levels. However, due to the limitations of model capabilities by parameters, a one-step substantial modification may not achieve the desired effect for models with parameters less than 100B. Moreover, humans interact with the LLM through explicit prompts, which hinders the LLM from receiving feedback from compiler and test cases to automatically optimize its repair policies. Explicit prompts from humans not only increase additional manpower costs, but also pose potential misunderstandings between human’s intent and LMs.Based on the above considerations, we are exploring how to ensure small-scale LM still outperform through process supervision and feedback. We start by constructing a dataset named CodeNet4Repair, replete with multiple repair records, which supervises the fine-tuning of a foundational mode. Building upon the encouraging outcomes of reinforcement learning, we develop a reward model that serves as a critic, providing feedback for the fine-tuned LM’s action, progressively optimizing its policy. During inference, we require the LM to generate solutions iteratively until the repair effect no longer improves or hits the maximum step limit. The experimental results show that this process-based feedback not only outperforms larger outcome-based generation methods, but also nearly matches the performance of closed-source commercial large-scale LMs.
Concise and Precise Context Compression for Tool-Using Language Models
Authors: Yang Xu; Yunlong Feng; Honglin Mu; Yutai Hou; Yitong Li; Xinghao Wang; Wanjun Zhong; Zhongyang Li; Dandan Tu; Qingfu Zhu; Min Zhang; Wanxiang Che
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Through reading the documentation in the context, tool-using language models can dynamically extend their capability using external tools. The cost is that we have to input lengthy documentation every time the model needs to use the tool, occupying the input window as well as slowing down the decoding process.Given the progress in general-purpose compression, soft context compression is a suitable approach to alleviate the problem. However, when compressing tool documentation, existing methods suffer from the weaknesses of key information loss (specifically, tool/parameter name errors) and difficulty in adjusting the length of compressed sequences based on documentation lengths.To address these problems, we propose two strategies for compressing tool documentation into concise and precise summary sequences for tool-using language models. 1) Selective compression strategy mitigates key information loss by deliberately retaining key information as raw text tokens. 2) Block compression strategy involves dividing tool documentation into short chunks and then employing a fixed-length compression model to achieve variable-length compression. This strategy facilitates the flexible adjustment of the compression ratio.Results on API-Bank and APIBench show that our approach reaches a performance comparable to the upper-bound baseline under up to 16x compression ratio.
MedDec: A Dataset for Extracting Medical Decisions from Discharge Summaries
Authors: Mohamed Elgaar; Jiali Cheng; Nidhi Vakil; Hadi Amiri; Leo Anthony Celi
Venue: ACL 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024)

Abstract: Medical decisions directly impact individuals’ health and well-being. Extracting decision spans from clinical notes plays a crucial role in understanding medical decision-making processes. In this paper, we develop a new dataset called “MedDec,” which contains clinical notes of eleven different phenotypes (diseases) annotated by ten types of medical decisions. We introduce the task of medical decision extraction, aiming to jointly extract and classify different types of medical decisions within clinical notes. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the dataset, develop a span detection model as a baseline for this task, evaluate recent span detection approaches, and employ a few metrics to measure the complexity of data samples. Our findings shed light on the complexities inherent in clinical decision extraction and enable future work in this area of research. The dataset and code are available through https://github.com/CLU-UML/MedDec.
WISMIR3: A Multi-Modal Dataset to Challenge Text-Image Retrieval Approaches
Authors: Florian Schneider; Chris Biemann
Venue: ACL 2024 (Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Advances in Language and Vision Research (ALVR))

Abstract: This paper presents WISMIR3, a multi-modal dataset comprising roughly 300K text-image pairs from Wikipedia. With a sophisticated automatic ETL pipeline, we scraped, filtered, and transformed the data so that WISMIR3 intrinsically differs from other popular text-image datasets like COCO and Flickr30k. We prove this difference by comparing various linguistic statistics between the three datasets computed using the pipeline. The primary purpose of WISMIR3 is to use it as a benchmark to challenge state-of-the-art text-image retrieval approaches, which already reach around 90% Recall@5 scores on the mentioned popular datasets. Therefore, we ran several text-image retrieval experiments on our dataset using current models, which show that the models, in fact, perform significantly worse compared to evaluation results on COCO and Flickr30k. In addition, for each text-image pair, we release features computed by Faster-R-CNN and CLIP models. With this, we want to ease and motivate the use of the dataset for other researchers.