GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
VHASR: A Multimodal Speech Recognition System With Vision Hotwords
Authors: Jiliang Hu; Zuchao Li; Ping Wang; Haojun Ai; Lefei Zhang; Hai Zhao
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The image-based multimodal automatic speech recognition (ASR) model enhances speech recognition performance by incorporating audio-related image. However, some works suggest that introducing image information to model does not help improving ASR performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach effectively utilizing audio-related image information and set up VHASR, a multimodal speech recognition system that uses vision as hotwords to strengthen the model’s speech recognition capability. Our system utilizes a dual-stream architecture, which firstly transcribes the text on the two streams separately, and then combines the outputs. We evaluate the proposed model on four datasets: Flickr8k, ADE20k, COCO, and OpenImages. The experimental results show that VHASR can effectively utilize key information in images to enhance the model’s speech recognition ability. Its performance not only surpasses unimodal ASR, but also achieves SOTA among existing image-based multimodal ASR.
Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs
Authors: Yaoke Wang; Yun Zhu; Wenqiao Zhang; Yueting Zhuang; Yunfei Li; Siliang Tang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is vital for real-world applications, as they combine semantic textual and contextual structural information. Research in this field generally consist of two main perspectives: local-level encoding and global-level aggregating, respectively refer to textual node information unification (e.g., using Language Models) and structure-augmented modeling (e.g., using Graph Neural Networks). Most existing works focus on combining different information levels but overlook the interconnections, i.e., the contextual textual information among nodes, which provides semantic insights to bridge local and global levels. In this paper, we propose GraphBridge, a multi-granularity integration framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information, enhancing fine-grained understanding of TAGs. Besides, to tackle scalability and efficiency challenges, we introduce a graph-aware token reduction module. Extensive experiments across various models and datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while our graph-aware token reduction module significantly enhances efficiency and solves scalability issues. Codes are available at https://github.com/wykk00/GraphBridge.
Building Resources for Emakhuwa: Machine Translation and News Classification Benchmarks
Authors: Felermino D. M. A. Ali; Henrique Lopes Cardoso; Rui Sousa-Silva
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper introduces a comprehensive collection of NLP resources for Emakhuwa, Mozambique’s most widely spoken language. The resources include the first manually translated news bitext corpus between Portuguese and Emakhuwa, news topic classification datasets, and monolingual data. We detail the process and challenges of acquiring this data and present benchmark results for machine translation and news topic classification tasks. Our evaluation examines the impact of different data types—originally clean text, post-corrected OCR, and back-translated data—and the effects of fine-tuning from pre-trained models, including those focused on African languages.Our benchmarks demonstrate good performance in news topic classification and promising results in machine translation. We fine-tuned multilingual encoder-decoder models using real and synthetic data and evaluated them on our test set and the FLORES evaluation sets. The results highlight the importance of incorporating more data and potential for future improvements.All models, code, and datasets are available in the https://huggingface.co/LIACC repository under the CC BY 4.0 license.
RepMatch: Quantifying Cross-Instance Similarities in Representation Space
Authors: Mohammad Reza Modarres; Sina Abbasi; Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Advances in dataset analysis techniques have enabled more sophisticated approaches to analyzing and characterizing training data instances, often categorizing data based on attributes such as “difficulty”. In this work, we introduce RepMatch, a novel method that characterizes data through the lens of similarity.RepMatch quantifies the similarity between subsets of training instances by comparing the knowledge encoded in models trained on them, overcoming the limitations of existing analysis methods that focus solely on individual instances and are restricted to within-dataset analysis.Our framework allows for a broader evaluation, enabling similarity comparisons across arbitrary subsets of instances, supporting both dataset-to-dataset and instance-to-dataset analyses. We validate the effectiveness of RepMatch across multiple NLP tasks, datasets, and models. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that RepMatch can effectively compare datasets, identify more representative subsets of a dataset (that lead to better performance than randomly selected subsets of equivalent size), and uncover heuristics underlying the construction of some challenge datasets.
Commonsense Knowledge Editing Based on Free-Text in LLMs
Authors: Xiusheng Huang; Yequan Wang; Jun Zhao; Kang Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Knowledge editing technology is crucial for maintaining the accuracy and timeliness of large language models (LLMs) . However, the setting of this task overlooks a significant portion of commonsense knowledge based on free-text in the real world, characterized by broad knowledge scope, long content and non instantiation. The editing objects of previous methods (e.g., MEMIT) were single token or entity, which were not suitable for commonsense knowledge in free-text form. To address the aforementioned challenges, we conducted experiments from two perspectives: knowledge localization and knowledge editing. Firstly, we introduced Knowledge Localization for Free-Text(KLFT) method, revealing the challenges associated with the distribution of commonsense knowledge in MLP and Attention layers, as well as in decentralized distribution. Next, we propose a Dynamics-aware Editing Method(DEM), which utilizes a Dynamics-aware Module to locate the parameter positions corresponding to commonsense knowledge, and uses Knowledge Editing Module to update knowledge. The DEM method fully explores the potential of the MLP and Attention layers, and successfully edits commonsense knowledge based on free-text. The experimental results indicate that the DEM can achieve excellent editing performance.
A Closer Look at Multidimensional Online Political Incivility
Authors: Sagi Pendzel; Nir Lotan; Alon Zoizner; Einat Minkov
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Toxic online political discourse has become prevalent, where scholars debate about its impact to Democratic processes. This work presents a large-scale study of political incivility on Twitter. In line with theories of political communication, we differentiate between harsh ‘impolite’ style and intolerant substance. We present a dataset of 13K political tweets in the U.S. context, which we collected and labeled by those categories using crowd sourcing. Our dataset and results shed light on hostile political discourse focused on partisan conflicts in the U.S. The evaluation of state-of-the-art classifiers illustrates the challenges involved in political incivility detection, which often requires high-level semantic and social understanding. Nevertheless, performing incivility detection at scale, we are able to characterise its distribution across individual users and geopolitical regions, where our findings align and extend existing theories of political communication. In particular, we find that roughly 80% of the uncivil tweets are authored by 20% of the users, where users who are politically engaged are more inclined to use uncivil language. We further find that political incivility exhibits network homophily, and that incivility is more prominent in highly competitive geopolitical regions. Our results apply to both uncivil style and substance.
Leveraging BERT and TFIDF Features for Short Text Clustering via Alignment-Promoting Co-Training
Authors: Zetong Li; Qinliang Su; Shijing Si; Jianxing Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: BERT and TFIDF features excel in capturing rich semantics and important words, respectively. Since most existing clustering methods are solely based on the BERT model, they often fall short in utilizing keyword information, which, however, is very useful in clustering short texts. In this paper, we propose a **CO**-**T**raining **C**lustering (**COTC**) framework to make use of the collective strengths of BERT and TFIDF features. Specifically, we develop two modules responsible for the clustering of BERT and TFIDF features, respectively. We use the deep representations and cluster assignments from the TFIDF module outputs to guide the learning of the BERT module, seeking to align them at both the representation and cluster levels. Reversely, we also use the BERT module outputs to train the TFIDF module, thus leading to the mutual promotion. We then show that the alternating co-training framework can be placed under a unified joint training objective, which allows the two modules to be connected tightly and the training signals to be propagated efficiently. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms current SOTA methods significantly.
Applying Intrinsic Debiasing on Downstream Tasks: Challenges and Considerations for Machine Translation
Authors: Bar Iluz; Yanai Elazar; Asaf Yehudai; Gabriel Stanovsky
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Most works on gender bias focus on intrinsic bias — removing traces of information about a protected group from the model’s internal representation. However, these works are often disconnected from the impact of such debiasing on downstream applications, which is the main motivation for debiasing in the first place. In this work, we systematically test how methods for intrinsic debiasing affect neural machine translation models, by measuring the extrinsic bias of such systems under different design choices. We highlight three challenges and mismatches between the debiasing techniques and their end-goal usage, including the choice of embeddings to debias, the mismatch between words and sub-word tokens debiasing, and the effect on different target languages. We find that these considerations have a significant impact on downstream performance and the success of debiasing.
Unsupervised Named Entity Disambiguation for Low Resource Domains
Authors: Debarghya Datta; Soumajit Pramanik
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In the ever-evolving landscape of natural language processing and information retrieval, the need for robust and domain-specific entity linking algorithms has become increasingly apparent. It is crucial in a considerable number of fields such as humanities, technical writing and biomedical sciences to enrich texts with semantics and discover more knowledge. The use of Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) in such domains requires handling noisy texts, low resource settings and domain-specific KBs. Existing approaches are mostly inappropriate for such scenarios, as they either depend on training data or are not flexible enough to work with domain-specific KBs. Thus in this work, we present a unsupervised approach leveraging the concept of Group Steiner Trees (GST), which can identify the most relevant candidate for entity disambiguation using the contextual similarities across candidate entities for all the mentions present in a document. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by more than 40%(in avg) in terms of Precision@1 and Hit@5 across various domain-specific datasets.
SparseGrad: A Selective Method for Efficient Fine-tuning of MLP Layers
Authors: Viktoriia A. Chekalina; Anna Rudenko; Gleb Mezentsev; Aleksandr Mikhalev; Alexander Panchenko; Ivan Oseledets
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The performance of Transformer models has been enhanced by increasing the number of parameters and the length of the processed text. Consequently, fine-tuning the entire model becomes a memory-intensive process. High-performance methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) typically work with Attention blocks and often overlook MLP blocks, which contain about half of the model parameters. We propose a new selective PEFT method, namely SparseGrad, that performs well on MLP blocks. We transfer layer gradients to a space where only about 1% of the layer’s elements remain significant. By converting gradients into a sparse structure, we reduce the number of updated parameters. We apply SparseGrad to fine-tune BERT and RoBERTa for the NLU task and LLaMa-2 for the Question-Answering task. In these experiments, with identical memory requirements, our method outperforms LoRA and MeProp, robust popular state-of-the-art PEFT approaches.
MoCoKGC: Momentum Contrast Entity Encoding for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Qingyang Li; Yanru Zhong; Yuchu Qin
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: In recent years, numerous studies have sought to enhance the capabilities of pretrained language models (PLMs) for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) tasks by integrating structural information from knowledge graphs. However, existing approaches have not effectively combined the structural attributes of knowledge graphs with the textual descriptions of entities to generate robust entity encodings.To address this issue, this paper proposes MoCoKGC (Momentum Contrast Entity Encoding for Knowledge Graph Completion), which incorporates three primary encoders: the entity-relation encoder, the entity encoder, and the momentum entity encoder. Momentum contrastive learning not only provides more negative samples but also allows for the gradual updating of entity encodings. Consequently, we reintroduce the generated entity encodings into the encoder to incorporate the graph’s structural information.Additionally, MoCoKGC enhances the inferential capabilities of the entity-relation encoder through deep prompts of relations. On the standard evaluation metric, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), the MoCoKGC model demonstrates superior performance, achieving a 7.1% improvement on the WN18RR dataset and an 11% improvement on the Wikidata5M dataset, while also surpassing the current best model on the FB15k-237 dataset. Through a series of experiments, this paper thoroughly examines the role and contribution of each component and parameter of the model.
ActPlan-1K: Benchmarking the Procedural Planning Ability of Visual Language Models in Household Activities
Authors: Ying Su; Zhan Ling; Haochen Shi; Cheng Jiayang; Yauwai Yim; Yangqiu Song
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models(LLMs) have been adopted to process textual task description and accomplish procedural planning in embodied AI tasks because of their powerful reasoning ability. However, there is still lack of study on how vision language models(VLMs) behave when multi-modal task inputs are considered. Counterfactual planning that evaluates the model’s reasoning ability over alternative task situations are also under exploited. In order to evaluate the planning ability of both multi-modal and counterfactual aspects, we propose ActPlan-1K. ActPlan-1K is a multi-modal planning benchmark constructed based on ChatGPT and household activity simulator iGibson2. The benchmark consists of 153 activities and 1,187 instances. Each instance describing one activity has a natural language task description and multiple environment images from the simulator. The gold plan of each instance is action sequences over the objects in provided scenes. Both the correctness and commonsense satisfaction are evaluated on typical VLMs. It turns out that current VLMs are still struggling at generating human-level procedural plans for both normal activities and counterfactual activities. We further provide automatic evaluation metrics by finetuning over BLEURT model to facilitate future research on our benchmark.
Shortcuts Arising from Contrast: Towards Effective and Lightweight Clean-Label Attacks in Prompt-Based Learning
Authors: Xiaopeng Xie; Ming Yan; Xiwen Zhou; Chenlong Zhao; Suli Wang; Yong Zhang; Joey Tianyi Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Prompt-based learning paradigm has been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Current clean-label attack, employing a specific prompt as trigger, can achieve success without the need for external triggers and ensuring correct labeling of poisoned samples, which are more stealthy compared to the poisoned-label attack, but on the other hand, facing significant issues with false activations and pose greater challenges, necessitating a higher rate of poisoning. Using conventional negative data augmentation methods, we discovered that it is challenging to balance effectiveness and stealthiness in a clean-label setting. In addressing this issue, we are inspired by the notion that a backdoor acts as a shortcut, and posit that this shortcut stems from the contrast between the trigger and the data utilized for poisoning. In this study, we propose a method named Contrastive Shortcut Injection (CSI), by leveraging activation values, integrates trigger design and data selection strategies to craft stronger shortcut features. With extensive experiments on full-shot and few-shot text classification tasks, we empirically validate CSI’s high effectiveness and high stealthiness at low poisoning rates.
RaTEScore: A Metric for Radiology Report Generation
Authors: Weike Zhao; Chaoyi Wu; Xiaoman Zhang; Ya Zhang; Yanfeng Wang; Weidi Xie
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel, entity-aware metric, termed as Radiological Report (Text) Evaluation (RaTEScore), to assess the quality of medical reports generated by AI models. RaTEScore emphasizes crucial medical entities such as diagnostic outcomes and anatomical details, and is robust against complex medical synonyms and sensitive to negation expressions. Technically, we developed a comprehensive medical NER dataset, RaTE-NER, and trained an NER model specifically for this purpose. This model enables the decomposition of complex radiological reports into constituent medical entities. The metric itself is derived by comparing the similarity of entity embeddings, obtained from a language model, based on their types and relevance to clinical significance. Our evaluations demonstrate that RaTEScore aligns more closely with human preference than existing metrics, validated both on established public benchmarks and our newly proposed RaTE-Eval benchmark.
HalluMeasure: Fine-grained Hallucination Measurement Using Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Shayan Ali Akbar; Md Mosharaf Hossain; Tess Wood; Si-Chi Chin; Erica M Salinas; Victor Alvarez; Erwin Cornejo
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Automating the measurement of hallucinations in LLM generated responses is a challenging task as it requires careful investigation of each factual claim in a response. In this paper, we introduce HalluMeasure, a new LLM-based hallucination detection mechanism that decomposes an LLM response into atomic claims, and evaluates each atomic claim against the provided reference context. The model uses a step-by-step reasoning process called Chain-of-Thought and can identify 3 major categories of hallucinations (e.g., contradiction) as well as 10 more specific subtypes (e.g., overgeneralization) which help to identify reasons behind the hallucination errors. Specifically, we explore four different configurations for HalluMeasure’s classifier: with and without CoT prompting, and using a single classifier call to classify all claims versus separate calls for each claim. The best-performing configuration (with CoT and separate calls for each claim) demonstrates significant improvements in detecting hallucinations, achieving a 10-point increase in F1 score on our TechNewsSumm dataset, and a 3-point increase in AUC ROC on the SummEval dataset, compared to three baseline models (RefChecker, AlignScore, and Vectara HHEM). We further show reasonable accuracy on detecting 10 novel error subtypes of hallucinations (where even humans struggle in classification) derived from linguistic analysis of the errors made by the LLMs.
Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization
Authors: Sajad Sotudeh; Nazli Goharian
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: This study examines the potential of integrating Learning-to-Rank (LTR) with Query-focused Summarization (QFS) to enhance the summary relevance via content prioritization. Using a shared secondary decoder with the summarization decoder, we carry out the LTR task at the segment level. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our model outperforms on QMSum benchmark (all metrics) and matches on SQuALITY benchmark (2 metrics) as measured by Rouge and BertScore while offering a lower training overhead. Specifically, on the QMSum benchmark, our proposed system achieves improvements, particularly in Rouge-L (+0.42) and BertScore (+0.34), indicating enhanced understanding and relevance. While facing minor challenges in Rouge-1 and Rouge-2 scores on the SQuALITY benchmark, the model significantly excels in Rouge-L (+1.47), underscoring its capability to generate coherent summaries. Human evaluations emphasize the efficacy of our method in terms of relevance and faithfulness of the generated summaries, without sacrificing fluency. A deeper analysis reveals our model’s superiority over the state-of-the-art for broad queries, as opposed to specific ones, from a qualitative standpoint. We further present an error analysis of our model, pinpointing challenges faced and suggesting potential directions for future research in this field.