GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
MarkQA: A large scale KBQA dataset with numerical reasoning
Authors: Xiang Huang; Sitao Cheng; Yuheng Bao; Shanshan Huang; Yuzhong Qu
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While question answering over knowledge bases (KBQA) has shown progress in addressing factoid questions, KBQA with numerical reasoning remains relatively unexplored. In this paper, we focus on the complex numerical reasoning in KBQA, and propose a new task, NR-KBQA, which necessitates the ability to perform both multi-hop reasoning and numerical reasoning. We also design a logic form in Python format called PyQL to represent the reasoning process of numerical reasoning questions. To facilitate the development of NR-KBQA, we present a large NR-KBQA dataset called MarkQA, which is automatically constructed by a small set of seeds. Each question in MarkQA is annotated with its corresponding SPARQL query, alongside the step-by-step reasoning path in the QDMR format and PyQL program. Experimental results of some state-of-the-art QA methods performed on the MarkQA dataset show that complex numerical reasoning in KBQA faces great challenges.
Comparing Biases and the Impact of Multilingual Training across Multiple Languages
Authors: Sharon Levy; Neha John; Ling Liu; Yogarshi Vyas; Jie Ma; Yoshinari Fujinuma; Miguel Ballesteros; Vittorio Castelli; Dan Roth
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Studies in bias and fairness in natural language processing have primarily examined social biases within a single language and/or across few attributes (e.g. gender, race). However, biases can manifest differently across various languages for individual attributes. As a result, it is critical to examine biases within each language and attribute. Of equal importance is to study how these biases compare across languages and how the biases are affected when training a model on multilingual data versus monolingual data. We present a bias analysis across Italian, Chinese, English, Hebrew, and Spanish on the downstream sentiment analysis task to observe whether specific demographics are viewed more positively. We study bias similarities and differences across these languages and investigate the impact of multilingual vs. monolingual training data. We adapt existing sentiment bias templates in English to Italian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Spanish for four attributes: race, religion, nationality, and gender. Our results reveal similarities in bias expression such as favoritism of groups that are dominant in each language’s culture (e.g. majority religions and nationalities). Additionally, we find an increased variation in predictions across protected groups, indicating bias amplification, after multilingual finetuning in comparison to multilingual pretraining.
HutCRS: Hierarchical User-Interest Tracking for Conversational Recommender System
Authors: Mingjie Qian; Yongsen Zheng; Jinghui Qin; Liang Lin
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Conversational Recommender System (CRS) aims to explicitly acquire user preferences towards items and attributes through natural language conversations. However, existing CRS methods ask users to provide explicit answers (yes/no) for each attribute they require, regardless of users’ knowledge or interest, which may significantly reduce the user experience and semantic consistency. Furthermore, these methods assume that users like all attributes of the target item and dislike those unrelated to it, which can introduce bias in attribute-level feedback and impede the system’s ability to accurately identify the target item. To address these issues, we propose a more realistic, user-friendly, and explainable CRS framework called Hierarchical User-Interest Tracking for Conversational Recommender System (HutCRS). HutCRS portrays the conversation as a hierarchical interest tree that consists of two stages. In stage I, the system identifies the aspects that the user prefers while the system asks about attributes related to these positive aspects or recommends items in stage II. In addition, we develop a Hierarchical-Interest Policy Learning (HIPL) module to integrate the decision-making process of which aspects to ask and when to ask about attributes or recommend items. Moreover, we classify the attribute-level feedback results to further enhance the system’s ability to capture special information, such as attribute instances that are accepted by users but not presented in their historical interactive data. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The implementation of HutCRS is publicly available at https://github.com/xinle1129/HutCRS.
Large Language Models Meet Open-World Intent Discovery and Recognition: An Evaluation of ChatGPT
Authors: Xiaoshuai Song; Keqing He; Pei Wang; Guanting Dong; Yutao Mou; Jingang Wang; Yunsen Xian; Xunliang Cai; Weiran Xu
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The tasks of out-of-domain (OOD) intent discovery and generalized intent discovery (GID) aim to extend a closed intent classifier to open-world intent sets, which is crucial to task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. Previous methods address them by fine-tuning discriminative models. Recently, although some studies has been exploring the application of large language models (LLMs) represented by ChatGPT to various downstream tasks, it is still unclear for the ability of ChatGPT to discover and incrementally extent OOD intents. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate ChatGPT on OOD intent discovery and GID, and then outline the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT. Overall, ChatGPT exhibits consistent advantages under zero-shot settings, but is still at a disadvantage compared to fine-tuned models. More deeply, through a series of analytical experiments, we summarize and discuss the challenges faced by LLMs including clustering, domain-specific understanding, and cross-domain in-context learning scenarios. Finally, we provide empirical guidance for future directions to address these challenges.
The Distributional Hypothesis Does Not Fully Explain the Benefits of Masked Language Model Pretraining
Authors: Ting-Rui Chiang; Dani Yogatama
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We analyze the masked language modeling pretraining objective function from the perspective of the Distributional Hypothesis. We investigate whether the better sample efficiency and the better generalization capability of models pretrained with masked language modeling can be attributed to the semantic similarity encoded in the pretraining data’s distributional property. Via a synthetic dataset, our analysis suggests that distributional property indeed leads to the better sample efficiency of pretrained masked language models, but does not fully explain the generalization capability. We also conduct an analysis over two real-world datasets and demonstrate that the distributional property does not explain the generalization ability of pretrained natural language models either. Our results illustrate our limited understanding of model pretraining and provide future research directions.
Simple and Effective Input Reformulations for Translation
Authors: Brian Yu; Hansen Lillemark; Kurt Keutzer
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Foundation language models learn from their finetuning input context in different ways. In this paper, we reformulate inputs during finetuning for challenging translation tasks, leveraging model strengths from pretraining in novel ways to improve downstream performance. These reformulations are simple data level modifications, require no additional collection of training data or modification of data at inference time. They can be applied either on single language pair translation tasks or massively multilingual translation tasks. Experiments with these techniques demonstrate significant performance improvements up to 3.5 chrF++ on the Flores200 translation benchmark. We hope our research accessibly improves finetuning data efficiency, enabling more effective training to scalably improve state-of-the-art performance. Our code is released here.
Pointwise Mutual Information Based Metric and Decoding Strategy for Faithful Generation in Document Grounded Dialogs
Authors: Yatin Nandwani; Vineet Kumar; Dinesh Raghu; Sachindra Joshi; Luis Lastras
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: A major concern in using deep learning based generative models for document-grounded dialogs is the potential generation of responses that are not faithful to the underlying document. Existing automated metrics used for evaluating the faithfulness of response with respect to the grounding document measure the degree of similarity between the generated response and the document’s content. However, these automated metrics are far from being well aligned with human judgments. Therefore, to improve the measurement of faithfulness, we propose a new metric that utilizes (Conditional) Point-wise Mutual Information (PMI) between the generated response and the source document, conditioned on the dialogue. PMI quantifies the extent to which the document influences the generated response – with a higher PMI indicating a more faithful response. We build upon this idea to create a new decoding technique that incorporates PMI into the response generation process to predict more faithful responses. Our experiments on the BEGIN benchmark demonstrate an improved correlation of our metric with human evaluation. We also show that our decoding technique is effective in generating more faithful responses when compared to standard decoding techniques on a set of publicly available document-grounded dialog datasets.
The ACL OCL Corpus: Advancing Open Science in Computational Linguistics
Authors: Shaurya Rohatgi; Yanxia Qin; Benjamin Aw; Niranjana Unnithan; Min-Yen Kan
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We present ACL OCL, a scholarly corpus derived from the ACL Anthology to assist Open scientific research in the Computational Linguistics domain. Integrating and enhancing the previous versions of the ACL Anthology, the ACL OCL contributes metadata, PDF files, citation graphs and additional structured full texts with sections, figures, and links to a large knowledge resource (Semantic Scholar). The ACL OCL spans seven decades, containing 73K papers, alongside 210K figures. We spotlight how ACL OCL applies to observe trends in computational linguistics. By detecting paper topics with a supervised neural model, we note that interest in “Syntax: Tagging, Chunking and Parsing” is waning and “Natural Language Generation” is resurging. Our dataset is available from HuggingFace (https://huggingface.co/datasets/WINGNUS/ACL-OCL).
Using Artificial French Data to Understand the Emergence of Gender Bias in Transformer Language Models
Authors: Lina Conti; Guillaume Wisniewski
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Numerous studies have demonstrated the ability of neural language models to learn various linguistic properties without direct supervision. This work takes an initial step towards exploring the less researched topic of how neural models discover linguistic properties of words, such as gender, as well as the rules governing their usage. We propose to use an artificial corpus generated by a PCFG based on French to precisely control the gender distribution in the training data and determine under which conditions a model correctly captures gender information or, on the contrary, appears gender-biased.
Learning to Rank Context for Named Entity Recognition Using a Synthetic Dataset
Authors: Arthur Amalvy; Vincent Labatut; Richard Dufour
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While recent pre-trained transformer-based models can perform named entity recognition (NER) with great accuracy, their limited range remains an issue when applied to long documents such as whole novels. To alleviate this issue, a solution is to retrieve relevant context at the document level. Unfortunately, the lack of supervision for such a task means one has to settle for unsupervised approaches. Instead, we propose to generate a synthetic context retrieval training dataset using Alpaca, an instruction-tuned large language model (LLM). Using this dataset, we train a neural context retriever based on a BERT model that is able to find relevant context for NER. We show that our method outperforms several retrieval baselines for the NER task on an English literary dataset composed of the first chapter of 40 books.
Improving Diversity of Demographic Representation in Large Language Models via Collective-Critiques and Self-Voting
Authors: Preethi Lahoti; Nicholas Blumm; Xiao Ma; Raghavendra Kotikalapudi; Sahitya Potluri; Qijun Tan; Hansa Srinivasan; Ben Packer; Ahmad Beirami; Alex Beutel; Jilin Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: A crucial challenge for generative large language models (LLMs) is diversity: when a user’s prompt is under-specified, models may follow implicit assumptions while generating a response, which may result in homogenization of the responses, as well as certain demographic groups being under-represented or even erased from the generated responses. In this paper, we formalize the problem diversity of representation in LLM generations. We present evaluation datasets and propose metrics to measure diversity in generated responses along people and culture axes. We find that LLMs understand the notion of diversity, and that they can reason and critique their own responses for that goal. This finding motivated a new prompting technique called collective-critique and self-voting (CCSV) to self-improve people diversity of LLMs by tapping into its diversity reasoning capabilities, without relying on handcrafted examples or prompt tuning. Extensive empirical experiments with both human and automated evaluations show that our proposed approach is effective at improving people and culture diversity, and outperforms all baseline methods by a large margin.
Hidding the Ghostwriters: An Adversarial Evaluation of AI-Generated Student Essay Detection
Authors: Xinlin Peng; Ying Zhou; Ben He; Le Sun; Yingfei Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in text generation tasks. However, the utilization of these models carries inherent risks, including but not limited to plagiarism, the dissemination of fake news, and issues in educational exercises. Although several detectors have been proposed to address these concerns, their effectiveness against adversarial perturbations, specifically in the context of student essay writing, remains largely unexplored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by constructing AIG-ASAP, an AI-generated student essay dataset, employing a range of text perturbation methods that are expected to generate high-quality essays while evading detection. Through empirical experiments, we assess the performance of current AIGC detectors on the AIG-ASAP dataset. The results reveal that the existing detectors can be easily circumvented using straightforward automatic adversarial attacks. Specifically, we explore word substitution and sentence substitution perturbation methods that effectively evade detection while maintaining the quality of the generated essays. This highlights the urgent need for more accurate and robust methods to detect AI-generated student essays in the education domain. Code and data are released for public use.
Contextual Interaction for Argument Post Quality Assessment
Authors: Yiran Wang; Xuanang Chen; Ben He; Le Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recently, there has been an increased emphasis on assessing the quality of natural language arguments. Existing approaches primarily focus on evaluating the quality of individual argument posts. However, they often fall short when it comes to effectively distinguishing arguments that possess a narrow quality margin. To address this limitation, this paper delves into two alternative methods for modeling the relative quality of different arguments. These approaches include: 1) Supervised contrastive learning that captures the intricate interactions between arguments. By incorporating this approach, we aim to enhance the assessment of argument quality by effectively distinguishing between arguments with subtle differences in quality. 2) Large language models (LLMs) with in-context examples that harness the power of LLMs and enrich them with in-context examples. Through extensive evaluation and analysis on the publicly available IBM-Rank-30k dataset, we demonstrate the superiority of our contrastive argument quality assessment approach over state-of-the-art baselines. On the other hand, while LLMs with in-context examples showcase a commendable ability to identify high-quality argument posts, they exhibit relatively limited efficacy in discerning between argument posts with a narrow quality gap.
Pre-training Intent-Aware Encoders for Zero- and Few-Shot Intent Classification
Authors: Mujeen Sung; James Gung; Elman Mansimov; Nikolaos Pappas; Raphael Shu; Salvatore Romeo; Yi Zhang; Vittorio Castelli
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Intent classification (IC) plays an important role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, IC models often generalize poorly when training without sufficient annotated examples for each user intent. We propose a novel pre-training method for text encoders that uses contrastive learning with intent psuedo-labels to produce embeddings that are well-suited for IC tasks, reducing the need for manual annotations. By applying this pre-training strategy, we also introduce Pre-trained Intent-aware Encoder (PIE), which is designed to align encodings of utterances with their intent names. Specifically, we first train a tagger to identify key phrases within utterances that are crucial for interpreting intents. We then use these extracted phrases to create examples for pre-training a text encoder in a contrastive manner. As a result, our PIE model achieves up to 5.4% and 4.0% higher accuracy than the previous state-of-the-art pre-trained text encoder for the N-way zero- and one-shot settings on four IC datasets.
Synthetic Data Generation with Large Language Models for Text Classification: Potential and Limitations
Authors: Zhuoyan Li; Hangxiao Zhu; Zhuoran Lu; Ming Yin
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The collection and curation of high-quality training data is crucial for developing text classification models with superior performance, but it is often associated with significant costs and time investment. Researchers have recently explored using large language models (LLMs) to generate synthetic datasets as an alternative approach. However, the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data in supporting model training is inconsistent across different classification tasks. To better understand factors that moderate the effectiveness of the LLM-generated synthetic data, in this study, we look into how the performance of models trained on these synthetic data may vary with the subjectivity of classification. Our results indicate that subjectivity, at both the task level and instance level, is negatively associated with the performance of the model trained on synthetic data. We conclude by discussing the implications of our work on the potential and limitations of leveraging LLM for synthetic data generation.
GazeVQA: A Video Question Answering Dataset for Multiview Eye-Gaze Task-Oriented Collaborations
Authors: Muhammet Ilaslan; Chenan Song; Joya Chen; Difei Gao; Weixian Lei; Qianli Xu; Joo Lim; Mike Shou
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The usage of exocentric and egocentric videos in Video Question Answering (VQA) is a new endeavor in human-robot interaction and collaboration studies. Particularly for egocentric videos, one may leverage eye-gaze information to understand human intentions during the task. In this paper, we build a novel task-oriented VQA dataset, called GazeVQA, for collaborative tasks where gaze information is captured during the task process. GazeVQA is designed with a novel QA format that covers thirteen different reasoning types to capture multiple aspects of task information and user intent. For each participant, GazeVQA consists of more than 1,100 textual questions and more than 500 labeled images that were annotated with the assistance of the Segment Anything Model. In total, 2,967 video clips, 12,491 labeled images, and 25,040 questions from 22 participants were included in the dataset. Additionally, inspired by the assisting models and common ground theory for industrial task collaboration, we propose a new AI model called AssistGaze that is designed to answer the questions with three different answer types, namely textual, image, and video. AssistGaze can effectively ground the perceptual input into semantic information while reducing ambiguities. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate the challenges of GazeVQA and the effectiveness of AssistGaze.
People Make Better Edits: Measuring the Efficacy of LLM-Generated Counterfactually Augmented Data for Harmful Language Detection
Authors: Indira Sen; Dennis Assenmacher; Mattia Samory; Isabelle Augenstein; Wil Aalst; Claudia Wagner
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: NLP models are used in a variety of critical social computing tasks, such as detecting sexist, racist, or otherwise hateful content. Therefore, it is imperative that these models are robust to spurious features. Past work has attempted to tackle such spurious features using training data augmentation, including Counterfactually Augmented Data (CADs). CADs introduce minimal changes to existing training data points and flip their labels; training on them may reduce model dependency on spurious features. However, manually generating CADs can be time-consuming and expensive. Hence in this work, we assess if this task can be automated using generative NLP models. We automatically generate CADs using Polyjuice, ChatGPT, and Flan-T5, and evaluate their usefulness in improving model robustness compared to manually-generated CADs. By testing both model performance on multiple out-of-domain test sets and individual data point efficacy, our results show that while manual CADs are still the most effective, CADs generated by ChatGPT come a close second. One key reason for the lower performance of automated methods is that the changes they introduce are often insufficient to flip the original label.