GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
ROME: Evaluating Pre-trained Vision-Language Models on Reasoning beyond Visual Common Sense
Authors: Kankan Zhou; Eason Lai; Wei Bin Au Yeong; Kyriakos Mouratidis; Jing Jiang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Humans possess a strong capability for reasoning beyond common sense. For example, given an unconventional image of a goldfish laying on the table next to an empty fishbowl, a human would effortlessly determine that the fish is not inside the fishbowl. The case, however, may be different for a vision-language model, whose reasoning could gravitate towards the common scenario that the fish is inside the bowl, despite the visual input. In this paper, we introduce a novel probing dataset named ROME (reasoning beyond commonsense knowledge) to evaluate whether the state-of-the-art pre-trained vision-language models have the reasoning capability to correctly interpret counter-intuitive content. ROME contains images that defy commonsense knowledge with regards to color, shape, material, size and positional relation. Experiments on the state-of-the-art pre-trained vision-language models reveal that most of these models are still largely incapable of interpreting counter-intuitive scenarios. We hope that ROME will spur further investigations on reasoning beyond commonsense knowledge in vision-language research.
Automatic Analysis of Substantiation in Scientific Peer Reviews
Authors: Yanzhu Guo; Guokan Shang; Virgile Rennard; Michalis Vazirgiannis; Chloé Clavel
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: With the increasing amount of problematic peer reviews in top AI conferences, the community is urgently in need of automatic quality control measures. In this paper, we restrict our attention to substantiation — one popular quality aspect indicating whether the claims in a review are sufficiently supported by evidence — and provide a solution automatizing this evaluation process. To achieve this goal, we first formulate the problem as claim-evidence pair extraction in scientific peer reviews, and collect SubstanReview, the first annotated dataset for this task. SubstanReview consists of 550 reviews from NLP conferences annotated by domain experts. On the basis of this dataset, we train an argument mining system to automatically analyze the level of substantiation in peer reviews. We also perform data analysis on the SubstanReview dataset to obtain meaningful insights on peer reviewing quality in NLP conferences over recent years. The dataset is available at https://github.com/YanzhuGuo/SubstanReview.
Hierarchical Prompting Assists Large Language Model on Web Navigation
Authors: Robert Lo; Abishek Sridhar; Frank Xu; Hao Zhu; Shuyan Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) struggle on processing complicated observations in interactive decision making. To alleviate this issue, we propose a simple hierarchical prompting approach. Diverging from previous prompting approaches that always put the full observation (a web page) to the prompt, we propose to first construct an action-aware observation which is more condensed and relevant with a dedicated Summarizer prompt. The Actor prompt then predicts the next action based on the summarized history. While our method has broad applicability, we particularly demonstrate its efficacy in the complex domain of web navigation where a full observation often contains redundant and irrelevant information. Our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art prompting mechanism with the same LLM by 6.2% on task success rate, demonstrating its potential on interactive decision making tasks with long observation traces.
Can Large Language Models Fix Data Annotation Errors? An Empirical Study Using Debatepedia for Query-Focused Text Summarization
Authors: Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar; Mizanur Rahman; Israt Jahan; Enamul Hoque; Jimmy Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Debatepedia is a publicly available dataset consisting of arguments and counter-arguments on controversial topics that has been widely used for the single-document query-focused abstractive summarization task in recent years. However, it has been recently found that this dataset is limited by noise and even most queries in this dataset do not have any relevance to the respective document. In this paper, we study whether large language models (LLMs) can be utilized to clean the Debatepedia dataset to make it suitable for query-focused abstractive summarization. More specifically, we harness the language generation capabilities of two LLMs, namely, ChatGPT and PaLM to regenerate its queries. Based on our experiments, we find that solely depending on large language models for query correction may not be very useful for data cleaning. However, we observe that leveraging a rule-based approach for data sampling followed by query regeneration using LLMs (especially ChatGPT) for the sampled instances may ensure a higher quality version of this dataset suitable for the development of more generalized query-focused text summarization models.
TSTR: Target Similarity Tuning Meets the Real World
Authors: Anirudh Khatry; Sumit Gulwani; Priyanshu Gupta; Vu Le; Mukul Singh; Ananya Singha; Gust Verbruggen
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Target similarity tuning (TST) is a method of selecting relevant examples in natural language (NL) to code generation through large language models (LLMs) to improve performance. Its goal is to adapt a sentence embedding model to have the similarity between two NL inputs match the similarity between their associated code outputs. In this paper, we propose different methods to apply and improve TST in the real world. First, we replace the sentence transformer with embeddings from a larger model, which reduces sensitivity to the language distribution and thus provides more flexibility in synthetic generation of examples, and we train a tiny model that transforms these embeddings to a space where embedding similarity matches code similarity, which allows the model to remain a black box and only requires a few matrix multiplications at inference time. Second, we how to efficiently select a smaller number of training examples to train the TST model. Third, we introduce a ranking-based evaluation for TST that does not require end-to-end code generation experiments, which can be expensive to perform.
RealBehavior: A Framework for Faithfully Characterizing Foundation Models’ Human-like Behavior Mechanisms
Authors: Enyu Zhou; Rui Zheng; Zhiheng Xi; Songyang Gao; Xiaoran Fan; Zichu Fei; Jingting Ye; Tao Gui; Qi Zhang; Xuanjing Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Reports of human-like behaviors in foundation models are growing, with psychological theories providing enduring tools to investigate these behaviors. However, current research tends to directly apply these human-oriented tools without verifying the faithfulness of their outcomes. In this paper, we introduce a framework, RealBehavior, which is designed to characterize the humanoid behaviors of models faithfully. Beyond simply measuring behaviors, our framework assesses the faithfulness of results based on reproducibility, internal and external consistency, and generalizability. Our findings suggest that a simple application of psychological tools cannot faithfully characterize all human-like behaviors. Moreover, we discuss the impacts of aligning models with human and social values, arguing for the necessity of diversifying alignment objectives to prevent the creation of models with restricted characteristics.
Unraveling Downstream Gender Bias from Large Language Models: A Study on AI Educational Writing Assistance
Authors: Thiemo Wambsganss; Xiaotian Su; Vinitra Swamy; Seyed Parsa Neshaei; Roman Rietsche; Tanja Käser
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly utilized in educational tasks such as providing writing suggestions to students. Despite their potential, LLMs are known to harbor inherent biases which may negatively impact learners. Previous studies have investigated bias in models and data representations separately, neglecting the potential impact of LLM bias on human writing. In this paper, we investigate how bias transfers through an AI writing support pipeline. We conduct a large-scale user study with 231 students writing business case peer reviews in German. Students are divided into five groups with different levels of writing support: one in-classroom group with recommender system feature-based suggestions and four groups recruited from Prolific – a control group with no assistance, two groups with suggestions from fine-tuned GPT-2 and GPT-3 models, and one group with suggestions from pre-trained GPT-3.5. Using GenBit gender bias analysis and Word Embedding Association Tests (WEAT), we evaluate the gender bias at various stages of the pipeline: in reviews written by students, in suggestions generated by the models, and in model embeddings directly. Our results demonstrate that there is no significant difference in gender bias between the resulting peer reviews of groups with and without LLM suggestions. Our research is therefore optimistic about the use of AI writing support in the classroom, showcasing a context where bias in LLMs does not transfer to students’ responses.
VERVE: Template-based ReflectiVE Rewriting for MotiVational IntErviewing
Authors: Do June Min; Veronica Perez-Rosas; Ken Resnicow; Rada Mihalcea
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Reflective listening is a fundamental skill that counselors must acquire to achieve proficiency in motivational interviewing (MI). It involves responding in a manner that acknowledges and explores the meaning of what the client has expressed in the conversation. In this work, we introduce the task of counseling response rewriting, which transforms non-reflective statements into reflective responses. We introduce VERVE, a template-based rewriting system with paraphrase-augmented training and adaptive template updating. VERVE first creates a template by identifying and filtering out tokens that are not relevant to reflections and constructs a reflective response using the template. Paraphrase-augmented training allows the model to learn less-strict fillings of masked spans, and adaptive template updating helps discover effective templates for rewriting without significantly removing the original content. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we compare our method against text rewriting baselines and show that our framework is effective in turning non-reflective statements into more reflective responses while achieving a good content preservation-reflection style trade-off.
Self-Knowledge Guided Retrieval Augmentation for Large Language Models
Authors: Yile Wang; Peng Li; Maosong Sun; Yang Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown superior performance without task-specific fine-tuning. Despite the success, the knowledge stored in the parameters of LLMs could still be incomplete and difficult to update due to the computational costs. As complementary, retrieval-based methods can offer non-parametric world knowledge and improve the performance on tasks such as question answering. However, we find that the retrieved knowledge does not always help and even has a negative impact on original responses occasionally. To better make use of both internal knowledge and external world knowledge, we investigate eliciting the model’s ability to recognize what they know and do not know (which is also called “self-knowledge”) and propose Self-Knowledge guided Retrieval augmentation (SKR), a simple yet effective method which can let LLMs refer to the questions they have previously encountered and adaptively call for external resources when dealing with new questions. We evaluate SKR on multiple datasets and demonstrate that it outperforms chain-of-thought based and fully retrieval-based methods by using either InstructGPT or ChatGPT.
Pretraining Language Models with Text-Attributed Heterogeneous Graphs
Authors: Tao Zou; Le Yu; Yifei Huang; Leilei Sun; Bowen Du
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: In many real-world scenarios (e.g., academic networks, social platforms), different types of entities are not only associated with texts but also connected by various relationships, which can be abstracted as Text-Attributed Heterogeneous Graphs (TAHGs). Current pretraining tasks for Language Models (LMs) primarily focus on separately learning the textual information of each entity and overlook the crucial aspect of capturing topological connections among entities in TAHGs. In this paper, we present a new pretraining framework for LMs that explicitly considers the topological and heterogeneous information in TAHGs. Firstly, we define a context graph as neighborhoods of a target node within specific orders and propose a topology-aware pretraining task to predict nodes involved in the context graph by jointly optimizing an LM and an auxiliary heterogeneous graph neural network. Secondly, based on the observation that some nodes are text-rich while others have little text, we devise a text augmentation strategy to enrich textless nodes with their neighbors’ texts for handling the imbalance issue. We conduct link prediction and node classification tasks on three datasets from various domains. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing methods and the rationality of each design. Our code is available at https://github.com/Hope-Rita/THLM.
CReTIHC: Designing Causal Reasoning Tasks about Temporal Interventions and Hallucinated Confoundings
Authors: Changwoo Chun; SongEun Lee; Jaehyung Seo; Heuiseok Lim
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language processing. However, their ability to establish causal relationships, particularly in the context of temporal interventions and language hallucinations, remains challenging. This paper presents CReTIHC, a novel dataset designed to test and enhance the causal reasoning abilities of LLMs. The dataset is constructed using a unique approach that incorporates elements of verbal hallucinations and temporal interventions through the reengineering of existing causal inference datasets. This transformation creates complex scenarios that push LLMs to critically evaluate the information presented and identify cause-and-effect relationships. The CReTIHC dataset serves as a pioneering tool for improving LLM’s causal inference capabilities, paving the way for a more nuanced understanding of causal relationships in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The whole dataset is publicly accessible at: (https://github.com/ChangwooChun/CReTIHC)
On the Dimensionality of Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Hongwei Wang; Hongming Zhang; Dong Yu
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Learning sentence embeddings is a fundamental problem in natural language processing. While existing research primarily focuses on enhancing the quality of sentence embeddings, the exploration of sentence embedding dimensions is limited. Here we present a comprehensive and empirical analysis of the dimensionality of sentence embeddings. First, we demonstrate that the optimal dimension of sentence embeddings is usually smaller than the default value. Subsequently, to compress the dimension of sentence embeddings with minimum performance degradation, we identify two components contributing to the overall performance loss: the encoder’s performance loss and the pooler’s performance loss. Therefore, we propose a two-step training method for sentence representation learning models, wherein the encoder and the pooler are optimized separately to mitigate the overall performance loss in low-dimension scenarios. Experimental results on seven STS tasks and seven sentence classification tasks demonstrate that our method significantly improves the performance of low-dimensional sentence embeddings.
Pit One Against Many: Leveraging Attention-head Embeddings for Parameter-efficient Multi-head Attention
Authors: Huiyin Xue; Nikolaos Aletras
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Scaling pre-trained language models has resulted in large performance gains in various natural language processing tasks but comes with a large cost in memory requirements. Inspired by the position embeddings in transformers, we aim to simplify and reduce the memory footprint of the multi-head attention (MHA) mechanism. We propose an alternative module that uses only a single shared projection matrix and multiple head embeddings (MHE), i.e. one per head. We empirically demonstrate that our MHE attention is substantially more memory efficient compared to alternative attention mechanisms while achieving high predictive performance retention ratio to vanilla MHA on several downstream tasks. MHE attention only requires a negligible fraction of additional parameters (3nd, where n is the number of attention heads and d the size of the head embeddings) compared to a single-head attention, while MHA requires (3n2-3n)d2-3nd additional parameters.
Entity-Based Evaluation of Political Bias in Automatic Summarization
Authors: Karen Zhou; Chenhao Tan
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Growing literature has shown that NLP systems may encode social biases; however, the *political* bias of summarization models remains relatively unknown. In this work, we use an entity replacement method to investigate the portrayal of politicians in automatically generated summaries of news articles. We develop an entity-based computational framework to assess the sensitivities of several extractive and abstractive summarizers to the politicians Donald Trump and Joe Biden. We find consistent differences in these summaries upon entity replacement, such as reduced emphasis of Trump’s presence in the context of the same article and a more individualistic representation of Trump with respect to the collective US government (i.e., administration). These summary dissimilarities are most prominent when the entity is heavily featured in the source article. Our characterization provides a foundation for future studies of bias in summarization and for normative discussions on the ideal qualities of automatic summaries.
StyleBART: Decorate Pretrained Model with Style Adapters for Unsupervised Stylistic Headline Generation
Authors: Hanqing Wang; Yajing Luo; Boya Xiong; Guanhua Chen; Yun Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: Stylistic headline generation is the task to generate a headline that not only summarizes the content of an article, but also reflects a desired style that attracts users. As style-specific article-headline pairs are scarce, previous researches focus on unsupervised approaches with a standard headline generation dataset and mono-style corpora. In this work, we follow this line and propose StyleBART, an unsupervised approach for stylistic headline generation. Our method decorates the pretrained BART model with adapters that are responsible for different styles and allows the generation of headlines with diverse styles by simply switching the adapters. Different from previous works, StyleBART separates the task of style learning and headline generation, making it possible to freely combine the base model and the style adapters during inference. We further propose an inverse paraphrasing task to enhance the style adapters. Extensive automatic and human evaluations show that StyleBART achieves new state-of-the-art performance in the unsupervised stylistic headline generation task, producing high-quality headlines with the desired style.
RSVP: Customer Intent Detection via Agent Response Contrastive and Generative Pre-Training
Authors: Yu-Chien Tang; Wei-Yao Wang; An-Zi Yen; Wen-Chih Peng
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: The dialogue systems in customer services have been developed with neural models to provide users with precise answers and round-the-clock support in task-oriented conversations by detecting customer intents based on their utterances. Existing intent detection approaches have highly relied on adaptively pre-training language models with large-scale datasets, yet the predominant cost of data collection may hinder their superiority. In addition, they neglect the information within the conversational responses of the agents, which have a lower collection cost, but are significant to customer intent as agents must tailor their replies based on the customers’ intent. In this paper, we propose RSVP, a self-supervised framework dedicated to task-oriented dialogues, which utilizes agent responses for pre-training in a two-stage manner. Specifically, we introduce two pre-training tasks to incorporate the relations of utterance-response pairs: 1) Response Retrieval by selecting a correct response from a batch of candidates, and 2) Response Generation by mimicking agents to generate the response to a given utterance. Our benchmark results for two real-world customer service datasets show that RSVP significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by 4.95% for accuracy, 3.4% for MRR@3, and 2.75% for MRR@5 on average. Extensive case studies are investigated to show the validity of incorporating agent responses into the pre-training stage.
Improving Low-resource Question Answering by Augmenting Question Information
Authors: Andong Chen; Yuan Sun; Xiaobing Zhao; Rosella Galindo Esparza; Kehai Chen; Yang Xiang; Tiejun Zhao; Min Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2023 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023)

Abstract: In the era of large models, low-resource question-answering tasks lag, emphasizing the importance of data augmentation - a key research avenue in natural language processing. The main challenges include leveraging the large model’s internal knowledge for data augmentation, determining which QA data component - the question, passage, or answer - benefits most from augmentation, and retaining consistency in the augmented content without inducing excessive noise. To tackle these, we introduce PQQ, an innovative approach for question data augmentation consisting of Prompt Answer, Question Generation, and Question Filter. Our experiments reveal that ChatGPT underperforms on the experimental data, yet our PQQ method excels beyond existing augmentation strategies. Further, its universal applicability is validated through successful tests on high-resource QA tasks like SQUAD1.1 and TriviaQA.