GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Can Machines Resonate with Humans? Evaluating the Emotional and Empathic Comprehension of LMs
Authors: Muhammad Arslan Manzoor; Yuxia Wang; Minghan Wang; Preslav Nakov
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Empathy plays a pivotal role in fostering prosocial behavior, often triggered by the sharing of personal experiences through narratives. However, modeling empathy using NLP approaches remains challenging due to its deep interconnection with human interaction dynamics. Previous approaches, which involve fine-tuning language models (LMs) on human-annotated empathic datasets, have had limited success. In our pursuit of improving empathy understanding in LMs, we propose several strategies, including contrastive learning with masked LMs and supervised fine-tuning with large language models. While these methods show improvements over previous methods, the overall results remain unsatisfactory. To better understand this trend, we performed an analysis which reveals a low agreement among annotators. This lack of consensus hinders training and highlights the subjective nature of the task. We also explore the cultural impact on annotations. To study this, we meticulously collected story pairs in Urdu language and find that subjectivity in interpreting empathy among annotators appears to be independent of cultural background. Our systematic exploration of LMs’ understanding of empathy reveals substantial opportunities for further investigation in both task formulation and modeling.
EU DisinfoTest: a Benchmark for Evaluating Language Models’ Ability to Detect Disinformation Narratives
Authors: Witold Sosnowski; Arkadiusz Modzelewski; Kinga Skorupska; Jahna Otterbacher; Adam Wierzbicki
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: As narratives shape public opinion and influence societal actions, distinguishing between truthful and misleading narratives has become a significant challenge. To address this, we introduce the EU DisinfoTest, a novel benchmark designed to evaluate the efficacy of Language Models in identifying disinformation narratives. Developed through a Human-in-the-Loop methodology and grounded in research from EU DisinfoLab, the EU DisinfoTest comprises more than 1,300 narratives. Our benchmark includes persuasive elements under Logos, Pathos, and Ethos rhetorical dimensions. We assessed state-of-the-art LLMs, including the newly released GPT-4o, on their capability to perform zero-shot classification of disinformation narratives versus credible narratives. Our findings reveal that LLMs tend to regard narratives with authoritative appeals as trustworthy, while those with emotional appeals are frequently incorrectly classified as disinformative. These findings highlight the challenges LLMs face in nuanced content interpretation and suggest the need for tailored adjustments in LLM training to better handle diverse narrative structures.
From Reading to Compressing: Exploring the Multi-document Reader for Prompt Compression
Authors: Eunseong Choi; Sunkyung Lee; Minjin Choi; Jun Park; Jongwuk Lee
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant performance gains using advanced prompting techniques over various tasks. However, the increasing length of prompts leads to high computational costs and often obscures crucial information. Prompt compression has been proposed to alleviate these issues, but it faces challenges in (i) capturing the global context and (ii) training the compressor effectively. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a novel prompt compression method, namely Reading To Compressing (R2C), utilizing the Fusion-in-Decoder (FiD) architecture to identify the important information in the prompt. Specifically, the cross-attention scores of the FiD are used to discern essential chunks and sentences from the prompt. R2C effectively captures the global context without compromising semantic consistency while detouring the necessity of pseudo-labels for training the compressor. Empirical results show that R2C retains key contexts, enhancing the LLM performance by 6% in out-of-domain evaluations while reducing the prompt length by 80%.
Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Xinyu Feng; Yuming Lin; Lihua He; You Li; Liang Chang; Ya Zhou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) utilizes multimodal data to infer the users’ sentiment. Previous methods focus on equally treating the contribution of each modality or statically using text as the dominant modality to conduct interaction, which neglects the situation where each modality may become dominant. In this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Guided Dynamic Modality Attention Fusion Framework (KuDA) for multimodal sentiment analysis. KuDA uses sentiment knowledge to guide the model dynamically selecting the dominant modality and adjusting the contributions of each modality. In addition, with the obtained multimodal representation, the model can further highlight the contribution of dominant modality through the correlation evaluation loss. Extensive experiments on four MSA benchmark datasets indicate that KuDA achieves state-of-the-art performance and is able to adapt to different scenarios of dominant modality.
LexMatcher: Dictionary-centric Data Curation for LLM-based Machine Translation
Authors: Yongjing Yin; Jiali Zeng; Yafu Li; Fandong Meng; Yue Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: The fine-tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) for machine translation has recently received considerable attention, marking a shift towards data-centric research from traditional neural machine translation. However, the area of data collection for instruction fine-tuning in machine translation remains relatively underexplored. In this paper, we present LexMatcher, a simple yet effective method for data curation,the design of which is driven by the coverage of senses found in bilingual dictionaries. The construction process comprises data retrieval from an existing corpus and data augmentation that supplements the infrequent senses of polysemous words. Utilizing LLaMA2 as our base model, our method outperforms the established baselines on the WMT2022 test sets and also exhibits remarkable performance in tasks related to word sense disambiguation and specialized terminology translation. Our method is also applicable to other pre-trained models, and complements the method of continual pre-training using monolingual data, demonstrating the effectiveness of LexMatcher in enhancing LLM-based machine translation.
SARCAT: Generative Span-Act Guided Response Generation using Copy-enhanced Target Augmentation
Authors: Jeong-Doo Lee; Hyeongjun Choi; Beomseok Hong; Youngsub Han; Byoung-Ki Jeon; Seung-Hoon Na
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: In this paper, we present a novel extension to improve the document grounded response generation, by proposing the Generative Span Act Guided Response Generation using Copy enhanced Target Augmentation (SARCAT) that consists of two major components as follows: 1) Copy-enhanced target-side input augmentation is an extended data augmentation to deal with the exposure bias problem by additionally incorporating the copy mechanism on top of the target-side augmentation (Xie et al., 2021). 2) Span-act guided response generation, which first predicts grounding spans and dialogue acts before generating a response. Experiment results on validation set in MultiDoc2Dial show that the proposed SARSAT leads to improvement over strong baselines on both seen and unseen settings and achieves the start-of the-art performance, even with the base reader using the pretrained T5-base model.
Does Context Help Mitigate Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation?
Authors: Harritxu Gete; Thierry Etchegoyhen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Neural Machine Translation models tend to perpetuate gender bias present in their training data distribution. Context-aware models have been previously suggested as a means to mitigate this type of bias. In this work, we examine this claim by analysing in detail the translation of stereotypical professions in English to German, and translation with non-informative context in Basque to Spanish. Our results show that, although context-aware models can significantly enhance translation accuracy for feminine terms, they can still maintain or even amplify gender bias. These results highlight the need for more fine-grained approaches to bias mitigation in Neural Machine Translation.
A Critical Look at Meta-evaluating Summarisation Evaluation Metrics
Authors: Xiang Dai; Sarvnaz Karimi; Biaoyan Fang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Effective summarisation evaluation metrics enable researchers and practitioners to compare different summarisation systems efficiently. Estimating the effectiveness of an automatic evaluation metric, termed meta-evaluation, is a critically important research question. In this position paper, we review recent meta-evaluation practices for summarisation evaluation metrics and find that (1) evaluation metrics are primarily meta-evaluated on datasets consisting of examples from news summarisation datasets, and (2) there has been a noticeable shift in research focus towards evaluating the faithfulness of generated summaries. We argue that the time is ripe to build more diverse benchmarks that enable the development of more robust evaluation metrics and analyze the generalization ability of existing evaluation metrics. In addition, we call for research focusing on user-centric quality dimensions that consider the generated summary’s communicative goal and the role of summarisation in the workflow.
LLMs for Generating and Evaluating Counterfactuals: A Comprehensive Study
Authors: Van Bach Nguyen; Paul Youssef; Christin Seifert; Jörg Schlötterer
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: As NLP models become more complex, understanding their decisions becomes more crucial. Counterfactuals (CFs), where minimal changes to inputs flip a model’s prediction, offer a way to explain these models. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable performance in NLP tasks, their efficacy in generating high-quality CFs remains uncertain. This work fills this gap by investigating how well LLMs generate CFs for three tasks. We conduct a comprehensive comparison of several common LLMs, and evaluate their CFs, assessing both intrinsic metrics, and the impact of these CFs on data augmentation. Moreover, we analyze differences between human and LLM-generated CFs, providing insights for future research directions. Our results show that LLMs generate fluent CFs, but struggle to keep the induced changes minimal. Generating CFs for Sentiment Analysis (SA) is less challenging than NLI and Hate Speech (HS) where LLMs show weaknesses in generating CFs that flip the original label. This also reflects on the data augmentation performance, where we observe a large gap between augmenting with human and LLM CFs. Furthermore, we evaluate LLMs’ ability to assess CFs in a mislabelled data setting, and show that they have a strong bias towards agreeing with the provided labels. GPT4 is more robust against this bias, but it shows strong preference to its own generations. Our analysis suggests that safety training is causing GPT4 to prefer its generations, since these generations do not contain harmful content. Our findings reveal several limitations and point to potential future work directions.
Unlocking Black-Box Prompt Tuning Efficiency via Zeroth-Order Optimization
Authors: Heshen Zhan; Congliang Chen; Tian Ding; Ziniu Li; Ruoyu Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Prompt optimization emerges as an important technique for adapting Large Language Models (LLMs) to specific tasks. Unfortunately, LLM proprietors often limit access to models’ internal weights, confining users to inference API services. This restriction poses a significant challenge for prompt optimization, as conventional optimization-based algorithms rely heavily on gradient information, which is unavailable via inference APIs. Addressing this challenge, this paper presents the Zeroth-Order Tuning (ZOT) approach, which enables efficient prompt tuning solely via inference APIs. ZOT adopts the zeroth-order optimization framework, utilizing finite differences to approximate gradient information. We further incorporate ZOT with gradient clipping and momentum techniques to enhance the tuning effectiveness. Experimental results show that ZOT outperforms existing black-box prompt tuning methods in terms of both task-specific performance and convergence speed. Furthermore, we provide a theoretical explanation for the unexpectedly strong performance of zeroth-order methods on LLM prompt tuning. By introducing the concept of effective dimension, we establish a strong connection between the inherently low effective dimension of prompt spaces and the superior convergence speed of zeroth-order methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZhanHeshen/ZOT.
Unveiling Narrative Reasoning Limits of Large Language Models with Trope in Movie Synopses
Authors: Hung-Ting Su; Ya-Ching Hsu; Xudong Lin; Xiang-Qian Shi; Yulei Niu; Han-Yuan Hsu; Hung-yi Lee; Winston H. Hsu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) equipped with chain-of-thoughts (CoT) prompting have shown significant multi-step reasoning capabilities in factual content like mathematics, commonsense, and logic. However, their performance in narrative reasoning, which demands greater abstraction capabilities, remains unexplored. This study utilizes tropes in movie synopses to assess the abstract reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs and uncovers their low performance. We introduce a trope-wise querying approach to address these challenges and boost the F1 score by 11.8 points. Moreover, while prior studies suggest that CoT enhances multi-step reasoning, this study shows CoT can cause hallucinations in narrative content, reducing GPT-4’s performance. We also introduce an Adversarial Injection method to embed trope-related text tokens into movie synopses without explicit tropes, revealing CoT’s heightened sensitivity to such injections. Our comprehensive analysis provides insights for future research directions.
Unveiling the Flaws: Exploring Imperfections in Synthetic Data and Mitigation Strategies for Large Language Models
Authors: Jie Chen; Yupeng Zhang; Bingning Wang; Wayne Xin Zhao; Ji-Rong Wen; Weipeng Chen
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Synthetic data has been proposed as a solution to address the issue of high-quality data scarcity in the training of large language models (LLMs). Studies have shown that synthetic data can effectively improve the performance of LLMs on downstream benchmarks. However, despite its potential benefits, our analysis suggests that there may be inherent flaws in synthetic data. The uniform format of synthetic data can lead to pattern overfitting and cause significant shifts in the output distribution, thereby reducing the model’s instruction-following capabilities. Our work delves into these specific flaws associated with question-answer (Q-A) pairs, a prevalent type of synthetic data, and presents a method based on unlearning techniques to mitigate these flaws. The empirical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which can reverse the instruction-following issues caused by pattern overfitting without compromising performance on benchmarks at relatively low cost. Our work has yielded key insights into the effective use of synthetic data, aiming to promote more robust and efficient LLM training.
CED: Comparing Embedding Differences for Detecting Out-of-Distribution and Hallucinated Text
Authors: Hakyung Lee; Keon-Hee Park; Hoyoon Byun; Jeyoon Yeom; Jihee Kim; Gyeong-Moon Park; Kyungwoo Song
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples is crucial for ensuring the safety and robustness of models deployed in real-world scenarios. While most studies on OOD detection focus on fine-tuned models trained on in-distribution (ID) data, detecting OOD in pre-trained models is also important due to computational limitations and the widespread use of open-source pre-trained models. However, in the same domain shift setting, the OOD detection performance of pre-trained models is insufficient because both ID and OOD samples originate from the same domain, leading to a high overlap in their embeddings. To address this issue, we introduce a new method called CED, a training-free OOD detection technique designed to enhance the distinction between ID and OOD datasets. We theoretically validate that specific auxiliary and oracle samples that satisfy certain conditions improve this distinction. Motivated by our theoretical analysis, CED enhances the differentiation by utilizing these specially designed auxiliary and oracle samples. As a result, CED significantly improves the ability of pre-trained models to distinguish between ID and OOD samples in text classification and hallucination detection tasks. Furthermore, we verify that CED is a plug-and-play method compatible with various backbone networks, such as RoBERTa, Llama, and OpenAI Embedding.
CHAmbi: A New Benchmark on Chinese Ambiguity Challenges for Large Language Models
Authors: Qin Zhang; Sihan Cai; Jiaxu Zhao; Mykola Pechenizkiy; Meng Fang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Ambiguity is an inherent feature of language, whose management is crucial for effective communication and collaboration. This is particularly true for Chinese, a language with extensive lexical-morphemic ambiguity. Despite the wide use of large language models (LLMs) in numerous domains and their growing proficiency in Chinese, there is a notable lack of datasets to thoroughly evaluate LLMs’ ability to handle ambiguity in Chinese. To bridge this gap, we introduce the CHAmbi dataset, a specialized Chinese multi-label disambiguation dataset formatted in Natural Language Inference. It comprises 4,991 pairs of premises and hypotheses, including 824 examples featuring a wide range of ambiguities. In addition to the dataset, we develop a series of tests and conduct an extensive evaluation of pre-trained LLMs’ proficiency in identifying and resolving ambiguity in the Chinese language. Our findings reveal that GPT-4 consistently delivers commendable performance across various evaluative measures, albeit with limitations in robustness. The performances of other LLMs, however, demonstrate variability in handling ambiguity-related tasks, underscoring the complexity of such tasks in the context of Chinese. The overall results highlight the challenge of ambiguity handling for current LLMs and underscore the imperative need for further enhancement in LLM capabilities for effective ambiguity resolution in the Chinese language.
Analyzing Context Contributions in LLM-based Machine Translation
Authors: Emmanouil Zaranis; Nuno M Guerreiro; Andre Martins
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in machine translation (MT) and demonstrated the ability to leverage in-context learning through few-shot examples. However, the mechanisms by which LLMs use different parts of the input context remain largely unexplored. In this work, we provide a comprehensive analysis of context utilization in MT, studying how LLMs use various context parts, such as few-shot examples and the source text, when generating translations. We highlight several key findings: (1) the source part of few-shot examples appears to contribute more than its corresponding targets, irrespective of translation direction; (2) finetuning LLMs with parallel data alters the contribution patterns of different context parts; and (3) there is a positional bias where earlier few-shot examples have higher contributions to the translated sequence. Finally, we demonstrate that inspecting anomalous context contributions can potentially uncover pathological translations, such as hallucinations. Our findings shed light on the internal workings of LLM-based MT which go beyond those known for standard encoder-decoder MT models.
ARTS: Assessing Readability & Text Simplicity
Authors: Björn Engelmann; Christin Katharina Kreutz; Fabian Haak; Philipp Schaer
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Automatic text simplification aims to reduce a text’s complexity. Its evaluation should quantify how easy it is to understand a text. Datasets with simplicity labels on text level are a prerequisite for developing such evaluation approaches. However, current publicly available datasets do not align with this, as they mainly treat text simplification as a relational concept (“How much simpler has this text gotten compared to the original version?”) or assign discrete readability levels.This work alleviates the problem of Assessing Readability & Text Simplicity. We present ARTS, a method for language-independent construction of datasets for simplicity assessment. We propose using pairwise comparisons of texts in conjunction with an Elo algorithm to produce a simplicity ranking and simplicity scores. Additionally, we provide a high-quality human-labeled and three GPT-labeled simplicity datasets. Our results show a high correlation between human and LLM-based labels, allowing for an effective and cost-efficient way to construct large synthetic datasets.
AXCEL: Automated eXplainable Consistency Evaluation using LLMs
Authors: P Aditya Sreekar; Sahil Verma; Suransh Chopra; Abhishek Persad; Sarik Ghazarian; Narayanan Sadagopan
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in both industry and academia for various tasks, yet evaluating the consistency of generated text responses continues to be a challenge. Traditional metrics like ROUGE and BLEU show a weak correlation with human judgment. More sophisticated metrics using Natural Language Inference (NLI) have shown improved correlations but are complex to implement, require domain-specific training due to poor cross-domain generalization, and lack explainability. More recently, prompt-based metrics using LLMs as evaluators have emerged; while they are easier to implement, they still lack explainability and depend on task-specific prompts, which limits their generalizability. This work introduces Automated eXplainable Consistency Evaluation using LLMs (AXCEL), a prompt-based consistency metric which offers explanations for the consistency scores by providing detailed reasoning and pinpointing inconsistent text spans. AXCEL is also a generalizable metric which can be adopted to multiple tasks without changing the prompt. AXCEL outperforms both non-prompt and prompt-based state-of-the-art (SOTA) metrics in detecting inconsistencies across summarization by 8.7%, free text generation by 6.2%, and data-to-text conversion tasks by 29.4%. We also evaluate the influence of underlying LLMs on prompt based metric performance and recalibrate the SOTA prompt-based metrics with the latest LLMs for fair comparison. Further, we show that AXCEL demonstrates strong performance using open source LLMs.