GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Embedded Named Entity Recognition using Probing Classifiers
Authors: Nicholas Popovic; Michael Färber
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Streaming text generation, has become a common way of increasing the responsiveness of language model powered applications such as chat assistants. At the same time, extracting semantic information from generated text is a useful tool for applications such as automated fact checking or retrieval augmented generation. Currently, this requires either separate models during inference, which increases computational cost, or destructive fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, we propose an approach called EMBER which enables streaming named entity recognition in decoder-only language models without fine-tuning them and while incurring minimal additional computational cost at inference time. Specifically, our experiments show that EMBER maintains high token generation rates, with only a negligible decrease in speed of around 1% compared to a 43.64% slowdown measured for a baseline. We make our code and data available online, including a toolkit for training, testing, and deploying efficient token classification models optimized for streaming text generation.
Unleashing the Power of Emojis in Texts via Self-supervised Graph Pre-Training
Authors: Zhou Zhang; Dongzeng Tan; Jiaan Wang; Yilong Chen; Jiarong Xu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Emojis have gained immense popularity on social platforms, serving as a common means to supplement or replace text. However, existing data mining approaches generally either completely ignore or simply treat emojis as ordinary Unicode characters, which may limit the model’s ability to grasp the rich semantic information in emojis and the interaction between emojis and texts. Thus, it is necessary to release the emoji’s power in social media data mining. To this end, we first construct a heterogeneous graph consisting of three types of nodes, i.e. post, word and emoji nodes to improve the representation of different elements in posts. The edges are also well-defined to model how these three elements interact with each other. To facilitate the sharing of information among post, word and emoji nodes, we propose a graph pre-train framework for text and emoji co-modeling, which contains two graph pre-training tasks: node-level graph contrastive learning and edge-level link reconstruction learning. Extensive experiments on the Xiaohongshu and Twitter datasets with two types of downstream tasks demonstrate that our approach proves significant improvement over previous strong baseline methods.
Data Contamination Can Cross Language Barriers
Authors: Feng Yao; Yufan Zhuang; Zihao Sun; Sunan Xu; Animesh Kumar; Jingbo Shang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: The opacity in developing large language models (LLMs) is raising growing concerns about the potential contamination of public benchmarks in the pre-training data. Existing contamination detection methods are typically based on the text overlap between training and evaluation data, which can be too superficial to reflect deeper forms of contamination. In this paper, we first present a cross-lingual form of contamination that inflates LLMs’ performance while evading current detection methods, deliberately injected by overfitting LLMs on the translated versions of benchmark test sets. Then, we propose generalization-based approaches to unmask such deeply concealed contamination. Specifically, we examine the LLM’s performance change after modifying the original benchmark by replacing the false answer choices with correct ones from other questions. Contaminated models can hardly generalize to such easier situations, where the false choices can be not even wrong, as all choices are correct in their memorization. Experimental results demonstrate that cross-lingual contamination can easily fool existing detection methods, but not ours. In addition, we discuss the potential utilization of cross-lingual contamination in interpreting LLMs’ working mechanisms and in post-training LLMs for enhanced multilingual capabilities.
Automated Essay Scoring: A Reflection on the State of the Art
Authors: Shengjie Li; Vincent Ng
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: While steady progress has been made on the task of automated essay scoring (AES) in the past decade, much of the recent work in this area has focused on developing models that beat existing models on a standard evaluation dataset. While improving performance numbers remains an important goal in the short term, such a focus is not necessarily beneficial for the long-term development of the field. We reflect on the state of the art in AES research, discussing issues that we believe can encourage researchers to think bigger than improving performance numbers with the ultimate goal of triggering discussion among AES researchers on how we should move forward.
Encouraging Divergent Thinking in Large Language Models through Multi-Agent Debate
Authors: Tian Liang; Zhiwei He; Wenxiang Jiao; Xing Wang; Yan Wang; Rui Wang; Yujiu Yang; Shuming Shi; Zhaopeng Tu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Modern large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have shown remarkable performance on general language tasks but still struggle on complex reasoning tasks, which drives the research on cognitive behaviors of LLMs to explore human-like problem-solving strategies. Along this direction, one representative strategy is self-reflection, which asks an LLM to refine the solution with the feedback generated by itself iteratively. However, our study shows that such reflection-style methods suffer from the Degeneration-of-Thought (DoT) problem: once the LLM has established confidence in its solutions, it is unable to generate novel thoughts later through reflection even if its initial stance is incorrect. To address the DoT problem, we propose a Multi-Agent Debate (MAD) framework, in which multiple agents express their arguments in the state of “tit for tat” and a judge manages the debate process to obtain a final solution. Clearly, our MAD framework encourages divergent thinking in LLMs which would be helpful for tasks that require deep levels of contemplation. Experiment results on two challenging datasets, commonsense machine translation and counter-intuitive arithmetic reasoning, demonstrate the effectiveness of our MAD framework. Extensive analyses suggest that the adaptive break of debate and the modest level of “tit for tat” state are required for MAD to obtain good performance. Moreover, we find that LLMs might not be a fair judge if different LLMs are used for agents.
Unveiling and Consulting Core Experts in Retrieval-Augmented MoE-based LLMs
Authors: Xin Zhou; Ping Nie; Yiwen Guo; Haojie Wei; Zhanqiu Zhang; Pasquale Minervini; Ruotian Ma; Tao Gui; Qi Zhang; Xuanjing Huang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) significantly improved the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve knowledge-intensive tasks. While existing research seeks to enhance RAG performance by retrieving higher-quality documents or designing RAG-specific LLMs, the internal mechanisms within LLMs that contribute to RAG’s effectiveness remain underexplored. In this paper, we aim to investigate these internal mechanisms within the popular Mixture-of-Expert (MoE)-based LLMs and demonstrate how to improve RAG by examining expert activations in these LLMs. Our controlled experiments reveal that several core groups of experts are primarily responsible for RAG-related behaviors. The activation of these core experts can signify the model’s inclination towards external/internal knowledge and adjust its behavior. For instance, we identify core experts that can (1) indicate the sufficiency of the model’s internal knowledge, (2) assess the quality of retrieved documents, and (3) enhance the model’s ability to utilize context. Based on these findings, we propose several strategies to enhance RAG’s efficiency and effectiveness through expert activation. Experimental results across various datasets and MoE LLMs show the effectiveness of our method.
CURE: Context- and Uncertainty-Aware Mental Disorder Detection
Authors: Migyeong Kang; Goun Choi; Hyolim Jeon; Ji Hyun An; Daejin Choi; Jinyoung Han
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: As the explainability of mental disorder detection models has become important, symptom-based methods that predict disorders from identified symptoms have been widely utilized. However, since these approaches focused on the presence of symptoms, the context of symptoms can be often ignored, leading to missing important contextual information related to detecting mental disorders. Furthermore, the result of disorder detection can be vulnerable to errors that may occur in identifying symptoms. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that detects mental disorders by leveraging symptoms and their context while mitigating potential errors in symptom identification. In this way, we propose to use large language models to effectively extract contextual information and introduce an uncertainty-aware decision fusion network that combines predictions of multiple models based on quantified uncertainty values. To evaluate the proposed method, we constructed a new Korean mental health dataset annotated by experts, named KoMOS. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model accurately detects mental disorders even in situations where symptom information is incomplete.
PepRec: Progressive Enhancement of Prompting for Recommendation
Authors: Yakun Yu; Shi-ang Qi; Baochun Li; Di Niu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: With large language models (LLMs) achieving remarkable breakthroughs in natural language processing (NLP) domains, recent researchers have actively explored the potential of LLMs for recommendation systems by converting the input data into textual sentences through prompt templates. Although semantic knowledge from LLMs can help enrich the content information of items, to date it is still hard for them to achieve comparable performance to traditional deep learning recommendation models, partly due to a lack of ability to leverage collaborative filtering. In this paper, we propose a novel training-free prompting framework, PepRec, which aims to capture knowledge from both content-based filtering and collaborative filtering to boost recommendation performance with LLMs, while providing interpretation for the recommendation. Experiments based on two real-world datasets from different domains show that PepRec significantly outperforms various traditional deep learning recommendation models and prompt-based recommendation systems.
In-Context Compositional Generalization for Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Chuanhao Li; Chenchen Jing; Zhen Li; Mingliang Zhai; Yuwei Wu; Yunde Jia
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Recent work has revealed that in-context learning for large language models exhibits compositional generalization capacity, which can be enhanced by selecting in-context demonstrations similar to test cases to provide contextual information. However, how to exhibit in-context compositional generalization (ICCG) of large vision-language models (LVLMs) is non-trival. Due to the inherent asymmetry between visual and linguistic modalities, ICCG in LVLMs faces an inevitable challenge—redundant information on the visual modality. The redundant information affects in-context learning from two aspects: (1) Similarity calculation may be dominated by redundant information, resulting in sub-optimal demonstration selection. (2) Redundant information in in-context demonstrations brings misleading contextual information to in-context learning. To alleviate these problems, we propose a demonstration selection method to achieve ICCG for LVLMs, by considering two key factors of demonstrations: content and structure, from a multimodal perspective. Specifically, we design a diversity-coverage-based matching score to select demonstrations with maximum coverage, and avoid selecting demonstrations with redundant information via their content redundancy and structural complexity. We build a GQA-ICCG dataset to simulate the ICCG setting, and conduct experiments on GQA-ICCG and the VQA v2 dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Game on Tree: Visual Hallucination Mitigation via Coarse-to-Fine View Tree and Game Theory
Authors: Xianwei Zhuang; Zhihong Zhu; Zhanpeng Chen; Yuxin Xie; Liming Liang; Yuexian Zou
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) may produce outputs that are unfaithful to reality, also known as visual hallucinations (VH), which hinders their application in multimodal understanding and decision-making. In this work, we introduce a novel plug-and-play train-free decoding algorithm named Game and Tree based Hallucination Mitigation (GTHM), designed for mitigating VH. GTHM is inspired by empirical observations that the fuzziness of multi-granularity view perception exacerbates VH. Based on this, GTHM leverages visual information to construct a coarse-to-fine visual view tree (CFTree) that organizes visual objects, attributes, and relationships in a hierarchical manner. Additionally, we innovatively model the optimal visual-token matching process on the CFTree as the cooperative game. Specifically, we define the Tree-based Shapley Value (TSV) for each visual view on the CFTree to assess its significant contribution to the overall visual understanding, thereby determining the optimal visual granularity. Subsequently, we utilize the TSV as guidance to implement adaptive weight contrastive decoding to achieve vision-aware decoding. Extensive experiments on four popular benchmarks confirm the effectiveness of our GTHM in alleviating VH across different LVLM families without additional training or post-processing. Our code is published at https://github.com/mengchuang123/GTHM.
Label Confidence Weighted Learning for Target-level Sentence Simplification
Authors: Xin Ying Qiu; Jingshen Zhang
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Multi-level sentence simplification generates simplified sentences with varying language proficiency levels. We propose Label Confidence Weighted Learning (LCWL), a novel approach that incorporates a label confidence weighting scheme in the training loss of the encoder-decoder model, setting it apart from existing confidence-weighting methods primarily designed for classification. Experimentation on English grade-level simplification dataset shows that LCWL outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised baselines. Fine-tuning the LCWL model on in-domain data and combining with Symmetric Cross Entropy (SCE) consistently delivers better simplifications compared to strong supervised methods. Our results highlight the effectiveness of label confidence weighting techniques for text simplification tasks with encoder-decoder architectures.
Quantum Recurrent Architectures for Text Classification
Authors: Wenduan Xu; Stephen Clark; Douglas Brown; Gabriel Matos; Konstantinos Meichanetzidis
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: We develop quantum RNNs with cells based on Parametrised Quantum Circuits (PQCs). PQCs can provide a form of hybrid quantum-classical computation where the input and the output is in the form of classical data. The previous “hidden” state is the quantum state from the previous time-step, and an angle encoding is used to define a (non-linear) mapping from a classical word embedding into the quantum Hilbert space. Measurements of the quantum state provide classical statistics which are used for classification. We report results which are competitive with various RNN baselines on the Rotten Tomatoes dataset, as well as emulator results which demonstrate the feasibility of running such models on quantum hardware.
Tree of Problems: Improving structured problem solving with compositionality
Authors: Armel Randy Zebaze; Benoît Sagot; Rachel Bawden
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across multipletasks through in-context learning. For complex reasoning tasks that require step-by-step thinking, Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has given impressive results, especially when combined with self-consistency. Nonetheless, some tasks remain particularly difficult for LLMs to solve. Tree of Thoughts (ToT) and Graph of Thoughts (GoT) emerged as alternatives, dividing the complex problem into paths of subproblems. In this paper, we propose Tree of Problems (ToP), a simpler version of ToT, which we hypothesise can work better for complex tasks that can be divided into identical subtasks. Our empirical results show that our approach outperforms ToT and GoT, and in addition per forms better than CoT on complex reasoning tasks. All code for this paper will be made available.
What the Harm? Quantifying the Tangible Impact of Gender Bias in Machine Translation with a Human-centered Study
Authors: Beatrice Savoldi; Sara Papi; Matteo Negri; Ana Guerberof-Arenas; Luisa Bentivogli
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Gender bias in machine translation (MT) is recognized as an issue that can harm people and society. And yet, advancements in the field rarely involve people, the final MT users, or inform how they might be impacted by biased technologies. Current evaluations are often restricted to automatic methods, which offer an opaque estimate of what the downstream impact of gender disparities might be. We conduct an extensive human-centered study to examine if and to what extent bias in MT brings harms with tangible costs, such as quality of service gaps across women and men. To this aim, we collect behavioral data from ~90 participants, who post-edited MT outputs to ensure correct gender translation. Across multiple datasets, languages, and types of users, our study shows that feminine post-editing demands significantly more technical and temporal effort, also corresponding to higher financial costs. Existing bias measurements, however, fail to reflect the found disparities. Our findings advocate for human-centered approaches that can inform the societal impact of bias.
Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring
Authors: Zichao Li; Shaojie He; Meng Liao; Xuanang Chen; Yaojie Lu; Hongyu Lin; Yanxiong Lu; Xianpei Han; Le Sun
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Document logical structuring aims to extract the underlying hierarchical structure of documents, which is crucial for document intelligence. Traditional approaches often fall short in handling the complexity and the variability of lengthy documents. To address these issues, we introduce Seg2Act, an end-to-end, generation-based method for document logical structuring, revisiting logical structure extraction as an action generation task. Specifically, given the text segments of a document, Seg2Act iteratively generates the action sequence via a global context-aware generative model, and simultaneously updates its global context and current logical structure based on the generated actions. Experiments on ChCatExt and HierDoc datasets demonstrate the superior performance of Seg2Act in both supervised and transfer learning settings.
Is C4 Dataset Optimal for Pruning? An Investigation of Calibration Data for LLM Pruning
Authors: Abhinav Bandari; Lu Yin; Cheng-Yu Hsieh; Ajay Kumar Jaiswal; Tianlong Chen; Li Shen; Ranjay Krishna; Shiwei Liu
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Network pruning has emerged as a potential solution to make LLMs cheaper to deploy. However, existing LLM pruning approachesuniversally rely on the C4 dataset as the calibration data for calculating pruning scores, leaving its optimality unexplored. In this study, we evaluate the choice of calibration data on LLM pruning, across a wide range of datasets that are most commonly used in LLM training and evaluation, including four pertaining datasets as well as three categories of downstream tasks encompassing nine datasets. Each downstream dataset is prompted with In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (CoT), respectively. Besides the already intriguingobservation that the choice of calibration data significantly impacts the performance of pruned LLMs, our results also uncover several subtle and often unexpected findings, summarized as follows: (1) C4 is not the optimal choice for LLM pruning, even among commonly used pre-training datasets; (2) arithmetic datasets—when used as calibration data—performs on par or even better than pre-training datasets; (3) pruning with downstream datasets does not necessarily help the corresponding downstream task, compared to pre-training data; (4) ICL is widely beneficial to all data categories, whereas CoT is only useful on certain tasks. Our findings shed light on the importance of carefully selecting calibration data for LLM pruning and pave the way for more efficient deployment of these powerfulmodels in real-world applications. We release our code at: https://github.com/abx393/llm-pruning-calibration-data.
Revisiting the Robustness of Watermarking to Paraphrasing Attacks
Authors: Saksham Rastogi; Danish Pruthi
Venue: EMNLP 2024 (Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing)

Abstract: Amidst rising concerns about the internet being proliferated with content generated from language models (LMs), watermarking is seen as a principled way to certify whether text was generated from a model. Many recent watermarking techniques slightly modify the output probabilities of LMs to embed a signal in the generated output that can later be detected. Since early proposals for text watermarking, questions about their robustness to paraphrasing have been prominently discussed. Lately, some techniques are deliberately designed and claimed to be robust to paraphrasing. Particularly, a recent approach trains a model to produce a watermarking signal that is invariant to semantically-similar inputs. However, such watermarking schemes do not adequately account for the ease with which they can be reverse-engineered. We show that with limited access to model generations, we can undo the effects of watermarking and drastically improve the effectiveness of paraphrasing attacks.