OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Synthetic Query Generation for Privacy-Preserving Deep Retrieval Systems using Differentially Private Language Models
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

We address the challenge of ensuring differential privacy (DP) guarantees in training deep retrieval systems. Training these systems often involves the use of contrastive-style losses, which are typically non-per-example decomposable, making them difficult to directly DP-train with since common techniques require per-example gradients. To address this issue, we propose an approach that prioritizes ensuring query privacy prior to training a deep retrieval system. Our method employs DP language models (LMs) to generate private synthetic queries representative of the original data. These synthetic queries can be used in downstream retrieval system training without compromising privacy. Our approach demonstrates a significant enhancement in retrieval quality compared to direct DP-training, all while maintaining query-level privacy guarantees. This work highlights the potential of harnessing LMs to overcome limitations in standard DP-training methods.
Okay, Let’s Do This! Modeling Event Coreference with Generated Rationales and Knowledge Distillation
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

In NLP, Event Coreference Resolution (ECR) is the task of connecting event clusters that refer to the same underlying real-life event, usually via neural systems. In this work, we investigate using abductive free-text rationales (FTRs) generated by modern autoregressive LLMs as distant supervision of smaller student models for cross-document coreference (CDCR) of events. We implement novel rationale-oriented event clustering and knowledge distillation methods for event coreference scoring that leverage enriched information from the FTRs for improved CDCR without additional annotation or expensive document clustering. Our model using coreference specific knowledge distillation achieves SOTA B3 F1 on the ECB+ and GVC corpora and we establish a new baseline on the AIDA Phase 1 corpus. Our code can be found at https://github.com/csu-signal/llama_cdcr
Take One Step at a Time to Know Incremental Utility of Demonstration: An Analysis on Reranking for Few-Shot In-Context Learning
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

In-Context Learning (ICL) is an emergent capability of Large Language Models (LLMs). Only a few demonstrations enable LLMs to be used as blackbox for new tasks. Previous studies have shown that using LLMs' outputs as labels is effective in training models to select demonstrations. Such a label is expected to estimate utility of a demonstration in ICL; however, it has not been well understood how different labeling strategies affect results on target tasks. This paper presents an analysis on different utility functions by focusing on LLMs' output probability given ground-truth output, and task-specific reward given LLMs' prediction. Unlike the previous work, we introduce a novel labeling method, incremental utility, which estimates how much incremental knowledge is brought into the LLMs by a demonstration. We conduct experiments with instruction-tuned LLMs on binary/multi-class classification, segmentation, and translation across Arabic, English, Finnish, Japanese, and Spanish. Our results show that (1) the probability is effective when the probability values are distributed across the whole value range (on the classification tasks), and (2) the downstream metric is more robust when nuanced reward values are provided with long outputs (on the segmentation and translation tasks). We then show that the proposed incremental utility further helps ICL by contrasting how the LLMs perform with and without the demonstrations.
LM-Infinite: Zero-Shot Extreme Length Generalization for Large Language Models
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Today's large language models (LLMs) typically train on short text segments (e.g., <4K tokens) due to the quadratic complexity of their Transformer architectures. As a result, their performance suffers drastically on inputs longer than those encountered during training, substantially limiting their applications in real-world tasks involving long contexts such as encoding scientific articles, code repositories, or long dialogues. Through theoretical analysis and empirical investigation, this work identifies three major factors contributing to this length generalization failure. Our theoretical analysis further reveals that commonly used techniques like truncating the attention window or relative positional encodings are inadequate to address them. Answering these challenges, we propose LM-Infinite, a simple and effective method for enhancing LLMs' capabilities of handling long contexts. LM-Infinite is highly flexible and can be used with most modern LLMs off-the-shelf. Without any parameter updates, it allows LLMs pre-trained with 2K or 4K-long segments to generalize to up to 200M length inputs while retaining perplexity. It also improves performance on downstream tasks such as Passkey Retrieval and Qasper in the zero-shot setting. LM-Infinite brings substantial efficiency improvements: it achieves 2.7x decoding speed up and 7.5x memory saving over the original model. Our codes are released at \url{https://github.com/Glaciohound/LM-Infinite}.
CONSCENDI: A Contrastive and Scenario-Guided Distillation Approach to Guardrail Models for Virtual Assistants
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

A wave of new task-based virtual assistants has been fueled by increasingly powerful large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4 (OpenAI, 2023). A major challenge in deploying LLM-based virtual conversational assistants in real world settings is ensuring they operate within what is admissible for the task. To overcome this challenge, the designers of these virtual assistants rely on an independent guardrail system that verifies the virtual assistant's output aligns with the constraints required for the task. However, relying on commonly used, prompt-based guardrails can be difficult to engineer correctly and comprehensively. To address these challenges, we propose CONSCENDI. We use CONSCENDI to exhaustively generate training data with two key LLM-powered components: scenario-augmented generation and contrastive training examples. When generating conversational data, we generate a set of rule-breaking scenarios, which enumerate a diverse set of high-level ways a rule can be violated. This scenario-guided approach produces a diverse training set and provides chatbot designers greater control. To generate contrastive examples, we prompt the LLM to alter conversations with violations into acceptable conversations to enable fine-grained distinctions. We then use this data, generated by CONSCENDI, to train a smaller model. We find that CONSCENDI results in guardrail models that improve over baselines in multiple dialogue domains.
Advancing Beyond Identification: Multi-bit Watermark for Large Language Models
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

We show the viability of tackling misuses of large language models beyond the identification of machine-generated text. While existing zero-bit watermark methods focus on detection only, some malicious misuses demand tracing the adversary user for counteracting them. To address this, we propose Multi-bit Watermark via Position Allocation, embedding traceable multi-bit information during language model generation. Through allocating tokens onto different parts of the messages, we embed longer messages in high corruption settings without added latency. By independently embedding sub-units of messages, the proposed method outperforms the existing works in terms of robustness and latency. Leveraging the benefits of zero-bit watermarking, our method enables robust extraction of the watermark without any model access, embedding and extraction of long messages ($\geq$ 32-bit) without finetuning, and maintaining text quality, while allowing zero-bit detection all at the same time. Code is released here: https://github.com/bangawayoo/mb-lm-watermarking
SemStamp: A Semantic Watermark with Paraphrastic Robustness for Text Generation
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Existing watermarking algorithms are vulnerable to paraphrase attacks because of their token-level design. To address this issue, we propose SemStamp, a robust sentence-level semantic watermarking algorithm based on locality-sensitive hashing (LSH), which partitions the semantic space of sentences. The algorithm encodes and LSH-hashes a candidate sentence generated by an LLM, and conducts sentence-level rejection sampling until the sampled sentence falls in watermarked partitions in the semantic embedding space. A margin-based constraint is used to enhance its robustness. To show the advantages of our algorithm, we propose a "bigram" paraphrase attack using the paraphrase that has the fewest bigram overlaps with the original sentence. This attack is shown to be effective against the existing token-level watermarking method. Experimental results show that our novel semantic watermark algorithm is not only more robust than the previous state-of-the-art method on both common and bigram paraphrase attacks, but also is better at preserving the quality of generation.
Better Zero-Shot Reasoning with Role-Play Prompting
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Modern large language models (LLMs) exhibit a remarkable capacity for role-playing, enabling them to embody not only human characters but also non-human entities. This versatility allows them to simulate complex human-like interactions and behaviors within various contexts, as well as to emulate specific objects or systems. While these capabilities have enhanced user engagement and introduced novel modes of interaction, the influence of role-playing on LLMs' reasoning abilities remains underexplored. In this study, we introduce a strategically designed role-play prompting methodology and assess its performance under the zero-shot setting across twelve diverse reasoning benchmarks. Our empirical results illustrate that role-play prompting consistently surpasses the standard zero-shot approach across most datasets. Notably, in experiments conducted using ChatGPT, accuracy on AQuA rises from 53.5% to 63.8%, and on Last Letter from 23.8% to 84.2%.Upon further comparison with the Zero-Shot-CoT technique, which prompts the model to "think step by step", our study demonstrates that role-play prompting acts as a more effective trigger for the CoT process. This highlights its potential to augment the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We release our code at https://github.com/NKU-HLT/Role-Play-Prompting.
DoG-Instruct: Towards Premium Instruction-Tuning Data via Text-Grounded Instruction Wrapping
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

The improvement of LLMs' instruction-following capabilities relies heavily on the availability of high-quality instruction-response pairs. Unfortunately, the current methods used to collect the pairs suffer from either unaffordable labor costs or severe hallucinations in the self-generation of LLM. To tackle these challenges, this paper proposes a scalable solution. It involves training LLMs to generate instruction-response pairs based on human-written documents, rather than relying solely on self-generation without context. Our proposed method not only exploits the advantages of human-written documents in reducing hallucinations but also utilizes an LLM to wrap the expression of documents, which enables us to bridge the gap between various document styles and the standard AI response. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing typical methods on multiple benchmarks. In particular, compared to the best-performing baseline, the LLM trained using our generated dataset exhibits a 10\% relative improvement in performance on AlpacaEval, despite utilizing only 1/5 of its training data. Furthermore, a comprehensive manual evaluation validates the quality of the data we generated. Our trained wrapper is publicly available at https://github.com/Bahuia/Dog-Instruct.
Beyond Borders: Investigating Cross-Jurisdiction Transfer in Legal Case Summarization
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Legal professionals face the challenge of managing an overwhelming volume of lengthy judgments, making automated legal case summarization crucial. However, prior approaches mainly focused on training and evaluating these models within the same jurisdiction. In this study, we explore the cross-jurisdictional generalizability of legal case summarization models.Specifically, we explore how to effectively summarize legal cases of a target jurisdiction where reference summaries are not available. In particular, we investigate whether supplementing models with unlabeled target jurisdiction corpus and extractive silver summaries obtained from unsupervised algorithms on target data enhances transfer performance. Our comprehensive study on three datasets from different jurisdictions highlights the role of pre-training in improving transfer performance. We shed light on the pivotal influence of jurisdictional similarity in selecting optimal source datasets for effective transfer. Furthermore, our findings underscore that incorporating unlabeled target data yields improvements in general pre-trained models, with additional gains when silver summaries are introduced. This augmentation is especially valuable when dealing with extractive datasets and scenarios featuring limited alignment between source and target jurisdictions. Our study provides key insights for developing adaptable legal case summarization systems, transcending jurisdictional boundaries.
Automatic Restoration of Diacritics for Speech Data Sets
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Automatic text-based diacritic restoration models generally have high diacritic error rates when applied to speech transcripts as a result of domain and style shifts in spoken language. In this work, we explore the possibility of improving the performance of automatic diacritic restoration when applied to speech data by utilizing parallel spoken utterances. In particular, we use the pre-trained Whisper ASR model fine-tuned on relatively small amounts of diacritized Arabic speech data to produce rough diacritized transcripts for the speech utterances, which we then use as an additional input for diacritic restoration models. The proposed framework consistently improves diacritic restoration performance compared to text-only baselines. Our results highlight the inadequacy of current text-based diacritic restoration models for speech data sets and provide a new baseline for speech-based diacritic restoration.
Enhancing Contextual Understanding in Large Language Models through Contrastive Decoding
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) tend to inadequately integrate input context during text generation, relying excessively on encoded prior knowledge in model parameters, potentially resulting in generated text with factual inconsistencies or contextually unfaithful content. LLMs utilize two primary knowledge sources: 1) prior (parametric) knowledge from pretraining, and 2) contextual (non-parametric) knowledge from input prompts. The study addresses the open question of how LLMs effectively balance these knowledge sources during the generation process, specifically in the context of open-domain question answering. To address this issue, we introduce a novel approach integrating contrastive decoding with adversarial irrelevant passages as negative samples to enhance robust context grounding during generation. Notably, our method operates at inference time without requiring further training. We conduct comprehensive experiments to demonstrate its applicability and effectiveness, providing empirical evidence showcasing its superiority over existing methodologies. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/amazon-science/ContextualUnderstanding-ContrastiveDecoding.
Generalizable Sarcasm Detection is Just Around the Corner, of Course!
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

We tested the robustness of sarcasm detection models by examining their behavior when fine-tuned on four sarcasm datasets containing varying characteristics of sarcasm: label source (authors vs. third-party), domain (social media/online vs. offline conversations/dialogues), style (aggressive vs. humorous mocking). We tested their prediction performance on the same dataset (intra-dataset) and across different datasets (cross-dataset). For intra-dataset predictions, models consistently performed better when fine-tuned with third-party labels rather than with author labels. For cross-dataset predictions, most models failed to generalize well to the other datasets, implying that one type of dataset cannot represent all sorts of sarcasm with different styles and domains. Compared to the existing datasets, models fine-tuned on the new dataset we release in this work showed the highest generalizability to other datasets. With a manual inspection of the datasets and post-hoc analysis, we attributed the difficulty in generalization to the fact that sarcasm actually comes in different domains and styles. We argue that future sarcasm research should take the broad scope of sarcasm into account.
Encoding of lexical tone in self-supervised models of spoken language
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Interpretability research has shown that self-supervised Spoken Language Models (SLMs) encode a wide variety of features in human speech from the acoustic, phonetic, phonological, syntactic and semantic levels, to speaker characteristics. The bulk of prior research on representations of phonology has focused on segmental features such as phonemes; the encoding of suprasegmental phonology (such as tone and stress patterns) in SLMs is not yet well understood. Tone is a suprasegmental feature that is present in more than half of the world's languages. This paper aims to analyze the tone encoding capabilities of SLMs, using Mandarin and Vietnamese as case studies. We show that SLMs encode lexical tone to a significant degree even when they are trained on data from non-tonal languages. We further find that SLMs behave similarly to native and non-native human participants in tone and consonant perception studies, but they do not follow the same developmental trajectory.
A Systematic Comparison of Contextualized Word Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Contextualized embeddings are the preferred tool for modeling Lexical Semantic Change (LSC). Current evaluations typically focus on a specific task known as Graded Change Detection (GCD). However, performance comparison across work are often misleading due to their reliance on diverse settings. In this paper, we evaluate state-of-the-art models and approaches for GCD under equal conditions. We further break the LSC problem into Word-in-Context (WiC) and Word Sense Induction (WSI) tasks, and compare models across these different levels. Our evaluation is performed across different languages on eight available benchmarks for LSC, and shows that (i) APD outperforms other approaches for GCD; (ii) XL-LEXEME outperforms other contextualized models for WiC, WSI, and GCD, while being comparable to GPT-4; (iii) there is a clear need for improving the modeling of word meanings, as well as focus on how, when, and why these meanings change, rather than solely focusing on the extent of semantic change.
iACOS: Advancing Implicit Sentiment Extraction with Informative and Adaptive Negative Examples
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) have been extensively studied, but little light has been shed on the quadruple extraction consisting of four fundamental elements: aspects, categories, opinions and sentiments, especially with implicit aspects and opinions. In this paper, we propose a new method iACOS for extracting Implicit Aspects with Categories and Opinions with Sentiments. First, iACOS appends two implicit tokens at the end of a text to capture the context-aware representation of all tokens including implicit aspects and opinions. Second, iACOS develops a sequence labeling model over the context-aware token representation to co-extract explicit and implicit aspects and opinions. Third, iACOS devises a multi-label classifier with a specialized multi-head attention for discovering aspect-opinion pairs and predicting their categories and sentiments simultaneously. Fourth, iACOS leverages informative and adaptive negative examples to jointly train the multi-label classifier and the other two classifiers on categories and sentiments by multi-task learning. Finally, the experimental results show that iACOS significantly outperforms other quadruple extraction baselines according to the F1 score on two public benchmark datasets.
Rectifying Demonstration Shortcut in In-Context Learning
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Large language models (LLMs) are able to solve various tasks with only a few demonstrations utilizing their in-context learning (ICL) abilities. However, LLMs often rely on their pre-trained semantic priors of demonstrations rather than on the input-label relationships to proceed with ICL prediction. In this work, we term this phenomenon as the 'Demonstration Shortcut'. While previous works have primarily focused on improving ICL prediction results for predefined tasks, we aim to rectify the Demonstration Shortcut, thereby enabling the LLM to effectively learn new input-label relationships from demonstrations. To achieve this, we introduce In-Context Calibration, a demonstration-aware calibration method. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in two settings: (1) the Original ICL Task using the standard label space and (2) the Task Learning setting, where the label space is replaced with semantically unrelated tokens. In both settings, In-Context Calibration demonstrates substantial improvements, with results generalized across three LLM families (OPT, GPT, and Llama2) under various configurations.
ODD: A Benchmark Dataset for the Natural Language Processing Based Opioid Related Aberrant Behavior Detection
Venue: Conference NAACL 2024
Year: 2024

Opioid related aberrant behaviors (ORABs) present novel risk factors for opioid overdose. This paper introduces a novel biomedical natural language processing benchmark dataset named ODD, for ORAB Detection Dataset. ODD is an expert-annotated dataset designed to identify ORABs from patients' EHR notes and classify them into nine categories; 1) Confirmed Aberrant Behavior, 2) Suggested Aberrant Behavior, 3) Opioids, 4) Indication, 5) Diagnosed opioid dependency, 6) Benzodiazepines, 7) Medication Changes, 8) Central Nervous System-related, and 9) Social Determinants of Health. We explored two state-of-the-art natural language processing models (fine-tuning and prompt-tuning approaches) to identify ORAB. Experimental results show that the prompt-tuning models outperformed the fine-tuning models in most categories and the gains were especially higher among uncommon categories (Suggested Aberrant Behavior, Confirmed Aberrant Behaviors, Diagnosed Opioid Dependence, and Medication Change). Although the best model achieved the highest 88.17% on macro average area under precision recall curve, uncommon classes still have a large room for performance improvement. ODD is publicly available.