Reviewerly/exHarmony huggingface dataset:
Interventional Rationalization

Selective rationalizations improve the explainability of neural networks by selecting a subsequence of the input (i.e., rationales) to explain the prediction results. Although existing methods have achieved promising results, they still suffer from adopting the spurious correlations in data (aka., shortcuts) to compose rationales and make predictions. Inspired by the causal theory, in this paper, we develop an interventional rationalization (Inter-RAT) to discover the causal rationales. Specifically, we first analyse the causalities among the input, rationales and results with a structural causal model. Then, we discover spurious correlations between the input and rationales, and between rationales and results, respectively, by identifying the confounder in the causalities. Next, based on the backdoor adjustment, we propose a causal intervention method to remove the spurious correlations between input and rationales. Further, we discuss reasons why spurious correlations between the selected rationales and results exist by analysing the limitations of the sparsity constraint in the rationalization, and employ the causal intervention method to remove these correlations. Extensive experimental results on three real-world datasets clearly validate the effectiveness of our proposed method. The source code of Inter-RAT is available at https://github.com/yuelinan/Codes-of-Inter-RAT.
Balance Act: Mitigating Hubness in Cross-Modal Retrieval with Query and Gallery Banks

In this work, we present a post-processing solution to address the hubness problem in cross-modal retrieval, a phenomenon where a small number of gallery data points are frequently retrieved, resulting in a decline in retrieval performance. We first theoretically demonstrate the necessity of incorporating both the gallery and query data for addressing hubness as hubs always exhibit high similarity with gallery and query data. Second, building on our theoretical results, we propose a novel framework, Dual Bank Normalization (DBNorm). While previous work has attempted to alleviate hubness by only utilizing the query samples, DBNorm leverages two banks constructed from the query and gallery samples to reduce the occurrence of hubs during inference. Next, to complement DBNorm, we introduce two novel methods, dual inverted softmax and dual dynamic inverted softmax, for normalizing similarity based on the two banks. Specifically, our proposed methods reduce the similarity between hubs and queries while improving the similarity between non-hubs and queries. Finally, we present extensive experimental results on diverse language-grounded benchmarks, including text-image, text-video, and text-audio, demonstrating the superior performance of our approaches compared to previous methods in addressing hubness and boosting retrieval performance.
PCMID: Multi-Intent Detection through Supervised Prototypical Contrastive Learning

Intent detection is a major task in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and is the component of dialogue systems for interpreting users’ intentions based on their utterances. Many works have explored detecting intents by assuming that each utterance represents only a single intent. Such systems have achieved very good results; however, intent detection is a far more challenging task in typical real-world scenarios, where each user utterance can be highly complex and express multiple intents. Therefore, in this paper, we propose PCMID, a novel Multi-Intent Detection framework enabled by Prototypical Contrastive Learning under a supervised setting. The PCMID model can learn multiple semantic representations of a given user utterance under the context of different intent labels in an optimized semantic space. Our experiments show that PCMID achieves the current state-of-the-art performance on both multiple public benchmark datasets and a private real-world dataset for the multi-intent detection task.
Semi-Structured Object Sequence Encoders

In this paper we explore the task of modeling semi-structured object sequences; in particular, we focus our attention on the problem of developing a structure-aware input representation for such sequences. Examples of such data include user activity on websites, machine logs, and many others. This type of data is often represented as a sequence of sets of key-value pairs over time and can present modeling challenges due to an ever-increasing sequence length. We propose a two-part approach, which first considers each key independently and encodes a representation of its values over time; we then self-attend over these value-aware key representations to accomplish a downstream task. This allows us to operate on longer object sequences than existing methods. We introduce a novel shared-attention-head architecture between the two modules and present an innovative training schedule that interleaves the training of both modules with shared weights for some attention heads. Our experiments on multiple prediction tasks using real-world data demonstrate that our approach outperforms a unified network with hierarchical encoding, as well as other methods including a record-centric representation and a flattened representation of the sequence.
EARA: Improving Biomedical Semantic Textual Similarity with Entity-Aligned Attention and Retrieval Augmentation

Measuring Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) is a fundamental task in biomedical text processing, which aims at quantifying the similarity between two input biomedical sentences. Unfortunately, the STS datasets in the biomedical domain are relatively smaller but more complex in semantics than common domain, often leading to overfitting issues and insufficient text representation even based on Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) due to too many biomedical entities. In this paper, we propose EARA, an entity-aligned, attention-based and retrieval-augmented PLMs. Our proposed EARA first aligns the same type of fine-grained entity information in each sentence pair with an entity alignment matrix. Then, EARA regularizes the attention mechanism with an entity alignment matrix with an auxiliary loss. Finally, we add a retrieval module that retrieves similar instances to expand the scope of entity pairs and improve the model’s generalization. The comprehensive experiments reflect that EARA can achieve state-of-the-art performance on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets. Source code is available.
Are Personalized Stochastic Parrots More Dangerous? Evaluating Persona Biases in Dialogue Systems

Recent advancements in Large Language Models empower them to follow freeform instructions, including imitating generic or specific demographic personas in conversations. We define generic personas to represent demographic groups, such as “an Asian person”, whereas specific personas may take the form of specific popular Asian names like “Yumi”. While the adoption of personas enriches user experiences by making dialogue systems more engaging and approachable, it also casts a shadow of potential risk by exacerbating social biases within model responses, thereby causing societal harm through interactions with users. In this paper, we systematically study “persona biases”, which we define to be the sensitivity of dialogue models’ harmful behaviors contingent upon the personas they adopt. We categorize persona biases into biases in harmful expression and harmful agreement, and establish a comprehensive evaluation framework to measure persona biases in five aspects: Offensiveness, Toxic Continuation, Regard, Stereotype Agreement, and Toxic Agreement. Additionally, we propose to investigate persona biases by experimenting with UNIVERSALPERSONA, a systematically constructed persona dataset encompassing various types of both generic and specific model personas. Through benchmarking on four different models- including Blender, ChatGPT, Alpaca, and Vicuna- our study uncovers significant persona biases in dialogue systems. Our findings also underscore the pressing need to revisit the use of personas in dialogue agents to ensure safe application.
Pre-trained Speech Processing Models Contain Human-Like Biases that Propagate to Speech Emotion Recognition

Previous work has established that a person’s demographics and speech style affect how well speech processing models perform for them. But where does this bias come from? In this work, we present the Speech Embedding Association Test (SpEAT), a method for detecting bias in one type of model used for many speech tasks: pre-trained models. The SpEAT is inspired by word embedding association tests in natural language processing, which quantify intrinsic bias in a model’s representations of different concepts, such as race or valence—something’s pleasantness or unpleasantness—and capture the extent to which a model trained on large-scale socio-cultural data has learned human-like biases. Using the SpEAT, we test for six types of bias in 16 English speech models (including 4 models also trained on multilingual data), which come from the wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, WavLM, and Whisper model families. We find that 14 or more models reveal positive valence (pleasantness) associations with abled people over disabled people, with European-Americans over African-Americans, with females over males, with U.S. accented speakers over non-U.S. accented speakers, and with younger people over older people. Beyond establishing that pre-trained speech models contain these biases, we also show that they can have real world effects. We compare biases found in pre-trained models to biases in downstream models adapted to the task of Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) and find that in 66 of the 96 tests performed (69%), the group that is more associated with positive valence as indicated by the SpEAT also tends to be predicted as speaking with higher valence by the downstream model. Our work provides evidence that, like text and image-based models, pre-trained speech based-models frequently learn human-like biases when trained on large-scale socio-cultural datasets. Our work also shows that bias found in pre-trained models can propagate to the downstream task of SER.
Open-source Large Language Models are Strong Zero-shot Query Likelihood Models for Document Ranking

In the field of information retrieval, Query Likelihood Models (QLMs) rank documents based on the probability of generating the query given the content of a document. Recently, advanced large language models (LLMs) have emerged as effective QLMs, showcasing promising ranking capabilities. This paper focuses on investigating the genuine zero-shot ranking effectiveness of recent LLMs, which are solely pre-trained on unstructured text data without supervised instruction fine-tuning. Our findings reveal the robust zero-shot ranking ability of such LLMs, highlighting that additional instruction fine-tuning may hinder effectiveness unless a question generation task is present in the fine-tuning dataset. Furthermore, we introduce a novel state-of-the-art ranking system that integrates LLM-based QLMs with a hybrid zero-shot retriever, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness in both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. We make our codebase publicly available at https://github.com/ielab/llm-qlm.
DeTiME: Diffusion-Enhanced Topic Modeling using Encoder-decoder based LLM

In the burgeoning field of natural language processing, Neural Topic Models (NTMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as areas of significant research interest. Despite this, NTMs primarily utilize contextual embeddings from LLMs, which are not optimal for clustering or capable for topic generation. Our study addresses this gap by introducing a novel framework named Diffusion-Enhanced Topic Modeling using Encoder-Decoder-based LLMs (DeTiME). DeTiME leverages Encoder-Decoder-based LLMs to produce highly clusterable embeddings that could generate topics that exhibit both superior clusterability and enhanced semantic coherence compared to existing methods. Additionally, by exploiting the power of diffusion, our framework also provides the capability to generate content relevant to the identified topics. This dual functionality allows users to efficiently produce highly clustered topics and related content simultaneously. DeTiME’s potential extends to generating clustered embeddings as well. Notably, our proposed framework proves to be efficient to train and exhibits high adaptability, demonstrating its potential for a wide array of applications.
Towards Concept-Aware Large Language Models

Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) work at the level of tokens, not concepts. In this work, we analyze how well contemporary LLMs capture human concepts and their structure. We then discuss ways to develop concept-aware LLMs, taking place at different stages of the pipeline. We sketch a method for pretraining LLMs using concepts, and also explore the simpler approach that uses the output of existing LLMs. Despite its simplicity, our proof-of-concept is shown to better match human intuition, as well as improve the robustness of predictions. These preliminary results underscore the promise of concept-aware LLMs.
HiddenTables and PyQTax: A Cooperative Game and Dataset For TableQA to Ensure Scale and Data Privacy Across a Myriad of Taxonomies

A myriad of different Large Language Models (LLMs) face a common challenge in contextually analyzing table question-answering tasks. These challenges are engendered from (1) finite context windows for large tables, (2) multi-faceted discrepancies amongst tokenization patterns against cell boundaries, and (3) various limitations stemming from data confidentiality in the process of using external models such as gpt-35-turbo. We propose a cooperative game dubbed “HiddenTables” as a potential resolution to this challenge. In essence, “HiddenTables” is played between the code-generating LLM “Solver” and the “Oracle” which evaluates the ability of the LLM agents to solve TableQA tasks. This game is based on natural language schemas and importantly, ensures the security of the underlying data. We provide evidential experiments on a diverse set of tables that demonstrate an LLM’s collective inability to generalize and perform on complex queries, handle compositional dependencies, and align natural language to programmatic commands when concrete table schemas are provided. Unlike encoder-based models, we have pushed the boundaries of “HiddenTables” to not be limited by the number of rows - therefore we exhibit improved efficiency in prompt and completion tokens. Our infrastructure has spawned a new dataset “PyQTax” that spans across 116,671 question-table-answer triplets and provides additional fine-grained breakdowns and labels for varying question taxonomies. Therefore, in tandem with our academic contributions regarding LLMs’ deficiency in TableQA tasks, “HiddenTables” is a tactile manifestation of how LLMs can interact with massive datasets while ensuring data security and minimizing generation costs.
SKD-NER: Continual Named Entity Recognition via Span-based Knowledge Distillation with Reinforcement Learning

Continual learning for named entity recognition (CL-NER) aims to enable models to continuously learn new entity types while retaining the ability to recognize previously learned ones. However, the current strategies fall short of effectively addressing the catastrophic forgetting of previously learned entity types. To tackle this issue, we propose the SKD-NER model, an efficient continual learning NER model based on the span-based approach, which innovatively incorporates reinforcement learning strategies to enhance the model’s ability against catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, we leverage knowledge distillation (KD) to retain memory and employ reinforcement learning strategies during the KD process to optimize the soft labeling and distillation losses generated by the teacher model to effectively prevent catastrophic forgetting during continual learning. This approach effectively prevents or mitigates catastrophic forgetting during continuous learning, allowing the model to retain previously learned knowledge while acquiring new knowledge. Our experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate that our model significantly improves the performance of the CL-NER task, outperforming state-of-the-art methods.
Log-FGAER: Logic-Guided Fine-Grained Address Entity Recognition from Multi-Turn Spoken Dialogue

Fine-grained address entity recognition (FGAER) from multi-turn spoken dialogues is particularly challenging. The major reason lies in that a full address is often formed through a conversation process. Different parts of an address are distributed through multiple turns of a dialogue with spoken noises. It is nontrivial to extract by turn and combine them. This challenge has not been well emphasized by main-stream entity extraction algorithms. To address this issue, we propose in this paper a logic-guided fine-grained address recognition method (Log-FGAER), where we formulate the address hierarchy relationship as the logic rule and softly apply it in a probabilistic manner to improve the accuracy of FGAER. In addition, we provide an ontology-based data augmentation methodology that employs ChatGPT to augment a spoken dialogue dataset with labeled address entities. Experiments are conducted using datasets generated by the proposed data augmentation technique and derived from real-world scenarios. The results of the experiment demonstrate the efficacy of our proposal.
DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents

Sanket Mehta, Jai Gupta, Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Vinh Tran, Jinfeng Rao, Marc Najork, Emma Strubell, Donald Metzler. Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. 2023.
We Need to Talk About Reproducibility in NLP Model Comparison

NLPers frequently face reproducibility crisis in a comparison of various models of a real-world NLP task. Many studies have empirically showed that the standard splits tend to produce low reproducible and unreliable conclusions, and they attempted to improve the splits by using more random repetitions. However, the improvement on the reproducibility in a comparison of NLP models is limited attributed to a lack of investigation on the relationship between the reproducibility and the estimator induced by a splitting strategy. In this paper, we formulate the reproducibility in a model comparison into a probabilistic function with regard to a conclusion. Furthermore, we theoretically illustrate that the reproducibility is qualitatively dominated by the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of a model performance estimator obtained on a corpus splitting strategy. Specifically, a higher value of the SNR of an estimator probably indicates a better reproducibility. On the basis of the theoretical motivations, we develop a novel mixture estimator of the performance of an NLP model with a regularized corpus splitting strategy based on a blocked 3× 2 cross-validation. We conduct numerical experiments on multiple NLP tasks to show that the proposed estimator achieves a high SNR, and it substantially increases the reproducibility. Therefore, we recommend the NLP practitioners to use the proposed method to compare NLP models instead of the methods based on the widely-used standard splits and the random splits with multiple repetitions.
Data Governance Model For Nation-Wide Non-Profit Organization

According to Connolly's (2017) research, the context of nonprofit organizations exhibits variations when compared to commercial organizations or businesses, as supported by Zhang's (2010) study. Hence, it is imperative for both theoretical and empirical studies to contribute towards enhancing our comprehension of the strategy, implementation, and utilization of information systems in the specific context of nonprofit organizations. The investigation of information systems within the context of non-profit organizations offers a promising avenue for advancing the field of information systems research. This study focuses on the development of an information systems framework using the soft systems methodology, which has already been established. One opportunity for the advancement of information systems in non-profit organizations lies in the establishment of a comprehensive framework that facilitates adoption and is accompanied by robust data governance. This framework enables the analysis of data and the generation of valuable insights, thereby contributing to the development of information systems in the non-profit sector. The choice of data governance was informed by Zhang's (2010) research, which demonstrated that non-profit organizations face significant obstacles in the form of privacy and data security concerns. Furthermore, it is apparent that the preservation of data privacy plays a crucial role in the acceptance and utilization of information systems within non-profit entities. This research aims to contribute to the resolution of the issue by establishing a governance framework for information systems that effectively communicates to users the absence of data privacy risks associated with the systems employed by organizations. The objective of this study is to create a data governance model that will fill the research gap mentioned earlier and make a valuable contribution to the field of information systems research. The formation of the data governance model will involve the integration of soft systems methodology and the DAMA framework. The outcome of this study will be a data governance model specifically designed for a nationwide non-profit organization that utilizes microservices as its cutting-edge technology.
Blowfish Advanced CS Untuk Solusi Keamanan Sistem Komputer Sekolah

Data security and privacy are very important issues for businesses, colleges, the government, and even individuals. The TKJ Laboratory is where PKM events take place. Students are free to use the computers there as they please, as long as they don't break the security system on each one. The types of files that can be protected in this case are text-based document files, picture files, audio and video files that are stored digitally, and question files. In the Community Partnership Program, which had 15 participants, there were outcomes and goals. The program produced a guidebook on how to use Blowfish Advanced CS for computer system security cryptography and instructions on how to use Blowfish Advanced CS for computer system security cryptography. This study is a type of research called qualitative research. With a case study that aims to learn how to use the Blowfish Advanced CS tool to secure text messages, files, and documents with cryptographic data. The predicted outcomes of this PKM are 1) This key is combined to make the Blowfish algorithm stronger during the key setup process. 2) The Blowfish algorithm tool needs a key with at least 4 characters to encrypt the data file during the file/folder simulation. 3) The Blowfish method uses symmetric keys, which means that the simulation process always uses the same key to encrypt and decrypt data files and folders. The same key is also used to split and join files.
Features of the Interaction between Teachers and Students in Conditions of Mixed Learning

The article is devoted to communicative technologies of blended learning as one of the most important areas of development of the educational process in higher education institutions. The author analyzes the main aspects and features of interaction between teachers and students in conditions of blended learning, the main advantages and disadvantages of such interaction. The practical implementation of information and communication models based on the functioning of modular object-oriented learning environments is studied. Based on the analysis, the author has developed the rules of communication between the teacher and students, which will make the educational process in conditions of blended learning more effective.&#x0D;