mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learn or Recall? Revisiting Incremental Learning with Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Shengjie Qiu, Qianli Ma Junhao Zheng
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Incremental Learning (IL) has been a long-standing problem in both vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities.In recent years, as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP downstream tasks, utilizing PLMs as backbones has become a common practice in recent research of IL in NLP.Most assume that catastrophic forgetting is the biggest obstacle to achieving superior IL performance and propose various techniques to overcome this issue.However, we find that this assumption is problematic.Specifically, we revisit more than 20 methods on four classification tasks (Text Classification, Intent Classification, Relation Extraction, and Named Entity Recognition) under the two most popular IL settings (Class-Incremental and Task-Incremental) and reveal that most of them severely underestimate the inherent anti-forgetting ability of PLMs.Based on the observation, we propose a frustratingly easy method called SEQ* for IL with PLMs.The results show that SEQ* has competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) IL methods yet requires considerably less trainable parameters and training time.These findings urge us to revisit the IL with PLMs and encourage future studies to have a fundamental understanding of the catastrophic forgetting in PLMs.
How to Handle Different Types of Out-of-Distribution Scenarios in Computational Argumentation? A Comprehensive and Fine-Grained Field Study
Authors: Yufang Hou, Iryna Gurevych Andreas Waldis
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The advent of pre-trained Language Models (LMs) has markedly advanced natural language processing, but their efficacy in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios remains a significant challenge. Computational argumentation (CA), modeling human argumentation processes, is a field notably impacted by these challenges because complex annotation schemes and high annotation costs naturally lead to resources barely covering the multiplicity of available text sources and topics. Due to this data scarcity, generalization to data from uncovered covariant distributions is a common challenge for CA tasks like stance detection or argument classification. This work systematically assesses LMs' capabilities for such OOD scenarios. While previous work targets specific OOD types like topic shifts or OOD uniformly, we address three prevalent OOD scenarios in CA: topic shift, domain shift, and language shift. Our findings challenge the previously asserted general superiority of in-context learning (ICL) for OOD. We find that the efficacy of such learning paradigms varies with the type of OOD. Specifically, while ICL excels for domain shifts, prompt-based fine-tuning surpasses for topic shifts. To sum up, we navigate the heterogeneity of OOD scenarios in CA and empirically underscore the potential of base-sized LMs in overcoming these challenges.
Cendol: Open Instruction-tuned Generative Large Language Models for Indonesian Languages
Authors: Holy Lovenia, Fajri Koto, Rifki Putri, Wawan Cenggoro, Jhonson Lee, Salsabil Akbar, Emmanuel Dave, Nuurshadieq Nuurshadieq, Muhammad Mahendra, Rr Putri, Bryan Wilie, Genta Winata, Alham Aji, Ayu Purwarianti, Pascale Fung Samuel Cahyawijaya
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable human-like capability in various domains and languages. To bridge this quality gap, we introduce Cendol, a collection of Indonesian LLMs encompassing both decoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures across a range of model sizes. We highlight Cendol`s effectiveness across a diverse array of tasks, attaining ~20% improvement, and demonstrate its capability to generalize to unseen tasks and indigenous languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, Cendol models showcase improved human favorability despite their limitations in capturing indigenous knowledge and cultural values in Indonesia. In addition, we discuss the shortcomings of parameter-efficient tunings, such as LoRA, for language adaptation. Alternatively, we propose the usage of vocabulary adaptation to enhance efficiency. Lastly, we evaluate the safety of Cendol and showcase that safety in pre-training in one language such as English is transferable to low-resource languages, such as Indonesian, even without RLHF and safety fine-tuning.
Must NLP be Extractive?
Authors: Steven Bird
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: How do we roll out language technologies across a world with 7,000 languages? In one story, we scale the successes of NLP further into \textquoteleftlow-resource' languages, doing ever more with less. However, this approach does not recognise the fact that, beyond the 500 institutional languages, the remaining languages are oral vernaculars spoken by communities who use a language of wider communication to interact with the outside world. I argue that such \textquoteleftcontact languages' are the appropriate target for technologies like machine translation, and that the 6,500 oral languages must be approached differently. I share a story from an Indigenous community, where local people reshaped an extractive agenda to align with their relational agenda. I describe the emerging paradigm of relational NLP and explain how it opens the way to non-extractive methods and to solutions that enhance human agency.
Spiral of Silence: How is Large Language Model Killing Information Retrieval?---A Case Study on Open Domain Question Answering
Authors: Ben He, Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Tianshu Wang, Boxi Cao, Le Sun, Yingfei Sun Xiaoyang Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The practice of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval systems, has become increasingly prevalent. However, the repercussions of LLM-derived content infiltrating the web and influencing the retrieval-generation feedback loop are largely uncharted territories. In this study, we construct and iteratively run a simulation pipeline to deeply investigate the short-term and long-term effects of LLM text on RAG systems. Taking the trending Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) task as a point of entry, our findings reveal a potential digital “Spiral of Silence” effect, with LLM-generated text consistently outperforming human-authored content in search rankings, thereby diminishing the presence and impact of human contributions online. This trend risks creating an imbalanced information ecosystem, where the unchecked proliferation of erroneous LLM-generated content may result in the marginalization of accurate information. We urge the academic community to take heed of this potential issue, ensuring a diverse and authentic digital information landscape.
Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque
Authors: Oscar Sainz, Naiara Miguel, Itziar Aldabe, German Rigau, Eneko Agirre, Aitor Ormazabal, Mikel Artetxe, Aitor Soroa Julen Etxaniz
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,046 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.
Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?
Authors: Mark Rofin Michael Hahn
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Empirical studies have identified a range of learnability biases and limitations of transformers, such as a persistent difficulty in learning to compute simple formal languages such as PARITY, and a bias towards low-degree functions. However, theoretical understanding remains limited, with existing expressiveness theory either overpredicting or underpredicting realistic learning abilities. We prove that, under the transformer architecture, the loss landscape is constrained by the input-space sensitivity: Transformers whose output is sensitive to many parts of the input string inhabit isolated points in parameter space, leading to a low-sensitivity bias in generalization. We show theoretically and empirically that this theory unifies a broad array of empirical observations about the learning abilities and biases of transformers, such as their generalization bias towards low sensitivity and low degree, and difficulty in length generalization for PARITY. This shows that understanding transformers' inductive biases requires studying not just their in-principle expressivity, but also their loss landscape.
Talk With Human-like Agents: Empathetic Dialogue Through Perceptible Acoustic Reception and Reaction
Authors: Yongxin Zhu, Kai Zheng, Bing Liu, Haoyu Cao, Deqiang Jiang, Linli Xu Haoqiu Yan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced agents become increasingly prevalent in Human-AI communication, offering vast potential from entertainment to professional domains. However, current multi-modal dialogue systems overlook the acoustic information present in speech, which is crucial for understanding human communication nuances. This oversight can lead to misinterpretations of speakers' intentions, resulting in inconsistent or even contradictory responses within dialogues. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose PerceptiveAgent, an empathetic multi-modal dialogue system designed to discern deeper or more subtle meanings beyond the literal interpretations of words through the integration of speech modality perception. Employing LLMs as a cognitive core, PerceptiveAgent perceives acoustic information from input speech and generates empathetic responses based on speaking styles described in natural language. Experimental results indicate that PerceptiveAgent excels in contextual understanding by accurately discerning the speakers' true intentions in scenarios where the linguistic meaning is either contrary to or inconsistent with the speaker`s true feelings, producing more nuanced and expressive spoken dialogues. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Haoqiu-Yan/PerceptiveAgent.
IRCoder: Intermediate Representations Make Language Models Robust Multilingual Code Generators
Authors: Goran Glavaš, Iryna Gurevych Indraneil Paul
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Code generation has fast become one of the most popular applications of language models (LMs). Nonetheless, research on multilingual aspects of Code-LMs, such as cross-lingual transfer between different programming languages, language-specific data augmentation, and post-hoc LM adaptation, alongside the exploitation of data sources other than the original textual content, has been much sparser than for their natural language counterparts. In particular, most mainstream Code-LMs have been pre-trained on source code files alone. In this work, we investigate the prospect of leveraging readily available compiler intermediate representations (IR)---shared across programming languages---to improve the multilingual capabilities of Code-LMs and facilitate cross-lingual transfer. To this end, we first compile SLTrans, a parallel dataset consisting of nearly 4M self-contained source code files coupled with their respective intermediate representations. Next, starting from various base Code-LMs (ranging from 1.1B to 7.3B parameters), we carry out continued causal language modelling training on SLTrans, forcing the Code-LMs to (1) learn the IR language and (2) align the IR constructs with respective constructs of various programming languages. Our resulting models, dubbed IRCoder, display sizeable and consistent gains across various code generation tasks and metrics, including prompt robustness, multilingual code completion, code understanding, and instruction following.
The Echoes of Multilinguality: Tracing Cultural Value Shifts during Language Model Fine-tuning
Authors: Anne Lauscher, Ekaterina Shutova Rochelle Choenni
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Texts written in different languages reflect different culturally-dependent beliefs of their writers. Thus, we expect multilingual LMs (MLMs), that are jointly trained on a concatenation of text in multiple languages, to encode different cultural values for each language. Yet, as the \textquoteleftmultilinguality' of these LMs is driven by cross-lingual sharing, we also have reason to belief that cultural values bleed over from one language into another. This limits the use of MLMs in practice, as apart from being proficient in generating text in multiple languages, creating language technology that can serve a community also requires the output of LMs to be sensitive to their biases (Naous et al. 2023). Yet, little is known about how cultural values emerge and evolve in MLMs (Hershcovich et al. 2022). We are the first to study how languages can exert influence on the cultural values encoded for different test languages, by studying how such values are revised during fine-tuning. Focusing on the fine-tuning stage allows us to study the interplay between value shifts when exposed to new linguistic experience from different data sources and languages. Lastly, we use a training data attribution method to find patterns in the fine-tuning examples, and the languages that they come from, that tend to instigate value shifts.
MYTE: Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding for Better and Fairer Multilingual Language Modeling
Authors: Terra Blevins, Hila Gonen, Orevaoghene Ahia, Luke Zettlemoyer Tomasz Limisiewicz
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts.Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world`s writing systems, they exhibit bias towards the high-resource languages of the Global West. As a result, texts of underrepresented languages tend to be segmented into long sequences of linguistically meaningless units. To address the disparities, we introduce a new paradigm that encodes the same information with segments of consistent size across diverse languages. Our encoding convention (MYTE) is based on morphemes, as their inventories are more balanced across languages than characters, which are used in previous methods. We show that MYTE produces shorter encodings for all 99 analyzed languages, with the most notable improvements for non-European languages and non-Latin scripts. This, in turn, improves multilingual LM performance and diminishes the perplexity gap throughout diverse languages.
MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus
Authors: Veton Matoshi, Matthias Stürmer, Ilias Chalkidis, Daniel Ho Joel Niklaus
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large, high-quality datasets are crucial for training Large Language Models (LLMs). However, so far, few datasets are available for specialized critical domains such as law and the available ones are often small and only in English. To fill this gap, we curate and release MultiLegalPile, a 689GB corpus in 24 languages from 17 jurisdictions. MultiLegalPile includes diverse legal data sources and allows for pretraining NLP models under fair use, with most of the dataset licensed very permissively. We pretrain two RoBERTa models and one Longformer multilingually, and 24 monolingual models on each of the language-specific subsets and evaluate them on LEXTREME. Additionally, we evaluate the English and multilingual models on LexGLUE. Our multilingual models set a new SotA on LEXTREME and our English models on LexGLUE. We release the dataset, trained models, and all code under the most open licenses possible.
WebCiteS: Attributed Query-Focused Summarization on Chinese Web Search Results with Citations
Authors: Chang Wang, Li Xin, Dezhang Yuan, Junlang Zhan, Tian Zhou, Jin Ma, Jun Gao, Ruifeng Xu Haolin Deng
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Enhancing the attribution in large language models (LLMs) is a crucial task. One feasible approach is to enable LLMs to cite external sources that support their generations. However, existing datasets and evaluation methods in this domain still exhibit notable limitations. In this work, we formulate the task of attributed query-focused summarization (AQFS) and present WebCiteS, a Chinese dataset featuring 7k human-annotated summaries with citations. WebCiteS derives from real-world user queries and web search results, offering a valuable resource for model training and evaluation. Prior works in attribution evaluation do not differentiate between groundedness errors and citation errors. They also fall short in automatically verifying sentences that draw partial support from multiple sources. We tackle these issues by developing detailed metrics and enabling the automatic evaluator to decompose the sentences into sub-claims for fine-grained verification. Our comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models on WebCiteS highlights the challenge LLMs face in correctly citing sources, underscoring the necessity for further improvement. The dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in this crucial field.
What Languages are Easy to Language-Model? A Perspective from Learning Probabilistic Regular Languages
Authors: Anej Svete, Robin Chan, Josef Valvoda, Franz Nowak, Isabelle Augenstein, Eleanor Chodroff, Ryan Cotterell Nadav Borenstein
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributionsover strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of distributions over strings. While prior work in this direction focused on assessing the theoretical limits, in contrast, we seek to understand the empirical learnability. Unlike prior empirical work, we evaluate neural LMs on their home turf---learning probabilistic languages---rather than as classifiers of formal languages. In particular, we investigate the learnability of regular LMs (RLMs) by RNN and Transformer LMs. We empirically test the learnability of RLMs as a function of various complexity parameters of the RLM and the hidden state size of the neural LM. We find that the RLM rank, which corresponds to the size of linear space spanned by the logits of its conditional distributions, and the expected length of sampled strings are strong and significant predictors of learnability for both RNNs and Transformers. Several other predictors also reach significance, but with differing patterns between RNNs and Transformers.
Tree-Averaging Algorithms for Ensemble-Based Unsupervised Discontinuous Constituency Parsing
Authors: Yuqiao Wen, Lili Mou Behzad Shayegh
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We address unsupervised discontinuous constituency parsing, where we observe a high variance in the performance of the only previous model in the literature. We propose to build an ensemble of different runs of the existing discontinuous parser by averaging the predicted trees, to stabilize and boost performance. To begin with, we provide comprehensive computational complexity analysis (in terms of P and NP-complete) for tree averaging under different setups of binarity and continuity. We then develop an efficient exact algorithm to tackle the task, which runs in a reasonable time for all samples in our experiments. Results on three datasets show our method outperforms all baselines in all metrics; we also provide in-depth analyses of our approach.
ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs
Authors: Zhangchen Xu, Luyao Niu, Zhen Xiang, Bhaskar Ramasubramanian, Bo Li, Radha Poovendran Fengqing Jiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Safety is critical to the usage of large language models (LLMs). Multiple techniques such as data filtering and supervised fine-tuning have been developed to strengthen LLM safety. However, currently known techniques presume that corpora used for safety alignment of LLMs are solely interpreted by semantics. This assumption, however, does not hold in real-world applications, which leads to severe vulnerabilities in LLMs. For example, users of forums often use ASCII art, a form of text-based art, to convey image information. In this paper, we propose a novel ASCII art-based jailbreak attack and introduce a comprehensive benchmark Vision-in-Text Challenge (ViTC) to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in recognizing prompts that cannot be solely interpreted by semantics. We show that five SOTA LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2) struggle to recognize prompts provided in the form of ASCII art. Based on this observation, we develop the jailbreak attack ArtPrompt, which leverages the poor performance of LLMs in recognizing ASCII art to bypass safety measures and elicit undesired behaviors from LLMs. ArtPrompt only requires black-box access to the victim LLMs, making it a practical attack. We evaluate ArtPrompt on five SOTA LLMs, and show that ArtPrompt can effectively and efficiently induce undesired behaviors from all five LLMs.
ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development
Authors: Wei Liu, Hongzhang Liu, Nuo Chen, Yufan Dang, Jiahao Li, Cheng Yang, Weize Chen, Yusheng Su, Xin Cong, Juyuan Xu, Dahai Li, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun Chen Qian
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Software development is a complex task that necessitates cooperation among multiple members with diverse skills. Numerous studies used deep learning to improve specific phases in a waterfall model, such as design, coding, and testing. However, the deep learning model in each phase requires unique designs, leading to technical inconsistencies across various phases, which results in a fragmented and ineffective development process. In this paper, we introduce ChatDev, a chat-powered software development framework in which specialized agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are guided in what to communicate (via chat chain) and how to communicate (via communicative dehallucination). These agents actively contribute to the design, coding, and testing phases through unified language-based communication, with solutions derived from their multi-turn dialogues. We found their utilization of natural language is advantageous for system design, and communicating in programming language proves helpful in debugging. This paradigm demonstrates how linguistic communication facilitates multi-agent collaboration, establishing language as a unifying bridge for autonomous task-solving among LLM agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.
Disentangled Learning with Synthetic Parallel Data for Text Style Transfer
Authors: Quan Wang, Zikang Guo, Benfeng Xu, Licheng Zhang, Zhendong Mao Jingxuan Han
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Text style transfer (TST) is an important task in natural language generation, which aims to transfer the text style (e.g., sentiment) while keeping its semantic information. Due to the absence of parallel datasets for supervision, most existing studies have been conducted in an unsupervised manner, where the generated sentences often suffer from high semantic divergence and thus low semantic preservation. In this paper, we propose a novel disentanglement-based framework for TST named DisenTrans, where disentanglement means that we separate the attribute and content components in the natural language corpus and consider this task from these two perspectives. Concretely, we first create a disentangled Chain-of-Thought prompting procedure to synthesize parallel data and corresponding attribute components for supervision. Then we develop a disentanglement learning method with synthetic data, where two losses are designed to enhance the focus on attribute properties and constrain the semantic space, thereby benefiting style control and semantic preservation respectively. Instructed by the disentanglement concept, our framework creates valuable supervised information and utilizes it effectively in TST tasks. Extensive experiments on mainstream datasets present that our framework achieves significant performance with great sample efficiency.
PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety
Authors: Yongting Zhang, Lijun Li, Hongzhi Gao, Lijun Wang, Huchuan Lu, Feng Zhao, Yu Qiao, Jing Shao Zaibin Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Multi-agent systems, when enhanced with Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit profound capabilities in collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. To date, comprehensive research on the safety issues associated with multi-agent systems remains limited. In this paper, we explore these concerns through the innovative lens of agent psychology, revealing that the dark psychological states of agents constitute a significant threat to safety.To tackle these concerns, we propose a comprehensive framework (PsySafe) grounded in agent psychology, focusing on three key areas: firstly, identifying how dark personality traits in agents can lead to risky behaviors; secondly, evaluating the safety of multi-agent systems from the psychological and behavioral perspectives, and thirdly, devising effective strategies to mitigate these risks.Our experiments reveal several intriguing phenomena, such as the collective dangerous behaviors among agents, agents' self-reflection when engaging in dangerous behavior, and the correlation between agents' psychological assessments and dangerous behaviors. We anticipate that our framework and observations will provide valuable insights for further research into the safety of multi-agent systems. We make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI4Good24/PsySafe.
Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation
Authors: Sunghwan Kim, Taeyoon Kwon, Seungjun Moon, Hyunsouk Cho, Youngjae Yu, Dongha Lee, Jinyoung Yeo Dongjin Kang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals' emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to facilitate the generation of appropriate responses. Recently, despite the remarkable conversational ability of large language models (LLMs), previous studies have suggested that they often struggle with providing useful emotional support. Hence, this work initially analyzes the results of LLMs on ESConv, revealing challenges in selecting the correct strategy and a notable preference for a specific strategy. Motivated by these, we explore the impact of the inherent preference in LLMs on providing emotional support, and consequently, we observe that exhibiting high preference for specific strategies hinders effective emotional support, aggravating its robustness in predicting the appropriate strategy. Moreover, we conduct a methodological study to offer insights into the necessary approaches for LLMs to serve as proficient emotional supporters. Our findings emphasize that (1) low preference for specific strategies hinders the progress of emotional support, (2) external assistance helps reduce preference bias, and (3) existing LLMs alone cannot become good emotional supporters. These insights suggest promising avenues for future research to enhance the emotional intelligence of LLMs.
$ınfty$Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokens
Authors: Yingfa Chen, Shengding Hu, Zihang Xu, Junhao Chen, Moo Hao, Xu Han, Zhen Thai, Shuo Wang, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun Xinrong Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Processing and reasoning over long contexts is crucial for many practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as document comprehension and agent construction. Despite recent strides in making LLMs process contexts with more than 100K tokens, there is currently a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate this long-context capability. Existing public benchmarks typically focus on contexts around 10K tokens, limiting the assessment and comparison of LLMs in processing longer contexts. In this paper, we propose , the first LLM benchmark featuring an average data length surpassing 100K tokens. comprises synthetic and realistic tasks spanning diverse domains in English and Chinese. The tasks in are designed to require an understanding of long dependencies in contexts and make simply retrieving a limited number of passages from contexts not sufficient for these tasks. Based on , we evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs tailored for processing long contexts. The experimental results indicate that existing long-context LLMs still require significant advancements to process 100K+ contexts effectively. Furthermore, we present three intriguing analyses regarding the behavior of LLMs processing long context. Our code and data is released.
Natural Language Satisfiability: Exploring the Problem Distribution and Evaluating Transformer-based Language Models
Authors: Ian Pratt-Hartmann, Riza Batista-Navarro Tharindu Madusanka
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Efforts to apply transformer-based language models (TLMs) to the problem of reasoning in natural language have enjoyed ever-increasing success in recent years. The most fundamental task in this area to which nearly all others can be reduced is that of determining satisfiability. However, from a logical point of view, satisfiability problems vary along various dimensions, which may affect TLMs' ability to learn how to solve them. The problem instances of satisfiability in natural language can belong to different computational complexity classes depending on the language fragment in which they are expressed. Although prior research has explored the problem of natural language satisfiability, the above-mentioned point has not been discussed adequately. Hence, we investigate how problem instances from varying computational complexity classes and having different grammatical constructs impact TLMs' ability to learn rules of inference. Furthermore, to faithfully evaluate TLMs, we conduct an empirical study to explore the distribution of satisfiability problems.
Political Compass or Spinning Arrow? Towards More Meaningful Evaluations for Values and Opinions in Large Language Models
Authors: Valentin Hofmann, Valentina Pyatkin, Musashi Hinck, Hannah Kirk, Hinrich Schuetze, Dirk Hovy Paul Röttger
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns around real-world LLM applications. For example, politically-biased LLMs may subtly influence society when they are used by millions of people. Such real-world concerns, however, stand in stark contrast to the artificiality of current evaluations: real users do not typically ask LLMs survey questions. Motivated by this discrepancy, we challenge the prevailing *constrained* evaluation paradigm for values and opinions in LLMs and explore more realistic *unconstrained* evaluations. As a case study, we focus on the popular Political Compass Test (PCT). In a systematic review, we find that most prior work using the PCT *forces models to comply with the PCT`s multiple-choice format. We show that models give substantively different answers when not forced; that answers change depending on how models are forced; and that answers lack paraphrase robustness. Then, we demonstrate that models give different answers yet again in a more realistic open-ended answer setting. We distill these findings into recommendations and open challenges in evaluating values and opinions in LLMs.
AI \textquoteleftNews' Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian
Authors: Anna Rogers, Chiara Alzetta, Felice Dell′Orletta, Andrea Esuli Giovanni Puccetti
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as \textquoteleftcontent farm' models (CFMs), to generate synthetic text that could pass for real news articles. This is already happening even for languages that do not have high-quality monolingual LLMs. We show that fine-tuning Llama (v1), mostly trained on English, on as little as 40K Italian news articles, is sufficient for producing news-like texts that native speakers of Italian struggle to identify as synthetic.We investigate three LLMs and three methods of detecting synthetic texts (log-likelihood, DetectGPT, and supervised classification), finding that they all perform better than human raters, but they are all impractical in the real world (requiring either access to token likelihood information or a large dataset of CFM texts). We also explore the possibility of creating a proxy CFM: an LLM fine-tuned on a similar dataset to one used by the real \textquoteleftcontent farm'. We find that even a small amount of fine-tuning data suffices for creating a successful detector, but we need to know which base LLM is used, which is a major challenge.Our results suggest that there are currently no practical methods for detecting synthetic news-like texts \textquoteleftin the wild', while generating them is too easy. We highlight the urgency of more NLP research on this problem.
Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Models
Authors: Alon Jacoby, Yoav Goldberg Mosh Levy
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood. We investigate this aspect by introducing a novel QA reasoning framework, specifically designed to assess the impact of input length. We isolate the effect of input length using multiple versions of the same sample, each being extended with padding of different lengths, types and locations. Our findings show a notable degradation in LLMs' reasoning performance at much shorter input lengths than their technical maximum. We show that the degradation trend appears in every version of our dataset, although at different intensities.Additionally, our study reveals that the traditional metric of next word prediction correlates negatively with performance of LLMs' on our reasoning dataset. We analyse our results and identify failure modes that can serve as useful guides for future research, potentially informing strategies to address the limitations observed in LLMs.
Disambiguate Words like Composing Them: A Morphology-Informed Approach to Enhance Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Qiliang Liang, Yaqi Yin, Hansi Wang, Yang Liu Yue Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: In parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings are highly correlated with morphological knowledge, which can help to disambiguate word senses. However, in-depth exploration of morphological knowledge in previous word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods is still lacking due to the absence of publicly available resources. In this paper, we are motivated to enhance Chinese WSD with full morphological knowledge, including both word-formations and morphemes. We first construct the largest and releasable Chinese WSD resources, including the lexico-semantic inventories MorInv and WrdInv, a Chinese WSD dataset MiCLS, and an out-of-volcabulary (OOV) test set. Then, we propose a model, MorBERT, to fully leverage this morphology-informed knowledge for Chinese WSD and achieve a SOTA F1 of 92.18% in the task. Finally, we demonstrated the model`s robustness in low-resource settings and generalizability to OOV senses. These resources and methods may bring new insights into and solutions for various downstream tasks in both computational and humanistic fields.
Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers
Authors: Veniamin Veselovsky, Giovanni Monea, Robert West Chris Wendler
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We ask whether multilingual language models trained on unbalanced, English-dominated corpora use English as an internal pivot language----a question of key importance for understanding how language models function and the origins of linguistic bias. Focusing on the Llama-2 family of transformer models, our study is based on carefully constructed non-English prompts with a unique correct single-token continuation. From layer to layer, transformers gradually map an input embedding of the final prompt token to an output embedding from which next-token probabilities are computed. Tracking intermediate embeddings through their high-dimensional space reveals three distinct phases, whereby intermediate embeddings (1) start far away from output token embeddings; (2) already in middle layers allow for decoding a semantically correct next token, but giving higher probability to its version in English than in the input language; (3) move into an input-language-specific region of the embedding space. We cast these results into a conceptual model where the three phases operate in ”input space”, ”concept space”, and ”output space”, respectively. Crucially, our evidence suggests that the abstract ”concept space” lies closer to English than to other input languages, which may have important consequences regarding the biases embodied by multilingual language models.
G-DIG: Towards Gradient-based DIverse and hiGh-quality Instruction Data Selection for Machine Translation
Authors: Luyang Huang, Liyan Kang, Zhicheng Liu, Yu Lu, Shanbo Cheng Xingyuan Pan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in general scenarios. Instruction finetuning empowers them to align with humans in various tasks. Nevertheless, the \textitDiversity and \textitQuality of the instruction data remain two main challenges for instruction finetuning. With regard to this, in this paper, we propose a novel gradient-based method to automatically select high-quality and diverse instruction finetuning data for machine translation. Our key innovation centers around analyzing how individual training examples influence the model during training. Specifically, we select training examples that exert beneficial influences on the model as high-quality ones by means of Influence Function plus a small high-quality seed dataset. Moreover, to enhance the diversity of the training data we maximize the variety of influences they have on the model by clustering on their gradients and resampling. Extensive experiments on WMT22 and FLORES translation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our methods, and in-depth analysis further validates their effectiveness and generalization.
Media Framing: A typology and Survey of Computational Approaches Across Disciplines
Authors: Shima Khanehzar, Lea Frermann Yulia Otmakhova
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Framing studies how individuals and societies make sense of the world, by communicating or representing complex issues through schema of interpretation. The framing of information in the mass media influences our interpretation of facts and corresponding decisions, so detecting and analysing it is essential to understand biases in the information we consume. Despite that, framing is still mostly examined manually, on a case-by-case basis, while existing large-scale automatic analyses using NLP methods are not mature enough to solve this task. In this survey we show that despite the growing interest to framing in NLP its current approaches do not capture those aspects which allow to frame, rather than simply convey, the message. To this end, we bring together definitions of frames and framing adopted in different disciplines; examine cognitive, linguistic, and communicative aspects a frame contains beyond its topical content. We survey recent work on computational frame detection, and discuss how framing aspects and frame definitions are (or should) be reflected in NLP approaches.
SPZ: A Semantic Perturbation-based Data Augmentation Method with Zonal-Mixing for Alzheimer`s Disease Detection
Authors: Cheng Huang, PuZhen Su, Jie Yin FangFang Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Alzheimer`s Disease (AD), characterized by significant cognitive and functional impairment, necessitates the development of early detection techniques. Traditional diagnostic practices, such as cognitive assessments and biomarker analysis, are often invasive and costly. Deep learning-based approaches for non-invasive AD detection have been explored in recent studies, but the lack of accessible data hinders further improvements in detection performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel semantic perturbation-based data augmentation method that essentially differs from existing techniques, which primarily rely on explicit data engineering. Our approach generates controlled semantic perturbations to enhance textual representations, aiding the model in identifying AD-specific linguistic patterns, particularly in scenarios with limited data availability. It learns contextual information and dynamically adjusts the perturbation degree for different linguistic features. This enhances the model`s sensitivity to AD-specific linguistic features and its robustness against natural language noise. Experimental results on the ADReSS challenge dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms other strong and competitive deep learning methods.
Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only
Authors: Martin Gubri, Hwaran Lee, Sangdoo Yun, Seong Oh Dennis Ulmer
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, building trust and maintaining safety by accurately quantifying a model`s confidence in its prediction becomes even more important. However, finding effective ways to calibrate LLMs---especially when the only interface to the models is their generated text---remains a challenge. We propose APRICOT (Auxiliary prediction of confidence targets): A method to set confidence targets and train an additional model that predicts an LLM`s confidence based on its textual input and output alone. This approach has several advantages: It is conceptually simple, does not require access to the target model beyond its output, does not interfere with the language generation, and has a multitude of potential usages, for instance by verbalizing the predicted confidence or using it to re-prompting the LLM to accurately reflecting its uncertainty. We show how our approach performs competitively in terms of calibration error for white-box and black-box LLMs on closed-book question-answering to detect incorrect LLM answers.