mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Toward Joint Language Modeling for Speech Units and Text
Authors: Chung-Ming Chien, Wei-Ning Hsu, Karen Livescu, Arun Babu, Alexis Conneau, Alexei Baevski, Michael Auli Ju-Chieh Chou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Speech and text are two major forms of human language. The research community has been focusing on mapping speech to text or vice versa for many years. However, in the field of language modeling, very little effort has been made to model them jointly. In light of this, we explore joint language modeling for speech units and text. Specifically, we compare different speech tokenizers to transform continuous speech signals into discrete units and use different methods to construct mixed speech-text data. We introduce automatic metrics to evaluate how well the joint LM mixes speech and text. We also fine-tune the LM on downstream spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks with different modalities (speech or text) and test its performance to assess the model`s learning of shared representations. Our results show that by mixing speech units and text with our proposed mixing techniques, the joint LM improves over a speech-only baseline on SLU tasks and shows zero-shot cross-modal transferability.
From Chaos to Clarity: Claim Normalization to Empower Fact-Checking
Authors: Tanmoy Chakraborty, Preslav Nakov Megha Sundriyal
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the proliferation of social media platforms, users are exposed to vast information, including posts containing misleading claims. However, the pervasive noise inherent in these posts presents a challenge in identifying precise and prominent claims that require verification. Extracting the core assertions from such posts is arduous and time-consuming. We introduce a novel task, called Claim Normalization ($\textitaka ClaimNorm$) that aims to decompose complex and noisy social media posts into more straightforward and understandable forms, termed $\textitnormalized claims$. We propose $\textttCACN$ , a pioneering approach that leverages chain-of-thought and claim check-worthiness estimation, mimicking human reasoning processes, to comprehend intricate claims. Moreover, we capitalize on large language models' powerful in-context learning abilities to provide guidance and improve the claim normalization process. To evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we meticulously compile a comprehensive real-world dataset, $\textttCLAN$, comprising more than $6k$ instances of social media posts alongside their respective normalized claims. Experimentation demonstrates that $\textttCACN$ outperforms several baselines across various evaluation measures. A rigorous error analysis validates $\textttCACN$\textquotelefts capabilities and pitfalls. We release our dataset and code at https://github.com/LCS2-IIITD/CACN-EMNLP-2023.
Mitigating Biases in Hate Speech Detection from A Causal Perspective
Authors: Jiaao Chen, Diyi Yang Zhehao Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Nowadays, many hate speech detectors are built to automatically detect hateful content. However, their training sets are sometimes skewed towards certain stereotypes (e.g., race or religion-related). As a result, the detectors are prone to depend on some shortcuts for predictions. Previous works mainly focus on token-level analysis and heavily rely on human experts' annotations to identify spurious correlations, which is not only costly but also incapable of discovering higher-level artifacts. In this work, we use grammar induction to find grammar patterns for hate speech and analyze this phenomenon from a causal perspective. Concretely, we categorize and verify different biases based on their spuriousness and influence on the model prediction. Then, we propose two mitigation approaches including Multi-Task Intervention and Data-Specific Intervention based on these confounders. Experiments conducted on 9 hate speech datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approaches.
Unmasking the Hidden Meaning: Bridging Implicit and Explicit Hate Speech Embedding Representations
Authors: Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata Nicolás Benjamín Ocampo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Research on automatic hate speech (HS) detection has mainly focused on identifying explicit forms of hateful expressions on user-generated content. Recently, a few works have started to investigate methods to address more implicit and subtle abusive content. However, despite these efforts, automated systems still struggle to correctly recognize implicit and more veiled forms of HS. As these systems heavily rely on proper textual representations for classification, it is crucial to investigate the differences in embedding implicit and explicit messages. Our contribution to address this challenging task is fourfold. First, we present a comparative analysis of transformer-based models, evaluating their performance across five datasets containing implicit HS messages. Second, we examine the embedding representations of implicit messages across different targets, gaining insight into how veiled cases are encoded. Third, we compare and link explicit and implicit hateful messages across these datasets through their targets, enforcing the relation between explicitness and implicitness and obtaining more meaningful embedding representations. Lastly, we show how these newer representation maintains high performance on HS labels, while improving classification in borderline cases.
PerturbScore: Connecting Discrete and Continuous Perturbations in NLP
Authors: Ke Ren, Yunfan Shao, Pengyu Wang, Xipeng Qiu Linyang Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the rapid development of neural network applications in NLP, model robustness problem is gaining more attention. Different from computer vision, the discrete nature of texts makes it more challenging to explore robustness in NLP. Therefore, in this paper, we aim to connect discrete perturbations with continuous perturbations, therefore we can use such connections as a bridge to help understand discrete perturbations in NLP models. Specifically, we first explore how to connect and measure the correlation between discrete perturbations and continuous perturbations. Then we design a regression task as a PerturbScore to learn the correlation automatically. Through experimental results, we find that we can build a connection between discrete and continuous perturbations and use the proposed PerturbScore to learn such correlation, surpassing previous methods used in discrete perturbation measuring. Further, the proposed PerturbScore can be well generalized to different datasets, perturbation methods, indicating that we can use it as a powerful tool to study model robustness in NLP.
InstructoR: Instructing Unsupervised Conversational Dense Retrieval with Large Language Models
Authors: Pengfei Cao, Yubo Chen, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao Zhuoran Jin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Compared to traditional single-turn ad-hoc retrieval, conversational retrieval needs to handle the multi-turn conversation and understand the user`s real query intent. However, most existing methods simply fine-tune the pre-trained ad-hoc retriever on limited supervised data, making it challenging for the retriever to fully grasp the entirety of the conversation. In this paper, we find that large language models (LLMs) can accurately discover the user`s query intent from the complex conversation context and provide the supervised signal to instruct the retriever in an unsupervised manner. Therefore, we propose a novel method termed InstructoR to Instruct unsupervised conversational dense Retrieval with LLMs. We design an unsupervised training framework that employs LLMs to estimate the session-passage relevance score as the soft label to guide the retriever`s training. Specially, we devise three instructing strategies from context, query and response perspectives to calculate the relevance score more precisely, including conversational retrieval as conversation generation, question rewrite as latent variable and question response as posterior guide. Experimental results show InstructoR can bring significant improvements across various ad-hoc retrievers, even surpassing the current supervised state-of-the-art method. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method under low-resource and zero-shot settings. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jinzhuoran/InstructoR/.
The Iron(ic) Melting Pot: Reviewing Human Evaluation in Humour, Irony and Sarcasm Generation
Authors: Aaron Maladry, Chenghua Lin Tyler Loakman
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Human evaluation in often considered to be the gold standard method of evaluating a Natural Language Generation system. However, whilst its importance is accepted by the community at large, the quality of its execution is often brought into question. In this position paper, we argue that the generation of more esoteric forms of language - humour, irony and sarcasm - constitutes a subdomain where the characteristics of selected evaluator panels are of utmost importance, and every effort should be made to report demographic characteristics wherever possible, in the interest of transparency and replicability. We support these claims with an overview of each language form and an analysis of examples in terms of how their interpretation is affected by different participant variables. We additionally perform a critical survey of recent works in NLG to assess how well evaluation procedures are reported in this subdomain, and note a severe lack of open reporting of evaluator demographic information, and a significant reliance on crowdsourcing platforms for recruitment.
INGENIOUS: Using Informative Data Subsets for Efficient Pre-Training of Language Models
Authors: Krishnateja Killamsetty, Sumit Bhatia, Milan Aggarwal, Ganesh Ramakrishnan, Rishabh Iyer, Balaji Krishnamurthy H S V N S Kowndinya Renduchintala
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A salient characteristic of pre-trained language models (PTLMs) is a remarkable improvement in their generalization capability and emergence of new capabilities with increasing model capacity and pre-training dataset size. Consequently, we are witnessing the development of enormous models pushing the state-of-the-art. It is, however, imperative to realize that this inevitably leads to prohibitively long training times, extortionate computing costs, and a detrimental environmental impact. Significant efforts are underway to make PTLM training more efficient through innovations in model architectures, training pipelines, and loss function design, with scant attention being paid to optimizing the utility of training data. The key question that we ask is whether it is possible to train PTLMs by employing only highly informative subsets of the training data while maintaining downstream performance? Building upon the recent progress in informative data subset selection, we show how we can employ submodular optimization to select highly representative subsets of the training corpora and demonstrate that the proposed framework can be applied to efficiently train multiple PTLMs (BERT, BioBERT, GPT-2) using only a fraction of data. Further, we perform a rigorous empirical evaluation to show that the resulting models achieve up to ~99% of the performance of the fully-trained models. We made our framework publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/Efficient-AI/ingenious.
Towards General Error Diagnosis via Behavioral Testing in Machine Translation
Authors: Lemao Liu, Dit-Yan Yeung Junjie Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Behavioral testing offers a crucial means of diagnosing linguistic errors and assessing capabilities of NLP models. However, applying behavioral testing to machine translation (MT) systems is challenging as it generally requires human efforts to craft references for evaluating the translation quality of such systems on newly generated test cases. Existing works in behavioral testing of MT systems circumvent this by evaluating translation quality without references, but this restricts diagnosis to specific types of errors, such as incorrect translation of single numeric or currency words. In order to diagnose general errors, this paper proposes a new Bilingual Translation Pair Generation based Behavior Testing (BTPGBT) framework for conducting behavioral testing of MT systems. The core idea of BTPGBT is to employ a novel bilingual translation pair generation (BTPG) approach that automates the construction of high-quality test cases and their pseudoreferences. Experimental results on various MT systems demonstrate that BTPGBT could provide comprehensive and accurate behavioral testing results for general error diagnosis, which further leads to several insightful findings. Our code and data are available at https: //github.com/wujunjie1998/BTPGBT.
Retrieval-Augmented Few-shot Text Classification
Authors: Lemao Liu, Haiyun Jiang, Shuming Shi, Xiang Ao Guoxin Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented methods are successful in the standard scenario where the retrieval space is sufficient; whereas in the few-shot scenario with limited retrieval space, this paper shows it is non-trivial to put them into practice. First, it is impossible to retrieve semantically similar examples by using an off-the-shelf metric and it is crucial to learn a task-specific retrieval metric; Second, our preliminary experiments demonstrate that it is difficult to optimize a plausible metric by minimizing the standard cross-entropy loss. The in-depth analyses quantitatively show minimizing cross-entropy loss suffers from the weak supervision signals and the severe gradient vanishing issue during the optimization. To address these issues, we introduce two novel training objectives, namely EM-L and R-L, which provide more task-specific guidance to the retrieval metric by the EM algorithm and a ranking-based loss, respectively. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets prove the superiority of the proposed retrieval augmented methods on the performance.
Temporal Extrapolation and Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Authors: Chengjin Xu, Fenglong Su, Zhen Huang, Yong Dou Zhongwu Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Real-world Temporal Knowledge Graphs keep growing with time and new entities and facts emerge continually, necessitating a model that can extrapolate to future timestamps and transfer knowledge for new components. Therefore, our work first dives into this more realistic issue, lifelong TKG reasoning, where existing methods can only address part of the challenges. Specifically, we formulate lifelong TKG reasoning as a temporal-path-based reinforcement learning (RL) framework. Then, we add temporal displacement into the action space of RL to extrapolate for the future and further propose a temporal-rule-based reward shaping to guide the training. To transfer and update knowledge, we design a new edge-aware message passing module, where the embeddings of new entities and edges are inductive. We conduct extensive experiments on three newly constructed benchmarks for lifelong TKG reasoning. Experimental results show the outperforming effectiveness of our model against all well-adapted baselines.
Comparing Prompt-Based and Standard Fine-Tuning for Urdu Text Classification
Authors: Ubaid Azam, Ali Faheem, Faisal Kamiran, Asim Karim Faizad Ullah
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent advancements in natural language processing have demonstrated the efficacy of pre-trained language models for various downstream tasks through prompt-based fine-tuning. In contrast to standard fine-tuning, which relies solely on labeled examples, prompt-based fine-tuning combines a few labeled examples (few shot) with guidance through prompts tailored for the specific language and task. For low-resource languages, where labeled examples are limited, prompt-based fine-tuning appears to be a promising alternative. In this paper, we compare prompt-based and standard fine-tuning for the popular task of text classification in Urdu and Roman Urdu languages. We conduct experiments using five datasets, covering different domains, and pre-trained multilingual transformers. The results reveal that significant improvement of up to 13% in accuracy is achieved by prompt-based fine-tuning over standard fine-tuning approaches. This suggests the potential of prompt-based fine-tuning as a valuable approach for low-resource languages with limited labeled data.
Explore the Way: Exploring Reasoning Path by Bridging Entities for Effective Cross-Document Relation Extraction
Authors: Jinsung Kim, Jungwoo Lim, Yoonna Jang, Heuiseok Lim Junyoung Son
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Cross-document relation extraction (CodRED) task aims to infer the relation between two entities mentioned in different documents within a reasoning path. Previous studies have concentrated on merely capturing implicit relations between the entities. However, humans usually utilize explicit information chains such as hyperlinks or additional searches to find the relations between two entities. Inspired by this, we propose Path wIth expLOraTion (PILOT) that provides the enhanced reasoning path by exploring the explicit clue information within the documents. PILOT finds the bridging entities which directly guide the paths between the entities and then employs them as stepstones to navigate desirable paths. We show that models with PILOT outperform the baselines in the CodRED task. Furthermore, we offer a variety of analyses to verify the validity of the reasoning paths constructed through PILOT, including evaluations using large language models such as ChatGPT.
The student becomes the master: Outperforming GPT3 on Scientific Factual Error Correction
Authors: Atharva Kulkarni, Hai Pham, Barnabas Poczos Dhananjay Ashok
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Due to the prohibitively high cost of creating error correction datasets, most Factual Claim Correction methods rely on a powerful verification model to guide the correction process. This leads to a significant drop in performance in domains like Scientific Claim Correction, where good verification models do not always exist. In this work we introduce SciFix, a claim correction system that does not require a verifier but is able to outperform existing methods by a considerable margin --- achieving correction accuracy of 84% on the SciFact dataset, 77% on SciFact-Open and 72.75% on the CovidFact dataset, compared to next best accuracies of 7.6%, 5% and 15% on the same datasets respectively. Our method leverages the power of prompting with LLMs during training to create a richly annotated dataset that can be used for fully supervised training and regularization. We additionally use a claim-aware decoding procedure to improve the quality of corrected claims. Our method outperforms the very LLM that was used to generate the annotated dataset --- with FewShot Prompting on GPT3.5 achieving 58%, 61% and 64% on the respective datasets, a consistently lower correction accuracy, despite using nearly 800 times as many parameters as our model.
Leveraging Structured Information for Explainable Multi-hop Question Answering and Reasoning
Authors: Xinya Du Ruosen Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Neural models, including large language models (LLMs), achieve superior performance on multi-hop question-answering. To elicit reasoning capabilities from LLMs, recent works propose using the chain-of-thought (CoT) mechanism to generate both the reasoning chain and the answer, which enhances the model`s capabilities in conducting multi-hop reasoning. However, several challenges still remain: such as struggling with inaccurate reasoning, hallucinations, and lack of interpretability. On the other hand, information extraction (IE) identifies entities, relations, and events grounded to the text. The extracted structured information can be easily interpreted by humans and machines (Grishman, 2019). In this work, we investigate constructing and leveraging extracted semantic structures (graphs) for multi-hop question answering, especially the reasoning process. Empirical results and human evaluations show that our framework: generates more faithful reasoning chains and substantially improves the QA performance on two benchmark datasets. Moreover, the extracted structures themselves naturally provide grounded explanations that are preferred by humans, as compared to the generated reasoning chains and saliency-based explanations.
Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review: A Benchmark
Authors: Xiaocheng Feng, Xiachong Feng, Yingsheng Wu, Bing Qin Kun Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Scientific literature review generation aims to extract and organize important information from an abundant collection of reference papers and produces corresponding reviews while lacking a clear and logical hierarchy. We observe that a high-quality catalogue-guided generation process can effectively alleviate this problem. Therefore, we present an atomic and challenging task named Hierarchical Catalogue Generation for Literature Review as the first step for review generation, which aims to produce a hierarchical catalogue of a review paper given various references. We construct a novel English Hierarchical Catalogues of Literature Reviews Dataset with 7.6k literature review catalogues and 389k reference papers. To accurately assess the model performance, we design two evaluation metrics for informativeness and similarity to ground truth from semantics and structure. Our extensive analyses verify the high quality of our dataset and the effectiveness of our evaluation metrics. We further benchmark diverse experiments on state-of-the-art summarization models like BART and large language models like ChatGPT to evaluate their capabilities. We further discuss potential directions for this task to motivate future research.
MCC-KD: Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Siyue Wu, Xiaojun Quan, Rui Wang, Ming Yan, Ji Zhang Hongzhan Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have showcased remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through chain of thought (CoT) prompting. Recently, there has been a growing interest in transferring these reasoning abilities from LLMs to smaller models. However, achieving both the diversity and consistency in rationales presents a challenge. In this paper, we focus on enhancing these two aspects and propose Multi-CoT Consistent Knowledge Distillation (MCC-KD) to efficiently distill the reasoning capabilities. In MCC-KD, we generate multiple rationales for each question and enforce consistency among their predictions by minimizing the bidirectional KL-divergence between the answer distributions. We conduct comprehensive experiments to investigate the effectiveness of MCC-KD with different model architectures (LLaMA/FlanT5) and various model scales (3B/7B/11B/13B) on both mathematical reasoning and commonsense reasoning benchmarks. The empirical results demonstrate that MCC-KD achieves superior performance on in-distribution datasets and exhibits a strong generalization ability on out-of-distribution datasets.
An Empirical Study of Frame Selection for Text-to-Video Retrieval
Authors: Min Cao, Yang Bai, Ziyin Zeng, Chen Chen, Liqiang Nie, Min Zhang Mengxia Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Text-to-video retrieval (TVR) aims to find the most relevant video in a large video gallery given a query text. The intricate and abundant context of the video challenges the performance and efficiency of TVR. To handle the serialized video contexts, existing methods typically select a subset of frames within a video to represent the video content for TVR. How to select the most representative frames is a crucial issue, whereby the selected frames are required to not only retain the semantic information of the video but also promote retrieval efficiency by excluding temporally redundant frames. In this paper, we make the first empirical study of frame selection for TVR. We systemically classify existing frame selection methods into text-free and text-guided ones, under which we detailedly analyze six different frame selections in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. Among them, two frame selections are first developed in this paper. According to the comprehensive analysis on multiple TVR benchmarks, we empirically conclude that the TVR with proper frame selections can significantly improve the retrieval efficiency without sacrificing the retrieval performance.
Conditional Natural Language Inference
Authors: Razieh Rahimi, James Allan Youngwoo Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: To properly explain sentence pairs that provide contradictory (different) information for different conditions, we introduce the task of conditional natural language inference (Cond-NLI) and focus on automatically extracting contradictory aspects and their conditions from a sentence pair. Cond-NLI can help to provide a full spectrum of information, such as when there are multiple answers to a question each addressing a specific condition, or reviews with different opinions for different conditions. We show that widely-used feature-attribution explanation models are not suitable for finding conditions, especially when sentences are long and are written independently. We propose a simple yet effective model for the original NLI task that can successfully extract conditions while not requiring token-level annotations. Our model enhances the interpretability of the NLI task while maintaining comparable accuracy. To evaluate models for the Cond-NLI, we build and release a token-level annotated dataset BioClaim which contains potentially contradictory claims from the biomedical domain. Our experiments show that our proposed model outperforms the full cross-encoder and other baselines in extracting conditions. It also performs on-par with GPT-3 which has an order of magnitude more parameters and trained on a huge amount of data.
Contrastive Distant Supervision for Debiased and Denoised Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Hongyu Lin, Xianpei Han, Ben He, Le Sun Ning Bian
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Distant Supervision (DS) is a promising learning approach for MRC by leveraging easily-obtained question-answer pairs. Unfortunately, the heuristically annotated dataset will inevitably lead to mislabeled instances, resulting in answer bias and context noise problems. To learn debiased and denoised MRC models, this paper proposes the Contrastive Distant Supervision algorithm -- CDS, which can learn to distinguish confusing and noisy instances via confidence-aware contrastive learning. Specifically, to eliminate answer bias, CDS samples counterfactual negative instances, which ensures that MRC models must take both answer information and question-context interaction into consideration. To denoise distantly annotated contexts, CDS samples confusing negative instances to increase the margin between correct and mislabeled instances. We further propose a confidence-aware contrastive loss to model and leverage the uncertainty of all DS instances during learning. Experimental results show that CDS is effective and can even outperform supervised MRC models without manual annotations.
KEPLET: Knowledge-Enhanced Pretrained Language Model with Topic Entity Awareness
Authors: Jialong Han, Kyumin Lee, Chengyuan Ma, Benjamin Yao, Xiaohu Liu Yichuan Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In recent years, Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have shown their superiority by pre-training on unstructured text corpus and then fine-tuning on downstream tasks. On entity-rich textual resources like Wikipedia, Knowledge-Enhanced PLMs (KEPLMs) incorporate the interactions between tokens and mentioned entities in pre-training, and are thus more effective on entity-centric tasks such as entity linking and relation classification. Although exploiting Wikipedia`s rich structures to some extent, conventional KEPLMs still neglect a unique layout of the corpus where each Wikipedia page is around a topic entity (identified by the page URL and shown in the page title). In this paper, we demonstrate that KEPLMs without incorporating the topic entities will lead to insufficient entity interaction and biased (relation) word semantics. We thus propose KEPLET, a novel Knowledge-Énhanced Pre-trained LanguagE model with Topic entity awareness. In an end-to-end manner, KEPLET identifies where to add the topic entity`s information in a Wikipedia sentence, fuses such information into token and mentioned entities representations, and supervises the network learning, through which it takes topic entities back into consideration. Experiments demonstrated the generality and superiority of KEPLET which was applied to two representative KEPLMs, achieving significant improvements on four entity-centric tasks.
Revisiting Large Language Models as Zero-shot Relation Extractors
Authors: Peng Wang, Wenjun Ke Guozheng Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) consistently involves a certain degree of labeled or unlabeled data even if under zero-shot setting. Recent studies have shown that large language models (LLMs) transfer well to new tasks out-of-the-box simply given a natural language prompt, which provides the possibility of extracting relations from text without any data and parameter tuning. This work focuses on the study of exploring LLMs, such as ChatGPT, as zero-shot relation extractors. On the one hand, we analyze the drawbacks of existing RE prompts and attempt to incorporate recent prompt techniques such as chain-of-thought (CoT) to improve zero-shot RE. We propose the summarize-and-ask (SumAsk) prompting, a simple prompt recursively using LLMs to transform RE inputs to the effective question answering (QA) format. On the other hand, we conduct comprehensive experiments on various benchmarks and settings to investigate the capabilities of LLMs on zero-shot RE. Specifically, we have the following findings: (i) SumAsk consistently and significantly improves LLMs performance on different model sizes, benchmarks and settings; (ii) Zero-shot prompting with ChatGPT achieves competitive or superior results compared with zero-shot and fully supervised methods; (iii) LLMs deliver promising performance in extracting overlapping relations; (iv) The performance varies greatly regarding different relations. Different from small language models, LLMs are effective in handling challenge none-of-the-above (NoTA) relation.
Multi-Stage Pre-training Enhanced by ChatGPT for Multi-Scenario Multi-Domain Dialogue Summarization
Authors: Gengyao Li, Xianfu Cheng, Xinnian Liang, Junnan Zhu, Feifei Zhai, Zhoujun Li Weixiao Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Dialogue summarization involves a wide range of scenarios and domains. However, existing methods generally only apply to specific scenarios or domains. In this study, we propose a new pre-trained model specifically designed for multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue summarization. It adopts a multi-stage pre-training strategy to reduce the gap between the pre-training objective and fine-tuning objective. Specifically, we first conduct domain-aware pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue data to enhance the adaptability of our pre-trained model. Then, we conduct task-oriented pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain “dialogue-summary” parallel data annotated by ChatGPT to enhance the dialogue summarization ability of our pre-trained model. Experimental results on three dialogue summarization datasets from different scenarios and domains indicate that our pre-trained model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in full fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot settings.
Towards large language model-based personal agents in the enterprise: Current trends and open problems
Authors: Yara Rizk, Kiran Kate, Praveen Venkateswaran, Vatche Isahagian, Ashu Gulati, Parijat Dube Vinod Muthusamy
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: There is an emerging trend to use large language models (LLMs) to reason about complex goals and orchestrate a set of pluggable tools or APIs to accomplish a goal. This functionality could, among other use cases, be used to build personal assistants for knowledge workers. While there are impressive demos of LLMs being used as autonomous agents or for tool composition, these solutions are not ready mission-critical enterprise settings. For example, they are brittle to input changes, and can produce inconsistent results for the same inputs. These use cases have many open problems in an exciting area of NLP research, such as trust and explainability, consistency and reproducibility, adherence to guardrails and policies, best practices for composable tool design, and the need for new metrics and benchmarks. This vision paper illustrates some examples of LLM-based autonomous agents that reason and compose tools, highlights cases where they fail, surveys some of the recent efforts in this space, and lays out the research challenges to make these solutions viable for enterprises.
CREATOR: Tool Creation for Disentangling Abstract and Concrete Reasoning of Large Language Models
Authors: Chi Han, Yi Fung, Yujia Qin, Zhiyuan Liu, Heng Ji Cheng Qian
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their ability is limited by API availability and the instability of implicit reasoning, particularly when both planning and execution are involved. To overcome these limitations, we propose CREATOR, a novel framework that enables LLMs to create their own tools using documentation and code realization. CREATOR disentangles abstract tool creation and concrete decision execution, resulting in improved performance. We evaluate CREATOR on MATH and TabMWP benchmarks, respectively consisting of challenging math competition problems and diverse tabular contents. Remarkably, CREATOR outperforms existing chain-of-thought, program-of-thought, and tool-using baselines. Additionally, we introduce the Creation Challenge dataset, featuring 2K diverse questions, to emphasize the necessity and benefits of LLMs' tool creation ability. Further research demonstrates that leveraging LLMs as tool creators facilitates knowledge transfer, and LLMs exhibit varying levels of tool creation abilities, enabling them to adapt to diverse situations. The tool creation ability revolutionizes the LLM`s problem-solving paradigm, driving us closer to the next frontier of artificial intelligence.
Query-based Image Captioning from Multi-context 360$cdegree$ Images
Authors: Shuhei Kurita, Taiki Miyanishi, Naoaki Okazaki Koki Maeda
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A 360-degree image captures the entire scene without the limitations of a camera`s field of view, which makes it difficult to describe all the contexts in a single caption. We propose a novel task called Query-based Image Captioning (QuIC) for 360-degree images, where a query (words or short phrases) specifies the context to describe. This task is more challenging than the conventional image captioning task, which describes salient objects in images, as it requires fine-grained scene understanding to select the contents consistent with user`s intent based on the query. We construct a dataset for the new task that comprises 3,940 360-degree images and 18,459 pairs of queries and captions annotated manually. Experiments demonstrate that fine-tuning image captioning models further on our dataset can generate more diverse and controllable captions from multiple contexts of 360-degree images.
Auto Search Indexer for End-to-End Document Retrieval
Authors: Minghui Song, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang Tianchi Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Generative retrieval, which is a new advanced paradigm for document retrieval, has recently attracted research interests, since it encodes all documents into the model and directly generates the retrieved documents. However, its power is still underutilized since it heavily relies on the “preprocessed” document identifiers (docids), thus limiting its retrieval performance and ability to retrieve new documents. In this paper, we propose a novel fully end-to-end retrieval paradigm. It can not only end-to-end learn the best docids for existing and new documents automatically via a semantic indexing module, but also perform end-to-end document retrieval via an encoder-decoder-based generative model, namely Auto Search Indexer (ASI). Besides, we design a reparameterization mechanism to combine the above two modules into a joint optimization framework. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our model over advanced baselines on both public and industrial datasets and also verify the ability to deal with new documents.
\textquoteleftPerson' == Light-skinned, Western Man, and Sexualization of Women of Color: Stereotypes in Stable Diffusion
Authors: Aylin Caliskan Sourojit Ghosh
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We study stereotypes embedded within one of the most popular text-to-image generators: Stable Diffusion. We answer the question: what stereotypes of gender and nationality/continental identity does Stable Diffusion display in the absence of such information i.e. what gender and nationality/continental identity is assigned to \textquotelefta person,' or to \textquotelefta person from Asia.' Using CLIP-cosine similarity for zero-shot classification of images generated by CLIP-based Stable Diffusion v2.1 verified by manual examination, we chronicle results from 136 prompts (50 results/prompt) of front-facing images of faces from 6 different continents, 27 countries and 3 genders. We observe how Stable Diffusion results of \textquotelefta person' without any additional gender/nationality information correspond closest to images of men (avg. similarity 0.64) and least with persons of nonbinary gender (avg. similarity 0.41), and to persons from Europe/North America (avg. similarities 0.71 and 0.68, respectively) over Africa/Asia (avg. similarities 0.43 and 0.41, respectively), pointing towards Stable Diffusion having a concerning representation of personhood to be a European/North American man. We also show continental stereotypes and resultant harms e.g. a person from Oceania is deemed to be Australian/New Zealander (avg. similarities 0.77 and 0.74, respectively) over Papua New Guinean (avg. similarity 0.31), pointing to the erasure of Indigenous Oceanic peoples, who form a majority over descendants of colonizers both in Papua New Guinea and in Oceania overall. Finally, we unexpectedly observe a pattern of sexualization of women, specifically Latin American, Mexican, Indian and Egyptian women, confirmed through an NSFW detector and verified by manual examination. This demonstrates how Stable Diffusion perpetuates Western fetishization of women of color through objectification in media, which if left unchecked will worsen this stereotypical representation. All code and relevant data will be made publicly available.
Task-Attentive Transformer Architecture for Continual Learning of Vision-and-Language Tasks Using Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Jesse Thomason, Mohammad Rostami Yuliang Cai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The size and the computational load of fine-tuning large-scale pre-trained neural network are becoming two major obstacles in adopting machine learning in many applications. Continual learning (CL) can serve as a remedy through enabling knowledge-transfer across sequentially arriving tasks which relaxes the need to fine-tune all network weights from scratch. However, existing CL algorithms primarily consider learning unimodal vision-only or language-only tasks. We develop a transformer-based CL architecture for learning bimodal vision-and-language tasks based on increasing the number of the learnable parameters dynamically and using knowledge distillation. The new additional parameters are used to specialize the network for each task. Our approach enables sharing information between the tasks while addressing the challenge of catastrophic forgetting. Our approach is scalable learning to a large number of tasks because it requires little memory and time overhead. Our model reaches state-of-the-art performance on challenging vision-and-language tasks.
Evaluating Verifiability in Generative Search Engines
Authors: Tianyi Zhang, Percy Liang Nelson Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Generative search engines directly generate responses to user queries, along with in-line citations. A prerequisite trait of a trustworthy generative search engine is verifiability, i.e., systems should cite comprehensively (high citation recall; all statements are fully supported by citations) and accurately (high citation precision; every cite supports its associated statement). We conduct human evaluation to audit four popular generative search engines---Bing Chat, NeevaAI, perplexity.ai, and YouChat---across a diverse set of queries from a variety of sources (e.g., historical Google user queries, dynamically-collected open-ended questions on Reddit, etc.). We find that responses from existing generative search engines are fluent and appear informative, but frequently contain unsupported statements and inaccurate citations: on average, a mere 51.5% of generated sentences are fully supported by citations and only 74.5% of citations support their associated sentence. We believe that these results are concerningly low for systems that may serve as a primary tool for information-seeking users, especially given their facade of trustworthiness. We hope that our results further motivate the development of trustworthy generative search engines and help researchers and users better understand the shortcomings of existing commercial systems.
Enhancing Abstractiveness of Summarization Models through Calibrated Distillation
Authors: Igor Shalyminov, Hang Su, Siffi Singh, Kaisheng Yao, Saab Mansour Hwanjun Song
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel approach named DisCal to enhance the level of abstractiveness (measured by n-gram overlap) without sacrificing the informativeness (measured by ROUGE) of generated summaries. DisCal exposes diverse pseudo summaries with two supervision to the student model. Firstly, the best pseudo summary is identified in terms of abstractiveness and informativeness and used for sequence-level distillation. Secondly, their ranks are used to ensure the student model to assign higher prediction scores to summaries with higher ranks. Our experiments show that DisCal outperforms prior methods in abstractive summarization distillation, producing highly abstractive and informative summaries.
Visually Grounded Continual Language Learning with Selective Specialization
Authors: Lennart Bengtson, Jae Hee Lee, Stefan Wermter Kyra Ahrens
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A desirable trait of an artificial agent acting in the visual world is to continually learn a sequence of language-informed tasks while striking a balance between sufficiently specializing in each task and building a generalized knowledge for transfer. Selective specialization, i.e., a careful selection of model components to specialize in each task, is a strategy to provide control over this trade-off. However, the design of selection strategies requires insights on the role of each model component in learning rather specialized or generalizable representations, which poses a gap in current research. Thus, our aim with this work is to provide an extensive analysis of selection strategies for visually grounded continual language learning. Due to the lack of suitable benchmarks for this purpose, we introduce two novel diagnostic datasets that provide enough control and flexibility for a thorough model analysis. We assess various heuristics for module specialization strategies as well as quantifiable measures for two different types of model architectures. Finally, we design conceptually simple approaches based on our analysis that outperform common continual learning baselines. Our results demonstrate the need for further efforts towards better aligning continual learning algorithms with the learning behaviors of individual model parts.
RoMQA: A Benchmark for Robust, Multi-evidence, Multi-answer Question Answering
Authors: Weijia Shi, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer Victor Zhong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce RoMQA, the first benchmark for robust, multi-evidence, multi-answer question answering (QA). RoMQA contains clusters of questions that are derived from related constraints mined from the Wikidata knowledge graph. RoMQA evaluates robustness of QA models to varying constraints by measuring worst-case performance within each question cluster. Compared to prior QA datasets, RoMQA has more human-written questions that require reasoning over more evidence text and have, on average, many more correct answers. In addition, human annotators rate RoMQA questions as more natural or likely to be asked by people. We evaluate state-of-the-art large language models in zero-shot, few-shot, and fine-tuning settings, and find that RoMQA is challenging: zeroshot and few-shot models perform similarly to naive baselines, while supervised retrieval methods perform well below gold evidence upper bounds. Moreover, existing models are not robust to variations in question constraints, but can be made more robust by tuning on clusters of related questions. Our results show that RoMQA is a challenging benchmark for large language models, and provides a quantifiable test to build more robust QA methods.