mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Revisiting Automated Evaluation for Long-form Table Question Answering
Authors: Lyuhao Chen, Songcheng Cai, Zhijian Xu, Yilun Zhao Yuqi Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In the era of data-driven decision-making, Long-Form Table Question Answering (LFTQA) is essential for integrating structured data with complex reasoning. Despite recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) for LFTQA, evaluating their effectiveness remains a significant challenge. We introduce LFTQA-Eval, a meta-evaluation dataset comprising 2,988 human-annotated examples, to rigorously assess the efficacy of current automated metrics in assessing LLM-based LFTQA systems, with a focus on faithfulness and comprehensiveness. Our findings reveal that existing automatic metrics poorly correlate with human judgments and fail to consistently differentiate between factually accurate responses and those that are coherent but factually incorrect. Additionally, our in-depth examination of the limitations associated with automated evaluation methods provides essential insights for the improvement of LFTQA automated evaluation.
Weak Reward Model Transforms Generative Models into Robust Causal Event Extraction Systems
Authors: Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Yulan He Italo Luis Da Silva
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The inherent ambiguity of cause and effect boundaries poses a challenge in evaluating causal event extraction tasks. Traditional metrics like Exact Match and BertScore poorly reflect model performance, so we trained evaluation models to approximate human evaluation, achieving high agreement. We used them to perform Reinforcement Learning with extraction models to align them with human preference, prioritising semantic understanding. We successfully explored our approach through multiple datasets, including transferring an evaluator trained on one dataset to another as a way to decrease the reliance on human-annotated data. In that vein, we also propose a weak-to-strong supervision method that uses a fraction of the annotated data to train an evaluation model while still achieving high performance in training an RL model.
Learn Beyond The Answer: Training Language Models with Reflection for Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Tao Ge, Zhenwen Liang, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Mengzhao Jia, Dong Yu, Meng Jiang Zhihan Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning enhances the problem-solving abilities of language models across various mathematical reasoning tasks. To maximize such benefits, existing research focuses on *broadening* the training set with various data augmentation techniques, which is effective for standard single-round question-answering settings. Our work introduces a novel technique aimed at cultivating a *deeper* understanding of the training problems at hand, enhancing performance not only in standard settings but also in more complex scenarios that require reflective thinking. Specifically, we propose **reflective augmentation**, a method that embeds problem reflection into each training instance. It trains the model to consider alternative perspectives and engage with abstractions and analogies, thereby fostering a thorough comprehension through reflective reasoning. Extensive experiments validate the achievement of our aim, underscoring the unique advantages of our method and its complementary nature relative to existing augmentation techniques.
FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents
Authors: Yitao Long, Tintin Jiang, Chengye Wang, Weiyuan Chen, Hongjun Liu, Xiangru Tang, Yiming Zhang, Chen Zhao, Arman Cohan Yilun Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce FinDVer, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing long, hybrid-content financial documents. FinDVer contains 4,000 expert-annotated examples across four subsets, each focusing on a type of scenario that frequently arises in real-world financial domains. We assess a broad spectrum of 25 LLMs under long-context and RAG settings. Our results show that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) significantly lags behind human experts. Our detailed findings and insights highlight the strengths and limitations of existing LLMs in this new task. We believe FinDVer can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLM capabilities in claim verification over complex, expert-domain documents.
Extracting Prompts by Inverting LLM Outputs
Authors: John Xavier Morris, Vitaly Shmatikov Collin Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We consider the problem of language model inversion: given outputs of a language model, we seek to extract the prompt that generated these outputs. We develop a new black-box method, output2prompt, that extracts prompts without access to the model`s logits and without adversarial or jailbreaking queries. Unlike previous methods, output2prompt only needs outputs of normal user queries. To improve memory efficiency, output2prompt employs a new sparse encoding techique. We measure the efficacy of output2prompt on a variety of user and system prompts and demonstrate zero-shot transferability across different LLMs.
BiasAlert: A Plug-and-play Tool for Social Bias Detection in LLMs
Authors: Ruizhe Chen, Ruiling Xu, Zuozhu Liu Zhiting Fan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Evaluating the bias of LLMs becomes more crucial with their rapid development. However, existing evaluation approaches rely on fixed-form outputs and cannot adapt to the flexible open-text generation scenarios of LLMs (e.g., sentence completion and question answering). To address this, we introduce BiasAlert, a plug-and-play tool designed to detect social bias in open-text generations of LLMs. BiasAlert integrates external human knowledge with its inherent reasoning capabilities to detect bias reliably. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BiasAlert significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods like GPT-4-as-Judge in detecting bias. Furthermore, through application studies, we showcase the utility of BiasAlert in reliable LLM fairness evaluation and bias mitigation across various scenarios. Model and code will be publicly released.
VHASR: A Multimodal Speech Recognition System With Vision Hotwords
Authors: Zuchao Li, Ping Wang, Haojun Ai, Lefei Zhang, Hai Zhao Jiliang Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The image-based multimodal automatic speech recognition (ASR) model enhances speech recognition performance by incorporating audio-related image. However, some works suggest that introducing image information to model does not help improving ASR performance. In this paper, we propose a novel approach effectively utilizing audio-related image information and set up VHASR, a multimodal speech recognition system that uses vision as hotwords to strengthen the model`s speech recognition capability. Our system utilizes a dual-stream architecture, which firstly transcribes the text on the two streams separately, and then combines the outputs. We evaluate the proposed model on four datasets: Flickr8k, ADE20k, COCO, and OpenImages. The experimental results show that VHASR can effectively utilize key information in images to enhance the model`s speech recognition ability. Its performance not only surpasses unimodal ASR, but also achieves SOTA among existing image-based multimodal ASR.
Bridging Local Details and Global Context in Text-Attributed Graphs
Authors: Yun Zhu, Wenqiao Zhang, Yueting Zhuang, Liyunfei Liyunfei, Siliang Tang Yaoke Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Representation learning on text-attributed graphs (TAGs) is vital for real-world applications, as they combine semantic textual and contextual structural information. Research in this field generally consist of two main perspectives: local-level encoding and global-level aggregating, respectively refer to textual node information unification ($e.g.$, using Language Models) and structure-augmented modeling ($e.g.$, using Graph Neural Networks). Most existing works focus on combining different information levels but overlook the interconnections, $i.e.$, the contextual textual information among nodes, which provides semantic insights to bridge local and global levels. In this paper, we propose GraphBridge, a $multi-granularity integration$ framework that bridges local and global perspectives by leveraging contextual textual information, enhancing fine-grained understanding of TAGs. Besides, to tackle scalability and efficiency challenges, we introduce a graph-aware token reduction module. Extensive experiments across various models and datasets show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance, while our graph-aware token reduction module significantly enhances efficiency and solves scalability issues. Codes are available at https://github.com/wykk00/GraphBridge.
Building Resources for Emakhuwa: Machine Translation and News Classification Benchmarks
Authors: Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Rui Sousa-Silva Felermino D. M. A. Ali
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces a comprehensive collection of NLP resources for Emakhuwa, Mozambique`s most widely spoken language. The resources include the first manually translated news bitext corpus between Portuguese and Emakhuwa, news topic classification datasets, and monolingual data. We detail the process and challenges of acquiring this data and present benchmark results for machine translation and news topic classification tasks. Our evaluation examines the impact of different data types---originally clean text, post-corrected OCR, and back-translated data---and the effects of fine-tuning from pre-trained models, including those focused on African languages.Our benchmarks demonstrate good performance in news topic classification and promising results in machine translation. We fine-tuned multilingual encoder-decoder models using real and synthetic data and evaluated them on our test set and the FLORES evaluation sets. The results highlight the importance of incorporating more data and potential for future improvements.All models, code, and datasets are available in the r̆lhttps://huggingface.co/LIACC repository under the CC BY 4.0 license.
RepMatch: Quantifying Cross-Instance Similarities in Representation Space
Authors: Sina Abbasi, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar Mohammad Reza Modarres
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Advances in dataset analysis techniques have enabled more sophisticated approaches to analyzing and characterizing training data instances, often categorizing data based on attributes such as “difficulty”. In this work, we introduce RepMatch, a novel method that characterizes data through the lens of similarity.RepMatch quantifies the similarity between subsets of training instances by comparing the knowledge encoded in models trained on them, overcoming the limitations of existing analysis methods that focus solely on individual instances and are restricted to within-dataset analysis.Our framework allows for a broader evaluation, enabling similarity comparisons across arbitrary subsets of instances, supporting both dataset-to-dataset and instance-to-dataset analyses. We validate the effectiveness of RepMatch across multiple NLP tasks, datasets, and models. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate that RepMatch can effectively compare datasets, identify more representative subsets of a dataset (that lead to better performance than randomly selected subsets of equivalent size), and uncover heuristics underlying the construction of some challenge datasets.
Commonsense Knowledge Editing Based on Free-Text in LLMs
Authors: Yequan Wang, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu Xiusheng Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge editing technology is crucial for maintaining the accuracy and timeliness of large language models (LLMs) . However, the setting of this task overlooks a significant portion of commonsense knowledge based on free-text in the real world, characterized by broad knowledge scope, long content and non instantiation. The editing objects of previous methods (e.g., MEMIT) were single token or entity, which were not suitable for commonsense knowledge in free-text form. To address the aforementioned challenges, we conducted experiments from two perspectives: knowledge localization and knowledge editing. Firstly, we introduced Knowledge Localization for Free-Text(KLFT) method, revealing the challenges associated with the distribution of commonsense knowledge in MLP and Attention layers, as well as in decentralized distribution. Next, we propose a Dynamics-aware Editing Method(DEM), which utilizes a Dynamics-aware Module to locate the parameter positions corresponding to commonsense knowledge, and uses Knowledge Editing Module to update knowledge. The DEM method fully explores the potential of the MLP and Attention layers, and successfully edits commonsense knowledge based on free-text. The experimental results indicate that the DEM can achieve excellent editing performance.
A Closer Look at Multidimensional Online Political Incivility
Authors: Nir Lotan, Alon Zoizner, Einat Minkov Sagi Pendzel
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Toxic online political discourse has become prevalent, where scholars debate about its impact to Democratic processes. This work presents a large-scale study of political incivility on Twitter. In line with theories of political communication, we differentiate between harsh \textquoteleftimpolite' style and intolerant substance. We present a dataset of 13K political tweets in the U.S. context, which we collected and labeled by those categories using crowd sourcing. Our dataset and results shed light on hostile political discourse focused on partisan conflicts in the U.S. The evaluation of state-of-the-art classifiers illustrates the challenges involved in political incivility detection, which often requires high-level semantic and social understanding. Nevertheless, performing incivility detection at scale, we are able to characterise its distribution across individual users and geopolitical regions, where our findings align and extend existing theories of political communication. In particular, we find that roughly 80% of the uncivil tweets are authored by 20% of the users, where users who are politically engaged are more inclined to use uncivil language. We further find that political incivility exhibits network homophily, and that incivility is more prominent in highly competitive geopolitical regions. Our results apply to both uncivil style and substance.
Leveraging BERT and TFIDF Features for Short Text Clustering via Alignment-Promoting Co-Training
Authors: Qinliang Su, Shijing Si, Jianxing Yu Zetong Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: BERT and TFIDF features excel in capturing rich semantics and important words, respectively. Since most existing clustering methods are solely based on the BERT model, they often fall short in utilizing keyword information, which, however, is very useful in clustering short texts. In this paper, we propose a **CO**-**T**raining **C**lustering (**COTC**) framework to make use of the collective strengths of BERT and TFIDF features. Specifically, we develop two modules responsible for the clustering of BERT and TFIDF features, respectively. We use the deep representations and cluster assignments from the TFIDF module outputs to guide the learning of the BERT module, seeking to align them at both the representation and cluster levels. Reversely, we also use the BERT module outputs to train the TFIDF module, thus leading to the mutual promotion. We then show that the alternating co-training framework can be placed under a unified joint training objective, which allows the two modules to be connected tightly and the training signals to be propagated efficiently. Experiments on eight benchmark datasets show that our method outperforms current SOTA methods significantly.
Applying Intrinsic Debiasing on Downstream Tasks: Challenges and Considerations for Machine Translation
Authors: Yanai Elazar, Asaf Yehudai, Gabriel Stanovsky Bar Iluz
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Most works on gender bias focus on intrinsic bias --- removing traces of information about a protected group from the model`s internal representation. However, these works are often disconnected from the impact of such debiasing on downstream applications, which is the main motivation for debiasing in the first place. In this work, we systematically test how methods for intrinsic debiasing affect neural machine translation models, by measuring the extrinsic bias of such systems under different design choices. We highlight three challenges and mismatches between the debiasing techniques and their end-goal usage, including the choice of embeddings to debias, the mismatch between words and sub-word tokens debiasing, and the effect on different target languages. We find that these considerations have a significant impact on downstream performance and the success of debiasing.
Unsupervised Named Entity Disambiguation for Low Resource Domains
Authors: Soumajit Pramanik Debarghya Datta
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In the ever-evolving landscape of natural language processing and information retrieval, the need for robust and domain-specific entity linking algorithms has become increasingly apparent. It is crucial in a considerable number of fields such as humanities, technical writing and biomedical sciences to enrich texts with semantics and discover more knowledge. The use of Named Entity Disambiguation (NED) in such domains requires handling noisy texts, low resource settings and domain-specific KBs. Existing approaches are mostly inappropriate for such scenarios, as they either depend on training data or are not flexible enough to work with domain-specific KBs. Thus in this work, we present a unsupervised approach leveraging the concept of Group Steiner Trees (GST), which can identify the most relevant candidate for entity disambiguation using the contextual similarities across candidate entities for all the mentions present in a document. We outperform the state-of-the-art unsupervised methods by more than 40%(in avg) in terms of Precision@1 and Hit@5 across various domain-specific datasets.
SparseGrad: A Selective Method for Efficient Fine-tuning of MLP Layers
Authors: Anna Rudenko, Gleb Mezentsev, Aleksandr Mikhalev, Alexander Panchenko, Ivan Oseledets Viktoriia A. Chekalina
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The performance of Transformer models has been enhanced by increasing the number of parameters and the length of the processed text. Consequently, fine-tuning the entire model becomes a memory-intensive process. High-performance methods for parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) typically work with Attention blocks and often overlook MLP blocks, which contain about half of the model parameters. We propose a new selective PEFT method, namely SparseGrad, that performs well on MLP blocks. We transfer layer gradients to a space where only about 1% of the layer`s elements remain significant. By converting gradients into a sparse structure, we reduce the number of updated parameters. We apply SparseGrad to fine-tune BERT and RoBERTa for the NLU task and LLaMa-2 for the Question-Answering task. In these experiments, with identical memory requirements, our method outperforms LoRA and MeProp, robust popular state-of-the-art PEFT approaches.
MoCoKGC: Momentum Contrast Entity Encoding for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Yanru Zhong, Yuchu Qin Qingyang Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In recent years, numerous studies have sought to enhance the capabilities of pretrained language models (PLMs) for Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) tasks by integrating structural information from knowledge graphs. However, existing approaches have not effectively combined the structural attributes of knowledge graphs with the textual descriptions of entities to generate robust entity encodings.To address this issue, this paper proposes MoCoKGC (Momentum Contrast Entity Encoding for Knowledge Graph Completion), which incorporates three primary encoders: the entity-relation encoder, the entity encoder, and the momentum entity encoder. Momentum contrastive learning not only provides more negative samples but also allows for the gradual updating of entity encodings. Consequently, we reintroduce the generated entity encodings into the encoder to incorporate the graph`s structural information.Additionally, MoCoKGC enhances the inferential capabilities of the entity-relation encoder through deep prompts of relations. On the standard evaluation metric, Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR), the MoCoKGC model demonstrates superior performance, achieving a 7.1% improvement on the WN18RR dataset and an 11% improvement on the Wikidata5M dataset, while also surpassing the current best model on the FB15k-237 dataset. Through a series of experiments, this paper thoroughly examines the role and contribution of each component and parameter of the model.
ActPlan-1K: Benchmarking the Procedural Planning Ability of Visual Language Models in Household Activities
Authors: Zhan Ling, Haochen Shi, Cheng Jiayang, Yauwai Yim, Yangqiu Song Ying Su
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models(LLMs) have been adopted to process textual task description and accomplish procedural planning in embodied AI tasks because of their powerful reasoning ability. However, there is still lack of study on how vision language models(VLMs) behave when multi-modal task inputs are considered. Counterfactual planning that evaluates the model`s reasoning ability over alternative task situations are also under exploited. In order to evaluate the planning ability of both multi-modal and counterfactual aspects, we propose ActPlan-1K. ActPlan-1K is a multi-modal planning benchmark constructed based on ChatGPT and household activity simulator iGibson2. The benchmark consists of 153 activities and 1,187 instances. Each instance describing one activity has a natural language task description and multiple environment images from the simulator. The gold plan of each instance is action sequences over the objects in provided scenes. Both the correctness and commonsense satisfaction are evaluated on typical VLMs. It turns out that current VLMs are still struggling at generating human-level procedural plans for both normal activities and counterfactual activities. We further provide automatic evaluation metrics by finetuning over BLEURT model to facilitate future research on our benchmark.
Shortcuts Arising from Contrast: Towards Effective and Lightweight Clean-Label Attacks in Prompt-Based Learning
Authors: Ming Yan, Xiwen Zhou, Chenlong Zhao, Suli Wang, Yong Zhang, Joey Tianyi Zhou Xiaopeng Xie
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Prompt-based learning paradigm has been shown to be vulnerable to backdoor attacks. Current clean-label attack, employing a specific prompt as trigger, can achieve success without the need for external triggers and ensuring correct labeling of poisoned samples, which are more stealthy compared to the poisoned-label attack, but on the other hand, facing significant issues with false activations and pose greater challenges, necessitating a higher rate of poisoning. Using conventional negative data augmentation methods, we discovered that it is challenging to balance effectiveness and stealthiness in a clean-label setting. In addressing this issue, we are inspired by the notion that a backdoor acts as a shortcut, and posit that this shortcut stems from the contrast between the trigger and the data utilized for poisoning. In this study, we propose a method named Contrastive Shortcut Injection (CSI), by leveraging activation values, integrates trigger design and data selection strategies to craft stronger shortcut features. With extensive experiments on full-shot and few-shot text classification tasks, we empirically validate CSI`s high effectiveness and high stealthiness at low poisoning rates.
RaTEScore: A Metric for Radiology Report Generation
Authors: Chaoyi Wu, Xiaoman Zhang, Ya Zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Weidi Xie Weike Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces a novel, entity-aware metric, termed as Radiological Report (Text) Evaluation (RaTEScore), to assess the quality of medical reports generated by AI models. RaTEScore emphasizes crucial medical entities such as diagnostic outcomes and anatomical details, and is robust against complex medical synonyms and sensitive to negation expressions. Technically, we developed a comprehensive medical NER dataset, RaTE-NER, and trained an NER model specifically for this purpose. This model enables the decomposition of complex radiological reports into constituent medical entities. The metric itself is derived by comparing the similarity of entity embeddings, obtained from a language model, based on their types and relevance to clinical significance. Our evaluations demonstrate that RaTEScore aligns more closely with human preference than existing metrics, validated both on established public benchmarks and our newly proposed RaTE-Eval benchmark.
HalluMeasure: Fine-grained Hallucination Measurement Using Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Md Mosharaf Hossain, Tess Wood, Si-Chi Chin, Erica M Salinas, Victor Alvarez, Erwin Cornejo Shayan Ali Akbar
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Automating the measurement of hallucinations in LLM generated responses is a challenging task as it requires careful investigation of each factual claim in a response. In this paper, we introduce HalluMeasure, a new LLM-based hallucination detection mechanism that decomposes an LLM response into atomic claims, and evaluates each atomic claim against the provided reference context. The model uses a step-by-step reasoning process called Chain-of-Thought and can identify 3 major categories of hallucinations (e.g., contradiction) as well as 10 more specific subtypes (e.g., overgeneralization) which help to identify reasons behind the hallucination errors. Specifically, we explore four different configurations for HalluMeasure`s classifier: with and without CoT prompting, and using a single classifier call to classify all claims versus separate calls for each claim. The best-performing configuration (with CoT and separate calls for each claim) demonstrates significant improvements in detecting hallucinations, achieving a 10-point increase in F1 score on our TechNewsSumm dataset, and a 3-point increase in AUC ROC on the SummEval dataset, compared to three baseline models (RefChecker, AlignScore, and Vectara HHEM). We further show reasonable accuracy on detecting 10 novel error subtypes of hallucinations (where even humans struggle in classification) derived from linguistic analysis of the errors made by the LLMs.
Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization
Authors: Nazli Goharian Sajad Sotudeh
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This study examines the potential of integrating Learning-to-Rank (LTR) with Query-focused Summarization (QFS) to enhance the summary relevance via content prioritization. Using a shared secondary decoder with the summarization decoder, we carry out the LTR task at the segment level. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our model outperforms on QMSum benchmark (all metrics) and matches on SQuALITY benchmark (2 metrics) as measured by Rouge and BertScore while offering a lower training overhead. Specifically, on the QMSum benchmark, our proposed system achieves improvements, particularly in Rouge-L (+0.42) and BertScore (+0.34), indicating enhanced understanding and relevance. While facing minor challenges in Rouge-1 and Rouge-2 scores on the SQuALITY benchmark, the model significantly excels in Rouge-L (+1.47), underscoring its capability to generate coherent summaries. Human evaluations emphasize the efficacy of our method in terms of relevance and faithfulness of the generated summaries, without sacrificing fluency. A deeper analysis reveals our model`s superiority over the state-of-the-art for broad queries, as opposed to specific ones, from a qualitative standpoint. We further present an error analysis of our model, pinpointing challenges faced and suggesting potential directions for future research in this field.
Are Large Language Models Good Classifiers? A Study on Edit Intent Classification in Scientific Document Revisions
Authors: Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych Qian Ruan
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Classification is a core NLP task architecture with many potential applications. While large language models (LLMs) have brought substantial advancements in text generation, their potential for enhancing classification tasks remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose a framework for thoroughly investigating fine-tuning LLMs for classification, including both generation- and encoding-based approaches. We instantiate this framework in edit intent classification (EIC), a challenging and underexplored classification task. Our extensive experiments and systematic comparisons with various training approaches and a representative selection of LLMs yield new insights into their application for EIC. We investigate the generalizability of these findings on five further classification tasks. To demonstrate the proposed methods and address the data shortage for empirical edit analysis, we use our best-performing EIC model to create Re3-Sci2.0, a new large-scale dataset of 1,780 scientific document revisions with over 94k labeled edits. The quality of the dataset is assessed through human evaluation. The new dataset enables an in-depth empirical study of human editing behavior in academic writing. We make our experimental framework, models and data publicly available.
LitSearch: A Retrieval Benchmark for Scientific Literature Search
Authors: Mengzhou Xia, Alexis Chevalier, Tanya Goyal, Danqi Chen, Tianyu Gao Anirudh Ajith
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Literature search questions, such as “where can I find research on the evaluation of consistency in generated summaries?” pose significant challenges for modern search engines and retrieval systems. These questions often require a deep understanding of research concepts and the ability to reason over entire articles. In this work, we introduce LitSearch, a retrieval benchmark comprising 597 realistic literature search queries about recent ML and NLP papers. LitSearch is constructed using a combination of (1) questions generated by GPT-4 based on paragraphs containing inline citations from research papers and (2) questions about recently published papers, manually written by their authors. All LitSearch questions were manually examined or edited by experts to ensure high quality. We extensively benchmark state-of-the-art retrieval models and also evaluate two LLM-based reranking pipelines. We find a significant performance gap between BM25 and state-of-the-art dense retrievers, with a 24.8% difference in absolute recall@5. The LLM-based reranking strategies further improve the best-performing dense retriever by 4.4%. Additionally, commercial search engines and research tools like Google Search perform poorly on LitSearch, lagging behind the best dense retriever by 32 points. Taken together, these results show that LitSearch is an informative new testbed for retrieval systems while catering to a real-world use case.
Open-world Multi-label Text Classification with Extremely Weak Supervision
Authors: Jinya Jiang, Ria Dharmani, Jayanth Srinivasa, Gaowen Liu, Jingbo Shang Xintong Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study open-world multi-label text classification under extremely weak supervision (XWS), where the user only provides a brief description for classification objectives without any labels or ground-truth label space. Similar single-label XWS settings have been explored recently, however, these methods cannot be easily adapted for multi-label. We observe that (1) most documents have a dominant class covering the majority of content and (2) long-tail labels would appear in some documents as a dominant class. Therefore, we first utilize the user description to prompt a large language model (LLM) for dominant keyphrases of a subset of raw documents, and then construct a (initial) label space via clustering. We further apply a zero-shot multi-label classifier to locate the documents with small top predicted scores, so we can revisit their dominant keyphrases for more long-tail labels. We iterate this process to discover a comprehensive label space and construct a multi-label classifier as a novel method, X-MLClass. X-MLClass exhibits a remarkable increase in ground-truth label space coverage on various datasets, for example, a 40% improvement on the AAPD dataset over topic modeling and keyword extraction methods. Moreover, X-MLClass achieves the best end-to-end multi-label classification accuracy.
LLMs learn governing principles of dynamical systems, revealing an in-context neural scaling law
Authors: Nicolas Boulle, Raphaël Sarfati, Christopher Earls Toni J.b. Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We study LLMs' ability to extrapolate the behavior of various dynamical systems, including stochastic, chaotic, continuous, and discrete systems, whose evolution is governed by principles of physical interest. Our results show that LLaMA-2, a language model trained on text, achieves accurate predictions of dynamical system time series without fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Moreover, the accuracy of the learned physical rules increases with the length of the input context window, revealing an in-context version of a neural scaling law. Along the way, we present a flexible and efficient algorithm for extracting probability density functions of multi-digit numbers directly from LLMs.
AKEW: Assessing Knowledge Editing in the Wild
Authors: Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang, Anh Tuan Luu Xiaobao Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge editing injects knowledge updates into language models to keep them correct and up-to-date. However, its current evaluations deviate significantly from practice: their knowledge updates solely consist of structured facts derived from meticulously crafted datasets, instead of practical sources---unstructured texts like news articles, and they often overlook practical real-world knowledge updates. To address these issues, in this paper we propose AKEW (Assessing Knowledge Editing in the Wild), a new practical benchmark for knowledge editing. AKEW fully covers three editing settings of knowledge updates: structured facts, unstructured texts as facts, and extracted triplets. It further introduces new datasets featuring both counterfactual and real-world knowledge updates. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the considerable gap between state-of-the-art knowledge-editing methods and practical scenarios. Our analyses further highlight key insights to motivate future research for practical knowledge editing.
CopyBench: Measuring Literal and Non-Literal Reproduction of Copyright-Protected Text in Language Model Generation
Authors: Akari Asai, Niloofar Mireshghallah, Sewon Min, James Grimmelmann, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh Tong Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Evaluating the degree of reproduction of copyright-protected content by language models (LMs) is of significant interest to the AI and legal communities. Although both literal and non-literal similarities are considered by courts when assessing the degree of reproduction, prior research has focused only on literal similarities. To bridge this gap, we introduce CopyBench, a benchmark designed to measure both literal and non-literal copying in LM generations. Using copyrighted fiction books as text sources, we provide automatic evaluation protocols to assess literal and non-literal copying, balanced against the model utility in terms of the ability to recall facts from the copyrighted works and generate fluent completions. We find that, although literal copying is relatively rare, two types of non-literal copying---event copying and character copying---occur even in models as small as 7B parameters. Larger models demonstrate significantly more copying, with literal copying rates increasing from 0.2% to 10.5% and non-literal copying from 2.3% to 5.9% when comparing Llama3-8B and 70B models, respectively. We further evaluate the effectiveness of current strategies for mitigating copying and show that (1) training-time alignment can reduce literal copying but may increase non-literal copying, and (2) current inference-time mitigation methods primarily reduce literal but not non-literal copying.
Dense X Retrieval: What Retrieval Granularity Should We Use?
Authors: Hongwei Wang, Sihao Chen, Wenhao Yu, Kaixin Ma, Xinran Zhao, Hongming Zhang, Dong Yu Tong Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our experiments reveal that indexing a corpus by fine-grained units such as propositions significantly outperforms passage-level units in retrieval tasks. Moreover, constructing prompts with fine-grained retrieved units for retrieval-augmented language models improves the performance of downstream QA tasks given a specific computation budget.
Decoding Susceptibility: Modeling Misbelief to Misinformation Through a Computational Approach
Authors: Mingyu Derek Ma, Wenna Qin, Azure Zhou, Jiaao Chen, Weiyan Shi, Wei Wang, Diyi Yang Yanchen Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Susceptibility to misinformation describes the degree of belief in unverifiable claims, a latent aspect of individuals' mental processes that is not observable. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on self-reported beliefs, which can be subject to bias, expensive to collect, and challenging to scale for downstream applications. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose a computational approach to efficiently model users' latent susceptibility levels. As shown in previous work, susceptibility is influenced by various factors (e.g., demographic factors, political ideology), and directly influences people`s reposting behavior on social media. To represent the underlying mental process, our susceptibility modeling incorporates these factors as inputs, guided by the supervision of people`s sharing behavior. Using COVID-19 as a testbed, our experiments demonstrate a significant alignment between the susceptibility scores estimated by our computational modeling and human judgments, confirming the effectiveness of this latent modeling approach. Furthermore, we apply our model to annotate susceptibility scores on a large-scale dataset and analyze the relationships between susceptibility with various factors. Our analysis reveals that political leanings and other psychological factors exhibit varying degrees of association with susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation, and shows that susceptibility is unevenly distributed across different professional and geographical backgrounds.
Layer by Layer: Uncovering Where Multi-Task Learning Happens in Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models
Authors: Yftah Ziser, Shay B Cohen Zheng Zhao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs) on a diverse array of tasks has become a common approach for building models that can solve various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, where and to what extent these models retain task-specific knowledge remains largely unexplored. This study investigates the task-specific information encoded in pre-trained LLMs and the effects of instruction tuning on their representations across a diverse set of over 60 NLP tasks. We use a set of matrix analysis tools to examine the differences between the way pre-trained and instruction-tuned LLMs store task-specific information. Our findings reveal that while some tasks are already encoded within the pre-trained LLMs, others greatly benefit from instruction tuning. Additionally, we pinpointed the layers in which the model transitions from high-level general representations to more task-oriented representations. This finding extends our understanding of the governing mechanisms of LLMs and facilitates future research in the fields of parameter-efficient transfer learning and multi-task learning. Our code is available at: https://github.com/zsquaredz/layer_by_layer/
XDetox: Text Detoxification with Token-Level Toxicity Explanations
Authors: Hyunwoo Kim, Keon Kim, Yong Suk Choi Beomseok Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Methods for mitigating toxic content through masking and infilling often overlook the decision-making process, leading to either insufficient or excessive modifications of toxic tokens. To address this challenge, we propose XDetox, a novel method that integrates token-level toxicity explanations with the masking and infilling detoxification process. We utilized this approach with two strategies to enhance the performance of detoxification. First, identifying toxic tokens to improve the quality of masking. Second, selecting the regenerated sentence by re-ranking the least toxic sentence among candidates. Our experimental results show state-of-the-art performance across four datasets compared to existing detoxification methods. Furthermore, human evaluations indicate that our method outperforms baselines in both fluency and toxicity reduction. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in text detoxification.
Optimizing Chinese Lexical Simplification Across Word Types: A Hybrid Approach
Authors: Jiefu Gong, Shijin Wang, Wei Song ZiHao Xiao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper addresses the task of Chinese Lexical Simplification (CLS). A key challenge in CLS is the scarcity of data resources. We begin by evaluating the performance of various language models at different scales in unsupervised and few-shot settings, finding that their effectiveness is sensitive to word types. Expensive large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-4, outperform small models in simplifying complex content words and Chinese idioms from the dictionary.To take advantage of this, we propose an automatic knowledge distillation framework called PivotKD for generating training data to fine-tune small models.In addition, all models face difficulties with out-of-dictionary (OOD) words such as internet slang.To address this, we implement a retrieval-based interpretation augmentation (RIA) strategy, injecting word interpretations from external resources into the context.Experimental results demonstrate that fine-tuned small models outperform GPT-4 in simplifying complex content words and Chinese idioms. Additionally, the RIA strategy enhances the performance of most models, particularly in handling OOD words. Our findings suggest that a hybrid approach could optimize CLS performance while managing inference costs. This would involve configuring choices such as model scale, linguistic resources, and the use of RIA based on specific word types to strike an ideal balance.