mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Generative Table Pre-training Empowers Models for Tabular Prediction
Authors: Shaowen Wang, Shuicheng Yan, Li Jian, Qian Liu Tianping Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, the topic of table pre-training has attracted considerable research interest. However, how to employ table pre-training to boost the performance of tabular prediction remains an open challenge. In this paper, we propose TapTap, the first attempt that leverages table pre-training to empower models for tabular prediction. After pre-training on a large corpus of real-world tabular data, TapTap can generate high-quality synthetic tables to support various applications on tabular data, including privacy protection, low resource regime, missing value imputation, and imbalanced classification. Extensive experiments on 12 datasets demonstrate that TapTap outperforms a total of 16 baselines in different scenarios. Meanwhile, it can be easily combined with various backbone models, including LightGBM, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Transformer. Moreover, with the aid of table pre-training, models trained using synthetic data generated by TapTap can even compete with models using the original dataset on half of the experimental datasets, marking a milestone in the development of synthetic tabular data generation. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/ZhangTP1996/TapTap.
Learning to Describe for Predicting Zero-shot Drug-Drug Interactions
Authors: Yongqi Zhang, Lei Chen, Bing Qin, Ruifeng Xu Fangqi Zhu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Adverse drug-drug interactions (DDIs) can compromise the effectiveness of concurrent drug administration, posing a significant challenge in healthcare. As the development of new drugs continues, the potential for unknown adverse effects resulting from DDIs becomes a growing concern. Traditional computational methods for DDI prediction may fail to capture interactions for new drugs due to the lack of knowledge. In this paper, we introduce a new problem setup as zero-shot DDI prediction that deals with the case of new drugs. Leveraging textual information from online databases like DrugBank and PubChem, we propose an innovative approach TextDDI with a language model-based DDI predictor and a reinforcement learning (RL)-based information selector, enabling the selection of concise and pertinent text for accurate DDI prediction on new drugs. Empirical results show the benefits of the proposed approach on several settings including zero-shot and few-shot DDI prediction, and the selected texts are semantically relevant. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/zhufq00/DDIs-Prediction.
A Simple Baseline for Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering
Authors: Themos Stafylakis, Ioannis Patras, Georgios Tzimiropoulos Alexandros Xenos
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper is on the problem of Knowledge-Based Visual Question Answering (KB-VQA). Recent works have emphasized the significance of incorporating both explicit (through external databases) and implicit (through LLMs) knowledge to answer questions requiring external knowledge effectively. A common limitation of such approaches is that they consist of relatively complicated pipelines and often heavily rely on accessing GPT-3 API. Our main contribution in this paper is to propose a much simpler and readily reproducible pipeline which, in a nutshell, is based on efficient in-context learning by prompting LLaMA (1 and 2) using question-informative captions as contextual information. Contrary to recent approaches, our method is training-free, does not require access to external databases or APIs, and yet achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on the OK-VQA and A-OK-VQA datasets. Finally, we perform several ablation studies to understand important aspects of our method. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/alexandrosXe/ASimple-Baseline-For-Knowledge-Based-VQA
Unveiling the Essence of Poetry: Introducing a Comprehensive Dataset and Benchmark for Poem Summarization
Authors: Ifrad Khan, Samiha Anuva, Md Shihab Shahriar, Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar, Sabbir Ahmed Ridwan Mahbub
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While research in natural language processing has progressed significantly in creative language generation, the question of whether language models can interpret the intended meaning of creative language largely remains unanswered. Poetry as a creative art form has existed for generations, and summarization of such content requires deciphering the figurative patterns to find out the actual intent and message of the poet. This task can provide the researchers an opportunity to evaluate the creative language interpretation capacity of the language models. Unlike typical text, summarization of poems is a challenging task as poems carry a deeper meaning, which can be easily lost if only the literal meaning is considered. That being said, we propose a new task in the field of natural language understanding called \textquoteleftPoem Summarization'. As a starting, we propose the first-ever dataset for this task, named \textquoteleftPoemSum', consisting of 3011 samples of poetry and its corresponding summarized interpretation in the English language. We have benchmarked the performance of different state-of-the-art summarization models and provided observations on their limitations. The dataset and all relevant code used in this work have been made publicly available.
Privacy Implications of Retrieval-Based Language Models
Authors: Samyak Gupta, Zexuan Zhong, Kai Li, Danqi Chen Yangsibo Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Retrieval-based language models (LMs) have demonstrated improved interpretability, factuality, and adaptability compared to their parametric counterparts by incorporating retrieved text from external datastores. While it is well known that parametric models are prone to leaking private data, it remains unclear how the addition of a retrieval datastore impacts model privacy. In this work, we present the first study of privacy risks in retrieval-based LMs, particularly $k$NN-LMs. Our goal is to explore the optimal design and training procedure in domains where privacy is of concern, aiming to strike a balance between utility and privacy. Crucially, we find that $k$NN-LMs are more susceptible to leaking private information from their private datastore than parametric models. We further explore mitigations of privacy risks: When privacy information is targeted and readily detected in the text, we find that a simple sanitization step would eliminate the risks while decoupling query and key encoders achieves an even better utility-privacy trade-off. Otherwise, we consider strategies of mixing public and private data in both datastore and encoder training. While these methods offer modest improvements, they leave considerable room for future work. Together, our findings provide insights for practitioners to better understand and mitigate privacy risks in retrieval-based LMs.
IMTLab: An Open-Source Platform for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Interactive Machine Translation Systems
Authors: Zhirui Zhang, Ruize Gao, Yichao Du, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Shuming Shi, Jiajun Chen, Shujian Huang Xu Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We present IMTLab, an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation (IMT) system platform that enables researchers to quickly build IMT systems with state-of-the-art models, perform an end-to-end evaluation, and diagnose the weakness of systems. IMTLab treats the whole interactive translation process as a task-oriented dialogue with a human-in-the-loop setting, in which human interventions can be explicitly incorporated to produce high-quality, error-free translations. To this end, a general communication interface is designed to support the flexible IMT architectures and user policies. Based on the proposed design, we construct a simulated and real interactive environment to achieve end-to-end evaluation and leverage the framework to systematically evaluate previous IMT systems. Our simulated and manual experiments show that the prefix-constrained decoding approach still gains the lowest editing cost in the end-to-end evaluation, while BiTIIMT achieves comparable editing cost with a better interactive experience.
Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents
Authors: Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Shuaiqiang Wang, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren Weiwei Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization across various language-related tasks, including search engines. However, existing work utilizes the generative ability of LLMs for Information Retrieval (IR) rather than direct passage ranking. The discrepancy between the pre-training objectives of LLMs and the ranking objective poses another challenge. In this paper, we first investigate generative LLMs such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 for relevance ranking in IR. Surprisingly, our experiments reveal that properly instructed LLMs can deliver competitive, even superior results to state-of-the-art supervised methods on popular IR benchmarks. Furthermore, to address concerns about data contamination of LLMs, we collect a new test set called NovelEval, based on the latest knowledge and aiming to verify the model`s ability to rank unknown knowledge. Finally, to improve efficiency in real-world applications, we delve into the potential for distilling the ranking capabilities of ChatGPT into small specialized models using a permutation distillation scheme. Our evaluation results turn out that a distilled 440M model outperforms a 3B supervised model on the BEIR benchmark. The code to reproduce our results is available at www.github.com/sunnweiwei/RankGPT.
DiNeR: A Large Realistic Dataset for Evaluating Compositional Generalization
Authors: Xiao Liu, Yansong Feng Chengang Hu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Most of the existing compositional generalization datasets are synthetically-generated, resulting in a lack of natural language variation. While there have been recent attempts to introduce non-synthetic datasets for compositional generalization, they suffer from either limited data scale or a lack of diversity in the forms of combinations. To better investigate compositional generalization with more linguistic phenomena and compositional diversity, we propose the DIsh NamE Recognition (DiNeR) task and create a large realistic Chinese dataset. Given a recipe instruction, models are required to recognize the dish name composed of diverse combinations of food, actions, and flavors. Our dataset consists of 3,811 dishes and 228,114 recipes, and involves plenty of linguistic phenomena such as anaphora, omission and ambiguity. We provide two strong baselines based on T5 and large language models (LLMs). This work contributes a challenging task, baseline methods to tackle the task, and insights into compositional generalization in the context of dish name recognition.
Can Pre-trained Vision and Language Models Answer Visual Information-Seeking Questions?
Authors: Hexiang Hu, Yi Luan, Haitian Sun, Soravit Changpinyo, Alan Ritter, Ming-Wei Chang Yang Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Pre-trained vision and language models have demonstrated state-of-the-art capabilities over existing tasks involving images and texts, including visual question answering. However, it remains unclear whether these models possess the capability to answer questions that are not only querying visual content but knowledge-intensive and information-seeking. In this study, we introduce InfoSeek, a visual question answering dataset tailored for information-seeking questions that cannot be answered with only common sense knowledge. Using InfoSeek, we analyze various pre-trained visual question answering models and gain insights into their characteristics. Our findings reveal that state-of-the-art pre-trained multi-modal models (e.g., PaLI-X, BLIP2, InstructBLIP) face challenges in answering visual information-seeking questions, but fine-tuning on the InfoSeek dataset elicits models to use fine-grained knowledge that was learned during pre-training. Furthermore, we show that accurate visual entity recognition can be used to improve performance on InfoSeek by retrieving relevant documents, showing a significant space for improvement.
EDeR: Towards Understanding Dependency Relations Between Events
Authors: Patrik Haslum, Leyang Cui Ruiqi Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Relation extraction is a crucial task in natural language processing (NLP) and information retrieval (IR). Previous work on event relation extraction mainly focuses on hierarchical, temporal and causal relations. Such relationships consider two events to be independent in terms of syntax and semantics, but they fail to recognize the interdependence between events. To bridge this gap, we introduce a human-annotated Event Dependency Relation dataset (EDeR). The annotation is done on a sample of documents from the OntoNotes dataset, which has the additional benefit that it integrates with existing, orthogonal, annotations of this dataset. We investigate baseline approaches for EDeR`s event dependency relation prediction. We show that recognizing such event dependency relations can further benefit critical NLP tasks, including semantic role labelling and co-reference resolution.
It Ain`t Over: A Multi-aspect Diverse Math Word Problem Dataset
Authors: Youngbin Kim, Ilwoong Baek, JinYeong Bak, Jongwuk Lee Jiwoo Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The math word problem (MWP) is a complex task that requires natural language understanding and logical reasoning to extract key knowledge from natural language narratives. Previous studies have provided various MWP datasets but lack diversity in problem types, lexical usage patterns, languages, and annotations for intermediate solutions. To address these limitations, we introduce a new MWP dataset, named DMath (Diverse Math Word Problems), offering a wide range of diversity in problem types, lexical usage patterns, languages, and intermediate solutions. The problems are available in English and Korean and include an expression tree and Python code as intermediate solutions. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that the DMath dataset provides a new opportunity to evaluate the capability of large language models, i.e., GPT-4 only achieves about 75% accuracy on the DMath dataset.
Dr ChatGPT tell me what I want to hear: How different prompts impact health answer correctness
Authors: Guido Zuccon Bevan Koopman
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper investigates the significant impact different prompts have on the behaviour of ChatGPT when used for health information seeking. As people more and more depend on generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, it is critical to understand model behaviour under different conditions, especially for domains where incorrect answers can have serious consequences such as health. Using the TREC Misinformation dataset, we empirically evaluate ChatGPT to show not just its effectiveness but reveal that knowledge passed in the prompt can bias the model to the detriment of answer correctness. We show this occurs both for retrieve-then-generate pipelines and based on how a user phrases their question as well as the question type. This work has important implications for the development of more robust and transparent question-answering systems based on generative large language models. Prompts, raw result files and manual analysis are made publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/ielab/drchatgpt-health_prompting.
$k$NN-LM Does Not Improve Open-ended Text Generation
Authors: Yixiao Song, Andrew Drozdov, Aparna Garimella, Varun Manjunatha, Mohit Iyyer Shufan Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we study the generation quality of interpolation-based retrieval-augmented language models (LMs). These methods, best exemplified by the $k$NN-LM, interpolate the LM`s predicted distribution of the next word with a distribution formed from the most relevant retrievals for a given prefix. While the $k$NN-LM and related methods yield impressive decreases in perplexity, we discover that they do not exhibit corresponding improvements in open-ended generation quality, as measured by both automatic evaluation metrics (e.g., MAUVE) and human evaluations. Digging deeper, we find that interpolating with a retrieval distribution actually increases perplexity compared to a baseline LM for the majority of tokens in the WikiText-103 test set, even though the overall perplexity is lower due to a smaller number of tokens for which perplexity dramatically decreases after interpolation. However, when decoding a long sequence at inference time, significant improvements on this smaller subset of tokens are washed out by slightly worse predictions on most tokens. Furthermore, we discover that the entropy of the retrieval distribution increases faster than that of the base LM as the generated sequence becomes longer, which indicates that retrieval is less reliable when using model-generated text as queries (i.e., is subject to exposure bias). We hope that our analysis spurs future work on improved decoding algorithms and interpolation strategies for retrieval-augmented language models.
Towards A Unified View of Sparse Feed-Forward Network in Pretraining Large Language Model
Authors: Tim Dettmers, Xi Lin, Veselin Stoyanov, Xian Li Zeyu Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large and sparse feed-forward layers (S-FFN) such as Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) have proven effective in scaling up Transformers model size for pretraining large language models. By only activating part of the FFN parameters conditioning on input, S-FFN improves generalization performance while keeping training and inference costs (in FLOPs) fixed. In this work, we analyzed two major design choices of S-FFN: the memory block (a.k.a. expert) size and the memory block selection method under a general conceptual framework of sparse neural memory. Using this unified framework, we compare several S-FFN architectures for language modeling and provide insights into their relative efficacy and efficiency. We found a simpler selection method --- Avg-K that selects blocks through their mean aggregated hidden states, achieving lower perplexity in language model pretraining compared to existing MoE architectures including Switch Transformer (Fedus et al., 2021) and HashLayer (Roller et al., 2021).
Exploring the Impact of Model Scaling on Parameter-Efficient Tuning
Authors: Chi-Min Chan, Jiali Cheng, Yujia Qin, Yankai Lin, Shengding Hu, Zonghan Yang, Ning Ding, Xingzhi Sun, Guotong Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun Yusheng Su
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Parameter-efficient tuning (PET) methods can effectively drive extremely large pre-trained language models (PLMs) by training only minimal parameters. Different PET methods utilize different manually designed tunable modules. In small PLMs, there are usually noticeable performance differences among PET methods. Nevertheless, as the model scale increases, the performance differences become marginal. Hence, we hypothesize that model scaling mitigates the impact of design differences on PET methods. To investigate this hypothesis, we introduce a more flexible PET method called Arbitrary PET (APET) method. The APET method is compatible with a tunable module, which consists of any number of parameters distributed in arbitrary positions. Then, we utilize it and conduct experiments on 11 NLP tasks across 3 representative PLMs. Our investigations reveal that model scaling (1) mitigates the effects of the positions of tunable parameters on performance, and (2) enables tuning methods to achieve performance comparable to full-parameter fine-tuning by optimizing fewer tunable parameters. Intriguingly, we also observe that tuning methods optimize the similar number of tunable parameters to exceed random guess performance on different tasks. We collectively discuss this phenomenon and the two aforementioned findings from an optimization perspective to understand the underlying mechanisms. These conclusions enhance our understanding of the impact of model scaling on PET and assist in designing more effective and efficient PET methods for PLMs of different scales. The source code can be obtained from this GitHub repository: r̆lhttps://github.com/yushengsu-thu/PET_Scaling.
STAIR: Learning Sparse Text and Image Representation in Grounded Tokens
Authors: Bowen Zhang, Liangliang Cao, Jiguang Shen, Tom Gunter, Albin Jose, Alexander Toshev, Yantao Zheng, Jonathon Shlens, Ruoming Pang, Yinfei Yang Chen Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Image and text retrieval is one of the foundational tasks in the vision and language domain with multiple real-world applications. State-of-the-art contrastive approaches, e.g. CLIP, ALIGN, represent images and texts as dense embeddings and calculate the similarity in the dense embedding space as the matching score. On the other hand, sparse semantic features like bag-of-words models are more interpretable, but believed to suffer from inferior accuracy than dense representations. In this work, we show that it is possible to build a sparse semantic representation that is as powerful as, or even better than, dense presentations. We extend the CLIP model and build a sparse text and image representation (STAIR), where the image and text are mapped to a sparse token space. Each token in the space is a (sub-)word in the vocabulary, which is not only interpretable but also easy to integrate with existing information retrieval systems. STAIR model significantly outperforms a CLIP model with +4.9% and +4.3% absolute Recall@1 improvement on COCO-5k text$i̊ghtarrow$image and image$\g̊htarrow$text retrieval respectively. It also achieved better performance on both of ImageNet zero-shot and linear probing compared to CLIP.
Crossing the Threshold: Idiomatic Machine Translation through Retrieval Augmentation and Loss Weighting
Authors: Aditi Chaudhary, Graham Neubig Emmy Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Idioms are common in everyday language, but often pose a challenge to translators because their meanings do not follow from the meanings of their parts. Despite significant advances, machine translation systems still struggle to translate idiomatic expressions. We provide a simple characterization of idiomatic translation and related issues. This allows us to conduct a synthetic experiment revealing a tipping point at which transformer-based machine translation models correctly default to idiomatic translations. To expand multilingual resources, we compile a dataset of ~4k natural sentences containing idiomatic expressions in French, Finnish, and Japanese. To improve translation of natural idioms, we introduce two straightforward yet effective techniques: the strategic upweighting of training loss on potentially idiomatic sentences, and using retrieval-augmented models. This not only improves the accuracy of a strong pretrained MT model on idiomatic sentences by up to 13% in absolute accuracy, but also holds potential benefits for non-idiomatic sentences.
CoRec: An Easy Approach for Coordination Recognition
Authors: Haojie Jia, Wenfei Song, Qi Li Qing Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we observe and address the challenges of the coordination recognition task. Most existing methods rely on syntactic parsers to identify the coordinators in a sentence and detect the coordination boundaries. However, state-of-the-art syntactic parsers are slow and suffer from errors, especially for long and complicated sentences. To better solve the problems, we propose a pipeline model COordination RECognizer (CoRec). It consists of two components: coordinator identifier and conjunct boundary detector. The experimental results on datasets from various domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method. Further experiments show that CoRec positively impacts downstream tasks, improving the yield of state-of-the-art Open IE models.
A linear time approximation of Wasserstein distance with word embedding selection
Authors: Makoto Yamada Sho Otao
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Wasserstein distance, which can be computed by solving the optimal transport problem, is a powerful method for measuring the dissimilarity between documents. In the NLP community, it is referred to as word mover`s distance (WMD). One of the key challenges of Wasserstein distance is its computational cost since it needs cubic time. Although the Sinkhorn algorithm is a powerful tool to speed up to compute the Wasserstein distance, it still requires square time. Recently, a linear time approximation of the Wasserstein distance including the sliced Wasserstein and the tree-Wasserstein distance (TWD) has been proposed. However, a linear time approximation method suffers when the dimensionality of word vectors is high. In this study, we propose a method to combine feature selection and tree approximation of Wasserstein distance to handle high-dimensional problems. More specifically, we use multiple word embeddings and automatically select useful word embeddings in a tree approximation of Wasserstein distance. To this end, we approximate Wasserstein distance for each word vector by tree approximation technique, and select the discriminative (i.e., large Wasserstein distance) word embeddings by solving an entropic regularized maximization problem. Through our experiments on document classification, our proposed method achieved high performance.
Exchange-of-Thought: Enhancing Large Language Model Capabilities through Cross-Model Communication
Authors: Qiushi Sun, Cheng Chang, Qipeng Guo, Junqi Dai, Xuanjing Huang, Xipeng Qiu Zhangyue Yin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently made significant strides in complex reasoning tasks through the Chain-of-Thought technique. Despite this progress, their reasoning is often constrained by their intrinsic understanding, lacking external insights. To address this, we propose Exchange-of-Thought (EoT), a novel framework that enables cross-model communication during problem-solving. Drawing inspiration from network topology, EoT integrates four unique communication paradigms: Memory, Report, Relay, and Debate. This paper delves into the communication dynamics and volume associated with each paradigm. To counterbalance the risks of incorrect reasoning chains, we implement a robust confidence evaluation mechanism within these communications. Our experiments across diverse complex reasoning tasks demonstrate that EoT significantly surpasses established baselines, underscoring the value of external insights in enhancing LLM performance. Furthermore, we show that EoT achieves these superior results in a cost-effective manner, marking a promising advancement for efficient and collaborative AI problem-solving.
Conversation Understanding using Relational Temporal Graph Neural Networks with Auxiliary Cross-Modality Interaction
Authors: Anh-Tuan Mai, The-Son Le, Hai-Dang Kieu, Duc-Trong Le Cam-Van Thi Nguyen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Emotion recognition is a crucial task for human conversation understanding. It becomes more challenging with the notion of multimodal data, e.g., language, voice, and facial expressions. As a typical solution, the global- and the local context information are exploited to predict the emotional label for every single sentence, i.e., utterance, in the dialogue. Specifically, the global representation could be captured via modeling of cross-modal interactions at the conversation level. The local one is often inferred using the temporal information of speakers or emotional shifts, which neglects vital factors at the utterance level. Additionally, most existing approaches take fused features of multiple modalities in an unified input without leveraging modality-specific representations. Motivating from these problems, we propose the Relational Temporal Graph Neural Network with Auxiliary Cross-Modality Interaction (CORECT), an novel neural network framework that effectively captures conversation-level cross-modality interactions and utterance-level temporal dependencies with the modality-specific manner for conversation understanding. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CORECT via its state-of-the-art results on the IEMOCAP and CMU-MOSEI datasets for the multimodal ERC task.
Connecting degree and polarity: An artificial language learning study
Authors: Alexey Tikhonov, Ekaterina Garmash Lisa Bylinina
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We investigate a new linguistic generalisation in pre-trained language models (taking BERT Devlin et al. 2019 as a case study). We focus on degree modifiers (expressions like slightly, very, rather, extremely) and test the hypothesis that the degree expressed by a modifier (low, medium or high degree) is related to the modifier`s sensitivity to sentence polarity (whether it shows preference for affirmative or negative sentences or neither). To probe this connection, we apply the Artificial Language Learning experimental paradigm from psycholinguistics to a neural language model. Our experimental results suggest that BERT generalizes in line with existing linguistic observations that relate de- gree semantics to polarity sensitivity, including the main one: low degree semantics is associated with preference towards positive polarity.
Prompting with Pseudo-Code Instructions
Authors: Prince Kumar, Riyaz Bhat, Rudra Murthy, Danish Contractor, Srikanth Tamilselvam Mayank Mishra
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Prompting with natural language instructions has recently emerged as a popular method of harnessing the capabilities of large language models (LLM). Given the inherent ambiguity present in natural language, it is intuitive to consider the possible advantages of prompting with less ambiguous prompt styles, like pseudo-code. In this paper, we explore if prompting via pseudo-code instructions helps improve the performance of pre-trained language models. We manually create a dataset of pseudo-code prompts for 132 different tasks spanning classification, QA, and generative language tasks, sourced from the Super-NaturalInstructions dataset. Using these prompts along with their counterparts in natural language, we study their performance on two LLM families - BLOOM, CodeGen. Our experiments show that using pseudo-code instructions leads to better results, with an average increase (absolute) of 7-16 points in F1 scores for classification tasks and an improvement (relative) of 12-38% in aggregate ROUGE-L scores across all tasks. We include detailed ablation studies which indicate that code comments, docstrings, and the structural clues encoded in pseudo-code all contribute towards the improvement in performance. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first to demonstrate how pseudo-code prompts can be helpful in improving the performance of pre-trained LMs.
CRAB: Assessing the Strength of Causal Relationships Between Real-world Events
Authors: Syrielle Montariol, Debjit Paul, Leo Laugier, Karl Aberer, Antoine Bosselut Angelika Romanou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Understanding narratives requires reasoning about the cause-and-effect relationships between events mentioned in the text. While existing foundation models yield impressive results in many NLP tasks requiring reasoning, it is unclear whether they understand the complexity of the underlying network of causal relationships of events in narratives. In this work, we present CRAB, a new Causal Reasoning Assessment Benchmark designed to evaluate causal understanding of events in real-world narratives. CRAB contains fine-grained, contextual causality annotations for ~2.7K pairs of real-world events that describe various newsworthy event timelines (e.g., the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk). Using CRAB, we measure the performance of several large language models, demonstrating that most systems achieve poor performance on the task. Motivated by classical causal principles, we also analyze the causal structures of groups of events in CRAB, and find that models perform worse on causal reasoning when events are derived from complex causal structures compared to simple linear causal chains. We make our dataset and code available to the research community.
NORMSAGE: Multi-Lingual Multi-Cultural Norm Discovery from Conversations On-the-Fly
Authors: Tuhin Chakrabarty, Hao Guo, Owen Rambow, Smaranda Muresan, Heng Ji Yi Fung
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Knowledge of norms is needed to understand and reason about acceptable behavior in human communication and interactions across sociocultural scenarios. Most computational research on norms has focused on a single culture, and manually built datasets, from non-conversational settings. We address these limitations by proposing a new framework, NormSage, to automatically extract culture-specific norms from multi-lingual conversations. NormSage uses GPT-3 prompting to 1) extract candidate norms directly from conversations and 2) provide explainable self-verification to ensure correctness and relevance. Comprehensive empirical results show the promise of our approach to extract high-quality culture-aware norms from multi-lingual conversations (English and Chinese), across several quality metrics. Further, our relevance verification can be extended to assess the adherence and violation of any norm with respect to a conversation on-the-fly, along with textual explanation. NormSage achieves an AUC of 94.6% in this grounding setup, with generated explanations matching human-written quality.
A State-Vector Framework for Dataset Effects
Authors: Zining Zhu, Frank Rudzicz Esmat Sahak
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The impressive success of recent deep neural network (DNN)-based systems is significantly influenced by the high-quality datasets used in training. However, the effects of the datasets, especially how they interact with each other, remain underexplored. We propose a state-vector framework to enable rigorous studies in this direction. This framework uses idealized probing test results as the bases of a vector space. This framework allows us to quantify the effects of both standalone and interacting datasets. We show that the significant effects of some commonly-used language understanding datasets are characteristic and are concentrated on a few linguistic dimensions. Additionally, we observe some “spill-over” effects: the datasets could impact the models along dimensions that may seem unrelated to the intended tasks. Our state-vector framework paves the way for a systematic understanding of the dataset effects, a crucial component in responsible and robust model development.
Challenges in Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Jacqueline He, Jonathan May, Xuezhe Ma Linghao Jin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Context-aware neural machine translation, a paradigm that involves leveraging information beyond sentence-level context to resolve inter-sentential discourse dependencies and improve document-level translation quality, has given rise to a number of recent techniques. However, despite well-reasoned intuitions, most context-aware translation models show only modest improvements over sentence-level systems. In this work, we investigate and present several core challenges that impede progress within the field, relating to discourse phenomena, context usage, model architectures, and document-level evaluation. To address these problems, we propose a more realistic setting for document-level translation, called paragraph-to-paragraph (PARA2PARA) translation, and collect a new dataset of Chinese-English novels to promote future research.
Task-Adaptive Tokenization: Enhancing Long-Form Text Generation Efficacy in Mental Health and Beyond
Authors: Naihao Deng, Sahand Sabour, Yilin Jia, Minlie Huang, Rada Mihalcea Siyang Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose task-adaptive tokenization as a way to adapt the generation pipeline to the specifics of a downstream task and enhance long-form generation in mental health. Inspired by insights from cognitive science, our task-adaptive tokenizer samples variable segmentations from multiple outcomes, with sampling probabilities optimized based on task-specific data. We introduce a strategy for building a specialized vocabulary and introduce a vocabulary merging protocol that allows for the integration of task-specific tokens into the pre-trained model`s tokenization step. Through extensive experiments on psychological question-answering tasks in both Chinese and English, we find that our task-adaptive tokenization approach brings a significant improvement in generation performance while using up to 60% fewer tokens. Preliminary experiments point to promising results when using our tokenization approach with very large language models.
FACTIFY3M: A benchmark for multimodal fact verification with explainability through 5W Question-Answering
Authors: Khushbu Pahwa, Anku Rani, Shreyas Chatterjee, Dwip Dalal, Harshit Dave, Ritvik G, Preethi Gurumurthy, Adarsh Mahor, Samahriti Mukherjee, Aditya Pakala, Ishan Paul, Janvita Reddy, Arghya Sarkar, Kinjal Sensharma, Aman Chadha, Amit Sheth, Amitava Das Megha Chakraborty
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Combating disinformation is one of the burning societal crises - about 67% of the American population believes that disinformation produces a lot of uncertainty, and 10% of them knowingly propagate disinformation. Evidence shows that disinformation can manipulate democratic processes and public opinion, causing disruption in the share market, panic and anxiety in society, and even death during crises. Therefore, disinformation should be identified promptly and, if possible, mitigated. With approximately 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared online daily on social media platforms, scalable detection of multimodal disinformation requires efficient fact verification. Despite progress in automatic text-based fact verification (e.g., FEVER, LIAR), the research community lacks substantial effort in multimodal fact verification. To address this gap, we introduce FACTIFY 3M, a dataset of 3 million samples that pushes the boundaries of the domain of fact verification via a multimodal fake news dataset, in addition to offering explainability through the concept of 5W question-answering. Salient features of the dataset include: (i) textual claims, (ii) ChatGPT-generated paraphrased claims, (iii) associated images, (iv) stable diffusion-generated additional images (i.e., visual paraphrases), (v) pixel-level image heatmap to foster image-text explainability of the claim, (vi) 5W QA pairs, and (vii) adversarial fake news stories.
Building Multi-domain Dialog State Trackers from Single-domain Dialogs
Authors: Zheng Zhang, Xiaoyan Zhu, Minlie Huang Qi Zhu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing multi-domain dialog state tracking (DST) models are developed based on multi-domain dialogs, which require significant manual effort to define domain relations and collect data. This process can be challenging and expensive, particularly when numerous domains are involved. In this paper, we propose a divide-and-conquer (DAC) DST paradigm and a multi-domain dialog synthesis framework, which makes building multi-domain DST models from single-domain dialogs possible. The DAC paradigm segments a multi-domain dialog into multiple single-domain dialogs for DST, which makes models generalize better on dialogs involving unseen domain combinations. The multi-domain dialog synthesis framework merges several potentially related single-domain dialogs into one multi-domain dialog and modifies the dialog to simulate domain relations. The synthesized dialogs can help DST models capture the value transfer between domains. Experiments with three representative DST models on two datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed DAC paradigm and data synthesis framework.
Specialist or Generalist? Instruction Tuning for Specific NLP Tasks
Authors: Yixuan Su, Cheng Yang, Yujiu Yang, Deng Cai Chufan Shi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The potential of large language models (LLMs) to simultaneously perform a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks has been the subject of extensive research. Although instruction tuning has proven to be a data-efficient method for transforming LLMs into such generalist models, their performance still lags behind specialist models trained exclusively for specific tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether incorporating broadcoverage generalist instruction tuning can contribute to building a specialist model. We hypothesize that its efficacy depends on task specificity and skill requirements. Our experiments assess four target tasks with distinct coverage levels, revealing that integrating generalist instruction tuning consistently enhances model performance when the task coverage is broad. The effect is particularly pronounced when the amount of task-specific training data is limited. Further investigation into three target tasks focusing on different capabilities demonstrates that generalist instruction tuning improves understanding and reasoning abilities. However, for tasks requiring factual knowledge, generalist data containing hallucinatory information may negatively affect the model`s performance. Overall, our work provides a systematic guide for developing specialist models with general instruction tuning.
Making Large Language Models Better Data Creators
Authors: Jay Pujara, Mohit Sewak, Ryen White, Sujay Jauhar Dong-Ho Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Although large language models (LLMs) have advanced the state-of-the-art in NLP significantly, deploying them for downstream applications is still challenging due to cost, responsiveness, control, or concerns around privacy and security. As such, trainable models are still the preferred option in some cases. However, these models still require human-labeled data for optimal performance, which is expensive and time-consuming to obtain. In order to address this issue, several techniques to reduce human effort involve labeling or generating data using LLMs. Although these methods are effective for certain applications, in practice they encounter difficulties in real-world scenarios. Labeling data requires careful data selection, while generating data necessitates task-specific prompt engineering. In this paper, we propose a unified data creation pipeline that requires only a single formatting example, and which is applicable to a broad range of tasks, including traditionally problematic ones with semantically devoid label spaces. In our experiments we demonstrate that instruction-following LLMs are highly cost-effective data creators, and that models trained with these data exhibit performance better than those trained with human-labeled data (by up to 17.5%) on out-of-distribution evaluation, while maintaining comparable performance on in-distribution tasks. These results have important implications for the robustness of NLP systems deployed in the real-world.
Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models by Bayesian Sequential Estimation
Authors: Yuliang Yan, Longtao Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang Xiaohua Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have made remarkable advancements in the field of natural language generation. However, the propensity of LLMs to generate inaccurate or non-factual content, termed “hallucinations”, remains a significant challenge. Current hallucination detection methods often necessitate the retrieval of great numbers of relevant evidence, thereby increasing response times. We introduce a unique framework that leverages statistical decision theory and Bayesian sequential analysis to optimize the trade-off between costs and benefits during the hallucination detection process. This approach does not require a predetermined number of observations. Instead, the analysis proceeds in a sequential manner, enabling an expeditious decision towards “belief” or “disbelief” through a stop-or-continue strategy. Extensive experiments reveal that this novel framework surpasses existing methods in both efficiency and precision of hallucination detection. Furthermore, it requires fewer retrieval steps on average, thus decreasing response times.