mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
mAggretriever: A Simple yet Effective Approach to Zero-Shot Multilingual Dense Retrieval
Authors: Amin Ahmad, Jimmy Lin Sheng-Chieh Lin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) is a crucial yet challenging task due to the need for human annotations in multiple languages, making training data creation labor-intensive. In this paper, we introduce mAggretriever, which effectively leverages semantic and lexical features from pre-trained multilingual transformers (e.g., mBERT and XLM-R) for dense retrieval. To enhance training and inference efficiency, we employ approximate masked-language modeling prediction for computing lexical features, reducing 70--85% GPU memory requirement for mAggretriever fine-tuning. Empirical results demonstrate that mAggretriever, fine-tuned solely on English training data, surpasses existing state-of-the-art multilingual dense retrieval models that undergo further training on large-scale MLIR training data. Our code is available at url.
CodeFusion: A Pre-trained Diffusion Model for Code Generation
Authors: José Cambronero, Sumit Gulwani, Vu Le, Carina Negreanu, Gust Verbruggen Mukul Singh
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Imagine a developer who can only change their last line of code---how often would they have to start writing a function from scratch before it is correct? Auto-regressive models for code generation from natural language have a similar limitation: they do not easily allow reconsidering earlier tokens generated. We introduce CodeFusion, a pre-trained diffusion code generation model that addresses this limitation by iteratively denoising a complete program conditioned on the encoded natural language. We evaluate CodeFusion on the task of natural language to code generation for Bash, Python, and Microsoft Excel conditional formatting (CF) rules. Experiments show that CodeFusion (75M parameters) performs on par with state-of-the-art auto-regressive systems (350M-175B parameters) in top-1 accuracy and outperforms them in top-3 and top-5 accuracy due to its better balance in diversity versus quality.
CESAR: Automatic Induction of Compositional Instructions for Multi-turn Dialogs
Authors: Devamanyu Hazarika, Shikib Mehri, Seokhwan Kim, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Yang Liu, Mahdi Namazifar Taha Aksu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Instruction-based multitasking has played a critical role in the success of large language models (LLMs) in multi-turn dialog applications. While publicly available LLMs have shown promising performance, when exposed to complex instructions with multiple constraints, they lag against state-of-the-art models like ChatGPT. In this work, we hypothesize that the availability of large-scale complex demonstrations is crucial in bridging this gap. Focusing on dialog applications, we propose a novel framework, CESAR, that unifies a large number of dialog tasks in the same format and allows programmatic induction of complex instructions without any manual effort. We apply CESAR on InstructDial, a benchmark for instruction-based dialog tasks. We further enhance InstructDial with new datasets and tasks and utilize CESAR to induce complex tasks with compositional instructions. This results in a new benchmark called InstructDial++, which includes 63 datasets with 86 basic tasks and 68 composite tasks. Through rigorous experiments, we demonstrate the scalability of CESAR in providing rich instructions. Models trained on InstructDial++ can follow compositional prompts, such as prompts that ask for multiple stylistic constraints.
VECHR: A Dataset for Explainable and Robust Classification of Vulnerability Type in the European Court of Human Rights
Authors: Leon Staufer, Santosh T.y.s.s, Oana Ichim, Corina Heri, Matthias Grabmair Shanshan Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recognizing vulnerability is crucial for understanding and implementing targeted support to empower individuals in need. This is especially important at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where the court adapts Convention standards to meet actual individual needs and thus to ensure effective human rights protection. However, the concept of vulnerability remains elusive at the ECtHR and no prior NLP research has dealt with it. To enable future research in this area, we present VECHR, a novel expert-annotated multi-label dataset comprising of vulnerability type classification and explanation rationale. We benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art models on VECHR from both prediction and explainability perspective. Our results demonstrate the challenging nature of task with lower prediction performance and limited agreement between models and experts. Further, we analyze the robustness of these models in dealing with out-of-domain (OOD) data and observe overall limited performance. Our dataset poses unique challenges offering a significant room for improvement regarding performance, explainability and robustness.
ACQUIRED: A Dataset for Answering Counterfactual Questions In Real-Life Videos
Authors: Zi-Yi Dou, Qingyuan Hu, Yu Hou, Nischal Chandra, Marjorie Freedman, Ralph Weischedel, Nanyun Peng Te-Lin Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Multimodal counterfactual reasoning is a vital yet challenging ability for AI systems. It involves predicting the outcomes of hypothetical circumstances based on vision and language inputs, which enables AI models to learn from failures and explore hypothetical scenarios. Despite its importance, there are only a few datasets targeting the counterfactual reasoning abilities of multimodal models. Among them, they only cover reasoning over synthetic environments or specific types of events (e.g. traffic collisions), making them hard to reliably benchmark the model generalization ability in diverse real-world scenarios and reasoning dimensions. To overcome these limitations, we develop a video question answering dataset, ACQUIRED: it consists of 3.9K annotated videos, encompassing a wide range of event types and incorporating both first and third-person viewpoints, which ensures a focus on real-world diversity. In addition, each video is annotated with questions that span three distinct dimensions of reasoning, including physical, social, and temporal, which can comprehensively evaluate the model counterfactual abilities along multiple aspects. We benchmark our dataset against several state-of-the-art language-only and multimodal models and experimental results demonstrate a significant performance gap (\ensuremath>13%) between models and humans. The findings suggest that multimodal counterfactual reasoning remains an open challenge and ACQUIRED is a comprehensive and reliable benchmark for inspiring future research in this direction.
From Parse-Execute to Parse-Execute-Refine: Improving Semantic Parser for Complex Question Answering over Knowledge Base
Authors: Linyin Luo, Hanjiang Lai, Jian Yin Wangzhen Guo
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Parsing questions into executable logical forms has showed impressive results for knowledge-base question answering (KBQA). However, complex KBQA is a more challenging task that requires to perform complex multi-step reasoning. Recently, a new semantic parser called KoPL has been proposed to explicitly model the reasoning processes, which achieved the state-of-the-art on complex KBQA. In this paper, we further explore how to unlock the reasoning ability of semantic parsers by a simple proposed parse-execute-refine paradigm. We refine and improve the KoPL parser by demonstrating the executed intermediate reasoning steps to the KBQA model. We show that such simple strategy can significantly improve the ability of complex reasoning. Specifically, we propose three components: a parsing stage, an execution stage and a refinement stage, to enhance the ability of complex reasoning. The parser uses the KoPL to generate the transparent logical forms. Then, the execution stage aligns and executes the logical forms over knowledge base to obtain intermediate reasoning processes. Finally, the intermediate step-by-step reasoning processes are demonstrated to the KBQA model in the refinement stage. With the explicit reasoning processes, it is much easier to answer the complex questions. Experiments on benchmark dataset shows that the proposed PER-KBQA performs significantly better than the stage-of-the-art baselines on the complex KBQA.
Reward-Augmented Decoding: Efficient Controlled Text Generation With a Unidirectional Reward Model
Authors: Colin Raffel Haikang Deng
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While large language models have proven effective in a huge range of downstream applications, they often generate text that is problematic or lacks a desired attribute. In this paper, we introduce Reward-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a text generation procedure that uses a small unidirectional reward model to encourage a language model to generate text that has certain properties. Specifically, RAD uses the reward model to score generations as they are produced and rescales sampling probabilities to favor high-reward tokens. By using a unidirectional reward model, RAD can cache activations from prior generation steps to decrease computational overhead. Through experiments on generating non-toxic and sentiment-controlled text, we demonstrate that RAD performs best among methods that change only the generation procedure and matches the performance of state-of-the-art methods that involve re-training the language model. We further validate that RAD is effective on very large language models while incurring a minimal computational overhead.
CORE: A Few-Shot Company Relation Classification Dataset for Robust Domain Adaptation.
Authors: Jochen De Weerdt, Kristof Coussement, Arno De Caigny, Marie-Francine Moens Philipp Borchert
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce CORE, a dataset for few-shot relation classification (RC) focused on company relations and business entities. CORE includes 4,708 instances of 12 relation types with corresponding textual evidence extracted from company Wikipedia pages. Company names and business entities pose a challenge for few-shot RC models due to the rich and diverse information associated with them. For example, a company name may represent the legal entity, products, people, or business divisions depending on the context. Therefore, deriving the relation type between entities is highly dependent on textual context. To evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art RC models on the CORE dataset, we conduct experiments in the few-shot domain adaptation setting. Our results reveal substantial performance gaps, confirming that models trained on different domains struggle to adapt to CORE. Interestingly, we find that models trained on CORE showcase improved out-of-domain performance, which highlights the importance of high-quality data for robust domain generalization. Specifically, the information richness embedded in business entities allows models to focus on contextual nuances, reducing their reliance on superficial clues such as relation-specific verbs. In addition to the dataset, we provide relevant code snippets to facilitate reproducibility and encourage further research in the field. The CORE dataset and code are publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/pnborchert/CORE.
Models See Hallucinations: Evaluating the Factuality in Video Captioning
Authors: Xiaojun Wan Hui Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Video captioning aims to describe events in a video with natural language. In recent years, many works have focused on improving captioning models' performance. However, like other text generation tasks, it risks introducing factual errors not supported by the input video. Factual errors can seriously affect the quality of the generated text, sometimes making it completely unusable. Although factual consistency has received much research attention in text-to-text tasks (e.g., summarization), it is less studied in vision-based text generation. In this work, we conduct the first human evaluation of the factuality in video captioning and annotate two factuality datasets. We find that 56% of the model-generated sentences have factual errors, indicating it is a severe problem in this field, but existing evaluation metrics show little correlation with human factuality annotation. We further propose a weakly-supervised, model-based factuality metric FactVC, which outperforms previous metrics on factuality evaluation of video captioning.
Back Transcription as a Method for Evaluating Robustness of Natural Language Understanding Models to Speech Recognition Errors
Authors: Paweł Skórzewski, Marcin Sowa\ŉski, Tomasz Zietkiewicz Marek Kubis
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: In a spoken dialogue system, an NLU model is preceded by a speech recognition system that can deteriorate the performance of natural language understanding. This paper proposes a method for investigating the impact of speech recognition errors on the performance of natural language understanding models. The proposed method combines the back transcription procedure with a fine-grained technique for categorizing the errors that affect the performance of NLU models. The method relies on the usage of synthesized speech for NLU evaluation. We show that the use of synthesized speech in place of audio recording does not change the outcomes of the presented technique in a significant way.
Cabbage Sweeter than Cake? Analysing the Potential of Large Language Models for Learning Conceptual Spaces
Authors: Amit Gajbhiye, Steven Schockaert Usashi Chatterjee
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: The theory of Conceptual Spaces is an influential cognitive-linguistic framework for representing the meaning of concepts. Conceptual spaces are constructed from a set of quality dimensions, which essentially correspond to primitive perceptual features (e.g. hue or size). These quality dimensions are usually learned from human judgements, which means that applications of conceptual spaces tend to be limited to narrow domains (e.g. modelling colour or taste). Encouraged by recent findings about the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to learn perceptually grounded representations, we explore the potential of such models for learning conceptual spaces. Our experiments show that LLMs can indeed be used for learning meaningful representations to some extent. However, we also find that fine-tuned models of the BERT family are able to match or even outperform the largest GPT-3 model, despite being 2 to 3 orders of magnitude smaller.
Can Language Models Understand Physical Concepts?
Authors: Jingjing Xu, Qingxiu Dong, Ce Zheng, Xu Sun, Lingpeng Kong, Qi Liu Lei Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Language models (LMs) gradually become general-purpose interfaces in the interactive and embodied world, where the understanding of physical concepts is an essential prerequisite. However, it is unclear whether LMs can understand physical concepts in the human world. To investigate this, we design a benchmark VEC that covers the tasks of (i) Visual concepts, such as the shape and material of objects, and (ii) Embodied Concepts, learned from the interaction with the world such as the temperature of objects. Our zero (few)-shot prompting results show that the understanding of certain visual concepts emerges as scaling up LMs, but there are still basic concepts to which the scaling law does not apply. For example, OPT-175B performs close to humans with a zero-shot accuracy of 85% on the material concept, yet behaves like random guessing on the mass concept. Instead, vision-augmented LMs such as CLIP and BLIP achieve a human-level understanding of embodied concepts. Analysis indicates that the rich semantics in visual representation can serve as a valuable source of embodied knowledge. Inspired by this, we propose a distillation method to transfer embodied knowledge from VLMs to LMs, achieving performance gain comparable with that by scaling up parameters of LMs $134\times$. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/TobiasLee/VEC.
SPT: Learning to Selectively Insert Prompts for Better Prompt Tuning
Authors: Ming Tan Wei Zhu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Prompt tuning prepends a soft prompt to the input embeddings or hidden states and only optimizes the prompt to adapt pretrained models (PTMs) to downstream tasks. The previous work manually selects prompt layers which are far from optimal and failed to exploit the potential of prompt tuning. In this work, we propose a novel framework, Selective Prompt Tuning (SPT), that learns to select the proper prompt layers by inserting a prompt controlled by a learnable probabilistic gate at each intermediate layer. We further propose a novel bi-level optimization framework, SPT-DARTS, that can better optimize the learnable gates and improve the final prompt tuning performances of the learned prompt layer settings. We conduct extensive experiments with ten benchmark datasets under the full-data and few-shot scenarios. The results demonstrate that our SPT framework can perform better than the previous state-of-the-art PETuning baselines with comparable or fewer tunable parameters.
Once Upon a $ıt Time$ in $ıt Graph$: Relative-Time Pretraining for Complex Temporal Reasoning
Authors: Xin Li, Lidong Bing, Wai Lam Sen Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Our physical world is constantly evolving over time, rendering challenges for pre-trained language models to understand and reason over the temporal contexts of texts. Existing work focuses on strengthening the direct association between a piece of text and its time-stamp. However, the knowledge-time association is usually insufficient for the downstream tasks that require reasoning over temporal dependencies between knowledge. In this work, we make use of the underlying nature of time, all temporally-scoped sentences are strung together through a one-dimensional time axis, and suggest creating a graph structure based on the relative placements of events along the time axis. Inspired by the graph view, we propose RemeMo ($n̆derlineRelative Ti\d̆erlineme \uĕrlineModeling$), which explicitly connects all temporally-scoped facts by modeling the time relations between any two sentences. Experimental results show that RemeMo outperforms the baseline T5 on multiple temporal question answering datasets under various settings. Further analysis suggests that RemeMo is especially good at modeling long-range complex temporal dependencies.
Expository Text Generation: Imitate, Retrieve, Paraphrase
Authors: Jie Huang, Kevin Chang Nishant Balepur
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Expository documents are vital resources for conveying complex information to readers. Despite their usefulness, writing expository text by hand is a challenging process that requires careful content planning, obtaining facts from multiple sources, and the ability to clearly synthesize these facts. To ease these burdens, we propose the task of expository text generation, which seeks to automatically generate an accurate and stylistically consistent expository text for a topic by intelligently searching a knowledge source. We solve our task by developing IRP, a framework that overcomes the limitations of retrieval-augmented models and iteratively performs content planning, fact retrieval, and rephrasing. Through experiments on three diverse, newly-collected datasets, we show that IRP produces factual and organized expository texts that accurately inform readers.
Large-scale similarity search with Optimal Transport
Authors: Yuki Takezawa, Makoto Yamada Cléa Laouar
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Wasserstein distance is a powerful tool for comparing probability distributions and is widely used for document classification and retrieval tasks in NLP. In particular, it is known as the word mover`s distance (WMD) in the NLP community. WMD exhibits excellent performance for various NLP tasks; however, one of its limitations is its computational cost and thus is not useful for large-scale distribution comparisons. In this study, we propose a simple and effective nearest neighbor search based on the Wasserstein distance. Specifically, we employ the L1 embedding method based on the tree-based Wasserstein approximation and subsequently used the nearest neighbor search to efficiently find the $k$-nearest neighbors. Through benchmark experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed approximation has comparable performance to the vanilla Wasserstein distance and can be computed three orders of magnitude faster than the vanilla Wasserstein distance.
Enhancing Textbooks with Visuals from the Web for Improved Learning
Authors: Vilém Zouhar, Mrinmaya Sachan Janvijay Singh
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Textbooks are one of the main mediums for delivering high-quality education to students. In particular, explanatory and illustrative visuals play a key role in retention, comprehension and general transfer of knowledge. However, many textbooks lack these interesting visuals to support student learning. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of vision-language models to automatically enhance textbooks with images from the web. We collect a dataset of e-textbooks in the math, science, social science and business domains. We then set up a text-image matching task that involves retrieving and appropriately assigning web images to textbooks, which we frame as a matching optimization problem. Through a crowd-sourced evaluation, we verify that (1) while the original textbook images are rated higher, automatically assigned ones are not far behind, and (2) the precise formulation of the optimization problem matters. We release the dataset of textbooks with an associated image bank to inspire further research in this intersectional area of computer vision and NLP for education.
Continual Event Extraction with Semantic Confusion Rectification
Authors: Xinyi Wang, Wei Hu Zitao Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: We study continual event extraction, which aims to extract incessantly emerging event information while avoiding forgetting. We observe that the semantic confusion on event types stems from the annotations of the same text being updated over time. The imbalance between event types even aggravates this issue. This paper proposes a novel continual event extraction model with semantic confusion rectification. We mark pseudo labels for each sentence to alleviate semantic confusion. We transfer pivotal knowledge between current and previous models to enhance the understanding of event types. Moreover, we encourage the model to focus on the semantics of long-tailed event types by leveraging other associated types. Experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and is proficient in imbalanced datasets.
An Empirical Study of Translation Hypothesis Ensembling with Large Language Models
Authors: José de Souza, Andre Martins António Farinhas
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are becoming a one-fits-many solution, but they sometimes hallucinate or produce unreliable output. In this paper, we investigate how hypothesis ensembling can improve the quality of the generated text for the specific problem of LLM-based machine translation. We experiment with several techniques for ensembling hypotheses produced by LLMs such as ChatGPT, LLaMA, and Alpaca. We provide a comprehensive study along multiple dimensions, including the method to generate hypotheses (multiple prompts, temperature-based sampling, and beam search) and the strategy to produce the final translation (instruction-based, quality-based reranking, and minimum Bayes risk (MBR) decoding). Our results show that MBR decoding is a very effective method, that translation quality can be improved using a small number of samples, and that instruction tuning has a strong impact on the relation between the diversity of the hypotheses and the sampling temperature.
FedTherapist: Mental Health Monitoring with User-Generated Linguistic Expressions on Smartphones via Federated Learning
Authors: Hyungjun Yoon, Seungjoo Lee, Sungjoon Park, Yunxin Liu, Jinho Choi, Sung-Ju Lee Jaemin Shin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Psychiatrists diagnose mental disorders via the linguistic use of patients. Still, due to data privacy, existing passive mental health monitoring systems use alternative features such as activity, app usage, and location via mobile devices. We propose FedTherapist, a mobile mental health monitoring system that utilizes continuous speech and keyboard input in a privacy-preserving way via federated learning. We explore multiple model designs by comparing their performance and overhead for FedTherapist to overcome the complex nature of on-device language model training on smartphones. We further propose a Context-Aware Language Learning (CALL) methodology to effectively utilize smartphones' large and noisy text for mental health signal sensing. Our IRB-approved evaluation of the prediction of self-reported depression, stress, anxiety, and mood from 46 participants shows higher accuracy of FedTherapist compared with the performance with non-language features, achieving 0.15 AUROC improvement and 8.21% MAE reduction.
Visually-Situated Natural Language Understanding with Contrastive Reading Model and Frozen Large Language Models
Authors: Hodong Lee, Daehee Kim, Haeji Jung, Sanghee Park, Yoonsik Kim, Sangdoo Yun, Taeho Kil, Bado Lee, Seunghyun Park Geewook Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have stimulated a surge of research aimed at extending their applications to the visual domain. While these models exhibit promise in generating abstract image captions and facilitating natural conversations, their performance on text-rich images still requires improvement. In this paper, we introduce Contrastive Reading Model (Cream), a novel neural architecture designed to enhance the language-image understanding capability of LLMs by capturing intricate details that are often overlooked in existing methods. Cream combines vision and auxiliary encoders, fortified by a contrastive feature alignment technique, to achieve a more effective comprehension of language information in visually situated contexts within the images. Our approach bridges the gap between vision and language understanding, paving the way for the development of more sophisticated Document Intelligence Assistants. Through rigorous evaluations across diverse visually-situated language understanding tasks that demand reasoning capabilities, we demonstrate the compelling performance of Cream, positioning it as a prominent model in the field of visual document understanding. We provide our codebase and newly-generated datasets at https://github.com/naver-ai/cream.
Continual Learning for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation via Dual Importance-based Model Division
Authors: Kaiyu Huang, Hao Yu, Jiuyi Li, Jinsong Su, Degen Huang Junpeng Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: A persistent goal of multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) is to continually adapt the model to support new language pairs or improve some current language pairs without accessing the previous training data. To achieve this, the existing methods primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting by making compromises between the original and new language pairs, leading to sub-optimal performance on both translation tasks. To mitigate this problem, we propose a dual importance-based model division method to divide the model parameters into two parts and separately model the translation of the original and new tasks. Specifically, we first remove the parameters that are negligible to the original tasks but essential to the new tasks to obtain a pruned model, which is responsible for the original translation tasks. Then we expand the pruned model with external parameters and fine-tune the newly added parameters with new training data. The whole fine-tuned model will be used for the new translation tasks. Experimental results show that our method can efficiently adapt the original model to various new translation tasks while retaining the performance of the original tasks. Further analyses demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms several strong baselines under different incremental translation scenarios.
SimCSE++: Improving Contrastive Learning for Sentence Embeddings from Two Perspectives
Authors: Wei Shao, Lihui Chen, Lemao Liu Jiahao Xu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper improves contrastive learning for sentence embeddings from two perspectives: handling dropout noise and addressing feature corruption. Specifically, for the first perspective, we identify that the dropout noise from negative pairs affects the model`s performance. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective method to deal with such type of noise. Secondly, we pinpoint the rank bottleneck of current solutions to feature corruption and propose a dimension-wise contrastive learning objective to address this issue. Both proposed methods are generic and can be applied to any contrastive learning based models for sentence embeddings. Experimental results on standard benchmarks demonstrate that combining both proposed methods leads to a gain of 1.8 points compared to the strong baseline SimCSE configured with BERT base. Furthermore, applying the proposed method to DiffCSE, another strong contrastive learning based baseline, results in a gain of 1.4 points.
Unlearn What You Want to Forget: Efficient Unlearning for LLMs
Authors: Diyi Yang Jiaao Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress from pre-training on and memorizing a wide range of textual data, however, this process might suffer from privacy issues and violations of data protection regulations. As a result, the ability to easily remove data related to individual users from such models while not deteriorating their predictive quality after the removal becomes increasingly important. To address these issues, in this work, we propose an efficient unlearning framework that could efficiently update LLMs without having to retrain the whole model after data removals, by introducing lightweight unlearning layers learned with a selective teacher-student objective into the transformers. In addition, we introduce a fusion mechanism to effectively combine different unlearning layers that learns to forget different sets of data to handle a sequence of forgetting operations. Experiments on classification and generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods compared to the state-of-the-art baselines.
Simplicity Level Estimate (SLE): A Learned Reference-Less Metric for Sentence Simplification
Authors: Joël Legrand, Claire Gardent Liam Cripwell
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Automatic evaluation for sentence simplification remains a challenging problem. Most popular evaluation metrics require multiple high-quality references -- something not readily available for simplification -- which makes it difficult to test performance on unseen domains. Furthermore, most existing metrics conflate simplicity with correlated attributes such as fluency or meaning preservation. We propose a new learned evaluation metric --- SLE --- which focuses on simplicity, outperforming almost all existing metrics in terms of correlation with human judgements.
Precedent-Enhanced Legal Judgment Prediction with LLM and Domain-Model Collaboration
Authors: Siying Zhou, Yifei Liu, Weiming Lu, Xiaozhong Liu, Yating Zhang, Changlong Sun, Fei Wu, Kun Kuang Yiquan Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) has become an increasingly crucial task in Legal AI, i.e., predicting the judgment of the case in terms of case fact description. Precedents are the previous legal cases with similar facts, which are the basis for the judgment of the subsequent case in national legal systems. Thus, it is worthwhile to explore the utilization of precedents in the LJP. Recent advances in deep learning have enabled a variety of techniques to be used to solve the LJP task. These can be broken down into two categories: large language models (LLMs) and domain-specific models. LLMs are capable of interpreting and generating complex natural language, while domain models are efficient in learning task-specific information. In this paper, we propose the precedent-enhanced LJP framework (PLJP) -- a system that leverages the strength of both LLM and domain models in the context of precedents. Specifically, the domain models are designed to provide candidate labels and find the proper precedents efficiently, and the large models will make the final prediction with an in-context precedents comprehension. Experiments on the real-world dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our PLJP. Moreover, our work shows a promising direction for LLM and domain-model collaboration that can be generalized to other vertical domains.
FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation
Authors: Kalpesh Krishna, Xinxi Lyu, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Pang Koh, Mohit Iyyer, Luke Zettlemoyer, Hannaneh Hajishirzi Sewon Min
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Evaluating the factuality of long-form text generated by large language models (LMs) is non-trivial because (1) generations often contain a mixture of supported and unsupported pieces of information, making binary judgments of quality inadequate, and (2) human evaluation is time-consuming and costly. In this paper, we introduce FACTSCORE, a new evaluation that breaks a generation into a series of atomic facts and computes the percentage of atomic facts supported by a reliable knowledge source. We conduct an extensive human evaluation to obtain FACTSCOREs of people biographies generated by several state-of-the-art commercial LMs---InstructGPT, ChatGPT, and the retrieval-augmented PerplexityAI---and report new analysis demonstrating the need for such a fine-grained score (e.g., ChatGPT only achieves 58%). Since human evaluation is costly, we also introduce an automated model that estimates FACTSCORE using retrieval and a strong language model, with less than a 2% error rate. Finally, we use this automated metric to evaluate 6,500 generations from a new set of 13 recent LMs that would have cost \$26K if evaluated by humans, with various findings: GPT-4 and ChatGPT are more factual than public models, and Vicuna and Alpaca are some of the best public models. FACTSCORE is available for public use via \textquoteleftpip install factscore\textquoteleft.
Calc-X and Calcformers: Empowering Arithmetical Chain-of-Thought through Interaction with Symbolic Systems
Authors: Michal Štefánik, Ondrej Sotolar, Vlastimil Martinek Marek Kadlčík
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Despite outstanding performance in many tasks, language models are notoriously inclined to make factual errors in tasks requiring arithmetic computation. We address this deficiency by creating Calc-X, a collection of datasets that demonstrates the appropriate use of a calculator in reasoning chains. Calc-X is suitable for teaching language models to offload computations to a symbolic system. We survey and unify several existing chain-of-thought datasets into a proposed format, resulting in a standard collection of over 300,000 samples requiring arithmetic reasoning. Finally, we use the new Calc-X collection to train open-source calculator-using models and show that these models approximately double the accuracy of generating correct results compared to vanilla language model baselines.
CoF-CoT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought Prompting for Multi-domain NLU Tasks
Authors: Ye Liu, Chenwei Zhang, Tao Zhang, Philip Yu Hoang Nguyen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: While Chain-of-Thought prompting is popular in reasoning tasks, its application to Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) is under-explored. Motivated by multi-step reasoning of LLMs, we propose Coarse-to-Fine Chain-of-Thought (CoF-CoT) approach that breaks down NLU tasks into multiple reasoning steps where LLMs can learn to acquire and leverage essential concepts to solve tasks from different granularities. Moreover, we propose leveraging semantic-based Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) structured knowledge as an intermediate step to capture the nuances and diverse structures of utterances, and to understand connections between their varying levels of granularity. Our proposed approach is demonstrated effective in assisting the LLMs adapt to the multi-grained NLU tasks under both zero-shot and few-shot multi-domain settings.
When Language Models Fall in Love: Animacy Processing in Transformer Language Models
Authors: Yonatan Belinkov, Sandro Pezzelle Michael Hanna
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Animacy---whether an entity is alive and sentient---is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always expressed directly in language: in English it often manifests indirectly, in the form of selectional constraints on verbs and adjectives. This poses a potential issue for transformer language models (LMs): they often train only on text, and thus lack access to extralinguistic information from which humans learn about animacy. We ask: how does this impact LMs' animacy processing---do they still behave as humans do? We answer this question using open-source LMs. Like previous studies, we find that LMs behave much like humans when presented with entities whose animacy is typical. However, we also show that even when presented with stories about atypically animate entities, such as a peanut in love, LMs adapt: they treat these entities as animate, though they do not adapt as well as humans. Even when the context indicating atypical animacy is very short, LMs pick up on subtle clues and change their behavior. We conclude that despite the limited signal through which LMs can learn about animacy, they are indeed sensitive to the relevant lexical semantic nuances available in English.
Improving Unsupervised Relation Extraction by Augmenting Diverse Sentence Pairs
Authors: Kang Zhou, Qiao Qiao, Yuepei Li, Qi Li Qing Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Unsupervised relation extraction (URE) aims to extract relations between named entities from raw text without requiring manual annotations or pre-existing knowledge bases. In recent studies of URE, researchers put a notable emphasis on contrastive learning strategies for acquiring relation representations. However, these studies often overlook two important aspects: the inclusion of diverse positive pairs for contrastive learning and the exploration of appropriate loss functions. In this paper, we propose AugURE with both within-sentence pairs augmentation and augmentation through cross-sentence pairs extraction to increase the diversity of positive pairs and strengthen the discriminative power of contrastive learning. We also identify the limitation of noise-contrastive estimation (NCE) loss for relation representation learning and propose to apply margin loss for sentence pairs. Experiments on NYT-FB and TACRED datasets demonstrate that the proposed relation representation learning and a simple K-Means clustering achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Paraphrase Types for Generation and Detection
Authors: Bela Gipp, Terry Ruas Jan Philip Wahle
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Current approaches in paraphrase generation and detection heavily rely on a single general similarity score, ignoring the intricate linguistic properties of language. This paper introduces two new tasks to address this shortcoming by considering paraphrase types - specific linguistic perturbations at particular text positions. We name these tasks Paraphrase Type Generation and Paraphrase Type Detection. Our results suggest that while current techniques perform well in a binary classification scenario, i.e., paraphrased or not, the inclusion of fine-grained paraphrase types poses a significant challenge. While most approaches are good at generating and detecting general semantic similar content, they fail to understand the intrinsic linguistic variables they manipulate. Models trained in generating and identifying paraphrase types also show improvements in tasks without them. In addition, scaling these models further improves their ability to understand paraphrase types. We believe paraphrase types can unlock a new paradigm for developing paraphrase models and solving tasks in the future.
Target-to-Source Augmentation for Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction
Authors: Yifan Yang, Meng Li, Bin Liang, Shiwei Chen, Ruifeng Xu Yice Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Aspect Sentiment Triplet Extraction (ASTE) is an important task in sentiment analysis, aiming to extract aspect-level opinions and sentiments from user-generated reviews. The fine-grained nature of ASTE incurs a high annotation cost, while the scarcity of annotated data limits the performance of existing methods. This paper exploits data augmentation to address this issue. Traditional augmentation methods typically modify the input sentences of existing samples via heuristic rules or language models, which have shown success in text classification tasks. However, applying these methods to fine-grained tasks like ASTE poses challenges in generating diverse augmented samples while maintaining alignment between modified sentences and origin labels. Therefore, this paper proposes a target-to-source augmentation approach for ASTE. Our approach focuses on learning a generator that can directly generate new sentences based on labels and syntactic templates. With this generator, we can generate a substantial number of diverse augmented samples by mixing labels and syntactic templates from different samples. Besides, to ensure the quality of the generated sentence, we introduce fluency and alignment discriminators to provide feedback on the generated sentence and then use this feedback to optimize the generator via a reinforcement learning framework. Experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the performance of existing ASTE models.
PAC-tuning: Fine-tuning Pre-trained Language Models with PAC-driven Perturbed Gradient Descent
Authors: Zhiyu Xue, Xitong Zhang, Kristen Johnson, Rongrong Wang Guangliang Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2023

Abstract: Fine-tuning pretrained language models (PLMs) for downstream tasks is a large-scale optimization problem, in which the choice of the training algorithm critically determines how well the trained model can generalize to unseen test data, especially in the context of few-shot learning. To achieve good generalization performance and avoid overfitting, techniques such as data augmentation and pruning are often applied. However, adding these regularizations necessitates heavy tuning of the hyperparameters of optimization algorithms, such as the popular Adam optimizer. In this paper, we propose a two-stage fine-tuning method, PAC-tuning, to address this optimization challenge. First, based on PAC-Bayes training, PAC-tuning directly minimizes the PAC-Bayes generalization bound to learn proper parameter distribution. Second, PAC-tuning modifies the gradient by injecting noise with the variance learned in the first stage into the model parameters during training, resulting in a variant of perturbed gradient descent (PGD). In the past, the few-shot scenario posed difficulties for PAC-Bayes training because the PAC-Bayes bound, when applied to large models with limited training data, might not be stringent. Our experimental results across 5 GLUE benchmark tasks demonstrate that PAC-tuning successfully handles the challenges of fine-tuning tasks and outperforms strong baseline methods by a visible margin, further confirming the potential to apply PAC training for any other settings where the Adam optimizer is currently used for training.