mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Is ChatGPT a Good Causal Reasoner? A Comprehensive Evaluation
Authors: Xiao Ding, Bing Qin, Ting Liu Jinglong Gao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Causal reasoning ability is crucial for numerous NLP applications. Despite the impressive emerging ability of ChatGPT in various NLP tasks, it is unclear how well ChatGPT performs in causal reasoning. In this paper, we conduct the first comprehensive evaluation of the ChatGPT`s causal reasoning capabilities. Experiments show that ChatGPT is not a good causal reasoner, but a good causal interpreter. Besides, ChatGPT has a serious hallucination on causal reasoning, possibly due to the reporting biases between causal and non-causal relationships in natural language, as well as ChatGPT`s upgrading processes, such as RLHF. The In-Context Learning (ICL) and Chain-of-Thought (COT) techniques can further exacerbate such causal hallucination. Additionally, the causal reasoning ability of ChatGPT is sensitive to the words used to express the causal concept in prompts, and close-ended prompts perform better than open-ended prompts. For events in sentences, ChatGPT excels at capturing explicit causality rather than implicit causality, and performs better in sentences with lower event density and smaller lexical distance between events.
Steering Large Language Models for Machine Translation with Finetuning and In-Context Learning
Authors: Nuno Guerreiro, João Alves, José Pombal, Ricardo Rei, José de Souza, Pierre Colombo, Andre Martins Duarte Alves
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are a promising avenue for machine translation (MT). However, current LLM-based MT systems are brittle: their effectiveness highly depends on the choice of few-shot examples and they often require extra post-processing due to overgeneration. Alternatives such as finetuning on translation instructions are computationally expensive and may weaken in-context learning capabilities, due to overspecialization. In this paper, we provide a closer look at this problem. We start by showing that adapter-based finetuning with LoRA matches the performance of traditional finetuning while reducing the number of training parameters by a factor of 50. This method also outperforms few-shot prompting and eliminates the need for post-processing or in-context examples. However, we show that finetuning generally degrades few-shot performance, hindering adaptation capabilities. Finally, to obtain the best of both worlds, we propose a simple approach that incorporates few-shot examples during finetuning. Experiments on 10 language pairs show that our proposed approach recovers the original few-shot capabilities while keeping the added benefits of finetuning.
How Many Demonstrations Do You Need for In-context Learning?
Authors: Lichang Chen, Chen Zhu, Tianyi Zhou Jiuhai Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are capable to perform complex reasoning by in-context learning (ICL) when provided with a few input-output demonstrations (demos) and more powerful when intermediate reasoning steps (chain of thoughts (CoT)) of the demos are given. Is it necessary to use multi-demo in ICL? In this paper, we study ICL using fewer demos for each test query on the tasks in (Wei et al., 2022). Surprisingly, we do not observe significant degradation when using only one randomly chosen demo. To study this phenomenon, for each test query, we categorize demos into “positive demos” leading to the correct answer, and “negative demos” resulting in wrong answers. Our analysis reveals an inherent bias in those widely studied datasets and the redundancy of demos: most demos are positive for a majority of test queries, which explains the good performance of ICL with one random demo. Moreover, ICL (with and w/o CoT) using only one positive demo significantly outperforms multi-demo ICL adopted by most previous works, indicating the weakness of LLMs in finding positive demo(s) for input queries, which is difficult to evaluate on the biased datasets. Furthermore, we observe a counterintuitive behavior of ICL using multi-demo, i.e., its accuracy degrades(improves) when given more positive(negative) demos. This implies that ICL can be easily misguided by interference among demos and their spurious correlations. Our analyses highlight several fundamental challenges that need to be addressed in LLMs training, ICL, and benchmark design.
Improving word mover`s distance by leveraging self-attention matrix
Authors: Sho Yokoi, Hidetoshi Shimodaira Hiroaki Yamagiwa
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Measuring the semantic similarity between two sentences is still an important task. The word mover`s distance (WMD) computes the similarity via the optimal alignment between the sets of word embeddings. However, WMD does not utilize word order, making it challenging to distinguish sentences with significant overlaps of similar words, even if they are semantically very different. Here, we attempt to improve WMD by incorporating the sentence structure represented by BERT`s self-attention matrix (SAM). The proposed method is based on the Fused Gromov-Wasserstein distance, which simultaneously considers the similarity of the word embedding and the SAM for calculating the optimal transport between two sentences. Experiments demonstrate the proposed method enhances WMD and its variants in paraphrase identification with near-equivalent performance in semantic textual similarity.
Improving Span Representation by Efficient Span-Level Attention
Authors: Songlin Yang, Kewei Tu Pengyu Ji
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: High-quality span representations are crucial to natural language processing tasks involving span prediction and classification. Most existing methods derive a span representation by aggregation of token representations within the span. In contrast, we aim to improve span representations by considering span-span interactions as well as more comprehensive span-token interactions. Specifically, we introduce layers of span-level attention on top of a normal token-level transformer encoder. Given that attention between all span pairs results in $O(n^4)$ complexity ($n$ being the sentence length) and not all span interactions are intuitively meaningful, we restrict the range of spans that a given span could attend to, thereby reducing overall complexity to $O(n^3)$. We conduct experiments on various span-related tasks and show superior performance of our model surpassing baseline models. Our code is publicly available at r̆lhttps://github.com/jipy0222/Span-Level-Attention.
Long-Horizon Dialogue Understanding for Role Identification in the Game of Avalon with Large Language Models
Authors: Joseph Campbell, Yaqi Xie, Zhengyang Qi, Wenxin Zhang, Ruiyi Wang, Sanketh Rangreji, Charles Lewis, Katia Sycara Simon Stepputtis
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Deception and persuasion play a critical role in long-horizon dialogues between multiple parties, especially when the interests, goals, and motivations of the participants are not aligned. Such complex tasks pose challenges for current Large Language Models (LLM) as deception and persuasion can easily mislead them, especially in long-horizon multi-party dialogues. To this end, we explore the game of Avalon: The Resistance, a social deduction game in which players must determine each other`s hidden identities to complete their team`s objective. We introduce an online testbed and a dataset containing 20 carefully collected and labeled games among human players that exhibit long-horizon deception in a cooperative-competitive setting. We discuss the capabilities of LLMs to utilize deceptive long-horizon conversations between six human players to determine each player`s goal and motivation. Particularly, we discuss the multimodal integration of the chat between the players and the game`s state that grounds the conversation, providing further insights into the true player identities. We find that even current state-of-the-art LLMs do not reach human performance, making our dataset a compelling benchmark to investigate the decision-making and language-processing capabilities of LLMs. Our dataset and online testbed can be found at our project website: https://sstepput.github.io/Avalon-NLU/
Improving Sequential Model Editing with Fact Retrieval
Authors: Ru Li, Hongye Tan, Wang Yuanlong, Qinghua Chai, Jeff Pan Xiaoqi Han
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The task of sequential model editing is to fix erroneous knowledge in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) efficiently, precisely and continuously. Although existing methods can deal with a small number of modifications, these methods experience a performance decline or require additional annotated data, when the number of edits increases. In this paper, we propose a $\textbfR$etrieval $\textbfA$ugmented $\textbfS$equential Model $\textbfE$diting framework ($\textbfRASE$) that leverages factual information to enhance editing generalization and to guide the identification of edits by retrieving related facts from the fact-patch memory we constructed. Our main findings are: (i) State-of-the-art models can hardly correct massive mistakes stably and efficiently; (ii) Even if we scale up to thousands of edits, RASE can significantly enhance editing generalization and maintain consistent performance and efficiency; (iii) RASE can edit large-scale PLMs and increase the performance of different editors. Moreover, it can integrate with ChatGPT and further improve performance. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/sev777/RASE.
Battle of the Large Language Models: Dolly vs LLaMA vs Vicuna vs Guanaco vs Bard vs ChatGPT - A Text-to-SQL Parsing Comparison
Authors: Yuchen Zhang, Jiahuan Yan, Yuze Gao, Donovan Ong, Bin Chen, Jian Su Shuo Sun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The success of ChatGPT has ignited an AI race, with researchers striving to develop new large language models (LLMs) that can match or surpass the language understanding and generation abilities of commercial ones. In recent times, a number of models have emerged, claiming performance near that of GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 through various instruction-tuning methods. As practitioners of Text-to-SQL parsing, we are grateful for their valuable contributions to open-source research. However, it is important to approach these claims with a sense of scrutiny and ascertain the actual effectiveness of these models. Therefore, we pit six popular large language models against each other, systematically evaluating their Text-to-SQL parsing capability on nine benchmark datasets with five different prompting strategies, covering both zero-shot and few-shot scenarios. Regrettably, the open-sourced models fell significantly short of the performance achieved by closed-source models like GPT-3.5, highlighting the need for further work to bridge the performance gap between these models.
KBioXLM: A Knowledge-anchored Biomedical Multilingual Pretrained Language Model
Authors: Xu Yan, Ziqiang Cao, Juntao Li, Wenjie Li, Sujian Li, Xinjie Zhou, Yang Yang, Jun Zhang Lei Geng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Most biomedical pretrained language models are monolingual and cannot handle the growing cross-lingual requirements. The scarcity of non-English domain corpora, not to mention parallel data, poses a significant hurdle in training multilingual biomedical models. Since knowledge forms the core of domain-specific corpora and can be translated into various languages accurately, we propose a model called KBioXLM, which transforms the multilingual pretrained model XLM-R into the biomedical domain using a knowledge-anchored approach. We achieve a biomedical multilingual corpus by incorporating three granularity knowledge alignments (entity, fact, and passage levels) into monolingual corpora. Then we design three corresponding training tasks (entity masking, relation masking, and passage relation prediction) and continue training on top of the XLM-R model to enhance its domain cross-lingual ability. To validate the effectiveness of our model, we translate the English benchmarks of multiple tasks into Chinese. Experimental results demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms monolingual and multilingual pretrained models in cross-lingual zero-shot and few-shot scenarios, achieving improvements of up to 10+ points.
Words, Subwords, and Morphemes: What Really Matters in the Surprisal-Reading Time Relationship?
Authors: Philip Resnik Sathvik Nair
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: An important assumption that comes with using LLMs on psycholinguistic data has gone unverified. LLM-based predictions are based on subword tokenization, not decomposition of words into morphemes. Does that matter? We carefully test this by comparing surprisal estimates using orthographic, morphological, and BPE tokenization against reading time data. Our results replicate previous findings and provide evidence that *in the aggregate*, predictions using BPE tokenization do not suffer relative to morphological and orthographic segmentation. However, a finer-grained analysis points to potential issues with relying on BPE-based tokenization, as well as providing promising results involving morphologically-aware surprisal estimates and suggesting a new method for evaluating morphological prediction.
A Zero-Shot Language Agent for Computer Control with Structured Reflection
Authors: Gang Li, Zhiwei Deng, Bryan Wang, Yang Li Tao Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capacity at planning and executing a high-level goal in a live computer environment (e.g. MiniWoB++). To perform a task, recent works often require a model to learn from trace examples of the task via either supervised learning or few/many-shot prompting. Without these trace examples, it remains a challenge how an agent can autonomously learn and improve its control on a computer, which limits the ability of an agent to perform a new task. We approach this problem with a zero-shot agent that requires no given expert traces. Our agent plans for executable actions on a partially observed environment, and iteratively progresses a task by identifying and learning from its mistakes via self-reflection and structured thought management. On the easy tasks of MiniWoB++, we show that our zero-shot agent often outperforms recent SoTAs, with more efficient reasoning. For tasks with more complexity, our reflective agent performs on par with prior best models, even though previous works had the advantages of accessing expert traces or additional screen information.
SteerLM: Attribute Conditioned SFT as an (User-Steerable) Alternative to RLHF
Authors: Zhilin Wang, Makesh Sreedhar, Xianchao Wu, Oleksii Kuchaiev Yi Dong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Model alignment with human preferences is an essential step in making Large Language Models (LLMs) helpful and consistent with human values. It typically consists of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) stages. However, RLHF faces inherent limitations stemming from a complex training setup and its tendency to align the model with implicit values that end users cannot control at run-time. Moreover, reward models in RLHF stage commonly rely on single-dimensional feedback as opposed to explicit, multifaceted signals that indicate attributes such as helpfulness, humor, and toxicity. To address these limitations, we propose SteerLM, a supervised fine-tuning method that empowers end-users to control responses during inference. SteerLM conditions responses to conform to an explicitly defined multi-dimensional set of attributes, thereby empowering a steerable AI capable of generating helpful and high-quality responses while maintaining customizability. Experiments show that SteerLM trained on open source datasets generates responses that are preferred by human and automatic evaluators to many state-of-the-art baselines trained with RLHF while being much easier to train. Try SteerLM at https://huggingface.co/nvidia/SteerLM-llama2-13B
IdealGPT: Iteratively Decomposing Vision and Language Reasoning via Large Language Models
Authors: Rui Sun, Zhecan Wang, Long Chen, Gengyu Wang, Hammad Ayyubi, Kai-Wei Chang, Shih-Fu Chang Haoxuan You
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The field of vision-and-language (VL) understanding has made unprecedented progress with end-to-end large pre-trained VL models (VLMs). However, they still fall short in zero-shot reasoning tasks that require multi-step inferencing. To achieve this goal, previous works resort to a divide-and-conquer pipeline. In this paper, we argue that previous efforts have several inherent shortcomings: 1) They rely on domain-specific sub-question decomposing models. 2) They force models to predict the final answer even if the sub-questions or sub-answers provide insufficient information. We address these limitations via IdealGPT, a framework that iteratively decomposes VL reasoning using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, IdealGPT utilizes an LLM to generate sub-questions, a VLM to provide corresponding sub-answers, and another LLM to reason to achieve the final answer. These three modules perform the divide-and-conquer procedure iteratively until the model is confident about the final answer to the main question. We evaluate IdealGPT on multiple challenging VL reasoning tasks under a zero-shot setting. In particular, our IdealGPT outperforms the best existing GPT-4-like models by an absolute 10% on VCR and 15% on SNLI-VE. Code is available at https://github.com/Hxyou/IdealGPT.
GRI: Graph-based Relative Isomorphism of Word Embedding Spaces
Authors: Yan Hu, Jianbin Qin, Di Wang Muhammad Ali
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Automated construction of bi-lingual dictionaries using monolingual embedding spaces is a core challenge in machine translation. The end performance of these dictionaries relies on the geometric similarity of individual spaces, i.e., their degree of isomorphism. Existing attempts aimed at controlling the relative isomorphism of different spaces fail to incorporate the impact of lexically different but semantically related words in the training objective. To address this, we propose GRI that combines the distributional training objectives with attentive graph convolutions to unanimously consider the impact of lexical variations of semantically similar words required to define/compute the relative isomorphism of multiple spaces. Exper imental evaluation shows that GRI outperforms the existing research by improving the average P@1 by a relative score of upto 63.6%.
PersonaLM: Language Model Personalization via Domain-distributed Span Aggregated K-Nearest N-gram Retrieval Augmentation
Authors: Zhe Liu, Ke Li, Yingyi Ma, Gil Keren, Zeeshan Ahmed, Dinesh Manocha, Xuedong Zhang Puneet Mathur
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce PersonaLM - Domain-distributed Span-Aggregated K-nearest N-gram retrieval augmentation to improve language modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) personalization. PersonaLM leverages contextually similar n-gram word frequencies for recognizing rare word patterns associated with unseen domains. It aggregates the next-word probability distribution based on the relative importance of different domains to the input query. To achieve this, we propose a Span Aggregated Group-Contrastive Neural (SCAN) retriever that learns to rank external domains/users by utilizing a group-wise contrastive span loss that pulls together span representations belonging to the same group while pushing away spans from unrelated groups in the semantic space. We propose ASAP benchmark for ASR LM personalization that consists of three user-specific speech-to-text tasks for meetings, TED talks, and financial earnings calls. Extensive experiments show that PersonaLM significantly outperforms strong baselines with a 10-16% improvement in perplexity and a 5-8% reduction in Word Error Rates on popular Wikitext-103, UserLibri, and our ASAP dataset. We further demonstrate the usefulness of the SCAN retriever for improving user-personalized text generation and classification by retrieving relevant context for zero-shot prompting and few-shot fine-tuning of LLMs by 7-12% on the LAMP benchmark.
Scaling Vision-Language Models with Sparse Mixture of Experts
Authors: Zhewei Yao, Chunyuan Li, Trevor Darrell, Kurt Keutzer, Yuxiong He Sheng Shen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The field of natural language processing (NLP) has made significant strides in recent years, particularly in the development of large-scale vision-language models (VLMs). These models aim to bridge the gap between text and visual information, enabling a more comprehensive understanding of multimedia data. However, as these models become larger and more complex, they also become more challenging to train and deploy. One approach to addressing this challenge is the use of sparsely-gated mixture-of-experts (MoE) techniques, which divide the model into smaller, specialized sub-models that can jointly solve a task. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of MoE in scaling vision-language models, demonstrating its potential to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a range of benchmarks over dense models of equivalent computational cost. Our research offers valuable insights into stabilizing the training of MoE models, understanding the impact of MoE on model interpretability, and balancing the trade-offs between compute performance when scaling VLMs. We hope our work will inspire further research into the use of MoE for scaling large-scale vision-language models and other multimodal machine learning applications.
Aspect-Category Enhanced Learning with a Neural Coherence Model for Implicit Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Fumiyo Fukumoto, Xinfeng Wang, Yoshimi Suzuki, Jiyi Li, Wanzeng Kong Jin Cui
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has been widely studied since the explosive growth of social networking services. However, the recognition of implicit sentiments that do not contain obvious opinion words remains less explored. In this paper, we propose aspect-category enhanced learning with a neural coherence model (ELCoM). It captures document-level coherence by using contrastive learning, and sentence-level by a hypergraph to mine opinions from explicit sentences to aid implicit sentiment classification. To address the issue of sentences with different sentiment polarities in the same category, we perform cross-category enhancement to offset the impact of anomalous nodes in the hypergraph and obtain sentence representations with enhanced aspect-category. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show that the ELCoM achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source codes and data are released at r̆lhttps://github.com/cuijin-23/ELCoM.
End-to-end Adversarial Sample Generation for Data Augmentation
Authors: Yuqing Sun Tianyuan Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Adversarial samples pose a significant challenge to neural inference models. In this paper, we propose a novel enhancing approach A3 for the robustness of the neural NLP models, which combines the adversarial training and data augmentation. We propose an adversarial sample generator that consists of a conditioned paraphrasing model and a condition generator. The latter aims to generate conditions which guides the paraphrasing model to generate adversarial samples. A pretrained discriminator is introduced to help the adversarial sample generator adapt to the data characteristics for different tasks. We adopt a weighted loss to incorporate the generated adversarial samples with the original samples for augmented training. Compared to existing methods, our approach is much efficient since the generation process is independent to the target model and the generated samples are reusable for different models. Experimental results on several tasks show that our approach improves the overall performance of the trained model. Specially, the enhanced model is robust for various attacking techniques.
Query2Triple: Unified Query Encoding for Answering Diverse Complex Queries over Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Shizhu He, Cunguang Wang, Li Cai, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao Yao Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Complex Query Answering (CQA) is a challenge task of Knowledge Graph (KG). Due to the incompleteness of KGs, query embedding (QE) methods have been proposed to encode queries and entities into the same embedding space, and treat logical operators as neural set operators to obtain answers. However, these methods train KG embeddings and neural set operators concurrently on both simple (one-hop) and complex (multi-hop and logical) queries, which causes performance degradation on simple queries and low training efficiency. In this paper, we propose Query to Triple (Q2T), a novel approach that decouples the training for simple and complex queries. Q2T divides the training into two stages: (1) Pre-training the neural link predictor on simple queries to predict tail entities based on the head entity and relation. (2) Training the query encoder on complex queries to encode diverse complex queries into a unified triple form that can be efficiently solved by the pretrained link predictor. Our proposed Q2T is not only efficient to train, but also modular, thus easily adaptable to various neural link predictors that have been studied well. Extensive experiments demonstrate that, even without explicit modeling for neural set operators, Q2T still achieves state-of-the-art performance on diverse complex queries over three public benchmarks.
Self-Polish: Enhance Reasoning in Large Language Models via Problem Refinement
Authors: Senjie Jin, Yuhao Zhou, Rui Zheng, Songyang Gao, Jia Liu, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang Zhiheng Xi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: To enhance the multi-step reasoning capabilities of large language models, researchers have extensively explored prompting methods, notably the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method which explicitly elicits human-like rationales. However, they have inadvertently overlooked the potential of enhancing model reasoning performance by formulating higher-quality problems. In this work, we start from the problem side and propose Self-Polish (SP), a novel method that facilitates the model`s reasoning by guiding it to progressively refine the given problems to be more comprehensible and solvable. We also explore several automatic prompting varients and propose the Self-Polish prompt bank for the community. SP is orthogonal to all other prompting methods of answer/reasoning side like CoT, allowing for seamless integration with state-of-the-art techniques for further improvement. Thorough experiments show that the proposed method attains notable and consistent effectiveness on five reasoning benchmarks across different models. Furthermore, our method also showcases impressive performance on robustness evaluation. Codes and prompts are available at https://github.com/WooooDyy/Self-Polish.
Breaking through Deterministic Barriers: Randomized Pruning Mask Generation and Selection
Authors: Weizhi Gao, Qi Lei, Dongkuan Xu Jianwei Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: It is widely acknowledged that large and sparse models have higher accuracy than small and dense models under the same model size constraints. This motivates us to train a large model and then remove its redundant neurons or weights by pruning. Most existing works pruned the networks in a deterministic way, the performance of which solely depends on a single pruning criterion and thus lacks variety. Instead, in this paper, we propose a model pruning strategy that first generates several pruning masks in a designed random way. Subsequently, along with an effective mask-selection rule, the optimal mask is chosen from the pool of mask candidates. To further enhance efficiency, we introduce an early mask evaluation strategy, mitigating the overhead associated with training multiple masks. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that this approach achieves state-of-the-art performance across eight datasets from GLUE, particularly excelling at high levels of sparsity.
Eyes Show the Way: Modelling Gaze Behaviour for Hallucination Detection
Authors: Ashita Saxena, Raja Kumar, Abhijit Mishra, Pushpak Bhattacharyya Kishan Maharaj
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Detecting hallucinations in natural language processing (NLP) is a critical undertaking that demands a deep understanding of both the semantic and pragmatic aspects of languages. Cognitive approaches that leverage users' behavioural signals, such as gaze, have demonstrated effectiveness in addressing NLP tasks with similar linguistic complexities. However, their potential in the context of hallucination detection remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel cognitive approach for hallucination detection that leverages gaze signals from humans. We first collect and introduce an eye tracking corpus (IITB-HGC: IITB-Hallucination Gaze corpus) consisting of 500 instances, annotated by five annotators for hallucination detection. Our analysis reveals that humans selectively attend to relevant parts of the text based on distributional similarity, similar to the attention bias phenomenon in psychology. We identify two attention strategies employed by humans: global attention, which focuses on the most informative sentence, and local attention, which focuses on important words within a sentence. Leveraging these insights, we propose a novel cognitive framework for hallucination detection that incorporates these attention biases. Experimental evaluations on the FactCC dataset demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, obtaining a balanced accuracy of 87.1%. Our study highlights the potential of gaze-based approaches in addressing the task of hallucination detection and sheds light on the cognitive processes employed by humans in identifying inconsistencies.
Noisy Pair Corrector for Dense Retrieval
Authors: Yeyun Gong, Xingwei He, Dayiheng Liu, Daya Guo, Jiancheng Lv, Jian Guo Hang Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Most dense retrieval models contain an implicit assumption: the training query-document pairs are exactly matched. Since it is expensive to annotate the corpus manually, training pairs in real-world applications are usually collected automatically, which inevitably introduces mismatched-pair noise. In this paper, we explore an interesting and challenging problem in dense retrieval, how to train an effective model with mismatched-pair noise. To solve this problem, we propose a novel approach called Noisy Pair Corrector (NPC), which consists of a detection module and a correction module. The detection module estimates noise pairs by calculating the perplexity between annotated positive and easy negative documents. The correction module utilizes an exponential moving average (EMA) model to provide a soft supervised signal, aiding in mitigating the effects of noise. We conduct experiments on text-retrieval benchmarks Natural Question and TriviaQA, code-search benchmarks StaQC and SO-DS. Experimental results show that NPC achieves excellent performance in handling both synthetic and realistic noise.
Enhancing Accessible Communication: from European Portuguese to Portuguese Sign Language
Authors: Luisa Coheur, Mara Moita Catarina Sousa
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) is the official language in deaf education in Portugal. Current approaches in developing a translation system between European Portuguese and LGP rely on hand-crafted rules. In this paper, we present a fully automatic corpora-driven rule-based machine translation system between European Portuguese and LGP glosses, and also two neural machine translation models. We also contribute with the LGP-5-Domain corpus, composed of five different text domains, built with the help of our rule-based system, and used to train the neural models. In addition, we provide a gold collection, annotated by LGP experts, that can be used for future evaluations. Compared with the only similar available translation system, PE2LGP, results are always improved with the new rule-based model, which competes for the highest scores with one of the neural models.
Diversifying language models for lesser-studied languages and language-usage contexts: A case of second language Korean
Authors: Gyu-Ho Shin Hakyung Sung
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This study investigates the extent to which currently available morpheme parsers/taggers apply to lesser-studied languages and language-usage contexts, with a focus on second language (L2) Korean. We pursue this inquiry by (1) training a neural-network model (pre-trained on first language [L1] Korean data) on varying L2 datasets and (2) measuring its morpheme parsing/POS tagging performance on L2 test sets from both the same and different sources of the L2 train sets. Results show that the L2 trained models generally excel in domain-specific tokenization and POS tagging compared to the L1 pre-trained baseline model. Interestingly, increasing the size of the L2 training data does not lead to improving model performance consistently.
Improving generalization in large langue model by learning prefix subspaces
Authors: Vincent Guigue, Laure Soulier Louis Falissard
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This article focuses on large language models (LLMs) fine-tuning in the scarce data regime (also known as “few-shot learning setting”). We propose a method to increase the generalization capabilities of LLMs based on neural network subspaces. This optimization method, recently introduced in computer vision, aims to improve model generalization by identifying wider local optima through the joint optimization of an entire simplex of models in parameter space. Although this property would be highly beneficial in the context of training large language models in the “few-shot learning” setting, its adaptation to massive, pretrained transformers poses some challenges. First, their considerable number of parameters make it difficult to train several model jointly, and second, their deterministic parameter initialisation schemes make them unfit to the subspace method as originaly proposed. We show in this paper that its application to “Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning” (PEFT) methods, however, is relatively natural, and we propose to apply it to prefix-tuning, by learning entire simplexes of continous prefixes. We test our method on a variant of the GLUE benchmark adapted to the few-shot learning setting, and show that both our contributions (learning prefix simplexes, and non-deterministic validation metric inference) jointly lead to a gain in average performances compared to state of the art methods.
Domain Adaptation for Sentiment Analysis Using Robust Internal Representations
Authors: Digbalay Bose, Shrikanth Narayanan, Aram Galstyan Mohammad Rostami
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Sentiment analysis is a costly yet necessary task for enterprises to study the opinions of their customers to improve their products and to determine optimal marketing strategies. Due to the existence of a wide range of domains across different products and services, cross-domain sentiment analysis methods have received significant attention. These methods mitigate the domain gap between different applications by training cross-domain generalizable classifiers which relax the need for data annotation for each domain. We develop a domain adaptation method which induces large margins between data representations that belong to different classes in an embedding space. This embedding space is trained to be domain-agnostic by matching the data distributions across the domains. Large interclass margins in the source domain help to reduce the effect of “domain shift” in the target domain. Theoretical and empirical analysis are provided to demonstrate that the proposed method is effective.
KeFVP: Knowledge-enhanced Financial Volatility Prediction
Authors: Yun Xiong, Xiaosu Wang, Wenjing Yu, Yao Zhang, Weizu Yang Hao Niu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Financial volatility prediction is vital for indicating a company`s risk profile. Transcripts of companies' earnings calls are important unstructured data sources to be utilized to access companies' performance and risk profiles. However, current works ignore the role of financial metrics knowledge (such as EBIT, EPS, and ROI) in transcripts, which is crucial for understanding companies' performance, and little consideration is given to integrating text and price information. In this work, we statistic common financial metrics and make a special dataset based on these metrics. Then, we introduce a knowledge-enhanced financial volatility prediction method (KeFVP) to inject knowledge of financial metrics into text comprehension by knowledge-enhanced adaptive pre-training (KePt) and effectively incorporating text and price information by introducing a conditional time series prediction module. We conduct extensive experiments on three real-world public datasets, and the results indicate that KeFVP is effective and outperforms all the state-of-the-art methods.
A Frustratingly Easy Plug-and-Play Detection-and-Reasoning Module for Chinese Spelling Check
Authors: Jingheng Ye, Qingyu Zhou, Yinghui Li, Yangning Li, Feng Zhou, Hai-Tao Zheng Haojing Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In recent years, Chinese Spelling Check (CSC) has been greatly improved by designing task-specific pre-training methods or introducing auxiliary tasks, which mostly solve this task in an end-to-end fashion. In this paper, we propose to decompose the CSC workflow into detection, reasoning, and searching subtasks so that the rich external knowledge about the Chinese language can be leveraged more directly and efficiently. Specifically, we design a plug-and-play detection-and-reasoning module that is compatible with existing SOTA non-autoregressive CSC models to further boost their performance. We find that the detection-and-reasoning module trained for one model can also benefit other models. We also study the primary interpretability provided by the task decomposition. Extensive experiments and detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and competitiveness of the proposed module.
Asking Clarification Questions to Handle Ambiguity in Open-Domain QA
Authors: Segwang Kim, Minwoo Lee, Hwanhee Lee, Joonsuk Park, Sang-Woo Lee, Kyomin Jung Dongryeol Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Ambiguous questions persist in open-domain question answering, because formulating a precise question with a unique answer is often challenging. Previous works have tackled this issue by asking disambiguated questions for all possible interpretations of the ambiguous question. Instead, we propose to ask a clarification question, where the user`s response will help identify the interpretation that best aligns with the user`s intention. We first present CAmbigNQ, a dataset consisting of 5,653 ambiguous questions, each with relevant passages, possible answers, and a clarification question. The clarification questions were efficiently created by generating them using InstructGPT and manually revising them as necessary. We then define a pipeline of three tasks---(1) ambiguity detection, (2) clarification question generation, and (3) clarification-based QA. In the process, we adopt or design appropriate evaluation metrics to facilitate sound research. Lastly, we achieve F1 of 61.3, 25.1, and 40.5 on the three tasks, demonstrating the need for further improvements while providing competitive baselines for future work.
Addressing the Length Bias Challenge in Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Shuhao Gu, Min Zhang, Yang Feng Zhang Zhuocheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Document-level neural machine translation (DNMT) has shown promising results by incorporating context information through increased maximum lengths of source and target sentences. However, this approach also introduces a length bias problem, whereby DNMT suffers from significant translation quality degradation when decoding sentences that are much shorter or longer than the maximum sentence length during training, i.e., the length bias problem. To prevent the model from neglecting shorter sentences, we sample the training data to ensure a more uniform distribution across different sentence lengths while progressively increasing the maximum sentence length during training. Additionally, we introduce a length-normalized attention mechanism to aid the model in focusing on target information, mitigating the issue of attention divergence when processing longer sentences. Furthermore, during the decoding stage of DNMT, we propose a sliding decoding strategy that limits the length of target sentences to not exceed the maximum length encountered during training. The experimental results indicate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results on several open datasets, and further analysis shows that our method can significantly alleviate the length bias problem.
EconBERTa: Towards Robust Extraction of Named Entities in Economics
Authors: Pedro Vitor Quinta de Castro, Mona Schirmer, Luis Eduardo San Martin, Linxi Wang, Tomáš Dulka, Haaya Naushan, John Pougué-Biyong, Arianna Legovini, Samuel Fraiberger Karim Lasri
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Adapting general-purpose language models has proven to be effective in tackling downstream tasks within specific domains. In this paper, we address the task of extracting entities from the economics literature on impact evaluation. To this end, we release EconBERTa, a large language model pretrained on scientific publications in economics, and ECON-IE, a new expert-annotated dataset of economics abstracts for Named Entity Recognition (NER). We find that EconBERTa reaches state-of-the-art performance on our downstream NER task. Additionally, we extensively analyze the model`s generalization capacities, finding that most errors correspond to detecting only a subspan of an entity or failure to extrapolate to longer sequences. This limitation is primarily due to an inability to detect part-of-speech sequences unseen during training, and this effect diminishes when the number of unique instances in the training set increases. Examining the generalization abilities of domain-specific language models paves the way towards improving the robustness of NER models for causal knowledge extraction.
Consonant is all you need: a compact representation of English text for efficient NLP
Authors: Irfan Ahmad Maged Al-shaibani
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In natural language processing (NLP), the representation of text plays a crucial role in various tasks such as language modeling, sentiment analysis, and machine translation. The standard approach is to represent text in the same way as we, as humans, read and write. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to represent text with only consonants which presents a compact representation of English text that offers improved efficiency without sacrificing performance. We exploit the fact that consonants are more discriminative than vowels and by representing text using consonants, we can significantly reduce the overall memory and compute footprint required for storing and processing textual data. We present two alternative representations: \textquoteleftconsonants-only', where we completely remove the vowels from the text, and \textquoteleftmasked-vowels', where we mask all the vowels into one special symbol. To evaluate our approaches, we conducted experiments on various NLP tasks, including text classification, part-of-speech (POS) tagging, named-entity recognition (NER), and neural machine translation (NMT), in addition to language modeling. Our results demonstrate that the proposed consonant-based representation achieves comparable performance compared to the standard text representation while requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Furthermore, we show that our representation can be seamlessly integrated with existing NLP models and frameworks, providing a practical solution for efficient text processing. Last but not the least, we present a technique to retrieve the vowel information from our processed text representation keeping in mind the need to reproduce text in human readable form in some NLP applications.
Detrimental Contexts in Open-Domain Question Answering
Authors: James Thorne Philhoon Oh
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: For knowledge intensive NLP tasks, it has been widely accepted that accessing more information is a contributing factor to improvements in the model`s end-to-end performance. However, counter-intuitively, too much context can have a negative impact on the model when evaluated on common question answering (QA) datasets. In this paper, we analyze how passages can have a detrimental effect on retrieve-then-read architectures used in question answering. Our empirical evidence indicates that the current read architecture does not fully leverage the retrieved passages and significantly degrades its performance when using the whole passages compared to utilizing subsets of them. Our findings demonstrate that model accuracy can be improved by 10% on two popular QA datasets by filtering out detrimental passages. Additionally, these outcomes are attained by utilizing existing retrieval methods without further training or data. We further highlight the challenges associated with identifying the detrimental passages. First, even with the correct context, the model can make an incorrect prediction, posing a challenge in determining which passages are most influential. Second, evaluation typically considers lexical matching, which is not robust to variations of correct answers. Despite these limitations, our experimental results underscore the pivotal role of identifying and removing these detrimental passages for the context-efficient retrieve-then-read pipeline.