mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
PlugMed: Improving Specificity in Patient-Centered Medical Dialogue Generation using In-Context Learning
Authors: Zhi Jin, Wenpin Jiao, Haiyan Zhao, Yongqiang Zhao, Zhengwei Tao Chengfeng Dou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The patient-centered medical dialogue systems strive to offer diagnostic interpretation services to users who are less knowledgeable about medical knowledge, through emphasizing the importance of providing responses specific to the patients. It is difficult for the large language models (LLMs) to guarantee the specificity of responses in spite of its promising performance even in some tasks in medical field. Inspired by in-context learning, we propose PlugMed, a Plug-and-Play Medical Dialogue System, for addressing this challenge. PlugMed is equipped with two modules, the prompt generation (PG) module and the response ranking (RR) module, to enhances LLMs' dialogue strategies for improving the specificity of the dialogue. The PG module is designed to stimulate the imitative ability of LLMs by providing them with real dialogues from similar patients as prompts. The RR module incorporates fine-tuned small model as response filter to enable the selection of appropriate responses generated by LLMs. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation method based on matching both user`s intent and high-frequency medical term to effectively assess the specificity of the responses. We conduct experimental evaluations on three medical dialogue datasets, and the results, including both automatic and human evaluation, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
CodeTransOcean: A Comprehensive Multilingual Benchmark for Code Translation
Authors: Yuchen Tian, Yunzhe Li, Qian Chen, Wen Wang Weixiang Yan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent code translation techniques exploit neural machine translation models to translate source code from one programming language to another to satisfy production compatibility or to improve efficiency of codebase maintenance. Most existing code translation datasets only focus on a single pair of popular programming languages. To advance research on code translation and meet diverse requirements of real-world applications, we construct **CodeTransOcean**, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark that supports the largest variety of programming languages for code translation. CodeTransOcean consists of three novel multilingual datasets, namely, **MultilingualTrans** supporting translations between multiple popular programming languages, **NicheTrans** for translating between niche programming languages and popular ones, and **LLMTrans** for evaluating executability of translated code by large language models (LLMs). CodeTransOcean also includes a novel cross-framework dataset, **DLTrans**, for translating deep learning code across different frameworks. We develop multilingual modeling approaches for code translation and demonstrate their great potential in improving the translation quality of both low-resource and high-resource language pairs and boosting the training efficiency. We also propose a novel evaluation metric **Debugging Success Rate@K** for program-level code translation. Last but not least, we evaluate LLM ChatGPT on our datasets and investigate its potential for fuzzy execution predictions. We build baselines for CodeTransOcean and analyze challenges of code translation for guiding future research. The CodeTransOcean datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeTransOcean.
impact of sample selection on in-context learning for entity extraction from scientific writing
Authors: Maciej Rybinski, Stephen Wan Necva Bölücü
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Prompt-based usage of Large Language Models (LLMs) is an increasingly popular way to tackle many well-known natural language problems. This trend is due, in part, to the appeal of the In-Context Learning (ICL) prompt set-up, in which a few selected training examples are provided along with the inference request. ICL, a type of few-shot learning, is especially attractive for natural language processing (NLP) tasks defined for specialised domains, such as entity extraction from scientific documents, where the annotation is very costly due to expertise requirements for the annotators. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis of in-context sample selection methods for entity extraction from scientific documents using GPT-3.5 and compare these results against a fully supervised transformer-based baseline. Our results indicate that the effectiveness of the in-context sample selection methods is heavily domain-dependent, but the improvements are more notable for problems with a larger number of entity types. More in-depth analysis shows that ICL is more effective for low-resource set-ups of scientific information extraction
Goodtriever: Adaptive Toxicity Mitigation with Retrieval-augmented Models
Authors: Beyza Ermis, Patrick Lewis, Sara Hooker Luiza Pozzobon
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Considerable effort has been dedicated to mitigating toxicity, but existing methods often require drastic modifications to model parameters or the use of computationally intensive auxiliary models. Furthermore, previous approaches have often neglected the crucial factor of language`s evolving nature over time. In this work, we present a comprehensive perspective on toxicity mitigation that takes into account its changing nature. We introduce Goodtriever, a flexible methodology that matches the current state-of-the-art toxicity mitigation while achieving 43% relative latency reduction during inference and being more computationally efficient. By incorporating a retrieval-based approach at decoding time, Goodtriever enables toxicity-controlled text generation. Our research advocates for an increased focus on adaptable mitigation techniques, which better reflect the data drift models face when deployed in the wild.
Robustness Tests for Automatic Machine Translation Metrics with Adversarial Attacks
Authors: Timothy Baldwin Yichen Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We investigate MT evaluation metric performance on adversarially-synthesized texts, to shed light on metric robustness. We experiment with word- and character-level attacks on three popular machine translation metrics: BERTScore, BLEURT, and COMET. Our human experiments validate that automatic metrics tend to overpenalize adversarially-degraded translations. We also identify inconsistencies in BERTScore ratings, where it judges the original sentence and the adversarially-degraded one as similar, while judging the degraded translation as notably worse than the original with respect to the reference. We identify patterns of brittleness that motivate more robust metric development.
Time-Considerable Dialogue Models via Reranking by Time Dependency
Authors: Masakazu Ishihata, Hiroaki Sugiyama Yuiko Tsunomori
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In the last few years, generative dialogue models have shown excellent performance and have been used for various applications. As chatbots become more prevalent in our daily lives, more and more people expect them to behave more like humans, but existing dialogue models do not consider the time information that people are constantly aware of. In this paper, we aim to construct a time-considerable dialogue model that actively utilizes time information. First, we categorize responses by their naturalness at different times and introduce a new metric to classify responses into our categories. Then, we propose a new reranking method to make the existing dialogue model time-considerable using the proposed metric and subjectively evaluate the performances of the obtained time-considerable dialogue models by humans.
Non-Compositionality in Sentiment: New Data and Analyses
Authors: Christopher Lucas Verna Dankers
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: When natural language phrases are combined, their meaning is often more than the sum of their parts. In the context of NLP tasks such as sentiment analysis, where the meaning of a phrase is its sentiment, that still applies. Many NLP studies on sentiment analysis, however, focus on the fact that sentiment computations are largely compositional. We, instead, set out to obtain non-compositionality ratings for phrases with respect to their sentiment. Our contributions are as follows: a) a methodology for obtaining those non-compositionality ratings, b) a resource of ratings for 259 phrases -- NonCompSST -- along with an analysis of that resource, and c) an evaluation of computational models for sentiment analysis using this new resource.
MPrompt: Exploring Multi-level Prompt Tuning for Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Yiming Qian, Bowen Wang, Liangzhi Li Guoxin Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The large language models have achieved superior performance on various natural language tasks. One major drawback of such approaches is they are resource-intensive in fine-tuning new datasets. Soft-prompt tuning presents a resource-efficient solution to fine-tune the pre-trained language models (PLMs) while keeping their weight frozen. Existing soft prompt methods mainly focus on designing the input-independent prompts that steer the model to fit the domain of the new dataset. Those methods often ignore the fine-grained information about the task and context of the text. In this paper, we propose a multi-level prompt tuning (MPrompt) method for machine reading comprehension. It utilizes prompts at task-specific, domain-specific, and context-specific levels to enhance the comprehension of input semantics at different granularities. We also propose an independence constraint to steer each domain-specific prompt to focus on information within its domain to avoid redundancy. Moreover, we present a prompt generator that incorporates context-related knowledge in the prompt generation to enhance contextual relevancy. We conducted extensive experiments on 12 benchmarks of various QA formats and achieved an average improvement of 1.94% over the state-of-the-art methods.
DocTrack: A Visually-Rich Document Dataset Really Aligned with Human Eye Movement for Machine Reading
Authors: Qingxuan Wang, Yue Li, Changqing Wang, Chenhui Chu, Rui Wang Hao Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The use of visually-rich documents in various fields has created a demand for Document AI models that can read and comprehend documents like humans, which requires the overcoming of technical, linguistic, and cognitive barriers. Unfortunately, the lack of appropriate datasets has significantly hindered advancements in the field. To address this issue, we introduce DocTrack, a visually-rich document dataset really aligned with human eye-movement information using eye-tracking technology. This dataset can be used to investigate the challenges mentioned above. Additionally, we explore the impact of human reading order on document understanding tasks and examine what would happen if a machine reads in the same order as a human. Our results suggest that although Document AI models have made significant progresses, they still have a long way to go before they can read visually richer documents as accurately, continuously, and flexibly as humans do. These findings have potential implications for future research and development of document intelligence.
Adaptation with Self-Evaluation to Improve Selective Prediction in LLMs
Authors: Jinsung Yoon, Sayna Ebrahimi, Sercan Arik, Tomas Pfister, Somesh Jha Jiefeng Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown great advances in a variety of tasks, including natural language understanding and generation. However, their use in high-stakes decision-making scenarios is still limited due to the potential for errors. *Selective prediction* is a technique that can be used to improve the reliability of the LLMs by allowing them to abstain from making predictions when they are unsure of the answer. In this work, we propose a novel framework for adaptation with self-evaluation to improve the selective prediction performance of LLMs. Our framework is based on the idea of using parameter-efficient tuning to adapt the LLM to the specific task at hand while improving its ability to perform self-evaluation. We evaluate our method on a variety of question-answering (QA) datasets and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art selective prediction methods. For example, on the CoQA benchmark, our method improves the AUACC from 91.23% to 92.63% and improves the AUROC from 74.61% to 80.25%.
Bi-Drop: Enhancing Fine-tuning Generalization via Synchronous sub-net Estimation and Optimization
Authors: Heming Xia, Damai Dai, Runxin Xu, Tianyu Liu, Binghuai Lin, Yunbo Cao, Zhifang Sui Shoujie Tong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Pretrained language models have achieved remarkable success in natural language understanding. However, fine-tuning pretrained models on limited training data tends to overfit and thus diminish performance. This paper presents Bi-Drop, a fine-tuning strategy that selectively updates model parameters using gradients from various sub-nets dynamically generated by dropout. The sub-net estimation of Bi-Drop is performed in an in-batch manner, so it overcomes the problem of hysteresis in sub-net updating, which is possessed by previous methods that perform asynchronous sub-net estimation. Also, Bi-Drop needs only one mini-batch to estimate the sub-net so it achieves higher utility of training data. Experiments on the GLUE benchmark demonstrate that Bi-Drop consistently outperforms previous fine-tuning methods. Furthermore, empirical results also show that Bi-Drop exhibits excellent generalization ability and robustness for domain transfer, data imbalance, and low-resource scenarios.
ClozEx: A Task toward Generation of English Cloze Explanation
Authors: Masato Mita, Mamoru Komachi Zizheng Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Providing explanations for cloze questions in language assessment (LA) has been recognized as a valuable approach to enhancing the language proficiency of learners. However, there is a noticeable absence of dedicated tasks and datasets specifically designed for generating language learner explanations. In response to this gap, this paper introduces a novel task ClozEx of generating explanations for cloze questions in LA, with a particular focus on English as a Second Language (ESL) learners. To support this task, we present a meticulously curated dataset comprising cloze questions paired with corresponding explanations. This dataset aims to assess language proficiency and facilitates language learning by offering informative and accurate explanations. To tackle the task, we fine-tuned various baseline models with our training data, including encoder-decoder and decoder-only architectures. We also explored whether large language models (LLMs) are able to generate good explanations without fine-tuning, just using pre-defined prompts. The evaluation results demonstrate that encoder-decoder models have the potential to deliver fluent and valid explanations when trained on our dataset.
Is Probing All You Need? Indicator Tasks as an Alternative to Probing Embedding Spaces
Authors: Omer Goldman, Reut Tsarfaty Tal Levy
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The ability to identify and control different kinds of linguistic information encoded in vector representations of words has many use cases, especially for explainability and bias removal. This is usually done via a set of simple classification tasks, termed \textitprobes, to evaluate the information encoded in the embedding space. However, the involvement of a trainable classifier leads to entanglement between the probe`s results and the classifier`s nature. As a result, contemporary works on probing include tasks that do not involve training of auxiliary models. In this work we introduce the term \textitindicator tasks for non-trainable tasks which are used to query embedding spaces for the existence of certain properties, and claim that this kind of tasks may point to a direction opposite to probes, and that this contradiction complicates the decision on whether a property exists in an embedding space. We demonstrate our claims with two test cases, one dealing with gender debiasing and another with the erasure of morphological information from embedding spaces. We show that the application of a suitable indicator provides a more accurate picture of the information captured and removed compared to probes. We thus conclude that indicator tasks should be implemented and taken into consideration when eliciting information from embedded representations.
The Cost of Compression: Investigating the Impact of Compression on Parametric Knowledge in Language Models
Authors: Makesh Sreedhar, Srinath Srinivasan, Frederic Sala Satya Sai Srinath Namburi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Compressing large language models (LLMs), often consisting of billions of parameters, provides faster inference, smaller memory footprints, and enables local deployment. The standard compression techniques are pruning and quantization, with the former eliminating redundant connections in model layers and the latter representing model parameters with as little as 4 bits. The key tradeoff is between the degree of compression and the impact on the quality of the compressed model. Existing research on LLM compression primarily focuses on performance in terms of general metrics like perplexity or downstream task accuracy. More fine-grained metrics, such as those measuring parametric knowledge, remain significantly underexplored. To help bridge this gap, we present a comprehensive analysis across multiple model families using the LAMA and LM-Harness benchmarks in order to systematically quantify the effect of commonly employed compression techniques on model performance. A particular focus is on tradeoffs involving parametric knowledge, with the goal of providing practitioners with practical insights to make informed decisions on compression.
CoEdIT: Text Editing by Task-Specific Instruction Tuning
Authors: Dhruv Kumar, Ryan Koo, Dongyeop Kang Vipul Raheja
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce CoEdIT, a state-of-the-art text editing system for writing assistance. CoEdIT takes instructions from the user specifying the attributes of the desired text, such as “Make the sentence simpler” or “Write it in a more neutral style,” and outputs the edited text. We present a large language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of task-specific instructions for text editing (a total of 82K instructions). Our model (1) achieves state-of-the-art performance on various text editing benchmarks, (2) is competitive with publicly available largest-sized LLMs trained on instructions while being ~60x smaller, (3) is capable of generalizing to unseen edit instructions, and (4) exhibits abilities to generalize to composite instructions containing different combinations of edit actions. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis, we show that writers prefer the edits suggested by CoEdIT relative to other state-of-the-art text editing models. Our code, data, and models are publicly available at https://github.com/vipulraheja/coedit.
Exploring Large Language Models for Multi-Modal Out-of-Distribution Detection
Authors: Hao Lang, Kaisheng Zeng, Fei Huang, Yongbin Li Yi Dai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Out-of-distribution (OOD) detection is essential for reliable and trustworthy machine learning. Recent multi-modal OOD detection leverages textual information from in-distribution (ID) class names for visual OOD detection, yet it currently neglects the rich contextual information of ID classes. Large language models (LLMs) encode a wealth of world knowledge and can be prompted to generate descriptive features for each class. Indiscriminately using such knowledge causes catastrophic damage to OOD detection due to LLMs' hallucinations, as is observed by our analysis. In this paper, we propose to apply world knowledge to enhance OOD detection performance through selective generation from LLMs. Specifically, we introduce a consistency-based uncertainty calibration method to estimate the confidence score of each generation. We further extract visual objects from each image to fully capitalize on the aforementioned world knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Better Together: Enhancing Generative Knowledge Graph Completion with Language Models and Neighborhood Information
Authors: Aydar Bulatov, Yuri Kuratov, Mikhail Burtsev Alla Chepurova
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Real-world Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incompleteness, which limits their potential performance. Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) techniques aim to address this issue. However, traditional KGC methods are computationally intensive and impractical for large-scale KGs, necessitating the learning of dense node embeddings and computing pairwise distances. Generative transformer-based language models (e.g., T5 and recent KGT5) offer a promising solution as they can predict the tail nodes directly. In this study, we propose to include node neighborhoods as additional information to improve KGC methods based on language models. We examine the effects of this imputation and show that, on both inductive and transductive Wikidata subsets, our method outperforms KGT5 and conventional KGC approaches. We also provide an extensive analysis of the impact of neighborhood on model prediction and show its importance. Furthermore, we point the way to significantly improve KGC through more effective neighborhood selection.
DeltaScore: Fine-Grained Story Evaluation with Perturbations
Authors: Miao Li, Trevor Cohn, Jey Lau Zhuohan Xie
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Numerous evaluation metrics have been developed for natural language generation tasks, but their effectiveness in evaluating stories is limited as they are not specifically tailored to assess intricate aspects of storytelling, such as fluency and interestingness. In this paper, we introduce DeltaScore, a novel methodology that uses perturbation techniques for the evaluation of nuanced story aspects. We posit that the extent to which a story excels in a specific aspect (e.g., fluency) correlates with the magnitude of its susceptibility to particular perturbations (e.g., the introduction of typos). Given this, we measure the quality of an aspect by calculating the likelihood difference between pre- and post-perturbation states using pre-trained language models. We compare DeltaScore with existing metrics on storytelling datasets from two domains in five fine-grained story aspects: fluency, coherence, relatedness, logicality, and interestingness. DeltaScore demonstrates strong performance, revealing a surprising finding that one specific perturbation proves highly effective in capturing multiple aspects. Source code is available on our GitHub repository.
MuG: A Multimodal Classification Benchmark on Game Data with Tabular, Textual, and Visual Fields
Authors: Yongchen Qian, Shifan Zhao, Yuanzhe Xi, Carl Yang Jiaying Lu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Previous research has demonstrated the advantages of integrating data from multiple sources over traditional unimodal data, leading to the emergence of numerous novel multimodal applications. We propose a multimodal classification benchmark MuG with eight datasets that allows researchers to evaluate and improve their models. These datasets are collected from four various genres of games that cover tabular, textual, and visual modalities. We conduct multi-aspect data analysis to provide insights into the benchmark, including label balance ratios, percentages of missing features, distributions of data within each modality, and the correlations between labels and input modalities. We further present experimental results obtained by several state-of-the-art unimodal classifiers and multimodal classifiers, which demonstrate the challenging and multimodal-dependent properties of the benchmark. MuG is released at https://github.com/lujiaying/MUG-Bench with the data, tutorials, and implemented baselines.
Don`t waste a single annotation: improving single-label classifiers through soft labels
Authors: Yue Li, Yida Mu, Carolina Scarton, Kalina Bontcheva, Xingyi Song Ben Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we address the limitations of the common data annotation and training methods for objective single-label classification tasks. Typically, when annotating such tasks annotators are only asked to provide a single label for each sample and annotator disagreement is discarded when a final hard label is decided through majority voting. We challenge this traditional approach, acknowledging that determining the appropriate label can be difficult due to the ambiguity and lack of context in the data samples. Rather than discarding the information from such ambiguous annotations, our soft label method makes use of them for training. Our findings indicate that additional annotator information, such as confidence, secondary label and disagreement, can be used to effectively generate soft labels. Training classifiers with these soft labels then leads to improved performance and calibration on the hard label test set.
Black-Box Tuning of Vision-Language Models with Effective Gradient Approximation
Authors: Yuxiang Wei, Ming Liu, Zhilong Ji, Jinfeng Bai, Yiwen Guo, Wangmeng Zuo Zixian Guo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods have provided an effective way for adapting large vision-language models to specific tasks or scenarios. Typically, they learn a very small scale of parameters for pre-trained models in a white-box formulation, which assumes model architectures to be known and parameters to be accessible. However, large models are often not open-source due to considerations of preventing abuse or commercial factors, hence posing a barrier to the deployment of white-box PEFT methods. To alleviate the dependence on model accessibility, we introduce collaborative black-box tuning (CBBT) for both textual prompt optimization and output feature adaptation for black-box models. Specifically, considering that the backpropagation gradients are blocked, we approximate the gradients of textual prompts by analyzing the predictions with perturbed prompts. Secondly, a lightweight adapter is deployed over the output feature of the inaccessible model, further facilitating the model adaptation process. Empowered with these designs, our CBBT is extensively evaluated on eleven downstream benchmarks and achieves remarkable improvements compared to existing black-box VL adaptation methods. Our code will be made publicly available.
How to Determine the Most Powerful Pre-trained Language Model without Brute Force Fine-tuning? An Empirical Survey
Authors: Xiaofeng Zhang, Chen Li, Hanhua Hong, Xi Xu, Chenghua Lin, Wenge Rong Jun Bai
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Transferability estimation has been attached to great attention in the computer vision fields. Researchers try to estimate with low computational cost the performance of a model when transferred from a source task to a given target task. Considering the effectiveness of such estimations, the communities of natural language processing also began to study similar problems for the selection of pre-trained language models. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive comparison between these estimation methods yet. Also, the differences between vision and language scenarios make it doubtful whether previous conclusions can be established across fields. In this paper, we first conduct a thorough survey of existing transferability estimation methods being able to find the most suitable model, then we conduct a detailed empirical study for the surveyed methods based on the GLUE benchmark. From qualitative and quantitative analyses, we demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of existing methods and show that H-Score generally performs well with superiorities in effectiveness and efficiency. We also outline the difficulties of consideration of training details, applicability to text generation, and consistency to certain metrics which shed light on future directions.
Licon: A Diverse, Controllable and Challenging Linguistic Concept Learning Benchmark
Authors: Ying Zhang, Wenya Guo, Zhengkun Zhang, Ru Zhou, Xiaojie Yuan Shenglong Yu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Concept Learning requires learning the definition of a general category from given training examples. Most of the existing methods focus on learning concepts from images. However, the visual information cannot present abstract concepts exactly, which struggles the introduction of novel concepts related to known concepts (e.g., \textquoteleftPlant'$i̊ghtarrow$\textquoteleftAsteroids'). In this paper, inspired by the fact that humans learn most concepts through linguistic description, we introduce Linguistic Concept Learning benchmark (Licon), where concepts in diverse forms (e.g., plain attributes, images, and text) are defined by linguistic descriptions. The difficulty to learn novel concepts can be controlled by the number of attributes or the hierarchical relationships between concepts. The diverse and controllable concepts are used to support challenging evaluation tasks, including concept classification, attribute prediction, and concept relationship recognition. In addition, we design an entailment-based concept learning method (EnC) to model the relationship among concepts. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of EnC. The benchmark will be released to the public soon.
InterroLang: Exploring NLP Models and Datasets through Dialogue-based Explanations
Authors: Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Sahil Chopra, Cennet Oguz, Sebastian Möller Nils Feldhus
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model`s predicted label when it`s not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.
INVITE: a Testbed of Automatically Generated Invalid Questions to Evaluate Large Language Models for Hallucinations
Authors: Rahul Gupta, Jens Lehmann, Morteza Ziyadi Anil Ramakrishna
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent advancements in Large language models (LLMs) have enabled them to hold free form conversations over multiple turns, but they exhibit a tendency to make unfounded and incorrect statements, commonly known as hallucinations. In particular, LLMs hallucinate frequently when given invalid questions, i.e. ones with incorrect assumptions. The most common approach to evaluate LLMs on hallucinations is to test them on Question Answering (QA) test sets such as TruthfulQA. However, LLMs are increasingly pretrained on massive text corpora scraped from the Internet, which may inevitably expose these test sets to the model during training, leading eventually to an overestimation of model performances on these test sets. In this work, we present an alternative framework to address this risk and to foster further research towards making LLMs robust against invalid questions. We name our framework INVITE: a testbed of automatically generated INValId questions to evaluaTE large language models for hallucinations. In each instantiation, our framework is set up to create a fresh batch of invalid questions by distorting valid facts in which subjects or objects are replaced by similar entities. We evaluate several state of the art LLMs against a testset generated by our framework and highlight its capacity to trigger hallucinations in these models.
Multimodal Automated Fact-Checking: A Survey
Authors: Michael Schlichtkrull, Zhijiang Guo, Oana Cocarascu, Elena Simperl, Andreas Vlachos Mubashara Akhtar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Misinformation is often conveyed in multiple modalities, e.g. a miscaptioned image. Multimodal misinformation is perceived as more credible by humans, and spreads faster than its text-only counterparts. While an increasing body of research investigates automated fact-checking (AFC), previous surveys mostly focus on text. In this survey, we conceptualise a framework for AFC including subtasks unique to multimodal misinformation. Furthermore, we discuss related terms used in different communities and map them to our framework. We focus on four modalities prevalent in real-world fact-checking: text, image, audio, and video. We survey benchmarks and models, and discuss limitations and promising directions for future research
PROTEGE: Prompt-based Diverse Question Generation from Web Articles
Authors: Anirban Majumder, Vineet Chaoji Vinayak Puranik
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Rich and diverse knowledge bases (KB) are foundational building blocks for online knowledge sharing communities such as StackOverflow and Quora, and applications such as conversational assistants (aka chatbots). A popular format for knowledge bases is question-answer pairs (or FAQs), where questions are designed to accurately match a multitude of queries. In this paper, we address the problem of automatic creation of such Q&A-based knowledge bases from domain-specific, long-form textual content (e.g., web articles). Specifically, we consider the problem of question generation, which is the task of generating questions given a paragraph of text as input, with a goal to achieve both diversity and fidelity of the generated questions. Towards this goal we propose PROTEGE, a diverse question generation framework which consists of (1) a novel encoder-decoder based Large Language Model (LLM) architecture which can take a variety of prompts and generate a diverse set of candidate questions, and (2) a hill-climbing algorithm that maximizes a sub-modular objective function to balance diversity with fidelity. Through our experiments on three popular public Q&A datasets, we demonstrate that PROTEGE improves diversity by +16% and fidelity by +8% over diverse beam search and prompt-based baselines.
GPT-4 as an Effective Zero-Shot Evaluator for Scientific Figure Captions
Authors: Chieh-Yang Huang, Ryan Rossi, Sungchul Kim, C. Giles, Ting-Hao Huang Ting-Yao Hsu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: There is growing interest in systems that generate captions for scientific figures. However, assessing these systems' output poses a significant challenge. Human evaluation requires academic expertise and is costly, while automatic evaluation depends on often low-quality author-written captions. This paper investigates using large language models (LLMs) as a cost-effective, reference-free method for evaluating figure captions. We first constructed SCICAP-EVAL, a human evaluation dataset that contains human judgments for 3,600 scientific figure captions, both original and machine-made, for 600 arXiv figures. We then prompted LLMs like GPT-4 and GPT-3 to score (1-6) each caption based on its potential to aid reader understanding, given relevant context such as figure-mentioning paragraphs. Results show that GPT-4, used as a zero-shot evaluator, outperformed all other models and even surpassed assessments made by computer science undergraduates, achieving a Kendall correlation score of 0.401 with Ph.D. students' rankings.
Mulan: A Multi-Level Alignment Model for Video Question Answering
Authors: Cong Cao, Yuling Yang, Yuhai Lu, Fangfang Yuan, Dakui Wang, Yanbing Liu Yu Fu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Video Question Answering (VideoQA) aims to answer questions about the visual content of a video. Current methods mainly focus on improving joint representations of video and text. However, these methods pay little attention to the fine-grained semantic interaction between video and text. In this paper, we propose Mulan: a Multi-Level Alignment Model for Video Question Answering, which establishes alignment between visual and textual modalities at the object-level, frame-level, and video-level. Specifically, for object-level alignment, we propose a mask-guided visual feature encoding method and a visual-guided text description method to learn fine-grained spatial information. For frame-level alignment, we introduce the use of visual features from individual frames, combined with a caption generator, to learn overall spatial information within the scene. For video-level alignment, we propose an expandable ordinal prompt for textual descriptions, combined with visual features, to learn temporal information. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods, even when utilizing the smallest amount of extra visual-language pre-training data and a reduced number of trainable parameters.
HARE: Explainable Hate Speech Detection with Step-by-Step Reasoning
Authors: Joonkee Kim, Yujin Kim, Namgyu Ho, James Thorne, Se-Young Yun Yongjin Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the proliferation of social media, accurate detection of hate speech has become critical to ensure safety online. To combat nuanced forms of hate speech, it is important to identify and thoroughly explain hate speech to help users understand its harmful effects. Recent benchmarks have attempted to tackle this issue by training generative models on free-text annotations of implications in hateful text. However, we find significant reasoning gaps in the existing annotations schemes, which may hinder the supervision of detection models. In this paper, we introduce a hate speech detection framework, **HARE**, which harnesses the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to fill these gaps in explanations of hate speech, thus enabling effective supervision of detection models. Experiments on SBIC and Implicit Hate benchmarks show that our method, using model-generated data, consistently outperforms baselines, using existing free-text human annotations. Analysis demonstrates that our method enhances the explanation quality of trained models and improves generalization to unseen datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/joonkeekim/hare-hate-speech.git.
ReLM: Leveraging Language Models for Enhanced Chemical Reaction Prediction
Authors: An Zhang, Enzhi Zhang, Zhiyuan Liu, Xiang Wang Yaorui Shi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Predicting chemical reactions, a fundamental challenge in chemistry, involves forecasting the resulting products from a given reaction process. Conventional techniques, notably those employing Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), are often limited by insufficient training data and their inability to utilize textual information, undermining their applicability in real-world applications. In this work, we propose **ReLM**, a novel framework that leverages the chemical knowledge encoded in language models (LMs) to assist GNNs, thereby enhancing the accuracy of real-world chemical reaction predictions. To further enhance the model`s robustness and interpretability, we incorporate the confidence score strategy, enabling the LMs to self-assess the reliability of their predictions. Our experimental results demonstrate that ReLM improves the performance of state-of-the-art GNN-based methods across various chemical reaction datasets, especially in out-of-distribution settings. Codes are available at https://github.com/syr-cn/ReLM.
Decomposing Complex Queries for Tip-of-the-tongue Retrieval
Authors: Kyle Lo, Joseph Gonzalez, Dan Klein Kevin Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs---complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). Standard retrieval models that rely on lexical or semantic overlap between query and document text are challenged in such retrieval settings, known as tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) retrieval. We introduce a simple but effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query with an LLM into individual clues routing those as subqueries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. Our approach takes advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorporating query decomposition into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 6% absolute gain for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.
Values, Ethics, Morals? On the Use of Moral Concepts in NLP Research
Authors: Judith Simon, Anne Lauscher Karina Vida
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With language technology increasingly affecting individuals' lives, many recent works have investigated the ethical aspects of NLP. Among other topics, researchers focused on the notion of morality, investigating, for example, which moral judgements language models make. However, there has been little to no discussion of the terminology and the theories underpinning those efforts and their implications. This lack is highly problematic, as it hides the works' underlying assumptions and hinders a thorough and targeted scientific debate of morality in NLP. In this work, we address this research gap by (a) providing an overview of some important ethical concepts stemming from philosophy and (b) systematically surveying the existing literature on moral NLP w.r.t. their philosophical foundation, terminology, and data basis. For instance, we analyse what ethical theory an approach is based on, how this decision is justified, and what implications it entails. Our findings surveying 92 papers show that, for instance, most papers neither provide a clear definition of the terms they use nor adhere to definitions from philosophy. Finally, (c) we give three recommendations for future research in the field. We hope our work will lead to a more informed, careful, and sound discussion of morality in language technology.
Self-Supervised Behavior Cloned Transformers are Path Crawlers for Text Games
Authors: Peter Jansen Ruoyao Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this work, we introduce a self-supervised behavior cloning transformer for text games, which are challenging benchmarks for multi-step reasoning in virtual environments. Traditionally, Behavior Cloning Transformers excel in such tasks but rely on supervised training data. Our approach auto-generates training data by exploring trajectories (defined by common macro-action sequences) that lead to reward within the games, while determining the generality and utility of these trajectories by rapidly training small models then evalauating their performance on unseen development games. Through empirical analysis, we show our method consistently uncovers generalizable training data, achieving about 90% performance of supervised systems across three benchmark text games.
Adapting Pretrained Text-to-Text Models for Long Text Sequences
Authors: Anchit Gupta, Shubham Toshniwal, Yashar Mehdad, Scott Yih Wenhan Xiong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present an empirical study of adapting an existing pretrained text-to-text model for long-sequence inputs. Through a comprehensive study along three axes of the pretraining pipeline -- model architecture, optimization objective, and pretraining corpus, we propose an effective recipe to build long-context models from existing short-context models. Specifically, we replace the full attention in transformers with \textitpooling-augmented blockwise attention, and pretrain the model with a masked-span prediction task with spans of varying lengths. In terms of the pretraining corpus, we find that using randomly concatenated short-documents from a large open-domain corpus results in better performance than using existing long document corpora, which are typically limited in their domain coverage. With these findings, we build a long-context model that achieves competitive performance on long-text QA tasks and establishes the new state of the art on \textitfive long-text summarization datasets, often outperforming previous methods with larger model sizes.