mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Adaptive Query Rewriting: Aligning Rewriters through Marginal Probability of Conversational Answers
Authors: Kun Li, Hongyin Luo, Xixin Wu, James R. Glass, Helen M. Meng Tianhua Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Query rewriting is a crucial technique for passage retrieval in open-domain conversational question answering (CQA). It decontexualizes conversational queries into self-contained questions suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. Existing methods attempt to incorporate retriever`s preference during the training of rewriting models. However, these approaches typically rely on extensive annotations such as in-domain rewrites and/or relevant passage labels, limiting the models' generalization and adaptation capabilities. In this paper, we introduce AdaQR (Adaptive Query Rewriting), a framework for training query rewriting models with limited rewrite annotations from seed datasets and completely no passage label. Our approach begins by fine-tuning compact large language models using only 10% of rewrite annotations from the seed dataset training split. The models are then utilized to self-sample rewrite candidates for each query instance, further eliminating the expense for human labeling or larger language model prompting often adopted in curating preference data. A novel approach is then proposed to assess retriever`s preference for these candidates with the probability of answers conditioned on the conversational query by marginalizing the Top-$K$ passages. This serves as the reward for optimizing the rewriter further using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), a process free of rewrite and retrieval annotations. Experimental results on four open-domain CQA datasets demonstrate that AdaQR not only enhances the in-domain capabilities of the rewriter with limited annotation requirement, but also adapts effectively to out-of-domain datasets.
Grasping the Essentials: Tailoring Large Language Models for Zero-Shot Relation Extraction
Authors: Yu Meng, Bowen Jin, Jiawei Han Sizhe Zhou
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Relation extraction (RE) aims to identify semantic relationships between entities within text. Despite considerable advancements, existing models predominantly require extensive annotated training data, which is both costly and labor-intensive to collect. Moreover, these models often struggle to adapt to new or unseen relations. Few-shot learning, aiming to lessen annotation demands, typically provides incomplete and biased supervision for target relations, leading to degraded and unstable performance. To accurately and explicitly describe relation semantics while minimizing annotation demands, we explore the definition only zero-shot RE setting where only relation definitions expressed in natural language are used to train a RE model. We introduce REPaL, comprising three stages: (1) We leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate initial seed instances from relation definitions and an unlabeled corpus. (2) We fine-tune a bidirectional Small Language Model (SLM) with initial seeds to learn relations for the target domain. (3) We expand pattern coverage and mitigate bias from initial seeds by integrating feedback from the SLM`s predictions on the unlabeled corpus and the synthesis history. To accomplish this, we leverage the multi-turn conversation ability of LLMs to generate new instances in follow-up dialogues, informed by both the feedback and synthesis history. Studies reveal that definition-oriented seed synthesis enhances pattern coverage whereas indiscriminately increasing seed quantity leads to performance saturation. Experiments on two datasets show REPaL significantly improved cost-effective zero-shot performance by large margins.
DA-Code: Agent Data Science Code Generation Benchmark for Large Language Models
Authors: Jianwen Luo, Yan Yu, Yitong Zhang, Fangyu Lei, Yifan Wei, Shizhu He, Lifu Huang, Xiao Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu Yiming Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce DA-Code, a code generation benchmark specifically designed to assess LLMs on agent-based data science tasks. This benchmark features three core elements: First, the tasks within DA-Code are inherently challenging, setting them apart from traditional code generation tasks and demanding advanced coding skills in grounding and planning. Second, examples in DA-Code are all based on real and diverse data, covering a wide range of complex data wrangling and analytics tasks. Third, to solve the tasks, the models must utilize complex data science programming languages, including Python and SQL, to perform intricate data processing and derive the answers. We set up the benchmark in a controllable and executable environment that aligns with real-world data analysis scenarios and is scalable. The annotators meticulously designed the evaluation suite to ensure the accuracy and robustness of the evaluation. We developed the DA-Agent baseline. Experiments show that although the baseline performs better than other existing frameworks, using the current best LLMs achieves only 30.5% accuracy, leaving ample room for improvement. We release our benchmark at [link](https://github.com/yiyihum/dabench)
Leveraging Context-Aware Prompting for Commit Message Generation
Authors: Jianwei Chen, Dongning Rao, Guanghui Ye Zhihua Jiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Writing comprehensive commit messages is tedious yet important, because these messages describe changes of code, such as fixing bugs or adding new features. However, most existing methods focus on either only the changed lines or nearest context lines, without considering the effectiveness of selecting useful contexts. On the other hand, it is possible that introducing excessive contexts can lead to noise. To this end, we propose a code model COMMIT (Context-aware prOMpting based comMIt-message generaTion) in conjunction with a code dataset CODEC (COntext and metaData Enhanced Code dataset). Leveraging program slicing, CODEC consolidates code changes along with related contexts via property graph analysis. Further, utilizing CodeT5+ as the backbone model, we train COMMIT via context-aware prompt on CODEC. Experiments show that COMMIT can surpass all compared models including pre-trained language models for code (code-PLMs) such as CommitBART and large language models for code (code-LLMs) such as Code-LlaMa. Besides, we investigate several research questions (RQs), further verifying the effectiveness of our approach. We release the data and code at: https://github.com/Jnunlplab/COMMIT.git.
Linguistic Bias in ChatGPT: Language Models Reinforce Dialect Discrimination
Authors: Genevieve Smith, Madeline Bossi, Ishita Rustagi, Xavier Yin, Dan Klein Eve Fleisig
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We present a large-scale study of linguistic bias exhibited by ChatGPT covering ten dialects of English (Standard American English, Standard British English, and eight widely spoken non-”standard” varieties from around the world). We prompted GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 with text by native speakers of each variety and analyzed the responses via detailed linguistic feature annotation and native speaker evaluation. We find that the models default to “standard” varieties of English; based on evaluation by native speakers, we also find that model responses to non-”standard” varieties consistently exhibit a range of issues: stereotyping (19% worse than for “standard” varieties), demeaning content (25% worse), lack of comprehension (9% worse), and condescending responses (15% worse). Moreover, if these models are asked to imitate the writing style of prompts in non-”standard” varieties, they produce text that exhibits lower comprehension of the input and is especially prone to stereotyping. GPT-4 improves on GPT-3.5 in terms of comprehension, warmth, and friendliness, but also exhibits a marked increase in stereotyping (+18%). The results indicate that GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 can perpetuate linguistic discrimination toward speakers of non-”standard” varieties.
Lifelong Knowledge Editing for LLMs with Retrieval-Augmented Continuous Prompt Learning
Authors: Taolin Zhang, Xiaofeng He, Dongyang Li, Chengyu Wang, Longtao Huang, Hui Xue′ Qizhou Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Model editing aims to correct outdated or erroneous knowledge in large language models (LLMs) without the need for costly retraining. Lifelong model editing is the most challenging task that caters to the continuous editing requirements of LLMs. Prior works primarily focus on single or batch editing; nevertheless, these methods fall short in lifelong editing scenarios due to catastrophic knowledge forgetting and the degradation of model performance. Although retrieval-based methods alleviate these issues, they are impeded by slow and cumbersome processes of integrating the retrieved knowledge into the model. In this work, we introduce RECIPE, a RetriEval-augmented ContInuous Prompt lEarning method, to boost editing efficacy and inference efficiency in lifelong learning. RECIPE first converts knowledge statements into short and informative continuous prompts, prefixed to the LLM`s input query embedding, to efficiently refine the response grounded on the knowledge. It further integrates the Knowledge Sentinel (KS) that acts as an intermediary to calculate a dynamic threshold, determining whether the retrieval repository contains relevant knowledge. Our retriever and prompt encoder are jointly trained to achieve editing properties, i.e., reliability, generality, and locality. In our experiments, RECIPE is assessed extensively across multiple LLMs and editing datasets, where it achieves superior editing performance. RECIPE also demonstrates its capability to maintain the overall performance of LLMs alongside showcasing fast editing and inference speed.
A Learning Rate Path Switching Training Paradigm for Version Updates of Large Language Models
Authors: Shiyu Liu, Jianheng Huang, Wang Zheng, YiXuan Liao, Xiaoxin Chen, Junfeng Yao, Jinsong Su Zhihao Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Due to the continuous emergence of new data, version updates have become an indispensable requirement for Large Language Models (LLMs). The training paradigms for version updates of LLMs include pre-training from scratch (PTFS) and continual pre-training (CPT). Preliminary experiments demonstrate that PTFS achieves better pre-training performance, while CPT has lower training cost. Moreover, their performance and training cost gaps widen progressively with version updates. To investigate the underlying reasons for this phenomenon, we analyze the effect of learning rate adjustments during the two stages of CPT: preparing an initialization checkpoint and continual pre-training based on this checkpoint. We find that a large learning rate in the first stage and a complete learning rate decay process in the second stage are crucial for version updates of LLMs. Hence, we propose a learning rate path switching training paradigm. Our paradigm comprises one main path, where we pre-train a LLM with the maximal learning rate, and multiple branching paths, each of which corresponds to an update of the LLM with newly-added training data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of our paradigm. Particularly, when training four versions of LLMs, our paradigm reduces the total training cost to 58% compared to PTFS, while maintaining comparable pre-training performance.
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual NER Using Phonemic Representations for Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Haeji Jung, Alex Cheng, Jooeon Kang, Yilin Du, David R Mortensen Jimin Sohn
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing zero-shot cross-lingual NER approaches require substantial prior knowledge of the target language, which is impractical for low-resource languages.In this paper, we propose a novel approach to NER using phonemic representation based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) to bridge the gap between representations of different languages.Our experiments show that our method significantly outperforms baseline models in extremely low-resource languages, with the highest average F1 score (46.38%) and lowest standard deviation (12.67), particularly demonstrating its robustness with non-Latin scripts. Ourcodes are available at https://github.com/Gabriel819/zeroshot_ner.git
Exploring the Practicality of Generative Retrieval on Dynamic Corpora
Authors: Soyoung Yoon, Hyunji Lee, Joel Jang, Sohee Yang, Minjoon Seo Chaeeun Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Benchmarking the performance of information retrieval (IR) is mostly conducted with a fixed set of documents (static corpora). However, in realistic scenarios, this is rarely the case and the documents to be retrieved are constantly updated and added. In this paper, we focus on Generative Retrievals (GR), which apply autoregressive language models to IR problems, and explore their adaptability and robustness in dynamic scenarios. We also conduct an extensive evaluation of computational and memory efficiency, crucial factors for real-world deployment of IR systems handling vast and ever-changing document collections. Our results on the StreamingQA benchmark demonstrate that GR is more adaptable to evolving knowledge (4--11%), robust in learning knowledge with temporal information, and efficient in terms of inference FLOPs (x2), indexing time (x6), and storage footprint (x4) compared to Dual Encoders (DE), which are commonly used in retrieval systems. Our paper highlights the potential of GR for future use in practical IR systems within dynamic environments.
OneNet: A Fine-Tuning Free Framework for Few-Shot Entity Linking via Large Language Model Prompting
Authors: Ye Liu, Kai Zhang, Kehang Wang, Qi Liu, Enhong Chen Xukai Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Entity Linking (EL) is the process of associating ambiguous textual mentions to specific entities in a knowledge base.Traditional EL methods heavily rely on large datasets to enhance their performance, a dependency that becomes problematic in the context of few-shot entity linking, where only a limited number of examples are available for training. To address this challenge, we present OneNet, an innovative framework that utilizes the few-shot learning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for fine-tuning. To the best of our knowledge, this marks a pioneering approach to applying LLMs to few-shot entity linking tasks. OneNet is structured around three key components prompted by LLMs: (1) an entity reduction processor that simplifies inputs by summarizing and filtering out irrelevant entities, (2) a dual-perspective entity linker that combines contextual cues and prior knowledge for precise entity linking, and (3) an entity consensus judger that employs a unique consistency algorithm to alleviate the hallucination in the entity linking reasoning.Comprehensive evaluations across seven benchmark datasets reveal that OneNet outperforms current state-of-the-art entity linking methods.
Don`t Just Say “I don`t know”! Self-aligning Large Language Models for Responding to Unknown Questions with Explanations
Authors: Yong Zhao, Moxin Li, See-Kiong Ng, Tat-Seng Chua Yang Deng
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the remarkable abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to answer questions, they often display a considerable level of overconfidence even when the question does not have a definitive answer. To avoid providing hallucinated answers to these unknown questions, existing studies typically investigate approaches to refusing to answer these questions. In this work, we propose a novel and scalable self-alignment method to utilize the LLM itself to enhance its response-ability to different types of unknown questions, being capable of not just refusing to answer but further proactively providing explanations to the unanswerability of unknown questions. Specifically, the Self-Align method first employ a two-stage class-aware self-augmentation approach to generate a large amount of unknown question-response data. Then we conduct disparity-driven self-curation to select qualified data for fine-tuning the LLM itself for aligning the responses to unknown questions as desired. Experimental results on two datasets across four types of unknown questions validate the superiority of the Self-Aligned method over existing baselines in terms of three types of task formulation.
Fewer is More: Boosting Math Reasoning with Reinforced Context Pruning
Authors: Li Lyna Zhang, Kwang-Ting Cheng, Fan Yang, Mao Yang Xijie Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities, yet they still struggle with math reasoning. In this work, we propose CoT-Influx, a novel approach that pushes the boundary of few-shot Chain-of-Thoughts (CoT) learning to improve LLM mathematical reasoning. Motivated by the observation that adding more concise CoT examples in the prompt can improve LLM reasoning performance, CoT-Influx employs a coarse-to-fine pruner to maximize the input of effective and concise CoT examples. The pruner first selects as many crucial CoT examples as possible and then prunes unimportant tokens to fit the context window. As a result, by enabling more CoT examples with double the context window size in tokens, CoT-Influx significantly outperforms various prompting baselines across various LLMs (LLaMA2-7B, 13B, 70B) and 5 math datasets, achieving up to 4.55% absolute improvements. Remarkably, without any fine-tuning, LLaMA2-70B with CoT-Influx surpasses GPT-3.5 and a wide range of larger LLMs (PaLM, Minerva 540B, etc.) on the GSM8K. CoT-Influx is a plug-and-play module for LLMs, adaptable in various scenarios. It`s compatible with advanced reasoning prompting techniques, such as self-consistency, and supports different long-context LLMs, including Mistral-7B-v0.3-32K and Yi-6B-200K.
Large Language Models Are Poor Clinical Decision-Makers: A Comprehensive Benchmark
Authors: Zheng Li, Hongjian Zhou, Qingyu Yin, Jingfeng Yang, Xianfeng Tang, Chen Luo, Ming Zeng, Haoming Jiang, Yifan Gao, Priyanka Nigam, Sreyashi Nag, Bing Yin, Yining Hua, Xuan Zhou, Omid Rohanian, Anshul Thakur, Lei Clifton, David A. Clifton Fenglin Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The adoption of large language models (LLMs) to assist clinicians has attracted remarkable attention. Existing works mainly adopt the close-ended question-answering (QA) task with answer options for evaluation. However, many clinical decisions involve answering open-ended questions without pre-set options. To better understand LLMs in the clinic, we construct a benchmark ClinicBench. We first collect eleven existing datasets covering diverse clinical language generation, understanding, and reasoning tasks. Furthermore, we construct six novel datasets and clinical tasks that are complex but common in real-world practice, e.g., open-ended decision-making, long document processing, and emerging drug analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of twenty-two LLMs under both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Finally, we invite medical experts to evaluate the clinical usefulness of LLMs
Holistic Automated Red Teaming for Large Language Models through Top-Down Test Case Generation and Multi-turn Interaction
Authors: Yan Zhou, Yaxin Liu, Ziming Li, Songlin Hu Jinchuan Zhang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Automated red teaming is an effective method for identifying misaligned behaviors in large language models (LLMs). Existing approaches, however, often focus primarily on improving attack success rates while overlooking the need for comprehensive test case coverage. Additionally, most of these methods are limited to single-turn red teaming, failing to capture the multi-turn dynamics of real-world human-machine interactions. To overcome these limitations, we propose **HARM** (**H**olistic **A**utomated **R**ed tea**M**ing), which scales up the diversity of test cases using a top-down approach based on an extensible, fine-grained risk taxonomy. Our method also leverages a novel fine-tuning strategy and reinforcement learning techniques to facilitate multi-turn adversarial probing in a human-like manner. Experimental results demonstrate that our framework enables a more systematic understanding of model vulnerabilities and offers more targeted guidance for the alignment process.
Householder Pseudo-Rotation: A Novel Approach to Activation Editing in LLMs with Direction-Magnitude Perspective
Authors: Thien Huu Nguyen Van-Cuong Pham
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Activation Editing, which involves directly editting the internal representations of large language models (LLMs) to alter their behavior and achieve desired properties, has emerged as a promising area of research. Existing works primarily treat LLMs' activations as points in space and modify them by adding steering vectors. We show that doing so would break the magnitude consistency of the activation vectors in LLMs. To overcome this shortcoming, we propose a novel editing method that views activations in terms of their directions and magnitudes. Our method, which we name Householder Pseudo-Rotation (HPR), mimics the rotation transformation, thus preserving activation norm and resulting in an improved performance on various safety benchmarks.
DynamicER: Resolving Emerging Mentions to Dynamic Entities for RAG
Authors: Dayoon Ko, Gunhee Kim Jinyoung Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In the rapidly evolving landscape of language, resolving new linguistic expressions in continuously updating knowledge bases remains a formidable challenge. This challenge becomes critical in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) with knowledge bases, as emerging expressions hinder the retrieval of relevant documents, leading to generator hallucinations. To address this issue, we introduce a novel task aimed at resolving emerging mentions to dynamic entities and present DynamicER benchmark. Our benchmark includes dynamic entity mention resolution and entity-centric knowledge-intensive QA task, evaluating entity linking and RAG model`s adaptability to new expressions, respectively. We discovered that current entity linking models struggle to link these new expressions to entities. Therefore, we propose a temporal segmented clustering method with continual adaptation, effectively managing the temporal dynamics of evolving entities and emerging mentions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines, enhancing RAG model performance on QA task with resolved mentions.
Preserving Generalization of Language models in Few-shot Continual Relation Extraction
Authors: Nguyen Xuan Thanh, Nguyen Hoang Anh, Nam Le Hai, Trung Le, Linh Van Ngo, Thien Huu Nguyen Quyen Tran
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Few-shot Continual Relations Extraction (FCRE) is an emerging and dynamic area of study where models can sequentially integrate knowledge from new relations with limited labeled data while circumventing catastrophic forgetting and preserving prior knowledge from pre-trained backbones. In this work, we introduce a novel method that leverages often-discarded language model heads. By employing these components via a mutual information maximization strategy, our approach helps maintain prior knowledge from the pre-trained backbone and strategically aligns the primary classification head, thereby enhancing model performance. Furthermore, we explore the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), renowned for their wealth of knowledge, in addressing FCRE challenges. Our comprehensive experimental results underscore the efficacy of the proposed method and offer valuable insights for future work.
A Systematic Survey and Critical Review on Evaluating Large Language Models: Challenges, Limitations, and Recommendations
Authors: Sawsan Alqahtani, M Saiful Bari, Mizanur Rahman, Mohammad Abdullah Matin Khan, Haidar Khan, Israt Jahan, Amran Bhuiyan, Chee Wei Tan, Md Rizwan Parvez, Enamul Hoque, Shafiq Joty, Jimmy Huang Md Tahmid Rahman Laskar
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their remarkable capabilities in performing diverse tasks across various domains. However, a thorough evaluation of these models is crucial before deploying them in real-world applications to ensure they produce reliable performance. Despite the well-established importance of evaluating LLMs in the community, the complexity of the evaluation process has led to varied evaluation setups, causing inconsistencies in findings and interpretations. To address this, we systematically review the primary challenges and limitations causing these inconsistencies and unreliable evaluations in various steps of LLM evaluation. Based on our critical review, we present our perspectives and recommendations to ensure LLM evaluations are reproducible, reliable, and robust.
Consecutive Batch Model Editing with HooK Layers
Authors: Yang Deng, Deng Cai, Hongyuan Lu, Liang Chen, Wai Lam Shuaiyi Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: As the typical retraining paradigm is unacceptably time- and resource-consuming, researchers are turning to model editing to find an effective way that supports both consecutive and batch scenarios to edit the model behavior directly. Despite all these practical expectations, existing model editing methods fail to realize all of them. Furthermore, the memory demands for such sequential model editing approaches tend to be prohibitive, frequently necessitating an external memory that grows incrementally over time. To cope with these challenges, we propose CoachHooK, a model editing method that simultaneously supports sequential and batch editing. CoachHooK is memory-friendly as it only needs a small amount of it to store several hook layers whose size remains unchanged over time. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over other batch-supportive model editing methods under both single-round and consecutive batch editing scenarios. Extensive analyses of CoachHooK have been conducted to verify the stability of our method over a number of consecutive steps.
Topic-Oriented Open Relation Extraction with A Priori Seed Generation
Authors: Jinfeng Xiao, Sizhe Zhou, Chaoqi Yang, Jiawei Han Linyi Ding
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The field of open relation extraction (ORE) has recently observed significant advancement thanks to the growing capability of large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, challenges persist when ORE is performed on specific topics. Existing methods give sub-optimal results in five dimensions: factualness, topic relevance, informativeness, coverage, and uniformity. To improve topic-oriented ORE, we propose a zero-shot approach called PriORE: Open Relation Extraction with a Priori seed generation. PriORE leverages the built-in knowledge of LLMs to maintain a dynamic seed relation dictionary for the topic. The dictionary is initialized by seed relations generated from topic-relevant entity types and expanded during contextualized ORE. PriORE then reduces the randomness in generative ORE by converting it to a more robust relation classification task. Experiments show the approach empowers better topic-oriented control over the generated relations and thus improves ORE performance along the five dimensions, especially on specialized and narrow topics.
Related Work and Citation Text Generation: A Survey
Authors: Jessica Ouyang Xiangci Li
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: To convince readers of the novelty of their research paper, authors must perform a literature review and compose a coherent story that connects and relates prior works to the current work. This challenging nature of literature review writing makes automatic related work generation (RWG) academically and computationally interesting, and also makes it an excellent test bed for examining the capability of SOTA natural language processing (NLP) models. Since the initial proposal of the RWG task, its popularity has waxed and waned, following the capabilities of mainstream NLP approaches. In this work, we survey the zoo of RWG historical works, summarizing the key approaches and task definitions and discussing the ongoing challenges of RWG.
Curriculum Consistency Learning for Conditional Sentence Generation
Authors: Xuebo Liu, Lian Lian, Shengjun Cheng, Jun Rao, Tengfei Yu, Hexuan Deng, Min Zhang Liangxin Liu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Consistency learning (CL) has proven to be a valuable technique for improving the robustness of models in conditional sentence generation (CSG) tasks by ensuring stable predictions across various input data forms. However, models augmented with CL often face challenges in optimizing consistency features, which can detract from their efficiency and effectiveness. To address these challenges, we introduce Curriculum Consistency Learning (CCL), a novel strategy that guides models to learn consistency in alignment with their current capacity to differentiate between features. CCL is designed around the inherent aspects of CL-related losses, promoting task independence and simplifying implementation. Implemented across four representative CSG tasks, including instruction tuning (IT) for large language models and machine translation (MT) in three modalities (text, speech, and vision), CCL demonstrates marked improvements. Specifically, it delivers +2.0 average accuracy point improvement compared with vanilla IT and an average increase of +0.7 in COMET scores over traditional CL methods in MT tasks. Our comprehensive analysis further indicates that models utilizing CCL are particularly adept at managing complex instances, showcasing the effectiveness and efficiency of CCL in improving CSG models. Code and scripts are available at https://github.com/xinxinxing/Curriculum-Consistency-Learning.
A Systematic Analysis of Large Language Models as Soft Reasoners: The Case of Syllogistic Inferences
Authors: Albert Gatt, Raffaella Bernardi Leonardo Bertolazzi
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming a central focus of study in NLP. In this paper, we consider the case of syllogistic reasoning, an area of deductive reasoning studied extensively in logic and cognitive psychology. Previous research has shown that pre-trained LLMs exhibit reasoning biases, such as content effects, avoid answering that no conclusion follows, align with human difficulties, and struggle with multi-step reasoning. We contribute to this research line by systematically investigating the effects of chain-of-thought reasoning, in-context learning (ICL), and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on syllogistic reasoning, considering syllogisms with conclusions that support or violate world knowledge and with multiple premises. Crucially, we go beyond the standard focus on accuracy, with an in-depth analysis of the conclusions generated by the models. Our results suggest that the behavior of pre-trained LLMs can be explained by heuristics studied in cognitive science and that both ICL and SFT improve model performance on valid inferences, although only the latter can mitigate most reasoning biases while being consistent.
MOSEL: 950,000 Hours of Speech Data for Open-Source Speech Foundation Model Training on EU Languages
Authors: Sara Papi, Luisa Bentivogli, Alessio Brutti, Mauro Cettolo, Roberto Gretter, Marco Matassoni, Mohamed Nabih, Matteo Negri Marco Gaido
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The rise of foundation models (FMs), coupled with regulatory efforts addressing their risks and impacts, has sparked significant interest in open-source models. However, existing speech FMs (SFMs) fall short of full compliance with the open-source principles, even if claimed otherwise, as no existing SFM has model weights, code, and training data publicly available under open-source terms. In this work, we take the first step toward filling this gap by focusing on the 24 official languages of the European Union (EU). We collect suitable training data by surveying automatic speech recognition datasets and unlabeled speech corpora under open-source compliant licenses, for a total of 950k hours. Additionally, we release automatic transcripts for 441k hours of unlabeled data under the permissive CC-BY license, thereby facilitating the creation of open-source SFMs for the EU languages.
Improving Knowledge Graph Completion with Structure-Aware Supervised Contrastive Learning
Authors: Lifang Wang, Xinyu Lu, Zhongtian Hu, Wei Zhang, Wenxuan Lu Jiashi Lin
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge Graphs (KGs) often suffer from incomplete knowledge, which which restricts their utility. Recently, Contrastive Learning (CL) has been introduced to Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC), significantly improving the discriminative capabilities of KGC models and setting new benchmarks in performance. However, existing contrastive methods primarily focus on individual triples, overlooking the broader structural connectivities and topologies of KGs. This narrow focus limits a comprehensive understanding of the graph`s structural knowledge. To address this gap, we propose StructKGC, a novel contrastive learning framework designed to flexibly accommodate the diverse topologies inherent in KGs. Additionally, we introduce four contrastive tasks specifically tailored to KG data: Vertex-level CL, Neighbor-level CL, Path-level CL, and Relation composition level CL. These tasks are trained synergistically during the fine-tuning of pre-trained language models (PLMs), allowing for a more nuanced capture of subgraph semantics. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we perform a comprehensive set of experiments on several real-world datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves SOTA performance under standard supervised and low-resource settings. Furthermore, the different levels of structure-aware tasks introduced can mutually reinforce each other, leading to consistent performance improvements.
Contribution of Linguistic Typology to Universal Dependency Parsing: An Empirical Investigation
Authors: Navid Baradaran Hemmati Ali Basirat
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Universal Dependencies (UD) is a global initiative to create a standard annotation for the dependency syntax of human languages. Addressing its deviation from typological principles, this study presents an empirical investigation of a typologically motivated transformation of UD proposed by William Croft. Our findings underscore the significance of the transformations across diverse languages and highlight their advantages and limitations.
TRoTR: A Framework for Evaluating the Re-contextualization of Text Reuse
Authors: Pierluigi Cassotti, Stefano Montanelli, Nina Tahmasebi, Dominik Schlechtweg Francesco Periti
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Current approaches for detecting text reuse do not focus on recontextualization, i.e., how the new context(s) of a reused text differs from its original context(s). In this paper, we propose a novel framework called TRoTR that relies on the notion of topic relatedness for evaluating the diachronic change of context in which text is reused. TRoTR includes two NLP tasks: TRiC and TRaC. TRiC is designed to evaluate the topic relatedness between a pair of recontextualizations. TRaC is designed to evaluate the overall topic variation within a set of recontextualizations. We also provide a curated TRoTR benchmark of biblical text reuse, human-annotated with topic relatedness. The benchmark exhibits an inter-annotator agreement of .811. We evaluate multiple, established SBERT models on the TRoTR tasks and find that they exhibit greater sensitivity to textual similarity than topic relatedness. Our experiments show that fine-tuning these models can mitigate such a kind of sensitivity.
Structured Optimal Brain Pruning for Large Language Models
Authors: Quan Lu, Ning Jiang, Siqi Li, Jingyang Xiang, Jun Chen, Yong Liu Jiateng Wei
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The massive parameters and computational demands hinder the widespread application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Network pruning provides a practical solution to this problem. However, existing pruning works for LLMs mainly focus on unstructured pruning or necessitate post-pruning fine-tuning. The former relies on special hardware to accelerate computation, while the latter may need substantial computational resources. In this paper, we introduce a retraining-free structured pruning method called SoBP (Structured Optimal Brain Pruning). It leverages global first-order information to select pruning structures, then refines them with a local greedy approach, and finally adopts module-wise reconstruction to mitigate information loss. We assess the effectiveness of SoBP across 14 models from 3 LLM families on 8 distinct datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that SoBP outperforms current state-of-the-art methods.
Automatically Generated Definitions and their utility for Modeling Word Meaning
Authors: David Alfter, Nina Tahmasebi Francesco Periti
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Modeling lexical semantics is a challenging task, often suffering from interpretability pitfalls. In this paper, we delve into the generation of dictionary-like sense definitions and explore their utility for modeling word meaning. We fine-tuned two Llama models and include an existing T5-based model in our evaluation. Firstly, we evaluate the quality of the generated definitions on existing English benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art results for the Definition Generation task. Next, we explore the use of definitions generated by our models as intermediate representations subsequently encoded as sentence embeddings. We evaluate this approach on lexical semantics tasks such as the Word-in-Context, Word Sense Induction, and Lexical Semantic Change, setting new state-of-the-art results in all three tasks when compared to unsupervised baselines.
How Do Your Code LLMs perform? Empowering Code Instruction Tuning with Really Good Data
Authors: Keqing He, Dayuan Fu, Zhuoma GongQue, Heyang Xu, Yanxu Chen, Zhexu Wang, Yujia Fu, Guanting Dong, Muxi Diao, Jingang Wang, Mengdi Zhang, Xunliang Cai, Weiran Xu Yejie Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, there has been a growing interest in studying how to construct better code instruction tuning data. However, we observe Code models trained with these datasets exhibit high performance on HumanEval but perform worse on other benchmarks such as LiveCodeBench. Upon further investigation, we find that many datasets suffer from severe data leakage. After cleaning up most of the leaked data, some well-known high-quality datasets perform poorly. This discovery reveals a new challenge: identifying which dataset genuinely qualify as high-quality code instruction data. To address this, we propose an efficient code data pruning strategy for selecting good samples. Our approach is based on three dimensions: instruction complexity, response quality, and instruction diversity. Based on our selected data, we present XCoder, a family of models finetuned from LLaMA3. Our experiments show Xcoder achieves new state-of-the-art performance using fewer training data, which verify the effectiveness of our data strategy. Moreover, we perform a comprehensive analysis on the data composition and find existing code datasets have different characteristics according to their construction methods, which provide new insights for future code LLMs.
MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval
Authors: Zhengliang Shi, Wu Jiu Long, Lingyong Yan, Xinyu Ma, Yiding Liu, Min Cao, Dawei Yin, Zhaochun Ren Weiwei Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent information retrieval (IR) models are pre-trained and instruction-tuned on massive datasets and tasks, enabling them to perform well on a wide range of tasks and potentially generalize to unseen tasks with instructions. However, existing IR benchmarks focus on a limited scope of tasks, making them insufficient for evaluating the latest IR models. In this paper, we propose MAIR (Massive Instructed Retrieval Benchmark), a heterogeneous IR benchmark that includes 126 distinct IR tasks across 6 domains, collected from existing datasets. We benchmark state-of-the-art instruction-tuned text embedding models and re-ranking models. Our experiments reveal that instruction-tuned models generally achieve superior performance compared to non-instruction-tuned models on MAIR Additionally, our results suggest that current instruction-tuned text embedding models and re-ranking models still lack effectiveness in specific long-tail tasks. MAIR is publicly available at https://github.com/sunnweiwei/Mair.
Rethinking the Evaluation of In-Context Learning for LLMs
Authors: Lemao Liu, Mo Yu, Yue Yu, Xiang Ao Guoxin Yu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has demonstrated excellent performance across various downstream NLP tasks, especially when synergized with powerful large language models (LLMs). Existing studies evaluate ICL methods primarily based on downstream task performance. This evaluation protocol overlooks the significant cost associated with the demonstration configuration process, i.e., tuning the demonstration as the ICL prompt. However, in this work, we point out that the evaluation protocol leads to unfair comparisons and potentially biased evaluation, because we surprisingly find the correlation between the configuration costs and task performance. Then we call for a two-dimensional evaluation paradigm that considers both of these aspects, facilitating a fairer comparison.Finally, based on our empirical finding that the optimized demonstration on one language model generalizes across language models of different sizes, we introduce a simple yet efficient strategy that can be applied to any ICL method as a plugin, yielding a better trade-off between the two dimensions according to the proposed evaluation paradigm.
Cluster-Norm for Unsupervised Probing of Knowledge
Authors: Sharan Maiya, Grégoire Dhimoïla, Owen Ho Wan Yeung, Kaarel Hänni Walter Laurito
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The deployment of language models brings challenges in generating reliable text, especially when these models are fine-tuned with human preferences. To extract the encoded knowledge in these models without (potentially) biased human labels, unsupervised probing techniques like Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS) have been developed (Burns et al., 2022). However, salient but unrelated features in activation space can mislead these probes (Farquhar et al., 2023). Addressing this, we propose a cluster-normalization method to minimize the impact of such features by clustering and normalizing activations of contrast pairs before applying unsupervised probing techniques. While this approach does not address the issue of distinguishing between latent knowledge and that portrayed by a simulated agent---a major issue in the literature of eliciting latent knowledge (Paul Christiano and Xu, 2021)---it still significantly improves the accuracy of probes in identifying the intended knowledge amidst distractions.
Hopping Too Late: Exploring the Limitations of Large Language Models on Multi-Hop Queries
Authors: Daniela Gottesman, Sohee Yang, Mor Geva, Amir Globerson Eden Biran
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) can solve complex multi-step problems, but little is known about how these computations are implemented internally. Motivated by this, we study how LLMs answer multi-hop queries such as “The spouse of the performer of Imagine is”. These queries require two information extraction steps: a latent one for resolving the first hop (“the performer of Imagine”) into the bridge entity (John Lennon), and another for resolving the second hop (“the spouse of John Lennon”) into the target entity (Yoko Ono). Understanding how the latent step is computed internally is key to understanding the overall computation. By carefully analyzing the internal computations of transformer-based LLMs, we discover that the bridge entity is resolved in the early layers of the model. Then, only after this resolution, the two-hop query is solved in the later layers. Because the second hop commences in later layers, there could be cases where these layers no longer encode the necessary knowledge for correctly predicting the answer. Motivated by this, we propose a novel “back-patching” analysis method whereby a hidden representation from a later layer is patched back to an earlier layer. We find that in up to 66% of previously incorrect cases there exists a back-patch that results in the correct generation of the answer, showing that the later layers indeed sometimes lack the needed functionality. Overall our methods and findings open further opportunities for understanding and improving latent reasoning in transformer-based LLMs.