mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Mapping Long-term Causalities in Psychiatric Symptomatology and Life Events from Social Media
Authors: Siyuan Chen, Meilin Wang, Minghao Lv, Zhiling Zhang, Juqianqian Juqianqian, Dejiyangla Dejiyangla, Yujia Peng, Kenny Zhu, Mengyue Wu
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Social media is a valuable data source for exploring mental health issues. However, previous studies have predominantly focused on the semantic content of these posts, overlooking the importance of their temporal attributes, as well as the evolving nature of mental disorders and symptoms.In this paper, we study the causality between psychiatric symptoms and life events, as well as among different symptoms from social media posts, which leads to better understanding of the underlying mechanisms of mental disorders. By applying these extracted causality features to tasks such as diagnosis point detection and early risk detection of depression, we notice considerable performance enhancement. This indicates that causality information extracted from social media data can boost the efficacy of mental disorder diagnosis and treatment planning.
Multimodal Chart Retrieval: A Comparison of Text, Table and Image Based Approaches
Authors: Averi Nowak, Francesco Piccinno, Yasemin Altun
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: We investigate multimodal chart retrieval, addressing the challenge of retrieving image-based charts using textual queries. We compare four approaches: (a) OCR with text retrieval, (b) chart derendering (DePlot) followed by table retrieval, (c) a direct image understanding model (PaLI-3), and (d) a combined PaLI-3 + DePlot approach. As the table retrieval component we introduce Tab-GTR, a text retrieval model augmented with table structure embeddings, achieving state-of-the-art results on the NQ-Tables benchmark with 48.88% R@1. On in-distribution data, the DePlot-based method (b) outperforms PaLI-3 (c), while being significantly more efficient (300M vs 3B trainable parameters). However, DePlot struggles with complex charts, indicating a need for improvements in chart derendering - specifically in terms of chart data diversity and the richness of text/table representations. We found no clear winner between methods (b) and (c) in general, with the best performance achieved by the combined approach (d), and further show that it benefits the most from multi-task training.
Retrieval Helps or Hurts? A Deeper Dive into the Efficacy of Retrieval Augmentation to Language Models
Authors: Seiji Maekawa, Hayate Iso, Sairam Gurajada, Nikita Bhutani
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: While large language models (LMs) demonstrate remarkable performance, they encounter challenges in providing accurate responses when queried for information beyond their pre-trained memorization. Although augmenting them with relevant external information can mitigate these issues, failure to consider the necessity of retrieval may adversely affect overall performance. Previous research has primarily focused on examining how entities influence retrieval models and knowledge recall in LMs, leaving other aspects relatively unexplored. In this work, our goal is to offer a more detailed, fact-centric analysis by exploring the effects of combinations of entities and relations. To facilitate this, we construct a new question answering (QA) dataset called WiTQA (Wikipedia Triple Question Answers). This dataset includes questions about entities and relations of various popularity levels, each accompanied by a supporting passage. Our extensive experiments with diverse LMs and retrievers reveal when retrieval does not consistently enhance LMs from the viewpoints of fact-centric popularity. Confirming earlier findings, we observe that larger LMs excel in recalling popular facts. However, they notably encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers. Interestingly, they can effectively retain popular relations of less common entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our finer-grained metric and insights through an adaptive retrieval system that selectively employs retrieval and recall based on the frequencies of entities and relations in the question.
AudioChatLlama: Towards General-Purpose Speech Abilities for LLMs
Authors: Yassir Fathullah, Chunyang Wu, Egor Lakomkin, Ke Li, Junteng Jia, Yuan Shangguan, Jay Mahadeokar, Ozlem Kalinli, Christian Fuegen, Mike Seltzer
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we extend the instruction-tuned Llama-2 model with end-to-end general-purpose speech processing and reasoning abilities while maintaining the wide range of original LLM capabilities, without using any carefully curated paired data. The resulting end-to-end model, named \textitAudioChatLlama, can utilize audio prompts as a replacement for text and sustain a conversation. Such a model also has extended cross-modal capabilities such as being able to perform spoken question answering (QA), speech translation, and audio summarization amongst many other closed and open-domain tasks. This is unlike prior approaches in speech, in which LLMs are extended to handle audio for a limited number of pre-designated tasks. On both synthesized and recorded speech QA test sets, evaluations show that our end-to-end approach is on par with or outperforms cascaded systems (speech recognizer + LLM) in terms of modelling the response to a prompt. Furthermore, unlike cascades, our approach can interchange text and audio modalities and intrinsically utilize prior context in a conversation to provide better results.
Whispers of Doubt Amidst Echoes of Triumph in NLP Robustness
Authors: Ashim Gupta, Rishanth Rajendhran, Nathan Stringham, Vivek Srikumar, Ana Marasovic
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: *Do larger and more performant models resolve NLP`s longstanding robustness issues?* We investigate this question using over 20 models of different sizes spanning different architectural choices and pretraining objectives. We conduct evaluations using (a) out-of-domain and challenge test sets, (b) behavioral testing with CheckLists, (c) contrast sets, and (d) adversarial inputs. Our analysis reveals that not all out-of-domain tests provide insight into robustness. Evaluating with CheckLists and contrast sets shows significant gaps in model performance; merely scaling models does not make them adequately robust. Finally, we point out that current approaches for adversarial evaluations of models are themselves problematic: they can be easily thwarted, and in their current forms, do not represent a sufficiently deep probe of model robustness. We conclude that not only is the question of robustness in NLP as yet unresolved, but even some of the approaches to measure robustness need to be reassessed.
Sequential Compositional Generalization in Multimodal Models
Authors: Semih Yagcioglu, Osman Batur İnce, Aykut Erdem, Erkut Erdem, Desmond Elliott, Deniz Yuret
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The rise of large-scale multimodal models has paved the pathway for groundbreaking advances in generative modeling and reasoning, unlocking transformative applications in a variety of complex tasks. However, a pressing question that remains is their genuine capability for stronger forms of generalization, which has been largely underexplored in the multimodal setting. Our study aims to address this by examining sequential compositional generalization using CompAct (Compositional Activities), a carefully constructed, perceptually grounded dataset set within a rich backdrop of egocentric kitchen activity videos. Each instance in our dataset is represented with a combination of raw video footage, naturally occurring sound, and crowd-sourced step-by-step descriptions. More importantly, our setup ensures that the individual concepts are consistently distributed across training and evaluation sets, while their compositions are novel in the evaluation set. We conduct a comprehensive assessment of several unimodal and multimodal models. Our findings reveal that bi-modal and tri-modal models exhibit a clear edge over their text-only counterparts. This highlights the importance of multimodality while charting a trajectory for future research in this domain.
Generating Uncontextualized and Contextualized Questions for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction
Authors: Md Nayem Uddin, Enfa George, Eduardo Blanco, Steven Corman
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper presents multiple question generation strategies for document-level event argument extraction. These strategies do not require human involvement and result in uncontextualized questions as well as contextualized questions grounded on the event and document of interest. Experimental results show that combining uncontextualized and contextualized questions is beneficial,especially when event triggers and arguments appear in different sentences. Our approach does not have corpus-specific components, in particular, the question generation strategies transfer across corpora. We also present a qualitative analysis of the most common errors made by our best model.
Evidence-Driven Retrieval Augmented Response Generation for Online Misinformation
Authors: Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yimeng Lu, Lanyu Shang, Yang Zhang, Dong Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The proliferation of online misinformation has posed significant threats to public interest. While numerous online users actively participate in the combat against misinformation, many of such responses can be characterized by the lack of politeness and supporting facts. As a solution, text generation approaches are proposed to automatically produce counter-misinformation responses. Nevertheless, existing methods are often trained end-to-end without leveraging external knowledge, resulting in subpar text quality and excessively repetitive responses. In this paper, we propose retrieval augmented response generation for online misinformation (RARG), which collects supporting evidence from scientific sources and generates counter-misinformation responses based on the evidences. In particular, our RARG consists of two stages: (1) evidence collection, where we design a retrieval pipeline to retrieve and rerank evidence documents using a database comprising over 1M academic articles; (2) response generation, in which we align large language models (LLMs) to generate evidence-based responses via reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). We propose a reward function to maximize the utilization of the retrieved evidence while maintaining the quality of the generated text, which yields polite and factual responses that clearly refutes misinformation. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we study the case of COVID-19 and perform extensive experiments with both in- and cross-domain datasets, where RARG consistently outperforms baselines by generating high-quality counter-misinformation responses.
Open-Vocabulary Federated Learning with Multimodal Prototyping
Authors: Huimin Zeng, Zhenrui Yue, Dong Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing federated learning (FL) studies usuallyassume the training label space and test labelspace are identical. However, in real-world applications, this assumption is too ideal to betrue. A new user could come up with queriesthat involve data from unseen classes, and suchopen-vocabulary queries would directly defectsuch FL systems. Therefore, in this work, weexplicitly focus on the under-explored openvocabulary challenge in FL. That is, for a newuser, the global server shall understand her/hisquery that involves arbitrary unknown classes.To address this problem, we leverage the pretrained vision-language models (VLMs). Inparticular, we present a novel adaptation framework tailored for VLMs in the context of FL,named as Federated Multimodal Prototyping(Fed-MP). Fed-MP adaptively aggregates thelocal model weights based on light-weightclient residuals, and makes predictions basedon a novel multimodal prototyping mechanism.Fed-MP exploits the knowledge learned fromthe seen classes, and robustifies the adaptedVLM to unseen categories. Our empirical evaluation on various datasets validates the effectiveness of Fed-MP.
Exploring Key Point Analysis with Pairwise Generation and Graph Partitioning
Authors: Xiao Li, Yong Jiang, Shen Huang, Pengjun Xie, Gong Cheng, Fei Huang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Key Point Analysis (KPA), the summarization of multiple arguments into a concise collection of key points, continues to be a significant and unresolved issue within the field of argument mining. Existing models adapt a two-stage pipeline of clustering arguments or generating key points for argument clusters. This approach rely on semantic similarity instead of measuring the existence of shared key points among arguments. Additionally, it only models the intra-cluster relationship among arguments, disregarding the inter-cluster relationship between arguments that do not share key points. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach for KPA with pairwise generation and graph partitioning. Our objective is to train a generative model that can simultaneously provide a score indicating the presence of shared key point between a pair of arguments and generate the shared key point. Subsequently, to map generated redundant key points to a concise set of key points, we proceed to construct an arguments graph by considering the arguments as vertices, the generated key points as edges, and the scores as edge weights. We then propose a graph partitioning algorithm to partition all arguments sharing the same key points to the same subgraph. Notably, our experimental findings demonstrate that our proposed model surpasses previous models when evaluated on both the ArgKP and QAM datasets.
Understanding the Capabilities and Limitations of Large Language Models for Cultural Commonsense
Authors: Siqi Shen, Lajanugen Logeswaran, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee, Soujanya Poria, Rada Mihalcea
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated substantial commonsense understanding through numerous benchmark evaluations. However, their understanding of cultural commonsense remains largely unexamined. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive examination of the capabilities and limitations of several state-of-the-art LLMs in the context of cultural commonsense tasks. Using several general and cultural commonsense benchmarks, we find that (1) LLMs have a significant discrepancy in performance when tested on culture-specific commonsense knowledge for different cultures; (2) LLMs' general commonsense capability is affected by cultural context; and (3) The language used to query the LLMs can impact their performance on cultural-related tasks.Our study points to the inherent bias in the cultural understanding of LLMs and provides insights that can help develop culturally-aware language models.
Code Models are Zero-shot Precondition Reasoners
Authors: Lajanugen Logeswaran, Sungryull Sohn, Yiwei Lyu, Anthony Liu, Dong-Ki Kim, Dongsub Shim, Moontae Lee, Honglak Lee
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: One of the fundamental skills required for an agent acting in an environment to complete tasks is the ability to understand what actions are plausible at any given point. This work explores a novel use of code representations to reason about action preconditions for sequential decision making tasks. Code representations offer the flexibility to model procedural activities and associated constraints as well as the ability to execute and verify constraint satisfaction. Leveraging code representations, we extract action preconditions from demonstration trajectories in a zero-shot manner using pre-trained code models. Given these extracted preconditions, we propose a precondition-aware action sampling strategy that ensures actions predicted by a policy are consistent with preconditions. We demonstrate that the proposed approach enhances the performance of few-shot policy learning approaches across task-oriented dialog and embodied textworld benchmarks.
Contrastive and Consistency Learning for Neural Noisy-Channel Model in Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Suyoung Kim, Jiyeon Hwang, Ho-Young Jung
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, deep end-to-end learning has been studied for intent classification in Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). However, end-to-end models require a large amount of speech data with intent labels, and highly optimized models are generally sensitive to the inconsistency between the training and evaluation conditions. Therefore, a natural language understanding approach based on Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) remains attractive because it can utilize a pre-trained general language model and adapt to the mismatch of the speech input environment. Using this module-based approach, we improve a noisy-channel model to handle transcription inconsistencies caused by ASR errors. We propose a two-stage method, Contrastive and Consistency Learning (CCL), that correlates error patterns between clean and noisy ASR transcripts and emphasizes the consistency of the latent features of the two transcripts. Experiments on four benchmark datasets show that CCL outperforms existing methods and improves the ASR robustness in various noisy environments. Code is available at https://github.com/syoung7388/CCL
Do Large Language Models Rank Fairly? An Empirical Study on the Fairness of LLMs as Rankers
Authors: Yuan Wang, Xuyang Wu, Hsin-Tai Wu, Zhiqiang Tao, Yi Fang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in information retrieval has raised a critical reevaluation of fairness in the text-ranking models. LLMs, such as GPT models and Llama2, have shown effectiveness in natural language understanding tasks, and prior works such as RankGPT have demonstrated that the LLMs have better performance than the traditional ranking models in the ranking task. However, their fairness remains largely unexplored. This paper presents an empirical study evaluating these LLMs using the TREC Fair Ranking dataset, focusing on the representation of binary protected attributes such as gender and geographic location, which are historically underrepresented in search outcomes. Our analysis delves into how these LLMs handle queries and documents related to these attributes, aiming to uncover biases in their ranking algorithms. We assess fairness from both user and content perspectives, contributing an empirical benchmark for evaluating LLMs as the fair ranker.
TabSQLify: Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs Through Table Decomposition
Authors: Md Mahadi Hasan Nahid, Davood Rafiei
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Table reasoning is a challenging task that requires understanding both natural language questions and structured tabular data. Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but they often struggle with large tables due to their limited input length. In this paper, we propose TabSQLify, a novel method that leverages text-to-SQL generation to decompose tables into smaller and relevant sub-tables, containing only essential information for answering questions or verifying statements, before performing the reasoning task. In our comprehensive evaluation on four challenging datasets, our approach demonstrates comparable or superior performance compared to prevailing methods reliant on full tables as input. Moreover, our method can reduce the input context length significantly, making it more scalable and efficient for large-scale table reasoning applications. Our method performs remarkably well on the WikiTQ benchmark, achieving an accuracy of 64.7%. Additionally, on the TabFact benchmark, it achieves a high accuracy of 79.5%. These results surpass other LLM-based baseline models on gpt-3.5-turbo (chatgpt). TabSQLify can reduce the table size significantly alleviating the computational load on LLMs when handling large tables without compromising performance.
Contextual Label Projection for Cross-Lingual Structured Prediction
Authors: Tanmay Parekh, I-Hung Hsu, Kuan-Hao Huang, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Label projection, which involves obtaining translated labels and texts jointly, is essential for leveraging machine translation to facilitate cross-lingual transfer in structured prediction tasks. Prior research exploring label projection often compromise translation accuracy by favoring simplified label translation or relying solely on word-level alignments. In this paper, we introduce a novel label projection approach, CLaP, which translates text to the target language and performs *contextual translation* on the labels using the translated text as the context, ensuring better accuracy for the translated labels. We leverage instruction-tuned language models with multilingual capabilities as our contextual translator, imposing the constraint of the presence of translated labels in the translated text via instructions. We benchmark CLaP with other label projection techniques on zero-shot cross-lingual transfer across 39 languages on two representative structured prediction tasks - event argument extraction (EAE) and named entity recognition (NER), showing over 2.4 F1 improvement for EAE and 1.4 F1 improvement for NER. We further explore the applicability of CLaP on ten extremely low-resource languages to showcase its potential for cross-lingual structured prediction.
Event Detection from Social Media for Epidemic Prediction
Authors: Tanmay Parekh, Anh Mac, Jiarui Yu, Yuxuan Dong, Syed Shahriar, Bonnie Liu, Eric Yang, Kuan-Hao Huang, Wei Wang, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Social media is an easy-to-access platform providing timely updates about societal trends and events. Discussions regarding epidemic-related events such as infections, symptoms, and social interactions can be crucial for informing policymaking during epidemic outbreaks. In our work, we pioneer exploiting Event Detection (ED) for better preparedness and early warnings of any upcoming epidemic by developing a framework to extract and analyze epidemic-related events from social media posts. To this end, we curate an epidemic event ontology comprising seven disease-agnostic event types and construct a Twitter dataset SPEED with human-annotated events focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. Experimentation reveals how ED models trained on COVID-based SPEED can effectively detect epidemic events for three unseen epidemics of Monkeypox, Zika, and Dengue; while models trained on existing ED datasets fail miserably. Furthermore, we show that reporting sharp increases in the extracted events by our framework can provide warnings 4-9 weeks earlier than the WHO epidemic declaration for Monkeypox. This utility of our framework lays the foundations for better preparedness against emerging epidemics.
RESPROMPT: Residual Connection Prompting Advances Multi-Step Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Song Jiang, Zahra Shakeri, Aaron Chan, Maziar Sanjabi, Hamed Firooz, Yinglong Xia, Bugra Akyildiz, Yizhou Sun, Jinchao Li, Qifan Wang, Asli Celikyilmaz
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Chain-of-thought (CoT) has impressively unlocked the reasoning potential of large language models (LLMs). Yet, it falls short when tackling problems that require multiple reasoning steps. This limitation arises from the complex nature of multi-step reasoning processes: later stages often depend not only on the immediately preceding step, but also on the results from several steps earlier. Such complexities indicate the reasoning process is naturally a graph. The almost linear structure of CoT, however, struggles to capture this complex reasoning graph. To address this challenge, we propose Residual Connection Prompting (ResPrompt), a new prompting strategy that advances multi-step reasoning in LLMs. The core of our idea is to reconstruct the reasoning graph within prompts. We achieve this by integrating necessary connections--links present in reasoning graph but missing in the linear CoT flow--into the prompts. Termed “residual connections”, these links can transform linear CoT into the complex reasoning graphs that multi-step problems entail. On benchmarks across math, sequential, and commonsense domains, ResPrompt demonstrates clear improvements in multi-step reasoning compared with CoT. Through extensive ablation studies and analyses, we pinpoint how to effectively build residual connections and also identify situations where it might be unnecessary.
BPE-knockout: Pruning Pre-existing BPE Tokenisers with Backwards-compatible Morphological Semi-supervision
Authors: Thomas Bauwens, Pieter Delobelle
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Byte-pair encoding (BPE) has become the default subword tokeniser in language models (LMs), allowing the representation of an infinite space of text with a finite set of units. Yet, BPE training is unsupervised, receiving no explicit information about a language`s morphology. This results in a subword vocabulary wherein many units are a concatenation of partial morphemes, preventing their formation as tokens. This, in turn, causes consistent intra-word patterns to be displayed inconsistently to downstream models, and bloats the vocabulary, hence requiring unnecessary embedding storage. In this paper, we address this issue by identifying blameworthy BPE merges and removing the resulting subwords from the BPE vocabulary, without impeding further use of merges that relied on them. We find that our method, BPE-knockout, is effective at making BPE`s segmentation positions adhere better to derivational and compound boundaries in English, Dutch and German, and improves token-based tasks in Dutch RoBERTa models, indicating that a tokeniser`s adherence to morphology impacts downstream models. We demonstrate the latter not only by training LMs from scratch, but also by continuing the pre-training of existing LMs. This proves promising, showing that suboptimal tokenisers can be remedied whilst salvaging training cost of downstream LMs.
How are Prompts Different in Terms of Sensitivity?
Authors: Sheng Lu, Hendrik Schuff, Iryna Gurevych
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: In-context learning (ICL) has become one of the most popular learning paradigms. While there is a growing body of literature focusing on prompt engineering, there is a lack of systematic analysis comparing the effects of prompt techniques across different models and tasks. To address this, we present a comprehensive prompt analysis based on sensitivity. Our analysis reveals that sensitivity is an unsupervised proxy for model performance, as it exhibits a strong negative correlation with accuracy. We use gradient-based saliency scores to empirically demonstrate how different prompts affect the relevance of input tokens to the output, resulting in different levels of sensitivity. Furthermore, we introduce sensitivity-aware decoding which incorporates sensitivity estimation as a penalty term in the standard greedy decoding. We show that this approach is particularly helpful when information in the input is scarce. Our work provides a fresh perspective on the analysis of prompts, and contributes to a better understanding of the mechanism of ICL.
LSTDial: Enhancing Dialogue Generation via Long- and Short-Term Measurement Feedback
Authors: Guanghui Ye, Huan Zhao, Zixing Zhang, Xupeng Zha, Zhihua Jiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Generating high-quality responses is a key challenge for any open domain dialogue systems. However, even though there exist a variety of quality dimensions especially designed for dialogue evaluation (e.g., coherence and diversity scores), current dialogue systems rarely utilize them to guide the response generation during training. To alleviate this issue, we propose LSTDial (Long- and Short-Term Dialogue), a novel two-stage framework which generates and utilizes conversation evaluation as explicit feedback during training. Specifically, we fine-tune pre-trained dialogue systems through using turn-level quality feedback in the first stage and further train ever-improving dialogue agents through using dialogue-level quality feedback in the second stage. By using our approach on dialogue systems, capable of enabling dialogue generation with both short-term capabilities (generating more fluent, relevant and varied responses at the turn-level) and long-term capabilities (generating more coherent, engaging and informative responses at the dialogue-level). We implement LSTDial on four strong baseline models and experiment with two open-domain dialogue datasets. Experimental results show that LSTDial achieves significant improvement, enabling to generate better dialogue responses in terms of both human and automatic evaluation.
The ART of LLM Refinement: Ask, Refine, and Trust
Authors: Kumar Shridhar, Koustuv Sinha, Andrew Cohen, Tianlu Wang, Ping Yu, Ramakanth Pasunuru, Mrinmaya Sachan, Jason Weston, Asli Celikyilmaz
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable generative abilities, but can they judge the quality of their own generations and self-improve?A popular concept, referred to as *self-refinement*, postulates that LLMs can detect and correct the errors in their generations when asked to do so. However, recent empirical evidence points in the opposite direction, suggesting that LLMs often struggle to accurately identify errors when reasoning is involved. To address this, we propose a reasoning with a refinement strategy called *ART: Ask, Refine, and Trust*, which *asks* necessary questions to decide when an LLM should *refine* its output, and uses it to affirm or deny *trust* in its refinement by ranking the refinement and the initial prediction. On two multistep reasoning tasks of mathematical word problems (GSM8K) and question answering (StrategyQA), *ART* achieves a performance gain of $+5$ points over self-refinement baselines, while using a much smaller model as the decision maker. We believe that *ART* with smaller models, making refinement decisions can be a cost-effective alternative to fine-tuning LLMs.
Modularized Multilingual NMT with Fine-grained Interlingua
Authors: Sungjun Lim, Yoonjung Choi, Sangha Kim
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Recently, one popular alternative in Multilingual NMT (MNMT) is modularized MNMT that has both language-specific encoders and decoders. However, due to the absence of layer-sharing, the modularized MNMT failed to produce satisfactory language-independent (Interlingua) features, leading to performance degradation in zero-shot translation. To address this issue, a solution was proposed to share the top of language-specific encoder layers, enabling the successful generation of interlingua features. Nonetheless, it should be noted that this sharing structure does not guarantee the explicit propagation of language-specific features to their respective language-specific decoders. Consequently, to overcome this challenge, we present our modularized MNMT approach, where a modularized encoder is divided into three distinct encoder modules based on different sharing criteria: (1) source language-specific ($Enc_s$); (2) universal ($Enc_all$); (3) target language-specific ($Enc_t$). By employing these sharing strategies, $Enc_all$ propagates the interlingua features, after which $Enc_t$ propagates the target language-specific features to the language-specific decoders. Additionally, we suggest the Denoising Bi-path Autoencoder (DBAE) to fortify the Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) by leveraging $Enc_t$. For experimental purposes, our training corpus comprises both En-to-Any and Any-to-En directions. We adjust the size of our corpus to simulate both balanced and unbalanced settings. Our method demonstrates an improved average BLEU score by ''+2.90” in En-to-Any directions and by ''+3.06” in zero-shot compared to other MNMT baselines.
ParallelPARC: A Scalable Pipeline for Generating Natural-Language Analogies
Authors: Oren Sultan, Yonatan Bitton, Ron Yosef, Dafna Shahaf
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Analogy-making is central to human cognition, allowing us to adapt to novel situations -- an ability that current AI systems still lack. Most analogy datasets today focus on simple analogies (e.g., word analogies); datasets including complex types of analogies are typically manually curated and very small. We believe that this holds back progress in computational analogy.In this work, we design a data generation pipeline, ParallelPARC (Parallel Paragraph Creator) leveraging state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) to create complex, paragraph-based analogies, as well as distractors, both simple and challenging. We demonstrate our pipeline and create ProPara-Logy, a dataset of analogies between scientific processes. We publish a gold-set, validated by humans, and a silver-set, generated automatically. We test LLMs' and humans' analogy recognition in binary and multiple-choice settings, and found that humans outperform the best models (\ensuremath∼13% gap) after a light supervision. We demonstrate that our silver-set is useful for training models. Lastly, we show challenging distractors confuse LLMs, but not humans. We hope our pipeline will encourage research in this emerging field.
AWESOME: GPU Memory-constrained Long Document Summarization using Memory Mechanism and Global Salient Content
Authors: Shuyang Cao, Lu Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Long document summarization systems are critical for domains with lengthy and jargon-laden text, yet they present significant challenges to researchers and developers with limited computing resources. Existing solutions mainly focus on efficient attentions or divide-and-conquer strategies. The former reduces theoretical time complexity, but is still memory-heavy. The latter methods sacrifice global context, leading to uninformative and incoherent summaries. This work aims to leverage the memory-efficient nature of divide-and-conquer methods while preserving global context. Concretely, our framework AWESOME uses two novel mechanisms: (1) External memory mechanisms track previously encoded document segments and their corresponding summaries, to enhance global document understanding and summary coherence. (2) Global salient content is further identified beforehand to augment each document segment to support its summarization. Extensive experiments on diverse genres of text, including government reports, meeting transcripts, screenplays, scientific papers, and novels, show that AWESOME produces summaries with improved informativeness, faithfulness, and coherence than competitive baselines on longer documents, while having a smaller GPU memory footprint.
NLP Systems That Can`t Tell Use from Mention Censor Counterspeech, but Teaching the Distinction Helps
Authors: Kristina Gligoric, Myra Cheng, Lucia Zheng, Esin Durmus, Dan Jurafsky
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: The use of words to convey speaker`s intent is traditionally distinguished from the \textquoteleftmention' of words for quoting what someone said, or pointing out properties of a word. Here we show that computationally modeling this use-mention distinction is crucial for dealing with counterspeech online. Counterspeech that refutes problematic content often mentions harmful language but is not harmful itself (e.g., calling a vaccine dangerous is not the same as expressing disapproval of someone for calling vaccines dangerous). We show that even recent language models fail at distinguishing use from mention, and that this failure propagates to two key downstream tasks: misinformation and hate speech detection, resulting in censorship of counterspeech. We introduce prompting mitigations that teach the use-mention distinction, and show they reduce these errors. Our work highlights the importance of the use-mention distinction for NLP and CSS and offers ways to address it.
Debiasing with Sufficient Projection: A General Theoretical Framework for Vector Representations
Authors: Enze Shi, Lei Ding, Linglong Kong, Bei Jiang
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Pre-trained vector representations in natural language processing often inadvertently encode undesirable social biases. Identifying and removing unwanted biased information from vector representation is an evolving and significant challenge. Our study uniquely addresses this issue from the perspective of statistical independence, proposing a framework for reducing bias by transforming vector representations to an unbiased subspace using sufficient projection. The key to our framework lies in its generality: it adeptly mitigates bias across both debiasing and fairness tasks, and across various vector representation types, including word embeddings and output representations of transformer models. Importantly, we establish the connection between debiasing and fairness, offering theoretical guarantees and elucidating our algorithm`s efficacy. Through extensive evaluation of intrinsic and extrinsic metrics, our method achieves superior performance in bias reduction while maintaining high task performance, and offers superior computational efficiency.
Semi-Supervised Dialogue Abstractive Summarization via High-Quality Pseudolabel Selection
Authors: Jianfeng He, Hang Su, Jason Cai, Igor Shalyminov, Hwanjun Song, Saab Mansour
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Semi-supervised dialogue summarization (SSDS) leverages model-generated summaries to reduce reliance on human-labeled data and improve the performance of summarization models. While addressing label noise, previous works on semi-supervised learning primarily focus on natural language understanding tasks, assuming each sample has a unique label. However, these methods are not directly applicable to SSDS, as it is a generative task, and each dialogue can be summarized in different ways. In this work, we propose a novel scoring approach, SiCF, which encapsulates three primary dimensions of summarization model quality: Semantic invariance (indicative of model confidence), Coverage (factual recall), and Faithfulness (factual precision). Using the SiCF score, we select unlabeled dialogues with high-quality generated summaries to train summarization models. Comprehensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of SiCF scores in uncertainty estimation and semi-supervised learning for dialogue summarization tasks. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/amazon-science/summarization-sicf-score.
AfriMTE and AfriCOMET: Enhancing COMET to Embrace Under-resourced African Languages
Authors: Jiayi Wang, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Sweta Agrawal, Marek Masiak, Ricardo Rei, Eleftheria Briakou, Marine Carpuat, Xuanli He, Sofia Bourhim, Andiswa Bukula, Muhidin Mohamed, Temitayo Olatoye, Tosin Adewumi, Hamam Mokayed, Christine Mwase, Wangui Kimotho, Foutse Yuehgoh, Anuoluwapo Aremu, Jessica Ojo, Shamsuddeen Hassan Muhammad, Salomey Osei, Abdul-Hakeem Omotayo, Chiamaka Chukwuneke, Perez Ogayo, Oumaima Hourrane, Salma El Anigri, Lolwethu Ndolela, Thabiso Mangwana, Shafie Abdi Mohamed, Hassan Ayinde, Oluwabusayo Olufunke Awoyomi, Lama Alkhaled, Sana Al-azzawi, Naome A. Etori, Millicent Ochieng, Clemencia Siro, Njoroge Kiragu, Eric Muchiri, Wangari Kimotho, Lyse Naomi Wamba Momo, Daud Abolade, Simbiat Ajao, Iyanuoluwa Shode, Ricky Macharm, Ruqayya Nasir Iro, Saheed S. Abdullahi, Stephen E. Moore, Bernard Opoku, Zainab Akinjobi, Abeeb Afolabi, Nnaemeka Obiefuna, Onyekachi Raphael Ogbu, Sam Ochieng′, Verrah Akinyi Otiende, Chinedu Emmanuel Mbonu, Sakayo Toadoum Sari, Yao Lu, Pontus Stenetorp
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the recent progress on scaling multilingual machine translation (MT) to several under-resourced African languages, accurately measuring this progress remains challenging, since evaluation is often performed on n-gram matching metrics such as BLEU, which typically show a weaker correlation with human judgments. Learned metrics such as COMET have higher correlation; however, the lack of evaluation data with human ratings for under-resourced languages, complexity of annotation guidelines like Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM), and limited language coverage of multilingual encoders have hampered their applicability to African languages. In this paper, we address these challenges by creating high-quality human evaluation data with simplified MQM guidelines for error detection and direct assessment (DA) scoring for 13 typologically diverse African languages. Furthermore, we develop AfriCOMET: COMET evaluation metrics for African languages by leveraging DA data from well-resourced languages and an African-centric multilingual encoder (AfroXLM-R) to create the state-of-the-art MT evaluation metrics for African languages with respect to Spearman-rank correlation with human judgments (0.441).
TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables
Authors: Tianshu Zhang, Xiang Yue, Yifei Li, Huan Sun
Published in: Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Main Conference Track), 2024

Abstract: Semi-structured tables are ubiquitous. There has been a variety of tasks that aim to automatically interpret, augment, and query tables. Current methods often require pretraining on tables or special model architecture design, are restricted to specific table types, or have simplifying assumptions about tables and tasks. This paper makes the first step towards developing open-source large language models (LLMs) as generalists for a diversity of table-based tasks. Towards that end, we construct TableInstruct, a new dataset with a variety of realistic tables and tasks, for instruction tuning and evaluating LLMs. We further develop the first open-source generalist model for tables, TableLlama, by fine-tuning Llama 2 (7B) with LongLoRA to address the long context challenge. We experiment under both in-domain setting and out-of-domain setting. On 7 out of 8 in-domain tasks, TableLlama achieves comparable or better performance than the SOTA for each task, despite the latter often has task-specific design. On 6 out-of-domain datasets, it achieves 5-44 absolute point gains compared with the base model, showing that training on TableInstruct enhances the model`s generalizability. We open-source our dataset and trained model to boost future work on developing open generalist models for tables.