mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Exploring the Limits of Fine-grained LLM-based Physics Inference via Premise Removal Interventions
Authors: Jordan Meadows, Tamsin Emily James, Andre Freitas
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Language models (LMs) can hallucinate when performing complex mathematical reasoning. Physics provides a rich domain for assessing their mathematical capabilities, where physical context requires that any symbolic manipulation satisfies complex semantics (\textite.g., units, tensorial order). In this work, we systematically remove crucial context from prompts to force instances where model inference may be algebraically coherent, yet unphysical. We assess LM capabilities in this domain using a curated dataset encompassing multiple notations and Physics subdomains. Further, we improve zero-shot scores using synthetic in-context examples, and demonstrate non-linear degradation of derivation quality with perturbation strength via the progressive omission of supporting premises. We find that the models' mathematical reasoning is not physics-informed in this setting, where physical context is predominantly ignored in favour of reverse-engineering solutions.
On the Rigour of Scientific Writing: Criteria, Analysis, and Insights
Authors: Joseph James, Chenghao Xiao, Yucheng Li, Chenghua Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Rigour is crucial for scientific research as it ensures the reproducibility and validity of results and findings. Despite its importance, little work exists on modelling rigour computationally, and there is a lack of analysis on whether these criteria can effectively signal or measure the rigour of scientific papers in practice. In this paper, we introduce a bottom-up, data-driven framework to automatically identify and define rigour criteria and assess their relevance in scientific writing. Our framework includes rigour keyword extraction, detailed rigour definition generation, and salient criteria identification. Furthermore, our framework is domain-agnostic and can be tailored to the evaluation of scientific rigour for different areas, accommodating the distinct salient criteria across fields. We conducted comprehensive experiments based on datasets collected from different domains (e.g. ICLR, ACL) to demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in modelling rigour. In addition, we analyse linguist patterns of rigour, revealing that framing certainty is crucial for enhancing the perception of scientific rigour, while suggestion certainty and probability uncertainty diminish it.
MMUTF: Multimodal Multimedia Event Argument Extraction with Unified Template Filling
Authors: Philipp Seeberger, Dominik Wagner, Korbinian Riedhammer
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: With the advancement of multimedia technologies, news documents and user-generated content are often represented as multiple modalities, making Multimedia Event Extraction (MEE) an increasingly important challenge. However, recent MEE methods employ weak alignment strategies and data augmentation with simple classification models, which ignore the capabilities of natural language-formulated event templates for the challenging Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. In this work, we focus on EAE and address this issue by introducing a unified template filling model that connects the textual and visual modalities via textual prompts. This approach enables the exploitation of cross-ontology transfer and the incorporation of event-specific semantics. Experiments on the M2E2 benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. Our system surpasses the current SOTA on textual EAE by +7% F1, and performs generally better than the second-best systems for multimedia EAE.
Not All Preference Pairs Are Created Equal: A Recipe for Annotation-Efficient Iterative Preference Learning
Authors: Sen Yang, Leyang Cui, Deng Cai, Xinting Huang, Shuming Shi, Wai Lam
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Iterative preference learning, though yielding superior performances, requires online annotated preference labels. In this work, we study strategies to save annotation budgets while achieving competitive or even better performances for iterative preference learning. Built on intuitions from active learning, we empirically show that annotating those response pairs with $small$ margins is generally better than $large$ or $random$. Besides, experiments under the multi-iteration scenario suggest allocating more annotation budgets in the earlier iterations rather than later ones.
Cross-lingual Contextualized Phrase Retrieval
Authors: Huayang Li, Deng Cai, Zhi Qu, Qu Cui, Hidetaka Kamigaito, Lemao Liu, Taro Watanabe
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Phrase-level dense retrieval has shown many appealing characteristics in downstream NLP tasks by leveraging the fine-grained information that phrases offer. In our work, we propose a new task formulation of dense retrieval, cross-lingual contextualized phrase retrieval, which aims to augment cross-lingual applications by addressing polysemy using context information. However, the lack of specific training data and models are the primary challenges to achieve our goal. As a result, we extract pairs of cross-lingual phrases using word alignment information automatically induced from parallel sentences. Subsequently, we train our Cross-lingual Contextualized Phrase Retriever (CCPR) using contrastive learning, which encourages the hidden representations of phrases with similar contexts and semantics to align closely. Comprehensive experiments on both the cross-lingual phrase retrieval task and a downstream task, i.e, machine translation, demonstrate the effectiveness of CCPR. On the phrase retrieval task, CCPR surpasses baselines by a significant margin, achieving a top-1 accuracy that is at least 13 points higher. When utilizing CCPR to augment the large-language-model-based translator, it achieves average gains of 0.7 and 1.5 in BERTScore for translations from X=\ensuremath>En and vice versa, respectively, on WMT16 dataset. We will release our code and data.
VideoINSTA: Zero-shot Long Video Understanding via Informative Spatial-Temporal Reasoning with LLMs
Authors: Ruotong Liao, Max Erler, Huiyu Wang, Guangyao Zhai, Gengyuan Zhang, Yunpu Ma, Volker Tresp
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In the video-language domain, recent works in leveraging zero-shot Large Language Model-based reasoning for video understanding have become competitive challengers to previous end-to-end models. However, long video understanding presents unique challenges due to the complexity of reasoning over extended timespans, even for zero-shot LLM-based approaches. The challenge of information redundancy in long videos prompts the question of what specific information is essential for large language models (LLMs) and how to leverage them for complex spatial-temporal reasoning in long-form video analysis. We propose a framework VideoINSTA , i.e. INformative Spatial-TemporAl Reasoning for zero-shot long-form video understanding.VideoINSTA contributes (1) a zero-shot framework for long video understanding using LLMs; (2) an event-based temporalreasoning and content-based spatial reasoning approach for LLMs to reason over spatial-temporal information in videos; (3) a self-reflective information reasoning scheme based on information sufficiency and prediction confidence while balancing temporal factors.Our model significantly improves the state-of-the-art on three long video question-answering benchmarks: EgoSchema, NextQA, and IntentQA, and the open question answering dataset ActivityNetQA. Code is released: https://github.com/mayhugotong/VideoINSTA.
Self-Constructed Context Decompilation with Fined-grained Alignment Enhancement
Authors: Yunlong Feng, Dechuan Teng, Yang Xu, Honglin Mu, Xiao Xu, Libo Qin, Qingfu Zhu, Wanxiang Che
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Decompilation transforms compiled code back into a high-level programming language for analysis when source code is unavailable. Previous work has primarily focused on enhancing decompilation performance by increasing the scale of model parameters or training data for pre-training. Based on the characteristics of the decompilation task, we propose two methods: (1) Without fine-tuning, the Self-Constructed Context Decompilation (sc$^2$dec) method recompiles the LLM`s decompilation results to construct pairs for in-context learning, helping the model improve decompilation performance. (2) Fine-grained Alignment Enhancement (FAE), which meticulously aligns assembly code with source code at the statement level by leveraging debugging information, is employed during the fine-tuning phase to achieve further improvements in decompilation. By integrating these two methods, we achieved a Re-Executability performance improvement of approximately 3.90% on the Decompile-Eval benchmark, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance of 52.41%. The code, data, and models are available at https://github.com/AlongWY/sccdec.
Efficiently Computing Susceptibility to Context in Language Models
Authors: Tianyu Liu, Kevin Du, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: One strength of modern language models is their ability to incorporate information from a user-input context when answering queries. However, they are not equally sensitive to the subtle changes to that context.To quantify this, Du et al. (2024) gives an information-theoretic metric to measure such sensitivity. Their metric, susceptibility, is defined as the degree to which contexts can influence a model`s response to a query at a distributional level.However, exactly computing susceptibility is difficult and, thus, Du et al. (2024) falls back on a Monte Carlo approximation.Due to the large number of samples required, the Monte Carlo approximation is inefficient in practice. As a faster alternative, we propose Fisher susceptibility, an efficient method to estimate the susceptibility based on Fisher information.Empirically, we validate that Fisher susceptibility is comparable to Monte Carlo estimated susceptibility across a diverse set of query domains despite its being $70\times$ faster.Exploiting the improved efficiency, we apply Fisher susceptibility to analyze factors affecting the susceptibility of language models.We observe that larger models are as susceptible as smaller ones.
ESG-Kor: A Korean Dataset for ESG-related Information Extraction and Practical Use Cases
Authors: Jaeyoung Lee, Geonyeong Son, Misuk Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: With the expansion of pre-trained language model usage in recent years, the importance of datasets for performing tasks in specialized domains has significantly increased. Therefore, we have built a Korean dataset called ESG-Kor to automatically extract Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information, which has recently gained importance. ESG-Kor is a dataset consisting of a total of 118,946 sentences that extracted information on each ESG component from Korean companies' sustainability reports and manually labeled it according to objective rules provided by ESG evaluation agencies. To verify the effectiveness and applicability of the ESG-Kor dataset, classification performance was confirmed using several Korean pre-trained language models, and significant performance was obtained. Additionally, by extending the ESG classification model to documents of small and medium enterprises and extracting information based on ESG key issues and in-depth analysis, we demonstrated potential and practical use cases in the ESG field.
Wrong-of-Thought: An Integrated Reasoning Framework with Multi-Perspective Verification and Wrong Information
Authors: Yongheng Zhang, Qiguang Chen, Jingxuan Zhou, Peng Wang, Jiasheng Si, Jin Wang, Wenpeng Lu, Libo Qin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Chain-of-Thought (CoT) has become a vital technique for enhancing the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs), attracting increasing attention from researchers. One stream of approaches focuses on the iterative enhancement of LLMs by continuously verifying and refining their reasoning outputs for desired quality. Despite its impressive results, this paradigm faces two critical issues: (1) Simple verification methods: The current paradigm relies solely on a single verification method. (2) Wrong Information Ignorance: Traditional paradigms directly ignore wrong information during reasoning and refine the logic paths from scratch each time. To address these challenges, we propose Wrong-of-Thought (WoT), which includes two core modules: (1) Multi-Perspective Verification: A multi-perspective verification method for accurately refining the reasoning process and result, and (2) Wrong Information Utilization: Utilizing wrong information to alert LLMs and reduce the probability of LLMs making same mistakes. Experiments on 8 popular datasets and 5 LLMs demonstrate that WoT surpasses all previous baselines. In addition, WoT exhibits powerful capabilities in difficult computation tasks.
Learning Semantic Structure through First-Order-Logic Translation
Authors: Akshay Chaturvedi, Nicholas Asher
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this paper, we study whether transformer-based language models can extract predicate argument structure from simple sentences. We firstly show that language models sometimes confuse which predicates apply to which objects. To mitigate this, we explore two tasks: question answering (Q/A), and first order logic (FOL) translation, and two regimes, prompting and finetuning. In FOL translation, we finetune several large language models on synthetic datasets designed to gauge their generalization abilities. For Q/A, we finetune encoder models like BERT and RoBERTa and use prompting for LLMs. The results show that FOL translation for LLMs is better suited to learn predicate argument structure.
A Training Data Recipe to Accelerate A* Search with Language Models
Authors: Devaansh Gupta, Boyang Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Combining Large Language Models (LLMs) with heuristic search algorithms like A* holds the promise of enhanced LLM reasoning and scalable inference. To accelerate training and reduce computational demands, we investigate the coreset selection problem for the training data of LLM heuristic learning. Few methods to learn the heuristic functions consider the interaction between the search algorithm and the machine learning model. In this work, we empirically disentangle the requirements of A* search algorithm from the requirements of the LLM to generalise on this task. Surprisingly, we find an overlap between their requirements; A* requires more accurate predictions on search nodes near the goal, and LLMs need the same set of nodes for effective generalisation. With these insights, we derive a data-selection distribution for learning LM-based heuristics. On three classical planning domains, maze navigation, Sokoban and sliding tile puzzles, our technique reduces the number of iterations required to find the solutions by up to 15x, with a wall-clock speed-up of search up to 5x. The code has been made available at https://github.com/devaansh100/a_star.
From Generation to Selection: Findings of Converting Analogical Problem-Solving into Multiple-Choice Questions
Authors: Donghyeon Shin, Seungpil Lee, Klea Lena Kovacec, Sundong Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: As artificial intelligence reasoning abilities gain prominence, generating reliable benchmarks becomes crucial. The Abstract and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) offers challenging problems yet unsolved by AI. While ARC effectively assesses reasoning, its generation-based evaluation overlooks other assessment aspects. Bloom`s Taxonomy suggests evaluating six cognitive stages: Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. To extend ARC`s focus beyond the \textitCreate stage, we developed MC-LARC, a multiple-choice format suitable for assessing stages like Understand and Apply in Large Language Models (LLMs). Our evaluation of ChatGPT4V`s analogical reasoning using MC-LARC confirmed that this format supports LLMs' reasoning capabilities and facilitates evidence analysis. However, we observed LLMs using shortcuts in MC-LARC tasks. To address this, we propose a self-feedback framework where LLMs identify issues and generate improved options. MC-LARC is available at https://mc-larc.github.io/.
What`s under the hood: Investigating Automatic Metrics on Meeting Summarization
Authors: Frederic Kirstein, Jan Philip Wahle, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Meeting summarization has become a critical task considering the increase in online interactions. Despite new techniques being proposed regularly, the evaluation of meeting summarization techniques relies on metrics not tailored to capture meeting-specific errors, leading to ineffective assessment. This paper explores what established automatic metrics capture and the errors they mask by correlating metric scores with human evaluations across a comprehensive error taxonomy. We start by reviewing the literature on English meeting summarization to identify key challenges, such as speaker dynamics and contextual turn-taking, and error types, including missing information and linguistic inaccuracy, concepts previously loosely defined in the field. We then examine the relationship between these challenges and errors using human annotated transcripts and summaries from encoder-decoder-based and autoregressive Transformer models on the QMSum dataset. Experiments reveal that different model architectures respond variably to the challenges, resulting in distinct links between challenges and errors. Current established metrics struggle to capture the observable errors, showing weak to moderate correlations, with a third of the correlations indicating error masking. Only a subset of metrics accurately reacts to specific errors, while most correlations show either unresponsiveness or failure to reflect the error`s impact on summary quality.
Self-Distillation for Model Stacking Unlocks Cross-Lingual NLU in 200+ Languages
Authors: Fabian David Schmidt, Philipp Borchert, Ivan Vulić, Goran Glavaš
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: LLMs have become a go-to solution not just for text generation, but also for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. Acquiring extensive knowledge through language modeling on web-scale corpora, they excel on English NLU, yet struggle to extend their NLU capabilities to underrepresented languages. In contrast, machine translation models (MT) produce excellent multilingual representations, resulting in strong translation performance even for low-resource languages. MT encoders, however, lack the knowledge necessary for comprehensive NLU that LLMs obtain through language modeling training on immense corpora. In this work, we get the best both worlds by integrating MT encoders directly into LLM backbones via sample-efficient self-distillation. The resulting MT-LLMs preserve the inherent multilingual representational alignment from the MT encoder, allowing lower-resource languages to tap into the rich knowledge embedded in English-centric LLMs. Merging the MT encoder and LLM in a single model, we mitigate the propagation of translation errors and inference overhead of MT decoding inherent to discrete translation-based cross-lingual transfer (e.g., translate-test). Evaluation spanning three prominent NLU tasks and 127 predominantly low-resource languages renders MT-LLMs highly effective in cross-lingual transfer. MT-LLMs substantially and consistently outperform translation-test based on the same MT model, showing that we truly unlock multilingual language understanding for LLMs.
CERD: A Comprehensive Chinese Rhetoric Dataset for Rhetorical Understanding and Generation in Essays
Authors: Nuowei Liu, Xinhao Chen, Hongyi Wu, Changzhi Sun, Man Lan, Yuanbin Wu, Xiaopeng Bai, Shaoguang Mao, Yan Xia
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024
An Empirical Study on Cross-lingual Vocabulary Adaptation for Efficient Language Model Inference
Authors: Atsuki Yamaguchi, Aline Villavicencio, Nikolaos Aletras
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: The development of state-of-the-art generative large language models (LLMs) disproportionately relies on English-centric tokenizers, vocabulary and pre-training data. Despite the fact that some LLMs have multilingual capabilities, recent studies have shown that their inference efficiency deteriorates when generating text in languages other than English. This results in increased inference time and costs. Cross-lingual vocabulary adaptation (CVA) methods have been proposed for adapting models to a target language aiming to improve downstream performance. However, the effectiveness of these methods on increasing inference efficiency of generative LLMs has yet to be explored. In this paper, we perform an empirical study of five CVA methods on four generative LLMs (including monolingual and multilingual models) across four typologically-diverse languages and four natural language understanding tasks. We find that CVA substantially contributes to LLM inference speedups of up to 271.5%. We also show that adapting LLMs that have been pre-trained on more balanced multilingual data results in downstream performance comparable to the original models.
AutoDetect: Towards a Unified Framework for Automated Weakness Detection in Large Language Models
Authors: Jiale Cheng, Yida Lu, Xiaotao Gu, Pei Ke, Xiao Liu, Yuxiao Dong, Hongning Wang, Jie Tang, Minlie Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly powerful, they still exhibit significant but subtle weaknesses, such as mistakes in instruction-following or coding tasks.As these unexpected errors could lead to severe consequences in practical deployments, it is crucial to investigate the limitations within LLMs systematically.Traditional benchmarking approaches cannot thoroughly pinpoint specific model deficiencies, while manual inspections are costly and not scalable. In this paper, we introduce a unified framework, AutoDetect, to automatically expose weaknesses in LLMs across various tasks. Inspired by the educational assessment process that measures students' learning outcomes, AutoDetect consists of three LLM-powered agents: Examiner, Questioner, and Assessor.The collaboration among these three agents is designed to realize comprehensive and in-depth weakness identification. Our framework demonstrates significant success in uncovering flaws, with an identification success rate exceeding 30% in prominent models such as ChatGPT and Claude.More importantly, these identified weaknesses can guide specific model improvements, proving more effective than untargeted data augmentation methods like Self-Instruct. Our approach has led to substantial enhancements in popular LLMs, including the Llama series and Mistral-7b, boosting their performance by over 10% across several benchmarks.Code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/thu-coai/AutoDetect.
BAPO: Base-Anchored Preference Optimization for Overcoming Forgetting in Large Language Models Personalization
Authors: Gihun Lee, Minchan Jeong, Yujin Kim, Hojung Jung, Jaehoon Oh, SangMook Kim, Se-Young Yun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: While learning to align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences has shown remarkable success, aligning these models to meet the diverse user preferences presents further challenges in preserving previous knowledge. This paper examines the impact of personalized preference optimization on LLMs, revealing that the extent of knowledge loss varies significantly with preference heterogeneity. Although previous approaches have utilized the KL constraint between the reference model and the policy model, we observe that they fail to maintain general knowledge and alignment when facing personalized preferences. To this end, we introduce Base-Anchored Preference Optimization (BAPO), a simple yet effective approach that utilizes the initial responses of reference model to mitigate forgetting while accommodating personalized alignment. BAPO effectively adapts to diverse user preferences while minimally affecting global knowledge or general alignment. Our experiments demonstrate the efficacy of BAPO in various setups.
Beyond Common Words: Enhancing ASR Cross-Lingual Proper Noun Recognition Using Large Language Models
Authors: Rishabh Kumar, Sabyasachi Ghosh, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: In this work, we address the challenge of cross-lingual proper noun recognition in automatic speech recognition (ASR), where proper nouns in an utterance may originate from a language different from the language in which the ASR system is trained. We enhance the performance of end-to-end ASR systems by instructing a large language model (LLM) to correct the ASR model`s predictions. The LLM`s context is augmented with a dictionary of cross-lingual words that are phonetically and graphemically similar to the potentially incorrect proper nouns in the ASR predictions. Our dictionary-based method DiP-ASR (Dictionary-based Prompting for Automatic Speech Recognition) significantly reduces word error rates compared to both the end-to-end ASR baseline and instruction-based prompting of the LLM without the dictionary across cross-lingual proper noun recognition tasks involving three secondary languages.
Few-shot clinical entity recognition in English, French and Spanish: masked language models outperform generative model prompting
Authors: Marco Naguib, Xavier Tannier, Aurélie Névéol
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have become the preferred solution for many natural language processing tasks. In low-resource environments such as specialized domains, their few-shot capabilities are expected to deliver high performance. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a critical task in information extraction that is not covered in recent LLM benchmarks. There is a need for better understanding the performance of LLMs for NER in a variety of settings including languages other than English. This study aims to evaluate generative LLMs, employed through prompt engineering, for few-shot clinical NER. We compare 13 auto-regressive models using prompting and 16 masked models using fine-tuning on 14 NER datasets covering English, French and Spanish. While prompt-based auto-regressive models achieve competitive F1 for general NER, they are outperformed within the clinical domain by lighter biLSTM-CRF taggers based on masked models. Additionally, masked models exhibit lower environmental impact compared to auto-regressive models. Findings are consistent across the three languages studied, which suggests that LLM prompting is not yet suited for NER production in the clinical domain.
STTATTS: Unified Speech-To-Text And Text-To-Speech Model
Authors: Hawau Olamide Toyin, Hao Li, Hanan Aldarmaki
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Speech recognition and speech synthesis models are typically trained separately, each with its own set of learning objectives, training data, and model parameters, resulting in two distinct large networks. We propose a parameter-efficient approach to learning ASR and TTS jointly via a multi-task learning objective and shared parameters. Our evaluation demonstrates thatthe performance of our multi-task model is comparable to that of individually trained models while significantly savingcomputational and memory costs (~50% reduction in the total number of parameters required for the two tasks combined). We experiment with English as a resource-rich language, and Arabic as a relatively low-resource language due to shortage of TTS data. Our models are trained with publicly available data, and both the training code and model checkpoints are openly available for further research.
From Text Segmentation to Enhanced Representation Learning: A Novel Approach to Multi-Label Classification for Long Texts
Authors: Wang Zhang, Xin Wang, Qian Wang, Tao Deng, Xiaoru Wu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Multi-label text classification (MLTC) is an important task in the field of natural language processing. Most existing models rely on high-quality text representations provided by pre-trained language models (PLMs). They hence face the challenge of input length limitation caused by PLMs, when dealing with long texts. In light of this, we introduce a comprehensive approach to multi-label long text classification. We propose a text segmentation algorithm, which guarantees to produce the optimal segmentation, to address the issue of input length limitation caused by PLMs. We incorporate external knowledge, labels' co-occurrence relations, and attention mechanisms in representation learning to enhance both text and label representations. Our method`s effectiveness is validated through extensive experiments on various MLTC datasets, unraveling the intricate correlations between texts and labels.
Learning from Imperfect Data: Towards Efficient Knowledge Distillation of Autoregressive Language Models for Text-to-SQL
Authors: Qihuang Zhong, Kunfeng Chen, Liang Ding, Juhua Liu, Bo Du, Dacheng Tao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in text-to-SQL, which involves translating natural language questions into SQL queries. However, current text-to-SQL LLMs are computationally expensive and challenging to deploy in real-world applications, highlighting the importance of compressing them. To achieve this goal, knowledge distillation (KD) is a common approach, which aims to distill the larger teacher model into a smaller student model. While numerous KD methods for autoregressive LLMs have emerged recently, it is still under-explored whether they work well in complex text-to-SQL scenarios. To this end, we conduct a series of analyses and reveal that these KD methods generally fall short in balancing performance and efficiency. In response to this problem, we propose to improve the KD with imperfect data, namely KID, which effectively boosts the performance without introducing much training budget. The core of KID is to efficiently mitigate the training-inference mismatch by simulating the cascading effect of inference in the imperfect training data. Extensive experiments on 5 text-to-SQL benchmarks show that, KID can not only achieve consistent and significant performance gains (up to +5.83% average score) across all model types and sizes, but also effectively improve the training efficiency.
ConU: Conformal Uncertainty in Large Language Models with Correctness Coverage Guarantees
Authors: Zhiyuan Wang, Jinhao Duan, Lu Cheng, Yue Zhang, Qingni Wang, Xiaoshuang Shi, Kaidi Xu, Heng Tao Shen, Xiaofeng Zhu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Uncertainty quantification (UQ) in natural language generation (NLG) tasks remains an open challenge, exacerbated by the closed-source nature of the latest large language models (LLMs). This study investigates applying conformal prediction (CP), which can transform any heuristic uncertainty notion into rigorous prediction sets, to black-box LLMs in open-ended NLG tasks. We introduce a novel uncertainty measure based on self-consistency theory, and then develop a conformal uncertainty criterion by integrating the uncertainty condition aligned with correctness into the CP algorithm. Empirical evaluations indicate that our uncertainty measure outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, we achieve strict control over the correctness coverage rate utilizing 7 popular LLMs on 4 free-form NLG datasets, spanning general-purpose and medical scenarios. Additionally, the calibrated prediction sets with small size further highlights the efficiency of our method in providing trustworthy guarantees for practical open-ended NLG applications.
Irrelevant Alternatives Bias Large Language Model Hiring Decisions
Authors: Kremena Valkanova, Pencho Yordanov
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: We investigate whether LLMs display a well-known human cognitive bias, the attraction effect, in hiring decisions. The attraction effect occurs when the presence of an inferior candidate makes a superior candidate more appealing, increasing the likelihood of the superior candidate being chosen over a non-dominated competitor. Our study finds consistent and significant evidence of the attraction effect in GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 when they assume the role of a recruiter. Irrelevant attributes of the decoy, such as its gender, further amplify the observed bias. GPT-4 exhibits greater bias variation than GPT-3.5. Our findings remain robust even when warnings against the decoy effect are included and the recruiter role definition is varied.
PclGPT: A Large Language Model for Patronizing and Condescending Language Detection
Authors: Hongbo Wang, LiMingDa LiMingDa, Junyu Lu, Hebin Xia, Liang Yang, Bo Xu, Ruizhu Liu, Hongfei Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Disclaimer: Samples in this paper may be harmful and cause discomfort! Patronizing and condescending language (PCL) is a form of speech directed at vulnerable groups. As an essential branch of toxic language, this type of language exacerbates conflicts and confrontations among Internet communities and detrimentally impacts disadvantaged groups. Traditional pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform poorly in detecting PCL due to its implicit toxicity traits like hypocrisy and false sympathy. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), we can harness their rich emotional semantics to establish a paradigm for exploring implicit toxicity. In this paper, we introduce PclGPT, a comprehensive LLM benchmark designed specifically for PCL. We collect, annotate, and integrate the Pcl-PT/SFT dataset, and then develop a bilingual PclGPT-EN/CN model group through a comprehensive pre-training and supervised fine-tuning staircase process to facilitate implicit toxic detection. Group detection results and fine-grained detection from PclGPT and other models reveal significant variations in the degree of bias in PCL towards different vulnerable groups, necessitating increased societal attention to protect them.
MultiAgent Collaboration Attack: Investigating Adversarial Attacks in Large Language Model Collaborations via Debate
Authors: Alfonso Amayuelas, Xianjun Yang, Antonis Antoniades, Wenyue Hua, Liangming Pan, William Yang Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown exceptional results on current benchmarks when working individually. The advancement in their capabilities, along with a reduction in parameter size and inference times, has facilitated the use of these models as agents, enabling interactions among multiple models to execute complex tasks. Such collaborations offer several advantages, including the use of specialized models (e.g. coding), improved confidence through multiple computations, and enhanced divergent thinking, leading to more diverse outputs. Thus, the collaborative use of language models is expected to grow significantly in the coming years. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of a network of models collaborating through debate under the influence of an adversary. We introduce pertinent metrics to assess the adversary`s effectiveness, focusing on system accuracy and model agreement. Our findings highlight the importance of a model`s persuasive ability in influencing others. Additionally, we explore inference-time methods to generate more compelling arguments and evaluate the potential of prompt-based mitigation as a defensive strategy.
CEAMC: Corpus and Empirical Study of Argument Analysis in Education via LLMs
Authors: Yupei Ren, Hongyi Wu, Zhaoguang Long, Shangqing Zhao, Xinyi Zhou, Zheqin Yin, Xinlin Zhuang, Xiaopeng Bai, Man Lan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper introduces the Chinese Essay Argument Mining Corpus (CEAMC), a manually annotated dataset designed for argument component classification on multiple levels of granularity. Existing argument component types in education remain simplistic and isolated, failing to encapsulate the complete argument information. Originating from authentic examination settings, CEAMC categorizes argument components into 4 coarse-grained and 10 fine-grained delineations, surpassing previous simple representations to capture the subtle nuances of argumentation in the real world, thus meeting the needs of complex and diverse argumentative scenarios. Our contributions include the development of CEAMC, the establishment of baselines for further research, and a thorough exploration of the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on CEAMC. The results indicate that our CEAMC can serve as a challenging benchmark for the development of argument analysis in education.
Ada-Instruct: Adapting Instruction Generators for Complex Reasoning
Authors: Wanyun Cui, Qianle Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Instructions augmentation is a crucial step for unleashing the full potential of large language models (LLMs) in downstream tasks. Existing Self-Instruct methods primarily simulate new instructions from a few initial instructions with in-context learning. However, our study identifies a critical flaw in this approach: even with GPT4o, it cannot generate complex instructions of length $\ge 100$, which is necessary in complex tasks such as code completion.To address this issue, our key insight is that fine-tuning open source LLMs with only \textitten examples can produce complex instructions that maintain distributional consistency for complex reasoning tasks. We introduce Ada-Instruct, an adaptive instruction generator developed through fine-tuning. We empirically validated Ada-Instruct`s efficacy across different applications. The results highlight Ada-Instruct`s capacity to generate long, intricate, and distributionally consistent instructions.
LINKAGE: Listwise Ranking among Varied-Quality References for Non-Factoid QA Evaluation via LLMs
Authors: Sihui Yang, Keping Bi, Wanqing Cui, Jiafeng Guo, Xueqi Cheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Non-Factoid (NF) Question Answering (QA) is challenging to evaluate due to diverse potential answers and no objective criterion. The commonly used automatic evaluation metrics like ROUGE or BERTScore cannot accurately measure semantic similarities or answers from different perspectives. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been resorted to for NFQA evaluation due to their compelling performance on various NLP tasks. Common approaches include pointwise scoring of each candidate answer and pairwise comparisons between answers. Inspired by the evolution from pointwise to pairwise to listwise in learning-to-rank methods, we propose a novel listwise NFQA evaluation approach, that utilizes LLMs to rank candidate answers in a list of reference answers sorted by descending quality. Moreover, for NF questions that do not have multi-grade or any golden answers, we leverage LLMs to generate the reference answer list of various quality to facilitate the listwise evaluation. Extensive experimental results on three NFQA datasets, i.e., ANTIQUE, the TREC-DL-NF, and WebGLM show that our method has significantly higher correlations with human annotations compared to automatic scores and common pointwise and pairwise approaches.
Breaking Language Barriers in Multilingual Mathematical Reasoning: Insights and Observations
Authors: Nuo Chen, Zinan Zheng, Ning Wu, Ming Gong, Dongmei Zhang, Jia Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Existing research predominantly focuses on developing powerful large language models (LLMs) for mathematical reasoning within monolingual languages, with few explorations in preserving efficacy in a multilingual context. To bridge this gap, this paper pioneers exploring and training powerful Multilingual Math Reasoning (xMR) LLMs. Firstly, by utilizing translation, we construct the first multilingual math reasoning instruction dataset, **MGSM8KInstruct**, encompassing ten distinct languages, thus addressing the issue of training data scarcity in xMR tasks. Based on the collected dataset, we propose different training strategies to build powerful xMR LLMs, named MathOctopus, notably outperform conventional open-source LLMs and exhibit superiority over ChatGPT in few-shot scenarios. Notably, MathOctopus-13B reaches 47.6% accuracy which exceeds ChatGPT 46.3% on MGSM testset. Beyond remarkable results, we unearth several pivotal observations and insights: (1) When extending the rejection sampling strategy to the multilingual context, it proves effective for model performances, albeit limited. (2) Employing parallel corpora for math Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) across multiple languages not only significantly enhances model performance multilingually but also elevates their monolingual performance. This indicates that crafting multilingual corpora can be regarded as a vital strategy for enhancing model performance in a specific language, especially in mathematical reasoning tasks. For instance, MathOctopus-7B improves its counterparts that trained on English from 42.4% to 50.8% on the GSM8K test set.
SynthEval: Hybrid Behavioral Testing of NLP Models with Synthetic CheckLists
Authors: Raoyuan Zhao, Abdullatif Köksal, Yihong Liu, Leonie Weissweiler, Anna Korhonen, Hinrich Schuetze
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Traditional benchmarking in NLP typically involves using static, held-out test sets and calculating aggregated statistics based on diverse examples. However, this approach often results in an overestimation of performance and lacks the ability to offer comprehensive, interpretable, and dynamic assessments of NLP models. Recently, works like DynaBench and Checklist have addressed these limitations through behavioral testing of NLP models with test types generated by a multi-step human-annotated pipeline. Unfortunately, manually creating a variety of test types requires significant human labor, thus weakening efficiency. In this work, we propose SynthEval, a hybrid behavioral testing framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to generate a wide range of test types for a comprehensive evaluation of NLP models. The SynthEval framework first generates sentences via LLMs using controlled generation, and then identifies challenging examples by comparing the predictions made by LLMs with task-specific NLP models. In the last stage, human experts investigate the challenging examples, manually design templates, and identify the types of failures the task-specific models consistently exhibit. We apply SynthEval to two classification tasks and show that our framework is effective in identifying weaknesses of strong models on these tasks.
TurkishMMLU: Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding in Turkish
Authors: Arda Yüksel, Abdullatif Köksal, Lütfi Kerem Senel, Anna Korhonen, Hinrich Schuetze
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Multiple choice question answering tasks evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and mathematical abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing benchmarks employ automatic translation for multilingual evaluation, this approach is error-prone and potentially introduces culturally biased questions, especially in social sciences. We introduce the first multitask, multiple-choice Turkish QA benchmark, TurkishMMLU, to evaluate LLMs' understanding of the Turkish language. TurkishMMLU includes over 10,000 questions, covering 9 different subjects from Turkish high-school education curricula. These questions are written by curriculum experts, suitable for the high-school curricula in Turkey, covering subjects ranging from natural sciences and math questions to more culturally representative topics such as Turkish Literature and the history of the Turkish Republic. We evaluate over 20 LLMs, including multilingual open-source (e.g., Gemma, Llama, MT5), closed-source (GPT 4o, Claude, Gemini), and Turkish-adapted (e.g., Trendyol) models. We provide an extensive evaluation, including zero-shot and few-shot evaluation of LLMs, chain-of-thought reasoning, and question difficulty analysis along with model performance. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Turkish capabilities and limitations of current LLMs to provide insights for future LLMs for the Turkish language. We publicly release our code for the dataset and evaluation: https://github.com/ArdaYueksel/TurkishMMLU
LongForm: Effective Instruction Tuning with Reverse Instructions
Authors: Abdullatif Köksal, Timo Schick, Anna Korhonen, Hinrich Schuetze
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024 (Findings Track), 2024

Abstract: Instruction tuning enables language models to more effectively generalize and better follow user intent. However, obtaining instruction data is costly and challenging. Prior work employs methods such as expensive human annotation, crowd-sourced datasets with alignment issues, and generating noisy examples via LLMs. We introduce the LongForm-C dataset, which is created by reverse instructions. We generate instructions via LLMs for human-written corpus examples using reverse instructions. First we select a diverse set of human-written documents from corpora such as C4 and Wikipedia; then we generate instructions for these documents via LLMs. This approach provides a cheaper and cleaner instruction-tuning dataset with natural output and one suitable for long text generation. Our models outperform 10x larger language models without instruction tuning on tasks such as story/recipe generation and long-form question answering. Moreover, LongForm models outperform prior instruction-tuned models such as FLAN-T5 and Alpaca by a large margin, and improve language understanding capabilities further. We publicly release our data and models: [Anonymized-URL].