mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Learning to Compose Representations of Different Encoder Layers towards Improving Compositional Generalization
Authors: Lei Lin, Shuangtao Li, Yafang Zheng, Biao Fu, Shan Liu, Yidong Chen, Xiaodong Shi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models struggle with compositional generalization (CG), i.e., the ability to systematically generalize to unseen compositions of seen components. There is mounting evidence that one of the reasons hindering CG is the representation of the encoder uppermost layer is entangled, i.e., the syntactic and semantic representations of sequences are entangled. However, we consider that the previously identified representation entanglement problem is not comprehensive enough. Additionally, we hypothesize that the source keys and values representations passing into different decoder layers are also entangled. Starting from this intuition, we propose CompoSition (\textbfCompose \textbfSyntactic and Semant\textbfic Representa\textbftions), an extension to seq2seq models which learns to compose representations of different encoder layers dynamically for different tasks, since recent studies reveal that the bottom layers of the Transformer encoder contain more syntactic information and the top ones contain more semantic information. Specifically, we introduce a \textitcomposed layer between the encoder and decoder to compose different encoder layers' representations to generate specific keys and values passing into different decoder layers. CompoSition achieves competitive results on two comprehensive and realistic benchmarks, which empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposal. Codes are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/thinkaboutzero/COMPOSITION.
SelectNoise: Unsupervised Noise Injection to Enable Zero-Shot Machine Translation for Extremely Low-resource Languages
Authors: Maharaj Brahma, Kaushal Maurya, Maunendra Desarkar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this work, we focus on the task of machine translation (MT) from extremely low-resource language (ELRLs) to English. The unavailability of parallel data, lack of representation from large multilingual pre-trained models, and limited monolingual data hinder the development of MT systems for ELRLs. However, many ELRLs often share lexical similarities with high-resource languages (HRLs) due to factors such as dialectical variations, geographical proximity, and language structure. We utilize this property to improve cross-lingual signals from closely related HRL to enable MT for ELRLs. Specifically, we propose a novel unsupervised approach, $\textitSelectNoise$, based on $\textitselective candidate extraction$ and $\textitnoise injection$ to generate noisy HRLs training data. The noise injection acts as a regularizer, and the model trained with noisy data learns to handle lexical variations such as spelling, grammar, and vocabulary changes, leading to improved cross-lingual transfer to ELRLs. The selective candidates are extracted using BPE merge operations and edit operations, and noise injection is performed using greedy, top-p, and top-k sampling strategies. We evaluate the proposed model on 12 ELRLs from the FLORES-200 benchmark in a zero-shot setting across two language families. The proposed model outperformed all the strong baselines, demonstrating its efficacy. It has comparable performance with the supervised noise injection model. Our code and model are publicly available.
Breaking Boundaries in Retrieval Systems: Unsupervised Domain Adaptation with Denoise-Finetuning
Authors: Che Chen, Ching-Wen Yang, Chun-Yi Lin, Hung-Yu Kao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Dense retrieval models have exhibited remarkable effectiveness, but they rely on abundant labeled data and face challenges when applied to different domains. Previous domain adaptation methods have employed generative models to generate pseudo queries, creating pseudo datasets to enhance the performance of dense retrieval models. However, these approaches typically use unadapted rerank models, leading to potentially imprecise labels. In this paper, we demonstrate the significance of adapting the rerank model to the target domain prior to utilizing it for label generation. This adaptation process enables us to obtain more accurate labels, thereby improving the overall performance of the dense retrieval model. Additionally, by combining the adapted retrieval model with the adapted rerank model, we achieve significantly better domain adaptation results across three retrieval datasets. We release our code for future research.
Exploring the Cognitive Knowledge Structure of Large Language Models: An Educational Diagnostic Assessment Approach
Authors: Zheyuan Zhang, Jifan Yu, Juanzi Li, Lei Hou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have not only exhibited exceptional performance across various tasks, but also demonstrated sparks of intelligence. Recent studies have focused on assessing their capabilities on human exams and revealed their impressive competence in different domains. However, cognitive research on the overall knowledge structure of LLMs is still lacking. In this paper, based on educational diagnostic assessment method, we conduct an evaluation using MoocRadar, a meticulously annotated human test dataset based on Bloom Taxonomy. We aim to reveal the knowledge structures of LLMs and gain insights of their cognitive capabilities. This research emphasizes the significance of investigating LLMs' knowledge and understanding the disparate cognitive patterns of LLMs. By shedding light on models' knowledge, researchers can advance development and utilization of LLMs in a more informed and effective manner.
Simpler neural networks prefer subregular languages
Authors: Charles Torres, Richard Futrell
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We apply a continuous relaxation of $L_0$ regularization (Louizos et al., 2017), which induces sparsity, to study the inductive biases of LSTMs. In particular, we are interested in the patterns of formal languages which are readily learned and expressed by LSTMs. Across a wide range of tests we find sparse LSTMs prefer subregular languages over regular languages and the strength of this preference increases as we increase the pressure for sparsity. Furthermore LSTMs which are trained on subregular languages have fewer non-zero parameters. We conjecture that this subregular bias in LSTMs is related to the cognitive bias for subregular language observed in human phonology which are both downstream of a simplicity bias in a suitable description language.
Simple Hardware-Efficient PCFGs with Independent Left and Right Productions
Authors: Wei Liu, Songlin Yang, Yoon Kim, Kewei Tu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Scaling dense PCFGs to thousands of nonterminals via low-rank parameterizations of the rule probability tensor has been shown to be beneficial for unsupervised parsing. However, PCFGs scaled this way still perform poorly as a language model, and even underperform similarly-sized HMMs. This work introduces $\emphSimplePCFG$, a simple PCFG formalism with independent left and right productions. Despite imposing a stronger independence assumption than the low-rank approach, we find that this formalism scales more effectively both as a language model and as an unsupervised parser. We further introduce $\emphFlashInside$, a hardware IO-aware implementation of the inside algorithm for efficiently scaling simple PCFGs. Through extensive experiments on multiple grammar induction benchmarks, we validate the effectiveness of simple PCFGs over low-rank baselines.
R$^3$ Prompting: Review, Rephrase and Resolve for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in Large Language Models under Noisy Context
Authors: Qingyuan Tian, Hanlun Zhu, Lei Wang, Yang Li, Yunshi Lan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the help of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various reasoning tasks. However, most of them have been evaluated under noise-free context and the dilemma for LLMs to produce inaccurate results under the noisy context has not been fully investigated. Existing studies utilize trigger sentences to encourage LLMs to concentrate on the relevant information but the trigger has limited effect on final answer prediction. Inspired by interactive CoT method, where intermediate reasoning steps are promoted by multiple rounds of interaction between users and LLMs, we propose a novel prompting method, namely R$^3$ prompting, for CoT reasoning under noisy context. Specifically, R$^3$ prompting interacts with LLMs to perform key sentence extraction, variable declaration and answer prediction, which corresponds to a thought process of reviewing, rephrasing and resolving. The responses generated at the last interaction will perform as hints to guide toward the responses of the next interaction. Our experiments show that R$^3$ prompting significantly outperforms existing CoT prompting methods on five reasoning tasks under noisy context. With GPT-3.5-turbo, we observe 3.7% accuracy improvement on average on the reasoning tasks under noisy context compared to the most competitive prompting baseline. More analyses and ablation studies show the robustness and generalization of R$^3$ prompting method in solving reasoning tasks in LLMs under noisy context.
Quality Estimation-Assisted Automatic Post-Editing
Authors: Sourabh Deoghare, Diptesh Kanojia, Fred Blain, Tharindu Ranasinghe, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Automatic Post-Editing (APE) systems are prone to over-correction of the Machine Translation (MT) outputs. While Word-level Quality Estimation (QE) system can provide a way to curtail the over-correction, a significant performance gain has not been observed thus far by utilizing existing APE and QE combination strategies. In this paper, we propose joint training of a model on APE and QE tasks to improve the APE. Our proposed approach utilizes a multi-task learning (MTL) methodology, which shows significant improvement while treating both tasks as a \textquoteleftbargaining game' during training. Moreover, we investigate various existing combination strategies and show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance for a \textquoteleftdistant' language pair, viz., English-Marathi. We observe an improvement of 1.09 TER and 1.37 BLEU points over a baseline QE-Unassisted APE system for English-Marathi, while also observing 0.46 TER and 0.62 BLEU points for English-German. Further, we discuss the results qualitatively and show how our approach helps reduce over-correction, thereby improving the APE performance. We also observe that the degree of integration between QE and APE directly correlates with the APE performance gain. We release our code and models publicly.
Adapter Pruning using Tropical Characterization
Authors: Rishabh Bhardwaj, Tushar Vaidya, Soujanya Poria
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Adapters are widely popular parameter-efficient transfer learning approaches in natural language processing that insert trainable modules in between layers of a pre-trained language model. Apart from several heuristics, however, there has been a lack of studies analyzing the optimal number of adapter parameters needed for downstream applications. Thus, we propose an adapter pruning approach by studying the tropical characteristics of trainable modules. We cast it as an optimization problem that aims to prune parameters from the adapter layers without changing the orientation of underlying tropical hypersurfaces. Our experiments on five NLP datasets show that tropical geometry tends to identify more relevant parameters to prune when compared with the magnitude-based baseline, while a combined approach works best across the tasks.
Self-Supervised Rule Learning to Link Text Segments to Relational Elements of Structured Knowledge
Authors: Shajith Ikbal, Udit Sharma, Hima Karanam, Sumit Neelam, Ronny Luss, Dheeraj Sreedhar, Pavan Kapanipathi, Naweed Khan, Kyle Erwin, Ndivhuwo Makondo, Ibrahim Abdelaziz, Achille Fokoue, Alexander Gray, Maxwell Crouse, Subhajit Chaudhury, Chitra Subramanian
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a neuro-symbolic approach to self-learn rules that serve as interpretable knowledge to perform relation linking in knowledge base question answering systems. These rules define natural language text predicates as a weighted mixture of knowledge base paths. The weights learned during training effectively serve the mapping needed to perform relation linking. We use popular masked training strategy to self-learn the rules. A key distinguishing aspect of our work is that the masked training operate over logical forms of the sentence instead of their natural language text form. This offers opportunity to extract extended context information from the structured knowledge source and use that to build robust and human readable rules. We evaluate accuracy and usefulness of such learned rules by utilizing them for prediction of missing kinship relation in CLUTRR dataset and relation linking in a KBQA system using SWQ-WD dataset. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach - its generalizability, interpretability and ability to achieve an average performance gain of 17% on CLUTRR dataset.
TaTA: A Multilingual Table-to-Text Dataset for African Languages
Authors: Sebastian Gehrmann, Sebastian Ruder, Vitaly Nikolaev, Jan Botha, Michael Chavinda, Ankur Parikh, Clara Rivera
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing data-to-text generation datasets are mostly limited to English. To address this lack of data, we create Table-to-Text in African languages (TaTA), the first large multilingual table-to-text dataset with a focus on African languages. We created TaTA by transcribing figures and accompanying text in bilingual reports by the Demographic and Health Surveys Program, followed by professional translation to make the dataset fully parallel. TaTA includes 8,700 examples in nine languages including four African languages (Hausa, Igbo, Swahili, and Yorùbá) and a zero-shot test language (Russian). We additionally release screenshots of the original figures for future research on multilingual multi-modal approaches. Through an in-depth human evaluation, we show that TaTA is challenging for current models and that less than half the outputs from an mT5-XXL-based model are understandable and attributable to the source data. Our results highlight a) the need for validating metrics; and b) the importance of domain-specific metrics.
Explain-then-translate: an analysis on improving program translation with self-generated explanations
Authors: Zilu Tang, Mayank Agarwal, Alexander Shypula, Bailin Wang, Derry Wijaya, Jie Chen, Yoon Kim
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This work explores the use of self-generated natural language explanations as an intermediate step for code-to-code translation with language models. Across three types of explanations and 19 programming languages constructed from the MultiPL-E dataset, we find the explanations to be particularly effective in the zero-shot case, improving performance by 12% on average. Improvements with natural language explanations are particularly pronounced on difficult programs. We release our dataset, code, and canonical solutions in all 19 languages.
Can Brain Signals Reveal Inner Alignment with Human Languages?
Authors: Jielin Qiu, William Han, Jiacheng Zhu, Mengdi Xu, Douglas Weber, Bo Li, Ding Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Brain Signals, such as Electroencephalography (EEG), and human languages have been widely explored independently for many downstream tasks, however, the connection between them has not been well explored. In this study, we explore the relationship and dependency between EEG and language. To study at the representation level, we introduced \textbfMTAM, a \textbfMultimodal \textbfTransformer \textbfAlignment \textbfModel, to observe coordinated representations between the two modalities. We used various relationship alignment-seeking techniques, such as Canonical Correlation Analysis and Wasserstein Distance, as loss functions to transfigure features. On downstream applications, sentiment analysis and relation detection, we achieved new state-of-the-art results on two datasets, ZuCo and K-EmoCon. Our method achieved an F1-score improvement of 1.7% on K-EmoCon and 9.3% on Zuco datasets for sentiment analysis, and 7.4% on ZuCo for relation detection. In addition, we provide interpretations of the performance improvement: (1) feature distribution shows the effectiveness of the alignment module for discovering and encoding the relationship between EEG and language; (2) alignment weights show the influence of different language semantics as well as EEG frequency features; (3) brain topographical maps provide an intuitive demonstration of the connectivity in the brain regions. Our code is available at r̆lhttps://github.com/Jason-Qiu/EEG_Language_Alignment.
DemoSG: Demonstration-enhanced Schema-guided Generation for Low-resource Event Extraction
Authors: Gang Zhao, Xiaocheng Gong, Xinjie Yang, Guanting Dong, Shudong Lu, Si Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Most current Event Extraction (EE) methods focus on the high-resource scenario, which requires a large amount of annotated data and can hardly be applied to low-resource domains. To address EE more effectively with limited resources, we propose the Demonstration-enhanced Schema-guided Generation (DemoSG) model, which benefits low-resource EE from two aspects: Firstly, we propose the demonstration-based learning paradigm for EE to fully use the annotated data, which transforms them into demonstrations to illustrate the extraction process and help the model learn effectively. Secondly, we formulate EE as a natural language generation task guided by schema-based prompts, thereby leveraging label semantics and promoting knowledge transfer in low-resource scenarios. We conduct extensive experiments under in-domain and domain adaptation low-resource settings on three datasets, and study the robustness of DemoSG. The results show that DemoSG significantly outperforms current methods in low-resource scenarios.
GLGR: Question-aware Global-to-Local Graph Reasoning for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension
Authors: Yanling Li, Bowei Zou, Yifan Fan, Xibo Li, Ai Ti Aw, Yu Hong
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Graph reasoning contributes to the integration of discretely-distributed attentive information (clues) for Multi-party Dialogue Reading Comprehension (MDRC). This is attributed primarily to multi-hop reasoning over global conversational structures. However, existing approaches barely apply questions for anti-noise graph reasoning. More seriously, the local semantic structures in utterances are neglected, although they are beneficial for bridging across semantically-related clues. In this paper, we propose a question-aware global-to-local graph reasoning approach. It expands the canonical Interlocutor-Utterance graph by introducing a question node, enabling comprehensive global graph reasoning. More importantly, it constructs a semantic-role graph for each utterance, and accordingly performs local graph reasoning conditioned on the semantic relations. We design a two-stage encoder network to implement the progressive reasoning from the global graph to local. The experiments on the benchmark datasets Molweni and FriendsQA show that our approach yields significant improvements, compared to BERT and ELECTRA baselines. It achieves 73.6% and 77.2% F1-scores on Molweni and FriendsQA, respectively, outperforming state-of-the-art methods that employ different pretrained language models as backbones.
Towards Mitigating LLM Hallucination via Self Reflection
Authors: Ziwei Ji, Tiezheng Yu, Yan Xu, Nayeon Lee, Etsuko Ishii, Pascale Fung
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for generative and knowledge-intensive tasks including question-answering (QA) tasks. However, the practical deployment still faces challenges, notably the issue of “hallucination”, where models generate plausible-sounding but unfaithful or nonsensical information. This issue becomes particularly critical in the medical domain due to the uncommon professional concepts and potential social risks involved. This paper analyses the phenomenon of hallucination in medical generative QA systems using widely adopted LLMs and datasets. Our investigation centers on the identification and comprehension of common problematic answers, with a specific emphasis on hallucination. To tackle this challenge, we present an interactive self-reflection methodology that incorporates knowledge acquisition and answer generation. Through this feedback process, our approach steadily enhances the factuality, consistency, and entailment of the generated answers. Consequently, we harness the interactivity and multitasking ability of LLMs and produce progressively more precise and accurate answers. Experimental results on both automatic and human evaluation demonstrate the superiority of our approach in hallucination reduction compared to baselines.
Making Body Movement in Sign Language Corpus Accessible for Linguists and Machines with Three-Dimensional Normalization of MediaPipe
Authors: Victor Skobov, Mayumi Bono
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Linguists can access movement in the sign language video corpus through manual annotation or computational methods. The first relies on a predefinition of features, and the second requires technical knowledge. Methods like MediaPipe and OpenPose are now more often used in sign language processing. MediaPipe detects a two-dimensional (2D) body pose in a single image with a limited approximation of the depth coordinate. Such 2D projection of a three-dimensional (3D) body pose limits the potential application of the resulting models outside the capturing camera settings and position. 2D pose data does not provide linguists with direct and human-readable access to the collected movement data. We propose our four main contributions: A novel 3D normalization method for MediaPipe`s 2D pose, a novel human-readable way of representing the 3D normalized pose data, an analysis of Japanese Sign Language (JSL) sociolinguistic features using the proposed techniques, where we show how an individual signer can be identified based on unique personal movement patterns suggesting a potential threat to anonymity. Our method outperforms the common 2D normalization on a small, diverse JSL dataset. We demonstrate its benefit for deep learning approaches by significantly outperforming the pose-based state-of-the-art models on the open sign language recognition benchmark.
XTREME-UP: A User-Centric Scarce-Data Benchmark for Under-Represented Languages
Authors: Sebastian Ruder, Jonathan H. Clark, Alexander Gutkin, Mihir Kale, Min Ma, Massimo Nicosia, Shruti Rijhwani, Parker Riley, Jean-Michel A- Sarr, Xinyi Wang, John Wieting, Nitish Gupta, Anna Katanova, Christo Kirov, Dana L. Dickinson, Brian Roark, Bidisha Samanta, Connie Tao, David I. Adelani, Vera Axelrod, Isaac Caswell, Colin Cherry, Dan Garrette, Reeve Ingle, Melvin Johnson, Dmitry Panteleev, Partha Talukdar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Data scarcity is a crucial issue for the development of highly multilingual NLP systems. Yet for many under-represented languages (ULs) --- languages for which NLP research is particularly far behind in meeting user needs --- it is feasible to annotate small amounts of data. Motivated by this, we propose XTREME-UP, a benchmark defined by: its focus on the scarce-data scenario rather than zero-shot; its focus on user-centric tasks --- tasks with broad adoption by speakers of high-resource languages; and its focus on under-represented languages where this scarce-data scenario tends to be most realistic. XTREME-UP evaluates the capabilities of language models across 88 under-represented languages over 9 key user-centric technologies including ASR, OCR, MT, and information access tasks that are of general utility. We create new datasets for OCR, autocomplete, semantic parsing, and transliteration, and build on and refine existing datasets for other tasks. XTREME-UP provides methodology for evaluating many modeling scenarios including text only, multi-modal (vision, audio, and text), supervised parameter tuning, and in-context learning. We evaluate commonly used models on the benchmark. We release all code and scripts to train and evaluate models.
DiffuVST: Narrating Fictional Scenes with Global-History-Guided Denoising Models
Authors: Shengguang Wu, Mei Yuan, Qi Su
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent advances in image and video creation, especially AI-based image synthesis, have led to the production of numerous visual scenes that exhibit a high level of abstractness and diversity. Consequently, Visual Storytelling (VST), a task that involves generating meaningful and coherent narratives from a collection of images, has become even more challenging and is increasingly desired beyond real-world imagery. While existing VST techniques, which typically use autoregressive decoders, have made significant progress, they suffer from low inference speed and are not well-suited for synthetic scenes. To this end, we propose a novel diffusion-based system DiffuVST, which models the generation of a series of visual descriptions as a single conditional denoising process. The stochastic and non-autoregressive nature of DiffuVST at inference time allows it to generate highly diverse narratives more efficiently. In addition, DiffuVST features a unique design with bi-directional text history guidance and multimodal adapter modules, which effectively improve inter-sentence coherence and image-to-text fidelity. Extensive experiments on the story generation task covering four fictional visual-story datasets demonstrate the superiority of DiffuVST over traditional autoregressive models in terms of both text quality and inference speed.
DiFair: A Benchmark for Disentangled Assessment of Gender Knowledge and Bias
Authors: Mahdi Zakizadeh, Kaveh Miandoab, Mohammad Pilehvar
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Numerous debiasing techniques have been proposed to mitigate the gender bias that is prevalent in pretrained language models. These are often evaluated on datasets that check the extent to which the model is gender-neutral in its predictions. Importantly, this evaluation protocol overlooks the possible adverse impact of bias mitigation on useful gender knowledge. To fill this gap, we propose **DiFair**, a manually curated dataset based on masked language modeling objectives. **DiFair** allows us to introduce a unified metric, *gender invariance score*, that not only quantifies a model`s biased behavior, but also checks if useful gender knowledge is preserved. We use **DiFair** as a benchmark for a number of widely-used pretained language models and debiasing techniques. Experimental results corroborate previous findings on the existing gender biases, while also demonstrating that although debiasing techniques ameliorate the issue of gender bias, this improvement usually comes at the price of lowering useful gender knowledge of the model.
Transformer-Based Language Model Surprisal Predicts Human Reading Times Best with About Two Billion Training Tokens
Authors: Byung-Doh Oh, William Schuler
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent psycholinguistic studies have drawn conflicting conclusions about the relationship between the quality of a language model and the ability of its surprisal estimates to predict human reading times, which has been speculated to be due to the large gap in both the amount of training data and model capacity across studies. The current work aims to consolidate these findings by evaluating surprisal estimates from Transformer-based language model variants that vary systematically in the amount of training data and model capacity on their ability to predict human reading times. The results show that surprisal estimates from most variants with contemporary model capacities provide the best fit after seeing about two billion training tokens, after which they begin to diverge from humanlike expectations. Additionally, newly-trained smaller model variants reveal a \textquotelefttipping point' at convergence, after which the decrease in language model perplexity begins to result in poorer fits to human reading times. These results suggest that the massive amount of training data is mainly responsible for the poorer fit achieved by surprisal from larger pre-trained language models, and that a certain degree of model capacity is necessary for Transformer-based language models to capture humanlike expectations.
ExplainCPE: A Free-text Explanation Benchmark of Chinese Pharmacist Examination
Authors: Dongfang Li, Jindi Yu, Baotian Hu, Zhenran Xu, Min Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In the field of Large Language Models (LLMs), researchers are increasingly exploring their effectiveness across a wide range of tasks. However, a critical area that requires further investigation is the interpretability of these models, particularly the ability to generate rational explanations for their decisions. Most existing explanation datasets are limited to the English language and the general domain, which leads to a scarcity of linguistic diversity and a lack of resources in specialized domains, such as medical. To mitigate this, we propose ExplainCPE, a challenging medical dataset consisting of over 7K problems from Chinese Pharmacist Examination, specifically tailored to assess the model-generated explanations. From the overall results, only GPT-4 passes the pharmacist examination with a 75.7% accuracy, while other models like ChatGPT fail. Further detailed analysis of LLM-generated explanations reveals the limitations of LLMs in understanding medical text and executing computational reasoning. With the increasing importance of AI safety and trustworthiness, ExplainCPE takes a step towards improving and evaluating the interpretability of LLMs in the medical domain.
CLASS: A Design Framework for Building Intelligent Tutoring Systems Based on Learning Science principles
Authors: Shashank Sonkar, Naiming Liu, Debshila Mallick, Richard Baraniuk
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present a design framework called Conversational Learning with Analytical Step-by-Step Strategies (CLASS) for building advanced Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITS) powered by high-performance Large Language Models (LLMs). The CLASS framework empowers ITS with two key capabilities. First, through a carefully curated scaffolding dataset, CLASS equips ITS with essential problem-solving strategies, enabling it to provide tutor-like, step-by-step guidance to students. Second, by using a dynamic conversational dataset, CLASS assists ITS in facilitating natural language interactions, fostering engaging student-tutor conversations. The CLASS framework also provides valuable insights into ITS`s internal decision-making process which allows seamless integration of user feedback, thus enabling continuous refinement and improvement. We also present a proof-of-concept ITS, referred to as SPOCK, which is trained using the CLASS framework with a focus on introductory college level biology content. A carefully constructed protocol was developed for SPOCK`s preliminary evaluation, examining aspects such as the factual accuracy and relevance of its responses. Experts in the field of biology offered favorable remarks, particularly highlighting SPOCK`s capability to break down questions into manageable subproblems and provide encouraging responses to students.
Normal-Abnormal Decoupling Memory for Medical Report Generation
Authors: Guosheng Zhao, Yan Yan, Zijian Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The automatic generation of medical reports plays a crucial role in clinical automation. In contrast to natural images, radiological images exhibit a high degree of similarity, while medical data are prone to data bias and complex noise, posing challenges for existing methods in capturing nuanced visual information. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel normal-abnormal semantic decoupling network that utilizes abnormal pattern memory. Different from directly optimizing the network using medical reports, we optimize visual extraction through the extraction of abnormal semantics from the reports. Moreover, we independently learn normal semantics based on abnormal semantics, ensuring that the optimization of the visual network remains unaffected by normal semantics learning. Then, we divided the words in the report into four parts: normal/abnormal sentences and normal/abnormal semantics, optimizing the network with distinct weights for each partition. The two semantic components, along with visual information, are seamlessly integrated to facilitate the generation of precise and coherent reports. This approach mitigates the impact of noisy normal semantics and reports. Moreover, we develop a novel encoder for abnormal pattern memory, which improves the network`s ability to detect anomalies by capturing and embedding the abnormal patterns of images in the visual encoder. This approach demonstrates excellent performance on the benchmark MIMIC-CXR, surpassing the current state-of-the-art methods.
mmT5: Modular Multilingual Pre-Training Solves Source Language Hallucinations
Authors: Jonas Pfeiffer, Francesco Piccinno, Massimo Nicosia, Xinyi Wang, Machel Reid, Sebastian Ruder
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Multilingual sequence-to-sequence models perform poorly with increased language coverage and fail to consistently generate text in the correct target language in few-shot settings. To address these challenges, we propose mmT5, a modular multilingual sequence-to-sequence model. mmT5 utilizes language-specific modules during pre-training, which disentangle language-specific information from language-agnostic information. We identify representation drift during fine-tuning as a key limitation of modular generative models and develop strategies that enable effective zero-shot transfer. Our model outperforms mT5 at the same parameter sizes by a large margin on representative natural language understanding and generation tasks in 40+ languages. Compared to mT5, mmT5 raises the rate of generating text in the correct language under zero-shot settings from 7% to 99%, thereby greatly alleviating the source language hallucination problem.
ImageNetVC: Zero- and Few-Shot Visual Commonsense Evaluation on 1000 ImageNet Categories
Authors: Heming Xia, Qingxiu Dong, Lei Li, Jingjing Xu, Tianyu Liu, Ziwei Qin, Zhifang Sui
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been serving as general-purpose interfaces, posing a significant demand for comprehensive visual knowledge. However, it remains unclear how well current LLMs and their visually augmented counterparts (VaLMs) can master visual commonsense knowledge. To investigate this, we propose ImageNetVC, a human-annotated dataset specifically designed for zero- and few-shot visual commonsense evaluation across 1,000 ImageNet categories. Utilizing ImageNetVC, we benchmark the fundamental visual commonsense knowledge of both unimodal LLMs and VaLMs. Furthermore, we analyze the factors affecting the visual commonsense knowledge of large-scale models, providing insights into the development of language models enriched with visual commonsense knowledge. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/hemingkx/ImageNetVC.
MultiCoNER v2: a Large Multilingual dataset for Fine-grained and Noisy Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Besnik Fetahu, Zhiyu Chen, Sudipta Kar, Oleg Rokhlenko, Shervin Malmasi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We present MULTICONER V2, a dataset for fine-grained Named Entity Recognition covering 33 entity classes across 12 languages, in both monolingual and multilingual settings. This dataset aims to tackle the following practical challenges in NER: (i) effective handling of fine-grained classes that include complex entities like movie titles, and (ii) performance degradation due to noise generated from typing mistakes or OCR errors. The dataset is compiled from open resources like Wikipedia and Wikidata, and is publicly available. Evaluation based on the XLM-RoBERTa baseline highlights the unique challenges posed by MULTICONER V2: (i) the fine-grained taxonomy is challenging, where the scores are low with macro-F1=0.63 (across all languages), and (ii) the corruption strategy significantly impairs performance, with entity corruption resulting in 9% lower performance relative to non-entity corruptions across all languages. This highlights the greater impact of entity noise in contrast to context noise.
A Query-Parallel Machine Reading Comprehension Framework for Low-resource NER
Authors: Yuhao Zhang, Yongliang Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recently, NER has been formulated as a machine reading comprehension (MRC) task, in which manually-crafted queries are used to extract entities of different types. However, current MRC-based NER techniques are limited to extracting a single type of entities at a time and are largely geared towards resource-rich settings. This renders them inefficient during the inference phase, while also leaving their potential untapped for utilization in low-resource settings. We suggest a query-parallel MRC-based approach to address these issues, which is capable of extracting multiple entity types concurrently and is applicable to both resource-rich and resource-limited settings. Specifically, we propose a query-parallel encoder which uses a query-segmented attention mechanism to isolate the semantics of queries and model the query-context interaction with a unidirectional flow. This allows for easier generalization to new entity types or transfer to new domains. After obtaining the query and context representations through the encoder, they are fed into a query-conditioned biaffine predictor to extract multiple entities at once. The model is trained with parameter-efficient tuning technique, making it more data-efficient. We conduct extensive experiments and demonstrate that our model performs competitively against strong baseline methods in resource-rich settings, and achieves state-of-the-art results in low-resource settings, including training-from-scratch, in-domain transfer and cross-domain transfer tasks.
BiSPN: Generating Entity Set and Relation Set Coherently in One Pass
Authors: Yuxin He, Buzhou Tang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: By modeling the interaction among instances and avoiding error propagation, Set Prediction Networks (SPNs) achieve state-of-the-art performance on the tasks of named entity recognition and relation triple extraction respectively. However, how to jointly extract entities and relation triples via SPNs remains an unexplored problem, where the main challenge is the maintenance of coherence between the predicted entity/relation sets during one-pass generation. In this work, we present Bipartite Set Prediction Network (BiSPN), a novel joint entity-relation extraction model that can efficiently generate entity set and relation set in parallel. To overcome the challenge of coherence, BiSPN is equipped with a novel bipartite consistency loss as well as an entity-relation linking loss during training. Experiments on three biomedical/clinical datasets and a general-domain dataset show that BiSPN achieves new state of the art in knowledge-intensive scene and performs competitively in general-domain, while being more efficient than two-stage joint extraction methods.
MEEP: Is this Engaging? Prompting Large Language Models for Dialogue Evaluation in Multilingual Settings
Authors: Amila Ferron, Amber Shore, Ekata Mitra, Ameeta Agrawal
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: As dialogue systems become more popular, evaluation of their response quality gains importance. Engagingness highly correlates with overall quality and creates a sense of connection that gives human participants a more fulfilling experience. Although qualities like coherence and fluency are readily measured with well-worn automatic metrics, evaluating engagingness often relies on human assessment, which is a costly and time-consuming process. Existing automatic engagingness metrics evaluate the response without the conversation history, are designed for one dataset, or have limited correlation with human annotations. Furthermore, they have been tested exclusively on English conversations. Given that dialogue systems are increasingly available in languages beyond English, multilingual evaluation capabilities are essential. We propose that large language models (LLMs) may be used for evaluation of engagingness in dialogue through prompting, and ask how prompt constructs and translated prompts compare in a multilingual setting. We provide a prompt-design taxonomy for engagingness and find that using selected prompt elements with LLMs, including our comprehensive definition of engagingness, outperforms state-of-the-art methods on evaluation of engagingness in dialogue across multiple languages.
Exploring the Impact of Corpus Diversity on Financial Pretrained Language Models
Authors: Jaeyoung Choe, Keonwoong Noh, Nayeon Kim, Seyun Ahn, Woohwan Jung
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Over the past few years, various domain-specific pretrained language models (PLMs) have been proposed and have outperformed general-domain PLMs in specialized areas such as biomedical, scientific, and clinical domains. In addition, financial PLMs have been studied because of the high economic impact of financial data analysis. However, we found that financial PLMs were not pretrained on sufficiently diverse financial data. This lack of diverse training data leads to a subpar generalization performance, resulting in general-purpose PLMs, including BERT, often outperforming financial PLMs on many downstream tasks. To address this issue, we collected a broad range of financial corpus and trained the Financial Language Model (FiLM) on these diverse datasets. Our experimental results confirm that FiLM outperforms not only existing financial PLMs but also general domain PLMs. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that this improvement can be achieved even for unseen corpus groups.
LLMDet: A Third Party Large Language Models Generated Text Detection Tool
Authors: Kangxi Wu, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng, Tat-Seng Chua
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Generated texts from large language models (LLMs) are remarkably close to high-quality human-authored text, raising concerns about their potential misuse in spreading false information and academic misconduct. Consequently, there is an urgent need for a highly practical detection tool capable of accurately identifying the source of a given text. However, existing detection tools typically rely on access to LLMs and can only differentiate between machine-generated and human-authored text, failing to meet the requirements of fine-grained tracing, intermediary judgment, and rapid detection. Therefore, we propose LLMDet, a model-specific, secure, efficient, and extendable detection tool, that can source text from specific LLMs, such as GPT-2, OPT, LLaMA, and others. In LLMDet, we record the next-token probabilities of salient n-grams as features to calculate proxy perplexity for each LLM. By jointly analyzing the proxy perplexities of LLMs, we can determine the source of the generated text. Experimental results show that LLMDet yields impressive detection performance while ensuring speed and security, achieving 98.54% precision and about $\times 5.0$ faster for recognizing human-authored text. Additionally, LLMDet can effortlessly extend its detection capabilities to a new open-source model. We will provide an open-source tool at r̆lhttps://github.com/TrustedLLM/LLMDet.
RECAP: Towards Precise Radiology Report Generation via Dynamic Disease Progression Reasoning
Authors: Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Kaishuai Xu, Wenjie Li, Jiang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Automating radiology report generation can significantly alleviate radiologists' workloads. Previous research has primarily focused on realizing highly concise observations while neglecting the precise attributes that determine the severity of diseases (e.g., small pleural effusion). Since incorrect attributes will lead to imprecise radiology reports, strengthening the generation process with precise attribute modeling becomes necessary. Additionally, the temporal information contained in the historical records, which is crucial in evaluating a patient`s current condition (e.g., heart size is unchanged), has also been largely disregarded. To address these issues, we propose RECAP, which generates precise and accurate radiology reports via dynamic disease progression reasoning. Specifically, RECAP first predicts the observations and progressions (i.e., spatiotemporal information) given two consecutive radiographs. It then combines the historical records, spatiotemporal information, and radiographs for report generation, where a disease progression graph and dynamic progression reasoning mechanism are devised to accurately select the attributes of each observation and progression. Extensive experiments on two publicly available datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model.