mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
Causal Intervention for Abstractive Related Work Generation
Authors: Jiachang Liu, Qi Zhang, Chongyang Shi, Usman Naseem, Shoujin Wang, Liang Hu, Ivor Tsang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Abstractive related work generation has attracted increasing attention in generating coherent related work that helps readers grasp the current research. However, most existing models ignore the inherent causality during related work generation, leading to spurious correlations which downgrade the models' generation quality and generalizability. In this study, we argue that causal intervention can address such limitations and improve the quality and coherence of generated related work. To this end, we propose a novel Causal Intervention Module for Related Work Generation (CaM) to effectively capture causalities in the generation process. Specifically, we first model the relations among the sentence order, document (reference) correlations, and transitional content in related work generation using a causal graph. Then, to implement causal interventions and mitigate the negative impact of spurious correlations, we use do-calculus to derive ordinary conditional probabilities and identify causal effects through CaM. Finally, we subtly fuse CaM with Transformer to obtain an end-to-end related work generation framework. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets show that CaM can effectively promote the model to learn causal relations and thus produce related work of higher quality and coherence.
G-SPEED: General SParse Efficient Editing MoDel
Authors: Haoke Zhang, Yue Wang, Juntao Li, Xiabing Zhou, Min Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated incredible capabilities in understanding, generating, and manipulating languages. Through human-model interactions, LLMs can automatically understand human-issued instructions and output the expected contents, which can significantly increase working efficiency. In various types of real-world demands, editing-oriented tasks account for a considerable proportion, which involves an interactive process that entails the continuous refinement of existing texts to meet specific criteria. Due to the need for multi-round human-model interaction and the generation of complicated editing tasks, there is an emergent need for efficient general editing models. In this paper, we propose \textbfGeneral \textbfSParse \textbfEfficient \textbfEditing Mo\textbfDel (\textbfG-SPEED), which can fulfill diverse editing requirements through a single model while maintaining low computational costs. Specifically, we first propose a novel unsupervised text editing data clustering algorithm to deal with the data scarcity problem. Subsequently, we introduce a sparse editing model architecture to mitigate the inherently limited learning capabilities of small language models. The experimental outcomes indicate that G-SPEED, with its 508M parameters, can surpass LLMs equipped with 175B parameters. Our code and model checkpoints are available at r̆lhttps://github.com/Banner-Z/G-SPEED.
Attack Prompt Generation for Red Teaming and Defending Large Language Models
Authors: Boyi Deng, Wenjie Wang, Fuli Feng, Yang Deng, Qifan Wang, Xiangnan He
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are susceptible to red teaming attacks, which can induce LLMs to generate harmful content. Previous research constructs attack prompts via manual or automatic methods, which have their own limitations on construction cost and quality. To address these issues, we propose an integrated approach that combines manual and automatic methods to economically generate high-quality attack prompts. Specifically, considering the impressive capabilities of newly emerged LLMs, we propose an attack framework to instruct LLMs to mimic human-generated prompts through in-context learning. Furthermore, we propose a defense framework that fine-tunes victim LLMs through iterative interactions with the attack framework to enhance their safety against red teaming attacks. Extensive experiments on different LLMs validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack and defense frameworks. Additionally, we release a series of attack prompts datasets named SAP with varying sizes, facilitating the safety evaluation and enhancement of more LLMs.
Smart “Chef”: Verifying the Effect of Role-based Paraphrasing for Aspect Term Extraction
Authors: Jiaxiang Chen, Yu Hong, Qingting Xu, Jianmin Yao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We tackle Aspect Term Extraction (ATE), a task of automatically extracting aspect terms from sentences. The current Pretrained Language Model (PLM) based extractors have achieved significant improvements. They primarily benefit from context-aware encoding. However, a considerable number of sentences in ATE corpora contain uninformative or low-quality contexts. Such sentences frequently act as “troublemakers” during test. In this study, we explore the context-oriented quality improvement method. Specifically, we propose to automatically rewrite the sentences from the perspectives of virtual experts with different roles, such as a “chef” in the restaurant domain. On this basis, we perform ATE over the paraphrased sentences during test, using the well-trained extractors without any change. In the experiments, we leverage ChatGPT to determine virtual experts in the considered domains, and induce ChatGPT to generate paraphrases conditioned on the roles of virtual experts. We experiment on the benchmark SemEval datasets, including Laptop-domain L14 and Restaurant-domain R14-16. The experimental results show that our approach effectively recalls the inconspicuous aspect terms like “al di la”, although it reduces the precision. In addition, it is proven that our approach can be substantially improved by redundancy elimination and multi-role voting. More importantly, our approach can be used to expand the predictions obtained on the original sentences. This yields state-of-the-art performance (i.e., F1-scores of 86.2%, 89.3%, 77.7%, 82.7% on L14 and R14-16) without retraining or fine-tuning the baseline extractors.
Multi-Defendant Legal Judgment Prediction via Hierarchical Reasoning
Authors: Yougang Lyu, Jitai Hao, Zihan Wang, Kai Zhao, Shen Gao, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Fang Wang, Zhaochun Ren
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Multiple defendants in a criminal fact description generally exhibit complex interactions, and cannot be well handled by existing Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) methods which focus on predicting judgment results (e.g., law articles, charges, and terms of penalty) for single-defendant cases. To address this problem, we propose the task of multi-defendant LJP, which aims to automatically predict the judgment results for each defendant of multi-defendant cases. Two challenges arise with the task of multi-defendant LJP: (1) indistinguishable judgment results among various defendants; and (2) the lack of a real-world dataset for training and evaluation. To tackle the first challenge, we formalize the multi-defendant judgment process as hierarchical reasoning chains and introduce a multi-defendant LJP method, named Hierarchical Reasoning Network (HRN), which follows the hierarchical reasoning chains to determine criminal relationships, sentencing circumstances, law articles, charges, and terms of penalty for each defendant. To tackle the second challenge, we collect a real-world multi-defendant LJP dataset, namely MultiLJP, to accelerate the relevant research in the future. Extensive experiments on MultiLJP verify the effectiveness of our proposed HRN.
Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages
Authors: Zijie Wang, Md Hossain, Shivam Mathur, Terry Melo, Kadir Ozler, Keun Park, Jacob Quintero, MohammadHossein Rezaei, Shreya Shakya, Md Uddin, Eduardo Blanco
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data, and demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). We show that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).
Generalizing Few-Shot Named Entity Recognizers to Unseen Domains with Type-Related Features
Authors: Zihan Wang, Ziqi Zhao, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren, Maarten de Rijke, Zhaochun Ren
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) has shown remarkable progress in identifying entities in low-resource domains. However, few-shot NER methods still struggle with out-of-domain (OOD) examples due to their reliance on manual labeling for the target domain. To address this limitation, recent studies enable generalization to an unseen target domain with only a few labeled examples using data augmentation techniques. Two important challenges remain: First, augmentation is limited to the training data, resulting in minimal overlap between the generated data and OOD examples. Second, knowledge transfer is implicit and insufficient, severely hindering model generalizability and the integration of knowledge from the source domain. In this paper, we propose a framework, prompt learning with type-related features (PLTR), to address these challenges. To identify useful knowledge in the source domain and enhance knowledge transfer, PLTR automatically extracts entity type-related features (TRFs) based on mutual information criteria. To bridge the gap between training and OOD data, PLTR generates a unique prompt for each unseen example by selecting relevant TRFs. We show that PLTR achieves significant performance improvements on in-domain and cross-domain datasets. The use of PLTR facilitates model adaptation and increases representation similarities between the source and unseen domains.
Intervention-Based Alignment of Code Search with Execution Feedback
Authors: Hojae Han, Minsoo Kim, Seung-won Hwang, Nan Duan, Shuai Lu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: One of the fundamental goals in code search is to retrieve a functionally correct code for a given natural language query. As annotating for correctness requires executing test cases (i.e. obtaining execution feedback), existing code search training datasets approximate text-code co-occurrences as positive execution feedback. However, this approximation may misalign models' retrieval decisions from ground-truth correctness. To address such limitation, we propose Code Intervention-based Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) that perturbs training code to result in misalignment (i.e. code intervention), then tests models' decisions and corrects them with the execution feedback by reinforcement learning. The first technical contribution of CIRL is to induce the execution feedback from perturbation, without actual execution. Secondly, CIRL introduces structural perturbations using abstract syntax trees, going beyond simple lexical changes. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of CIRL compared to conventional approaches.
Enhancing Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Units
Authors: Langlin Huang, Shuhao Gu, Zhang Zhuocheng, Yang Feng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Conventional neural machine translation (NMT) models typically use subwords and words as the basic units for model input and comprehension. However, complete words and phrases composed of several tokens are often the fundamental units for expressing semantics, referred to as semantic units. To address this issue, we propose a method Semantic Units for Machine Translation (SU4MT) which models the integral meanings of semantic units within a sentence, and then leverages them to provide a new perspective for understanding the sentence. Specifically, we first propose Word Pair Encoding (WPE), a phrase extraction method to help identify the boundaries of semantic units. Next, we design an Attentive Semantic Fusion (ASF) layer to integrate the semantics of multiple subwords into a single vector: the semantic unit representation. Lastly, the semantic-unit-level sentence representation is concatenated to the token-level one, and they are combined as the input of encoder. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively models and leverages semantic-unit-level information and outperforms the strong baselines.
DRAFT: Dense Retrieval Augmented Few-shot Topic classifier Framework
Authors: Keonwoo Kim, Younggun Lee
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the growing volume of diverse information, the demand for classifying arbitrary topics has become increasingly critical. To address this challenge, we introduce DRAFT, a simple framework designed to train a classifier for few-shot topic classification. DRAFT uses a few examples of a specific topic as queries to construct Customized dataset with a dense retriever model. Multi-query retrieval (MQR) algorithm, which effectively handles multiple queries related to a specific topic, is applied to construct the Customized dataset. Subsequently, we fine-tune a classifier using the Customized dataset to identify the topic. To demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach, we conduct evaluations on both widely used classification benchmark datasets and manually constructed datasets with 291 diverse topics, which simulate diverse contents encountered in real-world applications. DRAFT shows competitive or superior performance compared to baselines that use in-context learning, such as GPT-3 175B and InstructGPT 175B, on few-shot topic classification tasks despite having 177 times fewer parameters, demonstrating its effectiveness.
A Framework for Exploring Player Perceptions of LLM-Generated Dialogue in Commercial Video Games
Authors: Nader Akoury, Qian Yang, Mohit Iyyer
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The growing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have inspired recent efforts to integrate LLM-generated dialogue into video games. However, evaluation remains a major challenge: how do we assess the player experience in a commercial game augmented with LLM-generated dialogue? To explore this question, we introduce a dynamic evaluation framework for the dialogue management systems that govern the task-oriented dialogue often found in roleplaying video games. We first extract dialogue from the widely-acclaimed role-playing game *Disco Elysium: The Final Cut*, which contains 1.1M words of dialogue spread across a complex graph of utterances where node reachability depends on game state (e.g., whether a certain item is held). Using this dataset, we have GPT-4 perform *dialogue infilling* to generate grounded utterances based on game state represented via code. In a statistically robust study of 28 players recruited from the r/DiscoyElysium subreddit, the LLM outputs are evaluated against the game designers' writing via both preference judgments and free-form feedback using a web interface that recreates the game`s core conversation functionality. Overall, the game designers' prose is significantly preferred to GPT-4 generations, with participants citing reasons such as improved logical flow and grounding with the game state. To spur more principled future research in this area, we release our web interface and tools to enable researchers to build upon our work. https://pl.aiwright.dev
Generative Calibration for In-context Learning
Authors: Zhongtao Jiang, Yuanzhe Zhang, Cao Liu, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: As one of the most exciting features of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning is a mixed blessing. While it allows users to fast-prototype a task solver with only a few training examples, the performance is generally sensitive to various configurations of the prompt such as the choice or order of the training examples. In this paper, we for the first time theoretically and empirically identify that such a paradox is mainly due to the label shift of the in-context model to the data distribution, in which LLMs shift the label marginal $p(y)$ while having a good label conditional $p(x|y)$. With this understanding, we can simply calibrate the in-context predictive distribution by adjusting the label marginal, which is estimated via Monte-Carlo sampling over the in-context model, i.e., generation of LLMs. We call our approach as generative calibration. We conduct exhaustive experiments with 12 text classification tasks and 12 LLMs scaling from 774M to 33B, generally find that the proposed method greatly and consistently outperforms the ICL as well as state-of-the-art calibration methods, by up to 27% absolute in macro-F1. Meanwhile, the proposed method is also stable under different prompt configurations.
Chain of Thought with Explicit Evidence Reasoning for Few-shot Relation Extraction
Authors: Xilai Ma, Jing Li, Min Zhang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Few-shot relation extraction involves identifying the type of relationship between two specific entities within a text, using a limited number of annotated samples. A variety of solutions to this problem have emerged by applying meta-learning and neural graph techniques which typically necessitate a training process for adaptation. Recently, the strategy of in-context learning has been demonstrating notable results without the need of training. Few studies have already utilized in-context learning for zero-shot information extraction. Unfortunately, the evidence for inference is either not considered or implicitly modeled during the construction of chain-of-thought prompts. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for few-shot relation extraction using large language models, named CoT-ER, chain-of-thought with explicit evidence reasoning. In particular, CoT-ER first induces large language models to generate evidences using task-specific and concept-level knowledge. Then these evidences are explicitly incorporated into chain-of-thought prompting for relation extraction. Experimental results demonstrate that our CoT-ER approach (with 0% training data) achieves competitive performance compared to the fully-supervised (with 100% training data) state-of-the-art approach on the FewRel1.0 and FewRel2.0 datasets.
AdaTranS: Adapting with Boundary-based Shrinking for End-to-End Speech Translation
Authors: Xingshan Zeng, Liangyou Li, Qun Liu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: To alleviate the data scarcity problem in End-to-end speech translation (ST), pre-training on data for speech recognition and machine translation is considered as an important technique. However, the modality gap between speech and text prevents the ST model from efficiently inheriting knowledge from the pre-trained models. In this work, we propose AdaTranS for end-to-end ST. It adapts the speech features with a new shrinking mechanism to mitigate the length mismatch between speech and text features by predicting word boundaries. Experiments on the MUST-C dataset demonstrate that AdaTranS achieves better performance than the other shrinking-based methods, with higher inference speed and lower memory usage. Further experiments also show that AdaTranS can be equipped with additional alignment losses to further improve performance.
No offence, Bert - I insult only humans! Multilingual sentence-level attack on toxicity detection networks
Authors: Sergey Berezin, Reza Farahbakhsh, Noel Crespi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce a simple yet efficient sentence-level attack on black-box toxicity detector models. By adding several positive words or sentences to the end of a hateful message, we are able to change the prediction of a neural network and pass the toxicity detection system check. This approach is shown to be working on seven languages from three different language families. We also describe the defence mechanism against the aforementioned attack and discuss its limitations.
Manipulating the Perceived Personality Traits of Language Models
Authors: Graham Caron, Shashank Srivastava
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Psychology research has long explored aspects of human personality like extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability, three of the personality traits that make up the \textquoteleftBig Five'. Categorizations like the \textquoteleftBig Five' are commonly used to assess and diagnose personality types. In this work, we explore whether text generated from large language models exhibits consistency in it`s perceived \textquoteleftBig Five' personality traits. For example, is a language model such as GPT2 likely to respond in a consistent way if asked to go out to a party? We also show that when exposed to different types of contexts (such as personality descriptions, or answers to diagnostic questions about personality traits), language models such as BERT and GPT2 consistently identify and mirror personality markers in those contexts. This behavior illustrates an ability to be manipulated in a predictable way (with correlations up to 0.84 between intended and realized changes in personality traits), and frames them as tools for controlling personas in applications such as dialog systems. We contribute two data-sets of personality descriptions of humans subjects.
WikiChat: Stopping the Hallucination of Large Language Model Chatbots by Few-Shot Grounding on Wikipedia
Authors: Sina Semnani, Violet Yao, Heidi Zhang, Monica Lam
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: This paper presents the first few-shot LLM-based chatbot that almost never hallucinates and has high conversationality and low latency. WikiChat is grounded on the English Wikipedia, the largest curated free-text corpus. WikiChat generates a response from an LLM, retains only the grounded facts, and combines them with additional information it retrieves from the corpus to form factual and engaging responses. We distill WikiChat based on GPT-4 into a 7B-parameter LLaMA model with minimal loss of quality, to significantly improve its latency, cost and privacy, and facilitate research and deployment. Using a novel hybrid human-and-LLM evaluation methodology, we show that our best system achieves 97.3% factual accuracy in simulated conversations. It significantly outperforms all retrieval-based and LLM-based baselines, and by 3.9%, 38.6% and 51.0% on head, tail and recent knowledge compared to GPT-4. Compared to previous state-of-the-art retrieval-based chatbots, WikiChat is also significantly more informative and engaging, just like an LLM. WikiChat achieves 97.9% factual accuracy in conversations with human users about recent topics, 55.0% better than GPT-4, while receiving significantly higher user ratings and more favorable comments.
Automated Few-Shot Classification with Instruction-Finetuned Language Models
Authors: Rami Aly, Xingjian Shi, Kaixiang Lin, Aston Zhang, Andrew Wilson
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: A particularly successful class of approaches for few-shot learning combines language models with prompts - hand-crafted task descriptions that complement data samples. However, designing prompts by hand for each task commonly requires domain knowledge and substantial guesswork. We observe, in the context of classification tasks, that instruction finetuned language models are remarkably robust towards some dimensions of a prompt`s design. We subsequently propose a simple method to eliminate the need for handcrafted prompts, named AuT-Few. This approach consists of (i) a prompt retrieval module that selects suitable task instructions from the instruction-tuning knowledge base, and (ii) the generation of two distinct, semantically meaningful, class descriptions and a selection mechanism via cross-validation. Over 12 datasets, spanning 8 classification tasks, we show that AuT-Few outperforms current state-of-the-art few-shot learning methods. Moreover, AuT-Few is the best ranking method across datasets on the RAFT few-shot benchmark. Notably, these results are achieved without task-specific handcrafted prompts on unseen tasks.
Meta-Learning of Prompt Generation for Lightweight Prompt Engineering on Language-Model-as-a-Service
Authors: Hyeonmin Ha, Jihye Lee, Wookje Han, Byung-Gon Chun
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, many companies have been providing the capabilities of large language models as services. These Language-Model-as-a-Service (LMaaS) offerings support a variety of user tasks through in-context learning from prompts, which include instructions and demonstrations of the task. However, for users, manually crafting prompts or running automatic prompt tuning methods themselves can be demanding. Despite these challenges, LMaaS providers do not offer automatic prompt engineering methods as part of their services. One of the major obstacles to deploying them on an LMaaS is the heavy computational costs associated with automatic prompt engineering methods. These methods are typically designed to iterate through tens of thousands of examples, which impose unaffordable overheads for LMaaS providers. In this paper, we introduce MetaL-Prompt, a novel lightweight automatic prompt generation method for LMaaS. MetaL-Prompt meta-trains a prompt generation model (PGM) to enable robust learning by the language model from the contexts created by the generated prompts (i.e., in-context learning). Thanks to our meta-learning approach, a PGM can generate prompts for unseen tasks without requiring additional training for those specific tasks. Furthermore, the PGM can generate prompts with a single forward pass, significantly reducing computational costs compared to previous methods. We evaluate MetaL-Prompt on a range of unseen tasks and find that it improves performance by up to 19.4% in terms of mean F1 score on QA datasets compared to the state-of-the-art baseline P-tuning, with limited computational cost.
Beneath Surface Similarity: Large Language Models Make Reasonable Scientific Analogies after Structure Abduction
Authors: Siyu Yuan, Jiangjie Chen, Xuyang Ge, Yanghua Xiao, Deqing Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The vital role of analogical reasoning in human cognition allows us to grasp novel concepts by linking them with familiar ones through shared relational structures. Despite the attention previous research has given to word analogies, this work suggests that Large Language Models (LLMs) often overlook the structures that underpin these analogies, raising questions about the efficacy of word analogies as a measure of analogical reasoning skills akin to human cognition. In response to this, our paper introduces a task of analogical structure abduction, grounded in cognitive psychology, designed to abduce structures that form an analogy between two systems. In support of this task, we establish a benchmark called SCAR, containing 400 scientific analogies from 13 distinct fields, tailored for evaluating analogical reasoning with structure abduction. The empirical evidence underlines the continued challenges faced by LLMs, including ChatGPT and GPT-4, in mastering this task, signifying the need for future exploration to enhance their abilities.
HiCL: Hierarchical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Sentence Embeddings
Authors: Zhuofeng Wu, Chaowei Xiao, VG Vinod Vydiswaran
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a hierarchical contrastive learning framework, HiCL, which considers local segment-level and global sequence-level relationships to improve training efficiency and effectiveness. Traditional methods typically encode a sequence in its entirety for contrast with others, often neglecting local representation learning, leading to challenges in generalizing to shorter texts. Conversely, HiCL improves its effectiveness by dividing the sequence into several segments and employing both local and global contrastive learning to model segment-level and sequence-level relationships. Further, considering the quadratic time complexity of transformers over input tokens, HiCL boosts training efficiency by first encoding short segments and then aggregating them to obtain the sequence representation. Extensive experiments show that HiCL enhances the prior top-performing SNCSE model across seven extensively evaluated STS tasks, with an average increase of +0.2% observed on $BERT_large$ and +0.44% on $RoBERTa_large$.
Density-Aware Prototypical Network for Few-Shot Relation Classification
Authors: Jianfeng Wu, Mengting Hu, Yike Wu, Bingzhe Wu, Yalan Xie, Mingming Liu, Renhong Cheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In recent years, few-shot relation classification has evoked many research interests. Yet a more challenging problem, i.e. none-of-the-above (NOTA), is under-explored. Existing works mainly regard NOTA as an extra class and treat it the same as known relations. However, such a solution ignores the overall instance distribution, where NOTA instances are actually outliers and distributed unnaturally compared with known ones. In this paper, we propose a density-aware prototypical network (D-Proto) to treat various instances distinctly. Specifically, we design unique training objectives to separate known instances and isolate NOTA instances, respectively. This produces an ideal instance distribution, where known instances are dense yet NOTAs have a small density. Moreover, we propose a NOTA detection module to further enlarge the density of known samples, and discriminate NOTA and known samples accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms strong baselines with robustness towards various NOTA rates. The code will be made public after the paper is accepted.
Improved Training of Deep Text Clustering
Authors: Zonghao Yang, Wenpeng Hu, Yushan Tan, Zhunchen Luo
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The classical deep clustering optimization methods basically leverage information such as clustering centers, mutual information, and distance metrics to construct implicit generalized labels to establish information feedback (weak supervision) and thus optimize the deep model. However, the resulting generalized labels have different degrees of errors in the whole clustering process due to the limitation of clustering accuracy, which greatly interferes with the clustering process. To this end, this paper proposes a general deep clustering optimization method from the perspective of empirical risk minimization, using the correlation relationship between the samples. Experiments on two classical deep clustering methods demonstrate the necessity and effectiveness of the method. Code is available at https://github.com/yangzonghao1024/DCGLU.
RegaVAE: A Retrieval-Augmented Gaussian Mixture Variational Auto-Encoder for Language Modeling
Authors: Jingcheng Deng, Liang Pang, Huawei Shen, Xueqi Cheng
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Retrieval-augmented language models show promise in addressing issues like outdated information and hallucinations in language models (LMs). However, current research faces two main problems: 1) determining what information to retrieve, and 2) effectively combining retrieved information during generation. We argue that valuable retrieved information should not only be related to the current source text but also consider the future target text, given the nature of LMs that model future tokens. Moreover, we propose that aggregation using latent variables derived from a compact latent space is more efficient than utilizing explicit raw text, which is limited by context length and susceptible to noise. Therefore, we introduce RegaVAE, a retrieval-augmented language model built upon the variational auto-encoder (VAE). It encodes the text corpus into a latent space, capturing current and future information from both source and target text. Additionally, we leverage the VAE to initialize the latent space and adopt the probabilistic form of the retrieval generation paradigm by expanding the Gaussian prior distribution into a Gaussian mixture distribution. Theoretical analysis provides an optimizable upper bound for RegaVAE. Experimental results on various datasets demonstrate significant improvements in text generation quality and hallucination removal.
RefGPT: Dialogue Generation of GPT, by GPT, and for GPT
Authors: Dongjie Yang, Ruifeng Yuan, Yuantao Fan, Yifei Yang, Zili Wang, Shusen Wang, Hai Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have attained the impressive capability to resolve a wide range of NLP tasks by fine-tuning high-quality instruction data. However, collecting human-written data of high quality, especially multi-turn dialogues, is expensive and unattainable for most people. Though previous studies have used powerful LLMs to generate the dialogues automatically, they all suffer from generating untruthful dialogues because of the model hallucination. Therefore, we propose a method called RefGPT to generate enormous truthful and customized dialogues without worrying about factual errors caused by the model hallucination. RefGPT solves the model hallucination in dialogue generation by restricting the LLMs to leverage the given reference instead of reciting their own knowledge to generate dialogues. Additionally, RefGPT adds detailed controls on every utterance to enable high customization capability, which previous studies have ignored. On the basis of RefGPT, we also propose two high-quality dialogue datasets generated by GPT-4, namely **RefGPT-Fact** and **RefGPT-Code**. RefGPT-Fact is a dataset with 100k multi-turn dialogues based on factual knowledge and RefGPT-Code has 76k multi-turn dialogues covering a wide range of coding scenarios. Our code and datasets are released in https://github.com/mutonix/RefGPT.
INA: An Integrative Approach for Enhancing Negotiation Strategies with Reward-Based Dialogue Agent
Authors: Zishan Ahmad, Suman Saurabh, Vaishakh Menon, Asif Ekbal, Roshni Ramnani, Anutosh Maitra
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel negotiation agent designed for the online marketplace. Our dialogue agent is integrative in nature i.e, it possesses the capability to negotiate on price as well as other factors, such as the addition or removal of items from a deal bundle, thereby offering a more flexible and comprehensive negotiation experience. To enable this functionality, we create a new dataset called Integrative Negotiation Dataset (IND). For this dataset creation, we introduce a new semi-automated data creation method, which combines defining negotiation intents, actions, and intent-action simulation between users and the agent to generate potential dialogue flows. Finally, the prompting of GPT-J, a state-of-the-art language model, is done to generate dialogues for a given intent, with a human-in-the-loop process for post-editing and refining minor errors to ensure high data quality. We first train a maximum likelihood loss based model on IND, and then employ a set of novel rewards specifically tailored for the negotiation task to train our Integrative Negotiation Agent (INA). These rewards incentivize the agent to learn effective negotiation strategies that can adapt to various contextual requirements and price proposals. We train our model and conduct experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of our reward-based dialogue agent for negotiation. Our results demonstrate that the proposed approach and reward functions significantly enhance the negotiation capabilities of the dialogue agent. The INA successfully engages in integrative negotiations, displaying the ability to dynamically adjust prices and negotiate the inclusion or exclusion of items in a deal bundle.
Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification
Authors: Yixuan Weng, Minjun Zhu, Fei Xia, Bin Li, Shizhu He, Shengping Liu, Bin Sun, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recently, with the chain of thought (CoT) prompting, large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-3, have shown strong reasoning ability in several natural language processing tasks such as arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning. However, LLMs with CoT require multi-step prompting and multi-token prediction, which is highly sensitive to individual mistakes and vulnerable to error accumulation. The above issues make the LLMs need the ability to verify the answers. In fact, after inferring conclusions in some thinking decision tasks, people often check them by re-verifying steps to avoid some mistakes. In this paper, we propose and prove that LLMs also have similar self-verification abilities. We take the conclusion obtained by CoT as one of the conditions for solving the original problem. By performing a backward verification of the answers that LLM deduced for itself, we can obtain interpretable answer validation scores to select the candidate answer with the highest score. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the reasoning performance on various arithmetic, commonsense, and logical reasoning datasets. Our code is publicly available at: https://github.com/WENGSYX/Self-Verification.
Multi-Granularity Information Interaction Framework for Incomplete Utterance Rewriting
Authors: Haowei Du, Dinghao Zhang, Chen Li, Yang Li, Dongyan Zhao
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Recent approaches in Incomplete Utterance Rewriting (IUR) fail to capture the source of important words, which is crucial to edit the incomplete utterance, and introduce words from irrelevant utterances. We propose a novel and effective multi-task information interaction framework including context selection, edit matrix construction, and relevance merging to capture the multi-granularity of semantic information. Benefiting from fetching the relevant utterance and figuring out the important words, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art models on two benchmark datasets Restoration-200K and CANAND in this field.
Accuracy is not enough: Evaluating Personalization in Summarizers
Authors: Rahul Vansh, Darsh Rank, Sourish Dasgupta, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Text summarization models are evaluated in terms of their accuracy and quality using various measures such as ROUGE, BLEU, METEOR, BERTScore, PYRAMID, readability, and several other recently proposed ones. The central objective of all accuracy measures is to evaluate the model`s ability to capture $\textitsaliency$ accurately. Since saliency is subjective w.r.t the readers' preferences, there cannot be a fit-all summary for a given document. This means that in many use-cases, summarization models need to be personalized w.r.t user-profiles. However, to our knowledge, there is no measure to evaluate the $\textitdegree-of-personalization$ of a summarization model. In this paper, we first establish that existing accuracy measures cannot evaluate the degree of personalization of any summarization model, and then propose a novel measure, called $EGISES$, for automatically computing the same. Using the PENS dataset released by Microsoft Research, we analyze the degree of personalization of ten different state-of-the-art summarization models (both extractive and abstractive), five of which are explicitly trained for personalized summarization, and the remaining are appropriated to exhibit personalization. We conclude by proposing a generalized accuracy measure, called $P$-$Accuracy$, for designing accuracy measures that should also take personalization into account and demonstrate the robustness and reliability of the measure through meta-evaluation.
For Generated Text, Is NLI-Neutral Text the Best Text?
Authors: Michail Mersinias, Kyle Mahowald
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We explore incorporating natural language inference (NLI) into the text generative pipeline by using a pre-trained NLI model to assess whether a generated sentence entails, contradicts, or is neutral to the prompt and preceding text. First, we show that the NLI task is predictive of generation errors made by GPT-3. We use these results to develop an NLI-informed generation procedure for GPT-J. Then, we evaluate these generations by obtaining human annotations on error types and overall quality. We find that an NLI strategy of maximizing entailment improves text generation when the nucleus sampling randomness parameter value is high, while one which maximizes contradiction is in fact productive when the parameter value is low. Overall, though, we demonstrate that an NLI strategy of maximizing the neutral class provides the highest quality of generated text (significantly better than the vanilla generations), regardless of parameter value.
Combining Counting Processes and Classification Improves a Stopping Rule for Technology Assisted Review
Authors: Reem Bin-Hezam, Mark Stevenson
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Technology Assisted Review (TAR) stopping rules aim to reduce the cost of manually assessing documents for relevance by minimising the number of documents that need to be examined to ensure a desired level of recall. This paper extends an effective stopping rule using information derived from a text classifier that can be trained without the need for any additional annotation. Experiments on multiple data sets (CLEF e-Health, TREC Total Recall, TREC Legal and RCV1) showed that the proposed approach consistently improves performance and outperforms several alternative methods.
Complexity-Guided Curriculum Learning for Text Graphs
Authors: Nidhi Vakil, Hadi Amiri
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Curriculum learning provides a systematic approach to training. It refines training progressively, tailors training to task requirements, and improves generalization through exposure to diverse examples. We present a curriculum learning approach that builds on existing knowledge about text and graph complexity formalisms for training with text graph data. The core part of our approach is a novel data scheduler, which employs “spaced repetition” and complexity formalisms to guide the training process. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach on several text graph tasks and graph neural network architectures. The proposed model gains more and uses less data; consistently prefers text over graph complexity indices throughout training, while the best curricula derived from text and graph complexity indices are equally effective; and it learns transferable curricula across GNN models and datasets. In addition, we find that both node-level (local) and graph-level (global) graph complexity indices, as well as shallow and traditional text complexity indices play a crucial role in effective curriculum learning.
CoVariance-based Causal Debiasing for Entity and Relation Extraction
Authors: Lin Ren, Yongbin Liu, Yixin Cao, Chunping Ouyang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Joint entity and relation extraction tasks aim to recognize named entities and extract relations simultaneously. Suffering from a variety of data biases, such as data selection bias, and distribution bias (out of distribution, long-tail distribution), serious concerns can be witnessed to threaten the model`s transferability, robustness, and generalization. In this work, we address the above problems from a causality perspective. We propose a novel causal framework called c$n̆derline\textbfo$variance and $\d̆erline\textbfv$ariance $\uĕrline\textbfo$ptimization framework (OVO) to optimize feature representations and conduct general debiasing. In particular, the proposed $\unr̆line\textbfc$ovariance $\undl̆ine\textbfop$timizing (COP) minimizes characterizing features' covariance for alleviating the selection and distribution bias and enhances feature representation in the feature space. Furthermore, based on the causal backdoor adjustment, we propose $\\undeĭne\textbfv$ariance $\undern̆e\textbfop$timizing (VOP) separates samples in terms of label information and minimizes the variance of each dimension in the feature vectors of the same class label for mitigating the distribution bias further. By applying it to three strong baselines in two widely used datasets, the results demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of OVO for joint entity and relation extraction tasks. Furthermore, a fine-grained analysis reveals that OVO possesses the capability to mitigate the impact of long-tail distribution.
Multi-label and Multi-target Sampling of Machine Annotation for Computational Stance Detection
Authors: Zhengyuan Liu, Hai Leong Chieu, Nancy Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Data collection from manual labeling provides domain-specific and task-aligned supervision for data-driven approaches, and a critical mass of well-annotated resources is required to achieve reasonable performance in natural language processing tasks. However, manual annotations are often challenging to scale up in terms of time and budget, especially when domain knowledge, capturing subtle semantic features, and reasoning steps are needed. In this paper, we investigate the efficacy of leveraging large language models on automated labeling for computational stance detection. We empirically observe that while large language models show strong potential as an alternative to human annotators, their sensitivity to task-specific instructions and their intrinsic biases pose intriguing yet unique challenges in machine annotation. We introduce a multi-label and multi-target sampling strategy to optimize the annotation quality. Experimental results on the benchmark stance detection corpora show that our method can significantly improve performance and learning efficacy.