mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
PairCFR: Enhancing Model Training on Paired Counterfactually Augmented Data through Contrastive Learning
Authors: Xiaoqi Qiu, Yongjie Wang, Xu Guo, Zhiwei Zeng, Yu Yue, Yuhong Feng, Chunyan Miao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Counterfactually Augmented Data (CAD) involves creating new data samples by applying minimal yet sufficient modifications to flip the label of existing data samples to other classes. Training with CAD enhances model robustness against spurious features that happen to correlate with labels by spreading the casual relationships across different classes. Yet, recent research reveals that training with CAD may lead models to overly focus on modified features while ignoring other important contextual information, inadvertently introducing biases that may impair performance on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets. To mitigate this issue, we employ contrastive learning to promote global feature alignment in addition to learning counterfactual clues. We theoretically prove that contrastive loss can encourage models to leverage a broader range of features beyond those modified ones. Comprehensive experiments on two human-edited CAD datasets demonstrate that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art on OOD datasets.
LLMs Learn Task Heuristics from Demonstrations: A Heuristic-Driven Prompting Strategy for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction
Authors: Hanzhang Zhou, Junlang Qian, Zijian Feng, Lu Hui, Zixiao Zhu, Kezhi Mao
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: In this study, we explore in-context learning (ICL) in document-level event argument extraction (EAE) to alleviate the dependency on large-scale labeled data for this task. We introduce the Heuristic-Driven Link-of-Analogy (HD-LoA) prompting tailored for the EAE task. Specifically, we hypothesize and validate that LLMs learn task-specific heuristics from demonstrations in ICL. Building upon this hypothesis, we introduce an explicit heuristic-driven demonstration construction approach, which transforms the haphazard example selection process into a systematic method that emphasizes task heuristics. Additionally, inspired by the analogical reasoning of human, we propose the link-of-analogy prompting, which enables LLMs to process new situations by drawing analogies to known situations, enhancing their performance on unseen classes beyond limited ICL examples. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing prompting methods and few-shot supervised learning methods on document-level EAE datasets. Additionally, the HD-LoA prompting shows effectiveness in other tasks like sentiment analysis and natural language inference, demonstrating its broad adaptability.
Investigating and Mitigating the Multimodal Hallucination Snowballing in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Weihong Zhong, Xiaocheng Feng, Liang Zhao, Qiming Li, Lei Huang, Yuxuan Gu, Weitao Ma, Yuan Xu, Bing Qin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Though advanced in understanding visual information with human languages, Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) still suffer from multimodal hallucinations. A natural concern is that during multimodal interaction, the generated hallucinations could influence the LVLMs' subsequent generation. Thus, we raise a question: $\textitWhen presented with a query relevant to the previously generated hallucination, will LVLMs be misled and respond incorrectly, even though the ground visual information exists?$ To answer this, we propose a framework called $\\textitMMHalSnowball$ to evaluate LVLMs' behaviors when encountering generated hallucinations, where LVLMs are required to answer specific visual questions within a curated hallucinatory conversation. Crucially, our experiment shows that the performance of open-source LVLMs drops by at least $31\%$, indicating that LVLMs are prone to accept the generated hallucinations and make false claims that they would not have supported without distractions. We term this $\textitMultimodal Hallucination Snowballing$. To mitigate this issue, we further propose a training-free method called $\textitResidual Visual Decoding,$ where we revise the output distribution of LVLMs with the one derived from the residual visual input, providing models with direct access to the visual information. Experiments show that our method can mitigate more than $24\%$ of the snowballed multimodal hallucination while maintaining capabilities.
mCoT: Multilingual Instruction Tuning for Reasoning Consistency in Language Models
Authors: Huiyuan Lai, Malvina Nissim
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) with Chain-of-thought (CoT) have recently emerged as a powerful technique for eliciting reasoning to improve various downstream tasks. As most research mainly focuses on English, with few explorations in a multilingual context, the question of how reliable this reasoning capability is in different languages is still open. To address it directly, we study multilingual reasoning consistency across multiple languages, using popular open-source LLMs. First, we compile the first large-scale multilingual math reasoning dataset, *mCoT-MATH*, covering eleven diverse languages. Then, we introduce multilingual CoT instruction tuning to boost reasoning capability across languages, thereby improving model consistency. While existing LLMs show substantial variation across the languages we consider, and especially low performance for lesser resourced languages, our 7B parameter model *mCoT* achieves impressive consistency across languages, and superior or comparable performance to close- and open-source models even of much larger sizes.
GunStance: Stance Detection for Gun Control and Gun Regulation
Authors: Nikesh Gyawali, Iustin Sirbu, Tiberiu Sosea, Sarthak Khanal, Doina Caragea, Traian Rebedea, Cornelia Caragea
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The debate surrounding gun control and gun regulation in the United States has intensified in the wake of numerous mass shooting events. As perspectives on this matter vary, it becomes increasingly important to comprehend individuals' positions. Stance detection, the task of determining an author`s position towards a proposition or target, has gained attention for its potential use in understanding public perceptions towards controversial topics and identifying the best strategies to address public concerns. In this paper, we present GunStance, a dataset of tweets pertaining to shooting events, focusing specifically on the controversial topics of “banning guns” versus “regulating guns.” The tweets in the dataset are sourced from discussions on Twitter following various shooting incidents in the United States. Amazon Mechanical Turk was used to manually annotate a subset of the tweets relevant to the targets of interest (“banning guns” and “regulating guns”) into three classes: In-Favor, Against, and Neutral. The remaining unlabeled tweets are included in the dataset to facilitate studies on semi-supervised learning (SSL) approaches that can help address the scarcity of the labeled data in stance detection tasks. Furthermore, we propose a hybrid approach that combines curriculum-based SSL and Large Language Models (LLM), and show that the proposed approach outperforms supervised, semi-supervised, and LLM-based zero-shot models in most experiments on our assembled dataset.
Beyond Traditional Benchmarks: Analyzing Behaviors of Open LLMs on Data-to-Text Generation
Authors: Zdeněk Kasner, Ondrej Dusek
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We analyze the behaviors of open large language models (LLMs) on the task of data-to-text (D2T) generation, i.e., generating coherent and relevant text from structured data. To avoid the issue of LLM training data contamination with standard benchmarks, we design Quintd - a tool for collecting novel structured data records from public APIs. We find that open LLMs (Llama 2, Mistral, and Zephyr) can generate fluent and coherent texts in zero-shot settings from data in common formats collected with Quintd. However, we show that the semantic accuracy of the outputs is a major issue: both according to human annotators and our reference-free metric based on GPT-4, more than 80% of the outputs of open LLMs contain at least one semantic error. We publicly release the code, data, and model outputs.
Don`t Go To Extremes: Revealing the Excessive Sensitivity and Calibration Limitations of LLMs in Implicit Hate Speech Detection
Authors: Min Zhang, Jianfeng He, Taoran Ji, Chang-Tien Lu
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The fairness and trustworthiness of Large Language Models (LLMs) are receiving increasing attention. Implicit hate speech, which employs indirect language to convey hateful intentions, occupies a significant portion of practice. However, the extent to which LLMs effectively address this issue remains insufficiently examined. This paper delves into the capability of LLMs to detect implicit hate speech and express confidence in their responses. Our evaluation meticulously considers various prompt patterns and mainstream uncertainty estimation methods. Our findings highlight that LLMs exhibit two extremes: (1) LLMs display excessive sensitivity towards groups or topics that may cause fairness issues, resulting in misclassifying benign statements as hate speech. (2) LLMs' confidence scores for each method excessively concentrate on a fixed range, remaining unchanged regardless of the dataset`s complexity. Consequently, the calibration performance is heavily reliant on primary classification accuracy. These discoveries unveil new limitations of LLMs, underscoring the need for caution when optimizing models to ensure they do not veer towards extremes. This serves as a reminder to carefully consider sensitivity and confidence in the pursuit of model fairness.
Don`t Rank, Combine! Combining Machine Translation Hypotheses Using Quality Estimation
Authors: Giorgos Vernikos, Andrei Popescu-Belis
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Neural machine translation systems estimate probabilities of target sentences given source sentences, yet these estimates may not align with human preferences. This work introduces QE-fusion, a method that synthesizes translations using a quality estimation metric (QE), which correlates better with human judgments. QE-fusion leverages a pool of candidates sampled from a model, combining spans from different candidates using a QE metric such as CometKiwi. We compare QE-fusion against beam search and recent reranking techniques, such as Minimum Bayes Risk decoding or QE-reranking. Our method consistently improves translation quality in terms of COMET and BLEURT scores when applied to large language models (LLMs) used for translation (PolyLM, XGLM, Llama2, Mistral, ALMA, and Tower) and to multilingual translation models (NLLB), over five language pairs. Notably, QE-fusion exhibits larger improvements for LLMs due to their ability to generate diverse outputs. We demonstrate that our approach generates novel translations in over half of the cases and consistently outperforms other methods across varying numbers of candidates (5--200). Furthermore, we empirically establish that QE-fusion scales linearly with the number of candidates in the pool.
Generating and Evaluating Plausible Explanations for Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Antonio Di Mauro, Zhao Xu, Wiem Ben Rim, Timo Sztyler, Carolin Lawrence
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Explanations for AI should aid human users, yet this ultimate goal remains under-explored. This paper aims to bridge this gap by investigating the specific explanatory needs of human users in the context of Knowledge Graph Completion (KGC) systems. In contrast to the prevailing approaches that primarily focus on mathematical theories, we recognize the potential limitations of explanations that may end up being overly complex or nonsensical for users. Through in-depth user interviews, we gain valuable insights into the types of KGC explanations users seek. Building upon these insights, we introduce GradPath, a novel path-based explanation method designed to meet human-centric explainability constraints and enhance plausibility. Additionally, GradPath harnesses the gradients of the trained KGC model to maintain a certain level of faithfulness. We verify the effectiveness of GradPath through well-designed human-centric evaluations. The results confirm that our method provides explanations that users consider more plausible than previous ones.
One Prompt To Rule Them All: LLMs for Opinion Summary Evaluation
Authors: Tejpalsingh Siledar, Swaroop Nath, Sankara Muddu, Rupasai Rangaraju, Swaprava Nath, Pushpak Bhattacharyya, Suman Banerjee, Amey Patil, Sudhanshu Singh, Muthusamy Chelliah, Nikesh Garera
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Evaluation of opinion summaries using conventional reference-based metrics often fails to provide a comprehensive assessment and exhibits limited correlation with human judgments. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise as reference-free metrics for NLG evaluation, their potential remains unexplored for opinion summary evaluation. Furthermore, the absence of sufficient opinion summary evaluation datasets hinders progress in this area. In response, we introduce the SUMMEVAL-OP dataset, encompassing 7 dimensions crucial to the evaluation of opinion summaries: fluency, coherence, relevance, faithfulness, aspect coverage, sentiment consistency, and specificity. We propose OP-I-PROMPT, a dimension-independent prompt, along with OP-PROMPTS, a dimension-dependent set of prompts for opinion summary evaluation. Our experiments demonstrate that OP-I-PROMPT emerges as a good alternative for evaluating opinion summaries, achieving an average Spearman correlation of 0.70 with human judgments, surpassing prior methodologies. Remarkably, we are the first to explore the efficacy of LLMs as evaluators, both on closed-source and open-source models, in the opinion summary evaluation domain.
LANDeRMT: Dectecting and Routing Language-Aware Neurons for Selectively Finetuning LLMs to Machine Translation
Authors: Shaolin Zhu, Leiyu Pan, Bo Li, Deyi Xiong
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in multilingual translation even with limited bilingual supervision. The major challenges are catastrophic forgetting and parameter interference for finetuning LLMs when provided parallel training data. To address these challenges, we propose LANDeRMT, a Language-Aware Neuron Detecting and Routing framework that selectively finetunes LLMs to Machine Translation with diverse translation training data. In LANDeRMT, we evaluate the awareness of neurons to MT tasks and categorize them into language-general and language-specific neurons. This categorization enables selective parameter updates during finetuning, mitigating parameter interference and catastrophic forgetting issues. For the detected neurons, we further propose a conditional awareness-based routing mechanism to dynamically adjust language-general and language-specific capacity within LLMs, guided by translation signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LANDeRMT is very effective in learning translation knowledge, significantly improving translation quality over various strong baselines for multiple language pairs.
A Joint Coreference-Aware Approach to Document-Level Target Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Hongjie Cai, Heqing Ma, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Most existing work on aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) focuses on the sentence level, while research at the document level has not received enough attention. Compared to sentence-level ABSA, the document-level ABSA is not only more practical but also requires holistic document-level understanding capabilities such as coreference resolution. To investigate the impact of coreference information on document-level ABSA, we conduct a three-stage research for the document-level target sentiment analysis (DTSA) task: 1) exploring the effectiveness of coreference information for the DTSA task; 2) reducing the reliance on manually annotated coreference information; 3) alleviating the evaluation bias caused by missing the coreference information of opinion targets. Specifically, we first manually annotate the coreferential opinion targets and propose a multi-task learning framework to jointly model the DTSA task and the coreference resolution task. Then we annotate the coreference information with ChatGPT for joint training. Finally, to address the issue of missing coreference targets, we modify the metrics from strict matching to a loose matching method based on the clusters of targets. The experimental results not only demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework but also reflect the feasibility of using ChatGPT-annotated coreferential entities and the applicability of the modified metrics. Our source code is publicly released at https://github.com/NUSTM/DTSA-Coref.
VisDiaHalBench: A Visual Dialogue Benchmark For Diagnosing Hallucination in Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Qingxing Cao, Junhao Cheng, Xiaodan Liang, Liang Lin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Despite the significant success of large vision-language models (LVLMs), some studies have revealed that LVLMs suffer from the hallucination problem, where the LVLMs' response contains descriptions of non-existent objects. Although various benchmarks have been proposed to investigate this problem, they mostly focus on single-turn evaluation and overlook the hallucination raised by textual inputs. To investigate the hallucination problem of LVLMs when given long-term misleading textual history, we propose a novel visual dialogue hallucination evaluation benchmark VisDiaHalBench. The benchmark consists of samples with five-turn questions about an edited image and its original version. VisDiaHalBench differs from previous hallucination benchmarks in the following three points: 1) The questions and answers are unambiguously grounded by annotated scene graphs. 2) The images are uncommonly edited to inspect the visual model and common-object hallucination in LLMs. 3) The carefully designed dialogue refers a same object in different turns to assess the image consistency and influence of history for LVLMs. The detailed analysis of several state-of-the-art LVLMs across image consistency, visual understanding, history influence, and other dimensions reveals their substantial performance gap with single-turn VQA tasks. The benchmark is released in: https://github.com/qingxingcao/VisDiaHalBench
AutoDSL: Automated domain-specific language design for structural representation of procedures with constraints
Authors: Yu-Zhe Shi, Haofei Hou, Zhangqian Bi, Fanxu Meng, Xiang Wei, Lecheng Ruan, Qining Wang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Accurate representation of procedures in restricted scenarios, such as non-standardized scientific experiments, requires precise depiction of constraints. Unfortunately, Domain-specific Language (DSL), as an effective tool to express constraints structurally, often requires case-by-case hand-crafting, necessitating customized, labor-intensive efforts. To overcome this challenge, we introduce the AutoDSL framework to automate DSL-based constraint design across various domains. Utilizing domain specified experimental protocol corpora, AutoDSL optimizes syntactic constraints and abstracts semantic constraints. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of the DSLs designed by AutoDSL across five distinct domains highlight its potential as an auxiliary module for language models, aiming to improve procedural planning and execution.
Multipath parsing in the brain
Authors: Berta Franzluebbers, Donald Dunagan, Miloš Stanojević, Jan Buys, John Hale
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Humans understand sentences word-by-word, in the order that they hear them. This incrementality entails resolving temporary ambiguities about syntactic relationships. We investigate how humans process these syntactic ambiguities by correlating predictions from incremental generative dependency parsers with timecourse data from people undergoing functional neuroimaging while listening to an audiobook. In particular, we compare competing hypotheses regarding the number of developing syntactic analyses in play during word-by-word comprehension: one vs more than one. This comparison involves evaluating syntactic surprisal from a state-of-the-art dependency parser with LLM-adapted encodings against an existing fMRI dataset. In both English and Chinese data, we find evidence for multipath parsing. Brain regions associated with this multipath effect include bilateral superior temporal gyrus.
Search-Adaptor: Embedding Customization for Information Retrieval
Authors: Jinsung Yoon, Yanfei Chen, Sercan Arik, Tomas Pfister
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Embeddings extracted by pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) have significant potential to improve information retrieval and search. Beyond the zero-shot setup in which they are being conventionally used, being able to take advantage of the information from the relevant query-corpus paired data can further boost the LLM capabilities. In this paper, we propose a novel method, Search-Adaptor, for customizing LLMs for information retrieval in an efficient and robust way. Search-Adaptor modifies the embeddings generated by pre-trained LLMs, and can be integrated with any LLM, including those only available via prediction APIs. On multiple English, multilingual, and multimodal retrieval datasets, we show consistent and significant performance benefits for Search-Adaptor -- e.g., more than 5% improvements for Google Embedding APIs in nDCG@10 averaged over 14 BEIR datasets.
Back to Basics: Revisiting REINFORCE-Style Optimization for Learning from Human Feedback in LLMs
Authors: Arash Ahmadian, Chris Cremer, Matthias Gallé, Marzieh Fadaee, Julia Kreutzer, Olivier Pietquin, Ahmet Üstün, Sara Hooker
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: AI alignment in the shape of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is increasingly treated as a crucial ingredient for high performance large language models. Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been installed by the seminal literature as the standard method for the RL part of RLHF. However, it involves both high computational cost and sensitive hyperparameter tuning. We posit that most of the motivational principles that led to the development of PPO are less of a practical concern in RLHF and advocate for a less computationally expensive method that preserves and even increases performance. We revisit how alignment from human preferences is formulated in the context of RL. Keeping simplicity as a guiding principle, we show that many components of PPO are unnecessary in an RLHF context and that far simpler REINFORCE-style optimization variants outperform both PPO and newly proposed “RL-free” methods such as DPO and RAFT. Our work suggests that careful adaptation to LLMs alignment characteristics allows benefiting from online RL optimization at low cost.
VIEScore: Towards Explainable Metrics for Conditional Image Synthesis Evaluation
Authors: Max Ku, Dongfu Jiang, Cong Wei, Xiang Yue, Wenhu Chen
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: In the rapidly advancing field of conditional image generation research, challenges such as limited explainability lie in effectively evaluating the performance and capabilities of various models. This paper introduces VIEScore, a Visual Instruction-guided Explainable metric for evaluating any conditional image generation tasks. VIEScore leverages general knowledge from Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) as the backbone and does not require training or fine-tuning. We evaluate VIEScore on seven prominent tasks in conditional image tasks and found: (1) VIEScore (GPT4-o) achieves a high Spearman correlation of 0.4 with human evaluations, while the human-to-human correlation is 0.45. (2) VIEScore (with open-source MLLM) is significantly weaker than GPT-4o and GPT-4v in evaluating synthetic images. (3) VIEScore achieves a correlation on par with human ratings in the generation tasks but struggles in editing tasks. With these results, we believe VIEScore shows its great potential to replace human judges in evaluating image synthesis tasks.
Tree Transformer`s Disambiguation Ability of Prepositional Phrase Attachment and Garden Path Effects
Authors: Lingling Zhou, Suzan Verberne, Gijs Wijnholds
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: This work studies two types of ambiguity in natural language: prepositional phrase (PP) attachment ambiguity, and garden path constructions. Due to the different nature of these ambiguities -- one being structural, the other incremental in nature -- we pretrain and evaluate the Tree Transformer of Wang et al. (2019), an unsupervised Transformer model that induces tree representations internally. To assess PP attachment ambiguity we inspect the model`s induced parse trees against a newly prepared dataset derived from the PP attachment corpus (Ratnaparkhi et al., 1994). Measuring garden path effects is done by considering surprisal rates of the underlying language model on a number of dedicated test suites, following Futrell et al. (2019). For comparison we evaluate a pretrained supervised BiLSTM-based model trained on constituency parsing as sequence labelling (Gómez-Rodríguez and Vilares, 2018). Results show that the unsupervised Tree Transformer does exhibit garden path effects, but its parsing ability is far inferior to the supervised BiLSTM, and it is not as sensitive to lexical cues as other large LSTM models, suggesting that supervised parsers based on a pre-Transformer architecture may be the better choice in the presence of ambiguity.
Tree-of-Traversals: A Zero-Shot Reasoning Algorithm for Augmenting Black-box Language Models with Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Elan Markowitz, Anil Ramakrishna, Jwala Dhamala, Ninareh Mehrabi, Charith Peris, Rahul Gupta, Kai-Wei Chang, Aram Galstyan
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Knowledge graphs (KGs) complement Large Language Models (LLMs) by providing reliable, structured, domain-specific, and up-to-date external knowledge. However, KGs and LLMs are often developed separately and must be integrated after training. We introduce Tree-of-Traversals, a novel zero-shot reasoning algorithm that enables augmentation of black-box LLMs with one or more KGs. The algorithm equips a LLM with actions for interfacing a KG and enables the LLM to perform tree search over possible thoughts and actions to find high confidence reasoning paths. Tree-of-Traversals significantly improves performance on question answering and KG question answering tasks. Code is available at https://github.com/amazon-science/tree-of-traversals
Structured Tree Alignment for Evaluation of (Speech) Constituency Parsing
Authors: Freda Shi, Kevin Gimpel, Karen Livescu
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We present the structured average intersection-over-union ratio (STRUCT-IOU), an evaluation metric that compares a constituency parse tree over automatically recognized spoken word boundaries with the ground-truth parse tree over written words. To compute the metric, we (1) project the ground-truth parse tree to the speech domain by forced alignment, (2) align the projected ground-truth constituents with the predicted ones under certain structured constraints, and (3) calculate the average IOU score across all aligned constituent pairs. STRUCT-IOU takes word boundaries into account and overcomes the challenge that the predicted words and ground truth may not have perfect one-to-one correspondence. Extending to the evaluation of text constituency parsing, we demonstrate that STRUCT-IOU shows higher tolerance to syntactically plausible parses than PARSEVAL (Black et al., 1991).
ViSAGe: A Global-Scale Analysis of Visual Stereotypes in Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Akshita Jha, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Remi Denton, Sarah Laszlo, Shachi Dave, Rida Qadri, Chandan Reddy, Sunipa Dev
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent studies have shown that Text-to-Image (T2I) model generations can reflect social stereotypes present in the real world. However, existing approaches for evaluating stereotypes have a noticeable lack of coverage of global identity groups and their associated stereotypes. To address this gap, we introduce the ViSAGe (Visual Stereotypes Around the Globe) dataset to enable the evaluation of known nationality-based stereotypes in T2I models, across 135 nationalities. We enrich an existing textual stereotype resource by distinguishing between stereotypical associations that are more likely to have visual depictions, such as \textquoteleftsombrero', from those that are less visually concrete, such as \textquoteleftattractive'. We demonstrate ViSAGe`s utility through a multi-faceted evaluation of T2I generations. First, we show that stereotypical attributes in ViSAGe are thrice as likely to be present in generated images of corresponding identities as compared to other attributes, and that the offensiveness of these depictions is especially higher for identities from Africa, South America, and South East Asia. Second, we assess the \textquoteleftstereotypical pull' of visual depictions of identity groups, which reveals how the \textquoteleftdefault' representations of all identity groups in ViSAGe have a pull towards stereotypical depictions, and that this pull is even more prominent for identity groups from the Global South. CONTENT WARNING: Some examples contain offensive stereotypes.
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking
Authors: Xiaokang Zhang, Zijun Yao, Jing Zhang, Kaifeng Yun, Jifan Yu, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: This paper proposes PiNose, which trains a probing model on offline self-consistency checking results, thereby circumventing the need for human-annotated data and achieving transferability across diverse data distributions. As the consistency check process is offline, PiNose reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification. Additionally, it examines various aspects of internal states prior to response decoding, contributing to more effective detection of factual inaccuracies. Experiment results on both factuality detection and question answering benchmarks show that PiNose achieves surpassing results than existing factuality detection methods.
What Do Language Models Learn in Context? The Structured Task Hypothesis.
Authors: Jiaoda Li, Yifan Hou, Mrinmaya Sachan, Ryan Cotterell
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) exhibit an intriguing ability to learn a novel task from in-context examples presented in a demonstration, termed in-context learning (ICL). Understandably, a swath of research has been dedicated to uncovering the theories underpinning ICL. One popular hypothesis explains ICL by task selection. LLMs identify the task based on the demonstration and generalize it to the prompt. Another popular hypothesis is that ICL is a form of meta-learning, i.e., the models learn a learning algorithm at pre-training time and apply it to the demonstration. Finally, a third hypothesis argues that LLMs use the demonstration to select a composition of tasks learned during pre-training to perform ICL. In this paper, we empirically explore these three hypotheses that explain LLMs' ability to learn in context with a suite of experiments derived from common text classification tasks. We invalidate the first two hypotheses with counterexamples and provide evidence in support of the last hypothesis. Our results suggest an LLM could learn a novel task in context via composing tasks learned during pre-training.
Agent Lumos: Unified and Modular Training for Open-Source Language Agents
Authors: Da Yin, Faeze Brahman, Abhilasha Ravichander, Khyathi Chandu, Kai-Wei Chang, Yejin Choi, Bill Yuchen Lin
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Closed-source agents suffer from several issues such as a lack of affordability, transparency, and reproducibility, particularly on complex interactive tasks. This motivates the development of open-source alternatives. We introduce Lumos, one of the first frameworks for training open-source LLM-based agents. Lumos features a learnable, unified and modular architecture with a planning module that learns high-level subgoal generation, and a grounding module trained to translate these into the actions using various tools in the execution module. The design allows for modular upgrades and wider applicability to diverse interactive tasks. To foster generalizable agent learning, we collect large-scale, unified, and high-quality training annotations derived from diverse ground-truth reasoning rationales across various complex interactive tasks. On 9 datasets, Lumos exhibits several key advantages: (1) Lumos excels multiple larger open-source agents on the held-out datasets (unused for training) for each task type. Lumos even surpasses GPT agents on QA and web tasks; (2) Lumos outperforms open-source agents produced by chain-of-thoughts and unmodularized integrated training; and (3) Lumos effectively generalizes to unseen tasks, outperforming 33B-scale agents and domain-specific agents. Code and data will be released.
Investigating Cultural Alignment of Large Language Models
Authors: Badr AlKhamissi, Muhammad ElNokrashy, Mai Alkhamissi, Mona Diab
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The intricate relationship between language and culture has long been a subject of exploration within the realm of linguistic anthropology. Large Language Models (LLMs), promoted as repositories of collective human knowledge, raise a pivotal question: do these models genuinely encapsulate the diverse knowledge adopted by different cultures? Our study reveals that these models demonstrate greater cultural alignment along two dimensions---firstly, when prompted with the dominant language of a specific culture, and secondly, when pretrained with a refined mixture of languages employed by that culture. We quantify cultural alignment by simulating sociological surveys, comparing model responses to those of actual survey participants as references. Specifically, we replicate a survey conducted in various regions of Egypt and the United States through prompting LLMs with different pretraining data mixtures in both Arabic and English with the personas of the real respondents and the survey questions. Further analysis reveals that misalignment becomes more pronounced for underrepresented personas and for culturally sensitive topics, such as those probing social values. Finally, we introduce Anthropological Prompting, a novel method leveraging anthropological reasoning to enhance cultural alignment. Our study emphasizes the necessity for a more balanced multilingual pretraining dataset to better represent the diversity of human experience and the plurality of different cultures with many implications on the topic of cross-lingual transfer.
More Victories, Less Cooperation: Assessing Cicero`s Diplomacy Play
Authors: Wichayaporn Wongkamjan, Feng Gu, Yanze Wang, Ulf Hermjakob, Jonathan May, Brandon M. Stewart, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld, Denis Peskoff, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The boardgame Diplomacy is a challenging setting for communicative and cooperative artificial intelligence. The most prominent communicative Diplomacy AI, Cicero, has excellent strategic abilities, exceeding human players. However, the best Diplomacy players master communication, not just tactics, which is why the game has received attention as an AI challenge. This work seeks to understand the degree to which Cicero succeeds at communication. First, we annotate in-game communication with abstract meaning representation to separate in-game tactics from general language. Second, we run two dozen games with humans and Cicero, totaling over 200 human-player hours of competition. While AI can consistently outplay human players, AI-Human communication is still limited because of AI`s difficulty with deception and persuasion. This shows that Cicero relies on strategy and has not yet reached the full promise of communicative and cooperative AI.
VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild
Authors: Puyuan Peng, Po-Yao Huang, Shang-Wen Li, Abdelrahman Mohamed, David Harwath
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: We introduce VoiceCraft, a token infilling neural codec language model, that achieves state-of-the-art performance on both speech editing and zero-shot text-to-speech (TTS) on audiobooks, internet videos, and podcasts. VoiceCraft employs a Transformer decoder architecture and introduces a token rearrangement procedure that combines causal masking and delayed stacking to enable generation within an existing sequence. On speech editing tasks, VoiceCraft produces edited speech that is nearly indistinguishable from unedited recordings in terms of naturalness, as evaluated by humans; for zero-shot TTS, our model outperforms prior SotA models including VALL-E and the popular commercial model XTTS v2. Crucially, the models are evaluated on challenging and realistic datasets, that consist of diverse accents, speaking styles, recording conditions, and background noise and music, and our model performs consistently well compared to other models and real recordings. In particular, for speech editing evaluation, we introduce a high quality, challenging, and realistic dataset named . We encourage readers to listen to the demos at https://jasonppy.github.io/VoiceCraft_web. Data, code, and model weights are available at https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft
RAID: A Shared Benchmark for Robust Evaluation of Machine-Generated Text Detectors
Authors: Liam Dugan, Alyssa Hwang, Filip Trhlík, Andrew Zhu, Josh Magnus Ludan, Hainiu Xu, Daphne Ippolito, Chris Callison-Burch
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Many commercial and open-source models claim to detect machine-generated text with extremely high accuracy (99% or more). However, very few of these detectors are evaluated on shared benchmark datasets and even when they are, the datasets used for evaluation are insufficiently challenging---lacking variations in sampling strategy, adversarial attacks, and open-source generative models. In this work we present RAID: the largest and most challenging benchmark dataset for machine-generated text detection. RAID includes over 6 million generations spanning 11 models, 8 domains, 11 adversarial attacks and 4 decoding strategies. Using RAID, we evaluate the out-of-domain and adversarial robustness of 8 open- and 4 closed-source detectors and find that current detectors are easily fooled by adversarial attacks, variations in sampling strategies, repetition penalties, and unseen generative models. We release our data along with a leaderboard to encourage future research.
Silent Signals, Loud Impact: LLMs for Word-Sense Disambiguation of Coded Dog Whistles
Authors: Julia Kruk, Michela Marchini, Rijul Magu, Caleb Ziems, David Muchlinski, Diyi Yang
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: A dog whistle is a form of coded communication that carries a secondary meaning to specific audiences and is often weaponized for racial and socioeconomic discrimination. Dog whistling historically originated from United States politics, but in recent years has taken root in social media as a means of evading hate speech detection systems and maintaining plausible deniability. In this paper, we present an approach for word-sense disambiguation of dog whistles from standard speech using Large Language Models (LLMs), and leverage this technique to create a dataset of 16,550 high-confidence coded examples of dog whistles used in formal and informal communication. Silent Signals is the largest dataset of disambiguated dog whistle usage, created for applications in hate speech detection, neology, and political science.
On the Representational Capacity of Neural Language Models with Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Franz Nowak, Anej Svete, Alexandra Butoi, Ryan Cotterell
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: The performance of modern language models (LMs) has been improved by chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning, i.e., the process of generating intermediate results that guide the model towards a final answer. A possible explanation for this improvement is that CoT reasoning extends an LM`s computational power, as RNNs and transformers with additional scratch space are known to be Turing complete. Comparing LMs to Turing machines, however, introduces a category error---Turing machines decide language membership, whereas LMs define distributions over strings. To bridge this gap, we formalize CoT reasoning in a probabilistic setting. We present several results on the representational capacity of recurrent and transformer LMs with CoT reasoning, showing that they can represent the same family of distributions over strings as probabilistic Turing machines.
Analyzing LLM Behavior in Dialogue Summarization: Unveiling Circumstantial Hallucination Trends
Authors: Sanjana Ramprasad, Elisa Ferracane, Zachary Lipton
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the capabilities of summarization systems.However, they continue to face a persistent challenge: hallucination. While prior work has extensively examined LLMs in news domains, evaluation of dialogue summarization has primarily focused on BART-based models, resulting in a notable gap in understanding LLM effectiveness.Our work seeks to address this gap by benchmarking LLMs for dialogue summarization faithfulness using human annotations,focusing on identifying and categorizing span-level inconsistencies.Specifically, we evaluate two prominent LLMs: GPT-4 and Alpaca-13B.Our evaluation reveals that LLMs often generate plausible, but not fully supported inferences based on conversation contextual cues, a trait absent in older models. As a result, we propose a refined taxonomy of errors, introducing a novel category termed “Contextual Inference” to address this aspect of LLM behavior. Using our taxonomy, we compare the behavioral differences between LLMs and older fine-tuned models. Additionally, we systematically assess the efficacy of automatic error detection methods on LLM summaries and find that they struggle to detect these nuanced errors effectively. To address this, we introduce two prompt-based approaches for fine-grained error detection. Our methods outperform existing metrics, particularly in identifying the novel “Contextual Inference” error type.
LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory
Authors: Keivan Alizadeh, Seyed Iman Mirzadeh, Dmitry Belenko, S. Khatamifard, Minsik Cho, Carlo C Del Mundo, Mohammad Rastegari, Mehrdad Farajtabar
Published in: Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (Long Paper Track), 2024

Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are central to modern natural language processing, delivering exceptional performance in various tasks. However, their substantial computational and memory requirements present challenges, especially for devices with limited DRAM capacity. This paper tackles the challenge of efficiently running LLMs that exceed the available DRAM capacity by storing the model parameters in flash memory, but bringing them on demand to DRAM. Our method involves constructing an inference cost model that takes into account the characteristics of flash memory, guiding us to optimize in two critical areas: reducing the volume of data transferred from flash and reading data in larger, more contiguous chunks. Within this hardware-informed framework, we introduce two principal techniques. First, “windowing” strategically reduces data transfer by reusing previously activated neurons, and second, “row-column bundling”, tailored to the sequential data access strengths of flash memory, increases the size of data chunks read from flash memory. These methods collectively enable running models up to twice the size of the available DRAM, with a 4-5x and 20-25x increase in inference speed compared to naive loading approaches in CPU and GPU, respectively. Our integration of sparsity awareness, context-adaptive loading, and a hardware-oriented design paves the way for effective inference of LLMs on devices with limited memory.