mtybilly/Instruct2DS huggingface dataset:
TextMixer: Mixing Multiple Inputs for Privacy-Preserving Inference
Authors: Xin Zhou, Yi Lu, Ruotian Ma, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are often deployed as cloud services, enabling users to upload textual data and perform inference remotely. However, users' personal text often contains sensitive information, and sharing such data directly with the service providers can lead to serious privacy leakage. To address this problem, we introduce a novel privacy-preserving inference framework called \textbf \textitMixPi , which prevents plaintext leakage during the inference phase. Inspired by $k$-anonymity, MixPi aims to obfuscate a user`s private input by mixing it with multiple other inputs, thereby confounding potential privacy attackers. To achieve this, our approach involves: (1) proposing a novel encryption module, Privacy Mixer, which encrypts input from three distinct dimensions: mixing, representation, and position. (2) adopting a pre-trained Multi-input Multi-output network to handle mixed representations and obtain multiple predictions. (3) employing a Privacy Demixer to ensure only the user can decrypt the real output among the multiple predictions. Furthermore, we explore different ways to automatically generate synthetic inputs required for mixing. Experimental results on token and sentence classification tasks demonstrate that MixPi greatly surpasses existing privacy-preserving methods in both performance and privacy.
FinePrompt: Unveiling the Role of Finetuned Inductive Bias on Compositional Reasoning in GPT-4
Authors: Jeonghwan Kim, Giwon Hong, Sung-Hyon Myaeng, Joyce Whang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Compositional reasoning across texts has been a long-standing challenge in natural language processing. With large language models like GPT-4 taking over the field, prompting techniques such as chain-of-thought (CoT) were proposed to unlock compositional, multi-step reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Despite their success, the prompts demand significant human effort to discover and validate them. Our work draws attention to the idea of transferring task-specific inductive biases from finetuned models to prompts, as a way of improving GPT-4`s compositional reasoning capabilities. To leverage these inductive biases, we formulate prompt templates to ease the transfer of inductive biases. The experimental results on multi-hop question answering and numerical reasoning over text show that our proposed prompt scheme shows competitive zero-shot and few-shot performances compared to existing prompts on complicated reasoning tasks, highlighting the importance of adopting the validated biases of the previous paradigm.
Teacher Perception of Automatically Extracted Grammar Concepts for L2 Language Learning
Authors: Aditi Chaudhary, Arun Sampath, Ashwin Sheshadri, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: One of the challenges in language teaching is how best to organize rules regarding syntax, semantics, or phonology in a meaningful manner. This not only requires content creators to have pedagogical skills, but also have that language`s deep understanding. While comprehensive materials to develop such curricula are available in English and some broadly spoken languages, for many other languages, teachers need to manually create them in response to their students' needs. This is challenging because i) it requires that such experts be accessible and have the necessary resources, and ii) describing all the intricacies of a language is time-consuming and prone to omission. In this work, we aim to facilitate this process by automatically discovering and visualizing grammar descriptions. We extract descriptions from a natural text corpus that answer questions about morphosyntax (learning of word order, agreement, case marking, or word formation) and semantics (learning of vocabulary). We apply this method for teaching two Indian languages, Kannada and Marathi, which, unlike English, do not have well-developed resources for second language learning. To assess the perceived utility of the extracted material, we enlist the help of language educators from schools in North America to perform a manual evaluation, who find the materials have potential to be used for their lesson preparation and learner evaluation.
Allies: Prompting Large Language Model with Beam Search
Authors: Hao Sun, Xiao Liu, Yeyun Gong, Yan Zhang, Daxin Jiang, Linjun Yang, Nan Duan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the advance of large language models (LLMs), the research field of LLM applications becomes more and more popular and the idea of constructing pipelines to accomplish complex tasks by stacking LLM API calls come true. However, this kind of methods face two limitations: narrow information coverage and low fault tolerance. In this work, we propose a novel method called ALLIES. Given an input query, ALLIES leverages LLMs to iteratively generate new queries related to the original query, enabling an iterative reasoning process. By iteratively refining and expanding the scope of the original query, ALLIES captures and utilizes hidden knowledge that may not be directly obtainable through retrieval. We take zero-shot open-domain question answering (ODQA) as an application scene and evaluate ALLIES on the widely-used benchmarks, such as NQ, WebQ and TriviaQA. The experimental results demonstrate that ALLIES significantly outperforms other zero-shot baselines, indicating its effectiveness in tackling those challenges. Our code is available in https://github.com/microsoft/SimXNS/tree/main/ALLIES.
Logic-LM: Empowering Large Language Models with Symbolic Solvers for Faithful Logical Reasoning
Authors: Liangming Pan, Alon Albalak, Xinyi Wang, William Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown human-like reasoning abilities but still struggle with complex logical problems. This paper introduces a novel framework, Logic-LM, which integrates LLMs with symbolic solvers to improve logical problem-solving. Our method first utilizes LLMs to translate a natural language problem into a symbolic formulation. Afterward, a deterministic symbolic solver performs inference on the formulated problem. We also introduce a self-refinement module, which utilizes the symbolic solver`s error messages to revise symbolic formalizations. We demonstrate Logic-LM`s effectiveness on five logical reasoning datasets: ProofWriter, PrOntoQA, FOLIO, LogicalDeduction, and AR-LSAT. On average, Logic-LM achieves a significant performance boost of 39.2% over using LLM alone with standard prompting and 18.4% over LLM with chain-of-thought prompting. Our findings suggest that Logic-LM, by combining LLMs with symbolic logic, offers a promising avenue for faithful logical reasoning.
SiMFy: A Simple Yet Effective Approach for Temporal Knowledge Graph Reasoning
Authors: Zhengtao Liu, Lei Tan, Mengfan Li, Yao Wan, Hai Jin, Xuanhua Shi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Temporal Knowledge Graph (TKG) reasoning, which focuses on leveraging temporal information to infer future facts in knowledge graphs, plays a vital role in knowledge graph completion. Typically, existing works for this task design graph neural networks and recurrent neural networks to respectively capture the structural and temporal information in KGs. Despite their effectiveness, in our practice, we find that they tend to suffer the issues of low training efficiency and insufficient generalization ability, which can be attributed to the over design of model architectures. To this end, this paper aims to figure out whether the current complex model architectures are necessary for temporal knowledge graph reasoning. As a result, we put forward a simple yet effective approach (termed SiMFy), which simply utilizes multilayer perceptron (MLP) to model the structural dependencies of events and adopts a fixed-frequency strategy to incorporate historical frequency during inference. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our SiMFy can reach state-of-the-art performance with the following strengths: 1) faster convergence speed and better generalization ability; 2) a much smaller time consumption in the training process; and 3) better ability to capture the structural dependencies of events in KGs. These results provide evidence that the substitution of complex models with simpler counterparts is a feasible strategy.
Understanding Translationese in Cross-Lingual Summarization
Authors: Jiaan Wang, Fandong Meng, Yunlong Liang, Tingyi Zhang, Jiarong Xu, Zhixu Li, Jie Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Given a document in a source language, cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims at generating a concise summary in a different target language. Unlike monolingual summarization (MS), naturally occurring source-language documents paired with target-language summaries are rare. To collect large-scale CLS data, existing datasets typically involve translation in their creation. However, the translated text is distinguished from the text originally written in that language, i.e., translationese. In this paper, we first confirm that different approaches of constructing CLS datasets will lead to different degrees of translationese. Then we systematically investigate how translationese affects CLS model evaluation and performance when it appears in source documents or target summaries. In detail, we find that (1) the translationese in documents or summaries of test sets might lead to the discrepancy between human judgment and automatic evaluation; (2) the translationese in training sets would harm model performance in real-world applications; (3) though machine-translated documents involve translationese, they are very useful for building CLS systems on low-resource languages under specific training strategies. Lastly, we give suggestions for future CLS research including dataset and model developments. We hope that our work could let researchers notice the phenomenon of translationese in CLS and take it into account in the future.
The Truth, The Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth: A New Benchmark Dataset for Hebrew Text Credibility Assessment
Authors: Ben Hagag, Reut Tsarfaty
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In the age of information overload, it is more important than ever to discern fact from fiction. From the internet to traditional media, we are constantly confronted with a deluge of information, much of which comes from politicians and other public figures who wield significant influence. In this paper, we introduce HeTrue: a new, publicly available dataset for evaluating the credibility of statements made by Israeli public figures and politicians. This dataset consists of 1021 statements, manually annotated by Israeli professional journalists, for their credibility status. Using this corpus, we set out to assess whether the credibility of statements can be predicted based on the text alone. To establish a baseline, we compare text-only methods with others using additional data like metadata, context, and evidence. Furthermore, we develop several credibility assessment models, including a feature-based model that utilizes linguistic features, and state-of-the-art transformer-based models with contextualized embeddings from a pre-trained encoder. Empirical results demonstrate improved performance when models integrate statement and context, outperforming those relying on the statement text alone. Our best model, which also integrates evidence, achieves a 48.3 F1 Score, suggesting that HeTrue is a challenging benchmark, calling for further work on this task.
IndiSocialFT: Multilingual Word Representation for Indian languages in code-mixed environment
Authors: Saurabh Kumar, Ranbir Sanasam, Sukumar Nandi
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The increasing number of Indian language users on the internet necessitates the development of Indian language technologies. In response to this demand, our paper presents a generalized representation vector for diverse text characteristics, including native scripts, transliterated text, multilingual, code-mixed, and social media-related attributes. We gather text from both social media and well-formed sources and utilize the FastText model to create the “IndiSocialFT” embedding. Through intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation methods, we compare IndiSocialFT with three popular pretrained embeddings trained over Indian languages. Our findings show that the proposed embedding surpasses the baselines in most cases and languages, demonstrating its suitability for various NLP applications.
Adaptive Hinge Balance Loss for Document-Level Relation Extraction
Authors: Jize Wang, Xinyi Le, Xiaodi Peng, Cailian Chen
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Document-Level Relation Extraction aims at predicting relations between entities from multiple sentences. A common practice is to select multi-label classification thresholds to decide whether a relation exists between an entity pair. However, in the document-level task, most entity pairs do not express any relations, resulting in a highly imbalanced distribution between positive and negative classes. We argue that the imbalance problem affects threshold selection and may lead to incorrect “no-relation” predictions. In this paper, we propose to down-weight the easy negatives by utilizing a distance between the classification threshold and the predicted score of each relation. Our novel Adaptive Hinge Balance Loss measures the difficulty of each relation class with the distance, putting more focus on hard, misclassified relations, i.e. the minority positive relations. Experiment results on Re-DocRED demonstrate the superiority of our approach over other balancing methods. Source codes are available at https://github.com/Jize-W/HingeABL.
Answer-state Recurrent Relational Network (AsRRN) for Constructed Response Assessment and Feedback Grouping
Authors: Zhaohui Li, Susan Lloyd, Matthew Beckman, Rebecca Passonneau
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: STEM educators must trade off the ease of assessing selected response (SR) questions, like multiple choice, with constructed response (CR) questions, where students articulate their own reasoning. Our work addresses a CR type new to NLP but common in college STEM, consisting of multiple questions per context. To relate the context, the questions, the reference responses, and students' answers, we developed an Answer-state Recurrent Relational Network (AsRRN). In recurrent time-steps, relation vectors are learned for specific dependencies in a computational graph, where the nodes encode the distinct types of text input. AsRRN incorporates contrastive loss for better representation learning, which improves performance and supports student feedback. AsRRN was developed on a new dataset of 6,532 student responses to three, two-part CR questions. AsRRN outperforms classifiers based on LLMs, a previous relational network for CR questions, and few-shot learning with GPT-3.5. Ablation studies show the distinct contributions of AsRRN`s dependency structure, the number of time steps in the recurrence, and the contrastive loss.
Low-Resource Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction by Data Augmentation with Prompting
Authors: Qingting Xu, Yu Hong, Fubang Zhao, Kaisong Song, Yangyang Kang, Jiaxiang Chen, Guodong Zhou
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Comparative Opinion Quintuple Extraction (COQE) aims to predict comparative opinion quintuples from comparative sentences. These quintuples include subject, object, shareable aspect, comparative opinion, and preference. The existing pipeline-based COQE method fails in error propagation. In addition, the complexity and insufficient amounts of annotated data hinder the performance of COQE models. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called low-resource comparative opinion quintuple extraction by Data Augmentation with Prompting (DAP). Firstly, we present an end-to-end model architecture better suited to the data augmentation method from triplets to quintuples and can effectively avoid error propagation. Additionally, we introduce a data-centric augmentation approach that leverages the robust generative abilities of ChatGPT and integrates transfer learning techniques. Experimental results over three datasets (Camera, Car, Ele) demonstrate that our approach yields substantial improvements and achieves state-of-the-art results. The source code and data are publicly released at: https://github.com/qtxu-nlp/COQE-DAP.
A New Benchmark and Reverse Validation Method for Passage-level Hallucination Detection
Authors: Shiping Yang, Renliang Sun, Xiaojun Wan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown their ability to collaborate effectively with humans in real-world scenarios. However, LLMs are apt to generate hallucinations, i.e., makeup incorrect text and unverified information, which can cause significant damage when deployed for mission-critical tasks. In this paper, we propose a self-check approach based on reverse validation to detect factual errors automatically in a zero-resource fashion. To facilitate future studies and assess different methods, we construct a hallucination detection benchmark named PHD, which is generated by ChatGPT and annotated by human annotators. Contrasting previous studies of zero-resource hallucination detection, our method and benchmark concentrate on passage-level detection instead of sentence-level. We empirically evaluate our method and existing zero-resource detection methods on two datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method considerably outperforms the baselines while costing fewer tokens and less time. Furthermore, we manually analyze some hallucination cases that LLM failed to capture, revealing the shared limitation of zero-resource methods.
Speculative Decoding: Exploiting Speculative Execution for Accelerating Seq2seq Generation
Authors: Heming Xia, Tao Ge, Peiyi Wang, Si-Qing Chen, Furu Wei, Zhifang Sui
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We propose Speculative Decoding (SpecDec), for the first time ever, to formally study exploiting the idea of speculative execution to accelerate autoregressive (AR) decoding. Speculative Decoding has two innovations: Spec-Drafter -- an independent model specially optimized for efficient and accurate drafting -- and Spec-Verification -- a reliable method for verifying the drafted tokens efficiently in the decoding paradigm. Experimental results on various seq2seq tasks including machine translation and abstractive summarization show our approach can achieve around 5x speedup for the popular Transformer architectures with comparable generation quality to beam search decoding, refreshing the impression that the draft-then-verify paradigm introduces only 1.4x~2x speedup. In addition to the remarkable speedup, we also demonstrate 3 additional advantages of SpecDec, revealing its practical value for accelerating generative models in real-world applications. Our models and codes are available at https://github.com/hemingkx/SpecDec.
APP: Adaptive Prototypical Pseudo-Labeling for Few-shot OOD Detection
Authors: Pei Wang, Keqing He, Yutao Mou, Xiaoshuai Song, Yanan Wu, Jingang Wang, Yunsen Xian, Xunliang Cai, Weiran Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Detecting out-of-domain (OOD) intents from user queries is essential for a task-oriented dialogue system. Previous OOD detection studies generally work on the assumption that plenty of labeled IND intents exist. In this paper, we focus on a more practical few-shot OOD setting where there are only a few labeled IND data and massive unlabeled mixed data that may belong to IND or OOD. The new scenario carries two key challenges: learning discriminative representations using limited IND data and leveraging unlabeled mixed data. Therefore, we propose an adaptive prototypical pseudo-labeling(APP) method for few-shot OOD detection, including a prototypical OOD detection framework (ProtoOOD) to facilitate low-resourceOOD detection using limited IND data, and an adaptive pseudo-labeling method to produce high-quality pseudo OOD and IND labels. Extensive experiments and analysis demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for few-shot OOD detection.
2INER: Instructive and In-Context Learning on Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Jiasheng Zhang, Xikai Liu, Xinyi Lai, Yan Gao, Shusen Wang, Yao Hu, Yiqing Lin
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Prompt-based learning has emerged as a powerful technique in natural language processing (NLP) due to its ability to leverage pre-training knowledge for downstream few-shot tasks. In this paper, we propose 2INER, a novel text-to-text framework for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks. Our approach employs instruction finetuning based on InstructionNER to enable the model to effectively comprehend and process task-specific instructions, including both main and auxiliary tasks. We also introduce a new auxiliary task, called Type Extracting, to enhance the model`s understanding of entity types in the overall semantic context of a sentence. To facilitate in-context learning, we concatenate examples to the input, enabling the model to learn from additional contextual information. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing Few-Shot NER methods and remains competitive with state-of-the-art standard NER algorithms.
Generative Emotion Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations with Commonsense Knowledge
Authors: Fanfan Wang, Jianfei Yu, Rui Xia
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Emotion Cause Triplet Extraction in Conversations (ECTEC) aims to simultaneously extract emotion utterances, emotion categories, and cause utterances from conversations. However, existing studies mainly decompose the ECTEC task into multiple subtasks and solve them in a pipeline manner. Moreover, since conversations tend to contain many informal and implicit expressions, it often requires external knowledge and reasoning-based inference to accurately identify emotional and causal clues implicitly mentioned in the context, which are ignored by previous work. To address these limitations, in this paper, we propose a commonSense knowledge-enHanced generAtive fRameworK named SHARK, which formulates the ECTEC task as an index generation problem and generates the emotion-cause-category triplets in an end-to-end manner with a sequence-to-sequence model. Furthermore, we propose to incorporate both retrieved and generated commonsense knowledge into the generative model via a dual-view gate mechanism and a graph attention layer. Experimental results show that our SHARK model consistently outperforms several competitive systems on two benchmark datasets. Our source codes are publicly released at https://github.com/NUSTM/SHARK.
Proto-lm: A Prototypical Network-Based Framework for Built-in Interpretability in Large Language Models
Authors: Sean Xie, Soroush Vosoughi, Saeed Hassanpour
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), but their lack of interpretability has been a major concern. Current methods for interpreting LLMs are post hoc, applied after inference time, and have limitations such as their focus on low-level features and lack of explainability at higher-level text units. In this work, we introduce proto-lm, a prototypical network-based white-box framework that allows LLMs to learn immediately interpretable embeddings during the fine-tuning stage while maintaining competitive performance. Our method`s applicability and interpretability are demonstrated through experiments on a wide range of NLP tasks, and our results indicate a new possibility of creating interpretable models without sacrificing performance. This novel approach to interpretability in LLMs can pave the way for more interpretable models without the need to sacrifice performance. We release our code at https://github.com/yx131/proto-lm.
GROVE: A Retrieval-augmented Complex Story Generation Framework with A Forest of Evidence
Authors: Zhihua Wen, Zhiliang Tian, Wei Wu, Yuxin Yang, Yanqi Shi, Zhen Huang, Dongsheng Li
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Conditional story generation is significant in human-machine interaction, particularly in producing stories with complex plots. While Large language models (LLMs) perform well on multiple NLP tasks, including story generation, it is challenging to generate stories with both complex and creative plots. Existing methods often rely on detailed prompts to guide LLMs to meet target conditions, which inadvertently restrict the creative potential of the generated stories. We argue that leveraging information from exemplary human-written stories facilitates generating more diverse plotlines. Delving deeper into story details helps build complex and credible plots. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-auGmented stoRy generation framework with a fOrest of eVidEnce (GROVE) to enhance stories' complexity. We build a retrieval repository for target conditions to produce few-shot examples to prompt LLMs. Additionally, we design an “asking-why” prompting scheme that extracts a forest of evidence, providing compensation for the ambiguities that may occur in the generated story. This iterative process uncovers underlying story backgrounds. Finally, we select the most fitting chains of evidence from the evidence forest and integrate them into the generated story, thereby enhancing the narrative`s complexity and credibility. Experimental results and numerous examples verify the effectiveness of our method.
KAPALM: Knowledge grAPh enhAnced Language Models for Fake News Detection
Authors: Jing Ma, Chen Chen, Chunyan Hou, Xiaojie Yuan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Social media has not only facilitated news consumption, but also led to the wide spread of fake news. Because news articles in social media is usually condensed and full of knowledge entities, existing methods of fake news detection use external entity knowledge. However, majority of these methods focus on news entity information and ignore the structured knowledge among news entities. To address this issue, in this work, we propose a Knowledge grAPh enhAnced Language Model (KAPALM) which is a novel model that fuses coarse- and fine-grained representations of entity knowledge from Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Firstly, we identify entities in news content and link them to entities in KGs. Then, a subgraph of KGs is extracted to provide structured knowledge of entities in KGs and fed into a graph neural network to obtain the coarse-grained knowledge representation. This subgraph is pruned to provide fine-grained knowledge and fed into the attentive graph and graph pooling layer. Finally, we integrate the coarse- and fine-grained entity knowledge representations with the textual representation for fake news detection. The experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art baselines. In addition, it is competitive in the few-shot scenario.
Comparing the Evaluation and Production of Loophole Behavior in Humans and Large Language Models
Authors: Sonia Murthy, Kiera Parece, Sophie Bridgers, Peng Qian, Tomer Ullman
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: In law, lore, and everyday life, loopholes are commonplace. When people exploit a loophole, they understand the intended meaning or goal of another person, but choose to go with a different interpretation. Past and current AI research has shown that artificial intelligence engages in what seems superficially like the exploitation of loopholes, but this is likely anthropomorphization. It remains unclear to what extent current models, especially Large Language Models (LLMs), capture the pragmatic understanding required for engaging in loopholes. We examined the performance of LLMs on two metrics developed for studying loophole behavior in humans: evaluation (ratings of trouble, upset, and humor), and generation (coming up with new loopholes in a given context). We conducted a fine-grained comparison of state-of-the-art LLMs to humans, and find that while many of the models rate loophole behaviors as resulting in less trouble and upset than outright non-compliance (in line with adults), they struggle to recognize the humor in the creative exploitation of loopholes in the way that humans do. Furthermore, only two of the models, GPT 3 and 3.5, are capable of generating loopholes of their own, with GPT3.5 performing closest to the human baseline.
InstructExcel: A Benchmark for Natural Language Instruction in Excel
Authors: Justin Payan, Swaroop Mishra, Mukul Singh, Carina Negreanu, Christian Poelitz, Chitta Baral, Subhro Roy, Rasika Chakravarthy, Benjamin Van Durme, Elnaz Nouri
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) we can solve increasingly more complex NLP tasks across various domains, including spreadsheets. This work investigates whether LLMs can generate code (Excel OfficeScripts, a TypeScript API for executing many tasks in Excel) that solves Excel specific tasks provided via natural language user instructions. To do so we introduce a new large-scale benchmark, InstructExcel, created by leveraging the \textquoteleftAutomate' feature in Excel to automatically generate OfficeScripts from users' actions. Our benchmark includes over 10k samples covering 170+ Excel operations across 2,000 publicly available Excel spreadsheets. Experiments across various zero-shot and few-shot settings show that InstructExcel is a hard benchmark for state of the art models like GPT-4. We observe that (1) using GPT-4 over GPT-3.5, (2) providing more in-context examples, and (3) dynamic prompting can help improve performance on this benchmark.
Hallucination Detection for Grounded Instruction Generation
Authors: Lingjun Zhao, Khanh Nguyen, Hal Daumé III
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We investigate the problem of generating instructions to guide humans to navigate in simulated residential environments. A major issue with current models is hallucination: they generate references to actions or objects that are inconsistent with what a human follower would perform or encounter along the described path. We develop a model that detects these hallucinated references by adopting a model pre-trained on a large corpus of image-text pairs, and fine-tuning it with a contrastive loss that separates correct instructions from instructions containing synthesized hallucinations. Our final model outperforms several baselines, including using word probability estimated by the instruction-generation model, and supervised models based on LSTM and Transformer.
Definitions Matter: Guiding GPT for Multi-label Classification
Authors: Youri Peskine, Damir Korenčić, Ivan Grubisic, Paolo Papotti, Raphael Troncy, Paolo Rosso
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Large language models have recently risen in popularity due to their ability to perform many natural language tasks without requiring any fine-tuning. In this work, we focus on two novel ideas: (1) generating definitions from examples and using them for zero-shot classification, and (2) investigating how an LLM makes use of the definitions. We thoroughly analyze the performance of GPT-3 model for fine-grained multi-label conspiracy theory classification of tweets using zero-shot labeling. In doing so, we asses how to improve the labeling by providing minimal but meaningful context in the form of the definitions of the labels. We compare descriptive noun phrases, human-crafted definitions, introduce a new method to help the model generate definitions from examples, and propose a method to evaluate GPT-3`s understanding of the definitions. We demonstrate that improving definitions of class labels has a direct consequence on the downstream classification results.
ECHo: A Visio-Linguistic Dataset for Event Causality Inference via Human-Centric Reasoning
Authors: Yuxi Xie, Guanzhen Li, Min-Yen Kan
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: We introduce ECHo (Event Causality Inference via Human-Centric Reasoning), a diagnostic dataset of event causality inference grounded in visio-linguistic social scenarios. ECHo employs real-world human-centric deductive information building on a television crime drama. ECHo requires the Theory-of-Mind (ToM) ability to understand and reason about social interactions based on multimodal information. Using ECHo, we propose a unified Chain-of-Thought (CoT) framework to assess the reasoning capability of current AI systems. Our ToM-enhanced CoT pipeline accommodates various large foundation models in both zero-shot and few-shot visio-linguistic reasoning. We use this framework to scrutinize recent large foundation models such as InstructGPT and MiniGPT-4 on three diagnostic human-centric tasks. Further analysis demonstrates ECHo as a challenging dataset to expose imperfections and inconsistencies in reasoning. Our data and code are publicly available at [https://github.com/YuxiXie/ECHo](https://github.com/YuxiXie/ECHo).
An Empirical Study of Instruction-tuning Large Language Models in Chinese
Authors: Qingyi Si, Tong Wang, Zheng Lin, Xu Zhang, Yanan Cao, Weiping Wang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: The success of ChatGPT validates the potential of large language models (LLMs) in artificial general intelligence (AGI). Subsequently, the release of LLMs has sparked the open-source community`s interest in instruction-tuning, which is deemed to accelerate ChatGPT`s replication process. However, research on instruction-tuning LLMs in Chinese, the world`s most spoken language, is still in its early stages. Therefore, this paper makes an in-depth empirical study of instruction-tuning LLMs in Chinese, which can serve as a cookbook that provides valuable findings for effectively customizing LLMs that can better respond to Chinese instructions. Specifically, we systematically explore the impact of LLM bases, parameter-efficient methods, instruction data types, which are the three most important elements for instruction-tuning. Besides, we also conduct experiment to study the impact of other factors, e.g., chain-of-thought data and human-value alignment. We hope that this empirical study can make a modest contribution to the open Chinese version of ChatGPT. This paper will release a powerful Chinese LLM that is comparable to ChatGLM. The code and data are available at https: //github.com/PhoebusSi/Alpaca-CoT.
Debiasing Multimodal Models via Causal Information Minimization
Authors: Vaidehi Patil, Adyasha Maharana, Mohit Bansal
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Most existing debiasing methods for multimodal models, including causal intervention and inference methods, utilize approximate heuristics to represent the biases, such as shallow features from early stages of training or unimodal features for multimodal tasks like VQA, etc., which may not be accurate. In this paper, we study bias arising from confounders in a causal graph for multimodal data, and examine a novel approach that leverages causally-motivated information minimization to learn the confounder representations. Robust predictive features contain diverse information that helps a model generalize to out-of-distribution data. Hence, minimizing the information content of features obtained from a pretrained biased model helps learn the simplest predictive features that capture the underlying data distribution. We treat these features as confounder representations and use them via methods motivated by causal theory to remove bias from models. We find that the learned confounder representations indeed capture dataset biases and the proposed debiasing methods improve out-of-distribution (OOD) performance on multiple multimodal datasets without sacrificing in-distribution performance. Additionally, we introduce a novel metric to quantify the sufficiency of spurious features in models' predictions that further demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
Evaluating Emotion Arcs Across Languages: Bridging the Global Divide in Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Daniela Teodorescu, Saif Mohammad
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Emotion arcs capture how an individual (or a population) feels over time. They are widely used in industry and research; however, there is little work on evaluating the automatically generated arcs. This is because of the difficulty of establishing the true (gold) emotion arc. Our work, for the first time, systematically and quantitatively evaluates automatically generated emotion arcs. We also compare two common ways of generating emotion arcs: Machine-Learning (ML) models and Lexicon-Only (LexO) methods. By running experiments on 18 diverse datasets in 9 languages, we show that despite being markedly poor at instance level emotion classification, LexO methods are highly accurate at generating emotion arcs when aggregating information from hundreds of instances. We also show, through experiments on six indigenous African languages, as well as Arabic, and Spanish, that automatic translations of English emotion lexicons can be used to generate high-quality emotion arcs in less-resource languages. This opens up avenues for work on emotions in languages from around the world; which is crucial for commerce, public policy, and health research in service of speakers often left behind. Code and resources: https://github.com/dteodore/EmotionArcs
Multi-step Jailbreaking Privacy Attacks on ChatGPT
Authors: Haoran Li, Dadi Guo, Wei Fan, Mingshi Xu, Jie Huang, Fanpu Meng, Yangqiu Song
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: With the rapid progress of large language models (LLMs), many downstream NLP tasks can be well solved given appropriate prompts. Though model developers and researchers work hard on dialog safety to avoid generating harmful content from LLMs, it is still challenging to steer AI-generated content (AIGC) for the human good. As powerful LLMs are devouring existing text data from various domains (e.g., GPT-3 is trained on 45TB texts), it is natural to doubt whether the private information is included in the training data and what privacy threats can these LLMs and their downstream applications bring. In this paper, we study the privacy threats from OpenAI`s ChatGPT and the New Bing enhanced by ChatGPT and show that application-integrated LLMs may cause new privacy threats. To this end, we conduct extensive experiments to support our claims and discuss LLMs' privacy implications.
Chain-of-Thought Embeddings for Stance Detection on Social Media
Authors: Joseph Gatto, Omar Sharif, Sarah Preum
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Stance detection on social media is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs), as emerging slang and colloquial language in online conversations often contain deeply implicit stance labels. Chain-of-Thought (COT) prompting has recently been shown to improve performance on stance detection tasks --- alleviating some of these issues. However, COT prompting still struggles with implicit stance identification. This challenge arises because many samples are initially challenging to comprehend before a model becomes familiar with the slang and evolving knowledge related to different topics, all of which need to be acquired through the training data. In this study, we address this problem by introducing COT Embeddings which improve COT performance on stance detection tasks by embedding COT reasonings and integrating them into a traditional RoBERTa-based stance detection pipeline. Our analysis demonstrates that 1) text encoders can leverage COT reasonings with minor errors or hallucinations that would otherwise distort the COT output label. 2) Text encoders can overlook misleading COT reasoning when a sample`s prediction heavily depends on domain-specific patterns. Our model achieves SOTA performance on multiple stance detection datasets collected from social media.
Using LLM for Improving Key Event Discovery: Temporal-Guided News Stream Clustering with Event Summaries
Authors: Nishanth Nakshatri, Siyi Liu, Sihao Chen, Dan Roth, Dan Goldwasser, Daniel Hopkins
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Understanding and characterizing the discus- sions around key events in news streams is important for analyzing political discourse. In this work, we study the problem of identification of such key events and the news articles associated with those events from news streams. We propose a generic framework for news stream clustering that analyzes the temporal trend of news articles to automatically extract the underlying key news events that draw significant media attention. We characterize such key events by generating event summaries, based on which we form document clusters in an unsupervised fashion. We evaluate our simple yet effective framework, and show that it produces more coherent event-focused clusters. To demonstrate the utility of our approach, and facilitate future research along the line, we use our framework to construct KeyEvents, a dataset of 40k articles with 611 key events from 11 topics.
Descriptive Prompt Paraphrasing for Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification
Authors: Dan Liu, Lin Li, Xiaohui Tao, Jian Cui, Qing Xie
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Target-Oriented Multimodal Sentiment Classification (TMSC) aims to perform sentiment polarity on a target jointly considering its corresponding multiple modalities including text, image, and others. Current researches mainly work on either of two types of targets in a decentralized manner. One type is entity, such as a person name, a location name, etc. and the other is aspect, such as \textquoteleftfood', \textquoteleftservice', etc. We believe that this target type based division in task modelling is not necessary because the sentiment polarity of the specific target is not governed by its type but its context. For this reason, we propose a unified model for target-oriented multimodal sentiment classification, so called UnifiedTMSC. It is prompt-based language modelling and performs well on four datasets spanning the above two target types. Specifically, we design descriptive prompt paraphrasing to reformulate TMSC task via (1) task paraphrasing, which obtains paraphrased prompts based on the task description through a paraphrasing rule, and (2) image prefix tuning, which optimizes a small continuous image vector throughout the multimodal representation space of text and images. Conducted on two entity-level multimodal datasets: Twitter-2015 and Twitter-2017, and two aspect-level multimodal datasets: Multi-ZOL and MASAD, the experimental results show the effectiveness of our UnifiedTMSC.
Joint Semantic and Strategy Matching for Persuasive Dialogue
Authors: Chuhao Jin, Yutao Zhu, Lingzhen Kong, Shijie Li, Xiao Zhang, Ruihua Song, Xu Chen, Huan Chen, Yuchong Sun, Yu Chen, Jun Xu
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Persuasive dialogue aims to persuade users to achieve some targets by conversations. While previous persuasion models have achieved notable successes, they mostly base themselves on utterance semantic matching, and an important aspect has been ignored, that is, the strategy of the conversations, for example, the agent can choose an \textitemotional-appeal strategy to impress users. Compared with utterance semantics, conversation strategies are high-level concepts, which can be informative and provide complementary information to achieve effective persuasions. In this paper, we propose to build a persuasion model by jointly modeling the conversation semantics and strategies, where we design a BERT-like module and an auto-regressive predictor to match the semantics and strategies, respectively. Experimental results indicate that our proposed approach can significantly improve the state-of-the-art baseline by 5% on a small dataset and 37% on a large dataset in terms of Recall@1. Detailed analyses show that the auto-regressive predictor contributes most to the final performance.
Non-Autoregressive Sentence Ordering
Authors: Yi Bin, Wenhao Shi, Bin Ji, Jipeng Zhang, Yujuan Ding, Yang Yang
Published in: Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023 (Findings Track), 2023

Abstract: Existing sentence ordering approaches generally employ encoder-decoder frameworks with the pointer net to recover the coherence by recurrently predicting each sentence step-by-step. Such an autoregressive manner only leverages unilateral dependencies during decoding and cannot fully explore the semantic dependency between sentences for ordering. To overcome these limitations, in this paper, we propose a novel Non-Autoregressive Ordering Network, dubbed \textitNAON, which explores bilateral dependencies between sentences and predicts the sentence for each position in parallel. We claim that the non-autoregressive manner is not just applicable but also particularly suitable to the sentence ordering task because of two peculiar characteristics of the task: 1) each generation target is in deterministic length, and 2) the sentences and positions should match exclusively. Furthermore, to address the repetition issue of the naive non-autoregressive Transformer, we introduce an exclusive loss to constrain the exclusiveness between positions and sentences. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we conduct extensive experiments on several common-used datasets and the experimental results show that our method outperforms all the autoregressive approaches and yields competitive performance compared with the state-of-the-arts. The codes are available at: r̆lhttps://github.com/steven640pixel/nonautoregressive-sentence-ordering.