pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Claim Detection for Automated Fact-checking: A Survey on Monolingual, Multilingual and Cross-Lingual Research
Authors: Rrubaa Panchendrarajan, Arkaitz Zubiaga
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Checking, Misinformation, Survey

Automated fact-checking has drawn considerable attention over the past few decades due to the increase in the diffusion of misinformation on online platforms. This is often carried out as a sequence of tasks comprising (i) the detection of sentences circulating in online platforms which constitute claims needing verification, followed by (ii) the verification process of those claims. This survey focuses on the former, by discussing existing efforts towards detecting claims needing fact-checking, with a particular focus on multilingual data and methods. This is a challenging and fertile direction where existing methods are yet far from matching human performance due to the profoundly challenging nature of the issue. Especially, the dissemination of information across multiple social platforms, articulated in multiple languages and modalities demands more generalized solutions for combating misinformation. Focusing on multilingual misinformation, we present a comprehensive survey of existing multilingual claim detection research. We present state-of-the-art multilingual claim detection research categorized into three key factors of the problem, verifiability, priority, and similarity. Further, we present a detailed overview of the existing multilingual datasets along with the challenges and suggest possible future advancements.
AI for social science and social science of AI: A Survey
Authors: Ruoxi Xu, Yingfei Sun, Mengjie Ren, Shiguang Guo, Ruotong Pan, Hongyu Lin, Le Sun, Xianpei Han
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, particularly with the emergence of large language models (LLMs), have sparked a rethinking of artificial general intelligence possibilities. The increasing human-like capabilities of AI are also attracting attention in social science research, leading to various studies exploring the combination of these two fields. In this survey, we systematically categorize previous explorations in the combination of AI and social science into two directions that share common technical approaches but differ in their research objectives. The first direction is focused on AI for social science, where AI is utilized as a powerful tool to enhance various stages of social science research. While the second direction is the social science of AI, which examines AI agents as social entities with their human-like cognitive and linguistic capabilities. By conducting a thorough review, particularly on the substantial progress facilitated by recent advancements in large language models, this paper introduces a fresh perspective to reassess the relationship between AI and social science, provides a cohesive framework that allows researchers to understand the distinctions and connections between AI for social science and social science of AI, and also summarized state-of-art experiment simulation platforms to facilitate research in these two directions. We believe that as AI technology continues to advance and intelligent agents find increasing applications in our daily lives, the significance of the combination of AI and social science will become even more prominent.
Speak It Out: Solving Symbol-Related Problems with Symbol-to-Language Conversion for Language Models
Authors: Yile Wang, Sijie Cheng, Zixin Sun, Peng Li, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, Property Prediction, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis

Symbols (or more broadly, non-natural language textual representations) such as numerical sequences, molecular formulas, and table delimiters widely exist, playing important roles in various tasks such as abstract reasoning, chemical property prediction, and table question answering. Despite the impressive natural language comprehension capabilities of large language models (LLMs), their reasoning abilities for symbols remain inadequate, which could attributed to the difference between symbol representations and general natural languages. We propose symbol-to-language (S2L), a tuning-free method that enables large language models to solve symbol-related problems with information expressed in natural language. Specifically, S2L first converts the symbols involved to language-based representations, which can be implemented by prompting LLMs or leveraging external tools, then these language-based representations are integrated into the original problem via direct substitution or concatenation, serving as useful input information for LLMs. We evaluate the S2L method using both API-based (GPT-4, ChatGPT) and open-source (OpenChat) models over eight symbol-related tasks, ranging from symbol-only abstract reasoning to sentiment analysis in social media. Experimental results show that S2L consistently leads to superior performance. For example, by employing S2L for GPT-4, there can be average significant improvements of +21.9% and +9.5% for subtasks in 1D-ARC and Dyck language, respectively. Codes and data are available at https://github.com/THUNLP-MT/symbol2language.
Keep Decoding Parallel with Effective Knowledge Distillation from Language Models to End-to-end Speech Recognisers
Authors: Michael Hentschel, Yuta Nishikawa, Tatsuya Komatsu, Yusuke Fujita
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Decoder, Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This study presents a novel approach for knowledge distillation (KD) from a BERT teacher model to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model using intermediate layers. To distil the teacher's knowledge, we use an attention decoder that learns from BERT's token probabilities. Our method shows that language model (LM) information can be more effectively distilled into an ASR model using both the intermediate layers and the final layer. By using the intermediate layers as distillation target, we can more effectively distil LM knowledge into the lower network layers. Using our method, we achieve better recognition accuracy than with shallow fusion of an external LM, allowing us to maintain fast parallel decoding. Experiments on the LibriSpeech dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing greedy decoding with connectionist temporal classification (CTC).
Streaming Bilingual End-to-End ASR model using Attention over Multiple Softmax
Authors: Aditya Patil, Vikas Joshi, Purvi Agrawal, Rupesh Mehta
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

Even with several advancements in multilingual modeling, it is challenging to recognize multiple languages using a single neural model, without knowing the input language and most multilingual models assume the availability of the input language. In this work, we propose a novel bilingual end-to-end (E2E) modeling approach, where a single neural model can recognize both languages and also support switching between the languages, without any language input from the user. The proposed model has shared encoder and prediction networks, with language-specific joint networks that are combined via a self-attention mechanism. As the language-specific posteriors are combined, it produces a single posterior probability over all the output symbols, enabling a single beam search decoding and also allowing dynamic switching between the languages. The proposed approach outperforms the conventional bilingual baseline with 13.3%, 8.23% and 1.3% word error rate relative reduction on Hindi, English and code-mixed test sets, respectively.
Revolutionizing Finance with LLMs: An Overview of Applications and Insights
Authors: Huaqin Zhao, Zhengliang Liu, Zihao Wu, Yiwei Li, Tianze Yang, Peng Shu, Shaochen Xu, Haixing Dai, Lin Zhao, Hanqi Jiang, Yi Pan, JunHao Chen, Yifan Zhou, Gengchen Mai, Ninghao Liu, Tianming Liu
Date: 2024-01-22 00:00:00

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have seen considerable advancements and have been applied in diverse fields. Built on the Transformer architecture, these models are trained on extensive datasets, enabling them to understand and generate human language effectively. In the financial domain, the deployment of LLMs is gaining momentum. These models are being utilized for automating financial report generation, forecasting market trends, analyzing investor sentiment, and offering personalized financial advice. Leveraging their natural language processing capabilities, LLMs can distill key insights from vast financial data, aiding institutions in making informed investment choices and enhancing both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. In this study, we provide a comprehensive overview of the emerging integration of LLMs into various financial tasks. Additionally, we conducted holistic tests on multiple financial tasks through the combination of natural language instructions. Our findings show that GPT-4 effectively follow prompt instructions across various financial tasks. This survey and evaluation of LLMs in the financial domain aim to deepen the understanding of LLMs' current role in finance for both financial practitioners and LLM researchers, identify new research and application prospects, and highlight how these technologies can be leveraged to solve practical challenges in the finance industry.
Robust Evaluation Measures for Evaluating Social Biases in Masked Language Models
Authors: Yang Liu
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00

Many evaluation measures are used to evaluate social biases in masked language models (MLMs). However, we find that these previously proposed evaluation measures are lacking robustness in scenarios with limited datasets. This is because these measures are obtained by comparing the pseudo-log-likelihood (PLL) scores of the stereotypical and anti-stereotypical samples using an indicator function. The disadvantage is the limited mining of the PLL score sets without capturing its distributional information. In this paper, we represent a PLL score set as a Gaussian distribution and use Kullback Leibler (KL) divergence and Jensen Shannon (JS) divergence to construct evaluation measures for the distributions of stereotypical and anti-stereotypical PLL scores. Experimental results on the publicly available datasets StereoSet (SS) and CrowS-Pairs (CP) show that our proposed measures are significantly more robust and interpretable than those proposed previously.
CheX-GPT: Harnessing Large Language Models for Enhanced Chest X-ray Report Labeling
Authors: Jawook Gu, Kihyun You, Han-Cheol Cho, Jiho Kim, Eun Kyoung Hong, Byungseok Roh
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Free-text radiology reports present a rich data source for various medical tasks, but effectively labeling these texts remains challenging. Traditional rule-based labeling methods fall short of capturing the nuances of diverse free-text patterns. Moreover, models using expert-annotated data are limited by data scarcity and pre-defined classes, impacting their performance, flexibility and scalability. To address these issues, our study offers three main contributions: 1) We demonstrate the potential of GPT as an adept labeler using carefully designed prompts. 2) Utilizing only the data labeled by GPT, we trained a BERT-based labeler, CheX-GPT, which operates faster and more efficiently than its GPT counterpart. 3) To benchmark labeler performance, we introduced a publicly available expert-annotated test set, MIMIC-500, comprising 500 cases from the MIMIC validation set. Our findings demonstrate that CheX-GPT not only excels in labeling accuracy over existing models, but also showcases superior efficiency, flexibility, and scalability, supported by our introduction of the MIMIC-500 dataset for robust benchmarking. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Soombit-ai/CheXGPT.
Towards Better Inclusivity: A Diverse Tweet Corpus of English Varieties
Authors: Nhi Pham, Lachlan Pham, Adam L. Meyers
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties was - and, in many cases, still is - used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties. Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets. Following best annotation practices, our growing corpus features 170,800 tweets taken from 7 countries, labeled by annotators who are from those countries and can communicate in regionally-dominant varieties of English. Our corpus highlights the accuracy discrepancies in pre-trained language identifiers between western English and non-western (i.e., less standard) English varieties. We hope to contribute to the growing literature identifying and reducing the implicit demographic discrepancies in NLP.
Over-Reasoning and Redundant Calculation of Large Language Models
Authors: Cheng-Han Chiang, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Math

Large language models (LLMs) can solve problems step-by-step. While this chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts LLMs' performance, it is unclear if LLMs \textit{know} when to use CoT and whether those CoT are always necessary to answer the question. This paper shows that LLMs tend to generate redundant calculations and reasoning on a manually constructed math QA dataset, GSM8K-Zero. GSM8K-Zero is constructed such that the questions can be answered without any calculations, but LLMs, including Llama-2 models and Claude-2, tend to generate lengthy and unnecessary calculations to answer the questions. We also conduct experiments to explain why LLMs generate redundant calculations and reasonings. GSM8K-Zero is publicly available at https://github.com/d223302/Over-Reasoning-of-LLMs and https://huggingface.co/datasets/dcml0714/GSM8K-Zero.
Estimating the Usefulness of Clarifying Questions and Answers for Conversational Search
Authors: Ivan Sekulić, Weronika Łajewska, Krisztian Balog, Fabio Crestani
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Search, Retrieval

While the body of research directed towards constructing and generating clarifying questions in mixed-initiative conversational search systems is vast, research aimed at processing and comprehending users' answers to such questions is scarce. To this end, we present a simple yet effective method for processing answers to clarifying questions, moving away from previous work that simply appends answers to the original query and thus potentially degrades retrieval performance. Specifically, we propose a classifier for assessing usefulness of the prompted clarifying question and an answer given by the user. Useful questions or answers are further appended to the conversation history and passed to a transformer-based query rewriting module. Results demonstrate significant improvements over strong non-mixed-initiative baselines. Furthermore, the proposed approach mitigates the performance drops when non useful questions and answers are utilized.
Linear Alignment: A Closed-form Solution for Aligning Human Preferences without Tuning and Feedback
Authors: Songyang Gao, Qiming Ge, Wei Shen, Shihan Dou, Junjie Ye, Xiao Wang, Rui Zheng, Yicheng Zou, Zhi Chen, Hang Yan, Qi Zhang, Dahua Lin
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Form

The success of AI assistants based on Language Models (LLMs) hinges on Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to comprehend and align with user intentions. However, traditional alignment algorithms, such as PPO, are hampered by complex annotation and training requirements. This reliance limits the applicability of RLHF and hinders the development of professional assistants tailored to diverse human preferences. In this work, we introduce \textit{Linear Alignment}, a novel algorithm that aligns language models with human preferences in one single inference step, eliminating the reliance on data annotation and model training. Linear alignment incorporates a new parameterization for policy optimization under divergence constraints, which enables the extraction of optimal policy in a closed-form manner and facilitates the direct estimation of the aligned response. Extensive experiments on both general and personalized preference datasets demonstrate that linear alignment significantly enhances the performance and efficiency of LLM alignment across diverse scenarios. Our code and dataset is published on \url{https://github.com/Wizardcoast/Linear_Alignment.git}.
Towards Reliable and Factual Response Generation: Detecting Unanswerable Questions in Information-Seeking Conversations
Authors: Weronika Łajewska, Krisztian Balog
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: answerability prediction, Response Generation

Generative AI models face the challenge of hallucinations that can undermine users' trust in such systems. We approach the problem of conversational information seeking as a two-step process, where relevant passages in a corpus are identified first and then summarized into a final system response. This way we can automatically assess if the answer to the user's question is present in the corpus. Specifically, our proposed method employs a sentence-level classifier to detect if the answer is present, then aggregates these predictions on the passage level, and eventually across the top-ranked passages to arrive at a final answerability estimate. For training and evaluation, we develop a dataset based on the TREC CAsT benchmark that includes answerability labels on the sentence, passage, and ranking levels. We demonstrate that our proposed method represents a strong baseline and outperforms a state-of-the-art LLM on the answerability prediction task.
Majority or Minority: Data Imbalance Learning Method for Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Sota Nemoto, Shunsuke Kitada, Hitoshi Iyatomi
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Machine Reading Comprehension, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Reading Comprehension

Data imbalance presents a significant challenge in various machine learning (ML) tasks, particularly named entity recognition (NER) within natural language processing (NLP). NER exhibits a data imbalance with a long-tail distribution, featuring numerous minority classes (i.e., entity classes) and a single majority class (i.e., O-class). This imbalance leads to misclassifications of the entity classes as the O-class. To tackle this issue, we propose a simple and effective learning method named majority or minority (MoM) learning. MoM learning incorporates the loss computed only for samples whose ground truth is the majority class into the loss of the conventional ML model. Evaluation experiments on four NER datasets (Japanese and English) showed that MoM learning improves prediction performance of the minority classes without sacrificing the performance of the majority class and is more effective than widely known and state-of-the-art methods. We also evaluated MoM learning using frameworks as sequential labeling and machine reading comprehension, which are commonly used in NER. Furthermore, MoM learning has achieved consistent performance improvements regardless of language or framework.
Finding a Needle in the Adversarial Haystack: A Targeted Paraphrasing Approach For Uncovering Edge Cases with Minimal Distribution Distortion
Authors: Aly M. Kassem, Sherif Saad
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Adversarial attacks against language models(LMs) are a significant concern. In particular, adversarial samples exploit the model's sensitivity to small input changes. While these changes appear insignificant on the semantics of the input sample, they result in significant decay in model performance. In this paper, we propose Targeted Paraphrasing via RL (TPRL), an approach to automatically learn a policy to generate challenging samples that most likely improve the model's performance. TPRL leverages FLAN T5, a language model, as a generator and employs a self learned policy using a proximal policy gradient to generate the adversarial examples automatically. TPRL's reward is based on the confusion induced in the classifier, preserving the original text meaning through a Mutual Implication score. We demonstrate and evaluate TPRL's effectiveness in discovering natural adversarial attacks and improving model performance through extensive experiments on four diverse NLP classification tasks via Automatic and Human evaluation. TPRL outperforms strong baselines, exhibits generalizability across classifiers and datasets, and combines the strengths of language modeling and reinforcement learning to generate diverse and influential adversarial examples.
ProLex: A Benchmark for Language Proficiency-oriented Lexical Substitution
Authors: Xuanming Zhang, Zixun Chen, Zhou Yu
Date: 2024-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Lexical Substitution discovers appropriate substitutes for a given target word in a context sentence. However, the task fails to consider substitutes that are of equal or higher proficiency than the target, an aspect that could be beneficial for language learners looking to improve their writing. To bridge this gap, we propose a new task, language proficiency-oriented lexical substitution. We also introduce ProLex, a novel benchmark designed to assess systems' ability to generate not only appropriate substitutes but also substitutes that demonstrate better language proficiency. Besides the benchmark, we propose models that can automatically perform the new task. We show that our best model, a Llama2-13B model fine-tuned with task-specific synthetic data, outperforms ChatGPT by an average of 3.2% in F-score and achieves comparable results with GPT-4 on ProLex.
Identifying and Analyzing Task-Encoding Tokens in Large Language Models
Authors: Yu Bai, Heyan Huang, Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, Sanxing Chen, Yang Gao, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Date: 2024-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL) has become an effective solution for few-shot learning in natural language processing. However, our understanding of ICL's working mechanisms is limited, specifically regarding how models learn to perform tasks from ICL demonstrations. For example, unexpectedly large changes in performance can arise from small changes in the prompt, leaving prompt design a largely empirical endeavour. In this paper, we investigate this problem by identifying and analyzing task-encoding tokens on whose representations the task performance depends. Using experiments that ablate the representations of different token types, we find that template and stopword tokens are the most prone to be task-encoding. In addition, we demonstrate experimentally that lexical meaning, repetition, and text formatting are the main distinguishing characteristics of these tokens. Our work sheds light on how large language models (LLMs) learn to perform a task from demonstrations, deepens our understanding of the varied roles different types of tokens play in LLMs, and provides insights for avoiding instability from improperly utilizing task-encoding tokens.