pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HANSEN: Human and AI Spoken Text Benchmark for Authorship Analysis
Authors: Nafis Irtiza Tripto, Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le, Mattia Setzu, Fosca Giannotti, Dongwon Lee
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution, Text Detection

Authorship Analysis, also known as stylometry, has been an essential aspect of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for a long time. Likewise, the recent advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has made authorship analysis increasingly crucial for distinguishing between human-written and AI-generated texts. However, these authorship analysis tasks have primarily been focused on written texts, not considering spoken texts. Thus, we introduce the largest benchmark for spoken texts - HANSEN (Human ANd ai Spoken tExt beNchmark). HANSEN encompasses meticulous curation of existing speech datasets accompanied by transcripts, alongside the creation of novel AI-generated spoken text datasets. Together, it comprises 17 human datasets, and AI-generated spoken texts created using 3 prominent LLMs: ChatGPT, PaLM2, and Vicuna13B. To evaluate and demonstrate the utility of HANSEN, we perform Authorship Attribution (AA) & Author Verification (AV) on human-spoken datasets and conducted Human vs. AI spoken text detection using state-of-the-art (SOTA) models. While SOTA methods, such as, character ngram or Transformer-based model, exhibit similar AA & AV performance in human-spoken datasets compared to written ones, there is much room for improvement in AI-generated spoken text detection. The HANSEN benchmark is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/HANSEN-REPO/HANSEN.
Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems via Bias Analysis and Language-Model-Enhanced Data Augmentation
Authors: Xi Wang, Hossein A. Rahmani, Jiqun Liu, Emine Yilmaz
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Recommendation Systems, Selection bias

Conversational Recommendation System (CRS) is a rapidly growing research area that has gained significant attention alongside advancements in language modelling techniques. However, the current state of conversational recommendation faces numerous challenges due to its relative novelty and limited existing contributions. In this study, we delve into benchmark datasets for developing CRS models and address potential biases arising from the feedback loop inherent in multi-turn interactions, including selection bias and multiple popularity bias variants. Drawing inspiration from the success of generative data via using language models and data augmentation techniques, we present two novel strategies, 'Once-Aug' and 'PopNudge', to enhance model performance while mitigating biases. Through extensive experiments on ReDial and TG-ReDial benchmark datasets, we show a consistent improvement of CRS techniques with our data augmentation approaches and offer additional insights on addressing multiple newly formulated biases.
Disentangling Extraction and Reasoning in Multi-hop Spatial Reasoning
Authors: Roshanak Mirzaee, Parisa Kordjamshidi
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Spatial Reasoning

Spatial reasoning over text is challenging as the models not only need to extract the direct spatial information from the text but also reason over those and infer implicit spatial relations. Recent studies highlight the struggles even large language models encounter when it comes to performing spatial reasoning over text. In this paper, we explore the potential benefits of disentangling the processes of information extraction and reasoning in models to address this challenge. To explore this, we design various models that disentangle extraction and reasoning(either symbolic or neural) and compare them with state-of-the-art(SOTA) baselines with no explicit design for these parts. Our experimental results consistently demonstrate the efficacy of disentangling, showcasing its ability to enhance models' generalizability within realistic data domains.
LLM Performance Predictors are good initializers for Architecture Search
Authors: Ganesh Jawahar, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Dujian Ding
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Neural Architecture Search

In this work, we utilize Large Language Models (LLMs) for a novel use case: constructing Performance Predictors (PP) that estimate the performance of specific deep neural network architectures on downstream tasks. We create PP prompts for LLMs, comprising (i) role descriptions, (ii) instructions for the LLM, (iii) hyperparameter definitions, and (iv) demonstrations presenting sample architectures with efficiency metrics and `training from scratch' performance. In machine translation (MT) tasks, GPT-4 with our PP prompts (LLM-PP) achieves a SoTA mean absolute error and a slight degradation in rank correlation coefficient compared to baseline predictors. Additionally, we demonstrate that predictions from LLM-PP can be distilled to a compact regression model (LLM-Distill-PP), which surprisingly retains much of the performance of LLM-PP. This presents a cost-effective alternative for resource-intensive performance estimation. Specifically, for Neural Architecture Search (NAS), we introduce a Hybrid-Search algorithm (HS-NAS) employing LLM-Distill-PP for the initial search stages and reverting to the baseline predictor later. HS-NAS performs similarly to SoTA NAS, reducing search hours by approximately 50%, and in some cases, improving latency, GFLOPs, and model size. The code can be found at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/llmas.
BabyStories: Can Reinforcement Learning Teach Baby Language Models to Write Better Stories?
Authors: Xingmeng Zhao, Tongnian Wang, Sheri Osborn, Anthony Rios
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

Language models have seen significant growth in the size of their corpus, leading to notable performance improvements. Yet, there has been limited progress in developing models that handle smaller, more human-like datasets. As part of the BabyLM shared task, this study explores the impact of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) on language models pretrained from scratch with a limited training corpus. Comparing two GPT-2 variants, the larger model performs better in storytelling tasks after RLHF fine-tuning. These findings suggest that RLHF techniques may be more advantageous for larger models due to their higher learning and adaptation capacity, though more experiments are needed to confirm this finding. These insights highlight the potential benefits of RLHF fine-tuning for language models within limited data, enhancing their ability to maintain narrative focus and coherence while adhering better to initial instructions in storytelling tasks. The code for this work is publicly at https://github.com/Zephyr1022/BabyStories-UTSA.
SSLCL: An Efficient Model-Agnostic Supervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Emotion Recognition in Conversations
Authors: Tao Shi, Xiao Liang, Yaoyuan Liang, Xinyi Tong, Shao-Lun Huang
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Emotion Recognition

Emotion recognition in conversations (ERC) is a rapidly evolving task within the natural language processing community, which aims to detect the emotions expressed by speakers during a conversation. Recently, a growing number of ERC methods have focused on leveraging supervised contrastive learning (SCL) to enhance the robustness and generalizability of learned features. However, current SCL-based approaches in ERC are impeded by the constraint of large batch sizes and the lack of compatibility with most existing ERC models. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient and model-agnostic SCL framework named Supervised Sample-Label Contrastive Learning with Soft-HGR Maximal Correlation (SSLCL), which eliminates the need for a large batch size and can be seamlessly integrated with existing ERC models without introducing any model-specific assumptions. Specifically, we introduce a novel perspective on utilizing label representations by projecting discrete labels into dense embeddings through a shallow multilayer perceptron, and formulate the training objective to maximize the similarity between sample features and their corresponding ground-truth label embeddings, while minimizing the similarity between sample features and label embeddings of disparate classes. Moreover, we innovatively adopt the Soft-HGR maximal correlation as a measure of similarity between sample features and label embeddings, leading to significant performance improvements over conventional similarity measures. Additionally, multimodal cues of utterances are effectively leveraged by SSLCL as data augmentations to boost model performances. Extensive experiments on two ERC benchmark datasets, IEMOCAP and MELD, demonstrate the compatibility and superiority of our proposed SSLCL framework compared to existing state-of-the-art SCL methods. Our code is available at \url{https://github.com/TaoShi1998/SSLCL}.
ChatGPT is a Potential Zero-Shot Dependency Parser
Authors: Boda Lin, Xinyi Zhou, Binghao Tang, Xiaocheng Gong, Si Li
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Dependency Parsing

Pre-trained language models have been widely used in dependency parsing task and have achieved significant improvements in parser performance. However, it remains an understudied question whether pre-trained language models can spontaneously exhibit the ability of dependency parsing without introducing additional parser structure in the zero-shot scenario. In this paper, we propose to explore the dependency parsing ability of large language models such as ChatGPT and conduct linguistic analysis. The experimental results demonstrate that ChatGPT is a potential zero-shot dependency parser, and the linguistic analysis also shows some unique preferences in parsing outputs.
On the Interplay between Fairness and Explainability
Authors: Stephanie Brandl, Emanuele Bugliarello, Ilias Chalkidis
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Multi Class Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

In order to build reliable and trustworthy NLP applications, models need to be both fair across different demographics and explainable. Usually these two objectives, fairness and explainability, are optimized and/or examined independently of each other. Instead, we argue that forthcoming, trustworthy NLP systems should consider both. In this work, we perform a first study to understand how they influence each other: do fair(er) models rely on more plausible rationales? and vice versa. To this end, we conduct experiments on two English multi-class text classification datasets, BIOS and ECtHR, that provide information on gender and nationality, respectively, as well as human-annotated rationales. We fine-tune pre-trained language models with several methods for (i) bias mitigation, which aims to improve fairness; (ii) rationale extraction, which aims to produce plausible explanations. We find that bias mitigation algorithms do not always lead to fairer models. Moreover, we discover that empirical fairness and explainability are orthogonal.
Tailoring Personality Traits in Large Language Models via Unsupervisedly-Built Personalized Lexicons
Authors: Tianlong Li, Shihan Dou, Changze Lv, Wenhao Liu, Jianhan Xu, Muling Wu, Zixuan Ling, Xiaoqing Zheng, Xuanjing Huang
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

Personality plays a pivotal role in shaping human expression patterns, thus regulating the personality of large language models (LLMs) holds significant potential in enhancing the user experience of LLMs. Previous methods either relied on fine-tuning LLMs on specific corpora or necessitated manually crafted prompts to elicit specific personalities from LLMs. However, the former approach is inefficient and costly, while the latter cannot precisely manipulate personality traits at a fine-grained level. To address the above challenges, we have employed a novel Unsupervisedly-Built Personalized Lexicons (UBPL) in a pluggable manner during the decoding phase of LLMs to manipulate their personality traits. UBPL is a lexicon built through an unsupervised approach from a situational judgment test dataset (SJTs4LLM). Users can utilize UBPL to adjust the probability vectors of predicted words in the decoding phase of LLMs, thus influencing the personality expression of LLMs. Extensive experimentation demonstrates the remarkable effectiveness and pluggability of our method for fine-grained manipulation of LLM's personality.
WSDMS: Debunk Fake News via Weakly Supervised Detection of Misinforming Sentences with Contextualized Social Wisdom
Authors: Ruichao Yang, Wei Gao, Jing Ma, Hongzhan Lin, Zhiwei Yang
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Misinformation, Multiple Instance Learning, Sentence, Stance Detection

In recent years, we witness the explosion of false and unconfirmed information (i.e., rumors) that went viral on social media and shocked the public. Rumors can trigger versatile, mostly controversial stance expressions among social media users. Rumor verification and stance detection are different yet relevant tasks. Fake news debunking primarily focuses on determining the truthfulness of news articles, which oversimplifies the issue as fake news often combines elements of both truth and falsehood. Thus, it becomes crucial to identify specific instances of misinformation within the articles. In this research, we investigate a novel task in the field of fake news debunking, which involves detecting sentence-level misinformation. One of the major challenges in this task is the absence of a training dataset with sentence-level annotations regarding veracity. Inspired by the Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) approach, we propose a model called Weakly Supervised Detection of Misinforming Sentences (WSDMS). This model only requires bag-level labels for training but is capable of inferring both sentence-level misinformation and article-level veracity, aided by relevant social media conversations that are attentively contextualized with news sentences. We evaluate WSDMS on three real-world benchmarks and demonstrate that it outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines in debunking fake news at both the sentence and article levels.
Give Me the Facts! A Survey on Factual Knowledge Probing in Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Paul Youssef, Osman Alperen Koraş, Meijie Li, Jörg Schlötterer, Christin Seifert
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Probing, World Knowledge

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) are trained on vast unlabeled data, rich in world knowledge. This fact has sparked the interest of the community in quantifying the amount of factual knowledge present in PLMs, as this explains their performance on downstream tasks, and potentially justifies their use as knowledge bases. In this work, we survey methods and datasets that are used to probe PLMs for factual knowledge. Our contributions are: (1) We propose a categorization scheme for factual probing methods that is based on how their inputs, outputs and the probed PLMs are adapted; (2) We provide an overview of the datasets used for factual probing; (3) We synthesize insights about knowledge retention and prompt optimization in PLMs, analyze obstacles to adopting PLMs as knowledge bases and outline directions for future work.
1-PAGER: One Pass Answer Generation and Evidence Retrieval
Authors: Palak Jain, Livio Baldini Soares, Tom Kwiatkowski
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Question Answering, Retrieval

We present 1-Pager the first system that answers a question and retrieves evidence using a single Transformer-based model and decoding process. 1-Pager incrementally partitions the retrieval corpus using constrained decoding to select a document and answer string, and we show that this is competitive with comparable retrieve-and-read alternatives according to both retrieval and answer accuracy metrics. 1-Pager also outperforms the equivalent closed-book question answering model, by grounding predictions in an evidence corpus. While 1-Pager is not yet on-par with more expensive systems that read many more documents before generating an answer, we argue that it provides an important step toward attributed generation by folding retrieval into the sequence-to-sequence paradigm that is currently dominant in NLP. We also show that the search paths used to partition the corpus are easy to read and understand, paving a way forward for interpretable neural retrieval.
CUNI Submission to MRL 2023 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval
Authors: Jindřich Helcl, Jindřich Libovický
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Machine Translation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Question Answering, Retrieval, Translation

We present the Charles University system for the MRL~2023 Shared Task on Multi-lingual Multi-task Information Retrieval. The goal of the shared task was to develop systems for named entity recognition and question answering in several under-represented languages. Our solutions to both subtasks rely on the translate-test approach. We first translate the unlabeled examples into English using a multilingual machine translation model. Then, we run inference on the translated data using a strong task-specific model. Finally, we project the labeled data back into the original language. To keep the inferred tags on the correct positions in the original language, we propose a method based on scoring the candidate positions using a label-sensitive translation model. In both settings, we experiment with finetuning the classification models on the translated data. However, due to a domain mismatch between the development data and the shared task validation and test sets, the finetuned models could not outperform our baselines.
OccuQuest: Mitigating Occupational Bias for Inclusive Large Language Models
Authors: Mingfeng Xue, Dayiheng Liu, Kexin Yang, Guanting Dong, Wenqiang Lei, Zheng Yuan, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing tasks. However, existing instruction-tuning datasets suffer from occupational bias: the majority of data relates to only a few occupations, which hampers the instruction-tuned LLMs to generate helpful responses to professional queries from practitioners in specific fields. To mitigate this issue and promote occupation-inclusive LLMs, we create an instruction-tuning dataset named \emph{OccuQuest}, which contains 110,000+ prompt-completion pairs and 30,000+ dialogues covering over 1,000 occupations in 26 occupational categories. We systematically request ChatGPT, organizing queries hierarchically based on Occupation, Responsibility, Topic, and Question, to ensure a comprehensive coverage of occupational specialty inquiries. By comparing with three commonly used datasets (Dolly, ShareGPT, and WizardLM), we observe that OccuQuest exhibits a more balanced distribution across occupations. Furthermore, we assemble three test sets for comprehensive evaluation, an occu-test set covering 25 occupational categories, an estate set focusing on real estate, and an occu-quora set containing real-world questions from Quora. We then fine-tune LLaMA on OccuQuest to obtain OccuLLaMA, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLaMA variants (Vicuna, Tulu, and WizardLM) on professional questions in GPT-4 and human evaluations. Notably, on the occu-quora set, OccuLLaMA reaches a high win rate of 86.4\% against WizardLM.
Subspace Chronicles: How Linguistic Information Emerges, Shifts and Interacts during Language Model Training
Authors: Max Müller-Eberstein, Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank, Ivan Titov
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Task Learning

Representational spaces learned via language modeling are fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), however there has been limited understanding regarding how and when during training various types of linguistic information emerge and interact. Leveraging a novel information theoretic probing suite, which enables direct comparisons of not just task performance, but their representational subspaces, we analyze nine tasks covering syntax, semantics and reasoning, across 2M pre-training steps and five seeds. We identify critical learning phases across tasks and time, during which subspaces emerge, share information, and later disentangle to specialize. Across these phases, syntactic knowledge is acquired rapidly after 0.5% of full training. Continued performance improvements primarily stem from the acquisition of open-domain knowledge, while semantics and reasoning tasks benefit from later boosts to long-range contextualization and higher specialization. Measuring cross-task similarity further reveals that linguistically related tasks share information throughout training, and do so more during the critical phase of learning than before or after. Our findings have implications for model interpretability, multi-task learning, and learning from limited data.
CLEX: Continuous Length Extrapolation for Large Language Models
Authors: Guanzheng Chen, Xin Li, Zaiqiao Meng, Shangsong Liang, Lidong Bing
Date: 2023-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Position

Transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) are pioneering advances in many natural language processing tasks, however, their exceptional capabilities are restricted within the preset context window of Transformer. Position Embedding (PE) scaling methods, while effective in extending the context window to a specific length, demonstrate either notable limitations in their extrapolation abilities or sacrificing partial performance within the context window. Length extrapolation methods, although theoretically capable of extending the context window beyond the training sequence length, often underperform in practical long-context applications. To address these challenges, we propose Continuous Length EXtrapolation (CLEX) for LLMs. We generalise the PE scaling approaches to model the continuous dynamics by ordinary differential equations over the length scaling factor, thereby overcoming the constraints of current PE scaling methods designed for specific lengths. Moreover, by extending the dynamics to desired context lengths beyond the training sequence length, CLEX facilitates the length extrapolation with impressive performance in practical tasks. We demonstrate that CLEX can be seamlessly incorporated into LLMs equipped with Rotary Position Embedding, such as LLaMA and GPT-NeoX, with negligible impact on training and inference latency. Experimental results reveal that CLEX can effectively extend the context window to over 4x or almost 8x training length, with no deterioration in performance. Furthermore, when evaluated on the practical LongBench benchmark, our model trained on a 4k length exhibits competitive performance against state-of-the-art open-source models trained on context lengths up to 32k. Our code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/CLEX.