pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Benchmark Dataset for Tornado Detection and Prediction using Full-Resolution Polarimetric Weather Radar Data
Authors: Mark S. Veillette, James M. Kurdzo, Phillip M. Stepanian, John Y. N. Cho, Siddharth Samsi, Joseph McDonald
Date: 2024-01-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: Artificial Intelligence for the Earth Systems 2025 2
Tasks: Feature Engineering

Weather radar is the primary tool used by forecasters to detect and warn for tornadoes in near-real time. In order to assist forecasters in warning the public, several algorithms have been developed to automatically detect tornadic signatures in weather radar observations. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, which learn directly from large amounts of labeled data, have been shown to be highly effective for this purpose. Since tornadoes are extremely rare events within the corpus of all available radar observations, the selection and design of training datasets for ML applications is critical for the performance, robustness, and ultimate acceptance of ML algorithms. This study introduces a new benchmark dataset, TorNet to support development of ML algorithms in tornado detection and prediction. TorNet contains full-resolution, polarimetric, Level-II WSR-88D data sampled from 10 years of reported storm events. A number of ML baselines for tornado detection are developed and compared, including a novel deep learning (DL) architecture capable of processing raw radar imagery without the need for manual feature extraction required for existing ML algorithms. Despite not benefiting from manual feature engineering or other preprocessing, the DL model shows increased detection performance compared to non-DL and operational baselines. The TorNet dataset, as well as source code and model weights of the DL baseline trained in this work, are made freely available.
Weak-to-Strong Jailbreaking on Large Language Models
Authors: Xuandong Zhao, Xianjun Yang, Tianyu Pang, Chao Du, Lei LI, Yu-Xiang Wang, William Yang Wang
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are vulnerable to jailbreak attacks - resulting in harmful, unethical, or biased text generations. However, existing jailbreaking methods are computationally costly. In this paper, we propose the weak-to-strong jailbreaking attack, an efficient method to attack aligned LLMs to produce harmful text. Our key intuition is based on the observation that jailbroken and aligned models only differ in their initial decoding distributions. The weak-to-strong attack's key technical insight is using two smaller models (a safe and an unsafe one) to adversarially modify a significantly larger safe model's decoding probabilities. We evaluate the weak-to-strong attack on 5 diverse LLMs from 3 organizations. The results show our method can increase the misalignment rate to over 99% on two datasets with just one forward pass per example. Our study exposes an urgent safety issue that needs to be addressed when aligning LLMs. As an initial attempt, we propose a defense strategy to protect against such attacks, but creating more advanced defenses remains challenging. The code for replicating the method is available at https://github.com/XuandongZhao/weak-to-strong
Morality is Non-Binary: Building a Pluralist Moral Sentence Embedding Space using Contrastive Learning
Authors: Jeongwoo Park, Enrico Liscio, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Ethics, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding

Recent advances in NLP show that language models retain a discernible level of knowledge in deontological ethics and moral norms. However, existing works often treat morality as binary, ranging from right to wrong. This simplistic view does not capture the nuances of moral judgment. Pluralist moral philosophers argue that human morality can be deconstructed into a finite number of elements, respecting individual differences in moral judgment. In line with this view, we build a pluralist moral sentence embedding space via a state-of-the-art contrastive learning approach. We systematically investigate the embedding space by studying the emergence of relationships among moral elements, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results show that a pluralist approach to morality can be captured in an embedding space. However, moral pluralism is challenging to deduce via self-supervision alone and requires a supervised approach with human labels.
Gazetteer-Enhanced Bangla Named Entity Recognition with BanglaBERT Semantic Embeddings K-Means-Infused CRF Model
Authors: Niloy Farhan, Saman Sarker Joy, Tafseer Binte Mannan, Farig Sadeque
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a sub-task of Natural Language Processing (NLP) that distinguishes entities from unorganized text into predefined categorization. In recent years, a lot of Bangla NLP subtasks have received quite a lot of attention; but Named Entity Recognition in Bangla still lags behind. In this research, we explored the existing state of research in Bangla Named Entity Recognition. We tried to figure out the limitations that current techniques and datasets face, and we would like to address these limitations in our research. Additionally, We developed a Gazetteer that has the ability to significantly boost the performance of NER. We also proposed a new NER solution by taking advantage of state-of-the-art NLP tools that outperform conventional techniques.
Single Word Change is All You Need: Designing Attacks and Defenses for Text Classifiers
Authors: Lei Xu, Sarah Alnegheimish, Laure Berti-Equille, Alfredo Cuesta-Infante, Kalyan Veeramachaneni
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Data Augmentation, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

In text classification, creating an adversarial example means subtly perturbing a few words in a sentence without changing its meaning, causing it to be misclassified by a classifier. A concerning observation is that a significant portion of adversarial examples generated by existing methods change only one word. This single-word perturbation vulnerability represents a significant weakness in classifiers, which malicious users can exploit to efficiently create a multitude of adversarial examples. This paper studies this problem and makes the following key contributions: (1) We introduce a novel metric \r{ho} to quantitatively assess a classifier's robustness against single-word perturbation. (2) We present the SP-Attack, designed to exploit the single-word perturbation vulnerability, achieving a higher attack success rate, better preserving sentence meaning, while reducing computation costs compared to state-of-the-art adversarial methods. (3) We propose SP-Defense, which aims to improve \r{ho} by applying data augmentation in learning. Experimental results on 4 datasets and BERT and distilBERT classifiers show that SP-Defense improves \r{ho} by 14.6% and 13.9% and decreases the attack success rate of SP-Attack by 30.4% and 21.2% on two classifiers respectively, and decreases the attack success rate of existing attack methods that involve multiple-word perturbations.
Transfer Learning for Text Diffusion Models
Authors: Kehang Han, Kathleen Kenealy, Aditya Barua, Noah Fiedel, Noah Constant
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, Text Generation, Transfer Learning

In this report, we explore the potential for text diffusion to replace autoregressive (AR) decoding for the training and deployment of large language models (LLMs). We are particularly interested to see whether pretrained AR models can be transformed into text diffusion models through a lightweight adaptation procedure we call ``AR2Diff''. We begin by establishing a strong baseline setup for training text diffusion models. Comparing across multiple architectures and pretraining objectives, we find that training a decoder-only model with a prefix LM objective is best or near-best across several tasks. Building on this finding, we test various transfer learning setups for text diffusion models. On machine translation, we find that text diffusion underperforms the standard AR approach. However, on code synthesis and extractive QA, we find diffusion models trained from scratch outperform AR models in many cases. We also observe quality gains from AR2Diff -- adapting AR models to use diffusion decoding. These results are promising given that text diffusion is relatively underexplored and can be significantly faster than AR decoding for long text generation.
Planning, Creation, Usage: Benchmarking LLMs for Comprehensive Tool Utilization in Real-World Complex Scenarios
Authors: Shijue Huang, Wanjun Zhong, Jianqiao Lu, Qi Zhu, Jiahui Gao, Weiwen Liu, Yutai Hou, Xingshan Zeng, Yasheng Wang, Lifeng Shang, Xin Jiang, Ruifeng Xu, Qun Liu
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

The recent trend of using Large Language Models (LLMs) as tool agents in real-world applications underscores the necessity for comprehensive evaluations of their capabilities, particularly in complex scenarios involving planning, creating, and using tools. However, existing benchmarks typically focus on simple synthesized queries that do not reflect real-world complexity, thereby offering limited perspectives in evaluating tool utilization. To address this issue, we present UltraTool, a novel benchmark designed to improve and evaluate LLMs' ability in tool utilization within real-world scenarios. UltraTool focuses on the entire process of using tools - from planning and creating to applying them in complex tasks. It emphasizes real-world complexities, demanding accurate, multi-step planning for effective problem-solving. A key feature of UltraTool is its independent evaluation of planning with natural language, which happens before tool usage and simplifies the task solving by mapping out the intermediate steps. Thus, unlike previous work, it eliminates the restriction of pre-defined toolset. Through extensive experiments on various LLMs, we offer novel insights into the evaluation of capabilities of LLMs in tool utilization, thereby contributing a fresh perspective to this rapidly evolving field. The benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/JoeYing1019/UltraTool.
MT-Ranker: Reference-free machine translation evaluation by inter-system ranking
Authors: Ibraheem Muhammad Moosa, Rui Zhang, Wenpeng Yin
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference, Sentence, Translation

Traditionally, Machine Translation (MT) Evaluation has been treated as a regression problem -- producing an absolute translation-quality score. This approach has two limitations: i) the scores lack interpretability, and human annotators struggle with giving consistent scores; ii) most scoring methods are based on (reference, translation) pairs, limiting their applicability in real-world scenarios where references are absent. In practice, we often care about whether a new MT system is better or worse than some competitors. In addition, reference-free MT evaluation is increasingly practical and necessary. Unfortunately, these two practical considerations have yet to be jointly explored. In this work, we formulate the reference-free MT evaluation into a pairwise ranking problem. Given the source sentence and a pair of translations, our system predicts which translation is better. In addition to proposing this new formulation, we further show that this new paradigm can demonstrate superior correlation with human judgments by merely using indirect supervision from natural language inference and weak supervision from our synthetic data. In the context of reference-free evaluation, MT-Ranker, trained without any human annotations, achieves state-of-the-art results on the WMT Shared Metrics Task benchmarks DARR20, MQM20, and MQM21. On a more challenging benchmark, ACES, which contains fine-grained evaluation criteria such as addition, omission, and mistranslation errors, MT-Ranker marks state-of-the-art against reference-free as well as reference-based baselines.
NNOSE: Nearest Neighbor Occupational Skill Extraction
Authors: Mike Zhang, Rob van der Goot, Min-Yen Kan, Barbara Plank
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Retrieval

The labor market is changing rapidly, prompting increased interest in the automatic extraction of occupational skills from text. With the advent of English benchmark job description datasets, there is a need for systems that handle their diversity well. We tackle the complexity in occupational skill datasets tasks -- combining and leveraging multiple datasets for skill extraction, to identify rarely observed skills within a dataset, and overcoming the scarcity of skills across datasets. In particular, we investigate the retrieval-augmentation of language models, employing an external datastore for retrieving similar skills in a dataset-unifying manner. Our proposed method, \textbf{N}earest \textbf{N}eighbor \textbf{O}ccupational \textbf{S}kill \textbf{E}xtraction (NNOSE) effectively leverages multiple datasets by retrieving neighboring skills from other datasets in the datastore. This improves skill extraction \emph{without} additional fine-tuning. Crucially, we observe a performance gain in predicting infrequent patterns, with substantial gains of up to 30\% span-F1 in cross-dataset settings.
SemScore: Automated Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned LLMs based on Semantic Textual Similarity
Authors: Ansar Aynetdinov, Alan Akbik
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Textual Similarity, STS, Text Generation

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable advancements in their ability to generate fitting responses to natural language instructions. However, many current works rely on manual evaluation to judge the quality of generated responses. Since such manual evaluation is time-consuming, it does not easily scale to the evaluation of multiple models and model variants. In this short paper, we propose a straightforward but remarkably effective evaluation metric called SemScore, in which we directly compare model outputs to gold target responses using semantic textual similarity (STS). We conduct a comparative evaluation of the model outputs of 12 prominent instruction-tuned LLMs using 8 widely-used evaluation metrics for text generation. We find that our proposed SemScore metric outperforms all other, in many cases more complex, evaluation metrics in terms of correlation to human evaluation. These findings indicate the utility of our proposed metric for the evaluation of instruction-tuned LLMs.
CRUD-RAG: A Comprehensive Chinese Benchmark for Retrieval-Augmented Generation of Large Language Models
Authors: Yuanjie Lyu, Zhiyu Li, Simin Niu, Feiyu Xiong, Bo Tang, Wenjin Wang, Hao Wu, Huanyong Liu, Tong Xu, Enhong Chen
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Base Construction, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a technique that enhances the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) by incorporating external knowledge sources. This method addresses common LLM limitations, including outdated information and the tendency to produce inaccurate "hallucinated" content. However, the evaluation of RAG systems is challenging, as existing benchmarks are limited in scope and diversity. Most of the current benchmarks predominantly assess question-answering applications, overlooking the broader spectrum of situations where RAG could prove advantageous. Moreover, they only evaluate the performance of the LLM component of the RAG pipeline in the experiments, and neglect the influence of the retrieval component and the external knowledge database. To address these issues, this paper constructs a large-scale and more comprehensive benchmark, and evaluates all the components of RAG systems in various RAG application scenarios. Specifically, we have categorized the range of RAG applications into four distinct types-Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD), each representing a unique use case. "Create" refers to scenarios requiring the generation of original, varied content. "Read" involves responding to intricate questions in knowledge-intensive situations. "Update" focuses on revising and rectifying inaccuracies or inconsistencies in pre-existing texts. "Delete" pertains to the task of summarizing extensive texts into more concise forms. For each of these CRUD categories, we have developed comprehensive datasets to evaluate the performance of RAG systems. We also analyze the effects of various components of the RAG system, such as the retriever, the context length, the knowledge base construction, and the LLM. Finally, we provide useful insights for optimizing the RAG technology for different scenarios.
Taking Action Towards Graceful Interaction: The Effects of Performing Actions on Modelling Policies for Instruction Clarification Requests
Authors: Brielen Madureira, David Schlangen
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Clarification requests are a mechanism to help solve communication problems, e.g. due to ambiguity or underspecification, in instruction-following interactions. Despite their importance, even skilful models struggle with producing or interpreting such repair acts. In this work, we test three hypotheses concerning the effects of action taking as an auxiliary task in modelling iCR policies. Contrary to initial expectations, we conclude that its contribution to learning an iCR policy is limited, but some information can still be extracted from prediction uncertainty. We present further evidence that even well-motivated, Transformer-based models fail to learn good policies for when to ask Instruction CRs (iCRs), while the task of determining what to ask about can be more successfully modelled. Considering the implications of these findings, we further discuss the shortcomings of the data-driven paradigm for learning meta-communication acts.
Distinguishing Fictional Voices: a Study of Authorship Verification Models for Quotation Attribution
Authors: Gaspard Michel, Elena V. Epure, Romain Hennequin, Christophe Cerisara
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Verification

Recent approaches to automatically detect the speaker of an utterance of direct speech often disregard general information about characters in favor of local information found in the context, such as surrounding mentions of entities. In this work, we explore stylistic representations of characters built by encoding their quotes with off-the-shelf pretrained Authorship Verification models in a large corpus of English novels (the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus). Results suggest that the combination of stylistic and topical information captured in some of these models accurately distinguish characters among each other, but does not necessarily improve over semantic-only models when attributing quotes. However, these results vary across novels and more investigation of stylometric models particularly tailored for literary texts and the study of characters should be conducted.
Cross-Lingual Transfer from Related Languages: Treating Low-Resource Maltese as Multilingual Code-Switching
Authors: Kurt Micallef, Nizar Habash, Claudia Borg, Fadhl Eryani, Houda Bouamor
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Transliteration

Although multilingual language models exhibit impressive cross-lingual transfer capabilities on unseen languages, the performance on downstream tasks is impacted when there is a script disparity with the languages used in the multilingual model's pre-training data. Using transliteration offers a straightforward yet effective means to align the script of a resource-rich language with a target language, thereby enhancing cross-lingual transfer capabilities. However, for mixed languages, this approach is suboptimal, since only a subset of the language benefits from the cross-lingual transfer while the remainder is impeded. In this work, we focus on Maltese, a Semitic language, with substantial influences from Arabic, Italian, and English, and notably written in Latin script. We present a novel dataset annotated with word-level etymology. We use this dataset to train a classifier that enables us to make informed decisions regarding the appropriate processing of each token in the Maltese language. We contrast indiscriminate transliteration or translation to mixing processing pipelines that only transliterate words of Arabic origin, thereby resulting in text with a mixture of scripts. We fine-tune the processed data on four downstream tasks and show that conditional transliteration based on word etymology yields the best results, surpassing fine-tuning with raw Maltese or Maltese processed with non-selective pipelines.
State Value Generation with Prompt Learning and Self-Training for Low-Resource Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Ming Gu, Yan Yang, Chengcai Chen, Zhou Yu
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking, Prompt Learning

Recently, low-resource dialogue state tracking (DST) has received increasing attention. First obtaining state values then based on values to generate slot types has made great progress in this task. However, obtaining state values is still an under-studied problem. Existing extraction-based approaches cannot capture values that require the understanding of context and are not generalizable either. To address these issues, we propose a novel State VAlue Generation based framework (SVAG), decomposing DST into state value generation and domain slot generation. Specifically, we propose to generate state values and use self-training to further improve state value generation. Moreover, we design an estimator aiming at detecting incomplete generation and incorrect generation for pseudo-labeled data selection during self-training. Experimental results on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset show that our method which has only less than 1 billion parameters achieves state-of-the-art performance under the data ratio settings of 5%, 10%, and 25% when limited to models under 100 billion parameters. Compared to models with more than 100 billion parameters, SVAG still reaches competitive results.
Detecting Racist Text in Bengali: An Ensemble Deep Learning Framework
Authors: S. S. Saruar, Nusrat, Sadia
Date: 2024-01-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Deep Learning, Text Detection

Racism is an alarming phenomenon in our country as well as all over the world. Every day we have come across some racist comments in our daily life and virtual life. Though we can eradicate this racism from virtual life (such as Social Media). In this paper, we have tried to detect those racist comments with NLP and deep learning techniques. We have built a novel dataset in the Bengali Language. Further, we annotated the dataset and conducted data label validation. After extensive utilization of deep learning methodologies, we have successfully achieved text detection with an impressive accuracy rate of 87.94\% using the Ensemble approach. We have applied RNN and LSTM models using BERT Embeddings. However, the MCNN-LSTM model performed highest among all those models. Lastly, the Ensemble approach has been followed to combine all the model results to increase overall performance.