pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
VECHR: A Dataset for Explainable and Robust Classification of Vulnerability Type in the European Court of Human Rights
Authors: Shanshan Xu, Leon Staufer, T. Y. S. S Santosh, Oana Ichim, Corina Heri, Matthias Grabmair
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Robust classification

Recognizing vulnerability is crucial for understanding and implementing targeted support to empower individuals in need. This is especially important at the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where the court adapts Convention standards to meet actual individual needs and thus ensures effective human rights protection. However, the concept of vulnerability remains elusive at the ECtHR and no prior NLP research has dealt with it. To enable future research in this area, we present VECHR, a novel expert-annotated multi-label dataset comprising of vulnerability type classification and explanation rationale. We benchmark the performance of state-of-the-art models on VECHR from both prediction and explainability perspectives. Our results demonstrate the challenging nature of the task with lower prediction performance and limited agreement between models and experts. Further, we analyze the robustness of these models in dealing with out-of-domain (OOD) data and observe overall limited performance. Our dataset poses unique challenges offering significant room for improvement regarding performance, explainability, and robustness.
Disentangling the Linguistic Competence of Privacy-Preserving BERT
Authors: Stefan Arnold, Nils Kemmerzell, Annika Schreiner
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Differential Privacy (DP) has been tailored to address the unique challenges of text-to-text privatization. However, text-to-text privatization is known for degrading the performance of language models when trained on perturbed text. Employing a series of interpretation techniques on the internal representations extracted from BERT trained on perturbed pre-text, we intend to disentangle at the linguistic level the distortion induced by differential privacy. Experimental results from a representational similarity analysis indicate that the overall similarity of internal representations is substantially reduced. Using probing tasks to unpack this dissimilarity, we find evidence that text-to-text privatization affects the linguistic competence across several formalisms, encoding localized properties of words while falling short at encoding the contextual relationships between spans of words.
Enhancing Neural Machine Translation with Semantic Units
Authors: Langlin Huang, Shuhao Gu, Zhuocheng Zhang, Yang Feng
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Sentence, Translation

Conventional neural machine translation (NMT) models typically use subwords and words as the basic units for model input and comprehension. However, complete words and phrases composed of several tokens are often the fundamental units for expressing semantics, referred to as semantic units. To address this issue, we propose a method Semantic Units for Machine Translation (SU4MT) which models the integral meanings of semantic units within a sentence, and then leverages them to provide a new perspective for understanding the sentence. Specifically, we first propose Word Pair Encoding (WPE), a phrase extraction method to help identify the boundaries of semantic units. Next, we design an Attentive Semantic Fusion (ASF) layer to integrate the semantics of multiple subwords into a single vector: the semantic unit representation. Lastly, the semantic-unit-level sentence representation is concatenated to the token-level one, and they are combined as the input of encoder. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively models and leverages semantic-unit-level information and outperforms the strong baselines. The code is available at https://github.com/ictnlp/SU4MT.
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering
Authors: Haochen Shi, Weiqi Wang, Tianqing Fang, Baixuan Xu, Wenxuan Ding, Xin Liu, Yangqiu Song
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Question Answering

Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model's ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33% of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our codes and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.
ChapGTP, ILLC's Attempt at Raising a BabyLM: Improving Data Efficiency by Automatic Task Formation
Authors: Jaap Jumelet, Michael Hanna, Marianne de Heer Kloots, Anna Langedijk, Charlotte Pouw, Oskar van der Wal
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We present the submission of the ILLC at the University of Amsterdam to the BabyLM challenge (Warstadt et al., 2023), in the strict-small track. Our final model, ChapGTP, is a masked language model that was trained for 200 epochs, aided by a novel data augmentation technique called Automatic Task Formation. We discuss in detail the performance of this model on the three evaluation suites: BLiMP, (Super)GLUE, and MSGS. Furthermore, we present a wide range of methods that were ultimately not included in the model, but may serve as inspiration for training LMs in low-resource settings.
xMEN: A Modular Toolkit for Cross-Lingual Medical Entity Normalization
Authors: Florian Borchert, Ignacio Llorca, Roland Roller, Bert Arnrich, Matthieu-P. Schapranow
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00

Objective: To improve performance of medical entity normalization across many languages, especially when fewer language resources are available compared to English. Materials and Methods: We introduce xMEN, a modular system for cross-lingual medical entity normalization, which performs well in both low- and high-resource scenarios. When synonyms in the target language are scarce for a given terminology, we leverage English aliases via cross-lingual candidate generation. For candidate ranking, we incorporate a trainable cross-encoder model if annotations for the target task are available. We also evaluate cross-encoders trained in a weakly supervised manner based on machine-translated datasets from a high resource domain. Our system is publicly available as an extensible Python toolkit. Results: xMEN improves the state-of-the-art performance across a wide range of multilingual benchmark datasets. Weakly supervised cross-encoders are effective when no training data is available for the target task. Through the compatibility of xMEN with the BigBIO framework, it can be easily used with existing and prospective datasets. Discussion: Our experiments show the importance of balancing the output of general-purpose candidate generators with subsequent trainable re-rankers, which we achieve through a rank regularization term in the loss function of the cross-encoder. However, error analysis reveals that multi-word expressions and other complex entities are still challenging. Conclusion: xMEN exhibits strong performance for medical entity normalization in multiple languages, even when no labeled data and few terminology aliases for the target language are available. Its configuration system and evaluation modules enable reproducible benchmarks. Models and code are available online at the following URL: https://github.com/hpi-dhc/xmen
Utilizing Weak Supervision To Generate Indonesian Conservation Dataset
Authors: Mega Fransiska, Diah Pitaloka, Saripudin, Satrio Putra, Lintang Sutawika
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Multi-class Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Weak supervision has emerged as a promising approach for rapid and large-scale dataset creation in response to the increasing demand for accelerated NLP development. By leveraging labeling functions, weak supervision allows practitioners to generate datasets quickly by creating learned label models that produce soft-labeled datasets. This paper aims to show how such an approach can be utilized to build an Indonesian NLP dataset from conservation news text. We construct two types of datasets: multi-class classification and sentiment classification. We then provide baseline experiments using various pretrained language models. These baseline results demonstrate test performances of 59.79% accuracy and 55.72% F1-score for sentiment classification, 66.87% F1-score-macro, 71.5% F1-score-micro, and 83.67% ROC-AUC for multi-class classification. Additionally, we release the datasets and labeling functions used in this work for further research and exploration.
Watermarking LLMs with Weight Quantization
Authors: Linyang Li, Botian Jiang, Pengyu Wang, Ke Ren, Hang Yan, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Quantization

Abuse of large language models reveals high risks as large language models are being deployed at an astonishing speed. It is important to protect the model weights to avoid malicious usage that violates licenses of open-source large language models. This paper proposes a novel watermarking strategy that plants watermarks in the quantization process of large language models without pre-defined triggers during inference. The watermark works when the model is used in the fp32 mode and remains hidden when the model is quantized to int8, in this way, the users can only inference the model without further supervised fine-tuning of the model. We successfully plant the watermark into open-source large language model weights including GPT-Neo and LLaMA. We hope our proposed method can provide a potential direction for protecting model weights in the era of large language model applications.
KG-GPT: A General Framework for Reasoning on Knowledge Graphs Using Large Language Models
Authors: Jiho Kim, Yeonsu Kwon, Yohan Jo, Edward Choi
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Verification, Knowledge Graphs, Retrieval, Sentence, Sentence segmentation

While large language models (LLMs) have made considerable advancements in understanding and generating unstructured text, their application in structured data remains underexplored. Particularly, using LLMs for complex reasoning tasks on knowledge graphs (KGs) remains largely untouched. To address this, we propose KG-GPT, a multi-purpose framework leveraging LLMs for tasks employing KGs. KG-GPT comprises three steps: Sentence Segmentation, Graph Retrieval, and Inference, each aimed at partitioning sentences, retrieving relevant graph components, and deriving logical conclusions, respectively. We evaluate KG-GPT using KG-based fact verification and KGQA benchmarks, with the model showing competitive and robust performance, even outperforming several fully-supervised models. Our work, therefore, marks a significant step in unifying structured and unstructured data processing within the realm of LLMs.
ViSoBERT: A Pre-Trained Language Model for Vietnamese Social Media Text Processing
Authors: Quoc-Nam Nguyen, Thang Chau Phan, Duc-Vu Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Vietnamese Hate Speech Detection, Vietnamese Language Models, Vietnamese Social Media Text Processing, XLM-R

English and Chinese, known as resource-rich languages, have witnessed the strong development of transformer-based language models for natural language processing tasks. Although Vietnam has approximately 100M people speaking Vietnamese, several pre-trained models, e.g., PhoBERT, ViBERT, and vELECTRA, performed well on general Vietnamese NLP tasks, including POS tagging and named entity recognition. These pre-trained language models are still limited to Vietnamese social media tasks. In this paper, we present the first monolingual pre-trained language model for Vietnamese social media texts, ViSoBERT, which is pre-trained on a large-scale corpus of high-quality and diverse Vietnamese social media texts using XLM-R architecture. Moreover, we explored our pre-trained model on five important natural language downstream tasks on Vietnamese social media texts: emotion recognition, hate speech detection, sentiment analysis, spam reviews detection, and hate speech spans detection. Our experiments demonstrate that ViSoBERT, with far fewer parameters, surpasses the previous state-of-the-art models on multiple Vietnamese social media tasks. Our ViSoBERT model is available only for research purposes.
IMTLab: An Open-Source Platform for Building, Evaluating, and Diagnosing Interactive Machine Translation Systems
Authors: Xu Huang, Zhirui Zhang, Ruize Gao, Yichao Du, Lemao Liu, Gouping Huang, Shuming Shi, Jiajun Chen, ShuJian Huang
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We present IMTLab, an open-source end-to-end interactive machine translation (IMT) system platform that enables researchers to quickly build IMT systems with state-of-the-art models, perform an end-to-end evaluation, and diagnose the weakness of systems. IMTLab treats the whole interactive translation process as a task-oriented dialogue with a human-in-the-loop setting, in which human interventions can be explicitly incorporated to produce high-quality, error-free translations. To this end, a general communication interface is designed to support the flexible IMT architectures and user policies. Based on the proposed design, we construct a simulated and real interactive environment to achieve end-to-end evaluation and leverage the framework to systematically evaluate previous IMT systems. Our simulated and manual experiments show that the prefix-constrained decoding approach still gains the lowest editing cost in the end-to-end evaluation, while BiTIIMT achieves comparable editing cost with a better interactive experience.
The Quo Vadis of the Relationship between Language and Large Language Models
Authors: Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella, Elliot Murphy
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00

In the field of Artificial (General) Intelligence (AI), the several recent advancements in Natural language processing (NLP) activities relying on Large Language Models (LLMs) have come to encourage the adoption of LLMs as scientific models of language. While the terminology employed for the characterization of LLMs favors their embracing as such, it is not clear that they are in a place to offer insights into the target system they seek to represent. After identifying the most important theoretical and empirical risks brought about by the adoption of scientific models that lack transparency, we discuss LLMs relating them to every scientific model's fundamental components: the object, the medium, the meaning and the user. We conclude that, at their current stage of development, LLMs hardly offer any explanations for language, and then we provide an outlook for more informative future research directions on this topic.
Experimenting AI Technologies for Disinformation Combat: the IDMO Project
Authors: Lorenzo Canale, Alberto Messina
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

The Italian Digital Media Observatory (IDMO) project, part of a European initiative, focuses on countering disinformation and fake news. This report outlines contributions from Rai-CRITS to the project, including: (i) the creation of novel datasets for testing technologies (ii) development of an automatic model for categorizing Pagella Politica verdicts to facilitate broader analysis (iii) creation of an automatic model for recognizing textual entailment with exceptional accuracy on the FEVER dataset (iv) assessment using GPT-4 to detecting content treatment style (v) a game to raise awareness about fake news at national events.
Understanding writing style in social media with a supervised contrastively pre-trained transformer
Authors: Javier Huertas-Tato, Alejandro Martin, David Camacho
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00

Online Social Networks serve as fertile ground for harmful behavior, ranging from hate speech to the dissemination of disinformation. Malicious actors now have unprecedented freedom to misbehave, leading to severe societal unrest and dire consequences, as exemplified by events such as the Capitol assault during the US presidential election and the Antivaxx movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding online language has become more pressing than ever. While existing works predominantly focus on content analysis, we aim to shift the focus towards understanding harmful behaviors by relating content to their respective authors. Numerous novel approaches attempt to learn the stylistic features of authors in texts, but many of these approaches are constrained by small datasets or sub-optimal training losses. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the Style Transformer for Authorship Representations (STAR), trained on a large corpus derived from public sources of 4.5 x 10^6 authored texts involving 70k heterogeneous authors. Our model leverages Supervised Contrastive Loss to teach the model to minimize the distance between texts authored by the same individual. This author pretext pre-training task yields competitive performance at zero-shot with PAN challenges on attribution and clustering. Additionally, we attain promising results on PAN verification challenges using a single dense layer, with our model serving as an embedding encoder. Finally, we present results from our test partition on Reddit. Using a support base of 8 documents of 512 tokens, we can discern authors from sets of up to 1616 authors with at least 80\% accuracy. We share our pre-trained model at huggingface (https://huggingface.co/AIDA-UPM/star) and our code is available at (https://github.com/jahuerta92/star)
VoxArabica: A Robust Dialect-Aware Arabic Speech Recognition System
Authors: Abdul Waheed, Bashar Talafha, Peter Sullivan, AbdelRahim Elmadany, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Arabic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Dialect Identification, Diversity, Model Selection, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Arabic is a complex language with many varieties and dialects spoken by over 450 millions all around the world. Due to the linguistic diversity and variations, it is challenging to build a robust and generalized ASR system for Arabic. In this work, we address this gap by developing and demoing a system, dubbed VoxArabica, for dialect identification (DID) as well as automatic speech recognition (ASR) of Arabic. We train a wide range of models such as HuBERT (DID), Whisper, and XLS-R (ASR) in a supervised setting for Arabic DID and ASR tasks. Our DID models are trained to identify 17 different dialects in addition to MSA. We finetune our ASR models on MSA, Egyptian, Moroccan, and mixed data. Additionally, for the remaining dialects in ASR, we provide the option to choose various models such as Whisper and MMS in a zero-shot setting. We integrate these models into a single web interface with diverse features such as audio recording, file upload, model selection, and the option to raise flags for incorrect outputs. Overall, we believe VoxArabica will be useful for a wide range of audiences concerned with Arabic research. Our system is currently running at https://cdce-206-12-100-168.ngrok.io/.
Lyricist-Singer Entropy Affects Lyric-Lyricist Classification Performance
Authors: Mitsuki Morita, Masato Kikuchi, Tadachika Ozono
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification

Although lyrics represent an essential component of music, few music information processing studies have been conducted on the characteristics of lyricists. Because these characteristics may be valuable for musical applications, such as recommendations, they warrant further study. We considered a potential method that extracts features representing the characteristics of lyricists from lyrics. Because these features must be identified prior to extraction, we focused on lyricists with easily identifiable features. We believe that it is desirable for singers to perform unique songs that share certain characteristics specific to the singer. Accordingly, we hypothesized that lyricists account for the unique characteristics of the singers they write lyrics for. In other words, lyric-lyricist classification performance or the ease of capturing the features of a lyricist from the lyrics may depend on the variety of singers. In this study, we observed a relationship between lyricist-singer entropy or the variety of singers associated with a single lyricist and lyric-lyricist classification performance. As an example, the lyricist-singer entropy is minimal when the lyricist writes lyrics for only one singer. In our experiments, we grouped lyricists among five groups in terms of lyricist-singer entropy and assessed the lyric-lyricist classification performance within each group. Consequently, the best F1 score was obtained for the group with the lowest lyricist-singer entropy. Our results suggest that further analyses of the features contributing to lyric-lyricist classification performance on the lowest lyricist-singer entropy group may improve the feature extraction task for lyricists.
Exploring Automatic Evaluation Methods based on a Decoder-based LLM for Text Generation
Authors: Tomohito Kasahara, Daisuke Kawahara
Date: 2023-10-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, In-Context Learning, Machine Translation, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Generation

Automatic evaluation of text generation is essential for improving the accuracy of generation tasks. In light of the current trend towards increasingly larger decoder-based language models, we investigate automatic evaluation methods based on such models for text generation. This paper compares various methods, including tuning with encoder-based models and large language models under equal conditions, on two different tasks, machine translation evaluation and semantic textual similarity, in two languages, Japanese and English. Experimental results show that compared to the tuned encoder-based models, the tuned decoder-based models perform poorly. The analysis of the causes for this suggests that the decoder-based models focus on surface word sequences and do not capture meaning. It is also revealed that in-context learning of very large decoder-based models such as ChatGPT makes it difficult to identify fine-grained semantic differences.