pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Entity Linking in the Job Market Domain
Authors: Mike Zhang, Rob van der Goot, Barbara Plank
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Entity Linking

In Natural Language Processing, entity linking (EL) has centered around Wikipedia, but yet remains underexplored for the job market domain. Disambiguating skill mentions can help us get insight into the current labor market demands. In this work, we are the first to explore EL in this domain, specifically targeting the linkage of occupational skills to the ESCO taxonomy (le Vrang et al., 2014). Previous efforts linked coarse-grained (full) sentences to a corresponding ESCO skill. In this work, we link more fine-grained span-level mentions of skills. We tune two high-performing neural EL models, a bi-encoder (Wu et al., 2020) and an autoregressive model (Cao et al., 2021), on a synthetically generated mention--skill pair dataset and evaluate them on a human-annotated skill-linking benchmark. Our findings reveal that both models are capable of linking implicit mentions of skills to their correct taxonomy counterparts. Empirically, BLINK outperforms GENRE in strict evaluation, but GENRE performs better in loose evaluation (accuracy@$k$).
GUMsley: Evaluating Entity Salience in Summarization for 12 English Genres
Authors: Jessica Lin, Amir Zeldes
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Hallucination, Information Retrieval, Retrieval

As NLP models become increasingly capable of understanding documents in terms of coherent entities rather than strings, obtaining the most salient entities for each document is not only an important end task in itself but also vital for Information Retrieval (IR) and other downstream applications such as controllable summarization. In this paper, we present and evaluate GUMsley, the first entity salience dataset covering all named and non-named salient entities for 12 genres of English text, aligned with entity types, Wikification links and full coreference resolution annotations. We promote a strict definition of salience using human summaries and demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement for salience based on whether a source entity is mentioned in the summary. Our evaluation shows poor performance by pre-trained SOTA summarization models and zero-shot LLM prompting in capturing salient entities in generated summaries. We also show that predicting or providing salient entities to several model architectures enhances performance and helps derive higher-quality summaries by alleviating the entity hallucination problem in existing abstractive summarization.
[Lions: 1] and [Tigers: 2] and [Bears: 3], Oh My! Literary Coreference Annotation with LLMs
Authors: Rebecca M. M. Hicke, David Mimno
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

Coreference annotation and resolution is a vital component of computational literary studies. However, it has previously been difficult to build high quality systems for fiction. Coreference requires complicated structured outputs, and literary text involves subtle inferences and highly varied language. New language-model-based seq2seq systems present the opportunity to solve both these problems by learning to directly generate a copy of an input sentence with markdown-like annotations. We create, evaluate, and release several trained models for coreference, as well as a workflow for training new models.
SNNLP: Energy-Efficient Natural Language Processing Using Spiking Neural Networks
Authors: R. Alexander Knipper, Kaniz Mishty, Mehdi Sadi, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

As spiking neural networks receive more attention, we look toward applications of this computing paradigm in fields other than computer vision and signal processing. One major field, underexplored in the neuromorphic setting, is Natural Language Processing (NLP), where most state-of-the-art solutions still heavily rely on resource-consuming and power-hungry traditional deep learning architectures. Therefore, it is compelling to design NLP models for neuromorphic architectures due to their low energy requirements, with the additional benefit of a more human-brain-like operating model for processing information. However, one of the biggest issues with bringing NLP to the neuromorphic setting is in properly encoding text into a spike train so that it can be seamlessly handled by both current and future SNN architectures. In this paper, we compare various methods of encoding text as spikes and assess each method's performance in an associated SNN on a downstream NLP task, namely, sentiment analysis. Furthermore, we go on to propose a new method of encoding text as spikes that outperforms a widely-used rate-coding technique, Poisson rate-coding, by around 13\% on our benchmark NLP tasks. Subsequently, we demonstrate the energy efficiency of SNNs implemented in hardware for the sentiment analysis task compared to traditional deep neural networks, observing an energy efficiency increase of more than 32x during inference and 60x during training while incurring the expected energy-performance tradeoff.
Revisiting speech segmentation and lexicon learning with better features
Authors: Herman Kamper, Benjamin van Niekerk
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Acoustic Unit Discovery, Segmentation

We revisit a self-supervised method that segments unlabelled speech into word-like segments. We start from the two-stage duration-penalised dynamic programming method that performs zero-resource segmentation without learning an explicit lexicon. In the first acoustic unit discovery stage, we replace contrastive predictive coding features with HuBERT. After word segmentation in the second stage, we get an acoustic word embedding for each segment by averaging HuBERT features. These embeddings are clustered using K-means to get a lexicon. The result is good full-coverage segmentation with a lexicon that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the ZeroSpeech benchmarks.
Employing Label Models on ChatGPT Answers Improves Legal Text Entailment Performance
Authors: Chau Nguyen, Le-Minh Nguyen
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The objective of legal text entailment is to ascertain whether the assertions in a legal query logically follow from the information provided in one or multiple legal articles. ChatGPT, a large language model, is robust in many natural language processing tasks, including legal text entailment: when we set the temperature = 0 (the ChatGPT answers are deterministic) and prompt the model, it achieves 70.64% accuracy on COLIEE 2022 dataset, which outperforms the previous SOTA of 67.89%. On the other hand, if the temperature is larger than zero, ChatGPT answers are not deterministic, leading to inconsistent answers and fluctuating results. We propose to leverage label models (a fundamental component of weak supervision techniques) to integrate the provisional answers by ChatGPT into consolidated labels. By that way, we treat ChatGPT provisional answers as noisy predictions which can be consolidated by label models. The experimental results demonstrate that this approach can attain an accuracy of 76.15%, marking a significant improvement of 8.26% over the prior state-of-the-art benchmark. Additionally, we perform an analysis of the instances where ChatGPT produces incorrect answers, then we classify the errors, offering insights that could guide potential enhancements for future research endeavors.
I Think, Therefore I am: Benchmarking Awareness of Large Language Models Using AwareBench
Authors: Yuan Li, Yue Huang, Yuli Lin, Siyuan Wu, Yao Wan, Lichao Sun
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Multiple-choice, Philosophy

Do large language models (LLMs) exhibit any forms of awareness similar to humans? In this paper, we introduce AwareBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate awareness in LLMs. Drawing from theories in psychology and philosophy, we define awareness in LLMs as the ability to understand themselves as AI models and to exhibit social intelligence. Subsequently, we categorize awareness in LLMs into five dimensions, including capability, mission, emotion, culture, and perspective. Based on this taxonomy, we create a dataset called AwareEval, which contains binary, multiple-choice, and open-ended questions to assess LLMs' understandings of specific awareness dimensions. Our experiments, conducted on 13 LLMs, reveal that the majority of them struggle to fully recognize their capabilities and missions while demonstrating decent social intelligence. We conclude by connecting awareness of LLMs with AI alignment and safety, emphasizing its significance to the trustworthy and ethical development of LLMs. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/HowieHwong/Awareness-in-LLM.
Probing Language Models' Gesture Understanding for Enhanced Human-AI Interaction
Authors: Philipp Wicke
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Probing Language Models, Text Generation

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has affected various disciplines that got beyond mere text generation. Going beyond their textual nature, this project proposal aims to investigate the interaction between LLMs and non-verbal communication, specifically focusing on gestures. The proposal sets out a plan to examine the proficiency of LLMs in deciphering both explicit and implicit non-verbal cues within textual prompts and their ability to associate these gestures with various contextual factors. The research proposes to test established psycholinguistic study designs to construct a comprehensive dataset that pairs textual prompts with detailed gesture descriptions, encompassing diverse regional variations, and semantic labels. To assess LLMs' comprehension of gestures, experiments are planned, evaluating their ability to simulate human behaviour in order to replicate psycholinguistic experiments. These experiments consider cultural dimensions and measure the agreement between LLM-identified gestures and the dataset, shedding light on the models' contextual interpretation of non-verbal cues (e.g. gestures).
A Survey of Pre-trained Language Models for Processing Scientific Text
Authors: Xanh Ho, Anh Khoa Duong Nguyen, An Tuan Dao, Junfeng Jiang, Yuki Chida, Kaito Sugimoto, Huy Quoc To, Florian Boudin, Akiko Aizawa
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00

The number of Language Models (LMs) dedicated to processing scientific text is on the rise. Keeping pace with the rapid growth of scientific LMs (SciLMs) has become a daunting task for researchers. To date, no comprehensive surveys on SciLMs have been undertaken, leaving this issue unaddressed. Given the constant stream of new SciLMs, appraising the state-of-the-art and how they compare to each other remain largely unknown. This work fills that gap and provides a comprehensive review of SciLMs, including an extensive analysis of their effectiveness across different domains, tasks and datasets, and a discussion on the challenges that lie ahead.
CauESC: A Causal Aware Model for Emotional Support Conversation
Authors: Wei Chen, Hengxu Lin, Qun Zhang, Xiaojin Zhang, Xiang Bai, Xuanjing Huang, Zhongyu Wei
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00

Emotional Support Conversation aims at reducing the seeker's emotional distress through supportive response. Existing approaches have two limitations: (1) They ignore the emotion causes of the distress, which is important for fine-grained emotion understanding; (2) They focus on the seeker's own mental state rather than the emotional dynamics during interaction between speakers. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework CauESC, which firstly recognizes the emotion causes of the distress, as well as the emotion effects triggered by the causes, and then understands each strategy of verbal grooming independently and integrates them skillfully. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show the benefits of emotion understanding from cause to effect and independent-integrated strategy modeling.
Enhancing Large Language Model with Decomposed Reasoning for Emotion Cause Pair Extraction
Authors: Jialiang Wu, Yi Shen, Ziheng Zhang, Longjun Cai
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction, In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) involves extracting clause pairs representing emotions and their causes in a document. Existing methods tend to overfit spurious correlations, such as positional bias in existing benchmark datasets, rather than capturing semantic features. Inspired by recent work, we explore leveraging large language model (LLM) to address ECPE task without additional training. Despite strong capabilities, LLMs suffer from uncontrollable outputs, resulting in mediocre performance. To address this, we introduce chain-of-thought to mimic human cognitive process and propose the Decomposed Emotion-Cause Chain (DECC) framework. Combining inducing inference and logical pruning, DECC guides LLMs to tackle ECPE task. We further enhance the framework by incorporating in-context learning. Experiment results demonstrate the strength of DECC compared to state-of-the-art supervised fine-tuning methods. Finally, we analyze the effectiveness of each component and the robustness of the method in various scenarios, including different LLM bases, rebalanced datasets, and multi-pair extraction.
WSC+: Enhancing The Winograd Schema Challenge Using Tree-of-Experts
Authors: Pardis Sadat Zahraei, Ali Emami
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: valid

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) serves as a prominent benchmark for evaluating machine understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at answering WSC questions, their ability to generate such questions remains less explored. In this work, we propose Tree-of-Experts (ToE), a novel prompting method which enhances the generation of WSC instances (50% valid cases vs. 10% in recent methods). Using this approach, we introduce WSC+, a novel dataset comprising 3,026 LLM-generated sentences. Notably, we extend the WSC framework by incorporating new 'ambiguous' and 'offensive' categories, providing a deeper insight into model overconfidence and bias. Our analysis reveals nuances in generation-evaluation consistency, suggesting that LLMs may not always outperform in evaluating their own generated questions when compared to those crafted by other models. On WSC+, GPT-4, the top-performing LLM, achieves an accuracy of 68.7%, significantly below the human benchmark of 95.1%.
Mitigating the Influence of Distractor Tasks in LMs with Prior-Aware Decoding
Authors: Raymond Douglas, Andis Draguns, Tomáš Gavenčiak
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

The broad capabilities of Language Models (LMs) can be limited by their sensitivity to distractor tasks: LMs can infer secondary tasks from the prompt in addition to the intended one, leading to unwanted outputs. For example, prompt injection attacks can cause models to deviate from explicit directives. In some 'inverse scaling' cases, this unwanted behaviour actually worsens as models scale up to at least 540B parameters. We present a theoretical framework that interprets LMs as a product of experts that combine multiple data generation processes. Based on this framework, we demonstrate prior-aware decoding (PAD) - a simple contrastive inference method to reduce the influence of distractor tasks. We apply PAD to eleven models, across four datasets, and find improvements in 41 out of 44 task-model combinations, with a median increase in task completion proportion of 40%. The results suggest a promising direction for further development towards more reliable language models.
Deductive Beam Search: Decoding Deducible Rationale for Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Tinghui Zhu, Kai Zhang, Jian Xie, Yu Su
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00

Recent advancements have significantly augmented the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) through various methodologies, especially chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, previous methods fail to address reasoning errors in intermediate steps, leading to accumulative errors. In this paper, we propose Deductive Beam Search (DBS), which seamlessly integrates CoT and deductive reasoning with step-wise beam search for LLMs. Our approach deploys a verifier, verifying the deducibility of a reasoning step and its premises, thus alleviating the error accumulation. Furthermore, we introduce a scalable and labor-free data construction method to amplify our model's verification capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the base performance of LLMs of various scales (7B, 13B, 70B, and ChatGPT) across 8 reasoning datasets from 3 diverse reasoning genres, including arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic. Moreover, our analysis proves DBS's capability of detecting diverse and subtle reasoning errors and robustness on different model scales.
Document Structure in Long Document Transformers
Authors: Jan Buchmann, Max Eichler, Jan-Micha Bodensohn, Ilia Kuznetsov, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00

Long documents often exhibit structure with hierarchically organized elements of different functions, such as section headers and paragraphs. Despite the omnipresence of document structure, its role in natural language processing (NLP) remains opaque. Do long-document Transformer models acquire an internal representation of document structure during pre-training? How can structural information be communicated to a model after pre-training, and how does it influence downstream performance? To answer these questions, we develop a novel suite of probing tasks to assess structure-awareness of long-document Transformers, propose general-purpose structure infusion methods, and evaluate the effects of structure infusion on QASPER and Evidence Inference, two challenging long-document NLP tasks. Results on LED and LongT5 suggest that they acquire implicit understanding of document structure during pre-training, which can be further enhanced by structure infusion, leading to improved end-task performance. To foster research on the role of document structure in NLP modeling, we make our data and code publicly available.
What Do Self-Supervised Speech and Speaker Models Learn? New Findings From a Cross Model Layer-Wise Analysis
Authors: Takanori Ashihara, Marc Delcroix, Takafumi Moriya, Kohei Matsuura, Taichi Asami, Yusuke Ijima
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has attracted increased attention for learning meaningful speech representations. Speech SSL models, such as WavLM, employ masked prediction training to encode general-purpose representations. In contrast, speaker SSL models, exemplified by DINO-based models, adopt utterance-level training objectives primarily for speaker representation. Understanding how these models represent information is essential for refining model efficiency and effectiveness. Unlike the various analyses of speech SSL, there has been limited investigation into what information speaker SSL captures and how its representation differs from speech SSL or other fully-supervised speaker models. This paper addresses these fundamental questions. We explore the capacity to capture various speech properties by applying SUPERB evaluation probing tasks to speech and speaker SSL models. We also examine which layers are predominantly utilized for each task to identify differences in how speech is represented. Furthermore, we conduct direct comparisons to measure the similarities between layers within and across models. Our analysis unveils that 1) the capacity to represent content information is somewhat unrelated to enhanced speaker representation, 2) specific layers of speech SSL models would be partly specialized in capturing linguistic information, and 3) speaker SSL models tend to disregard linguistic information but exhibit more sophisticated speaker representation.
Neighboring Perturbations of Knowledge Editing on Large Language Models
Authors: Jun-Yu Ma, Zhen-Hua Ling, Ningyu Zhang, Jia-Chen Gu
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: knowledge editing

Despite their exceptional capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are prone to generating unintended text due to false or outdated knowledge. Given the resource-intensive nature of retraining LLMs, there has been a notable increase in the development of knowledge editing. However, current approaches and evaluations rarely explore the perturbation of editing on neighboring knowledge. This paper studies whether updating new knowledge to LLMs perturbs the neighboring knowledge encapsulated within them. Specifically, we seek to figure out whether appending a new answer into an answer list to a factual question leads to catastrophic forgetting of original correct answers in this list, as well as unintentional inclusion of incorrect answers. A metric of additivity is introduced and a benchmark dubbed as Perturbation Evaluation of Appending Knowledge (PEAK) is constructed to evaluate the degree of perturbation to neighboring knowledge when appending new knowledge. Besides, a plug-and-play framework termed Appending via Preservation and Prevention (APP) is proposed to mitigate the neighboring perturbation by maintaining the integrity of the answer list. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of APP coupling with four editing methods on four LLMs. The code and data are available at https://github.com/mjy1111/PEAK.
Assertion Detection Large Language Model In-context Learning LoRA Fine-tuning
Authors: Yuelyu Ji, Zeshui Yu, Yanshan Wang
Date: 2024-01-31 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

In this study, we aim to address the task of assertion detection when extracting medical concepts from clinical notes, a key process in clinical natural language processing (NLP). Assertion detection in clinical NLP usually involves identifying assertion types for medical concepts in the clinical text, namely certainty (whether the medical concept is positive, negated, possible, or hypothetical), temporality (whether the medical concept is for present or the past history), and experiencer (whether the medical concept is described for the patient or a family member). These assertion types are essential for healthcare professionals to quickly and clearly understand the context of medical conditions from unstructured clinical texts, directly influencing the quality and outcomes of patient care. Although widely used, traditional methods, particularly rule-based NLP systems and machine learning or deep learning models, demand intensive manual efforts to create patterns and tend to overlook less common assertion types, leading to an incomplete understanding of the context. To address this challenge, our research introduces a novel methodology that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) pre-trained on a vast array of medical data for assertion detection. We enhanced the current method with advanced reasoning techniques, including Tree of Thought (ToT), Chain of Thought (CoT), and Self-Consistency (SC), and refine it further with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning. We first evaluated the model on the i2b2 2010 assertion dataset. Our method achieved a micro-averaged F-1 of 0.89, with 0.11 improvements over the previous works. To further assess the generalizability of our approach, we extended our evaluation to a local dataset that focused on sleep concept extraction. Our approach achieved an F-1 of 0.74, which is 0.31 higher than the previous method.