pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
BLESS: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Sentence Simplification
Authors: Tannon Kew, Alison Chi, Laura Vásquez-Rodríguez, Sweta Agrawal, Dennis Aumiller, Fernando Alva-Manchego, Matthew Shardlow
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diversity, Sentence, Text Simplification

We present BLESS, a comprehensive performance benchmark of the most recent state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on the task of text simplification (TS). We examine how well off-the-shelf LLMs can solve this challenging task, assessing a total of 44 models, differing in size, architecture, pre-training methods, and accessibility, on three test sets from different domains (Wikipedia, news, and medical) under a few-shot setting. Our analysis considers a suite of automatic metrics as well as a large-scale quantitative investigation into the types of common edit operations performed by the different models. Furthermore, we perform a manual qualitative analysis on a subset of model outputs to better gauge the quality of the generated simplifications. Our evaluation indicates that the best LLMs, despite not being trained on TS, perform comparably with state-of-the-art TS baselines. Additionally, we find that certain LLMs demonstrate a greater range and diversity of edit operations. Our performance benchmark will be available as a resource for the development of future TS methods and evaluation metrics.
Learning From Free-Text Human Feedback -- Collect New Datasets Or Extend Existing Ones?
Authors: Dominic Petrak, Nafise Sadat Moosavi, Ye Tian, Nikolai Rozanov, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Response Generation, Text Generation

Learning from free-text human feedback is essential for dialog systems, but annotated data is scarce and usually covers only a small fraction of error types known in conversational AI. Instead of collecting and annotating new datasets from scratch, recent advances in synthetic dialog generation could be used to augment existing dialog datasets with the necessary annotations. However, to assess the feasibility of such an effort, it is important to know the types and frequency of free-text human feedback included in these datasets. In this work, we investigate this question for a variety of commonly used dialog datasets, including MultiWoZ, SGD, BABI, PersonaChat, Wizards-of-Wikipedia, and the human-bot split of the Self-Feeding Chatbot. Using our observations, we derive new taxonomies for the annotation of free-text human feedback in dialogs and investigate the impact of including such data in response generation for three SOTA language generation models, including GPT-2, LLAMA, and Flan-T5. Our findings provide new insights into the composition of the datasets examined, including error types, user response types, and the relations between them.
Do Differences in Values Influence Disagreements in Online Discussions?
Authors: Michiel van der Meer, Piek Vossen, Catholijn M. Jonker, Pradeep K. Murukannaiah
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00

Disagreements are common in online discussions. Disagreement may foster collaboration and improve the quality of a discussion under some conditions. Although there exist methods for recognizing disagreement, a deeper understanding of factors that influence disagreement is lacking in the literature. We investigate a hypothesis that differences in personal values are indicative of disagreement in online discussions. We show how state-of-the-art models can be used for estimating values in online discussions and how the estimated values can be aggregated into value profiles. We evaluate the estimated value profiles based on human-annotated agreement labels. We find that the dissimilarity of value profiles correlates with disagreement in specific cases. We also find that including value information in agreement prediction improves performance.
Failures Pave the Way: Enhancing Large Language Models through Tuning-free Rule Accumulation
Authors: Zeyuan Yang, Peng Li, Yang Liu
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased impressive performance. However, due to their inability to capture relationships among samples, these frozen LLMs inevitably keep repeating similar mistakes. In this work, we propose our Tuning-free Rule Accumulation (TRAN) framework, which guides LLMs in improving their performance by learning from previous mistakes. Considering data arrives sequentially, LLMs gradually accumulate rules from incorrect cases, forming a rule collection. These rules are then utilized by the LLMs to avoid making similar mistakes when processing subsequent inputs. Moreover, the rules remain independent of the primary prompts, seamlessly complementing prompt design strategies. Experimentally, we show that TRAN improves over recent baselines by a large margin.
RAPL: A Relation-Aware Prototype Learning Approach for Few-Shot Document-Level Relation Extraction
Authors: Shiao Meng, Xuming Hu, Aiwei Liu, Shu'ang Li, Fukun Ma, Yawen Yang, Lijie Wen
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Document-level Relation Extraction, Meta-Learning, Relation, Relation Extraction

How to identify semantic relations among entities in a document when only a few labeled documents are available? Few-shot document-level relation extraction (FSDLRE) is crucial for addressing the pervasive data scarcity problem in real-world scenarios. Metric-based meta-learning is an effective framework widely adopted for FSDLRE, which constructs class prototypes for classification. However, existing works often struggle to obtain class prototypes with accurate relational semantics: 1) To build prototype for a target relation type, they aggregate the representations of all entity pairs holding that relation, while these entity pairs may also hold other relations, thus disturbing the prototype. 2) They use a set of generic NOTA (none-of-the-above) prototypes across all tasks, neglecting that the NOTA semantics differs in tasks with different target relation types. In this paper, we propose a relation-aware prototype learning method for FSDLRE to strengthen the relational semantics of prototype representations. By judiciously leveraging the relation descriptions and realistic NOTA instances as guidance, our method effectively refines the relation prototypes and generates task-specific NOTA prototypes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by average 2.61% $F_1$ across various settings of two FSDLRE benchmarks.
Variator: Accelerating Pre-trained Models with Plug-and-Play Compression Modules
Authors: Chaojun Xiao, Yuqi Luo, Wenbin Zhang, Pengle Zhang, Xu Han, Yankai Lin, Zhengyan Zhang, Ruobing Xie, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Jie zhou
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable results on NLP tasks but at the expense of huge parameter sizes and the consequent computational costs. In this paper, we propose Variator, a parameter-efficient acceleration method that enhances computational efficiency through plug-and-play compression plugins. Compression plugins are designed to reduce the sequence length via compressing multiple hidden vectors into one and trained with original PLMs frozen. Different from traditional model acceleration methods, which compress PLMs to smaller sizes, Variator offers two distinct advantages: (1) In real-world applications, the plug-and-play nature of our compression plugins enables dynamic selection of different compression plugins with varying acceleration ratios based on the current workload. (2) The compression plugin comprises a few compact neural network layers with minimal parameters, significantly saving storage and memory overhead, particularly in scenarios with a growing number of tasks. We validate the effectiveness of Variator on seven datasets. Experimental results show that Variator can save 53% computational costs using only 0.9% additional parameters with a performance drop of less than 2%. Moreover, when the model scales to billions of parameters, Variator matches the strong performance of uncompressed PLMs.
Re-Temp: Relation-Aware Temporal Representation Learning for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Kunze Wang, Soyeon Caren Han, Josiah Poon
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Relation, Representation Learning, Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion (TKGC) under the extrapolation setting aims to predict the missing entity from a fact in the future, posing a challenge that aligns more closely with real-world prediction problems. Existing research mostly encodes entities and relations using sequential graph neural networks applied to recent snapshots. However, these approaches tend to overlook the ability to skip irrelevant snapshots according to entity-related relations in the query and disregard the importance of explicit temporal information. To address this, we propose our model, Re-Temp (Relation-Aware Temporal Representation Learning), which leverages explicit temporal embedding as input and incorporates skip information flow after each timestamp to skip unnecessary information for prediction. Additionally, we introduce a two-phase forward propagation method to prevent information leakage. Through the evaluation on six TKGC (extrapolation) datasets, we demonstrate that our model outperforms all eight recent state-of-the-art models by a significant margin.
Ensemble of Task-Specific Language Models for Brain Encoding
Authors: Arvindh Arun, Jerrin John, Sanjai Kumaran
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Language models have been shown to be rich enough to encode fMRI activations of certain Regions of Interest in our Brains. Previous works have explored transfer learning from representations learned for popular natural language processing tasks for predicting brain responses. In our work, we improve the performance of such encoders by creating an ensemble model out of 10 popular Language Models (2 syntactic and 8 semantic). We beat the current baselines by 10% on average across all ROIs through our ensembling methods.
Enhancing Biomedical Lay Summarisation with External Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Tomas Goldsack, Zhihao Zhang, Chen Tang, Carolina Scarton, Chenghua Lin
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Knowledge Graphs

Previous approaches for automatic lay summarisation are exclusively reliant on the source article that, given it is written for a technical audience (e.g., researchers), is unlikely to explicitly define all technical concepts or state all of the background information that is relevant for a lay audience. We address this issue by augmenting eLife, an existing biomedical lay summarisation dataset, with article-specific knowledge graphs, each containing detailed information on relevant biomedical concepts. Using both automatic and human evaluations, we systematically investigate the effectiveness of three different approaches for incorporating knowledge graphs within lay summarisation models, with each method targeting a distinct area of the encoder-decoder model architecture. Our results confirm that integrating graph-based domain knowledge can significantly benefit lay summarisation by substantially increasing the readability of generated text and improving the explanation of technical concepts.
Creating a silver standard for patent simplification
Authors: Silvia Casola, Alberto Lavelli, Horacio Saggion
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Patents are legal documents that aim at protecting inventions on the one hand and at making technical knowledge circulate on the other. Their complex style -- a mix of legal, technical, and extremely vague language -- makes their content hard to access for humans and machines and poses substantial challenges to the information retrieval community. This paper proposes an approach to automatically simplify patent text through rephrasing. Since no in-domain parallel simplification data exist, we propose a method to automatically generate a large-scale silver standard for patent sentences. To obtain candidates, we use a general-domain paraphrasing system; however, the process is error-prone and difficult to control. Thus, we pair it with proper filters and construct a cleaner corpus that can successfully be used to train a simplification system. Human evaluation of the synthetic silver corpus shows that it is considered grammatical, adequate, and contains simple sentences.
Prevalence and prevention of large language model use in crowd work
Authors: Veniamin Veselovsky, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Philip Cozzolino, Andrew Gordon, David Rothschild, Robert West
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Summarization

We show that the use of large language models (LLMs) is prevalent among crowd workers, and that targeted mitigation strategies can significantly reduce, but not eliminate, LLM use. On a text summarization task where workers were not directed in any way regarding their LLM use, the estimated prevalence of LLM use was around 30%, but was reduced by about half by asking workers to not use LLMs and by raising the cost of using them, e.g., by disabling copy-pasting. Secondary analyses give further insight into LLM use and its prevention: LLM use yields high-quality but homogeneous responses, which may harm research concerned with human (rather than model) behavior and degrade future models trained with crowdsourced data. At the same time, preventing LLM use may be at odds with obtaining high-quality responses; e.g., when requesting workers not to use LLMs, summaries contained fewer keywords carrying essential information. Our estimates will likely change as LLMs increase in popularity or capabilities, and as norms around their usage change. Yet, understanding the co-evolution of LLM-based tools and users is key to maintaining the validity of research done using crowdsourcing, and we provide a critical baseline before widespread adoption ensues.
How Much Context Does My Attention-Based ASR System Need?
Authors: Robert Flynn, Anton Ragni
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

For the task of speech recognition, the use of more than 30 seconds of acoustic context during training is uncommon and under-investigated in literature. In this work, we conduct an empirical study on the effect of scaling the sequence length used to train/evaluate (dense-attention-based) acoustic models on speech recognition performance. For these experiments, a dataset of roughly 100,000 pseudo-labelled Spotify podcasts is used, with context lengths of 5 seconds to 1 hour being explored. Zero-shot evaluations are presented on the long-format datasets: Earnings-22, Tedlium and Rev16. Results demonstrate a benefit from training with up to 21.8 minutes of acoustic context, showing up to a 14.5\% relative improvement from a baseline trained with 10 seconds of context. We find that the model's width/depth, positional encoding scheme and number of attention heads impact its ability to use longer contexts.
Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck for Math Word Problems
Authors: Jing Xiong, Chengming Li, Min Yang, Xiping Hu, Bin Hu
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Math Word Problems (MWP) aims to automatically solve mathematical questions given in texts. Previous studies tend to design complex models to capture additional information in the original text so as to enable the model to gain more comprehensive features. In this paper, we turn our attention in the opposite direction, and work on how to discard redundant features containing spurious correlations for MWP. To this end, we design an Expression Syntax Information Bottleneck method for MWP (called ESIB) based on variational information bottleneck, which extracts essential features of expression syntax tree while filtering latent-specific redundancy containing syntax-irrelevant features. The key idea of ESIB is to encourage multiple models to predict the same expression syntax tree for different problem representations of the same problem by mutual learning so as to capture consistent information of expression syntax tree and discard latent-specific redundancy. To improve the generalization ability of the model and generate more diverse expressions, we design a self-distillation loss to encourage the model to rely more on the expression syntax information in the latent space. Experimental results on two large-scale benchmarks show that our model not only achieves state-of-the-art results but also generates more diverse solutions. The code is available.
CoAnnotating: Uncertainty-Guided Work Allocation between Human and Large Language Models for Data Annotation
Authors: Minzhi Li, Taiwei Shi, Caleb Ziems, Min-Yen Kan, Nancy F. Chen, Zhengyuan Liu, Diyi Yang
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: text annotation

Annotated data plays a critical role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in training models and evaluating their performance. Given recent developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), models such as ChatGPT demonstrate zero-shot capability on many text-annotation tasks, comparable with or even exceeding human annotators. Such LLMs can serve as alternatives for manual annotation, due to lower costs and higher scalability. However, limited work has leveraged LLMs as complementary annotators, nor explored how annotation work is best allocated among humans and LLMs to achieve both quality and cost objectives. We propose CoAnnotating, a novel paradigm for Human-LLM co-annotation of unstructured texts at scale. Under this framework, we utilize uncertainty to estimate LLMs' annotation capability. Our empirical study shows CoAnnotating to be an effective means to allocate work from results on different datasets, with up to 21% performance improvement over random baseline. For code implementation, see https://github.com/SALT-NLP/CoAnnotating.
Tips for making the most of 64-bit architectures in langage design, libraries or garbage collection
Authors: Benoît Sonntag, Dominique Colnet
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00

The 64-bit architectures that have become standard today offer unprecedented low-level programming possibilities. For the first time in the history of computing, the size of address registers far exceeded the physical capacity of their bus.After a brief reminder of the possibilities offered by the small size of addresses compared to the available 64 bits,we develop three concrete examples of how the vacant bits of these registers can be used.Among these examples, two of them concern the implementation of a library for a new statically typed programming language.Firstly, the implementation of multi-precision integers, with the aim of improving performance in terms of both calculation speed and RAM savings.The second example focuses on the library's handling of UTF-8 character strings.Here, the idea is to make indexing easier by ignoring the physical size of each UTF-8 characters.Finally, the third example is a possible enhancement of garbage collectors, in particular the mark \& sweep for the object marking phase.
MUSER: A Multi-View Similar Case Retrieval Dataset
Authors: Qingquan Li, Yiran Hu, Feng Yao, Chaojun Xiao, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun, Weixing Shen
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Retrieval, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

Similar case retrieval (SCR) is a representative legal AI application that plays a pivotal role in promoting judicial fairness. However, existing SCR datasets only focus on the fact description section when judging the similarity between cases, ignoring other valuable sections (e.g., the court's opinion) that can provide insightful reasoning process behind. Furthermore, the case similarities are typically measured solely by the textual semantics of the fact descriptions, which may fail to capture the full complexity of legal cases from the perspective of legal knowledge. In this work, we present MUSER, a similar case retrieval dataset based on multi-view similarity measurement and comprehensive legal element with sentence-level legal element annotations. Specifically, we select three perspectives (legal fact, dispute focus, and law statutory) and build a comprehensive and structured label schema of legal elements for each of them, to enable accurate and knowledgeable evaluation of case similarities. The constructed dataset originates from Chinese civil cases and contains 100 query cases and 4,024 candidate cases. We implement several text classification algorithms for legal element prediction and various retrieval methods for retrieving similar cases on MUSER. The experimental results indicate that incorporating legal elements can benefit the performance of SCR models, but further efforts are still required to address the remaining challenges posed by MUSER. The source code and dataset are released at https://github.com/THUlawtech/MUSER.
ScanDL: A Diffusion Model for Generating Synthetic Scanpaths on Texts
Authors: Lena S. Bolliger, David R. Reich, Patrick Haller, Deborah N. Jakobi, Paul Prasse, Lena A. Jäger
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00

Eye movements in reading play a crucial role in psycholinguistic research studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language processing. More recently, the tight coupling between eye movements and cognition has also been leveraged for language-related machine learning tasks such as the interpretability, enhancement, and pre-training of language models, as well as the inference of reader- and text-specific properties. However, scarcity of eye movement data and its unavailability at application time poses a major challenge for this line of research. Initially, this problem was tackled by resorting to cognitive models for synthesizing eye movement data. However, for the sole purpose of generating human-like scanpaths, purely data-driven machine-learning-based methods have proven to be more suitable. Following recent advances in adapting diffusion processes to discrete data, we propose ScanDL, a novel discrete sequence-to-sequence diffusion model that generates synthetic scanpaths on texts. By leveraging pre-trained word representations and jointly embedding both the stimulus text and the fixation sequence, our model captures multi-modal interactions between the two inputs. We evaluate ScanDL within- and across-dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art scanpath generation methods. Finally, we provide an extensive psycholinguistic analysis that underlines the model's ability to exhibit human-like reading behavior. Our implementation is made available at https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/ScanDL.
POE: Process of Elimination for Multiple Choice Reasoning
Authors: Chenkai Ma, Xinya Du
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Logical Reasoning, Multiple-choice

Language models (LMs) are capable of conducting in-context learning for multiple choice reasoning tasks, but the options in these tasks are treated equally. As humans often first eliminate wrong options before picking the final correct answer, we argue a similar two-step strategy can make LMs better at these tasks. To this end, we present the Process of Elimination (POE), a two-step scoring method. In the first step, POE scores each option, and eliminates seemingly wrong options. In the second step, POE masks these wrong options, and makes the final prediction from the remaining options. Zero-shot experiments on 8 reasoning tasks illustrate the effectiveness of POE, and a following analysis finds our method to be especially performant on logical reasoning tasks. We further analyze the effect of masks, and show that POE applies to few-shot settings and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT.