pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Statistical Uncertainty in Word Embeddings: GloVe-V
Authors: Andrea Vallebueno, Cassandra Handan-Nader, Christopher D. Manning, Daniel E. Ho
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Model Selection, Word Embeddings

Static word embeddings are ubiquitous in computational social science applications and contribute to practical decision-making in a variety of fields including law and healthcare. However, assessing the statistical uncertainty in downstream conclusions drawn from word embedding statistics has remained challenging. When using only point estimates for embeddings, researchers have no streamlined way of assessing the degree to which their model selection criteria or scientific conclusions are subject to noise due to sparsity in the underlying data used to generate the embeddings. We introduce a method to obtain approximate, easy-to-use, and scalable reconstruction error variance estimates for GloVe (Pennington et al., 2014), one of the most widely used word embedding models, using an analytical approximation to a multivariate normal model. To demonstrate the value of embeddings with variance (GloVe-V), we illustrate how our approach enables principled hypothesis testing in core word embedding tasks, such as comparing the similarity between different word pairs in vector space, assessing the performance of different models, and analyzing the relative degree of ethnic or gender bias in a corpus using different word lists.
A dual task learning approach to fine-tune a multilingual semantic speech encoder for Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Gaëlle Laperrière, Sahar Ghannay, Bassam Jabaian, Yannick Estève
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Spoken Language Understanding

Self-Supervised Learning is vastly used to efficiently represent speech for Spoken Language Understanding, gradually replacing conventional approaches. Meanwhile, textual SSL models are proposed to encode language-agnostic semantics. SAMU-XLSR framework employed this semantic information to enrich multilingual speech representations. A recent study investigated SAMU-XLSR in-domain semantic enrichment by specializing it on downstream transcriptions, leading to state-of-the-art results on a challenging SLU task. This study's interest lies in the loss of multilingual performances and lack of specific-semantics training induced by such specialization in close languages without any SLU implication. We also consider SAMU-XLSR's loss of initial cross-lingual abilities due to a separate SLU fine-tuning. Therefore, this paper proposes a dual task learning approach to improve SAMU-XLSR semantic enrichment while considering distant languages for multilingual and language portability experiments.
Gram2Vec: An Interpretable Document Vectorizer
Authors: Peter Zeng, Eric Sclafani, Owen Rambow
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Authorship Attribution

We present Gram2Vec, a grammatical style embedding algorithm that embeds documents into a higher dimensional space by extracting the normalized relative frequencies of grammatical features present in the text. Compared to neural approaches, Gram2Vec offers inherent interpretability based on how the feature vectors are generated. In our demo, we present a way to visualize a mapping of authors to documents based on their Gram2Vec vectors and highlight the ability to drop or add features to view which authors make certain linguistic choices. Next, we use authorship attribution as an application to show how Gram2Vec can explain why a document is attributed to a certain author, using cosine similarities between the Gram2Vec feature vectors to calculate the distances between candidate documents and a query document.
AI "News" Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian
Authors: Giovanni Puccetti, Anna Rogers, Chiara Alzetta, Felice Dell'Orletta, Andrea Esuli
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as "content farm" models (CFMs), to generate synthetic text that could pass for real news articles. This is already happening even for languages that do not have high-quality monolingual LLMs. We show that fine-tuning Llama (v1), mostly trained on English, on as little as 40K Italian news articles, is sufficient for producing news-like texts that native speakers of Italian struggle to identify as synthetic. We investigate three LLMs and three methods of detecting synthetic texts (log-likelihood, DetectGPT, and supervised classification), finding that they all perform better than human raters, but they are all impractical in the real world (requiring either access to token likelihood information or a large dataset of CFM texts). We also explore the possibility of creating a proxy CFM: an LLM fine-tuned on a similar dataset to one used by the real "content farm". We find that even a small amount of fine-tuning data suffices for creating a successful detector, but we need to know which base LLM is used, which is a major challenge. Our results suggest that there are currently no practical methods for detecting synthetic news-like texts 'in the wild', while generating them is too easy. We highlight the urgency of more NLP research on this problem.
Decoding the Narratives: Analyzing Personal Drug Experiences Shared on Reddit
Authors: Layla Bouzoubaa, Elham Aghakhani, Max Song, Minh Trinh, Rezvaneh Rezapour
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION

Online communities such as drug-related subreddits serve as safe spaces for people who use drugs (PWUD), fostering discussions on substance use experiences, harm reduction, and addiction recovery. Users' shared narratives on these forums provide insights into the likelihood of developing a substance use disorder (SUD) and recovery potential. Our study aims to develop a multi-level, multi-label classification model to analyze online user-generated texts about substance use experiences. For this purpose, we first introduce a novel taxonomy to assess the nature of posts, including their intended connections (Inquisition or Disclosure), subjects (e.g., Recovery, Dependency), and specific objectives (e.g., Relapse, Quality, Safety). Using various multi-label classification algorithms on a set of annotated data, we show that GPT-4, when prompted with instructions, definitions, and examples, outperformed all other models. We apply this model to label an additional 1,000 posts and analyze the categories of linguistic expression used within posts in each class. Our analysis shows that topics such as Safety, Combination of Substances, and Mental Health see more disclosure, while discussions about physiological Effects focus on harm reduction. Our work enriches the understanding of PWUD's experiences and informs the broader knowledge base on SUD and drug use.
Can LLMs Learn Macroeconomic Narratives from Social Media?
Authors: Almog Gueta, Amir Feder, Zorik Gekhman, Ariel Goldstein, Roi Reichart
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

This study empirically tests the $\textit{Narrative Economics}$ hypothesis, which posits that narratives (ideas that are spread virally and affect public beliefs) can influence economic fluctuations. We introduce two curated datasets containing posts from X (formerly Twitter) which capture economy-related narratives (Data will be shared upon paper acceptance). Employing Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods, we extract and summarize narratives from the tweets. We test their predictive power for $\textit{macroeconomic}$ forecasting by incorporating the tweets' or the extracted narratives' representations in downstream financial prediction tasks. Our work highlights the challenges in improving macroeconomic models with narrative data, paving the way for the research community to realistically address this important challenge. From a scientific perspective, our investigation offers valuable insights and NLP tools for narrative extraction and summarization using Large Language Models (LLMs), contributing to future research on the role of narratives in economics.
COMMUNITY-CROSS-INSTRUCT: Unsupervised Instruction Generation for Aligning Large Language Models to Online Communities
Authors: Zihao He, Minh Duc Chu, Rebecca Dorn, Siyi Guo, Kristina Lerman
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00

Social scientists use surveys to probe the opinions and beliefs of populations, but these methods are slow, costly, and prone to biases. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) enable the creating of computational representations or "digital twins" of populations that generate human-like responses mimicking the population's language, styles, and attitudes. We introduce Community-Cross-Instruct, an unsupervised framework for aligning LLMs to online communities to elicit their beliefs. Given a corpus of a community's online discussions, Community-Cross-Instruct automatically generates instruction-output pairs by an advanced LLM to (1) finetune a foundational LLM to faithfully represent that community, and (2) evaluate the alignment of the finetuned model to the community. We demonstrate the method's utility in accurately representing political and diet communities on Reddit. Unlike prior methods requiring human-authored instructions, Community-Cross-Instruct generates instructions in a fully unsupervised manner, enhancing scalability and generalization across domains. This work enables cost-effective and automated surveying of diverse online communities.
Satyrn: A Platform for Analytics Augmented Generation
Authors: Marko Sterbentz, Cameron Barrie, Shubham Shahi, Abhratanu Dutta, Donna Hooshmand, Harper Pack, Kristian J. Hammond
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of producing documents, and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has shown itself to be a powerful method for improving accuracy without sacrificing fluency. However, not all information can be retrieved from text. We propose an approach that uses the analysis of structured data to generate fact sets that are used to guide generation in much the same way that retrieved documents are used in RAG. This analytics augmented generation (AAG) approach supports the ability to utilize standard analytic techniques to generate facts that are then converted to text and passed to an LLM. We present a neurosymbolic platform, Satyrn, that leverages AAG to produce accurate, fluent, and coherent reports grounded in large scale databases. In our experiments, we find that Satyrn generates reports in which over 86% of claims are accurate while maintaining high levels of fluency and coherence, even when using smaller language models such as Mistral-7B, as compared to GPT-4 Code Interpreter in which just 57% of claims are accurate.
Language Models are Surprisingly Fragile to Drug Names in Biomedical Benchmarks
Authors: Jack Gallifant, Shan Chen, Pedro Moreira, Nikolaj Munch, Mingye Gao, Jackson Pond, Leo Anthony Celi, Hugo Aerts, Thomas Hartvigsen, Danielle Bitterman
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: MedQA

Medical knowledge is context-dependent and requires consistent reasoning across various natural language expressions of semantically equivalent phrases. This is particularly crucial for drug names, where patients often use brand names like Advil or Tylenol instead of their generic equivalents. To study this, we create a new robustness dataset, RABBITS, to evaluate performance differences on medical benchmarks after swapping brand and generic drug names using physician expert annotations. We assess both open-source and API-based LLMs on MedQA and MedMCQA, revealing a consistent performance drop ranging from 1-10\%. Furthermore, we identify a potential source of this fragility as the contamination of test data in widely used pre-training datasets. All code is accessible at https://github.com/BittermanLab/RABBITS, and a HuggingFace leaderboard is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/AIM-Harvard/rabbits-leaderboard.
InternalInspector $I^2$: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States
Authors: Mohammad Beigi, Ying Shen, Runing Yang, Zihao Lin, Qifan Wang, Ankith Mohan, Jianfeng He, Ming Jin, Chang-Tien Lu, Lifu Huang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contrastive Learning, Hallucination, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Despite their vast capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle with generating reliable outputs, frequently producing high-confidence inaccuracies known as hallucinations. Addressing this challenge, our research introduces InternalInspector, a novel framework designed to enhance confidence estimation in LLMs by leveraging contrastive learning on internal states including attention states, feed-forward states, and activation states of all layers. Unlike existing methods that primarily focus on the final activation state, InternalInspector conducts a comprehensive analysis across all internal states of every layer to accurately identify both correct and incorrect prediction processes. By benchmarking InternalInspector against existing confidence estimation methods across various natural language understanding and generation tasks, including factual question answering, commonsense reasoning, and reading comprehension, InternalInspector achieves significantly higher accuracy in aligning the estimated confidence scores with the correctness of the LLM's predictions and lower calibration error. Furthermore, InternalInspector excels at HaluEval, a hallucination detection benchmark, outperforming other internal-based confidence estimation methods in this task.
Learn Beyond The Answer: Training Language Models with Reflection for Mathematical Reasoning
Authors: Zhihan Zhang, Tao Ge, Zhenwen Liang, Wenhao Yu, Dian Yu, Mengzhao Jia, Dong Yu, Meng Jiang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Mathematical Reasoning, Question Answering

Supervised fine-tuning enhances the problem-solving abilities of language models across various mathematical reasoning tasks. To maximize such benefits, existing research focuses on broadening the training set with various data augmentation techniques, which is effective for standard single-round question-answering settings. Our work introduces a novel technique aimed at cultivating a deeper understanding of the training problems at hand, enhancing performance not only in standard settings but also in more complex scenarios that require reflective thinking. Specifically, we propose reflective augmentation, a method that embeds problem reflection into each training instance. It trains the model to consider alternative perspectives and engage with abstractions and analogies, thereby fostering a thorough comprehension through reflective reasoning. Extensive experiments validate the achievement of our aim, underscoring the unique advantages of our method and its complementary nature relative to existing augmentation techniques.
Unveiling and Mitigating Bias in Mental Health Analysis with Large Language Models
Authors: Yuqing Wang, Yun Zhao, Sara Alessandra Keller, Anne de Hond, Marieke M. van Buchem, Malvika Pillai, Tina Hernandez-Boussard
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated strong capabilities across various applications, including mental health analysis. However, existing studies have focused on predictive performance, leaving the critical issue of fairness underexplored, posing significant risks to vulnerable populations. Despite acknowledging potential biases, previous works have lacked thorough investigations into these biases and their impacts. To address this gap, we systematically evaluate biases across seven social factors (e.g., gender, age, religion) using ten LLMs with different prompting methods on eight diverse mental health datasets. Our results show that GPT-4 achieves the best overall balance in performance and fairness among LLMs, although it still lags behind domain-specific models like MentalRoBERTa in some cases. Additionally, our tailored fairness-aware prompts can effectively mitigate bias in mental health predictions, highlighting the great potential for fair analysis in this field.
CItruS: Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction for Long Sequence Modeling
Authors: Yu Bai, Xiyuan Zou, Heyan Huang, Sanxing Chen, Marc-Antoine Rondeau, Yang Gao, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Long sequence modeling has gained broad interest as large language models (LLMs) continue to advance. Recent research has identified that a large portion of hidden states within the key-value caches of Transformer models can be discarded (also termed evicted) without affecting the perplexity performance in generating long sequences. However, we show that these methods, despite preserving perplexity performance, often drop information that is important for solving downstream tasks, a problem which we call information neglect. To address this issue, we introduce Chunked Instruction-aware State Eviction (CItruS), a novel modeling technique that integrates the attention preferences useful for a downstream task into the eviction process of hidden states. In addition, we design a method for chunked sequence processing to further improve efficiency. Our training-free method exhibits superior performance on long sequence comprehension and retrieval tasks over several strong baselines under the same memory budget, while preserving language modeling perplexity. The code and data have been released at https://github.com/ybai-nlp/CItruS.
FinTruthQA: A Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating the Quality of Financial Information Disclosure
Authors: Ziyue Xu, Peilin Zhou, Xinyu Shi, Jiageng Wu, Yikang Jiang, Dading Chong, Bin Ke, Jie Yang
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Accurate and transparent financial information disclosure is crucial in the fields of accounting and finance, ensuring market efficiency and investor confidence. Among many information disclosure platforms, the Chinese stock exchanges' investor interactive platform provides a novel and interactive way for listed firms to disclose information of interest to investors through an online question-and-answer (Q&A) format. However, it is common for listed firms to respond to questions with limited or no substantive information, and automatically evaluating the quality of financial information disclosure on large amounts of Q&A pairs is challenging. This paper builds a benchmark FinTruthQA, that can evaluate advanced natural language processing (NLP) techniques for the automatic quality assessment of information disclosure in financial Q&A data. FinTruthQA comprises 6,000 real-world financial Q&A entries and each Q&A was manually annotated based on four key evaluation criteria: question identification, question relevance, answer readability, and answer relevance. We benchmarked various NLP techniques on FinTruthQA, including statistical machine learning models, pre-trained language model and their fine-tuned versions, as well as large language models (LLMs). By establishing this benchmark, we provide a robust foundation for the automatic evaluation of information disclosure, significantly enhancing the transparency and quality of financial reporting. FinTruthQA can be used by auditors, regulators, and financial analysts for real-time monitoring and data-driven decision-making, as well as by researchers for advanced studies in accounting and finance, ultimately fostering greater trust and efficiency in the financial markets.
Reframing linguistic bootstrapping as joint inference using visually-grounded grammar induction models
Authors: Eva Portelance, Siva Reddy, Timothy J. O'Donnell
Date: 2024-06-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Acquisition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

Semantic and syntactic bootstrapping posit that children use their prior knowledge of one linguistic domain, say syntactic relations, to help later acquire another, such as the meanings of new words. Empirical results supporting both theories may tempt us to believe that these are different learning strategies, where one may precede the other. Here, we argue that they are instead both contingent on a more general learning strategy for language acquisition: joint learning. Using a series of neural visually-grounded grammar induction models, we demonstrate that both syntactic and semantic bootstrapping effects are strongest when syntax and semantics are learnt simultaneously. Joint learning results in better grammar induction, realistic lexical category learning, and better interpretations of novel sentence and verb meanings. Joint learning makes language acquisition easier for learners by mutually constraining the hypotheses spaces for both syntax and semantics. Studying the dynamics of joint inference over many input sources and modalities represents an important new direction for language modeling and learning research in both cognitive sciences and AI, as it may help us explain how language can be acquired in more constrained learning settings.
Zeroing neural dynamics solving time-variant complex conjugate matrix equation
Authors: Jiakuang He, Dongqing Wu
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

Complex conjugate matrix equations (CCME) have aroused the interest of many researchers because of computations and antilinear systems. Existing research is dominated by its time-invariant solving methods, but lacks proposed theories for solving its time-variant version. Moreover, artificial neural networks are rarely studied for solving CCME. In this paper, starting with the earliest CCME, zeroing neural dynamics (ZND) is applied to solve its time-variant version. Firstly, the vectorization and Kronecker product in the complex field are defined uniformly. Secondly, Con-CZND1 model and Con-CZND2 model are proposed and theoretically prove convergence and effectiveness. Thirdly, three numerical experiments are designed to illustrate the effectiveness of the two models, compare their differences, highlight the significance of neural dynamics in the complex field, and refine the theory related to ZND.
Evolutionary Spiking Neural Networks: A Survey
Authors: Shuaijie Shen, Rui Zhang, Chao Wang, Renzhuo Huang, Aiersi Tuerhong, Qinghai Guo, Zhichao Lu, JianGuo Zhang, Luziwei Leng
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are gaining increasing attention as potential computationally efficient alternatives to traditional artificial neural networks(ANNs). However, the unique information propagation mechanisms and the complexity of SNN neuron models pose challenges for adopting traditional methods developed for ANNs to SNNs. These challenges include both weight learning and architecture design. While surrogate gradient learning has shown some success in addressing the former challenge, the latter remains relatively unexplored. Recently, a novel paradigm utilizing evolutionary computation methods has emerged to tackle these challenges. This approach has resulted in the development of a variety of energy-efficient and high-performance SNNs across a wide range of machine learning benchmarks. In this paper, we present a survey of these works and initiate discussions on potential challenges ahead.