pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
No perspective, no perception!! Perspective-aware Healthcare Answer Summarization
Authors: Gauri Naik, Sharad Chandakacherla, Shweta Yadav, Md. Shad Akhtar
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Question Answering, Question Answering

Healthcare Community Question Answering (CQA) forums offer an accessible platform for individuals seeking information on various healthcare-related topics. People find such platforms suitable for self-disclosure, seeking medical opinions, finding simplified explanations for their medical conditions, and answering others' questions. However, answers on these forums are typically diverse and prone to off-topic discussions. It can be challenging for readers to sift through numerous answers and extract meaningful insights, making answer summarization a crucial task for CQA forums. While several efforts have been made to summarize the community answers, most of them are limited to the open domain and overlook the different perspectives offered by these answers. To address this problem, this paper proposes a novel task of perspective-specific answer summarization. We identify various perspectives, within healthcare-related responses and frame a perspective-driven abstractive summary covering all responses. To achieve this, we annotate 3167 CQA threads with 6193 perspective-aware summaries in our PUMA dataset. Further, we propose PLASMA, a prompt-driven controllable summarization model. To encapsulate the perspective-specific conditions, we design an energy-controlled loss function for the optimization. We also leverage the prefix tuner to learn the intricacies of the health-care perspective summarization. Our evaluation against five baselines suggests the superior performance of PLASMA by a margin of 1.5-21% improvement. We supplement our experiments with ablation and qualitative analysis.
Plan, Generate and Complicate: Improving Low-resource Dialogue State Tracking via Easy-to-Difficult Zero-shot Data Augmentation
Authors: Ming Gu, Yan Yang
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Dialogue State Tracking

Data augmentation methods have been a promising direction to improve the performance of small models for low-resource dialogue state tracking. However, traditional methods rely on pre-defined user goals and neglect the importance of data complexity in this task. In this paper, we propose EDZ-DA, an Easy-to-Difficult Zero-shot Data Augmentation framework for low-resource dialogue state tracking that utilizes large language models to automatically catch the relationships of different domains and then generate the dialogue data. We also complicate the dialogues based on the domain relation to enhance the model's capability for co-reference slot tracking. Furthermore, we permute slot values to mitigate the influence of output orders and the problem of incomplete value generation. Experimental results illustrate the superiority of our proposed method compared to previous strong data augmentation baselines on MultiWOZ.
ContraSolver: Self-Alignment of Language Models by Resolving Internal Preference Contradictions
Authors: Xu Zhang, Xunjian Yin, Xiaojun Wan
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00

While substantial advancements have been made in developing large language models (LLMs), achieving control over their behavior can be difficult. Direct preference optimization (DPO) assumes the existence of a latent reward function to evaluate the responses of LLMs. This assumption indicates a strict preference ordering of different responses to the same input. However, there always exist contradictions of preference in LLMs according to our experimental observations. In this paper, we construct a graph structure of the preference relationship among different responses with self-annotation to find contradictions in the preference order. We propose ContraSolver, an algorithm that traverses all edges on the preference graph to identify those that might cause contradictions. ContraSolver initializes the graph with a maximum spanning tree and identifies contradictory edges, prioritizing the resolution of low-confidence preferences while preserving high-confidence ones. Experimental results on four different generation tasks show that the performance of different LLMs can be largely improved through our completely unsupervised self-alignment. Furthermore, by analyzing the preference graphs of LLMs with and without self-alignment by ContraSolver, we quantify the reduction in contradictions, suggesting that resolving preference contradictions is crucial for achieving better alignment performance.
DisfluencySpeech -- Single-Speaker Conversational Speech Dataset with Paralanguage
Authors: Kyra Wang, Dorien Herremans
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Laughing, sighing, stuttering, and other forms of paralanguage do not contribute any direct lexical meaning to speech, but they provide crucial propositional context that aids semantic and pragmatic processes such as irony. It is thus important for artificial social agents to both understand and be able to generate speech with semantically-important paralanguage. Most speech datasets do not include transcribed non-lexical speech sounds and disfluencies, while those that do are typically multi-speaker datasets where each speaker provides relatively little audio. This makes it challenging to train conversational Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis models that include such paralinguistic components. We thus present DisfluencySpeech, a studio-quality labeled English speech dataset with paralanguage. A single speaker recreates nearly 10 hours of expressive utterances from the Switchboard-1 Telephone Speech Corpus (Switchboard), simulating realistic informal conversations. To aid the development of a TTS model that is able to predictively synthesise paralanguage from text without such components, we provide three different transcripts at different levels of information removal (removal of non-speech events, removal of non-sentence elements, and removal of false starts), as well as benchmark TTS models trained on each of these levels.
Linguistic Bias in ChatGPT: Language Models Reinforce Dialect Discrimination
Authors: Eve Fleisig, Genevieve Smith, Madeline Bossi, Ishita Rustagi, Xavier Yin, Dan Klein
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00

We present a large-scale study of linguistic bias exhibited by ChatGPT covering ten dialects of English (Standard American English, Standard British English, and eight widely spoken non-"standard" varieties from around the world). We prompted GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 with text by native speakers of each variety and analyzed the responses via detailed linguistic feature annotation and native speaker evaluation. We find that the models default to "standard" varieties of English; based on evaluation by native speakers, we also find that model responses to non-"standard" varieties consistently exhibit a range of issues: stereotyping (19% worse than for "standard" varieties), demeaning content (25% worse), lack of comprehension (9% worse), and condescending responses (15% worse). We also find that if these models are asked to imitate the writing style of prompts in non-"standard" varieties, they produce text that exhibits lower comprehension of the input and is especially prone to stereotyping. GPT-4 improves on GPT-3.5 in terms of comprehension, warmth, and friendliness, but also exhibits a marked increase in stereotyping (+18%). The results indicate that GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4 can perpetuate linguistic discrimination toward speakers of non-"standard" varieties.
Automated Essay Scoring Using Grammatical Variety and Errors with Multi-Task Learning and Item Response Theory
Authors: Kosuke Doi, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring, Multi-Task Learning

This study examines the effect of grammatical features in automatic essay scoring (AES). We use two kinds of grammatical features as input to an AES model: (1) grammatical items that writers used correctly in essays, and (2) the number of grammatical errors. Experimental results show that grammatical features improve the performance of AES models that predict the holistic scores of essays. Multi-task learning with the holistic and grammar scores, alongside using grammatical features, resulted in a larger improvement in model performance. We also show that a model using grammar abilities estimated using Item Response Theory (IRT) as the labels for the auxiliary task achieved comparable performance to when we used grammar scores assigned by human raters. In addition, we weight the grammatical features using IRT to consider the difficulty of grammatical items and writers' grammar abilities. We found that weighting grammatical features with the difficulty led to further improvement in performance.
Mixture-of-Skills: Learning to Optimize Data Usage for Fine-Tuning Large Language Models
Authors: Minghao Wu, Thuy-Trang Vu, Lizhen Qu, Gholamreza Haffari
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are typically fine-tuned on diverse and extensive datasets sourced from various origins to develop a comprehensive range of skills, such as writing, reasoning, chatting, coding, and more. Each skill has unique characteristics, and these datasets are often heterogeneous and imbalanced, making the fine-tuning process highly challenging. Balancing the development of each skill while ensuring the model maintains its overall performance requires sophisticated techniques and careful dataset curation. In this work, we propose a general, model-agnostic, reinforcement learning framework, Mixture-of-Skills (MoS), that learns to optimize data usage automatically during the fine-tuning process. This framework ensures the optimal comprehensive skill development of LLMs by dynamically adjusting the focus on different datasets based on their current learning state. To validate the effectiveness of MoS, we conduct extensive experiments using three diverse LLM backbones on two widely used benchmarks and demonstrate that MoS substantially enhances model performance. Building on the success of MoS, we propose MoSpec, an adaptation for task-specific fine-tuning, which harnesses the utilities of various datasets for a specific purpose. Our work underlines the significance of dataset rebalancing and present MoS as a powerful, general solution for optimizing data usage in the fine-tuning of LLMs for various purposes.
Deep Exploration of Cross-Lingual Zero-Shot Generalization in Instruction Tuning
Authors: Janghoon Han, Changho Lee, Joongbo Shin, Stanley Jungkyu Choi, Honglak Lee, Kynghoon Bae
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Zero-shot Generalization

Instruction tuning has emerged as a powerful technique, significantly boosting zero-shot performance on unseen tasks. While recent work has explored cross-lingual generalization by applying instruction tuning to multilingual models, previous studies have primarily focused on English, with a limited exploration of non-English tasks. For an in-depth exploration of cross-lingual generalization in instruction tuning, we perform instruction tuning individually for two distinct language meta-datasets. Subsequently, we assess the performance on unseen tasks in a language different from the one used for training. To facilitate this investigation, we introduce a novel non-English meta-dataset named "KORANI" (Korean Natural Instruction), comprising 51 Korean benchmarks. Moreover, we design cross-lingual templates to mitigate discrepancies in language and instruction-format of the template between training and inference within the cross-lingual setting. Our experiments reveal consistent improvements through cross-lingual generalization in both English and Korean, outperforming baseline by average scores of 20.7\% and 13.6\%, respectively. Remarkably, these enhancements are comparable to those achieved by monolingual instruction tuning and even surpass them in some tasks. The result underscores the significance of relevant data acquisition across languages over linguistic congruence with unseen tasks during instruction tuning.
StructuralSleight: Automated Jailbreak Attacks on Large Language Models Utilizing Uncommon Text-Organization Structures
Authors: Bangxin Li, Hengrui Xing, Cong Tian, Chao Huang, Jin Qian, Huangqing Xiao, Linfeng Feng
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used in natural language processing but face the risk of jailbreak attacks that maliciously induce them to generate harmful content. Existing jailbreak attacks, including character-level and context-level attacks, mainly focus on the prompt of plain text without specifically exploring the significant influence of its structure. In this paper, we focus on studying how the prompt structure contributes to the jailbreak attack. We introduce a novel structure-level attack method based on long-tailed structures, which we refer to as Uncommon Text-Organization Structures (UTOS). We extensively study 12 UTOS templates and 6 obfuscation methods to build an effective automated jailbreak tool named StructuralSleight that contains three escalating attack strategies: Structural Attack, Structural and Character/Context Obfuscation Attack, and Fully Obfuscated Structural Attack. Extensive experiments on existing LLMs show that StructuralSleight significantly outperforms the baseline methods. In particular, the attack success rate reaches 94.62\% on GPT-4o, which has not been addressed by state-of-the-art techniques.
StreamBench: Towards Benchmarking Continuous Improvement of Language Agents
Authors: Cheng-Kuang Wu, Zhi Rui Tam, Chieh-Yen Lin, Yun-Nung Chen, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recent works have shown that large language model (LLM) agents are able to improve themselves from experience, which is an important ability for continuous enhancement post-deployment. However, existing benchmarks primarily evaluate their innate capabilities and do not assess their ability to improve over time. To address this gap, we introduce StreamBench, a pioneering benchmark designed to evaluate the continuous improvement of LLM agents over an input-feedback sequence. StreamBench simulates an online learning environment where LLMs receive a continuous flow of feedback stream and iteratively enhance their performance. In addition, we propose several simple yet effective baselines for improving LLMs on StreamBench, and provide a comprehensive analysis to identify critical components that contribute to successful streaming strategies. Our work serves as a stepping stone towards developing effective online learning strategies for LLMs, paving the way for more adaptive AI systems in streaming scenarios. Source code: https://github.com/stream-bench/stream-bench. Benchmark website: https://stream-bench.github.io.
Standard Language Ideology in AI-Generated Language
Authors: Genevieve Smith, Eve Fleisig, Madeline Bossi, Ishita Rustagi, Xavier Yin
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00

In this position paper, we explore standard language ideology in language generated by large language models (LLMs). First, we outline how standard language ideology is reflected and reinforced in LLMs. We then present a taxonomy of open problems regarding standard language ideology in AI-generated language with implications for minoritized language communities. We introduce the concept of standard AI-generated language ideology, the process by which AI-generated language regards Standard American English (SAE) as a linguistic default and reinforces a linguistic bias that SAE is the most "appropriate" language. Finally, we discuss tensions that remain, including reflecting on what desirable system behavior looks like, as well as advantages and drawbacks of generative AI tools imitating--or often not--different English language varieties. Throughout, we discuss standard language ideology as a manifestation of existing global power structures in and through AI-generated language before ending with questions to move towards alternative, more emancipatory digital futures.
ECBD: Evidence-Centered Benchmark Design for NLP
Authors: Yu Lu Liu, Su Lin Blodgett, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung, Q. Vera Liao, Alexandra Olteanu, Ziang Xiao
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Benchmarking is seen as critical to assessing progress in NLP. However, creating a benchmark involves many design decisions (e.g., which datasets to include, which metrics to use) that often rely on tacit, untested assumptions about what the benchmark is intended to measure or is actually measuring. There is currently no principled way of analyzing these decisions and how they impact the validity of the benchmark's measurements. To address this gap, we draw on evidence-centered design in educational assessments and propose Evidence-Centered Benchmark Design (ECBD), a framework which formalizes the benchmark design process into five modules. ECBD specifies the role each module plays in helping practitioners collect evidence about capabilities of interest. Specifically, each module requires benchmark designers to describe, justify, and support benchmark design choices -- e.g., clearly specifying the capabilities the benchmark aims to measure or how evidence about those capabilities is collected from model responses. To demonstrate the use of ECBD, we conduct case studies with three benchmarks: BoolQ, SuperGLUE, and HELM. Our analysis reveals common trends in benchmark design and documentation that could threaten the validity of benchmarks' measurements.
Enhancing Psychotherapy Counseling: A Data Augmentation Pipeline Leveraging Large Language Models for Counseling Conversations
Authors: Jun-Woo Kim, Ji-Eun Han, Jun-Seok Koh, Hyeon-Tae Seo, Du-Seong Chang
Date: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

We introduce a pipeline that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to transform single-turn psychotherapy counseling sessions into multi-turn interactions. While AI-supported online counseling services for individuals with mental disorders exist, they are often constrained by the limited availability of multi-turn training datasets and frequently fail to fully utilize therapists' expertise. Our proposed pipeline effectively addresses these limitations. The pipeline comprises two main steps: 1) Information Extraction and 2) Multi-turn Counseling Generation. Each step is meticulously designed to extract and generate comprehensive multi-turn counseling conversations from the available datasets. Experimental results from both zero-shot and few-shot generation scenarios demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the ability of LLMs to produce higher quality multi-turn dialogues in the context of mental health counseling. Our pipeline and dataset are publicly available https://github.com/jwkim-chat/A-Data-Augmentation-Pipeline-Leveraging-Large-Language-Models-for-Counseling-Conversations.
Analyzing Large Language Models for Classroom Discussion Assessment
Authors: Nhat Tran, Benjamin Pierce, Diane Litman, Richard Correnti, Lindsay Clare Matsumura
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Automatically assessing classroom discussion quality is becoming increasingly feasible with the help of new NLP advancements such as large language models (LLMs). In this work, we examine how the assessment performance of 2 LLMs interacts with 3 factors that may affect performance: task formulation, context length, and few-shot examples. We also explore the computational efficiency and predictive consistency of the 2 LLMs. Our results suggest that the 3 aforementioned factors do affect the performance of the tested LLMs and there is a relation between consistency and performance. We recommend a LLM-based assessment approach that has a good balance in terms of predictive performance, computational efficiency, and consistency.
Mistral-C2F: Coarse to Fine Actor for Analytical and Reasoning Enhancement in RLHF and Effective-Merged LLMs
Authors: Chen Zheng, Ke Sun, Xun Zhou
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00

Despite the advances in Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by models like GPT-4 and Claude, smaller-scale LLMs such as Llama and Mistral often struggle with generating in-depth and coherent dialogues. This paper presents a novel two-step Coarse-to-Fine Actor model to address the inherent limitations in conversational and analytical capabilities of small-sized LLMs. Our approach begins with the Policy-based Coarse Actor, employing a technique we term "Continuous Maximization". The Coarse Actor establishes an enhanced, knowledge-rich pool adept at aligning with human preference styles in analysis and reasoning. Through the RLHF process, it employs Continuous Maximization, a strategy that dynamically and adaptively extends the output length limit, enabling the generation of more detailed and analytical content. Subsequently, the Fine Actor refines this analytical content, addressing the generation of excessively redundant information from the Coarse Actor. We introduce a "Knowledge Residue Merger" approach, refining the content from the Coarse Actor and merging it with an existing Instruction model to improve quality, correctness, and reduce redundancies. We applied our methodology to the popular Mistral model, creating Mistral-C2F, which has demonstrated exceptional performance across 11 general language tasks and the MT-Bench Dialogue task, outperforming similar-scale models and even larger models with 13B and 30B parameters. Our model has significantly improved conversational and analytical reasoning abilities.
ML-SUPERB 2.0: Benchmarking Multilingual Speech Models Across Modeling Constraints, Languages, and Datasets
Authors: Jiatong Shi, Shih-Heng Wang, William Chen, Martijn Bartelds, Vanya Bannihatti Kumar, Jinchuan Tian, Xuankai Chang, Dan Jurafsky, Karen Livescu, Hung-Yi Lee, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2024-06-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Benchmarking, Language Identification, Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

ML-SUPERB evaluates self-supervised learning (SSL) models on the tasks of language identification and automatic speech recognition (ASR). This benchmark treats the models as feature extractors and uses a single shallow downstream model, which can be fine-tuned for a downstream task. However, real-world use cases may require different configurations. This paper presents ML-SUPERB~2.0, which is a new benchmark for evaluating pre-trained SSL and supervised speech models across downstream models, fine-tuning setups, and efficient model adaptation approaches. We find performance improvements over the setup of ML-SUPERB. However, performance depends on the downstream model design. Also, we find large performance differences between languages and datasets, suggesting the need for more targeted approaches to improve multilingual ASR performance.