pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A SMART Mnemonic Sounds like "Glue Tonic": Mixing LLMs with Student Feedback to Make Mnemonic Learning Stick
Authors: Nishant Balepur, Matthew Shu, Alexander Hoyle, Alison Robey, Shi Feng, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Jordan Boyd-Graber
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Labels

Keyword mnemonics are memorable explanations that link new terms to simpler keywords. Prior work generates mnemonics for students, but they do not train models using mnemonics students prefer and aid learning. We build SMART, a mnemonic generator trained on feedback from real students learning new terms. To train SMART, we first fine-tune LLaMA-2 on a curated set of user-written mnemonics. We then use LLM alignment to enhance SMART: we deploy mnemonics generated by SMART in a flashcard app to find preferences on mnemonics students favor. We gather 2684 preferences from 45 students across two types: expressed (inferred from ratings) and observed (inferred from student learning), yielding three key findings. First, expressed and observed preferences disagree; what students think is helpful does not always capture what is truly helpful. Second, Bayesian models can synthesize complementary data from multiple preference types into a single effectiveness signal. SMART is tuned via Direct Preference Optimization on this signal, which resolves ties and missing labels in the typical method of pairwise comparisons, augmenting data for LLM output quality gains. Third, mnemonic experts assess SMART as matching GPT-4 at much lower deployment costs, showing the utility of capturing diverse student feedback to align LLMs in education.
STARD: A Chinese Statute Retrieval Dataset with Real Queries Issued by Non-professionals
Authors: Weihang Su, Yiran Hu, Anzhe Xie, Qingyao Ai, Zibing Que, Ning Zheng, Yun Liu, Weixing Shen, Yiqun Liu
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Diversity, Retrieval

Statute retrieval aims to find relevant statutory articles for specific queries. This process is the basis of a wide range of legal applications such as legal advice, automated judicial decisions, legal document drafting, etc. Existing statute retrieval benchmarks focus on formal and professional queries from sources like bar exams and legal case documents, thereby neglecting non-professional queries from the general public, which often lack precise legal terminology and references. To address this gap, we introduce the STAtute Retrieval Dataset (STARD), a Chinese dataset comprising 1,543 query cases collected from real-world legal consultations and 55,348 candidate statutory articles. Unlike existing statute retrieval datasets, which primarily focus on professional legal queries, STARD captures the complexity and diversity of real queries from the general public. Through a comprehensive evaluation of various retrieval baselines, we reveal that existing retrieval approaches all fall short of these real queries issued by non-professional users. The best method only achieves a Recall@100 of 0.907, suggesting the necessity for further exploration and additional research in this area. All the codes and datasets are available at: https://github.com/oneal2000/STARD/tree/main
NLP-KG: A System for Exploratory Search of Scientific Literature in Natural Language Processing
Authors: Tim Schopf, Florian Matthes
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Scientific literature searches are often exploratory, whereby users are not yet familiar with a particular field or concept but are interested in learning more about it. However, existing systems for scientific literature search are typically tailored to keyword-based lookup searches, limiting the possibilities for exploration. We propose NLP-KG, a feature-rich system designed to support the exploration of research literature in unfamiliar natural language processing (NLP) fields. In addition to a semantic search, NLP-KG allows users to easily find survey papers that provide a quick introduction to a field of interest. Further, a Fields of Study hierarchy graph enables users to familiarize themselves with a field and its related areas. Finally, a chat interface allows users to ask questions about unfamiliar concepts or specific articles in NLP and obtain answers grounded in knowledge retrieved from scientific publications. Our system provides users with comprehensive exploration possibilities, supporting them in investigating the relationships between different fields, understanding unfamiliar concepts in NLP, and finding relevant research literature. Demo, video, and code are available at: https://github.com/NLP-Knowledge-Graph/NLP-KG-WebApp.
The Greek podcast corpus: Competitive speech models for low-resourced languages with weakly supervised data
Authors: Georgios Paraskevopoulos, Chara Tsoukala, Athanasios Katsamanis, Vassilis Katsouros
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00

The development of speech technologies for languages with limited digital representation poses significant challenges, primarily due to the scarcity of available data. This issue is exacerbated in the era of large, data-intensive models. Recent research has underscored the potential of leveraging weak supervision to augment the pool of available data. In this study, we compile an 800-hour corpus of Modern Greek from podcasts and employ Whisper large-v3 to generate silver transcriptions. This corpus is utilized to fine-tune our models, aiming to assess the efficacy of this approach in enhancing ASR performance. Our analysis spans 16 distinct podcast domains, alongside evaluations on established datasets for Modern Greek. The findings indicate consistent WER improvements, correlating with increases in both data volume and model size. Our study confirms that assembling large, weakly supervised corpora serves as a cost-effective strategy for advancing speech technologies in under-resourced languages.
How language models extrapolate outside the training data: A case study in Textualized Gridworld
Authors: Doyoung Kim, Jongwon Lee, Jinho Park, Minjoon Seo
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00

Language models' ability to extrapolate learned behaviors to novel, more complex environments beyond their training scope is highly unknown. This study introduces a path planning task in a textualized Gridworld to probe language models' extrapolation capabilities. We show that conventional approaches, including next token prediction and Chain of Thought (CoT) finetuning, fail to extrapolate in larger, unseen environments. Inspired by human cognition and dual process theory, we propose cognitive maps for path planning, a novel CoT framework that simulates humanlike mental representations. Our experiments show that cognitive maps not only enhance extrapolation to unseen environments but also exhibit humanlike characteristics through structured mental simulation and rapid adaptation. Our finding that these cognitive maps require specialized training schemes and cannot be induced through simple prompting opens up important questions about developing general-purpose cognitive maps in language models. Our comparison with exploration-based methods further illuminates the complementary strengths of offline planning and online exploration.
Evaluating Diversity in Automatic Poetry Generation
Authors: Yanran Chen, Hannes Gröner, Sina Zarrieß, Steffen Eger
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Text Generation

Natural Language Generation (NLG), and more generally generative AI, are among the currently most impactful research fields. Creative NLG, such as automatic poetry generation, is a fascinating niche in this area. While most previous research has focused on forms of the Turing test when evaluating automatic poetry generation -- can humans distinguish between automatic and human generated poetry -- we evaluate the diversity of automatically generated poetry (with a focus on quatrains), by comparing distributions of generated poetry to distributions of human poetry along structural, lexical, semantic and stylistic dimensions, assessing different model types (word vs. character-level, general purpose LLMs vs. poetry-specific models), including the very recent LLaMA3-8B, and types of fine-tuning (conditioned vs. unconditioned). We find that current automatic poetry systems are considerably underdiverse along multiple dimensions -- they often do not rhyme sufficiently, are semantically too uniform and even do not match the length distribution of human poetry. Our experiments reveal, however, that style-conditioning and character-level modeling clearly increases diversity across virtually all dimensions we explore. Our identified limitations may serve as the basis for more genuinely diverse future poetry generation models.
Perception of Phonological Assimilation by Neural Speech Recognition Models
Authors: Charlotte Pouw, Marianne de Heer Kloots, Afra Alishahi, Willem Zuidema
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Human listeners effortlessly compensate for phonological changes during speech perception, often unconsciously inferring the intended sounds. For example, listeners infer the underlying /n/ when hearing an utterance such as "clea[m] pan", where [m] arises from place assimilation to the following labial [p]. This article explores how the neural speech recognition model Wav2Vec2 perceives assimilated sounds, and identifies the linguistic knowledge that is implemented by the model to compensate for assimilation during Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Using psycholinguistic stimuli, we systematically analyze how various linguistic context cues influence compensation patterns in the model's output. Complementing these behavioral experiments, our probing experiments indicate that the model shifts its interpretation of assimilated sounds from their acoustic form to their underlying form in its final layers. Finally, our causal intervention experiments suggest that the model relies on minimal phonological context cues to accomplish this shift. These findings represent a step towards better understanding the similarities and differences in phonological processing between neural ASR models and humans.
Towards Fine-Grained Citation Evaluation in Generated Text: A Comparative Analysis of Faithfulness Metrics
Authors: Weijia Zhang, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Yifei Yuan, Jiahuan Pei, Jia-Hong Huang, Evangelos Kanoulas
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Retrieval

Large language models (LLMs) often produce unsupported or unverifiable content, known as "hallucinations." To mitigate this, retrieval-augmented LLMs incorporate citations, grounding the content in verifiable sources. Despite such developments, manually assessing how well a citation supports the associated statement remains a major challenge. Previous studies use faithfulness metrics to estimate citation support automatically but are limited to binary classification, overlooking fine-grained citation support in practical scenarios. To investigate the effectiveness of faithfulness metrics in fine-grained scenarios, we propose a comparative evaluation framework that assesses the metric effectiveness in distinguishing citations between three-category support levels: full, partial, and no support. Our framework employs correlation analysis, classification evaluation, and retrieval evaluation to measure the alignment between metric scores and human judgments comprehensively. Our results show no single metric consistently excels across all evaluations, revealing the complexity of assessing fine-grained support. Based on the findings, we provide practical recommendations for developing more effective metrics.
A LLM-Based Ranking Method for the Evaluation of Automatic Counter-Narrative Generation
Authors: Irune Zubiaga, Aitor Soroa, Rodrigo Agerri
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Misinformation

This paper proposes a novel approach to evaluate Counter Narrative (CN) generation using a Large Language Model (LLM) as an evaluator. We show that traditional automatic metrics correlate poorly with human judgements and fail to capture the nuanced relationship between generated CNs and human perception. To alleviate this, we introduce a model ranking pipeline based on pairwise comparisons of generated CNs from different models, organized in a tournament-style format. The proposed evaluation method achieves a high correlation with human preference, with a $\rho$ score of 0.88. As an additional contribution, we leverage LLMs as zero-shot CN generators and provide a comparative analysis of chat, instruct, and base models, exploring their respective strengths and limitations. Through meticulous evaluation, including fine-tuning experiments, we elucidate the differences in performance and responsiveness to domain-specific data. We conclude that chat-aligned models in zero-shot are the best option for carrying out the task, provided they do not refuse to generate an answer due to security concerns.
Unsupervised Extraction of Dialogue Policies from Conversations
Authors: Makesh Narsimhan Sreedhar, Traian Rebedea, Christopher Parisien
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Dialogue policies play a crucial role in developing task-oriented dialogue systems, yet their development and maintenance are challenging and typically require substantial effort from experts in dialogue modeling. While in many situations, large amounts of conversational data are available for the task at hand, people lack an effective solution able to extract dialogue policies from this data. In this paper, we address this gap by first illustrating how Large Language Models (LLMs) can be instrumental in extracting dialogue policies from datasets, through the conversion of conversations into a unified intermediate representation consisting of canonical forms. We then propose a novel method for generating dialogue policies utilizing a controllable and interpretable graph-based methodology. By combining canonical forms across conversations into a flow network, we find that running graph traversal algorithms helps in extracting dialogue flows. These flows are a better representation of the underlying interactions than flows extracted by prompting LLMs. Our technique focuses on giving conversation designers greater control, offering a productivity tool to improve the process of developing dialogue policies.
Inference Time Alignment with Reward-Guided Tree Search
Authors: Chia-Yu Hung, Navonil Majumder, Ambuj Mehrish, Soujanya Poria
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00

Inference-time computation methods enhance the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging additional computational resources to achieve superior results. Common techniques, such as Best-of-N sampling, Majority Voting, and variants of tree-search algorithms have proven to be effective in boosting the performance of LLMs. These approaches strategically trade increased computational resources for improved model responses. In this work, we proposed DARWIN, an inference-time alignment method that leverages the guidance of a reward model to achieve alignment through a reward-guided tree search. Empirical evidences indicates that our method outperforms other inference-time alignment methods such as Best-of-N and ARGS on two widely accepted alignment benchmarks AlpacaEval 2 and MT-Bench. Furthermore, we show that our inference-time approach achieves performance comparable to preference-tuned models on both benchmarks, highlighting the effectiveness of trading inference-time compute for enhanced performance during inference. We have released our codes at https://github.com/declare-lab/darwin.
Hybrid Alignment Training for Large Language Models
Authors: Chenglong Wang, Hang Zhou, Kaiyan Chang, Bei Li, Yongyu Mu, Tong Xiao, Tongran Liu, Jingbo Zhu
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Alignment training is crucial for enabling large language models (LLMs) to cater to human intentions and preferences. It is typically performed based on two stages with different objectives: instruction-following alignment and human-preference alignment. However, aligning LLMs with these objectives in sequence suffers from an inherent problem: the objectives may conflict, and the LLMs cannot guarantee to simultaneously align with the instructions and human preferences well. To response to these, in this work, we propose a Hybrid Alignment Training (Hbat) approach, based on alternating alignment and modified elastic weight consolidation methods. The basic idea is to alternate between different objectives during alignment training, so that better collaboration can be achieved between the two alignment tasks.We experiment with Hbat on summarization and dialogue tasks. Experimental results show that the proposed \textsc{Hbat} can significantly outperform all baselines. Notably, Hbat yields consistent performance gains over the traditional two-stage alignment training when using both proximal policy optimization and direct preference optimization.
A Syntax-Injected Approach for Faster and More Accurate Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Muhammad Imran, Olga Kellert, Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Dependency Parsing, Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a crucial aspect of Natural Language Processing (NLP), addressing subjective assessments in textual content. Syntactic parsing is useful in SA because explicit syntactic information can improve accuracy while providing explainability, but it tends to be a computational bottleneck in practice due to the slowness of parsing algorithms. This paper addresses said bottleneck by using a SEquence Labeling Syntactic Parser (SELSP) to inject syntax into SA. By treating dependency parsing as a sequence labeling problem, we greatly enhance the speed of syntax-based SA. SELSP is trained and evaluated on a ternary polarity classification task, demonstrating its faster performance and better accuracy in polarity prediction tasks compared to conventional parsers like Stanza and to heuristic approaches that use shallow syntactic rules for SA like VADER. This increased speed and improved accuracy make SELSP particularly appealing to SA practitioners in both research and industry. In addition, we test several sentiment dictionaries on our SELSP to see which one improves the performance in polarity prediction tasks. Moreover, we compare the SELSP with Transformer-based models trained on a 5-label classification task. The results show that dictionaries that capture polarity judgment variation provide better results than dictionaries that ignore polarity judgment variation. Moreover, we show that SELSP is considerably faster than Transformer-based models in polarity prediction tasks.
A Unified Framework for Input Feature Attribution Analysis
Authors: Jingyi Sun, Pepa Atanasova, Isabelle Augenstein
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Fairness

Explaining the decision-making process of machine learning models is crucial for ensuring their reliability and fairness. One popular explanation form highlights key input features, such as i) tokens (e.g., Shapley Values and Integrated Gradients), ii) interactions between tokens (e.g., Bivariate Shapley and Attention-based methods), or iii) interactions between spans of the input (e.g., Louvain Span Interactions). However, these explanation types have only been studied in isolation, making it difficult to judge their respective applicability. To bridge this gap, we propose a unified framework that facilitates a direct comparison between highlight and interactive explanations comprised of four diagnostic properties. Through extensive analysis across these three types of input feature explanations--each utilizing three different explanation techniques--across two datasets and two models, we reveal that each explanation type excels in terms of different diagnostic properties. In our experiments, highlight explanations are the most faithful to a model's prediction, and interactive explanations provide better utility for learning to simulate a model's predictions. These insights further highlight the need for future research to develop combined methods that enhance all diagnostic properties.
Cross-lingual paraphrase identification
Authors: Inessa Fedorova, Aleksei Musatow
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Paraphrase Identification, Paraphrase Identification, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

The paraphrase identification task involves measuring semantic similarity between two short sentences. It is a tricky task, and multilingual paraphrase identification is even more challenging. In this work, we train a bi-encoder model in a contrastive manner to detect hard paraphrases across multiple languages. This approach allows us to use model-produced embeddings for various tasks, such as semantic search. We evaluate our model on downstream tasks and also assess embedding space quality. Our performance is comparable to state-of-the-art cross-encoders, with only a minimal relative drop of 7-10% on the chosen dataset, while keeping decent quality of embeddings.
PARIKSHA: A Large-Scale Investigation of Human-LLM Evaluator Agreement on Multilingual and Multi-Cultural Data
Authors: Ishaan Watts, Varun Gumma, Aditya Yadavalli, Vivek Seshadri, Manohar Swaminathan, Sunayana Sitaram
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Evaluation of multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging due to a variety of factors -- the lack of benchmarks with sufficient linguistic diversity, contamination of popular benchmarks into LLM pre-training data and the lack of local, cultural nuances in translated benchmarks. In this work, we study human and LLM-based evaluation in a multilingual, multi-cultural setting. We evaluate 30 models across 10 Indic languages by conducting 90K human evaluations and 30K LLM-based evaluations and find that models such as GPT-4o and Llama-3 70B consistently perform best for most Indic languages. We build leaderboards for two evaluation settings - pairwise comparison and direct assessment and analyze the agreement between humans and LLMs. We find that humans and LLMs agree fairly well in the pairwise setting but the agreement drops for direct assessment evaluation especially for languages such as Bengali and Odia. We also check for various biases in human and LLM-based evaluation and find evidence of self-bias in the GPT-based evaluator. Our work presents a significant step towards scaling up multilingual evaluation of LLMs.
Integrating Knowledge Retrieval and Large Language Models for Clinical Report Correction
Authors: Jinge Wu, Zhaolong Wu, Ruizhe Li, Abul Hasan, Yunsoo Kim, Jason P. Y. Cheung, Teng Zhang, Honghan Wu
Date: 2024-06-21 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This study proposes an approach for error correction in radiology reports, leveraging large language models (LLMs) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques. The proposed framework employs a novel internal+external retrieval mechanism to extract relevant medical entities and relations from the report of interest and an external knowledge source. A three-stage inference process is introduced, decomposing the task into error detection, localization, and correction subtasks, which enhances the explainability and performance of the system. The effectiveness of the approach is evaluated using a benchmark dataset created by corrupting real-world radiology reports with realistic errors, guided by domain experts. Experimental results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed methods, with the combination of internal and external retrieval significantly improving the accuracy of error detection, localization, and correction across various state-of-the-art LLMs. The findings contribute to the development of more robust and reliable error correction systems for clinical documentation.