pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Greed is All You Need: An Evaluation of Tokenizer Inference Methods
Authors: Omri Uzan, Craig W. Schmidt, Chris Tanner, Yuval Pinter
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: All

While subword tokenizers such as BPE and WordPiece are typically used to build vocabularies for NLP models, the method of decoding text into a sequence of tokens from these vocabularies is often left unspecified, or ill-suited to the method in which they were constructed. We provide a controlled analysis of seven tokenizer inference methods across four different algorithms and three vocabulary sizes, performed on a novel intrinsic evaluation suite we curated for English, combining measures rooted in morphology, cognition, and information theory. We show that for the most commonly used tokenizers, greedy inference performs surprisingly well; and that SaGe, a recently-introduced contextually-informed tokenizer, outperforms all others on morphological alignment.
A comprehensive cross-language framework for harmful content detection with the aid of sentiment analysis
Authors: Mohammad Dehghani
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

In today's digital world, social media plays a significant role in facilitating communication and content sharing. However, the exponential rise in user-generated content has led to challenges in maintaining a respectful online environment. In some cases, users have taken advantage of anonymity in order to use harmful language, which can negatively affect the user experience and pose serious social problems. Recognizing the limitations of manual moderation, automatic detection systems have been developed to tackle this problem. Nevertheless, several obstacles persist, including the absence of a universal definition for harmful language, inadequate datasets across languages, the need for detailed annotation guideline, and most importantly, a comprehensive framework. This study aims to address these challenges by introducing, for the first time, a detailed framework adaptable to any language. This framework encompasses various aspects of harmful language detection. A key component of the framework is the development of a general and detailed annotation guideline. Additionally, the integration of sentiment analysis represents a novel approach to enhancing harmful language detection. Also, a definition of harmful language based on the review of different related concepts is presented. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework, its implementation in a challenging low-resource language is conducted. We collected a Persian dataset and applied the annotation guideline for harmful detection and sentiment analysis. Next, we present baseline experiments utilizing machine and deep learning methods to set benchmarks. Results prove the framework's high performance, achieving an accuracy of 99.4% in offensive language detection and 66.2% in sentiment analysis.
Accelerating Greedy Coordinate Gradient and General Prompt Optimization via Probe Sampling
Authors: Yiran Zhao, Wenyue Zheng, Tianle Cai, Xuan Long Do, Kenji Kawaguchi, Anirudh Goyal, Michael Shieh
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00

Safety of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become a critical issue given their rapid progresses. Greedy Coordinate Gradient (GCG) is shown to be effective in constructing adversarial prompts to break the aligned LLMs, but optimization of GCG is time-consuming. To reduce the time cost of GCG and enable more comprehensive studies of LLM safety, in this work, we study a new algorithm called $\texttt{Probe sampling}$. At the core of the algorithm is a mechanism that dynamically determines how similar a smaller draft model's predictions are to the target model's predictions for prompt candidates. When the target model is similar to the draft model, we rely heavily on the draft model to filter out a large number of potential prompt candidates. Probe sampling achieves up to $5.6$ times speedup using Llama2-7b-chat and leads to equal or improved attack success rate (ASR) on the AdvBench. Furthermore, probe sampling is also able to accelerate other prompt optimization techniques and adversarial methods, leading to acceleration of $1.8\times$ for AutoPrompt, $2.4\times$ for APE and $2.4\times$ for AutoDAN.
Emotion Analysis in NLP: Trends, Gaps and Roadmap for Future Directions
Authors: Flor Miriam Plaza-del-Arco, Alba Curry, Amanda Cercas Curry, Dirk Hovy
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition

Emotions are a central aspect of communication. Consequently, emotion analysis (EA) is a rapidly growing field in natural language processing (NLP). However, there is no consensus on scope, direction, or methods. In this paper, we conduct a thorough review of 154 relevant NLP publications from the last decade. Based on this review, we address four different questions: (1) How are EA tasks defined in NLP? (2) What are the most prominent emotion frameworks and which emotions are modeled? (3) Is the subjectivity of emotions considered in terms of demographics and cultural factors? and (4) What are the primary NLP applications for EA? We take stock of trends in EA and tasks, emotion frameworks used, existing datasets, methods, and applications. We then discuss four lacunae: (1) the absence of demographic and cultural aspects does not account for the variation in how emotions are perceived, but instead assumes they are universally experienced in the same manner; (2) the poor fit of emotion categories from the two main emotion theories to the task; (3) the lack of standardized EA terminology hinders gap identification, comparison, and future goals; and (4) the absence of interdisciplinary research isolates EA from insights in other fields. Our work will enable more focused research into EA and a more holistic approach to modeling emotions in NLP.
DMoERM: Recipes of Mixture-of-Experts for Effective Reward Modeling
Authors: Shanghaoran Quan
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Mixture-of-Experts

The performance of the reward model (RM) is a critical factor in improving the effectiveness of the large language model (LLM) during alignment fine-tuning. There remain two challenges in RM training: 1) training the same RM using various categories of data may cause its generalization performance to suffer from multi-task disturbance, and 2) the human annotation consistency rate is generally only $60\%$ to $75\%$, causing training data to contain a lot of noise. To tackle these two challenges, we introduced the idea of Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) into the field of RM for the first time. We propose the Double-Layer MoE RM (DMoERM). The outer layer MoE is a sparse model. After classifying an input into task categories, we route it to the corresponding inner layer task-specific model. The inner layer MoE is a dense model. We decompose the specific task into multiple capability dimensions and individually fine-tune a LoRA expert on each one. Their outputs are then synthesized by an MLP to compute the final rewards. To minimize costs, we call a public LLM API to obtain the capability preference labels. The validation on manually labeled datasets confirms that our model attains superior consistency with human preference and outstrips advanced generative approaches. Meanwhile, through BoN sampling and RL experiments, we demonstrate that our model outperforms state-of-the-art ensemble methods of RM and mitigates the overoptimization problem. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/quanshr/DMoERM-v1.
A Compositional Typed Semantics for Universal Dependencies
Authors: Laurestine Bradford, Timothy John O'Donnell, Siva Reddy
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Languages may encode similar meanings using different sentence structures. This makes it a challenge to provide a single set of formal rules that can derive meanings from sentences in many languages at once. To overcome the challenge, we can take advantage of language-general connections between meaning and syntax, and build on cross-linguistically parallel syntactic structures. We introduce UD Type Calculus, a compositional, principled, and language-independent system of semantic types and logical forms for lexical items which builds on a widely-used language-general dependency syntax framework. We explain the essential features of UD Type Calculus, which all involve giving dependency relations denotations just like those of words. These allow UD-TC to derive correct meanings for sentences with a wide range of syntactic structures by making use of dependency labels. Finally, we present evaluation results on a large existing corpus of sentences and their logical forms, showing that UD-TC can produce meanings comparable with our baseline.
BootTOD: Bootstrap Task-oriented Dialogue Representations by Aligning Diverse Responses
Authors: Weihao Zeng, Keqing He, Yejie Wang, Dayuan Fu, Weiran Xu
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Pre-trained language models have been successful in many scenarios. However, their usefulness in task-oriented dialogues is limited due to the intrinsic linguistic differences between general text and task-oriented dialogues. Current task-oriented dialogue pre-training methods rely on a contrastive framework, which faces challenges such as selecting true positives and hard negatives, as well as lacking diversity. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model called BootTOD. It learns task-oriented dialogue representations via a self-bootstrapping framework. Unlike contrastive counterparts, BootTOD aligns context and context+response representations and dismisses the requirements of contrastive pairs. BootTOD also uses multiple appropriate response targets to model the intrinsic one-to-many diversity of human conversations. Experimental results show that BootTOD outperforms strong TOD baselines on diverse downstream dialogue tasks.
MulCogBench: A Multi-modal Cognitive Benchmark Dataset for Evaluating Chinese and English Computational Language Models
Authors: Yunhao Zhang, Xiaohan Zhang, Chong Li, Shaonan Wang, Chengqing Zong
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00

Pre-trained computational language models have recently made remarkable progress in harnessing the language abilities which were considered unique to humans. Their success has raised interest in whether these models represent and process language like humans. To answer this question, this paper proposes MulCogBench, a multi-modal cognitive benchmark dataset collected from native Chinese and English participants. It encompasses a variety of cognitive data, including subjective semantic ratings, eye-tracking, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and magnetoencephalography (MEG). To assess the relationship between language models and cognitive data, we conducted a similarity-encoding analysis which decodes cognitive data based on its pattern similarity with textual embeddings. Results show that language models share significant similarities with human cognitive data and the similarity patterns are modulated by the data modality and stimuli complexity. Specifically, context-aware models outperform context-independent models as language stimulus complexity increases. The shallow layers of context-aware models are better aligned with the high-temporal-resolution MEG signals whereas the deeper layers show more similarity with the high-spatial-resolution fMRI. These results indicate that language models have a delicate relationship with brain language representations. Moreover, the results between Chinese and English are highly consistent, suggesting the generalizability of these findings across languages.
LLMCRIT: Teaching Large Language Models to Use Criteria
Authors: Weizhe Yuan, PengFei Liu, Matthias Gallé
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00

Humans follow criteria when they execute tasks, and these criteria are directly used to assess the quality of task completion. Therefore, having models learn to use criteria to provide feedback can help humans or models to perform tasks better. However, existing research in this field tends to consider only a limited set of criteria or quality assessment aspects. To fill this gap, we propose a general framework that enables large language models (LLMs) to use comprehensive criteria for a task in delivering natural language feedback on task execution. In particular, we present a model-in-the-loop framework that semi-automatically derives criteria from collected guidelines for different writing tasks and constructs in-context demonstrations for each criterion. We choose three tasks from real-world scenarios to operationalize this idea: paper introduction writing, Python code writing, and Reddit post writing, and evaluate our feedback generation framework using different LLMs. The results reveal the fine-grained effects of incorporating criteria and demonstrations and provide valuable insights on how to teach LLMs to use criteria more effectively.
FaiMA: Feature-aware In-context Learning for Multi-domain Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Songhua Yang, Xinke Jiang, Hanjie Zhao, Wenxuan Zeng, Hongde Liu, Yuxiang Jia
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Contrastive Learning, Graph Attention, In-Context Learning, Sentence, Sentiment Analysis

Multi-domain aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) seeks to capture fine-grained sentiment across diverse domains. While existing research narrowly focuses on single-domain applications constrained by methodological limitations and data scarcity, the reality is that sentiment naturally traverses multiple domains. Although large language models (LLMs) offer a promising solution for ABSA, it is difficult to integrate effectively with established techniques, including graph-based models and linguistics, because modifying their internal architecture is not easy. To alleviate this problem, we propose a novel framework, Feature-aware In-context Learning for Multi-domain ABSA (FaiMA). The core insight of FaiMA is to utilize in-context learning (ICL) as a feature-aware mechanism that facilitates adaptive learning in multi-domain ABSA tasks. Specifically, we employ a multi-head graph attention network as a text encoder optimized by heuristic rules for linguistic, domain, and sentiment features. Through contrastive learning, we optimize sentence representations by focusing on these diverse features. Additionally, we construct an efficient indexing mechanism, allowing FaiMA to stably retrieve highly relevant examples across multiple dimensions for any given input. To evaluate the efficacy of FaiMA, we build the first multi-domain ABSA benchmark dataset. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that FaiMA achieves significant performance improvements in multiple domains compared to baselines, increasing F1 by 2.07% on average. Source code and data sets are anonymously available at https://github.com/SupritYoung/FaiMA.
Reading Subtext: Evaluating Large Language Models on Short Story Summarization with Writers
Authors: Melanie Subbiah, Sean Zhang, Lydia B. Chilton, Kathleen McKeown
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

We evaluate recent Large Language Models (LLMs) on the challenging task of summarizing short stories, which can be lengthy, and include nuanced subtext or scrambled timelines. Importantly, we work directly with authors to ensure that the stories have not been shared online (and therefore are unseen by the models), and to obtain informed evaluations of summary quality using judgments from the authors themselves. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis grounded in narrative theory, we compare GPT-4, Claude-2.1, and LLama-2-70B. We find that all three models make faithfulness mistakes in over 50% of summaries and struggle with specificity and interpretation of difficult subtext. We additionally demonstrate that LLM ratings and other automatic metrics for summary quality do not correlate well with the quality ratings from the writers.
Predictions from language models for multiple-choice tasks are not robust under variation of scoring methods
Authors: Polina Tsvilodub, Hening Wang, Sharon Grosch, Michael Franke
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

This paper systematically compares different methods of deriving item-level predictions of language models for multiple-choice tasks. It compares scoring methods for answer options based on free generation of responses, various probability-based scores, a Likert-scale style rating method, and embedding similarity. In a case study on pragmatic language interpretation, we find that LLM predictions are not robust under variation of method choice, both within a single LLM and across different LLMs. As this variability entails pronounced researcher degrees of freedom in reporting results, knowledge of the variability is crucial to secure robustness of results and research integrity.
Formulation Comparison for Timeline Construction using LLMs
Authors: Kimihiro Hasegawa, Nikhil Kandukuri, Susan Holm, Yukari Yamakawa, Teruko Mitamura
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00

Constructing a timeline requires identifying the chronological order of events in an article. In prior timeline construction datasets, temporal orders are typically annotated by either event-to-time anchoring or event-to-event pairwise ordering, both of which suffer from missing temporal information. To mitigate the issue, we develop a new evaluation dataset, TimeSET, consisting of single-document timelines with document-level order annotation. TimeSET features saliency-based event selection and partial ordering, which enable a practical annotation workload. Aiming to build better automatic timeline construction systems, we propose a novel evaluation framework to compare multiple task formulations with TimeSET by prompting open LLMs, i.e., Llama 2 and Flan-T5. Considering that identifying temporal orders of events is a core subtask in timeline construction, we further benchmark open LLMs on existing event temporal ordering datasets to gain a robust understanding of their capabilities. Our experiments show that (1) NLI formulation with Flan-T5 demonstrates a strong performance among others, while (2) timeline construction and event temporal ordering are still challenging tasks for few-shot LLMs. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/kimihiroh/timeset.
LocalRQA: From Generating Data to Locally Training, Testing, and Deploying Retrieval-Augmented QA Systems
Authors: Xiao Yu, Yunan Lu, Zhou Yu
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Retrieval

Retrieval-augmented question-answering systems combine retrieval techniques with large language models to provide answers that are more accurate and informative. Many existing toolkits allow users to quickly build such systems using off-the-shelf models, but they fall short in supporting researchers and developers to customize the model training, testing, and deployment process. We propose LocalRQA, an open-source toolkit that features a wide selection of model training algorithms, evaluation methods, and deployment tools curated from the latest research. As a showcase, we build QA systems using online documentation obtained from Databricks and Faire's websites. We find 7B-models trained and deployed using LocalRQA reach a similar performance compared to using OpenAI's text-ada-002 and GPT-4-turbo.
An Interpretable Ensemble of Graph and Language Models for Improving Search Relevance in E-Commerce
Authors: Nurendra Choudhary, Edward W Huang, Karthik Subbian, Chandan K. Reddy
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The problem of search relevance in the E-commerce domain is a challenging one since it involves understanding the intent of a user's short nuanced query and matching it with the appropriate products in the catalog. This problem has traditionally been addressed using language models (LMs) and graph neural networks (GNNs) to capture semantic and inter-product behavior signals, respectively. However, the rapid development of new architectures has created a gap between research and the practical adoption of these techniques. Evaluating the generalizability of these models for deployment requires extensive experimentation on complex, real-world datasets, which can be non-trivial and expensive. Furthermore, such models often operate on latent space representations that are incomprehensible to humans, making it difficult to evaluate and compare the effectiveness of different models. This lack of interpretability hinders the development and adoption of new techniques in the field. To bridge this gap, we propose Plug and Play Graph LAnguage Model (PP-GLAM), an explainable ensemble of plug and play models. Our approach uses a modular framework with uniform data processing pipelines. It employs additive explanation metrics to independently decide whether to include (i) language model candidates, (ii) GNN model candidates, and (iii) inter-product behavioral signals. For the task of search relevance, we show that PP-GLAM outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines as well as a proprietary model on real-world multilingual, multi-regional e-commerce datasets. To promote better model comprehensibility and adoption, we also provide an analysis of the explainability and computational complexity of our model. We also provide the public codebase and provide a deployment strategy for practical implementation.
Self-Consistent Decoding for More Factual Open Responses
Authors: Christopher Malon, Xiaodan Zhu
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Response Generation, Sentence

Self-consistency has emerged as a powerful method for improving the accuracy of short answers generated by large language models. As previously defined, it only concerns the accuracy of a final answer parsed from generated text. In this work, we extend the idea to open response generation, by integrating voting into the decoding method. Each output sentence is selected from among multiple samples, conditioning on the previous selections, based on a simple token overlap score. We compare this "Sample & Select" method to greedy decoding, beam search, nucleus sampling, and the recently introduced hallucination avoiding decoders of DoLA, P-CRR, and S-CRR. We show that Sample & Select improves factuality by a 30% relative margin against these decoders in NLI-based evaluation on the subsets of CNN/DM and XSum used in the FRANK benchmark, while maintaining comparable ROUGE-1 F1 scores against reference summaries. We collect human verifications of the generated summaries, confirming the factual superiority of our method.
A Bit of a Problem: Measurement Disparities in Dataset Sizes Across Languages
Authors: Catherine Arnett, Tyler A. Chang, Benjamin K. Bergen
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00

How should text dataset sizes be compared across languages? Even for content-matched (parallel) corpora, UTF-8 encoded text can require a dramatically different number of bytes for different languages. In our work, we define the byte premium between two languages as the ratio of bytes used to encode content-matched text in those languages. We compute byte premiums for 1155 languages, and we use linear regressions to estimate byte premiums for other languages. We release a tool to obtain byte premiums for any two languages, enabling comparisons of dataset sizes across languages for more equitable multilingual model development and data practices.