pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Table Question Answering for Low-resourced Indic Languages
Authors: Vaishali Pal, Evangelos Kanoulas, Andrew Yates, Maarten de Rijke
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Mathematical Reasoning, Question Answering, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).
Structure-Enhanced Protein Instruction Tuning: Towards General-Purpose Protein Understanding with LLMs
Authors: Wei Wu, Chao Wang, Liyi Chen, Mingze Yin, Yiheng Zhu, Kun fu, Jieping Ye, Hui Xiong, Zheng Wang
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Denoising, Mixture-of-Experts

Proteins, as essential biomolecules, play a central role in biological processes, including metabolic reactions and DNA replication. Accurate prediction of their properties and functions is crucial in biological applications. Recent development of protein language models (pLMs) with supervised fine tuning provides a promising solution to this problem. However, the fine-tuned model is tailored for particular downstream prediction task, and achieving general-purpose protein understanding remains a challenge. In this paper, we introduce Structure-Enhanced Protein Instruction Tuning (SEPIT) framework to bridge this gap. Our approach incorporates a novel structure-aware module into pLMs to enrich their structural knowledge, and subsequently integrates these enhanced pLMs with large language models (LLMs) to advance protein understanding. In this framework, we propose a novel instruction tuning pipeline. First, we warm up the enhanced pLMs using contrastive learning and structure denoising. Then, caption-based instructions are used to establish a basic understanding of proteins. Finally, we refine this understanding by employing a mixture of experts (MoEs) to capture more complex properties and functional information with the same number of activated parameters. Moreover, we construct the largest and most comprehensive protein instruction dataset to date, which allows us to train and evaluate the general-purpose protein understanding model. Extensive experiments on both open-ended generation and closed-set answer tasks demonstrate the superior performance of SEPIT over both closed-source general LLMs and open-source LLMs trained with protein knowledge.
Enhancing Data Quality through Simple De-duplication: Navigating Responsible Computational Social Science Research
Authors: Yida Mu, Mali Jin, Xingyi Song, Nikolaos Aletras
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

Research in natural language processing (NLP) for Computational Social Science (CSS) heavily relies on data from social media platforms. This data plays a crucial role in the development of models for analysing socio-linguistic phenomena within online communities. In this work, we conduct an in-depth examination of 20 datasets extensively used in NLP for CSS to comprehensively examine data quality. Our analysis reveals that social media datasets exhibit varying levels of data duplication. Consequently, this gives rise to challenges like label inconsistencies and data leakage, compromising the reliability of models. Our findings also suggest that data duplication has an impact on the current claims of state-of-the-art performance, potentially leading to an overestimation of model effectiveness in real-world scenarios. Finally, we propose new protocols and best practices for improving dataset development from social media data and its usage.
Re-examining Sexism and Misogyny Classification with Annotator Attitudes
Authors: Aiqi Jiang, Nikolas Vitsakis, Tanvi Dinkar, Gavin Abercrombie, Ioannis Konstas
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

Gender-Based Violence (GBV) is an increasing problem online, but existing datasets fail to capture the plurality of possible annotator perspectives or ensure the representation of affected groups. We revisit two important stages in the moderation pipeline for GBV: (1) manual data labelling; and (2) automated classification. For (1), we examine two datasets to investigate the relationship between annotator identities and attitudes and the responses they give to two GBV labelling tasks. To this end, we collect demographic and attitudinal information from crowd-sourced annotators using three validated surveys from Social Psychology. We find that higher Right Wing Authoritarianism scores are associated with a higher propensity to label text as sexist, while for Social Dominance Orientation and Neosexist Attitudes, higher scores are associated with a negative tendency to do so. For (2), we conduct classification experiments using Large Language Models and five prompting strategies, including infusing prompts with annotator information. We find: (i) annotator attitudes affect the ability of classifiers to predict their labels; (ii) including attitudinal information can boost performance when we use well-structured brief annotator descriptions; and (iii) models struggle to reflect the increased complexity and imbalanced classes of the new label sets.
Steering Large Language Models between Code Execution and Textual Reasoning
Authors: Yongchao Chen, Harsh Jhamtani, Srinagesh Sharma, Chuchu Fan, Chi Wang
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Math, Text Generation

While a lot of recent research focuses on enhancing the textual reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by optimizing the multi-agent framework or reasoning chains, several benchmark tasks can be solved with 100% success through direct coding, which is more scalable and avoids the computational overhead associated with textual iterating and searching. Textual reasoning has inherent limitations in solving tasks with challenges in math, logics, optimization, and searching, which is unlikely to be solved by simply scaling up the model and data size. The recently released OpenAI GPT Code Interpreter and multi-agent frameworks such as AutoGen have demonstrated remarkable proficiency of integrating code generation and execution to solve complex tasks using LLMs. However, based on our experiments on 7 existing popular methods for steering code/text generation in both single- and multi-turn settings with 14 tasks and 6 types of LLMs (including the new O1-preview), currently there is no optimal method to correctly steer LLMs to write code when needed. We discover some interesting patterns on when models use code vs. textual reasoning with the evolution to task complexity and model sizes, which even result in an astonishingly inverse scaling law. We also discover that results from LLM written code are not always better than using textual reasoning, even if the task could be solved through code. To mitigate the above issues, we propose three methods to better steer LLM code/text generation and achieve a notable improvement. The costs of token lengths and runtime are thoroughly discussed for all the methods. We believe the problem of steering LLM code/text generation is critical for future research and has much space for further improvement. Project Page, Datasets, and Codes are available at https://yongchao98.github.io/CodeSteer/.
CliMedBench: A Large-Scale Chinese Benchmark for Evaluating Medical Large Language Models in Clinical Scenarios
Authors: Zetian Ouyang, Yishuai Qiu, LinLin Wang, Gerard de Melo, Ya zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Liang He
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Clinical Knowledge, Diagnostic

With the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in diverse domains, there is a particular need for unified evaluation standards in clinical medical scenarios, where models need to be examined very thoroughly. We present CliMedBench, a comprehensive benchmark with 14 expert-guided core clinical scenarios specifically designed to assess the medical ability of LLMs across 7 pivot dimensions. It comprises 33,735 questions derived from real-world medical reports of top-tier tertiary hospitals and authentic examination exercises. The reliability of this benchmark has been confirmed in several ways. Subsequent experiments with existing LLMs have led to the following findings: (i) Chinese medical LLMs underperform on this benchmark, especially where medical reasoning and factual consistency are vital, underscoring the need for advances in clinical knowledge and diagnostic accuracy. (ii) Several general-domain LLMs demonstrate substantial potential in medical clinics, while the limited input capacity of many medical LLMs hinders their practical use. These findings reveal both the strengths and limitations of LLMs in clinical scenarios and offer critical insights for medical research.
Towards Reproducible LLM Evaluation: Quantifying Uncertainty in LLM Benchmark Scores
Authors: Robert E. Blackwell, Jon Barry, Anthony G. Cohn
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) are stochastic, and not all models give deterministic answers, even when setting temperature to zero with a fixed random seed. However, few benchmark studies attempt to quantify uncertainty, partly due to the time and cost of repeated experiments. We use benchmarks designed for testing LLMs' capacity to reason about cardinal directions to explore the impact of experimental repeats on mean score and prediction interval. We suggest a simple method for cost-effectively quantifying the uncertainty of a benchmark score and make recommendations concerning reproducible LLM evaluation.
Is Safer Better? The Impact of Guardrails on the Argumentative Strength of LLMs in Hate Speech Countering
Authors: Helena Bonaldi, Greta Damo, Nicolás Benjamín Ocampo, Elena Cabrio, Serena Villata, Marco Guerini
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

The potential effectiveness of counterspeech as a hate speech mitigation strategy is attracting increasing interest in the NLG research community, particularly towards the task of automatically producing it. However, automatically generated responses often lack the argumentative richness which characterises expert-produced counterspeech. In this work, we focus on two aspects of counterspeech generation to produce more cogent responses. First, by investigating the tension between helpfulness and harmlessness of LLMs, we test whether the presence of safety guardrails hinders the quality of the generations. Secondly, we assess whether attacking a specific component of the hate speech results in a more effective argumentative strategy to fight online hate. By conducting an extensive human and automatic evaluation, we show how the presence of safety guardrails can be detrimental also to a task that inherently aims at fostering positive social interactions. Moreover, our results show that attacking a specific component of the hate speech, and in particular its implicit negative stereotype and its hateful parts, leads to higher-quality generations.
Multi-Dialect Vietnamese: Task, Dataset, Baseline Models and Challenges
Authors: Nguyen Van Dinh, Thanh Chi Dang, Luan Thanh Nguyen, Kiet Van Nguyen
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialect Identification, Diversity, Multi-Dialect Vietnamese, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Vietnamese Language Models, Vietnamese Speech Recognition

Vietnamese, a low-resource language, is typically categorized into three primary dialect groups that belong to Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnam. However, each province within these regions exhibits its own distinct pronunciation variations. Despite the existence of various speech recognition datasets, none of them has provided a fine-grained classification of the 63 dialects specific to individual provinces of Vietnam. To address this gap, we introduce Vietnamese Multi-Dialect (ViMD) dataset, a novel comprehensive dataset capturing the rich diversity of 63 provincial dialects spoken across Vietnam. Our dataset comprises 102.56 hours of audio, consisting of approximately 19,000 utterances, and the associated transcripts contain over 1.2 million words. To provide benchmarks and simultaneously demonstrate the challenges of our dataset, we fine-tune state-of-the-art pre-trained models for two downstream tasks: (1) Dialect identification and (2) Speech recognition. The empirical results suggest two implications including the influence of geographical factors on dialects, and the constraints of current approaches in speech recognition tasks involving multi-dialect speech data. Our dataset is available for research purposes.
CoCoLoFa: A Dataset of News Comments with Common Logical Fallacies Written by LLM-Assisted Crowds
Authors: Min-Hsuan Yeh, Ruyuan Wan, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Logical Fallacies

Detecting logical fallacies in texts can help users spot argument flaws, but automating this detection is not easy. Manually annotating fallacies in large-scale, real-world text data to create datasets for developing and validating detection models is costly. This paper introduces CoCoLoFa, the largest known logical fallacy dataset, containing 7,706 comments for 648 news articles, with each comment labeled for fallacy presence and type. We recruited 143 crowd workers to write comments embodying specific fallacy types (e.g., slippery slope) in response to news articles. Recognizing the complexity of this writing task, we built an LLM-powered assistant into the workers' interface to aid in drafting and refining their comments. Experts rated the writing quality and labeling validity of CoCoLoFa as high and reliable. BERT-based models fine-tuned using CoCoLoFa achieved the highest fallacy detection (F1=0.86) and classification (F1=0.87) performance on its test set, outperforming the state-of-the-art LLMs. Our work shows that combining crowdsourcing and LLMs enables us to more effectively construct datasets for complex linguistic phenomena that crowd workers find challenging to produce on their own.
How Language Models Prioritize Contextual Grammatical Cues?
Authors: Hamidreza Amirzadeh, Afra Alishahi, Hosein Mohebbi
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Decoder

Transformer-based language models have shown an excellent ability to effectively capture and utilize contextual information. Although various analysis techniques have been used to quantify and trace the contribution of single contextual cues to a target task such as subject-verb agreement or coreference resolution, scenarios in which multiple relevant cues are available in the context remain underexplored. In this paper, we investigate how language models handle gender agreement when multiple gender cue words are present, each capable of independently disambiguating a target gender pronoun. We analyze two widely used Transformer-based models: BERT, an encoder-based, and GPT-2, a decoder-based model. Our analysis employs two complementary approaches: context mixing analysis, which tracks information flow within the model, and a variant of activation patching, which measures the impact of cues on the model's prediction. We find that BERT tends to prioritize the first cue in the context to form both the target word representations and the model's prediction, while GPT-2 relies more on the final cue. Our findings reveal striking differences in how encoder-based and decoder-based models prioritize and use contextual information for their predictions.
ToolGen: Unified Tool Retrieval and Calling via Generation
Authors: Renxi Wang, Xudong Han, Lei Ji, Shu Wang, Timothy Baldwin, Haonan Li
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Text Generation

As large language models (LLMs) advance, their inability to autonomously execute tasks by directly interacting with external tools remains a critical limitation. Traditional methods rely on inputting tool descriptions as context, which is constrained by context length and requires separate, often inefficient, retrieval mechanisms. We introduce ToolGen, a paradigm shift that integrates tool knowledge directly into the LLM's parameters by representing each tool as a unique token. This enables the LLM to generate tool calls and arguments as part of its next token prediction capabilities, seamlessly blending tool invocation with language generation. Our framework allows the LLM to access and utilize a vast amount of tools with no additional retrieval step, significantly enhancing both performance and scalability. Experimental results with over 47,000 tools show that ToolGen not only achieves superior results in both tool retrieval and autonomous task completion but also sets the stage for a new era of AI agents that can adapt to tools across diverse domains. By fundamentally transforming tool retrieval into a generative process, ToolGen paves the way for more versatile, efficient, and autonomous AI systems. ToolGen enables end-to-end tool learning and opens opportunities for integration with other advanced techniques such as chain-of-thought and reinforcement learning, thereby expanding the practical capabilities of LLMs.
How Hard is this Test Set? NLI Characterization by Exploiting Training Dynamics
Authors: Adrian Cosma, Stefan Ruseti, Mihai Dascalu, Cornelia Caragea
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Natural Language Inference (NLI) evaluation is crucial for assessing language understanding models; however, popular datasets suffer from systematic spurious correlations that artificially inflate actual model performance. To address this, we propose a method for the automated creation of a challenging test set without relying on the manual construction of artificial and unrealistic examples. We categorize the test set of popular NLI datasets into three difficulty levels by leveraging methods that exploit training dynamics. This categorization significantly reduces spurious correlation measures, with examples labeled as having the highest difficulty showing markedly decreased performance and encompassing more realistic and diverse linguistic phenomena. When our characterization method is applied to the training set, models trained with only a fraction of the data achieve comparable performance to those trained on the full dataset, surpassing other dataset characterization techniques. Our research addresses limitations in NLI dataset construction, providing a more authentic evaluation of model performance with implications for diverse NLU applications.
Surgical, Cheap, and Flexible: Mitigating False Refusal in Language Models via Single Vector Ablation
Authors: Xinpeng Wang, Chengzhi Hu, Paul Röttger, Barbara Plank
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Training a language model to be both helpful and harmless requires careful calibration of refusal behaviours: Models should refuse to follow malicious instructions or give harmful advice (e.g. "how do I kill someone?"), but they should not refuse safe requests, even if they superficially resemble unsafe ones (e.g. "how do I kill a Python process?"). Avoiding such false refusal, as prior work has shown, is challenging even for highly-capable language models. In this paper, we propose a simple and surgical method for mitigating false refusal in language models via single vector ablation. For a given model, we extract a false refusal vector and show that ablating this vector reduces false refusal rate without negatively impacting model safety and general model capabilities. We also show that our approach can be used for fine-grained calibration of model safety. Our approach is training-free and model-agnostic, making it useful for mitigating the problem of false refusal in current and future language models.
Team MTS @ AutoMin 2021: An Overview of Existing Summarization Approaches and Comparison to Unsupervised Summarization Techniques
Authors: Olga Iakovenko, Anna Andreeva, Anna Lapidus, Liana Mikaelyan
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Remote communication through video or audio conferences has become more popular than ever because of the worldwide pandemic. These events, therefore, have provoked the development of systems for automatic minuting of spoken language leading to AutoMin 2021 challenge. The following paper illustrates the results of the research that team MTS has carried out while participating in the Automatic Minutes challenge. In particular, in this paper we analyze existing approaches to text and speech summarization, propose an unsupervised summarization technique based on clustering and provide a pipeline that includes an adapted automatic speech recognition block able to run on real-life recordings. The proposed unsupervised technique outperforms pre-trained summarization models on the automatic minuting task with Rouge 1, Rouge 2 and Rouge L values of 0.21, 0.02 and 0.2 on the dev set, with Rouge 1, Rouge 2, Rouge L, Adequacy, Grammatical correctness and Fluency values of 0.180, 0.035, 0.098, 1.857, 2.304, 1.911 on the test set accordingly
Killing Two Flies with One Stone: An Attempt to Break LLMs Using English->Icelandic Idioms and Proper Names
Authors: Bjarki Ármannsson, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Atli Jasonarson, Steinþór Steingrímsson
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

This paper presents the submission of the \'Arni Magn\'usson Institute's team to the WMT24 test suite subtask, focusing on idiomatic expressions and proper names for the English->Icelandic translation direction. Intuitively and empirically, idioms and proper names are known to be a significant challenge for modern translation models. We create two different test suites. The first evaluates the competency of MT systems in translating common English idiomatic expressions, as well as testing whether systems can distinguish between those expressions and the same phrases when used in a literal context. The second test suite consists of place names that should be translated into their Icelandic exonyms (and correctly inflected) and pairs of Icelandic names that share a surface form between the male and female variants, so that incorrect translations impact meaning as well as readability. The scores reported are relatively low, especially for idiomatic expressions and place names, and indicate considerable room for improvement.
Cogs in a Machine, Doing What They're Meant to Do -- The AMI Submission to the WMT24 General Translation Task
Authors: Atli Jasonarson, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Bjarki Ármannsson, Steinþór Steingrímsson
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Translation

This paper presents the submission of the \'Arni Magnusson Institute's team to the WMT24 General translation task. We work on the English->Icelandic translation direction. Our system comprises four translation models and a grammar correction model. For training our models we carefully curate our datasets, aggressively filtering out sentence pairs that may detrimentally affect the quality of our system's output. Some of our data are collected from human translations and some are synthetically generated. A part of the synthetic data is generated using an LLM, and we find that it increases the translation capability of our system significantly.