pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
"Why" Has the Least Side Effect on Model Editing
Authors: Tsung-Hsuan Pan, Chung-Chi Chen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, knowledge editing, Model Editing, World Knowledge

Training large language models (LLMs) from scratch is an expensive endeavor, particularly as world knowledge continually evolves. To maintain relevance and accuracy of LLMs, model editing has emerged as a pivotal research area. While these methods hold promise, they can also produce unintended side effects. Their underlying factors and causes remain largely unexplored. This paper delves into a critical factor-question type-by categorizing model editing questions. Our findings reveal that the extent of performance degradation varies significantly across different question types, providing new insights for experimental design in knowledge editing. Furthermore, we investigate whether insights from smaller models can be extrapolated to larger models. Our results indicate discrepancies in findings between models of different sizes, suggesting that insights from smaller models may not necessarily apply to larger models. Additionally, we examine the impact of batch size on side effects, discovering that increasing the batch size can mitigate performance drops.
Rehearsing Answers to Probable Questions with Perspective-Taking
Authors: Yung-Yu Shih, Ziwei Xu, Hiroya Takamura, Yun-Nung Chen, Chung-Chi Chen
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension

Question answering (QA) has been a long-standing focus in the NLP field, predominantly addressing reading comprehension and common sense QA. However, scenarios involving the preparation of answers to probable questions during professional oral presentations remain underexplored. In this paper, we pioneer the examination of this crucial yet overlooked topic by utilizing real-world QA conversation transcripts between company managers and professional analysts. We explore the proposed task using three causal knowledge graphs (KGs) and three large language models (LLMs). This work provides foundational insights into the application of LLMs in professional QA scenarios, highlighting the importance of causal KGs and perspective-taking in generating effective responses.
Co-Trained Retriever-Generator Framework for Question Generation in Earnings Calls
Authors: Yining Juan, Chung-Chi Chen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation

In diverse professional environments, ranging from academic conferences to corporate earnings calls, the ability to anticipate audience questions stands paramount. Traditional methods, which rely on manual assessment of an audience's background, interests, and subject knowledge, often fall short - particularly when facing large or heterogeneous groups, leading to imprecision and inefficiency. While NLP has made strides in text-based question generation, its primary focus remains on academic settings, leaving the intricate challenges of professional domains, especially earnings call conferences, underserved. Addressing this gap, our paper pioneers the multi-question generation (MQG) task specifically designed for earnings call contexts. Our methodology involves an exhaustive collection of earnings call transcripts and a novel annotation technique to classify potential questions. Furthermore, we introduce a retriever-enhanced strategy to extract relevant information. With a core aim of generating a spectrum of potential questions that analysts might pose, we derive these directly from earnings call content. Empirical evaluations underscore our approach's edge, revealing notable excellence in the accuracy, consistency, and perplexity of the questions generated.
HiCuLR: Hierarchical Curriculum Learning for Rhetorical Role Labeling of Legal Documents
Authors: T. Y. S. S. Santosh, Apolline Isaia, Shiyu Hong, Matthias Grabmair
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Argument Mining

Rhetorical Role Labeling (RRL) of legal documents is pivotal for various downstream tasks such as summarization, semantic case search and argument mining. Existing approaches often overlook the varying difficulty levels inherent in legal document discourse styles and rhetorical roles. In this work, we propose HiCuLR, a hierarchical curriculum learning framework for RRL. It nests two curricula: Rhetorical Role-level Curriculum (RC) on the outer layer and Document-level Curriculum (DC) on the inner layer. DC categorizes documents based on their difficulty, utilizing metrics like deviation from a standard discourse structure and exposes the model to them in an easy-to-difficult fashion. RC progressively strengthens the model to discern coarse-to-fine-grained distinctions between rhetorical roles. Our experiments on four RRL datasets demonstrate the efficacy of HiCuLR, highlighting the complementary nature of DC and RC.
The Craft of Selective Prediction: Towards Reliable Case Outcome Classification -- An Empirical Study on European Court of Human Rights Cases
Authors: T. Y. S. S. Santosh, Irtiza Chowdhury, Shanshan Xu, Matthias Grabmair
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In high-stakes decision-making tasks within legal NLP, such as Case Outcome Classification (COC), quantifying a model's predictive confidence is crucial. Confidence estimation enables humans to make more informed decisions, particularly when the model's certainty is low, or where the consequences of a mistake are significant. However, most existing COC works prioritize high task performance over model reliability. This paper conducts an empirical investigation into how various design choices including pre-training corpus, confidence estimator and fine-tuning loss affect the reliability of COC models within the framework of selective prediction. Our experiments on the multi-label COC task, focusing on European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) cases, highlight the importance of a diverse yet domain-specific pre-training corpus for better calibration. Additionally, we demonstrate that larger models tend to exhibit overconfidence, Monte Carlo dropout methods produce reliable confidence estimates, and confident error regularization effectively mitigates overconfidence. To our knowledge, this is the first systematic exploration of selective prediction in legal NLP. Our findings underscore the need for further research on enhancing confidence measurement and improving the trustworthiness of models in the legal domain.
Incorporating Precedents for Legal Judgement Prediction on European Court of Human Rights Cases
Authors: T. Y. S. S. Santosh, Mohamed Hesham Elganayni, Stanisław Sójka, Matthias Grabmair
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Decision Making, Retrieval

Inspired by the legal doctrine of stare decisis, which leverages precedents (prior cases) for informed decision-making, we explore methods to integrate them into LJP models. To facilitate precedent retrieval, we train a retriever with a fine-grained relevance signal based on the overlap ratio of alleged articles between cases. We investigate two strategies to integrate precedents: direct incorporation at inference via label interpolation based on case proximity and during training via a precedent fusion module using a stacked-cross attention model. We employ joint training of the retriever and LJP models to address latent space divergence between them. Our experiments on LJP tasks from the ECHR jurisdiction reveal that integrating precedents during training coupled with joint training of the retriever and LJP model, outperforms models without precedents or with precedents incorporated only at inference, particularly benefiting sparser articles.
Do LLMs suffer from Multi-Party Hangover? A Diagnostic Approach to Addressee Recognition and Response Selection in Conversations
Authors: Nicolò Penzo, Maryam Sajedinia, Bruno Lepri, Sara Tonelli, Marco Guerini
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Assessing the performance of systems to classify Multi-Party Conversations (MPC) is challenging due to the interconnection between linguistic and structural characteristics of conversations. Conventional evaluation methods often overlook variances in model behavior across different levels of structural complexity on interaction graphs. In this work, we propose a methodological pipeline to investigate model performance across specific structural attributes of conversations. As a proof of concept we focus on Response Selection and Addressee Recognition tasks, to diagnose model weaknesses. To this end, we extract representative diagnostic subdatasets with a fixed number of users and a good structural variety from a large and open corpus of online MPCs. We further frame our work in terms of data minimization, avoiding the use of original usernames to preserve privacy, and propose alternatives to using original text messages. Results show that response selection relies more on the textual content of conversations, while addressee recognition requires capturing their structural dimension. Using an LLM in a zero-shot setting, we further highlight how sensitivity to prompt variations is task-dependent.
Hit the Sweet Spot! Span-Level Ensemble for Large Language Models
Authors: Yangyifan Xu, Jianghao Chen, Junhong Wu, Jiajun Zhang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Ensembling various LLMs to unlock their complementary potential and leverage their individual strengths is highly valuable. Previous studies typically focus on two main paradigms: sample-level and token-level ensembles. Sample-level ensemble methods either select or blend fully generated outputs, which hinders dynamic correction and enhancement of outputs during the generation process. On the other hand, token-level ensemble methods enable real-time correction through fine-grained ensemble at each generation step. However, the information carried by an individual token is quite limited, leading to suboptimal decisions at each step. To address these issues, we propose SweetSpan, a span-level ensemble method that effectively balances the need for real-time adjustments and the information required for accurate ensemble decisions. Our approach involves two key steps: First, we have each candidate model independently generate candidate spans based on the shared prefix. Second, we calculate perplexity scores to facilitate mutual evaluation among the candidate models and achieve robust span selection by filtering out unfaithful scores. To comprehensively evaluate ensemble methods, we propose a new challenging setting (ensemble models with significant performance gaps) in addition to the standard setting (ensemble the best-performing models) to assess the performance of model ensembles in more realistic scenarios. Experimental results in both standard and challenging settings across various language generation tasks demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and versatility of our approach compared with previous ensemble methods.
A Survey on Complex Tasks for Goal-Directed Interactive Agents
Authors: Mareike Hartmann, Alexander Koller
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00

Goal-directed interactive agents, which autonomously complete tasks through interactions with their environment, can assist humans in various domains of their daily lives. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) led to a surge of new, more and more challenging tasks to evaluate such agents. To properly contextualize performance across these tasks, it is imperative to understand the different challenges they pose to agents. To this end, this survey compiles relevant tasks and environments for evaluating goal-directed interactive agents, structuring them along dimensions relevant for understanding current obstacles. An up-to-date compilation of relevant resources can be found on our project website: https://coli-saar.github.io/interactive-agents.
Do We Need Domain-Specific Embedding Models? An Empirical Investigation
Authors: Yixuan Tang, Yi Yang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00

Embedding models play a crucial role in representing and retrieving information across various NLP applications. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have further enhanced the performance of embedding models, which are trained on massive amounts of text covering almost every domain. These models are often benchmarked on general-purpose datasets like Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB), where they demonstrate superior performance. However, a critical question arises: Is the development of domain-specific embedding models necessary when general-purpose models are trained on vast corpora that already include specialized domain texts? In this paper, we empirically investigate this question, choosing the finance domain as an example. We introduce the Finance Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (FinMTEB), a counterpart to MTEB that consists of financial domain-specific text datasets. We evaluate the performance of seven state-of-the-art embedding models on FinMTEB and observe a significant performance drop compared to their performance on MTEB. To account for the possibility that this drop is driven by FinMTEB's higher complexity, we propose four measures to quantify dataset complexity and control for this factor in our analysis. Our analysis provides compelling evidence that state-of-the-art embedding models struggle to capture domain-specific linguistic and semantic patterns. Moreover, we find that the performance of general-purpose embedding models on MTEB is not correlated with their performance on FinMTEB, indicating the need for domain-specific embedding benchmarks for domain-specific embedding models. This study sheds light on developing domain-specific embedding models in the LLM era. FinMTEB comes with open-source code at https://github.com/yixuantt/FinMTEB
Evaluation of OpenAI o1: Opportunities and Challenges of AGI
Authors: Tianyang Zhong, Zhengliang Liu, Yi Pan, Yutong Zhang, Yifan Zhou, Shizhe Liang, Zihao Wu, Yanjun Lyu, Peng Shu, Xiaowei Yu, Chao Cao, Hanqi Jiang, Hanxu Chen, Yiwei Li, JunHao Chen, Huawen Hu, Yihen Liu, Huaqin Zhao, Shaochen Xu, Haixing Dai, Lin Zhao, Ruidong Zhang, Wei Zhao, Zhenyuan Yang, Jingyuan Chen, Peilong Wang, Wei Ruan, Hui Wang, Huan Zhao, Jing Zhang, Yiming Ren, Shihuan Qin, Tong Chen, Jiaxi Li, Arif Hassan Zidan, Afrar Jahin, Minheng Chen, Sichen Xia, Jason Holmes, Yan Zhuang, Jiaqi Wang, Bochen Xu, Weiran Xia, Jichao Yu, Kaibo Tang, Yaxuan Yang, Bolun Sun, Tao Yang, Guoyu Lu, Xianqiao Wang, Lilong Chai, He Li, Jin Lu, Lichao Sun, Xin Zhang, Bao Ge, Xintao Hu, Lian Zhang, Hua Zhou, Lu Zhang, Shu Zhang, Ninghao Liu, Bei Jiang, Linglong Kong, Zhen Xiang, Yudan Ren, Jun Liu, Xi Jiang, Yu Bao, Wei zhang, Xiang Li, Gang Li, Wei Liu, Dinggang Shen, Andrea Sikora, Xiaoming Zhai, Dajiang Zhu, Tianming Liu
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Large Language Model, Mathematical Reasoning, Natural Language Inference, Script Generation, Sentiment Analysis

This comprehensive study evaluates the performance of OpenAI's o1-preview large language model across a diverse array of complex reasoning tasks, spanning multiple domains, including computer science, mathematics, natural sciences, medicine, linguistics, and social sciences. Through rigorous testing, o1-preview demonstrated remarkable capabilities, often achieving human-level or superior performance in areas ranging from coding challenges to scientific reasoning and from language processing to creative problem-solving. Key findings include: -83.3% success rate in solving complex competitive programming problems, surpassing many human experts. -Superior ability in generating coherent and accurate radiology reports, outperforming other evaluated models. -100% accuracy in high school-level mathematical reasoning tasks, providing detailed step-by-step solutions. -Advanced natural language inference capabilities across general and specialized domains like medicine. -Impressive performance in chip design tasks, outperforming specialized models in areas such as EDA script generation and bug analysis. -Remarkable proficiency in anthropology and geology, demonstrating deep understanding and reasoning in these specialized fields. -Strong capabilities in quantitative investing. O1 has comprehensive financial knowledge and statistical modeling skills. -Effective performance in social media analysis, including sentiment analysis and emotion recognition. The model excelled particularly in tasks requiring intricate reasoning and knowledge integration across various fields. While some limitations were observed, including occasional errors on simpler problems and challenges with certain highly specialized concepts, the overall results indicate significant progress towards artificial general intelligence.
Exploring Language Model Generalization in Low-Resource Extractive QA
Authors: Saptarshi Sengupta, Wenpeng Yin, Preslav Nakov, Shreya Ghosh, Suhang Wang
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Extractive Question-Answering, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

In this paper, we investigate Extractive Question Answering (EQA) with Large Language Models (LLMs) under domain drift, i.e., can LLMs generalize to domains that require specific knowledge such as medicine and law in a zero-shot fashion without additional in-domain training? To this end, we devise a series of experiments to explain the performance gap empirically. Our findings suggest that: (a) LLMs struggle with dataset demands of closed domains such as retrieving long answer spans; (b) Certain LLMs, despite showing strong overall performance, display weaknesses in meeting basic requirements as discriminating between domain-specific senses of words which we link to pre-processing decisions; (c) Scaling model parameters is not always effective for cross domain generalization; and (d) Closed-domain datasets are quantitatively much different than open-domain EQA datasets and current LLMs struggle to deal with them. Our findings point out important directions for improving existing LLMs.
Improving Multilingual ASR in the Wild Using Simple N-best Re-ranking
Authors: Brian Yan, Vineel Pratap, Shinji Watanabe, Michael Auli
Date: 2024-09-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Language Identification, Re-Ranking, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Spoken language identification

Multilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models are typically evaluated in a setting where the ground-truth language of the speech utterance is known, however, this is often not the case for most practical settings. Automatic Spoken Language Identification (SLID) models are not perfect and misclassifications have a substantial impact on the final ASR accuracy. In this paper, we present a simple and effective N-best re-ranking approach to improve multilingual ASR accuracy for several prominent acoustic models by employing external features such as language models and text-based language identification models. Our results on FLEURS using the MMS and Whisper models show spoken language identification accuracy improvements of 8.7% and 6.1%, respectively and word error rates which are 3.3% and 2.0% lower on these benchmarks.
LangSAMP: Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining
Authors: Yihong Liu, Haotian Ye, Chunlan Ma, Mingyang Wang, Hinrich Schütze
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Pretraining, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Representation Learning, XLM-R

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) often avoid using language embeddings -- learnable vectors assigned to different languages. These embeddings are discarded for two main reasons: (1) mPLMs are expected to have a single, unified parameter set across all languages, and (2) they need to function seamlessly as universal text encoders without requiring language IDs as input. However, this removal increases the burden on token embeddings to encode all language-specific information, which may hinder the model's ability to produce more language-neutral representations. To address this challenge, we propose Language-Script Aware Multilingual Pretraining (LangSAMP), a method that incorporates both language and script embeddings to enhance representation learning while maintaining a simple architecture. Specifically, we integrate these embeddings into the output of the transformer blocks before passing the final representations to the language modeling head for prediction. We apply LangSAMP to the continual pretraining of XLM-R on a highly multilingual corpus covering more than 500 languages. The resulting model consistently outperforms the baseline. Extensive analysis further shows that language/script embeddings encode language/script-specific information, which improves the selection of source languages for crosslingual transfer. We make our code and models publicly available at \url{https://github.com/cisnlp/LangSAMP}.
GrEmLIn: A Repository of Green Baseline Embeddings for 87 Low-Resource Languages Injected with Multilingual Graph Knowledge
Authors: Daniil Gurgurov, Rishu Kumar, Simon Ostermann
Date: 2024-09-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Sentiment Analysis, Topic Classification, Word Embeddings, XLM-R

Contextualized embeddings based on large language models (LLMs) are available for various languages, but their coverage is often limited for lower resourced languages. Using LLMs for such languages is often difficult due to a high computational cost; not only during training, but also during inference. Static word embeddings are much more resource-efficient ("green"), and thus still provide value, particularly for very low-resource languages. There is, however, a notable lack of comprehensive repositories with such embeddings for diverse languages. To address this gap, we present GrEmLIn, a centralized repository of green, static baseline embeddings for 87 mid- and low-resource languages. We compute GrEmLIn embeddings with a novel method that enhances GloVe embeddings by integrating multilingual graph knowledge, which makes our static embeddings competitive with LLM representations, while being parameter-free at inference time. Our experiments demonstrate that GrEmLIn embeddings outperform state-of-the-art contextualized embeddings from E5 on the task of lexical similarity. They remain competitive in extrinsic evaluation tasks like sentiment analysis and natural language inference, with average performance gaps of just 5-10\% or less compared to state-of-the-art models, given a sufficient vocabulary overlap with the target task, and underperform only on topic classification. Our code and embeddings are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/DFKI.