pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Metric Dimension and Resolvability of Jaccard Spaces
Authors: Manuel E. Lladser, Alexander J. Paradise
Date: 2024-05-19 00:00:00

A subset of points in a metric space is said to resolve it if each point in the space is uniquely characterized by its distance to each point in the subset. In particular, resolving sets can be used to represent points in abstract metric spaces as Euclidean vectors. Importantly, due to the triangle inequality, points close by in the space are represented as vectors with similar coordinates, which may find applications in classification problems of symbolic objects under suitably chosen metrics. In this manuscript, we address the resolvability of Jaccard spaces, i.e., metric spaces of the form $(2^X,\text{Jac})$, where $2^X$ is the power set of a finite set $X$, and $\text{Jac}$ is the Jaccard distance between subsets of $X$. Specifically, for different $a,b\in 2^X$, $\text{Jac}(a,b)=|a\Delta b|/|a\cup b|$, where $|\cdot|$ denotes size (i.e., cardinality) and $\Delta$ denotes the symmetric difference of sets. We combine probabilistic and linear algebra arguments to construct highly likely but nearly optimal (i.e., of minimal size) resolving sets of $(2^X,\text{Jac})$. In particular, we show that the metric dimension of $(2^X,\text{Jac})$, i.e., the minimum size of a resolving set of this space, is $\Theta(|X|/\ln|X|)$. In addition, we show that a much smaller subset of $2^X$ suffices to resolve, with high probability, all different pairs of subsets of $X$ of cardinality at most $\sqrt{|X|}/\ln|X|$, up to a factor.
Can Public LLMs be used for Self-Diagnosis of Medical Conditions ?
Authors: Nikil Sharan Prabahar Balasubramanian, Sagnik Dakshit
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval-augmented Generation

Advancements in deep learning have generated a large-scale interest in the development of foundational deep learning models. The development of Large Language Models (LLM) has evolved as a transformative paradigm in conversational tasks, which has led to its integration and extension even in the critical domain of healthcare. With LLMs becoming widely popular and their public access through open-source models and integration with other applications, there is a need to investigate their potential and limitations. One such crucial task where LLMs are applied but require a deeper understanding is that of self-diagnosis of medical conditions based on bias-validating symptoms in the interest of public health. The widespread integration of Gemini with Google search and GPT-4.0 with Bing search has led to a shift in the trend of self-diagnosis using search engines to conversational LLM models. Owing to the critical nature of the task, it is prudent to investigate and understand the potential and limitations of public LLMs in the task of self-diagnosis. In this study, we prepare a prompt engineered dataset of 10000 samples and test the performance on the general task of self-diagnosis. We compared the performance of both the state-of-the-art GPT-4.0 and the fee Gemini model on the task of self-diagnosis and recorded contrasting accuracies of 63.07% and 6.01%, respectively. We also discuss the challenges, limitations, and potential of both Gemini and GPT-4.0 for the task of self-diagnosis to facilitate future research and towards the broader impact of general public knowledge. Furthermore, we demonstrate the potential and improvement in performance for the task of self-diagnosis using Retrieval Augmented Generation.
Large Language Models Lack Understanding of Character Composition of Words
Authors: Andrew Shin, Kunitake Kaneko
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performances on a wide range of natural language tasks. Yet, LLMs' successes have been largely restricted to tasks concerning words, sentences, or documents, and it remains questionable how much they understand the minimal units of text, namely characters. In this paper, we examine contemporary LLMs regarding their ability to understand character composition of words, and show that most of them fail to reliably carry out even the simple tasks that can be handled by humans with perfection. We analyze their behaviors with comparison to token level performances, and discuss the potential directions for future research.
Unveiling Key Aspects of Fine-Tuning in Sentence Embeddings: A Representation Rank Analysis
Authors: Euna Jung, Jaeill Kim, Jungmin Ko, Jinwoo Park, Wonjong Rhee
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings

The latest advancements in unsupervised learning of sentence embeddings predominantly involve employing contrastive learning-based (CL-based) fine-tuning over pre-trained language models. In this study, we analyze the latest sentence embedding methods by adopting representation rank as the primary tool of analysis. We first define Phase 1 and Phase 2 of fine-tuning based on when representation rank peaks. Utilizing these phases, we conduct a thorough analysis and obtain essential findings across key aspects, including alignment and uniformity, linguistic abilities, and correlation between performance and rank. For instance, we find that the dynamics of the key aspects can undergo significant changes as fine-tuning transitions from Phase 1 to Phase 2. Based on these findings, we experiment with a rank reduction (RR) strategy that facilitates rapid and stable fine-tuning of the latest CL-based methods. Through empirical investigations, we showcase the efficacy of RR in enhancing the performance and stability of five state-of-the-art sentence embedding methods.
MBIAS: Mitigating Bias in Large Language Models While Retaining Context
Authors: Shaina Raza, Ananya Raval, Veronica Chatrath
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00

The deployment of Large Language Models (LLMs) in diverse applications necessitates an assurance of safety without compromising the contextual integrity of the generated content. Traditional approaches, including safety-specific fine-tuning or adversarial testing, often yield safe outputs at the expense of contextual meaning. This can result in a diminished capacity to handle nuanced aspects of bias and toxicity, such as underrepresentation or negative portrayals across various demographics. To address these challenges, we introduce MBIAS, an LLM framework carefully instruction fine-tuned on a custom dataset designed specifically for safety interventions. MBIAS is designed to significantly reduce biases and toxic elements in LLM outputs while preserving the main information. This work also details our further use of LLMs: as annotator under human supervision and as evaluator of generated content. Empirical analysis reveals that MBIAS achieves a reduction in bias and toxicity by over 30\% in standard evaluations, and by more than 90\% in diverse demographic tests, highlighting the robustness of our approach. We make the dataset and the fine-tuned model available to the research community for further investigation and ensure reproducibility. The code for this project can be accessed here https://github.com/shainarazavi/MBIAS/tree/main. Warning: This paper contains examples that may be offensive or upsetting.
BadActs: A Universal Backdoor Defense in the Activation Space
Authors: Biao Yi, Sishuo Chen, Yiming Li, Tong Li, Baolei Zhang, Zheli Liu
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: backdoor defense

Backdoor attacks pose an increasingly severe security threat to Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) during their development stage. In response, backdoor sample purification has emerged as a promising defense mechanism, aiming to eliminate backdoor triggers while preserving the integrity of the clean content in the samples. However, existing approaches have been predominantly focused on the word space, which are ineffective against feature-space triggers and significantly impair performance on clean data. To address this, we introduce a universal backdoor defense that purifies backdoor samples in the activation space by drawing abnormal activations towards optimized minimum clean activation distribution intervals. The advantages of our approach are twofold: (1) By operating in the activation space, our method captures from surface-level information like words to higher-level semantic concepts such as syntax, thus counteracting diverse triggers; (2) the fine-grained continuous nature of the activation space allows for more precise preservation of clean content while removing triggers. Furthermore, we propose a detection module based on statistical information of abnormal activations, to achieve a better trade-off between clean accuracy and defending performance.
Transformer based neural networks for emotion recognition in conversations
Authors: Claudiu Creanga, Liviu P. Dinu
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Language Modeling, Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Sentence

This paper outlines the approach of the ISDS-NLP team in the SemEval 2024 Task 10: Emotion Discovery and Reasoning its Flip in Conversation (EDiReF). For Subtask 1 we obtained a weighted F1 score of 0.43 and placed 12 in the leaderboard. We investigate two distinct approaches: Masked Language Modeling (MLM) and Causal Language Modeling (CLM). For MLM, we employ pre-trained BERT-like models in a multilingual setting, fine-tuning them with a classifier to predict emotions. Experiments with varying input lengths, classifier architectures, and fine-tuning strategies demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. Additionally, we utilize Mistral 7B Instruct V0.2, a state-of-the-art model, applying zero-shot and few-shot prompting techniques. Our findings indicate that while Mistral shows promise, MLMs currently outperform them in sentence-level emotion classification.
Identifying and Aligning Medical Claims Made on Social Media with Medical Evidence
Authors: Anthony Hughes, Xingyi Song
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00

Evidence-based medicine is the practice of making medical decisions that adhere to the latest, and best known evidence at that time. Currently, the best evidence is often found in the form of documents, such as randomized control trials, meta-analyses and systematic reviews. This research focuses on aligning medical claims made on social media platforms with this medical evidence. By doing so, individuals without medical expertise can more effectively assess the veracity of such medical claims. We study three core tasks: identifying medical claims, extracting medical vocabulary from these claims, and retrieving evidence relevant to those identified medical claims. We propose a novel system that can generate synthetic medical claims to aid each of these core tasks. We additionally introduce a novel dataset produced by our synthetic generator that, when applied to these tasks, demonstrates not only a more flexible and holistic approach, but also an improvement in all comparable metrics. We make our dataset, the Expansive Medical Claim Corpus (EMCC), available at https://zenodo.org/records/8321460
MemeMQA: Multimodal Question Answering for Memes via Rationale-Based Inferencing
Authors: Siddhant Agarwal, Shivam Sharma, Preslav Nakov, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Text Generation

Memes have evolved as a prevalent medium for diverse communication, ranging from humour to propaganda. With the rising popularity of image-focused content, there is a growing need to explore its potential harm from different aspects. Previous studies have analyzed memes in closed settings - detecting harm, applying semantic labels, and offering natural language explanations. To extend this research, we introduce MemeMQA, a multimodal question-answering framework aiming to solicit accurate responses to structured questions while providing coherent explanations. We curate MemeMQACorpus, a new dataset featuring 1,880 questions related to 1,122 memes with corresponding answer-explanation pairs. We further propose ARSENAL, a novel two-stage multimodal framework that leverages the reasoning capabilities of LLMs to address MemeMQA. We benchmark MemeMQA using competitive baselines and demonstrate its superiority - ~18% enhanced answer prediction accuracy and distinct text generation lead across various metrics measuring lexical and semantic alignment over the best baseline. We analyze ARSENAL's robustness through diversification of question-set, confounder-based evaluation regarding MemeMQA's generalizability, and modality-specific assessment, enhancing our understanding of meme interpretation in the multimodal communication landscape.
Automated Text Identification Using CNN and Training Dynamics
Authors: Claudiu Creanga, Liviu Petrisor Dinu
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Generalization

We used Data Maps to model and characterize the AuTexTification dataset. This provides insights about the behaviour of individual samples during training across epochs (training dynamics). We characterized the samples across 3 dimensions: confidence, variability and correctness. This shows the presence of 3 regions: easy-to-learn, ambiguous and hard-to-learn examples. We used a classic CNN architecture and found out that training the model only on a subset of ambiguous examples improves the model's out-of-distribution generalization.
LexGen: Domain-aware Multilingual Lexicon Generation
Authors: Ayush Maheshwari, Atul Kumar Singh, Karthika NJ, Krishnakant Bhatt, Preethi Jyothi, Ganesh Ramakrishnan
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00

Lexicon or dictionary generation across domains is of significant societal importance, as it can potentially enhance information accessibility for a diverse user base while preserving language identity. Prior work in the field primarily focuses on bilingual lexical induction, which deals with word alignments using mapping-based or corpora-based approaches. Though initiated by researchers, the research associated with lexicon generation is limited, even more so with domain-specific lexicons. This task becomes particularly important in atypical medical, engineering, and other technical domains, owing to the highly infrequent usage of the terms and negligibly low data availability of technical terms in many low-resource languages. Owing to the research gap in lexicon generation, especially with a limited focus on the domain-specific area, we propose a new model to generate dictionary words for 6 Indian languages in the multi-domain setting. Our model consists of domain-specific and domain-generic layers that encode information, and these layers are invoked via a learnable routing technique. Further, we propose an approach to explicitly leverage the relatedness between these Indian languages toward coherent translation. We also release a new benchmark dataset across 6 Indian languages that span 8 diverse domains that can propel further research in domain-specific lexicon induction. We conduct both zero-shot and few-shot experiments across multiple domains to show the efficacy of our proposed model in generalizing to unseen domains and unseen languages.
Designing NLP Systems That Adapt to Diverse Worldviews
Authors: Claudiu Creanga, Liviu P. Dinu
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference

Natural Language Inference (NLI) is foundational for evaluating language understanding in AI. However, progress has plateaued, with models failing on ambiguous examples and exhibiting poor generalization. We argue that this stems from disregarding the subjective nature of meaning, which is intrinsically tied to an individual's \textit{weltanschauung} (which roughly translates to worldview). Existing NLP datasets often obscure this by aggregating labels or filtering out disagreement. We propose a perspectivist approach: building datasets that capture annotator demographics, values, and justifications for their labels. Such datasets would explicitly model diverse worldviews. Our initial experiments with a subset of the SBIC dataset demonstrate that even limited annotator metadata can improve model performance.
BrainStorm @ iREL at #SMM4H 2024: Leveraging Translation and Topical Embeddings for Annotation Detection in Tweets
Authors: Manav Chaudhary, Harshit Gupta, Vasudeva Varma
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00

The proliferation of LLMs in various NLP tasks has sparked debates regarding their reliability, particularly in annotation tasks where biases and hallucinations may arise. In this shared task, we address the challenge of distinguishing annotations made by LLMs from those made by human domain experts in the context of COVID-19 symptom detection from tweets in Latin American Spanish. This paper presents BrainStorm @ iRELs approach to the SMM4H 2024 Shared Task, leveraging the inherent topical information in tweets, we propose a novel approach to identify and classify annotations, aiming to enhance the trustworthiness of annotated data.
Automating PTSD Diagnostics in Clinical Interviews: Leveraging Large Language Models for Trauma Assessments
Authors: Sichang Tu, Abigail Powers, Natalie Merrill, Negar Fani, Sierra Carter, Stephen Doogan, Jinho D. Choi
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The shortage of clinical workforce presents significant challenges in mental healthcare, limiting access to formal diagnostics and services. We aim to tackle this shortage by integrating a customized large language model (LLM) into the workflow, thus promoting equity in mental healthcare for the general population. Although LLMs have showcased their capability in clinical decision-making, their adaptation to severe conditions like Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) remains largely unexplored. Therefore, we collect 411 clinician-administered diagnostic interviews and devise a novel approach to obtain high-quality data. Moreover, we build a comprehensive framework to automate PTSD diagnostic assessments based on interview contents by leveraging two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4 and Llama-2, with potential for broader clinical diagnoses. Our results illustrate strong promise for LLMs, tested on our dataset, to aid clinicians in diagnostic validation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first AI system that fully automates assessments for mental illness based on clinician-administered interviews.
LG AI Research & KAIST at EHRSQL 2024: Self-Training Large Language Models with Pseudo-Labeled Unanswerable Questions for a Reliable Text-to-SQL System on EHRs
Authors: Yongrae Jo, Seongyun Lee, Minju Seo, Sung Ju Hwang, Moontae Lee
Date: 2024-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Misinformation, Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Text-to-SQL models are pivotal for making Electronic Health Records (EHRs) accessible to healthcare professionals without SQL knowledge. With the advancements in large language models, these systems have become more adept at translating complex questions into SQL queries. Nonetheless, the critical need for reliability in healthcare necessitates these models to accurately identify unanswerable questions or uncertain predictions, preventing misinformation. To address this problem, we present a self-training strategy using pseudo-labeled unanswerable questions to enhance the reliability of text-to-SQL models for EHRs. This approach includes a two-stage training process followed by a filtering method based on the token entropy and query execution. Our methodology's effectiveness is validated by our top performance in the EHRSQL 2024 shared task, showcasing the potential to improve healthcare decision-making through more reliable text-to-SQL systems.
A Reproducibility Study on Quantifying Language Similarity: The Impact of Missing Values in the URIEL Knowledge Base
Authors: Hasti Toossi, Guo Qing Huai, Jinyu Liu, Eric Khiu, A. Seza Doğruöz, En-Shiun Annie Lee
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Values, Multilingual NLP

In the pursuit of supporting more languages around the world, tools that characterize properties of languages play a key role in expanding the existing multilingual NLP research. In this study, we focus on a widely used typological knowledge base, URIEL, which aggregates linguistic information into numeric vectors. Specifically, we delve into the soundness and reproducibility of the approach taken by URIEL in quantifying language similarity. Our analysis reveals URIEL's ambiguity in calculating language distances and in handling missing values. Moreover, we find that URIEL does not provide any information about typological features for 31\% of the languages it represents, undermining the reliabilility of the database, particularly on low-resource languages. Our literature review suggests URIEL and lang2vec are used in papers on diverse NLP tasks, which motivates us to rigorously verify the database as the effectiveness of these works depends on the reliability of the information the tool provides.
AudioSetMix: Enhancing Audio-Language Datasets with LLM-Assisted Augmentations
Authors: David Xu
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Signal Processing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Multi-modal learning in the audio-language domain has seen significant advancements in recent years. However, audio-language learning faces challenges due to limited and lower-quality data compared to image-language tasks. Existing audio-language datasets are notably smaller, and manual labeling is hindered by the need to listen to entire audio clips for accurate labeling. Our method systematically generates audio-caption pairs by augmenting audio clips with natural language labels and corresponding audio signal processing operations. Leveraging a Large Language Model, we generate descriptions of augmented audio clips with a prompt template. This scalable method produces AudioSetMix, a high-quality training dataset for text-and-audio related models. Integration of our dataset improves models performance on benchmarks by providing diversified and better-aligned examples. Notably, our dataset addresses the absence of modifiers (adjectives and adverbs) in existing datasets. By enabling models to learn these concepts, and generating hard negative examples during training, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on multiple benchmarks.
Multilingual Substitution-based Word Sense Induction
Authors: Denis Kokosinskii, Nikolay Arefyev
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Word Sense Induction

Word Sense Induction (WSI) is the task of discovering senses of an ambiguous word by grouping usages of this word into clusters corresponding to these senses. Many approaches were proposed to solve WSI in English and a few other languages, but these approaches are not easily adaptable to new languages. We present multilingual substitution-based WSI methods that support any of 100 languages covered by the underlying multilingual language model with minimal to no adaptation required. Despite the multilingual capabilities, our methods perform on par with the existing monolingual approaches on popular English WSI datasets. At the same time, they will be most useful for lower-resourced languages which miss lexical resources available for English, thus, have higher demand for unsupervised methods like WSI.