pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mixed Preference Optimization: Reinforcement Learning with Data Selection and Better Reference Model
Authors: Qi Gou, Cam-Tu Nguyen
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to process and generate natural language. However, as they are trained on massive datasets of text, LLMs can inherit harmful biases and produce outputs that are not aligned with human values. This paper studies two main approaches to LLM alignment: Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) and contrastive learning-based methods like Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). By analyzing the stability and robustness of RLHF and DPO, we propose MPO (Mixed Preference Optimization), a novel method that mitigates the weaknesses of both approaches. Specifically, we propose a two-stage training procedure: first train DPO on an easy dataset, and then perform RLHF on a difficult set with DPO model being the reference model. Here, the easy and difficult sets are constructed by a well-trained reward model that splits response pairs into those with large gaps of reward (easy), and those with small gaps (difficult). The first stage allows us to obtain a relatively optimal policy (LLM) model quickly, whereas the second stage refines LLM with online RLHF, thus mitigating the distribution shift issue associated with DPO. Experiments are conducted on two public alignment datasets, namely HH-RLHF and TLDR, demonstrating the effectiveness of MPO, both in terms of GPT4 and human evaluation.
Echo-chambers and Idea Labs: Communication Styles on Twitter
Authors: Aleksandra Sorokovikova, Michael Becker, Ivan P. Yamshchikov
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

This paper investigates the communication styles and structures of Twitter (X) communities within the vaccination context. While mainstream research primarily focuses on the echo-chamber phenomenon, wherein certain ideas are reinforced and participants are isolated from opposing opinions, this study reveals the presence of diverse communication styles across various communities. In addition to the communities exhibiting echo-chamber behavior, this research uncovers communities with distinct communication patterns. By shedding light on the nuanced nature of communication within social networks, this study emphasizes the significance of understanding the diversity of perspectives within online communities.
BP4ER: Bootstrap Prompting for Explicit Reasoning in Medical Dialogue Generation
Authors: Yuhong He, Yongqi Zhang, Shizhu He, Jun Wan
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Medical dialogue generation (MDG) has gained increasing attention due to its substantial practical value. Previous works typically employ a sequence-to-sequence framework to generate medical responses by modeling dialogue context as sequential text with annotated medical entities. While these methods have been successful in generating fluent responses, they fail to provide process explanations of reasoning and require extensive entity annotation. To address these limitations, we propose the method Bootstrap Prompting for Explicit Reasoning in MDG (BP4ER), which explicitly model MDG's multi-step reasoning process and iteratively enhance this reasoning process. We employ a least-to-most prompting strategy to guide a large language model (LLM) in explicit reasoning, breaking down MDG into simpler sub-questions. These sub-questions build on answers from previous ones. Additionally, we also introduce two distinct bootstrapping techniques for prompting, which autonomously correct errors and facilitate the LLM's explicit reasoning. This approach eliminates the need for entity annotation and increases the transparency of the MDG process by explicitly generating the intermediate reasoning chain. The experimental findings on the two public datasets indicate that BP4ER outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both objective and subjective evaluation metrics.
KazParC: Kazakh Parallel Corpus for Machine Translation
Authors: Rustem Yeshpanov, Alina Polonskaya, Huseyin Atakan Varol
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We introduce KazParC, a parallel corpus designed for machine translation across Kazakh, English, Russian, and Turkish. The first and largest publicly available corpus of its kind, KazParC contains a collection of 371,902 parallel sentences covering different domains and developed with the assistance of human translators. Our research efforts also extend to the development of a neural machine translation model nicknamed Tilmash. Remarkably, the performance of Tilmash is on par with, and in certain instances, surpasses that of industry giants, such as Google Translate and Yandex Translate, as measured by standard evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and chrF. Both KazParC and Tilmash are openly available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.
Checkpoint Merging via Bayesian Optimization in LLM Pretraining
Authors: Deyuan Liu, Zecheng Wang, Bingning Wang, WeiPeng Chen, Chunshan Li, Zhiying Tu, Dianhui Chu, Bo Li, Dianbo Sui
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization

The rapid proliferation of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 and Gemini underscores the intense demand for resources during their training processes, posing significant challenges due to substantial computational and environmental costs. To alleviate this issue, we propose checkpoint merging in pretraining LLM. This method utilizes LLM checkpoints with shared training trajectories, and is rooted in an extensive search space exploration for the best merging weight via Bayesian optimization. Through various experiments, we demonstrate that: (1) Our proposed methodology exhibits the capacity to augment pretraining, presenting an opportunity akin to obtaining substantial benefits at minimal cost; (2) Our proposed methodology, despite requiring a given held-out dataset, still demonstrates robust generalization capabilities across diverse domains, a pivotal aspect in pretraining.
EthioMT: Parallel Corpus for Low-resource Ethiopian Languages
Authors: Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Olga Kolesnikova, Alexander Gelbukh, Jugal Kalita
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, News Classification, Question Answering

Recent research in natural language processing (NLP) has achieved impressive performance in tasks such as machine translation (MT), news classification, and question-answering in high-resource languages. However, the performance of MT leaves much to be desired for low-resource languages. This is due to the smaller size of available parallel corpora in these languages, if such corpora are available at all. NLP in Ethiopian languages suffers from the same issues due to the unavailability of publicly accessible datasets for NLP tasks, including MT. To help the research community and foster research for Ethiopian languages, we introduce EthioMT -- a new parallel corpus for 15 languages. We also create a new benchmark by collecting a dataset for better-researched languages in Ethiopia. We evaluate the newly collected corpus and the benchmark dataset for 23 Ethiopian languages using transformer and fine-tuning approaches.
Risk prediction of pathological gambling on social media
Authors: Angelina Parfenova, Marianne Clausel
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Classification, Prediction

This paper addresses the problem of risk prediction on social media data, specifically focusing on the classification of Reddit users as having a pathological gambling disorder. To tackle this problem, this paper focuses on incorporating temporal and emotional features into the model. The preprocessing phase involves dealing with the time irregularity of posts by padding sequences. Two baseline architectures are used for preliminary evaluation: BERT classifier on concatenated posts per user and GRU with LSTM on sequential data. Experimental results demonstrate that the sequential models outperform the concatenation-based model. The results of the experiments conclude that the incorporation of a time decay layer (TD) and passing the emotion classification layer (EmoBERTa) through LSTM improves the performance significantly. Experiments concluded that the addition of a self-attention layer didn't significantly improve the performance of the model, however provided easily interpretable attention scores. The developed architecture with the inclusion of EmoBERTa and TD layers achieved a high F1 score, beating existing benchmarks on pathological gambling dataset. Future work may involve the early prediction of risk factors associated with pathological gambling disorder and testing models on other datasets. Overall, this research highlights the significance of the sequential processing of posts including temporal and emotional features to boost the predictive power, as well as adding an attention layer for interpretability.
AIpom at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Detecting AI-produced Outputs in M4
Authors: Alexander Shirnin, Nikita Andreev, Vladislav Mikhailov, Ekaterina Artemova
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Text Detection

This paper describes AIpom, a system designed to detect a boundary between human-written and machine-generated text (SemEval-2024 Task 8, Subtask C: Human-Machine Mixed Text Detection). We propose a two-stage pipeline combining predictions from an instruction-tuned decoder-only model and encoder-only sequence taggers. AIpom is ranked second on the leaderboard while achieving a Mean Absolute Error of 15.94. Ablation studies confirm the benefits of pipelining encoder and decoder models, particularly in terms of improved performance.
A diverse Multilingual News Headlines Dataset from around the World
Authors: Felix Leeb, Bernhard Schölkopf
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Babel Briefings is a novel dataset featuring 4.7 million news headlines from August 2020 to November 2021, across 30 languages and 54 locations worldwide with English translations of all articles included. Designed for natural language processing and media studies, it serves as a high-quality dataset for training or evaluating language models as well as offering a simple, accessible collection of articles, for example, to analyze global news coverage and cultural narratives. As a simple demonstration of the analyses facilitated by this dataset, we use a basic procedure using a TF-IDF weighted similarity metric to group articles into clusters about the same event. We then visualize the \emph{event signatures} of the event showing articles of which languages appear over time, revealing intuitive features based on the proximity of the event and unexpectedness of the event. The dataset is available on \href{https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/felixludos/babel-briefings}{Kaggle} and \href{https://huggingface.co/datasets/felixludos/babel-briefings}{HuggingFace} with accompanying \href{https://github.com/felixludos/babel-briefings}{GitHub} code.
Large Language Models Are Struggle to Cope with Unreasonability in Math Problems
Authors: Jingyuan Ma, Damai Dai, Zihang Yuan, Rui Li, Weilin Luo, Bin Wang, Qun Liu, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Recent research have demonstrated LLMs' impressive performance in math and reasoning. However, the capacity of LLMs to address math problems under unconventional conditions, such as internal inconsistencies and flawed assumptions, remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmark Unreasonable Math Problem (UMP) designed to assess LLMs' ability to recognize and respond to unreasonability in math problem. The benchmark consists of a carefully curated collection of unreasonable math questions across diverse types. Based on extensive experiments covering 19 LLMs, we observe that even state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o achieve only limited performance of 0.6 in UMP, while reasoning models such as DeepSeek-R1 are prone to overthinking and unstable. We further explore strategies for improving the recognition of unreasonable inputs, shedding light on both the possibility and limitations of LLMs in this challenging setting.
KazSAnDRA: Kazakh Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Reviews and Attitudes
Authors: Rustem Yeshpanov, Huseyin Atakan Varol
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

This paper presents KazSAnDRA, a dataset developed for Kazakh sentiment analysis that is the first and largest publicly available dataset of its kind. KazSAnDRA comprises an extensive collection of 180,064 reviews obtained from various sources and includes numerical ratings ranging from 1 to 5, providing a quantitative representation of customer attitudes. The study also pursued the automation of Kazakh sentiment classification through the development and evaluation of four machine learning models trained for both polarity classification and score classification. Experimental analysis included evaluation of the results considering both balanced and imbalanced scenarios. The most successful model attained an F1-score of 0.81 for polarity classification and 0.39 for score classification on the test sets. The dataset and fine-tuned models are open access and available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.
TableLLM: Enabling Tabular Data Manipulation by LLMs in Real Office Usage Scenarios
Authors: Xiaokang Zhang, Jing Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Yang Li, Bohan Zhang, Guanlin Li, Zijun Yao, Kangli Xu, Jinchang Zhou, Daniel Zhang-li, Jifan Yu, Shu Zhao, Juanzi Li, Jie Tang
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

We introduce TableLLM, a robust large language model (LLM) with 13 billion parameters, purpose-built for proficiently handling tabular data manipulation tasks, whether they are embedded within documents or spreadsheets, catering to real-world office scenarios. We propose a distant supervision method for training, which comprises a reasoning process extension strategy, aiding in training LLMs to understand reasoning patterns more effectively as well as a cross-way validation strategy, ensuring the quality of the automatically generated data. To evaluate the performance of TableLLM, we have crafted a benchmark tailored to address both document and spreadsheet formats as well as constructed a well-organized evaluation pipeline capable of handling both scenarios. Thorough evaluations underscore the advantages of TableLLM when compared to various existing general-purpose and tabular data-focused LLMs. We have publicly released the model checkpoint, source code, benchmarks, and a web application for user interaction.Our codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/TableLLM/TableLLM.
Beyond Borders: Investigating Cross-Jurisdiction Transfer in Legal Case Summarization
Authors: T. Y. S. S Santosh, Vatsal Venkatkrishna, Saptarshi Ghosh, Matthias Grabmair
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00

Legal professionals face the challenge of managing an overwhelming volume of lengthy judgments, making automated legal case summarization crucial. However, prior approaches mainly focused on training and evaluating these models within the same jurisdiction. In this study, we explore the cross-jurisdictional generalizability of legal case summarization models.Specifically, we explore how to effectively summarize legal cases of a target jurisdiction where reference summaries are not available. In particular, we investigate whether supplementing models with unlabeled target jurisdiction corpus and extractive silver summaries obtained from unsupervised algorithms on target data enhances transfer performance. Our comprehensive study on three datasets from different jurisdictions highlights the role of pre-training in improving transfer performance. We shed light on the pivotal influence of jurisdictional similarity in selecting optimal source datasets for effective transfer. Furthermore, our findings underscore that incorporating unlabeled target data yields improvements in general pre-trained models, with additional gains when silver summaries are introduced. This augmentation is especially valuable when dealing with extractive datasets and scenarios featuring limited alignment between source and target jurisdictions. Our study provides key insights for developing adaptable legal case summarization systems, transcending jurisdictional boundaries.
Going Beyond Word Matching: Syntax Improves In-context Example Selection for Machine Translation
Authors: Chenming Tang, Zhixiang Wang, Yunfang Wu
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Machine Translation, Translation

In-context learning (ICL) is the trending prompting strategy in the era of large language models (LLMs), where a few examples are demonstrated to evoke LLMs' power for a given task. How to select informative examples remains an open issue. Previous works on in-context example selection for machine translation (MT) focus on superficial word-level features while ignoring deep syntax-level knowledge. In this paper, we propose a syntax-based in-context example selection method for MT, by computing the syntactic similarity between dependency trees using Polynomial Distance. In addition, we propose an ensemble strategy combining examples selected by both word-level and syntax-level criteria. Experimental results between English and 6 common languages indicate that syntax can effectively enhancing ICL for MT, obtaining the highest COMET scores on 11 out of 12 translation directions.
Ungrammatical-syntax-based In-context Example Selection for Grammatical Error Correction
Authors: Chenming Tang, Fanyi Qu, Yunfang Wu
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Grammatical Error Correction, In-Context Learning

In the era of large language models (LLMs), in-context learning (ICL) stands out as an effective prompting strategy that explores LLMs' potency across various tasks. However, applying LLMs to grammatical error correction (GEC) is still a challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel ungrammatical-syntax-based in-context example selection strategy for GEC. Specifically, we measure similarity of sentences based on their syntactic structures with diverse algorithms, and identify optimal ICL examples sharing the most similar ill-formed syntax to the test input. Additionally, we carry out a two-stage process to further improve the quality of selection results. On benchmark English GEC datasets, empirical results show that our proposed ungrammatical-syntax-based strategies outperform commonly-used word-matching or semantics-based methods with multiple LLMs. This indicates that for a syntax-oriented task like GEC, paying more attention to syntactic information can effectively boost LLMs' performance. Our code will be publicly available after the publication of this paper.
NaijaHate: Evaluating Hate Speech Detection on Nigerian Twitter Using Representative Data
Authors: Manuel Tonneau, Pedro Vitor Quinta de Castro, Karim Lasri, Ibrahim Farouq, Lakshminarayanan Subramanian, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Samuel P. Fraiberger
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

To address the global issue of online hate, hate speech detection (HSD) systems are typically developed on datasets from the United States, thereby failing to generalize to English dialects from the Majority World. Furthermore, HSD models are often evaluated on non-representative samples, raising concerns about overestimating model performance in real-world settings. In this work, we introduce NaijaHate, the first dataset annotated for HSD which contains a representative sample of Nigerian tweets. We demonstrate that HSD evaluated on biased datasets traditionally used in the literature consistently overestimates real-world performance by at least two-fold. We then propose NaijaXLM-T, a pretrained model tailored to the Nigerian Twitter context, and establish the key role played by domain-adaptive pretraining and finetuning in maximizing HSD performance. Finally, owing to the modest performance of HSD systems in real-world conditions, we find that content moderators would need to review about ten thousand Nigerian tweets flagged as hateful daily to moderate 60% of all hateful content, highlighting the challenges of moderating hate speech at scale as social media usage continues to grow globally. Taken together, these results pave the way towards robust HSD systems and a better protection of social media users from hateful content in low-resource settings.
J-CRe3: A Japanese Conversation Dataset for Real-world Reference Resolution
Authors: Nobuhiro Ueda, Hideko Habe, Yoko Matsui, Akishige Yuguchi, Seiya Kawano, Yasutomo Kawanishi, Sadao Kurohashi, Koichiro Yoshino
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00

Understanding expressions that refer to the physical world is crucial for such human-assisting systems in the real world, as robots that must perform actions that are expected by users. In real-world reference resolution, a system must ground the verbal information that appears in user interactions to the visual information observed in egocentric views. To this end, we propose a multimodal reference resolution task and construct a Japanese Conversation dataset for Real-world Reference Resolution (J-CRe3). Our dataset contains egocentric video and dialogue audio of real-world conversations between two people acting as a master and an assistant robot at home. The dataset is annotated with crossmodal tags between phrases in the utterances and the object bounding boxes in the video frames. These tags include indirect reference relations, such as predicate-argument structures and bridging references as well as direct reference relations. We also constructed an experimental model and clarified the challenges in multimodal reference resolution tasks.
Collaborative Knowledge Infusion for Low-resource Stance Detection
Authors: Ming Yan, Joey Tianyi Zhou, Ivor W. Tsang
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Stance Detection

Stance detection is the view towards a specific target by a given context (\textit{e.g.} tweets, commercial reviews). Target-related knowledge is often needed to assist stance detection models in understanding the target well and making detection correctly. However, prevailing works for knowledge-infused stance detection predominantly incorporate target knowledge from a singular source that lacks knowledge verification in limited domain knowledge. The low-resource training data further increases the challenge for the data-driven large models in this task. To address those challenges, we propose a collaborative knowledge infusion approach for low-resource stance detection tasks, employing a combination of aligned knowledge enhancement and efficient parameter learning techniques. Specifically, our stance detection approach leverages target background knowledge collaboratively from different knowledge sources with the help of knowledge alignment. Additionally, we also introduce the parameter-efficient collaborative adaptor with a staged optimization algorithm, which collaboratively addresses the challenges associated with low-resource stance detection tasks from both network structure and learning perspectives. To assess the effectiveness of our method, we conduct extensive experiments on three public stance detection datasets, including low-resource and cross-target settings. The results demonstrate significant performance improvements compared to the existing stance detection approaches.