pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Project MOSLA: Recording Every Moment of Second Language Acquisition
Authors: Masato Hagiwara, Joshua Tanner
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Acquisition

Second language acquisition (SLA) is a complex and dynamic process. Many SLA studies that have attempted to record and analyze this process have typically focused on a single modality (e.g., textual output of learners), covered only a short period of time, and/or lacked control (e.g., failed to capture every aspect of the learning process). In Project MOSLA (Moments of Second Language Acquisition), we have created a longitudinal, multimodal, multilingual, and controlled dataset by inviting participants to learn one of three target languages (Arabic, Spanish, and Chinese) from scratch over a span of two years, exclusively through online instruction, and recording every lesson using Zoom. The dataset is semi-automatically annotated with speaker/language IDs and transcripts by both human annotators and fine-tuned state-of-the-art speech models. Our experiments reveal linguistic insights into learners' proficiency development over time, as well as the potential for automatically detecting the areas of focus on the screen purely from the unannotated multimodal data. Our dataset is freely available for research purposes and can serve as a valuable resource for a wide range of applications, including but not limited to SLA, proficiency assessment, language and speech processing, pedagogy, and multimodal learning analytics.
HILL: Hierarchy-aware Information Lossless Contrastive Learning for Hierarchical Text Classification
Authors: He Zhu, Junran Wu, Ruomei Liu, Yue Hou, Ze Yuan, Shangzhe Li, YiCheng Pan, Ke Xu
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Document Embedding, Hierarchical Multi-label Classification, Representation Learning, text-classification, Text Classification

Existing self-supervised methods in natural language processing (NLP), especially hierarchical text classification (HTC), mainly focus on self-supervised contrastive learning, extremely relying on human-designed augmentation rules to generate contrastive samples, which can potentially corrupt or distort the original information. In this paper, we tend to investigate the feasibility of a contrastive learning scheme in which the semantic and syntactic information inherent in the input sample is adequately reserved in the contrastive samples and fused during the learning process. Specifically, we propose an information lossless contrastive learning strategy for HTC, namely \textbf{H}ierarchy-aware \textbf{I}nformation \textbf{L}ossless contrastive \textbf{L}earning (HILL), which consists of a text encoder representing the input document, and a structure encoder directly generating the positive sample. The structure encoder takes the document embedding as input, extracts the essential syntactic information inherent in the label hierarchy with the principle of structural entropy minimization, and injects the syntactic information into the text representation via hierarchical representation learning. Experiments on three common datasets are conducted to verify the superiority of HILL.
Decoding Probing: Revealing Internal Linguistic Structures in Neural Language Models using Minimal Pairs
Authors: Linyang He, Peili Chen, Ercong Nie, Yuanning Li, Jonathan R. Brennan
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

Inspired by cognitive neuroscience studies, we introduce a novel `decoding probing' method that uses minimal pairs benchmark (BLiMP) to probe internal linguistic characteristics in neural language models layer by layer. By treating the language model as the `brain' and its representations as `neural activations', we decode grammaticality labels of minimal pairs from the intermediate layers' representations. This approach reveals: 1) Self-supervised language models capture abstract linguistic structures in intermediate layers that GloVe and RNN language models cannot learn. 2) Information about syntactic grammaticality is robustly captured through the first third layers of GPT-2 and also distributed in later layers. As sentence complexity increases, more layers are required for learning grammatical capabilities. 3) Morphological and semantics/syntax interface-related features are harder to capture than syntax. 4) For Transformer-based models, both embeddings and attentions capture grammatical features but show distinct patterns. Different attention heads exhibit similar tendencies toward various linguistic phenomena, but with varied contributions.
Common Ground Tracking in Multimodal Dialogue
Authors: Ibrahim Khebour, Kenneth Lai, Mariah Bradford, Yifan Zhu, Richard Brutti, Christopher Tam, Jingxuan Tu, Benjamin Ibarra, Nathaniel Blanchard, Nikhil Krishnaswamy, James Pustejovsky
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking

Within Dialogue Modeling research in AI and NLP, considerable attention has been spent on ``dialogue state tracking'' (DST), which is the ability to update the representations of the speaker's needs at each turn in the dialogue by taking into account the past dialogue moves and history. Less studied but just as important to dialogue modeling, however, is ``common ground tracking'' (CGT), which identifies the shared belief space held by all of the participants in a task-oriented dialogue: the task-relevant propositions all participants accept as true. In this paper we present a method for automatically identifying the current set of shared beliefs and ``questions under discussion'' (QUDs) of a group with a shared goal. We annotate a dataset of multimodal interactions in a shared physical space with speech transcriptions, prosodic features, gestures, actions, and facets of collaboration, and operationalize these features for use in a deep neural model to predict moves toward construction of common ground. Model outputs cascade into a set of formal closure rules derived from situated evidence and belief axioms and update operations. We empirically assess the contribution of each feature type toward successful construction of common ground relative to ground truth, establishing a benchmark in this novel, challenging task.
Automate Knowledge Concept Tagging on Math Questions with LLMs
Authors: Hang Li, Tianlong Xu, Jiliang Tang, Qingsong Wen
Date: 2024-03-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Math

Knowledge concept tagging for questions plays a crucial role in contemporary intelligent educational applications, including learning progress diagnosis, practice question recommendations, and course content organization. Traditionally, these annotations have been conducted manually with help from pedagogical experts, as the task requires not only a strong semantic understanding of both question stems and knowledge definitions but also deep insights into connecting question-solving logic with corresponding knowledge concepts. In this paper, we explore automating the tagging task using Large Language Models (LLMs), in response to the inability of prior manual methods to meet the rapidly growing demand for concept tagging in questions posed by advanced educational applications. Moreover, the zero/few-shot learning capability of LLMs makes them well-suited for application in educational scenarios, which often face challenges in collecting large-scale, expertise-annotated datasets. By conducting extensive experiments with a variety of representative LLMs, we demonstrate that LLMs are a promising tool for concept tagging in math questions. Furthermore, through case studies examining the results from different LLMs, we draw some empirical conclusions about the key factors for success in applying LLMs to the automatic concept tagging task.
A Hybrid Approach To Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis Using Transfer Learning
Authors: Gaurav Negi, Rajdeep Sarkar, Omnia Zayed, Paul Buitelaar
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, Term Extraction, Transfer Learning

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) aims to identify terms or multiword expressions (MWEs) on which sentiments are expressed and the sentiment polarities associated with them. The development of supervised models has been at the forefront of research in this area. However, training these models requires the availability of manually annotated datasets which is both expensive and time-consuming. Furthermore, the available annotated datasets are tailored to a specific domain, language, and text type. In this work, we address this notable challenge in current state-of-the-art ABSA research. We propose a hybrid approach for Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis using transfer learning. The approach focuses on generating weakly-supervised annotations by exploiting the strengths of both large language models (LLM) and traditional syntactic dependencies. We utilise syntactic dependency structures of sentences to complement the annotations generated by LLMs, as they may overlook domain-specific aspect terms. Extensive experimentation on multiple datasets is performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our hybrid method for the tasks of aspect term extraction and aspect sentiment classification. Keywords: Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis, Syntactic Parsing, large language model (LLM)
SPLICE: A Singleton-Enhanced PipeLIne for Coreference REsolution
Authors: YIlun Zhu, Siyao Peng, Sameer Pradhan, Amir Zeldes
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg, coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, NER

Singleton mentions, i.e.~entities mentioned only once in a text, are important to how humans understand discourse from a theoretical perspective. However previous attempts to incorporate their detection in end-to-end neural coreference resolution for English have been hampered by the lack of singleton mention spans in the OntoNotes benchmark. This paper addresses this limitation by combining predicted mentions from existing nested NER systems and features derived from OntoNotes syntax trees. With this approach, we create a near approximation of the OntoNotes dataset with all singleton mentions, achieving ~94% recall on a sample of gold singletons. We then propose a two-step neural mention and coreference resolution system, named SPLICE, and compare its performance to the end-to-end approach in two scenarios: the OntoNotes test set and the out-of-domain (OOD) OntoGUM corpus. Results indicate that reconstructed singleton training yields results comparable to end-to-end systems for OntoNotes, while improving OOD stability (+1.1 avg. F1). We conduct error analysis for mention detection and delve into its impact on coreference clustering, revealing that precision improvements deliver more substantial benefits than increases in recall for resolving coreference chains.
The Role of $n$-gram Smoothing in the Age of Neural Networks
Authors: Luca Malagutti, Andrius Buinovskij, Anej Svete, Clara Meister, Afra Amini, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation

For nearly three decades, language models derived from the $n$-gram assumption held the state of the art on the task. The key to their success lay in the application of various smoothing techniques that served to combat overfitting. However, when neural language models toppled $n$-gram models as the best performers, $n$-gram smoothing techniques became less relevant. Indeed, it would hardly be an understatement to suggest that the line of inquiry into $n$-gram smoothing techniques became dormant. This paper re-opens the role classical $n$-gram smoothing techniques may play in the age of neural language models. First, we draw a formal equivalence between label smoothing, a popular regularization technique for neural language models, and add-$\lambda$ smoothing. Second, we derive a generalized framework for converting any $n$-gram smoothing technique into a regularizer compatible with neural language models. Our empirical results find that our novel regularizers are comparable to and, indeed, sometimes outperform label smoothing on language modeling and machine translation.
Making Sentence Embeddings Robust to User-Generated Content
Authors: Lydia Nishimwe, Benoît Sagot, Rachel Bawden
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings

NLP models have been known to perform poorly on user-generated content (UGC), mainly because it presents a lot of lexical variations and deviates from the standard texts on which most of these models were trained. In this work, we focus on the robustness of LASER, a sentence embedding model, to UGC data. We evaluate this robustness by LASER's ability to represent non-standard sentences and their standard counterparts close to each other in the embedding space. Inspired by previous works extending LASER to other languages and modalities, we propose RoLASER, a robust English encoder trained using a teacher-student approach to reduce the distances between the representations of standard and UGC sentences. We show that with training only on standard and synthetic UGC-like data, RoLASER significantly improves LASER's robustness to both natural and artificial UGC data by achieving up to 2x and 11x better scores. We also perform a fine-grained analysis on artificial UGC data and find that our model greatly outperforms LASER on its most challenging UGC phenomena such as keyboard typos and social media abbreviations. Evaluation on downstream tasks shows that RoLASER performs comparably to or better than LASER on standard data, while consistently outperforming it on UGC data.
Ontology Completion with Natural Language Inference and Concept Embeddings: An Analysis
Authors: Na Li, Thomas Bailleux, Zied Bouraoui, Steven Schockaert
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Taxonomy Expansion

We consider the problem of finding plausible knowledge that is missing from a given ontology, as a generalisation of the well-studied taxonomy expansion task. One line of work treats this task as a Natural Language Inference (NLI) problem, thus relying on the knowledge captured by language models to identify the missing knowledge. Another line of work uses concept embeddings to identify what different concepts have in common, taking inspiration from cognitive models for category based induction. These two approaches are intuitively complementary, but their effectiveness has not yet been compared. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for evaluating ontology completion methods and thoroughly analyse the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches. We find that both approaches are indeed complementary, with hybrid strategies achieving the best overall results. We also find that the task is highly challenging for Large Language Models, even after fine-tuning.
Extracting Social Support and Social Isolation Information from Clinical Psychiatry Notes: Comparing a Rule-based NLP System and a Large Language Model
Authors: Braja Gopal Patra, Lauren A. Lepow, Praneet Kasi Reddy Jagadeesh Kumar, Veer Vekaria, Mohit Manoj Sharma, Prakash Adekkanattu, Brian Fennessy, Gavin Hynes, Isotta Landi, Jorge A. Sanchez-Ruiz, Euijung Ryu, Joanna M. Biernacka, Girish N. Nadkarni, Ardesheer Talati, Myrna Weissman, Mark Olfson, J. John Mann, Alexander W. Charney, Jyotishman Pathak
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Background: Social support (SS) and social isolation (SI) are social determinants of health (SDOH) associated with psychiatric outcomes. In electronic health records (EHRs), individual-level SS/SI is typically documented as narrative clinical notes rather than structured coded data. Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms can automate the otherwise labor-intensive process of data extraction. Data and Methods: Psychiatric encounter notes from Mount Sinai Health System (MSHS, n=300) and Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM, n=225) were annotated and established a gold standard corpus. A rule-based system (RBS) involving lexicons and a large language model (LLM) using FLAN-T5-XL were developed to identify mentions of SS and SI and their subcategories (e.g., social network, instrumental support, and loneliness). Results: For extracting SS/SI, the RBS obtained higher macro-averaged f-scores than the LLM at both MSHS (0.89 vs. 0.65) and WCM (0.85 vs. 0.82). For extracting subcategories, the RBS also outperformed the LLM at both MSHS (0.90 vs. 0.62) and WCM (0.82 vs. 0.81). Discussion and Conclusion: Unexpectedly, the RBS outperformed the LLMs across all metrics. Intensive review demonstrates that this finding is due to the divergent approach taken by the RBS and LLM. The RBS were designed and refined to follow the same specific rules as the gold standard annotations. Conversely, the LLM were more inclusive with categorization and conformed to common English-language understanding. Both approaches offer advantages and are made available open-source for future testing.
Text Understanding in GPT-4 vs Humans
Authors: Thomas R. Shultz, Jamie M. Wise, Ardavan Salehi Nobandegani
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Reading Comprehension

We examine whether a leading AI system GPT4 understands text as well as humans do, first using a well-established standardized test of discourse comprehension. On this test, GPT4 performs slightly, but not statistically significantly, better than humans given the very high level of human performance. Both GPT4 and humans make correct inferences about information that is not explicitly stated in the text, a critical test of understanding. Next, we use more difficult passages to determine whether that could allow larger differences between GPT4 and humans. GPT4 does considerably better on this more difficult text than do the high school and university students for whom these the text passages are designed, as admission tests of student reading comprehension. Deeper exploration of GPT4 performance on material from one of these admission tests reveals generally accepted signatures of genuine understanding, namely generalization and inference.
Reflecting the Male Gaze: Quantifying Female Objectification in 19th and 20th Century Novels
Authors: Kexin Luo, Yue Mao, Bei Zhang, Sophie Hao
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00

Inspired by the concept of the male gaze (Mulvey, 1975) in literature and media studies, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing gender bias in terms of female objectification: the extent to which a text portrays female individuals as objects of visual pleasure. Our framework measures female objectification along two axes. First, we compute an agency bias score that indicates whether male entities are more likely to appear in the text as grammatical agents than female entities. Next, by analyzing the word embedding space induced by a text (Caliskan et al., 2017), we compute an appearance bias score that indicates whether female entities are more closely associated with appearance-related words than male entities. Applying our framework to 19th and 20th century novels reveals evidence of female objectification in literature: we find that novels written from a male perspective systematically objectify female characters, while novels written from a female perspective do not exhibit statistically significant objectification of any gender.
Task-Agnostic Detector for Insertion-Based Backdoor Attacks
Authors: Weimin Lyu, Xiao Lin, Songzhu Zheng, Lu Pang, Haibin Ling, Susmit Jha, Chao Chen
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Question Answering, Sentence, Sentence Classification

Textual backdoor attacks pose significant security threats. Current detection approaches, typically relying on intermediate feature representation or reconstructing potential triggers, are task-specific and less effective beyond sentence classification, struggling with tasks like question answering and named entity recognition. We introduce TABDet (Task-Agnostic Backdoor Detector), a pioneering task-agnostic method for backdoor detection. TABDet leverages final layer logits combined with an efficient pooling technique, enabling unified logit representation across three prominent NLP tasks. TABDet can jointly learn from diverse task-specific models, demonstrating superior detection efficacy over traditional task-specific methods.
Outcome-Constrained Large Language Models for Countering Hate Speech
Authors: Lingzi Hong, Pengcheng Luo, Eduardo Blanco, Xiaoying Song
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Text Generation

Automatic counterspeech generation methods have been developed to assist efforts in combating hate speech. Existing research focuses on generating counterspeech with linguistic attributes such as being polite, informative, and intent-driven. However, the real impact of counterspeech in online environments is seldom considered. This study aims to develop methods for generating counterspeech constrained by conversation outcomes and evaluate their effectiveness. We experiment with large language models (LLMs) to incorporate into the text generation process two desired conversation outcomes: low conversation incivility and non-hateful hater reentry. Specifically, we experiment with instruction prompts, LLM finetuning, and LLM reinforcement learning (RL). Evaluation results show that our methods effectively steer the generation of counterspeech toward the desired outcomes. Our analyses, however, show that there are differences in the quality and style depending on the model.
Attribute First, then Generate: Locally-attributable Grounded Text Generation
Authors: Aviv Slobodkin, Eran Hirsch, Arie Cattan, Tal Schuster, Ido Dagan
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Document Summarization, Fact Checking, Fact Verification, Long Form Question Answering, Multi-Document Summarization, Question Answering, Sentence, Text Generation

Recent efforts to address hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) have focused on attributed text generation, which supplements generated texts with citations of supporting sources for post-generation fact-checking and corrections. Yet, these citations often point to entire documents or paragraphs, burdening users with extensive verification work. In this paper, we introduce a locally-attributable text generation approach, prioritizing concise attributions. Our method, named "Attribute First, then Generate", breaks down the conventional end-to-end generation process into three intuitive steps: content selection, sentence planning, and sequential sentence generation. By initially identifying relevant source segments ("select first") and then conditioning the generation process on them ("then generate"), we ensure these segments also act as the output's fine-grained attributions ("select" becomes "attribute"). Tested on Multi-document Summarization and Long-form Question-answering, our method not only yields more concise citations than the baselines but also maintains - and in some cases enhances - both generation quality and attribution accuracy. Furthermore, it significantly reduces the time required for fact verification by human assessors.