ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
NarrativeXL: a Large-scale Dataset for Long-Term Memory Models (2023)

We propose a new large-scale (nearly a million questions) ultra-long-context (more than 50,000 words average document length) reading comprehension dataset. Using GPT 3.5, we summarized each scene in 1,500 hand-curated fiction books from Project Gutenberg, which resulted in approximately 150 scene-level summaries per book. After that, we created a number of reading comprehension questions based on these summaries, including three types of multiple-choice scene recognition questions, as well as free-form narrative reconstruction questions. With 990,595 total questions, our dataset is an order of magnitude larger than the closest alternatives. Crucially, most questions have a known {\textquotedblleft}retention demand{\textquotedblright}, indicating how long-term of a memory is needed to answer them, which should aid long-term memory performance evaluation. We validate our data in four small-scale experiments: one with human labelers, and three with existing language models. We show that our questions 1) adequately represent the source material 2) can be used to diagnose a model`s memory capacity 3) are not trivial for modern language models even when the memory demand does not exceed those models' context lengths. Lastly, we provide our code which can be used to further expand the dataset with minimal human labor.
Dialogue Act-Aided Backchannel Prediction Using Multi-Task Learning (2023)

Produced in the form of small injections such as {\textquotedblleft}Yeah!{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}Uh-Huh{\textquotedblright} by listeners in a conversation, supportive verbal feedback (i.e., backchanneling) is essential for natural dialogue. Highlighting its tight relation to speaker intent and utterance type, we propose a multi-task learning approach that learns textual representations for the task of backchannel prediction in tandem with dialogue act classification. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by improving the prediction of specific backchannels like {\textquotedblleft}Yeah{\textquotedblright} or {\textquotedblleft}Really?{\textquotedblright} by up to 2.0{\%} in F1. Additionally, whereas previous models relied on well-established methods to extract audio features, we further pre-train the audio encoder in a self-supervised fashion using voice activity projection. This leads to additional gains of 1.4{\%} in weighted F1.
mReFinED: An Efficient End-to-End Multilingual Entity Linking System (2023)

End-to-end multilingual entity linking (MEL) is concerned with identifying multilingual entity mentions and their corresponding entity IDs in a knowledge base. Existing works assumed that entity mentions were given and skipped the entity mention detection step due to a lack of high-quality multilingual training corpora. To overcome this limitation, we propose mReFinED, the first end-to-end multilingual entity linking. Additionally, we propose a bootstrapping mention detection framework that enhances the quality of training corpora. Our experimental results demonstrated that mReFinED outperformed the best existing work in the end-to-end MEL task while being 44 times faster.
Sub-network Discovery and Soft-masking for Continual Learning of Mixed Tasks (2023)

Continual learning (CL) has two main objectives: preventing catastrophic forgetting (CF) and encouraging knowledge transfer (KT). The existing literature mainly focused on overcoming CF. Some work has also been done on KT when the tasks are similar. To our knowledge, only one method has been proposed to learn a sequence of mixed tasks. However, these techniques still suffer from CF and/or limited KT. This paper proposes a new CL method to achieve both. It overcomes CF by isolating the knowledge of each task via discovering a sub-network for it. A soft-masking mechanism is also proposed to preserve the previous knowledge and to enable the new task to leverage the past knowledge to achieve KT. Experiments using classification, generation, information extraction, and their mixture (i.e., heterogeneous tasks) show that the proposed method consistently outperforms strong baselines.
PIVOINE: Instruction Tuning for Open-world Entity Profiling (2023)

This work considers the problem of Open-world Entity Profiling, a sub-domain of Open-world Information Extraction (Open-world IE). Unlike the conventional closed-world IE, Open-world IE is considered a more general situation where entities and relations could be beyond a predefined ontology. We seek to develop a large language model (LLM) that can perform Open-world Entity Profiling with instruction tuning to extract desirable entity profiles characterized by (possibly fine-grained) natural language instructions. In particular, we construct INSTRUCTOPENWIKI, a substantial instruction-tuning dataset for Open-world Entity Profiling enriched with a comprehensive corpus, extensive annotations, and diverse instructions. We finetune pretrained BLOOM models on INSTRUCTOPENWIKI and obtain PIVOINE, an LLM for Open-world Entity Profiling with strong instruction-following capabilities. Our experiments demonstrate that PIVOINE significantly outperforms traditional methods and ChatGPT-based baselines, displaying impressive generalization capabilities on both unseen instructions and out-of-ontology cases. Consequently, PIVOINE emerges as a promising solution to tackle the open-world challenge of entity profiling.
DiQAD: A Benchmark Dataset for Open-domain Dialogue Quality Assessment (2023)

Dialogue assessment plays a critical role in the development of open-domain dialogue systems. Existing work are uncapable of providing an end-to-end and human-epistemic assessment dataset, while they only provide sub-metrics like coherence or the dialogues are conversed between annotators far from real user settings. In this paper, we release a large-scale dialogue quality assessment dataset (DiQAD), for automatically assessing open-domain dialogue quality. Specifically, we (1) establish the assessment criteria based on the dimensions conforming to human judgements on dialogue qualities, and (2) annotate large-scale dialogues that conversed between real users based on these annotation criteria, which contains around 100,000 dialogues. We conduct several experiments and report the performances of the baselines as the benchmark on DiQAD. The dataset is openly accessible at \url{https://github.com/yukunZhao/Dataset_Dialogue_quality_evaluation}.
Tuna: Instruction Tuning using Feedback from Large Language Models (2023)

Instruction tuning of open-source large language models (LLMs) like LLaMA, using direct outputs from more powerful LLMs such as Instruct-GPT and GPT-4, has proven to be a cost-effective way to align model behaviors with human preferences. However, the instruction-tuned model has only seen one response per instruction, lacking the knowledge of potentially better responses. In this paper, we propose finetuning an instruction-tuned LLM using our novel probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking approaches to increase the likelihood of generating better responses. Probabilistic ranking enables the instruction-tuned model to inherit the relative rankings of high-quality and low-quality responses from the teacher LLM. On the other hand, learning with contextual ranking allows the model to refine its own response distribution using the contextual understanding ability of stronger LLMs. Furthermore, we apply probabilistic ranking and contextual ranking sequentially to the instruction-tuned LLM. The resulting model, which we call Tuna, consistently improves the performance on Super Natural Instructions (119 test tasks), LMentry (25 test tasks), Vicuna QA, and can even obtain better results than several strong reinforcement learning baselines. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/microsoft/LMOps.
Emptying the Ocean with a Spoon: Should We Edit Models? (2023)

We call into question the recently popularized method of direct model editing as a means of correcting factual errors in LLM generations. We contrast model editing with three similar but distinct approaches that pursue better defined objectives: (1) retrieval-based architectures, which decouple factual memory from inference and linguistic capabilities embodied in LLMs; (2) concept erasure methods, which aim at preventing systemic bias in generated text; and (3) attribution methods, which aim at grounding generations into identified textual sources. We argue that direct model editing cannot be trusted as a systematic remedy for the disadvantages inherent to LLMs, and while it has proven potential in improving model explainability, it opens risks by reinforcing the notion that models can be trusted for factuality. We call for cautious promotion and application of model editing as part of the LLM deployment process, and for responsibly limiting the use cases of LLMs to those not relying on editing as a critical component.
A Causal View of Entity Bias in (Large) Language Models (2023)

Entity bias widely affects pretrained (large) language models, causing them to rely on (biased) parametric knowledge to make unfaithful predictions. Although causality-inspired methods have shown great potential to mitigate entity bias, it is hard to precisely estimate the parameters of underlying causal models in practice. The rise of black-box LLMs also makes the situation even worse, because of their inaccessible parameters and uncalibrated logits. To address these problems, we propose a specific structured causal model (SCM) whose parameters are comparatively easier to estimate. Building upon this SCM, we propose causal intervention techniques to mitigate entity bias for both white-box and black-box settings. The proposed causal intervention perturbs the original entity with neighboring entities. This intervention reduces specific biasing information pertaining to the original entity while still preserving sufficient semantic information from similar entities. Under the white-box setting, our training-time intervention improves OOD performance of PLMs on relation extraction (RE) and machine reading comprehension (MRC) by 5.7 points and by 9.1 points, respectively. Under the black-box setting, our in-context intervention effectively reduces the entity-based knowledge conflicts of GPT-3.5, achieving up to 20.5 points of improvement of exact match accuracy on MRC and up to 17.6 points of reduction in memorization ratio on RE.
T5Score: Discriminative Fine-tuning of Generative Evaluation Metrics (2023)

Modern embedding-based metrics for evaluation of generated text generally fall into one of two paradigms: discriminative metrics that are trained to directly predict which outputs are of higher quality according to supervised human annotations, and generative metrics that are trained to evaluate text based on the probabilities of a generative model. Both have their advantages; discriminative metrics are able to directly optimize for the problem of distinguishing between good and bad outputs, while generative metrics can be trained using abundant raw text. In this paper, we present a framework that combines the best of both worlds, using both supervised and unsupervised signals from whatever data we have available. We operationalize this idea by training T5Score, a metric that uses these training signals with mT5 as backbone. We perform an extensive empirical comparison with other existing metrics on 5 datasets, 19 languages and 280 systems, demonstrating the utility of our method. Experimental results show that: T5Score achieves the best performance on all datasets against existing top-scoring metrics at the segment level.
T-Projection: High Quality Annotation Projection for Sequence Labeling Tasks (2023)

In the absence of readily available labeled data for a given sequence labeling task and language, annotation projection has been proposed as one of the possible strategies to automatically generate annotated data. Annotation projection has often been formulated as the task of transporting, on parallel corpora, the labels pertaining to a given span in the source language into its corresponding span in the target language. In this paper we present T-Projection, a novel approach for annotation projection that leverages large pretrained text2text language models and state-of-the-art machine translation technology. T-Projection decomposes the label projection task into two subtasks: (i) A candidate generation step, in which a set of projection candidates using a multilingual T5 model is generated and, (ii) a candidate selection step, in which the generated candidates are ranked based on translation probabilities. We conducted experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic tasks in 5 Indo-European and 8 low-resource African languages. We demostrate that T-projection outperforms previous annotation projection methods by a wide margin. We believe that T-Projection can help to automatically alleviate the lack of high-quality training data for sequence labeling tasks. Code and data are publicly available.
MTGER: Multi-view Temporal Graph Enhanced Temporal Reasoning over Time-Involved Document (2023)

The facts and time in the document are intricately intertwined, making temporal reasoning over documents challenging. Previous work models time implicitly, making it difficult to handle such complex relationships. To address this issue, we propose MTGER, a novel Multi-view Temporal Graph Enhanced Reasoning framework for temporal reasoning over time-involved documents. Concretely, MTGER explicitly models the temporal relationships among facts by multi-view temporal graphs. On the one hand, the heterogeneous temporal graphs explicitly model the temporal and discourse relationships among facts; on the other hand, the multi-view mechanism captures both time-focused and fact-focused information, allowing the two views to complement each other through adaptive fusion. To further improve the implicit reasoning capability of the model, we design a self-supervised time-comparing objective. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on the TimeQA and SituatedQA datasets. Furthermore, MTGER gives more consistent answers under question perturbations.
MSCFFN: A New FFN with Multi-Space Cross to Accelerate Transformer (2023)

Transformer models have achieved impressive success in various natural language processing tasks. But it is also limited used in some areas and the heavy computation complexity is one of the main limitations. Many model structures have been proposed to reduce the computation complexity and some are really effective. The previous research can be divided into two categories. One is to use more effective training and inference strategies and the other is focused on how to replace the standard self-attention mechanism with linear attention method. Differently, we revisit the design in Transformer and find that the feed forward network (FFN) is also computationally expensive, especially when the hidden dimension is large. In this paper, we propose a new FFN structure, named MSCFFN, which splits the large matrix space to several small space to reduce the computation complexity and uses the Multi-Space Cross method to ensure the accurate result. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time to redesign FFN to accelerate Transformers. We experimentally validate the effectiveness of the proposed method on the Long-Range Arena benchmark. And the results show MSCFFN can achieve a faster speed with a similar or even better accuracy.
Dialect Transfer for Swiss German Speech Translation (2023)

This paper investigates the challenges in building Swiss German speech translation systems, specifically focusing on the impact of dialect diversity and differences between Swiss German and Standard German. Swiss German is a spoken language with no formal writing system, it comprises many diverse dialects and is a low-resource language with only around 5 million speakers. The study is guided by two key research questions: how does the inclusion and exclusion of dialects during the training of speech translation models for Swiss German impact the performance on specific dialects, and how do the differences between Swiss German and Standard German impact the performance of the systems? We show that dialect diversity and linguistic differences pose significant challenges to Swiss German speech translation, which is in line with linguistic hypotheses derived from empirical investigations.
Masked Path Modeling for Vision-and-Language Navigation (2023)

Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents are trained to navigate in real-world environments based on natural language instructions. A major challenge in VLN is the limited available training data, which hinders the models' ability to generalize effectively. Previous approaches have attempted to alleviate this issue by using external tools to generate pseudo-labeled data or integrating web-scaled image-text pairs during training. However, these methods often rely on automatically-generated or out-of-domain data, leading to challenges such as suboptimal data quality and domain mismatch. In this paper, we introduce a masked path modeling (MPM) objective. MPM pretrains an agent using self-collected data for subsequent navigation tasks, eliminating the need for external tools. Specifically, our method allows the agent to explore navigation environments and record the paths it traverses alongside the corresponding agent actions. Subsequently, we train the agent on this collected data to reconstruct the original action sequence when given a randomly masked subsequence of the original path. This approach enables the agent to accumulate a diverse and substantial dataset, facilitating the connection between visual observations of paths and the agent`s actions, which is the foundation of the VLN task. Importantly, the collected data are in-domain, and the training process avoids synthetic data with uncertain quality, addressing previous issues. We conduct experiments on various VLN datasets and demonstrate the applications of MPM across different levels of instruction complexity. Our results exhibit significant improvements in success rates, with enhancements of 1.3{\%}, 1.1{\%}, and 1.2{\%} on the val-unseen split of the Room-to-Room, Room-for-Room, and Room-across-Room datasets, respectively. Additionally, we underscore the adaptability of MPM as well as the potential for additional improvements when the agent is allowed to explore unseen environments prior to testing.
Learning Interpretable Style Embeddings via Prompting LLMs (2023)

Style representation learning builds content-independent representations of author style in text. To date, no large dataset of texts with stylometric annotations on a wide range of style dimensions has been compiled, perhaps because the linguistic expertise to perform such annotation would be prohibitively expensive. Therefore, current style representation approaches make use of unsupervised neural methods to disentangle style from content to create style vectors. These approaches, however, result in uninterpretable representations, complicating their usage in downstream applications like authorship attribution where auditing and explainability is critical. In this work, we use prompting to perform stylometry on a large number of texts to generate a synthetic stylometry dataset. We use this synthetic data to then train human-interpretable style representations we call LISA embeddings. We release our synthetic dataset (StyleGenome) and our interpretable style embedding model (LISA) as resources.
Exploring Context-Aware Evaluation Metrics for Machine Translation (2023)

Previous studies on machine translation evaluation mostly focused on the quality of individual sentences, while overlooking the important role of contextual information. Although WMT Metrics Shared Tasks have introduced context content into the human annotations of translation evaluation since 2019, the relevant metrics and methods still did not take advantage of the corresponding context. In this paper, we propose a context-aware machine translation evaluation metric called Cont-COMET, built upon the effective COMET framework. Our approach simultaneously considers the preceding and subsequent contexts of the sentence to be evaluated and trains our metric to be aligned with the setting during human annotation. We also introduce a content selection method to extract and utilize the most relevant information. The experiments and evaluation of Cont-COMET on the official test framework from WMT show improvements in both system-level and segment-level assessments.
GRACE: Discriminator-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning (2023)

In the context of multi-step reasoning, e.g., with chain-of-thought, language models (LMs) can easily assign a high likelihood to incorrect steps. As a result, decoding strategies that optimize for solution likelihood often yield incorrect solutions. To address this issue, we propose Guiding chain-of-thought ReAsoning with a CorrectnEss Discriminator (GRACE), a stepwise decoding approach that steers the decoding process towards producing correct reasoning steps. GRACE employs a discriminator trained with a contrastive loss over correct and incorrect steps, which is used during decoding to score next-step candidates based on their correctness. Importantly, GRACE only requires sampling from the LM, without the need for LM training or fine-tuning. Using models from FLAN-T5 and LLaMA families, we evaluate GRACE over four math and two symbolic reasoning tasks, where it exhibits substantial performance gains compared to greedy decoding, verifiers, and self-consistency in most settings. When further combined with self-consistency, GRACE outperforms all the baselines by sizeable margins. Human and LLM evaluations over GSM8K show that GRACE not only improves the final answer accuracy but also the correctness of the intermediate reasoning.
QADYNAMICS: Training Dynamics-Driven Synthetic QA Diagnostic for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering (2023)

Zero-shot commonsense Question-Answering (QA) requires models to reason about general situations beyond specific benchmarks. State-of-the-art approaches fine-tune language models on QA pairs constructed from CommonSense Knowledge Bases (CSKBs) to equip the models with more commonsense knowledge in a QA context. However, current QA synthesis protocols may introduce noise from the CSKBs and generate ungrammatical questions and false negative options, which impede the model`s ability to generalize. To address these issues, we propose QADYNAMICS, a training dynamics-driven framework for QA diagnostics and refinement. Our approach analyzes the training dynamics of each QA pair at both the question level and option level, discarding machine-detectable artifacts by removing uninformative QA pairs and mislabeled or false-negative options. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms all baselines while using only 33{\%} of the synthetic data, even including LLMs such as ChatGPT. Moreover, expert evaluations confirm that our framework significantly improves the quality of QA synthesis. Our code and model checkpoints are available at https://github.com/HKUST-KnowComp/QaDynamics.