ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Images Speak Volumes: User-Centric Assessment of Image Generation for Accessible Communication (2024)

Explanatory images play a pivotal role in accessible and easy-to-read (E2R) texts. However, the images available in online databases are not tailored toward the respective texts, and the creation of customized images is expensive. In this large-scale study, we investigated whether text-to-image generation models can close this gap by providing customizable images quickly and easily. We benchmarked seven, four open- and three closed-source, image generation models and provide an extensive evaluation of the resulting images. In addition, we performed a user study with people from the E2R target group to examine whether the images met their requirements. We find that some of the models show remarkable performance, but none of the models are ready to be used at a larger scale without human supervision. Our research is an important step toward facilitating the creation of accessible information for E2R creators and tailoring accessible images to the target group`s needs.
Cochrane-auto: An Aligned Dataset for the Simplification of Biomedical Abstracts (2024)

The most reliable and up-to-date information on health questions is in the biomedical literature, but inaccessible due to the complex language full of jargon. Domain specific scientific text simplification holds the promise to make this literature accessible to a lay audience. Therefore, we create Cochrane-auto: a large corpus of pairs of aligned sentences, paragraphs, and abstracts from biomedical abstracts and lay summaries. Experiments demonstrate that a plan-guided simplification system trained on Cochrane-auto is able to outperform a strong baseline trained on unaligned abstracts and lay summaries. More generally, our freely available corpus complementing Newsela-auto and Wiki-auto facilitates text simplification research beyond the sentence-level and direct lexical and grammatical revisions.
Considering Human Interaction and Variability in Automatic Text Simplification (2024)

Research into automatic text simplification aims to promote access to information for all members of society. To facilitate generalizability, simplification research often abstracts away from specific use cases, and targets a prototypical reader and an underspecified content creator. In this paper, we consider a real-world use case {--} simplification technology for use in Dutch municipalities {--} and identify the needs of the content creators and the target audiences in this use case. The stakeholders envision a system that (a) assists the human writer without taking over the task; (b) can provide diverse alternative outputs, tailored for specific target audiences; and (c) can explain and motivate the suggestions that it outputs. These requirements call for technology that is characterized by modularity, explainability, and variability. We believe that these are important research directions that require further exploration.
Society of Medical Simplifiers (2024)

Medical text simplification is crucial for making complex biomedical literature more accessible to non-experts. Traditional methods struggle with the specialized terms and jargon of medical texts, lacking the flexibility to adapt the simplification process dynamically. In contrast, recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) present unique opportunities by offering enhanced control over text simplification through iterative refinement and collaboration between specialized agents. In this work, we introduce the Society of Medical Simplifiers, a novel LLM-based framework inspired by the {\textquotedblleft}Society of Mind{\textquotedblright} (SOM) philosophy. Our approach leverages the strengths of LLMs by assigning five distinct roles, i.e., Layperson, Simplifier, Medical Expert, Language Clarifier, and Redundancy Checker, organized into interaction loops. This structure allows the agents to progressively improve text simplification while maintaining the complexity and accuracy of the original content. Evaluations on the Cochrane text simplification dataset demonstrate that our framework is on par with or outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving superior readability and content preservation through controlled simplification processes.
Difficult for Whom? A Study of Japanese Lexical Complexity (2024)

The tasks of lexical complexity prediction (LCP) and complex word identification (CWI) commonly presuppose that difficult-to-understand words are shared by the target population. Meanwhile, personalization methods have also been proposed to adapt models to individual needs. We verify that a recent Japanese LCP dataset is representative of its target population by partially replicating the annotation. By another reannotation we show that native Chinese speakers perceive the complexity differently due to Sino-Japanese vocabulary. To explore the possibilities of personalization, we compare competitive baselines trained on the group mean ratings and individual ratings in terms of performance for an individual. We show that the model trained on a group mean performs similarly to an individual model in the CWI task, while achieving good LCP performance for an individual is difficult. We also experiment with adapting a finetuned BERT model, which results only in marginal improvements across all settings.
Lexical Complexity Prediction and Lexical Simplification for Catalan and Spanish: Resource Creation, Quality Assessment, and Ethical Considerations (2024)

Automatic lexical simplification is a task to substitute lexical items that may be unfamiliar and difficult to understand with easier and more common words. This paper presents the description and analysis of two novel datasets for lexical simplification in Spanish and Catalan. This dataset represents the first of its kind in Catalan and a substantial addition to the sparse data on automatic lexical simplification which is available for Spanish. Specifically, it is the first dataset for Spanish which includes scalar ratings of the understanding difficulty of lexical items. In addition, we present a detailed analysis aiming at assessing the appropriateness and ethical dimensions of the data for the lexical simplification task.
SciGisPy: a Novel Metric for Biomedical Text Simplification via Gist Inference Score (2024)

Biomedical literature is often written in highly specialized language, posing significant comprehension challenges for non-experts. Automatic text simplification (ATS) offers a solution by making such texts more accessible while preserving critical information. However, evaluating ATS for biomedical texts is still challenging due to the limitations of existing evaluation metrics. General-domain metrics like SARI, BLEU, and ROUGE focus on surface-level text features, and readability metrics like FKGL and ARI fail to account for domain-specific terminology or assess how well the simplified text conveys core meanings (gist). To address this, we introduce SciGisPy, a novel evaluation metric inspired by Gist Inference Score (GIS) from Fuzzy-Trace Theory (FTT). SciGisPy measures how well a simplified text facilitates the formation of abstract inferences (gist) necessary for comprehension, especially in the biomedical domain. We revise GIS for this purpose by introducing domain-specific enhancements, including semantic chunking, Information Content (IC) theory, and specialized embeddings, while removing unsuitable indexes. Our experimental evaluation on the Cochrane biomedical text simplification dataset demonstrates that SciGisPy outperforms the original GIS formulation, with a significant increase in correctly identified simplified texts (84{\%} versus 44.8{\%}). The results and a thorough ablation study confirm that SciGisPy better captures the essential meaning of biomedical content, outperforming existing approaches.
EASSE-DE \& EASSE-multi: Easier Automatic Sentence Simplification Evaluation for German \& Multiple Languages (2024)

In this work, we propose EASSE-multi, a framework for easier automatic sentence evaluation for languages other than English. Compared to the original EASSE framework, EASSE-multi does not focus only on English.It contains tokenizers and versions of text simplification evaluation metrics which are suitable for multiple languages. In this paper, we exemplify the usage of EASSE-multi for German TS resulting in EASSE-DE. Further, we compare text simplification results when evaluating with different language or tokenization settings of the metrics. Based on this, we formulate recommendations on how to make the evaluation of (German) TS models more transparent and better comparable. Additionally, we present a benchmark on German TS evaluated with EASSE-DE and make its resources (i.e., test sets, system outputs, and evaluation reports) available. The code of EASSE-multi and its German specialisation (EASSE-DE) can be found at https://github.com/rstodden/easse-multi and https://github.com/rstodden/easse-de.
Evaluating the Simplification of Brazilian Legal Rulings in LLMs Using Readability Scores as a Target (2024)

Legal documents are often characterized by complex language, including jargon and technical terms, making them challenging for Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications. We apply the readability-controlled text modification task with an emphasis on legal texts simplification. Additionally, our work explores an evaluation based on the comparison of word complexity in the documents using Zipf scale, demonstrating the models' ability to simplify text according to the target readability scores, while also identifying a limit to this capability. Our results with Llama-3 and Sabi{\'a}-2 show that while the complexity score decreases with higher readability targets, there is a trade-off with reduced semantic similarity.
Measuring and Modifying the Readability of English Texts with GPT-4 (2024)

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) in other domains has raised the question of whether LLMs can reliably assess and manipulate the readability of text. We approach this question empirically. First, using a published corpus of 4,724 English text excerpts, we find that readability estimates produced {\textquotedblleft}zero-shot{\textquotedblright} from GPT-4 Turbo and GPT-4o mini exhibit relatively high correlation with human judgments (r = 0.76 and r = 0.74, respectively), out-performing estimates derived from traditional readability formulas and various psycholinguistic indices. Then, in a pre-registered human experiment (N = 59), we ask whether Turbo can reliably make text easier or harder to read. We find evidence to support this hypothesis, though considerable variance in human judgments remains unexplained. We conclude by discussing the limitations of this approach, including limited scope, as well as the validity of the {\textquotedblleft}readability{\textquotedblright} construct and its dependence on context, audience, and goal.
Beyond Turing: A Comparative Analysis of Approaches for Detecting Machine-Generated Text (2024)

Significant progress has been made on text generation by pre-trained language models (PLMs), yet distinguishing between human and machine-generated text poses an escalating challenge. This paper offers an in-depth evaluation of three distinct methods used to address this task: traditional shallow learning, Language Model (LM) fine-tuning, and Multilingual Model fine-tuning. These approaches are rigorously tested on a wide range of machine-generated texts, providing a benchmark of their competence in distinguishing between human-authored and machine-authored linguistic constructs. The results reveal considerable differences in performance across methods, thus emphasizing the continued need for advancement in this crucial area of NLP. This study offers valuable insights and paves the way for future research aimed at creating robust and highly discriminative models.
Automated Adversarial Discovery for Safety Classifiers (2024)

Safety classifiers are critical in mitigating toxicity on online forums such as social media and in chatbots. Still, they continue to be vulnerable to emergent, and often innumerable, adversarial attacks.Traditional automated adversarial data generation methods, however, tend to produce attacks that are not diverse, but variations of previously observed harm types.We formalize the task of automated adversarial discovery for safety classifiers - to find new attacks along previously unseen harm dimensions that expose new weaknesses in the classifier.We measure progress on this task along two key axes (1) adversarial success: does the attack fool the classifier? and (2) dimensional diversity: does the attack represent a previously unseen harm type?Our evaluation of existing attack generation methods on the CivilComments toxicity task reveals their limitations: Word perturbation attacks fail to fool classifiers, while prompt-based LLM attacks have more adversarial success, but lack dimensional diversity.Even our best-performing prompt-based method finds new successful attacks on unseen harm dimensions of attacks only 5{\%} of the time.Automatically finding new harmful dimensions of attack is crucial and there is substantial headroom for future research on our new task.
FairBelief - Assessing Harmful Beliefs in Language Models (2024)

Language Models (LMs) have been shown to inherit undesired biases that might hurt minorities and underrepresented groups if such systems were integrated into real-world applications without careful fairness auditing.This paper proposes FairBelief, an analytical approach to capture and assess beliefs, i.e., propositions that an LM may embed with different degrees of confidence and that covertly influence its predictions. With FairBelief, we leverage prompting to study the behavior of several state-of-the-art LMs across different previously neglected axes, such as model scale and likelihood, assessing predictions on a fairness dataset specifically designed to quantify LMs' outputs' hurtfulness.Finally, we conclude with an in-depth qualitative assessment of the beliefs emitted by the models.We apply FairBelief to English LMs, revealing that, although these architectures enable high performances on diverse natural language processing tasks, they show hurtful beliefs about specific genders. Interestingly, training procedure and dataset, model scale, and architecture induce beliefs of different degrees of hurtfulness.
The Trade-off between Performance, Efficiency, and Fairness in Adapter Modules for Text Classification (2024)

Current natural language processing (NLP) research tends to focus on only one or, less frequently, two dimensions {--} e.g., performance, interpretability, or efficiency {--} at a time, which may lead to suboptimal conclusions. Work on adapter modulesfocuses on improving performance and efficiency, with no investigation of unintended consequences on other aspects such as fairness. To address this gap, we conduct experiments on three text classification datasets by either (1) finetuning all parameters or (2) using adapter modules. Regarding performance and efficiency, we confirm prior findings that the accuracy of adapter-enhanced models is roughly on par with that of fully finetuned models, while training time is substantially reduced. Regarding fairness, we show that adapter modules result in mixed fairness across sensitive groups. Further investigation reveals that, when the standard finetuned model exhibits limited biases, adapter modules typically do not introduce extra bias. On the other hand, when the finetuned model exhibits increased bias, the use of adapter modules poses the potential danger of amplifying these biases to a significant extent. Our findings highlight the need for a case-by-case evaluation rather than a one-size-fits-all judgment.
When XGBoost Outperforms GPT-4 on Text Classification: A Case Study (2024)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for applications beyond text generation, ranging from text summarization to instruction following. One popular example of exploiting LLMs' zero- and few-shot capabilities is the task of text classification. This short paper compares two popular LLM-based classification pipelines (GPT-4 and LLAMA 2) to a popular pre-LLM-era classification pipeline on the task of news trustworthiness classification, focusing on performance, training, and deployment requirements. We find that, in this case, the pre-LLM-era ensemble pipeline outperforms the two popular LLM pipelines while being orders of magnitude smaller in parameter size.
Towards Healthy AI: Large Language Models Need Therapists Too (2024)

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to the development of powerful chatbots capable of engaging in fluent human-like conversations. However, these chatbots may be harmful, exhibiting manipulation, gaslighting, narcissism, and other toxicity. To work toward safer and more well-adjusted models, we propose a framework that uses psychotherapy to identify and mitigate harmful chatbot behaviors. The framework involves four different artificial intelligence (AI) agents: the Chatbot whose behavior is to be adjusted, a User, a Therapist, and a Critic that can be paired with reinforcement learning-based LLM tuning. We illustrate the framework with a working example of a social conversation involving four instances of ChatGPT, showing that the framework may mitigate the toxicity in conversations between LLM-driven chatbots and people. Although there are still several challenges and directions to be addressed in the future, the proposed framework is a promising approach to improving the alignment between LLMs and human values.
Exploring Causal Mechanisms for Machine Text Detection Methods (2024)

The immense attraction towards text generation garnered by ChatGPT has spurred the need for discriminating machine-text from human text. In this work, we provide preliminary evidence that the scores computed by existing zero-shot and supervised machine-generated text detection methods are not solely determined by the generated texts, but are affected by prompts and real texts as well. Using techniques from causal inference, we show the existence of backdoor paths that confounds the relationships between text and its detection score and how the confounding bias can be partially mitigated. We open up new research directions in identifying other factors that may be interwoven in the detection of machine text. Our study calls for a deeper investigation into which kinds of prompts make the detection of machine text more difficult or easier
FactAlign: Fact-Level Hallucination Detection and Classification Through Knowledge Graph Alignment (2024)

This paper proposes a novel black-box approach for fact-level hallucination detection and classification by transforming the problem into a knowledge graph alignment task. This approach allows us to classify detected hallucinations as either intrinsic or extrinsic. The paper starts by discussing the field of hallucination detection and introducing several approaches to related work. Then, we introduce the proposed FactAlign approach for hallucination detection and discuss how we can use it to classify hallucinations as either intrinsic or extrinsic. Experiments are carried out to evaluate the proposed method against state-of-the-art methods on the hallucination detection task using the WikiBio GPT-3 hallucination dataset, and on the hallucination type classification task using the XSum hallucination annotations dataset. The experimental results show that our method achieves a 0.889 F1 score for the hallucination detection and 0.825 F1 for the hallucination type classification, without any further training, fine-tuning, or producing multiple samples of the LLM response.
Cross-Task Defense: Instruction-Tuning LLMs for Content Safety (2024)

Recent studies reveal that Large Language Models (LLMs) face challenges in balancing safety with utility, particularly when processing long texts for NLP tasks like summarization and translation. Despite defenses against malicious short questions, the ability of LLMs to safely handle dangerous long content, such as manuals teaching illicit activities, remains unclear. Our work aims to develop robust defenses for LLMs in processing malicious documents alongside benign NLP task queries. We introduce a defense dataset comprised of safety-related examples and propose single-task and mixed-task losses for instruction tuning. Our empirical results demonstrate that LLMs can significantly enhance their capacity to safely manage dangerous content with appropriate instruction tuning. Additionally, strengthening the defenses of tasks most susceptible to misuse is effective in protecting LLMs against processing harmful information. We also observe that trade-offs between utility and safety exist in defense strategies, where Llama2, utilizing our proposed approach, displays a significantly better balance compared to Llama1.
On the Interplay between Fairness and Explainability (2024)

In order to build reliable and trustworthy NLP applications, models need to be both fair across different demographics and explainable. Usually these two objectives, fairness and explainability, are optimized and/or examined independently of each other. Instead, we argue that forthcoming, trustworthy NLP systems should consider both.In this work, we perform a first study to understand how they influence each other: do fair(er) models rely on more plausible explanations? and vice versa. To this end, we conduct experiments on two English multi-class text classification datasets, BIOS and ECtHR, that provide information on gender and nationality, respectively, as well as human-annotated rationales. We fine-tune pre-trained language models with several methods for (i) bias mitigation, which aims to improve fairness; (ii) rationale extraction, which aims to produce plausible explanations.We find that bias mitigation algorithms do not always lead to fairer models. Moreover, in our analysis, we see that empirical fairness and explainability are orthogonal.
Holistic Evaluation of Large Language Models: Assessing Robustness, Accuracy, and Toxicity for Real-World Applications (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely used in real-world applications. However, as LLMs evolve and new datasets are released, it becomes crucial to build processes to evaluate and control the models' performance. In this paper, we describe how to add Robustness, Accuracy, and Toxicity scores to model comparison tables, or leaderboards. We discuss the evaluation metrics, the approaches considered, and present the results of the first evaluation round for model Robustness, Accuracy, and Toxicity scores. Our results show that GPT 4 achieves top performance on robustness and accuracy test, while Llama 2 achieves top performance on the toxicity test. We note that newer open-source models such as open chat 3.5 and neural chat 7B can perform well on these three test categories. Finally, domain-specific tests and models are also planned to be added to the leaderboard to allow for a more detailed evaluation of models in specific areas such as healthcare, legal, and finance.