ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Can Large Language Models Reason About Goal-Oriented Tasks? (2024)

Most adults can complete a sequence of steps to achieve a certain goal, such as making a sandwich or repairing a bicycle tire. In completing these goal-oriented tasks, or simply tasks in this paper, one must use sequential reasoning to understand the relationship between the sequence of steps and the goal. LLMs have shown impressive capabilities across various natural language understanding tasks. However, prior work has mainlyfocused on logical reasoning tasks (e.g. arithmetic, commonsense QA); how well LLMs can perform on more complex reasoning tasks like sequential reasoning is not clear. In this paper, we address this gap and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of how well LLMs are able to conduct this reasoning for tasks and how they scale w.r.t multiple dimensions(e.g. adaptive prompting strategies, number of in-context examples, varying complexity of the sequential task). Our findings reveal that while Chain of Thought (CoT) prompting can significantly enhance LLMs' sequential reasoning in certain scenarios, it can also be detrimental in others, whereas Tree of Thoughts (ToT) reasoning is less effective for this type of task. Additionally, we discover that an increase in model size or in-context examples does not consistently lead to improved performance.
InstructEval: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models (2024)

Instruction-tuned large language models have revolutionized natural language processing and have shown great potential in applications such as conversational agents. These models, such as GPT-4, can not only master language but also solve complex tasks in areas like mathematics, coding, medicine, and law. However, there is still a lack of comprehensive understanding regarding their full potential, primarily due to the black-box nature of many models and lack of holistic evaluation. To address these challenges, we present InstructEval, a more comprehensive evaluation suite designed specifically for instruction-tuned large language models. Unlike previous works, our evaluation involves a rigorous assessment of models based on problem-solving, writing ability, and alignment to human values. We take a holistic approach to analyze various factors affecting model performance, including the pretraining foundation, instruction-tuning data, and training methods. Our findings reveal that the quality of instruction data is a crucial factor in scaling model performance. While open-source models demonstrate impressive writing abilities, there is substantial room for improvement in problem-solving and alignment.
Detecting Mode Collapse in Language Models via Narration (2024)

No two authors write alike. Personal flourishes invoked in written narratives, from lexicon to rhetorical devices, imply a particular author{---}what literary theorists label the implied or virtual author; distinct from the real author or narrator of a text. Early large language models trained on unfiltered training sets drawn from a variety of discordant sources yielded incoherent personalities, problematic for conversational tasks but proving useful for sampling literature from multiple perspectives. Successes in alignment research in recent years have allowed researchers to impose subjectively consistent personae on language models via instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), but whether aligned models retain the ability to model an arbitrary virtual author has received little scrutiny. By studying 4,374 stories sampled from three OpenAI language models, we show successive versions of GPT-3 suffer from increasing degrees of {\textquotedblleft}mode collapse{\textquotedblright} whereby overfitting the model during alignment constrains it from generalizing over authorship: models suffering from mode collapse become unable to assume a multiplicity of perspectives. Our method and results are significant for researchers seeking to employ language models in sociological simulations.
Grounding LLMs to In-prompt Instructions: Reducing Hallucinations Caused by Static Pre-training Knowledge (2024)

When deploying LLMs in certain commercial or research settings, domain specific knowledge must be explicitly provided within the prompt. This in-prompt knowledge can conflict with an LLM`s static world knowledge learned at pre-training, causing model hallucination (see examples in Table 1). In safety-critical settings, like healthcare and finance, these hallucinations can harm vulnerable users. We have curated a QA corpus containing information that LLMs could not have seen at pre-training. Using our corpus, we have probed various LLMs, manipulating both the prompt and the knowledge representation. We have found that our {\textquoteleft}Jodie' prompt consistently improves the model`s textual grounding to the given knowledge, and in-turn the overall answer accuracy. This is true in both the healthcare and finance domains - improving accuracy by up to 28{\%} (mean: 12{\%}). We have also identified that hierarchical and direct node-property graph structures could lead to more interpretable and controllable systems that provide a natural language interface with real-time in-domain knowledge. Our corpus will enable further work on this critical challenge.
Diversity-Aware Annotation for Conversational AI Safety (2024)

How people interpret content is deeply influenced by their socio-cultural backgrounds and lived experiences. This is especially crucial when evaluating AI systems for safety, where accounting for such diversity in interpretations and potential impacts on human users will make them both more successful and inclusive. While recent work has demonstrated the importance of diversity in human ratings that underlie AI pipelines, effective and efficient ways to incorporate diverse perspectives in human data annotation pipelines is still largely elusive. In this paper, we discuss the primary challenges faced in incorporating diversity into model evaluations, and propose a practical diversity-aware annotation approach. Using an existing dataset with highly parallel safety annotations, we take as a test case a policy that prioritizes recall of safety issues, and demonstrate that our diversity-aware approach can efficiently obtain a higher recall of safety issues flagged by minoritized rater groups without hurting overall precision.
Using Information Retrieval Techniques to Automatically Repurpose Existing Dialogue Datasets for Safe Chatbot Development (2024)

There has been notable progress in the development of open-domain dialogue systems (chatbots) especially with the rapid advancement of the capabilities of Large Language Models. Chatbots excel at holding conversations in a manner that keeps a user interested and engaged. However, their responses can be unsafe, as they can respond in an offensive manner or offer harmful professional advice. As a way to mitigate this issue, recent work crowdsource datasets with exemplary responses or annotate dialogue safety datasets, which are relatively scarce compared to casual dialogues. Despite the quality of data obtained from crowdsourcing, it can be expensive and time consuming. This work proposes an effective pipeline, using information retrieval, to automatically repurpose existing dialogue datasets for safe chatbot development, as a way to address the aforementioned challenges. We select an existing dialogue dataset, revise its unsafe responses, as a way to obtain a dataset with safer responses to unsafe user inputs. We then fine-tune dialogue models on the original and revised datasets and generate responses to evaluate the safeness of the models.
FairPair: A Robust Evaluation of Biases in Language Models through Paired Perturbations (2024)

The accurate evaluation of differential treatment in language models to specific groups is critical to ensuring a positive and safe user experience. An ideal evaluation should have the properties of being robust, extendable to new groups or attributes, and being able to capture biases that appear in typical usage (rather than just extreme, rare cases). Relatedly, bias evaluation should surface not only egregious biases but also ones that are subtle and commonplace, such as a likelihood for talking about appearances with regard to women. We present FairPair, an evaluation framework for assessing differential treatment that occurs during ordinary usage. FairPair operates through counterfactual pairs, but crucially, the paired continuations are grounded in the same demographic group, which ensures equivalent comparison. Additionally, unlike prior work, our method factors in the inherent variability that comes from the generation process itself by measuring the sampling variability. We present an evaluation of several commonly used generative models and a qualitative analysis that indicates a preference for discussing family and hobbies with regard to women.
Learning To See But Forgetting To Follow: Visual Instruction Tuning Makes LLMs More Prone To Jailbreak Attacks (2024)

Augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with image-understanding capabilities has resulted in a boom of high-performing Vision-Language models (VLMs). While studying the alignment of LLMs to human values has received widespread attention, the safety of VLMs has not received the same attention. In this paper, we explore the impact of jailbreaking on three state-of-the-art VLMs, each using a distinct modeling approach. By comparing each VLM to their respective LLM backbone, we find that each VLM is more susceptible to jailbreaking. We consider this as an undesirable outcome from visual instruction-tuning, which imposes a forgetting effect on an LLM`s safety guardrails. Therefore, we provide recommendations for future work based on evaluation strategies that aim to highlight the weaknesses of a VLM, as well as take safety measures into account during visual instruction tuning.
Tracking Perspectives on Event Participants: a Structural Analysis of the Framing of Real-World Events in Co-Referential Corpora (2024)

In this paper, we present the outcome of a structural linguistic analysis performed on a referentially grounded FrameNet dataset. In this dataset, multiple Dutch events are referenced by multiple co-referential Dutch news texts. Mentions in those documents are annotated with respect to their referential grounding (i.e., links to structured Wikidata), and their conceptual representation (i.e., frames). Provided with each document`s temporal reporting distance, we selected documents for two events - the Utrecht shooting and MH17 - and performed an analysis in which we tracked the events' participants over time in both their focalization (number of mentions) and their framing (distribution of frame element labels). This way, we use the carefully collected and annotated data to schematize shifts in focalization and perspectivization of the participants as a result of the constantly developing narrative surrounding the events. This novel type of linguistic research involves reference to the real-world referents and takes into account storytelling in news streams.
TimeFrame: Querying and Visualizing Event Semantic Frames in Time (2024)

In this work we introduce TimeFrame, an online platform to easily query and visualize events and participants extracted from document collections in Italian following a frame-based approach. The system allows users to select one or more events (frames) or event categories and to display their occurrences on a timeline. Different query types, from coarse to fine-grained, are available through the interface, enabling a time-bound analysis of large historical corpora. We present three use cases based on the full archive of news published in 1948 by the newspaper {\textquotedblleft}Corriere della Sera{\textquotedblright}. We show that different crucial events can be explored, providing interesting insights into the narratives around such events, the main participants and their points of view.
Comparing News Framing of Migration Crises using Zero-Shot Classification (2024)

We present an experiment on classifying news frames in a language unseen by the learner, using zero-shot cross-lingual transfer learning. We used two pre-trained multilingual Transformer Encoder neural network models and tested with four specific news frames, investigating two approaches to the resulting multi-label task: Binary Relevance (treating each frame independently) and Label Power-set (predicting each possible combination of frames). We train our classifiers on an available annotated multilingual migration news dataset and test on an unseen Slovene language migration news corpus, first evaluating performance and then using the classifiers to analyse how media framed the news during the periods of Syria and Ukraine conflict-related migrations.
Manosphrames: exploring an Italian incel community through the lens of NLP and Frame Semantics (2024)

We introduce a large corpus of comments extracted from an Italian online incel ({\textquoteleft}involuntary incelibate') forum, a community of men who build a collective identity and anti-feminist ideology centered around their inability to find a sexual or romantic partner and who frequently use explicitly misogynistic language. Our corpus consists of 2.4K comments that have been manually collected, analyzed and annotated with topic labels, and a further 32K threads (300K comments) that have been automatically scraped and automatically annotated with FrameNet annotations. We show how large-scale frame semantic analysis can shed a light on what is discussed in the community, and introduce incel topic classification as a new NLP task and benchmark.
Broadening the coverage of computational representations of metaphor through Dynamic Metaphor Theory (2024)

Current approaches to computational metaphor processing typically incorporate static representations of metaphor. We aim to show that this limits the coverage of such systems. We take insights from dynamic metaphor theory and discuss how existing computational models of metaphor might benefit from representing the dynamics of metaphor when applied to the analysis of conflicting discourse. We propose that a frame-based approach to metaphor representation based on the model of YinYang Dynamics of Metaphoricity (YYDM) would pave the way to more comprehensive modeling of metaphor. In particular, the metaphoricity cues of the YYDM model could be used to address the task of dynamic metaphor identification. Frame-based modeling of dynamic metaphor would facilitate the computational analysis of perspectives in conflicting discourse, with potential applications in analyzing political discourse.
Learning Contextualized Box Embeddings with Prototypical Networks (2024)

This paper proposes ProtoBox, a novel method to learn contextualized box embeddings. Unlike an ordinary word embedding, which represents a word as a single vector, a box embedding represents the meaning of a word as a box in a high-dimensional space: that is suitable for representing semantic relations between words. In addition, our method aims to obtain a {\textquotedblleft}contextualized{\textquotedblright} box embedding, which is an abstract representation of a word in a specific context. ProtoBox is based on Prototypical Networks, which is a robust method for classification problems, especially focusing on learning the hypernym{--}hyponym relation between senses. ProtoBox is evaluated on three tasks: Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD), New Sense Classification (NSC), and Hypernym Identification (HI). Experimental results show that ProtoBox outperforms baselines for the HI task and is comparable for the WSD and NSC tasks.
DomainInv: Domain Invariant Fine Tuning and Adversarial Label Correction For Unsupervised QA Domain Adaptation (2024)

Existing Question Answering (QA) systems are limited in their ability to answer questions from unseen domains or any out-of-domain distributions, making them less reliable for deployment in real scenarios. Importantly, all existing QA domain adaptation methods are either based on generating synthetic data or pseudo-labeling the target domain data. Domain adaptation methods relying on synthetic data and pseudo-labeling suffer from either the need for extensive computational resources or an additional overhead of carefully selecting the confidence threshold to distinguish noisy examples from the training dataset. In this paper, we propose unsupervised domain adaptation for an unlabeled target domain by transferring the target representation close to the source domain without using supervision from the target domain. To achieve this, we introduce the idea of domain-invariant fine-tuning along with adversarial label correction (DomainInv) to identify target instances that are distant from the source domain. This involves learning the domain invariant feature encoder to minimize the distance between such target instances and source instances class-wisely. This eliminates the possibility of learning features of the target domain that are still close to the source support but are ambiguous. The evaluation of our QA domain adaptation method, namely DomainInv, on multiple target QA datasets reveals a performance improvement over the strongest baseline.
Relevance-aware Diverse Query Generation for Out-of-domain Text Ranking (2024)

Domain adaptation presents significant challenges for out-of-domain text ranking, especially when supervised data is limited. In this paper, we present ReadQG (Relevance-Aware Diverse Query Generation), a method to generate informative synthetic queries to facilitate the adaptation process of text ranking models. Unlike previous approaches focusing solely on relevant query generation, our ReadQG generates diverse queries with continuous relevance scores. Specifically, we propose leveraging soft-prompt tuning and diverse generation objectives to control query generation according to the given relevance. Our experiments show that integrating negative queries into the learning process enhances the effectiveness of text ranking models in out-of-domain information retrieval (IR) benchmarks. Furthermore, we measure the quality of query generation, highlighting the underlying beneficial characteristics of negative queries. Our empirical results and analysis also shed light on potential directions for more advanced data augmentation in IR. The data and code have been released.
Learning from Others: Similarity-based Regularization for Mitigating Dataset Bias. (2024)

Common methods for mitigating spurious correlations in natural language understanding (NLU) usually operate in the output space, encouraging a main model to behave differently from a bias model by down-weighing examples where the bias model is confident.While improving out of distribution (OOD) performance, it was recently observed that the internal representations of the presumably debiased models are actually more, rather than less biased. We propose SimgReg, a new method for debiasing internal model components via similarity-based regularization, in representation space: We encourage the model to learn representations that are either similar to an unbiased model or different from a biased model. We experiment with three NLU tasks and different kinds of biases.We find that SimReg improves OOD performance, with little in-distribution degradation. Moreover, the representations learned by SimReg are less biased than in other methods.
Prior Knowledge-Guided Adversarial Training (2024)

We introduce a simple yet effective Prior Knowledge-Guided ADVersarial Training (PKG-ADV) algorithm to improve adversarial training for natural language understanding. Our method simply utilizes task-specific label distribution to guide the training process. By prioritizing the use of prior knowledge of labels, we aim to generate more informative adversarial perturbations. We apply our model to several challenging temporal reasoning tasks. Our method enables a more reliable and controllable data training process than relying on randomized adversarial perturbation. Albeit simple, our method achieved significant improvements in these tasks. To facilitate further research, we will release the code and models.
IT-Tuning : Parameter Efficient Information Token Tuning for Language Model (2024)

Recently, language models have demonstrated exceptional performance compared to their predecessors. In this context, attention mechanisms and pre-training significantly contribute to the enhanced performance of modern language models. Additionally, a continuously increasing number of parameters plays a crucial role in these advancements . However, an increase in the number of parameters significantly increases the GPU memory and training time required during fine-tuning of language models, this makes fine-tuning infeasible in environments with limited computing resources. Furthermore, after fine-tuning, the storage space required for deployment increases proportionally with the number of tasks, making it challenging to deploy devices with limited storage capacities. In this study, we propose IT-Tuning, a Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning method that introduces a new concept called information tokens to address these issues.
Bridging the Gap: Transfer Learning from English PLMs to Malaysian English (2024)

Malaysian English is a low resource creole languages, where it carries the elements of Malay, Chinese, and Tamil languages, in addition to Standard English. Named Entity Recognition (NER) models underperforms when capturing entities from Malaysian English text due to its distinctive morphosyntactic adaptations, semantic features and code-switching (mixing English and Malay). Considering these gaps, we introduce MENmBERT and MENBERT, a pre-trained language model with contextual understanding, specifically tailored for Malaysian English. We have fine-tuned MENmBERT and MENBERT using manually annotated entities and relations from the Malaysian English News Article (MEN) Dataset. This fine-tuning process allows the PLM to learn representations that capture the nuances of Malaysian English relevant for NER and RE tasks. MENmBERT achieved a 1.52{\%} and 26.27{\%} improvement on NER and RE tasks respectively compared to the bert-base-multilingual-cased model. While the overall performance for NER does not have significant improvement, our further analysis shows that there is a significant improvement when evaluated by the 12 entity labels. These findings suggest that pre-training language models on language-specific and geographically-focused corpora can be a promising approach for improving NER performance in low-resource settings. The dataset and code published through this paper provide valuable resources for NLP research work focusing on Malaysian English.
Unified Interpretation of Smoothing Methods for Negative Sampling Loss Functions in Knowledge Graph Embedding (2024)

Knowledge Graphs (KGs) are fundamental resources in knowledge-intensive tasks in NLP. Due to the limitation of manually creating KGs, KG Completion (KGC) has an important role in automatically completing KGs by scoring their links with KG Embedding (KGE). To handle many entities in training, KGE relies on Negative Sampling (NS) loss that can reduce the computational cost by sampling. Since the appearance frequencies for each link are at most one in KGs, sparsity is an essential and inevitable problem. The NS loss is no exception. As a solution, the NS loss in KGE relies on smoothing methods like Self-Adversarial Negative Sampling (SANS) and subsampling. However, it is uncertain what kind of smoothing method is suitable for this purpose due to the lack of theoretical understanding. This paper provides theoretical interpretations of the smoothing methods for the NS loss in KGE and induces a new NS loss, Triplet Adaptive Negative Sampling (TANS), that can cover the characteristics of the conventional smoothing methods. Experimental results of TransE, DistMult, ComplEx, RotatE, HAKE, and HousE on FB15k-237, WN18RR, and YAGO3-10 datasets and their sparser subsets show the soundness of our interpretation and performance improvement by our TANS.