ymoslem/acl-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Natural Language Embedded Programs for Hybrid Language Symbolic Reasoning (2024)

How can we perform computations over natural language representations to solve tasks that require symbolic and numeric reasoning? We propose natural language embedded programs (NLEP) as a unifying framework for addressing math/symbolic reasoning, natural language understanding, and instruction following tasks. Our approach prompts a language model to generate full Python programs that define functions over data structures which contain natural language representations of structured knowledge. A Python interpreter then executes the generated code and prints the output. Despite using a task-general prompt, we find that this approach can improve upon strong baselines across a range of different tasks including math and symbolic reasoning, text classification, question answering, and instruction following. We found that the generated programs are interpretable since they outline the exact reasoning process followed by the program interpreter.
A Study on Scaling Up Multilingual News Framing Analysis (2024)

Media framing is the study of strategically selecting and presenting specific aspects of political issues to shape public opinion. Despite its relevance to almost all societies around the world, research has been limited due to the lack of available datasets and other resources. This study explores the possibility of dataset creation through crowdsourcing, utilizing non-expert annotators to develop training corpora. We first extend framing analysis beyond English news to a multilingual context (12 typologically diverse languages) through automatic translation. We also present a novel benchmark in Bengali and Portuguese on the immigration and same-sex marriage domains.Additionally, we show that a system trained on our crowd-sourced dataset, combined with other existing ones, leads to a 5.32 percentage point increase from the baseline, showing that crowdsourcing is a viable option. Last, we study the performance of large language models (LLMs) for this task, finding that task-specific fine-tuning is a better approach than employing bigger non-specialized models.
ViGLUE: A Vietnamese General Language Understanding Benchmark and Analysis of Vietnamese Language Models (2024)

As the number of language models has increased, various benchmarks have been suggested to assess the proficiency of the models in natural language understanding. However, there is a lack of such a benchmark in Vietnamese due to the difficulty in accessing natural language processing datasets or the scarcity of task-specific datasets. **ViGLUE**, the proposed dataset collection, is a **Vi**etnamese **G**eneral **L**anguage **U**nderstanding **E**valuation benchmark developed using three methods: translating an existing benchmark, generating new corpora, and collecting available datasets. ViGLUE contains twelve tasks and encompasses over ten areas and subjects, enabling it to evaluate models comprehensively over a broad spectrum of aspects. Baseline models utilizing multilingual language models are also provided for all tasks in the proposed benchmarks. In addition, the study of the available Vietnamese large language models is conducted to explore the language models' ability in the few-shot learning framework, leading to the exploration of the relationship between specific tasks and the number of shots.
Exploring the Trade-off Between Model Performance and Explanation Plausibility of Text Classifiers Using Human Rationales (2024)

Saliency post-hoc explainability methods are important tools for understanding increasingly complex NLP models. While these methods can reflect the model`s reasoning, they may not align with human intuition, making the explanations not plausible. In this work, we present a methodology for incorporating rationales, which are text annotations explaining human decisions, into text classification models. This incorporation enhances the plausibility of post-hoc explanations while preserving their faithfulness. Our approach is agnostic to model architectures and explainability methods. We introduce the rationales during model training by augmenting the standard cross-entropy loss with a novel loss function inspired by contrastive learning. By leveraging a multi-objective optimization algorithm, we explore the trade-off between the two loss functions and generate a Pareto-optimal frontier of models that balance performance and plausibility. Through extensive experiments involving diverse models, datasets, and explainability methods, we demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances the quality of model explanations without causing substantial (sometimes negligible) degradation in the original model`s performance.
Unlocking Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Low-Resource Language Translation (2024)

Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods are increasingly vital in adapting large-scale pre-trained language models for diverse tasks, offering a balance between adaptability and computational efficiency. They are important in Low-Resource Language (LRL) Neural Machine Translation (NMT) to enhance translation accuracy with minimal resources. However, their practical effectiveness varies significantly across different languages. We conducted comprehensive empirical experiments with varying LRL domains and sizes to evaluate the performance of 8 PEFT methods with in total of 15 architectures using the SacreBLEU score. We showed that 6 PEFT architectures outperform the baseline for both in-domain and out-domain tests and the Houlsby+Inversion adapter has the best performance overall, proving the effectiveness of PEFT methods.
ADaPT: As-Needed Decomposition and Planning with Language Models (2024)

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used for interactive decision-making tasks requiring planning and adapting to the environment. Recent works employ LLMs-as-agents in broadly two ways: iteratively determining the next action (iterative executors) or generating plans and executing sub-tasks using LLMs (plan-and-execute). However, these methods struggle with task complexity, as the inability to execute any sub-task may lead to task failure. To address these shortcomings, we introduce As-Needed Decomposition and Planning for complex Tasks (ADaPT), an approach that explicitly plans and decomposes complex sub-tasks as-needed, i.e., when the LLM is unable to execute them. ADaPT recursively decomposes sub-tasks to adapt to both task complexity and LLM capability. Our results demonstrate that ADaPT substantially outperforms established strong baselines, achieving success rates up to 28.3{\%} higher in ALFWorld, 27{\%} in WebShop, and 33{\%} in TextCraft {--} a novel compositional dataset that we introduce. Through extensive analysis, we illustrate the importance of multilevel decomposition and establish that ADaPT dynamically adjusts to the capabilities of the executor LLM as well as to task complexity.
Guiding Large Language Models to Post-Edit Machine Translation with Error Annotations (2024)

Machine Translation (MT) remains one of the last NLP tasks where large language models (LLMs) have not yet replaced dedicated supervised systems. This work exploits the complementary strengths of LLMs and supervised MT by guiding LLMs to automatically post-edit MT with external feedback on its quality, derived from Multidimensional Quality Metric (MQM) annotations. Working with LLaMA-2 models, we consider prompting strategies varying the nature of feedback provided and then fine-tune the LLM to improve its ability to exploit the provided guidance. Through experiments on Chinese-English, English-German, and English-Russian MQM data, we demonstrate that prompting LLMs to post-edit MT improves TER, BLEU and COMET scores, although the benefits of fine-grained feedback are not clear. Fine-tuning helps integrate fine-grained feedback more effectively and further improves translation quality based on both automatic and human evaluation.
Non-contrastive sentence representations via self-supervision (2024)

Sample contrastive methods, typically referred to simply as contrastive are the foundation of most unsupervised methods to learn text and sentence embeddings. On the other hand, a different class of self-supervised non-contrastive loss functions and methods have been considered in the computer vision community and referred to as dimension contrastive. In this paper, we thoroughly compare this class of methods with the standard baseline for contrastive sentence embeddings, SimCSE. We find that self-supervised embeddings trained using dimension contrastive objectives can outperform SimCSE on downstream tasks without needing auxiliary loss functions.
Semantically-Prompted Language Models Improve Visual Descriptions (2024)

Language-vision models like CLIP have made significant strides in vision tasks, such as zero-shot image classification (ZSIC). However, generating specific and expressive visual descriptions remains challenging; descriptions produced by current methods are often ambiguous and lacking in granularity. To tackle these issues, we propose V-GLOSS: Visual Glosses, a novel method built upon two key ideas. The first is Semantic Prompting, which conditions a language model on structured semantic knowledge. The second is a new contrastive algorithm that elicits fine-grained distinctions between similar concepts. With both ideas, we demonstrate that V-GLOSS improves visual descriptions and achieves strong results in the zero-shot setting on general and fine-grained image-classification datasets, including ImageNet, STL-10, FGVC Aircraft, and Flowers 102. Moreover, these descriptive capabilities contribute to enhancing image-generation performance. Finally, we introduce a quality-tested silver dataset with descriptions generated with V-GLOSS for all ImageNet classes.
GenTKG: Generative Forecasting on Temporal Knowledge Graph with Large Language Models (2024)

The rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) have ignited interest in the temporal knowledge graph (tKG) domain, where conventional embedding-based and rule-based methods dominate. The question remains open of whether pre-trained LLMs can understand structured temporal relational data and replace them as the foundation model for temporal relational forecasting. Therefore, we bring temporal knowledge forecasting into the generative setting. However, challenges occur in the huge chasms between complex temporal graph data structure and sequential natural expressions LLMs can handle, and between the enormous data sizes of tKGs and heavy computation costs of finetuning LLMs. To address these challenges, we propose a novel retrieval-augmented generation framework named GenTKG combining a temporal logical rule-based retrieval strategy and few-shot parameter-efficient instruction tuning to solve the above challenges, respectively. Extensive experiments have shown that GenTKG outperforms conventional methods of temporal relational forecasting with low computation resources using extremely limited training data as few as 16 samples. GenTKG also highlights remarkable cross-domain generalizability with outperforming performance on unseen datasets without re-training, and in-domain generalizability regardless of time split in the same dataset. Our work reveals the huge potential of LLMs in the tKG domain and opens a new frontier for generative forecasting on tKGs. The code and data are released here: \url{https://github.com/mayhugotong/GenTKG}.
A Transformer with Stack Attention (2024)

Natural languages are believed to be (mildly) context-sensitive. Despite underpinning remarkably capable large language models, transformers are unable to model many context-free language tasks. In an attempt to address this limitation in the modeling power of transformer-based language models, we propose augmenting them with a differentiable, stack-based attention mechanism. Our stack-basedattention mechanism can be incorporated into any transformer-based language model and adds a level of interpretability to the model. We show that the addition of our stack-based attention mechanism enables the transformer to model some, but not all, deterministic context-freelanguages.
InstructEval: Systematic Evaluation of Instruction Selection Methods (2024)

In-context learning (ICL) performs tasks by prompting a large language model (LLM) using an instruction and a small set of annotated examples called demonstrations. Recent work has shown that precise details of the inputs used in the ICL prompt significantly impact performance, which has incentivized instruction selection algorithms. The effect of instruction-choice however is severely underexplored, with existing analyses restricted to shallow subsets of models and tasks, limiting the generalizability of their insights. We develop InstructEval, an ICL evaluation suite to conduct a thorough assessment of these techniques. The suite includes 13 open-sourced LLMs of varying scales from four model families, and covers nine tasks across three categories. Using the suite, we evaluate the relative performance of seven popular instruction selection methods over five metrics relevant to ICL. Our experiments reveal that using curated manually-written instructions or simple instructions without any task-specific descriptions often elicits superior ICL performance overall than that of automatic instruction-induction methods, pointing to a lack of generalizability among the latter. We release our evaluation suite (at https://github.com/princeton-nlp/InstructEval) for benchmarking instruction selection approaches and enabling more generalizable methods in this space.
RecMind: Large Language Model Powered Agent For Recommendation (2024)

While the recommendation system (RS) has advanced significantly through deep learning, current RS approaches usually train and fine-tune models on task-specific datasets, limiting their generalizability to new recommendation tasks and their ability to leverage external knowledge due to model scale and data size constraints. Thus, we designed an LLM-powered autonomous recommender agent, RecMind, which is capable of leveraging external knowledge, utilizing tools with careful planning to provide zero-shot personalized recommendations. We propose a Self-Inspiring algorithm to improve the planning ability. At each intermediate step, the LLM {\textquotedblleft}self-inspires{\textquotedblright} to consider all previously explored states to plan for the next step. This mechanism greatly improves the model`s ability to comprehend and utilize historical information in planning for recommendation. We evaluate RecMind`s performance in various recommendation scenarios. Our experiment shows that RecMind outperforms existing zero/few-shot LLM-based recommendation baseline methods in various tasks and achieves comparable performance to a fully trained recommendation model P5.
GOLD: Generalized Knowledge Distillation via Out-of-Distribution-Guided Language Data Generation (2024)

Knowledge distillation from LLMs is essential for the efficient deployment of language models. Prior works have proposed data generation using LLMs for preparing distilled models. We argue that generating data with LLMs is prone to sampling mainly from the center of original content distribution. This limitation hinders the distilled model from learning the true underlying data distribution and to forget the tails of the distributions (samples with lower probability). To this end, we propose GOLD, a task-agnostic data generation and knowledge distillation framework, which employs an iterative out-of-distribution-guided feedback mechanism for the LLM. As a result, the generated data improves the generalizability of distilled models. An energy-based OOD evaluation approach is also introduced to deal with noisy generated data. Our extensive experiments on 10 different classification and sequence-to-sequence tasks in NLP show that GOLD respectively outperforms prior arts and the LLM with an average improvement of 5{\%} and 14{\%}. We will also show that the proposed method is applicable to less explored and novel tasks. Code is available in the Appendix.
How Lexical is Bilingual Lexicon Induction? (2024)

In contemporary machine learning approaches to bilingual lexicon induction (BLI), a model learns a mapping between the embedding spaces of a language pair. Recently, retrieve-and-rank approach to BLI has achieved state of the art results on the task. However, the problem remains challenging in low-resource settings, due to the paucity of data. The task is complicated by factors such as lexical variation across languages. We argue that the incorporation of additional lexical information into the recent retrieve-and-rank approach should improve lexicon induction. We demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed approach on XLING, improving over the previous state of the art by an average of 2{\%} across all language pairs.
Fumbling in Babel: An Investigation into ChatGPT`s Language Identification Ability (2024)

ChatGPT has recently emerged as a powerful NLP tool that can carry out a variety of tasks. However, the range of languages ChatGPT can handle remains largely a mystery. To uncover which languages ChatGPT {\textquoteleft}knows', we investigate its language identification (LID) abilities. For this purpose, we compile Babel-670, a benchmark comprising 670 languages representing 23 language families spoken in five continents. Languages in Babel-670 run the gamut from the very high-resource to the very low-resource. We then study ChatGPT`s (both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) ability to (i) identify language names and language codes (ii) under zero- and few-shot conditions (iii) with and without provision of a label set. When compared to smaller finetuned LID tools, we find that ChatGPT lags behind. For example, it has poor performance on African languages. We conclude that current large language models would benefit from further development before they can sufficiently serve diverse communities.
Targeted Augmentation for Low-Resource Event Extraction (2024)

Addressing the challenge of low-resource information extraction remains an ongoing issue due to the inherent information scarcity within limited training examples. Existing data augmentation methods, considered potential solutions, struggle to strike a balance between weak augmentation (e.g., synonym augmentation) and drastic augmentation (e.g., conditional generation without proper guidance). This paper introduces a novel paradigm that employs targeted augmentation and back validation to produce augmented examples with enhanced diversity, polarity, accuracy, and coherence. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed paradigm. Furthermore, identified limitations are discussed, shedding light on areas for future improvement.
Asking More Informative Questions for Grounded Retrieval (2024)

When a model is trying to gather information in an interactive setting, it benefits from asking informative questions. However, in the case of a grounded multi-turn image identification task, previous studies have been constrained to polar yes/no questions (White et al., 2021), limiting how much information the model can gain in a single turn. We present an approach that formulates more informative, open-ended questions. In doing so, we discover that off-the-shelf visual question answering (VQA) models often make presupposition errors, which standard information gain question selection methods fail to account for. To address this issue, we propose a method that can incorporate presupposition handling into both question selection and belief updates. Specifically, we use a two-stage process, where the model first filters out images which are irrelevant to a given question, then updates its beliefs about which image the user intends. Through self-play and human evaluations, we show that our method is successful in asking informative open-ended questions, increasing accuracy over the past state-of-the-art by 14{\%}, while resulting in 48{\%} more efficient games in human evaluations.
Efficient Citer: Tuning Large Language Models for Enhanced Answer Quality and Verification (2024)

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in utilizing external knowledge to reduce hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) and provide them with updated information. Despite this improvement, a major challenge lies in the lack of explicit citations, which hampers the ability to verify the information generated by these models.This paper focuses on providing models with citation capabilities efficiently. By constructing a dataset of citations, we train two model architectures: an FID-style FLAN-T5 model for efficient answer composition and a 13B model known for its success in instruction following after tuning. Evaluation on fluency, correctness, and citation quality is conducted through human assessment and the newly introduced Automatic LLMs' Citation Evaluation (ALCE) benchmark.Results demonstrate significant improvements in answer quality and efficiency, surpassing the performance of the popular ChatGPT on some of the metrics. The models exhibit exceptional out-of-domain generalization in both human and automatic evaluation. Notably, the FID-style FLAN-T5 model with only 3B parameters performs impressively compared to the 13B model.
Addressing Healthcare-related Racial and LGBTQ+ Biases in Pretrained Language Models (2024)

Recent studies have highlighted the issue of Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) inadvertently propagating social stigmas and stereotypes, a critical concern given their widespread use. This is particularly problematic in sensitive areas like healthcare, where such biases could lead to detrimental outcomes. Our research addresses this by adapting two intrinsic bias benchmarks to quantify racial and LGBTQ+ biases in prevalent PLMs. We also empirically evaluate the effectiveness of various debiasing methods in mitigating these biases. Furthermore, we assess the impact of debiasing on both Natural Language Understanding and specific biomedical applications. Our findings reveal that while PLMs commonly exhibit healthcare-related racial and LGBTQ+ biases, the applied debiasing techniques successfully reduce these biases without compromising the models' performance in downstream tasks.
ATG: Benchmarking Automated Theorem Generation for Generative Language Models (2024)

Humans can develop new theorems to explore broader and more complex mathematical results.While current generative language models (LMs) have achieved significant improvement in automatically proving theorems, their ability to generate new or reusable theorems is still under-explored. Without the new theorems, current LMs struggle to prove harder theorems that are distant from the given hypotheses with the exponentially growing search space.More advanced theorem proving is if an agent (for instance, a generative LM) can leverage its creativity to generate new but also reasonable theorems that properly substitute part of a proof and also be saved as reusable knowledge for future theorem proving.Therefore, this paper proposes an Automated Theorem Generation (ATG) benchmark that evaluates whether an agent can automatically generate valuable (and possibly brand new) theorems that are applicable for downstream theorem proving as reusable knowledge. Specifically, we construct the ATG benchmark by splitting the Metamath library into three sets: axioms, library, and problem based on their proving depth.We conduct extensive experiments to investigate whether current LMs can generate theorems in the library and benefit the problem theorems proving. The results demonstrate that high-quality ATG data facilitates models' performances on downstream ATP. However, there is still room for current LMs to develop better ATG and generate more advanced and human-like theorems. We hope the new ATG challenge can shed some light on advanced complex theorem proving.