yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: Arabic Diacritics in the Wild: Exploiting Opportunities for Improved Diacritization
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: The widespread absence of diacritical marks in Arabic text poses a significant challenge for Arabic natural language processing (NLP). This paper explores instances of naturally occurring diacritics, referred to as “diacritics in the wild,” to unveil patterns and latent information across six diverse genres: news articles, novels, children’s books, poetry, political documents, and ChatGPT outputs. We present a new annotated dataset that maps real-world partially diacritized words to their maximal full diacritization in context. Additionally, we propose extensions to the analyze-and-disambiguate approach in Arabic NLP to leverage these diacritics, resulting in notable improvements. Our contributions encompass a thorough analysis, valuable datasets, and an extended diacritization algorithm. We release our code and datasets as open source.
Title: Disinformation Capabilities of Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Automated disinformation generation is often listed as one of the risks of large language models (LLMs). The theoretical ability to flood the information space with disinformation content might have dramatic consequences for democratic societies around the world. This paper presents a comprehensive study of the disinformation capabilities of the current generation of LLMs to generate false news articles in English language. In our study, we evaluated the capabilities of 10 LLMs using 20 disinformation narratives. We evaluated several aspects of the LLMs: how well they are at generating news articles, how strongly they tend to agree or disagree with the disinformation narratives, how often they generate safety warnings, etc. We also evaluated the abilities of detection models to detect these articles as LLM-generated. We conclude that LLMs are able to generate convincing news articles that agree with dangerous disinformation narratives.
Title: Learn or Recall? Revisiting Incremental Learning with Pre-trained Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: machine learning for nlp
Abstract: Incremental Learning (IL) has been a long-standing problem in both vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) communities.In recent years, as Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in various NLP downstream tasks, utilizing PLMs as backbones has become a common practice in recent research of IL in NLP.Most assume that catastrophic forgetting is the biggest obstacle to achieving superior IL performance and propose various techniques to overcome this issue.However, we find that this assumption is problematic.Specifically, we revisit more than 20 methods on four classification tasks (Text Classification, Intent Classification, Relation Extraction, and Named Entity Recognition) under the two most popular IL settings (Class-Incremental and Task-Incremental) and reveal that most of them severely underestimate the inherent anti-forgetting ability of PLMs.Based on the observation, we propose a frustratingly easy method called SEQ* for IL with PLMs.The results show that SEQ* has competitive or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art (SOTA) IL methods yet requires considerably less trainable parameters and training time.These findings urge us to revisit the IL with PLMs and encourage future studies to have a fundamental understanding of the catastrophic forgetting in PLMs.
Title: How to Handle Different Types of Out-of-Distribution Scenarios in Computational Argumentation? A Comprehensive and Fine-Grained Field Study
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: The advent of pre-trained Language Models (LMs) has markedly advanced natural language processing, but their efficacy in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios remains a significant challenge. Computational argumentation (CA), modeling human argumentation processes, is a field notably impacted by these challenges because complex annotation schemes and high annotation costs naturally lead to resources barely covering the multiplicity of available text sources and topics. Due to this data scarcity, generalization to data from uncovered covariant distributions is a common challenge for CA tasks like stance detection or argument classification. This work systematically assesses LMs’ capabilities for such OOD scenarios. While previous work targets specific OOD types like topic shifts or OOD uniformly, we address three prevalent OOD scenarios in CA: topic shift, domain shift, and language shift. Our findings challenge the previously asserted general superiority of in-context learning (ICL) for OOD. We find that the efficacy of such learning paradigms varies with the type of OOD. Specifically, while ICL excels for domain shifts, prompt-based fine-tuning surpasses for topic shifts. To sum up, we navigate the heterogeneity of OOD scenarios in CA and empirically underscore the potential of base-sized LMs in overcoming these challenges.
Title: Cendol: Open Instruction-tuned Generative Large Language Models for Indonesian Languages
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) show remarkable human-like capability in various domains and languages. To bridge this quality gap, we introduce Cendol, a collection of Indonesian LLMs encompassing both decoder-only and encoder-decoder architectures across a range of model sizes. We highlight Cendol’s effectiveness across a diverse array of tasks, attaining ~20% improvement, and demonstrate its capability to generalize to unseen tasks and indigenous languages of Indonesia. Furthermore, Cendol models showcase improved human favorability despite their limitations in capturing indigenous knowledge and cultural values in Indonesia. In addition, we discuss the shortcomings of parameter-efficient tunings, such as LoRA, for language adaptation. Alternatively, we propose the usage of vocabulary adaptation to enhance efficiency. Lastly, we evaluate the safety of Cendol and showcase that safety in pre-training in one language such as English is transferable to low-resource languages, such as Indonesian, even without RLHF and safety fine-tuning.
Title: Must NLP be Extractive?
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: How do we roll out language technologies across a world with 7,000 languages? In one story, we scale the successes of NLP further into ‘low-resource’ languages, doing ever more with less. However, this approach does not recognise the fact that, beyond the 500 institutional languages, the remaining languages are oral vernaculars spoken by communities who use a language of wider communication to interact with the outside world. I argue that such ‘contact languages’ are the appropriate target for technologies like machine translation, and that the 6,500 oral languages must be approached differently. I share a story from an Indigenous community, where local people reshaped an extractive agenda to align with their relational agenda. I describe the emerging paradigm of relational NLP and explain how it opens the way to non-extractive methods and to solutions that enhance human agency.
Title: Spiral of Silence: How is Large Language Model Killing Information Retrieval?—A Case Study on Open Domain Question Answering
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: The practice of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), which integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) with retrieval systems, has become increasingly prevalent. However, the repercussions of LLM-derived content infiltrating the web and influencing the retrieval-generation feedback loop are largely uncharted territories. In this study, we construct and iteratively run a simulation pipeline to deeply investigate the short-term and long-term effects of LLM text on RAG systems. Taking the trending Open Domain Question Answering (ODQA) task as a point of entry, our findings reveal a potential digital “Spiral of Silence” effect, with LLM-generated text consistently outperforming human-authored content in search rankings, thereby diminishing the presence and impact of human contributions online. This trend risks creating an imbalanced information ecosystem, where the unchecked proliferation of erroneous LLM-generated content may result in the marginalization of accurate information. We urge the academic community to take heed of this potential issue, ensuring a diverse and authentic digital information landscape.
Title: Latxa: An Open Language Model and Evaluation Suite for Basque
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,046 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.
Title: Why are Sensitive Functions Hard for Transformers?
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Empirical studies have identified a range of learnability biases and limitations of transformers, such as a persistent difficulty in learning to compute simple formal languages such as PARITY, and a bias towards low-degree functions. However, theoretical understanding remains limited, with existing expressiveness theory either overpredicting or underpredicting realistic learning abilities. We prove that, under the transformer architecture, the loss landscape is constrained by the input-space sensitivity: Transformers whose output is sensitive to many parts of the input string inhabit isolated points in parameter space, leading to a low-sensitivity bias in generalization. We show theoretically and empirically that this theory unifies a broad array of empirical observations about the learning abilities and biases of transformers, such as their generalization bias towards low sensitivity and low degree, and difficulty in length generalization for PARITY. This shows that understanding transformers’ inductive biases requires studying not just their in-principle expressivity, but also their loss landscape.
Title: Talk With Human-like Agents: Empathetic Dialogue Through Perceptible Acoustic Reception and Reaction
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: speech processing and spoken language understanding
Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM)-enhanced agents become increasingly prevalent in Human-AI communication, offering vast potential from entertainment to professional domains. However, current multi-modal dialogue systems overlook the acoustic information present in speech, which is crucial for understanding human communication nuances. This oversight can lead to misinterpretations of speakers’ intentions, resulting in inconsistent or even contradictory responses within dialogues. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose PerceptiveAgent, an empathetic multi-modal dialogue system designed to discern deeper or more subtle meanings beyond the literal interpretations of words through the integration of speech modality perception. Employing LLMs as a cognitive core, PerceptiveAgent perceives acoustic information from input speech and generates empathetic responses based on speaking styles described in natural language. Experimental results indicate that PerceptiveAgent excels in contextual understanding by accurately discerning the speakers’ true intentions in scenarios where the linguistic meaning is either contrary to or inconsistent with the speaker’s true feelings, producing more nuanced and expressive spoken dialogues. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Haoqiu-Yan/PerceptiveAgent.
Title: IRCoder: Intermediate Representations Make Language Models Robust Multilingual Code Generators
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Code generation has fast become one of the most popular applications of language models (LMs). Nonetheless, research on multilingual aspects of Code-LMs, such as cross-lingual transfer between different programming languages, language-specific data augmentation, and post-hoc LM adaptation, alongside the exploitation of data sources other than the original textual content, has been much sparser than for their natural language counterparts. In particular, most mainstream Code-LMs have been pre-trained on source code files alone. In this work, we investigate the prospect of leveraging readily available compiler intermediate representations (IR)—shared across programming languages—to improve the multilingual capabilities of Code-LMs and facilitate cross-lingual transfer. To this end, we first compile SLTrans, a parallel dataset consisting of nearly 4M self-contained source code files coupled with their respective intermediate representations. Next, starting from various base Code-LMs (ranging from 1.1B to 7.3B parameters), we carry out continued causal language modelling training on SLTrans, forcing the Code-LMs to (1) learn the IR language and (2) align the IR constructs with respective constructs of various programming languages. Our resulting models, dubbed IRCoder, display sizeable and consistent gains across various code generation tasks and metrics, including prompt robustness, multilingual code completion, code understanding, and instruction following.
Title: The Echoes of Multilinguality: Tracing Cultural Value Shifts during Language Model Fine-tuning
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Texts written in different languages reflect different culturally-dependent beliefs of their writers. Thus, we expect multilingual LMs (MLMs), that are jointly trained on a concatenation of text in multiple languages, to encode different cultural values for each language. Yet, as the ‘multilinguality’ of these LMs is driven by cross-lingual sharing, we also have reason to belief that cultural values bleed over from one language into another. This limits the use of MLMs in practice, as apart from being proficient in generating text in multiple languages, creating language technology that can serve a community also requires the output of LMs to be sensitive to their biases (Naous et al. 2023). Yet, little is known about how cultural values emerge and evolve in MLMs (Hershcovich et al. 2022). We are the first to study how languages can exert influence on the cultural values encoded for different test languages, by studying how such values are revised during fine-tuning. Focusing on the fine-tuning stage allows us to study the interplay between value shifts when exposed to new linguistic experience from different data sources and languages. Lastly, we use a training data attribution method to find patterns in the fine-tuning examples, and the languages that they come from, that tend to instigate value shifts.
Title: MYTE: Morphology-Driven Byte Encoding for Better and Fairer Multilingual Language Modeling
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: A major consideration in multilingual language modeling is how to best represent languages with diverse vocabularies and scripts.Although contemporary text encoding methods cover most of the world’s writing systems, they exhibit bias towards the high-resource languages of the Global West. As a result, texts of underrepresented languages tend to be segmented into long sequences of linguistically meaningless units. To address the disparities, we introduce a new paradigm that encodes the same information with segments of consistent size across diverse languages. Our encoding convention (MYTE) is based on morphemes, as their inventories are more balanced across languages than characters, which are used in previous methods. We show that MYTE produces shorter encodings for all 99 analyzed languages, with the most notable improvements for non-European languages and non-Latin scripts. This, in turn, improves multilingual LM performance and diminishes the perplexity gap throughout diverse languages.
Title: MultiLegalPile: A 689GB Multilingual Legal Corpus
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Large, high-quality datasets are crucial for training Large Language Models (LLMs). However, so far, few datasets are available for specialized critical domains such as law and the available ones are often small and only in English. To fill this gap, we curate and release MultiLegalPile, a 689GB corpus in 24 languages from 17 jurisdictions. MultiLegalPile includes diverse legal data sources and allows for pretraining NLP models under fair use, with most of the dataset licensed very permissively. We pretrain two RoBERTa models and one Longformer multilingually, and 24 monolingual models on each of the language-specific subsets and evaluate them on LEXTREME. Additionally, we evaluate the English and multilingual models on LexGLUE. Our multilingual models set a new SotA on LEXTREME and our English models on LexGLUE. We release the dataset, trained models, and all code under the most open licenses possible.
Title: WebCiteS: Attributed Query-Focused Summarization on Chinese Web Search Results with Citations
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Enhancing the attribution in large language models (LLMs) is a crucial task. One feasible approach is to enable LLMs to cite external sources that support their generations. However, existing datasets and evaluation methods in this domain still exhibit notable limitations. In this work, we formulate the task of attributed query-focused summarization (AQFS) and present WebCiteS, a Chinese dataset featuring 7k human-annotated summaries with citations. WebCiteS derives from real-world user queries and web search results, offering a valuable resource for model training and evaluation. Prior works in attribution evaluation do not differentiate between groundedness errors and citation errors. They also fall short in automatically verifying sentences that draw partial support from multiple sources. We tackle these issues by developing detailed metrics and enabling the automatic evaluator to decompose the sentences into sub-claims for fine-grained verification. Our comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models on WebCiteS highlights the challenge LLMs face in correctly citing sources, underscoring the necessity for further improvement. The dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in this crucial field.
Title: What Languages are Easy to Language-Model? A Perspective from Learning Probabilistic Regular Languages
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributionsover strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of distributions over strings. While prior work in this direction focused on assessing the theoretical limits, in contrast, we seek to understand the empirical learnability. Unlike prior empirical work, we evaluate neural LMs on their home turf—learning probabilistic languages—rather than as classifiers of formal languages. In particular, we investigate the learnability of regular LMs (RLMs) by RNN and Transformer LMs. We empirically test the learnability of RLMs as a function of various complexity parameters of the RLM and the hidden state size of the neural LM. We find that the RLM rank, which corresponds to the size of linear space spanned by the logits of its conditional distributions, and the expected length of sampled strings are strong and significant predictors of learnability for both RNNs and Transformers. Several other predictors also reach significance, but with differing patterns between RNNs and Transformers.
Title: Tree-Averaging Algorithms for Ensemble-Based Unsupervised Discontinuous Constituency Parsing
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: syntax: tagging, chunking and parsing
Abstract: We address unsupervised discontinuous constituency parsing, where we observe a high variance in the performance of the only previous model in the literature. We propose to build an ensemble of different runs of the existing discontinuous parser by averaging the predicted trees, to stabilize and boost performance. To begin with, we provide comprehensive computational complexity analysis (in terms of P and NP-complete) for tree averaging under different setups of binarity and continuity. We then develop an efficient exact algorithm to tackle the task, which runs in a reasonable time for all samples in our experiments. Results on three datasets show our method outperforms all baselines in all metrics; we also provide in-depth analyses of our approach.
Title: ArtPrompt: ASCII Art-based Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned LLMs
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Safety is critical to the usage of large language models (LLMs). Multiple techniques such as data filtering and supervised fine-tuning have been developed to strengthen LLM safety. However, currently known techniques presume that corpora used for safety alignment of LLMs are solely interpreted by semantics. This assumption, however, does not hold in real-world applications, which leads to severe vulnerabilities in LLMs. For example, users of forums often use ASCII art, a form of text-based art, to convey image information. In this paper, we propose a novel ASCII art-based jailbreak attack and introduce a comprehensive benchmark Vision-in-Text Challenge (ViTC) to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in recognizing prompts that cannot be solely interpreted by semantics. We show that five SOTA LLMs (GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Claude, and Llama2) struggle to recognize prompts provided in the form of ASCII art. Based on this observation, we develop the jailbreak attack ArtPrompt, which leverages the poor performance of LLMs in recognizing ASCII art to bypass safety measures and elicit undesired behaviors from LLMs. ArtPrompt only requires black-box access to the victim LLMs, making it a practical attack. We evaluate ArtPrompt on five SOTA LLMs, and show that ArtPrompt can effectively and efficiently induce undesired behaviors from all five LLMs.