yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: ChatDev: Communicative Agents for Software Development
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Software development is a complex task that necessitates cooperation among multiple members with diverse skills. Numerous studies used deep learning to improve specific phases in a waterfall model, such as design, coding, and testing. However, the deep learning model in each phase requires unique designs, leading to technical inconsistencies across various phases, which results in a fragmented and ineffective development process. In this paper, we introduce ChatDev, a chat-powered software development framework in which specialized agents driven by large language models (LLMs) are guided in what to communicate (via chat chain) and how to communicate (via communicative dehallucination). These agents actively contribute to the design, coding, and testing phases through unified language-based communication, with solutions derived from their multi-turn dialogues. We found their utilization of natural language is advantageous for system design, and communicating in programming language proves helpful in debugging. This paradigm demonstrates how linguistic communication facilitates multi-agent collaboration, establishing language as a unifying bridge for autonomous task-solving among LLM agents. The code and data are available at https://github.com/OpenBMB/ChatDev.
Title: Disentangled Learning with Synthetic Parallel Data for Text Style Transfer
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: sentiment analysis, stylistic analysis, and argument mining
Abstract: Text style transfer (TST) is an important task in natural language generation, which aims to transfer the text style (e.g., sentiment) while keeping its semantic information. Due to the absence of parallel datasets for supervision, most existing studies have been conducted in an unsupervised manner, where the generated sentences often suffer from high semantic divergence and thus low semantic preservation. In this paper, we propose a novel disentanglement-based framework for TST named DisenTrans, where disentanglement means that we separate the attribute and content components in the natural language corpus and consider this task from these two perspectives. Concretely, we first create a disentangled Chain-of-Thought prompting procedure to synthesize parallel data and corresponding attribute components for supervision. Then we develop a disentanglement learning method with synthetic data, where two losses are designed to enhance the focus on attribute properties and constrain the semantic space, thereby benefiting style control and semantic preservation respectively. Instructed by the disentanglement concept, our framework creates valuable supervised information and utilizes it effectively in TST tasks. Extensive experiments on mainstream datasets present that our framework achieves significant performance with great sample efficiency.
Title: PsySafe: A Comprehensive Framework for Psychological-based Attack, Defense, and Evaluation of Multi-agent System Safety
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Multi-agent systems, when enhanced with Large Language Models (LLMs), exhibit profound capabilities in collective intelligence. However, the potential misuse of this intelligence for malicious purposes presents significant risks. To date, comprehensive research on the safety issues associated with multi-agent systems remains limited. In this paper, we explore these concerns through the innovative lens of agent psychology, revealing that the dark psychological states of agents constitute a significant threat to safety.To tackle these concerns, we propose a comprehensive framework (PsySafe) grounded in agent psychology, focusing on three key areas: firstly, identifying how dark personality traits in agents can lead to risky behaviors; secondly, evaluating the safety of multi-agent systems from the psychological and behavioral perspectives, and thirdly, devising effective strategies to mitigate these risks.Our experiments reveal several intriguing phenomena, such as the collective dangerous behaviors among agents, agents’ self-reflection when engaging in dangerous behavior, and the correlation between agents’ psychological assessments and dangerous behaviors. We anticipate that our framework and observations will provide valuable insights for further research into the safety of multi-agent systems. We make our data and code publicly accessible at https://github.com/AI4Good24/PsySafe.
Title: Can Large Language Models be Good Emotional Supporter? Mitigating Preference Bias on Emotional Support Conversation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: Emotional Support Conversation (ESC) is a task aimed at alleviating individuals’ emotional distress through daily conversation. Given its inherent complexity and non-intuitive nature, ESConv dataset incorporates support strategies to facilitate the generation of appropriate responses. Recently, despite the remarkable conversational ability of large language models (LLMs), previous studies have suggested that they often struggle with providing useful emotional support. Hence, this work initially analyzes the results of LLMs on ESConv, revealing challenges in selecting the correct strategy and a notable preference for a specific strategy. Motivated by these, we explore the impact of the inherent preference in LLMs on providing emotional support, and consequently, we observe that exhibiting high preference for specific strategies hinders effective emotional support, aggravating its robustness in predicting the appropriate strategy. Moreover, we conduct a methodological study to offer insights into the necessary approaches for LLMs to serve as proficient emotional supporters. Our findings emphasize that (1) low preference for specific strategies hinders the progress of emotional support, (2) external assistance helps reduce preference bias, and (3) existing LLMs alone cannot become good emotional supporters. These insights suggest promising avenues for future research to enhance the emotional intelligence of LLMs.
Title: \inftyBench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokens
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Processing and reasoning over long contexts is crucial for many practical applications of Large Language Models (LLMs), such as document comprehension and agent construction. Despite recent strides in making LLMs process contexts with more than 100K tokens, there is currently a lack of a standardized benchmark to evaluate this long-context capability. Existing public benchmarks typically focus on contexts around 10K tokens, limiting the assessment and comparison of LLMs in processing longer contexts. In this paper, we propose , the first LLM benchmark featuring an average data length surpassing 100K tokens. comprises synthetic and realistic tasks spanning diverse domains in English and Chinese. The tasks in are designed to require an understanding of long dependencies in contexts and make simply retrieving a limited number of passages from contexts not sufficient for these tasks. Based on , we evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs tailored for processing long contexts. The experimental results indicate that existing long-context LLMs still require significant advancements to process 100K+ contexts effectively. Furthermore, we present three intriguing analyses regarding the behavior of LLMs processing long context. Our code and data is released.
Title: Natural Language Satisfiability: Exploring the Problem Distribution and Evaluating Transformer-based Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Efforts to apply transformer-based language models (TLMs) to the problem of reasoning in natural language have enjoyed ever-increasing success in recent years. The most fundamental task in this area to which nearly all others can be reduced is that of determining satisfiability. However, from a logical point of view, satisfiability problems vary along various dimensions, which may affect TLMs’ ability to learn how to solve them. The problem instances of satisfiability in natural language can belong to different computational complexity classes depending on the language fragment in which they are expressed. Although prior research has explored the problem of natural language satisfiability, the above-mentioned point has not been discussed adequately. Hence, we investigate how problem instances from varying computational complexity classes and having different grammatical constructs impact TLMs’ ability to learn rules of inference. Furthermore, to faithfully evaluate TLMs, we conduct an empirical study to explore the distribution of satisfiability problems.
Title: Political Compass or Spinning Arrow? Towards More Meaningful Evaluations for Values and Opinions in Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns around real-world LLM applications. For example, politically-biased LLMs may subtly influence society when they are used by millions of people. Such real-world concerns, however, stand in stark contrast to the artificiality of current evaluations: real users do not typically ask LLMs survey questions. Motivated by this discrepancy, we challenge the prevailing *constrained* evaluation paradigm for values and opinions in LLMs and explore more realistic *unconstrained* evaluations. As a case study, we focus on the popular Political Compass Test (PCT). In a systematic review, we find that most prior work using the PCT *forces models to comply with the PCT’s multiple-choice format. We show that models give substantively different answers when not forced; that answers change depending on how models are forced; and that answers lack paraphrase robustness. Then, we demonstrate that models give different answers yet again in a more realistic open-ended answer setting. We distill these findings into recommendations and open challenges in evaluating values and opinions in LLMs.
Title: AI ‘News’ Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as ‘content farm’ models (CFMs), to generate synthetic text that could pass for real news articles. This is already happening even for languages that do not have high-quality monolingual LLMs. We show that fine-tuning Llama (v1), mostly trained on English, on as little as 40K Italian news articles, is sufficient for producing news-like texts that native speakers of Italian struggle to identify as synthetic.We investigate three LLMs and three methods of detecting synthetic texts (log-likelihood, DetectGPT, and supervised classification), finding that they all perform better than human raters, but they are all impractical in the real world (requiring either access to token likelihood information or a large dataset of CFM texts). We also explore the possibility of creating a proxy CFM: an LLM fine-tuned on a similar dataset to one used by the real ‘content farm’. We find that even a small amount of fine-tuning data suffices for creating a successful detector, but we need to know which base LLM is used, which is a major challenge.Our results suggest that there are currently no practical methods for detecting synthetic news-like texts ‘in the wild’, while generating them is too easy. We highlight the urgency of more NLP research on this problem.
Title: Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood. We investigate this aspect by introducing a novel QA reasoning framework, specifically designed to assess the impact of input length. We isolate the effect of input length using multiple versions of the same sample, each being extended with padding of different lengths, types and locations. Our findings show a notable degradation in LLMs’ reasoning performance at much shorter input lengths than their technical maximum. We show that the degradation trend appears in every version of our dataset, although at different intensities.Additionally, our study reveals that the traditional metric of next word prediction correlates negatively with performance of LLMs’ on our reasoning dataset. We analyse our results and identify failure modes that can serve as useful guides for future research, potentially informing strategies to address the limitations observed in LLMs.
Title: Disambiguate Words like Composing Them: A Morphology-Informed Approach to Enhance Chinese Word Sense Disambiguation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: In parataxis languages like Chinese, word meanings are highly correlated with morphological knowledge, which can help to disambiguate word senses. However, in-depth exploration of morphological knowledge in previous word sense disambiguation (WSD) methods is still lacking due to the absence of publicly available resources. In this paper, we are motivated to enhance Chinese WSD with full morphological knowledge, including both word-formations and morphemes. We first construct the largest and releasable Chinese WSD resources, including the lexico-semantic inventories MorInv and WrdInv, a Chinese WSD dataset MiCLS, and an out-of-volcabulary (OOV) test set. Then, we propose a model, MorBERT, to fully leverage this morphology-informed knowledge for Chinese WSD and achieve a SOTA F1 of 92.18% in the task. Finally, we demonstrated the model’s robustness in low-resource settings and generalizability to OOV senses. These resources and methods may bring new insights into and solutions for various downstream tasks in both computational and humanistic fields.
Title: Do Llamas Work in English? On the Latent Language of Multilingual Transformers
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: We ask whether multilingual language models trained on unbalanced, English-dominated corpora use English as an internal pivot language—-a question of key importance for understanding how language models function and the origins of linguistic bias. Focusing on the Llama-2 family of transformer models, our study is based on carefully constructed non-English prompts with a unique correct single-token continuation. From layer to layer, transformers gradually map an input embedding of the final prompt token to an output embedding from which next-token probabilities are computed. Tracking intermediate embeddings through their high-dimensional space reveals three distinct phases, whereby intermediate embeddings (1) start far away from output token embeddings; (2) already in middle layers allow for decoding a semantically correct next token, but giving higher probability to its version in English than in the input language; (3) move into an input-language-specific region of the embedding space. We cast these results into a conceptual model where the three phases operate in ”input space”, ”concept space”, and ”output space”, respectively. Crucially, our evidence suggests that the abstract ”concept space” lies closer to English than to other input languages, which may have important consequences regarding the biases embodied by multilingual language models.
Title: G-DIG: Towards Gradient-based DIverse and hiGh-quality Instruction Data Selection for Machine Translation
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in general scenarios. Instruction finetuning empowers them to align with humans in various tasks. Nevertheless, the Diversity and Quality of the instruction data remain two main challenges for instruction finetuning. With regard to this, in this paper, we propose a novel gradient-based method to automatically select high-quality and diverse instruction finetuning data for machine translation. Our key innovation centers around analyzing how individual training examples influence the model during training. Specifically, we select training examples that exert beneficial influences on the model as high-quality ones by means of Influence Function plus a small high-quality seed dataset. Moreover, to enhance the diversity of the training data we maximize the variety of influences they have on the model by clustering on their gradients and resampling. Extensive experiments on WMT22 and FLORES translation tasks demonstrate the superiority of our methods, and in-depth analysis further validates their effectiveness and generalization.
Title: Media Framing: A typology and Survey of Computational Approaches Across Disciplines
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Framing studies how individuals and societies make sense of the world, by communicating or representing complex issues through schema of interpretation. The framing of information in the mass media influences our interpretation of facts and corresponding decisions, so detecting and analysing it is essential to understand biases in the information we consume. Despite that, framing is still mostly examined manually, on a case-by-case basis, while existing large-scale automatic analyses using NLP methods are not mature enough to solve this task. In this survey we show that despite the growing interest to framing in NLP its current approaches do not capture those aspects which allow to frame, rather than simply convey, the message. To this end, we bring together definitions of frames and framing adopted in different disciplines; examine cognitive, linguistic, and communicative aspects a frame contains beyond its topical content. We survey recent work on computational frame detection, and discuss how framing aspects and frame definitions are (or should) be reflected in NLP approaches.
Title: SPZ: A Semantic Perturbation-based Data Augmentation Method with Zonal-Mixing for Alzheimer’s Disease Detection
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), characterized by significant cognitive and functional impairment, necessitates the development of early detection techniques. Traditional diagnostic practices, such as cognitive assessments and biomarker analysis, are often invasive and costly. Deep learning-based approaches for non-invasive AD detection have been explored in recent studies, but the lack of accessible data hinders further improvements in detection performance. To address these challenges, we propose a novel semantic perturbation-based data augmentation method that essentially differs from existing techniques, which primarily rely on explicit data engineering. Our approach generates controlled semantic perturbations to enhance textual representations, aiding the model in identifying AD-specific linguistic patterns, particularly in scenarios with limited data availability. It learns contextual information and dynamically adjusts the perturbation degree for different linguistic features. This enhances the model’s sensitivity to AD-specific linguistic features and its robustness against natural language noise. Experimental results on the ADReSS challenge dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms other strong and competitive deep learning methods.
Title: Calibrating Large Language Models Using Their Generations Only
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in user-facing applications, building trust and maintaining safety by accurately quantifying a model’s confidence in its prediction becomes even more important. However, finding effective ways to calibrate LLMs—especially when the only interface to the models is their generated text—remains a challenge. We propose APRICOT (Auxiliary prediction of confidence targets): A method to set confidence targets and train an additional model that predicts an LLM’s confidence based on its textual input and output alone. This approach has several advantages: It is conceptually simple, does not require access to the target model beyond its output, does not interfere with the language generation, and has a multitude of potential usages, for instance by verbalizing the predicted confidence or using it to re-prompting the LLM to accurately reflecting its uncertainty. We show how our approach performs competitively in terms of calibration error for white-box and black-box LLMs on closed-book question-answering to detect incorrect LLM answers.
Title: Iterative Forward Tuning Boosts In-Context Learning in Language Models
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Despite the advancements in in-context learning (ICL) for large language models (LLMs), current research centers on specific prompt engineering, such as demonstration selection, with the expectation that a single iteration of demonstrations processing can generalize effectively to a given test sample. However, this perspective overlooks the potential benefits derived from multiple iterations involving demonstrations, a practice aligning more closely with the iterative decision-making process exhibited by humans, who often learn through analogy. In this study, we introduce a novel two-stage framework to boost ICL in LLMs. Specifically, our framework delineates the ICL process into two distinct stages: Deep-Thinking and test stages. The Deep-Thinking stage incorporates a unique attention mechanism, i.e., iterative enhanced attention, which enables multiple rounds of information accumulation. This mechanism operates by manipulating the Key-Value matrices without training, fostering enhanced understanding capabilities in LLMs by thinking demonstrations multiple times. We evaluated Deep-Thinking across a range of benchmarks and LLMs, showing its superior performance over vanilla ICL methods and its effectiveness in challenging tasks where demonstration selection is infeasible.
Title: Pride and Prejudice: LLM Amplifies Self-Bias in Self-Refinement
Venue: ACL (2024)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) improve their performance through self-feedback on certain tasks while degrade on others. We discovered that such a contrary is due to LLM’s bias in evaluating their own output. In this paper, we formally define LLM’s self-bias – the tendency to favor its own generation – using two statistics. We analyze six LLMs (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Gemini, LLaMA2, Mixtral and DeepSeek) on translation, constrained text generation, and mathematical reasoning tasks. We find that self-bias is prevalent in all examined LLMs across multiple languages and tasks. Our analysis reveals that while the self-refine pipeline improves the fluency and understandability of model outputs, it further amplifies self-bias. To mitigate such biases, we discover that larger model size and external feedback with accurate assessment can significantly reduce bias in the self-refine pipeline, leading to actual performance improvement in downstream tasks. The code and data are released at https://github.com/xu1998hz/llm_self_bias.