yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: A Reproducibility Study on Quantifying Language Similarity: The Impact of Missing Values in the URIEL Knowledge Base
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: In the pursuit of supporting more languages around the world, tools that characterize properties of languages play a key role in expanding the existing multilingual NLP research. In this study, we focus on a widely used typological knowledge base, URIEL, which aggregates linguistic information into numeric vectors. Specifically, we delve into the soundness and reproducibility of the approach taken by URIEL in quantifying language similarity. Our analysis reveals URIEL’s ambiguity in calculating language distances and in handling missing values. Moreover, we find that URIEL does not provide any information about typological features for 31% of the languages it represents, undermining the reliabilility of the database, particularly on low-resource languages. Our literature review suggests URIEL and lang2vec are used in papers on diverse NLP tasks, which motivates us to rigorously verify the database as the effectiveness of these works depends on the reliability of the information the tool provides.
Title: Coding Open-Ended Responses using Pseudo Response Generation by Large Language Models
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Survey research using open-ended responses is an important method thatcontributes to the discovery of unknown issues and new needs. However,survey research generally requires time and cost-consuming manual dataprocessing, indicating that it is difficult to analyze large dataset.To address this issue, we propose an LLM-based method to automate partsof the grounded theory approach (GTA), a representative approach of thequalitative data analysis. We generated and annotated pseudo open-endedresponses, and used them as the training data for the coding proceduresof GTA. Through evaluations, we showed that the models trained withpseudo open-ended responses are quite effective compared with thosetrained with manually annotated open-ended responses. We alsodemonstrate that the LLM-based approach is highly efficient andcost-saving compared to human-based approach.
Title: Cross-Task Generalization Abilities of Large Language Models
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Humans can learn a new language task efficiently with only few examples, by leveraging their knowledge and experience obtained when learning prior tasks. Enabling similar cross-task generalization abilities in NLP systems is fundamental for approaching the goal of general intelligence and expanding the reach of language technology in the future.In this thesis proposal, I will present my work on (1) benchmarking cross-task generalization abilities with diverse NLP tasks; (2) developing model architectures for improving cross-task generalization abilities; (3) analyzing and predicting the generalization landscape of current state-of-the-art large language models. Additionally, I will outline future research directions, along with preliminary thoughts on addressing them.
Title: Commentary Generation from Data Records of Multiplayer Strategy Esports Game
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Esports, a sports competition on video games, has become one of the most important sporting events. Although esports play logs have been accumulated, only a small portion of them accompany text commentaries for the audience to retrieve and understand the plays. In this study, we therefore introduce the task of generating game commentaries from esports’ data records. We first build large-scale esports data-to-text datasets that pair structured data and commentaries from a popular esports game, League of Legends. We then evaluate Transformer-based models to generate game commentaries from structured data records, while examining the impact of the pre-trained language models. Evaluation results on our dataset revealed the challenges of this novel task. We will release our dataset to boost potential research in the data-to-text generation community.
Title: Facilitating Opinion Diversity through Hybrid NLP Approaches
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved in facilitating large-scale online discussions with Natural Language Processing (NLP), 2) suggests solutions to these challenges by incorporating hybrid human-AI technologies, and 3) investigates what these technologies can reveal about individual perspectives in online discussions. We propose a three-layered hierarchy for representing perspectives that can be obtained by a mixture of human intelligence and large language models. We illustrate how these representations can draw insights into the diversity of perspectives and allow us to investigate interactions in online discussions.
Title: HybridBERT - Making BERT Pretraining More Efficient Through Hybrid Mixture of Attention Mechanisms
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Pretrained transformer-based language models have produced state-of-the-art performance in most natural language understanding tasks. These models undergo two stages of training: pretraining on a huge corpus of data and fine-tuning on a specific downstream task. The pretraining phase is extremely compute-intensive and requires several high-performance computing devices like GPUs and several days or even months of training, but it is crucial for the model to capture global knowledge and also has a significant impact on the fine-tuning task. This is a major roadblock for researchers without access to sophisticated computing resources. To overcome this challenge, we propose two novel hybrid architectures called HybridBERT (HBERT), which combine self-attention and additive attention mechanisms together with sub-layer normalization. We introduce a computing budget to the pretraining phase, limiting the training time and usage to a single GPU. We show that HBERT attains twice the pretraining accuracy of a vanilla-BERT baseline. We also evaluate our proposed models on two downstream tasks, where we outperform BERT-base while accelerating inference. Moreover, we study the effect of weight initialization with a limited pretraining budget. The code and models are publicly available at: www.github.com/gokulsg/HBERT/.
Title: Catch Me If You GPT: Tutorial on Deepfake Texts
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: In recent years, Natural Language Generation (NLG) techniques have greatly advanced, especially in the realm of Large Language Models (LLMs). With respect to the quality of generated texts, it is no longer trivial to tell the difference between human-written and LLMgenerated texts (i.e., deepfake texts). While this is a celebratory feat for NLG, it poses new security risks (e.g., the generation of misinformation). To combat this novel challenge, researchers have developed diverse techniques to detect deepfake texts. While this niche field of deepfake text detection is growing, the field of NLG is growing at a much faster rate, thus making it difficult to understand the complex interplay between state-of-the-art NLG methods and the detectability of their generated texts. To understand such inter-play, two new computational problems emerge: (1) Deepfake Text Attribution (DTA) and (2) Deepfake Text Obfuscation (DTO) problems, where the DTA problem is concerned with attributing the authorship of a given text to one of k NLG methods, while the DTO problem is to evade the authorship of a given text by modifying parts of the text. In this cutting-edge tutorial, therefore, we call attention to the serious security risk both emerging problems pose and give a comprehensive review of recent literature on the detection and obfuscation of deepfake text authorships. Our tutorial will be 3 hours long with a mix of lecture and hands-on examples for interactive audience participation. You can find our tutorial materials here: https://tinyurl.com/naacl24-tutorial.
Title: Combating Security and Privacy Issues in the Era of Large Language Models
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: ethics, bias, and fairness
Abstract: This tutorial seeks to provide a systematic summary of risks and vulnerabilities in security, privacy and copyright aspects of large language models (LLMs), and most recent solutions to address those issues. We will discuss a broad thread of studies that try to answer the following questions: (i) How do we unravel the adversarial threats that attackers may leverage in the training time of LLMs, especially those that may exist in recent paradigms of instruction tuning and RLHF processes? (ii) How do we guard the LLMs against malicious attacks in inference time, such as attacks based on backdoors and jailbreaking? (iii) How do we ensure privacy protection of user information and LLM decisions for Language Model as-a-Service (LMaaS)? (iv) How do we protect the copyright of an LLM? (v) How do we detect and prevent cases where personal or confidential information is leaked during LLM training? (vi) How should we make policies to control against improper usage of LLM-generated content? In addition, will conclude the discussions by outlining emergent challenges in security, privacy and reliability of LLMs that deserve timely investigation by the community
Title: Explanation in the Era of Large Language Models
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Explanation has long been a part of communications, where humans use language to elucidate each other and transmit information about the mechanisms of events. There have been numerous works that study the structures of the explanations and their utility to humans. At the same time, explanation relates to a collection of research directions in natural language processing (and more broadly, computer vision and machine learning) where researchers develop computational approaches to explain the (usually deep neural network) models. Explanation has received rising attention. In recent months, the advance of large language models (LLMs) provides unprecedented opportunities to leverage their reasoning abilities, both as tools to produce explanations and as the subjects of explanation analysis. On the other hand, the sheer sizes and the opaque nature of LLMs introduce challenges to the explanation methods. In this tutorial, we intend to review these opportunities and challenges of explanations in the era of LLMs, connect lines of research previously studied by different research groups, and hopefully spark thoughts of new research directions
Title: From Text to Context: Contextualizing Language with Humans, Groups, and Communities for Socially Aware NLP
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Aimed at the NLP researchers or practitioners who would like to integrate human - individual, group, or societal level factors into their analyses, this tutorial will cover recent techniques and libraries for doing so at each level of analysis. Starting with human-centered techniques that provide benefit to traditional document- or word-level NLP tasks (Garten et al., 2019; Lynn et al., 2017), we undertake a thorough exploration of critical human-level aspects as they pertain to NLP, gradually moving up to higher levels of analysis: individual persons, individual with agent (chat/dialogue), groups of people, and finally communities or societies.
Title: Human-AI Interaction in the Age of LLMs
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: Recently, the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has revolutionized the capabilities of AI systems. These models possess the ability to comprehend and generate human-like text, enabling them to engage in sophisticated conversations, generate content, and even perform tasks that once seemed beyond the reach of machines. As a result, the way we interact with technology and each other — an established field called “Human-AI Interaction” and have been studied for over a decade — is undergoing a profound transformation. This tutorial will provide an overview of the interaction between humans and LLMs, exploring the challenges, opportunities, and ethical considerations that arise in this dynamic landscape. It will start with a review of the types of AI models we interact with, and a walkthrough of the core concepts in Human-AI Interaction. We will then emphasize the emerging topics shared between HCI and NLP communities in light of LLMs.
Title: Spatial and Temporal Language Understanding: Representation, Reasoning, and Grounding
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: This tutorial provides an overview of the cutting edge research on spatial and temporal language understanding. We also cover some essential background material from various subdisciplines to this topic, which we believe will enrich the CL community’s appreciation of the complexity of spatiotemporal reasoning.
Title: HPipe: Large Language Model Pipeline Parallelism for Long Context on Heterogeneous Cost-effective Devices
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Micro-enterprises and individual developers emerge analysis demands for long sequence with powerful Large Language Models (LLMs). They try to deploy the LLMs at local, but only possess various commodity devices and the unreliable interconnection between devices. Existing parallel techniques do not lead to the same effectiveness in limited environment. The heterogeneity of devices, coupled with their limited capacity and expensive communication, brings challenges to private deployment for maximized utilization of available devices while masking latency. Hence, we introduce HPipe, a pipeline inference framework that successfully mitigates LLMs from high-performance clusters to heterogeneous commodity devices. By ensuring a balanced distribution of workloads, HPipe facilitates the parallel execution of LLMs through pipelining the sequences on the token dimension. The evaluation conducted on LLaMA-7B and GPT3-2B demonstrates that HPipe holds the potential for context analysis on LLM with heterogeneity devices, achieving an impressive speedup in latency and throughput up to 2.28 times.
Title: Lossless Acceleration of Large Language Model via Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities, they are hindered by significant resource consumption and considerable latency due to autoregressive processing. In this study, we introduce Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding (ANPD), an innovative and lossless approach that accelerates inference by allowing the simultaneous generation of multiple tokens. ANPD incorporates a two-stage approach: it begins with a rapid drafting phase that employs an N-gram module, which adapts based on the current interactive context, followed by a verification phase, during which the original LLM assesses and confirms the proposed tokens. Consequently, ANPD preserves the integrity of the LLM’s original output while enhancing processing speed. We further leverage a multi-level architecture for the N-gram module to enhance the precision of the initial draft, consequently reducing inference latency. ANPD eliminates the need for retraining or extra GPU memory, making it an efficient and plug-and-play enhancement. In our experiments, models such as LLaMA and its fine-tuned variants have shown speed improvements up to 3.67x, validating the effectiveness of our proposed ANPD.
Title: SOLAR 10.7B: Scaling Large Language Models with Simple yet Effective Depth Up-Scaling
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: We introduce SOLAR 10.7B, a large language model (LLM) with 10.7 billion parameters, demonstrating superior performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Inspired by recent efforts to efficiently up-scale LLMs, we present a method for scaling LLMs called depth up-scaling (DUS), which encompasses depthwise scaling and continued pretraining. In contrast to other LLM up-scaling methods that use mixture-of-experts, DUS does not require complex changes to train and inference efficiently. We show experimentally that DUS is simple yet effective in scaling up high-performance LLMs from small ones. Building on the DUS model, we additionally present SOLAR 10.7B-Instruct, a variant fine-tuned for instruction-following capabilities, surpassing Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. SOLAR 10.7B is publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting broad access and application in the LLM field.
Title: UINav: A Practical Approach to Train On-Device Automation Agents
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Automation systems that can autonomously drive application user interfaces to complete user tasks are of great benefit, especially when users are situationally or permanently impaired. Prior automation systems do not produce generalizable models while AI-based automation agents work reliably only in simple, hand-crafted applications or incur high computation costs. We propose UINav, a demonstration-based approach to train automation agents that fit mobile devices, yet achieving high success rates with modest numbers of demonstrations. To reduce the demonstration overhead, UINav uses a referee model that provides users with immediate feedback on tasks where the agent fails, and automatically augments human demonstrations to increase diversity in training data. Our evaluation shows that with only 10 demonstrations can achieve 70% accuracy, and that with enough demonstrations it can surpass 90% accuracy.
Title: Efficiently Distilling LLMs for Edge Applications
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Supernet training of LLMs is of great interest in industrial applications as it confers the ability to produce a palette of smaller models at constant cost, regardless of the number of models (of different size / latency) produced. We propose a new method called Multistage Low-rank Fine-tuning of Super-transformers (MLFS) for parameter-efficient supernet training. We show that it is possible to obtain high-quality encoder models that are suitable for commercial edge applications, and that while decoder-only models are resistant to a comparable degree of compression, decoders can be effectively sliced for a significant reduction in training time.
Title: Modeling and Detecting Company Risks from News
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Identifying risks associated with a company is important to investors and the wellbeing of the overall financial markets. In this study, we build a computational framework to automatically extract company risk factors from news articles. Our newly proposed schema comprises seven distinct aspects, such as supply chain, regulations, and competition. We annotate 666 news articles and benchmark various machine learning models. While large language mod- els have achieved remarkable progress in various types of NLP tasks, our experiment shows that zero-shot and few-shot prompting state-of- the-art LLMs (e.g., Llama-2) can only achieve moderate to low performances in identifying risk factors. In contrast, fine-tuning pre-trained language models yields better results on most risk factors. Using this model, we analyze over 277K Bloomberg News articles and demonstrate that identifying risk factors from news could provide extensive insights into the operations of companies and industries.
Title: Multiple-Question Multiple-Answer Text-VQA
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: We present Multiple-Question Multiple-Answer (MQMA), a novel approach to do text-VQA in encoder-decoder transformer models. To the best of our knowledge, almost all previous approaches for text-VQA process a single question and its associated content to predict a single answer. However, in industry applications, users may come up with multiple questions about a single image. In order to answer multiple questions from the same image, each question and content are fed into the model multiple times. In contrast, our proposed MQMA approach takes multiple questions and content as input at the encoder and predicts multiple answers at the decoder in an auto-regressive manner at the same time. We make several novel architectural modifications to standard encoder-decoder transformers to support MQMA. We also propose a novel MQMA denoising pre-training task which is designed to teach the model to align and delineate multiple questions and content with associated answers. MQMA pre-trained model achieves state-of-the-art results on multiple text-VQA datasets, each with strong baselines. Specifically, on OCR-VQA (+2.5%), TextVQA (+1.4%), ST-VQA (+0.6%), DocVQA (+1.1%) absolute improvements over the previous state-of-the-art approaches.
Title: An NLP-Focused Pilot Training Agent for Safe and Efficient Aviation Communication
Venue: NAACL (2024)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: Aviation communication significantly influences the success of flight operations, ensuring safety of lives and efficient air transportation. In day-to-day flight operations, air traffic controllers (ATCos) would timely communicate instructions to pilots using specific phraseology for aircraft manipulation . However, pilots, originating from diverse backgrounds and understanding of English language, have struggled with conforming to strict phraseology for readback and communication in the live operation, this problem had not been effectively addressed over the past decades. Traditionally, aviation communication training involved expensive setups and resources, often relying on human-in-the-loop (HIL) air traffic simulations that demand allocating a specific environment, domain experts for participation, and substantial amount of annotated data for simulation. Therefore, we would like to propose an NLP-oriented training agent and address these challenges. Our approach involves leveraging only natural language capabilities and fine-tuning on communication data to generate instructions based on input scenarios (keywords). Given the absence of prior references for this business problem, we investigated the feasibility of our proposed solution by 1) generating all instructions at once and 2) generating one instruction while incorporating conversational history in each input. Our findings affirm the feasibility of this approach, highlighting the effectiveness of fine-tuning pre-trained models and large language models in advancing aviation communication training.