The 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

St. Julian’s, Malta
March, 2024

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bib (full) Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

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Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Yvette Graham | Matthew Purver

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Enhancing Ethical Explanations of Large Language Models through Iterative Symbolic Refinement
Xin Quan | Marco Valentino | Louise Dennis | Andre Freitas

An increasing amount of research in Natural Language Inference (NLI) focuses on the application and evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their reasoning capabilities. Despite their success, however, LLMs are still prone to factual errors and inconsistencies in their explanations, offering limited control and interpretability for inference in complex domains. In this paper, we focus on ethical NLI, investigating how hybrid neuro-symbolic techniques can enhance the logical validity and alignment of ethical explanations produced by LLMs. Specifically, we present an abductive-deductive framework named Logic-Explainer, which integrates LLMs with an external backward-chaining solver to refine step-wise natural language explanations and jointly verify their correctness, reduce incompleteness and minimise redundancy. An extensive empirical analysis demonstrates that Logic-Explainer can improve explanations generated via in-context learning methods and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) on challenging ethical NLI tasks, while, at the same time, producing formal proofs describing and supporting models’ reasoning. As ethical NLI requires commonsense reasoning to identify underlying moral violations, our results suggest the effectiveness of neuro-symbolic methods for multi-step NLI more broadly, opening new opportunities to enhance the logical consistency, reliability, and alignment of LLMs.

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Multi-Relational Hyperbolic Word Embeddings from Natural Language Definitions
Marco Valentino | Danilo Carvalho | Andre Freitas

Natural language definitions possess a recursive, self-explanatory semantic structure that can support representation learning methods able to preserve explicit conceptual relations and constraints in the latent space. This paper presents a multi-relational model that explicitly leverages such a structure to derive word embeddings from definitions. By automatically extracting the relations linking defined and defining terms from dictionaries, we demonstrate how the problem of learning word embeddings can be formalised via a translational framework in Hyperbolic space and used as a proxy to capture the global semantic structure of definitions. An extensive empirical analysis demonstrates that the framework can help imposing the desired structural constraints while preserving the semantic mapping required for controllable and interpretable traversal. Moreover, the experiments reveal the superiority of the Hyperbolic word embeddings over the Euclidean counterparts and demonstrate that the multi-relational approach can obtain competitive results when compared to state-of-the-art neural models, with the advantage of being intrinsically more efficient and interpretable

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Anisotropy Is Inherent to Self-Attention in Transformers
Nathan Godey | Éric Clergerie | Benoît Sagot

The representation degeneration problem is a phenomenon that is widely observed among self-supervised learning methods based on Transformers. In NLP, it takes the form of anisotropy, a singular property of hidden representations which makes them unexpectedly close to each other in terms of angular distance (cosine-similarity). Some recent works tend to show that anisotropy is a consequence of optimizing the cross-entropy loss on long-tailed distributions of tokens. We show in this paper that anisotropy can also be observed empirically in language models with specific objectives that should not suffer directly from the same consequences. We also show that the anisotropy problem extends to Transformers trained on other modalities. Our observations tend to demonstrate that anisotropy might actually be inherent to Transformers-based models.

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Generating Benchmarks for Factuality Evaluation of Language Models
Dor Muhlgay | Ori Ram | Inbal Magar | Yoav Levine | Nir Ratner | Yonatan Belinkov | Omri Abend | Kevin Leyton-Brown | Amnon Shashua | Yoav Shoham

Before deploying a language model (LM) within a given domain, it is important to measure its tendency to generate factually incorrect information in that domain. Existing methods for factuality evaluation of LLM generation focus on facts sampled from the LM itself, and thus do not control the set of evaluated facts and might under-represent domain specific or rare facts. We propose FACTOR: Factual Assessment via Corpus TransfORmation, a scalable approach for evaluating LM factuality. FACTOR automatically transforms a factual corpus of interest into a benchmark evaluating an LM’s propensity to generate true facts from the corpus vs. similar but incorrect statements. We use our framework to create three benchmarks: Wiki-FACTOR, News-FACTOR and Expert-FACTOR. We show that: (i) our benchmark scores increase with model size and improve when the LM is augmented with retrieval; (ii) benchmark score and perplexity do not always agree on model ranking; (iii) when perplexity and benchmark score disagree, the latter better reflects factuality in open-ended generation, as measured by human annotators.

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Leak, Cheat, Repeat: Data Contamination and Evaluation Malpractices in Closed-Source LLMs
Simone Balloccu | Patrícia Schmidtová | Mateusz Lango | Ondrej Dusek

Natural Language Processing (NLP) research is increasingly focusing on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs), with some of the most popular ones being either fully or partially closed-source. The lack of access to model details, especially regarding training data, has repeatedly raised concerns about data contamination among researchers. Several attempts have been made to address this issue, but they are limited to anecdotal evidence and trial and error. Additionally, they overlook the problem of indirect data leaking, where modelsare iteratively improved by using data coming from users. In this work, we conduct the first systematic analysis of work using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the most prominently used LLMs today, in the context of data contamination. By analysing 255 papers and considering OpenAI’s data usage policy, we extensively document the amount of data leaked to these models during the first year after the model’s release. We report that these models have been globally exposed to ∼4.7M samples from 263 benchmarks. At the same time, we document a number of evaluation malpractices emerging in the reviewed papers, such as unfair or missing baseline comparisons and reproducibility issues. We release our results as a collaborative project on https://leak-llm.github.io/, where other researchers can contribute to our efforts.

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Archer: A Human-Labeled Text-to-SQL Dataset with Arithmetic, Commonsense and Hypothetical Reasoning
Danna Zheng | Mirella Lapata | Jeff Pan

We present Archer, a challenging bilingual text-to-SQL dataset specific to complex reasoning, including arithmetic, commonsense and hypothetical reasoning. It contains 1,042 English questions and 1,042 Chinese questions, along with 521 unique SQL queries, covering 20 English databases across 20 domains. Notably, this dataset demonstrates a significantly higher level of complexity compared to existing publicly available datasets. Our evaluation shows that Archer challenges the capabilities of current state-of-the-art models, with a high-ranked model on the Spider leaderboard achieving only 6.73% execution accuracy on Archer test set. Thus, Archer presents a significant challenge for future research in this field.

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GEAR: Augmenting Language Models with Generalizable and Efficient Tool Resolution
Yining Lu | Haoping Yu | Daniel Khashabi

Augmenting large language models (LLM) to use external tools enhances their performance across a variety of tasks. However, prior works over-rely on task-specific demonstration of tool use that limits their generalizability and computational cost due to making many calls to large-scale LLMs. We introduce GEAR, a computationally efficient query-tool grounding algorithm that is generalizable to various tasks that require tool use while not relying on task-specific demonstrations. GEAR achieves better efficiency by delegating tool grounding and execution to small language models (SLM) and LLM, respectively; while leveraging semantic and pattern-based evaluation at both question and answer levels for generalizable tool grounding. We evaluate GEAR on 14 datasets across 6 downstream tasks, demonstrating its strong generalizability to novel tasks, tools and different SLMs. Despite offering more efficiency, GEAR achieves higher precision in tool grounding compared to prior strategies using LLM prompting, thus improving downstream accuracy at a reduced computational cost. For example, we demonstrate that GEAR-augmented GPT-J and GPT-3 outperform counterpart tool-augmented baselines because of better tool use.

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LLM Comparative Assessment: Zero-shot NLG Evaluation through Pairwise Comparisons using Large Language Models
Adian Liusie | Potsawee Manakul | Mark Gales

Current developments in large language models (LLMs) have enabled impressive zero-shot capabilities across various natural language tasks. An interesting application of these systems is in the automated assessment of natural language generation (NLG), a highly challenging area with great practical benefit. In this paper, we explore two options for exploiting the emergent abilities of LLMs for zero-shot NLG assessment: absolute score prediction, and comparative assessment which uses relative comparisons between pairs of candidates. Though comparative assessment has not been extensively studied in NLG assessment, we note that humans often find it more intuitive to compare two options rather than scoring each one independently. This work examines comparative assessment from multiple perspectives: performance compared to absolute grading; positional biases in the prompt; and efficient ranking in terms of the number of comparisons. We illustrate that LLM comparative assessment is a simple, general and effective approach for NLG assessment. For moderate-sized open-source LLMs, such as FlanT5 and Llama2-chat, comparative assessment is superior to prompt scoring, and in many cases can achieve performance competitive with state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we demonstrate that LLMs often exhibit strong positional biases when making pairwise comparisons, and we propose debiasing methods that can further improve performance.

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Parameter-Efficient Conversational Recommender System as a Language Processing Task
Mathieu Ravaut | Hao Zhang | Lu Xu | Aixin Sun | Yong Liu

Conversational recommender systems (CRS) aim to recommend relevant items to users by eliciting user preference through natural language conversation. Prior work often utilizes external knowledge graphs for items’ semantic information, a language model for dialogue generation, and a recommendation module for ranking relevant items. This combination of multiple components suffers from a cumber-some training process, and leads to semantic misalignment issues between dialogue generation and item recommendation. In this paper, we represent items in natural language and formulate CRS as a natural language processing task. Accordingly, we leverage the power of pre-trained language models to encode items, understand user intent via conversation, perform item recommendation through semantic matching, and generate dialogues. As a unified model, our PECRS (Parameter-Efficient CRS), can be optimized in a single stage, without relying on non-textual metadata such as a knowledge graph. Experiments on two benchmark CRS datasets, ReDial and INSPIRED, demonstrate the effectiveness of PECRS on recommendation and conversation. Our code is available at: https://github.com/Ravoxsg/efficient_unified_crs.

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OpenPI2.0: An Improved Dataset for Entity Tracking in Texts
Li Zhang | Hainiu Xu | Abhinav Kommula | Chris Callison-Burch | Niket Tandon

Much texts describe a changing world (e.g., procedures, stories, newswires), and understanding them requires tracking how entities change. An earlier dataset, OpenPI, provided crowdsourced annotations of entity state changes in text. However, a major limitation was that those annotations were free-form and did not identify salient changes, hampering model evaluation. To overcome these limitations, we present an improved dataset, OpenPI2.0, where entities and attributes are fully canonicalized and additional entity salience annotations are added. On our fairer evaluation setting, we find that current state-of-the-art language models are far from competent. We also show that using state changes of salient entities as a chain-of-thought prompt, downstream performance is improved on tasks such as question answering and classical planning, outperforming the setting involving all related entities indiscriminately. We offer OpenPI2.0 for the continued development of models that can understand the dynamics of entities in text.

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A Comparative Multidimensional Analysis of Empathetic Systems
Andrew Lee | Jonathan Kummerfeld | Larry Ann | Rada Mihalcea

Recently, empathetic dialogue systems have received significant attention.While some researchers have noted limitations, e.g., that these systems tend to generate generic utterances, no study has systematically verified these issues. We survey 21 systems, asking what progress has been made on the task. We observe multiple limitations of current evaluation procedures. Most critically, studies tend to rely on a single non-reproducible empathy score, which inadequately reflects the multidimensional nature of empathy. To better understand the differences between systems, we comprehensively analyze each system with automated methods that are grounded in a variety of aspects of empathy. We find that recent systems lack three important aspects of empathy: specificity, reflection levels, and diversity. Based on our results, we discuss problematic behaviors that may have gone undetected in prior evaluations, and offer guidance for developing future systems.

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Few-Shot Data Synthesis for Open Domain Multi-Hop Question Answering
Mingda Chen | Xilun Chen | Wen-tau Yih

Few-shot learning for open domain multi-hop question answering typically relies on the in-context learning capability of large language models (LLMs). While powerful, these LLMs usually contain tens or hundreds of billions of parameters, making them rather inefficient at inference time. To improve performance of smaller language models, we propose a data synthesis framework for multi-hop question answering that requires less than 10 human-annotated question answer pairs. Our framework depends only on rich, naturally-occurring relationships among documents and is built upon the data generation functions parameterized by LLMs and prompts. We synthesize millions of multi-hop questions and claims to finetune language models, evaluated on popular benchmarks for multi-hop question answering and fact verification. Empirically, our approach improves model performance significantly, allowing the finetuned models to be competitive with GPT-3.5 based approaches while being almost one-third the size in parameter count.

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Language Models as Inductive Reasoners
Zonglin Yang | Li Dong | Xinya Du | Hao Cheng | Erik Cambria | Xiaodong Liu | Jianfeng Gao | Furu Wei

Inductive reasoning is a core component of human intelligence. In the past research of inductive reasoning within computer science, formal language is used as representations of knowledge (facts and rules, more specifically). However, formal language can cause systematic problems for inductive reasoning such as disability of handling raw input such as natural language, sensitiveness to mislabeled data, and incapacity to handle ambiguous input. To this end, we propose a new paradigm (task) for inductive reasoning, which is to induce natural language rules from natural language facts, and create a dataset termed DEER containing 1.2k rule-fact pairs for the task, where rules and facts are written in natural language. New automatic metrics are also proposed and analysed for the evaluation of this task. With DEER, we investigate a modern approach for inductive reasoning where we use natural language as representation for knowledge instead of formal language and use pretrained language models as ”reasoners”. Moreover, we provide the first and comprehensive analysis of how well pretrained language models can induce natural language rules from natural language facts. We also propose a new framework drawing insights from philosophy literature for this task, which we show in the experiment section that surpasses baselines in both automatic and human evaluations. We discuss about our future perspectives for inductive reasoning in Section 7. Dataset and code are available at https://github.com/ZonglinY/Inductive_Reasoning.

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SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects
David Adelani | Hannah Liu | Xiaoyu Shen | Nikita Vassilyev | Jesujoba Alabi | Yanke Mao | Haonan Gao | En-Shiun Lee

Despite the progress in building multilingual language models, evaluation is often limited to a few languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource languages. In this paper, we create SIB-200—a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For many of the languages covered in SIB-200, this is the first publicly available evaluation dataset for NLU. The dataset is based on Flores-200 machine translation corpus. We annotated the English portion of the dataset and extended the sentence-level annotation to the remaining 204 languages covered in the corpus. Despite the simplicity of this task, our evaluation in full-supervised setting, cross-lingual transfer setting and prompting of large language model setting show that there is still a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages when multilingual evaluation is scaled to numerous world languages. We found that languages unseen during the pre-training of multilingual language models, languages from under-represented families (like Nilotic and Altantic-Congo), and languages from the regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania and South East Asia, often have the lowest performance on our topic classification dataset. We hope our dataset %will encourages a more inclusive evaluation of multilingual language models on a more diverse set of languages.

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FinBPM: A Framework for Portfolio Management-based Financial Investor Behavior Perception Model
Zhilu Zhang | Procheta Sen | Zimu Wang | Ruoyu Sun | Zhengyong Jiang | Jionglong Su

The goal of portfolio management is to simultaneously maximize the accumulated return and also to control risk. In consecutive trading periods, portfolio manager needs to continuously adjust the portfolio weights based on the factors which can cause price fluctuation in the market. In the stock market, the factors affecting the stock price can be divided into two categories. The first is price fluctuations caused by irrational investment of the speculators. The second is endogenous value changes caused by operations of the company. In recent years, with the advancement of artificial intelligence technology, reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have been increasingly employed by scholars to address financial problems, particularly in the area of portfolio management. However, the deep RL models proposed by these scholars in the past have focused more on analyzing the price changes caused by the investment behavior of speculators in response to technical indicators of actual stock prices. In this research, we introduce an RL-based framework called FinBPM, which takes both the factor pertaining to the impact on operations of the company and the factor of the irrational investment of the speculator into consideration. For our experimentation, we randomly selected twelve stocks from the Dow Jones Industrial Index to construct our portfolio. The experimental results reveal that, in comparison to conventional reinforcement learning methods, our approach with at least 13.26% increase over other methods compared. Additionally, it achieved the best Sharpe ratio of 2.77, effectively maximizing the return per unit of risk.

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Asking the Right Question at the Right Time: Human and Model Uncertainty Guidance to Ask Clarification Questions
Alberto Testoni | Raquel Fernández

Clarification questions are an essential dialogue tool to signal misunderstanding, ambiguities, and under-specification in language use. While humans are able to resolve uncertainty by asking questions since childhood, modern dialogue systems struggle to generate effective questions. To make progress in this direction, in this work we take a collaborative dialogue task as a testbed and study how model uncertainty relates to human uncertainty—an as yet under-explored problem. We show that model uncertainty does not mirror human clarification-seeking behavior, which suggests that using human clarification questions as supervision for deciding when to ask may not be the most effective way to resolve model uncertainty. To address this issue, we propose an approach to generating clarification questions based on model uncertainty estimation, compare it to several alternatives, and show that it leads to significant improvements in terms of task success. Our findings highlight the importance of equipping dialogue systems with the ability to assess their own uncertainty and exploit in interaction.

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Like a Good Nearest Neighbor: Practical Content Moderation and Text Classification
Luke Bates | Iryna Gurevych

Few-shot text classification systems have impressive capabilities but are infeasible to deploy and use reliably due to their dependence on prompting and billion-parameter language models. SetFit (Tunstall, 2022) is a recent, practical approach that fine-tunes a Sentence Transformer under a contrastive learning paradigm and achieves similar results to more unwieldy systems. Inexpensive text classification is important for addressing the problem of domain drift in all classification tasks, and especially in detecting harmful content, which plagues social media platforms. Here, we propose Like a Good Nearest Neighbor (LaGoNN), a modification to SetFit that introduces no learnable parameters but alters input text with information from its nearest neighbor, for example, the label and text, in the training data, making novel data appear similar to an instance on which the model was optimized. LaGoNN is effective at flagging undesirable content and text classification, and improves SetFit’s performance. To demonstrate LaGoNN’s value, we conduct a thorough study of text classification systems in the context of content moderation under four label distributions, and in general and multilingual classification settings.

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Zero-shot Sentiment Analysis in Low-Resource Languages Using a Multilingual Sentiment Lexicon
Fajri Koto | Tilman Beck | Zeerak Talat | Iryna Gurevych | Timothy Baldwin

Improving multilingual language models capabilities in low-resource languages is generally difficult due to the scarcity of large-scale data in those languages. In this paper, we relax the reliance on texts in low-resource languages by using multilingual lexicons in pretraining to enhance multilingual capabilities. Specifically, we focus on zero-shot sentiment analysis tasks across 34 languages, including 6 high/medium-resource languages, 25 low-resource languages, and 3 code-switching datasets. We demonstrate that pretraining using multilingual lexicons, without using any sentence-level sentiment data, achieves superior zero-shot performance compared to models fine-tuned on English sentiment datasets, and large language models like GPT–3.5, BLOOMZ, and XGLM. These findings are observable for unseen low-resource languages to code-mixed scenarios involving high-resource languages.

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CEAN: Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation for Event Extraction
Zihao Meng | Tao Liu | Heng Zhang | Kai Feng | Peng Zhao

Event Extraction is a crucial yet arduous task in natural language processing (NLP), as its performance is significantly hindered by laborious data annotation. Given this challenge, recent research has predominantly focused on two approaches: pretraining task-oriented models for event extraction and employing data augmentation techniques. These methods involve integrating external knowledge, semantic structures, or artificially generated samples using large language models (LLMs). However, their performances can be compromised due to two fundamental issues. Firstly, the alignment between the introduced knowledge and event extraction knowledge is crucial. Secondly, the introduction of data noise during the augmentation is unavoidable and can mislead the model’s convergence. To address these issues, we propose a Contrastive Event Aggregation Network with LLM-based Augmentation to promote low-resource learning and reduce data noise for event extraction. Different from the existing methods introducing linguistic knowledge into data augmentation, an event aggregation network is established to introduce event knowledge into supervised learning by constructing adaptively-updated semantic representation for trigger and argument. For LLM-based augmentation, we design a new scheme including a multi-pattern rephrasing paradigm and a data-free composing paradigm. Instead of directly using augmentation samples in the supervised task, we introduce span-level contrastive learning to reduce data noise. Experiments on the ACE2005 and ERE-EN demonstrate that our proposed approach achieves new state-of-the-art results on both of the two datasets.

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How Transferable are Attribute Controllers on Pretrained Multilingual Translation Models?
Danni Liu | Jan Niehues

Customizing machine translation models to comply with desired attributes (e.g., formality or grammatical gender) is a well-studied topic. However, most current approaches rely on (semi-)supervised data with attribute annotations. This data scarcity bottlenecks democratizing such customization possibilities to a wider range of languages, particularly lower-resource ones. This gap is out of sync with recent progress in pretrained massively multilingual translation models. In response, we transfer the attribute controlling capabilities to languages without attribute-annotated data with an NLLB-200 model as a foundation. Inspired by techniques from controllable generation, we employ a gradient-based inference-time controller to steer the pretrained model. The controller transfers well to zero-shot conditions, as it is operates on pretrained multilingual representations and is attribute- rather than language-specific. With a comprehensive comparison to finetuning-based control, we demonstrate that, despite finetuning’s clear dominance in supervised settings, the gap to inference-time control closes when moving to zero-shot conditions, especially with new and distant target languages. The latter also shows stronger domain robustness. We further show that our inference-time control complements finetuning. Moreover, a human evaluation on a real low-resource language, Bengali, confirms our findings. Our code is in the supplementary material.

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MultiMUC: Multilingual Template Filling on MUC-4
William Gantt | Shabnam Behzad | Hannah An | Yunmo Chen | Aaron White | Benjamin Van Durme | Mahsa Yarmohammadi

We introduce MultiMUC, the first multilingual parallel corpus for template filling, comprising translations of the classic MUC-4 template filling benchmark into five languages: Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Korean, and Russian. We obtain automatic translations from a strong multilingual machine translation system and manually project the original English annotations into each target language. For all languages, we also provide human translations for key portions of the dev and test splits. Finally, we present baselines on MultiMUC both with state-of-the-art template filling models for MUC-4 and with ChatGPT. We release MUC-4 and the supervised baselines to facilitate further work on document-level information extraction in multilingual settings.

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Align and Augment: Generative Data Augmentation for Compositional Generalization
Francesco Cazzaro | Davide Locatelli | Ariadna Quattoni

Recent work on semantic parsing has shown that seq2seq models find compositional generalization challenging. Several strategies have been proposed to mitigate this challenge. One such strategy is to improve compositional generalization via data augmentation techniques. In this paper we follow this line of work and propose Archer, a data-augmentation strategy that exploits alignment annotations between sentences and their corresponding meaning representations. More precisely, we use alignments to train a two step generative model that combines monotonic lexical generation with reordering. Our experiments show that Archer leads to significant improvements in compositional generalization performance.

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UNSEE: Unsupervised Non-contrastive Sentence Embeddings
Ömer Çağatan

In this paper, we introduce UNSEE, which stands for Unsupervised Non-Contrastive Sentence Embeddings. UNSEE demonstrates better performance compared to SimCSE in the Massive Text Embedding (MTEB) benchmark. We begin by highlighting the issue of representation collapse that occurs with the replacement of contrastive objectives with non-contrastive objectives in SimCSE. Subsequently, we introduce a straightforward solution called the target network to mitigate this problem. This approach enables us to harness non-contrastive objectives while ensuring training stability and achieving performance improvements similar to those seen with contrastive objectives. We have reached peak performance in non-contrastive sentence embeddings through extensive fine-tuning and optimization. These efforts have resulted in superior sentence representation models, emphasizing the importance of careful tuning and optimization for non-contrastive objectives.

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EXPLORER: Exploration-guided Reasoning for Textual Reinforcement Learning
Kinjal Basu | Keerthiram Murugesan | Subhajit Chaudhury | Murray Campbell | Kartik Talamadupula | Tim Klinger

Text-based games (TBGs) have emerged as an important collection of NLP tasks, requiring reinforcement learning (RL) agents to combine natural language understanding with reasoning. A key challenge for agents attempting to solve such tasks is to generalize across multiple games and demonstrate good performance on both seen and unseen objects. Purely deep-RL-based approaches may perform well on seen objects; however, they fail to showcase the same performance on unseen objects. Commonsense-infused deep-RL agents may work better on unseen data; unfortunately, their policies are often not interpretable or easily transferable. To tackle these issues, in this paper, we present EXPLORER which is an exploration-guided reasoning agent for textual reinforcement learning. EXPLORER is neuro-symbolic in nature, as it relies on a neural module for exploration and a symbolic module for exploitation. It can also learn generalized symbolic policies and perform well over unseen data. Our experiments show that EXPLORER outperforms the baseline agents on Text-World cooking (TW-Cooking) and Text-World Commonsense (TWC) games.

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From Text Segmentation to Smart Chaptering: A Novel Benchmark for Structuring Video Transcriptions
Fabian Retkowski | Alexander Waibel

Text segmentation is a fundamental task in natural language processing, where documents are split into contiguous sections. However, prior research in this area has been constrained by limited datasets, which are either small in scale, synthesized, or only contain well-structured documents. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing a novel benchmark YTSeg focusing on spoken content that is inherently more unstructured and both topically and structurally diverse. As part of this work, we introduce an efficient hierarchical segmentation model MiniSeg, that outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Lastly, we expand the notion of text segmentation to a more practical “smart chaptering” task that involves the segmentation of unstructured content, the generation of meaningful segment titles, and a potential real-time application of the models.

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Fréchet Distance for Offline Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems with Sparse Labels
Negar Arabzadeh | Charles Clarke

The rapid advancement of natural language processing, information retrieval (IR), computer vision, and other technologies has presented significant challenges in evaluating the performance of these systems. One of the main challenges is the scarcity of human-labeled data, which hinders the fair and accurate assessment of these systems. In this work, we specifically focus on evaluating IR systems with sparse labels, borrowing from recent research on evaluating computer vision tasks.taking inspiration from the success of using Fréchet Inception Distance (FID) in assessing text-to-image generation systems. We propose leveraging the Fréchet Distance to measure the distance between the distributions of relevant judged items and retrieved results. Our experimental results on MS MARCO V1 dataset and TREC Deep Learning Tracks query sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the Fréchet Distance as a metric for evaluating IR systems, particularly in settings where a few labels are available.This approach contributes to the advancement of evaluation methodologies in real-world scenarios such as the assessment of generative IR systems.

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Semantic Sensitivities and Inconsistent Predictions: Measuring the Fragility of NLI Models
Erik Arakelyan | Zhaoqi Liu | Isabelle Augenstein

Recent studies of the emergent capabilities of transformer-based Natural Language Understanding (NLU) models have indicated that they have an understanding of lexical and compositional semantics. We provide evidence that suggests these claims should be taken with a grain of salt: we find that state-of-the-art Natural Language Inference (NLI) models are sensitive towards minor semantics preserving surface-form variations, which lead to sizable inconsistent model decisions during inference. Notably, this behaviour differs from valid and in-depth comprehension of compositional semantics, however does neither emerge when evaluating model accuracy on standard benchmarks nor when probing for syntactic, monotonic, and logically robust reasoning. We propose a novel framework to measure the extent of semantic sensitivity. To this end, we evaluate NLI models on adversarially generated examples containing minor semantics-preserving surface-form input noise. This is achieved using conditional text generation, with the explicit condition that the NLI model predicts the relationship between the original and adversarial inputs as a symmetric equivalence entailment. We systematically study the effects of the phenomenon across NLI models for in- and out-of- domain settings. Our experiments show that semantic sensitivity causes performance degradations of 12.92% and 23.71% average over in- and out-of- domain settings, respectively. We further perform ablation studies, analysing this phenomenon across models, datasets, and variations in inference and show that semantic sensitivity can lead to major inconsistency within model predictions.

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Exploring the Robustness of Task-oriented Dialogue Systems for Colloquial German Varieties
Ekaterina Artemova | Verena Blaschke | Barbara Plank

Mainstream cross-lingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems leverage the transfer learning paradigm by training a joint model for intent recognition and slot-filling in English and applying it, zero-shot, to other languages.We address a gap in prior research, which often overlooked the transfer to lower-resource colloquial varieties due to limited test data.Inspired by prior work on English varieties, we craft and manually evaluate perturbation rules that transform German sentences into colloquial forms and use them to synthesize test sets in four ToD datasets.Our perturbation rules cover 18 distinct language phenomena, enabling us to explore the impact of each perturbation on slot and intent performance.Using these new datasets, we conduct an experimental evaluation across six different transformers.Here, we demonstrate that when applied to colloquial varieties, ToD systems maintain their intent recognition performance, losing 6% (4.62 percentage points) in accuracy on average. However, they exhibit a significant drop in slot detection, with a decrease of 31% (21 percentage points) in slot F1 score.Our findings are further supported by a transfer experiment from Standard American English to synthetic Urban African American Vernacular English.

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PEARL: Prompting Large Language Models to Plan and Execute Actions Over Long Documents
Simeng Sun | Yang Liu | Shuohang Wang | Dan Iter | Chenguang Zhu | Mohit Iyyer

Strategies such as chain-of-thought prompting improve the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks by decomposing input examples into intermediate steps. However, it remains unclear how to apply such methods to reason over long input documents, in which both the decomposition and the output of each intermediate step are non-trivial to obtain. In this work, we propose PEARL, a prompting framework to improve reasoning over long documents, which consists of three stages: action mining, plan formulation, and plan execution. More specifically, given a question about a long document, PEARL decomposes the question into a sequence of actions (e.g., SUMMARIZE, FIND_EVENT, FIND_RELATION) and then executes them over the document to obtain the answer. Each stage of PEARL is implemented via zero-shot or few-shot prompting of LLMs (in our work, GPT-4) with minimal human input. We evaluate PEARL on a challenging subset of the QuALITY dataset, which contains questions that require complex reasoning over long narrative texts. PEARL outperforms zero-shot and chain-of-thought prompting on this dataset, and ablation experiments show that each stage of PEARL is critical to its performance. Overall, PEARL is a first step towards leveraging LLMs to reason over long documents.

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LAraBench: Benchmarking Arabic AI with Large Language Models
Ahmed Abdelali | Hamdy Mubarak | Shammur Chowdhury | Maram Hasanain | Basel Mousi | Sabri Boughorbel | Samir Abdaljalil | Yassine El Kheir | Daniel Izham | Fahim Dalvi | Majd Hawasly | Nizi Nazar | Youssef Elshahawy | Ahmed Ali | Nadir Durrani | Natasa Milic-Frayling | Firoj Alam

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly influenced the landscape of language and speech research. Despite this progress, these models lack specific benchmarking against state-of-the-art (SOTA) models tailored to particular languages and tasks. LAraBench addresses this gap for Arabic Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Speech Processing tasks, including sequence tagging and content classification across different domains. We utilized models such as GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4, BLOOMZ, Jais-13b-chat, Whisper, and USM, employing zero and few-shot learning techniques to tackle 33 distinct tasks across 61 publicly available datasets. This involved 98 experimental setups, encompassing ~296K data points, ~46 hours of speech, and 30 sentences for Text-to-Speech (TTS). This effort resulted in 330+ sets of experiments. Our analysis focused on measuring the performance gap between SOTA models and LLMs. The overarching trend observed was that SOTA models generally outperformed LLMs in zero-shot learning, with a few exceptions. Notably, larger computational models with few-shot learning techniques managed to reduce these performance gaps. Our findings provide valuable insights into the applicability of LLMs for Arabic NLP and speech processing tasks.

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SentenceLDA: Discriminative and Robust Document Representation with Sentence Level Topic Model
Taehun Cha | Donghun Lee

A subtle difference in context results in totally different nuances even for lexically identical words. On the other hand, two words can convey similar meanings given a homogeneous context. As a result, considering only word spelling information is not sufficient to obtain quality text representation. We propose SentenceLDA, a sentence-level topic model. We combine modern SentenceBERT and classical LDA to extend the semantic unit from word to sentence. By extending the semantic unit, we verify that SentenceLDA returns more discriminative document representation than other topic models, while maintaining LDA’s elegant probabilistic interpretability. We also verify the robustness of SentenceLDA by comparing the inference results on original and paraphrased texts. Additionally, we implement one possible application of SentenceLDA on corpus-level key opinion mining by applying SentenceLDA on an argumentative corpus, DebateSum.

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Towards Hierarchical Spoken Language Disfluency Modeling
Jiachen Lian | Gopala Anumanchipalli

Speech dysfluency modeling is the bottleneck for both speech therapy and language learning. However, there is no AI solution to systematically tackle this problem. We first propose to define the concept of dysfluent speech and dysfluent speech modeling. We then present Hierarchical Unconstrained Dysfluency Modeling (H-UDM) approach that addresses both dysfluency transcription and detection to eliminate the need for extensive manual annotation. Furthermore, we introduce a simulated dysfluent dataset called VCTK++ to enhance the capabilities of H-UDM in phonetic transcription. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed methods in both transcription and detection tasks.

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Finding a Needle in the Adversarial Haystack: A Targeted Paraphrasing Approach For Uncovering Edge Cases with Minimal Distribution Distortion
Aly Kassem | Sherif Saad

Adversarial attacks against Language models (LMs) are a significant concern. In particular, adversarial samples exploit the model’s sensitivity to small input changes. While these changes appear insignificant on the semantics of the input sample, they result in significant decay in model performance. In this paper, we propose Targeted Paraphrasing via RL (TPRL), an approach to automatically learn a policy to generate challenging samples that improve the model’s performance. TPRL leverages FLAN-T5, a language model, as a generator and employs a self-learned policy using a proximal policy optimization to generate the adversarial examples automatically. TPRL’s reward is based on the confusion induced in the classifier, preserving the original text meaning through a Mutual Implication score. We demonstrate & evaluate TPRL’s effectiveness in discovering natural adversarial attacks and improving model performance through extensive experiments on four diverse NLP classification tasks via Automatic & Human evaluation. TPRL outperforms strong baselines, exhibits generalizability across classifiers and datasets, and combines the strengths of language modeling and reinforcement learning to generate diverse and influential adversarial examples.

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FAIR: Filtering of Automatically Induced Rules
Divya Jyoti Bajpai | Ayush Maheshwari | Manjesh Hanawal | Ganesh Ramakrishnan

Availability of large annotated data can be a critical bottleneck in training machine learning algorithms successfully, especially when applied to diverse domains. Weak supervision offers a promising alternative by accelerating the creation of labeled training data using domain-specific rules. However, it requires users to write a diverse set of high-quality rules to assign labels to the unlabeled data (eg., Snorkel (CITATION)). Automatic Rule Induction (ARI) approaches such as Snuba (CITATION) circumvent this problem by automatically creating rules from features on a small labeled set and filtering a final set of rules from them. In the ARI approach, the crucial step is to filter out a set of a high-quality useful subset of rules from the large set of automatically created rules. In this paper, we propose an algorithm FAIR (Filtering of Automatically Induced Rules) to filter rules from a large number of automatically induced rules using submodular objective functions that account for the collective precision, coverage, and conflicts of the rule set. We experiment with three ARI approaches and five text classification datasets to validate the superior performance of our algorithm with respect to several semi-supervised label aggregation approaches. We show that our approach achieves statistically significant results in comparison to existing rule-filtering approaches. The anonymized source code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAIR-LF-Induction-9B60.

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NNOSE: Nearest Neighbor Occupational Skill Extraction
Mike Zhang | Rob Goot | Min-Yen Kan | Barbara Plank

The labor market is changing rapidly, prompting increased interest in the automatic extraction of occupational skills from text. With the advent of English benchmark job description datasets, there is a need for systems that handle their diversity well. We tackle the complexity in occupational skill datasets tasks—combining and leveraging multiple datasets for skill extraction, to identify rarely observed skills within a dataset, and overcoming the scarcity of skills across datasets. In particular, we investigate the retrieval-augmentation of language models, employing an external datastore for retrieving similar skills in a dataset-unifying manner. Our proposed method, Nearest Neighbor Occupational Skill Extraction (NNOSE) effectively leverages multiple datasets by retrieving neighboring skills from other datasets in the datastore. This improves skill extraction without additional fine-tuning. Crucially, we observe a performance gain in predicting infrequent patterns, with substantial gains of up to 30% span-F1 in cross-dataset settings.

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GAINER: Graph Machine Learning with Node-specific Radius for Classification of Short Texts and Documents
Naganand Yadati

Graphs provide a natural, intuitive, and holistic means to capture relationships between different text elements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) such as words, sentences, and documents. Recent advancements in the field of Graph Machine Learning (GML) have led to the development of numerous models to process text for various natural language applications, including but not limited to short-text classification, document classification, and others.At the heart of GML models, specifically those based on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), lies the message passing operation which has shown to be an essential component for strong empirical performance in NLP.However, the number of message passing steps (often known as the radius) is fixed for all the nodes in existing GML models for NLP.Fixing the radius poses a fundamental restriction as nodes exhibit diverse properties and varying amounts of informative local structures in the input graph.This paper presents GAINER, a novel framework called Graph mAchine learnIng with Node-spEcific Radius, aimed at graph-based NLP. We propose non-neural and novel neural approaches built on the core ideas of GAINER.Through rigorous experimentation, we demonstrate the efficacy of GAINER in various popular NLP tasks.

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MAFIA: Multi-Adapter Fused Inclusive Language Models
Prachi Jain | Ashutosh Sathe | Varun Gumma | Kabir Ahuja | Sunayana Sitaram

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) are widely used in NLP for various tasks. Recent studies have identified various biases that such models exhibit and have proposed methods to correct these biases. However, most of the works address a limited set of bias dimensions independently such as gender, race, or religion. Moreover, the methods typically involve finetuning the full model in order to maintain the performance on the downstream task. In this work, we aim to modularly debias a pre-trained language model across multiple dimensions. Previous works extensively explored debiasing PLMs by using limited US-centric counterfactual data augmentation (CDA). We use structured knowledge and a large generative model to build a diverse CDA across multiple bias dimensions in a semi-automated way. We highlight how existing debiasing methods do not consider interactions between multiple societal biases and propose a debiasing model that exploits the synergy amongst various societal biases and enables multi-bias debiasing simultaneously. An extensive evaluation on multiple tasks and languages demonstrates the efficacy of the approach.

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Code-Switched Language Identification is Harder Than You Think
Laurie Burchell | Alexandra Birch | Robert Thompson | Kenneth Heafield

Code switching (CS) is a very common phenomenon in written and spoken communication, but is handled poorly by many NLP applications. Looking to the application of building CS corpora, we explore CS language identification for corpus building. We make the task more realistic by scaling it to more languages and considering models with simpler architectures for faster inference. We also reformulate the task as a sentence-level multi-label tagging problem to make it more tractable. Having defined the task, we investigate three reasonable architectures for this task and define metrics which better reflect desired performance. We present empirical evidence that no current approach is adequate, and finally provide recommendations for future work in this area.

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Generation-driven Contrastive Self-training for Zero-shot Text Classification with Instruction-following LLM
Ruohong Zhang | Yau-Shian Wang | Yiming Yang

The remarkable performance of large language models (LLMs) in zero-shot language understanding has garnered significant attention.However, employing LLMs for large-scale inference or domain-specific fine-tuning requires immense computational resources due to their substantial model size. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel method, namely GenCo, which leverages the strong generative power of LLMs to assist in training a smaller and more adaptable language model. In our method, an LLM plays an important role in the self-training loop of a smaller model in two important ways. Firstly, we utilize an LLM to generate multiple augmented texts for each input instance to enhance its semantic meaning for better understanding. Secondly, we additionally generate high-quality training instances conditioned on predicted labels, ensuring the generated texts are relevant to the labels. In this way, GenCo not only corrects the errors of predicted labels during self-training but also eliminates the need for extensive unlabeled texts. In our experiments, GenCo outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods when only limited (<5% of original) in-domain text data is available. Notably, our approach surpasses Alpaca-7B with human instructions, highlighting the significance of self-training.

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Quantifying the Hyperparameter Sensitivity of Neural Networks for Character-level Sequence-to-Sequence Tasks
Adam Wiemerslage | Kyle Gorman | Katharina Wense

Hyperparameter tuning, the process of searching for suitable hyperparameters, becomes more difficult as the computing resources required to train neural networks continue to grow. This topic continues to receive little attention and discussion—much of it hearsay—despite its obvious importance. We attempt to formalize hyperparameter sensitivity using two metrics: similarity-based sensitivity and performance-based sensitivity. We then use these metrics to quantify two such claims: (1) transformers are more sensitive to hyperparameter choices than LSTMs and (2) transformers are particularly sensitive to batch size. We conduct experiments on two different character-level sequence-to-sequence tasks and find that, indeed, the transformer is slightly more sensitive to hyperparameters according to both of our metrics. However, we do not find that it is more sensitive to batch size in particular.

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Examining Gender and Racial Bias in Large Vision–Language Models Using a Novel Dataset of Parallel Images
Kathleen Fraser | Svetlana Kiritchenko

Following on recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and subsequent chat models, a new wave of large vision–language models (LVLMs) has emerged. Such models can incorporate images as input in addition to text, and perform tasks such as visual question answering, image captioning, story generation, etc. Here, we examine potential gender and racial biases in such systems, based on the perceived characteristics of the people in the input images. To accomplish this, we present a new dataset PAIRS (PArallel Images for eveRyday Scenarios). The PAIRS dataset contains sets of AI-generated images of people, such that the images are highly similar in terms of background and visual content, but differ along the dimensions of gender (man, woman) and race (Black, white). By querying the LVLMs with such images, we observe significant differences in the responses according to the perceived gender or race of the person depicted.

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ConstraintChecker: A Plugin for Large Language Models to Reason on Commonsense Knowledge Bases
Quyet V. Do | Tianqing Fang | Shizhe Diao | Zhaowei Wang | Yangqiu Song

Reasoning over Commonsense Knowledge Bases (CSKB), i.e. CSKB reasoning, has been explored as a way to acquire new commonsense knowledge based on reference knowledge in the original CSKBs and external prior knowledge.Despite the advancement of Large Language Models (LLM) and prompt engineering techniques in various reasoning tasks, they still struggle to deal with CSKB reasoning.One of the problems is that it is hard for them to acquire explicit relational constraints in CSKBs from only in-context exemplars, due to a lack of symbolic reasoning capabilities (CITATION).To this end, we proposed **ConstraintChecker**, a plugin over prompting techniques to provide and check explicit constraints.When considering a new knowledge instance, ConstraintChecker employs a rule-based module to produce a list of constraints, then it uses a zero-shot learning module to check whether this knowledge instance satisfies all constraints.The acquired constraint-checking result is then aggregated with the output of the main prompting technique to produce the final output.Experimental results on CSKB Reasoning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our method by bringing consistent improvements over all prompting methods.

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A* shortest string decoding for non-idempotent semirings
Kyle Gorman | Cyril Allauzen

Abstract: The single shortest path algorithm is undefined for weighted finite-state automata over non-idempotent semirings because such semirings do not guarantee the existence of a shortest path. However, in non-idempotent semirings admitting an order satisfying a monotonicity condition (such as the plus-times or log semirings), the shortest string is well-defined. We describe an algorithm which finds the shortest string for a weighted non-deterministic automaton over such semirings using the backwards shortest distance of an equivalent deterministic automaton (DFA) as a heuristic for A* search performed over a companion idempotent semiring, which is proven to return the shortest string. There may be exponentially more states in the DFA, but the proposed algorithm needs to visit only a small fraction of them if determinization is performed “on the fly”.

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Importance-Aware Data Augmentation for Document-Level Neural Machine Translation
Minghao Wu | Yufei Wang | George Foster | Lizhen Qu | Gholamreza Haffari

Document-level neural machine translation (DocNMT) aims to generate translations that are both coherent and cohesive, in contrast to its sentence-level counterpart. However, due to its longer input length and limited availability of training data, DocNMT often faces the challenge of data sparsity. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel Importance-Aware Data Augmentation (IADA) algorithm for DocNMT that augments the training data based on token importance information estimated by the norm of hidden states and training gradients. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three widely-used DocNMT benchmarks. Our empirical results show that our proposed IADA outperforms strong DocNMT baselines as well as several data augmentation approaches, with statistical significance on both sentence-level and document-level BLEU.

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Lost in Translationese? Reducing Translation Effect Using Abstract Meaning Representation
Shira Wein | Nathan Schneider

Translated texts bear several hallmarks distinct from texts originating in the language (“translationese”). Though individual translated texts are often fluent and preserve meaning, at a large scale, translated texts have statistical tendencies which distinguish them from text originally written in the language and can affect model performance. We frame the novel task of translationese reduction and hypothesize that Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a graph-based semantic representation which abstracts away from the surface form, can be used as an interlingua to reduce the amount of translationese in translated texts. By parsing English translations into an AMR and then generating text from that AMR, the result more closely resembles originally English text across three quantitative macro-level measures, without severely compromising fluency or adequacy. We compare our AMR-based approach against three other techniques based on machine translation or paraphrase generation. This work represents the first approach to reducing translationese in text and highlights the promise of AMR, given that our AMR-based approach outperforms more computationally intensive methods.

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Comparing Template-based and Template-free Language Model Probing
Sagi Shaier | Kevin Bennett | Lawrence Hunter | Katharina Wense

The differences between cloze-task language model (LM) probing with 1) expert-made templates and 2) naturally-occurring text have often been overlooked. Here, we evaluate 16 different LMs on 10 probing English datasets – 4 template-based and 6 template-free – in general and biomedical domains to answer the following research questions: (RQ1) Do model rankings differ between the two approaches? (RQ2) Do models’ absolute scores differ between the two approaches? (RQ3) Do the answers to RQ1 and RQ2 differ between general and domain-specific models? Our findings are: 1) Template-free and template-based approaches often rank models differently, except for the top domain- specific models. 2) Scores decrease by up to 42% Acc@1 when comparing parallel template-free and template-based prompts. 3) Perplexity is negatively correlated with accuracy in the template-free approach, but, counter-intuitively, they are positively correlated for template-based probing. 4) Models tend to predict the same answers frequently across prompts for template-based probing, which is less common when employing template-free techniques.

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Desiderata For The Context Use Of Question Answering Systems
Sagi Shaier | Lawrence Hunter | Katharina Wense

Prior work has uncovered a set of common problems in state-of-the-art context-based question answering (QA) systems: a lack of attention to the context when the latter conflicts with a model’s parametric knowledge, little robustness to noise, and a lack of consistency with their answers. However, most prior work focus on one or two of those problems in isolation, which makes it difficult to see trends across them. We aim to close this gap, by first outlining a set of – previously discussed as well as novel – desiderata for QA models. We then survey relevant analysis and methods papers to provide an overview of the state of the field. The second part of our work presents experiments where we evaluate 15 QA systems on 5 datasets according to all desiderata at once. We find many novel trends, including (1) systems that are less susceptible to noise are not necessarily more consistent with their answers when given irrelevant context; (2) most systems that are more susceptible to noise are more likely to correctly answer according to a context that conflicts with their parametric knowledge; and (3) the combination of conflicting knowledge and noise can reduce system performance by up to 96%. As such, our desiderata help increase our understanding of how these models work and reveal potential avenues for improvements.

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Scaling up Discovery of Latent Concepts in Deep NLP Models
Majd Hawasly | Fahim Dalvi | Nadir Durrani

Despite the revolution caused by deep NLP models, they remain black boxes, necessitating research to understand their decision-making processes. A recent work by Dalvi et al. (2022) carried out representation analysis through the lens of clustering latent spaces within pre-trained models (PLMs), but that approach is limited to small scale due to the high cost of running Agglomerative hierarchical clustering. This paper studies clustering algorithms in order to scale the discovery of encoded concepts in PLM representations to larger datasets and models. We propose metrics for assessing the quality of discovered latent concepts and use them to compare the studied clustering algorithms. We found that K-Means-based concept discovery significantly enhances efficiency while maintaining the quality of the obtained concepts. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practicality of this newfound efficiency by scaling latent concept discovery to LLMs and phrasal concepts.

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AnthroScore: A Computational Linguistic Measure of Anthropomorphism
Myra Cheng | Kristina Gligoric | Tiziano Piccardi | Dan Jurafsky

Anthropomorphism, or the attribution of human-like characteristics to non-human entities, has shaped conversations about the impacts and possibilities of technology. We present AnthroScore, an automatic metric of implicit anthropomorphism in language. We use a masked language model to quantify how non-human entities are implicitly framed as human by the surrounding context. We show that AnthroScore corresponds with human judgments of anthropomorphism and dimensions of anthropomorphism described in social science literature. Motivated by concerns of misleading anthropomorphism in computer science discourse, we use AnthroScore to analyze 15 years of research papers and downstream news articles. In research papers, we find that anthropomorphism has steadily increased over time, and that papers related to language models have the most anthropomorphism. Within ACL papers, temporal increases in anthropomorphism are correlated with key neural advancements. Building upon concerns of scientific misinformation in mass media, we identify higher levels of anthropomorphism in news headlines compared to the research papers they cite. Since AnthroScore is lexicon-free, it can be directly applied to a wide range of text sources.

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Centering the Speech Community
Steven Bird | Dean Yibarbuk

How can NLP/AI practitioners engage with oral societies and develop locally appropriate language technologies? We report on our experience of working together over five years in a remote community in the far north of Australia, and how we prototyped simple language technologies to support our collaboration. We navigated different understandings of language, the functional differentiation of oral vs institutional languages, and the distinct technology opportunities for each. Our collaboration unsettled the first author’s western framing of language as data for exploitation by machines, and we devised a design pattern that seems better aligned with local interests and aspirations. We call for new collaborations on the design of locally appropriate technologies for languages with primary orality.

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Improving the TENOR of Labeling: Re-evaluating Topic Models for Content Analysis
Zongxia Li | Andrew Mao | Daniel Stephens | Pranav Goel | Emily Walpole | Alden Dima | Juan Fung | Jordan Boyd-Graber

Topic models are a popular tool for understanding text collections, but their evaluation has been a point of contention. Automated evaluation metrics such as coherence are often used, however, their validity has been questioned for neural topic models (NTMs) and can overlook a model’s benefits in real-world applications. To this end, we conduct the first evaluation of neural, supervised and classical topic models in an interactive task-based setting. We combine topic models with a classifier and test their ability to help humans conduct content analysis and document annotation. From simulated, real user and expert pilot studies, the Contextual Neural Topic Model does the best on cluster evaluation metrics and human evaluations; however, LDA is competitive with two other NTMs under our simulated experiment and user study results, contrary to what coherence scores suggest. We show that current automated metrics do not provide a complete picture of topic modeling capabilities, but the right choice of NTMs can be better than classical models on practical tasks.

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Quality Does Matter: A Detailed Look at the Quality and Utility of Web-Mined Parallel Corpora
Surangika Ranathunga | Nisansa De Silva | Velayuthan Menan | Aloka Fernando | Charitha Rathnayake

We conducted a detailed analysis on the quality of web-mined corpora for two low-resource languages (making three language pairs, English-Sinhala, English-Tamil and Sinhala-Tamil). We ranked each corpus according to a similarity measure and carried out an intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation on different portions of this ranked corpus. We show that there are significant quality differences between different portions of web-mined corpora and that the quality varies across languages and datasets. We also show that, for some web-mined datasets, Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models trained with their highest-ranked 25k portion can be on par with human-curated datasets.

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VOLTAGE: A Versatile Contrastive Learning based OCR Methodology for ultra low-resource scripts through Auto Glyph Feature Extraction
Prawaal Sharma | Poonam Goyal | Vidisha Sharma | Navneet Goyal

UNESCO has classified 2500 out of 7000 languages spoken worldwide as endangered. Attrition of a language leads to loss of traditional wisdom, folk literature, and the essence of the community that uses it. It is therefore imperative to bring digital inclusion to these languages and avoid its extinction. Low resource languages are at a greater risk of extinction. Lack of unsupervised Optical Character Recognition(OCR) methodologies for low resource languages is one of the reasons impeding their digital inclusion. We propose VOLTAGE - a contrastive learning based OCR methodology, leveraging auto-glyph feature recommendation for cluster-based labelling. We augment the labelled data for diversity and volume using image transformations and Generative Adversarial Networks. Voltage has been designed using Takri - a family of scripts used in 16th to 20th century in the Himalayan regions of India. We present results for Takri along with other Indic scripts (both low and high resource) to substantiate the universal behavior of the methodology. An accuracy of 95% for machine printed and 87% for handwritten samples on Takri script has been achieved. We conduct baseline and ablation studies along with building downstream use cases for Takri, demonstrating the usefulness of our work.

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Unsupervised Contrast-Consistent Ranking with Language Models
Niklas Stoehr | Pengxiang Cheng | Jing Wang | Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro | Rajarshi Bhowmik

Language models contain ranking-based knowledge and are powerful solvers of in-context ranking tasks. For instance, they may have parametric knowledge about the ordering of countries by size or may be able to rank product reviews by sentiment. We compare pairwise, pointwise and listwise prompting techniques to elicit a language model’s ranking knowledge. However, we find that even with careful calibration and constrained decoding, prompting-based techniques may not always be self-consistent in the rankings they produce. This motivates us to explore an alternative approach that is inspired by an unsupervised probing method called Contrast-Consistent Search (CCS). The idea is to train a probe guided by a logical constraint: a language model’s representation of a statement and its negation must be mapped to contrastive true-false poles consistently across multiple statements. We hypothesize that similar constraints apply to ranking tasks where all items are related via consistent, pairwise or listwise comparisons. To this end, we extend the binary CCS method to Contrast-Consistent Ranking (CCR) by adapting existing ranking methods such as the Max-Margin Loss, Triplet Loss and an Ordinal Regression objective. Across different models and datasets, our results confirm that CCR probing performs better or, at least, on a par with prompting.

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Entity-level Factual Adaptiveness of Fine-tuning based Abstractive Summarization Models
Jongyoon Song | Nohil Park | Bongkyu Hwang | Jaewoong Yun | Seongho Joe | Youngjune Gwon | Sungroh Yoon

Abstractive summarization models often generate factually inconsistent content particularly when the parametric knowledge of the model conflicts with the knowledge in the input document. In this paper, we analyze the robustness of fine-tuning based summarization models to the knowledge conflict, which we call factual adaptiveness. We utilize pre-trained language models to construct evaluation sets and find that factual adaptiveness is not strongly correlated with factual consistency on original datasets. Furthermore, we introduce a controllable counterfactual data augmentation method where the degree of knowledge conflict within the augmented data can be adjustable. Our experimental results on two pre-trained language models (PEGASUS and BART) and two fine-tuning datasets (XSum and CNN/DailyMail) demonstrate that our method enhances factual adaptiveness while achieving factual consistency on original datasets on par with the contrastive learning baseline.

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Meme-ingful Analysis: Enhanced Understanding of Cyberbullying in Memes Through Multimodal Explanations
Prince Jha | Krishanu Maity | Raghav Jain | Apoorv Verma | Sriparna Saha | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Internet memes have gained significant influence in communicating political, psychological, and sociocultural ideas. While meme are often humorous, there has been a rise in the use of memes for trolling and cyberbullying. Although a wide variety of effective deep learning-based models have been developed for detecting offensive multimodal memes, only a few works have been done on explainability aspect. Recent laws like “right to explanations” of General Data Protection Regulation, have spurred research in developing interpretable models rather than only focusing on performance. Motivated by this, we introduce MultiBully-Ex, the first benchmark dataset for multimodal explanation from code-mixed cyberbullying memes. Here, both visual and textual modalities are highlighted to explain why a given meme is cyberbullying. A Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining (CLIP) projection based multimodal shared-private multitask approach has been proposed for visual and textual explanation of a meme. Experimental results demonstrate that training with multimodal explanations improves performance in generating textual justifications and more accurately identifying the visual evidence supporting a decision with reliable performance improvements.

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LaMini-LM: A Diverse Herd of Distilled Models from Large-Scale Instructions
Minghao Wu | Abdul Waheed | Chiyu Zhang | Muhammad Abdul-Mageed | Alham Aji

Large language models (LLMs) with instruction fine-tuning demonstrate superior generative capabilities. However, these models are resource-intensive. To alleviate this issue, we explore distilling knowledge from instruction-tuned LLMs into much smaller ones. While other similar works have been done, they are often conducted on a limited set of (usually still large) models and are not accompanied by proper evaluations. To this end, we carefully develop a large set of 2.58M instructions based on both existing and newly-generated instructions. In addition to being sizable, we design our instructions to cover a broad set of topics to ensure diversity. Extensive analysis of our instruction dataset confirms its diversity, and we generate responses for these instructions using gpt-3.5-turbo. Leveraging these instructions, we fine-tune a diverse herd of models, collectively referred to as LaMini-LM, which includes models from both the encoder-decoder and decoder-only families, with varying sizes. We evaluate the performance of our models using automatic metrics on 15 different natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks, as well as through human assessment. We also assess the model for hallucination and toxicity, and for the former, we introduce a new benchmark dataset for hallucination-inducing QA. The results demonstrate that our proposed LaMini-LM models are comparable to strong baselines while being much smaller in size.

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Automated Cognate Detection as a Supervised Link Prediction Task with Cognate Transformer
V.S.D.S.Mahesh Akavarapu | Arnab Bhattacharya

Identification of cognates across related languages is one of the primary problems in historical linguistics. Automated cognate identification is helpful for several downstream tasks including identifying sound correspondences, proto-language reconstruction, phylogenetic classification, etc. Previous state-of-the-art methods are mostly based on distributions of phonemes computed across multilingual wordlists and make little use of the cognacy labels that define links among cognate clusters. In this paper, we present a transformer-based architecture inspired by computational biology for the task of automated cognate detection. Beyond a certain amount of supervision, this method performs better than the existing methods, and shows steady improvement with further increase in supervision proving the efficacy of utilizing the labeled information. We also demonstrate that accepting multiple sequence alignments as input and having an end-to-end architecture with link prediction head saves much computation time while simultaneously yielding superior performance.

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Leveraging Multi-lingual Positive Instances in Contrastive Learning to Improve Sentence Embedding
Kaiyan Zhao | Qiyu Wu | Xin-Qiang Cai | Yoshimasa Tsuruoka

Learning multilingual sentence embeddings is a fundamental task in natural language processing. Recent trends in learning both monolingual and multilingual sentence embeddings are mainly based on contrastive learning (CL) among an anchor, one positive, and multiple negative instances. In this work, we argue that leveraging multiple positives should be considered for multilingual sentence embeddings because (1) positives in a diverse set of languages can benefit cross-lingual learning, and (2) transitive similarity across multiple positives can provide reliable structural information for learning.In order to investigate the impact of multiple positives in CL, we propose a novel approach, named MPCL, to effectively utilize multiple positive instances to improve the learning of multilingual sentence embeddings. Experimental results on various backbone models and downstream tasks demonstrate that MPCL leads to better retrieval, semantic similarity, and classification performance compared to conventional CL. We also observe that in unseen languages, sentence embedding models trained on multiple positives show better cross-lingual transfer performance than models trained on a single positive instance.

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Moderation in the Wild: Investigating User-Driven Moderation in Online Discussions
Neele Falk | Eva Vecchi | Iman Jundi | Gabriella Lapesa

Effective content moderation is imperative for fostering healthy and productive discussions in online domains. Despite the substantial efforts of moderators, the overwhelming nature of discussion flow can limit their effectiveness. However, it is not only trained moderators who intervene in online discussions to improve their quality. “Ordinary” users also act as moderators, actively intervening to correct information of other users’ posts, enhance arguments, and steer discussions back on course.This paper introduces the phenomenon of user moderation, documenting and releasing UMOD, the first dataset of comments in whichusers act as moderators. UMOD contains 1000 comment-reply pairs from the subreddit r/changemyview with crowdsourced annotations from a large annotator pool and with a fine-grained annotation schema targeting the functions of moderation, stylistic properties(aggressiveness, subjectivity, sentiment), constructiveness, as well as the individual perspectives of the annotators on the task. The releaseof UMOD is complemented by two analyses which focus on the constitutive features of constructiveness in user moderation and on thesources of annotator disagreements, given the high subjectivity of the task.

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Cross-Lingual Transfer from Related Languages: Treating Low-Resource Maltese as Multilingual Code-Switching
Kurt Micallef | Nizar Habash | Claudia Borg | Fadhl Eryani | Houda Bouamor

Although multilingual language models exhibit impressive cross-lingual transfer capabilities on unseen languages, the performance on downstream tasks is impacted when there is a script disparity with the languages used in the multilingual model’s pre-training data. Using transliteration offers a straightforward yet effective means to align the script of a resource-rich language with a target language thereby enhancing cross-lingual transfer capabilities. However, for mixed languages, this approach is suboptimal, since only a subset of the language benefits from the cross-lingual transfer while the remainder is impeded. In this work, we focus on Maltese, a Semitic language, with substantial influences from Arabic, Italian, and English, and notably written in Latin script. We present a novel dataset annotated with word-level etymology. We use this dataset to train a classifier that enables us to make informed decisions regarding the appropriate processing of each token in the Maltese language. We contrast indiscriminate transliteration or translation to mixing processing pipelines that only transliterate words of Arabic origin, thereby resulting in text with a mixture of scripts. We fine-tune the processed data on four downstream tasks and show that conditional transliteration based on word etymology yields the best results, surpassing fine-tuning with raw Maltese or Maltese processed with non-selective pipelines.

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Where Do We Go From Here? Multi-scale Allocentric Relational Inferencefrom Natural Spatial Descriptions
Tzuf Paz-Argaman | John Palowitch | Sayali Kulkarni | Jason Baldridge | Reut Tsarfaty

The concept of acquired spatial knowledge is crucial in spatial cognitive research, particularly when it comes to communicating routes. However, NLP navigation studies often overlook the impact of acquired knowledge on textual descriptions. Current navigation studies concentrate on egocentric local descriptions (e.g., ‘it will be on your right’) that require reasoning over the agent’s local perception. These instructions are typically given in a sequence of steps, with each action-step explicitly mentioned and followed by a landmark that the agent can use to verify that they are on the correct path (e.g., ‘turn right and then you will see...’). In contrast, descriptions based on knowledge acquired through a map provide a complete view of the environment and capture its compositionality. These instructions typically contain allocentric relations, are non-sequential, with implicit actions and multiple spatial relations without any verification (e.g., ‘south of Central Park and a block north of a police station’). This paper introduces the Rendezvous (RVS) task and dataset, which includes 10,404 examples of English geospatial instructions for reaching a target location using map-knowledge. Our analysis reveals that RVS exhibits a richer use of spatial allocentric relations, and requires resolving more spatial relations simultaneously compared to previous text-based navigation benchmarks.

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Bias in Opinion Summarisation from Pre-training to Adaptation: A Case Study in Political Bias
Nannan Huang | Haytham Fayek | Xiuzhen Zhang

Opinion summarisation aims to summarise the salient information and opinions presented in documents such as product reviews, discussion forums, and social media texts into short summaries that enable users to effectively understand the opinions therein.Generating biased summaries has the risk of potentially swaying public opinion. Previous studies focused on studying bias in opinion summarisation using extractive models, but limited research has paid attention to abstractive summarisation models. In this study, using political bias as a case study, we first establish a methodology to quantify bias in abstractive models, then trace it from the pre-trained models to the task of summarising social media opinions using different models and adaptation methods. We find that most models exhibit intrinsic bias. Using a social media text summarisation dataset and contrasting various adaptation methods, we find that tuning a smaller number of parameters is less biased compared to standard fine-tuning; however, the diversity of topics in training data used for fine-tuning is critical.

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Document Structure in Long Document Transformers
Jan Buchmann | Max Eichler | Jan-Micha Bodensohn | Ilia Kuznetsov | Iryna Gurevych

Long documents often exhibit structure with hierarchically organized elements of different functions, such as section headers and paragraphs. Despite the omnipresence of document structure, its role in natural language processing (NLP) remains opaque. Do long-document Transformer models acquire an internal representation of document structure during pre-training? How can structural information be communicated to a model after pre-training, and how does it influence downstream performance? To answer these questions, we develop a novel suite of probing tasks to assess structure-awareness of long-document Transformers, propose general-purpose structure infusion methods, and evaluate the effects of structure infusion on QASPER and Evidence Inference, two challenging long-document NLP tasks. Results on LED and LongT5 suggest that they acquire implicit understanding of document structure during pre-training, which can be further enhanced by structure infusion, leading to improved end-task performance. To foster research on the role of document structure in NLP modeling, we make our data and code publicly available.

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The Role of Data Curation in Image Captioning
Wenyan Li | Jonas Lotz | Chen Qiu | Desmond Elliott

Image captioning models are typically trained by treating all samples equally, neglecting to account for mismatched or otherwise difficult data points. In contrast, recent work has shown the effectiveness of training models by scheduling the data using curriculum learning strategies. This paper contributes to this direction by actively curating difficult samples in datasets without increasing the total number of samples. We explore the effect of using three data curation methods within the training process: complete removal of an sample, caption replacement, or image replacement via a text-to-image generation model. Experiments on the Flickr30K and COCO datasets with the BLIP and BEiT-3 models demonstrate that these curation methods do indeed yield improved image captioning models, underscoring their efficacy.

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Large-Scale Bitext Corpora Provide New Evidence for Cognitive Representations of Spatial Terms
Peter Viechnicki | Kevin Duh | Anthony Kostacos | Barbara Landau

Recent evidence from cognitive science suggests that there exist two classes of cognitive representations within the spatial terms of a language, one represented geometrically (e.g., above, below) and the other functionally (e.g., on, in). It has been hypothesized that geometric terms are more constrained and are mastered relatively early in language learning, whereas functional terms are less constrained and are mastered over longer time periods (Landau, 2016). One consequence of this hypothesis is that these two classes should exhibit different cross-linguistic variability, which is supported by human elicitation studies. In this work we present to our knowledge the first corpus-based empirical test of this hypothesis. We develop a pipeline for extracting, isolating, and aligning spatial terms in basic locative constructions from parallel text. Using Shannon entropy to measure the variability of spatial term use across eight languages, we find supporting evidence that variability in functional terms differs significantly from that of geometric terms. We also perform latent variable modeling and find support for the division of spatial terms into geometric and functional classes.

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REFINER: Reasoning Feedback on Intermediate Representations
Debjit Paul | Mete Ismayilzada | Maxime Peyrard | Beatriz Borges | Antoine Bosselut | Robert West | Boi Faltings

Language models (LMs) have recently shown remarkable performance on reasoning tasks by explicitly generating intermediate inferences,e.g., chain-of-thought prompting. However, these intermediate inference steps may be inappropriate deductions from the initial contextand lead to incorrect final predictions. Here we introduce REFINER, a framework for finetuning LMs to explicitly generate intermediate reasoning steps while interacting with a critic model that provides automated feedback on the reasoning. Specifically, the critic provides structured feedback that the reasoning LM uses to iteratively improve its intermediate arguments. Empirical evaluations of REFINER on three diverse reasoning tasks show significant improvements over baseline LMs of comparable scale. Furthermore, when using GPT-3.5 or ChatGPT as the reasoner, the trained critic significantly improves reasoning without finetuning the reasoner. Finally, our critic model is trained without expensive human-in-the-loop data but can be substituted with humans at inference time.

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HumBEL: A Human-in-the-Loop Approach for Evaluating Demographic Factors of Language Models in Human-Machine Conversations
Anthony Sicilia | Jennifer Gates | Malihe Alikhani

While demographic factors like age and gender change the way people talk, and in particular, the way people talk to machines, there is little investigation into how large pre-trained language models (LMs) can adapt to these changes. To remedy this gap, we consider how demographic factors in LM language skills can be measured to determine compatibility with a target demographic. We suggest clinical techniques from Speech Language Pathology, which has norms for acquisition of language skills in humans. We conduct evaluation with a domain expert (i.e., a clinically licensed speech language pathologist), and also propose automated techniques to complement clinical evaluation at scale. Empirically, we focus on age, finding LM capability varies widely depending on task: GPT-3.5 mimics the ability of humans ranging from age 6-15 at tasks requiring inference, and simultaneously, outperforms a typical 21 year old at memorization. GPT-3.5 also has trouble with social language use, exhibiting less than 50% of the tested pragmatic skills. Findings affirm the importance of considering demographic alignment and conversational goals when using LMs as public-facing tools. Code, data, and a package will be available.

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LOCOST: State-Space Models for Long Document Abstractive Summarization
Florian Le Bronnec | Song Duong | Mathieu Ravaut | Alexandre Allauzen | Nancy Chen | Vincent Guigue | Alberto Lumbreras | Laure Soulier | Patrick Gallinari

State-space models are a low-complexity alternative to transformers for encoding long sequences and capturing long-term dependencies. We propose LOCOST: an encoder-decoder architecture based on state-space models for conditional text generation with long context inputs. With a computational complexity of 𝒪(L log L), this architecture can handle significantly longer sequences than state-of-the-art models that are based on sparse attention patterns. We evaluate our model on a series of long document abstractive summarization tasks. The model reaches a performance level that is 93-96% comparable to the top-performing sparse transformers of the same size while saving up to 50% memory during training and up to 87% during inference. Additionally, LOCOST effectively handles input texts exceeding 600K tokens at inference time, setting new state-of-the-art results on full-book summarization and opening new perspectives for long input processing.

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A Classification-Guided Approach for Adversarial Attacks against Neural Machine Translation
Sahar Sadrizadeh | Ljiljana Dolamic | Pascal Frossard

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models have been shown to be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, wherein carefully crafted perturbations of the input can mislead the target model. In this paper, we introduce ACT, a novel adversarial attack framework against NMT systems guided by a classifier. In our attack, the adversary aims to craft meaning-preserving adversarial examples whose translations in the target language by the NMT model belong to a different class than the original translations. Unlike previous attacks, our new approach has a more substantial effect on the translation by altering the overall meaning, which then leads to a different class determined by an oracle classifier. To evaluate the robustness of NMT models to our attack, we propose enhancements to existing black-box word-replacement-based attacks by incorporating output translations of the target NMT model and the output logits of a classifier within the attack process. Extensive experiments, including a comparison with existing untargeted attacks, show that our attack is considerably more successful in altering the class of the output translation and has more effect on the translation. This new paradigm can reveal the vulnerabilities of NMT systems by focusing on the class of translation rather than the mere translation quality as studied traditionally.

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Improving Generalization in Semantic Parsing by Increasing Natural Language Variation
Irina Saparina | Mirella Lapata

Text-to-SQL semantic parsing has made significant progress in recent years, with various models demonstrating impressive performance on the challenging Spider benchmark. However, it has also been shown that these models often struggle to generalize even when faced with small perturbations of previously (accurately) parsed expressions. This is mainly due to the linguistic form of questions in Spider which are overly specific, unnatural, and display limited variation. In this work, we use data augmentation to enhance the robustness of text-to-SQL parsers against natural language variations. Existing approaches generate question reformulations either via models trained on Spider or only introduce local changes. In contrast, we leverage the capabilities of large language models to generate more realistic and diverse questions. Using only a few prompts, we achieve a two-fold increase in the number of questions in Spider. Training on this augmented dataset yields substantial improvements on a range of evaluation sets, including robustness benchmarks and out-of-domain data.

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Text-to-Code Generation with Modality-relative Pre-training
Fenia Christopoulou | Guchun Zhang | Gerasimos Lampouras

Large pre-trained language models have recently been expanded and applied to programming language tasks with great success, often through further pre-training of a strictly-natural language model–where training sequences typically contain both natural and (linearised) programming language. Such approaches effectively map both modalities of the sequence into the same embedding space. However, programming language keywords (e.g. “while”) often have very strictly defined semantics. As such, transfer learning from their natural language usage may not necessarily be beneficial to their code application and vise versa. Assuming an already pre-trained language model, in this work we investigate how sequence tokens can be adapted and represented differently, depending on which modality they belong to, and to the ultimate benefit of the downstream task. We experiment with separating embedding spaces between modalities during further model pre-training with modality-relative training objectives. We focus on text-to-code generation and observe consistent improvements across two backbone models and two test sets, measuring pass@k and a novel incremental variation.

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No Error Left Behind: Multilingual Grammatical Error Correction with Pre-trained Translation Models
Agnes Luhtaru | Elizaveta Korotkova | Mark Fishel

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) enhances language proficiency and promotes effective communication, but research has primarily centered around English. We propose a simple approach to multilingual and low-resource GEC by exploring the potential of multilingual machine translation (MT) models for error correction. We show that MT models are not only capable of error correction out-of-the-box, but that they can also be fine-tuned to even better correction quality. Results show the effectiveness of this approach, with our multilingual model outperforming similar-sized mT5-based models and even competing favourably with larger models.

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Quantifying Stereotypes in Language
Yang Liu

A stereotype is a generalized perception of a specific group of humans. It is often potentially encoded in human language, which is more common in texts on social issues. Previous works simply define a sentence as stereotypical and anti-stereotypical. However, the stereotype of a sentence may require fine-grained quantification. In this paper, to fill this gap, we quantify stereotypes in language by annotating a dataset. We use the pre-trained language models (PLMs) to learn this dataset to predict stereotypes of sentences. Then, we discuss stereotypes about common social issues such as hate speech, sexism, sentiments, and disadvantaged and advantaged groups. We demonstrate the connections and differences between stereotypes and common social issues, and all four studies validate the general findings of the current studies. In addition, our work suggests that fine-grained stereotype scores are a highly relevant and competitive dimension for research on social issues. The models and datasets used in this paper are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/quantifying_stereotypes_in_language.

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Generation, Distillation and Evaluation of Motivational Interviewing-Style Reflections with a Foundational Language Model
Andrew Brown | Jiading Zhu | Mohamed Abdelwahab | Alec Dong | Cindy Wang | Jonathan Rose

Large Foundational Language Models are capable of performing many tasks at a high level but are difficult to deploy in many applications because of their size and proprietary ownership. Many will be motivated to distill specific capabilities of foundational models into smaller models that can be owned and controlled. In the development of a therapeutic chatbot, we wish to distill a capability known as reflective listening, in which a therapist produces reflections of client speech. These reflections either restate what a client has said, or connect what was said to a relevant observation, idea or guess that encourages and guides the client to continue contemplation. In this paper, we present a method for distilling the generation of reflections from a Foundational Language Model (GPT-4) into smaller models. We first show that GPT-4, using zero-shot prompting, can generate reflections at near 100% success rate, superior to all previous methods. Using reflections generated by GPT-4, we fine-tune different sizes of the GPT-2 family. The GPT-2-small model achieves 83% success on a hold-out test set and the GPT-2 XL achieves 90% success. We also show that GPT-4 can help in the labor-intensive task of evaluating the quality of the distilled models, using it as a zero-shot classifier. Using triple-human review as a guide, the classifier achieves a Cohen-Kappa of 0.66, a substantial inter-rater reliability figure.

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Multi-Reference Benchmarks for Russian Grammatical Error Correction
Frank Palma Gomez | Alla Rozovskaya

This paper presents multi-reference benchmarks for the Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) of Russian, based on two existing single-reference datasets, for a total of 7,444 learner sentences from a variety of first language backgrounds. Each sentence is corrected independently by two new raters, and their corrections are reviewed by a senior annotator, resulting in a total of three references per sentence. Analysis of the annotations reveals that the new raters tend to make more changes, compared to the original raters, especially at the lexical level. We conduct experiments with two popular GEC approaches and show competitive performance on the original datasets and the new benchmarks. We also compare system scores as evaluated against individual annotators and discuss the effect of using multiple references overall and on specific error types. We find that using the union of the references increases system scores by more than 10 points and decreases the gap between system and human performance, thereby providing a more realistic evaluation of GEC system performance, although the effect is not the same across the error types. The annotations are available for research.

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Plan-Grounded Large Language Models for Dual Goal Conversational Settings
Diogo Glória-Silva | Rafael Ferreira | Diogo Tavares | David Semedo | Joao Magalhaes

Training Large Language Models (LLMs) to follow user instructions has shown to supply the LLM with ample capacity to converse fluently while being aligned with humans. Yet, it is not completely clear how an LLM can lead a plan-grounded conversation in mixed-initiative settings where instructions flow in both directions of the conversation, i.e. both the LLM and the user provide instructions to one another. In this paper, we tackle a dual goal mixed-initiative conversational setting where the LLM not only grounds the conversation on an arbitrary plan but also seeks to satisfy both a procedural plan and user instructions. The LLM is then responsible for guiding the user through the plan and, at the same time, adapting to new circumstances, answering questions, and activating safety guardrails when needed. We propose a novel LLM that grounds the dialogue on a procedural plan, can take the dialogue initiative, and enforces guardrails on the system’s behavior, while also improving the LLM’s responses to unexpected user behavior. Experiments in controlled settings and with real users show that the best-performing model, which we call PlanLLM, achieves a 2.1x improvement over a strong baseline. Moreover, experiments also show good generalization to unseen domains.

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“Define Your Terms” : Enhancing Efficient Offensive Speech Classification with Definition
Huy Nghiem | Umang Gupta | Fred Morstatter

The propagation of offensive content through social media channels has garnered attention of the research community. Multiple works have proposed various semantically related yet subtle distinct categories of offensive speech. In this work, we explore meta-learning approaches to leverage the diversity of offensive speech corpora to enhance their reliable and efficient detection. We propose a joint embedding architecture that incorporates the input’s label and definition for classification via Prototypical Network. Our model achieves at least 75% of the maximal F1-score while using less than 10% of the available training data across 4 datasets. Our experimental findings also provide a case study of training strategies valuable to combat resource scarcity.

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VlogQA: Task, Dataset, and Baseline Models for Vietnamese Spoken-Based Machine Reading Comprehension
Thinh Ngo | Khoa Dang | Son Luu | Kiet Nguyen | Ngan Nguyen

This paper presents the development process of a Vietnamese spoken language corpus for machine reading comprehension (MRC) tasks and provides insights into the challenges and opportunities associated with using real-world data for machine reading comprehension tasks. The existing MRC corpora in Vietnamese mainly focus on formal written documents such as Wikipedia articles, online newspapers, or textbooks. In contrast, the VlogQA consists of 10,076 question-answer pairs based on 1,230 transcript documents sourced from YouTube – an extensive source of user-uploaded content, covering the topics of food and travel. By capturing the spoken language of native Vietnamese speakers in natural settings, an obscure corner overlooked in Vietnamese research, the corpus provides a valuable resource for future research in reading comprehension tasks for the Vietnamese language. Regarding performance evaluation, our deep-learning models achieved the highest F1 score of 75.34% on the test set, indicating significant progress in machine reading comprehension for Vietnamese spoken language data. In terms of EM, the highest score we accomplished is 53.97%, which reflects the challenge in processing spoken-based content and highlights the need for further improvement.

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CEV-LM: Controlled Edit Vector Language Model for Shaping Natural Language Generations
Samraj Moorjani | Adit Krishnan | Hari Sundaram

As large-scale language models become the standard for text generation, there is a greater need to tailor the generations to be more or less concise, targeted, and informative, depending on the audience/application. Existing control approaches primarily adjust the semantic (e.g., emotion, topics), structural (e.g., syntax tree, parts-of-speech), and lexical (e.g., keyword/phrase inclusion) properties of text, but are insufficient to accomplish complex objectives such as pacing which control the complexity and readability of the text. In this paper, we introduce CEV-LM - a lightweight, semi-autoregressive language model that utilizes constrained edit vectors to control three complementary metrics (speed, volume, and circuitousness) that quantify the shape of text (e.g., pacing of content). We study an extensive set of state-of-the-art CTG models and find that CEV-LM provides significantly more targeted and precise control of these three metrics while preserving semantic content, using less training data, and containing fewer parameters.

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It’s All Relative: Learning Interpretable Models for Scoring Subjective Bias in Documents from Pairwise Comparisons
Aswin Suresh | Wu Hsuan | Matthias Grossglauser

We propose an interpretable model to score the subjective bias present in documents, based only on their textual content. Our model is trained on pairs of revisions of the same Wikipedia article, where one version is more biased than the other. Although prior approaches based on bias classification have struggled to obtain a high accuracy for the task, we are able to develop a useful model for scoring bias by learning to accurately perform pairwise comparisons. We show that we can interpret the parameters of the trained model to discover the words most indicative of bias. We also apply our model in three different settings by studying the temporal evolution of bias in Wikipedia articles, comparing news sources based on bias, and scoring bias in law amendments. In each case, we demonstrate that the outputs of the model can be explained and validated, even for the two domains that are outside the training-data domain. We also use the model to compare the general level of bias between domains, where we see that legal texts are the least biased and news media are the most biased, with Wikipedia articles in between.

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HiGen: Hierarchy-Aware Sequence Generation for Hierarchical Text Classification
Vidit Jain | Mukund Rungta | Yuchen Zhuang | Yue Yu | Zeyu Wang | Mu Gao | Jeffrey Skolnick | Chao Zhang

Hierarchical text classification (HTC) is a complex subtask under multi-label text classification, characterized by a hierarchical label taxonomy and data imbalance. The best-performing models aim to learn a static representation by combining document and hierarchical label information. However, the relevance of document sections can vary based on the hierarchy level, necessitating a dynamic document representation. To address this, we propose HiGen, a text-generation-based framework utilizing language models to encode dynamic text representations. We introduce a level-guided loss function to capture the relationship between text and label name semantics. Our approach incorporates a task-specific pretraining strategy, adapting the language model to in-domain knowledge and significantly enhancing performance for classes with limited examples. Furthermore, we present a new and valuable dataset called ENZYME, designed for HTC, which comprises articles from PubMed with the goal of predicting Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers. Through extensive experiments on the ENZYME dataset and the widely recognized WOS and NYT datasets, our methodology demonstrates superior performance, surpassing existing approaches while efficiently handling data and mitigating class imbalance. We release our code and dataset here: https://github.com/viditjain99/HiGen.

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M4: Multi-generator, Multi-domain, and Multi-lingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection
Yuxia Wang | Jonibek Mansurov | Petar Ivanov | Jinyan Su | Artem Shelmanov | Akim Tsvigun | Chenxi Whitehouse | Osama Mohammed Afzal | Tarek Mahmoud | Toru Sasaki | Thomas Arnold | Alham Aji | Nizar Habash | Iryna Gurevych | Preslav Nakov

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capability to generate fluent responses to a wide variety of user queries. However, this has also raised concerns about the potential misuse of such texts in journalism, education, and academia. In this study, we strive to create automated systems that can detect machine-generated texts and pinpoint potential misuse. We first introduce a large-scale benchmark M4, which is a multi-generator, multi-domain, and multi-lingual corpus for machine-generated text detection. Through an extensive empirical study of this dataset, we show that it is challenging for detectors to generalize well on instances from unseen domains or LLMs. In such cases, detectors tend to misclassify machine-generated text as human-written. These results show that the problem is far from solved and that there is a lot of room for improvement. We believe that our dataset will enable future research towards more robust approaches to this pressing societal problem. The dataset is available at https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/M4

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A Truly Joint Neural Architecture for Segmentation and Parsing
Danit Yshaayahu Levi | Reut Tsarfaty

Contemporary multilingual dependency parsers can parse a diverse set of languages, but for Morphologically Rich Languages (MRLs), performance is attested to be lower than other languages. The key challenge is that, due to high morphological complexity and ambiguity of the space-delimited input tokens, the linguistic units that act as nodes in the tree are not known in advance. Pre-neural dependency parsers for MRLs subscribed to the joint morpho-syntactic hypothesis, stating that morphological segmentation and syntactic parsing should be solved jointly, rather than as a pipeline where segmentation precedes parsing. However, neural state-of-the-art parsers to date use a strict pipeline. In this paper we introduce a joint neural architecture where a lattice-based representation preserving all morphological ambiguity of the input is provided to an arc-factored model, which then solves the morphological segmentation and syntactic parsing tasks at once. Our experiments on Hebrew, a rich and highly ambiguous MRL, demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on parsing, tagging and segmentation of the Hebrew section of UD, using a single model. This proposed architecture is LLM-based and language agnostic, providing a solid foundation for MRLs to obtain further performance improvements and bridge the gap with other languages.

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ViLexNorm: A Lexical Normalization Corpus for Vietnamese Social Media Text
Thanh-Nhi Nguyen | Thanh-Phong Le | Kiet Nguyen

Lexical normalization, a fundamental task in Natural Language Processing (NLP), involves the transformation of words into their canonical forms. This process has been proven to benefit various downstream NLP tasks greatly. In this work, we introduce Vietnamese Lexical Normalization (ViLexNorm), the first-ever corpus developed for the Vietnamese lexical normalization task. The corpus comprises over 10,000 pairs of sentences meticulously annotated by human annotators, sourced from public comments on Vietnam’s most popular social media platforms. Various methods were used to evaluate our corpus, and the best-performing system achieved a result of 57.74% using the Error Reduction Rate (ERR) metric (van der Goot, 2019a) with the Leave-As-Is (LAI) baseline. For extrinsic evaluation, employing the model trained on ViLexNorm demonstrates the positive impact of the Vietnamese lexical normalization task on other NLP tasks. Our corpus is publicly available exclusively for research purposes.

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Diffusion-NAT: Self-Prompting Discrete Diffusion for Non-Autoregressive Text Generation
Kun Zhou | Yifan Li | Xin Zhao | Ji-Rong Wen

Recently, continuous diffusion models (CDM) have been introduced into non-autoregressive (NAR) text-to-text generation. However, the discrete nature of text increases the difficulty of CDM to generate coherent and fluent texts, and also causes the incompatibility problem between CDM and advanced NLP techniques, especially the popular pre-trained language models (PLMs).To solve it, we propose Diffusion-NAT, which introduces discrete diffusion models (DDM) into NAR text-to-text generation and integrates BART to improve the performance.By revising the decoding process of BART and the typical settings of DDM, we unify the inference process of BART and the denoising process of DDM into the same NAR masked tokens recovering task.In this way, DDM can rely on BART to perform denoising, which can benefit from both the rich pre-learned knowledge of BART and the iterative refining paradigm of DDM.Besides, we also propose the iterative self-prompting strategy to further improve the generation quality.Experimental results on 7 datasets show that our approach can outperform competitive NAR methods, and even surpass autoregressive methods.Our code and data are released at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/DiffusionNAT.

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Unleashing the Power of Discourse-Enhanced Transformers for Propaganda Detection
Alexander Chernyavskiy | Dmitry Ilvovsky | Preslav Nakov

The prevalence of information manipulation online has created a need for propaganda detection systems. Such systems have typically focused on the surface words, ignoring the linguistic structure. Here we aim to bridge this gap. In particular, we present the first attempt at using discourse analysis for the task. We consider both paragraph-level and token-level classification and we propose a discourse-aware Transformer architecture. Our experiments on English and Russian demonstrate sizeable performance gains compared to a number of baselines. Moreover, our ablation study emphasizes the importance of specific types of discourse features, and our in-depth analysis reveals a strong correlation between propaganda instances and discourse spans.

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Predicting Client Emotions and Therapist Interventions in Psychotherapy Dialogues
Tobias Mayer | Neha Warikoo | Amir Eliassaf | Dana Atzil-Slonim | Iryna Gurevych

Natural Language Processing (NLP) can advance psychotherapy research by scaling up therapy dialogue analysis as well as by allowing researchers to examine client-therapist interactions in detail. Previous studies have mainly either explored the clients’ behavior or the therapists’ intervention in dialogues. Yet, modelling conversations from both dialogue participants is crucial to understanding the therapeutic interaction. This study explores speaker contribution-based dialogue acts at the utterance-level; i.e, the therapist - Intervention Prediction (IP) and the client - Emotion Recognition (ER) in psychotherapy using a pan-theoretical schema. We perform experiments with fine-tuned language models and light-weight adapter solutions on a Hebrew dataset. We deploy the results from our ER model predictions in investigating the coherence between client self-reports on emotion and the utterance-level emotions. Our best adapters achieved on-par performance with fully fine-tuned models, at 0.64 and 0.66 micro F1 for IP and ER, respectively. In addition, our analysis identifies ambiguities within categorical clinical coding, which can be used to fine-tune the coding schema. Finally, our results indicate a positive correlation between client self-reports and utterance-level emotions.

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Who Needs Decoders? Efficient Estimation of Sequence-Level Attributes with Proxies
Yassir Fathullah | Puria Radmard | Adian Liusie | Mark Gales

Sequence-to-sequence models often require an expensive autoregressive decoding process. However, for some downstream tasks such as out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and resource allocation, the actual decoding output is not needed, just a scalar attribute of this sequence. In such scenarios, where knowing the quality of a system’s output to predict poor performance prevails over knowing the output itself, is it possible to bypass the autoregressive decoding? We propose Non-Autoregressive Proxy (NAP) models that can efficiently predict scalar-valued sequence-level attributes. Importantly, NAPs predict these metrics directly from the encodings, avoiding the expensive decoding stage. We consider two sequence tasks: Machine Translation (MT) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). In OOD for MT, NAPs outperform ensembles while being significantly faster. NAPs are also proven capable of predicting metrics such as BERTScore (MT) or word error rate (ASR). For downstream tasks, such as data filtering and resource optimization, NAPs generate performance predictions that outperform predictive uncertainty while being highly inference efficient.

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3D Rotation and Translation for Hyperbolic Knowledge Graph Embedding
Yihua Zhu | Hidetoshi Shimodaira

The main objective of Knowledge Graph (KG) embeddings is to learn low-dimensional representations of entities and relations, enabling the prediction of missing facts. A significant challenge in achieving better KG embeddings lies in capturing relation patterns, including symmetry, antisymmetry, inversion, commutative composition, non-commutative composition, hierarchy, and multiplicity. This study introduces a novel model called 3H-TH (3D Rotation and Translation in Hyperbolic space) that captures these relation patterns simultaneously. In contrast, previous attempts have not achieved satisfactory performance across all the mentioned properties at the same time. The experimental results demonstrate that the new model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models in terms of accuracy, hierarchy property, and other relation patterns in low-dimensional space, meanwhile performing similarly in high-dimensional space.

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Geo-Encoder: A Chunk-Argument Bi-Encoder Framework for Chinese Geographic Re-Ranking
Yong Cao | Ruixue Ding | Boli Chen | Xianzhi Li | Min Chen | Daniel Hershcovich | Pengjun Xie | Fei Huang

Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates, which is crucial for location-related services such as navigation maps. Unlike the general sentences, Chinese geographic contexts are closely intertwined with geographical concepts, from general spans (e.g., province) to specific spans (e.g., road). Given this feature, we propose an innovative framework, namely Geo-Encoder, to more effectively integrate Chinese geographical semantics into re-ranking pipelines. Our methodology begins by employing off-the-shelf tools to associate text with geographical spans, treating them as chunking units. Then, we present a multi-task learning module to simultaneously acquire an effective attention matrix that determines chunk contributions to geographic representations. Furthermore, we put forth an asynchronous update mechanism for the proposed task, aiming to guide the model to focus on specific chunks. Experiments on two Chinese benchmark datasets, show that the Geo-Encoder achieves significant improvements when compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, it leads to a substantial improvement in the Hit@1 score of MGEO-BERT, increasing it by 6.22% from 62.76 to 68.98 on the GeoTES dataset.

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Style-News: Incorporating Stylized News Generation and Adversarial Verification for Neural Fake News Detection
Wei-Yao Wang | Yu-Chieh Chang | Wen-Chih Peng

With the improvements in generative models, the issues of producing hallucinations in various domains (e.g., law, writing) have been brought to people’s attention due to concerns about misinformation. In this paper, we focus on neural fake news, which refers to content generated by neural networks aiming to mimic the style of real news to deceive people. To prevent harmful disinformation spreading fallaciously from malicious social media (e.g., content farms), we propose a novel verification framework, Style-News, using publisher metadata to imply a publisher’s template with the corresponding text types, political stance, and credibility. Based on threat modeling aspects, a style-aware neural news generator is introduced as an adversary for generating news content conditioning for a specific publisher, and style and source discriminators are trained to defend against this attack by identifying which publisher the style corresponds with, and discriminating whether the source of the given news is human-written or machine-generated. To evaluate the quality of the generated content, we integrate various dimensional metrics (language fluency, content preservation, and style adherence) and demonstrate that Style-News significantly outperforms the previous approaches by a margin of 0.35 for fluency, 15.24 for content, and 0.38 for style at most. Moreover, our discriminative model outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of publisher prediction (up to 4.64%) and neural fake news detection (+6.94% 31.72%). We plan to release our Style-News publicly, with the aim of improving neural fake news detection.

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Graph-based Clustering for Detecting Semantic Change Across Time and Languages
Xianghe Ma | Michael Strube | Wei Zhao

Despite the predominance of contextualized embeddings in NLP, approaches to detect semantic change relying on these embeddings and clustering methods underperform simpler counterparts based on static word embeddings. This stems from the poor quality of the clustering methods to produce sense clusters—which struggle to capture word senses, especially those with low frequency. This issue hinders the next step in examining how changes in word senses in one language influence another. To address this issue, we propose a graph-based clustering approach to capture nuanced changes in both high- and low-frequency word senses across time and languages, including the acquisition and loss of these senses over time. Our experimental results show that our approach substantially surpasses previous approaches in the SemEval2020 binary classification task across four languages. Moreover, we showcase the ability of our approach as a versatile visualization tool to detect semantic changes in both intra-language and inter-language setups. We make our code and data publicly available.

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Translate to Disambiguate: Zero-shot Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation with Pretrained Language Models
Haoqiang Kang | Terra Blevins | Luke Zettlemoyer

Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) learn rich cross-lingual knowledge and perform well on diverse tasks such as translation and multilingual word sense disambiguation (WSD) when finetuned. However, they often struggle at disambiguating word sense in a zero-shot setting. To better understand this contrast, we present a new study investigating how well PLMs capture cross-lingual word sense with Contextual Word-Level Translation (C-WLT), an extension of word-level translation that prompts the model to translate a given word in context. We find that as the model size increases, PLMs encode more cross-lingual word sense knowledge and better use context to improve WLT performance. Building on C-WLT, we introduce a zero-shot prompting approach for WSD, tested on 18 languages from the XL-WSD dataset. Our method outperforms fully supervised baselines on recall for many evaluation languages without additional training or finetuning. This study presents a first step towards understanding how to best leverage the cross-lingual knowledge inside PLMs for robust zero-shot reasoning in any language.

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Anchor Points: Benchmarking Models with Much Fewer Examples
Rajan Vivek | Kawin Ethayarajh | Diyi Yang | Douwe Kiela

Modern language models often exhibit powerful but brittle behavior, leading to the development of larger and more diverse benchmarks to reliably assess their behavior. Here, we suggest that model performance can be benchmarked and elucidated with much smaller evaluation sets. We first show that in six popular language classification benchmarks, model confidence in the correct class on many pairs of points is strongly correlated across models. We build upon this phenomenon to propose Anchor Point Selection, a technique to select small subsets of datasets that capture model behavior across the entire dataset. Anchor points reliably rank models: across 87 diverse language model-prompt pairs, evaluating models using 1-30 anchor points outperforms uniform sampling and other baselines at accurately ranking models. Moreover, just a dozen anchor points can be used to estimate model per-class predictions on all other points in a dataset with low error, sufficient for gauging where the model is likely to fail. Lastly, we present Anchor Point Maps for visualizing these insights and facilitating comparisons of the performance of different models on various regions within the dataset distribution.

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SCO-VIST: Social Interaction Commonsense Knowledge-based Visual Storytelling
Eileen Wang | Caren Han | Josiah Poon

Visual storytelling aims to automatically generate a coherent story based on a given image sequence. Unlike tasks like image captioning, visual stories should contain factual descriptions, worldviews, and human social commonsense to put disjointed elements together to form a coherent and engaging human-writeable story. However, most models mainly focus on applying factual information and using taxonomic/lexical external knowledge when attempting to create stories. This paper introduces SCO-VIST, a framework representing the image sequence as a graph with objects and relations that includes human action motivation and its social interaction commonsense knowledge. SCO-VIST then takes this graph representing plot points and creates bridges between plot points with semantic and occurrence-based edge weights. This weighted story graph produces the storyline in a sequence of events using Floyd-Warshall’s algorithm. Our proposed framework produces stories superior across multiple metrics in terms of visual grounding, coherence, diversity, and humanness, per both automatic and human evaluations.

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Discovering and Articulating Frames of Communication from Social Media Using Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Maxwell Weinzierl | Sanda Harabagiu

Frames of Communication (FoCs) are ubiquitous in social media discourse. They define what counts as a problem, diagnose what is causing the problem, elicit moral judgments and imply remedies for resolving the problem. Most research on automatic frame detection involved the recognition of the problems addressed by frames, but did not consider the articulation of frames. Articulating an FoC involves reasoning with salient problems, their cause and eventual solution. In this paper we present a method for Discovering and Articulating FoCs (DA-FoC) that relies on a combination of Chain-of-Thought prompting of large language models (LLMs) with In-Context Active Curriculum Learning. Very promising evaluation results indicate that 86.72% of the FoCs encoded by communication experts on the same reference dataset were also uncovered by DA-FoC. Moreover, DA-FoC uncovered many new FoCs, which escaped the experts. Interestingly, 55.1% of the known FoCs were judged as being better articulated than the human-written ones, while 93.8% of the new FoCs were judged as having sound rationale and being clearly articulated.

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VEIL: Vetting Extracted Image Labels from In-the-Wild Captions for Weakly-Supervised Object Detection
Arushi Rai | Adriana Kovashka

The use of large-scale vision-language datasets is limited for object detection due to the negative impact of label noise on localization. Prior methods have shown how such large-scale datasets can be used for pretraining, which can provide initial signal for localization, but is insufficient without clean bounding-box data for at least some categories. We propose a technique to “vet” labels extracted from noisy captions, and use them for weakly-supervised object detection (WSOD), without any bounding boxes. We analyze and annotate the types of label noise in captions in our Caption Label Noise dataset, and train a classifier that predicts if an extracted label is actually present in the image or not. Our classifier generalizes across dataset boundaries and across categories. We compare the classifier to nine baselines on five datasets, and demonstrate that it can improve WSOD without label vetting by 30% (31.2 to 40.5 mAP when evaluated on PASCAL VOC). See dataset at: https://github.com/arushirai1/CLaNDataset.

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WSC+: Enhancing The Winograd Schema Challenge Using Tree-of-Experts
Pardis Zahraei | Ali Emami

The Winograd Schema Challenge (WSC) serves as a prominent benchmark for evaluating machine understanding. While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at answering WSC questions, their ability to generate such questions remains less explored. In this work, we propose Tree-of-Experts (ToE), a novel prompting method which enhances the generation of WSC instances (50% valid cases vs. 10% in recent methods). Using this approach, we introduce WSC+, a novel dataset comprising 3,026 LLM-generated sentences. Notably, we extend the WSC framework by incorporating new ‘ambiguous’ and ‘offensive’ categories, providing a deeper insight into model overconfidence and bias. Our analysis reveals nuances in generation-evaluation consistency, suggesting that LLMs may not always outperform in evaluating their own generated questions when compared to those crafted by other models. On WSC+, GPT-4, the top-performing LLM, achieves an accuracy of 68.7%, significantly below the human benchmark of 95.1%.

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Kardeş-NLU: Transfer to Low-Resource Languages with the Help of a High-Resource Cousin – A Benchmark and Evaluation for Turkic Languages
Lütfi Kerem Senel | Benedikt Ebing | Konul Baghirova | Hinrich Schuetze | Goran Glavaš

Cross-lingual transfer (XLT) driven by massively multilingual language models (mmLMs) has been shown largely ineffective for low-resource (LR) target languages with little (or no) representation in mmLM’s pretraining, especially if they are linguistically distant from the high-resource (HR) source language. Much of the recent focus in XLT research has been dedicated to LR language families, i.e., families without any HR languages (e.g., families of African languages or indigenous languages of the Americas). In this work, in contrast, we investigate a configuration that is arguably of practical relevance for more of the world’s languages: XLT to LR languages that do have a close HR relative. To explore the extent to which a HR language can facilitate transfer to its LR relatives, we (1) introduce Kardeş-NLU, an evaluation benchmark with language understanding datasets in five LR Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Uyghur; and (2) investigate (a) intermediate training and (b) fine-tuning strategies that leverage Turkish in XLT to these target languages. Our experimental results show that both - integrating Turkish in intermediate training and in downstream fine-tuning - yield substantial improvements in XLT to LR Turkic languages. Finally, we benchmark cutting-edge instruction-tuned large language models on Kardeş-NLU, showing that their performance is highly task- and language-dependent.

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Chaining Event Spans for Temporal Relation Grounding
Jongho Kim | Dohyeon Lee | Minsoo Kim | Seung-won Hwang

Accurately understanding temporal relations between events is a critical building block of diverse tasks, such as temporal reading comprehension (TRC) and relation extraction (TRE). For example in TRC, we need to understand the temporal semantic differences between the following two questions that are lexically near-identical: “What finished right before the decision?” or “What finished right after the decision?”. To discern the two questions, existing solutions have relied on answer overlaps as a proxy label to contrast similar and dissimilar questions. However, we claim that answer overlap can lead to unreliable results, due to spurious overlaps of two dissimilar questions with coincidentally identical answers. To address the issue, we propose a novel approach that elicits proper reasoning behaviors through a module for predicting time spans of events. We introduce the Timeline Reasoning Network (TRN) operating in a two-step inductive reasoning process: In the first step model initially answers each question with semantic and syntactic information. The next step chains multiple questions on the same event to predict a timeline, which is then used to ground the answers. Results on the TORQUE and TB-dense, TRC, and TRE tasks respectively, demonstrate that TRN outperforms previous methods by effectively resolving the spurious overlaps using the predicted timeline.

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Fine-Grained Natural Language Inference Based Faithfulness Evaluation for Diverse Summarisation Tasks
Huajian Zhang | Yumo Xu | Laura Perez-Beltrachini

We study existing approaches to leverage off-the-shelf Natural Language Inference (NLI) models for the evaluation of summary faithfulness and argue that these are sub-optimal due to the granularity level considered for premises and hypotheses. That is, the smaller content unit considered as hypothesis is a sentence and premises are made up of a fixed number of document sentences. We propose a novel approach, namely INFUSE, that uses a variable premise size and simplifies summary sentences into shorter hypotheses. Departing from previous studies which focus on single short document summarisation, we analyse NLI based faithfulness evaluation for diverse summarisation tasks. We introduce DiverSumm, a new benchmark comprising long form summarisation (long documents and summaries) and diverse summarisation tasks (e.g., meeting and multi-document summarisation). In experiments, INFUSE obtains superior performance across the different summarisation tasks.

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AnaDE1.0: A Novel Data Set for Benchmarking Analogy Detection and Extraction
Bhavya Bhavya | Shradha Sehgal | Jinjun Xiong | ChengXiang Zhai

Textual analogies that make comparisons between two concepts are often used for explaining complex ideas, creative writing, and scientific discovery. In this paper, we propose and study a new task, called Analogy Detection and Extraction (AnaDE), which includes three synergistic sub-tasks: 1) detecting documents containing analogies, 2) extracting text segments that make up the analogy, and 3) identifying the (source and target) concepts being compared. To facilitate the study of this new task, we create a benchmark dataset by scraping Metamia.com and investigate the performances of state-of-the-art models on all sub-tasks to establish the first-generation benchmark results for this new task. We find that the Longformer model achieves the best performance on all the three sub-tasks demonstrating its effectiveness for handling long texts. Moreover, smaller models fine-tuned on our dataset perform better than non-finetuned ChatGPT, suggesting high task difficulty. Overall, the models achieve a high performance on documents detection suggesting that it could be used to develop applications like analogy search engines. Further, there is a large room for improvement on the segment and concept extraction tasks.

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A Comprehensive Survey of Sentence Representations: From the BERT Epoch to the CHATGPT Era and Beyond
Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap | Thanh-Tung Nguyen | Viktor Schlegel | Stefan Winkler | See-Kiong Ng | Soujanya Poria

Sentence representations are a critical component in NLP applications such as retrieval, question answering, and text classification. They capture the meaning of a sentence, enabling machines to understand and reason over human language. In recent years, significant progress has been made in developing methods for learning sentence representations, including unsupervised, supervised, and transfer learning approaches. However there is no literature review on sentence representations till now. In this paper, we provide an overview of the different methods for sentence representation learning, focusing mostly on deep learning models. We provide a systematic organization of the literature, highlighting the key contributions and challenges in this area. Overall, our review highlights the importance of this area in natural language processing, the progress made in sentence representation learning, and the challenges that remain. We conclude with directions for future research, suggesting potential avenues for improving the quality and efficiency of sentence representations.

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Learning to Retrieve In-Context Examples for Large Language Models
Liang Wang | Nan Yang | Furu Wei

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to learn in-context, allowing them to perform various tasks based on a few input-output examples. However, the effectiveness of in-context learning is heavily reliant on the quality of the selected examples. In this paper, we propose a novel framework to iteratively train dense retrievers that can identify high-quality in-context examples for LLMs. Our framework initially trains a reward model based on LLM feedback to evaluate the quality of candidate examples, followed by knowledge distillation to train a bi-encoder based dense retriever. Our experiments on a suite of 30 tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances in-context learning performance. Furthermore, we show the generalization ability of our framework to unseen tasks during training. An in-depth analysis reveals that our model improves performance by retrieving examples with similar patterns, and the gains are consistent across LLMs of varying sizes.

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EnCore: Fine-Grained Entity Typing by Pre-Training Entity Encoders on Coreference Chains
Frank Mtumbuka | Steven Schockaert

Entity typing is the task of assigning semantic types to the entities that are mentioned in a text. In the case of fine-grained entity typing (FET), a large set of candidate type labels is considered. Since obtaining sufficient amounts of manual annotations is then prohibitively expensive, FET models are typically trained using distant supervision. In this paper, we propose to improve on this process by pre-training an entity encoder such that embeddings of coreferring entities are more similar to each other than to the embeddings of other entities. The main problem with this strategy, which helps to explain why it has not previously been considered, is that predicted coreference links are often too noisy. We show that this problem can be addressed by using a simple trick: we only consider coreference links that are predicted by two different off-the-shelf systems. With this prudent use of coreference links, our pre-training strategy allows us to improve the state-of-the-art in benchmarks on fine-grained entity typing, as well as traditional entity extraction.

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Unsupervised stance detection for social media discussions: A generic baseline
Maia Sutter | Antoine Gourru | Amine Trabelsi | Christine Largeron

With the ever-growing use of social media to express opinions on the national and international stage, unsupervised methods of stance detection are increasingly important to handle the task without costly annotation of data. The current unsupervised state-of-the-art models are designed for specific network types, either homophilic or heterophilic, and they fail to generalize to both. In this paper, we first analyze the generalization ability of recent baselines to these two very different network types. Then, we conduct extensive experiments with a baseline model based on text embeddings propagated with a graph neural network that generalizes well to heterophilic and homophilic networks. We show that it outperforms, on average, other state-of-the-art methods across the two network types. Additionally, we show that combining textual and network information outperforms using text only, and that the language model size has only a limited impact on the model performance.

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Putting Context in Context: the Impact of Discussion Structure on Text Classification
Nicolò Penzo | Antonio Longa | Bruno Lepri | Sara Tonelli | Marco Guerini

Current text classification approaches usually focus on the content to be classified. Contextual aspects (both linguistic and extra-linguistic) are usually neglected, even in tasks based on online discussions. Still in many cases the multi-party and multi-turn nature of the context from which these elements are selected can be fruitfully exploited. In this work, we propose a series of experiments on a large dataset for stance detection in English, in which we evaluate the contribution of different types of contextual information, i.e. linguistic, structural and temporal, by feeding them as natural language input into a transformer-based model. We also experiment with different amounts of training data and analyse the topology of local discussion networks in a privacy-compliant way. Results show that structural information can be highly beneficial to text classification but only under certain circumstances (e.g. depending on the amount of training data and on discussion chain complexity). Indeed, we show that contextual information on smaller datasets from other classification tasks does not yield significant improvements. Our framework, based on local discussion networks, allows the integration of structural information while minimising user profiling, thus preserving their privacy.

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Aligning Large and Small Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Leonardo Ranaldi | Andre Freitas

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting empowersthe reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), eliciting them to solve complexreasoning tasks in a step-wise manner. However, these capabilities appear only in models with billions of parameters, which represent an entry barrier for many users who are constrained to operate on a smaller model scale, i.e., Small Language Models (SLMs). Although many companies are releasing LLMs of the same family with fewer parameters, these models tend not to preserve all the reasoning capabilities of the original models, including CoT reasoning.In this paper, we propose a method for aligning and transferring reasoning abilities between larger to smaller Language Models. By using an Instruction-tuning-CoT method, that is, an Instruction-tuning designed around CoT-Demonstrations, we enable the SLMs to generate multi-step controlled reasoned answers when they are elicited with the CoT mechanism. Hence, we instruct a smaller Language Model using outputs generated by more robust models belonging to the same family or not, evaluating the impact across different types of models. Results obtained on question-answering and mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that LMs instructed via the Instruction-tuning CoT method produced by LLMs outperform baselines within both in-domain and out-domain scenarios.

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Disentangling the Roles of Target-side Transfer and Regularization in Multilingual Machine Translation
Yan Meng | Christof Monz

Multilingual Machine Translation (MMT) benefits from knowledge transfer across different language pairs. However, improvements in one-to-many translation compared to many-to-one translation are only marginal and sometimes even negligible. This performance discrepancy raises the question of to what extent positive transfer plays a role on the target-side for one-to-many MT. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale study that varies the auxiliary target-side languages along two dimensions, i.e., linguistic similarity and corpus size, to show the dynamic impact of knowledge transfer on the main language pairs. We show that linguistically similar auxiliary target languages exhibit strong ability to transfer positive knowledge. With an increasing size of similar target languages, the positive transfer is further enhanced to benefit the main language pairs. Meanwhile, we find distant auxiliary target languages can also unexpectedly benefit main language pairs, even with minimal positive transfer ability. Apart from transfer, we show distant auxiliary target languages can act as a regularizer to benefit translation performance by enhancing the generalization and model inference calibration.

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Uncovering Stereotypes in Large Language Models: A Task Complexity-based Approach
Hari Shrawgi | Prasanjit Rath | Tushar Singhal | Sandipan Dandapat

Recent Large Language Models (LLMs) have unlocked unprecedented applications of AI. As these models continue to transform human life, there are growing socio-ethical concerns around their inherent stereotypes that can lead to bias in their applications. There is an urgent need for holistic bias evaluation of these LLMs. Few such benchmarks exist today and evaluation techniques that do exist are either non-holistic or may provide a false sense of security as LLMs become better at hiding their biases on simpler tasks. We address these issues with an extensible benchmark - LLM Stereotype Index (LSI). LSI is grounded on Social Progress Index, a holistic social benchmark. We also test the breadth and depth of bias protection provided by LLMs via a variety of tasks with varying complexities. Our findings show that both ChatGPT and GPT-4 have strong inherent prejudice with respect to nationality, gender, race, and religion. The exhibition of such issues becomes increasingly apparent as we increase task complexity. Furthermore, GPT-4 is better at hiding the biases, but when displayed it is more significant. Our findings highlight the harms and divide that these LLMs can bring to society if we do not take very diligent care in their use.

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Rainbow - A Benchmark for Systematic Testing of How Sensitive Visio-Linguistic Models are to Color Naming
Marie Bexte | Andrea Horbach | Torsten Zesch

With the recent emergence of powerful visio-linguistic models comes the question of how fine-grained their multi-modal understanding is. This has lead to the release of several probing datasets. Results point towards models having trouble with prepositions and verbs, but being relatively robust when it comes to color.To gauge how deep this understanding goes, we compile a comprehensive probing dataset to systematically test multi-modal alignment around color. We demonstrate how human perception influences descriptions of color and pay special attention to the extent to which this is reflected within the predictions of a visio-linguistic model. Probing a set of models with diverse properties with our benchmark confirms the superiority of models that do not rely on pre-extracted image features, and demonstrates that augmentation with too much noisy pre-training data can produce an inferior model. While the benchmark remains challenging for all models we test, the overall result pattern suggests well-founded alignment of color terms with hues. Analyses do however reveal uncertainty regarding the boundaries between neighboring color terms.

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CATfOOD: Counterfactual Augmented Training for Improving Out-of-Domain Performance and Calibration
Rachneet Sachdeva | Martin Tutek | Iryna Gurevych

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities at scale, particularly at generating text conditioned on a prompt. In our work, we investigate the use of LLMs to augment training data of smaller language models (SLMs) with automatically generated counterfactual (CF) instances – i.e. minimally altered inputs – in order to improve out-of-domain (OOD) performance of SLMs in the extractive question answering (QA) setup. We show that, across various LLM generators, such data augmentation consistently enhances OOD performance and improves model calibration for both confidence-based and rationale-augmented calibrator models. Furthermore, these performance improvements correlate with higher diversity of CF instances in terms of their surface form and semantic content. Finally, we show that CF augmented models which are easier to calibrate also exhibit much lower entropy when assigning importance, indicating that rationale-augmented calibrators prefer concise explanations.

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UP5: Unbiased Foundation Model for Fairness-aware Recommendation
Wenyue Hua | Yingqiang Ge | Shuyuan Xu | Jianchao Ji | Zelong Li | Yongfeng Zhang

Recent advances in Foundation Models such as Large Language Models (LLMs) have propelled them to the forefront of Recommender Systems (RS). Despite their utility, there is a growing concern that LLMs might inadvertently perpetuate societal stereotypes, resulting in unfair recommendations. Since fairness is critical for RS as many users take it for decision-making and demand fulfillment, this paper focuses on user-side fairness for LLM-based recommendation where the users may require a recommender system to be fair on specific sensitive features such as gender or age. In this paper, we dive into the extent of unfairness exhibited by LLM-based recommender models based on both T5 and LLaMA backbones, and discuss appropriate methods for promoting equitable treatment of users in LLM-based recommendation models. We introduce a novel Counterfactually-Fair-Prompt (CFP) method towards Unbiased Foundation mOdels (UFO) for fairness-aware LLM-based recommendation. Experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets, MovieLens-1M and Insurance, and compared with both matching-based and sequential-based fairness-aware recommendation models. Results show that CFP achieves better recommendation performance with a high level of fairness.

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Human Temporal Inferences Go Beyond Aspectual Class
Katarzyna Pruś | Mark Steedman | Adam Lopez

Past work in NLP has proposed the task of classifying English verb phrases into situation aspect categories, assuming that these categories play an important role in tasks requiring temporal reasoning. We investigate this assumption by gathering crowd-sourced judgements about aspectual entailments from non-expert, native English participants. The results suggest that aspectual class alone is not sufficient to explain the response patterns of the participants. We propose that looking at scenarios which can feasibly accompany an action description contributes towards a better explanation of the participants’ answers. A further experiment using GPT-3.5 shows that its outputs follow different patterns than human answers, suggesting that such conceivable scenarios cannot be fully accounted for in the language alone. We release our dataset to support further research.

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It is not True that Transformers are Inductive Learners: Probing NLI Models with External Negation
Michael Sullivan

NLI tasks necessitate a substantial degree of logical reasoning; as such, the remarkable performance of SoTA transformers on these tasks may lead us to believe that those models have learned to reason logically. The results presented in this paper demonstrate that (i) models fine-tuned on NLI datasets learn to treat external negation as a distractor, effectively ignoring its presence in hypothesis sentences; (ii) several near-SoTA encoder and encoder-decoder transformer models fail to inductively learn the law of the excluded middle for a single external negation prefix with respect to NLI tasks, despite extensive fine-tuning; (iii) those models which are are able to learn the law of the excluded middle for a single prefix are unable to generalize this pattern to similar prefixes. Given the critical role of negation in logical reasoning, we may conclude from these findings that transformers do not learn to reason logically when fine-tuned for NLI tasks. Furthermore, these results suggest that transformers may not be able to inductively learn the role of negation with respect to NLI tasks, calling into question their capacity to fully acquire logical reasoning abilities.

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Polarized Opinion Detection Improves the Detection of Toxic Language
John Pavlopoulos | Aristidis Likas

Distance from unimodality (DFU) has been found to correlate well with human judgment for the assessment of polarized opinions. However, its un-normalized nature makes it less intuitive and somewhat difficult to exploit in machine learning (e.g., as a supervised signal). In this work a normalized version of this measure, called nDFU, is proposed that leads to better assessment of the degree of polarization. Then, we propose a methodology for K-class text classification, based on nDFU, that exploits polarized texts in the dataset. Such polarized instances are assigned to a separate K+1 class, so that a K+1-class classifier is trained. An empirical analysis on three datasets for abusive language detection, shows that nDFU can be used to model polarized annotations and prevent them from harming the classification performance. Finally, we further exploit nDFU to specify conditions that could explain polarization given a dimension and present text examples that polarized the annotators when the dimension was gender and race. Our code is available at https://github.com/ipavlopoulos/ndfu.

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Improving Acoustic Word Embeddings through Correspondence Training of Self-supervised Speech Representations
Amit Meghanani | Thomas Hain

Acoustic word embeddings (AWEs) are vector representations of spoken words. An effective method for obtaining AWEs is the Correspondence Auto-Encoder (CAE). In the past, the CAE method has been associated with traditional MFCC features. Representations obtained from self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models such as HuBERT, Wav2vec2, etc., are outperforming MFCC in many downstream tasks. However, they have not been well studied in the context of learning AWEs. This work explores the effectiveness of CAE with SSL-based speech representations to obtain improved AWEs. Additionally, the capabilities of SSL-based speech models are explored in cross-lingual scenarios for obtaining AWEs. Experiments are conducted on five languages: Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English. HuBERT-based CAE model achieves the best results for word discrimination in all languages, despite HuBERT being pre-trained on English only. Also, the HuBERT-based CAE model works well in cross-lingual settings. It outperforms MFCC-based CAE models trained on the target languages when trained on one source language and tested on target languages.

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Investigating Agency of LLMs in Human-AI Collaboration Tasks
Ashish Sharma | Sudha Rao | Chris Brockett | Akanksha Malhotra | Nebojsa Jojic | Bill Dolan

Agency, the capacity to proactively shape events, is central to how humans interact and collaborate. While LLMs are being developed to simulate human behavior and serve as human-like agents, little attention has been given to the Agency that these models should possess in order to proactively manage the direction of interaction and collaboration. In this paper, we investigate Agency as a desirable function of LLMs, and how it can be measured and managed. We build on social-cognitive theory to develop a framework of features through which Agency is expressed in dialogue – indicating what you intend to do (Intentionality), motivating your intentions (Motivation), having self-belief in intentions (Self-Efficacy), and being able to self-adjust (Self-Regulation). We collect a new dataset of 83 human-human collaborative interior design conversations containing 908 conversational snippets annotated for Agency features. Using this dataset, we develop methods for measuring Agency of LLMs. Automatic and human evaluations show that models that manifest features associated with high Intentionality, Motivation, Self-Efficacy, and Self-Regulation are more likely to be perceived as strongly agentive.

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SynthDST: Synthetic Data is All You Need for Few-Shot Dialog State Tracking
Atharva Kulkarni | Bo-Hsiang Tseng | Joel Moniz | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Hong Yu | Shruti Bhargava

In-context learning with Large Language Models (LLMs) has emerged as a promising avenue of research in Dialog State Tracking (DST). However, the best-performing in-context learning methods involve retrieving and adding similar examples to the prompt, requiring access to labeled training data. Procuring such training data for a wide range of domains and applications is time-consuming, expensive, and, at times, infeasible. While zero-shot learning requires no training data, it significantly lags behind the few-shot setup. Thus, ‘Can we efficiently generate synthetic data for any dialogue schema to enable few-shot prompting?' Addressing this question, we propose , a data generation framework tailored for DST, utilizing LLMs. Our approach only requires the dialogue schema and a few hand-crafted dialogue templates to synthesize natural, coherent, and free-flowing dialogues with DST annotations. Few-shot learning using data from results in 4-5% improvement in Joint Goal Accuracy over the zero-shot baseline on MultiWOZ 2.1 and 2.4. Remarkably, our few-shot learning approach recovers nearly 98% of the performance compared to the few-shot setup using human-annotated training data.

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Argument Mining as a Text-to-Text Generation Task
Masayuki Kawarada | Tsutomu Hirao | Wataru Uchida | Masaaki Nagata

Argument Mining (AM) aims to uncover the argumentative structures within a text. Previous methods require several subtasks, such as span identification, component classification, and relation classification. Consequently, these methods need rule-based postprocessing to derive argumentative structures from the output of each subtask. This approach adds to the complexity of the model and expands the search space of the hyperparameters. To address this difficulty, we propose a simple yet strong method based on a text-to-text generation approach using a pretrained encoder-decoder language model. Our method simultaneously generates argumentatively annotated text for spans, components, and relations, eliminating the need for task-specific postprocessing and hyperparameter tuning. Furthermore, because it is a straightforward text-to-text generation method, we can easily adapt our approach to various types of argumentative structures.Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, as it achieves state-of-the-art performance on three different types of benchmark datasets: the Argument-annotated Essays Corpus (AAEC), AbstRCT, and the Cornell eRulemaking Corpus (CDCP).

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Answering legal questions from laymen in German civil law system
Marius Büttner | Ivan Habernal

What is preventing us from building a NLP system that could help real people in real situations, for instance when they need legal advice but don’t understand law? This question is trickier than one might think, because legal systems vary from country to country, so do the law books, availability of data, and incomprehensibility of legalese. In this paper we focus Germany (which employs the civil-law system where, roughly speaking, interpretation of law codes dominates over precedence) and lay a foundational work to address the laymen’s legal question answering empirically. We create GerLayQA, a new dataset comprising of 21k laymen’s legal questions paired with answers from lawyers and grounded to concrete law book paragraphs. We experiment with a variety of retrieval and answer generation models and provide an in-depth analysis of limitations, which helps us to provide first empirical answers to the question above.

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An Empirical Analysis of Diversity in Argument Summarization
Michiel Van Der Meer | Piek Vossen | Catholijn Jonker | Pradeep Murukannaiah

Presenting high-level arguments is a crucial task for fostering participation in online societal discussions. Current argument summarization approaches miss an important facet of this task—capturing diversity—which is important for accommodating multiple perspectives. We introduce three aspects of diversity: those of opinions, annotators, and sources. We evaluate approaches to a popular argument summarization task called Key Point Analysis, which shows how these approaches struggle to (1) represent arguments shared by few people, (2) deal with data from various sources, and (3) align with subjectivity in human-provided annotations. We find that both general-purpose LLMs and dedicated KPA models exhibit this behavior, but have complementary strengths. Further, we observe that diversification of training data may ameliorate generalization in zero-shot cases. Addressing diversity in argument summarization requires a mix of strategies to deal with subjectivity.

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What Makes Medical Claims (Un)Verifiable? Analyzing Entity and Relation Properties for Fact Verification
Amelie Wuehrl | Yarik Menchaca Resendiz | Lara Grimminger | Roman Klinger

Verifying biomedical claims fails if no evidence can be discovered. In these cases, the fact-checking verdict remains unknown and the claim is unverifiable. To improve this situation, we have to understand if there are any claim properties that impact its verifiability. In this work we assume that entities and relations define the core variables in a biomedical claim’s anatomy and analyze if their properties help us to differentiate verifiable from unverifiable claims. In a study with trained annotation experts we prompt them to find evidence for biomedical claims, and observe how they refine search queries for their evidence search. This leads to the first corpus for scientific fact verification annotated with subject–relation–object triplets, evidence documents, and fact-checking verdicts (the BEAR-FACT corpus). We find (1) that discovering evidence for negated claims (e.g., X–does-not-cause–Y) is particularly challenging. Further, we see that annotators process queries mostly by adding constraints to the search and by normalizing entities to canonical names. (2) We compare our in-house annotations with a small crowdsourcing setting where we employ both medical experts and laypeople. We find that domain expertise does not have a substantial effect on the reliability of annotations. Finally, (3), we demonstrate that it is possible to reliably estimate the success of evidence retrieval purely from the claim text (.82F1), whereas identifying unverifiable claims proves more challenging (.27F1)

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Approximate Attributions for Off-the-Shelf Siamese Transformers
Lucas Moeller | Dmitry Nikolaev | Sebastian Padó

Siamese encoders such as sentence transformers are among the least understood deep models.Established attribution methods cannot tackle this model class since it compares two inputs rather than processing a single one. To address this gap, we have recently proposed an attribution method specifically for Siamese encoders (Möller et al., 2023). However, it requires models to be adjusted and fine-tuned and therefore cannot be directly applied to off-the-shelf models. In this work, we reassess these restrictions and propose (i) a model with exact attribution ability that retains the original model’s predictive performance and (ii) a way to compute approximate attributions for off-the-shelf models.We extensively compare approximate and exact attributions and use them to analyze the models’ attendance to different linguistic aspects. We gain insights into which syntactic roles Siamese transformers attend to, confirm that they mostly ignore negation, explore how they judge semantically opposite adjectives, and find that they exhibit lexical bias.

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Describing Images Fast and Slow: Quantifying and Predicting the Variation in Human Signals during Visuo-Linguistic Processes
Ece Takmaz | Sandro Pezzelle | Raquel Fernández

There is an intricate relation between the properties of an image and how humans behave while describing the image. This behavior shows ample variation, as manifested in human signals such as eye movements and when humans start to describe the image. Despite the value of such signals of visuo-linguistic variation, they are virtually disregarded in the training of current pretrained models, which motivates further investigation. Using a corpus of Dutch image descriptions with concurrently collected eye-tracking data, we explore the nature of the variation in visuo-linguistic signals, and find that they correlate with each other. Given this result, we hypothesize that variation stems partly from the properties of the images, and explore whether image representations encoded by pretrained vision encoders can capture such variation. Our results indicate that pretrained models do so to a weak-to-moderate degree, suggesting that the models lack biases about what makes a stimulus complex for humans and what leads to variations in human outputs.

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Tracing the Roots of Facts in Multilingual Language Models: Independent, Shared, and Transferred Knowledge
Xin Zhao | Naoki Yoshinaga | Daisuke Oba

Acquiring factual knowledge for language models (LMs) in low-resource languages poses a serious challenge, thus resorting to cross-lingual transfer in multilingual LMs (ML-LMs). In this study, we ask how ML-LMs acquire and represent factual knowledge. Using the multilingual factual knowledge probing dataset, mLAMA, we first conducted a neuron investigation of ML-LMs (specifically, multilingual BERT). We then traced the roots of facts back to the knowledge source (Wikipedia) to identify the ways in which ML-LMs acquire specific facts. We finally identified three patterns of acquiring and representing facts in ML-LMs: language-independent, cross-lingual shared and transferred, and devised methods for differentiating them. Our findings highlight the challenge of maintaining consistent factual knowledge across languages, underscoring the need for better fact representation learning in ML-LMs.

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Comparing Knowledge Sources for Open-Domain Scientific Claim Verification
Juraj Vladika | Florian Matthes

The increasing rate at which scientific knowledge is discovered and health claims shared online has highlighted the importance of developing efficient fact-checking systems for scientific claims. The usual setting for this task in the literature assumes that the documents containing the evidence for claims are already provided and annotated or contained in a limited corpus. This renders the systems unrealistic for real-world settings where knowledge sources with potentially millions of documents need to be queried to find relevant evidence. In this paper, we perform an array of experiments to test the performance of open-domain claim verification systems. We test the final verdict prediction of systems on four datasets of biomedical and health claims in different settings. While keeping the pipeline’s evidence selection and verdict prediction parts constant, document retrieval is performed over three common knowledge sources (PubMed, Wikipedia, Google) and using two different information retrieval techniques. We show that PubMed works better with specialized biomedical claims, while Wikipedia is more suited for everyday health concerns. Likewise, BM25 excels in retrieval precision, while semantic search in recall of relevant evidence. We discuss the results, outline frequent retrieval patterns and challenges, and provide promising future directions.

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Measuring Uncertainty in Neural Machine Translation with Similarity-Sensitive Entropy
Julius Cheng | Andreas Vlachos

Uncertainty estimation is an important diagnostic tool for statistical models, and is often used to assess the confidence of model predictions. Previous work shows that neural machine translation (NMT) is an intrinsically uncertain task where there are often multiple correct and semantically equivalent translations, and that well-trained NMT models produce good translations despite spreading probability mass among many semantically similar translations. These findings suggest that popular measures of uncertainty based on token- and sequence-level entropies which measure surface form diversity may not be good proxies of the more useful quantity of interest, semantic diversity. We propose to adapt similarity-sensitive Shannon entropy (S3E), a concept borrowed from theoretical ecology, for NMT. By demonstrating significantly improved correlation between S3E and task performance on quality estimation and named entity recall, we show that S3E is a useful framework for measuring uncertainty in NMT.

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LegalLens: Leveraging LLMs for Legal Violation Identification in Unstructured Text
Dor Bernsohn | Gil Semo | Yaron Vazana | Gila Hayat | Ben Hagag | Joel Niklaus | Rohit Saha | Kyryl Truskovskyi

In this study, we focus on two main tasks, the first for detecting legal violations within unstructured textual data, and the second for associating these violations with potentially affected individuals. We constructed two datasets using Large Language Models (LLMs) which were subsequently validated by domain expert annotators. Both tasks were designed specifically for the context of class-action cases. The experimental design incorporated fine-tuning models from the BERT family and open-source LLMs, and conducting few-shot experiments using closed-source LLMs. Our results, with an F1-score of 62.69% (violation identification) and 81.02% (associating victims), show that our datasets and setups can be used for both tasks. Finally, we publicly release the datasets and the code used for the experiments in order to advance further research in the area of legal natural language processing (NLP).

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𝜇PLAN: Summarizing using a Content Plan as Cross-Lingual Bridge
Fantine Huot | Joshua Maynez | Chris Alberti | Reinald Kim Amplayo | Priyanka Agrawal | Constanza Fierro | Shashi Narayan | Mirella Lapata

Cross-lingual summarization aims to generate a summary in one languagegiven input in a different language, allowing for the dissemination ofrelevant content among different language speaking populations. Thetask is challenging mainly due to the paucity of cross-lingualdatasets and the compounded difficulty of summarizing andtranslating.This work presents 𝜇PLAN, an approach to cross-lingual summarization that uses an intermediate planning step as a cross-lingual bridge. We formulate the plan as a sequence of entities capturing thesummary’s content and the order in which it should becommunicated. Importantly, our plans abstract from surface form: usinga multilingual knowledge base, we align entities to their canonicaldesignation across languages and generate the summary conditioned onthis cross-lingual bridge and the input. Automatic and human evaluation on the XWikis dataset (across four language pairs) demonstrates that our planning objective achieves state-of-the-art performance interms of informativeness and faithfulness. Moreover, 𝜇PLAN modelsimprove the zero-shot transfer to new cross-lingual language pairscompared to baselines without a planning component.

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Exploring Data Augmentation in Neural DRS-to-Text Generation
Muhammad Saad Amin | Luca Anselma | Alessandro Mazzei

Neural networks are notoriously data-hungry. This represents an issue in cases where data are scarce such as in low-resource languages. Data augmentation is a technique commonly used in computer vision to provide neural networks with more data and increase their generalization power. When dealing with data augmentation for natural language, however, simple data augmentation techniques similar to the ones used in computer vision such as rotation and cropping cannot be employed because they would generate ungrammatical texts. Thus, data augmentation needs a specific design in the case of neural logic-to-text systems, especially for a structurally rich input format such as the ones used for meaning representation. This is the case of the neural natural language generation for Discourse Representation Structures (DRS-to-Text), where the logical nature of DRS needs a specific design of data augmentation. In this paper, we adopt a novel approach in DRS-to-Text to selectively augment a training set with new data by adding and varying two specific lexical categories, i.e. proper and common nouns. In particular, we propose using WordNet supersenses to produce new training sentences using both in-and-out-of-context nouns. We present a number of experiments for evaluating the role played by augmented lexical information. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of our approach for data augmentation in DRS-to-Text generation.

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Think Twice: Measuring the Efficiency of Eliminating Prediction Shortcuts of Question Answering Models
Lukáš Mikula | Michal Štefánik | Marek Petrovič | Petr Sojka

While the Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate a majority of language understanding tasks, previous work shows that some of these results are supported by modelling spurious correlations of training datasets. Authors commonly assess model robustness by evaluating their models on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets of the same task, but these datasets might share the bias of the training dataset. We propose a simple method for measuring a scale of models’ reliance on any identified spurious feature and assess the robustness towards a large set of known and newly found prediction biases for various pre-trained models and debiasing methods in Question Answering (QA). We find that the reported OOD gains of debiasing methods can not be explained by mitigated reliance on biased features, suggesting that biases are shared among different QA datasets. We further evidence this by measuring that performance of OOD models depends on bias features comparably to the ID model. Our findings motivate future work to refine the reports of LLMs’ robustness to a level of known spurious features.

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Improving Contrastive Learning in Emotion Recognition in Conversation via Data Augmentation and Decoupled Neutral Emotion
Yujin Kang | Yoon-Sik Cho

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) has attracted much attention due to its wide applications. While consistent improvement is being made in this area, inevitable challenge comes from the dataset. The ERC dataset exhibits significantly imbalanced emotion distribution. While the utterances with neutral emotion predominate the data, this emotion label is always treated the same as other emotion labels in current approaches. To address the problem caused by the dataset, we propose a supervised contrastive learning specifically oriented for ERC task. We employ a novel data augmentation method emulating the emotion dynamics in a conversation and formulate supervised contrastive learning method tailored for ERC addressing the predominance and the ambiguity of neutral emotion. Experimental results on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

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CroCoAlign: A Cross-Lingual, Context-Aware and Fully-Neural Sentence Alignment System for Long Texts
Francesco Molfese | Andrei Bejgu | Simone Tedeschi | Simone Conia | Roberto Navigli

Sentence alignment – establishing links between corresponding sentences in two related documents – is an important NLP task with several downstream applications, such as machine translation (MT). Despite the fact that existing sentence alignment systems have achieved promising results, their effectiveness is based on auxiliary information such as document metadata or machine-generated translations, as well as hyperparameter-sensitive techniques. Moreover, these systems often overlook the crucial role that context plays in the alignment process. In this paper, we address the aforementioned issues and propose CroCoAlign: the first context-aware, end-to-end and fully neural architecture for sentence alignment. Our system maps source and target sentences in long documents by contextualizing their sentence embeddings with respect to the other sentences in the document. We extensively evaluate CroCoAlign on a multilingual dataset consisting of 20 language pairs derived from the Opus project, and demonstrate that our model achieves state-of-the-art performance. To ensure reproducibility, we release our code and model checkpoints at https://github.com/Babelscape/CroCoAlign.

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Explaining Speech Classification Models via Word-Level Audio Segments and Paralinguistic Features
Eliana Pastor | Alkis Koudounas | Giuseppe Attanasio | Dirk Hovy | Elena Baralis

Predictive models make mistakes and have biases. To combat both, we need to understand their predictions.Explainable AI (XAI) provides insights into models for vision, language, and tabular data. However, only a few approaches exist for speech classification models. Previous works focus on a selection of spoken language understanding (SLU) tasks, and most users find their explanations challenging to interpret.We propose a novel approach to explain speech classification models. It provides two types of insights. (i) Word-level. We measure the impact of each audio segment aligned with a word on the outcome. (ii) Paralinguistic. We evaluate how non-linguistic features (e.g., prosody and background noise) affect the outcome if perturbed.We validate our approach by explaining two state-of-the-art SLU models on two tasks in English and Italian. We test their plausibility with human subject ratings. Our results show that the explanations correctly represent the model’s inner workings and are plausible to humans.

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Zero-Shot End-to-End Spoken Language Understanding via Cross-Modal Selective Self-Training
Jianfeng He | Julian Salazar | Kaisheng Yao | Haoqi Li | Jason Cai

End-to-end (E2E) spoken language understanding (SLU) is constrained by the cost of collecting speech-semantics pairs, especially when label domains change. Hence, we explore zero-shot E2E SLU, which learns E2E SLU without speech-semantics pairs, instead using only speech-text and text-semantics pairs. Previous work achieved zero-shot by pseudolabeling all speech-text transcripts with a natural language understanding (NLU) model learned on text-semantics corpora. However, this method requires the domains of speech-text and text-semantics to match, which often mismatch due to separate collections. Furthermore, using the entire collected speech-text corpus from any domains leads to imbalance and noise issues. To address these, we propose cross-modal selective self-training (CMSST). CMSST tackles imbalance by clustering in a joint space of the three modalities (speech, text, and semantics) and handles label noise with a selection network. We also introduce two benchmarks for zero-shot E2E SLU, covering matched and found speech (mismatched) settings. Experiments show that CMSST improves performance in both two settings, with significantly reduced sample sizes and training time. Our code and data are released in https://github.com/amazon-science/zero-shot-E2E-slu.

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Clever Hans or Neural Theory of Mind? Stress Testing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models
Natalie Shapira | Mosh Levy | Seyed Hossein Alavi | Xuhui Zhou | Yejin Choi | Yoav Goldberg | Maarten Sap | Vered Shwartz

The escalating debate on AI’s capabilities warrants developing reliable metrics to assess machine “intelligence.” Recently, many anecdotal examples were used to suggest that newer Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibit Neural Theory-of-Mind (N-ToM); however, prior work reached conflicting conclusions regarding those abilities. We investigate the extent of LLMs’ N-ToM through an extensive evaluation of 6 tasks and find that while LLMs exhibit certain N-ToM abilities, this behavior is far from being robust. We further examine the factors impacting performance on N-ToM tasks and discover that LLMs struggle with adversarial examples, indicating reliance on shallow heuristics rather than robust ToM abilities. We caution against drawing conclusions from anecdotal examples, limited benchmark testing, and using human-designed psychological tests to evaluate models.

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NevIR: Negation in Neural Information Retrieval
Orion Weller | Dawn Lawrie | Benjamin Van Durme

Negation is a common everyday phenomena and has been a consistent area of weakness for language models (LMs). Although the Information Retrieval (IR) community has adopted LMs as the backbone of modern IR architectures, there has been little to no research in understanding how negation impacts neural IR. We therefore construct a straightforward benchmark on this theme: asking IR models to rank two documents that differ only by negation. We show that the results vary widely according to the type of IR architecture: cross-encoders perform best, followed by late-interaction models, and in last place are bi-encoder and sparse neural architectures. We find that most current information retrieval models do not consider negation, performing similarly or worse than randomly ranking. We show that although the obvious approach of continued fine-tuning on a dataset of contrastive documents containing negations increases performance (as does model size), there is still a large gap between machine and human performance.

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“According to . . . ”: Prompting Language Models Improves Quoting from Pre-Training Data
Orion Weller | Marc Marone | Nathaniel Weir | Dawn Lawrie | Daniel Khashabi | Benjamin Van Durme

Large Language Models (LLMs) may hallucinate and generate fake information, despite pre-training on factual data. Inspired by the journalistic device of “according to sources”, we propose according-to prompting: directing LLMs to ground responses against previously observed text. To quantify this grounding, we propose a novel evaluation metric (QUIP-Score) that measures the extent to which model-produced answers are directly found in underlying text corpora. We illustrate with experiments on three corpora (Wikipedia, PubMed, and the U.S. legal tax code) that these prompts improve grounding under our metrics, with the additional benefit of often improving end-task performance. Furthermore, prompts that ask the model to decrease grounding (or to ground to other corpora) indeed decrease QUIP-Score, indicating the ability of LLMs to increase or decrease grounded generations on request.

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Accurate and Well-Calibrated ICD Code Assignment Through Attention Over Diverse Label Embeddings
Goncalo Gomes | Isabel Coutinho | Bruno Martins

Although the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) has been adopted worldwide, manually assigning ICD codes to clinical text is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive, motivating the development of automated approaches. This paper describes a novel approach for automated ICD coding, combining several ideas from previous related work. We specifically employ a strong Transformer-based model as a text encoder and, to handle lengthy clinical narratives, we explored either (a) adapting the base encoder model into a Longformer, or (b) dividing the text into chunks and processing each chunk independently. The representations produced by the encoder are combined with a label embedding mechanism that explores diverse ICD code synonyms. Experiments with different splits of the MIMIC-III dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms the current state-of-the-art models in ICD coding, with the label embeddings significantly contributing to the good performance. Our approach also leads to properly calibrated classification results, which can effectively inform downstream tasks such as quantification.

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Investigating Content Planning for Navigating Trade-offs in Knowledge-Grounded Dialogue
Kushal Chawla | Hannah Rashkin | Gaurav Singh Tomar | David Reitter

Knowledge-grounded dialogue generation is a challenging task because it requires satisfying two fundamental, yet often competing constraints: being responsive in a manner that is specific to what the conversation partner has said while also being attributable to an underlying source document. In this work, we bring this trade-off between these two objectives (specificity and attribution) to light, and ask the question: Can explicit content planning before the response generation help the model to address this challenge? To answer this question, we design a framework called PLEDGE, which allows us to experiment with various plan variables explored in prior work supporting both metric-agnostic and metric-aware approaches. While content planning shows promise, our results on whether it can actually help to navigate this trade-off are mixed – planning mechanisms that are metric-aware (use automatic metrics during training) are better at automatic evaluations but underperform in human judgment compared to metric-agnostic mechanisms. We discuss how this may be caused by over-fitting to automatic metrics, and the need for future work to better calibrate these metrics towards human judgment. We hope the observations from our analysis will inform future work that aims to apply content planning in this context.

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SPUQ: Perturbation-Based Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models
Xiang Gao | Jiaxin Zhang | Lalla Mouatadid | Kamalika Das

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent, offering remarkable text generation capabilities. However, a pressing challenge is their tendency to make confidently wrong predictions, highlighting the critical need for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in LLMs. While previous works have mainly focused on addressing aleatoric uncertainty, the full spectrum of uncertainties, including epistemic, remains inadequately explored. Motivated by this gap, we introduce a novel UQ method, sampling with perturbation for UQ (SPUQ), designed to tackle both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. The method entails generating a set of perturbations for LLM inputs, sampling outputs for each perturbation, and incorporating an aggregation module that generalizes the sampling uncertainty approach for text generation tasks. Through extensive experiments on various datasets, we investigated different perturbation and aggregation techniques. Our findings show a substantial improvement in model uncertainty calibration, with a reduction in Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 50% on average. Our findings suggest that our proposed UQ method offers promising steps toward enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of LLMs.

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TESS: Text-to-Text Self-Conditioned Simplex Diffusion
Rabeeh Karimi Mahabadi | Hamish Ivison | Jaesung Tae | James Henderson | Iz Beltagy | Matthew Peters | Arman Cohan

Diffusion models have emerged as a powerful paradigm for generation, obtaining strong performance in various continuous domains. However, applying continuous diffusion models to natural language remains challenging due to its discrete nature and the need for a large number of diffusion steps to generate text, making diffusion-based generation expensive.In this work, we propose Text-to-text Self-conditioned Simplex Diffusion (TESS), a text diffusion model that is fully non-autoregressive, employs a new form of self-conditioning, and applies the diffusion process on the logit simplex space rather than the learned embedding space.Through extensive experiments on natural language understanding and generation tasks including summarization, text simplification, paraphrase generation, and question generation, we demonstrate that TESS outperforms state-of-the-art non-autoregressive models, requires fewer diffusion steps with minimal drop in performance, and is competitive with pretrained autoregressive sequence-to-sequence models.

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Advancing Precise Outline-Conditioned Text Generation with Task Duality and Explicit Outline Control
Yunzhe Li | Qian Chen | Weixiang Yan | Wen Wang | Qinglin Zhang | Hari Sundaram

Existing works on outline-conditioned text generation typically aim to generate text using provided outlines as rough sketches, such as keywords and phrases. However, these approaches make it challenging to control the quality of text generation and assess consistency between outlines and generated texts due to lack of clarity and rationality of the rough outlines. In this paper, we introduce a novel text generation task called Precise Outline-conditioned Generation, which requires generating stories based on specific, sentence-level outlines. To facilitate research on this task, we construct two new datasets, WPOG and CDM. We provide strong baselines based on fine-tuning models such as BART and GPT-2, and evaluating zero-shot performance of models such as ChatGPT and Vicuna. Furthermore, we identify an issue of imbalanced utilization of the outline information in the precise outline-conditioned generation, which is ubiquitously observed across fine-tuned models and zero-shot inference models. To address this issue, we propose an explicit outline utilization control approach and a novel framework that leverages the task duality between summarization and generation. Experimental results show that the proposed approaches effectively alleviate the issue of imbalanced outline utilization and enhance the quality of precise outline-conditioned text generation for both fine-tuning and zero-shot settings.

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Localization vs. Semantics: Visual Representations in Unimodal and Multimodal Models
Zhuowan Li | Cihang Xie | Benjamin Van Durme | Alan Yuille

Despite the impressive advancements achieved through vision-and-language pretraining, it remains unclear whether multi-modal learning can help understand each individual modality. In this work, we conduct a comparative analysis of the visual representations in existing vision-and-language models and vision-only models by probing on a broad range of tasks. Five probing tasks are evaluated in order to assess the quality of the learned representations in a nuanced manner. Our results on five probing tasks suggest vision-and-language models are better at label prediction tasks like object and attribute prediction, while vision-only models are stronger at dense prediction tasks that require more localized information. We hope our study sheds light on the role of language in visual learning, and serves as an empirical guide for various pretrained models.

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Creating Suspenseful Stories: Iterative Planning with Large Language Models
Kaige Xie | Mark Riedl

Automated story generation has been one of the long-standing challenges in NLP. Among all dimensions of stories, *suspense* is very common in human-written stories but relatively under-explored in AI-generated stories. While recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly promoted language generation in general, state-of-the-art LLMs are still unreliable when it comes to suspenseful story generation. We propose a novel iterative-prompting-based planning method that is grounded in two theoretical foundations of story suspense from cognitive psychology and narratology. This theory-grounded method works in a fully zero-shot manner and does not rely on any supervised story corpora. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first attempt at suspenseful story generation with LLMs. Extensive human evaluations of the generated suspenseful stories demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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Few-Shot Dialogue Summarization via Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer in Prompt Tuning
Kaige Xie | Tong Yu | Haoliang Wang | Junda Wu | Handong Zhao | Ruiyi Zhang | Kanak Mahadik | Ani Nenkova | Mark Riedl

In real-world scenarios, labeled samples for dialogue summarization are usually limited (i.e., few-shot) due to high annotation costs for high-quality dialogue summaries. To efficiently learn from few-shot samples, previous works have utilized massive annotated data from other downstream tasks and then performed prompt transfer in prompt tuning so as to enable cross-task knowledge transfer. However, existing general-purpose prompt transfer techniques lack consideration for dialogue-specific information. In this paper, we focus on improving the prompt transfer from dialogue state tracking to dialogue summarization and propose Skeleton-Assisted Prompt Transfer (SAPT), which leverages skeleton generation as extra supervision that functions as a medium connecting the distinct source and target task and resulting in the model’s better consumption of dialogue state information. To automatically extract dialogue skeletons as supervised training data for skeleton generation, we design a novel approach with perturbation-based probes requiring neither annotation effort nor domain knowledge. Training the model on such skeletons can also help preserve model capability during prompt transfer. Our method significantly outperforms existing baselines. In-depth analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in facilitating cross-task knowledge transfer in few-shot dialogue summarization.

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Ask, Assess, and Refine: Rectifying Factual Consistency and Hallucination in LLMs with Metric-Guided Feedback Learning
Dongyub Lee | Eunhwan Park | Hodong Lee | Heuiseok Lim

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have heralded unprecedented capabilities in information-seeking and text generation, as evidenced by applications like Bing Chat and perplexity.ai. Despite these strides, challenges on hallucination and factual inconsistency continue to impede their wider real-world adoption. Contemporary methods, including retrieval-augmented LLMs and feedback-based learning, serve as alternatives to mitigate these challenges. However, challenges remain, particularly regarding referencing erroneous evidence (citation errors) and generating information not present in the evidence (hallucination). In this paper, we introduce the 𝖠2𝖱 framework: Ask, Assess, and Refine. Our approach utilizes an explicit evaluation paradigm, incorporating metrics specifically tailored to assess citation errors and hallucination, aiming to address these prevalent challenges robustly. Capitalizing on these evaluations, we devise a strategy to formulate actionable natural language feedback, enabling iterative refinements that yield improved factual consistency and reduced hallucinations in responses. Our experiments on ASQA, ELI5, and QAMPARI datasets demonstrate our method’s superiority in enhancing correctness, fluency, and citation quality.

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Effective Controllable Bias Mitigation for Classification and Retrieval using Gate Adapters
Shahed Masoudian | Cornelia Volaucnik | Markus Schedl | Navid Rekabsaz

Bias mitigation of Language Models has been the topic of many studies with a recent focus on learning separate modules like adapters for on-demand debiasing. Besides optimizing for a modularized debiased model, it is often critical in practice to control the degree of bias reduction at inference time, e.g., in order to tune for a desired performance-fairness trade-off in search results or to control the strength of debiasing in classification tasks. In this paper, we introduce Controllable Gate Adapter (ConGater), a novel modular gating mechanism with adjustable sensitivity parameters, %In addition to better perseverance of task performance and enhanced information removal, which allows for a gradual transition from the biased state of the model to the fully debiased version at inference time. We demonstrate ConGater performance by (1) conducting adversarial debiasing experiments with three different models on three classification tasks with four protected attributes, and (2) reducing the bias of search results through fairness list-wise regularization to enable adjusting a trade-off between performance and fairness metrics. Our experiments on the classification tasks show that compared to baselines of the same caliber, ConGater can maintain higher task performance while containing less information regarding the attributes. Our results on the retrieval task show that the fully debiased ConGater can achieve the same fairness performance while maintaining more than twice as high task performance than recent strong baselines. Overall, besides strong performance ConGater enables the continuous transitioning between biased and debiased states of models, enhancing personalization of use and interpretability through controllability.

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STable: Table Generation Framework for Encoder-Decoder Models
Michał Pietruszka | Michał Turski | Łukasz Borchmann | Tomasz Dwojak | Gabriela Nowakowska | Karolina Szyndler | Dawid Jurkiewicz | Łukasz Garncarek

The output structure of database-like tables, consisting of values structured in horizontal rows and vertical columns identifiable by name, can cover a wide range of NLP tasks. Following this constatation, we propose a framework for text-to-table neural models applicable to problems such as extraction of line items, joint entity and relation extraction, or knowledge base population. The permutation-based decoder of our proposal is a generalized sequential method that comprehends information from all cells in the table. The training maximizes the expected log-likelihood for a table’s content across all random permutations of the factorization order. During the content inference, we exploit the model’s ability to generate cells in any order by searching over possible orderings to maximize the model’s confidence and avoid substantial error accumulation, which other sequential models are prone to. Experiments demonstrate a high practical value of the framework, which establishes state-of-the-art results on several challenging datasets, outperforming previous solutions by up to 15\\%.

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A RelEntLess Benchmark for Modelling Graded Relations between Named Entities
Asahi Ushio | Jose Camacho-Collados | Steven Schockaert

Relations such as “is influenced by”, “is known for” or “is a competitor of” are inherently graded: we can rank entity pairs based on how well they satisfy these relations, but it is hard to draw a line between those pairs that satisfy them and those that do not. Such graded relations play a central role in many applications, yet they are typically not covered by existing Knowledge Graphs. In this paper, we consider the possibility of using Large Language Models (LLMs) to fill this gap. To this end, we introduce a new benchmark, in which entity pairs have to be ranked according to how much they satisfy a given graded relation. The task is formulated as a few-shot ranking problem, where models only have access to a description of the relation and five prototypical instances. We use the proposed benchmark to evaluate state-of-the-art relation embedding strategies as well as several publicly available LLMs and closed conversational models such as GPT-4. We find that smaller language models struggle to outperform a naive baseline. Overall, the best results are obtained with the 11B parameter Flan-T5 model and the 13B parameter OPT model, where further increasing the model size does not seem to be beneficial. For all models, a clear gap with human performance remains.

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A Multimodal Framework to Detect Target Aware Aggression in Memes
Shawly Ahsan | Eftekhar Hossain | Omar Sharif | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque | M. Dewan

Internet memes have gained immense traction as a medium for individuals to convey emotions, thoughts, and perspectives on social media. While memes often serve as sources of humor and entertainment, they can also propagate offensive, incendiary, or harmful content, deliberately targeting specific individuals or communities. Identifying such memes is challenging because of their satirical and cryptic characteristics. Most contemporary research on memes’ detrimental facets is skewed towards high-resource languages, often sidelining the unique challenges tied to low-resource languages, such as Bengali. To facilitate this research in low-resource languages, this paper presents a novel dataset MIMOSA (MultIMOdal aggreSsion dAtaset) in Bengali. MIMOSA encompasses 4,848 annotated memes across five aggression target categories: Political, Gender, Religious, Others, and non-aggressive. We also propose MAF (Multimodal Attentive Fusion), a simple yet effective approach that uses multimodal context to detect the aggression targets. MAF captures the selective modality-specific features of the input meme and jointly evaluates them with individual modality features. Experiments on MIMOSA exhibit that the proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art rivaling approaches. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/shawlyahsan/Bengali-Aggression-Memes.

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Graph Guided Question Answer Generation for Procedural Question-Answering
Hai Pham | Isma Hadji | Xinnuo Xu | Ziedune Degutyte | Jay Rainey | Evangelos Kazakos | Afsaneh Fazly | Georgios Tzimiropoulos | Brais Martinez

In this paper, we focus on task-specific question answering (QA). To this end, we introduce a method for generating exhaustive and high-quality training data, which allows us to train compact (e.g., run on a mobile device), task-specific QA models that are competitive against GPT variants. The key technological enabler is a novel mechanism for automatic question-answer generation from procedural text which can ingest large amounts of textual instructions and produce exhaustive in-domain QA training data. While current QA data generation methods can produce well-formed and varied data, their non-exhaustive nature is sub-optimal for training a QA model. In contrast, we leverage the highly structured aspect of procedural text and represent each step and the overall flow of the procedure as graphs. We then condition on graph nodes to automatically generate QA pairs in an exhaustive and controllable manner. Comprehensive evaluations of our method show that: 1) small models trained with our data achieve excellent performance on the target QA task, even exceeding that of GPT3 and ChatGPT despite being several orders of magnitude smaller. 2) semantic coverage is the key indicator for downstream QA performance. Crucially, while large language models excel at syntactic diversity, this does not necessarily result in improvements on the end QA model. In contrast, the higher semantic coverage provided by our method is critical for QA performance.

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Contrastive Decoding Reduces Hallucinations in Large Multilingual Machine Translation Models
Jonas Waldendorf | Barry Haddow | Alexandra Birch

In Neural Machine Translation (NMT), models will sometimes generate repetitive or fluent output that is not grounded in the source sentence. This phenomenon is known as hallucination and is a problem even in large-scale multilingual translation models. We propose to use Contrastive Decoding, an algorithm developed to improve generation from unconditional language models, to mitigate hallucinations in NMT. Specifically, we maximise the log-likelihood difference between a model and the same model with reduced contribution from the encoder outputs. Additionally, we propose an alternative implementation of Contrastive Decoding that dynamically weights the difference based on the maximum probability in the output distribution to reduce the effect of CD when the model is confident of its prediction. We evaluate our methods using the Small (418M) and Medium (1.2B) M2M models across 21 low and medium-resource language pairs. Our results show a 14.6 ± 0.5 and 11.0 ± 0.6 maximal increase in the mean COMET scores for the Small and Medium models on those sentences for which the M2M models initially generate a hallucination., respectively.

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Leveraging fine-tuned Large Language Models with LoRA for Effective Claim, Claimer, and Claim Object Detection
Sotiris Kotitsas | Panagiotis Kounoudis | Eleni Koutli | Haris Papageorgiou

Misinformation and disinformation phenomena existed long before the advent of digital technologies. The exponential use of social media platforms, whose information feeds have created the conditions for many to many communication and instant amplification of the news has accelerated the diffusion of inaccurate and misleading information. As a result, the identification of claims have emerged as a pivotal technology for combating the influence of misinformation and disinformation within news media. Most existing work has concentrated on claim analysis at the sentence level, neglecting the crucial exploration of supplementary attributes such as the claimer and the claim object of the claim or confining it by limiting its scope to a predefined list of topics. Furthermore, previous research has been mostly centered around political debates, Wikipedia articles, and COVID-19 related content. By leveraging the advanced capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and text generation, we propose a novel architecture utilizing LLMs finetuned with LoRA to transform the claim, claimer and claim object detection task into a Question Answering (QA) setting. We evaluate our approach in a dataset of 867 scientific news articles of 3 domains (Health, Climate Change, Nutrition) (HCN), which are human annotated with the major claim, the claimer and the object of the major claim. We also evaluate our proposed model in the benchmark dataset of NEWSCLAIMS. Experimental and qualitative results showcase the effectiveness of the proposed approach. We make our dataset publicly available to encourage further research.

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Should I try multiple optimizers when fine-tuning a pre-trained Transformer for NLP tasks? Should I tune their hyperparameters?
Nefeli Gkouti | Prodromos Malakasiotis | Stavros Toumpis | Ion Androutsopoulos

NLP research has explored different neural model architectures and sizes, datasets, training objectives, and transfer learning techniques. However, the choice of optimizer during training has not been explored as extensively. Typically, some variant of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) is employed, selected among numerous variants, using unclear criteria, often with minimal or no tuning of the optimizer’s hyperparameters. Experimenting with five GLUE datasets, two models (DistilBERT and DistilRoBERTa), and seven popular optimizers (SGD, SGD with Momentum, Adam, AdaMax, Nadam, AdamW, and AdaBound), we find that when the hyperparameters of the optimizers are tuned, there is no substantial difference in test performance across the five more elaborate (adaptive) optimizers, despite differences in training loss. Furthermore, tuning just the learning rate is in most cases as good as tuning all the hyperparameters. Hence, we recommend picking any of the best-behaved adaptive optimizers (e.g., Adam) and tuning only its learning rate. When no hyperparameter can be tuned, SGD with Momentum is the best choice.

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GUMsley: Evaluating Entity Salience in Summarization for 12 English Genres
Jessica Lin | Amir Zeldes

As NLP models become increasingly capable of understanding documents in terms of coherent entities rather than strings, obtaining the most salient entities for each document is not only an important end task in itself but also vital for Information Retrieval (IR) and other downstream applications such as controllable summarization. In this paper, we present and evaluate GUMsley, the first entity salience dataset covering all named and non-named salient entities for 12 genres of English text, aligned with entity types, Wikification links and full coreference resolution annotations. We promote a strict definition of salience using human summaries and demonstrate high inter-annotator agreement for salience based on whether a source entity is mentioned in the summary. Our evaluation shows poor performance by pre-trained SOTA summarization models and zero-shot LLM prompting in capturing salient entities in generated summaries. We also show that predicting or providing salient entities to several model architectures enhances performance and helps derive higher-quality summaries by alleviating the entity hallucination problem in existing abstractive summarization.

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Sensitivity, Performance, Robustness: Deconstructing the Effect of Sociodemographic Prompting
Tilman Beck | Hendrik Schuff | Anne Lauscher | Iryna Gurevych

Annotators’ sociodemographic backgrounds (i.e., the individual compositions of their gender, age, educational background, etc.) have a strong impact on their decisions when working on subjective NLP tasks, such as toxic language detection. Often, heterogeneous backgrounds result in high disagreements. To model this variation, recent work has explored sociodemographic prompting, a technique, which steers the output of prompt-based models towards answers that humans with specific sociodemographic profiles would give. However, the available NLP literature disagrees on the efficacy of this technique — it remains unclear for which tasks and scenarios it can help, and the role of the individual factors in sociodemographic prompting is still unexplored. We address this research gap by presenting the largest and most comprehensive study of sociodemographic prompting today. We use it to analyze its influence on model sensitivity, performance and robustness across seven datasets and six instruction-tuned model families. We show that sociodemographic information affects model predictions and can be beneficial for improving zero-shot learning in subjective NLP tasks.However, its outcomes largely vary for different model types, sizes, and datasets, and are subject to large variance with regards to prompt formulations. Most importantly, our results show that sociodemographic prompting should be used with care when used for data annotation or studying LLM alignment.

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Threat Behavior Textual Search by Attention Graph Isomorphism
Chanwoo Bae | Guanhong Tao | Zhuo Zhang | Xiangyu Zhang

Cyber attacks cause over $1 trillion loss every year. An important task for cyber security analysts is attack forensics. It entails understanding malware behaviors and attack origins. However, existing automated or manual malware analysis can only disclose a subset of behaviors due to inherent difficulties (e.g., malware cloaking and obfuscation). As such, analysts often resort to text search techniques to identify existing malware reports based on the symptoms they observe, exploiting the fact that malware samples share a lot of similarity, especially those from the same origin. In this paper, we propose a novel malware behavior search technique that is based on graph isomorphism at the attention layers of Transformer models. We also compose a large dataset collected from various agencies to facilitate such research.Our technique outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as those based on sentence embeddings and keywords by 6-14%. In the case study of 10 real-world malwares, our technique can correctly attribute 8 of them to their ground truth origins while using Google only works for 3 cases.

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Identifying Narrative Content in Podcast Transcripts
Yosra Abdessamed | Shadi Rezapour | Steven Wilson

As one of the oldest forms of human communication, narratives appear across a variety of genres and media. Computational methods have been applied to study narrativity in novels, social media, and patient records, leading to new approaches and insights. However, other types of media are growing in popularity, like podcasts. Podcasts contain a multitude of spoken narratives that can provide a meaningful glimpse into how people share stories with one another.In this paper, we outline and apply methods to process English-language podcast transcripts and extract narrative content from conversations within each episode. We provide an initial analysis of the types of narrative content that exists within a wide range of podcasts, and compare our results to other established narrative analysis tools.Our annotations for narrativity and pretrained models can help to enable future research into narrativity within a large corpus of approximately 100,000 podcast episodes.

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Frequency Explains the Inverse Correlation of Large Language Models’ Size, Training Data Amount, and Surprisal’s Fit to Reading Times
Byung-Doh Oh | Shisen Yue | William Schuler

Recent studies have shown that as Transformer-based language models become larger and are trained on very large amounts of data, the fit of their surprisal estimates to naturalistic human reading times degrades. The current work presents a series of analyses showing that word frequency is a key explanatory factor underlying these two trends. First, residual errors from four language model families on four corpora show that the inverse correlation between model size and fit to reading times is the strongest on the subset of least frequent words, which is driven by excessively accurate predictions of larger model variants. Additionally, training dynamics reveal that during later training steps, all model variants learn to predict rare words and that larger model variants do so more accurately, which explains the detrimental effect of both training data amount and model size on fit to reading times. Finally, a feature attribution analysis demonstrates that larger model variants are able to accurately predict rare words based on both an effectively longer context window size as well as stronger local associations compared to smaller model variants. Taken together, these results indicate that Transformer-based language models’ surprisal estimates diverge from human-like expectations due to the superhumanly complex associations they learn for predicting rare words.

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Presentations by the Humans and For the Humans: Harnessing LLMs for Generating Persona-Aware Slides from Documents
Ishani Mondal | Shwetha S | Anandhavelu Natarajan | Aparna Garimella | Sambaran Bandyopadhyay | Jordan Boyd-Graber

Scientific papers and slides are two different representations of the same underlying information, but both require substantial work to prepare. While there had been prior efforts on automating document-to-slides generation, there is still a pressing need of customizing the presentation of content aligning with the persona of target audience or duration of presentation. This paper first introduces the concept of end-user specification-aware document to slides conversion that incorporates end-user specifications into the conversion process. For this, we initially introduce a new dataset reuse the existing SciDuet dataset consisting of pairs of papers and corresponding slides decks from recent years’ *ACL conferences to create four persona-aware configurations. Secondly, we present Persona-Aware-D2S, a novel approach by finetuning LLMs using target audience feedback to create persona-aware slides from scientific documents. Our evaluation on both automated metrics and qualitative human evaluation suggests that by incorporating end-user specifications into the conversion process, our model can create presentations that are not only informative but also tailored to expectations and cognitive abilities of target audience.

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ToPro: Token-Level Prompt Decomposition for Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling Tasks
Bolei Ma | Ercong Nie | Shuzhou Yuan | Helmut Schmid | Michael Färber | Frauke Kreuter | Hinrich Schuetze

Prompt-based methods have been successfully applied to multilingual pretrained language models for zero-shot cross-lingual understanding. However, most previous studies primarily focused on sentence-level classification tasks, and only a few considered token-level labeling tasks such as Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging. In this paper, we propose Token-Level Prompt Decomposition (ToPro), which facilitates the prompt-based method for token-level sequence labeling tasks. The ToPro method decomposes an input sentence into single tokens and applies one prompt template to each token. Our experiments on multilingual NER and POS tagging datasets demonstrate that ToPro-based fine-tuning outperforms Vanilla fine-tuning and Prompt-Tuning in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer, especially for languages that are typologically different from the source language English. Our method also attains state-of-the-art performance when employed with the mT5 model. Besides, our exploratory study in multilingual large language models shows that ToPro performs much better than the current in-context learning method. Overall, the performance improvements show that ToPro could potentially serve as a novel and simple benchmarking method for sequence labeling tasks.

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Small Language Models Improve Giants by Rewriting Their Outputs
Giorgos Vernikos | Arthur Brazinskas | Jakub Adamek | Jonathan Mallinson | Aliaksei Severyn | Eric Malmi

Despite the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs), theyoften lag behind specialized models in various tasks. LLMs only use a fractionof the existing training data for in-context learning, while task-specificmodels harness the full dataset for fine-tuning. In this work, we tackle theproblem of leveraging training data to improve the performance of LLMs withoutfine-tuning. Our approach directly targets LLM predictions without requiringaccess to their weights. We create a pool of candidates from the LLM throughfew-shot prompting and we employ a compact model, the LM-corrector (LMCor),specifically trained to merge these candidates to produce an enhanced output.Our experiments on four natural language generation tasks demonstrate that evena small LMCor model (250M) substantially improves the few-shot performance ofLLMs (62B), matching and even outperforming standard fine-tuning. Furthermore,we illustrate the robustness of LMCor against different prompts, therebyminimizing the need for extensive prompt engineering. Finally, we show thatLMCor can be seamlessly integrated with different LLMs at inference, serving asa plug-and-play module to improve their performance.

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Unintended Bias Detection and Mitigation in Misogynous Memes
Gitanjali Kumari | Anubhav Sinha | Asif Ekbal

Online sexism has become a concerning issue in recent years, especially conveyed through memes. Although this alarming phenomenon has triggered many studies from computational linguistic and natural language processing points of view, less effort has been spent analyzing if those misogyny detection models are affected by an unintended bias. Such biases can lead models to incorrectly label non-misogynous memes misogynous due to specific identity terms, perpetuating harmful stereotypes and reinforcing negative attitudes. This paper presents the first and most comprehensive approach to measure and mitigate unintentional bias in the misogynous memes detection model, aiming to develop effective strategies to counter their harmful impact. Our proposed model, the Contextualized Scene Graph-based Multimodal Network (CTXSGMNet), is an integrated architecture that combines VisualBERT, a CLIP-LSTM-based memory network, and an unbiased scene graph module with supervised contrastive loss, achieves state-of-the-art performance in mitigating unintentional bias in misogynous memes.Empirical evaluation, including both qualitative and quantitative analysis, demonstrates the effectiveness of our CTXSGMNet framework on the SemEval-2022 Task 5 (MAMI task) dataset, showcasing its promising performance in terms of Equity of Odds and F1 score. Additionally, we assess the generalizability of the proposed model by evaluating their performance on a few benchmark meme datasets, providing a comprehensive understanding of our approach’s efficacy across diverse datasets.

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A Weak Supervision Approach for Few-Shot Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis
Robert Vacareanu | Siddharth Varia | Kishaloy Halder | Shuai Wang | Giovanni Paolini | Neha Anna John | Miguel Ballesteros | Smaranda Muresan

We explore how weak supervision on abundant unlabeled data can be leveraged to improve few-shot performance in aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) tasks. We propose a pipeline approach to construct a noisy ABSA dataset, and we use it to adapt a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model to the ABSA tasks. We test the resulting model on three widely used ABSA datasets, before and after fine-tuning. Our proposed method preserves the full fine-tuning performance while showing significant improvements (15.84 absolute F1) in the few-shot learning scenario for the harder tasks. In zero-shot (i.e., without fine-tuning), our method outperforms the previous state of the art on the aspect extraction sentiment classification (AESC) task and is, additionally, capable of performing the harder aspect sentiment triplet extraction (ASTE) task.

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Counterfactual Reasoning with Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Lena Zellinger | Andreas Stephan | Benjamin Roth

Knowledge graph embeddings (KGEs) were originally developed to infer true but missing facts in incomplete knowledge repositories.In this paper, we link knowledge graph completion and counterfactual reasoning via our new task CFKGR. We model the original world state as a knowledge graph, hypothetical scenarios as edges added to the graph, and plausible changes to the graph as inferences from logical rules. We create corresponding benchmark datasets, which contain diverse hypothetical scenarios with plausible changes to the original knowledge graph and facts that should be retained. We develop COULDD, a general method for adapting existing knowledge graph embeddings given a hypothetical premise, and evaluate it on our benchmark. Our results indicate that KGEs learn patterns in the graph without explicit training. We further observe that KGEs adapted with COULDD solidly detect plausible counterfactual changes to the graph that follow these patterns. An evaluation on human-annotated data reveals that KGEs adapted with COULDD are mostly unable to recognize changes to the graph that do not follow learned inference rules. In contrast, ChatGPT mostly outperforms KGEs in detecting plausible changes to the graph but has poor knowledge retention. In summary, CFKGR connects two previously distinct areas, namely KG completion and counterfactual reasoning.

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System-Level Natural Language Feedback
Weizhe Yuan | Kyunghyun Cho | Jason Weston

Natural language (NL) feedback offers rich insights into user experience. While existing studies focus on an instance-level approach, where feedback is used to refine specific examples, we introduce a framework for system-level use of NL feedback. We show how to use feedback to formalize system-level design decisions in a human-in-the-loop-process – in order to produce better models. In particular this is done through: (i) metric design for tasks; and (ii) language model prompt design for refining model responses. We conduct two case studies of this approach for improving search query and dialog response generation, demonstrating the effectiveness of system-level feedback. We show the combination of system-level and instance-level feedback brings further gains, and that human written instance-level feedback results in more grounded refinements than GPT-3.5 written ones, underlying the importance of human feedback for building systems.

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Syntactic Preposing and Discourse Relations
Yunfang Dong | Xixian Liao | Bonnie Webber

Over 15 years ago, Ward & Birner (2006) suggested that non-canonical constructions in English can serve both to mark information status and to structure the information flow of discourse. One such construction is preposing, where a phrasal constituent appears to the left of its canonical position, typically sentence-initially. But computational work on discourse has, to date, ignored non-canonical syntax. We take account of non-canonical syntax by providing quantitative evidence relating NP/PP preposing to discourse relations. The evidence comes from an LLM mask-filling task that compares the predictions when a mask is inserted between the arguments of an implicit inter-sentential discourse relation — first, when the right-hand argument (Arg2) starts with a preposed constituent, and again, when that constituent is in canonical (post-verbal) position. Results show that (1) the top-ranked mask-fillers in the preposed case agree more often with “gold” annotations in the Penn Discourse TreeBank than they do in the latter case, and (2) preposing in Arg2 can affect the distribution of discourse-relational senses.

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Can we obtain significant success in RST discourse parsing by using Large Language Models?
Aru Maekawa | Tsutomu Hirao | Hidetaka Kamigaito | Manabu Okumura

Recently, decoder-only pre-trained large language models (LLMs), with several tens of billion parameters, have significantly impacted a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. While encoder-only or encoder-decoder pre-trained language models have already proved to be effective in discourse parsing, the extent to which LLMs can perform this task remains an open research question. Therefore, this paper explores how beneficial such LLMs are for Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) discourse parsing. Here, the parsing process for both fundamental top-down and bottom-up strategies is converted into prompts, which LLMs can work with. We employ Llama 2 and fine-tune it with QLoRA, which has fewer parameters that can be tuned. Experimental results on three benchmark datasets, RST-DT, Instr-DT, and the GUM corpus, demonstrate that Llama 2 with 70 billion parameters in the bottom-up strategy obtained state-of-the-art (SOTA) results with significant differences. Furthermore, our parsers demonstrated generalizability when evaluated on RST-DT, showing that, in spite of being trained with the GUM corpus, it obtained similar performances to those of existing parsers trained with RST-DT.

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Ameli: Enhancing Multimodal Entity Linking with Fine-Grained Attributes
Barry Yao | Sijia Wang | Yu Chen | Qifan Wang | Minqian Liu | Zhiyang Xu | Licheng Yu | Lifu Huang

We propose attribute-aware multimodal entity linking, where the input consists of a mention described with a text paragraph and images, and the goal is to predict the corresponding target entity from a multimodal knowledge base (KB) where each entity is also accompanied by a text description, visual images, and a collection of attributes that present the meta-information of the entity in a structured format. To facilitate this research endeavor, we construct Ameli, encompassing a new multimodal entity linking benchmark dataset that contains 16,735 mentions described in text and associated with 30,472 images, and a multimodal knowledge base that covers 34,690 entities along with 177,873 entity images and 798,216 attributes. To establish baseline performance on Ameli, we experiment with several state-of-the-art architectures for multimodal entity linking and further propose a new approach that incorporates attributes of entities into disambiguation. Experimental results and extensive qualitative analysis demonstrate that extracting and understanding the attributes of mentions from their text descriptions and visual images play a vital role in multimodal entity linking. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to integrate attributes in the multimodal entity linking task. The programs, model checkpoints, and the dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/VT-NLP/Ameli.

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Generative Dense Retrieval: Memory Can Be a Burden
Peiwen Yuan | Xinglin Wang | Shaoxiong Feng | Boyuan Pan | Yiwei Li | Heda Wang | Xupeng Miao | Kan Li

Generative Retrieval (GR), autoregressively decoding relevant document identifiers given a query, has been shown to perform well under the setting of small-scale corpora. By memorizing the document corpus with model parameters, GR implicitly achieves deep interaction between query and document. However, such a memorizing mechanism faces three drawbacks: (1) Poor memory accuracy for fine-grained features of documents; (2) Memory confusion gets worse as the corpus size increases; (3) Huge memory update costs for new documents. To alleviate these problems, we propose the Generative Dense Retrieval (GDR) paradigm. Specifically, GDR first uses the limited memory volume to achieve inter-cluster matching from query to relevant document clusters. Memorizing-free matching mechanism from Dense Retrieval (DR) is then introduced to conduct fine-grained intra-cluster matching from clusters to relevant documents. The coarse-to-fine process maximizes the advantages of GR’s deep interaction and DR’s scalability. Besides, we design a cluster identifier constructing strategy to facilitate corpus memory and a cluster-adaptive negative sampling strategy to enhance the intra-cluster mapping ability. Empirical results show that GDR obtains an average of 3.0 R@100 improvement on NQ dataset under multiple settings and has better scalability.

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Backward Compatibility During Data Updates by Weight Interpolation
Raphael Schumann | Elman Mansimov | Yi-An Lai | Nikolaos Pappas | Xibin Gao | Yi Zhang

Backward compatibility of model predictions is a desired property when updating a machine learning driven application. It allows to seamlessly improve the underlying model without introducing regression bugs. In classification tasks these bugs occur in the form of negative flips. This means an instance that was correctly classified by the old model is now classified incorrectly by the updated model. This has direct negative impact on the user experience of such systems e.g. a frequently used voice assistant query is suddenly misclassified.A common reason to update the model is when new training data becomes available and needs to be incorporated. Simply retraining the model with the updated data introduces the unwanted negative flips. We study the problem of regression during data updates and propose Backward Compatible Weight Interpolation (BCWI). This method interpolates between the weights of the old and new model and we show in extensive experiments that it reduces negative flips without sacrificing the improved accuracy of the new model. BCWI is straight forward to implement and does not increase inference cost. We also explore the use of importance weighting during interpolation and averaging the weights of multiple new models in order to further reduce negative flips.

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Gradient-Based Language Model Red Teaming
Nevan Wichers | Carson Denison | Ahmad Beirami

Red teaming is a common strategy for identifying weaknesses in generative language models (LMs) by producing adversarial prompts that trigger models to generate unsafe responses. Red teaming is instrumental for both model alignment and evaluation, but is labor-intensive and difficult to scale when done by humans. In this paper, we present Gradient-Based Red Teaming (GBRT), a novel red teaming method for automatically generating diverse prompts that are likely to cause an LM to output unsafe responses. GBRT is a form of prompt learning, trained by scoring an LM response with a safety classifier and then backpropagating through the frozen safety classifier and LM to update the prompt. To improve the coherence of input prompts, we introduce two variants that add a realism loss and fine-tune a pretrained model to generate the prompts instead of learning the prompts directly. Our experiments show that GBRT is more effective at finding prompts that trigger an LM to generate unsafe responses than a strong reinforcement learning-based red teaming approach and works even when the LM has been fine-tuned to produce safer outputs.

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Do Moral Judgment and Reasoning Capability of LLMs Change with Language? A Study using the Multilingual Defining Issues Test
Aditi Khandelwal | Utkarsh Agarwal | Kumar Tanmay | Monojit Choudhury

This paper explores the moral judgment and moral reasoning abilities exhibited by Large Language Models (LLMs) across languages through the Defining Issues Test. It is a well known fact that moral judgment depends on the language in which the question is asked. We extend the work of beyond English, to 5 new languages (Chinese, Hindi, Russian, Spanish and Swahili), and probe three LLMs – ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Llama2Chat-70B – that shows substantial multilingual text processing and generation abilities. Our study shows that the moral reasoning ability for all models, as indicated by the post-conventional score, is substantially inferior for Hindi and Swahili, compared to Spanish, Russian, Chinese and English, while there is no clear trend for the performance of the latter four languages. The moral judgments too vary considerably by the language.

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Analyzing the Evaluation of Cross-Lingual Knowledge Transfer in Multilingual Language Models
Sara Rajaee | Christof Monz

Recent advances in training multilingual language models on large datasets seem to have shown promising results in knowledge transfer across languages and achieve high performance on downstream tasks. However, we question to what extent the current evaluation benchmarks and setups accurately measure zero-shot cross-lingual knowledge transfer. In this work, we challenge the assumption that high zero-shot performance on target tasks reflects high cross-lingual ability by introducing more challenging setups involving instances with multiple languages. Through extensive experiments and analysis, we show that the observed high performance of multilingual models can be largely attributed to factors not requiring the transfer of actual linguistic knowledge, such as task- and surface-level knowledge. More specifically, we observe what has been transferred across languages is mostly data artifacts and biases, especially for low-resource languages. Our findings highlight the overlooked drawbacks of existing cross-lingual test data and evaluation setups, calling for a more nuanced understanding of the cross-lingual capabilities of multilingual models.

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Large-Scale Label Interpretation Learning for Few-Shot Named Entity Recognition
Jonas Golde | Felix Hamborg | Alan Akbik

Few-shot named entity recognition (NER) detects named entities within text using only a few annotated examples. One promising line of research is to leverage natural language descriptions of each entity type: the common label PER might, for example, be verbalized as ”person entity.” In an initial label interpretation learning phase, the model learns to interpret such verbalized descriptions of entity types. In a subsequent few-shot tagset extension phase, this model is then given a description of a previously unseen entity type (such as ”music album”) and optionally a few training examples to perform few-shot NER for this type. In this paper, we systematically explore the impact of a strong semantic prior to interpret verbalizations of new entity types by massively scaling up the number and granularity of entity types used for label interpretation learning. To this end, we leverage an entity linking benchmark to create a dataset with orders of magnitude of more distinct entity types and descriptions as currently used datasets. We find that this increased signal yields strong results in zero- and few-shot NER in in-domain, cross-domain, and even cross-lingual settings. Our findings indicate significant potential for improving few-shot NER through heuristical data-based optimization.

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MLCopilot: Unleashing the Power of Large Language Models in Solving Machine Learning Tasks
Lei Zhang | Yuge Zhang | Kan Ren | Dongsheng Li | Yuqing Yang

The field of machine learning (ML) has gained widespread adoption, leading to significant demand for adapting ML to specific scenarios, which is yet expensive and non-trivial. The predominant approaches towards the automation of solving ML tasks (e.g., AutoML) are often time-consuming and hard to understand for human developers. In contrast, though human engineers have the incredible ability to understand tasks and reason about solutions, their experience and knowledge are often sparse and difficult to utilize by quantitative approaches. In this paper, we aim to bridge the gap between machine intelligence and human knowledge by introducing a novel framework MLCopilot, which leverages the state-of-the-art large language models to develop ML solutions for novel tasks. We showcase the possibility of extending the capability of LLMs to comprehend structured inputs and perform thorough reasoning for solving novel ML tasks. And we find that, after some dedicated design, the LLM can (i) observe from the existing experiences of ML tasks and (ii) reason effectively to deliver promising results for new tasks. The solution generated can be used directly to achieve high levels of competitiveness.

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Text-Guided Image Clustering
Andreas Stephan | Lukas Miklautz | Kevin Sidak | Jan Philip Wahle | Bela Gipp | Claudia Plant | Benjamin Roth

Image clustering divides a collection of images into meaningful groups, typically interpreted post-hoc via human-given annotations. Those are usually in the form of text, begging the question of using text as an abstraction for image clustering. Current image clustering methods, however, neglect the use of generated textual descriptions. We, therefore, propose Text-Guided Image Clustering, i.e., generating text using image captioning and visual question-answering (VQA) models and subsequently clustering the generated text. Further, we introduce a novel approach to inject task- or domain knowledge for clustering by prompting VQA models. Across eight diverse image clustering datasets, our results show that the obtained text representations often outperform image features. Additionally, we propose a counting-based cluster explainability method. Our evaluations show that the derived keyword-based explanations describe clusters better than the respective cluster accuracy suggests. Overall, this research challenges traditional approaches and paves the way for a paradigm shift in image clustering, using generated text.

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CCPrefix: Counterfactual Contrastive Prefix-Tuning for Many-Class Classification
Yang Li | Canran Xu | Guodong Long | Tao Shen | Chongyang Tao | Jing Jiang

Recently, prefix-tuning was proposed to efficiently adapt pre-trained language models to a broad spectrum of natural language classification tasks. It leverages soft prefix as task-specific indicators and language verbalizers as categorical-label mentions to narrow the formulation gap from pre-training language models. However, when the label space increases considerably (i.e., many-class classification), such a tuning technique suffers from a verbalizer ambiguity problem since the many-class labels are represented by semantic-similar verbalizers in short language phrases. To overcome this, inspired by the human-decision process that the most ambiguous classes would be mulled over for an instance, we propose a brand-new prefix-tuning method, Counterfactual Contrastive Prefix-tuning (CCPrefix), for many-class classification. Basically, an instance-dependent soft prefix, derived from fact-counterfactual pairs in the label space, is leveraged to complement the language verbalizers in many-class classification. We conduct experiments on many-class benchmark datasets in both the fully supervised setting and the few-shot setting, which indicates that our model outperforms former baselines.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Yvette Graham | Matthew Purver

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French GossipPrompts: Dataset For Prevention of Generating French Gossip Stories By LLMs
Msvpj Sathvik | Abhilash Dowpati | Revanth Narra

The realm of Large Language Models (LLMs) is undergoing a continuous and dynamic transformation. These state-of-the-art LLMs showcase an impressive ability to craft narratives based on contextual cues, highlighting their skill in comprehending and producing text resembling human writing. However, there exists a potential risk: the potential inclination of LLMs to create gossips when prompted with specific contexts. These LLMs possess the capacity to generate stories rooted in the context provided by the prompts. Yet, this very capability carries a risk of generating gossips given the context as input. To mitigate this, we introduce a dataset named “French GossipPrompts” designed for identifying prompts that lead to the creation of gossipy content in the French language. This dataset employs binary classification, categorizing whether a given prompt generates gossip or not. The dataset comprises a total of 7253 individual prompts. We have developed classification models and achieved an accuracy of 89.95%.

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More Discriminative Sentence Embeddings via Semantic Graph Smoothing
Chakib Fettal | Lazhar Labiod | Mohamed Nadif

This paper explores an empirical approach to learn more discriminantive sentence representations in an unsupervised fashion. Leveraging semantic graph smoothing, we enhance sentence embeddings obtained from pretrained models to improve results for the text clustering and classification tasks. Our method, validated on eight benchmarks, demonstrates consistent improvements, showcasing the potential of semantic graph smoothing in improving sentence embeddings for the supervised and unsupervised document categorization tasks.

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Multi-Level Attention Aggregation for Language-Agnostic Speaker Replication
Yejin Jeon | Gary Lee

This paper explores the task of language-agnostic speaker replication, a novel endeavor that seeks to replicate a speaker’s voice irrespective of the language they are speaking. Towards this end, we introduce a multi-level attention aggregation approach that systematically probes and amplifies various speaker-specific attributes in a hierarchical manner. Through rigorous evaluations across a wide range of scenarios including seen and unseen speakers conversing in seen and unseen lingua, we establish that our proposed model is able to achieve substantial speaker similarity, and is able to generalize to out-of-domain (OOD) cases.

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Mitigating Hallucinations and Off-target Machine Translation with Source-Contrastive and Language-Contrastive Decoding
Rico Sennrich | Jannis Vamvas | Alireza Mohammadshahi

Hallucinations and off-target translation remain unsolved problems in MT, especially for low-resource languages and massively multilingual models. In this paper, we introduce two related methods to mitigate these failure cases with a modified decoding objective, without either requiring retraining or external models. In source-contrastive decoding, we search for a translation that is probable given the correct input, but improbable given a random input segment. In language-contrastive decoding, we search for a translation that is probable, but improbable given the wrong language indicator token. Experiments on the massively multilingual models M2M-100 (418M) and SMaLL-100 show that these methods suppress hallucinations and off-target translations, reducing the number of translations with segment-level chrF2 below 10 by 67-83% on average across 57 tested translation directions. In a proof of concept on out-of-English translation, we also show that we can suppress off-target translations with large language models. We release code upon acceptance.

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Injecting Wiktionary to improve token-level contextual representations using contrastive learning
Anna Mosolova | Marie Candito | Carlos Ramisch

While static word embeddings are blind to context, for lexical semantics tasks context is rather too present in contextual word embeddings, vectors of same-meaning occurrences being too different (Ethayarajh, 2019). Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs) using contrastive learning was proposed, leveraging automatically self-augmented examples (Liu et al., 2021b). In this paper, we investigate how to inject a lexicon as an alternative source of supervision, using the English Wiktionary. We also test how dimensionality reduction impacts the resulting contextual word embeddings. We evaluate our approach on the Word-In-Context (WiC) task, in the unsupervised setting (not using the training set). We achieve new SoTA result on the original WiC test set. We also propose two new WiC test sets for which we show that our fine-tuning method achieves substantial improvements. We also observe improvements, although modest, for the semantic frame induction task. Although we experimented on English to allow comparison with related work, our method is adaptable to the many languages for which large Wiktionaries exist.

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Multilingual Gradient Word-Order Typology from Universal Dependencies
Emi Baylor | Esther Ploeger | Johannes Bjerva

While information from the field of linguistic typology has the potential to improve performance on NLP tasks, reliable typological data is a prerequisite. Existing typological databases, including WALS and Grambank, suffer from inconsistencies primarily caused by their categorical format. Furthermore, typological categorisations by definition differ significantly from the continuous nature of phenomena, as found in natural language corpora. In this paper, we introduce a new seed dataset made up of continuous-valued data, rather than categorical data, that can better reflect the variability of language. While this initial dataset focuses on word-order typology, we also present the methodology used to create the dataset, which can be easily adapted to generate data for a broader set of features and languages.

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Evaluating the Factuality of Zero-shot Summarizers Across Varied Domains
Sanjana Ramprasad | Kundan Krishna | Zachary Lipton | Byron Wallace

Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating summaries zero-shot—i.e., without explicit supervision—that, under human assessment, are often comparable or even preferred to manually composed reference summaries. However, this prior work has focussed almost exclusively on evaluating news article summarization. How do zero-shot summarizers perform in other (potentially more specialized) domains?In this work we evaluate zero-shot generated summaries across specialized domains including: biomedical articles, and legal bills (in addition to standard news benchmarks for reference). We focus especially on the factuality of outputs. We acquire annotations from domain experts to identify inconsistencies in summaries and systematically categorize these errors. We analyze whether the prevalence of a given domain in the pretraining corpus affects extractiveness and faithfulness of generated summaries of articles in this domain. We release all collected annotations to facilitate additional research toward measuring and realizing factually accurate summarization, beyond news articles (The dataset can be downloaded from https://anonymous.4open.science/r/zero_shot_faceval_domains-9B83)

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Leveraging Implicit Feedback from Deployment Data in Dialogue
Richard Yuanzhe Pang | Stephen Roller | Kyunghyun Cho | He He | Jason Weston

We study improving social conversational agents by learning from natural dialogue between users and a deployed model, without extra annotations. To implicitly measure the quality of a machine-generated utterance, we leverage signals like user response length, sentiment and reaction of the future human utterances in the collected dialogue episodes. Our experiments use the publicly released deployment data from BlenderBot (Xu et al., 2023). Human evaluation indicates improvements in our new models over baseline responses; however, we find that some proxy signals can lead to more generations with undesirable properties as well. For example, optimizing for conversation length can lead to more controversial or unfriendly generations compared to the baseline, whereas optimizing for positive sentiment or reaction can decrease these behaviors.

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Characterizing the Confidence of Large Language Model-Based Automatic Evaluation Metrics
Rickard Stureborg | Dimitris Alikaniotis | Yoshi Suhara

There has recently been a growing interest in using Large Language Models (LLMs) to evaluate NLP tasks automatically. Considerable research effort has been put into improving such systems towards achieving high correlations with human judgement. However, it is still unclear what level of correlation is good enough for practical applications of LLM-based automatic evaluation systems. This paper characterizes these LLM evaluators’ confidence in ranking candidate NLP models and develops a configurable Monte Carlo simulation method. We show that even automatic metrics with low correlation with human judgement can reach high-confidence rankings of candidate models with reasonable evaluation set sizes (100s of examples). Further, we describe tradeoff curves between the LLM evaluator performance (i.e., correlation with humans) and evaluation set size; loss in correlation can be compensated with modest increases in the evaluation set size. We validate our results on RoSE, a text summarization dataset, and find our estimates of confidence align with empirical observations.Code available at https://github.com/rickardstureborg/llm-eval-confidence

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Equipping Language Models with Tool Use Capability for Tabular Data Analysis in Finance
Adrian Theuma | Ehsan Shareghi

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited an array of reasoning capabilities but face challenges like error propagation and hallucination, particularly in specialised areas like finance, where data is heterogeneous, and precision is paramount. We explore the potential of language model augmentation with external tools to mitigate these limitations and offload certain reasoning steps to external tools that are more suited for the task, instead of solely depending on the LLM’s inherent abilities. More concretely, using financial domain question answering datasets, we apply supervised finetuning on a LLAMA-2 13B CHAT model to act both as a task router and task solver. The task router dynamically directs a question to either be answered internally by the LLM or externally via the right tool from the tool set. Our tool-equipped SFT model, RAVEN, demonstrates an improvement of 35.2% and 5.06% over the base model and SFT-only baselines, respectively, and is highly competitive with strong GPT-3.5 results. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first that investigates tool augmentation of language models for the finance domain.

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Commonsense-augmented Memory Construction and Management in Long-term Conversations via Context-aware Persona Refinement
Hana Kim | Kai Ong | Seoyeon Kim | Dongha Lee | Jinyoung Yeo

Memorizing and utilizing speakers’ personas is a common practice for response generation in long-term conversations. Yet, human-authored datasets often provide uninformative persona sentences that hinder response quality. This paper presents a novel framework that leverages commonsense-based persona expansion to address such issues in long-term conversation.While prior work focuses on not producing personas that contradict others, we focus on transforming contradictory personas into sentences that contain rich speaker information, by refining them based on their contextual backgrounds with designed strategies. As the pioneer of persona expansion in multi-session settings, our framework facilitates better response generation via human-like persona refinement. The supplementary video of our work is available at https://caffeine-15bbf.web.app/.

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Investigating the Potential of Task Arithmetic for Cross-Lingual Transfer
Marinela Parović | Ivan Vulić | Anna Korhonen

Cross-lingual transfer has recently been tackled through modular, parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods which allow arbitrary combinations of language and task modules for transfer of any task to any language. Concurrently, task arithmetic has emerged as a powerful and modular tool for editing pretrained models using multiple full fine-tunings. In this work, we connect the paradigms of task arithmetic and cross-lingual transfer, demonstrating that modularity for cross-lingual transfer can be achieved even with full model fine-tuning. Our approach displays strong performance on a range of multilingual benchmarks encompassing both high-resource and low-resource languages.

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On the Benefits of Fine-Grained Loss Truncation: A Case Study on Factuality in Summarization
Lorenzo Jaime Flores | Arman Cohan

Text summarization and simplification are among the most widely used applications of AI. However, such models are often prone to hallucination, which can result from training models on unaligned data. One efficient approach to address this issue is Loss Truncation (Kang and Hashimoto, 2020), an approach to modify the standard log loss to adaptively remove noisy examples during training. However, we find that LT alone yields a considerable number of hallucinated entities on various datasets. We study the behavior of the underlying losses between factual and non-factual examples, to understand and refine the performance of LT. We demonstrate that LT’s performance is limited when the underlying assumption that noisy targets have higher NLL loss is not satisfied, and find that word-level NLL among entities provides better signal for distinguishing factuality. We then leverage this to propose a fine-grained NLL loss and fine-grained data cleaning strategies, and observe improvements in hallucination reduction across some datasets. Our work is available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/Simplification-Projects.

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Evaluating Unsupervised Argument Aligners via Generation of Conclusions of Structured Scientific Abstracts
Yingqiang Gao | Nianlong Gu | Jessica Lam | James Henderson | Richard Hahnloser

Scientific abstracts provide a concise summary of research findings, making them a valuable resource for extracting scientific arguments. In this study, we assess various unsupervised approaches for extracting arguments as aligned premise-conclusion pairs: semantic similarity, text perplexity, and mutual information. We aggregate structured abstracts from PubMed Central Open Access papers published in 2022 and evaluate the argument aligners in terms of the performance of language models that we fine-tune to generate the conclusions from the extracted premise given as input prompts. We find that mutual information outperforms the other measures on this task, suggesting that the reasoning process in scientific abstracts hinges mostly on linguistic constructs beyond simple textual similarity.

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Over-Reasoning and Redundant Calculation of Large Language Models
Cheng-Han Chiang | Hung-yi Lee

Large language models (LLMs) can solve problems step-by-step.While this chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning boosts LLMs’ performance, it is unclear if LLMs know when to use CoT and whether those CoT are always necessary to answer the question. This paper shows that LLMs tend to generate redundant calculations and reasoning on a manually constructed math QA dataset, GSM8K-Zero.GSM8K-Zero is constructed such that the questions can be answered without any calculations, but LLMs, including Llama-2 models and Claude-2, tend to generate lengthy and unnecessary calculations to answer the questions.We also conduct experiments to explain why LLMs generate redundant calculations and reasonings.

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Multimodal Fallacy Classification in Political Debates
Eleonora Mancini | Federico Ruggeri | Paolo Torroni

Recent advances in NLP suggest that some tasks, such as argument detection and relation classification, are better framed in a multimodal perspective. We propose multimodal argument mining for argumentative fallacy classification in political debates. To this end, we release the first corpus for multimodal fallacy classification. Our experiments show that the integration of the audio modality leads to superior classification performance. Our findings confirm that framing fallacy classification as a multimodal task is essential to capture paralinguistic aspects of fallacious arguments.

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The Parrot Dilemma: Human-Labeled vs. LLM-augmented Data in Classification Tasks
Anders Giovanni Møller | Arianna Pera | Jacob Dalsgaard | Luca Aiello

In the realm of Computational Social Science (CSS), practitioners often navigate complex, low-resource domains and face the costly and time-intensive challenges of acquiring and annotating data. We aim to establish a set of guidelines to address such challenges, comparing the use of human-labeled data with synthetically generated data from GPT-4 and Llama-2 in ten distinct CSS classification tasks of varying complexity. Additionally, we examine the impact of training data sizes on performance. Our findings reveal that models trained on human-labeled data consistently exhibit superior or comparable performance compared to their synthetically augmented counterparts. Nevertheless, synthetic augmentation proves beneficial, particularly in improving performance on rare classes within multi-class tasks. Furthermore, we leverage GPT-4 and Llama-2 for zero-shot classification and find that, while they generally display strong performance, they often fall short when compared to specialized classifiers trained on moderately sized training sets.

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Language Model Sentence Completion with a Parser-Driven Rhetorical Control Method
Joshua Zingale | Jugal Kalita

Controlled text generation (CTG) seeks to guide large language model (LLM) output, that statistical language generation would conform to desired criteria. The current study presents a novel CTG algorithm that enforces adherence toward specific rhetorical relations in an LLM sentence-completion context by a parser-driven decoding scheme that requires no model fine-tuning. The method is validated both with automatic and human evaluation.

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”It’s how you do things that matters”: Attending to Process to Better Serve Indigenous Communities with Language Technologies
Ned Cooper | Courtney Heldreth | Ben Hutchinson

Indigenous languages are historically under-served by Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies, but this is changing for some languages with the recent scaling of large multilingual models and an increased focus by the NLP community on endangered languages. This position paper explores ethical considerations in building NLP technologies for Indigenous languages, based on the premise that such projects should primarily serve Indigenous communities. We report on interviews with 17 researchers working in or with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander communities on language technology projects in Australia. Drawing on insights from the interviews, we recommend practices for NLP researchers to increase attention to the process of engagements with Indigenous communities, rather than focusing only on decontextualised artefacts.

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Source Identification in Abstractive Summarization
Yoshi Suhara | Dimitris Alikaniotis

Neural abstractive summarization models make summaries in an end-to-end manner, and little is known about how the source information is actually converted into summaries. In this paper, we define input sentences that contain essential information in the generated summary as source sentences and study how abstractive summaries are made by analyzing the source sentences. To this end, we annotate source sentences for reference summaries and system summaries generated by PEGASUS on document-summary pairs sampled from the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets. We also formulate automatic source sentence detection and compare multiple methods to establish a strong baseline for the task. Experimental results show that the perplexity-based method performs well in highly abstractive settings, while similarity-based methods perform robustly in relatively extractive settings.

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From Partial to Strictly Incremental Constituent Parsing
Ana Ezquerro | Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez | David Vilares

We study incremental constituent parsers to assess their capacity to output trees based on prefix representations alone. Guided by strictly left-to-right generative language models and tree-decoding modules, we build parsers that adhere to a strong definition of incrementality across languages. This builds upon work that asserted incrementality, but that mostly only enforced it on either the encoder or the decoder. Finally, we conduct an analysis against non-incremental and partially incremental models.

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Predict the Next Word: <Humans exhibit uncertainty in this task and language models _____>
Evgenia Ilia | Wilker Aziz

Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical assessment is difficult to perform at the passage level, for it requires acceptability judgments (i.e., human evaluation) or a robust automated proxy (which is non-trivial). At the word level, however, given some context, samples from an LM can be assessed via exact matching against a prerecorded dataset of alternative single-word continuations of the available context. We exploit this fact and evaluate the LM’s ability to reproduce variability that humans (in particular, a population of English speakers) exhibit in the ‘next word prediction’ task. This can be seen as assessing a form of calibration, which, in the context of text classification, Baan et al. (2022) termed calibration to human uncertainty. We assess GPT2, BLOOM and ChatGPT and find that they exhibit fairly low calibration to human uncertainty. We also verify the failure of expected calibration error (ECE) to reflect this, and as such, advise the community against relying on it in this setting.

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A Prompt Response to the Demand for Automatic Gender-Neutral Translation
Beatrice Savoldi | Andrea Piergentili | Dennis Fucci | Matteo Negri | Luisa Bentivogli

Gender-neutral translation (GNT) that avoids biased and undue binary assumptions is a pivotal challenge for the creation of more inclusive translation technologies. Advancements for this task in Machine Translation (MT), however, are hindered by the lack of dedicated parallel data, which are necessary to adapt MT systems to satisfy neutral constraints. For such a scenario, large language models offer hitherto unforeseen possibilities, as they come with the distinct advantage of being versatile in various (sub)tasks when provided with explicit instructions. In this paper, we explore this potential to automate GNT by comparing MT with the popular GPT-4 model. Through extensive manual analyses, our study empirically reveals the inherent limitations of current MT systems in generating GNTs and provides valuable insights into the potential and challenges associated with prompting for neutrality.

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Interpreting Predictive Probabilities: Model Confidence or Human Label Variation?
Joris Baan | Raquel Fernández | Barbara Plank | Wilker Aziz

With the rise of increasingly powerful and user-facing NLP systems, there is growing interest in assessing whether they have a good _representation of uncertainty_ by evaluating the quality of their predictive distribution over outcomes. We identify two main perspectives that drive starkly different evaluation protocols. The first treats predictive probability as an indication of model confidence; the second as an indication of human label variation. We discuss their merits and limitations, and take the position that both are crucial for trustworthy and fair NLP systems, but that exploiting a single predictive distribution is limiting. We recommend tools and highlight exciting directions towards models with disentangled representations of uncertainty about predictions and uncertainty about human labels.

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Smaller Language Models are Better Zero-shot Machine-Generated Text Detectors
Niloofar Mireshghallah | Justus Mattern | Sicun Gao | Reza Shokri | Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick

As large language models are becoming more embedded in different user-facing services, it is important to be able to distinguish between human-written and machine-generated text to verify the authenticity of news articles, product reviews, etc. Thus, in this paper we set out to explore whether it is possible to use one language model to identify machine-generated text produced by another language model, in a zero-shot way, even if the two have different architectures and are trained on different data. We find that overall, smaller models are better universal machine-generated text detectors: they can more precisely detect text generated from both small and larger models, without the need for any additional training/data. Interestingly, we find that whether or not the detector and generator models were trained on the same data is not critically important to the detection success. For instance the OPT-125M model has an AUC of 0.90 in detecting GPT4 generations, whereas a larger model from the GPT family, GPTJ-6B, has AUC of 0.65.

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CharSpan: Utilizing Lexical Similarity to Enable Zero-Shot Machine Translation for Extremely Low-resource Languages
Kaushal Maurya | Rahul Kejriwal | Maunendra Desarkar | Anoop Kunchukuttan

We address the task of machine translation (MT) from extremely low-resource language (ELRL) to English by leveraging cross-lingual transfer from *closely-related* high-resource language (HRL). The development of an MT system for ELRL is challenging because these languages typically lack parallel corpora and monolingual corpora, and their representations are absent from large multilingual language models. Many ELRLs share lexical similarities with some HRLs, which presents a novel modeling opportunity. However, existing subword-based neural MT models do not explicitly harness this lexical similarity, as they only implicitly align HRL and ELRL latent embedding space. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel, CharSpan, approach based on character-span noise augmentation into the training data of HRL. This serves as a regularization technique, making the model more robust to lexical divergences between the HRL and ELRL, thus facilitating effective cross-lingual transfer. Our method significantly outperformed strong baselines in zero-shot settings on closely related HRL and ELRL pairs from three diverse language families, emerging as the state-of-the-art model for ELRLs.

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Robust Neural Machine Translation for Abugidas by Glyph Perturbation
Hour Kaing | Chenchen Ding | Hideki Tanaka | Masao Utiyama

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems are vulnerable when trained on limited data. This is a common scenario in low-resource tasks in the real world. To increase robustness, a solution is to intently add realistic noise in the training phase. Noise simulation using text perturbation has been proven to be efficient in writing systems that use Latin letters. In this study, we further explore perturbation techniques on more complex abugida writing systems, for which the visual similarity of complex glyphs is considered to capture the essential nature of these writing systems. Besides the generated noise, we propose a training strategy to improve robustness. We conducted experiments on six languages: Bengali, Hindi, Myanmar, Khmer, Lao, and Thai. By overcoming the introduced noise, we obtained non-degenerate NMT systems with improved robustness for low-resource tasks for abugida glyphs.

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Translation Errors Significantly Impact Low-Resource Languages in Cross-Lingual Learning
Ashish Agrawal | Barah Fazili | Preethi Jyothi

Popular benchmarks (e.g., XNLI) used to evaluate cross-lingual language understanding consist of parallel versions of English evaluation sets in multiple target languages created with the help of professional translators. When creating such parallel data, it is critical to ensure high-quality translations for all target languages for an accurate characterization of cross-lingual transfer. In this work, we find that translation inconsistencies do exist and interestingly they disproportionally impact low-resource languages in XNLI. To identify such inconsistencies, we propose measuring the gap in performance between zero-shot evaluations on the human-translated and machine-translated target text across multiple target languages; relatively large gaps are indicative of translation errors. We also corroborate that translation errors exist for two target languages, namely Hindi and Urdu, by doing a manual reannotation of human-translated test instances in these two languages and finding poor agreement with the original English labels these instances were supposed to inherit.

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Less is More for Long Document Summary Evaluation by LLMs
Yunshu Wu | Hayate Iso | Pouya Pezeshkpour | Nikita Bhutani | Estevam Hruschka

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in summary evaluation tasks, yet they face challenges such as high computational costs and the Lost-in-the-Middle problem where important information in the middle of long documents is often overlooked. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach, Extract-then-Evaluate, which involves extracting key sentences from a long source document and then evaluating the summary by prompting LLMs. The results reveal that the proposed method not only significantly reduces evaluation costs but also exhibits a higher correlation with human evaluations. Furthermore, we provide practical recommendations for optimal document length and sentence extraction methods, contributing to the development of cost-effective yet more accurate methods for LLM-based text generation evaluation.

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Leveraging ChatGPT in Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction: An Empirical Study
Zhaoyue Sun | Gabriele Pergola | Byron Wallace | Yulan He

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been growing interest in exploring their potential for medical applications. This research aims to investigate the ability of LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, in the context of pharmacovigilance event extraction, of which the main goal is to identify and extract adverse events or potential therapeutic events from textual medical sources. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of ChatGPT in the pharmacovigilance event extraction task, employing various prompts and demonstration selection strategies. The findings demonstrate that while ChatGPT demonstrates reasonable performance with appropriate demonstration selection strategies, it still falls short compared to fully fine-tuned small models. Additionally, we explore the potential of leveraging ChatGPT for data augmentation. However, our investigation reveals that the inclusion of synthesized data into fine-tuning may lead to a decrease in performance, possibly attributed to noise in the ChatGPT-generated labels. To mitigate this, we explore different filtering strategies and find that, with the proper approach, more stable performance can be achieved, although constant improvement remains elusive.

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A Comparative Analysis of Conversational Large Language Models in Knowledge-Based Text Generation
Phillip Schneider | Manuel Klettner | Elena Simperl | Florian Matthes

Generating natural language text from graph-structured data is essential for conversational information seeking. Semantic triples derived from knowledge graphs can serve as a valuable source for grounding responses from conversational agents by providing a factual basis for the information they communicate. This is especially relevant in the context of large language models, which offer great potential for conversational interaction but are prone to hallucinating, omitting, or producing conflicting information. In this study, we conduct an empirical analysis of conversational large language models in generating natural language text from semantic triples. We compare four large language models of varying sizes with different prompting techniques. Through a series of benchmark experiments on the WebNLG dataset, we analyze the models’ performance and identify the most common issues in the generated predictions. Our findings show that the capabilities of large language models in triple verbalization can be significantly improved through few-shot prompting, post-processing, and efficient fine-tuning techniques, particularly for smaller models that exhibit lower zero-shot performance.

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Extreme Fine-tuning: A Novel and Fast Fine-tuning Approach for Text Classification
Boonnithi Jiaramaneepinit | Thodsaporn Chay-intr | Kotaro Funakoshi | Manabu Okumura

Although fine-tuning a pre-trained model with a conventional approach has shown to be effective in various downstream tasks, previous work has used only backpropagation to fine-tune the model, which causes a massive amount of computational resources and time. We propose Extreme Fine-Tuning (EFT), a novel approach for fine-tuning a pre-trained model effectively and efficiently. EFT uses backpropagation for a brief fine-tuning and an iterative extreme learning machine for training a classifier. We applied EFT to four text classification datasets, MELD, IEMOCAP, IMDb, and AG News, and compared its performance with state-of-the-art (SOTA) approaches. The results indicate that EFT noticeably outperformed the other approaches in training-time measurement with comparable model performance. We will release our code at https://github.com/up-33/extreme-fine-tuning.

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Flow Matching for Conditional Text Generation in a Few Sampling Steps
Vincent Hu | Di Wu | Yuki Asano | Pascal Mettes | Basura Fernando | Björn Ommer | Cees Snoek

Diffusion models are a promising tool for high-quality text generation. However, current models face multiple drawbacks including slow sampling, noise schedule sensitivity, and misalignment between the training and sampling stages. In this paper, we introduce FlowSeq, which bypasses all current drawbacks by leveraging flow matching for conditional text generation. FlowSeq can generate text in a few steps by training with a novel anchor loss, alleviating the need for expensive hyperparameter optimization of the noise schedule prevalent in diffusion models. We extensively evaluate our proposed method and show competitive performance in tasks such as question generation, open-domain dialogue, and paraphrasing tasks.

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Corpus-Steered Query Expansion with Large Language Models
Yibin Lei | Yu Cao | Tianyi Zhou | Tao Shen | Andrew Yates

Recent studies demonstrate that query expansions generated by large language models (LLMs) can considerably enhance information retrieval systems by generating hypothetical documents that answer the queries as expansions. However, challenges arise from misalignments between the expansions and the retrieval corpus, resulting in issues like hallucinations and outdated information due to the limited intrinsic knowledge of LLMs. Inspired by Pseudo Relevance Feedback (PRF), we introduce Corpus-Steered Query Expansion (CSQE) to promote the incorporation of knowledge embedded within the corpus. CSQE utilizes the relevance assessing capability of LLMs to systematically identify pivotal sentences in the initially-retrieved documents. These corpus-originated texts are subsequently used to expand the query together with LLM-knowledge empowered expansions, improving the relevance prediction between the query and the target documents. Extensive experiments reveal that CSQE exhibits strong performance without necessitating any training, especially with queries for which LLMs lack knowledge.

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Defending Against Disinformation Attacks in Open-Domain Question Answering
Orion Weller | Aleem Khan | Nathaniel Weir | Dawn Lawrie | Benjamin Van Durme

Recent work in open-domain question answering (ODQA) has shown that adversarial poisoning of the search collection can cause large drops in accuracy for production systems. However, little to no work has proposed methods to defend against these attacks. To do so, we rely on the intuition that redundant information often exists in large corpora. To find it, we introduce a method that uses query augmentation to search for a diverse set of passages that could answer the original question but are less likely to have been poisoned. We integrate these new passages into the model through the design of a novel confidence method, comparing the predicted answer to its appearance in the retrieved contexts (what we call Confidence from Answer Redundancy, i.e. CAR). Together these methods allow for a simple but effective way to defend against poisoning attacks that provides gains of nearly 20% exact match across varying levels of data poisoning/knowledge conflicts.

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Sentence Representations via Gaussian Embedding
Shohei Yoda | Hayato Tsukagoshi | Ryohei Sasano | Koichi Takeda

Recent progress in sentence embedding, which represents a sentence’s meaning as a point in a vector space, has achieved high performance on several tasks such as the semantic textual similarity (STS) task.However, a sentence representation cannot adequately express the diverse information that sentences contain: for example, such representations cannot naturally handle asymmetric relationships between sentences.This paper proposes GaussCSE, a Gaussian-distribution-based contrastive learning framework for sentence embedding that can handle asymmetric inter-sentential relations, as well as a similarity measure for identifying entailment relations.Our experiments show that GaussCSE achieves performance comparable to that of previous methods on natural language inference (NLI) tasks, and that it can estimate the direction of entailment relations, which is difficult with point representations.

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STORiCo: Storytelling TTS for Hindi with Character Voice Modulation
Pavan Tankala | Preethi Jyothi | Preeti Rao | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

We present a new Hindi text-to-speech (TTS) dataset and demonstrate its utility for the expressive synthesis of children’s audio stories. The dataset comprises narration by a single female speaker who modifies her voice to produce different story characters. Annotation for dialogue identification, character labelling, and character attribution are provided, all of which are expected to facilitate the learning of character voice and speaking styles. Experiments are conducted using different versions of the annotated dataset that enable training a multi-speaker TTS model on the single-speaker data. Subjective tests show that the multi-speaker model improves expressiveness and character voice consistency compared to the baseline single-speaker TTS. With the multi-speaker model, objective evaluations show comparable word error rates, better speaker voice consistency, and higher correlations with ground-truth emotion attributes. We release a new 16.8 hours storytelling speech dataset in Hindi and propose effective solutions for expressive TTS with narrator voice modulation and character voice consistency.

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Rethinking Loss Functions for Fact Verification
Yuta Mukobara | Yutaro Shigeto | Masashi Shimbo

We explore loss functions for fact verification in the FEVER shared task. While the cross-entropy loss is a standard objective for training verdict predictors, it fails to capture the heterogeneity among the FEVER verdict classes. In this paper, we develop two task-specific objectives tailored to FEVER. Experimental results confirm that the proposed objective functions outperform the standard cross-entropy. Performance is further improved when these objectives are combined with simple class weighting, which effectively overcomes the imbalance in the training data. The source code is available (https://github.com/yuta-mukobara/RLF-KGAT).

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A Dataset for Metaphor Detection in Early Medieval Hebrew Poetry
Michael Toker | Oren Mishali | Ophir Münz-Manor | Benny Kimelfeld | Yonatan Belinkov

There is a large volume of late antique and medieval Hebrew texts. They represent a crucial linguistic and cultural bridge between Biblical and modern Hebrew. Poetry is prominent in these texts and one of its main characteristics is the frequent use of metaphor. Distinguishing figurative and literal language use is a major task for scholars of the Humanities, especially in the fields of literature, linguistics, and hermeneutics. This paper presents a new, challenging dataset of late antique and medieval Hebrew poetry with expert annotations of metaphor, as well as some baseline results, which we hope will facilitate further research in this area.

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SOCIALITE-LLAMA: An Instruction-Tuned Model for Social Scientific Tasks
Gourab Dey | Adithya V Ganesan | Yash Kumar Lal | Manal Shah | Shreyashee Sinha | Matthew Matero | Salvatore Giorgi | Vivek Kulkarni | H. Schwartz

Social science NLP tasks, such as emotion or humor detection, are required to capture the semantics along with the implicit pragmatics from text, often with limited amounts of training data. Instruction tuning has been shown to improve the many capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as commonsense reasoning, reading comprehension, and computer programming. However, little is known about the effectiveness of instruction tuning on the social domain where implicit pragmatic cues are often needed to be captured. We explore the use of instruction tuning for social science NLP tasks and introduce Socialite-Llama — an open-source, instruction-tuned Llama. On a suite of 20 social science tasks, Socialite-Llama improves upon the performance of Llama as well as matches or improves upon the performance of a state-of-the-art, multi-task finetuned model on a majority of them. Further, Socialite-Llama also leads to improvement on 5 out of 6 related social tasks as compared to Llama, suggesting instruction tuning can lead to generalized social understanding. All resources including our code, model and dataset can be found through [bit.ly/socialitellama](https://bit.ly/socialitellama/).

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Pre-Training Methods for Question Reranking
Stefano Campese | Ivano Lauriola | Alessandro Moschitti

One interesting approach to Question Answering (QA) is to search for semantically similar questions, which have been answered before. This task is different from answer retrieval as it focuses on questions rather than only on the answers, therefore it requires different model training on different data.In this work, we introduce a novel unsupervised pre-training method specialized for retrieving and ranking questions. This leverages (i) knowledge distillation from a basic question retrieval model, and (ii) new pre-training task and objective for learning to rank questions in terms of their relevance with the query. Our experiments show that (i) the proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art performance on QRC and Quora-match datasets, and (ii) the benefit of combining re-ranking and retrieval models.

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Dynamic Masking Rate Schedules for MLM Pretraining
Zachary Ankner | Naomi Saphra | Davis Blalock | Jonathan Frankle | Matthew Leavitt

Most works on transformers trained with the Masked Language Modeling (MLM) objective use the original BERT model’s fixed masking rate of 15%. We propose to instead dynamically schedule the masking rate throughout training. We find that linearly decreasing the masking rate over the course of pretraining improves average GLUE accuracy by up to 0.46% and 0.25% in BERT-base and BERT-large, respectively, compared to fixed rate baselines. These gains come from exposure to both high and low masking rate regimes, providing benefits from both settings. Our results demonstrate that masking rate scheduling is a simple way to improve the quality of masked language models, achieving up to a 1.89x speedup in pretraining for BERT-base as well as a Pareto improvement for BERT-large.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

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Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations
Nikolaos Aletras | Orphee De Clercq

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TextBI: An Interactive Dashboard for Visualizing Multidimensional NLP Annotations in Social Media Data
Maxime Masson | Christian Sallaberry | Marie-Noelle Bessagnet | Annig Le Parc Lacayrelle | Philippe Roose | Rodrigo Agerri

In this paper we introduce TextBI, a multimodal generic dashboard designed to present multidimensional text annotations on large volumes of multilingual social media data. This tool focuses on four core dimensions: spatial, temporal, thematic, and personal, and also supports additional enrichment data such as sentiment and engagement. Multiple visualization modes are offered, including frequency, movement, and association. This dashboard addresses the challenge of facilitating the interpretation of NLP annotations by visualizing them in a user-friendly, interactive interface catering to two categories of users: (1) domain stakeholders and (2) NLP researchers. We conducted experiments within the domain of tourism leveraging data from X (formerly Twitter) and incorporating requirements from tourism offices. Our approach, TextBI, represents a significant advancement in the field of visualizing NLP annotations by integrating and blending features from a variety of Business Intelligence, Geographical Information Systems and NLP tools. A demonstration video is also provided https://youtu.be/x714RKvo9Cg

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kNN-BOX: A Unified Framework for Nearest Neighbor Generation
Wenhao Zhu | Qianfeng Zhao | Yunzhe Lv | Shujian Huang | Siheng Zhao | Sizhe Liu | Jiajun Chen

Augmenting the base neural model with a token-level symbolic datastore is a novel generation paradigm and has achieved promising results in machine translation (MT). In this paper, we introduce a unified framework kNN-BOX, which enables quick development and visualization for this novel paradigm. kNN-BOX decomposes the datastore-augmentation approach into three modules: datastore, retriever and combiner, thus putting diverse kNN generation methods into a unified way. Currently, kNN-BOX has provided implementation of seven popular kNN-MT variants, covering research from performance enhancement to efficiency optimization. It is easy for users to reproduce these existing work or customize their own models. Besides, users can interact with their kNN generation systems with kNN-BOX to better understand the underlying inference process in a visualized way. In experiment section, we apply kNN-BOX for machine translation and three other seq2seq generation tasks (text simplification, paraphrase generation and question generation). Experiment results show that augmenting the base neural model with kNN-BOX can bring large performance improvement in all these tasks. The code and document of kNN-BOX is available at https://github.com/NJUNLP/knn-box. The demo can be accessed at http://nlp.nju.edu.cn/demo/knn-box/. The introduction video is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0eJldHVR3w.

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A Human-Centric Evaluation Platform for Explainable Knowledge Graph Completion
Zhao Xu | Wiem Ben Rim | Kiril Gashteovski | Timo Sztyler | Carolin Lawrence

Explanations for AI are expected to help human users understand AI-driven predictions. Evaluating plausibility, the helpfulness of the explanations, is therefore essential for developing eXplainable AI (XAI) that can really aid human users. Here we propose a human-centric evaluation platform to measure plausibility of explanations in the context of eXplainable Knowledge Graph Completion (XKGC). The target audience of the platform are researchers and practitioners who want to 1) investigate real needs and interests of their target users in XKGC, 2) evaluate the plausibility of the XKGC methods. We showcase these two use cases in an experimental setting to illustrate what results can be achieved with our system.

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pyTLEX: A Python Library for TimeLine EXtraction
Akul Singh | Jared Hummer | Mustafa Ocal | Mark Finlayson

pyTLEX is an implementation of the TimeLine EXtraction algorithm (TLEX; Finlayson et al.,2021) that enables users to work with TimeML annotations and perform advanced temporal analysis, offering a comprehensive suite of features. TimeML is a standardized markup language for temporal information in text. pyTLEX allows users to parse TimeML annotations, construct TimeML graphs, and execute the TLEX algorithm to effect complete timeline extraction. In contrast to previous implementations (i.e., jTLEX for Java), pyTLEX sets itself apart with a range of advanced features. It introduces a React-based visualization system, enhancing the exploration of temporal data and the comprehension of temporal connections within textual information. Furthermore, pyTLEX incorporates an algorithm for increasing connectivity in temporal graphs, which identifies graph disconnectivity and recommends links based on temporal reasoning, thus enhancing the coherence of the graph representation. Additionally, pyTLEX includes a built-in validation algorithm, ensuring compliance with TimeML annotation guidelines, which is essential for maintaining data quality and reliability. pyTLEX equips researchers and developers with an extensive toolkit for temporal analysis, and its testing across various datasets validates its accuracy and reliability.

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DepressMind: A Depression Surveillance System for Social Media Analysis
Roque Fernández-Iglesias | Marcos Fernandez-Pichel | Mario Aragon | David E. Losada

Depression is a pressing global issue that impacts millions of individuals worldwide. This prevailing psychologicaldisorder profoundly influences the thoughts and behavior of those who suffer from it. We have developed DepressMind, a versatile screening tool designed to facilitate the analysis of social network data. This automated tool explores multiple psychological dimensions associated with clinical depression and estimates the extent to which these symptoms manifest in language use. Our project comprises two distinct components: one for data extraction and another one for analysis.The data extraction phase is dedicated to harvesting texts and the associated meta-information from social networks and transforming them into a user-friendly format that serves various analytical purposes.For the analysis, the main objective is to conduct an in-depth inspection of the user publications and establish connections between the posted contents and dimensions or traits defined by well-established clinical instruments.Specifically, we aim to associate extracts authored by individuals with symptoms or dimensions of the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI).

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Check News in One Click: NLP-Empowered Pro-Kremlin Propaganda Detection
Veronika Solopova | Viktoriia Herman | Christoph Benzmüller | Tim Landgraf

Many European citizens become targets of the Kremlin propaganda campaigns, aiming to minimise public support for Ukraine, foster a climate of mistrust and disunity, and shape elections (Meister, 2022). To address this challenge, we developed “Check News in 1 Click”, the first NLP-empowered pro-Kremlin propaganda detection application available in 7 languages, which provides the lay user with feedback on their news, and explains manipulative linguistic features and keywords. We conducted a user study, analysed user entries and models’ behaviour paired with questionnaire answers, and investigated the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed interpretative solution.

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NESTLE: a No-Code Tool for Statistical Analysis of Legal Corpus
Kyoungyeon Cho | Seungkum Han | Young Rok Choi | Wonseok Hwang

The statistical analysis of large scale legal corpus can provide valuable legal insights. For such analysis one needs to (1) select a subset of the corpus using document retrieval tools, (2) structure text using information extraction (IE) systems, and (3) visualize the data for the statistical analysis. Each process demands either specialized tools or programming skills whereas no comprehensive unified “no-code” tools have been available. Here we provide NESTLE, a no-code tool for large-scale statistical analysis of legal corpus. Powered by a Large Language Model (LLM) and the internal custom end-to-end IE system, NESTLE can extract any type of information that has not been predefined in the IE system opening up the possibility of unlimited customizable statistical analysis of the corpus without writing a single line of code. We validate our system on 15 Korean precedent IE tasks and 3 legal text classification tasks from LexGLUE. The comprehensive experiments reveal NESTLE can achieve GPT-4 comparable performance by training the internal IE module with 4 human-labeled, and 192 LLM-labeled examples.

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Multi-party Multimodal Conversations Between Patients, Their Companions, and a Social Robot in a Hospital Memory Clinic
Angus Addlesee | Neeraj Cherakara | Nivan Nelson | Daniel Hernandez Garcia | Nancie Gunson | Weronika Sieińska | Christian Dondrup | Oliver Lemon

We have deployed an LLM-based spoken dialogue system in a real hospital. The ARI social robot embodies our system, which patients and their companions can have multi-party conversations with together. In order to enable this multi-party ability, multimodality is critical. Our system, therefore, receives speech and video as input, and generates both speech and gestures (arm, head, and eye movements). In this paper, we describe our complex setting and the architecture of our dialogue system. Each component is detailed, and a video of the full system is available with the appropriate components highlighted in real-time. Our system decides when it should take its turn, generates human-like clarification requests when the patient pauses mid-utterance, answers in-domain questions (grounding to the in-prompt knowledge), and responds appropriately to out-of-domain requests (like generating jokes or quizzes). This latter feature is particularly remarkable as real patients often utter unexpected sentences that could not be handled previously.

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ScamSpot: Fighting Financial Fraud in Instagram Comments
Stefan Erben | Andreas Waldis

The long-standing problem of spam and fraudulent messages in the comment sections of Instagram pages in the financial sector claims new victims every day. Instagram’s current spam filter proves inadequate, and existing research approaches are primarily confined to theoretical concepts. Practical implementations with evaluated results are missing. To solve this problem, we propose ScamSpot, a comprehensive system that includes a browser extension, a fine-tuned BERT model and a REST API. This approach ensures public accessibility of our results for Instagram users using the Chrome browser. Furthermore, we conduct a data annotation study, shedding light on the reasons and causes of the problem and evaluate the system through user feedback and comparison with existing models. ScamSpot is an open-source project and is publicly available at https://scamspot.github.io/.

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NarrativePlay: Interactive Narrative Understanding
Runcong Zhao | Wenjia Zhang | Jiazheng Li | Lixing Zhu | Yanran Li | Yulan He | Lin Gui

In this paper, we introduce NarrativePlay, a novel system that allows users to role-play a fictional character and interact with other characters in narratives in an immersive environment. We leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-like responses, guided by personality traits extracted from narratives. The system incorporates auto-generated visual display of narrative settings, character portraits, and character speech, greatly enhancing the user experience. Our approach eschews predefined sandboxes, focusing instead on main storyline events from the perspective of a user-selected character. NarrativePlay has been evaluated on two types of narratives, detective and adventure stories, where users can either explore the world or increase affinity with other characters through conversations.

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DP-NMT: Scalable Differentially Private Machine Translation
Timour Igamberdiev | Doan Nam Long Vu | Felix Kuennecke | Zhuo Yu | Jannik Holmer | Ivan Habernal

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a widely popular text generation task, yet there is a considerable research gap in the development of privacy-preserving NMT models, despite significant data privacy concerns for NMT systems. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a popular method for training machine learning models with concrete privacy guarantees; however, the implementation specifics of training a model with DP-SGD are not always clarified in existing models, with differing software libraries used and code bases not always being public, leading to reproducibility issues. To tackle this, we introduce DP-NMT, an open-source framework for carrying out research on privacy-preserving NMT with DP-SGD, bringing together numerous models, datasets, and evaluation metrics in one systematic software package. Our goal is to provide a platform for researchers to advance the development of privacy-preserving NMT systems, keeping the specific details of the DP-SGD algorithm transparent and intuitive to implement. We run a set of experiments on datasets from both general and privacy-related domains to demonstrate our framework in use. We make our framework publicly available and welcome feedback from the community.

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AnnoPlot: Interactive Visualizations of Text Annotations
Elisabeth Fittschen | Tim Fischer | Daniel Brühl | Julia Spahr | Yuliia Lysa | Phuoc Thang Le

This paper presents AnnoPlot, a web application designed to analyze, manage, and visualize annotated text data.Users can configure projects, upload datasets, and explore their data through interactive visualization of span annotations with scatter plots, clusters, and statistics. AnnoPlot supports various transformer models to compute high-dimensional embeddings of text annotations and utilizes dimensionality reduction algorithms to offer users a novel 2D view of their datasets.A dynamic approach to dimensionality reduction allows users to adjust visualizations in real-time, facilitating category reorganization and error identification. The proposed application is open-source, promoting transparency and user control.Especially suited for the Digital Humanities, AnnoPlot offers a novel solution to address challenges in dynamic annotation datasets, empowering users to enhance data integrity and adapt to evolving categorizations.

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GeospaCy: A tool for extraction and geographical referencing of spatial expressions in textual data
Syed Mehtab Alam | Elena Arsevska | Mathieu Roche | Maguelonne Teisseire

Spatial information in text enables to understand the geographical context and relationships within text for better decision-making across various domains such as disease surveillance, disaster management and other location based services. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the precise geographical context for location-sensitive applications. In response to this necessity, we introduce the GeospaCy software tool, designed for the extraction and georeferencing of spatial information present in textual data. GeospaCy fulfils two primary objectives: 1) Geoparsing, which involves extracting spatial expressions, encompassing place names and associated spatial relations within the text data, and 2) Geocoding, which facilitates the assignment of geographical coordinates to the spatial expressions extracted during the Geoparsing task. Geoparsing is evaluated with a disease news article dataset consisting of event information, whereas a qualitative evaluation of geographical coordinates (polygons/geometries) of spatial expressions is performed by end-users for Geocoding task.

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MAMMOTH: Massively Multilingual Modular Open Translation @ Helsinki
Timothee Mickus | Stig-Arne Grönroos | Joseph Attieh | Michele Boggia | Ona De Gibert | Shaoxiong Ji | Niki Andreas Loppi | Alessandro Raganato | Raúl Vázquez | Jörg Tiedemann

NLP in the age of monolithic large language models is approaching its limits in terms of size and information that can be handled. The trend goes to modularization, a necessary step into the direction of designing smaller sub-networks and components with specialized functionality. In this paper, we present the MAMMOTH toolkit: a framework designed for training massively multilingual modular machine translation systems at scale, initially derived from OpenNMT-py and then adapted to ensure efficient training across computation clusters.We showcase its efficiency across clusters of A100 and V100 NVIDIA GPUs, and discuss our design philosophy and plans for future information.The toolkit is publicly available online at https://github.com/Helsinki-NLP/mammoth.

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The DURel Annotation Tool: Human and Computational Measurement of Semantic Proximity, Sense Clusters and Semantic Change
Dominik Schlechtweg | Shafqat Mumtaz Virk | Pauline Sander | Emma Sköldberg | Lukas Theuer Linke | Tuo Zhang | Nina Tahmasebi | Jonas Kuhn | Sabine Schulte Im Walde

We present the DURel tool implementing the annotation of semantic proximity between word uses into an online, open source interface. The tool supports standardized human annotation as well as computational annotation, building on recent advances with Word-in-Context models. Annotator judgments are clustered with automatic graph clustering techniques and visualized for analysis. This allows to measure word senses with simple and intuitive micro-task judgments between use pairs, requiring minimal preparation efforts. The tool offers additional functionalities to compare the agreement between annotators to guarantee the inter-subjectivity of the obtained judgments and to calculate summary statistics over the annotated data giving insights into sense frequency distributions, semantic variation or changes of senses over time.

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RAGAs: Automated Evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation
Shahul Es | Jithin James | Luis Espinosa Anke | Steven Schockaert

We introduce RAGAs (Retrieval Augmented Generation Assessment), a framework for reference-free evaluation of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines. RAGAs is available at [https://github.com/explodinggradients/ragas]. RAG systems are composed of a retrieval and an LLM based generation module. They provide LLMs with knowledge from a reference textual database, enabling them to act as a natural language layer between a user and textual databases, thus reducing the risk of hallucinations. Evaluating RAG architectures is challenging due to several dimensions to consider: the ability of the retrieval system to identify relevant and focused context passages, the ability of the LLM to exploit such passages faithfully, and the quality of the generation itself. With RAGAs, we introduce a suite of metrics that can evaluate these different dimensions without relying on ground truth human annotations. We posit that such a framework can contribute crucially to faster evaluation cycles of RAG architectures, which is especially important given the fast adoption of LLMs.

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NeuroPrompts: An Adaptive Framework to Optimize Prompts for Text-to-Image Generation
Shachar Rosenman | Vasudev Lal | Phillip Howard

Despite impressive recent advances in text-to-image diffusion models, obtaining high-quality images often requires prompt engineering by humans who have developed expertise in using them. In this work, we present NeuroPrompts, an adaptive framework that automatically enhances a user’s prompt to improve the quality of generations produced by text-to-image models. Our framework utilizes constrained text decoding with a pre-trained language model that has been adapted to generate prompts similar to those produced by human prompt engineers. This approach enables higher-quality text-to-image generations and provides user control over stylistic features via constraint set specification. We demonstrate the utility of our framework by creating an interactive application for prompt enhancement and image generation using Stable Diffusion. Additionally, we conduct experiments utilizing a large dataset of human-engineered prompts for text-to-image generation and show that our approach automatically produces enhanced prompts that result in superior image quality. We make our code, a screencast video demo and a live demo instance of NeuroPrompts publicly available.

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MEGAnno+: A Human-LLM Collaborative Annotation System
Hannah Kim | Kushan Mitra | Rafael Li Chen | Sajjadur Rahman | Dan Zhang

Large language models (LLMs) can label data faster and cheaper than humans for various NLP tasks. Despite their prowess, LLMs may fall short in understanding of complex, sociocultural, or domain-specific context, potentially leading to incorrect annotations. Therefore, we advocate a collaborative approach where humans and LLMs work together to produce reliable and high-quality labels. We present MEGAnno+, a human-LLM collaborative annotation system that offers effective LLM agent and annotation management, convenient and robust LLM annotation, and exploratory verification of LLM labels by humans.

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X-AMR Annotation Tool
Shafiuddin Rehan Ahmed | Jon Cai | Martha Palmer | James H. Martin

This paper presents a novel Cross-document Abstract Meaning Representation (X-AMR) annotation tool designed for annotating key corpus-level event semantics. Leveraging machine assistance through the Prodigy Annotation Tool, we enhance the user experience, ensuring ease and efficiency in the annotation process. Through empirical analyses, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in augmenting an existing event corpus, highlighting its advantages when integrated with GPT-4. Code and annotations: href{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/xamr-9ED0}{anonymous.4open.science/r/xamr-9ED0} footnote Demo: {href{https://youtu.be/TuirftxciNE}{https://youtu.be/TuirftxciNE}} footnote Live Link: {href{https://tinyurl.com/mrxmafwh}{https://tinyurl.com/mrxmafwh}}

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DocChecker: Bootstrapping Code Large Language Model for Detecting and Resolving Code-Comment Inconsistencies
Anh Dau | Jin L.c. Guo | Nghi Bui

Comments in source code are crucial for developers to understand the purpose of the code and to use it correctly. However, keeping comments aligned with the evolving codebase poses a significant challenge. With increasing interest in automated solutions to identify and rectify discrepancies between code and its associated comments, most existing methods rely heavily on heuristic rules. This paper introduces DocChecker, a language model-based framework adept at detecting inconsistencies between code and comments and capable of generating synthetic comments. This functionality allows DocChecker to identify and rectify cases where comments do not accurately represent the code they describe.The efficacy of DocChecker is demonstrated using the Just-In-Time and CodeXGlue datasets in various scenarios. Notably, DocChecker sets a new benchmark in the Inconsistency Code-Comment Detection (ICCD) task, achieving 72.3% accuracy, and scoring 33.64 in BLEU-4 on the code summarization task. These results surpass other Large Language Models (LLMs), including GPT 3.5 and CodeLlama.DocChecker is accessible for use and evaluation. It can be found on https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/DocChecker and at http://4.193.50.237:5000/. For a more comprehensive understanding of its functionality, a demonstration video is available on https://youtu.be/FqnPmd531xw.

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TL;DR Progress: Multi-faceted Literature Exploration in Text Summarization
Shahbaz Syed | Khalid Al Khatib | Martin Potthast

This paper presents TL;DR Progress, a new tool for exploring the literature on neural text summarization. It organizes 514~papers based on a comprehensive annotation scheme for text summarization approaches and enables fine-grained, faceted search. Each paper was manually annotated to capture aspects such as evaluation metrics, quality dimensions, learning paradigms, challenges addressed, datasets, and document domains. In addition, a succinct indicative summary is provided for each paper, describing contextual factors, issues, and proposed solutions. The tool is available at {url{https://www.tldr-progress.de}}, a demo video at {url{https://youtu.be/uCVRGFvXUj8}}

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FRAPPE: FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Explorer
Ahmed Sajwani | Alaa El Setohy | Ali Mekky | Diana Turmakhan | Lara Hassan | Mohamed El Zeftawy | Omar El Herraoui | Osama Afzal | Qisheng Liao | Tarek Mahmoud | Zain Muhammad Mujahid | Muhammad Umar Salman | Muhammad Arslan Manzoor | Massa Baali | Jakub Piskorski | Nicolas Stefanovitch | Giovanni Da San Martino | Preslav Nakov

The abundance of news sources and the urgent demand for reliable information have led to serious concerns about the threat of misleading information. In this paper, we present FRAPPE, a FRAming, Persuasion, and Propaganda Explorer system. FRAPPE goes beyond conventional news analysis of articles and unveils the intricate linguistic techniques used to shape readers’ opinions and emotions. Our system allows users not only to analyze individual articles for their genre, framings, and use of persuasion techniques, but also to draw comparisons between the strategies of persuasion and framing adopted by a diverse pool of news outlets and countries across multiple languages for different topics, thus providing a comprehensive understanding of how information is presented and manipulated. FRAPPE is publicly accessible at https://frappe.streamlit.app/ and a video explaining our system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RlTfSVnZmk

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LLMeBench: A Flexible Framework for Accelerating LLMs Benchmarking
Fahim Dalvi | Maram Hasanain | Sabri Boughorbel | Basel Mousi | Samir Abdaljalil | Nizi Nazar | Ahmed Abdelali | Shammur Absar Chowdhury | Hamdy Mubarak | Ahmed Ali

The recent development and success of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitate an evaluation of their performance across diverse NLP tasks in different languages. Although several frameworks have been developed and made publicly available, their customization capabilities for specific tasks and datasets are often complex for different users. In this study, we introduce the LLMeBench framework, which can be seamlessly customized to evaluate LLMs for any NLP task, regardless of language. The framework features generic dataset loaders, several model providers, and pre-implements most standard evaluation metrics. It supports in-context learning with zero- and few-shot settings. A specific dataset and task can be evaluated for a given LLM in less than 20 lines of code while allowing full flexibility to extend the framework for custom datasets, models, or tasks. The framework has been tested on 31 unique NLP tasks using 53 publicly available datasets within 90 experimental setups, involving approximately 296K data points. We open-sourced LLMeBench for the community (https://github.com/qcri/LLMeBench/) and a video demonstrating the framework is available online (https://youtu.be/9cC2m_abk3A).

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Sig-Networks Toolkit: Signature Networks for Longitudinal Language Modelling
Talia Tseriotou | Ryan Chan | Adam Tsakalidis | Iman Munire Bilal | Elena Kochkina | Terry Lyons | Maria Liakata

We present an open-source, pip installable toolkit, Sig-Networks, the first of its kind for longitudinal language modelling. A central focus is the incorporation of Signature-based Neural Network models, which have recently shown success in temporal tasks. We apply and extend published research providing a full suite of signature-based models. Their components can be used as PyTorch building blocks in future architectures. Sig-Networks enables task-agnostic dataset plug-in, seamless preprocessing for sequential data, parameter flexibility, automated tuning across a range of models. We examine signature networks under three different NLP tasks of varying temporal granularity: counselling conversations, rumour stance switch and mood changes in social media threads, showing SOTA performance in all three, and provide guidance for future tasks. We release the Toolkit as a PyTorch package with an introductory video, Git repositories for preprocessing and modelling including sample notebooks on the modeled NLP tasks.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop

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Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Neele Falk | Sara Papi | Mike Zhang

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AutoAugment Is What You Need: Enhancing Rule-based Augmentation Methods in Low-resource Regimes
Juhwan Choi | Kyohoon Jin | Junho Lee | Sangmin Song | YoungBin Kim

Text data augmentation is a complex problem due to the discrete nature of sentences. Although rule-based augmentation methods are widely adopted in real-world applications because of their simplicity, they suffer from potential semantic damage. Previous researchers have suggested easy data augmentation with soft labels (softEDA), employing label smoothing to mitigate this problem. However, finding the best factor for each model and dataset is challenging; therefore, using softEDA in real-world applications is still difficult. In this paper, we propose adapting AutoAugment to solve this problem. The experimental results suggest that the proposed method can boost existing augmentation methods and that rule-based methods can enhance cutting-edge pretrained language models. We offer the source code.

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Generating Diverse Translation with Perturbed kNN-MT
Yuto Nishida | Makoto Morishita | Hidetaka Kamigaito | Taro Watanabe

Generating multiple translation candidates would enable users to choose the one that satisfies their needs.Although there has been work on diversified generation, there exists room for improving the diversity mainly because the previous methods do not address the overcorrection problem—the model underestimates a prediction that is largely different from the training data, even if that prediction is likely.This paper proposes methods that generate more diverse translations by introducing perturbed k-nearest neighbor machine translation (kNN-MT).Our methods expand the search space of kNN-MT and help incorporate diverse words into candidates by addressing the overcorrection problem.Our experiments show that the proposed methods drastically improve candidate diversity and control the degree of diversity by tuning the perturbation’s magnitude.

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The KIND Dataset: A Social Collaboration Approach for Nuanced Dialect Data Collection
Asma Yamani | Raghad Alziyady | Reem AlYami | Salma Albelali | Leina Albelali | Jawharah Almulhim | Amjad Alsulami | Motaz Alfarraj | Rabeah Al-Zaidy

Nuanced dialects are a linguistic variant that pose several challenges for NLP models and techniques. One of the main challenges is the limited amount of datasets to enable extensive research and experimentation. We propose an approach for efficiently collecting nuanced dialectal datasets that are not only of high quality, but are versatile enough to be multipurpose as well. To test our approach we collect the KIND corpus, which is a collection of fine-grained Arabic dialect data. The data is short texts, and unlike many nuanced dialectal datasets, it is curated manually through social collaboration efforts as opposed to being crawled from social media. The collaborative approach is incentivized through educational gamification and competitions for which the community itself benefits from the open source dataset. Our approach aims to achieve: (1) coverage of dialects from under-represented groups and fine-grained dialectal varieties, (2) provide aligned parallel corpora for translation between Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and multiple dialects to enable translation and comparison studies, (3) promote innovative approaches for nuanced dialect data collection. We explain the steps for the competition as well as the resulting datasets and the competing data collection systems. The KIND dataset is shared with the research community.

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Can Stanza be Used for Part-of-Speech Tagging Historical Polish?
Maria Irena Szawerna

The goal of this paper is to evaluate the performance of Stanza, a part-of-speech (POS) tagger developed for modern Polish, on historical text to assess its possible use for automating the annotation of other historical texts. While the issue of the reliability of utilizing POS taggers on historical data has been previously discussed, most of the research focuses on languages whose grammar differs from Polish, meaning that their results need not be fully applicable in this case. The evaluation of Stanza is conducted on two sets of 10286 and 3270 manually annotated tokens from a piece of historical Polish writing (1899), and the errors are analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. The results show a good performance of the tagger, especially when it comes to Universal Part-of-Speech (UPOS) tags, which is promising for utilizing the tagger for automatic annotation in larger projects, and pinpoint some common features of misclassified tokens.

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Toward Zero-Shot Instruction Following
Renze Lou | Wenpeng Yin

This work proposes a challenging yet more realistic setting for zero-shot cross-task generalization: zero-shot instruction following, presuming the existence of a paragraph-style task definition while no demonstrations exist. To better learn the task supervision from the definition, we propose two strategies: first, to automatically find out the critical sentences in the definition; second, a ranking objective to force the model to generate the gold outputs with higher probabilities when those critical parts are highlighted in the definition. The joint efforts of the two strategies yield state-of-the-art performance on the Super-NaturalInstructions. Our code is available on GitHub.

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UnMASKed: Quantifying Gender Biases in Masked Language Models through Linguistically Informed Job Market Prompts
Iñigo Parra

Language models (LMs) have become pivotal in the realm of technological advancements. While their capabilities are vast and transformative, they often include societal biases encoded in the human-produced datasets used for their training. This research delves into the inherent biases present in masked language models (MLMs), with a specific focus on gender biases. This study evaluated six prominent models: BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, BERT- multilingual, XLM-RoBERTa, and DistilBERT- multilingual. The methodology employed a novel dataset, bifurcated into two subsets: one containing prompts that encouraged models to generate subject pronouns in English and the other requiring models to return the probabilities of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives linked to the prompts’ gender pronouns. The analysis reveals stereotypical gender alignment of all models, with multilingual variants showing comparatively reduced biases.

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Distribution Shifts Are Bottlenecks: Extensive Evaluation for Grounding Language Models to Knowledge Bases
Yiheng Shu | Zhiwei Yu

Grounding language models (LMs) to knowledge bases (KBs) helps to obtain rich and accurate facts. However, it remains challenging because of the enormous size, complex structure, and partial observability of KBs. One reason is that current benchmarks fail to reflect robustness challenges and fairly evaluate models.This paper analyzes whether these robustness challenges arise from distribution shifts, including environmental, linguistic, and modal aspects.This affects the ability of LMs to cope with unseen schema, adapt to language variations, and perform few-shot learning. Thus, the paper proposes extensive evaluation protocols and conducts experiments to demonstrate that, despite utilizing our proposed data augmentation method, both advanced small and large language models exhibit poor robustness in these aspects. We conclude that current LMs are too fragile to navigate in complex environments due to distribution shifts. This underscores the need for future research focusing on data collection, evaluation protocols, and learning paradigms.

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AttriSage: Product Attribute Value Extraction Using Graph Neural Networks
Rohan Potta | Mallika Asthana | Siddhant Yadav | Nidhi Goyal | Sai Patnaik | Parul Jain

Extracting the attribute value of a product from the given product description is essential for ecommerce functions like product recommendations, search, and information retrieval. Therefore, understanding products in E-commerce. Greater accuracy certainly gives any retailer the edge. The burdensome aspect of this problem lies in the diversity of the products and their attributes and values. Existing solutions typically employ large language models or sequence-tagging approaches to capture the context of a given product description and extract attribute values. However, they do so with limited accuracy, which serves as the underlying motivation to explore a more comprehensive solution. Through this paper, we present a novel approach for attribute value extraction from product description leveraging graphs and graph neural networks. Our proposed method demonstrates improvements in attribute value extraction accuracy compared to the baseline sequence tagging approaches.

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HypoTermQA: Hypothetical Terms Dataset for Benchmarking Hallucination Tendency of LLMs
Cem Uluoglakci | Tugba Temizel

Hallucinations pose a significant challenge to the reliability and alignment of Large Language Models (LLMs), limiting their widespread acceptance beyond chatbot applications. Despite ongoing efforts, hallucinations remain a prevalent challenge in LLMs. The detection of hallucinations itself is also a formidable task, frequently requiring manual labeling or constrained evaluations. This paper introduces an automated scalable framework that combines benchmarking LLMs’ hallucination tendencies with efficient hallucination detection. We leverage LLMs to generate challenging tasks related to hypothetical phenomena, subsequently employing them as agents for efficient hallucination detection. The framework is domain-agnostic, allowing the use of any language model for benchmark creation or evaluation in any domain. We introduce the publicly available HypoTermQA Benchmarking Dataset, on which state-of-the-art models’ performance ranged between 3% and 11%, and evaluator agents demonstrated a 6% error rate in hallucination prediction. The proposed framework provides opportunities to test and improve LLMs. Additionally, it has the potential to generate benchmarking datasets tailored to specific domains, such as law, health, and finance.

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Arabic Synonym BERT-based Adversarial Examples for Text Classification
Norah Alshahrani | Saied Alshahrani | Esma Wali | Jeanna Matthews

Text classification systems have been proven vulnerable to adversarial text examples, modified versions of the original text examples that are often unnoticed by human eyes, yet can force text classification models to alter their classification. Often, research works quantifying the impact of adversarial text attacks have been applied only to models trained in English. In this paper, we introduce the first word-level study of adversarial attacks in Arabic. Specifically, we use a synonym (word-level) attack using a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task with a BERT model in a black-box setting to assess the robustness of the state-of-the-art text classification models to adversarial attacks in Arabic. To evaluate the grammatical and semantic similarities of the newly produced adversarial examples using our synonym BERT-based attack, we invite four human evaluators to assess and compare the produced adversarial examples with their original examples. We also study the transferability of these newly produced Arabic adversarial examples to various models and investigate the effectiveness of defense mechanisms against these adversarial examples on the BERT models. We find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to our synonym attacks than the other Deep Neural Networks (DNN) models like WordCNN and WordLSTM we trained. We also find that fine-tuned BERT models were more susceptible to transferred attacks. We, lastly, find that fine-tuned BERT models successfully regain at least 2% in accuracy after applying adversarial training as an initial defense mechanism.

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A Hypothesis-Driven Framework for the Analysis of Self-Rationalising Models
Marc Braun | Jenny Kunz

The self-rationalising capabilities of LLMs are appealing because the generated explanations can give insights into the plausibility of the predictions. However, how faithful the explanations are to the predictions is questionable, raising the need to explore the patterns behind them further.To this end, we propose a hypothesis-driven statistical framework. We use a Bayesian network to implement a hypothesis about how a task (in our example, natural language inference) is solved, and its internal states are translated into natural language with templates. Those explanations are then compared to LLM-generated free-text explanations using automatic and human evaluations. This allows us to judge how similar the LLM’s and the Bayesian network’s decision processes are. We demonstrate the usage of our framework with an example hypothesis and two realisations in Bayesian networks. The resulting models do not exhibit a strong similarity to GPT-3.5. We discuss the implications of this as well as the framework’s potential to approximate LLM decisions better in future work.

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Align before Attend: Aligning Visual and Textual Features for Multimodal Hateful Content Detection
Eftekhar Hossain | Omar Sharif | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque | Sarah Masud Preum

Multimodal hateful content detection is a challenging task that requires complex reasoning across visual and textual modalities. Therefore, creating a meaningful multimodal representation that effectively captures the interplay between visual and textual features through intermediate fusion is critical. Conventional fusion techniques are unable to attend to the modality-specific features effectively. Moreover, most studies exclusively concentrated on English and overlooked other low-resource languages. This paper proposes a context-aware attention framework for multimodal hateful content detection and assesses it for both English and non-English languages. The proposed approach incorporates an attention layer to meaningfully align the visual and textual features. This alignment enables selective focus on modality-specific features before fusing them. We evaluate the proposed approach on two benchmark hateful meme datasets, viz. MUTE (Bengali code-mixed) and MultiOFF (English). Evaluation results demonstrate our proposed approach’s effectiveness with F1-scores of 69.7% and 70.3% for the MUTE and MultiOFF datasets. The scores show approximately 2.5% and 3.2% performance improvement over the state-of-the-art systems on these datasets. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/eftekhar-hossain/Bengali-Hateful-Memes.

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Topic-guided Example Selection for Domain Adaptation in LLM-based Machine Translation
Seth Aycock | Rachel Bawden

Current machine translation (MT) systems perform well in the domains on which they were trained, but adaptation to unseen domains remains a challenge. Rather than fine-tuning on domain data or modifying the architecture for training, an alternative approach exploits large language models (LLMs), which are performant across NLP tasks especially when presented with in-context examples. We focus on adapting a pre-trained LLM to a domain at inference through in-context example selection. For MT, examples are usually randomly selected from a development set. Some more recent methods though select using the more intuitive basis of test source similarity. We employ topic models to select examples based on abstract semantic relationships below the level of a domain. We test the relevance of these statistical models and use them to select informative examples even for out-of-domain inputs, experimenting on 7 diverse domains and 11 language pairs of differing resourcedness. Our method outperforms baselines on challenging multilingual out-of-domain tests, though it does not match performance with strong baselines for the in-language setting. We find that adding few-shot examples and related keywords consistently improves translation quality, that example diversity must be balanced with source similarity, and that our pipeline is overly restrictive for example selection when a targeted development set is available.

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Reforging : A Method for Constructing a Linguistically Valid Japanese CCG Treebank
Asa Tomita | Hitomi Yanaka | Daisuke Bekki

The linguistic validity of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) parsing results relies heavily on treebanks for training and evaluation, so the treebank construction is crucial. Yet the current Japanese CCG treebank is known to have inaccuracies in its analyses of Japanese syntactic structures, including passive and causative constructions. While ABCTreebank, a treebank for ABC grammar, has been made to improve the analysis, particularly of argument structures, it lacks the detailed syntactic features required for Japanese CCG. In contrast, the Japanese CCG parser, lightblue, efficiently provides detailed syntactic features, but it does not accurately capture argument structures. We propose a method to generate a linguistically valid Japanese CCG treebank with detailed information by combining the strengths of ABCTreebank and lightblue. We develop an algorithm that filters lightblue’s lexical items using ABCTreebank, effectively converting lightblue output into a linguistically valid CCG treebank. To evaluate our treebank, we manually evaluate CCG syntactic structures and semantic representations and analyze conversion rates.

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Thesis Proposal: Detecting Agency Attribution
Igor Ryazanov | Johanna Björklund

We explore computational methods for perceived agency attribution in natural language data. We consider ‘agency’ as the freedom and capacity to act, and the corresponding Natural Language Processing (NLP) task involves automatically detecting attributions of agency to entities in text. Our theoretical framework draws on semantic frame analysis, role labelling and related techniques. In initial experiments, we focus on the perceived agency of AI systems. To achieve this, we analyse a dataset of English-language news coverage of AI-related topics, published within one year surrounding the release of the Large Language Model-based service ChatGPT, a milestone in the general public’s awareness of AI. Building on this, we propose a schema to annotate a dataset for agency attribution and formulate additional research questions to answer by applying NLP models.

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A Thesis Proposal ClaimInspector Framework: A Hybrid Approach to Data Annotation using Fact-Checked Claims and LLMs
Basak Bozkurt

This thesis explores the challenges and limitations encountered in automated fact-checking processes, with a specific emphasis on data annotation in the context of misinformation. Despite the widespread presence of misinformation in multiple formats and across various channels, current efforts concentrate narrowly on textual claims sourced mainly from Twitter, resulting in datasets with considerably limited scope. Furthermore, the absence of automated control measures, coupled with the reliance on human annotation, which is very limited, increases the risk of noisy data within these datasets. This thesis proposal examines the existing methods, elucidates their limitations and explores the potential integration of claim detection subtasks and Large Language Models to mitigate these issues. It introduces ClaimInspector, a novel framework designed for a systemic collection of multimodal data from the internet. By implementing this framework, this thesis will propose a dataset comprising fact-checks alongside the corresponding claims made by politicians. Overall, this thesis aims to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of annotation processes, thereby contributing to automated fact-checking efforts.

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Large Language Models for Mathematical Reasoning: Progresses and Challenges
Janice Ahn | Rishu Verma | Renze Lou | Di Liu | Rui Zhang | Wenpeng Yin

Mathematical reasoning serves as a cornerstone for assessing the fundamental cognitive capabilities of human intelligence. In recent times, there has been a notable surge in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) geared towards the automated resolution of mathematical problems. However, the landscape of mathematical problem types is vast and varied, with LLM-oriented techniques undergoing evaluation across diverse datasets and settings. This diversity makes it challenging to discern the true advancements and obstacles within this burgeoning field. This survey endeavors to address four pivotal dimensions: i) a comprehensive exploration of the various mathematical problems and their corresponding datasets that have been investigated; ii) an examination of the spectrum of LLM-oriented techniques that have been proposed for mathematical problem-solving; iii) an overview of factors and concerns affecting LLMs in solving math; and iv) an elucidation of the persisting challenges within this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this survey stands as one of the first extensive examinations of the landscape of LLMs in the realm of mathematics, providing a holistic perspective on the current state, accomplishments, and future challenges in this rapidly evolving field.

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Representation and Generation of Machine Learning Test Functions
Souha Hassine | Steven Wilson

Writing tests for machine learning (ML) code is a crucial step towards ensuring the correctness and reliability of ML software. At the same time, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted at a rapid pace for various code generation tasks, making it a natural choice for many developers who need to write ML tests. However, the implications of using these models, and how the LLM-generated tests differ from human-written ones, are relatively unexplored. In this work, we examine the use of LLMs to extract representations of ML source code and tests in order to understand the semantic relationships between human-written test functions and LLM-generated ones, and annotate a set of LLM-generated tests for several important qualities including usefulness, documentation, and correctness. We find that programmers prefer LLM-generated tests to those selected using retrieval-based methods, and in some cases, to those written by other humans.

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The Generative AI Paradox in Evaluation: “What It Can Solve, It May Not Evaluate”
Juhyun Oh | Eunsu Kim | Inha Cha | Alice Oh

This paper explores the assumption that Large Language Models (LLMs) skilled in generation tasks are equally adept as evaluators. We assess the performance of three LLMs and one open-source LM in Question-Answering (QA) and evaluation tasks using the TriviaQA (Joshi et al., 2017) dataset. Results indicate a significant disparity, with LLMs exhibiting lower performance in evaluation tasks compared to generation tasks. Intriguingly, we discover instances of unfaithful evaluation where models accurately evaluate answers in areas where they lack competence, underscoring the need to examine the faithfulness and trustworthiness of LLMs as evaluators. This study contributes to the understanding of “the Generative AI Paradox” (West et al., 2023), highlighting a need to explore the correlation between generative excellence and evaluation proficiency, and the necessity to scrutinize the faithfulness aspect in model evaluations.

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Generative Data Augmentation using LLMs improves Distributional Robustness in Question Answering
Arijit Chowdhury | Aman Chadha

Robustness in Natural Language Processing continues to be a pertinent issue, where state of the art models under-perform under naturally shifted distributions. In the context of Question Answering, work on domain adaptation methods continues to be a growing body of research. However, very little attention has been given to the notion of domain generalization under natural distribution shifts, where the target domain is unknown. With drastic improvements in the quality and access to generative models, we answer the question: How do generated datasets influence the performance of QA models under natural distribution shifts? We perform experiments on 4 different datasets under varying amounts of distribution shift, and analyze how “in-the-wild” generation can help achieve domain generalization. We take a two-step generation approach, generating both contexts and QA pairs to augment existing datasets. Through our experiments, we demonstrate how augmenting reading comprehension datasets with generated data leads to better robustness towards natural distribution shifts.

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Japanese-English Sentence Translation Exercises Dataset for Automatic Grading
Naoki Miura | Hiroaki Funayama | Seiya Kikuchi | Yuichiroh Matsubayashi | Yuya Iwase | Kentaro Inui

This paper proposes the task of automatic assessment of Sentence Translation Exercises (STEs), that have been used in the early stage of L2 language learning.We formalize the task as grading student responses for each rubric criterion pre-specified by the educators.We then create a dataset for STE between Japanese and English including 21 questions, along with a total of 3,498 student responses (167 on average).The answer responses were collected from students and crowd workers.Using this dataset, we demonstrate the performance of baselines including a finetuned BERT model and GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning. Experimental results showed that the baseline model with fine-tuned BERT was able to classify correct responses with approximately 90% in F1, but only less than 80% for incorrect responses. Furthermore, GPT-3.5 with few-shot learning shows a poorer result than the BERT model, indicating that our newly proposed task presents a challenging issue, even for the state-of-the-art large language model.

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The Impact of Integration Step on Integrated Gradients
Masahiro Makino | Yuya Asazuma | Shota Sasaki | Jun Suzuki

Integrated Gradients (IG) serve as a potent tool for explaining the internal structure of a language model. The calculation of IG requires numerical integration, wherein the number of steps serves as a critical hyperparameter. The step count can drastically alter the results, inducing considerable errors in interpretability. To scrutinize the effect of step variation on IG, we measured the difference between theoretical and observed IG totals for each step amount.Our findings indicate that the ideal number of steps to maintain minimal error varies from instance to instance. Consequently, we advocate for customizing the step count for each instance. Our study is the first to quantitatively analyze the variation of IG values with the number of steps.

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GesNavi: Gesture-guided Outdoor Vision-and-Language Navigation
Aman Jain | Teruhisa Misu | Kentaro Yamada | Hitomi Yanaka

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task involves navigating mobility using linguistic commands and has application in developing interfaces for autonomous mobility. In reality, natural human communication also encompasses non-verbal cues like hand gestures and gaze. These gesture-guided instructions have been explored in Human-Robot Interaction systems for effective interaction, particularly in object-referring expressions. However, a notable gap exists in tackling gesture-based demonstrative expressions in outdoor VLN task. To address this, we introduce a novel dataset for gesture-guided outdoor VLN instructions with demonstrative expressions, designed with a focus on complex instructions requiring multi-hop reasoning between the multiple input modalities. In addition, our work also includes a comprehensive analysis of the collected data and a comparative evaluation against the existing datasets.

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Can docstring reformulation with an LLM improve code generation?
Nicola Dainese | Alexander Ilin | Pekka Marttinen

Generating code is an important application of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the task of function completion is one of the core open challenges in this context. Existing approaches focus on either training, fine-tuning or prompting LLMs to generate better outputs given the same input. We propose a novel and complementary approach: to optimize part of the input, the docstring (summary of a function’s purpose and usage), via reformulation with an LLM, in order to improve code generation. We develop two baseline methods for optimizing code generation via docstring reformulation and test them on the original HumanEval benchmark and multiple curated variants which are made more challenging by realistically worsening the docstrings. Our results show that, when operating on docstrings reformulated by an LLM instead of the original (or worsened) inputs, the performance of a number of open-source LLMs does not change significantlyThis finding demonstrates an unexpected robustness of current open-source LLMs to the details of the docstrings. We conclude by examining a series of questions, accompanied by in-depth analyses, pertaining to the sensitivity of current open-source LLMs to the details in the docstrings, the potential for improvement via docstring reformulation and the limitations of the methods employed in this work.

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Benchmarking Diffusion Models for Machine Translation
Yunus Demirag | Danni Liu | Jan Niehues

Diffusion models have recently shown great potential on many generative tasks.In this work, we explore diffusion models for machine translation (MT).We adapt two prominent diffusion-based text generation models, Diffusion-LM and DiffuSeq, to perform machine translation.As the diffusion models generate non-autoregressively (NAR),we draw parallels to NAR machine translation models.With a comparison to conventional Transformer-based translation models, as well as to the Levenshtein Transformer,an established NAR MT model,we show that the multimodality problem that limits NAR machine translation performance is also a challenge to diffusion models.We demonstrate that knowledge distillation from an autoregressive model improves the performance of diffusion-based MT.A thorough analysis on the translation quality of inputs of different lengths shows that the diffusion models struggle more on long-range dependencies than other models.

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Forged-GAN-BERT: Authorship Attribution for LLM-Generated Forged Novels
Kanishka Silva | Ingo Frommholz | Burcu Can | Fred Blain | Raheem Sarwar | Laura Ugolini

The advancement of generative Large Language Models (LLMs), capable of producing human-like texts, introduces challenges related to the authenticity of the text documents. This requires exploring potential forgery scenarios within the context of authorship attribution, especially in the literary domain. Particularly,two aspects of doubted authorship may arise in novels, as a novel may be imposed by a renowned author or include a copied writing style of a well-known novel. To address these concerns, we introduce Forged-GAN-BERT, a modified GANBERT-based model to improve the classification of forged novels in two data-augmentation aspects: via the Forged Novels Generator (i.e., ChatGPT) and the generator in GAN. Compared to other transformer-based models, the proposed Forged-GAN-BERT model demonstrates an improved performance with F1 scores of 0.97 and 0.71 for identifying forged novels in single-author and multi-author classification settings. Additionally, we explore different prompt categories for generating the forged novels to analyse the quality of the generated texts using different similarity distance measures, including ROUGE-1, Jaccard Similarity, Overlap Confident, and Cosine Similarity.

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Thesis Proposal: Detecting Empathy Using Multimodal Language Model
Md Rakibul Hasan | Md Zakir Hossain | Aneesh Krishna | Shafin Rahman | Tom Gedeon

Empathy is crucial in numerous social interactions, including human-robot, patient-doctor, teacher-student, and customer-call centre conversations. Despite its importance, empathy detection in videos continues to be a challenging task because of the subjective nature of empathy and often remains under-explored. Existing studies have relied on scripted or semi-scripted interactions in text-, audio-, or video-only settings that fail to capture the complexities and nuances of real-life interactions. This PhD research aims to fill these gaps by developing a multimodal language model (MMLM) that detects empathy in audiovisual data. In addition to leveraging existing datasets, the proposed study involves collecting real-life interaction video and audio. This study will leverage optimisation techniques like neural architecture search to deliver an optimised small-scale MMLM. Successful implementation of this project has significant implications in enhancing the quality of social interactions as it enables real-time measurement of empathy and thus provides potential avenues for training for better empathy in interactions.

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Toward Sentiment Aware Semantic Change Analysis
Roksana Goworek | Haim Dubossarsky

This student paper explores the potential of augmenting computational models of semantic change with sentiment information. It tests the efficacy of this approach on the English SemEval of Lexical Semantic Change and its associated historical corpora. We first establish the feasibility of our approach by demonstrating that existing models extract reliable sentiment information from historical corpora, and then validate that words that underwent semantic change also show greater sentiment change in comparison to historically stable words. We then integrate sentiment information into standard models of semantic change for individual words, and test if this can improve the overall performance of the latter, showing mixed results. This research contributes to our understanding of language change by providing the first attempt to enrich standard models of semantic change with additional information. It taps into the multifaceted nature of language change, that should not be reduced only to binary or scalar report of change, but adds additional dimensions to this change, sentiment being only one of these. As such, this student paper suggests novel directions for future work in integrating additional, more nuanced information of change and interpretation for finer-grained semantic change analysis.

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Dynamic Task-Oriented Dialogue: A Comparative Study of Llama-2 and Bert in Slot Value Generation
Tiziano Labruna | Sofia Brenna | Bernardo Magnini

Recent advancements in instruction-based language models have demonstrated exceptional performance across various natural language processing tasks. We present a comprehensive analysis of the performance of two open-source language models, BERT and Llama-2, in the context of dynamic task-oriented dialogues. Focusing on the Restaurant domain and utilizing the MultiWOZ 2.4 dataset, our investigation centers on the models’ ability to generate predictions for masked slot values within text. The dynamic aspect is introduced through simulated domain changes, mirroring real-world scenarios where new slot values are incrementally added to a domain over time.This study contributes to the understanding of instruction-based models’ effectiveness in dynamic natural language understanding tasks when compared to traditional language models and emphasizes the significance of open-source, reproducible models in advancing research within the academic community.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts

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Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Tutorial Abstracts
Mohsen Mesgar | Sharid Loáiciga

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Computational modeling of semantic change
Pierluigi Cassotti | Francesco Periti | Stefano de Pascale | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi

Languages change constantly over time, influenced by social, technological, cultural and political factors that affect how people express themselves. In particular, words can undergo the process of semantic change, which can be subtle and significantly impact the interpretation of texts. For example, the word terrific used to mean ‘causing terror’ and was as such synonymous to terrifying. Nowadays, speakers use the word in the sense of ‘excessive’ and even ‘amazing’. In Historical Linguistics, tools and methods have been developed to analyse this phenomenon, including systematic categorisations of the types of change, the causes and the mechanisms underlying the different types of change. However, traditional linguistic methods, while informative, are often based on small, carefully curated samples. Thanks to the availability of both large diachronic corpora, the computational means to model word meaning unsupervised, and evaluation benchmarks, we are seeing an increasing interest in the computational modelling of semantic change. This is evidenced by the increasing number of publications in this new domain as well as the organisation of initiatives and events related to this topic, such as four editions of the International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change LChange1, and several evaluation campaigns (Schlechtweg et al., 2020a; Basile et al., 2020b; Kutuzov et al.; Zamora-Reina et al., 2022).

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Item Response Theory for Natural Language Processing
John P. Lalor | Pedro Rodriguez | João Sedoc | Jose Hernandez-Orallo

This tutorial will introduce the NLP community to Item Response Theory (IRT; Baker 2001). IRT is a method from the field of psychometrics for model and dataset assessment. IRT has been used for decades to build test sets for human subjects and estimate latent characteristics of dataset examples. Recently, there has been an uptick in work applying IRT to tasks in NLP. It is our goal to introduce the wider NLP community to IRT and show its benefits for a number of NLP tasks. From this tutorial, we hope to encourage wider adoption of IRT among NLP researchers.

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Language + Molecules
Carl Edwards | Qingyun Wang | Heng Ji

Climate change, access to food and water, pandemics–the world faces an enormous number of problems in the coming decades on scales of complexity never-before-seen. To address these issues, development of scientific solutions which are scalable, flexible, and inexpensive are critical. Over the last couple years, considerable interest has arisen for applying natural language-driven solutions to these problems. Particularly, the chemistry field is posed to be substantially accelerated by language+molecule models. This tutorial is designed to provide an introduction to this area of research. It requires no knowledge outside mainstream NLP, and it will enable participants to begin exploring relevant research. By discussing cutting-edge work, we will highlight the key roles language can fill for 1) abstract, compositional control of generative models, 2) bridging different biochemical modalities, 3) planning experimental procedures, and 4) broadening access to computational approaches. Beyond this, language models have also seen considerable success when applied to proteins or molecule structures, which can be considered as ‘exotic’ languages, and computational linguistics researchers’ expertise can be highly valuable for these impactful, possibly life-saving tasks.

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Transformer-specific Interpretability
Hosein Mohebbi | Jaap Jumelet | Michael Hanna | Afra Alishahi | Willem Zuidema

Transformers have emerged as dominant play- ers in various scientific fields, especially NLP. However, their inner workings, like many other neural networks, remain opaque. In spite of the widespread use of model-agnostic interpretability techniques, including gradient-based and occlusion-based, their shortcomings are becoming increasingly apparent for Transformer interpretation, making the field of interpretability more demanding today. In this tutorial, we will present Transformer-specific interpretability methods, a new trending approach, that make use of specific features of the Transformer architecture and are deemed more promising for understanding Transformer-based models. We start by discussing the potential pitfalls and misleading results model-agnostic approaches may produce when interpreting Transformers. Next, we discuss Transformer-specific methods, including those designed to quantify context- mixing interactions among all input pairs (as the fundamental property of the Transformer architecture) and those that combine causal methods with low-level Transformer analysis to identify particular subnetworks within a model that are responsible for specific tasks. By the end of the tutorial, we hope participants will understand the advantages (as well as current limitations) of Transformer-specific interpretability methods, along with how these can be applied to their own research.

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LLMs for Low Resource Languages in Multilingual, Multimodal and Dialectal Settings
Firoj Alam | Shammur Absar Chowdhury | Sabri Boughorbel | Maram Hasanain

The recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be attributed to the remarkable performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) across a spectrum of research areas (e.g., machine translation, question-answering, automatic speech recognition, text-to-speech generation) and application domains (e.g., business, law, healthcare, education, and psychology). The success of these LLMs largely de- pends on specific training techniques, most notably instruction tuning, RLHF, and subsequent prompting to achieve the desired output. As the development of such LLMs continues to increase in both closed and open settings, evaluation has become crucial for understanding their generalization capabilities across different tasks, modalities, languages, and dialects. This evaluation process is tightly coupled with prompting, which plays a key role in obtain- ing better outputs. There has been attempts to evaluate such models focusing on diverse tasks, languages, and dialects, which suggests that the capabilities of LLMs are still limited to medium-to-low-resource languages due to the lack of representative datasets. The tutorial offers an overview of this emerging research area. We explore the capabilities of LLMs in terms of their performance, zero- and few-shot settings, fine-tuning, instructions tuning, and close vs. open models with a special emphasis on low-resource settings. In addition to LLMs for standard NLP tasks, we will focus on speech and multimodality.
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Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2024
Yvette Graham | Matthew Purver

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Chem-FINESE: Validating Fine-Grained Few-shot Entity Extraction through Text Reconstruction
Qingyun Wang | Zixuan Zhang | Hongxiang Li | Xuan Liu | Jiawei Han | Huimin Zhao | Heng Ji

Fine-grained few-shot entity extraction in the chemical domain faces two unique challenges. First, compared with entity extraction tasks in the general domain, sentences from chemical papers usually contain more entities. Moreover, entity extraction models usually have difficulty extracting entities of long-tailed types. In this paper, we propose Chem-FINESE, a novel sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) based few-shot entity extraction approach, to address these two challenges. Our Chem-FINESE has two components: a seq2seq entity extractor to extract named entities from the input sentence and a seq2seq self-validation module to reconstruct the original input sentence from extracted entities. Inspired by the fact that a good entity extraction system needs to extract entities faithfully, our new self-validation module leverages entity extraction results to reconstruct the original input sentence. Besides, we design a new contrastive loss to reduce excessive copying during the extraction process. Finally, we release ChemNER+, a new fine-grained chemical entity extraction dataset that is annotated by domain experts with the ChemNER schema. Experiments in few-shot settings with both ChemNER+ and CHEMET datasets show that our newly proposed framework has contributed up to 8.26% and 6.84% absolute F1-score gains respectively.

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GPTs Are Multilingual Annotators for Sequence Generation Tasks
Juhwan Choi | Eunju Lee | Kyohoon Jin | YoungBin Kim

Data annotation is an essential step for constructing new datasets. However, the conventional approach of data annotation through crowdsourcing is both time-consuming and expensive. In addition, the complexity of this process increases when dealing with low-resource languages owing to the difference in the language pool of crowdworkers. To address these issues, this study proposes an autonomous annotation method by utilizing large language models, which have been recently demonstrated to exhibit remarkable performance. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed method is not just cost-efficient but also applicable for low-resource language annotation. Additionally, we constructed an image captioning dataset using our approach and are committed to open this dataset for future study. We have opened our source code for further study and reproducibility.

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Next Visit Diagnosis Prediction via Medical Code-Centric Multimodal Contrastive EHR Modelling with Hierarchical Regularisation
Heejoon Koo

Predicting next visit diagnosis using Electronic Health Records (EHR) is an essential task in healthcare, critical for devising proactive future plans for both healthcare providers and patients. Nonetheless, many preceding studies have not sufficiently addressed the heterogeneous and hierarchical characteristics inherent in EHR data, inevitably leading to sub-optimal performance. To this end, we propose NECHO, a novel medical code-centric multimodal contrastive EHR learning framework with hierarchical regularisation. First, we integrate multifaceted information encompassing medical codes, demographics, and clinical notes using a tailored network design and a pair of bimodal contrastive losses, all of which pivot around a medical codes representation. We also regularise modality-specific encoders using a parental level information in medical ontology to learn hierarchical structure of EHR data. A series of experiments on MIMIC-III data demonstrates effectiveness of our approach.

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FlexiQA: Leveraging LLM’s Evaluation Capabilities for Flexible Knowledge Selection in Open-domain Question Answering
Yuhan Chen | Shuqi Li | Rui Yan

Nowadays, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to be a powerful knowledge generator of generate-then-read paradigm for open-domain question answering (ODQA). However this new paradigm mainly suffers from the “hallucination” and struggles to handle time-sensitive issue because of its expensive knowledge update costs. On the other hand, retrieve-then-read, as a traditional paradigm, is more limited by the relevance of acquired knowledge to the given question. In order to combine the strengths of both paradigms, and overcome their respective shortcomings, we design a new pipeline called “FlexiQA”, in which we utilize the diverse evaluation capabilities of LLMs to select knowledge effectively and flexibly. First, given a question, we prompt a LLM as a discriminator to identify whether it is time-sensitive. For time-sensitive questions, we follow the retrieve-then-read paradigm to obtain the answer. For the non time-sensitive questions, we further prompt the LLM as an evaluator to select a better document from two perspectives: factuality and relevance. Based on the selected document, we leverage a reader to get the final answer. We conduct extensive experiments on three widely-used ODQA benchmarks, the experimental results fully confirm the effectiveness of our approach.

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Hyper-BTS Dataset: Scalability and Enhanced Analysis of Back TranScription (BTS) for ASR Post-Processing
Chanjun Park | Jaehyung Seo | Seolhwa Lee | Junyoung Son | Hyeonseok Moon | Sugyeong Eo | Chanhee Lee | Heuiseok Lim

The recent advancements in the realm of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) post-processing have been primarily driven by sequence-to-sequence paradigms. Despite their effectiveness, these methods often demand substantial amounts of data, necessitating the expensive recruitment of phonetic transcription experts to rectify the erroneous outputs of ASR systems, thereby creating the desired training data. Back TranScription (BTS) alleviates this issue by generating ASR inputs from clean text via a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system. While initial studies on BTS exhibited promise, they were constrained by a limited dataset of just 200,000 sentence pairs, leaving the scalability of this method in question. In this study, we delve into the potential scalability of BTS. We introduce the “Hyper-BTS” dataset, a corpus approximately five times larger than that utilized in prior research. Additionally, we present innovative criteria for categorizing error types within ASR post-processing. This not only facilitates a more comprehensive qualitative analysis, which was absent in preceding studies, but also enhances the understanding of ASR error patterns. Our empirical results, both quantitative and qualitative, suggest that the enlarged scale of the Hyper-BTS dataset sufficiently addresses a vast majority of the ASR error categories. We make the Hyper-BTS dataset publicly available.

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ParrotTTS: Text-to-speech synthesis exploiting disentangled self-supervised representations
Neil Shah | Saiteja Kosgi | Vishal Tambrahalli | Neha S | Anil Nelakanti | Vineet Gandhi

We present ParrotTTS, a modularized text-to-speech synthesis model leveraging disentangled self-supervised speech representations. It can train a multi-speaker variant effectively using transcripts from a single speaker. ParrotTTS adapts to a new language in low resource setup and generalizes to languages not seen while training the self-supervised backbone. Moreover, without training on bilingual or parallel examples, ParrotTTS can transfer voices across languages while preserving the speaker-specific characteristics, e.g., synthesizing fluent Hindi speech using a French speaker’s voice and accent. We present extensive results in monolingual and multi-lingual scenarios. ParrotTTS outperforms state-of-the-art multi-lingual text-to-speech (TTS) models using only a fraction of paired data as latter. Speech samples from ParrotTTS and code can be found at https://parrot-tts.github.io/tts/

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NavHint: Vision and Language Navigation Agent with a Hint Generator
Yue Zhang | Quan Guo | Parisa Kordjamshidi

The existing work on vision and language navigation mainly relies on navigation-related losses to establish the connection between vision and language modalities, neglecting aspects of helping the navigation agent build a deep understanding of the visual environment.In our work, we provide indirect supervision to the navigation agent through a hint generator that provides detailed visual descriptions.The hint generator assists the navigation agent in developing a global understanding of the visual environment. It directs the agent’s attention toward related navigation details, including the relevant sub-instruction, potential challenges in recognition and ambiguities in grounding, and the targeted viewpoint description. To train the hint generator, we construct a synthetic dataset based on landmarks in the instructions and visible and distinctive objects in the visual environment.We evaluate our method on the R2R and R4R datasets and achieve state-of-the-art on several metrics. The experimental results demonstrate that generating hints not only enhances the navigation performance but also helps improve the agent’s interpretability.

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Text or Image? What is More Important in Cross-Domain Generalization Capabilities of Hate Meme Detection Models?
Piush Aggarwal | Jawar Mehrabanian | Weigang Huang | Özge Alacam | Torsten Zesch

This paper delves into the formidable challenge of cross-domain generalization in multimodal hate meme detection, presenting compelling findings. We provide evidence supporting the hypothesis that only the textual component of hateful memes enables the multimodal classifier to generalize across different domains, while the image component proves highly sensitive to a specific training dataset. The evidence includes demonstrations showing that hate-text classifiers perform similarly to hate-meme classifiers in a zero-shot setting. Simultaneously, the introduction of captions generated from images of memes to the hate-meme classifier worsens performance by an average F1 of 0.02. Through blackbox explanations, we identify a substantial contribution of the text modality (average of 83%), which diminishes with the introduction of meme’s image captions (52%). Additionally, our evaluation on a newly created confounder dataset reveals higher performance on text confounders as compared to image confounders with average ∆F1 of 0.18.

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Where are we Still Split on Tokenization?
Rob Goot

Many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks are labeled on the token level, forthese tasks, the first step is to identify the tokens (tokenization). Becausethis step is often considered to be a solved problem, gold tokenization iscommonly assumed. In this paper, we propose an efficient method fortokenization with subword-based language models, and reflect on the status ofperformance on the tokenization task by evaluating on 122 languages in 20different scripts. We show that our proposed model performs on par with thestate-of-the-art, and that tokenization performance is mainly dependent on theamount and consistency of annotated data. We conclude that besidesinconsistencies in the data and exceptional cases the task can be consideredsolved for Latin languages for in-dataset settings (>99.5 F1). However,performance is 0.75 F1 point lower on average for datasets in other scripts andperformance deteriorates in cross-dataset setups.

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A Methodology for Generative Spelling Correction via Natural Spelling Errors Emulation across Multiple Domains and Languages
Nikita Martynov | Mark Baushenko | Anastasia Kozlova | Katerina Kolomeytseva | Aleksandr Abramov | Alena Fenogenova

Large language models excel in text generation and generalization, however they face challenges in text editing tasks, especially in correcting spelling errors and mistyping.In this paper, we present a methodology for generative spelling correction (SC), tested on English and Russian languages and potentially can be extended to any language with minor changes. Our research mainly focuses on exploring natural spelling errors and mistyping in texts and studying how those errors can be emulated in correct sentences to enrich generative models’ pre-train procedure effectively. We investigate the effects of emulations in various text domains and examine two spelling corruption techniques: 1) first one mimics human behavior when making a mistake through leveraging statistics of errors from a particular dataset, and 2) second adds the most common spelling errors, keyboard miss clicks, and some heuristics within the texts.We conducted experiments employing various corruption strategies, models’ architectures, and sizes in the pre-training and fine-tuning stages and evaluated the models using single-domain and multi-domain test sets. As a practical outcome of our work, we introduce SAGE (Spell checking via Augmentation and Generative distribution Emulation).

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How Does In-Context Learning Help Prompt Tuning?
Simeng Sun | Yang Liu | Dan Iter | Chenguang Zhu | Mohit Iyyer

Fine-tuning large language models is becoming ever more impractical due to their rapidly-growing scale. This motivates the use of parameter-efficient adaptation methods such as prompt tuning (PT), which adds a small number of tunable embeddings to an otherwise frozen model, and in-context learning (ICL), in which demonstrations of the task are provided to the model in natural language without any additional training. Recently, (CITATION) propose “instruction prompt tuning” (IPT), which combines PT with ICL by concatenating a natural language demonstration with learned prompt embeddings. While all of these methods have proven effective on different tasks, how they interact with each other remains unexplored. In this paper, we empirically study when and how in-context examples improve prompt tuning by measuring the effectiveness of ICL, PT, and IPT on five text generation tasks with multiple base language models. We observe that (1) IPT does not always outperform PT, and in fact requires the in-context demonstration to be semantically similar to the test input to yield improvements; (2) PT is unstable and exhibits high variance, but combining PT and ICL (into IPT) consistently reduces variance across all five tasks; and(3) prompts learned for a specific source task via PT exhibit positive transfer when paired with in-context examples of a different target task. Our results offer actionable insights on choosing a suitable parameter-efficient adaptation method for a given task.

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Large Language Models for Psycholinguistic Plausibility Pretesting
Samuel Amouyal | Aya Meltzer-Asscher | Jonathan Berant

In psycholinguistics, the creation of controlled materials is crucial to ensure that research outcomes are solely attributed to the intended manipulations and not influenced by extraneous factors. To achieve this, psycholinguists typically pretest linguistic materials, where a common pretest is to solicit plausibility judgments from human evaluators on specific sentences. In this work, we investigate whether Language Models (LMs) can be used to generate these plausibility judgements. We investigate a wide range of LMs across multiple linguistic structures and evaluate whether their plausibility judgements correlate with human judgements. We find that GPT-4 plausibility judgements highly correlate with human judgements across the structures we examine, whereas other LMs correlate well with humans on commonly used syntactic structures. We then test whether this correlation implies that LMs can be used instead of humans for pretesting. We find that when coarse-grained plausibility judgements are needed, this works well, but when fine-grained judgements are necessary, even GPT-4 does not provide satisfactory discriminative power.

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Modeling Aspect Sentiment Coherency via Local Sentiment Aggregation
Heng Yang | Ke Li

Aspect sentiment coherency is an intriguing yet underexplored topic in the field of aspect-based sentiment classification. This concept reflects the common pattern where adjacent aspects often share similar sentiments. Despite its prevalence, current studies have not fully recognized the potential of modeling aspect sentiment coherency, including its implications in adversarial defense. To model aspect sentiment coherency, we propose a novel local sentiment aggregation (LSA) paradigm based on constructing a differential-weighted sentiment aggregation window. We have rigorously evaluated our model through experiments, and the results affirm the proficiency of LSA in terms of aspect coherency prediction and aspect sentiment classification. For instance, it outperforms existing models and achieves state-of-the-art sentiment classification performance across five public datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate the promising ability of LSA in ABSC adversarial defense, thanks to its sentiment coherency modeling. To encourage further exploration and application of this concept, we have made our code publicly accessible. This will provide researchers with a valuable tool to delve into sentiment coherency modeling in future research.

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An Examination of the Robustness of Reference-Free Image Captioning Evaluation Metrics
Saba Ahmadi | Aishwarya Agrawal

Recently, reference-free metrics such as CLIPScore (Hessel et al., 2021), UMIC (Lee et al., 2021), and PAC-S (Sarto et al., 2023) have been proposed for automatic reference-free evaluation of image captions. Our focus lies in evaluating the robustness of these metrics in scenarios that require distinguishing between two captions with high lexical overlap but very different meanings. Our findings reveal that despite their high correlation with human judgments, CLIPScore, UMIC, and PAC-S struggle to identify fine-grained errors. While all metrics exhibit strong sensitivity to visual grounding errors, their sensitivity to caption implausibility errors is limited. Furthermore, we found that all metrics are sensitive to variations in the size of image-relevant objects mentioned in the caption, while CLIPScore and PAC-S are also sensitive to the number of mentions of image-relevant objects in the caption. Regarding linguistic aspects of a caption, all metrics show weak comprehension of negation, and CLIPScore and PAC-S are insensitive to the structure of the caption to a great extent. We hope our findings will guide further improvements in reference-free evaluation of image captioning.

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Barriers to Effective Evaluation of Simultaneous Interpretation
Shira Wein | Te I | Colin Cherry | Juraj Juraska | Dirk Padfield | Wolfgang Macherey

Simultaneous interpretation is an especially challenging form of translation because it requires converting speech from one language to another in real-time. Though prior work has relied on out-of-the-box machine translation metrics to evaluate interpretation data, we hypothesize that strategies common in high-quality human interpretations, such as summarization, may not be handled well by standard machine translation metrics. In this work, we examine both qualitatively and quantitatively four potential barriers to evaluation of interpretation: disfluency, summarization, paraphrasing, and segmentation. Our experiments reveal that, while some machine translation metrics correlate fairly well with human judgments of interpretation quality, much work is still needed to account for strategies of interpretation during evaluation. As a first step to address this, we develop a fine-tuned model for interpretation evaluation, and achieve better correlation with human judgments than the state-of-the-art machine translation metrics.

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Inconsistent dialogue responses and how to recover from them
Mian Zhang | Lifeng Jin | Linfeng Song | Haitao Mi | Dong Yu

One critical issue for chat systems is to stay consistent about preferences, opinions, beliefs and facts of itself, which has been shown a difficult problem. In this work, we study methods to assess and bolster utterance consistency of chat systems. A dataset is first developed for studying the inconsistencies, where inconsistent dialogue responses, explanations of the inconsistencies, and recovery utterances are authored by annotators. This covers the life span of inconsistencies, namely introduction, understanding, and resolution. Building on this, we introduce a set of tasks centered on dialogue consistency, specifically focused on its detection and resolution. Our experimental findings indicate that our dataset significantly helps the progress in identifying and resolving conversational inconsistencies, and current popular large language models like ChatGPT which are good at resolving inconsistencies however still struggle with detection.

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MUG: Interactive Multimodal Grounding on User Interfaces
Tao Li | Gang Li | Jingjie Zheng | Purple Wang | Yang Li

We present MUG, a novel interactive task for multimodal grounding where a user and an agent work collaboratively on an interface screen. Prior works modeled multimodal UI grounding in one round: the user gives a command and the agent responds to the command. Yet, in a realistic scenario, a user command can be ambiguous when the target action is inherently difficult to articulate in natural language. MUG allows multiple rounds of interactions such that upon seeing the agent responses, the user can give further commands for the agent to refine or even correct its actions. Such interaction is critical for improving grounding performances in real-world use cases. To investigate the problem, we create a new dataset that consists of 77,820 sequences of human user-agent interaction on mobile interfaces in which 20% involves multiple rounds of interactions. To establish benchmark, we experiment with a range of modeling variants and evaluation strategies, including both offline and online evaluation—the online strategy consists of both human evaluation and automatic with simulators. Our experiments show that iterative interaction significantly improves the absolute task completion by 18% over the entire test set and 31% over the challenging split. Our results lay the foundation for further investigation of the problem.

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PRILoRA: Pruned and Rank-Increasing Low-Rank Adaptation
Nadav Benedek | Lior Wolf

With the proliferation of large pre-trained language models (PLMs), fine-tuning all model parameters becomes increasingly inefficient, particularly when dealing with numerous downstream tasks that entail substantial training and storage costs. Several approaches aimed at achieving parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have been proposed. Among them, Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) stands out as an archetypal method, incorporating trainable rank decomposition matrices into each target module. Nevertheless, LoRA does not consider the varying importance of each layer. To address these challenges, we introduce PRILoRA, which linearly allocates a different rank for each layer, in an increasing manner, and performs pruning throughout the training process, considering both the temporary magnitude of weights and the accumulated statistics of the input to any given layer. We validate the effectiveness of PRILoRA through extensive experiments on eight GLUE benchmarks, setting a new state of the art.

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Revamping Multilingual Agreement Bidirectionally via Switched Back-translation for Multilingual Neural Machine Translation
Hongyuan Lu | Haoyang Huang | Dongdong Zhang | Furu Wei | Wai Lam

Despite the fact that multilingual agreement (MA) has shown its importance for multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT), current methodologies in the field have two shortages: (i) require parallel data between multiple language pairs, which is not always realistic and (ii) optimize the agreement in an ambiguous direction, which hampers the translation performance. We present Bidirectional Multilingual Agreement via Switched Back-translation (BMA-SBT), a novel and universal multilingual agreement framework for fine-tuning pre-trained MNMT models, which (i) exempts the need for aforementioned parallel data by using a novel method called switched BT that creates synthetic text written in another source language using the translation target and (ii) optimizes the agreement bidirectionally with the Kullback-Leibler Divergence loss. Experiments indicate that BMA-SBT clearly improves the strong baselines on the task of MNMT with three benchmarks: TED Talks, News, and Europarl. In-depth analyzes indicate that BMA-SBT brings additive improvements to the conventional BT method.

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mPLM-Sim: Better Cross-Lingual Similarity and Transfer in Multilingual Pretrained Language Models
Peiqin Lin | Chengzhi Hu | Zheyu Zhang | Andre Martins | Hinrich Schuetze

Recent multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have been shown to encode strong language-specific signals, which are not explicitly provided during pretraining. It remains an open question whether it is feasible to employ mPLMs to measure language similarity, and subsequently use the similarity results to select source languages for boosting cross-lingual transfer. To investigate this, we propose mPLM-Sim, a language similarity measure that induces the similarities across languages from mPLMs using multi-parallel corpora. Our study shows that mPLM-Sim exhibits moderately high correlations with linguistic similarity measures, such as lexicostatistics, genealogical language family, and geographical sprachbund. We also conduct a case study on languages with low correlation and observe that mPLM-Sim yields more accurate similarity results. Additionally, we find that similarity results vary across different mPLMs and different layers within an mPLM. We further investigate whether mPLM-Sim is effective for zero-shot cross-lingual transfer by conducting experiments on both low-level syntactic tasks and high-level semantic tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that mPLM-Sim is capable of selecting better source languages than linguistic measures, resulting in a 1%-2% improvement in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer performance.

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OYXOY: A Modern NLP Test Suite for Modern Greek
Konstantinos Kogkalidis | Stergios Chatzikyriakidis | Eirini Giannikouri | Vasiliki Katsouli | Christina Klironomou | Christina Koula | Dimitris Papadakis | Thelka Pasparaki | Erofili Psaltaki | Efthymia Sakellariou | Charikleia Soupiona

This paper serves as a foundational step towards the development of a linguistically motivated and technically relevant evaluation suite for Greek NLP. We initiate this endeavor by introducing four expert-verified evaluation tasks, specifically targeted at natural language inference, word sense disambiguation (through example comparison or sense selection) and metaphor detection. More than language-adapted replicas of existing tasks, we contribute two innovations which will resonate with the broader resource and evaluation community. Firstly, our inference dataset is the first of its kind, marking not just one, but rather all possible inference labels, accounting for possible shifts due to e.g. ambiguity or polysemy. Secondly, we demonstrate a cost-efficient method to obtain datasets for under-resourced languages. Using ChatGPT as a language-neutral parser, we transform the Dictionary of Standard Modern Greek into a structured format, from which we derive the other three tasks through simple projections. Alongside each task, we conduct experiments using currently available state of the art machinery. Our experimental baselines affirm the challenging nature of our tasks and highlight the need for expedited progress in order for the Greek NLP ecosystem to keep pace with contemporary mainstream research.

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A Comprehensive Evaluation of Inductive Reasoning Capabilities and Problem Solving in Large Language Models
Chen Bowen | Rune Sætre | Yusuke Miyao

Inductive reasoning is fundamental to both human and artificial intelligence. The inductive reasoning abilities of current Large Language Models (LLMs) are evaluated in this research.We argue that only considering induction of rules is too narrow and unrealistic, since inductive reasoning is usually mixed with other abilities, like rules application, results/rules validation, and updated information integration.We probed the LLMs with a set of designed symbolic tasks and found that even state-of-the-art (SotA) LLMs fail significantly, showing the inability of LLMs to perform these intuitively simple tasks.Furthermore, we found that perfect accuracy in a small-size problem does not guarantee the same accuracy in a larger-size version of the same problem, provoking the question of how we can assess the LLMs’ actual problem-solving capabilities.We also argue that Chain-of-Thought prompts help the LLMs by decomposing the problem-solving process, but the LLMs still learn limitedly.Furthermore, we reveal that few-shot examples assist LLM generalization in out-of-domain (OOD) cases, albeit limited. The LLM starts to fail when the problem deviates from the provided few-shot examples.

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Towards efficient self-supervised representation learning in speech processing
Luis Lugo | Valentin Vielzeuf

Self-supervised learning has achieved impressive results in speech processing, but current models are computationally expensive, generating environmental concerns because of their high energy consumption. Therefore, we propose an efficient self-supervised approach to address high computational costs, using a single GPU during 24 to 48 hours of pretraining. The proposed approach combines linear, convolutional, and self-attention layers with several optimizations, including dynamic batching, flash attention, mixed-precision training, gradient accumulation, and acoustic feature extraction with input preprocessing. Computational cost estimations for our proposed model represent up to two orders of magnitude improvements in computational efficiency against existing speech models.

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Improving Cross-Domain Low-Resource Text Generation through LLM Post-Editing: A Programmer-Interpreter Approach
Zhuang Li | Levon Haroutunian | Raj Tumuluri | Philip Cohen | Reza Haf

Post-editing has proven effective in improving the quality of text generated by large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 or GPT-4, particularly when direct updating of their parameters to enhance text quality is infeasible or expensive. However, relying solely on smaller language models for post-editing can limit the LLMs’ ability to generalize across domains. Moreover, the editing strategies in these methods are not optimally designed for text generation tasks. To address these limitations, we propose a neural programmer-interpreter approach that preserves the domain generalization ability of LLMs while editing their output. The editing actions in this framework are specifically devised for text generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the programmer-interpreter significantly enhances GPT-3.5’s performance in logical form-to-text conversion and low-resource machine translation, surpassing other state-of-the-art (SOTA) LLM post-editing methods in cross-domain settings.

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Noise Contrastive Estimation-based Matching Framework for Low-Resource Security Attack Pattern Recognition
Tu Nguyen | Nedim Šrndić | Alexander Neth

Techniques, Tactics and Procedures (TTP) mapping is an important and difficult task in the application of cyber threat intelligence (CTI) extraction for threat reports. TTPs are typically expressed in semantic forms within security knowledge bases like MITRE ATT&CK, serving as textual high-level descriptions for sophisticated attack patterns. Conversely, attacks in CTI threat reports are detailed in a combination of natural and technical language forms, presenting a significant challenge even for security experts to establish correlations or mappings with the corresponding TTPs.Conventional learning approaches often target the TTP mapping problem in the classical multiclass/label classification setting. This setting hinders the learning capabilities of the model, due to the large number of classes (i.e., TTPs), the inevitable skewness of the label distribution and the complex hierarchical structure of the label space. In this work, we approach the problem in a different learning paradigm, such that the assignment of a text to a TTP label is essentially decided by the direct semantic similarity between the two, thus, reducing the complexity of competing solely over the large labeling space. In order that, we propose a neural matching architecture that incorporates a sampling based learn-to-compare mechanism, facilitating the learning process of the matching model despite constrained resources.

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Large Language Models for Scientific Information Extraction: An Empirical Study for Virology
Mahsa Shamsabadi | Jennifer D’Souza | Sören Auer

In this paper, we champion the use of structured and semantic content representation of discourse-based scholarly communication, inspired by tools like Wikipedia infoboxes or structured Amazon product descriptions. These representations provide users with a concise overview, aiding scientists in navigating the dense academic landscape. Our novel automated approach leverages the robust text generation capabilities of LLMs to produce structured scholarly contribution summaries, offering both a practical solution and insights into LLMs’ emergent abilities.For LLMs, the prime focus is on improving their general intelligence as conversational agents. We argue that these models can also be applied effectively in information extraction (IE), specifically in complex IE tasks within terse domains like Science. This paradigm shift replaces the traditional modular, pipelined machine learning approach with a simpler objective expressed through instructions. Our results show that finetuned FLAN-T5 with 1000x fewer parameters than the state-of-the-art GPT-davinci is competitive for the task.

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Re3val: Reinforced and Reranked Generative Retrieval
EuiYul Song | Sangryul Kim | Haeju Lee | Joonkee Kim | James Thorne

Generative retrieval models encode pointers to information in a corpus as an index within the model’s parameters. These models serve as part of a larger pipeline, where retrieved information conditions generation for knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, we identify two limitations: the generative retrieval does not account for contextual information. Secondly, the retrieval can’t be tuned for the downstream readers as decoding the page title is a non-differentiable operation. This paper introduces Re3val, trained with generative reranking and reinforcement learning using limited data. Re3val leverages context acquired via Dense Passage Retrieval to rerank the retrieved page titles and utilizes REINFORCE to maximize rewards generated by constrained decoding. Additionally, we generate questions from our pre-training dataset to mitigate epistemic uncertainty and bridge the domain gap between the pre-training and fine-tuning datasets. Subsequently, we extract and rerank contexts from the KILT database using the rerank page titles. Upon grounding the top five reranked contexts, Re3val demonstrates the Top 1 KILT scores compared to all other generative retrieval models across five KILT datasets.

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Entity Linking in the Job Market Domain
Mike Zhang | Rob Goot | Barbara Plank

In Natural Language Processing, entity linking (EL) has centered around Wikipedia, but yet remains underexplored for the job market domain. Disambiguating skill mentions can help us get insight into the current labor market demands. In this work, we are the first to explore EL in this domain, specifically targeting the linkage of occupational skills to the ESCO taxonomy (le Vrang et al., 2014). Previous efforts linked coarse-grained (full) sentences to a corresponding ESCO skill. In this work, we link more fine-grained span-level mentions of skills. We tune two high-performing neural EL models, a bi-encoder (Wu et al., 2020) and an autoregressive model (Cao et al., 2021), on a synthetically generated mention–skill pair dataset and evaluate them on a human-annotated skill-linking benchmark. Our findings reveal that both models are capable of linking implicit mentions of skills to their correct taxonomy counterparts. Empirically, BLINK outperforms GENRE in strict evaluation, but GENRE performs better in loose evaluation (accuracy@k).

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(Chat)GPT v BERT Dawn of Justice for Semantic Change Detection
Francesco Periti | Haim Dubossarsky | Nina Tahmasebi

In the universe of Natural Language Processing, Transformer-based language models like BERT and (Chat)GPT have emerged as lexical superheroes with great power to solve open research problems. In this paper, we specifically focus on the temporal problem of semantic change, and evaluate their ability to solve two diachronic extensions of the Word-in-Context (WiC) task: TempoWiC and HistoWiC. In particular, we investigate the potential of a novel, off-the-shelf technology like ChatGPT (and GPT) 3.5 compared to BERT, which represents a family of models that currently stand as the state-of-the-art for modeling semantic change. Our experiments represent the first attempt to assess the use of (Chat)GPT for studying semantic change. Our results indicate that ChatGPT performs significantly worse than the foundational GPT version. Furthermore, our results demonstrate that (Chat)GPT achieves slightly lower performance than BERT in detecting long-term changes but performs significantly worse in detecting short-term changes.

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Towards Unified Uni- and Multi-modal News Headline Generation
Mateusz Krubiński | Pavel Pecina

Thanks to the recent progress in vision-language modeling and the evolving nature of news consumption, the tasks of automatic summarization and headline generation based on multimodal news articles have been gaining popularity. One of the limitations of the current approaches is caused by the commonly used sophisticated modular architectures built upon hierarchical cross-modal encoders and modality-specific decoders, which restrict the model’s applicability to specific data modalities – once trained on, e.g., text+video pairs there is no straightforward way to apply the model to text+image or text-only data. In this work, we propose a unified task formulation that utilizes a simple encoder-decoder model to generate headlines from uni- and multi-modal news articles. This model is trained jointly on data of several modalities and extends the textual decoder to handle the multimodal output.

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On the Relationship between Sentence Analogy Identification and Sentence Structure Encoding in Large Language Models
Thilini Wijesiriwardene | Ruwan Wickramarachchi | Aishwarya Naresh Reganti | Vinija Jain | Aman Chadha | Amit Sheth | Amitava Das

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode syntactic and semantic structures of language is well examined in NLP. Additionally, analogy identification, in the form of word analogies are extensively studied in the last decade of language modeling literature. In this work we specifically look at how LLMs’ abilities to capture sentence analogies (sentences that convey analogous meaning to each other) vary with LLMs’ abilities to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Through our analysis, we find that LLMs’ ability to identify sentence analogies is positively correlated with their ability to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Specifically, we find that the LLMs which capture syntactic structures better, also have higher abilities in identifying sentence analogies.

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Contextualization Distillation from Large Language Model for Knowledge Graph Completion
Dawei Li | Zhen Tan | Tianlong Chen | Huan Liu

While textual information significantly enhances the performance of pre-trained language models (PLMs) in knowledge graph completion (KGC), the static and noisy nature of existing corpora collected from Wikipedia articles or synsets definitions often limits the potential of PLM-based KGC models. To surmount these challenges, we introduce the Contextualization Distillation strategy, a versatile plug-in-and-play approach compatible with both discriminative and generative KGC frameworks. Our method begins by instructing large language models (LLMs) to transform compact, structural triplets into context-rich segments. Subsequently, we introduce two tailored auxiliary tasks—reconstruction and contextualization—allowing smaller KGC models to assimilate insights from these enriched triplets. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse datasets and KGC techniques highlight the efficacy and adaptability of our approach, revealing consistent performance enhancements irrespective of underlying pipelines or architectures. Moreover, our analysis makes our method more explainable and provides insight into how to generate high-quality corpora for KGC, as well as the selection of suitable distillation tasks.

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Differentially Private Natural Language Models: Recent Advances and Future Directions
Lijie Hu | Ivan Habernal | Lei Shen | Di Wang

Recent developments in deep learning have led to great success in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, these applications may involve data that contain sensitive information. Therefore, how to achieve good performance while also protecting the privacy of sensitive data is a crucial challenge in NLP. To preserve privacy, Differential Privacy (DP), which can prevent reconstruction attacks and protect against potential side knowledge, is becoming a de facto technique for private data analysis. In recent years, NLP in DP models (DP-NLP) has been studied from different perspectives, which deserves a comprehensive review. In this paper, we provide the first systematic review of recent advances in DP deep learning models in NLP. In particular, we first discuss some differences and additional challenges of DP-NLP compared with the standard DP deep learning. Then, we investigate some existing work on DP-NLP andpresent its recent developments from three aspects: gradient perturbation based methods, embedding vector perturbation based methods, and ensemble model based methods. We also discuss some challenges and future directions.

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Learning to Compare Financial Reports for Financial Forecasting
Ross Koval | Nicholas Andrews | Xifeng Yan

Public companies in the US are required to publish annual reports that detail their recent financial performance, present the current state of ongoing business operations, and discuss future prospects. However, they typically contain over 25,000 words across all sections, large amounts of industry and legal jargon, and a high percentage of boilerplate content that does not change much year-to-year. These unique characteristics present challenges for many generic pretrained language models because it is likely that only a small percentage of the long report that reflects salient information contains meaningful signal about the future prospects of the company. In this work, we curate a large-scale dataset of paired financial reports and introduce two novel, challenging tasks of predicting long-horizon company risk and correlation that evaluate the ability of the model to recognize cross-document relationships with complex, nuanced signals. We explore and present a comprehensive set of methods and experiments, and establish strong baselines designed to learn to identify subtle similarities and differences between long documents. Furthermore, we demonstrate that it is possible to predict company risk and correlation solely from the text of their financial reports and further that modeling the cross-document interactions at a fine-grained level provides significant benefit. Finally, we probe the best performing model through quantitative and qualitative interpretability methods to reveal some insight into the underlying task signal.

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Arukikata Travelogue Dataset with Geographic Entity Mention, Coreference, and Link Annotation
Shohei Higashiyama | Hiroki Ouchi | Hiroki Teranishi | Hiroyuki Otomo | Yusuke Ide | Aitaro Yamamoto | Hiroyuki Shindo | Yuki Matsuda | Shoko Wakamiya | Naoya Inoue | Ikuya Yamada | Taro Watanabe

Geoparsing is a fundamental technique for analyzing geo-entity information in text, which is useful for geographic applications, e.g., tourist spot recommendation. We focus on document-level geoparsing that considers geographic relatedness among geo-entity mentions and present a Japanese travelogue dataset designed for training and evaluating document-level geoparsing systems. Our dataset comprises 200 travelogue documents with rich geo-entity information: 12,171 mentions, 6,339 coreference clusters, and 2,551 geo-entities linked to geo-database entries.

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Knowledge Generation for Zero-shot Knowledge-based VQA
Rui Cao | Jing Jiang

Previous solutions to knowledge-based visual question answering (K-VQA) retrieve knowledge from external knowledge bases and use supervised learning to train the K-VQA model.Recently pre-trained LLMs have been used as both a knowledge source and a zero-shot QA model for K-VQA and demonstrated promising results.However, these recent methods do not explicitly show the knowledge needed to answer the questions and thus lack interpretability.Inspired by recent work on knowledge generation from LLMs for text-based QA, in this work we propose and test a similar knowledge-generation-based K-VQA method, which first generates knowledge from an LLM and then incorporates the generated knowledge for K-VQA in a zero-shot manner. We evaluate our method on two K-VQA benchmarks and found that our method performs better than previous zero-shot K-VQA methods and our generated knowledge is generally relevant and helpful.

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Simple Temperature Cool-down in Contrastive Framework for Unsupervised Sentence Representation Learning
Yoo Hyun Jeong | Myeong Soo Han | Dong-Kyu Chae

In this paper, we proposes a simple, tricky method to improve sentence representation of unsupervised contrastive learning. Even though contrastive learning has achieved great performances in both visual representation learning (VRL) and sentence representation learning (SRL) fields, we focus on the fact that there is a gap between characteristics and training dynamics of VRL and SRL. We first examine the role of temperature to bridge the gap between VRL and SRL, and find some temperature-dependent elements in SRL; i.e., a higher temperature causes overfitting of the uniformity while improving the alignment in earlier phase of training. Then, we design a temperature cool-down technique based on this observation, which helps PLMs to be more suitable for contrastive learning via preparation of uniform representation space. Our experimental results on widely-utilized benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness and extensiblity of our method.

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Bootstrap Your Own PLM: Boosting Semantic Features of PLMs for Unsuperivsed Contrastive Learning
Yoo Hyun Jeong | Myeong Soo Han | Dong-Kyu Chae

This paper aims to investigate the possibility of exploiting original semantic features of PLMs (pre-trained language models) during contrastive learning in the context of SRL (sentence representation learning). In the context of feature modification, we identified a method called IFM (implicit feature modification), which reduces the tendency of contrastive models for VRL (visual representation learning) to rely on feature-suppressing shortcut solutions. We observed that IFM did not work well for SRL, which may be due to differences between the nature of VRL and SRL. We propose BYOP, which boosts well-represented features, taking the opposite idea of IFM, under the assumption that SimCSE’s dropout-noise-based augmentation may be too simple to modify high-level semantic features, and that the features learned by PLMs are semantically meaningful and should be boosted, rather than removed. Extensive experiments lend credence to the logic of BYOP, which considers the nature of SRL.

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Personalized Abstractive Summarization by Tri-agent Generation Pipeline
Wen Xiao | Yujia Xie | Giuseppe Carenini | Pengcheng He

Tailoring outputs from large language models, like ChatGPT, to implicit user preferences remains a challenge despite their impressive generative capabilities. In this paper, we propose a tri-agent generation pipeline comprising a generator, an instructor, and an editor to enhance output personalization. The generator produces an initial output, the instructor automatically generates editing instructions based on user preferences, and the editor refines the output to align with those preferences. The inference-only large language model (ChatGPT) serves as both the generator and editor, with a smaller model acting as the instructor to guide output generation. We train the instructor using editor-steered reinforcement learning, leveraging feedback from a large-scale editor model to optimize instruction generation. Experimental results on two abstractive summarization datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating outputs that better meet user expectations.

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Revisiting the Markov Property for Machine Translation
Cunxiao Du | Hao Zhou | Zhaopeng Tu | Jing Jiang

In this paper, we re-examine the Markov property in the context of neural machine translation. We design a Markov Autoregressive Transformer (MAT) and undertake a comprehensive assessment of its performance across four WMT benchmarks. Our findings indicate that MAT with an order larger than 4 can generate translations with quality on par with that of conventional autoregressive transformers. In addition, counter-intuitively, we also find that the advantages of utilizing a higher-order MAT do not specifically contribute to the translation of longer sentences.

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Reward Engineering for Generating Semi-structured Explanation
Jiuzhou Han | Wray Buntine | Ehsan Shareghi

Semi-structured explanation depicts the implicit process of a reasoner with an explicit representation. This explanation highlights how available information in a specific query is utilised and supplemented with information a reasoner produces from its internal weights towards generating an answer. Despite the recent improvements in generative capabilities of language models, producing structured explanations to verify a model’s true reasoning capabilities remains a challenge. This issue is particularly pronounced for not-so-large LMs (e.g., FLAN-T5-XXL). In this work, we first underscore the limitations of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) in tackling this challenge, and then introduce a carefully crafted reward engineering method in reinforcement learning (RL) to better address this problem. We investigate multiple reward aggregation methods and provide a detailed discussion which sheds light on the promising potential of RL for future research. Our proposed method on two semi-structured explanation generation benchmarks (ExplaGraph and COPA-SSE) achieves new state-of-the-art results.

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Towards Context-Based Violence Detection: A Korean Crime Dialogue Dataset
Minju Kim | Heuiyeen Yeen | Myoung-Wan Koo

In order to enhance the security of society, there is rising interest in artificial intelligence (AI) to help detect and classify in advanced violence in daily life. The field of violence detection has introduced various datasets, yet context-based violence detection predominantly focuses on vision data, with a notable lack of NLP datasets. To overcome this, this paper presents the first Korean dialogue dataset for classifying violence that occurs in online settings: the Korean Crime Dialogue Dataset (KCDD). KCDD contains 22,249 dialogues created by crowd workers assuming offline scenarios. It has four criminal classes that meet international legal standards and one clean class (Serious Threats, Extortion or Blackmail, Harassment in the Workplace, Other Harassment, and Clean Dialogue). Plus, we propose a strong baseline for the proposed dataset, Relationship-Aware BERT. The model shows that understanding varying relationships among interlocutors improves the performance of crime dialogue classification. We hope that the proposed dataset will be used to detect cases of violence and aid people in danger. The KCDD dataset and corresponding baseline implementations can be found at the following link: https://sites.google.com/view/kcdd.

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Capturing the Relationship Between Sentence Triplets for LLM and Human-Generated Texts to Enhance Sentence Embeddings
Na Min An | Sania Waheed | James Thorne

Deriving meaningful sentence embeddings is crucial in capturing the semantic relationship between texts. Recent advances in building sentence embedding models have centered on replacing traditional human-generated text datasets with those generated by LLMs. However, the properties of these widely used LLM-generated texts remain largely unexplored. Here, we evaluate the quality of the LLM-generated texts from four perspectives (Positive Text Repetition, Length Difference Penalty, Positive Score Compactness, and Negative Text Implausibility) and find that there exists an inherent difference between human and LLM-generated datasets. To further enhance sentence embeddings using both human and LLM-generated datasets, we propose a novel loss function that incorporates Positive-Negative sample Augmentation (PNA) within the contrastive learning objective. Our results demonstrate that PNA effectively mitigates the sentence anisotropy problem in Wikipedia corpus (-7% compared to CLHAIF) and simultaneously improves the Spearman’s correlation in standard Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks (+1.47% compared to CLHAIF).

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Harmonizing Code-mixed Conversations: Personality-assisted Code-mixed Response Generation in Dialogues
Shivani Kumar | Tanmoy Chakraborty

Code-mixing, the blending of multiple languages within a single conversation, introduces a distinctive challenge, particularly in the context of response generation. Capturing the intricacies of code-mixing proves to be a formidable task, given the wide-ranging variations influenced by individual speaking styles and cultural backgrounds. In this study, we explore response generation within code-mixed conversations. We introduce a novel approach centered on harnessing the Big Five personality traits acquired in an unsupervised manner from the conversations to bolster the performance of response generation. These inferred personality attributes are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the dialogue context, using a novel fusion mechanism, . It uses an effective two-step attention formulation to fuse the dialogue and personality information. This fusion not only enhances the contextual relevance of generated responses but also elevates the overall performance of the model. Our experimental results, grounded in a dataset comprising of multi-party Hindi-English code-mix conversations, highlight the substantial advantages offered by personality-infused models over their conventional counterparts. This is evident in the increase observed in ROUGE and BLUE scores for the response generation task when the identified personality is seamlessly integrated into the dialogue context. Qualitative assessment for personality identification and response generation aligns well with our quantitative results.

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Morality is Non-Binary: Building a Pluralist Moral Sentence Embedding Space using Contrastive Learning
Jeongwoo Park | Enrico Liscio | Pradeep Murukannaiah

Recent advances in NLP show that language models retain a discernible level of knowledge in deontological ethics and moral norms. However, existing works often treat morality as binary, ranging from right to wrong. This simplistic view does not capture the nuances of moral judgment. Pluralist moral philosophers argue that human morality can be deconstructed into a finite number of elements, respecting individual differences in moral judgment. In line with this view, we build a pluralist moral sentence embedding space via a state-of-the-art contrastive learning approach. We systematically investigate the embedding space by studying the emergence of relationships among moral elements, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Our results show that a pluralist approach to morality can be captured in an embedding space. However, moral pluralism is challenging to deduce via self-supervision alone and requires a supervised approach with human labels.

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Prosody in Cascade and Direct Speech-to-Text Translation: a case study on Korean Wh-Phrases
Giulio Zhou | Tsz Kin Lam | Alexandra Birch | Barry Haddow

Speech-to-Text Translation (S2TT) has typically been addressed with cascade systems, where speech recognition systems generate a transcription that is subsequently passed to a translation model. While there has been a growing interest in developing direct speech translation systems to avoid propagating errors and losing non-verbal content, prior work in direct S2TT has struggled to conclusively establish the advantages of integrating the acoustic signal directly into the translation process. This work proposes using contrastive evaluation to quantitatively measure the ability of direct S2TT systems to disambiguate utterances where prosody plays a crucial role. Specifically, we evaluated Korean-English translation systems on a test set containing wh-phrases, for which prosodic features are necessary to produce translations with the correct intent, whether it’s a statement, a yes/no question, a wh-question, and more. Our results clearly demonstrate the value of direct translation systems over cascade translation models, with a notable 12.9% improvement in overall accuracy in ambiguous cases, along with up to a 15.6% increase in F1 scores for one of the major intent categories. To the best of our knowledge, this work stands as the first to provide quantitative evidence that direct S2TT models can effectively leverage prosody. The code for our evaluation is openly accessible and freely available for review and utilisation.

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Exploring the Potential of ChatGPT on Sentence Level Relations: A Focus on Temporal, Causal, and Discourse Relations
Chunkit Chan | Cheng Jiayang | Weiqi Wang | Yuxin Jiang | Tianqing Fang | Xin Liu | Yangqiu Song

This paper aims to quantitatively evaluate the performance of ChatGPT, an interactive large language model, on inter-sentential relations such as temporal relations, causal relations, and discourse relations. Given ChatGPT’s promising performance across various tasks, we proceed to carry out thorough evaluations on the whole test sets of 11 datasets, including temporal and causal relations, PDTB2.0-based, and dialogue-based discourse relations. To ensure the reliability of our findings, we employ three tailored prompt templates for each task, including the zero-shot prompt template, zero-shot prompt engineering (PE) template, and in-context learning (ICL) prompt template, to establish the initial baseline scores for all popular sentence-pair relation classification tasks for the first time. Through our study, we discover that ChatGPT exhibits exceptional proficiency in detecting and reasoning about causal relations, albeit it may not possess the same level of expertise in identifying the temporal order between two events. While it is capable of identifying the majority of discourse relations with existing explicit discourse connectives, the implicit discourse relation remains a formidable challenge. Concurrently, ChatGPT demonstrates subpar performance in the dialogue discourse parsing task that requires structural understanding in a dialogue before being aware of the discourse relation.

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Backtracing: Retrieving the Cause of the Query
Rose Wang | Pawan Wirawarn | Omar Khattab | Noah Goodman | Dorottya Demszky

Many online content portals allow users to ask questions to supplement their understanding (e.g., of lectures). While information retrieval (IR) systems may provide answers for such user queries, they do not directly assist content creators—such as lecturers who want to improve their content—identify segments that caused a user to ask those questions.We introduce the task of backtracing, in which systems retrieve the text segment that most likely caused a user query.We formalize three real-world domains for which backtracing is important in improving content delivery and communication: understanding the cause of (a) student confusion in the Lecture domain, (b) reader curiosity in the News Article domain, and (c) user emotion in the Conversation domain.We evaluate the zero-shot performance of popular information retrieval methods and language modeling methods, including bi-encoder, re-ranking and likelihood-based methods and ChatGPT.While traditional IR systems retrieve semantically relevant information (e.g., details on “projection matrices” for a query “does projecting multiple times still lead to the same point?”), they often miss the causally relevant context (e.g., the lecturer states “projecting twice gets me the same answer as one projection”). Our results show that there is room for improvement on backtracing and it requires new retrieval approaches.We hope our benchmark serves to improve future retrieval systems for backtracing, spawning systems that refine content generation and identify linguistic triggers influencing user queries.

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Unsupervised Multilingual Dense Retrieval via Generative Pseudo Labeling
Chao-Wei Huang | Chen-An Li | Tsu-Yuan Hsu | Chen-Yu Hsu | Yun-Nung Chen

Dense retrieval methods have demonstrated promising performance in multilingual information retrieval, where queries and documents can be in different languages. However, dense retrievers typically require a substantial amount of paired data, which poses even greater challenges in multilingual scenarios. This paper introduces UMR, an  ̲Unsupervised  ̲Multilingual dense  ̲Retriever trained without any paired data. Our approach leverages the sequence likelihood estimation capabilities of multilingual language models to acquire pseudo labels for training dense retrievers. We propose a two-stage framework which iteratively improves the performance of multilingual dense retrievers. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that UMR outperforms supervised baselines, showcasing the potential of training multilingual retrievers without paired data, thereby enhancing their practicality. All of our source code, data, and models are available: https://github.com/MiuLab/UMR

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Investigating grammatical abstraction in language models using few-shot learning of novel noun gender
Priyanka Sukumaran | Conor Houghton | Nina Kazanina

Humans can learn a new word and infer its grammatical properties from very few examples. They have an abstract notion of linguistic properties like grammatical gender and agreement rules that can be applied to novel syntactic contexts and words. Drawing inspiration from psycholinguistics, we conduct a noun learning experiment to assess whether an LSTM and a decoder-only transformer can achieve human-like abstraction of grammatical gender in French. Language models were tasked with learning the gender of a novel noun embedding from a few examples in one grammatical agreement context and predicting agreement in another, unseen context. We find that both language models effectively generalise novel noun gender from one to two learning examples and apply the learnt gender across agreement contexts, albeit with a bias for the masculine gender category. Importantly, the few-shot updates were only applied to the embedding layers, demonstrating that models encode sufficient gender information within the word-embedding space. While the generalisation behaviour of models suggests that they represent grammatical gender as an abstract category, like humans, further work is needed to explore the details of how exactly this is implemented. For a comparative perspective with human behaviour, we conducted an analogous one-shot novel noun gender learning experiment, which revealed that native French speakers, like language models, also exhibited a masculine gender bias and are not excellent one-shot learners either.

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On-the-fly Denoising for Data Augmentation in Natural Language Understanding
Tianqing Fang | Wenxuan Zhou | Fangyu Liu | Hongming Zhang | Yangqiu Song | Muhao Chen

Data Augmentation (DA) is frequently used to provide additional training data without extra human annotation automatically.However, data augmentation may introduce noisy data that impairs training.To guarantee the quality of augmented data,existing methods either assume no noise exists in the augmented data and adopt consistency training or use simple heuristics such as training loss and diversity constraints to filter out “noisy” data.However, those filtered examples may still contain useful information, and dropping them completely causes a loss of supervision signals.In this paper, based on the assumption that the original dataset is cleaner than the augmented data, we propose an on-the-fly denoising technique for data augmentation that learns from soft augmented labels provided by an organic teacher model trained on the cleaner original data.To further prevent overfitting on noisy labels, a simple self-regularization module is applied to force the model prediction to be consistent across two distinct dropouts.Our method can be applied to general augmentation techniques and consistently improve the performance on both text classification and question-answering tasks.

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Style Vectors for Steering Generative Large Language Models
Kai Konen | Sophie Jentzsch | Diaoulé Diallo | Peer Schütt | Oliver Bensch | Roxanne El Baff | Dominik Opitz | Tobias Hecking

This research explores strategies for steering the output of large language models (LLMs) towards specific styles, such as sentiment, emotion, or writing style, by adding style vectors to the activations of hidden layers during text generation. We show that style vectors can be simply computed from recorded layer activations for input texts in a specific style in contrast to more complex training-based approaches. Through a series of experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of activation engineering using such style vectors to influence the style of generated text in a nuanced and parameterisable way, distinguishing it from prompt engineering. The presented research constitutes a significant step towards developing more adaptive and effective AI-empowered interactive systems.

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Consistent Joint Decision-Making with Heterogeneous Learning Models
Hossein Rajaby Faghihi | Parisa Kordjamshidi

This paper introduces a novel decision-making framework that promotes consistency among decisions made by diverse models while utilizing external knowledge. Leveraging the Integer Linear Programming(ILP) framework, we map predictions from various models into globally normalized and comparable values by incorporating information about decisions’ prior probability, confidence (uncertainty), and the models’ expected accuracy. Our empirical study demonstrates the superiority of our approach over conventional baselines on multiple datasets.

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Quantifying Association Capabilities of Large Language Models and Its Implications on Privacy Leakage
Hanyin Shao | Jie Huang | Shen Zheng | Kevin Chang

The advancement of large language models (LLMs) brings notable improvements across various applications, while simultaneously raising concerns about potential private data exposure. One notable capability of LLMs is their ability to form associations between different pieces of information, but this raises concerns when it comes to personally identifiable information (PII). This paper delves into the association capabilities of language models, aiming to uncover the factors that influence their proficiency in associating information. Our study reveals that as models scale up, their capacity to associate entities/information intensifies, particularly when target pairs demonstrate shorter co-occurrence distances or higher co-occurrence frequencies. However, there is a distinct performance gap when associating commonsense knowledge versus PII, with the latter showing lower accuracy. Despite the proportion of accurately predicted PII being relatively small, LLMs still demonstrate the capability to predict specific instances of email addresses and phone numbers when provided with appropriate prompts. These findings underscore the potential risk to PII confidentiality posed by the evolving capabilities of LLMs, especially as they continue to expand in scale and power.

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Probing Critical Learning Dynamics of PLMs for Hate Speech Detection
Sarah Masud | Mohammad Aflah Khan | Vikram Goyal | Md Shad Akhtar | Tanmoy Chakraborty

Despite the widespread adoption, there is a lack of research into how various critical aspects of pretrained language models (PLMs) affect their performance in hate speech detection. Through five research questions, our findings and recommendations lay the groundwork for empirically investigating different aspects of PLMs’ use in hate speech detection. We deep dive into comparing different pretrained models, evaluating their seed robustness, finetuning settings, and the impact of pretraining data collection time. Our analysis reveals early peaks for downstream tasks during pretraining, the limited benefit of employing a more recent pretraining corpus, and the significance of specific layers during finetuning. We further call into question the use of domain-specific models and highlight the need for dynamic datasets for benchmarking hate speech detection.

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Embible: Reconstruction of Ancient Hebrew and Aramaic Texts Using Transformers
Niv Fono | Harel Moshayof | Eldar Karol | Itai Assraf | Mark Last

Hebrew and Aramaic inscriptions serve as an essential source of information on the ancient history of the Near East. Unfortunately, some parts of the inscribed texts become illegible over time. Special experts, called epigraphists, use time-consuming manual procedures to estimate the missing content. This problem can be considered an extended masked language modeling task, where the damaged content can comprise single characters, character n-grams (partial words), single complete words, and multi-word n-grams.This study is the first attempt to apply the masked language modeling approach to corrupted inscriptions in Hebrew and Aramaic languages, both using the Hebrew alphabet consisting mostly of consonant symbols. In our experiments, we evaluate several transformer-based models, which are fine-tuned on the Biblical texts and tested on three different percentages of randomly masked parts in the testing corpus. For any masking percentage, the highest text completion accuracy is obtained with a novel ensemble of word and character prediction models.

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Stateful Memory-Augmented Transformers for Efficient Dialogue Modeling
Qingyang Wu | Zhou Yu

Transformer models have achieved great performance in dialogue generation tasks. However, their inability to process long dialogue history often leads to truncation of the context. To address this problem, we propose a novel memory-augmented transformer that is compatible with existing pre-trained encoder-decoder models and enables efficient preservation of the dialogue history information. The new model incorporates a separate memory module alongside the pre-trained transformer, which can effectively interchange information between the memory states and the current input context. We evaluate the efficiency of our model on three dialogue datasets and two language modeling datasets. Experimental results show that our method has achieved superior efficiency and performance compared to other pre-trained Transformer baselines.

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The Shape of Learning: Anisotropy and Intrinsic Dimensions in Transformer-Based Models
Anton Razzhigaev | Matvey Mikhalchuk | Elizaveta Goncharova | Ivan Oseledets | Denis Dimitrov | Andrey Kuznetsov

In this study, we present an investigation into the anisotropy dynamics and intrinsic dimension of embeddings in transformer architectures, focusing on the dichotomy between encoders and decoders. Our findings reveal that the anisotropy profile in transformer decoders exhibits a distinct bell-shaped curve, with the highest anisotropy concentrations in the middle layers. This pattern diverges from the more uniformly distributed anisotropy observed in encoders. In addition, we found that the intrinsic dimension of embeddings increases in the initial phases of training, indicating an expansion into higher-dimensional space. This fact is then followed by a compression phase towards the end of training with dimensionality decrease, suggesting a refinement into more compact representations. Our results provide fresh insights to the understanding of encoders and decoders embedding properties.

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MEDs for PETs: Multilingual Euphemism Disambiguation for Potentially Euphemistic Terms
Patrick Lee | Alain Chirino Trujillo | Diana Cuevas Plancarte | Olumide Ojo | Xinyi Liu | Iyanuoluwa Shode | Yuan Zhao | Anna Feldman | Jing Peng

Euphemisms are found across the world’s languages, making them a universal linguistic phenomenon. As such, euphemistic data may have useful properties for computational tasks across languages. In this study, we explore this premise by training a multilingual transformer model (XLM-RoBERTa) to disambiguate potentially euphemistic terms (PETs) in multilingual and cross-lingual settings. In line with current trends, we demonstrate that zero-shot learning across languages takes place. We also show cases where multilingual models perform better on the task compared to monolingual models by a statistically significant margin, indicating that multilingual data presents additional opportunities for models to learn about cross-lingual, computational properties of euphemisms. In a follow-up analysis, we focus on universal euphemistic “categories” such as death and bodily functions among others. We test to see whether cross-lingual data of the same domain is more important than within-language data of other domains to further understand the nature of the cross-lingual transfer.

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PromptExplainer: Explaining Language Models through Prompt-based Learning
Zijian Feng | Hanzhang Zhou | Zixiao Zhu | Kezhi Mao

Pretrained language models have become workhorses for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, sparking a growing demand for enhanced interpretability and transparency. However, prevailing explanation methods, such as attention-based and gradient-based strategies, largely rely on linear approximations, potentially causing inaccuracies such as accentuating irrelevant input tokens. To mitigate the issue, we develop PromptExplainer, a novel method for explaining language models through prompt-based learning. PromptExplainer aligns the explanation process with the masked language modeling (MLM) task of pretrained language models and leverages the prompt-based learning framework for explanation generation. It disentangles token representations into the explainable embedding space using the MLM head and extracts discriminative features with a verbalizer to generate class-dependent explanations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that PromptExplainer significantly outperforms state-of-the-art explanation methods.

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Do-Not-Answer: Evaluating Safeguards in LLMs
Yuxia Wang | Haonan Li | Xudong Han | Preslav Nakov | Timothy Baldwin

With the rapid evolution of large language models (LLMs), new and hard-to-predict harmful capabilities are emerging. This requires developers to identify potential risks through the evaluation of “dangerous capabilities” in order to responsibly deploy LLMs. Here we aim to facilitate this process. In particular, we collect an open-source dataset to evaluate the safeguards in LLMs, to facilitate the deployment of safer open-source LLMs at a low cost. Our dataset is curated and filtered to consist only of instructions that responsible language models should not follow. We assess the responses of six popular LLMs to these instructions, and we find that simple BERT-style classifiers can achieve results that are comparable to GPT-4 on automatic safety evaluation. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/Libr-AI/do-not-answer

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Do Language Models Know When They’re Hallucinating References?
Ayush Agrawal | Mirac Suzgun | Lester Mackey | Adam Kalai

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) are notoriously susceptible to generating hallucinated information. Such inaccurate outputs not only undermine the reliability of these models but also limit their use and raise serious concerns about misinformation and propaganda. In this work, we focus on hallucinated book and article references and present them as the “model organism” of language model hallucination research, due to their frequent and easy-to-discern nature. We posit that if a language model cites a particular reference in its output, then it should ideally possess sufficient information about its authors and content, among other relevant details. Using this basic insight, we illustrate that one can identify hallucinated references without ever consulting any external resources, by asking a set of direct or indirect queries to the language model about the references. These queries can be considered as “consistency checks.” Our findings highlight that while LMs, including GPT-4, often produce inconsistent author lists for hallucinated references, they also often accurately recall the authors of real references. In this sense, the LM can be said to “know” when it is hallucinating references. Furthermore, these findings show how hallucinated references can be dissected to shed light on their nature.

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Bridging Cultural Nuances in Dialogue Agents through Cultural Value Surveys
Yong Cao | Min Chen | Daniel Hershcovich

The cultural landscape of interactions with dialogue agents is a compelling yet relatively unexplored territory. It’s clear that various sociocultural aspects—from communication styles and beliefs to shared metaphors and knowledge—profoundly impact these interactions. To delve deeper into this dynamic, we introduce cuDialog, a first-of-its-kind benchmark for dialogue generation with a cultural lens. We also develop baseline models capable of extracting cultural attributes from dialogue exchanges, with the goal of enhancing the predictive accuracy and quality of dialogue agents. To effectively co-learn cultural understanding and multi-turn dialogue predictions, we propose to incorporate cultural dimensions with dialogue encoding features. Our experimental findings highlight that incorporating cultural value surveys boosts alignment with references and cultural markers, demonstrating its considerable influence on personalization and dialogue quality. To facilitate further exploration in this exciting domain, we publish our benchmark publicly accessible at https://github.com/yongcaoplus/cuDialog.

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CEO: Corpus-based Open-Domain Event Ontology Induction
Nan Xu | Hongming Zhang | Jianshu Chen

Existing event-centric NLP models often only apply to the pre-defined ontology, which significantly restricts their generalization capabilities.This paper presents CEO, a novel Corpus-based Event Ontology induction model to relax the restriction imposed by pre-defined event ontologies. Without direct supervision, CEO leverages distant supervision from available summary datasets to detect corpus-wise salient events and exploits external event knowledge to force events within a short distance to have close embeddings. Experiments on three popular event datasets show that the schema induced by CEO has better coverage and higher accuracy than previous methods. Moreover, CEO is the first event ontology induction model that can induce a hierarchical event ontology with meaningful names on eleven open-domain corpora, making the induced schema more trustworthy and easier to be further curated. We anonymously release our dataset, codes, and induced ontology.

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Rethinking STS and NLI in Large Language Models
Yuxia Wang | Minghan Wang | Preslav Nakov

Recent years, have seen the rise of large language models (LLMs), where practitioners use task-specific prompts; this was shown to be effective for a variety of tasks. However, when applied to semantic textual similarity (STS) and natural language inference (NLI), the effectiveness of LLMs turns out to be limited by low-resource domain accuracy, model overconfidence, and difficulty to capture the disagreements between human judgements. With this in mind, here we try to rethink STS and NLI in the era of LLMs. We first evaluate the performance of STS and NLI in the clinical/biomedical domain, and then we assess LLMs’ predictive confidence and their capability of capturing collective human opinions. We find that these old problems are still to be properly addressed in the era of LLMs.

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Learning High-Quality and General-Purpose Phrase Representations
Lihu Chen | Gael Varoquaux | Fabian Suchanek

Phrase representations play an important role in data science and natural language processing, benefiting various tasks like Entity Alignment, Record Linkage, Fuzzy Joins, and Paraphrase Classification.The current state-of-the-art method involves fine-tuning pre-trained language models for phrasal embeddings using contrastive learning. However, we have identified areas for improvement. First, these pre-trained models tend to be unnecessarily complex and require to be pre-trained on a corpus with context sentences.Second, leveraging the phrase type and morphology gives phrase representations that are both more precise and more flexible.We propose an improved framework to learn phrase representations in a context-free fashion.The framework employs phrase type classification as an auxiliary task and incorporates character-level information more effectively into the phrase representation.Furthermore, we design three granularities of data augmentation to increase the diversity of training samples.Our experiments across a wide range of tasks reveal that our approach generates superior phrase embeddings compared to previous methods while requiring a smaller model size.

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Explaining Language Model Predictions with High-Impact Concepts
Ruochen Zhao | Tan Wang | Yongjie Wang | Shafiq Joty

To encourage fairness and transparency, there exists an urgent demand for deriving reliable explanations for large language models (LLMs). One promising solution is concept-based explanations, i.e., human-understandable concepts from internal representations. However, due to the compositional nature of languages, current methods mostly discover correlational explanations instead of causal features. Therefore, we propose a novel framework to provide impact-aware explanations for users to understand the LLM’s behavior, which are robust to feature changes and influential to the model’s predictions. Specifically, we extract predictive high-level features (concepts) from the model’s hidden layer activations. Then, we innovatively optimize for features whose existence causes the output predictions to change substantially. Extensive experiments on real and synthetic tasks demonstrate that our method achieves superior results on predictive impact, explainability, and faithfulness compared to the baselines, especially for LLMs.

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Understanding and Mitigating Spurious Correlations in Text Classification with Neighborhood Analysis
Oscar Chew | Hsuan-Tien Lin | Kai-Wei Chang | Kuan-Hao Huang

Recent research has revealed that machine learning models have a tendency to leverage spurious correlations that exist in the training set but may not hold true in general circumstances. For instance, a sentiment classifier may erroneously learn that the token “performances” is commonly associated with positive movie reviews.Relying on these spurious correlations degrades the classifier’s performance when it deploys on out-of-distribution data.In this paper, we examine the implications of spurious correlations through a novel perspective called neighborhood analysis. The analysis uncovers how spurious correlations lead unrelated words to erroneously cluster together in the embedding space. Driven by the analysis, we design a metric to detect spurious tokens and also propose a family of regularization methods, NFL (doN’t Forget your Language) to mitigate spurious correlations in text classification.Experiments show that NFL can effectively prevent erroneous clusters and significantly improve the robustness of classifiers without auxiliary data. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/oscarchew/doNt-Forget-your-Language.

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On the Intractability to Synthesize Factual Inconsistencies in Summarization
Ge Luo | Weisi Fan | Miaoran Li | Youbiao He | Yinfei Yang | Forrest Bao

Factual consistency detection has gotten raised attention in the task of abstractive summarization. Many existing works rely on synthetic training data, which may not accurately reflect or match the inconsistencies produced by summarization models. In this paper, we first systematically analyze the shortcomings of the current methods in synthesizing inconsistent summaries. Current synthesis methods may fail to produce inconsistencies of coreference errors and discourse errors, per our quantitative and qualitative study. Then, employing the parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) technique, we discover that a competitive factual consistency detector can be achieved using thousands of real model-generated summaries with human annotations. Our study demonstrates the importance of real machine-generated texts with human annotation in NLG evaluation as our model outperforms the SOTA on the CoGenSumm, FactCC, Frank, and SummEval datasets.

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IndiVec: An Exploration of Leveraging Large Language Models for Media Bias Detection with Fine-Grained Bias Indicators
Luyang Lin | Lingzhi Wang | Xiaoyan Zhao | Jing Li | Kam-Fai Wong

This study focuses on media bias detection, crucial in today’s era of influential social media platforms shaping individual attitudes and opinions. In contrast to prior work that primarily relies on training specific models tailored to particular datasets, resulting in limited adaptability and subpar performance on out-of-domain data, we introduce a general bias detection framework, IndiVec, built upon large language models. IndiVec begins by constructing a fine-grained media bias database, leveraging the robust instruction-following capabilities of large language models and vector database techniques. When confronted with new input for bias detection, our framework automatically selects the most relevant indicator from the vector database and employs majority voting to determine the input’s bias label. IndiVec excels compared to previous methods due to its adaptability (demonstrating consistent performance across diverse datasets from various sources) and explainability (providing explicit top-k indicators to interpret bias predictions). Experimental results on four political bias datasets highlight IndiVec’s significant superiority over baselines. Furthermore, additional experiments and analysis provide profound insights into the framework’s effectiveness.

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Are Large Language Model-based Evaluators the Solution to Scaling Up Multilingual Evaluation?
Rishav Hada | Varun Gumma | Adrian Wynter | Harshita Diddee | Mohamed Ahmed | Monojit Choudhury | Kalika Bali | Sunayana Sitaram

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, yet their evaluation, particularly in languages beyond the top 20, remains inadequate due to existing benchmarks and metrics limitations. Employing LLMs as evaluators to rank or score other models’ outputs emerges as a viable solution, addressing the constraints tied to human annotators and established benchmarks. In this study, we explore the potential of LLM-based evaluators in enhancing multilingual evaluation by calibrating them against 20K human judgments across three text-generation tasks, five metrics, and eight languages. Our analysis reveals a bias in LLM-based evaluators towards higher scores, underscoring the necessity of calibration with native speaker judgments, especially in low-resource and non-Latin script languages, to ensure accurate evaluation of LLM performance across diverse languages.

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Computational Morphology and Lexicography Modeling of Modern Standard Arabic Nominals
Christian Khairallah | Reham Marzouk | Salam Khalifa | Mayar Nassar | Nizar Habash

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) nominals present many morphological and lexical modeling challenges that have not been consistently addressed previously. This paper attempts to define the space of such challenges, and leverage a recently proposed morphological framework to build a comprehensive and extensible model for MSA nominals. Our model design addresses the nominals’ intricate morphotactics, as well as their paradigmatic irregularities. Our implementation showcases enhanced accuracy and consistency compared to a commonly used MSA morphological analyzer and generator. We make our models publicly available.

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Relabeling Minimal Training Subset to Flip a Prediction
Jinghan Yang | Linjie Xu | Lequan Yu

When facing an unsatisfactory prediction from a machine learning model, users can be interested in investigating the underlying reasons and exploring the potential for reversing the outcome. We ask: To flip the prediction on a test point xt, how to identify the smallest training subset 𝒮t that we need to relabel?We propose an efficient algorithm to identify and relabel such a subset via an extended influence function for binary classification models with convex loss.We find that relabeling fewer than 2% of the training points can always flip a prediction.This mechanism can serve multiple purposes: (1) providing an approach to challenge a model prediction by altering training points; (2) evaluating model robustness with the cardinality of the subset (i.e., |𝒮t|); we show that |𝒮t| is highly related to the noise ratio in the training set and |𝒮t| is correlated with but complementary to predicted probabilities; and (3) revealing training points lead to group attribution bias. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate identifying and relabeling the minimal training subset required to flip a given prediction.

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Why Generate When You Can Discriminate? A Novel Technique for Text Classification using Language Models
Sachin Pawar | Nitin Ramrakhiyani | Anubhav Sinha | Manoj Apte | Girish Palshikar

In this paper, we propose a novel two-step technique for text classification using autoregressive Language Models (LM). In the first step, a set of perplexity and log-likelihood based numeric features are elicited from an LM for a text instance to be classified. Then, in the second step, a classifier based on these features is trained to predict the final label. The classifier used is usually a simple machine learning classifier like Support Vector Machine (SVM) or Logistic Regression (LR) and it is trained using a small set of training examples. We believe, our technique presents a whole new way of exploiting the available training instances, in addition to the existing ways like fine-tuning LMs or in-context learning. Our approach stands out by eliminating the need for parameter updates in LMs, as required in fine-tuning, and does not impose limitations on the number of training examples faced while building prompts for in-context learning. We evaluate our technique across 5 different datasets and compare with multiple competent baselines.

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Autism Detection in Speech – A Survey
Nadine Probol | Margot Mieskes

There has been a range of studies of how autism is displayed in voice, speech, and language. We analyse studies from the biomedical, as well as the psychological domain, but also from the NLP domain in order to find linguistic, prosodic and acoustic cues. Our survey looks at all three domains. We define autism and which comorbidities might influence the correct detection of the disorder. We especially look at observations such as verbal and semantic fluency, prosodic features, but also disfluencies and speaking rate. We also show word-based approaches and describe machine learning and transformer-based approaches both on the audio data as well as the transcripts. Lastly, we conclude, while there already is a lot of research, female patients seem to be severely under-researched. Also, most NLP research focuses on traditional machine learning methods instead of transformers. Additionally, we were unable to find research combining both features from audio and transcripts.

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Improving Multimodal Classification of Social Media Posts by Leveraging Image-Text Auxiliary Tasks
Danae Sanchez Villegas | Daniel Preotiuc-Pietro | Nikolaos Aletras

Effectively leveraging multimodal information from social media posts is essential to various downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis, sarcasm detection or hate speech classification. Jointly modeling text and images is challenging because cross-modal semantics might be hidden or the relation between image and text is weak. However, prior work on multimodal classification of social media posts has not yet addressed these challenges. In this work, we present an extensive study on the effectiveness of using two auxiliary losses jointly with the main task during fine-tuning multimodal models. First, Image-Text Contrastive (ITC) is designed to minimize the distance between image-text representations within a post, thereby effectively bridging the gap between posts where the image plays an important role in conveying the post’s meaning. Second, Image-Text Matching (ITM) enhances the model’s ability to understand the semantic relationship between images and text, thus improving its capacity to handle ambiguous or loosely related posts. We combine these objectives with five multimodal models, demonstrating consistent improvements of up to 2.6 F1 score across five diverse social media datasets. Our comprehensive analysis shows the specific scenarios where each auxiliary task is most effective.

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What the Weight?! A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Knowledge Composition
Carolin Holtermann | Markus Frohmann | Navid Rekabsaz | Anne Lauscher

The knowledge encapsulated in a model is the core factor determining its final performance on downstream tasks. Much research in NLP has focused on efficient methods for storing and adapting different types of knowledge, e.g., in dedicated modularized structures, and on how to effectively combine these, e.g., by learning additional parameters. However, given the many possible options, a thorough understanding of the mechanisms involved in these compositions is missing, and hence it remains unclear which strategies to utilize. To address this research gap, we propose a novel framework for zero-shot module composition, which encompasses existing and some novel variations for selecting, weighting, and combining parameter modules under a single unified notion. Focusing on the scenario of domain knowledge and adapter layers, our framework provides a systematic unification of concepts, allowing us to conduct the first comprehensive benchmarking study of various zero-shot knowledge composition strategies. In particular, we test two module combination methods and five selection and weighting strategies for their effectiveness and efficiency in an extensive experimental setup. Our results highlight the efficacy of ensembling but also hint at the power of simple though often-ignored weighting methods. Further in-depth analyses allow us to understand the role of weighting vs. top-k selection, and show that, to a certain extent, the performance of adapter composition can even be predicted.

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IndiFoodVQA: Advancing Visual Question Answering and Reasoning with a Knowledge-Infused Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline
Pulkit Agarwal | Settaluri Sravanthi | Pushpak Bhattacharyya

Large Vision Language Models (VLMs) like GPT-4, LLaVA, and InstructBLIP exhibit extraordinary capabilities for both knowledge understanding and reasoning. However, the reasoning capabilities of such models on sophisticated problems that require external knowledge of a specific domain have not been assessed well, due to the unavailability of necessary datasets. In this work, we release a first-of-its-kind dataset called IndiFoodVQA with around 16.7k data samples, consisting of explicit knowledge-infused questions, answers, and reasons. We also release IndiFoodKG, a related Knowledge Graph (KG) with 79k triples. The data has been created with minimal human intervention via an automated pipeline based on InstructBlip and GPT-3.5. We also present a methodology to extract knowledge from the KG and use it to both answer and reason upon the questions. We employ different models to report baseline zero-shot and fine-tuned results. Fine-tuned VLMs on our data showed an improvement of ~25% over the corresponding base model, highlighting the fact that current VLMs need domain-specific fine-tuning to excel in specialized settings. Our findings reveal that (1) explicit knowledge infusion during question generation helps in making questions that have more grounded knowledge, and (2) proper knowledge retrieval can often lead to better-answering potential in such cases. The data and code is available at https://github.com/SLSravanthi/IndifoodVQA.

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MAPLE: Micro Analysis of Pairwise Language Evolution for Few-Shot Claim Verification
Xia Zeng | Arkaitz Zubiaga

Claim verification is an essential step in the automated fact-checking pipeline which assesses the veracity of a claim against a piece of evidence. In this work, we explore the potential of few-shot claim verification, where only very limited data is available for supervision. We propose MAPLE (Micro Analysis of Pairwise Language Evolution), a pioneering approach that explores the alignment between a claim and its evidence with a small seq2seq model and a novel semantic measure. Its innovative utilization of micro language evolution path leverages unlabelled pairwise data to facilitate claim verification while imposing low demand on data annotations and computing resources. MAPLE demonstrates significant performance improvements over SOTA baselines SEED, PET and LLaMA 2 across three fact-checking datasets: FEVER, Climate FEVER, and SciFact. Data and code are available.

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Leveraging Open Information Extraction for More Robust Domain Transfer of Event Trigger Detection
David Dukić | Kiril Gashteovski | Goran Glavaš | Jan Snajder

Event detection is a crucial information extraction task in many domains, such as Wikipedia or news. The task typically relies on trigger detection (TD) – identifying token spans in the text that evoke specific events. While the notion of triggers should ideally be universal across domains, domain transfer for TD from high- to low-resource domains results in significant performance drops. We address the problem of negative transfer in TD by coupling triggers between domains using subject-object relations obtained from a rule-based open information extraction (OIE) system. We demonstrate that OIE relations injected through multi-task training can act as mediators between triggers in different domains, enhancing zero- and few-shot TD domain transfer and reducing performance drops, in particular when transferring from a high-resource source domain (Wikipedia) to a low(er)-resource target domain (news). Additionally, we combine this improved transfer with masked language modeling on the target domain, observing further TD transfer gains. Finally, we demonstrate that the gains are robust to the choice of the OIE system.

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Exploring efficient zero-shot synthetic dataset generation for Information Retrieval
Tiago Almeida | Sérgio Matos

The broad integration of neural retrieval models into Information Retrieval (IR) systems is significantly impeded by the high cost and laborious process associated with the manual labelling of training data. Similarly, synthetic training data generation, a potential workaround, often requires expensive computational resources due to the reliance on large language models. This work explored the potential of small language models for efficiently creating high-quality synthetic datasets to train neural retrieval models. We aim to identify an optimal method to generate synthetic datasets, enabling training neural reranking models in document collections where annotated data is unavailable. We introduce a novel methodology, grounded in the principles of information theory, to select the most appropriate documents to be used as context for question generation. Then, we employ a small language model for zero-shot conditional question generation, supplemented by a filtering mechanism to ensure the quality of generated questions. Extensive evaluation on five datasets unveils the potential of our approach, outperforming unsupervised retrieval methods such as BM25 and pretrained monoT5. Our findings indicate that an efficiently generated “silver-standard” dataset allows effective training of neural rerankers in unlabeled scenarios. To ensure reproducibility and facilitate wider application, we will release a code repository featuring an accessible API for zero-shot synthetic question generation.

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Clustering-based Sampling for Few-Shot Cross-Domain Keyphrase Extraction
Prakamya Mishra | Lincy Pattanaik | Arunima Sundar | Nishant Yadav | Mayank Kulkarni

Keyphrase extraction is the task of identifying a set of keyphrases present in a document that captures its most salient topics. Scientific domain-specific pre-training has led to achieving state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction performance with a majority of benchmarks being within the domain. In this work, we explore how to effectively enable the cross-domain generalization capabilities of such models without requiring the same scale of data. We primarily focus on the few-shot setting in non-scientific domain datasets such as OpenKP from the Web domain & StackEx from the StackExchange forum. We propose to leverage topic information intrinsically available in the data, to build a novel clustering-based sampling approach that facilitates selecting a few samples to label from the target domain facilitating building robust and performant models. This approach leads to large gains in performance of up to 26.35 points in F1 when compared to selecting few-shot samples uniformly at random. We also explore the setting where we have access to labeled data from the model’s pretraining domain corpora and perform gradual training which involves slowly folding in target domain data to the source domain data. Here we demonstrate further improvements in the model performance by up to 12.76 F1 points.

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Random Smooth-based Certified Defense against Text Adversarial Attack
Zeliang Zhang | Wei Yao | Susan Liang | Chenliang Xu

Certified defense methods have identified their effectiveness against textual adversarial examples, which train models on the worst-case text generated by substituting words in original texts with synonyms. However, due to the discrete word embedding representations, the large search space hinders the robust training efficiency, resulting in significant time consumption. To overcome this challenge, motivated by the observation that synonym embedding has a small distance, we propose to treat the word substitution as a continuous perturbation on the word embedding representation. The proposed method Text-RS applies random smooth techniques to approximate the word substitution operation, offering a computationally efficient solution that outperforms conventional discrete methods and improves the robustness in training. The evaluation results demonstrate its effectiveness in defending against multiple textual adversarial attacks.

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Clarifying the Path to User Satisfaction: An Investigation into Clarification Usefulness
Hossein A. Rahmani | Xi Wang | Mohammad Aliannejadi | Mohammadmehdi Naghiaei | Emine Yilmaz

Clarifying questions are an integral component of modern information retrieval systems, directly impacting user satisfaction and overall system performance. Poorly formulated questions can lead to user frustration and confusion, negatively affecting the system’s performance. This research addresses the urgent need to identify and leverage key features that contribute to the classification of clarifying questions, enhancing user satisfaction. To gain deeper insights into how different features influence user satisfaction, we conduct a comprehensive analysis, considering a broad spectrum of lexical, semantic, and statistical features, such as question length and sentiment polarity. Our empirical results provide three main insights into the qualities of effective query clarification: (1) specific questions are more effective than generic ones; (2) the subjectivity and emotional tone of a question play a role; and (3) shorter and more ambiguous queries benefit significantly from clarification. Based on these insights, we implement feature-integrated user satisfaction prediction using various classifiers, both traditional and neural-based, including random forest, BERT, and large language models. Our experiments show a consistent and significant improvement, particularly in traditional classifiers, with a minimum performance boost of 45%. This study presents invaluable guidelines for refining the formulation of clarifying questions and enhancing both user satisfaction and system performance.

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Efficiently Aligned Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Conversational Tasks using Prompt-Tuning
Lifu Tu | Jin Qu | Semih Yavuz | Shafiq Joty | Wenhao Liu | Caiming Xiong | Yingbo Zhou

Cross-lingual transfer of language models trained on high-resource languages like English has been widely studied for many NLP tasks, but focus on conversational tasks has been rather limited. This is partly due to the high cost of obtaining non-English conversational data, which results in limited coverage. In this work, we introduce for cross-lingual alignment pretraining, a parallel and large-scale multilingual conversation dataset that we created by translating the English-only Schema-Guided Dialogue (SGD) dataset (Rastogi et al., 2020) into 105 other languages. XSGD contains about 330k utterances per language. To facilitate aligned cross-lingual representations, we develop an efficient prompt-tuning-based method for learning alignment prompts. We also investigate two different classifiers: NLI-based and vanilla classifiers, and test cross-lingual capability enabled by the aligned prompts. We evaluate our model’s cross-lingual generalization capabilities on two conversation tasks: slot-filling and intent classification. Our results demonstrate strong and efficient modeling ability of NLI-based classifiers and the large cross-lingual transfer improvements achieved by our aligned prompts, particularly in few-shot settings. We also conduct studies on large language models (LLMs) such as text-davinci-003 and ChatGPT in both zero- and few-shot settings. While LLMs exhibit impressive performance in English, their cross-lingual capabilities in other languages, particularly low-resource ones, are limited.

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Correcting Language Model Outputs by Editing Salient Layers
Kshitij Mishra | Tamer Soliman | Anil Ramakrishna | Aram Galstyan | Anoop Kumar

Large language models can accumulate incorrect or outdated knowledge as the real world evolves. Compared to typical solutions such as retraining, retrieval augmented generation, model editing offers an effective yet low cost solution to address this issue. However, existing model editing algorithms employ manual selection of edit layers, which requires prior domain knowledge or expensive architecture-specific empirical layer selection methods, such as causal tracing. In this work, we propose SaLEM (Salient Layers Editing Model), an efficient solution for data driven layer selection for the model editing task. Our solution utilizes layer-wise saliency maps for layer selection, and matches the accuracy of prior approaches but with only 1/3 of their edits, enabling efficient updates to the parametric knowledge in large language models.

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Improving Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment by Interacting with Agents Through Help Feedback
Nikhil Mehta | Milagro Teruel | Xin Deng | Sergio Figueroa Sanz | Ahmed Awadallah | Julia Kiseleva

Many approaches to Natural Language Processing tasks often treat them as single-step problems, where an agent receives an instruction, executes it, and is evaluated based on the final outcome. However, language is inherently interactive, as evidenced by the back-and-forth nature of human conversations. In light of this, we posit that human-AI collaboration should also be interactive, with humans monitoring the work of AI agents and providing feedback that the agent can understand and utilize. Further, the AI agent should be able to detect when it needs additional information and proactively ask for help. Enabling this scenario would lead to more natural, efficient, and engaging human-AI collaboration.In this paper, we investigate these directions using the challenging task established by the IGLU competition, an interactive grounded language understanding task in a MineCraft-like world. We delve into multiple types of help players can give to the AI to guide it and analyze the impact of this help on behavior, resulting in performance improvements and an end-to-end interactive system.

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Goodhart’s Law Applies to NLP’s Explanation Benchmarks
Jennifer Hsia | Danish Pruthi | Aarti Singh | Zachary Lipton

Despite the rising popularity of saliency-based explanations, the research community remains at an impasse, facing doubts concerning their purpose, efficacy, and tendency to contradict each other. Seeking to unite the community’s efforts around common goals, several recent works have proposed evaluation metrics. In this paper, we critically examine two sets of metrics: the ERASER metrics (comprehensiveness and sufficiency) and the EVAL-X metrics, focusing our inquiry on natural language processing. First, we show that we can inflate a model’s comprehensiveness and sufficiency scores dramatically without altering its predictions or explanations on in-distribution test inputs. Our strategy exploits the tendency for extracted explanations and their complements to be “out-of-support” relative to each other and in-distribution inputs. Next, we demonstrate that the EVAL-X metrics can be inflated arbitrarily by a simple method that encodes the label, even though EVAL-X is precisely motivated to address such exploits. Our results raise doubts about the ability of current metrics to guide explainability research, underscoring the need for a broader reassessment of what precisely these metrics are intended to capture.

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Syllable-level lyrics generation from melody exploiting character-level language model
Zhe Zhang | Karol Lasocki | Yi Yu | Atsuhiro Takasu

The generation of lyrics tightly connected to accompanying melodies involves establishing a mapping between musical notes and syllables of lyrics. This process requires a deep understanding of music constraints and semantic patterns at syllable-level, word-level, and sentence-level semantic meanings. However, pre-trained language models specifically designed at the syllable level are publicly unavailable. To solve these challenging issues, we propose to exploit fine-tuning character-level language models for syllable-level lyrics generation from symbolic melody. In particular, our method aims to fine-tune a character-level pre-trained language model, allowing to incorporation of linguistic knowledge of the language model into the beam search process of a syllable-level Transformer generator network. Besides, by exploring ChatGPT-based evaluation of generated lyrics in addition to human subjective evaluation, we prove that our approach improves the coherence and correctness of generated lyrics, without the need to train expensive new language models.

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Monolingual or Multilingual Instruction Tuning: Which Makes a Better Alpaca
Pinzhen Chen | Shaoxiong Ji | Nikolay Bogoychev | Andrey Kutuzov | Barry Haddow | Kenneth Heafield

Foundational large language models (LLMs) can be instruction-tuned to perform open-domain question answering, facilitating applications like chat assistants. While such efforts are often carried out in a single language, we empirically analyze cost-efficient strategies for multilingual scenarios. Our study employs the Alpaca dataset and machine translations of it to form multilingual data, which is then used to tune LLMs through either low-rank adaptation or full-parameter training. Under a controlled computation budget, comparisons show that multilingual tuning is on par or better than tuning a model for each language. Furthermore, multilingual tuning with downsampled data can be as powerful and more robust. Our findings serve as a guide for expanding language support through instruction tuning.

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Prompt Perturbation Consistency Learning for Robust Language Models
Yao Qiang | Subhrangshu Nandi | Ninareh Mehrabi | Greg Ver Steeg | Anoop Kumar | Anna Rumshisky | Aram Galstyan

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on a number of natural language processing tasks, such as question answering and text summarization. However, their performance on sequence labeling tasks such as intent classification and slot filling (IC-SF), which is a central component in personal assistant systems, lags significantly behind discriminative models. Furthermore, there is a lack of substantive research on robustness of LLMs to various perturbations in the input prompts. The contributions of this paper are three-fold. First, we show that fine-tuning sufficiently large LLMs can produce IC-SF performance comparable to discriminative models. Next, we systematically analyze the performance deterioration of those fine-tuned models due to three distinct yet relevant types of input perturbations - oronyms, synonyms, and paraphrasing. Finally, we propose an efficient mitigation approach, Prompt Perturbation Consistency Learning (PPCL), which works by regularizing the divergence between losses from clean and perturbed samples. Our experiments show that PPCL can recover on an average 59% and 69% of the performance drop for IC and SF tasks, respectively. Furthermore, PPCL beats data augmentation approach while using ten times fewer augmented data samples.

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Enhancing Society-Undermining Disinformation Detection through Fine-Grained Sentiment Analysis Pre-Finetuning
Tsung-Hsuan Pan | Chung-Chi Chen | Hen-Hsen Huang | Hsin-Hsi Chen

In the era of the digital world, while freedom of speech has been flourishing, it has also paved the way for disinformation, causing detrimental effects on society. Legal and ethical criteria are insufficient to address this concern, thus necessitating technological intervention. This paper presents a novel method leveraging pre-finetuning concept for efficient detection and removal of disinformation that may undermine society, as deemed by judicial entities. We argue the importance of detecting this type of disinformation and validate our approach with real-world data derived from court orders. Following a study that highlighted four areas of interest for rumor analysis, our research proposes the integration of a fine-grained sentiment analysis task in the pre-finetuning phase of language models, using the GoEmotions dataset. Our experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing performance significantly. Furthermore, we explore the application of our approach across different languages using multilingual language models, showing promising results. To our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the role of sentiment analysis pre-finetuning in disinformation detection.

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Minimal Distillation Schedule for Extreme Language Model Compression
Chen Zhang | Yang Yang | Qifan Wang | Jiahao Liu | Jingang Wang | Wei Wu | Dawei Song

Recent studies have revealed that language model distillation can become less effective when there is a significant capacity gap between the teacher and the student models. In order to bridge the gap, teacher assistant-based distillation has been introduced, in which the selection of the teacher assistant plays a crucial role in transferring knowledge from the teacher to the student. However, existing approaches for teacher assistant-based distillation require numerous trials to find the optimal teacher assistant.In this paper, we propose a novel approach called Minimal Distillation Schedule (MiniDisc), which enables the scheduling of an optimal teacher assistant in just one trial for extreme model compression (e.g, to 5% scale). In particular, we empirically show that the performance of the student is positively correlated with the scale-performance tradeoff of the teacher assistant. We then introduce a new 𝜆-tradeoff metric that quantifies the optimality of the teacher assistant without the need for trial distillation to the student. By employing a sandwich framework, MiniDisc can select the optimal teacher assistant with the best 𝜆-tradeoff.We extensively evaluate MiniDisc through a series of experiments on the GLUE benchmark. The results demonstrate that our approach achieved an improved efficiency compared to various state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, we showcase the scalability of MiniDisc by applying it to a language model with billions of parameters.

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Event Semantic Classification in Context
Haoyu Wang | Hongming Zhang | Kaiqiang Song | Dong Yu | Dan Roth

In this work, we focus on a fundamental yet underexplored problem, event semantic classification in context, to help machines gain a deeper understanding of events. We classify events from six perspectives: modality, affirmation, specificity, telicity, durativity, and kinesis. These properties provide essential cues regarding the occurrence and grounding of events, changes of status that events can bring about, and the connection between events and time. To this end, this paper introduces a novel dataset collected for the semantic classification tasks and several effective models. By incorporating these event properties into downstream tasks, we demonstrate that understanding the fine-grained event semantics benefits downstream event understanding and reasoning via experiments on event extraction, temporal relation extraction, and subevent relation extraction.

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Local and Global Contexts for Conversation
Zuoquan Lin | Xinyi Shen

The context in conversation is the dialog history crucial for multi-turn dialogue. Learning from the relevant contexts in dialog history for grounded conversation is a challenging problem. Local context is the most neighbor and more sensitive to the subsequent response, and global context is relevant to a whole conversation far beyond neighboring utterances. Currently, pretrained transformer models for conversation challenge capturing the correlation and connection between local and global contexts. We introduce a local and global conversation model (LGCM) for general-purpose conversation in open domain. It is a local-global hierarchical transformer model that excels at accurately discerning and assimilating the relevant contexts necessary for generating responses. It employs a local encoder to grasp the local context at the level of individual utterances and a global encoder to understand the broader context at the dialogue level. The seamless fusion of these locally and globally contextualized encodings ensures a comprehensive comprehension of the conversation. Experiments on popular datasets show that LGCM outperforms the existing conversation models on the performance of automatic metrics with significant margins.

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Aspect-based Key Point Analysis for Quantitative Summarization of Reviews
An Tang | Xiuzhen Zhang | Minh Dinh

Key Point Analysis (KPA) is originally for summarizing arguments, where short sentences containing salient viewpoints are extracted as key points (KPs) and quantified for their prevalence as salience scores. Recently, KPA was applied to summarize reviews, but the study still relies on sentence-based KP extraction and matching, which leads to two issues: sentence-based extraction can result in KPs of overlapping opinions on the same aspects, and sentence-based matching of KP to review comment can be inaccurate, resulting in inaccurate salience scores. To address the above issues, in this paper, we propose Aspect-based Key Point Analysis (ABKPA), a novel framework for quantitative review summarization. Leveraging the readily available aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) resources of reviews to automatically annotate silver labels for matching aspect-sentiment pairs, we propose a contrastive learning model to effectively match KPs to reviews and quantify KPs at the aspect level. Especially, the framework ensures extracting KP of distinct aspects and opinions, leading to more accurate opinion quantification. Experiments on five business categories of the popular Yelp review dataset show that ABKPA outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Source code and data are available at: https://github.com/antangrocket1312/ABKPA

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Improving Semantic Control in Discrete Latent Spaces with Transformer Quantized Variational Autoencoders
Yingji Zhang | Danilo Carvalho | Marco Valentino | Ian Pratt-Hartmann | Andre Freitas

Achieving precise semantic control over the latent spaces of Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) holds significant value for downstream tasks in NLP as the underlying generative mechanisms could be better localised, explained and improved upon. Recent research, however, has struggled to achieve consistent results, primarily due to the inevitable loss of semantic information in the variational bottleneck and limited control over the decoding mechanism. To overcome these challenges, we investigate discrete latent spaces in Vector Quantized Variational AutoEncoder (VQVAE) to improve semantic control and generation in Transformer-based VAEs. In particular, We propose T5VQVAE, a novel model that leverages the controllability of VQVAE to guide the self-attention mechanism in T5, exploiting its full generalization capabilities. Experimental results indicate that T5VQVAE outperforms existing state-of-the-art VAE models, including Optimus, in terms of control and preservation of semantic information across different tasks such as auto-encoding of sentences and mathematical expressions, text transfer, and inference. Moreover, T5VQVAE exhibits improved reasoning capabilities, suggesting potential applications for downstream natural language and symbolic inference tasks.

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High-quality Data-to-Text Generation for Severely Under-Resourced Languages with Out-of-the-box Large Language Models
Michela Lorandi | Anya Belz

The performance of NLP methods for severely under-resourced languages cannot currently hope to match the state of the art in NLP methods for well resourced languages. We explore the extent to which pretrained large language models (LLMs) can bridge this gap, via the example of data-to-text generation for Irish, Welsh, Breton and Maltese. We test LLMs on these under-resourced languages and English, in a range of scenarios. We find that LLMs easily set the state of the art for the under-resourced languages by substantial margins, as measured by both automatic and human evaluations. For all our languages, human evaluation shows on-a-par performance with humans for our best systems, but BLEU scores collapse compared to English, casting doubt on the metric’s suitability for evaluating non-task-specific systems. Overall, our results demonstrate the great potential of LLMs to bridge the performance gap for under-resourced languages.

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Antonym vs Synonym Distinction using InterlaCed Encoder NETworks (ICE-NET)
Muhammad Ali | Yan Hu | Jianbin Qin | Di Wang

Antonyms vs synonyms distinction is a core challenge in lexico-semantic analysis and automated lexical resource construction. These pairs share a similar distributional context which makes it harder to distinguish them. Leading research in this regard attempts to capture the properties of the relation pairs, i.e., symmetry, transitivity, and trans-transitivity. However, the inability of existing research to appropriately model the relation-specific properties limits their end performance. In this paper, we propose InterlaCed Encoder NETworks (i.e., ICE-NET) for antonym vs synonym distinction, that aim to capture and model the relation-specific properties of the antonyms and synonyms pairs in order to perform the classification task in a performance-enhanced manner. Experimental evaluation using the benchmark datasets shows that ICE-NET outperforms the existing research by a relative score of upto 1.8% in F1-measure.

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Predicting Machine Translation Performance on Low-Resource Languages: The Role of Domain Similarity
Eric Khiu | Hasti Toossi | Jinyu Liu | Jiaxu Li | David Anugraha | Juan Flores | Leandro Roman | A. Seza Doğruöz | En-Shiun Lee

Fine-tuning and testing a multilingual large language model is a challenge for low-resource languages (LRLs) since it is an expensive process. While previous studies have predicted the performance of natural language processing (NLP) tasks using machine learning methods, they primarily focus on high-resource languages, overlooking LRLs and shifts across domains. Focusing on LRLs, we investigate three factors (the size of the fine-tuning corpus, domain similarity between fine-tuning and testing corpora, and language similarity between source and target languages), which can potentially impact the model performance by using classical regression models. Our results indicate that domain similarity has the most important impact on predicting the performance of Machine Translation models.

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Does CLIP Bind Concepts? Probing Compositionality in Large Image Models
Martha Lewis | Nihal Nayak | Peilin Yu | Jack Merullo | Qinan Yu | Stephen Bach | Ellie Pavlick

Large-scale neural network models combining text and images have made incredible progress in recent years. However, it remains an open question to what extent such models encode compositional representations of the concepts over which they operate, such as correctly identifying ‘red cube’ by reasoning over the constituents ‘red’ and ‘cube’. In this work, we focus on the ability of a large pretrained vision and language model (CLIP) to encode compositional concepts and to bind variables in a structure-sensitive way (e.g., differentiating ‘cube behind sphere’ from ‘sphere behind cube’). To inspect the performance of CLIP, we compare several architectures from research on compositional distributional semantics models (CDSMs), a line of research that attempts to implement traditional compositional linguistic structures within embedding spaces. We benchmark them on three synthetic datasets – single-object, two-object, and relational – designed to test concept binding. We find that CLIP can compose concepts in a single-object setting, but in situations where concept binding is needed, performance drops dramatically. At the same time, CDSMs also perform poorly, with best performance at chance level.

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Code-Switching and Back-Transliteration Using a Bilingual Model
Daniel Weisberg Mitelman | Nachum Dershowitz | Kfir Bar

The challenges of automated transliteration and code-switching–detection in Judeo-Arabic texts are addressed. We introduce two novel machine-learning models, one focused on transliterating Judeo-Arabic into Arabic, and another aimed at identifying non-Arabic words, predominantly Hebrew and Aramaic. Unlike prior work, our models are based on a bilingual Arabic-Hebrew language model, providing a unique advantage in capturing shared linguistic nuances. Evaluation results show that our models outperform prior solutions for the same tasks. As a practical contribution, we present a comprehensive pipeline capable of taking Judeo-Arabic text, identifying non-Arabic words, and then transliterating the Arabic portions into Arabic script. This work not only advances the state of the art but also offers a valuable toolset for making Judeo-Arabic texts more accessible to a broader Arabic-speaking audience.

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Tsetlin Machine Embedding: Representing Words Using Logical Expressions
Bimal Bhattarai | Ole-Christoffer Granmo | Lei Jiao | Rohan Yadav | Jivitesh Sharma

Embedding words in vector space is a fundamental first step in state-of-the-art natural language processing (NLP). Typical NLP solutions employ pre-defined vector representations to improve generalization by co-locating similar words in vector space. For instance, Word2Vec is a self-supervised predictive model that captures the context of words using a neural network. Similarly, GLoVe is a popular unsupervised model incorporating corpus-wide word co-occurrence statistics. Such word embedding has significantly boosted important NLP tasks, including sentiment analysis, document classification, and machine translation. However, the embeddings are dense floating-point vectors, making them expensive to compute and difficult to interpret. In this paper, we instead propose to represent the semantics of words with a few defining words that are related using propositional logic. To produce such logical embeddings, we introduce a Tsetlin Machine-based autoencoder that learns logical clauses self-supervised. The clauses consist of contextual words like black, cup, and hot to define other words like coffee, thus being human-understandable. We evaluate our embedding approach on several intrinsic and extrinsic benchmarks, outperforming GLoVe on six classification tasks. Furthermore, we investigate the interpretability of our embedding using the logical representations acquired during training. We also visualize word clusters in vector space, demonstrating how our logical embedding co-locate similar words.

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Reading Between the Tweets: Deciphering Ideological Stances of Interconnected Mixed-Ideology Communities
Zihao He | Ashwin Rao | Siyi Guo | Negar Mokhberian | Kristina Lerman

Recent advances in NLP have improved our ability to understand the nuanced worldviews of online communities. Existing research focused on probing ideological stances treats liberals and conservatives as separate groups. However, this fails to account for the nuanced views of the organically formed online communities and the connections between them. In this paper, we study discussions of the 2020 U.S. election on Twitter to identify complex interacting communities. Capitalizing on this interconnectedness, we introduce a novel approach that harnesses message passing when finetuning language models (LMs) to probe the nuanced ideologies of these communities. By comparing the responses generated by LMs and real-world survey results, our method shows higher alignment than existing baselines, highlighting the potential of using LMs in revealing complex ideologies within and across interconnected mixed-ideology communities.

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Unified Embeddings for Multimodal Retrieval via Frozen LLMs
Ziyang Wang | Heba Elfardy | Markus Dreyer | Kevin Small | Mohit Bansal

In this work, We present Unified Embeddings for Multimodal Retrieval (UniMuR), a simple but effective approach that embeds multimodal inputs and retrieves visual and textual outputs via frozen Large Language Models (LLMs). Specifically, UniMuR jointly retrieves multimodal outputs via a unified multimodal embedding and applies dual alignment training to account for both visual and textual semantics. Thus, unlike previous approaches, UniMuR significantly reduces LLM’s modality bias towards generating text-only outputs. Meanwhile, the proposed unified multimodal embedding mitigates the inconsistency between visual and textual outputs and provides coherent multimodal outputs. Furthermore, benefiting from the joint training of visual and textual semantics, UniMuR also achieves strong image/text retrieval ability. Compared to existing approaches, UniMuR achieves better zero-shot multimodal response retrieval performance on MMDialog, improving the overall R@1 by 6.5% while boosting the image retrieval rate and having better cross-modal consistency on multimodal outputs. UniMuR also achieves 2.4% and 3.9% improvement on context-based image retrieval tasks on MMDialog and VisDial respectively when compared to previous approaches, validating its generalization ability across multiple tasks.

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Assessing the Portability of Parameter Matrices Trained by Parameter-Efficient Finetuning Methods
Mohammed Mohammed | Anya Belz

As the cost of training ever larger language models has grown, so has the interest in reusing previously learnt knowledge. Transfer learning methods have shown how reusing non-task-specific knowledge can help in subsequent task-specific learning.In this paper, we investigate the inverse: porting whole functional modules that encode task-specific knowledge from one model to another. We designed a study comprising 1,440 training/testing runs to test the portability of modules trained by parameter-efficient finetuning (PEFT) techniques, using sentiment analysis as an example task. We test portability in a wide range of scenarios, involving different PEFT techniques and different pretrained host models, among other dimensions. We compare the performance of ported modules with that of equivalent modules trained (i) from scratch, and (ii) from parameters sampled from the same distribution as the ported module.We find that the ported modules far outperform the two alternatives tested, but that there are interesting differences between the four PEFT techniques tested.We conclude that task-specific knowledge in the form of structurally modular sets of parameters as produced by PEFT techniques is highly portable, but that degree of success depends on type of PEFT and on differences between originating and receiving pretrained models.

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Exploiting Class Probabilities for Black-box Sentence-level Attacks
Raha Moraffah | Huan Liu

Sentence-level attacks craft adversarial sentences that are synonymous with correctly-classified sentences but are misclassified by the text classifiers. Under the black-box setting, classifiers are only accessible through their feedback to queried inputs, which is predominately available in the form of class probabilities. Even though utilizing class probabilities results in stronger attacks, due to the challenges of using them for sentence-level attacks, existing attacks use either no feedback or only the class labels. Overcoming the challenges, we develop a novel algorithm that uses class probabilities for black-box sentence-level attacks, investigate the effectiveness of using class probabilities on the attack’s success, and examine the question if it is worthy or practical to use class probabilities by black-box sentence-level attacks. We conduct extensive evaluations of the proposed attack comparing with the baselines across various classifiers and benchmark datasets.

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Learning Label Hierarchy with Supervised Contrastive Learning
Ruixue Lian | William Sethares | Junjie Hu

Supervised contrastive learning (SCL) frameworks treat each class as independent and thus consider all classes to be equally important. This neglects the common scenario in which label hierarchy exists, where fine-grained classes under the same category show more similarity than very different ones. This paper introduces a family of Label-Aware SCL methods (LA-SCL) that incorporates hierarchical information to SCL by leveraging similarities between classes, resulting in creating a more well-structured and discriminative feature space. This is achieved by first adjusting the distance between instances based on measures of the proximity of their classes with the scaled instance-instance-wise contrastive. An additional instance-center-wise contrastive is introduced to move within-class examples closer to their centers, which are represented by a set of learnable label parameters. The learned label parameters can be directly used as a nearest neighbor classifier without further finetuning. In this way, a better feature representation is generated with improvements of intra-cluster compactness and inter-cluster separation. Experiments on three datasets show that the proposed LA-SCL works well on text classification of distinguishing a single label among multi-labels, outperforming the baseline supervised approaches. Our code is publicly available 1.

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GrounDial: Human-norm Grounded Safe Dialog Response Generation
Siwon Kim | Shuyang Dai | Mohammad Kachuee | Shayan Ray | Tara Taghavi | Sungroh Yoon

Current conversational AI systems based on large language models (LLMs) are known to generate unsafe responses agreeing to offensive user input or including toxic content. Previous research aimed to alleviate the toxicity by fine-tuning LLM with manually annotated safe dialogue histories. However, the dependency on additional tuning requires substantial costs. To remove the dependency, we propose GrounDial, where response safety is achieved by grounding responses to commonsense social rules without requiring fine-tuning. A hybrid approach of in-context learning and human-norm-guided decoding of GrounDial enables the response to be quantitatively and qualitatively safer even without additional data or tuning.

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Trainable Hard Negative Examples in Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Abstractive Summarization
Haojie Zhuang | Wei Emma Zhang | Chang Dong | Jian Yang | Quan Sheng

Contrastive learning has demonstrated promising results in unsupervised abstractive summarization. However, existing methods rely on manually crafted negative examples, demanding substantial human effort and domain knowledge. Moreover, these human-generated negative examples may be poor in quality and lack adaptability during model training. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach that learns trainable negative examples for contrastive learning in unsupervised abstractive summarization, which eliminates the need for manual negative example design. Our framework introduces an adversarial optimization process between a negative example network and a representation network (including the summarizer and encoders). The negative example network is trained to synthesize hard negative examples that are close to the positive examples, driving the representation network to improve the quality of the generated summaries. We evaluate our method on two benchmark datasets for unsupervised abstractive summarization and observe significant performance improvements compared to strong baseline models.

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Low-Resource Counterspeech Generation for Indic Languages: The Case of Bengali and Hindi
Mithun Das | Saurabh Pandey | Shivansh Sethi | Punyajoy Saha | Animesh Mukherjee

With the rise of online abuse, the NLP community has begun investigating the use of neural architectures to generate counterspeech that can “counter” the vicious tone of such abusive speech and dilute/ameliorate their rippling effect over the social network. However, most of the efforts so far have been primarily focused on English. To bridge the gap for low-resource languages such as Bengali and Hindi, we create a benchmark dataset of 5,062 abusive speech/counterspeech pairs, of which 2,460 pairs are in Bengali, and 2,602 pairs are in Hindi. We implement several baseline models considering various interlingual transfer mechanisms with different configurations to generate suitable counterspeech to set up an effective benchmark. We observe that the monolingual setup yields the best performance. Further, using synthetic transfer, language models can generate counterspeech to some extent; specifically, we notice that transferability is better when languages belong to the same language family.

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Teaching Probabilistic Logical Reasoning to Transformers
Aliakbar Nafar | K. Brent Venable | Parisa Kordjamshidi

In this paper, we evaluate the capability of transformer-based language models in making inferences over uncertain text that includes uncertain rules of reasoning. We cover both Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and generative Large Language Models (LLMs). Our evaluation results show that both generations of language models struggle with reasoning over uncertain text. We propose a novel end-to-end fine-tuning approach, Probabilistic Constraint Training (PCT), that utilizes probabilistic logical rules as constraints in the fine-tuning phase without relying on these rules in the inference stage. To assess the effectiveness of PCT, we utilize the related corpora and, additionally, create a new and more challenging benchmark that, unlike the previous ones, uses instance-specific rules. Our study demonstrates that PCT improves the transformer-based language model’s intrinsic reasoning and makes their probabilistic logical reasoning process more explicit and explainable. Furthermore, PCT equips these models to effectively handle novel situations, including higher reasoning depth, new domains, and complex probabilistic structures.

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On Measuring Context Utilization in Document-Level MT Systems
Wafaa Mohammed | Vlad Niculae

Document-level translation models are usually evaluated using general metrics such as BLEU, which are not informative about the benefits of context. Current work on context-aware evaluation, such as contrastive methods, only measure translation accuracy on words that need context for disambiguation. Such measures cannot reveal whether the translation model uses the correct supporting context. We propose to complement accuracy-based evaluation with measures of context utilization. We find that perturbation-based analysis (comparing models’ performance when provided with correct versus random context) is an effective measure of overall context utilization. For a finer-grained phenomenon-specific evaluation, we propose to measure how much the supporting context contributes to handling context-dependent discourse phenomena. We show that automatically-annotated supporting context gives similar conclusions to human-annotated context and can be used as alternative for cases where human annotations are not available. Finally, we highlight the importance of using discourse-rich datasets when assessing context utilization.

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Solving NLP Problems through Human-System Collaboration: A Discussion-based Approach
Masahiro Kaneko | Graham Neubig | Naoaki Okazaki

Humans work together to solve common problems by having discussions, explaining, and agreeing or disagreeing with each other.Similarly, if a system can have discussions with human partners when solving tasks, it has the potential to improve the system’s performance and reliability.In previous research on explainability, it has only been possible for systems to make predictions and for humans to ask questions about them, rather than having a mutual exchange of opinions.This research aims to create a dataset and computational framework for systems that discuss and refine their predictions through dialogue. Through experiments, we show that the proposed system can have beneficial discussions with humans, improving the accuracy by up to 25 points on a natural language inference task.

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Autoregressive Score Generation for Multi-trait Essay Scoring
Heejin Do | Yunsu Kim | Gary Lee

Recently, encoder-only pre-trained models such as BERT have been successfully applied in automated essay scoring (AES) to predict a single overall score. However, studies have yet to explore these models in multi-trait AES, possibly due to the inefficiency of replicating BERT-based models for each trait. Breaking away from the existing sole use of *encoder*, we propose an autoregressive prediction of multi-trait scores (ArTS), incorporating a *decoding* process by leveraging the pre-trained T5. Unlike prior regression or classification methods, we redefine AES as a score-generation task, allowing a single model to predict multiple scores. During decoding, the subsequent trait prediction can benefit by conditioning on the preceding trait scores. Experimental results proved the efficacy of ArTS, showing over 5% average improvements in both prompts and traits.

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CMA-R: Causal Mediation Analysis for Explaining Rumour Detection
Lin Tian | Xiuzhen Zhang | Jey Han Lau

We apply causal mediation analysis to explain the decision-making process of neural models for rumour detection on Twitter.Interventions at the input and network level reveal the causal impacts of tweets and words in the model output.We find that our approach CMA-R – Causal Mediation Analysis for Rumour detection – identifies salient tweets that explain model predictions and show strong agreement with human judgements for critical tweets determining the truthfulness of stories.CMA-R can further highlight causally impactful words in the salient tweets, providing another layer of interpretability and transparency into these blackbox rumour detection systems. Code is available at: https://github.com/ltian678/cma-r.

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Morphology Aware Source Term Masking for Terminology-Constrained NMT
Ander Corral | Xabier Saralegi

Terminology-constrained NMT systems facilitate the forced translation of domain-specific vocabulary. A notable method in this context is the “copy-and-inflect” approach, which appends the target term lemmas of constraints to their corresponding source terms in the input sentence. In this work, we propose a novel adaptation of the “copy-and-inflect” method, referred to as “morph-masking”. Our method involves masking the source terms of the constraints from the input sentence while retaining essential grammatical information. Our approach is based on the hypothesis that “copy-and-inflect” systems have access to both source and target terms, allowing them to generate the correct surface form of the constraint by either translating the source term itself or properly inflecting the target term lemma. Through extensive validation of our method in two translation directions with different levels of source morphological complexity, Basque to Spanish and English to German, we have demonstrated that “morph-masking” is capable of providing a harder constraint signal, resulting in a notable improvement over the “copy-and-inflect” method (up to 38% in term accuracy), especially in challenging constraint scenarios.

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Improving Backchannel Prediction Leveraging Sequential and Attentive Context Awareness
Yo-Han Park | Wencke Liermann | Yong-Seok Choi | Kong Joo Lee

Backchannels, which refer to short and often affirmative or empathetic responses from a listener during a conversation, play a crucial role in effective communication. In this paper, we introduce CABP(Context-Aware Backchannel Prediction), a sequential and attentive context approach aimed at enhancing backchannel prediction performance. Additionally, CABP leverages the pretrained wav2vec model for encoding audio signal. Experimental results show that CABP performs better than context-free models, with performance improvements of 1.3% and 1.8% in Korean and English datasets, respectively. Furthermore, when utilizing the pretrained wav2vec model, CABP consistently demonstrates the best performance, achieving performance improvements of 4.4% and 3.1% in Korean and English datasets.

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SENSE-LM : A Synergy between a Language Model and Sensorimotor Representations for Auditory and Olfactory Information Extraction
Cédric Boscher | Christine Largeron | Véronique Eglin | Elöd Egyed-Zsigmond

The five human senses – vision, taste, smell, hearing, and touch – are key concepts that shape human perception of the world. The extraction of sensory references (i.e., expressions that evoke the presence of a sensory experience) in textual corpus is a challenge of high interest, with many applications in various areas. In this paper, we propose SENSE-LM, an information extraction system tailored for the discovery of sensory references in large collections of textual documents. Based on the novel idea of combining the strength of large language models and linguistic resources such as sensorimotor norms, it addresses the task of sensory information extraction at a coarse-grained (sentence binary classification) and fine-grained (sensory term extraction) level.Our evaluation of SENSE-LM for two sensory functions, Olfaction and Audition, and comparison with state-of-the-art methods emphasize a significant leap forward in automating these complex tasks.

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Analyzing the Role of Part-of-Speech in Code-Switching: A Corpus-Based Study
Jie Chi | Peter Bell

Code-switching (CS) is a common linguistic phenomenon wherein speakers fluidly transition between languages in conversation. While the cognitive processes driving CS remain a complex domain, earlier investigations have shed light on its multifaceted triggers. This study delves into the influence of Part-of-Speech (POS) on the propensity of bilinguals to engage in CS, employing a comprehensive analysis of Spanish-English and Mandarin-English corpora. Compared with prior research, our findings not only affirm the existence of a statistically significant connection between POS and the likelihood of CS across language pairs, but notably find this relationship exhibits its maximum strength in proximity to CS instances, progressively diminishing as tokens distance themselves from these CS points.

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In-Contextual Gender Bias Suppression for Large Language Models
Daisuke Oba | Masahiro Kaneko | Danushka Bollegala

Despite their impressive performance in a wide range of NLP tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to encode worrying-levels of gender biases. Prior work has proposed debiasing methods that require human labelled examples, data augmentation and fine-tuning of LLMs, which are computationally costly. Moreover, one might not even have access to the model parameters for performing debiasing such as in the case of closed LLMs such as GPT-4. To address this challenge, we propose bias suppression that prevents biased generations of LLMs by simply providing textual preambles constructed from manually designed templates and real-world statistics, without accessing to model parameters. We show that, using CrowsPairs dataset, our textual preambles covering counterfactual statements can suppress gender biases in English LLMs such as LLaMA2. Moreover, we find that gender-neutral descriptions of gender-biased objects can also suppress their gender biases. Moreover, we show that bias suppression has acceptable adverse effect on downstream task performance with HellaSwag and COPA.

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Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning: Is There An Optimal Subset of Parameters to Tune?
Max Ploner | Alan Akbik

The ever-growing size of pretrained language models (PLM) presents a significant challenge for efficiently fine-tuning and deploying these models for diverse sets of tasks within memory-constrained environments.In light of this, recent research has illuminated the possibility of selectively updating only a small subset of a model’s parameters during the fine-tuning process.Since no new parameters or modules are added, these methods retain the inference speed of the original model and come at no additional computational cost. However, an open question pertains to which subset of parameters should best be tuned to maximize task performance and generalizability. To investigate, this paper presents comprehensive experiments covering a large spectrum of subset selection strategies. We comparatively evaluate their impact on model performance as well as the resulting model’s capability to generalize to different tasks.Surprisingly, we find that the gains achieved in performance by elaborate selection strategies are, at best, marginal when compared to the outcomes obtained by tuning a random selection of parameter subsets. Our experiments also indicate that selection-based tuning impairs generalizability to new tasks.

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Contextualized Topic Coherence Metrics
Hamed Rahimi | David Mimno | Jacob Hoover | Hubert Naacke | Camelia Constantin | Bernd Amann

This article proposes a new family of LLM-based topic coherence metrics called Contextualized Topic Coherence (CTC) and inspired by standard human topic evaluation methods. CTC metrics simulate human-centered coherence evaluation while maintaining the efficiency of other automated methods. We compare the performance of our CTC metrics and five other baseline metrics on seven topic models and show that CTC metrics better reflect human judgment, particularly for topics extracted from short text collections by avoiding highly scored topics that are meaningless to humans.

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ProMISe: A Proactive Multi-turn Dialogue Dataset for Information-seeking Intent Resolution
Yash Butala | Siddhant Garg | Pratyay Banerjee | Amita Misra

Users of AI-based virtual assistants and search systems encounter challenges in articulating their intents while seeking information on unfamiliar topics, possibly due to complexity of the user’s intent or the lack of meta-information on the topic. We posit that an iterative suggested question-answering (SQA) conversation can improve the trade-off between the satisfaction of the user’s intent while keeping the information exchange natural and cognitive load of the interaction minimal on the users. In this paper, we evaluate a novel setting ProMISe by means of a sequence of interactions between a user, having a predefined information-seeking intent, and an agent that generates a set of SQA pairs at each step to aid the user to get closer to their intent. We simulate this two-player setting to create a multi-turn conversational dataset of SQAs and user choices (1025 dialogues comprising 4453 turns and 17812 SQAs) using human-feedback, chain-of-thought prompting and web-retrieval augmented large language models. We evaluate the quality of the SQs in the dataset on attributes such as diversity, specificity, grounding, etc, and benchmark the performance of different language models for the task of replicating user behavior.

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CODET: A Benchmark for Contrastive Dialectal Evaluation of Machine Translation
Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam | Sina Ahmadi | Antonios Anastasopoulos

Neural machine translation (NMT) systems exhibit limited robustness in handling source-side linguistic variations. Their performance tends to degrade when faced with even slight deviations in language usage, such as different domains or variations introduced by second-language speakers. It is intuitive to extend this observation to encompass dialectal variations as well, but the work allowing the community to evaluate MT systems on this dimension is limited. To alleviate this issue, we compile and release CODET, a contrastive dialectal benchmark encompassing 891 different variations from twelve different languages. We also quantitatively demonstrate the challenges large MT models face in effectively translating dialectal variants. All the data and code have been released.

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QAEVENT: Event Extraction as Question-Answer Pairs Generation
Milind Choudhary | Xinya Du

We propose a novel representation of document-level events as question and answer pairs (QAEVENT). Under this paradigm: (1) questions themselves can define argument roles without the need for predefined schemas, which will cover a comprehensive list of event arguments from the document; (2) it allows for more scalable and faster annotations from crowdworkers without linguistic expertise. Based on our new paradigm, we collect a novel and wide-coverage dataset. Our examinations show that annotations with the QA representations produce high-quality data for document-level event extraction, both in terms of human agreement level and high coverage of roles comparing to the pre-defined schema. We present and compare representative approaches for generating event question answer pairs on our benchmark.

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Sequence Shortening for Context-Aware Machine Translation
Paweł Maka | Yusuf Semerci | Jan Scholtes | Gerasimos Spanakis

Context-aware Machine Translation aims to improve translations of sentences by incorporating surrounding sentences as context. Towards this task, two main architectures have been applied, namely single-encoder (based on concatenation) and multi-encoder models. In this study, we show that a special case of multi-encoder architecture, where the latent representation of the source sentence is cached and reused as the context in the next step, achieves higher accuracy on the contrastive datasets (where the models have to rank the correct translation among the provided sentences) and comparable BLEU and COMET scores as the single- and multi-encoder approaches. Furthermore, we investigate the application of Sequence Shortening to the cached representations. We test three pooling-based shortening techniques and introduce two novel methods - Latent Grouping and Latent Selecting, where the network learns to group tokens or selects the tokens to be cached as context. Our experiments show that the two methods achieve competitive BLEU and COMET scores and accuracies on the contrastive datasets to the other tested methods while potentially allowing for higher interpretability and reducing the growth of memory requirements with increased context size.

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Jigsaw Pieces of Meaning: Modeling Discourse Coherence with Informed Negative Sample Synthesis
Shubhankar Singh

Coherence in discourse is fundamental for comprehension and perception. Much research on coherence modeling has focused on better model architectures and training setups optimizing on the permuted document task, where random permutations of a coherent document are considered incoherent. However, there’s very limited work on creating “informed” synthetic incoherent samples that better represent or mimic incoherence. We source a diverse positive corpus for local coherence and propose six rule-based methods leveraging information from Constituency trees, Part-of-speech, semantic overlap and more, for “informed” negative sample synthesis for better representation of incoherence. We keep a straightforward training setup for local coherence modeling by fine-tuning popular transformer models, and aggregate local scores for global coherence. We evaluate on a battery of independent downstream tasks to assess the impact of improved negative sample quality. We assert that a step towards optimality for coherence modeling requires better negative sample synthesis in tandem with model improvements.

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Non-Exchangeable Conformal Language Generation with Nearest Neighbors
Dennis Ulmer | Chrysoula Zerva | Andre Martins

Quantifying uncertainty in automatically generated text is important for letting humans check potential hallucinations and making systems more reliable. Conformal prediction is an attractive framework to provide predictions imbued with statistical guarantees, however, its application to text generation is challenging since any i.i.d. assumptions are not realistic. In this paper, we bridge this gap by leveraging recent results on *non-exchangeable* conformal prediction, which still ensures bounds on coverage. The result, *non-exchangeable conformal nucleus sampling*, is a novel extension of the conformal prediction framework to generation based on nearest neighbors. Our method can be used post-hoc for an arbitrary model without extra training and supplies token-level, calibrated prediction sets equipped with statistical guarantees. Experiments in machine translation and language modeling show encouraging results in generation quality. By also producing tighter prediction sets with good coverage, we thus give a more theoretically principled way to perform sampling with conformal guarantees.

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Evidentiality-aware Retrieval for Overcoming Abstractiveness in Open-Domain Question Answering
Yongho Song | Dahyun Lee | Myungha Jang | Seung-won Hwang | Kyungjae Lee | Dongha Lee | Jinyoung Yeo

The long-standing goal of dense retrievers in abtractive open-domain question answering (ODQA) tasks is to learn to capture evidence passages among relevant passages for any given query, such that the reader produce factually correct outputs from evidence passages. One of the key challenge is the insufficient amount of training data with the supervision of the answerability of the passages. Recent studies rely on iterative pipelines to annotate answerability using signals from the reader, but their high computational costs hamper practical applications. In this paper, we instead focus on a data-driven approach and propose Evidentiality-Aware Dense Passage Retrieval (EADPR), which leverages synthetic distractor samples to learn to discriminate evidence passages from distractors. We conduct extensive experiments to validate the effectiveness of our proposed method on multiple abstractive ODQA tasks.

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Self-training Strategies for Sentiment Analysis: An Empirical Study
Haochen Liu | Sai Rallabandi | Yijing Wu | Parag Dakle | Preethi Raghavan

Sentiment analysis is a crucial task in natural language processing that involves identifying and extracting subjective sentiment from text. Self-training has recently emerged as an economical and efficient technique for developing sentiment analysis models by leveraging a small amount of labeled data and a large amount of unlabeled data. However, given a set of training data, how to utilize them to conduct self-training makes a significant difference in the final performance of the model. We refer to this methodology as the self-training strategy. In this paper, we present an empirical study of various self-training strategies for sentiment analysis. First, we investigate the influence of the self-training strategy and hyper-parameters on the performance of traditional small language models (SLMs) in various few-shot settings. Second, we also explore the feasibility of leveraging large language models (LLMs) to help self-training. We propose and empirically compare several self-training strategies with the intervention of LLMs. Extensive experiments are conducted on three real-world sentiment analysis datasets.

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Language is All a Graph Needs
Ruosong Ye | Caiqi Zhang | Runhui Wang | Shuyuan Xu | Yongfeng Zhang

The emergence of large-scale pre-trained language models has revolutionized various AI research domains. Transformers-based Large Language Models (LLMs) have gradually replaced CNNs and RNNs to unify fields of computer vision and natural language processing. Compared with independent data like images, videos or texts, graphs usually contain rich structural and relational information. Meanwhile, languages, especially natural language, being one of the most expressive mediums, excels in describing complex structures. However, existing work on incorporating graph problems into the generative language modeling framework remains very limited. Considering the rising prominence of LLMs, it becomes essential to explore whether LLMs can also replace GNNs as the foundation model for graphs. In this paper, we propose InstructGLM (Instruction-finetuned Graph Language Model) with highly scalable prompts based on natural language instructions. We use natural language to describe multi-scale geometric structure of the graph and then instruction finetune an LLM to perform graph tasks, which enables Generative Graph Learning. Our method surpasses all GNN baselines on ogbn-arxiv, Cora and PubMed datasets, underscoring its effectiveness and sheds light on generative LLMs as new foundation model for graph machine learning. Our code is available at https://github.com/agiresearch/InstructGLM.

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Unraveling the Dynamics of Semi-Supervised Hate Speech Detection: The Impact of Unlabeled Data Characteristics and Pseudo-Labeling Strategies
Florian Ludwig | Klara Dolos | Ana Alves-Pinto | Torsten Zesch

Despite advances in machine learning based hate speech detection, the need for larges amounts of labeled training data for state-of-the-art approaches remains a challenge for their application. Semi-supervised learning addresses this problem by leveraging unlabeled data and thus reducing the amount of annotated data required. Underlying this approach is the assumption that labeled and unlabeled data follow similar distributions. This assumption however may not always hold, with consequences for real world applications. We address this problem by investigating the dynamics of pseudo-labeling, a commonly employed form of semi-supervised learning, in the context of hate speech detection. Concretely we analysed the influence of data characteristics and of two strategies for selecting pseudo-labeled samples: threshold- and ratio-based. The results show that the influence of data characteristics on the pseudo-labeling performances depends on other factors, such as pseudo-label selection strategies or model biases. Furthermore, the effectiveness of pseudo-labeling in classification performance is determined by the interaction between the number, hate ratio and accuracy of the selected pseudo-labels. Analysis of the results suggests an advantage of the threshold-based approach when labeled and unlabeled data arise from the same domain, whilst the ratio-based approach may be recommended in the opposite situation.

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When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets
Orion Weller | Kyle Lo | David Wadden | Dawn Lawrie | Benjamin Van Durme | Arman Cohan | Luca Soldaini

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such as for particular retrieval models, dataset domains, or query types. To answer this, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LM-based expansion. We find that there exists a strong negative correlation between retriever performance and gains from expansion: expansion improves scores for weaker models, but generally harms stronger models. We show this trend holds across a set of eleven expansion techniques, twelve datasets with diverse distribution shifts, and twenty-four retrieval models. Through qualitative error analysis, we hypothesize that although expansions provide extra information (potentially improving recall), they add additional noise that makes it difficult to discern between the top relevant documents (thus introducing false positives). Our results suggest the following recipe: use expansions for weaker models or when the target dataset significantly differs from training corpus in format; otherwise, avoid expansions to keep the relevance signal clear.

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Can Large Language Models Understand Context?
Yilun Zhu | Joel Moniz | Shruti Bhargava | Jiarui Lu | Dhivya Piraviperumal | Site Li | Yuan Zhang | Hong Yu | Bo-Hsiang Tseng

Understanding context is key to understanding human language, an ability which Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly seen to demonstrate to an impressive extent. However, though the evaluation of LLMs encompasses various domains within the realm of Natural Language Processing, limited attention has been paid to probing their linguistic capability of understanding contextual features. This paper introduces a context understanding benchmark by adapting existing datasets to suit the evaluation of generative models. This benchmark comprises of four distinct tasks and nine datasets, all featuring prompts designed to assess the models’ ability to understand context. First, we evaluate the performance of LLMs under the in-context learning pretraining scenario. Experimental results indicate that pre-trained dense models struggle with understanding more nuanced contextual features when compared to state-of-the-art fine-tuned models. Second, as LLM compression holds growing significance in both research and real-world applications, we assess the context understanding of quantized models under in-context-learning settings. We find that 3-bit post-training quantization leads to varying degrees of performance reduction on our benchmark. We conduct an extensive analysis of these scenarios to substantiate our experimental results.

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Let’s Negotiate! A Survey of Negotiation Dialogue Systems
Haolan Zhan | Yufei Wang | Zhuang Li | Tao Feng | Yuncheng Hua | Suraj Sharma | Lizhen Qu | Zhaleh Semnani Azad | Ingrid Zukerman | Reza Haf

Negotiation is a crucial ability in human communication. Recently, there has been a resurgent research interest in negotiation dialogue systems, whose goal is to create intelligent agents that can assist people in resolving conflicts or reaching agreements. Although there have been many explorations into negotiation dialogue systems, a systematic review of this task has not been performed to date. We aim to fill this gap by investigating recent studies in the field of negotiation dialogue systems, and covering benchmarks, evaluations and methodologies within the literature. We also discuss potential future directions, including multi-modal, multi-party and cross-cultural negotiation scenarios. Our goal is to provide the community with a systematic overview of negotiation dialogue systems and to inspire future research.

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Towards Understanding Counseling Conversations: Domain Knowledge and Large Language Models
Younghun Lee | Dan Goldwasser | Laura Schwab Reese

Understanding the dynamics of counseling conversations is an important task, yet it is a challenging NLP problem regardless of the recent advance of Transformer-based pre-trained language models. This paper proposes a systematic approach to examine the efficacy of domain knowledge and large language models (LLMs) in better representing conversations between a crisis counselor and a help seeker. We empirically show that state-of-the-art language models such as Transformer-based models and GPT models fail to predict the conversation outcome. To provide richer context to conversations, we incorporate human-annotated domain knowledge and LLM-generated features; simple integration of domain knowledge and LLM features improves the model performance by approximately 15%. We argue that both domain knowledge and LLM-generated features can be exploited to better characterize counseling conversations when they are used as an additional context to conversations.

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Better Explain Transformers by Illuminating Important Information
Linxin Song | Yan Cui | Ao Luo | Freddy Lecue | Irene Li

Transformer-based models excel in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, attracting countless efforts to explain their inner workings. Prior methods explain Transformers by focusing on the raw gradient and attention as token attribution scores, where non-relevant information is often considered during explanation computation, resulting in confusing results. In this work, we propose highlighting the important information and eliminating irrelevant information by a refined information flow on top of the layer-wise relevance propagation (LRP) method. Specifically, we consider identifying syntactic and positional heads as important attention heads and focus on the relevance obtained from these important heads. Experimental results demonstrate that irrelevant information does distort output attribution scores and then should be masked during explanation computation. Compared to eight baselines on both classification and question-answering datasets, our method consistently outperforms with over 3% to 33% improvement on explanation metrics, providing superior explanation performance. Our anonymous code repository is available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/MLRP-E676/

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Testing the Depth of ChatGPT’s Comprehension via Cross-Modal Tasks Based on ASCII-Art: GPT3.5’s Abilities in Regard to Recognizing and Generating ASCII-Art Are Not Totally Lacking
David Bayani

In the months since its release, ChatGPT and its underlying model, GPT3.5, have garnered massive attention, due to their potent mix of capability and accessibility. While a niche industry of papers have emerged examining the scope of capabilities these models possess, language — whether natural or stylized like code — has been the vehicle to exchange information with the network. Drawing inspiration from the multi-modal knowledge we’d expect an agent with true understanding to possess, we examine GPT3.5’s aptitude for visual tasks, where the inputs feature ASCII-art without overt distillation into a lingual summary. In particular, we scrutinize its performance on carefully designed image recognition and generation tasks. An extended version of this write-up is available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16806 .

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Cross-lingual Editing in Multilingual Language Models
Himanshu Beniwal | Kowsik D | Mayank Singh

The training of large language models (LLMs) necessitates substantial data and computational resources, and updating outdated LLMs entails significant efforts and resources. While numerous model editing techniques (METs) have emerged to efficiently update model outputs without retraining, their effectiveness in multilingual LLMs, where knowledge is stored in diverse languages, remains an underexplored research area. This research paper introduces the cross-lingual model editing (XME) paradigm, wherein a fact is edited in one language, and the subsequent update propagation is observed across other languages. To investigate the XME paradigm, we conducted experiments using BLOOM, mBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa using the two writing scripts: Latin (English, French, and Spanish) and Indic (Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali). The results reveal notable performance limitations of state-of-the-art METs under the XME setting, mainly when the languages involved belong to two distinct script families. These findings highlight the need for further research and development of XME techniques to address these challenges. For more comprehensive information, the dataset used in this research and the associated code are publicly available at the following [URL](https://github.com/lingo-iitgn/XME).

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Sorted LLaMA: Unlocking the Potential of Intermediate Layers of Large Language Models for Dynamic Inference
Parsa Kavehzadeh | Mojtaba Valipour | Marzieh Tahaei | Ali Ghodsi | Boxing Chen | Mehdi Rezagholizadeh

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) by excelling at understanding and generating human-like text. However, their widespread deployment can be prohibitively expensive. SortedNet is a recent training technique for enabling dynamic inference by leveraging the modularity in networks and sorting sub-models based on computation/accuracy in a nested manner. We extend SortedNet to generative NLP tasks, making large language models dynamic without any Pre-Training and by only replacing Standard Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Sorted Fine-Tuning (SoFT). Our approach boosts model efficiency, eliminating the need for multiple models for various scenarios during inference. We show that this approach can unlock the potential of intermediate layers of transformers in generating the target output. Our sub-models remain integral components of the original model, minimizing storage requirements and transition costs between different computational/latency budgets. The efficacy of our proposed method was demonstrated by applying it to tune LLaMA 2 13B on the Stanford Alpaca dataset for instruction following and TriviaQA for closed-book question answering. Our results show the superior performance of sub-models in comparison to Standard Fine-Tuning and SFT+ICT (Early-Exit), all achieved with very efficient tuning and without additional memory usage during inference.

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AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accents
Abraham Owodunni | Aditya Yadavalli | Chris Emezue | Tobi Olatunji | Clinton Mbataku

Despite advancements in speech recognition, accented speech remains challenging. While previous approaches have focused on modeling techniques or creating accented speech datasets, gathering sufficient data for the multitude of accents, particularly in the African context, remains impractical due to their sheer diversity and associated budget constraints. To address these challenges, we propose AccentFold, a method that exploits spatial relationships between learned accent embeddings to improve downstream Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Our exploratory analysis of speech embeddings representing 100+ African accents reveals interesting spatial accent relationships highlighting geographic and genealogical similarities, capturing consistent phonological, and morphological regularities, all learned empirically from speech. Furthermore, we discover accent relationships previously uncharacterized by the Ethnologue. Through empirical evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of AccentFold by showing that, for out-of-distribution (OOD) accents, sampling accent subsets for training based on AccentFold information outperforms strong baselines a relative WER improvement of 4.6%. AccentFold presents a promising approach for improving ASR performance on accented speech, particularly in the context of African accents, where data scarcity and budget constraints pose significant challenges. Our findings emphasize the potential of leveraging linguistic relationships to improve zero-shot ASR adaptation to target accents.

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Hierarchical and Dynamic Prompt Compression for Efficient Zero-shot API Usage
Yichen Jiang | Marco Vecchio | Mohit Bansal | Anders Johannsen

Long prompts present a significant challenge for practical LLM-based systems that need to operate with low latency and limited resources. We investigate prompt compression for zero-shot dialogue systems that learn to use unseen APIs directly in-context from their documentation, which may take up hundreds of prompt tokens per API. We start from a recently introduced approach (Mu et al., 2023) that learns to compress the prompt into a few “gist token” activations during finetuning. However, this simple idea is ineffective in compressing API documentation, resulting in low accuracy compared to the baseline using an uncompressed prompt. In this work, we introduce two major improvements. First, we specialize gist tokens for different hierarchies within an API: we use one Gistarg token for compressing an argument and one Gistvalue token for compressing an acceptable value of a categorical argument. We then dynamically reveal Gistvalue tokens only when they are needed. Second, we add a reconstruction loss to predict the API documentation from the gist tokens. On multiple API-calling tasks, our proposed system keeps the simplicity, efficiency, and large compression factor (20x on SGD) of the gist token approach while achieving significantly better accuracy.

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Fine-tuning CLIP Text Encoders with Two-step Paraphrasing
Hyunjae Kim | Seunghyun Yoon | Trung Bui | Handong Zhao | Quan Tran | Franck Dernoncourt | Jaewoo Kang

Contrastive language-image pre-training (CLIP) models have demonstrated considerable success across various vision-language tasks, such as text-to-image retrieval, where the model is required to effectively process natural language input to produce an accurate visual output. However, current models still face limitations in dealing with linguistic variations in input queries, such as paraphrases, making it challenging to handle a broad range of user queries in real-world applications. In this study, we introduce a straightforward fine-tuning approach to enhance the representations of CLIP models for paraphrases. Our approach involves a two-step paraphrase generation process, where we automatically create two categories of paraphrases from web-scale image captions by leveraging large language models. Subsequently, we fine-tune the CLIP text encoder using these generated paraphrases while freezing the image encoder. Our resulting model, which we call ParaCLIP, exhibits significant improvements over baseline CLIP models across various tasks, including paraphrased retrieval (with rank similarity scores improved by up to 7.6% and 9.6%), Visual Genome Relation and Attribution, as well as seven semantic textual similarity tasks.

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Generative Interpretation: Toward Human-Like Evaluation for Educational Question-Answer Pair Generation
Hyeonseok Moon | Jaewook Lee | Sugyeong Eo | Chanjun Park | Jaehyung Seo | Heuiseok Lim

Educational question-answer generation has been extensively researched owing to its practical applicability. However, we have identified a persistent challenge concerning the evaluation of such systems. Existing evaluation methods often fail to produce objective results and instead exhibit a bias towards favoring high similarity to the ground-truth question-answer pairs. In this study, we demonstrate that these evaluation methods yield low human alignment and propose an alternative approach called Generative Interpretation (GI) to achieve more objective evaluations. Through experimental analysis, we reveal that GI outperforms existing evaluation methods in terms of human alignment, and even shows comparable performance with GPT3.5, only with BART-large.

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Dive into the Chasm: Probing the Gap between In- and Cross-Topic Generalization
Andreas Waldis | Yufang Hou | Iryna Gurevych

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) perform well in In-Topic setups, where training and testing data come from the same topics. However, they face challenges in Cross-Topic scenarios where testing data is derived from distinct topics. This paper analyzes various PLMs with three probing-based experiments to better understand the reasons behind such generalization gaps. For the first time, we demonstrate that the extent of these generalization gaps and the sensitivity to token-level interventions vary significantly across PLMs. By evaluating large language models (LLMs), we show the usefulness of our analysis for these recent models. Overall, we observe diverse pre-training objectives and architectural regularization contribute to more robust PLMs and mitigate generalization gaps. Our research contributes to a deeper understanding and comparison of language models across different generalization scenarios.

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LLM-GEm: Large Language Model-Guided Prediction of People’s Empathy Levels towards Newspaper Article
Md Rakibul Hasan | Md Zakir Hossain | Tom Gedeon | Shafin Rahman

Empathy – encompassing the understanding and supporting others’ emotions and perspectives – strengthens various social interactions, including written communication in healthcare, education and journalism. Detecting empathy using AI models by relying on self-assessed ground truth through crowdsourcing is challenging due to the inherent noise in such annotations. To this end, we propose a novel system, named Large Language Model-Guided Empathy _(LLM-GEm)_ prediction system. It rectifies annotation errors based on our defined annotation selection threshold and makes the annotations reliable for conventional empathy prediction models, e.g., BERT-based pre-trained language models (PLMs). Previously, demographic information was often integrated numerically into empathy detection models. In contrast, our _LLM-GEm_ leverages GPT-3.5 LLM to convert numerical data into semantically meaningful textual sequences, enabling seamless integration into PLMs. We experiment with three _NewsEmpathy_ datasets involving people’s empathy levels towards newspaper articles and achieve state-of-the-art test performance using a RoBERTa-based PLM. Code and evaluations are publicly available at [https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLM-GEm](https://github.com/hasan-rakibul/LLM-GEm).

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ICE-Score: Instructing Large Language Models to Evaluate Code
Terry Yue Zhuo

Recent advancements in the field of natural language generation have facilitated the use of large language models to assess the quality of generated text. Although these models have shown promising results in tasks such as machine translation and summarization, their applicability in code intelligence tasks remains limited without human involvement. The complexity of programming concepts required for such tasks makes it difficult to develop evaluation metrics that align with human judgment. Token-matching-based metrics, such as BLEU, have demonstrated weak correlations with human practitioners in code intelligence tasks. Moreover, utilizing human-written test suites to evaluate functional correctness can be challenging in domains with low resources. To overcome these obstacles, we propose ICE-Score, a new evaluation metric via instructing large language models (LLMs) for code assessments. Our metric addresses the limitations of existing approaches by achieving superior correlations with functional correctness and human preferences, without the need for test oracles or references. We evaluate the efficacy of our metric on two different aspects (human preference and execution success) and four programming languages. Our results demonstrate that our metric surpasses state-of-the-art metrics for code generation, delivering high levels of accuracy and consistency across various programming languages and tasks. We also make our evaluation metric and datasets available to the public, encouraging further research in evaluating code intelligence tasks.

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CReSE: Benchmark Data and Automatic Evaluation Framework for Recommending Eligibility Criteria from Clinical Trial Information
Siun Kim | Jung-Hyun Won | David Lee | Renqian Luo | Lijun Wu | Tao Qin | Howard Lee

Eligibility criteria (EC) refer to a set of conditions an individual must meet to participate in a clinical trial, defining the study population and minimizing potential risks to patients. Previous research in clinical trial design has been primarily focused on searching for similar trials and generating EC within manual instructions, employing similarity-based performance metrics, which may not fully reflect human judgment. In this study, we propose a novel task of recommending EC based on clinical trial information, including trial titles, and introduce an automatic evaluation framework to assess the clinical validity of the EC recommendation model. Our new approach, known as CReSE (Contrastive learning and Rephrasing-based and Clinical Relevance-preserving Sentence Embedding), represents EC through contrastive learning and rephrasing via large language models (LLMs). The CReSE model outperforms existing language models pre-trained on the biomedical domain in EC clustering. Additionally, we have curated a benchmark dataset comprising 3.2M high-quality EC-title pairs extracted from 270K clinical trials available on ClinicalTrials.gov. The EC recommendation models achieve commendable performance metrics, with 49.0% precision@1 and 44.2% MAP@5 on our evaluation framework. We expect that our evaluation framework built on the CReSE model will contribute significantly to the development and assessment of the EC recommendation models in terms of clinical validity.

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BMX: Boosting Natural Language Generation Metrics with Explainability
Christoph Leiter | Hoa Nguyen | Steffen Eger

State-of-the-art natural language generation evaluation metrics are based on black-box language models. Hence, recent works consider their explainability with the goals of better understandability for humans and better metric analysis, including failure cases. In contrast, we explicitly leverage explanations to boost the metrics’ performance. In particular, we perceive feature importance explanations as word-level scores, which we convert, via power means, into a segment-level score. We then combine this segment-level score with the original metric to obtain a better metric. Our tests show improvements for multiple metrics across MT and summarization datasets. While improvements on machine translation are small, they are strong for summarization. Notably, BMX with the LIME explainer and preselected parameters achieves an average improvement of 0.087 points in Spearman correlation on the system-level evaluation of SummEval.

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Joint Inference of Retrieval and Generation for Passage Re-ranking
Wei Fang | Yung-Sung Chuang | James Glass

Passage retrieval is a crucial component of modern open-domain question answering (QA) systems, providing information for downstream QA components to generate accurate and transparent answers. In this study we focus on passage re-ranking, proposing a simple yet effective method, Joint Passage Re-ranking (JPR), that optimizes the mutual information between query and passage distributions, integrating both cross-encoders and generative models in the re-ranking process. Experimental results demonstrate that JPR outperforms conventional re-rankers and language model scorers in both open-domain QA retrieval settings and diverse retrieval benchmarks under zero-shot settings.

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DialogStudio: Towards Richest and Most Diverse Unified Dataset Collection for Conversational AI
Jianguo Zhang | Kun Qian | Zhiwei Liu | Shelby Heinecke | Rui Meng | Ye Liu | Zhou Yu | Huan Wang | Silvio Savarese | Caiming Xiong

Despite advancements in conversational AI, language models encounter challenges to handle diverse conversational tasks, and existing dialogue dataset collections often lack diversity and comprehensiveness. To tackle these issues, we introduce DialogStudio: the largest and most diverse collection of dialogue datasets, unified under a consistent format while preserving their original information. Our collection encompasses data from open-domain dialogues, task-oriented dialogues, natural language understanding, conversational recommendation, dialogue summarization, and knowledge-grounded dialogues, making it an incredibly rich and diverse resource for dialogue research and model training.To further enhance the utility of DialogStudio, we identify the licenses for each dataset, design external knowledge and domain-aware prompts for selected dialogues to facilitate instruction-aware fine-tuning. To improve transparency and support dataset and task-based research, as well as language model pre-training, all datasets, licenses, codes, and models associated with DialogStudio will be made publicly accessible.

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Exploring hybrid approaches to readability: experiments on the complementarity between linguistic features and transformers
Rodrigo Wilkens | Patrick Watrin | Rémi Cardon | Alice Pintard | Isabelle Gribomont | Thomas François

Linguistic features have a strong contribution in the context of the automatic assessment of text readability (ARA). They have been one of the anchors between the computational and theoretical models. With the development in the ARA field, the research moved to Deep Learning (DL). In an attempt to reconcile the mixed results reported in this context, we present a systematic comparison of 6 hybrid approaches along with standard Machine Learning and DL approaches, on 4 corpora (different languages and target audiences). The various experiments clearly highlighted two rather simple hybridization methods (soft label and simple concatenation). They also appear to be the most robust on smaller datasets and across various tasks and languages. This study stands out as the first to systematically compare different architectures and approaches to feature hybridization in DL, as well as comparing performance in terms of two languages and two target audiences of the text, which leads to a clearer pattern of results.

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Establishing degrees of closeness between audio recordings along different dimensions using large-scale cross-lingual models
Maxime Fily | Guillaume Wisniewski | Severine Guillaume | Gilles Adda | Alexis Michaud

In the highly constrained context of low-resource language studies, we explore vector representations of speech from a pretrained model to determine their level of abstraction with regard to the audio signal. We propose a new unsupervised method using ABX tests on audio recordings with carefully curated metadata to shed light on the type of information present in the representations. ABX tests determine whether the representations computed by a multilingual speech model encode a given characteristic. Three experiments are devised: one on room acoustics aspects, one on linguistic genre, and one on phonetic aspects. The results confirm that the representations extracted from recordings with different linguistic/extra-linguistic characteristics differ along the same lines. Embedding more audio signal in one vector better discriminates extra-linguistic characteristics, whereas shorter snippets are better to distinguish segmental information. The method is fully unsupervised, potentially opening new research avenues for comparative work on under-documented languages.

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The Queen of England is not England’s Queen: On the Lack of Factual Coherency in PLMs
Paul Youssef | Jörg Schlötterer | Christin Seifert

Factual knowledge encoded in Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) enriches their representations and justifies their use as knowledge bases. Previous work has focused on probing PLMs for factual knowledge by measuring how often they can correctly predict an _object_ entity given a subject and a relation, and improving fact retrieval by optimizing the prompts used for querying PLMs. In this work, we consider a complementary aspect, namely the coherency of factual knowledge in PLMs, i.e., how often can PLMs predict the _subject_ entity given its initial prediction of the object entity. This goes beyond evaluating how much PLMs know, and focuses on the internal state of knowledge inside them. Our results indicate that PLMs have low coherency using manually written, optimized and paraphrased prompts, but including an evidence paragraph leads to substantial improvement. This shows that PLMs fail to model inverse relations and need further enhancements to be able to handle retrieving facts from their parameters in a coherent manner, and to be considered as knowledge bases.

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HierarchyNet: Learning to Summarize Source Code with Heterogeneous Representations
Minh Nguyen | Nghi Bui | Truong Son Hy | Long Tran-Thanh | Tien Nguyen

Code representation is important to machine learning models in the code-related applications. Existing code summarization approaches primarily leverage Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs) and sequential information from source code to generate code summaries while often overlooking the critical consideration of the interplay of dependencies among code elements and code hierarchy. However, effective summarization necessitates a holistic analysis of code snippets from three distinct aspects: lexical, syntactic, and semantic information. In this paper, we propose a novel code summarization approach utilizing Heterogeneous Code Representations (HCRs) and our specially designed HierarchyNet. HCRs adeptly capture essential code features at lexical, syntactic, and semantic levels within a hierarchical structure. HierarchyNet processes each layer of the HCR separately, employing a Heterogeneous Graph Transformer, a Tree-based CNN, and a Transformer Encoder. In addition, HierarchyNet demonstrates superior performance compared to fine-tuned pre-trained models, including CodeT5, and CodeBERT, as well as large language models that employ zero/few-shot settings, such as CodeLlama, StarCoder, and CodeGen. Implementation details can be found at https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/HierarchyNet.

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Understanding the effects of language-specific class imbalance in multilingual fine-tuning
Vincent Jung | Lonneke Plas

We study the effect of one type of imbalance often present in real-life multilingual classification datasets: an uneven distribution of labels across languages. We show evidence that fine-tuning a transformer-based Large Language Model (LLM) on a dataset with this imbalance leads to worse performance, a more pronounced separation of languages in the latent space, and the promotion of uninformative features. We modify the traditional class weighing approach to imbalance by calculating class weights separately for each language and show that this helps mitigate those detrimental effects. These results create awareness of the negative effects of language-specific class imbalance in multilingual fine-tuning and the way in which the model learns to rely on the separation of languages to perform the task.

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NL2Formula: Generating Spreadsheet Formulas from Natural Language Queries
Wei Zhao | Zhitao Hou | Siyuan Wu | Yan Gao | Haoyu Dong | Yao Wan | Hongyu Zhang | Yulei Sui | Haidong Zhang

Writing formulas on spreadsheets, such as Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, is a widespread practice among users performing data analysis. However, crafting formulas on spreadsheets remains a tedious and error-prone task for many end-users, particularly when dealing with complex operations. To alleviate the burden associated with writing spreadsheet formulas, this paper introduces a novel benchmark task called NL2Formula, with the aim to generate executable formulas that are grounded on a spreadsheet table, given a Natural Language (NL) query as input. To accomplish this, we construct a comprehensive dataset consisting of 70,799 paired NL queries and corresponding spreadsheet formulas, covering 21,670 tables and 37 types of formula functions. We realize the NL2Formula task by providing a sequence-to-sequence baseline implementation called fCoder. Experimental results validate the effectiveness of fCoder, demonstrating its superior performance compared to the baseline models. Furthermore, we also compare fCoder with an initial GPT-3.5 model (i.e., text-davinci-003). Lastly, through in-depth error analysis, we identify potential challenges in the NL2Formula task and advocate for further investigation.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization (CALD-pseudo 2024)

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Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Approaches to Language Data Pseudonymization (CALD-pseudo 2024)
Elena Volodina | David Alfter | Simon Dobnik | Therese Lindström Tiedemann | Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez | Maria Irena Szawerna | Xuan-Son Vu

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Handling Name Errors of a BERT-Based De-Identification System: Insights from Stratified Sampling and Markov-based Pseudonymization
Dalton Simancek | VG Vinod Vydiswaran

Missed recognition of named entities while de-identifying clinical narratives poses a critical challenge in protecting patient-sensitive health information. Mitigating name recognition errors is essential to minimize risk of patient re-identification. In this paper, we emphasize the need for stratified sampling and enhanced contextual considerations concerning Name Tokens using a fine-tuned Longformer BERT model for clinical text de-identifcation. We introduce a Hidden in Plain Sight (HIPS) Markov-based replacement technique for names to mask name recognition misses, revealing a significant reduction in name leakage rates. Our experimental results underscore the impact on addressing name recognition challenges in BERT-based de-identification systems for heightened privacy protection in electronic health records.

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Assessing Authenticity and Anonymity of Synthetic User-generated Content in the Medical Domain
Tomohiro Nishiyama | Lisa Raithel | Roland Roller | Pierre Zweigenbaum | Eiji Aramaki

Since medical text cannot be shared easily due to privacy concerns, synthetic data bears much potential for natural language processing applications. In the context of social media and user-generated messages about drug intake and adverse drug effects, this work presents different methods to examine the authenticity of synthetic text. We conclude that the generated tweets are untraceable and show enough authenticity from the medical point of view to be used as a replacement for a real Twitter corpus. However, original data might still be the preferred choice as they contain much more diversity.

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Automatic Detection and Labelling of Personal Data in Case Reports from the ECHR in Spanish: Evaluation of Two Different Annotation Approaches
Maria Sierro | Begoña Altuna | Itziar Gonzalez-Dios

In this paper we evaluate two annotation approaches for automatic detection and labelling of personal information in legal texts in relation to the ambiguity of the labels and the homogeneity of the annotations. For this purpose, we built a corpus of 44 case reports from the European Court of Human Rights in Spanish language and we annotated it following two different annotation approaches: automatic projection of the annotations of an existing English corpus, and manual annotation with our reinterpretation of their guidelines. Moreover, we employ Flair on a Named Entity Recognition task to compare its performance in the two annotation schemes.

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PSILENCE: A Pseudonymization Tool for International Law
Luis Adrián Cabrera-Diego | Akshita Gheewala

Since the announcement of the GDPR, the pseudonymization of legal documents has become a high-priority task in many legal organizations. This means that for making public a document, it is necessary to redact the identity of certain entities, such as witnesses. In this work, we present the first results obtained by PSILENCE, a pseudonymization tool created for redacting semi-automatically international arbitration documents in English. PSILENCE has been built using a Named Entity Recognition (NER) system, along with a Coreference Resolution system. These systems allow us to find the people that we need to redact in a clustered way, but also to propose the same pseudonym throughout one document. This last aspect makes it easier to read and comprehend a redacted legal document. Different experiments were done on four different datasets, one of which was legal, and the results are promising, reaching a Macro F-score of up to 0.72 on the legal dataset.

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Deidentifying a Norwegian Clinical Corpus - an Effort to Create a Privacy-preserving Norwegian Large Clinical Language Model
Phuong Ngo | Miguel Tejedor | Therese Olsen Svenning | Taridzo Chomutare | Andrius Budrionis | Hercules Dalianis

The study discusses the methods and challenges of deidentifying and pseudonymizing Norwegian clinical text for research purposes. The results of the NorDeid tool for deidentification and pseudonymization on different types of protected health information were evaluated and discussed, as well as the extension of its functionality with regular expressions to identify specific types of sensitive information. The research used a clinical corpus of adult patients treated in a gastro-surgical department in Norway, which contains approximately nine million clinical notes. The study also highlights the challenges posed by the unique language and clinical terminology of Norway and emphasizes the importance of protecting privacy and the need for customized approaches to meet legal and research requirements.

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Extending Off-the-shelf NER Systems to Personal Information Detection in Dialogues with a Virtual Agent: Findings from a Real-Life Use Case
Mario Mina | Carlos Rodríguez | Aitor Gonzalez-Agirre | Marta Villegas

We present the findings and results of our pseudonymisation system, which has been developed for a real-life use-case involving users and an informative chatbot in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Message exchanges between the two involve the former group providing information about themselves and their residential area, which could easily allow for their re-identification. We create a modular pipeline to detect PIIs and perform basic deidentification such that the data can be stored while mitigating any privacy concerns. The use-case presents several challenging aspects, the most difficult of which is the logistic challenge of not being able to directly view or access the data due to the very privacy issues we aim to resolve. Nevertheless, our system achieves a high recall of 0.99, correctly identifying almost all instances of personal data. However, this comes at the expense of precision, which only reaches 0.64. We describe the sensitive information identification in detail, explaining the design principles behind our decisions. We additionally highlight the particular challenges we’ve encountered.

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Detecting Personal Identifiable Information in Swedish Learner Essays
Maria Irena Szawerna | Simon Dobnik | Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez | Therese Lindström Tiedemann | Elena Volodina

Linguistic data can — and often does — contain PII (Personal Identifiable Information). Both from a legal and ethical standpoint, the sharing of such data is not permissible. According to the GDPR, pseudonymization, i.e. the replacement of sensitive information with surrogates, is an acceptable strategy for privacy preservation. While research has been conducted on the detection and replacement of sensitive data in Swedish medical data using Large Language Models (LLMs), it is unclear whether these models handle PII in less structured and more thematically varied texts equally well. In this paper, we present and discuss the performance of an LLM-based PII-detection system for Swedish learner essays.

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Data Anonymization for Privacy-Preserving Large Language Model Fine-Tuning on Call Transcripts
Shayna Gardiner | Tania Habib | Kevin Humphreys | Masha Azizi | Frederic Mailhot | Anne Paling | Preston Thomas | Nathan Zhang

Large language models in public-facing industrial applications must accurately process data for the domain in which they are deployed, but they must not leak sensitive or confidential information when used. We present a process for anonymizing training data, a framework for quantitatively and qualitatively assessing the effectiveness of this process, and an assessment of the effectiveness of models fine-tuned on anonymized data in comparison with commercially available LLM APIs.

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When Is a Name Sensitive? Eponyms in Clinical Text and Implications for De-Identification
Thomas Vakili | Tyr Hullmann | Aron Henriksson | Hercules Dalianis

Clinical data, in the form of electronic health records, are rich resources that can be tapped using natural language processing. At the same time, they contain very sensitive information that must be protected. One strategy is to remove or obscure data using automatic de-identification. However, the detection of sensitive data can yield false positives. This is especially true for tokens that are similar in form to sensitive entities, such as eponyms. These names tend to refer to medical procedures or diagnoses rather than specific persons. Previous research has shown that automatic de-identification systems often misclassify eponyms as names, leading to a loss of valuable medical information. In this study, we estimate the prevalence of eponyms in a real Swedish clinical corpus. Furthermore, we demonstrate that modern transformer-based de-identification systems are more accurate in distinguishing between names and eponyms than previous approaches.

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Did the Names I Used within My Essay Affect My Score? Diagnosing Name Biases in Automated Essay Scoring
Ricardo Muñoz Sánchez | Simon Dobnik | Maria Irena Szawerna | Therese Lindström Tiedemann | Elena Volodina

Automated essay scoring (AES) of second-language learner essays is a high-stakes task as it can affect the job and educational opportunities a student may have access to. Thus, it becomes imperative to make sure that the essays are graded based on the students’ language proficiency as opposed to other reasons, such as personal names used in the text of the essay. Moreover, most of the research data for AES tends to contain personal identifiable information. Because of that, pseudonymization becomes an important tool to make sure that this data can be freely shared. Thus, our systems should not grade students based on which given names were used in the text of the essay, both for fairness and for privacy reasons. In this paper we explore how given names affect the CEFR level classification of essays of second language learners of Swedish. We use essays containing just one personal name and substitute it for names from lists of given names from four different ethnic origins, namely Swedish, Finnish, Anglo-American, and Arabic. We find that changing the names within the essays has no apparent effect on the classification task, regardless of whether a feature-based or a transformer-based model is used.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2024)

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Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2024)
Ali Hürriyetoğlu | Hristo Tanev | Surendrabikram Thapa | Gökçe Uludoğan

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The Future of Web Data Mining: Insights from Multimodal and Code-based Extraction Methods
Evan Fellman | Jacob Tyo | Zachary Lipton

The extraction of structured data from websites is critical for numerous Artificial Intelligence applications, but modern web design increasingly stores information visually in images rather than in text. This shift calls into question the optimal technique, as language-only models fail without textual cues while new multimodal models like GPT-4 promise image understanding abilities. We conduct the first rigorous comparison between text-based and vision-based models for extracting event metadata harvested from comic convention websites. Surprisingly, our results between GPT-4 Vision and GPT-4 Text uncover a significant accuracy advantage for vision-based methods in an applies-to-apples setting, indicating that vision models may be outpacing language-alone techniques in the task of information extraction from websites. We release our dataset and provide a qualitative analysis to guide further research in multi-modal models for web information extraction.

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Fine-Tuning Language Models on Dutch Protest Event Tweets
Meagan Loerakker | Laurens Müter | Marijn Schraagen

Being able to obtain timely information about an event, like a protest, becomes increasingly more relevant with the rise of affective polarisation and social unrest over the world. Nowadays, large-scale protests tend to be organised and broadcast through social media. Analysing social media platforms like X has proven to be an effective method to follow events during a protest. Thus, we trained several language models on Dutch tweets to analyse their ability to classify if a tweet expresses discontent, considering these tweets may contain practical information about a protest. Our results show that models pre-trained on Twitter data, including Bernice and TwHIN-BERT, outperform models that are not. Additionally, the results showed that Sentence Transformers is a promising model. The added value of oversampling is greater for models that were not trained on Twitter data. In line with previous work, pre-processing the data did not help a transformer language model to make better predictions.

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Timeline Extraction from Decision Letters Using ChatGPT
Femke Bakker | Ruben Van Heusden | Maarten Marx

Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) legislation grants citizens the right to request information from various levels of the government, and aims to promote the transparency of governmental agencies. However, the processing of these requests is often met with delays, due to the inherent complexity of gathering the required documents. To obtain accurate estimates of the processing times of requests, and to identify bottlenecks in the process, this research proposes a pipeline to automatically extract these timelines from decision letters of Dutch FOIA requests. These decision letters are responses to requests, and contain an overview of the process, including when the request was received, and possible communication between the requester and the relevant agency. The proposed pipeline can extract dates with an accuracy of .94, extract event phrases with a mean ROUGE- L F1 score of .80 and can classify events with a macro F1 score of .79.Out of the 50 decision letters used for testing (each letter containing one timeline), the model correctly classified 10 of the timelines completely correct, with an average of 3.1 mistakes per decision letter.

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Leveraging Approximate Pattern Matching with BERT for Event Detection
Hristo Tanev

We describe a new weakly supervised method for sentence-level event detection, based exclusively on linear prototype patterns like “people got sick” or “a roadside bomb killed people”. We propose a new BERT based algorithm for approximate pattern matching to identify event phrases, semantically similar to these prototypes. To the best of our knowledge, a similar approach has not been used in the context of event detection. We experimented with two event corpora in the area of disease outbreaks and terrorism and we achieved promising results in sentence level event identification: 0.78 F1 score for new disease cases detection and 0.68 F1 in detecting terrorist attacks. Results were in line with some state-of-the-art systems.

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Socio-political Events of Conflict and Unrest: A Survey of Available Datasets
Helene Olsen | Étienne Simon | Erik Velldal | Lilja Øvrelid

There is a large and growing body of literature on datasets created to facilitate the study of socio-political events of conflict and unrest. However, the datasets, and the approaches taken to create them, vary a lot depending on the type of research they are intended to support. For example, while scholars from natural language processing (NLP) tend to focus on annotating specific spans of text indicating various components of an event, scholars from the disciplines of political science and conflict studies tend to focus on creating databases that code an abstract but structured representation of the event, less tied to a specific source text.The survey presented in this paper aims to map out the current landscape of available event datasets within the domain of social and political conflict and unrest – both from the NLP and political science communities – offering a unified view of the work done across different disciplines.

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Evaluating ChatGPT’s Ability to Detect Hate Speech in Turkish Tweets
Somaiyeh Dehghan | Berrin Yanikoglu

ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, has made a significant impact on the world, mainly on how people interact with technology. In this study, we evaluate ChatGPT’s ability to detect hate speech in Turkish tweets and measure its strength using zero- and few-shot paradigms and compare the results to the supervised fine-tuning BERT model. On evaluations with the SIU2023-NST dataset, ChatGPT achieved 65.81% accuracy in detecting hate speech for the few-shot setting, while BERT with supervised fine-tuning achieved 82.22% accuracy. This results supports previous findings that show that, despite its much smaller size, BERT is more suitable for natural language classifications tasks such as hate speech detection.

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YYama@Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2024: Simpler Prompts, Better Results - Enhancing Zero-shot Detection with a Large Multimodal Model
Yosuke Yamagishi

This paper introduces a zero-shot hate detection experiment using a multimodal large model. Although the implemented model comprises an unsupervised method, results demonstrate that its performance is comparable to previous supervised methods. Furthemore, this study proposed experiments with various prompts and demonstrated that simpler prompts, as opposed to the commonly used detailed prompts in large language models, led to better performance for multimodal hate speech event detection tasks. While supervised methods offer high performance, they require significant computational resources for training, and the approach proposed here can mitigate this issue.The code is publicly available at https://github.com/yamagishi0824/zeroshot-hate-detect.

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RACAI at ClimateActivism 2024: Improving Detection of Hate Speech by Extending LLM Predictions with Handcrafted Features
Vasile Păiș

This paper describes the system that participated in the Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection shared task organized at The 7th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2024). The system tackles the important task of hate speech detection by combining large language model predictions with manually designed features, while trying to explain where the LLM approach fails to predict the correct results.

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CLTL@Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2024: The Winning Approach to Detecting Multimodal Hate Speech and Its Targets
Yeshan Wang | Ilia Markov

In the context of the proliferation of multimodal hate speech related to the Russia-Ukraine conflict, we introduce a unified multimodal fusion system for detecting hate speech and its targets in text-embedded images. Our approach leverages the Twitter-based RoBERTa and Swin Transformer V2 models to encode textual and visual modalities, and employs the Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) fusion mechanism for classification. Our system achieved macro F1 scores of 87.27% for hate speech detection and 80.05% for hate speech target detection in the Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection Challenge 2024, securing the 1st rank in both subtasks. We open-source the trained models at https://huggingface.co/Yestin-Wang

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HAMiSoN-Generative at ClimateActivism 2024: Stance Detection using generative large language models
Jesus M. Fraile-Hernandez | Anselmo Peñas

CASE in EACL 2024 proposes the shared task on Hate Speech and Stance Detection during Climate Activism. In our participation in the stance detection task, we have tested different approaches using LLMs for this classification task. We have tested a generative model using the classical seq2seq structure. Subsequently, we have considerably improved the results by replacing the last layer of these LLMs with a classifier layer. We have also studied how the performance is affected by the amount of data used in training. For this purpose, a partition of the dataset has been used and external data from posture detection tasks has been added.

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JRC at ClimateActivism 2024: Lexicon-based Detection of Hate Speech
Hristo Tanev

In this paper we describe the participation of the JRC team in the Sub-task A: “Hate Speech Detection” in the Shared task on Hate Speech and Stance Detection during Climate Activism at the CASE 2024 workshop. Our system is purely lexicon (keyword) based and does not use any statistical classifier. The system ranked 18 out of 22 participants with F1 of 0.83, only one point below a system, based on LLM. Our system also obtained one the highest achieved precision scores among all participating algo- rithms.

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HAMiSoN-MTL at ClimateActivism 2024: Detection of Hate Speech, Targets, and Stance using Multi-task Learning
Raquel Rodriguez-Garcia | Roberto Centeno

The automatic identification of hate speech constitutes an important task, playing a relevant role towards inclusivity. In these terms, the shared task on Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection at CASE 2024 proposes the analysis of Twitter messages related to climate change activism for three subtasks. Subtasks A and C aim at detecting hate speech and establishing the stance of the tweet, respectively, while subtask B seeks to determine the target of the hate speech. In this paper, we describe our approach to the given subtasks. Our systems leverage transformer-based multi-task learning. Additionally, since the dataset contains a low number of tweets, we have studied the effect of adding external data to increase the learning of the model. With our approach we achieve the fourth position on subtask C on the final leaderboard, with minimal difference from the first position, showcasing the strength of multi-task learning.

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NLPDame at ClimateActivism 2024: Mistral Sequence Classification with PEFT for Hate Speech, Targets and Stance Event Detection
Christina Christodoulou

The paper presents the approach developed for the “Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection” Shared Task at CASE 2024, comprising three sub-tasks. The Shared Task aimed to create a system capable of detecting hate speech, identifying the targets of hate speech, and determining the stance regarding climate change activism events in English tweets. The approach involved data cleaning and pre-processing, addressing data imbalance, and fine-tuning the “mistralai/Mistral-7B-v0.1” LLM for sequence classification using PEFT (Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning). The LLM was fine-tuned using two PEFT methods, namely LoRA and prompt tuning, for each sub-task, resulting in the development of six Mistral-7B fine-tuned models in total. Although both methods surpassed the baseline model scores of the task organizers, the prompt tuning method yielded the highest results. Specifically, the prompt tuning method achieved a Macro-F1 score of 0.8649, 0.6106 and 0.6930 in the test data of sub-tasks A, B and C, respectively.

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AAST-NLP at ClimateActivism 2024: Ensemble-Based Climate Activism Stance and Hate Speech Detection : Leveraging Pretrained Language Models
Ahmed El-Sayed | Omar Nasr

Climate activism has emerged as a powerful force in addressing the urgent challenges posed by climate change. Individuals and organizations passionate about environmental issues use platforms like Twitter to mobilize support, share information, and advocate for policy changes. Unfortunately, amidst the passionate discussions, there has been an unfortunate rise in the prevalence of hate speech on the platform. Some users resort to personal attacks and divisive language, undermining the constructive efforts of climate activists. In this paper, we describe our approaches for three subtasks of ClimateActivism at CASE 2024. For all the three subtasks, we utilize pretrained language models enhanced by ensemble learning. Regarding the second subtask, dedicated to target detection, we experimented with incorporating Named Entity Recognition in the pipeline. Additionally, our models secure the second, third and fifth ranks in the three subtasks respectively.

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ARC-NLP at ClimateActivism 2024: Stance and Hate Speech Detection by Generative and Encoder Models Optimized with Tweet-Specific Elements
Ahmet Kaya | Oguzhan Ozcelik | Cagri Toraman

Social media users often express hate speech towards specific targets and may either support or refuse activist movements. The automated detection of hate speech, which involves identifying both targets and stances, plays a critical role in event identification to mitigate its negative effects. In this paper, we present our methods for three subtasks of the Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection Shared Task at CASE 2024. For each subtask (i) hate speech identification (ii) targets of hate speech identification (iii) stance detection, we experiment with optimized Transformer-based architectures that focus on tweet-specific features such as hashtags, URLs, and emojis. Furthermore, we investigate generative large language models, such as Llama2, using specific prompts for the first two subtasks. Our experiments demonstrate better performance of our models compared to baseline models in each subtask. Our solutions also achieve third, fourth, and first places respectively in the subtasks.

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HAMiSoN-Ensemble at ClimateActivism 2024: Ensemble of RoBERTa, Llama 2, and Multi-task for Stance Detection
Raquel Rodriguez-Garcia | Julio Reyes Montesinos | Jesus M. Fraile-Hernandez | Anselmo Peñas

CASE @ EACL 2024 proposes a shared task on Stance and Hate Event Detection for Climate Activism discourse. For our participation in the stance detection task, we propose an ensemble of different approaches: a transformer-based model (RoBERTa), a generative Large Language Model (Llama 2), and a Multi-Task Learning model. Our main goal is twofold: to study the effect of augmenting the training data with external datasets, and to examine the contribution of several, diverse models through a voting ensemble. The results show that if we take the best configuration during training for each of the three models (RoBERTa, Llama 2 and MTL), the ensemble would have ranked first with the highest F1 on the leaderboard for the stance detection subtask.

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MasonPerplexity at Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2024: Hate Speech and Target Detection Using Transformer Ensembles
Amrita Ganguly | Al Nahian Bin Emran | Sadiya Sayara Chowdhury Puspo | Md Nishat Raihan | Dhiman Goswami | Marcos Zampieri

The automatic identification of offensive language such as hate speech is important to keep discussions civil in online communities. Identifying hate speech in multimodal content is a particularly challenging task because offensiveness can be manifested in either words or images or a juxtaposition of the two. This paper presents the MasonPerplexity submission for the Shared Task on Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection at CASE 2024 at EACL 2024. The task is divided into two sub-tasks: sub-task A focuses on the identification of hate speech and sub-task B focuses on the identification of targets in text-embedded images during political events. We use an XLM-roBERTa-large model for sub-task A and an ensemble approach combining XLM-roBERTa-base, BERTweet-large, and BERT-base for sub-task B. Our approach obtained 0.8347 F1-score in sub-task A and 0.6741 F1-score in sub-task B ranking 3rd on both sub-tasks.

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MasonPerplexity at ClimateActivism 2024: Integrating Advanced Ensemble Techniques and Data Augmentation for Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Identification
Al Nahian Bin Emran | Amrita Ganguly | Sadiya Sayara Chowdhury Puspo | Dhiman Goswami | Md Nishat Raihan

The task of identifying public opinions on social media, particularly regarding climate activism and the detection of hate events, has emerged as a critical area of research in our rapidly changing world. With a growing number of people voicing either to support or oppose to climate-related issues - understanding these diverse viewpoints has become increasingly vital. Our team, MasonPerplexity, participates in a significant research initiative focused on this subject. We extensively test various models and methods, discovering that our most effective results are achieved through ensemble modeling, enhanced by data augmentation techniques like back-translation. In the specific components of this research task, our team achieved notable positions, ranking 5th, 1st, and 6th in the respective sub-tasks, thereby illustrating the effectiveness of our approach in this important field of study.

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AAST-NLP at Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection 2024 : A Multimodal Approach for Classification of Text-Embedded Images Based on CLIP and BERT-Based Models.
Ahmed El-Sayed | Omar Nasr

With the rapid rise of social media platforms, communities have been able to share their passions and interests with the world much more conveniently. This, in turn, has led to individuals being able to spread hateful messages through the use of memes. The classification of such materials requires not only looking at the individual images but also considering the associated text in tandem. Looking at the images or the text separately does not provide the full context. In this paper, we describe our approach to hateful meme classification for the Multimodal Hate Speech Shared Task at CASE 2024. We utilized the same approach in the two subtasks, which involved a classification model based on text and image features obtained using Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) in addition to utilizing BERT-Based models. We then utilize predictions created by both models in an ensemble approach. This approach ranked second in both subtasks, respectively.

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CUET_Binary_Hackers at ClimateActivism 2024: A Comprehensive Evaluation and Superior Performance of Transformer-Based Models in Hate Speech Event Detection and Stance Classification for Climate Activism
Salman Farsi | Asrarul Hoque Eusha | Mohammad Shamsul Arefin

The escalating impact of climate change on our environment and lives has spurred a global surge in climate change activism. However, the misuse of social media platforms like Twitter has opened the door to the spread of hatred against activism, targeting individuals, organizations, or entire communities. Also, the identification of the stance in a tweet holds paramount significance, especially in the context of understanding the success of activism. So, to address the challenge of detecting such hate tweets, identifying their targets, and classifying stances from tweets, this shared task introduced three sub-tasks, each aiming to address exactly one mentioned issue. We participated in all three sub-tasks and in this paper, we showed a comparative analysis between the different machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), hybrid, and transformer models. Our approach involved proper hyper-parameter tuning of models and effectively handling class imbalance datasets through data oversampling. Notably, our fine-tuned m-BERT achieved a macro-average $f1$ score of 0.91 in sub-task A (Hate Speech Detection) and 0.74 in sub-task B (Target Identification). On the other hand, Climate-BERT achieved a $f1$ score of 0.67 in sub-task C. These scores positioned us at the forefront, securing 1st, 6th, and 15th ranks in the respective sub-tasks. The detailed implementation information for the tasks is available in the GitHub.

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HAMiSoN-baselines at ClimateActivism 2024: A Study on the Use of External Data for Hate Speech and Stance Detection
Julio Reyes Montesinos | Alvaro Rodrigo

The CASE@EACL2024 Shared Task addresses Climate Activism online through three subtasks that focus on hate speech detection (Subtask A), hate speech target classification (Subtask B), and stance detection (Subtask C) respectively.Our contribution examines the effect of fine-tuning on external data for each of these subtasks. For the two subtasks that focus on hate speech, we augment the training data with the OLID dataset, whereas for the stance subtask we harness the SemEval-2016 Stance dataset. We fine-tune RoBERTa and DeBERTa models for each of the subtasks, with and without external training data.For the hate speech detection and stance detection subtasks, our RoBERTa models came up third and first on the leaderboard, respectively. While the use of external data was not relevant on those tasks, we found that it greatly improved the performance on the hate speech target categorization.

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Z-AGI Labs at ClimateActivism 2024: Stance and Hate Event Detection on Social Media
Nikhil Narayan | Mrutyunjay Biswal

In the digital realm, rich data serves as a crucial source of insights into the complexities of social, political, and economic landscapes. Addressing the growing need for high-quality information on events and the imperative to combat hate speech, this research led to the establishment of the Shared Task on Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection at CASE 2024. Focused on climate activists contending with hate speech on social media, our study contributes to hate speech identification from tweets. Analyzing three sub-tasks - Hate Speech Detection (Sub-task A), Targets of Hate Speech Identification (Sub-task B), and Stance Detection (Sub-task C) - Team Z-AGI Labs evaluated various models, including LSTM, Xgboost, and LGBM based on Tf-Idf. Results unveiled intriguing variations, with Catboost excelling in Subtask-B (F1: 0.5604) and Subtask-C (F1: 0.7081), while LGBM emerged as the top-performing model for Subtask-A (F1: 0.8684). This research provides valuable insights into the suitability of classical machine learning models for climate hate speech and stance detection, aiding informed model selection for robust mechanisms.

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Bryndza at ClimateActivism 2024: Stance, Target and Hate Event Detection via Retrieval-Augmented GPT-4 and LLaMA
Marek Suppa | Daniel Skala | Daniela Jass | Samuel Sucik | Andrej Svec | Peter Hraska

This study details our approach for the CASE 2024 Shared Task on Climate Activism Stance and Hate Event Detection, focusing on Hate Speech Detection, Hate Speech Target Identification, and Stance Detection as classification challenges. We explored the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly GPT-4, in zero- or few-shot settings enhanced by retrieval augmentation and re-ranking for Tweet classification. Our goal was to determine if LLMs could match or surpass traditional methods in this context. We conducted an ablation study with LLaMA for comparison, and our results indicate that our models significantly outperformed the baselines, securing second place in the Target Detection task. The code for our submission is available at https://github.com/NaiveNeuron/bryndza-case-2024

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IUST at ClimateActivism 2024: Towards Optimal Stance Detection: A Systematic Study of Architectural Choices and Data Cleaning Techniques
Ghazaleh Mahmoudi | Sauleh Eetemadi

This work presents a systematic search of various model architecture configurations and data cleaning methods. The study evaluates the impact of data cleaning methods on the obtained results. Additionally, we demonstrate that a combination of CNN and Encoder-only models such as BERTweet outperforms FNNs. Moreover, by utilizing data augmentation, we are able to overcome the challenge of data imbalance.

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VRLLab at HSD-2Lang 2024: Turkish Hate Speech Detection Online with TurkishBERTweet
Ali Najafi | Onur Varol

Social media platforms like Twitter - recently rebranded as X - produce nearly half a billion tweets daily and host a significant number of users that can be affected by content that are not properly moderated. In this work, we present an approach that ranked third at the HSD-2Lang 2024 competition’s subtask-A along with additional methodology developed for this task and evaluation of different approaches. We utilize three different models and the best performing approach use publicly-available TurkishBERTweet model with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) for fine tuning. We also experiment with another publicly available model and a novel methodology to ensemble different hand-crafted features and outcomes of different models. Finally, we report the experimental results, competition scores, and discussion to improve this effort further.

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Transformers at HSD-2Lang 2024: Hate Speech Detection in Arabic and Turkish Tweets Using BERT Based Architectures
Kriti Singhal | Jatin Bedi

Over the past years, researchers across the globe have made significant efforts to develop systems capable of identifying the presence of hate speech in different languages. This paper describes the team Transformers’ submission to the subtasks: Hate Speech Detection in Turkish across Various Contexts and Hate Speech Detection with Limited Data in Arabic, organized by HSD-2Lang in conjunction with CASE at EACL 2024. A BERT based architecture was employed in both the subtasks. We achieved an F1 score of 0.63258 using XLM RoBERTa and 0.48101 using mBERT, hence securing the 6th rank and the 5th rank in the first and the second subtask, respectively.

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ReBERT at HSD-2Lang 2024: Fine-Tuning BERT with AdamW for Hate Speech Detection in Arabic and Turkish
Utku Yagci | Egemen Iscan | Ahmet Kolcak

Identifying hate speech is a challenging specialization in the natural language processing field (NLP). Particularly in fields with differing linguistics, it becomes more demanding to construct a well-performing classifier for the betterment of the community. In this paper, we leveraged the performances of pre-trained models on the given hate speech detection dataset. By conducting a hyperparameter search, we computed the feasible setups for fine-tuning and trained effective classifiers that performed well in both subtasks in the HSD-2Lang 2024 contest.

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DetectiveReDASers at HSD-2Lang 2024: A New Pooling Strategy with Cross-lingual Augmentation and Ensembling for Hate Speech Detection in Low-resource Languages
Fatima Zahra Qachfar | Bryan Tuck | Rakesh Verma

This paper addresses hate speech detection in Turkish and Arabic tweets, contributing to the HSD-2Lang Shared Task. We propose a specialized pooling strategy within a soft-voting ensemble framework to improve classification in Turkish and Arabic language models. Our approach also includes expanding the training sets through cross-lingual translation, introducing a broader spectrum of hate speech examples. Our method attains F1-Macro scores of 0.6964 for Turkish (Subtask A) and 0.7123 for Arabic (Subtask B). While achieving these results, we also consider the computational overhead, striking a balance between the effectiveness of our unique pooling strategy, data augmentation, and soft-voting ensemble. This approach advances the practical application of language models in low-resource languages for hate speech detection.

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Detecting Hate Speech in Turkish Print Media: A Corpus and A Hybrid Approach with Target-oriented Linguistic Knowledge
Gökçe Uludoğan | Atıf Emre Yüksel | Ümit Tunçer | Burak Işık | Yasemin Korkmaz | Didar Akar | Arzucan Özgür

The use of hate speech targeting ethnicity, nationalities, religious identities, and specific groups has been on the rise in the news media. However, most existing automatic hate speech detection models focus on identifying hate speech, often neglecting the target group-specific language that is common in news articles. To address this problem, we first compile a hate speech dataset, TurkishHatePrintCorpus, derived from Turkish news articles and annotate it specifically for the language related to the targeted group. We then introduce the HateTargetBERT model, which integrates the target-centric linguistic features extracted in this study into the BERT model, and demonstrate its effectiveness in detecting hate speech while allowing the model’s classification decision to be explained. We have made the dataset and source code publicly available at url{https://github.com/boun-tabi/HateTargetBERT-TR}.

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Team Curie at HSD-2Lang 2024: Hate Speech Detection in Turkish and Arabic Tweets using BERT-based models
Ehsan Barkhodar | Işık Topçu | Ali Hürriyetoğlu

Team Curie at HSD-2Lang 2024: Team Curie at HSD-2Lang 2024: Hate Speech Detection in Turkish and Arabic Tweets using BERT-based models This paper has presented our methodologies and findings in tackling hate speech detection in Turkish and Arabic tweets as part of the HSD-2Lang 2024 contest. Through innovative approaches and the fine-tuning of BERT-based models, we have achieved notable F1 scores, demonstrating the potential of our models in addressing the linguistic challenges inherent in Turkish and Arabic languages. The ablation study for Subtask A provided valuable insights into the impact of preprocessing and data balancing on model performance, guiding future enhancements. Our work contributes to the broader goal of improving online content moderation and safety, with future research directions including the expansion to more languages and the integration of multi-modal data and explainable AI techniques.

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Extended Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection During Russia-Ukraine Crisis - Shared Task at CASE 2024
Surendrabikram Thapa | Kritesh Rauniyar | Farhan Jafri | Hariram Veeramani | Raghav Jain | Sandesh Jain | Francielle Vargas | Ali Hürriyetoğlu | Usman Naseem

Addressing the need for effective hate speech moderation in contemporary digital discourse, the Multimodal Hate Speech Event Detection Shared Task made its debut at CASE 2023, co-located with RANLP 2023. Building upon its success, an extended version of the shared task was organized at the CASE workshop in EACL 2024. Similar to the earlier iteration, in this shared task, participants address hate speech detection through two subtasks. Subtask A is a binary classification problem, assessing whether text-embedded images contain hate speech. Subtask B goes further, demanding the identification of hate speech targets, such as individuals, communities, and organizations within text-embedded images. Performance is evaluated using the macro F1-score metric in both subtasks. With a total of 73 registered participants, the shared task witnessed remarkable achievements, with the best F1-scores in Subtask A and Subtask B reaching 87.27% and 80.05%, respectively, surpassing the leaderboard of the previous CASE 2023 shared task. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the performance of seven teams that submitted results for Subtask A and five teams for Subtask B.

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Overview of the Hate Speech Detection in Turkish and Arabic Tweets (HSD-2Lang) Shared Task at CASE 2024
Gökçe Uludoğan | Somaiyeh Dehghan | Inanc Arin | Elif Erol | Berrin Yanikoglu | Arzucan Özgür

This paper offers an overview of Hate Speech Detection in Turkish and Arabic Tweets (HSD-2Lang) Shared Task at CASE workshop to be held jointly with EACL 2024. The task was divided into two subtasks: Subtask A, targeting hate speech detection in various Turkish contexts, and Subtask B, addressing hate speech detection in Arabic with limited data. The shared task attracted significant attention with 33 teams that registered and 10 teams that participated in at least one task. In this paper, we provide the details of the tasks and the approaches adopted by the participant along with an analysis of the results obtained from this shared task.

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Stance and Hate Event Detection in Tweets Related to Climate Activism - Shared Task at CASE 2024
Surendrabikram Thapa | Kritesh Rauniyar | Farhan Jafri | Shuvam Shiwakoti | Hariram Veeramani | Raghav Jain | Guneet Singh Kohli | Ali Hürriyetoğlu | Usman Naseem

Social media plays a pivotal role in global discussions, including on climate change. The variety of opinions expressed range from supportive to oppositional, with some instances of hate speech. Recognizing the importance of understanding these varied perspectives, the 7th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE) at EACL 2024 hosted a shared task focused on detecting stances and hate speech in climate activism-related tweets. This task was divided into three subtasks: subtasks A and B concentrated on identifying hate speech and its targets, while subtask C focused on stance detection. Participants’ performance was evaluated using the macro F1-score. With over 100 teams participating, the highest F1 scores achieved were 91.44% in subtask C, 78.58% in subtask B, and 74.83% in subtask A. This paper details the methodologies of 24 teams that submitted their results to the competition’s leaderboard.

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A Concise Report of the 7th Workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text
Ali Hürriyetoğlu | Surendrabikram Thapa | Gökçe Uludoğan | Somaiyeh Dehghan | Hristo Tanev

In this paper, we provide a brief overview of the 7th workshop on Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE) co-located with EACL 2024. This workshop consisted of regular papers, system description papers submitted by shared task participants, and overview papers of shared tasks held. This workshop series has been bringing together experts and enthusiasts from technical and social science fields, providing a platform for better understanding event information. This workshop not only advances text-based event extraction but also facilitates research in event extraction in multimodal settings.
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Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych 2024)
Andrew Yates | Bart Desmet | Emily Prud’hommeaux | Ayah Zirikly | Steven Bedrick | Sean MacAvaney | Kfir Bar | Molly Ireland | Yaakov Ophir

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Assessing Motivational Interviewing Sessions with AI-Generated Patient Simulations
Stav Yosef | Moreah Zisquit | Ben Cohen | Anat Klomek Brunstein | Kfir Bar | Doron Friedman

There is growing interest in utilizing large language models (LLMs) in the field of mental health, and this goes as far as suggesting automated LLM-based therapists. Evaluating such generative models in therapy sessions is essential, yet remains an ongoing and complex challenge. We suggest a novel approach: an LLMbased digital patient platform which generates digital patients that can engage in a text-based conversation with either automated or human therapists. Moreover, we show that LLMs can be used to rate the quality of such sessions by completing questionnaires originally designed for human patients. We demonstrate that the ratings are both statistically reliable and valid, indicating that they are consistent and capable of distinguishing among three levels of therapist expertise. In the present study, we focus on motivational interviewing, but we suggest that this platform can be adapted to facilitate other types of therapies. We plan to publish the digital patient platform and make it available to the research community, with the hope of contributing to the standardization of evaluating automated therapists.

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Delving into the Depths: Evaluating Depression Severity through BDI-biased Summaries
Mario Aragon | Javier Parapar | David E Losada

Depression is a global concern suffered by millions of people, significantly impacting their thoughts and behavior. Over the years, heightened awareness, spurred by health campaigns and other initiatives, has driven the study of this disorder using data collected from social media platforms. In our research, we aim to gauge the severity of symptoms related to depression among social media users. The ultimate goal is to estimate the user’s responses to a well-known standardized psychological questionnaire, the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI). This is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory that covers multiple topics about how the subject has been feeling. Mining users’ social media interactions and understanding psychological states represents a challenging goal. To that end, we present here an approach based on search and summarization that extracts multiple BDI-biased summaries from the thread of users’ publications. We also leverage a robust large language model to estimate the potential answer for each BDI item. Our method involves several steps. First, we employ a search strategy based on sentence similarity to obtain pertinent extracts related to each topic in the BDI questionnaire. Next, we compile summaries of the content of these groups of extracts. Last, we exploit chatGPT to respond to the 21 BDI questions, using the summaries as contextual information in the prompt. Our model has undergone rigorous evaluation across various depression datasets, yielding encouraging results. The experimental report includes a comparison against an assessment done by expert humans and competes favorably with state-of-the-art methods.

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How Can Client Motivational Language Inform Psychotherapy Agents?
Van Hoang | Eoin Rogers | Robert Ross

Within Motivational Interviewing (MI), client utterances are coded as for or against a certain behaviour change, along with commitment strength; this is essential to ensure therapists soften rather than persisting goal-related actions in the face of resistance. Prior works in MI agents have been scripted or semi-scripted, limiting users’ natural language expressions. With the aim of automating the MI interactions, we propose and explore the task of automated identification of client motivational language. Employing Large Language Models (LLMs), we compare in-context learning (ICL) and instruction fine-tuning (IFT) with varying training sizes for this identification task. Our experiments show that both approaches can learn under low-resourced settings. Our results demonstrate that IFT, though cheaper, is more stable to prompt choice, and yields better performance with more data. Given the detected motivation, we further present an approach to the analysis of therapists’ strategies for balancing building rapport with clients with advancing the treatment plan. A framework of MI agents is developed using insights from the data and the psychotherapy literature.

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Linguistic markers of schizophrenia: a case study of Robert Walser
Ivan Nenchev | Tatjana Scheffler | Marie de la Fuente | Heiner Stuke | Benjamin Wilck | Sandra Anna Just | Christiane Montag

We present a study of the linguistic output of the German-speaking writer Robert Walser using NLP. We curated a corpus comprising texts written by Walser during periods of sound health, and writings from the year before his hospitalization, and writings from the first year of his stay in a psychiatric clinic, all likely at- tributed to schizophrenia. Within this corpus, we identified and analyzed a total of 20 lin- guistic markers encompassing established met- rics for lexical diversity, semantic similarity, and syntactic complexity. Additionally, we ex- plored lesser-known markers such as lexical innovation, concreteness, and imageability. No- tably, we introduced two additional markers for phonological similarity for the first time within this context. Our findings reveal sig- nificant temporal dynamics in these markers closely associated with Walser’s contempora- neous diagnosis of schizophrenia. Furthermore, we investigated the relationship between these markers, leveraging them for classification of the schizophrenic episode.

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Therapist Self-Disclosure as a Natural Language Processing Task
Natalie Shapira | Tal Alfi-Yogev

Therapist Self-Disclosure (TSD) within the context of psychotherapy entails the revelation of personal information by the therapist. The ongoing scholarly discourse surrounding the utility of TSD, spanning from the inception of psychotherapy to the present day, has underscored the need for greater specificity in conceptualizing TSD. This inquiry has yielded more refined classifications within the TSD domain, with a consensus emerging on the distinction between immediate and non-immediate TSD, each of which plays a distinct role in the therapeutic process. Despite this progress in the field of psychotherapy, the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain currently lacks methodological solutions or explorations for such scenarios. This lacuna can be partly due to the difficulty of attaining publicly available clinical data. To address this gap, this paper presents an innovative NLP-based approach that formalizes TSD as an NLP task. The proposed methodology involves the creation of publicly available, expert-annotated test sets designed to simulate therapist utterances, and the employment of NLP techniques for evaluation purposes. By integrating insights from psychotherapy research with NLP methodologies, this study aims to catalyze advancements in both NLP and psychotherapy research.

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Ethical thematic and topic modelling analysis of sleep concerns in a social media derived suicidality dataset
Martin Orr | Kirsten Van Kessel | David Parry

Objective: A thematic and topic modelling analysis of sleep concerns in a social media derived, privacy-preserving, suicidality dataset. This forms the basis for an exploration of sleep as a potential computational linguistic signal in suicide prevention. Background: Suicidal ideation is a limited signal for suicide. Developments in computational linguistics and mental health datasets afford an opportunity to investigate additional signals and to consider the broader clinical ethical design implications. Methodology: A clinician-led integration of reflexive thematic analysis, with machine learning topic modelling (Bertopic), and the purposeful sampling of the University of Maryland Suicidality Dataset. Results: Sleep as a place of refuge and escape, revitalisation for exhaustion, and risk and vulnerability were generated as core themes in an initial thematic analysis of 546 posts. Bertopic analysing 21,876 sleep references in 16791 posts facilitated the production of 40 topics that were clinically interpretable, relevant, and thematically aligned to a level that exceeded original expectations. Privacy and synthetic representative data, reproducibility, validity and stochastic variability of results, and a multi-signal formulation perspective, are highlighted as key research and clinical issues.

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Automatic Annotation of Dream Report’s Emotional Content with Large Language Models
Lorenzo Bertolini | Valentina Elce | Adriana Michalak | Hanna-Sophia Widhoezl | Giulio Bernardi | Julie Weeds

In the field of dream research, the study of dream content typically relies on the analysis of verbal reports provided by dreamers upon awakening from their sleep. This task is classically performed through manual scoring provided by trained annotators, at a great time expense. While a consistent body of work suggests that natural language processing (NLP) tools can support the automatic analysis of dream reports, proposed methods lacked the ability to reason over a report’s full context and required extensive data pre-processing. Furthermore, in most cases, these methods were not validated against standard manual scoring approaches. In this work, we address these limitations by adopting large language models (LLMs) to study and replicate the manual annotation of dream reports, using a mixture of off-the-shelf and bespoke approaches, with a focus on references to reports’ emotions. Our results show that the off-the-shelf method achieves a low performance probably in light of inherent linguistic differences between reports collected in different (groups of) individuals. On the other hand, the proposed bespoke text classification method achieves a high performance, which is robust against potential biases. Overall, these observations indicate that our approach could find application in the analysis of large dream datasets and may favour reproducibility and comparability of results across studies.

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Explainable Depression Detection Using Large Language Models on Social Media Data
Yuxi Wang | Diana Inkpen | Prasadith Kirinde Gamaarachchige

Due to the rapid growth of user interaction on different social media platforms, publicly available social media data has increased substantially. The sheer amount of data and level of personal information being shared on such platforms has made analyzing textual information to predict mental disorders such as depression a reliable preliminary step when it comes to psychometrics. In this study, we first proposed a system to search for texts that are related to depression symptoms from the Beck’s Depression Inventory (BDI) questionnaire, and providing a ranking for further investigation in a second step. Then, in this second step, we address the even more challenging task of automatic depression level detection, using writings and voluntary answers provided by users on Reddit. Several Large Language Models (LLMs) were applied in experiments. Our proposed system based on LLMs can generate both predictions and explanations for each question. By combining two LLMs for different questions, we achieved better performance on three of four metrics compared to the state-of-the-art and remained competitive on the one remaining metric. In addition, our system is explainable on two levels: first, knowing the answers to the BDI questions provides clues about the possible symptoms that could lead to a clinical diagnosis of depression; second, our system can explain the predicted answer for each question.

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Analysing relevance of Discourse Structure for Improved Mental Health Estimation
Navneet Agarwal | Gaël Dias | Sonia Dollfus

Automated depression estimation has received significant research attention in recent years as a result of its growing impact on the global community. Within the context of studies based on patient-therapist interview transcripts, most researchers treat the dyadic discourse as a sequence of unstructured sentences, thus ignoring the discourse structure within the learning process. In this paper we propose Multi-view architectures that divide the input transcript into patient and therapist views based on sentence type in an attempt to utilize symmetric discourse structure for improved model performance. Experiments on DAIC-WOZ dataset for binary classification task within depression estimation show advantages of Multi-view architecture over sequential input representations. Our model also outperforms the current state-of-the-art results and provide new SOTA performance on test set of DAIC-WOZ dataset.

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Using Daily Language to Understand Drinking: Multi-Level Longitudinal Differential Language Analysis
Matthew Matero | Huy Vu | August Nilsson | Syeda Mahwish | Young Min Cho | James McKay | Johannes Eichstaedt | Richard Rosenthal | Lyle Ungar | H. Andrew Schwartz

Analyses for linking language with psychological factors or behaviors predominately treat linguistic features as a static set, working with a single document per person or aggregating across multiple posts (e.g. on social media) into a single set of features. This limits language to mostly shed light on between-person differences rather than changes in behavior within-person. Here, we collected a novel dataset of daily surveys where participants were asked to describe their experienced well-being and report the number of alcoholic beverages they had within the past 24 hours. Through this data, we first build a multi-level forecasting model that is able to capture within-person change and leverage both the psychological features of the person and daily well-being responses. Then, we propose a longitudinal version of differential language analysis that finds patterns associated with drinking more (e.g. social events) and less (e.g. task-oriented), as well as distinguishing patterns of heavy drinks versus light drinkers.

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Prevalent Frequency of Emotional and Physical Symptoms in Social Anxiety using Zero Shot Classification: An Observational Study
Muhammad Rizwan | Jure Demšar

Social anxiety represents a prevalent challenge in modern society, affecting individuals across personal and professional spheres. Left unaddressed, this condition can yield substantial negative consequences, impacting social interactions and performance. Further understanding its diverse physical and emotional symptoms becomes pivotal for comprehensive diagnosis and tailored therapeutic interventions. This study analyze prev lance and frequency of social anxiety symptoms taken from Mayo Clinic, exploring diverse human experiences from utilizing a large Reddit dataset dedicated to this issue. Leveraging these platforms, the research aims to extract insights and examine a spectrum of physical and emotional symptoms linked to social anxiety disorder. Upholding ethical considerations, the study maintains strict user anonymity within the dataset. By employing a novel approach, the research utilizes BART-based multi-label zero-shot classification to identify and measure symptom prevalence and significance in the form of probability score for each symptom under consideration. Results uncover distinctive patterns: “Trembling” emerges as a prevalent physical symptom, while emotional symptoms like “Fear of being judged negatively” exhibit high frequencies. These findings offer insights into the multifaceted nature of social anxiety, aiding clinical practices and interventions tailored to its diverse expressions.

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Comparing panic and anxiety on a dataset collected from social media
Sandra Mitrović | Oscar William Lithgow-Serrano | Carlo Schillaci

The recognition of mental health’s crucial significance has led to a growing interest in utilizing social media text data in current research trends. However, there remains a significant gap in the study of panic and anxiety on these platforms, despite their high prevalence and severe impact. In this paper, we address this gap by presenting a dataset consisting of 1,930 user posts from Quora and Reddit specifically focusing on panic and anxiety. Through a combination of lexical analysis, emotion detection, and writer attitude assessment, we explore the unique characteristics of each condition. To gain deeper insights, we employ a mental health-specific transformer model and a large language model for qualitative analysis. Our findings not only contribute to the understanding digital discourse on anxiety and panic but also provide valuable resources for the broader research community. We make our dataset, methodologies, and code available to advance understanding and facilitate future studies.

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Your Model Is Not Predicting Depression Well And That Is Why: A Case Study of PRIMATE Dataset
Kirill Milintsevich | Kairit Sirts | Gaël Dias

This paper addresses the quality of annotations in mental health datasets used for NLP-based depression level estimation from social media texts. While previous research relies on social media-based datasets annotated with binary categories, i.e. depressed or non-depressed, recent datasets such as D2S and PRIMATE aim for nuanced annotations using PHQ-9 symptoms. However, most of these datasets rely on crowd workers without the domain knowledge for annotation. Focusing on the PRIMATE dataset, our study reveals concerns regarding annotation validity, particularly for the lack of interest or pleasure symptom. Through reannotation by a mental health professional, we introduce finer labels and textual spans as evidence, identifying a notable number of false positives. Our refined annotations, to be released under a Data Use Agreement, offer a higher-quality test set for anhedonia detection. This study underscores the necessity of addressing annotation quality issues in mental health datasets, advocating for improved methodologies to enhance NLP model reliability in mental health assessments.

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Detecting a Proxy for Potential Comorbid ADHD in People Reporting Anxiety Symptoms from Social Media Data
Claire Lee | Noelle Lim | Michael Guerzhoy

We present a novel task that can elucidate the connection between anxiety and ADHD; use Transformers to make progress toward solving a task that is not solvable by keyword-based classifiers; and discuss a method for visualization of our classifier illuminating the connection between anxiety and ADHD presentations. Up to approximately 50% of adults with ADHD may also have an anxiety disorder and approximately 30% of adults with anxiety may also have ADHD. Patients presenting with anxiety may be treated for anxiety without ADHD ever being considered, possibly affecting treatment. We show how data that bears on ADHD that is comorbid with anxiety can be obtained from social media data, and show that Transformers can be used to detect a proxy for possible comorbid ADHD in people with anxiety symptoms. We collected data from anxiety and ADHD online forums (subreddits). We identified posters who first started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and later started posting in the ADHD subreddit as well. We use this subset of the posters as a proxy for people who presented with anxiety symptoms and then became aware that they might have ADHD. We fine-tune a Transformer architecture-based classifier to classify people who started posting in the Anxiety subreddit and then started posting in the ADHD subreddit vs. people who posted in the Anxiety subreddit without later posting in the ADHD subreddit. We show that a Transformer architecture is capable of achieving reasonable results (76% correct for RoBERTa vs. under 60% correct for the best keyword-based model, both with 50% base rate).

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Overview of the CLPsych 2024 Shared Task: Leveraging Large Language Models to Identify Evidence of Suicidality Risk in Online Posts
Jenny Chim | Adam Tsakalidis | Dimitris Gkoumas | Dana Atzil-Slonim | Yaakov Ophir | Ayah Zirikly | Philip Resnik | Maria Liakata

We present the overview of the CLPsych 2024 Shared Task, focusing on leveraging open source Large Language Models (LLMs) for identifying textual evidence that supports the suicidal risk level of individuals on Reddit. In particular, given a Reddit user, their pre- determined suicide risk level (‘Low’, ‘Mod- erate’ or ‘High’) and all of their posts in the r/SuicideWatch subreddit, we frame the task of identifying relevant pieces of text in their posts supporting their suicidal classification in two ways: (a) on the basis of evidence highlighting (extracting sub-phrases of the posts) and (b) on the basis of generating a summary of such evidence. We annotate a sample of 125 users and introduce evaluation metrics based on (a) BERTScore and (b) natural language inference for the two sub-tasks, respectively. Finally, we provide an overview of the system submissions and summarise the key findings.

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Team ISM at CLPsych 2024: Extracting Evidence of Suicide Risk from Reddit Posts with Knowledge Self-Generation and Output Refinement using A Large Language Model
Vu Tran | Tomoko Matsui

This paper presents our approach to the CLPsych 2024 shared task: utilizing large language models (LLMs) for finding supporting evidence about an individual’s suicide risk level in Reddit posts. Our framework is constructed around an LLM with knowledge self-generation and output refinement. The knowledge self-generation process produces task-related knowledge which is generated by the LLM and leads to accurate risk predictions. The output refinement process, later, with the selected best set of LLM-generated knowledge, refines the outputs by prompting the LLM repeatedly with different knowledge instances interchangeably. We achieved highly competitive results comparing to the top-performance participants with our official recall of 93.5%, recall–precision harmonic-mean of 92.3%, and mean consistency of 96.1%.

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Exploring Instructive Prompts for Large Language Models in the Extraction of Evidence for Supporting Assigned Suicidal Risk Levels
Jiyu Chen | Vincent Nguyen | Xiang Dai | Diego Molla-Aliod | Cecile Paris | Sarvnaz Karimi

Monitoring and predicting the expression of suicidal risk in individuals’ social media posts is a central focus in clinical NLP. Yet, existing approaches frequently lack a crucial explainability component necessary for extracting evidence related to an individual’s mental health state. We describe the CSIRO Data61 team’s evidence extraction system submitted to the CLPsych 2024 shared task. The task aims to investigate the zero-shot capabilities of open-source LLM in extracting evidence regarding an individual’s assigned suicide risk level from social media discourse. The results are assessed against ground truth evidence annotated by psychological experts, with an achieved recall-oriented BERTScore of 0.919. Our findings suggest that LLMs showcase strong feasibility in the extraction of information supporting the evaluation of suicidal risk in social media discourse. Opportunities for refinement exist, notably in crafting concise and effective instructions to guide the extraction process.

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Psychological Assessments with Large Language Models: A Privacy-Focused and Cost-Effective Approach
Sergi Blanco-Cuaresma

This study explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze text comments from Reddit users, aiming to achieve two primary objectives: firstly, to pinpoint critical excerpts that support a predefined psychological assessment of suicidal risk; and secondly, to summarize the material to substantiate the preassigned suicidal risk level. The work is circumscribed to the use of “open-source” LLMs that can be run locally, thereby enhancing data privacy. Furthermore, it prioritizes models with low computational requirements, making it accessible to both individuals and institutions operating on limited computing budgets. The implemented strategy only relies on a carefully crafted prompt and a grammar to guide the LLM’s text completion. Despite its simplicity, the evaluation metrics show outstanding results, making it a valuable privacy-focused and cost-effective approach. This work is part of the Computational Linguistics and Clinical Psychology (CLPsych) 2024 shared task.

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Incorporating Word Count Information into Depression Risk Summary Generation: INF@UoS CLPsych 2024 Submission
Judita Preiss | Zenan Chen

Large language model classifiers do not directly offer transparency: it is not clear why one class is chosen over another. In this work, summaries explaining the suicide risk level assigned using a fine-tuned mental-roberta-base model are generated from key phrases extracted using SHAP explainability using Mistral-7B. The training data for the classifier consists of all Reddit posts of a user in the University of Maryland Reddit Suicidality Dataset, Version 2, with their suicide risk labels along with selected features extracted from each post by the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22) tool. The resulting model is used to make predictions regarding risk on each post of the users in the evaluation set of the CLPsych 2024 shared task, with a SHAP explainer used to identify the phrases contributing to the top scoring, correct and severe risk categories. Some basic stoplisting is applied to the extracted phrases, along with length based filtering, and a locally run version of Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.1 is used to create summaries from the highest value (based on SHAP) phrases.

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Extracting and Summarizing Evidence of Suicidal Ideation in Social Media Contents Using Large Language Models
Loitongbam Gyanendro Singh | Junyu Mao | Rudra Mutalik | Stuart Middleton

This paper explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in analyzing social media content for mental health monitoring, specifically focusing on detecting and summarizing evidence of suicidal ideation. We utilized LLMs Mixtral7bx8 and Tulu-2-DPO-70B, applying diverse prompting strategies for effective content extraction and summarization. Our methodology included detailed analysis through Few-shot and Zero-shot learning, evaluating the ability of Chain-of-Thought and Direct prompting strategies. The study achieved notable success in the CLPsych 2024 shared task (ranked top for the evidence extraction task and second for the summarization task), demonstrating the potential of LLMs in mental health interventions and setting a precedent for future research in digital mental health monitoring.

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Detecting Suicide Risk Patterns using Hierarchical Attention Networks with Large Language Models
Koushik L | Vishruth M | Anand Kumar M

Suicide has become a major public health and social concern in the world . This Paper looks into a method through use of LLMs (Large Lan- guage Model) to extract the likely reason for a person to attempt suicide , through analysis of their social media text posts detailing about the event , using this data we can extract the rea- son for the cause such mental state which can provide support for suicide prevention. This submission presents our approach for CLPsych Shared Task 2024. Our model uses Hierarchi- cal Attention Networks (HAN) and Llama2 for finding supporting evidence about an individ- ual’s suicide risk level.

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Using Large Language Models (LLMs) to Extract Evidence from Pre-Annotated Social Media Data
Falwah Alhamed | Julia Ive | Lucia Specia

For numerous years, researchers have employed social media data to gain insights into users’ mental health. Nevertheless, the majority of investigations concentrate on categorizing users into those experiencing depression and those considered healthy, or on detection of suicidal thoughts. In this paper, we aim to extract evidence of a pre-assigned gold label. We used a suicidality dataset containing Reddit posts labeled with the suicide risk level. The task is to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract evidence from the post that justifies the given label. We used Meta Llama 7b and lexicons for solving the task and we achieved a precision of 0.96.

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XinHai@CLPsych 2024 Shared Task: Prompting Healthcare-oriented LLMs for Evidence Highlighting in Posts with Suicide Risk
Jingwei Zhu | Ancheng Xu | Minghuan Tan | Min Yang

In this article, we introduce a new method for analyzing and summarizing posts from r/SuicideWatch on Reddit, overcoming the limitations of current techniques in processing complex mental health discussions online. Existing methods often struggle to accurately identify and contextualize subtle expressions of mental health problems, leading to inadequate support and intervention strategies. Our approach combines the open-source Large Language Model (LLM), fine-tuned with health-oriented knowledge, to effectively process Reddit posts. We also design prompts that focus on suicide-related statements, extracting key statements, and generating concise summaries that capture the core aspects of the discussions. The preliminary results indicate that our method improves the understanding of online suicide-related posts compared to existing methodologies.

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A Dual-Prompting for Interpretable Mental Health Language Models
Hyolim Jeon | Dongje Yoo | Daeun Lee | Sejung Son | Seungbae Kim | Jinyoung Han

Despite the increasing demand for AI-based mental health monitoring tools, their practical utility for clinicians is limited by the lack of interpretability. The CLPsych 2024 Shared Task (Chim et al., 2024) aims to enhance the interpretability of Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in mental health analysis, by providing evidence of suicidality through linguistic content. We propose a dual-prompting approach: (i) Knowledge-aware evidence extraction by leveraging the expert identity and a suicide dictionary with a mental health-specific LLM; and (ii) Evidence summarization by employing an LLM-based consistency evaluator. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of combining domain-specific information, revealing performance improvements and the approach’s potential to aid clinicians in assessing mental state progression.

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Cheap Ways of Extracting Clinical Markers from Texts
Anastasia Sandu | Teodor Mihailescu | Sergiu Nisioi

This paper describes the Unibuc Archaeology team work for CLPsych’s 2024 Shared Task that involved finding evidence within the text supporting the assigned suicide risk level. Two types of evidence were required: highlights (extracting relevant spans within the text) and summaries (aggregating evidence into a synthesis). Our work focuses on evaluating Large Language Models (LLM) as opposed to an alternative method that is much more memory and resource efficient. The first approach employs an LLM that is used for generating the summaries and is guided to provide sequences of text indicating suicidal tendencies through a processing chain for highlights. The second approach involves implementing a good old-fashioned machine learning tf-idf with a logistic regression classifier, whose representative features we use to extract relevant highlights.

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Utilizing Large Language Models to Identify Evidence of Suicidality Risk through Analysis of Emotionally Charged Posts
Ahmet Yavuz Uluslu | Andrianos Michail | Simon Clematide

This paper presents our contribution to the CLPsych 2024 shared task, focusing on the use of open-source large language models (LLMs) for suicide risk assessment through the analysis of social media posts. We achieved first place (out of 15 participating teams) in the task of providing summarized evidence of a user’s suicide risk. Our approach is based on Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), where we retrieve the top-k (k=5) posts with the highest emotional charge and provide the level of three different negative emotions (sadness, fear, anger) for each post during the generation phase.

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Integrating Supervised Extractive and Generative Language Models for Suicide Risk Evidence Summarization
Rika Tanaka | Yusuke Fukazawa

We propose a method that integrates supervised extractive and generative language models for providing supporting evidence of suicide risk in the CLPsych 2024 shared task. Our approach comprises three steps. Initially, we construct a BERT-based model for estimating sentence-level suicide risk and negative sentiment. Next, we precisely identify high suicide risk sentences by emphasizing elevated probabilities of both suicide risk and negative sentiment. Finally, we integrate generative summaries using the MentaLLaMa framework and extractive summaries from identified high suicide risk sentences and a specialized dictionary of suicidal risk words. SophiaADS, our team, achieved 1st place for highlight extraction and ranked 10th for summary generation, both based on recall and consistency metrics, respectively.

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Archetypes and Entropy: Theory-Driven Extraction of Evidence for Suicide Risk
Vasudha Varadarajan | Allison Lahnala | Adithya V Ganesan | Gourab Dey | Siddharth Mangalik | Ana-Maria Bucur | Nikita Soni | Rajath Rao | Kevin Lanning | Isabella Vallejo | Lucie Flek | H. Andrew Schwartz | Charles Welch | Ryan Boyd

Research on psychological risk factors for suicide has developed for decades. However, combining explainable theory with modern data-driven language model approaches is non-trivial. In this study, we propose and evaluate methods for identifying language patterns aligned with theories of suicide risk by combining theory-driven suicidal archetypes with language model-based and relative entropy-based approaches. Archetypes are based on prototypical statements that evince risk of suicidality while relative entropy considers the ratio of how unusual both a risk-familiar and unfamiliar model find the statements. While both approaches independently performed similarly, we find that combining the two significantly improved the performance in the shared task evaluations, yielding our combined system submission with a BERTScore Recall of 0.906. Consistent with the literature, we find that titles are highly informative as suicide risk evidence, despite the brevity. We conclude that a combination of theory- and data-driven methods are needed in the mental health space and can outperform more modern prompt-based methods.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2024)

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Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse (CODI 2024)
Michael Strube | Chloe Braud | Christian Hardmeier | Junyi Jessy Li | Sharid Loaiciga | Amir Zeldes | Chuyuan Li

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An Algorithmic Approach to Analyzing Rhetorical Structures
Andrew Potter

Although diagrams are fundamental to Rhetorical Structure Theory, their interpretation has received little in-depth exploration. This paper presents an algorithmic approach to accessing the meaning of these diagrams. Three algorithms are presented. The first of these, called reenactment, recreates the abstract process whereby structures are created, following the dynamic of coherence development, starting from simple relational propositions, and combing these to form complex expressions which are in turn integrated to define the comprehensive discourse organization. The second algorithm, called composition, implements Marcu’s strong nuclearity assumption. It uses a simple inference mechanism to demonstrate the reducibility of complex structures to simple relational propositions. The third algorithm, called compress, picks up where Marcu’s assumption leaves off, providing a generalized fully scalable procedure for progressive reduction of relational propositions to their simplest accessible forms. These inferred reductions may then be recycled to produce RST diagrams of abridged texts. The algorithms described here are useful in positioning computational descriptions of rhetorical structures as discursive processes, allowing researchers to go beyond static diagrams and look into their formative and interpretative significance.

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SciPara: A New Dataset for Investigating Paragraph Discourse Structure in Scientific Papers
Anna Kiepura | Yingqiang Gao | Jessica Lam | Nianlong Gu | Richard H.r. Hahnloser

Good scientific writing makes use of specific sentence and paragraph structures, providing a rich platform for discourse analysis and developing tools to enhance text readability. In this vein, we introduce SciPara, a novel dataset consisting of 981 scientific paragraphs annotated by experts in terms of sentence discourse types and topic information. On this dataset, we explored two tasks: 1) discourse category classification, which is to predict the discourse category of a sentence by using its paragraph and surrounding paragraphs as context, and 2) discourse sentence generation, which is to generate a sentence of a certain discourse category by using various contexts as input. We found that Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) can accurately identify Topic Sentences in SciPara, but have difficulty distinguishing Concluding, Transition, and Supporting Sentences. The quality of the sentences generated by all investigated PLMs improved with amount of context, regardless of discourse category. However, not all contexts were equally influential. Contrary to common assumptions about well-crafted scientific paragraphs, our analysis revealed that paradoxically, paragraphs with complete discourse structures were less readable.

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Using Discourse Connectives to Test Genre Bias in Masked Language Models
Heidrun Dorgeloh | Lea Kawaletz | Simon Stein | Regina Stodden | Stefan Conrad

This paper presents evidence for an effect of genre on the use of discourse connectives in argumentation. Drawing from discourse processing research on reasoning based structures, we use fill-mask computation to measure genre-induced expectations of argument realisation, and beta regression to model the probabilities of these realisations against a set of predictors. Contrasting fill-mask probabilities for the presence or absence of a discourse connective in baseline and finetuned language models reveals that genre introduces biases for the realisation of argument structure. These outcomes suggest that cross-domain discourse processing, but also argument mining, should take into account generalisations about specific features, such as connectives, and their probability related to the genre context.

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Projecting Annotations for Discourse Relations: Connective Identification for Low-Resource Languages
Peter Bourgonje | Pin-Jie Lin

We present a pipeline for multi-lingual Shallow Discourse Parsing. The pipeline exploits Machine Translation and Word Alignment, by translating any incoming non-English input text into English, applying an English discourse parser, and projecting the found relations onto the original input text through word alignments. While the purpose of the pipeline is to provide rudimentary discourse relation annotations for low-resource languages, in order to get an idea of performance, we evaluate it on the sub-task of discourse connective identification for several languages for which gold data are available. We experiment with different setups of our modular pipeline architecture and analyze intermediate results. Our code is made available on GitHub.

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Experimenting with Discourse Segmentation of Taiwan Southern Min Spontaneous Speech
Laurent Prévot | Sheng-Fu Wang

Discourse segmentation received increased attention in the past years, however the majority of studies have focused on written genres and with high-resource languages. This paper investigates discourse segmentation of a Taiwan Southern Min spontaneous speech corpus. We compare the fine-tuning a Language Model (LLM using two approaches: supervised, thanks to a high-quality annotated dataset, and weakly-supervised, requiring only a small amount of manual labeling. The corpus used here is transcribed with both Chinese characters and romanized transcription. This allows us to compare the impact of the written form on the discourse segmentation task. Additionally, the dataset includes manual prosodic breaks labeling, allowing an exploration of the role prosody can play in contemporary discourse segmentation systems grounded in LLMs. In our study, the supervised approach outperforms weak-supervision ; character-based version demonstrated better scores compared to the romanized version; and prosodic information proved to be an interesting source to increase discourse segmentation performance.

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Actor Identification in Discourse: A Challenge for LLMs?
Ana Barić | Sebastian Padó | Sean Papay

The identification of political actors who put forward claims in public debate is a crucial step in the construction of discourse networks, which are helpful to analyze societal debates. Actor identification is, however, rather challenging: Often, the locally mentioned speaker of a claim is only a pronoun (“He proposed that [claim]”), so recovering the canonical actor name requires discourse understanding. We compare a traditional pipeline of dedicated NLP components (similar to those applied to the related task of coreference) with a LLM, which appears a good match for this generation task. Evaluating on a corpus of German actors in newspaper reports, we find surprisingly that the LLM performs worse. Further analysis reveals that the LLM is very good at identifying the right reference, but struggles to generate the correct canonical form. This points to an underlying issue in LLMs with controlling generated output. Indeed, a hybrid model combining the LLM with a classifier to normalize its output substantially outperforms both initial models.

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Quantitative metrics to the CARS model in academic discourse in biology introductions
Charles Lam | Nonso Nnamoko

Writing research articles is crucial in any academic’s development and is thus an important component of the academic discourse. The Introduction section is often seen as a difficult task within the research article genre. This study presents two metrics of rhetorical moves in academic writing: step-n-grams and lengths of steps. While scholars agree that expert writers follow the general pattern described in the CARS model (Swales, 1990), this study complements previous studies with empirical quantitative data that highlight how writers progress from one rhetorical function to another in practice, based on 50 recent papers by expert writers. The discussion shows the significance of the results in relation to writing instructors and data-driven learning.

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Probing of pretrained multilingual models on the knowledge of discourse
Mary Godunova | Ekaterina Voloshina

With the raise of large language models (LLMs), different evaluation methods, including probing methods, are gaining more attention. Probing methods are meant to evaluate LLMs on their linguistic abilities. However, most of the studies are focused on morphology and syntax, leaving discourse research out of the scope. At the same time, understanding discourse and pragmatics is crucial to building up the conversational abilities of models. In this paper, we address the problem of probing several models of discourse knowledge in 10 languages. We present an algorithm to automatically adapt existing discourse tasks to other languages based on the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation. We find that models perform similarly on high- and low-resourced languages. However, the overall low performance of the models’ quality shows that they do not acquire discourse well enough.

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Feature-augmented model for multilingual discourse relation classification
Eleni Metheniti | Chloé Braud | Philippe Muller

Discourse relation classification within a multilingual, cross-framework setting is a challenging task, and the best-performing systems so far have relied on monolingual and mono-framework approaches.In this paper, we introduce transformer-based multilingual models, trained jointly over all datasets—thus covering different languages and discourse frameworks. We demonstrate their ability to outperform single-corpus models and to overcome (to some extent) the disparity among corpora, by relying on linguistic features and generic information about the nature of the datasets. We also compare the performance of different multilingual pretrained models, as well as the encoding of the relation direction, a key component for the task. Our results on the 16 datasets of the DISRPT 2021 benchmark show improvements in accuracy in (almost) all datasets compared to the monolingual models, with at best 65.91% in average accuracy, thus corresponding to a 4% improvement over the state-of-the-art.

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Complex question generation using discourse-based data augmentation
Khushnur Jahangir | Philippe Muller | Chloé Braud

Question Generation (QG), the process of generating meaningful questions from a given context, has proven to be useful for several tasks such as question answering or FAQ generation. While most existing QG techniques generate simple, fact-based questions, this research aims to generate questions that can have complex answers (e.g. “why” questions). We propose a data augmentation method that uses discourse relations to create such questions, and experiment on existing English data. Our approach generates questions based solely on the context without answer supervision, in order to enhance question diversity and complexity. We use an encoder-decoder trained on the augmented dataset to generate either one question or multiple questions at a time, and show that the latter improves over the baseline model when doing a human quality evaluation, without degrading performance according to standard automated metrics.

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Exploring Soft-Label Training for Implicit Discourse Relation Recognition
Nelson Filipe Costa | Leila Kosseim

This paper proposes a classification model for single label implicit discourse relation recognition trained on soft-label distributions. It follows the PDTB 3.0 framework and it was trained and tested on the DiscoGeM corpus, where it achieves an F1-score of 51.38 on third-level sense classification of implicit discourse relations. We argue that training on soft-label distributions allows the model to better discern between more ambiguous discourse relations.

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The ARRAU 3.0 Corpus
Massimo Poesio | Maris Camilleri | Paloma Carretero Garcia | Juntao Yu | Mark-Christoph Müller

The ARRAU corpus is an anaphorically annotated corpus designed to cover a wide variety of aspects of anaphoric reference in a variety of genres, including both written text and spoken language. The objective of this annotation project is to push forward the state of the art in anaphoric annotation, by overcoming the limitations of current annotation practice and the scope of current models of anaphoric interpretation, which in turn may reveal other issues. The resulting corpus is still therefore very much a work in progress almost twenty years after the project started. In this paper, we discuss the issues identified with the coding scheme used for the previous release, ARRAU 2, and through the use of this corpus for three shared tasks; the proposed solutions to these issues; and the resulting corpus, ARRAU 3.

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Signals as Features: Predicting Error/Success in Rhetorical Structure Parsing
Martial Pastor | Nelleke Oostdijk

This study introduces an approach for evaluating the importance of signals proposed by Das and Taboada in discourse parsing. Previous studies using other signals indicate that discourse markers (DMs) are not consistently reliable cues and can act as distractors, complicating relations recognition. The study explores the effectiveness of alternative signal types, such as syntactic and genre-related signals, revealing their efficacy even when not predominant for specific relations. An experiment incorporating RST signals as features for a parser error / success prediction model demonstrates their relevance and provides insights into signal combinations that prevents (or facilitates) accurate relation recognition. The observations also identify challenges and potential confusion posed by specific signals. This study resulted in producing publicly available code and data, contributing to an accessible resources for research on RST signals in discourse parsing.

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GroundHog: Dialogue Generation using Multi-Grained Linguistic Input
Alexander Chernyavskiy | Lidiia Ostyakova | Dmitry Ilvovsky

Recent language models have significantly boosted conversational AI by enabling fast and cost-effective response generation in dialogue systems. However, dialogue systems based on neural generative approaches often lack truthfulness, reliability, and the ability to analyze the dialogue flow needed for smooth and consistent conversations with users. To address these issues, we introduce GroundHog, a modified BART architecture, to capture long multi-grained inputs gathered from various factual and linguistic sources, such as Abstract Meaning Representation, discourse relations, sentiment, and grounding information. For experiments, we present an automatically collected dataset from Reddit that includes multi-party conversations devoted to movies and TV series. The evaluation encompasses both automatic evaluation metrics and human evaluation. The obtained results demonstrate that using several linguistic inputs has the potential to enhance dialogue consistency, meaningfulness, and overall generation quality, even for automatically annotated data. We also provide an analysis that highlights the importance of individual linguistic features in interpreting the observed enhancements.

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Discourse Relation Prediction and Discourse Parsing in Dialogues with Minimal Supervision
Chuyuan Li | Chloé Braud | Maxime Amblard | Giuseppe Carenini

Discourse analysis plays a crucial role in Natural Language Processing, with discourse relation prediction arguably being the most difficult task in discourse parsing. Previous studies have generally focused on explicit or implicit discourse relation classification in monologues, leaving dialogue an under-explored domain. Facing the data scarcity issue, we propose to leverage self-training strategies based on a Transformer backbone. Moreover, we design the first semi-supervised pipeline that sequentially predicts discourse structures and relations. Using 50 examples, our relation prediction module achieves 58.4 in accuracy on the STAC corpus, close to supervised state-of-the-art. Full parsing results show notable improvements compared to the supervised models both in-domain (gaming) and cross-domain (technical chat), with better stability.

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With a Little Help from my (Linguistic) Friends: Topic segmentation of multi-party casual conversations
Amandine Decker | Maxime Amblard

Topics play an important role in the global organisation of a conversation as what is currently discussed constrains the possible contributions of the participant. Understanding the way topics are organised in interaction would provide insight on the structure of dialogue beyond the sequence of utterances. However, studying this high-level structure is a complex task that we try to approach by first segmenting dialogues into smaller topically coherent sets of utterances. Understanding the interactions between these segments would then enable us to propose a model of topic organisation at a dialogue level. In this paper we work with open-domain conversations and try to reach a comparable level of accuracy as recent machine learning based topic segmentation models but with a formal approach. The features we identify as meaningful for this task help us understand better the topical structure of a conversation.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages

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Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages
Sarah Moeller | Godfred Agyapong | Antti Arppe | Aditi Chaudhary | Shruti Rijhwani | Christopher Cox | Ryan Henke | Alexis Palmer | Daisy Rosenblum | Lane Schwartz

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Cloud-based Platform for Indigenous Language Sound Education
Min Chen | Chris Lee | Naatosi Fish | Mizuki Miyashita | James Randall

Blackfoot is challenging for English speaking instructors and learners to acquire because it exhibits unique pitch patterns. This study presents MeTILDA (Melodic Transcription in Language Documentation and Application) as a solution to teaching pitch patterns distinct from English. Specifically, we explore ways to improve data visualization through a visualized pronunciation teaching guide called Pitch Art. The working materials can be downloaded or stored in the cloud for further use and collaboration. These features are aimed to facilitate teachers in developing curriculum for learning pronunciation, and provide students with an interactive and integrative learning environment to better understand Blackfoot language and pronunciation.

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Technology and Language Revitalization: A Roadmap for the Mvskoke Language
Julia Mainzinger

This paper is a discussion of how NLP can come alongside community efforts to aid in revitalizing the Mvskoke language. Mvskoke is a language indigenous to the southeastern United States that has seen an increase in language revitalization efforts in the last few years. This paper presents an overview of available resources in Mvskoke, an exploration of relevant NLP tasks and related work in endangered language contexts, and applications to language revitalization.

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Investigating the productivity of Passamaquoddy medials: A computational approach
James Roberts

Little is known about medials in Passamaquoddy, which appear to be involved in the construction of verb stems in the language. Investigating the productivity of such morphemes using traditional fieldwork methods is a difficult undertaking that can be made easier with computational methods. I first generated a list of possible verb stems using a simple Python script, then compared this list against Passamaquoddy text corpora to see how many of these tokens were attested. If a given medial is productive, we should expect to see it in a large portion of possible verb stems that include said medial. If this assumption is correct, the corpora analysis will be a key indicator in determining the productivity of individual medials.

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T is for Treu, but how do you pronounce that? Using C-LARA to create phonetic texts for Kanak languages
Pauline Welby | Fabrice Wacalie | Manny Rayner | Chatgpt-4 C-Lara-Instance

In Drehu, a language of the indigenous Kanak people of New Caledonia, the word treu ‘moon’ is pronounced [{tSe.u}]; but, even if they hear the word, the spelling pulls French speakers to a spurious pronunciation [tK{o}]. We implement a strategy to mitigate the influence of such orthographic conflicts, while retaining the benefits of written input on vocabulary learning. We present text in “phonetized” form, where words are broken down into components associated with mnemonically presented phonetic values, adapting features from the “Comment ça se prononce~?” multilingual phonetizer. We present an exploratory project where we used the ChatGPT-based Learning And Reading Assistant (C-LARA) to implement a version of the phonetizer strategy, outlining how the AI-engineered codebase and help from the AI made it easy to add the necessary extensions. We describe two proof-of-concept texts for learners produced using the platform, a Drehu alphabet book and a Drehu version of “The (North) Wind and the Sun”; both texts include native-speaker recorded audio, pronunciation respellings based on French orthography, and AI-generated illustrations.

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Machine-in-the-Loop with Documentary and Descriptive Linguists
Sarah Moeller | Antti Arppe

This paper describes a curriculum for teaching linguists how to apply machine-in-the-loop (MitL) approach to documentary and descriptive tasks. It also shares observations about the learning participants, who are primarily non-computational linguists, and how they interact with the MitL approach. We found that they prefer cleaning over increasing the training data and then proceed to reanalyze their analytical decisions, before finally undertaking small actions that emphasize analytical strategies. Overall, participants display an understanding of the curriculum which covers fundamental concepts of machine learning and statistical modeling.

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Automatic Transcription of Grammaticality Judgements for Language Documentation
Éric Le Ferrand | Emily Prud’hommeaux

Descriptive linguistics is a sub-field of linguistics that involves the collection and annotationof language resources to describe linguistic phenomena. The transcription of these resources is often described as a tedious task, and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has frequently been employed to support this process. However, the typical research approach to ASR in documentary linguistics often only captures a subset of the field’s diverse reality. In this paper, we focus specifically on one type of data known as grammaticality judgment elicitation in the context of documenting Kréyòl Gwadloupéyen. We show that only a few minutes of speech is enough to fine-tune a model originally trained in French to transcribe segments in Kréyol.

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Fitting a Square Peg into a Round Hole: Creating a UniMorph dataset of Kanien’kéha Verbs
Anna Kazantseva | Akwiratékha Martin | Karin Michelson | Jean-Pierre Koenig

This paper describes efforts to annotate a dataset of verbs in the Iroquoian language Kanien’kéha (a.k.a. Mohawk) using the UniMorph schema (Batsuren et al. 2022a). It is based on the output of a symbolic model - a hand-built verb conjugator. Morphological constituents of each verb are automatically annotated with UniMorph tags. Overall the process was smooth but some central features of the language did not fall neatly into the schema which resulted in a large number of custom tags and a somewhat ad hoc mapping process. We think the same difficulties are likely to arise for other Iroquoian languages and perhaps other North American language families. This paper describes our decision making process with respect to Kanien’kéha and reports preliminary results of morphological induction experiments using the dataset.

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Data-mining and Extraction: the gold rush of AI on Indigenous Languages
Marie-Odile Junker

The goal of this paper is to start a discussion on the topic of Data mining and Extraction of Indigenous Language data, describing recent events that took place within the Algonquian Dictionaries and Language Resources common infrastructure. We raise questions about ethics, social context, vulnerability, responsibility, and societal benefits and concerns in the age of generative AI.

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Looking within the self: Investigating the Impact of Data Augmentation with Self-training on Automatic Speech Recognition for Hupa
Nitin Venkateswaran | Zoey Liu

We investigate the performance of state-of-the-art neural ASR systems in transcribing audio recordings for Hupa, a critically endangered language of the Hoopa Valley Tribe. We also explore the impact on ASR performance when augmenting a small dataset of gold-standard high-quality transcriptions with a) a larger dataset with transcriptions of lower quality, and b) model-generated transcriptions in a self-training approach. An evaluation of both data augmentation approaches shows that the self-training approach is competitive, producing better WER scores than models trained with no additional data and not lagging far behind models trained with additional lower quality manual transcriptions instead: the deterioration in WER score is just 4.85 points when all the additional data is used in experiments with the best performing system, Wav2Vec. These findings have encouraging implications on the use of ASR systems for transcription and language documentation efforts in the Hupa language.

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Creating Digital Learning and Reference Resources for Southern Michif
Heather Souter | Olivia Sammons | David Huggins Daines

Minority and Indigenous languages are often under-documented and under-resourced. Where such resources do exist, particularly in the form of legacy materials, they are often inaccessible to learners and educators involved in revitalization efforts, whether due to the limitations of their original formats or the structure of their contents. Digitizing such resources and making them available on a variety of platforms is one step in overcoming these barriers. This is a major undertaking which requires significant expertise at the intersection of documentary linguistics, computational linguistics, and software development, and must be done while walking alongside speakers and language specialists in the community. We discuss the particular strategies and challenges involved in the development of one such resource, and make recommendations for future projects with a similar goal of mobilizing legacy language resources.

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MunTTS: A Text-to-Speech System for Mundari
Varun Gumma | Rishav Hada | Aditya Yadavalli | Pamir Gogoi | Ishani Mondal | Vivek Seshadri | Kalika Bali

We present MunTTS, an end-to-end text-to-speech (TTS) system specifically for Mundari, a low-resource Indian language of the Austo-Asiatic family. Our work addresses the gap in linguistic technology for underrepresented languages by collecting and processing data to build a speech synthesis system. We begin our study by gathering a substantial dataset of Mundari text and speech and train end-to-end speech models. We also delve into the methods used for training our models, ensuring they are efficient and effective despite the data constraints. We evaluate our system with native speakers and objective metrics, demonstrating its potential as a tool for preserving and promoting the Mundari language in the digital age.

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End-to-End Speech Recognition for Endangered Languages of Nepal
Marieke Meelen | Alexander O’neill | Rolando Coto-Solano

This paper presents three experiments to test the most effective and efficient ASR pipeline to facilitate the documentation and preservation of endangered languages, which are often extremely low-resourced. With data from two languages in Nepal —Dzardzongke and Newar— we show that model improvements are different for different masses of data, and that transfer learning as well as a range of modifications (e.g. normalising amplitude and pitch) can be effective, but that a consistently-standardised orthography as NLP input and post-training dictionary corrections improve results even more.

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Akha, Dara-ang, Karen, Khamu, Mlabri and Urak Lawoi’ language minorities’ subjective perception of their languages and the outlook for development of digital tools
Joanna Dolinska | Shekhar Nayak | Sumittra Suraratdecha

Multilingualism is deeply rooted in the sociopolitical history of Thailand. Some minority language communities entered the Thai territory a few decades ago, while the families of some other minority speakers have been living in Thailand since at least several generations. The authors of this article address the question how Akha, Dara-ang, Karen, Khamu, Mlabri and Urak Lawoi’ language speakers perceive the current situation of their language and whether they see the need for the development of digital tools for documentation, revitalization and daily use of their languages. The objective is complemented by a discussion on the feasibility of development of such tools for some of the above mentioned languages and the motivation of their speakers to participate in this process. Furthermore, this article highlights the challenges associated with developing digital tools for these low-resource languages and outlines the standards researchers must adhere to in conceptualizing the development of such tools, collecting data, and engaging with the language communities throughout the collaborative process.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Speech, Vision, and Language Technologies for Dravidian Languages
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Ruba Priyadharshini | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Elizabeth Sherly | Rajeswari Nadarajan | Manikandan Ravikiran

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A Few-Shot Multi-Accented Speech Classification for Indian Languages using Transformers and LLM’s Fine-Tuning Approaches
Jairam R | Jyothish G | Premjith B

Accented speech classification plays a vital role in the advancement of high-quality automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. For certain applications, like multi-accented speech classification, it is not always viable to obtain data with accent variation, especially for resource-poor languages. This is one of the major reasons that contributes to the underperformance of the speech classification systems. Therefore, in order to handle speech variability in Indian language speaker accents, we propose a few-shot learning paradigm in this study. It learns generic feature embeddings using an encoder from a pre-trained whisper model and a classification head for classification. The model is refined using LLM’s fine-tuning techniques, such as LoRA and QLoRA, for the six Indian English accents in the Indic Accent Dataset. The experimental findings show that the accuracy of the model is greatly increased by the few-shot learning paradigm’s effectiveness combined with LLM’s fine-tuning techniques. In optimal settings, the model’s accuracy can reach 94% when the trainable parameters are set to 5%.

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Neural Machine Translation for Malayalam Paraphrase Generation
Christeena Varghese | Sergey Koshelev | Ivan Yamshchikov

This study explores four methods of generating paraphrases in Malayalam, utilizing resources available for English paraphrasing and pre-trained Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models. We evaluate the resulting paraphrases using both automated metrics, such as BLEU, METEOR, and cosine similarity, as well as human annotation. Our findings suggest that automated evaluation measures may not be fully appropriate for Malayalam, as they do not consistently align with human judgment. This discrepancy underscores the need for more nuanced paraphrase evaluation approaches especially for highly agglutinative languages.

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From Dataset to Detection: A Comprehensive Approach to Combating Malayalam Fake News
Devika K | Hariprasath .s.b | Haripriya B | Vigneshwar E | Premjith B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi

Identifying fake news hidden as real news is crucial to fight misinformation and ensure reliable information, especially in resource-scarce languages like Malayalam. To recognize the unique challenges of fake news in languages like Malayalam, we present a dataset curated specifically for classifying fake news in Malayalam. This fake news is categorized based on the degree of misinformation, marking the first of its kind in this language. Further, we propose baseline models employing multilingual BERT and diverse machine learning classifiers. Our findings indicate that logistic regression trained on LaBSE features demonstrates promising initial performance with an F1 score of 0.3393. However, addressing the significant data imbalance remains essential for further improvement in model accuracy.

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Social Media Fake News Classification Using Machine Learning Algorithm
Girma Bade | Olga Kolesnikova | Grigori Sidorov | José Oropeza

The rise of social media has facilitated easier communication, information sharing, and current affairs updates. However, the prevalence of misleading and deceptive content, commonly referred to as fake news, poses a significant challenge. This paper focuses on the classification of fake news in Malayalam, a Dravidian language, utilizing natural language processing (NLP) techniques. To develop a model, we employed a random forest machine learning method on a dataset provided by a shared task(DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024)1. When evaluated by the separate test dataset, our developed model achieved a 0.71 macro F1 measure.

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Exploring the impact of noise in low-resource ASR for Tamil
Vigneshwar Lakshminarayanan | Emily Prud’hommeaux

The use of deep learning algorithms has resulted in significant progress in automatic speech recognition (ASR). Robust high-accuracy ASR models typically require thousands or tens of thousands of hours of speech data, but even the strongest models tend fail under noisy conditions. Unsurprisingly, the impact of noise on accuracy is more drastic in low-resource settings. In this paper, we investigate the impact of noise on ASR in a low-resource setting. We explore novel methods for developing noise-robust ASR models using a a small dataset for Tamil, a widely-spoken but under-resourced Dravidian languages. We add various noises to the audio data to determine the impact of different kinds of noise (e.g., punctuated vs. constant, man-made vs natural) We also explore the relationship between different data augmentation methods are better suited to handling different types of noise. Our results show that all noises, regardless of the type, had an impact on ASR performance, and that upgrading the architecture alone could not mitigate the impact of noise. SpecAugment, the most common data augmentation method, was not as helpful as raw data augmentation, in which noise is explicitly added to the training data. Raw data augmentation enhances ASR performance on both clean data and noise-mixed data.

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SetFit: A Robust Approach for Offensive Content Detection in Tamil-English Code-Mixed Conversations Using Sentence Transfer Fine-tuning
Kathiravan Pannerselvam | Saranya Rajiakodi | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Sathiyaraj Thangasamy | Kishore Ponnusamy

Code-mixed languages are increasingly prevalent on social media and online platforms, presenting significant challenges in offensive content detection for natural language processing (NLP) systems. Our study explores how effectively the Sentence Transfer Fine-tuning (Set-Fit) method, combined with logistic regression, detects offensive content in a Tamil-English code-mixed dataset. We compare our model’s performance with five other NLP models: Multilingual BERT (mBERT), LSTM, BERT, IndicBERT, and Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embeddings (LaBSE). Our model, SetFit, outperforms these models in accuracy, achieving an impressive 89.72%, significantly higher than other models. These results suggest the sentence transformer model’s substantial potential for detecting offensive content in codemixed languages. Our study provides valuable insights into the sentence transformer model’s ability to identify various types of offensive material in Tamil-English online conversations, paving the way for more advanced NLP systems tailored to code-mixed languages.

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Findings of the First Shared Task on Offensive Span Identification from Code-Mixed Kannada-English Comments
Manikandan Ravikiran | Ratnavel Rajalakshmi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Sajeetha Thavareesan

Effectively managing offensive content is crucial on social media platforms to encourage positive online interactions. However, addressing offensive contents in code-mixed Dravidian languages faces challenges, as current moderation methods focus on flagging entire comments rather than pinpointing specific offensive segments. This limitation stems from a lack of annotated data and accessible systems designed to identify offensive language sections. To address this, our shared task presents a dataset comprising Kannada-English code-mixed social comments, encompassing offensive comments. This paper outlines the dataset, the utilized algorithms, and the results obtained by systems participating in this shared task.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLD-Telugu)@DravidianLangTech 2024
Premjith B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Saranya Rajiakodi | Sai Karnati | Sai Mangamuru | Chandu Janakiram

This paper examines the submissions of various participating teams to the task on Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLD-Telugu) organized as part of DravidianLangTech 2024. In order to identify the contents containing harmful information in Telugu codemixed social media text, the shared task pushes researchers and academicians to build models. The dataset for the task was created by gathering YouTube comments and annotated manually. A total of 23 teams participated and submitted their results to the shared task. The rank list was created by assessing the submitted results using the macro F1-score.

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Findings of the Shared Task on Multimodal Social Media Data Analysis in Dravidian Languages (MSMDA-DL)@DravidianLangTech 2024
Premjith B | Jyothish G | Sowmya V | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | K Nandhini | Rajeswari Natarajan | Abirami Murugappan | Bharathi B | Saranya Rajiakodi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Jayanth Mohan | Mekapati Reddy

This paper presents the findings of the shared task on multimodal sentiment analysis, abusive language detection and hate speech detection in Dravidian languages. Through this shared task, researchers worldwide can submit models for three crucial social media data analysis challenges in Dravidian languages: sentiment analysis, abusive language detection, and hate speech detection. The aim is to build models for deriving fine-grained sentiment analysis from multimodal data in Tamil and Malayalam, identifying abusive and hate content from multimodal data in Tamil. Three modalities make up the multimodal data: text, audio, and video. YouTube videos were gathered to create the datasets for the tasks. Thirty-nine teams took part in the competition. However, only two teams, though, turned in their findings. The macro F1-score was used to assess the submissions

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Overview of Second Shared Task on Sentiment Analysis in Code-mixed Tamil and Tulu
Lavanya Sambath Kumar | Asha Hegde | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Hosahalli Shashirekha | Rajeswari Natarajan | Sajeetha Thavareesan | Ratnasingam Sakuntharaj | Thenmozhi Durairaj | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Charmathi Rajkumar

Sentiment Analysis (SA) in Dravidian codemixed text is a hot research area right now. In this regard, the “Second Shared Task on SA in Code-mixed Tamil and Tulu” at Dravidian- LangTech (EACL-2024) is organized. Two tasks namely SA in Tamil-English and Tulu- English code-mixed data, make up this shared assignment. In total, 64 teams registered for the shared task, out of which 19 and 17 systems were received for Tamil and Tulu, respectively. The performance of the systems submitted by the participants was evaluated based on the macro F1-score. The best method obtained macro F1-scores of 0.260 and 0.584 for code-mixed Tamil and Tulu texts, respectively.

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Overview of the Second Shared Task on Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages: DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024
Malliga Subramanian | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Santhiya Pandiyan | Prasanna Kumar Kumaresan | Balasubramanian Palani | Premjith B | Vanaja K | Mithunja S | Devika K | Hariprasath S.b | Haripriya B | Vigneshwar E

The rise of online social media has revolutionized communication, offering users a convenient way to share information and stay updated on current events. However, this surge in connectivity has also led to the proliferation of misinformation, commonly known as fake news. This misleading content, often disguised as legitimate news, poses a significant challenge as it can distort public perception and erode trust in reliable sources. This shared task consists of two subtasks such as task 1 and task 2. Task 1 aims to classify a given social media text into original or fake. The goal of the FakeDetect-Malayalam task2 is to encourage participants to develop effective models capable of accurately detecting and classifying fake news articles in the Malayalam language into different categories like False, Half True, Mostly False, Partly False, and Mostly True. For this shared task, 33 participants submitted their results.

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byteSizedLLM@DravidianLangTech 2024: Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages - Unleashing the Power of Custom Subword Tokenization with Subword2Vec and BiLSTM
Rohith Kodali | Durga Manukonda

This paper focuses on detecting fake news in resource-constrained languages, particularly Malayalam. We present a novel framework combining subword tokenization, Sanskrit-transliterated Subword2vec embeddings, and a powerful Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) architecture. Despite using only monolingual Malayalam data, our model excelled in the FakeDetect-Malayalam challenge, ranking 4th. The innovative subword tokenizer achieves a remarkable 200x compression ratio, highlighting its efficiency in minimizing model size without compromising accuracy. Our work facilitates resource-efficient deployment in diverse linguistic landscapes and sparks discussion on the potential of multilingual data augmentation. This research provides a promising avenue for mitigating linguistic challenges in the NLP-driven battle against deceptive content.

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Fida @DravidianLangTech 2024: A Novel Approach to Hate Speech Detection Using Distilbert-base-multilingual-cased
Fida Ullah | Muhammad Zamir | Muhammad Arif | M. Ahmad | E Felipe-Riveron | Alexander Gelbukh

In the contemporary digital landscape, social media has emerged as a prominent means of communication and information dissemination, offering a rapid outreach to a broad audience compared to traditional communication methods. Unfortunately, the escalating prevalence of abusive language and hate speech on these platforms has become a pressing issue. Detecting and addressing such content on the Internet has garnered considerable attention due to the significant impact it has on individuals. The advent of deep learning has facilitated the use of pre-trained deep neural network models for text classification tasks. While these models demonstrate high performance, some exhibit a substantial number of parameters. In the DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024 task, we opted for the Distilbert-base-multilingual-cased model, an enhancement of the BERT model that effectively reduces the number of parameters without compromising performance. This model was selected based on its exceptional results in the task. Our system achieved a commendable Macro F1 score of 0.6369%.

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Selam@DravidianLangTech 2024:Identifying Hate Speech and Offensive Language
Selam Abitte Kanta | Grigori Sidorov | Alexander Gelbukh

Social media has transformed into a powerful tool for sharing information while upholding the principle of free expression. However, this open platform has given rise to significant issues like hate speech, cyberbullying, aggression, and offensive language, negatively impacting societal well-being. These problems can even lead to severe consequences such as suicidal thoughts, affecting the mental health of the victims. Our primary goal is to develop an automated system for the rapid detection of offensive content on social media, facilitating timely interventions and moderation. This research employs various machine learning classifiers, utilizing character N-gram TF-IDF features. Additionally, we introduce SVM, RL, and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models specifically designed for hate speech detection. SVM utilizes character Ngram TF-IDF features, while CNN employs word embedding features. Through extensive experiments, we achieved optimal results, with a weighted F1-score of 0.77 in identifying hate speech and offensive language.

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Tewodros@DravidianLangTech 2024: Hate Speech Recognition in Telugu Codemixed Text
Tewodros Achamaleh | Lemlem Kawo | Ildar Batyrshini | Grigori Sidorov

This study goes into our team’s active participation in the Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLDTelugu) shared task, which is an essential component of the DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024 workshop. The ultimate goal of this collaborative work is to push the bounds of hate speech recognition, especially tackling the issues given by codemixed text in Telugu, where English blends smoothly. Our inquiry offers a complete evaluation of the task’s aims, the technique used, and the precise achievements obtained by our team, providing a full insight into our contributions to this crucial linguistic and technical undertaking.

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Lidoma@DravidianLangTech 2024: Identifying Hate Speech in Telugu Code-Mixed: A BERT Multilingual
Muhammad Zamir | Moein Tash | Zahra Ahani | Alexander Gelbukh | Grigori Sidorov

Over the past few years, research on hate speech and offensive content identification on social media has been ongoing. Since most people in the world are not native English speakers, unapproved messages are typically sent in code-mixed language. We accomplished collaborative work to identify the language of code-mixed text on social media in order to address the difficulties associated with it in the Telugu language scenario. Specifically, we participated in the shared task on the provided dataset by the Dravidian- LangTech Organizer for the purpose of identifying hate and non-hate content. The assignment is to classify each sentence in the provided text into two predetermined groups: hate or non-hate. We developed a model in Python and selected a BERT multilingual to do the given task. Using a train-development data set, we developed a model, which we then tested on test data sets. An average macro F1 score metric was used to measure the model’s performance. For the task, the model reported an average macro F1 of 0.6151.

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Zavira@DravidianLangTech 2024:Telugu hate speech detection using LSTM
Z. Ahani | M. Tash | M. Zamir | I. Gelbukh

Hate speech is communication, often oral or written, that incites, stigmatizes, or incites violence or prejudice against individuals or groups based on characteristics such as race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristics. This usually involves expressions of hostility, contempt, or prejudice and can have harmful social consequences.Among the broader social landscape, an important problem and challenge facing the medical community is related to the impact of people’s verbal expression. These words have a significant and immediate effect on human behavior and psyche. Repeating such phrases can even lead to depression and social isolation.In an attempt to identify and classify these Telugu text samples in the social media domain, our research LSTM and the findings of this experiment are summarized in this paper, in which out of 27 participants, we obtained 8th place with an F1 score of 0.68.

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Tayyab@DravidianLangTech 2024:Detecting Fake News in Malayalam LSTM Approach and Challenges
M. Zamir | M. Tash | Z. Ahani | A. Gelbukh | G. Sidorov

Global communication has been made easier by the emergence of online social media, but it has also made it easier for “fake news,” or information that is misleading or false, to spread. Since this phenomenon presents a significant challenge, reliable detection techniques are required to discern between authentic and fraudulent content. The primary goal of this study is to identify fake news on social media platforms and in Malayalam-language articles by using LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) model. This research explores this approach in tackling the DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024 tasks. Using LSTM networks to differentiate between real and fake content at the comment or post level, Task 1 focuses on classifying social media text. To precisely classify the authenticity of the content, LSTM models are employed, drawing on a variety of sources such as comments on YouTube. Task 2 is dubbed the FakeDetect-Malayalam challenge, wherein Malayalam-language articles with fake news are identified and categorized using LSTM models. In order to successfully navigate the challenges of identifying false information in regional languages, we use lstm model. This algoritms seek to accurately categorize the multiple classes written in Malayalam. In Task 1, the results are encouraging. LSTM models distinguish between orignal and fake social media content with an impressive macro F1 score of 0.78 when testing. The LSTM model’s macro F1 score of 0.2393 indicates that Task 2 offers a more complex landscape. This emphasizes the persistent difficulties in LSTM-based fake news detection across various linguistic contexts and the difficulty of correctly classifying fake news within the context of the Malayalam language.

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IIITDWD_SVC@DravidianLangTech-2024: Breaking Language Barriers; Hate Speech Detection in Telugu-English Code-Mixed Text
Chava Sai | Rangoori Kumar | Sunil Saumya | Shankar Biradar

Social media platforms have become increasingly popular and are utilized for a wide range of purposes, including product promotion, news sharing, accomplishment sharing, and much more. However, it is also employed for defamatory speech, intimidation, and the propagation of untruths about particular groups of people. Further, hateful and offensive posts spread quickly and often have a negative impact on people; it is important to identify and remove them from social media platforms as soon as possible. Over the past few years, research on hate speech detection and offensive content has grown in popularity. One of the many difficulties in identifying hate speech on social media platforms is the use of code-mixed language. The majority of people who use social media typically share their messages in languages with mixed codes, like Telugu–English. To encourage research in this direction, the organizers of DravidianLangTech@EACL-2024 conducted a shared task to identify hateful content in Telugu-English code-mixed text. Our team participated in this shared task, employing three different models: Xlm-Roberta, BERT, and Hate-BERT. In particular, our BERT-based model secured the 14th rank in the competition with a macro F1 score of 0.65.

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Beyond Tech@DravidianLangTech2024 : Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages Using Machine Learning
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Malliga Subramanian | Sanjai R | Mohammed Sameer B | Motheeswaran K

In the digital age, identifying fake news is essential when fake information travels quickly via social media platforms. This project employs machine learning techniques, including Random Forest, Logistic Regression, and Decision Tree, to distinguish between real and fake news. With the rise of news consumption on social media, it becomes essential to authenticate information shared on platforms like YouTube comments. The research emphasizes the need to stop spreading harmful rumors and focuses on authenticating news articles. The proposed model utilizes machine learning and natural language processing, specifically Support Vector Machines, to aggregate and determine the authenticity of news. To address the challenges of detecting fake news in this paper, describe the Machine Learning (ML) models submitted to ‘Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages” at DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024 shared task. Four different models, namely: Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random forest, and Decision tree.

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Code_Makers@DravidianLangTech-EACL 2024 : Sentiment Analysis in Code-Mixed Tamil using Machine Learning Techniques
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Sowbharanika J S | Navbila K | Malliga Subramanian

The rising importance of sentiment analysis online community research is addressed in our project, which focuses on the surge of code-mixed writing in multilingual social media. Targeting sentiments in texts combining Tamil and English, our supervised learning approach, particularly the Decision Tree algorithm, proves essential for effective sentiment classification. Notably, Decision Tree(accuracy: 0.99, average F1 score: 0.39), Random Forest exhibit high accuracy (accuracy: 0.99, macro average F1 score : 0.35), SVM (accuracy: 0.78, macro average F1 score : 0.68), Logistic Regression (accuracy: 0.75, macro average F1 score: 0.62), KNN (accuracy: 0.73, macro average F1 score : 0.26) also demonstrate commendable results. These findings showcase the project’s efficacy, offering promise for linguistic research and technological advancements. Securing the 8th rank emphasizes its recognition in the field.

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IIITDWD-zk@DravidianLangTech-2024: Leveraging the Power of Language Models for Hate Speech Detection in Telugu-English Code-Mixed Text
Zuhair Shaik | Sai Kartheek Reddy Kasu | Sunil Saumya | Shankar Biradar

Hateful online content is a growing concern, especially for young people. While social media platforms aim to connect us, they can also become breeding grounds for negativity and harmful language. This study tackles this issue by proposing a novel framework called HOLD-Z, specifically designed to detect hate and offensive comments in Telugu-English code-mixed social media content. HOLD-Z leverages a combination of approaches, including three powerful models: LSTM architecture, Zypher, and openchat_3.5. The study highlights the effectiveness of prompt engineering and Quantized Low-Rank Adaptation (QLoRA) in boosting performance. Notably, HOLD-Z secured the 9th place in the prestigious HOLD-Telugu DravidianLangTech@EACL-2024 shared task, showcasing its potential for tackling the complexities of hate and offensive comment classification.

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DLRG-DravidianLangTech@EACL2024 : Combating Hate Speech in Telugu Code-mixed Text on Social Media
Ratnavel Rajalakshmi | Saptharishee M | Hareesh S | Gabriel R | Varsini Sr

Detecting hate speech in code-mixed language is vital for a secure online space, curbing harmful content, promoting inclusive communication, and safeguarding users from discrimination. Despite the linguistic complexities of code-mixed languages, this study explores diverse pre-processing methods. It finds that the Transliteration method excels in handling linguistic variations. The research comprehensively investigates machine learning and deep learning approaches, namely Logistic Regression and Bi-directional Gated Recurrent Unit (Bi-GRU) models. These models achieved F1 scores of 0.68 and 0.70, respectively, contributing to ongoing efforts to combat hate speech in code-mixed languages and offering valuable insights for future research in this critical domain.

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MIT-KEC-NLP@DravidianLangTech-EACL 2024: Offensive Content Detection in Kannada and Kannada-English Mixed Text Using Deep Learning Techniques
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Sowbarnigaa K S | Mehal Sakthi M S | Subhadevi K | Malliga Subramanian

This study presents a strong methodology for detecting offensive content in multilingual text, with a focus on Kannada and Kannada-English mixed comments. The first step in data preprocessing is to work with a dataset containing Kannada comments, which is backed by Google Translate for Kannada-English translation. Following tokenization and sequence labeling, BIO tags are assigned to indicate the existence and bounds of objectionable spans within the text. On annotated data, a Bidirectional LSTM neural network model is trained and BiLSTM model’s macro F1 score is 61.0 in recognizing objectionable content. Data preparation, model architecture definition, and iterative training with Kannada and Kannada- English text are all part of the training process. In a fresh dataset, the trained model accurately predicts offensive spans, emphasizing comments in the aforementioned languages. Predictions that have been recorded and include offensive span indices are organized into a database.

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Transformers@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Sentiment Analysis of Code-Mixed Tamil Using RoBERTa
Kriti Singhal | Jatin Bedi

In recent years, there has been a persistent focus on developing systems that can automatically identify the hate speech content circulating on diverse social media platforms. This paper describes the team Transformers’ submission to the Caste/Immigration Hate Speech Detection in Tamil shared task by LT-EDI 2024 workshop at EACL 2024. We used an ensemble approach in the shared task, combining various transformer-based pre-trained models using majority voting. The best macro average F1-score achieved was 0.82. We secured the 1st rank in the Caste/Immigration Hate Speech in Tamil shared task.

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Habesha@DravidianLangTech 2024: Detecting Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages using Deep Learning
Mesay Yigezu | Olga Kolesnikova | Grigori Sidorov | Alexander Gelbukh

This research tackles the issue of fake news by utilizing the RNN-LSTM deep learning method with optimized hyperparameters identified through grid search. The model’s performance in multi-label classification is hindered by unbalanced data, despite its success in binary classification. We achieved a score of 0.82 in the binary classification task, whereas in the multi-class task, the score was 0.32. We suggest incorporating data balancing techniques for researchers who aim to further this task, aiming to improve results in managing a variety of information.

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WordWizards@DravidianLangTech 2024:Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages using Cross-lingual Sentence Embeddings
Akshatha Anbalagan | Priyadharshini T | Niranjana A | Shreedevi Balaji | Durairaj Thenmozhi

The proliferation of fake news in digital media has become a significant societal concern, impacting public opinion, trust, and decision-making. This project focuses on the development of machine learning models for the detection of fake news. Leveraging a dataset containing both genuine and deceptive news articles, the proposed models employ natural language processing techniques, feature extraction and classification algorithms. This paper provides a solution to Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages - DravidianLangTech 2024. There are two sub tasks: Task 1 - The goal of this task is to classify a given social media text into original or fake. We propose an approach for this with the help of a supervised machine learning model – SVM (Support Vector Machine). The SVM classifier achieved a macro F1 score of 0.78 in test data and a rank 11. The Task 2 is classifying fake news articles in Malayalam language into different categories namely False, Half True, Mostly False, Partly False and Mostly True.We have used Naive Bayes which achieved macro F1-score 0.3517 in test data and a rank 6.

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Sandalphon@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Code-mixed Text using Transliteration-Augmentation
Nafisa Tabassum | Mosabbir Khan | Shawly Ahsan | Jawad Hossain | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Hate and offensive language in online platforms pose significant challenges, necessitating automatic detection methods. Particularly in the case of codemixed text, which is very common in social media, the complexity of this problem increases due to the cultural nuances of different languages. DravidianLangTech-EACL2024 organized a shared task on detecting hate and offensive language for Telugu. To complete this task, this study investigates the effectiveness of transliteration-augmented datasets for Telugu code-mixed text. In this work, we compare the performance of various machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and transformer-based models on both original and augmented datasets. Experimental findings demonstrate the superiority of transformer models, particularly Telugu-BERT, achieving the highest f1-score of 0.77 on the augmented dataset, ranking the 1st position in the leaderboard. The study highlights the potential of transliteration-augmented datasets in improving model performance and suggests further exploration of diverse transliteration options to address real-world scenarios.

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CUET_Binary_Hackers@DravidianLangTech EACL2024: Fake News Detection in Malayalam Language Leveraging Fine-tuned MuRIL BERT
Salman Farsi | Asrarul Eusha | Ariful Islam | Hasan Mesbaul Ali Taher | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Due to technological advancements, various methods have emerged for disseminating news to the masses. The pervasive reach of news, however, has given rise to a significant concern: the proliferation of fake news. In response to this challenge, a shared task in Dravidian- LangTech EACL2024 was initiated to detect fake news and classify its types in the Malayalam language. The shared task consisted of two sub-tasks. Task 1 focused on a binary classification problem, determining whether a piece of news is fake or not. Whereas task 2 delved into a multi-class classification problem, categorizing news into five distinct levels. Our approach involved the exploration of various machine learning (RF, SVM, XGBoost, Ensemble), deep learning (BiLSTM, CNN), and transformer-based models (MuRIL, Indic- SBERT, m-BERT, XLM-R, Distil-BERT) by emphasizing parameter tuning to enhance overall model performance. As a result, we introduce a fine-tuned MuRIL model that leverages parameter tuning, achieving notable success with an F1-score of 0.86 in task 1 and 0.5191 in task 2. This successful implementation led to our system securing the 3rd position in task 1 and the 1st position in task 2. The source code will be found in the GitHub repository at this link: https://github.com/Salman1804102/ DravidianLangTech-EACL-2024-FakeNews.

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Punny_Punctuators@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Transformer-based Approach for Detection and Classification of Fake News in Malayalam Social Media Text
Nafisa Tabassum | Sumaiya Aodhora | Rowshon Akter | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

The alarming rise of fake news on social media poses a significant threat to public discourse and decision-making. While automatic detection of fake news offers a promising solution, research in low-resource languages like Malayalam often falls behind due to limited data and tools. This paper presents the participation of team Punny_Punctuators in the Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages shared task at DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024, addressing this gap. The shared task focuses on two sub-tasks: 1. classifying social media texts as original or fake, and 2. categorizing fake news into 5 categories. We experimented with various machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL) and transformer-based models as well as processing techniques such as transliteration. Malayalam-BERT achieved the best performance on both sub-tasks, which obtained us 2nd place with a macro f1-score of 0.87 for the subtask-1 and 11th place with a macro f1-score of 0.17 for the subtask-2. Our results highlight the potential of transformer models for low-resource languages in fake news detection and pave the way for further research in this crucial area.

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CUET_NLP_GoodFellows@DravidianLangTech EACL2024: A Transformer-Based Approach for Detecting Fake News in Dravidian Languages
Md Osama | Kawsar Ahmed | Hasan Mesbaul Ali Taher | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

In this modern era, many people have been using Facebook and Twitter, leading to increased information sharing and communication. However, a considerable amount of information on these platforms is misleading or intentionally crafted to deceive users, which is often termed as fake news. A shared task on fake news detection in Malayalam organized by DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024 allowed us for addressing the challenge of distinguishing between original and fake news content in the Malayalam language. Our approach involves creating an intelligent framework to categorize text as either fake or original. We experimented with various machine learning models, including Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Multinomial Naive Bayes, SVM, and SGD, and various deep learning models, including CNN, BiLSTM, and BiLSTM + Attention. We also explored Indic-BERT, MuRIL, XLM-R, and m-BERT for transformer-based approaches. Notably, our most successful model, m-BERT, achieved a macro F1 score of 0.85 and ranked 4th in the shared task. This research contributes to combating misinformation on social media news, offering an effective solution to classify content accurately.

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CUET_Binary_Hackers@DravidianLangTech EACL2024: Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Code-Mixed Text Using Sentence Similarity BERT
Salman Farsi | Asrarul Eusha | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

With the continuous evolution of technology and widespread internet access, various social media platforms have gained immense popularity, attracting a vast number of active users globally. However, this surge in online activity has also led to a concerning trend by driving many individuals to resort to posting hateful and offensive comments or posts, publicly targeting groups or individuals. In response to these challenges, we participated in this shared task. Our approach involved proposing a fine-tuning-based pre-trained transformer model to effectively discern whether a given text contains offensive content that propagates hatred. We conducted comprehensive experiments, exploring various machine learning (LR, SVM, and Ensemble), deep learning (CNN, BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based models (Indic-SBERT, m- BERT, MuRIL, Distil-BERT, XLM-R), adhering to a meticulous fine-tuning methodology. Among the models evaluated, our fine-tuned L3Cube-Indic-Sentence-Similarity- BERT or Indic-SBERT model demonstrated superior performance, achieving a macro-average F1-score of 0.7013. This notable result positioned us at the 6th place in the task. The implementation details of the task will be found in the GitHub repository.

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TechWhiz@DravidianLangTech 2024: Fake News Detection Using Deep Learning Models
Madhumitha M | Kunguma M | Tejashri J | Jerin Mahibha C

The ever-evolving landscape of online social media has initiated a transformative phase in communication, presenting unprecedented opportunities alongside inherent challenges. The pervasive issue of false information, commonly termed fake news, has emerged as a significant concern within these dynamic platforms. This study delves into the domain of Fake News Detection, with a specific focus on Malayalam. Utilizing advanced transformer models like mBERT, ALBERT, and XMLRoBERTa, our research proficiently classifies social media text into original or fake categories. Notably, our proposed model achieved commendable results, securing a rank of 3 in Task 1 with macro F1 scores of 0.84 using mBERT, 0.56 using ALBERT, and 0.84 using XMLRoBERTa. In Task 2, the XMLRoBERTa model excelled with a rank of 12, attaining a macro F1 score of 0.21, while mBERT and BERT achieved scores of 0.16 and 0.11, respectively. This research aims to develop robust systems capable of discerning authentic from deceptive content, a crucial endeavor in maintaining information reliability on social media platforms amid the rampant spread of misinformation.

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CUET_Binary_Hackers@DravidianLangTech-EACL 2024: Sentiment Analysis using Transformer-Based Models in Code-Mixed and Transliterated Tamil and Tulu
Asrarul Eusha | Salman Farsi | Ariful Islam | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Textual Sentiment Analysis (TSA) delves into people’s opinions, intuitions, and emotions regarding any entity. Natural Language Processing (NLP) serves as a technique to extract subjective knowledge, determining whether an idea or comment leans positive, negative, neutral, or a mix thereof toward an entity. In recent years, it has garnered substantial attention from NLP researchers due to the vast availability of online comments and opinions. Despite extensive studies in this domain, sentiment analysis in low-resourced languages such as Tamil and Tulu needs help handling code-mixed and transliterated content. To address these challenges, this work focuses on sentiment analysis of code-mixed and transliterated Tamil and Tulu social media comments. It explored four machine learning (ML) approaches (LR, SVM, XGBoost, Ensemble), four deep learning (DL) methods (BiLSTM and CNN with FastText and Word2Vec), and four transformer-based models (m-BERT, MuRIL, L3Cube-IndicSBERT, and Distilm-BERT) for both languages. For Tamil, L3Cube-IndicSBERT and ensemble approaches outperformed others, while m-BERT demonstrated superior performance among the models for Tulu. The presented models achieved the 3rd and 1st ranks by attaining macro F1-scores of 0.227 and 0.584 in Tamil and Tulu, respectively.

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Binary_Beasts@DravidianLangTech-EACL 2024: Multimodal Abusive Language Detection in Tamil based on Integrated Approach of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques
Md. Rahman | Abu Raihan | Tanzim Rahman | Shawly Ahsan | Jawad Hossain | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Detecting abusive language on social media is a challenging task that needs to be solved effectively. This research addresses the formidable challenge of detecting abusive language in Tamil through a comprehensive multimodal approach, incorporating textual, acoustic, and visual inputs. This study utilized ConvLSTM, 3D-CNN, and a hybrid 3D-CNN with BiLSTM to extract video features. Several models, such as BiLSTM, LR, and CNN, are explored for processing audio data, whereas for textual content, MNB, LR, and LSTM methods are explored. To further enhance overall performance, this work introduced a weighted late fusion model amalgamating predictions from all modalities. The fusion model was then applied to make predictions on the test dataset. The ConvLSTM+BiLSTM+MNB model yielded the highest macro F1 score of 71.43%. Our methodology allowed us to achieve 1 st rank for multimodal abusive language detection in the shared task

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WordWizards@DravidianLangTech 2024: Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu using Sentence Embedding
Shreedevi Balaji | Akshatha Anbalagan | Priyadharshini T | Niranjana A | Durairaj Thenmozhi

Sentiment Analysis of Dravidian Languages has begun to garner attention recently as there is more need to analyze emotional responses and subjective opinions present in social media text. As this data is code-mixed and there are not many solutions to code-mixed text out there, we present to you a stellar solution to DravidianLangTech 2024: Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu task. To understand the sentiment of social media text, we used pre-trained transformer models and feature extraction vectorizers to classify the data with results that placed us 11th in the rankings for the Tamil task and 8th for the Tulu task with a accuracy F1 score of 0.12 and 0.30 which shows the efficiency of our approach.

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CUET_DUO@DravidianLangTech EACL2024: Fake News Classification Using Malayalam-BERT
Tanzim Rahman | Abu Raihan | Md. Rahman | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Identifying between fake and original news in social media demands vigilant procedures. This paper introduces the significant shared task on ‘Fake News Detection in Dravidian Languages - DravidianLangTech@EACL 2024’. With a focus on the Malayalam language, this task is crucial in identifying social media posts as either fake or original news. The participating teams contribute immensely to this task through their varied strategies, employing methods ranging from conventional machine-learning techniques to advanced transformer-based models. Notably, the findings of this work highlight the effectiveness of the Malayalam-BERT model, demonstrating an impressive macro F1 score of 0.88 in distinguishing between fake and original news in Malayalam social media content, achieving a commendable rank of 1st among the participants.

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Wit Hub@DravidianLangTech-2024:Multimodal Social Media Data Analysis in Dravidian Languages using Machine Learning Models
Anierudh S | Abhishek R | Ashwin Sundar | Amrit Krishnan | Bharathi B

The main objective of the task is categorised into three subtasks. Subtask-1 Build models to determine the sentiment expressed in multimodal posts (or videos) in Tamil and Malayalam languages, leveraging textual, audio, and visual components. The videos are labelled into five categories: highly positive, positive, neutral, negative and highly negative. Subtask-2 Design machine models that effectively identify and classify abusive language within the multimodal context of social media posts in Tamil. The data are categorized into abusive and non-abusive categories. Subtask-3 Develop advanced models that accurately detect and categorize hate speech and offensive language in multimodal social media posts in Dravidian languages. The data points are categorized into Caste, Offensive, Racist and Sexist classes. In this session, the focus is primarily on Tamil language text data analysis. Various combination of machine learning models have been used to perform each tasks and do oversampling techniques to train models on biased dataset.

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CUETSentimentSillies@DravidianLangTech-EACL2024: Transformer-based Approach for Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu Code-Mixed Texts
Zannatul Tripty | Md. Nafis | Antu Chowdhury | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Sentiment analysis (SA) on social media reviews has become a challenging research agenda in recent years due to the exponential growth of textual content. Although several effective solutions are available for SA in high-resourced languages, it is considered a critical problem for low-resourced languages. This work introduces an automatic system for analyzing sentiment in Tamil and Tulu code-mixed languages. Several ML (DT, RF, MNB), DL (CNN, BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based models (Indic-BERT, XLM-RoBERTa, m-BERT) are investigated for SA tasks using Tamil and Tulu code-mixed textual data. Experimental outcomes reveal that the transformer-based models XLM-R and m-BERT surpassed others in performance for Tamil and Tulu, respectively. The proposed XLM-R and m-BERT models attained macro F1-scores of 0.258 (Tamil) and 0.468 (Tulu) on test datasets, securing the 2nd and 5th positions, respectively, in the shared task.

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Social Media Hate and Offensive Speech Detection Using Machine Learning method
Girma Bade | Olga Kolesnikova | Grigori Sidorov | José Oropeza

Even though the improper use of social media is increasing nowadays, there is also technology that brings solutions. Here, improperness is posting hate and offensive speech that might harm an individual or group. Hate speech refers to an insult toward an individual or group based on their identities. Spreading it on social media platforms is a serious problem for society. The solution, on the other hand, is the availability of natural language processing(NLP) technology that is capable to detect and handle such problems. This paper presents the detection of social media’s hate and offensive speech in the code-mixed Telugu language. For this, the task and golden standard dataset were provided for us by the shared task organizer (DravidianLangTech@ EACL 2024)1. To this end, we have employed the TF-IDF technique for numeric feature extraction and used a random forest algorithm for modeling hate speech detection. Finally, the developed model was evaluated on the test dataset and achieved 0.492 macro-F1.

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CUETSentimentSillies@DravidianLangTech EACL2024: Transformer-based Approach for Detecting and Categorizing Fake News in Malayalam Language
Zannatul Tripty | Md. Nafis | Antu Chowdhury | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

Fake news misleads people and may lead to real-world miscommunication and injury. Removing misinformation encourages critical thinking, democracy, and the prevention of hatred, fear, and misunderstanding. Identifying and removing fake news and developing a detection system is essential for reliable, accurate, and clear information. Therefore, a shared task was organized to detect fake news in Malayalam. This paper presents a system developed for the shared task of detecting and classifying fake news in Malayalam. The approach involves a combination of machine learning models (LR, DT, RF, MNB), deep learning models (CNN, BiLSTM, CNN+BiLSTM), and transformer-based models (Indic-BERT, XLMR, Malayalam-BERT, m-BERT) for both subtasks. The experimental results demonstrate that transformer-based models, specifically m- BERT and Malayalam-BERT, outperformed others. The m-BERT model achieved superior performance in subtask 1 with macro F1-scores of 0.84, and Malayalam-BERT outperformed the other models in subtask 2 with macro F1- scores of 0.496, securing us the 5th and 2nd positions in subtask 1 and subtask 2, respectively.

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MUCS@DravidianLangTech-2024: Role of Learning Approaches in Strengthening Hate-Alert Systems for code-mixed text
Manavi K | Sonali K | Gauthamraj K | Kavya G | Asha Hegde | Hosahalli Shashirekha

Hate and offensive language detection is the task of detecting hate and/or offensive content targetting a person or a group of people. Despite many efforts to detect hate and offensive content on social media platforms, the problem remains unsolved till date due to the ever growing social media users and their creativity to create and spread hate and offensive content. To address the automatic detection of hate and offensive content on social media platforms, this paper describes the learning models submitted by our team - MUCS to “Hate and Offensive Language Detection in Telugu Codemixed Text (HOLD-Telugu): DravidianLangTech@EACL” - a shared task organized at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2024 invites the research community to address the challenges of detecting hate and offensive language in Telugu language. In this paper, we - team MUCS, describe the learning models submitted to the above mentioned shared task. Three models: Three models: i) LR model - a Machine Learning (ML) algorithm fed with TF-IDF of n-grams of subword, word and char_wb are in the range (1, 3), (1, 3), and (1, 5), ii) TL- a pretrained BERT models which makes use of Hate-speech-CNERG/bert-base-uncased-hatexplain model and iii) Ensemble model which is the combination of ML classifieres( MNB, LR, GNB) trained CountVectorizer with word and char ngrams of range (1, 3) and (1, 5) respectively. Proposed LR model trained with TF-IDF of subword, word and char n-grams outperformed the other models with macro F1 scores of 0.6501 securing 15th rankin the shared task for Telugu text.

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MUCS@DravidianLangTech-2024: A Grid Search Approach to Explore Sentiment Analysis in Code-mixed Tamil and Tulu
Prathvi B | Manavi K | Subrahmanyapoojary K | Asha Hegde | Kavya G | Hosahalli Shashirekha

Sentiment Analysis (SA) is a field of computational study that analyzes and understands people’s opinions, attitudes, and emotions toward any entity. A review of an entity can be written about an individual, an event, a topic, a product, etc., and such reviews are abundant on social media platforms. The increasing number of social media users and the growing amount of user-generated code-mixed content such as reviews, comments, posts etc., on social media have resulted in a rising demand for efficient tools capable of effectively analyzing such content to detect the sentiments. In spite of this, SA of social media text is challenging because the code-mixed text is complex. To address SA in code-mixed Tamil and Tulu text, this paper describes the Machine Learning (ML) models submitted by our team - MUCS to “Sentiment Analysis in Tamil and Tulu - Dravidian- LangTech” - a shared task organized at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2024. Linear Support Vector classifier (LinearSVC) and ensemble of 5 ML classifiers (k Nearest Neighbour (kNN), Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Logistic Regression (LR), LinearSVC, and Random Forest Classifier (RFC)) with hard voting trained using concatenated features obtained from word and character n-ngrams vectoized from Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) vectorizer and CountVectorizer. Further, Gridsearch algorithm is employed to obtain optimal hyperparameter values.The proposed ensemble model obtained macro F1 scores of 0.260 and 0.550 for Tamil and Tulu languages respectively.

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InnovationEngineers@DravidianLangTech-EACL 2024: Sentimental Analysis of YouTube Comments in Tamil by using Machine Learning
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Malliga Subramanian | Palanimurugan V | Pavul chinnappan D

There is opportunity for machine learning and natural language processing research because of the growing volume of textual data. Although there has been little research done on trend extraction from YouTube comments, sentiment analysis is an intriguing issue because of the poor consistency and quality of the material found there. The purpose of this work is to use machine learning techniques and algorithms to do sentiment analysis on YouTube comments pertaining to popular themes. The findings demonstrate that sentiment analysis is capable of giving a clear picture of how actual events affect public opinion. This study aims to make it easier for academics to find high-quality sentiment analysis research publications. Data normalisation methods are used to clean an annotated corpus of 1500 citation sentences for the study. .For classification, a system utilising one machine learning algorithm—K-Nearest Neighbour (KNN), Na ̈ıve Bayes, SVC (Support Vector Machine), and RandomForest—is built. Metrics like the f1-score and correctness score are used to assess the correctness of the system.

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KEC_HAWKS@DravidianLangTech 2024 : Detecting Malayalam Fake News using Machine Learning Models
Malliga Subramanian | Jayanthjr J R | Muthu Karuppan P | Keerthibala T | Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel

The proliferation of fake news in the Malayalam language across digital platforms has emerged as a pressing issue. By employing Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), a type of machine learning model, we aim to distinguish between Original and Fake News in Malayalam and achieved 9th rank in Task 1.RNNs are chosen for their ability to understand the sequence of words in a sentence, which is important in languages like Malayalam. Our main goal is to develop better models that can spot fake news effectively. We analyze various features to understand what contributes most to this accuracy. By doing so, we hope to provide a reliable method for identifying and combating fake news in the Malayalam language.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)

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Proceedings of the 8th Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature (LaTeCH-CLfL 2024)
Yuri Bizzoni | Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb | Anna Kazantseva | Stan Szpakowicz

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Evaluating In-Context Learning for Computational Literary Studies: A Case Study Based on the Automatic Recognition of Knowledge Transfer in German Drama
Janis Pagel | Axel Pichler | Nils Reiter

In this paper, we evaluate two different natural language processing (NLP) approaches to solve a paradigmatic task for computational literary studies (CLS): the recognition of knowledge transfer in literary texts. We focus on the question of how adequately large language models capture the transfer of knowledge about family relations in German drama texts when this transfer is treated as a classification or textual entailment task using in-context learning (ICL). We find that a 13 billion parameter LLAMA 2 model performs best on the former, while GPT-4 performs best on the latter task. However, all models achieve relatively low scores compared to standard NLP benchmark results, struggle from inconsistencies with small changes in prompts and are often not able to make simple inferences beyond the textual surface, which is why an unreflected generic use of ICL in the CLS seems still not advisable.

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Coreference in Long Documents using Hierarchical Entity Merging
Talika Gupta | Hans Ole Hatzel | Chris Biemann

Current top-performing coreference resolution approaches are limited with regard to the maximum length of texts they can accept. We explore a recursive merging technique of entities that allows us to apply coreference models to texts of arbitrary length, as found in many narrative genres. In experiments on established datasets, we quantify the drop in resolution quality caused by this approach. Finally, we use an under-explored resource in the form of a fully coreference-annotated novel to illustrate our model’s performance for long documents in practice. Here, we achieve state-of-the-art performance, outperforming previous systems capable of handling long documents.

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Metaphorical Framing of Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Immigrants in UKs Left and Right-Wing Media
Yunxiao Wang

The metaphorical framing of refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants (RASIM) has been widely explored in academia, but mainly through close analysis. The present research outlines a large-scale computational investigation of RASIM metaphors in UKs media discourse. We experiment with a method that facilitates automatic identification of RASIM metaphors in 21 years of RASIM-related news reports from eight popular UK newspapers. From the metaphors extracted, four overarching frames are identified. Further analysis reveals correlations between political bias and metaphor usage: overall, right-biased newspapers use RASIM metaphors more frequently than their left-biased counterparts. Within the metaphorical frames, water, disaster, and non-human metaphors are more prevalent in right-biased media. Additionally, diachronic analysis illustrates that the distinctions between left and right media have evolved over time. Water metaphors, for example, have become increasingly more representative of the political right in the past two decades.

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Computational Analysis of Dehumanization of Ukrainians on Russian Social Media
Kateryna Burovova | Mariana Romanyshyn

Dehumanization is a pernicious process of denying some or all attributes of humanness to the target group. It is frequently cited as a common hallmark of incitement to commit genocide. The international security landscape has seen a dramatic shift following the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. This, coupled with recent developments in the conceptualization of dehumanization, necessitates the creation of new techniques for analyzing and detecting this extreme violence-related phenomenon on a large scale. Our project pioneers the development of a detection system for instances of dehumanization. To achieve this, we collected the entire posting history of the most popular bloggers on Russian Telegram and tested classical machine learning, deep learning, and zero-shot learning approaches to explore and detect the dehumanizing rhetoric. We found that the transformer-based method for entity extraction SpERT shows a promising result of F 1 = 0.85 for binary classification. The proposed methods can be built into the systems of anticipatory governance, contribute to the collection of evidence of genocidal intent in the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and pave the way for large-scale studies of dehumanizing language. This paper contains references to language that some readers may find offensive.

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Compilation of a Synthetic Judeo-French Corpus
Iglika Nikolova-Stoupak | Gaél Lejeune | Eva Schaeffer-Lacroix

This is a short paper describing the process of derivation of synthetic Judeo-French text. Judeo-French is one of a number of rare languages used in speaking and writing by Jewish communities as confined to a particular temporal and geographical frame (in this case, 11th- to 14th-century France). The number of resources in the language is very limited and its involvement in the contemporary domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is practically non-existent. This work outlines the compilation of a synthetic Judeo-French corpus. For the purpose, a pipeline of transformations is applied to Old French text belonging to the same general time period, leading to the derivation of text that is as reliable as possible in terms of phonological, morphological and lexical characteristics as witnessed in Judeo-French. Ultimately, the goal is for this synthetic corpus to be used in standard NLP tasks, such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), as an instance of data augmentation.

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Detecting Structured Language Alternations in Historical Documents by Combining Language Identification with Fourier Analysis
Hale Sirin | Sabrina Li | Thomas Lippincott

In this study, we present a generalizable workflow to identify documents in a historic language with a nonstandard language and script combination, Armeno-Turkish. We introduce the task of detecting distinct patterns of multilinguality based on the frequency of structured language alternations within a document.

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EmotionArcs: Emotion Arcs for 9,000 Literary Texts
Emily Ohman | Yuri Bizzoni | Pascale Feldkamp Moreira | Kristoffer Nielbo

We introduce EmotionArcs, a dataset comprising emotional arcs from over 9,000 English novels, assembled to understand the dynamics of emotions represented in text and how these emotions may influence a novel ́s reception and perceived quality. We evaluate emotion arcs manually, by comparing them to human annotation and against other similar emotion modeling systems to show that our system produces coherent emotion arcs that correspond to human interpretation. We present and make this resource available for further studies of a large collection of emotion arcs and present one application, exploring these arcs for modeling reader appreciation. Using information-theoretic measures to analyze the impact of emotions on literary quality, we find that emotional entropy, as well as the skewness and steepness of emotion arcs correlate with two proxies of literary reception. Our findings may offer insights into how quality assessments relate to emotional complexity and could help with the study of affect in literary novels.

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Multi-word Expressions in English Scientific Writing
Diego Alves | Stefan Fischer | Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb | Elke Teich

Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) play a pivotal role in language use overall and in register formation more specifically, e.g. encoding field-specific terminology. Our study focuses on the identification and categorization of MWEs used in scientific writing, considering their formal characteristics as well as their developmental trajectory over time from the mid-17th century to the present. For this, we develop an approach combining three different types of methods to identify MWEs (Universal Dependency annotation, Partitioner and the Academic Formulas List) and selected measures to characterize MWE properties (e.g., dispersion by Kullback-Leibler Divergence and several association measures). This allows us to inspect MWEs types in a novel data-driven way regarding their functions and change over time in specialized discourse.

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EventNet-ITA: Italian Frame Parsing for Events
Marco Rovera

This paper introduces EventNet-ITA, a large, multi-domain corpus annotated full-text with event frames for Italian. Moreover, we present and thoroughly evaluate an efficient multi-label sequence labeling approach for Frame Parsing. Covering a wide range of individual, social and historical phenomena, with more than 53,000 annotated sentences and over 200 modeled frames, EventNet-ITA constitutes the first systematic attempt to provide the Italian language with a publicly available resource for Frame Parsing of events, useful for a broad spectrum of research and application tasks. Our approach achieves a promising 0.9 strict F1-score for frame classification and 0.72 for frame element classification, on top of minimizing computational requirements. The annotated corpus and the frame parsing model are released under open license.

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Modeling Moravian Memoirs: Ternary Sentiment Analysis in a Low Resource Setting
Patrick Brookshire | Nils Reiter

The Moravians are a Christian group that has emerged from a 15th century movement. In this paper, we investigate how memoirs written by the devotees of this group can be analyzed with methods from computational linguistics, in particular sentiment analysis. To this end, we experiment with two different fine-tuning strategies and find that the best performance for ternary sentiment analysis (81% accuracy) is achieved by fine-tuning a German BERT model, outperforming in particular models trained on much larger German sentiment datasets. We further investigate the model(s) using SHAP scores and find that the best performing model struggles with multiple negations and mixed statements. Finally, we show two application scenarios motivated by research questions from religious studies.

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Applying Information-theoretic Notions to Measure Effects of the Plain English Movement on English Law Reports and Scientific Articles
Sergei Bagdasarov | Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb

We investigate the impact of the Plain English Movement (PEM) on the complexity of legal language in UK law reports from the 1950s-2010s, contrasting it with the evolution of scientific language. The PEM, emerging in the late 20th century, advocated for clear and understandable legal language. We define complexity through the concept of surprisal - an information-theoretic measure correlating with cognitive processing difficulty. Our research contrasts surprisal with traditional readability measures, which often overlook content. We hypothesize that, if the PEM has influenced legal language, there would be a reduction in complexity over time and a shift from a nominal to a more verbal style. We analyze text complexity and lexico-grammatical changes in line with PEM recommendations. Results indicate minimal impact of the PEM on both legal and scientific domains. This finding suggests future research should consider processing effort when advocating for linguistic norms to enhance accessibility.

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Uncovering the Handwritten Text in the Margins: End-to-end Handwritten Text Detection and Recognition
Liang Cheng | Jonas Frankemölle | Adam Axelsson | Ekta Vats

The pressing need for digitization of historical documents has led to a strong interest in designing computerised image processing methods for automatic handwritten text recognition. However, not much attention has been paid on studying the handwritten text written in the margins, i.e. marginalia, that also forms an important source of information. Nevertheless, training an accurate and robust recognition system for marginalia calls for data-efficient approaches due to the unavailability of sufficient amounts of annotated multi-writer texts. Therefore, this work presents an end-to-end framework for automatic detection and recognition of handwritten marginalia, and leverages data augmentation and transfer learning to overcome training data scarcity. The detection phase involves investigation of R-CNN and Faster R-CNN networks. The recognition phase includes an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model, with ResNet feature extraction, bidirectional LSTM-based sequence modeling, and attention-based prediction of marginalia. The effectiveness of the proposed framework has been empirically evaluated on the data from early book collections found in the Uppsala University Library in Sweden. Source code and pre-trained models are available at Github.

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Historical Portrayal of Greek Tourism through Topic Modeling on International Newspapers
Eirini Karamouzi | Maria Pontiki | Yannis Krasonikolakis

In this paper, we bridge computational linguistics with historical methods to explore the potential of topic modeling in historical newspapers. Our case study focuses on British and American newspapers published in the second half of the 20th century that debate issues of Greek tourism, but our method can be transposed to any diachronic data. We demonstrate that Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NFM) can generate interpretable topics within the historical period under examination providing a tangible example of how computational text analysis can assist historical research. The contribution of our work is two-fold; first, the extracted topics are evaluated both by a computational linguist and by a historian highlighting the crucial role of domain experts when interpreting topic modeling outputs. Second, the extracted topics are contextualized within the historical and political environment in which they appear, providing interesting insights about the historical representations of Greek tourism over the years, and about the development and the hallmarks of American and British tourism in Greece across different historical periods (from 1945 to 1989). The comparative analysis between the American and the British press reveals interesting insights including similar responses to specific events as well as notable differences between British and American tourism to Greece during the historical periods under examination. Overall, the results of our analysis can provide valuable information for academics and researchers in the field of (Digital) Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as for stakeholders in the tourism industry.

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Post-Correction of Historical Text Transcripts with Large Language Models: An Exploratory Study
Emanuela Boros | Maud Ehrmann | Matteo Romanello | Sven Najem-Meyer | Frédéric Kaplan

The quality of automatic transcription of heritage documents, whether from printed, manuscripts or audio sources, has a decisive impact on the ability to search and process historical texts. Although significant progress has been made in text recognition (OCR, HTR, ASR), textual materials derived from library and archive collections remain largely erroneous and noisy. Effective post-transcription correction methods are therefore necessary and have been intensively researched for many years. As large language models (LLMs) have recently shown exceptional performances in a variety of text-related tasks, we investigate their ability to amend poor historical transcriptions. We evaluate fourteen foundation language models against various post-correction benchmarks comprising different languages, time periods and document types, as well as different transcription quality and origins. We compare the performance of different model sizes and different prompts of increasing complexity in zero and few-shot settings. Our evaluation shows that LLMs are anything but efficient at this task. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of results allow us to share valuable insights for future work on post-correcting historical texts with LLMs.

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Distinguishing Fictional Voices: a Study of Authorship Verification Models for Quotation Attribution
Gaspard Michel | Elena Epure | Romain Hennequin | Christophe Cerisara

Recent approaches to automatically detect the speaker of an utterance of direct speech often disregard general information about characters in favor of local information found in the context, such as surrounding mentions of entities. In this work, we explore stylistic representations of characters built by encoding their quotes with off-the-shelf pretrained Authorship Verification models in a large corpus of English novels (the Project Dialogism Novel Corpus). Results suggest that the combination of stylistic and topical information captured in some of these models accurately distinguish characters among each other, but does not necessarily improve over semantic-only models when attributing quotes. However, these results vary across novels and more investigation of stylometric models particularly tailored for literary texts and the study of characters should be conducted.

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Perplexing Canon: A study on GPT-based perplexity of canonical and non-canonical literary works
Yaru Wu | Yuri Bizzoni | Pascale Moreira | Kristoffer Nielbo

This study extends previous research on literary quality by using information theory-based methods to assess the level of perplexity recorded by three large language models when processing 20th-century English novels deemed to have high literary quality, recognized by experts as canonical, compared to a broader control group. We find that canonical texts appear to elicit a higher perplexity in the models, we explore which textual features might concur to create such an effect. We find that the usage of a more heavily nominal style, together with a more diverse vocabulary, is one of the leading causes of the difference between the two groups. These traits could reflect “strategies” to achieve an informationally dense literary style.

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People and Places of the Past - Named Entity Recognition in Swedish Labour Movement Documents from Historical Sources
Crina Tudor | Eva Pettersson

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is an important step in many Natural Language Processing tasks. The existing state-of-the-art NER systems are however typically developed based on contemporary data, and not very well suited for analyzing historical text. In this paper, we present a comparative analysis of the performance of several language models when applied to Named Entity Recognition for historical Swedish text. The source texts we work with are documents from Swedish labour unions from the 19th and 20th century. We experiment with three off-the-shelf models for contemporary Swedish text, and one language model built on historical Swedish text that we fine-tune with labelled data for adaptation to the NER task. Lastly, we propose a hybrid approach by combining the results of two models in order to maximize usability. We show that, even though historical Swedish is a low-resource language with data sparsity issues affecting overall performance, historical language models still show very promising results. Further contributions of our paper are the release of our newly trained model for NER of historical Swedish text, along with a manually annotated corpus of over 650 named entities.

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Part-of-Speech Tagging of 16th-Century Latin with GPT
Elina Stüssi | Phillip Ströbel

Part-of-speech tagging is foundational to natural language processing, transcending mere linguistic functions. However, taggers optimized for Classical Latin struggle when faced with diverse linguistic eras shaped by the language ́s evolution. Exploring 16th-century Latin from the correspondence and assessing five Latin treebanks, we focused on carefully evaluating tagger accuracy and refining Large Language Models for improved performance in this nuanced linguistic context. Our discoveries unveiled the competitive accuracies of different versions of GPT, particularly after fine-tuning. Notably, our best fine-tuned model soared to an average accuracy of 88.99% over the treebank data, underscoring the remarkable adaptability and learning capabilities when fine-tuned to the specific intricacies of Latin texts. Next to emphasising GPT’s part-of-speech tagging capabilities, our second aim is to strengthen taggers ́ adaptability across different periods. We establish solid groundwork for using Large Language Models in specific natural language processing tasks where part-of-speech tagging is often employed as a pre-processing step. This work significantly advances the use of modern language models in interpreting historical language, bridging the gap between past linguistic epochs and modern computational linguistics.

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Two Approaches to Diachronic Normalization of Polish Texts
Kacper Dudzic | Filip Gralinski | Krzysztof Jassem | Marek Kubis | Piotr Wierzchon

This paper discusses two approaches to the diachronic normalization of Polish texts: a rule-based solution that relies on a set of handcrafted patterns, and a neural normalization model based on the text-to-text transfer transformer architecture. The training and evaluation data prepared for the task are discussed in detail, along with experiments conducted to compare the proposed normalization solutions. A quantitative and qualitative analysis is made. It is shown that at the current stage of inquiry into the problem, the rule-based solution outperforms the neural one on 3 out of 4 variants of the prepared dataset, although in practice both approaches have distinct advantages and disadvantages.

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Enriching the Metadata of Community-Generated Digital Content through Entity Linking: An Evaluative Comparison of State-of-the-Art Models
Youcef Benkhedda | Adrians Skapars | Viktor Schlegel | Goran Nenadic | Riza Batista-Navarro

Digital archive collections that have been contributed by communities, known as community-generated digital content (CGDC), are important sources of historical and cultural knowledge. However, CGDC items are not easily searchable due to semantic information being obscured within their textual metadata. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which state-of-the-art, general-domain entity linking (EL) models (i.e., BLINK, EPGEL and mGENRE) can map named entities mentioned in CGDC textual metadata, to Wikidata entities. We evaluate and compare their performance on an annotated dataset of CGDC textual metadata and provide some error analysis, in the way of informing future studies aimed at enriching CGDC metadata using entity linking methods.

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Recognising Occupational Titles in German Parliamentary Debates
Johanna Binnewitt

The application of text mining methods is becoming more and more popular, not only in Digital Humanities (DH) and Computational Social Sciences (CSS) in general, but also in vocational education and training (VET) research. Employing algorithms offers the possibility to explore corpora that are simply too large for manual methods. However, challenges arise when dealing with abstract concepts like occupations or skills, which are crucial subjects of VET research. Since algorithms require concrete instructions, either in the form of rules or annotated examples, these abstract concepts must be broken down as part of the operationalisation process. In our paper, we tackle the task of identifying occupational titles in the plenary protocols of the German Bundestag. The primary focus lies in the comparative analysis of two distinct approaches: a dictionary-based method and a BERT fine-tuning approach. Both approaches are compared in a quantitative evaluation and applied to a larger corpus sample. Results indicate comparable precision for both approaches (0.93), but the BERT-based models outperform the dictionary-based approach in terms of recall (0.86 vs. 0.77). Errors in the dictionary-based method primarily stem from the ambiguity of occupational titles (e.g., ‘baker’ as both a surname and a profession) and missing terms in the dictionary. In contrast, the BERT model faces challenges in distinguishing occupational titles from other personal names, such as ‘mother’ or ‘Christians’.

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Dynamic embedded topic models and change-point detection for exploring literary-historical hypotheses
Hale Sirin | Thomas Lippincott

We present a novel combination of dynamic embedded topic models and change-point detection to explore diachronic change of lexical semantic modality in classical and early Christian Latin. We demonstrate several methods for finding and characterizing patterns in the output, and relating them to traditional scholarship in Comparative Literature and Classics. This simple approach to unsupervised models of semantic change can be applied to any suitable corpus, and we conclude with future directions and refinements aiming to allow noisier, less-curated materials to meet that threshold.

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Post-OCR Correction of Digitized Swedish Newspapers with ByT5
Viktoria Löfgren | Dana Dannélls

Many collections of digitized newspapers suffer from poor OCR quality, which impacts readability, information retrieval, and analysis of the material. Errors in OCR output can be reduced by applying machine translation models to “translate” it into a corrected version. Although transformer models show promising results in post-OCR correction and related tasks in other languages, they have not yet been explored for correcting OCR errors in Swedish texts. This paper presents a post-OCR correction model for Swedish 19th to 21th century newspapers based on the pre-trained transformer model ByT5. Three versions of the model were trained on different mixes of training data. The best model, which achieved a 36% reduction in CER, is made freely available and will be integrated into the automatic processing pipeline of Sprakbanken Text, a Swedish language technology infrastructure containing modern and historical written data.

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The Kronieken Corpus: an Annotated Collection of Dutch/Flemish Chronicles from 1500-1850
Theo Dekker | Erika Kuijpers | Alie Lassche | Carolina Lenarduzzi | Roser Morante | Judith Pollmann

In this paper we present the Kronieken Corpus, a new digital collection of 204 chronicles written in Dutch/Flemish between 1500 and 1850, which have been scanned, transcribed and annotated with named entities, dates, pages and a smaller part with sources and attributions. The texts belong to 308 physical volumes and contain between 23 and 24 million words. 107 chronicles, or 178 chronicle volumes, collected from 39 different archives and libraries in The Netherlands and Belgium and transcribed by volunteers had never been transcribed or published before. The result is a unique enriched historical text corpus of original hand-written, non-canonical and non-fiction text by lay people from the early modern period.

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Direct Speech Identification in Swedish Literature and an Exploration of Training Data Type, Typographical Markers, and Evaluation Granularity
Sara Stymne

Identifying direct speech in literary fiction is challenging for cases that do not mark speech segments with quotation marks. Such efforts have previously been based either on smaller manually annotated gold data or larger automatically annotated silver data, extracted from works with quotation marks. However, no direct comparison has so far been made between the performance of these two types of training data. In this work, we address this gap. We further explore the effect of different types of typographical speech marking and of using evaluation metrics of different granularity. We perform experiments on Swedish literary texts and find that using gold and silver data has different strengths, with gold data having stronger results on token-level metrics, whereas silver data overall has stronger results on span-level metrics. If the training data contains some data that matches the typographical speech marking of the target, that is generally sufficient for achieving good results, but it does not seem to hurt if the training data also contains other types of marking.

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Pairing Orthographically Variant Literary Words to Standard Equivalents Using Neural Edit Distance Models
Craig Messner | Thomas Lippincott

We present a novel corpus consisting of orthographically variant words found in works of 19th century U.S. literature annotated with their corresponding “standard” word pair. We train a set of neural edit distance models to pair these variants with their standard forms, and compare the performance of these models to the performance of a set of neural edit distance models trained on a corpus of orthographic errors made by L2 English learners. Finally, we analyze the relative performance of these models in the light of different negative training sample generation strategies, and offer concluding remarks on the unique challenge literary orthographic variation poses to string pairing methodologies.

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[Lions: 1] and [Tigers: 2] and [Bears: 3], Oh My! Literary Coreference Annotation with LLMs
Rebecca Hicke | David Mimno

Coreference annotation and resolution is a vital component of computational literary studies. However, it has previously been difficult to build high quality systems for fiction. Coreference requires complicated structured outputs, and literary text involves subtle inferences and highly varied language. New language-model-based seq2seq systems present the opportunity to solve both these problems by learning to directly generate a copy of an input sentence with markdown-like annotations. We create, evaluate, and release several trained models for coreference, as well as a workflow for training new models.

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Stage Direction Classification in French Theater: Transfer Learning Experiments
Alexia Schneider | Pablo Ruiz Fabo

The automatic classification of stage directions is a little explored topic in computational drama analysis, in spite of their relevance for plays’ structural and stylistic analysis. With a view to start assessing good practices for the automatic annotation of this textual element, we developed a 13-class stage direction typology, based on annotations in the FreDraCor corpus (French-language plays), but abstracting away from their huge variability while still providing classes useful for literary research. We fine-tuned transformers-based models to classify against the typology, gradually decreasing the corpus size used for fine tuning, to compare model efficiency with reduced training data. A result comparison speaks in favour of distilled monolingual models for this task, and, unlike earlier research on German, shows no negative effects of model case-sensitivity. The results have practical relevance for computational literary studies, as comparing classification results with complementary stage direction typologies, limiting the amount of manual annotation needed to apply them, would be helpful towards a systematic study of this important textual element.
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bib (full) Proceedings of The 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII)

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Proceedings of The 18th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVIII)
Sophie Henning | Manfred Stede

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TreeForm: End-to-end Annotation and Evaluation for Form Document Parsing
Ran Zmigrod | Zhiqiang Ma | Armineh Nourbakhsh | Sameena Shah

Visually Rich Form Understanding (VRFU) poses a complex research problemdue to the documents’ highly structured nature and yet highly variable style and content. Current annotation schemes decompose form understanding and omit key hierarchical structure, making development and evaluation of end-to-end models difficult. In this paper, we propose a novel F1 metric to evaluate form parsers and describe a new content-agnostic, tree-based annotation scheme for VRFU: TreeForm. We provide methods to convert previous annotation schemes into TreeForm structures and evaluate TreeForm predictions using a modified version of the normalized tree-edit distance. We present initial baselines for our end-to-end performance metric and the TreeForm edit distance, averaged over the FUNSD and XFUND datasets, of 61.5 and 26.4 respectively. We hope that TreeForm encourages deeper research in annotating, modeling, and evaluating the complexities of form-like documents.

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Annotation Scheme for English Argument Structure Constructions Treebank
Hakyung Sung | Kristopher Kyle

We introduce a detailed annotation scheme for argument structure constructions (ASCs) along with a manually annotated ASC treebank. This treebank encompasses 10,204 sentences from both first (5,936) and second language English datasets (1,948 for written; 2,320 for spoken). We detail the annotation process and evaluate inter-annotation agreement for overall and each ASC category.

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A Mapping on Current Classifying Categories of Emotions Used in Multimodal Models for Emotion Recognition
Ziwei Gong | Muyin Yao | Xinyi Hu | Xiaoning Zhu | Julia Hirschberg

In Emotion Detection within Natural Language Processing and related multimodal research, the growth of datasets and models has led to a challenge: disparities in emotion classification methods. The lack of commonly agreed upon conventions on the classification of emotions creates boundaries for model comparisons and dataset adaptation. In this paper, we compare the current classification methods in recent models and datasets and propose a valid method to combine different emotion categories. Our proposal arises from experiments across models, psychological theories, and human evaluations, and we examined the effect of proposed mapping on models.

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Surveying the FAIRness of Annotation Tools: Difficult to find, difficult to reuse
Ekaterina Borisova | Raia Abu Ahmad | Leyla Garcia-Castro | Ricardo Usbeck | Georg Rehm

In the realm of Machine Learning and Deep Learning, there is a need for high-quality annotated data to train and evaluate supervised models. An extensive number of annotation tools have been developed to facilitate the data labelling process. However, finding the right tool is a demanding task involving thorough searching and testing. Hence, to effectively navigate the multitude of tools, it becomes essential to ensure their findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). This survey addresses the FAIRness of existing annotation software by evaluating 50 different tools against the FAIR principles for research software (FAIR4RS). The study indicates that while being accessible and interoperable, annotation tools are difficult to find and reuse. In addition, there is a need to establish community standards for annotation software development, documentation, and distribution.

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Automatic Annotation Elaboration as Feedback to Sign Language Learners
Alessia Battisti | Sarah Ebling

Beyond enabling linguistic analyses, linguistic annotations may serve as training material for developing automatic language assessment models as well as for providing textual feedback to language learners. Yet these linguistic annotations in their original form are often not easily comprehensible for learners. In this paper, we explore the utilization of GPT-4, as an example of a large language model (LLM), to process linguistic annotations into clear and understandable feedback on their productions for language learners, specifically sign language learners.

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Towards Better Inclusivity: A Diverse Tweet Corpus of English Varieties
Nhi Pham | Lachlan Pham | Adam Meyers

The prevalence of social media presents a growing opportunity to collect and analyse examples of English varieties. Whilst usage of these varieties is often used only in spoken contexts or hard-to-access private messages, social media sites like Twitter provide a platform for users to communicate informally in a scrapeable format. Notably, Indian English (Hinglish), Singaporean English (Singlish), and African-American English (AAE) can be commonly found online. These varieties pose a challenge to existing natural language processing (NLP) tools as they often differ orthographically and syntactically from standard English for which the majority of these tools are built. NLP models trained on standard English texts produced biased outcomes for users of underrepresented varieties (Blodgett and O’Connor, 2017). Some research has aimed to overcome the inherent biases caused by unrepresentative data through techniques like data augmentation or adjusting training models. We aim to address the issue of bias at its root - the data itself. We curate a dataset of tweets from countries with high proportions of underserved English variety speakers, and propose an annotation framework of six categorical classifications along a pseudo-spectrum that measures the degree of standard English and that thereby indirectly aims to surface the manifestations of English varieties in these tweets.

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Building a corpus for the anonymization of Romanian jurisprudence
Vasile Păiș | Dan Tufis | Elena Irimia | Verginica Barbu Mititelu

Access to jurisprudence is of paramount importance for both law professionals (judges, lawyers, law students) and for the larger public. In Romania, the Superior Council of Magistracy holds a large database of jurisprudence from different courts in the country, which is updated daily. However, granting public access requires its anonymization. This paper presents the efforts behind building a corpus for the anonymization process. We present the annotation scheme, the manual annotation methods, and the platform used.

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Class Balancing for Efficient Active Learning in Imbalanced Datasets
Yaron Fairstein | Oren Kalinsky | Zohar Karnin | Guy Kushilevitz | Alexander Libov | Sofia Tolmach

Recent developments in active learning algorithms for NLP tasks show promising results in terms of reducing labelling complexity. In this paper we extend this effort to imbalanced datasets; we bridge between the active learning approach of obtaining diverse andinformative examples, and the heuristic of class balancing used in imbalanced datasets. We develop a novel tune-free weighting technique that canbe applied to various existing active learning algorithms, adding a component of class balancing. We compare several active learning algorithms to their modified version on multiple public datasetsand show that when the classes are imbalanced, with manual annotation effort remaining equal the modified version significantly outperforms the original both in terms of the test metric and the number of obtained minority examples. Moreover, when the imbalance is mild or non-existent (classes are completely balanced), our technique does not harm the base algorithms.

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When is a Metaphor Actually Novel? Annotating Metaphor Novelty in the Context of Automatic Metaphor Detection
Sebastian Reimann | Tatjana Scheffler

We present an in-depth analysis of metaphor novelty, a relatively overlooked phenomenon in NLP. Novel metaphors have been analyzed via scores derived from crowdsourcing in NLP, while in theoretical work they are often defined by comparison to senses in dictionary entries. We reannotate metaphorically used words in the large VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus based on whether their metaphoric meaning is present in the dictionary. Based on this, we find that perceived metaphor novelty often clash with the dictionary based definition. We use the new labels to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art language models for automatic metaphor detection and notice that novel metaphors according to our dictionary-based definition are easier to identify than novel metaphors according to crowd-sourced novelty scores. In a subsequent analysis, we study the correlation between high novelty scores and word frequencies in the pretraining and finetuning corpora, as well as potential problems with rare words for pre-trained language models. In line with previous works, we find a negative correlation between word frequency in the training data and novelty scores and we link these aspects to problems with the tokenization of BERT and RoBERTa.

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Enhancing Text Classification through LLM-Driven Active Learning and Human Annotation
Hamidreza Rouzegar | Masoud Makrehchi

In the context of text classification, the financial burden of annotation exercises for creating training data is a critical issue. Active learning techniques, particularly those rooted in uncertainty sampling, offer a cost-effective solution by pinpointing the most instructive samples for manual annotation. Similarly, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-3.5 provide an alternative for automated annotation but come with concerns regarding their reliability. This study introduces a novel methodology that integrates human annotators and LLMs within an Active Learning framework. We conducted evaluations on three public datasets. IMDB for sentiment analysis, a Fake News dataset for authenticity discernment, and a Movie Genres dataset for multi-label classification.The proposed framework integrates human annotation with the output of LLMs, depending on the model uncertainty levels. This strategy achieves an optimal balance between cost efficiency and classification performance. The empirical results show a substantial decrease in the costs associated with data annotation while either maintaining or improving model accuracy.

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Using ChatGPT for Annotation of Attitude within the Appraisal Theory: Lessons Learned
Mirela Imamovic | Silvana Deilen | Dylan Glynn | Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski

We investigate the potential of using ChatGPT to annotate complex linguistic phenomena, such as language of evaluation, attitude and emotion. For this, we automatically annotate 11 texts in English, which represent spoken popular science, and evaluate the annotations manually. Our results show that ChatGPT has good precision in itemisation, i.e. detecting linguistic items in the text that carry evaluative meaning. However, we also find that the recall is very low. Besides that, we state that the tool fails in labeling the detected items with the correct categories on a more fine-grained level of granularity. We analyse the errors to find systematic errors related to specific categories in the annotation scheme.

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Are You Serious? Handling Disagreement When Annotating Conspiracy Theory Texts
Ashley Hemm | Sandra Kübler | Michelle Seelig | John Funchion | Manohar Murthi | Kamal Premaratne | Daniel Verdear | Stefan Wuchty

We often assume that annotation tasks, such as annotating for the presence of conspiracy theories, can be annotated with hard labels, without definitions or guidelines. Our annotation experiments, comparing students and experts, show that there is little agreement on basic annotations even among experts. For this reason, we conclude that we need to accept disagreement as an integral part of such annotations.

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A GPT among Annotators: LLM-based Entity-Level Sentiment Annotation
Egil Rønningstad | Erik Velldal | Lilja Øvrelid

We investigate annotator variation for the novel task of Entity-Level Sentiment Analysis (ELSA) which annotates the aggregated sentiment directed towards volitional entities in a text. More specifically, we analyze the annotations of a newly constructed Norwegian ELSA dataset and release additional data with each annotator’s labels for the 247 entities in the dataset’s test split. We also perform a number of experiments prompting ChatGPT for these sentiment labels regarding each entity in the text and compare the generated annotations with the human labels. Cohen’s Kappa for agreement between the best LLM-generated labels and curated gold was 0.425, which indicates that these labels would not have high quality. Our analyses further investigate the errors that ChatGPT outputs, and compare them with the variations that we find among the 5 trained annotators that all annotated the same test data.

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Datasets Creation and Empirical Evaluations of Cross-Lingual Learning on Extremely Low-Resource Languages: A Focus on Comorian Dialects
Abdou Mohamed Naira | Benelallam Imade | Bahafid Abdessalam | Erraji Zakarya

In this era of extensive digitalization, there are a profusion of Intelligent Systems that attempt to understand how languages are structured for the aim of providing solutions in various tasks like Text Summarization, Sentiment Analysis, Speech Recognition, etc. But for multiple reasons going from lack of data to the nonexistence of initiatives, these applications are in an embryonic stage in certain languages and dialects, especially those spoken in the African continent, like Comorian dialects. Today, thanks to the improvement of Pre-trained Large Language Models, a spacious way is open to enable these kind of technologies on these languages. In this study, we are pioneering the representation of Comorian dialects in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) by constructing datasets (Lexicons, Speech Recognition and Raw Text datasets) that could be used on different tasks. We also measure the impact of using pre-trained models on languages closely related to Comorian dialects to enhance the state-of-the-art in NLP for these latter, compared to using pre-trained models on languages that may not necessarily be close to these dialects. We construct models covering the following use cases: Language Identification, Sentiment Analysis, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, and Speech Recognition. Ultimately, we hope that these solutions can catalyze the improvement of similar initiatives in Comorian dialects and in languages facing similar challenges.

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Prompting Implicit Discourse Relation Annotation
Frances Yung | Mansoor Ahmad | Merel Scholman | Vera Demberg

Pre-trained large language models, such as ChatGPT, archive outstanding performance in various reasoning tasks without supervised training and were found to have outperformed crowdsourcing workers. Nonetheless, ChatGPT’s performance in the task of implicit discourse relation classification, prompted by a standard multiple-choice question, is still far from satisfactory and considerably inferior to state-of-the-art supervised approaches. This work investigates several proven prompting techniques to improve ChatGPT’s recognition of discourse relations. In particular, we experimented with breaking down the classification task that involves numerous abstract labels into smaller subtasks. Nonetheless, experiment results show that the inference accuracy hardly changes even with sophisticated prompt engineering, suggesting that implicit discourse relation classification is not yet resolvable under zero-shot or few-shot settings.

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PropBank goes Public: Incorporation into Wikidata
Elizabeth Spaulding | Kathryn Conger | Anatole Gershman | Mahir Morshed | Susan Windisch Brown | James Pustejovsky | Rosario Uceda-Sosa | Sijia Ge | Martha Palmer

This paper presents the first integration of PropBank role information into Wikidata, in order to provide a novel resource for information extraction, one combining Wikidata’s ontological metadata with PropBank’s rich argument structure encoding for event classes. We discuss a technique for PropBank augmentation to existing eventive Wikidata items, as well as identification of gaps in Wikidata’s coverage based on manual examination of over 11,300 PropBank rolesets. We propose five new Wikidata properties to integrate PropBank structure into Wikidata so that the annotated mappings can be added en masse. We then outline the methodology and challenges of this integration, including annotation with the combined resources.

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Reference and discourse structure annotation of elicited chat continuations in German
Katja Jasinskaja | Yuting Li | Fahime Same | David Uerlings

We present the construction of a German chat corpus in an experimental setting. Our primary objective is to advance the methodology of discourse continuation for dialogue. The corpus features a fine-grained, multi-layer annotation of referential expressions and coreferential chains. Additionally, we have developed a comprehensive annotation scheme for coherence relations to describe discourse structure.

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Dependency Annotation of Ottoman Turkish with Multilingual BERT
Şaziye Özateş | Tarık Tıraş | Efe Genç | Esma Bilgin Tasdemir

This study introduces a pretrained large language model-based annotation methodology of the first dependency treebank in Ottoman Turkish. Our experimental results show that, through iteratively i) pseudo-annotating data using a multilingual BERT-based parsing model, ii) manually correcting the pseudo-annotations, and iii) fine-tuning the parsing model with the corrected annotations, we speed up and simplify the challenging dependency annotation process. The resulting treebank, that will be a part of the Universal Dependencies (UD) project, will facilitate automated analysis of Ottoman Turkish documents, unlocking the linguistic richness embedded in this historical heritage.

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Donkii: Characterizing and Detecting Errors in Instruction-Tuning Datasets
Leon Weber | Robert Litschko | Ekaterina Artemova | Barbara Plank

Instruction tuning has become an integral part of training pipelines for Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been shown to yield strong performance gains. In an orthogonal line of research, Annotation Error Detection (AED) has emerged as a tool for detecting quality problems in gold standard labels. So far, however, the application of AED methods has been limited to classification tasks. It is an open question how well AED methods generalize to language generation settings, which are becoming more widespread via LLMs. In this paper, we present a first and novel benchmark for AED on instruction tuning data: Donkii.It comprises three instruction-tuning datasets enriched with error annotations by experts and semi-automatic methods. We also provide a novel taxonomy of error types for instruction-tuning data.We find that all three datasets contain clear errors, which sometimes propagate directly into instruction-tuned LLMs. We propose four AED baselines for the generative setting and evaluate them extensively on the newly introduced dataset. Our results show that the choice of the right AED method and model size is indeed crucial and derive practical recommendations for how to use AED methods to clean instruction-tuning data.

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EEVEE: An Easy Annotation Tool for Natural Language Processing
Axel Sorensen | Siyao Peng | Barbara Plank | Rob Van Der Goot

Annotation tools are the starting point for creating Natural Language Processing (NLP) datasets. There is a wide variety of tools available; setting up these tools is however a hindrance. We propose Eevee, an annotation tool focused on simplicity, efficiency, and ease of use. It can run directly in the browser (no setup required) and uses tab-separated files (as opposed to character offsets or task-specific formats) for annotation. It allows for annotation of multiple tasks on a single dataset and supports four task-types: sequence labeling, span labeling, text classification and seq2seq.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion

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Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, Inclusion
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Bharathi B | Paul Buitelaar | Thenmozhi Durairaj | György Kovács | Miguel Ángel García Cumbreras

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Sociocultural knowledge is needed for selection of shots in hate speech detection tasks
Antonis Maronikolakis | Abdullatif Köksal | Hinrich Schuetze

We introduce HATELEXICON, a lexicon of slurs and targets of hate speech for Brazil, Germany, India and Kenya, to aid model development and interpretability. First, we demonstrate how HATELEXICON can be used to interpret model predictions, showing that models developed to classify extreme speech rely heavily on target group names. Further, we propose a culturally-informed method to aid shot selection for training in low-resource settings. In few-shot learning, shot selection is of paramount importance to model performance and we need to ensure we make the most of available data. We work with HASOC German and Hindi data for training and the Multilingual HateCheck (MHC) benchmark for evaluation. We show that selecting shots based on our lexicon leads to models performing better than models trained on shots sampled randomly. Thus, when given only a few training examples, using HATELEXICON to select shots containing more sociocultural information leads to better few-shot performance. With these two use-cases we show how our HATELEXICON can be used for more effective hate speech detection.

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A Dataset for the Detection of Dehumanizing Language
Paul Engelmann | Peter Trolle | Christian Hardmeier

Dehumanization is a mental process that enables the exclusion and ill treatment of a group of people. In this paper, we present two data sets of dehumanizing text, a large, automatically collected corpus and a smaller, manually annotated data set. Both data sets include a combination of political discourse and dialogue from movie subtitles. Our methods give us a broad and varied amount of dehumanization data to work with, enabling further exploratory analysis as well as automatic classification of dehumanization patterns. Both data sets will be publicly released.

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Beyond the Surface: Spurious Cues in Automatic Media Bias Detection
Martin Wessel | Tomáš Horych

This study investigates the robustness and generalization of transformer-based models for automatic media bias detection. We explore the behavior of current bias classifiers by analyzing feature attributions and stress-testing with adversarial datasets. The findings reveal a disproportionate focus on rare but strongly connotated words, suggesting a rather superficial understanding of linguistic bias and challenges in contextual interpretation. This problem is further highlighted by inconsistent bias assessment when stress-tested with different entities and minorities. Enhancing automatic media bias detection models is critical to improving inclusivity in media, ensuring balanced and fair representation of diverse perspectives.

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The Balancing Act: Unmasking and Alleviating ASR Biases in Portuguese
Ajinkya Kulkarni | Anna Tokareva | Rameez Qureshi | Miguel Couceiro

In the field of spoken language understanding, systems like Whisper and Multilingual Massive Speech (MMS) have shown state-of-the-art performances. This study is dedicated to a comprehensive exploration of the Whisper and MMS systems, with a focus on assessing biases in automatic speech recognition (ASR) inherent to casual conversation speech specific to the Portuguese language. Our investigation encompasses various categories, including gender, age, skin tone color, and geo-location. Alongside traditional ASR evaluation metrics such as Word Error Rate (WER), we have incorporated p-value statistical significance for gender bias analysis. Furthermore, we extensively examine the impact of data distribution and empirically show that oversampling techniques alleviate such stereotypical biases. This research represents a pioneering effort in quantifying biases in the Portuguese language context through the application of MMS and Whisper, contributing to a better understanding of ASR systems’ performance in multilingual settings.

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Towards Content Accessibility Through Lexical Simplification for Maltese as a Low-Resource Language
Martina Meli | Marc Tanti | Chris Porter

Natural Language Processing techniques have been developed to assist in simplifying online content while preserving meaning. However, for low-resource languages, like Maltese, there are still numerous challenges and limitations. Lexical Simplification (LS) is a core technique typically adopted to improve content accessibility, and has been widely studied for high-resource languages such as English and French. Motivated by the need to improve access to Maltese content and the limitations in this context, this work set out to develop and evaluate an LS system for Maltese text. An LS pipeline was developed consisting of (1) potential complex word identification, (2) substitute generation, (3) substitute selection, and (4) substitute ranking. An evaluation data set was developed to assess the performance of each step. Results are encouraging and will lead to numerous future work. Finally, a single-blind study was carried out with over 200 participants, where the system’s perceived quality in text simplification was evaluated. Results suggest that meaning is retained about 50% of the time, and when meaning is retained, about 70% of system-generated sentences are either perceived as simpler or of equal simplicity to the original. Challenges remain, and this study proposes a number of areas that may benefit from further research.

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Prompting Fairness: Learning Prompts for Debiasing Large Language Models
Andrei-Victor Chisca | Andrei-Cristian Rad | Camelia Lemnaru

Large language models are prone to internalize social biases due to the characteristics of the data used for their self-supervised training scheme. Considering their recent emergence and wide availability to the general public, it is mandatory to identify and alleviate these biases to avoid perpetuating stereotypes towards underrepresented groups. We present a novel prompt-tuning method for reducing biases in encoder models such as BERT or RoBERTa. Unlike other methods, we only train a small set of additional reusable token embeddings that can be concatenated to any input sequence to reduce bias in the outputs. We particularize this method to gender bias by providing a set of templates used for training the prompts. Evaluations on two benchmarks show that our method is on par with the state of the art while having a limited impact on language modeling ability.

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German Text Simplification: Finetuning Large Language Models with Semi-Synthetic Data
Lars Klöser | Mika Beele | Jan-Niklas Schagen | Bodo Kraft

This study pioneers the use of synthetically generated data for training generative models in document-level text simplification of German texts. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with real-world online texts. Addressing the challenge of data scarcity in language simplification, we crawled professionally simplified German texts and synthesized a corpus using GPT-4. We finetune Large Language Models with up to 13 billion parameters on this data and evaluate their performance. This paper employs various methodologies for evaluation and demonstrates the limitations of currently used rule-based metrics. Both automatic and manual evaluations reveal that our models can significantly simplify real-world online texts, indicating the potential of synthetic data in improving text simplification.

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ChatGPT Based Data Augmentation for Improved Parameter-Efficient Debiasing of LLMs
Pengrui Han | Rafal Kocielnik | Adhithya Saravanan | Roy Jiang | Or Sharir | Anima Anandkumar

Large Language models (LLMs), while powerful, exhibit harmful social biases. Debiasing is often challenging due to computational costs, data constraints, and potential degradation of multi-task language capabilities. This work introduces a novel approach utilizing ChatGPT to generate synthetic training data, aiming to enhance the debiasing of LLMs. We propose two strategies: Targeted Prompting, which provides effective debiasing for known biases but necessitates prior specification of bias in question; and General Prompting, which, while slightly less effective, offers debiasing across various categories. We leverage resource-efficient LLM debiasing using adapter tuning and compare the effectiveness of our synthetic data to existing debiasing datasets. Our results reveal that: (1) ChatGPT can efficiently produce high-quality training data for debiasing other LLMs; (2) data produced via our approach surpasses existing datasets in debiasing performance while also preserving internal knowledge of a pre-trained LLM; and (3) synthetic data exhibits generalizability across categories, effectively mitigating various biases, including intersectional ones. These findings underscore the potential of synthetic data in advancing the fairness of LLMs with minimal retraining cost.

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DE-Lite - a New Corpus of Easy German: Compilation, Exploration, Analysis
Sarah Jablotschkin | Elke Teich | Heike Zinsmeister

In this paper, we report on a new corpus of simplified German. It is recently requested from public agencies in Germany to provide information in easy language on their outlets (e.g. websites) so as to facilitate participation in society for people with low-literacy levels related to learning difficulties or low language proficiency (e.g. L2 speakers). While various rule sets and guidelines for Easy German (a specific variant of simplified German) have emerged over time, it is unclear (a) to what extent authors and other content creators, including generative AI tools consistently apply them, and (b) how adequate texts in authentic Easy German really are for the intended audiences. As a first step in gaining insights into these issues and to further LT development for simplified German, we compiled DE-Lite, a corpus of easy-to-read texts including Easy German and comparable Standard German texts, by integrating existing collections and gathering new data from the web. We built n-gram models for an Easy German subcorpus of DE-Lite and comparable Standard German texts in order to identify typical features of Easy German. To this end, we use relative entropy (Kullback-Leibler Divergence), a standard technique for evaluating language models, which we apply here for corpus comparison. Our analysis reveals that some rules of Easy German are fairly dominant (e.g. punctuation) and that text genre has a strong effect on the distinctivity of the two language variants.

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A Diachronic Analysis of Gender-Neutral Language on wikiHow
Katharina Suhr | Michael Roth

As a large how-to website, wikiHow’s mission is to empower every person on the planet to learn how to do anything. An important part of including everyone also linguistically is the use of gender-neutral language. In this short paper, we study in how far articles from wikiHow fulfill this criterion based on manual annotation and automatic classification. In particular, we employ a classifier to analyze how the use of gender-neutral language has developed over time. Our results show that although about 75% of all articles on wikiHow were written in a gender-neutral way from the outset, revisions have a higher tendency to add gender-specific language than to change it to inclusive wording.

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Overview of Third Shared Task on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Prasanna Kumaresan | Ruba Priyadharshini | Paul Buitelaar | Asha Hegde | Hosahalli Shashirekha | Saranya Rajiakodi | Miguel Ángel García | Salud María Jiménez-Zafra | José García-Díaz | Rafael Valencia-García | Kishore Ponnusamy | Poorvi Shetty | Daniel García-Baena

This paper provides a comprehensive summary of the “Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments” shared task, which was held at the LT-EDI@EACL 2024. The objective of this task was to develop systems capable of identifying instances of homophobia and transphobia within social media comments. This challenge was extended across ten languages: English, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Gujarati, Hindi, Marathi, Spanish, and Tulu. Each comment in the dataset was annotated into three categories. The shared task attracted significant interest, with over 60 teams participating through the CodaLab platform. The submission of prediction from the participants was evaluated with the macro F1 score.

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Overview of the Third Shared Task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil
Bharathi B | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Sripriya N | Rajeswari Natarajan | Suhasini S

The overview of the shared task on speech recognition for vulnerable individuals in Tamil (LT-EDI-2024) is described in this paper. The work comes with a Tamil dataset that was gath- ered from elderly individuals who identify as male, female, or transgender. The audio sam- ples were taken in public places such as marketplaces, vegetable shops, hospitals, etc. The training phase and the testing phase are when the dataset is made available. The task required of the participants was to handle audio signals using various models and techniques, and then turn in their results as transcriptions of the pro- vided test samples. The participant’s results were assessed using WER (Word Error Rate). The transformer-based approach was employed by the participants to achieve automatic voice recognition. This overview paper discusses the findings and various pre-trained transformer- based models that the participants employed.

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Overview of Shared Task on Multitask Meme Classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes
Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Saranya Rajiakodi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Kathiravan Pannerselvam | Anand Kumar Madasamy | Ramachandran Rajalakshmi | Hariharan LekshmiAmmal | Anshid Kizhakkeparambil | Susminu S Kumar | Bhuvaneswari Sivagnanam | Charmathi Rajkumar

This paper offers a detailed overview of the first shared task on “Multitask Meme Classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes,” organized as part of the LT-EDI@EACL 2024 conference. The task was set to classify misogynistic content and troll memes within online platforms, focusing specifically on memes in Tamil and Malayalam languages. A total of 52 teams registered for the competition, with four submitting systems for the Tamil meme classification task and three for the Malayalam task. The outcomes of this shared task are significant, providing insights into the current state of misogynistic content in digital memes and highlighting the effectiveness of various computational approaches in identifying such detrimental content. The top-performing model got a macro F1 score of 0.73 in Tamil and 0.87 in Malayalam.

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Overview of Shared Task on Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection
Saranya Rajiakodi | Bharathi Raja Chakravarthi | Rahul Ponnusamy | Prasanna Kumaresan | Sathiyaraj Thangasamy | Bhuvaneswari Sivagnanam | Charmathi Rajkumar

We present an overview of the first shared task on “Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection.” The shared task is organized as part of LTEDI@EACL 2024. The system must delineate between binary outcomes, ascertaining whether the text is categorized as a caste/migration hate speech or not. The dataset presented in this shared task is in Tamil, which is one of the under-resource languages. There are a total of 51 teams participated in this task. Among them, 15 teams submitted their research results for the task. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time the shared task has been conducted on textual hate speech detection concerning caste and migration. In this study, we have conducted a systematic analysis and detailed presentation of all the contributions of the participants as well as the statistics of the dataset, which is the social media comments in Tamil language to detect hate speech. It also further goes into the details of a comprehensive analysis of the participants’ methodology and their findings.

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Pinealai_StressIdent_LT-EDI@EACL2024: Minimal configurations for Stress Identification in Tamil and Telugu
Anvi Alex Eponon | Ildar Batyrshin | Grigori Sidorov

This paper introduces an approach to stress identification in Tamil and Telugu, leveraging traditional machine learning models—Fasttext for Tamil and Naive Bayes for Telugu—yielding commendable results. The study highlights the scarcity of annotated data and recognizes limitations in phonetic features relevant to these languages, impacting precise information extraction. Our models achieved a macro F1 score of 0.77 for Tamil and 0.72 for Telugu with Fasttext and Naive Bayes, respectively. While the Telugu model secured the second rank in shared tasks, ongoing research is crucial to unlocking the full potential of stress identification in these languages, necessitating the exploration of additional features and advanced techniques specified in the discussions and limitations section.

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byteLLM@LT-EDI-2024: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments - Custom Subword Tokenization with Subword2Vec and BiLSTM
Durga Manukonda | Rohith Kodali

This research focuses on Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Dravidian languages, specifically Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, and Malayalam. Leveraging the Homophobia/ Transphobia Detection dataset, we propose an innovative approach employing a custom-designed tokenizer with a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) architecture. Our distinctive contribution lies in a tokenizer that reduces model sizes to below 7MB, improving efficiency and addressing real-time deployment challenges. The BiLSTM implementation demonstrates significant enhancements in hate speech detection accuracy, effectively capturing linguistic nuances. Low-size models efficiently alleviate inference challenges, ensuring swift real-time detection and practical deployment. This work pioneers a framework for hate speech detection, providing insights into model size, inference speed, and real-time deployment challenges in combatting online hate speech within Dravidian languages.

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MasonTigers@LT-EDI-2024: An Ensemble Approach Towards Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in Social Media Comments
Dhiman Goswami | Sadiya Sayara Chowdhury Puspo | Md Nishat Raihan | Al Emran

In this paper, we describe our approaches and results for Task 2 of the LT-EDI 2024 Workshop, aimed at detecting homophobia and/or transphobia across ten languages. Our methodologies include monolingual transformers and ensemble methods, capitalizing on the strengths of each to enhance the performance of the models. The ensemble models worked well, placing our team, MasonTigers, in the top five for eight of the ten languages, as measured by the macro F1 score. Our work emphasizes the efficacy of ensemble methods in multilingual scenarios, addressing the complexities of language-specific tasks.

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JudithJeyafreeda_StressIdent_LT-EDI@EACL2024: GPT for stress identification
Judith Jeyafreeda Andrew

Stress detection from social media texts has proved to play an important role in mental health assessments. People tend to express their stress on social media more easily. Analysing and classifying these texts allows for improvements in development of recommender systems and automated mental health assessments. In this paper, a GPT model is used for classification of social media texts into two classes - stressed and not-stressed. The texts used for classification are in two Dravidian languages - Tamil and Telugu. The results, although not very good shows a promising direction of research to use GPT models for classification.

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cantnlp@LT-EDI-2024: Automatic Detection of Anti-LGBTQ+ Hate Speech in Under-resourced Languages
Sidney Wong | Matthew Durward

This paper describes our homophobia/transphobia in social media comments detection system developed as part of the shared task at LT-EDI-2024. We took a transformer-based approach to develop our multiclass classification model for ten language conditions (English, Spanish, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Tulu, and Telugu). We introduced synthetic and organic instances of script-switched language data during domain adaptation to mirror the linguistic realities of social media language as seen in the labelled training data. Our system ranked second for Gujarati and Telugu with varying levels of performance for other language conditions. The results suggest incorporating elements of paralinguistic behaviour such as script-switching may improve the performance of language detection systems especially in the cases of under-resourced languages conditions.

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Lidoma@LT-EDI 2024:Tamil Hate Speech Detection in Migration Discourse
M. Tash | Z. Ahani | M. Zamir | O. Kolesnikova | G. Sidorov

The exponential rise in social media users has revolutionized information accessibility and exchange. While these platforms serve various purposes, they also harbor negative elements, including hate speech and offensive behavior. Detecting hate speech in diverse languages has garnered significant attention in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This paper delves into hate speech detection in Tamil, particularly related to migration and refuge, contributing to the Caste/migration hate speech detection shared task. Employing a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), our model achieved an F1 score of 0.76 in identifying hate speech and significant potential in the domain despite encountering complexities. We provide an overview of related research, methodology, and insights into the competition’s diverse performances, showcasing the landscape of hate speech detection nuances in the Tamil language.

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CEN_Amrita@LT-EDI 2024: A Transformer based Speech Recognition System for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil
Jairam R | Jyothish G | Premjith B | Viswa M

Speech recognition is known to be a specialized application of speech processing. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are designed to perform the speech-to-text task. Although ASR systems have been the subject of extensive research, they still encounter certain challenges when speech variations arise. The speaker’s age, gender, vulnerability, and other factors are the main causes of the variations in speech. In this work, we propose a fine-tuned speech recognition model for recognising the spoken words of vulnerable individuals in Tamil. This research utilizes a dataset sourced from the LT-EDI@EACL2024 shared task. We trained and tested pre-trained ASR models, including XLS-R and Whisper. The findings highlight that the fine-tuned Whisper ASR model surpasses the XLSR, achieving a word error rate (WER) of 24.452, signifying its superior performance in recognizing speech from diverse individuals.

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kubapok@LT-EDI 2024: Evaluating Transformer Models for Hate Speech Detection in Tamil
Jakub Pokrywka | Krzysztof Jassem

We describe the second-place submission for the shared task organized at the Fourth Workshop on Language Technology for Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (LT-EDI-2024). The task focuses on detecting caste/migration hate speech in Tamil. The included texts involve the Tamil language in both Tamil script and transliterated into Latin script, with some texts also in English. Considering different scripts, we examined the performance of 12 transformer language models on the dev set. Our analysis revealed that for the whole dataset, the model google/muril-large-cased performs the best. We used an ensemble of several models for the final challenge submission, achieving 0.81 for the test dataset.

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KEC-AI-NLP@LT-EDI-2024:Homophobia and Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Machine Learning
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Malliga Subramanian | Shri R | Srigha S | Samyuktha K | Nithika K

Our work addresses the growing concern of abusive comments in online platforms, particularly focusing on the identification of Homophobia and Transphobia in social media comments. The goal is to categorize comments into three classes: Homophobia, Transphobia, and non-anti LGBT+ comments. Utilizing machine learning techniques and a deep learning model, our work involves training on a English dataset with a designated training set and testing on a validation set. This approach aims to contribute to the understanding and detection of Homophobia and Transphobia within the realm of social media interactions. Our team participated in the shared task organized by LTEDI@EACL 2024 and secured seventh rank in the task of Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments in Tamil with a macro- f1 score of 0.315. Also, our run was submitted for the English language and secured eighth rank with a macro-F1 score of 0.369. The run submitted for Malayalam language securing fourth rank with a macro- F1 score of 0.883 using the Random Forest model.

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KEC AI DSNLP@LT-EDI-2024:Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection using Machine Learning Techniques
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Malliga Subramanian | Aiswarya M | Aruna T | Jeevaananth S

Commonly used language defines “hate speech” as objectionable statements that may jeopardize societal harmony by singling out a group or a person based on fundamental traits (including gender, caste, or religion). Using machine learning techniques, our research focuses on identifying hate speech in social media comments. Using a variety of machine learning methods, we created machine learning models to detect hate speech. An approximate Macro F1 of 0.60 was attained by the created models.

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Quartet@LT-EDI 2024: A Support Vector Machine Approach For Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection
Shaun H | Samyuktaa Sivakumar | Rohan R | Nikilesh Jayaguptha | Durairaj Thenmozhi

Hate speech refers to the offensive remarks against a community or individual based on inherent characteristics. Hate speech against a community based on their caste and native are unfortunately prevalent in the society. Especially with social media platforms being a very popular tool for communication and sharing ideas, people post hate speech against caste or migrants on social medias. The Shared Task LT–EDI 2024: Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection was created with the objective to create an automatic classification system that detects and classifies hate speech posted on social media targeting a community belonging to a particular caste and migrants. Datasets in Tamil language were provided along with the shared task. We experimented with several traditional models such as Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Logistic Regression, Random Forest Classifier and Decision Tree Classifier out of which Support Vector Machine yielded the best results placing us 8th in the rank list released by the organizers.

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SSN-Nova@LT-EDI 2024: Leveraging Vectorisation Techniques in an Ensemble Approach for Stress Identification in Low-Resource Languages
A Reddy | Ann Thomas | Pranav Moorthi | Bharathi B

This paper presents our submission for Shared task on Stress Identification in Dravidian Languages: StressIdent LT-EDI@EACL2024. The objective of this task is to identify stress levels in individuals based on their social media content. The system is tasked with analysing posts written in a code-mixed language of Tamil and Telugu and categorising them into two labels: “stressed” or “not stressed.” Our approach aimed to leverage feature extraction and juxtapose the performance of widely used traditional, deep learning and transformer models. Our research highlighted that building a pipeline with traditional classifiers proved to significantly improve their performance (0.98 and 0.93 F1-scores in Telugu and Tamil respectively), surpassing the baseline as well as deep learning and transformer models.

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Quartet@LT-EDI 2024: A SVM-ResNet50 Approach For Multitask Meme Classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes
Shaun H | Samyuktaa Sivakumar | Rohan R | Nikilesh Jayaguptha | Durairaj Thenmozhi

Meme is a very popular term prevailing among almost all social media platforms in recent days. A meme can be a combination of text and image whose sole purpose is meant to be funny and entertain people. Memes can sometimes promote misogynistic content expressing hatred, contempt, or prejudice against women. The Shared Task LT–EDI 2024: Multitask Meme Classification: Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes Task 1 was created with the purpose to classify social media memes as “misogynistic” and “Non - Misogynistic”. The task encompassed Tamil and Malayalam datasets. We separately classified the textual data using Multinomial Naive Bayes and pictorial data using ResNet50 model. The results of from both data were combined to yield an overall result. We were ranked 2nd for both languages in this task.

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Quartet@LT-EDI 2024: Support Vector Machine Based Approach For Homophobia/Transphobia Detection In Social Media Comments
Shaun H | Samyuktaa Sivakumar | Rohan R | Nikilesh Jayaguptha | Durairaj Thenmozhi

Homophobia and transphobia are terms which are used to describe the fear or hatred towards people who are attracted to the same sex or people whose psychological gender differs from his biological sex. People use social media to exert this behaviour. The increased amount of abusive content negatively affects people in a lot of ways. It makes the environment toxic and unpleasant to LGBTQ+ people. The paper talks about the classification model for classifying the contents into 3 categories which are homophobic, transphobic and nonhomophobic/ transphobic. We used many traditional models like Support Vector Machine, Random Classifier, Logistic Regression and KNearest Neighbour to achieve this. The macro average F1 scores for Malayalam, Telugu, English, Marathi, Kannada, Tamil, Gujarati, Hindi are 0.88, 0.94, 0.96, 0.78, 0.93, 0.77, 0.94, 0.47 and the rank for these languages are 5, 6, 9, 6, 8, 6, 6, 4.

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SSN-Nova@LT-EDI 2024: POS Tagging, Boosting Techniques and Voting Classifiers for Caste And Migration Hate Speech Detection
A Reddy | Ann Thomas | Pranav Moorthi | Bharathi B

This paper presents our submission for the shared task on Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection: LT-EDI@EACL 20241 . This text classification task aims to foster the creation of models capable of identifying hate speech related to caste and migration. The dataset comprises social media comments, and the goal is to categorize them into negative and positive sentiments. Our approach explores back-translation for data augmentation to address sparse datasets in low-resource Dravidian languages. While Part-of-Speech (POS) tagging is valuable in natural language processing, our work highlights its ineffectiveness in Dravidian languages, with model performance drastically reducing from 0.73 to 0.67 on application. In analyzing boosting and ensemble methods, the voting classifier with traditional models outperforms others and the boosting techniques, underscoring the efficacy of simper models on low-resource data despite augmentation.

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CUET_NLP_Manning@LT-EDI 2024: Transformer-based Approach on Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection
Md Alam | Hasan Mesbaul Ali Taher | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

The widespread use of online communication has caused a significant increase in the spread of hate speech on social media. However, there are also hate crimes based on caste and migration status. Despite several nations efforts to bring equality among their citizens, numerous crimes occur just based on caste. Migration-based hostility happens both in India and in developed countries. A shared task was arranged to address this issue in a low-resourced language such as Tamil. This paper aims to improve the detection of hate speech and hostility based on caste and migration status on social media. To achieve this, this work investigated several Machine Learning (ML), Deep Learning (DL), and transformer-based models, including M-BERT, XLM-R, and Tamil BERT. Experimental results revealed the highest macro f1-score of 0.80 using the M-BERT model, which enabled us to rank 3rd on the shared task.

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DRAVIDIAN LANGUAGE@ LT-EDI 2024:Pretrained Transformer based Automatic Speech Recognition system for Elderly People
Abirami. J | Aruna Devi. S | Dharunika Sasikumar | Bharathi B

In this paper, the main goal of the study is to create an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that is tailored to the Tamil language. The dataset that was employed includes audio recordings that were obtained from vulnerable populations in the Tamil region, such as elderly men and women and transgender individuals. The pre-trained model Rajaram1996/wav2vec2- large-xlsr-53-tamil is used in the engineering of the ASR system. This existing model is finetuned using a variety of datasets that include typical Tamil voices. The system is then tested with a specific test dataset, and the transcriptions that are produced are sent in for assessment. The Word Error Rate is used to evaluate the system’s performance. Our system has a WER of 37.733.

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Transformers@LT-EDI-EACL2024: Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection in Tamil Using Ensembling on Transformers
Kriti Singhal | Jatin Bedi

In recent years, there has been a persistent focus on developing systems that can automatically identify the hate speech content circulating on diverse social media platforms. This paper describes the team “Transformers” submission to the Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection in Tamil shared task by LT-EDI 2024 workshop at EACL 2024. We used an ensemble approach in the shared task, combining various transformer-based pre-trained models using majority voting. The best macro average F1-score achieved was 0.82. We secured the 1st rank in the Caste and Migration Hate Speech in Tamil shared task.

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Algorithm Alliance@LT-EDI-2024: Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection
Saisandeep Sangeetham | Shreyamanisha Vinay | Kavin Rajan G | Abishna A | Bharathi B

Caste and Migration speech refers to the use of language that distinguishes the offense, violence, and distress on their social, caste, and migration status. Here, caste hate speech targets the imbalance of an individual’s social status and focuses mainly on the degradation of their caste group. While the migration hate speech imposes the differences in nationality, culture, and individual status. These speeches are meant to affront the social status of these people. To detect this hate in the speech, our task on Caste and Migration Hate Speech Detection has been created which classifies human speech into genuine or stimulate categories. For this task, we used multiple classification models such as the train test split model to split the dataset into train and test data, Logistic regression, Support Vector Machine, MLP (multi-layer Perceptron) classifier, Random Forest classifier, KNN classifier, and Decision tree classification. Among these models, The SVM gave the highest macro average F1 score of 0.77 and the average accuracy for these models is around 0.75.

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MEnTr@LT-EDI-2024: Multilingual Ensemble of Transformer Models for Homophobia/Transphobia Detection
Adwita Arora | Aaryan Mattoo | Divya Chaudhary | Ian Gorton | Bijendra Kumar

Detection of Homophobia and Transphobia in social media comments serves as an important step in the overall development of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). In this research, we describe the system we formulated while participating in the shared task of Homophobia/ Transphobia detection as a part of the Fourth Workshop On Language Technology For Equality, Diversity, Inclusion (LT-EDI- 2024) at EACL 2024. We used an ensemble of three state-of-the-art multilingual transformer models, namely Multilingual BERT (mBERT), Multilingual Representations for Indic Languages (MuRIL) and XLM-RoBERTa to detect the presence of Homophobia or Transphobia in YouTube comments. The task comprised of datasets in ten languages - Hindi, English, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati, Marathi, Spanish and Tulu. Our system achieved rank 1 for the Spanish and Tulu tasks, 2 for Telugu, 3 for Marathi and Gujarati, 4 for Tamil, 5 for Hindi and Kannada, 6 for English and 8 for Malayalam. These results speak for the efficacy of our ensemble model as well as the data augmentation strategy we adopted for the detection of anti-LGBT+ language in social media data.

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CUET_DUO@StressIdent_LT-EDI@EACL2024: Stress Identification Using Tamil-Telugu BERT
Abu Raihan | Tanzim Rahman | Md. Rahman | Jawad Hossain | Shawly Ahsan | Avishek Das | Mohammed Moshiul Hoque

The pervasive impact of stress on individuals necessitates proactive identification and intervention measures, especially in social media interaction. This research paper addresses the imperative need for proactive identification and intervention concerning the widespread influence of stress on individuals. This study focuses on the shared task, “Stress Identification in Dravidian Languages,” specifically emphasizing Tamil and Telugu code-mixed languages. The primary objective of the task is to classify social media messages into two categories: stressed and non stressed. We employed various methodologies, from traditional machine-learning techniques to state-of-the-art transformer-based models. Notably, the Tamil-BERT and Telugu-BERT models exhibited exceptional performance, achieving a noteworthy macro F1-score of 0.71 and 0.72, respectively, and securing the 15th position in Tamil code-mixed language and the 9th position in the Telugu code-mixed language. These findings underscore the effectiveness of these models in recognizing stress signals within social media content composed in Tamil and Telugu.

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dkit@LT-EDI-2024: Detecting Homophobia and Transphobia in English Social Media Comments
Sargam Yadav | Abhishek Kaushik | Kevin McDaid

Machine learning and deep learning models have shown great potential in detecting hate speech from social media posts. This study focuses on the homophobia and transphobia detection task of LT-EDI-2024 in English. Several machine learning models, a Deep Neural Network (DNN), and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model have been trained on the provided dataset using different feature vectorization techniques. We secured top rank with the best macro-F1 score of 0.4963, which was achieved by fine-tuning the BERT model on the English test set.

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KEC_AI_MIRACLE_MAKERS@LT-EDI-2024: Stress Identification in Dravidian Languages using Machine Learning Techniques
Kogilavani Shanmugavadivel | Malliga Subramanian | Monika J | Monishaa S | Rishibalan B

Identifying an individual where he/she is stressed or not stressed is our shared task topic. we have used several machine learning models for identifying the stress. This paper presents our system submission for the task 1 and 2 for both Tamil and Telugu dataset, focusing on us- ing supervised approaches. For Tamil dataset, we got highest accuracy for the Support Vector Machine model with f1-score of 0.98 and for Telugu dataset, we got highest accuracy for Random Forest algorithm with f1-score of 0.99. By using this model, Stress Identification System will be helpful for an individual to improve their mental health in optimistic manner.

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MUCS@LT-EDI-2024: Exploring Joint Representation for Memes Classification
Sidharth Mahesh | Sonith D | Gauthamraj Gauthamraj | Kavya G | Asha Hegde | H Shashirekha

Misogynistic memes are a category of memes which contain disrespectful language targeting women on social media platforms. Hence, detecting such memes is necessary in order to maintain a healthy social media environment. To address the challenges of detecting misogynistic memes, “Multitask Meme classification - Unraveling Misogynistic and Trolls in Online Memes: LT-EDI@EACL 2024” shared task organized at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2024, invites researchers to develop models to detect misogynistic memes in Tamil and Malayalam. The shared task has two subtasks, and in this paper, we - team MUCS, describe the learning models submitted to Task 1 - Identification of Misogynistic Memes in Tamil and Malayalam. As memes represent multi-modal data of image and text, three models: i) Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT)+Residual Network (ResNet)-50, ii) Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL)+ResNet-50, and iii) multilingual BERT (mBERT)+ResNet50, are proposed based on joint representation of text and image, for detecting misogynistic memes in Tamil and Malayalam. Among the proposed models, mBERT+ResNet-50 and MuRIL+ ResNet-50 models obtained macro F1 scores of 0.73 and 0.87 for Tamil and Malayalam datasets respectively securing 1st rank for both the datasets in the shared task.

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MUCS@LT-EDI-2024: Learning Approaches to Empower Homophobic/Transphobic Comment Identification
Sonali Kulal | Nethravathi Gidnakanala | Raksha G | Kavya G | Asha Hegde | H Shashirekha

Homophobic/Transphobic (H/T) content includes hatred and discriminatory comments directed at Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBTQ) individuals on social media platforms. As this unfavourable perception towards LGBTQ individuals may affect them physically and mentally, it is necessary to detect H/T content on social media. This demands automated tools to identify and address H/T content. In view of this, in this paper, we - team MUCS describe the learning models submitted to “Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in social media comments:LT-EDI@EACL 2024” shared task at European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 2024. The learning models: i) Homo_Ensemble - an ensemble of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms trained with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TFIDF) of syllable n-grams in the range (1, 3), ii) Homo_TL - a model based on Transfer Learning (TL) approach with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) models, iii) Homo_probfuse - an ensemble of ML classifiers with soft voting trained using sentence embeddings (except for Hindi), and iv) Homo_FSL - Few-Shot Learning (FSL) models using Sentence Transformer (ST) (only for Tulu), are proposed to detect H/T content in the given languages. Among the models submitted to the shared task, the models that performed better for each language include: i) Homo_Ensemble model obtained macro F1 score of 0.95 securing 4th rank for Telugu language, ii) Homo_TL model obtained macro F1 scores of 0.49, 0.53, 0.45, 0.94, and 0.95 securing 2nd, 2nd, 1st, 1st, and 4th ranks for English, Marathi, Hindi, Kannada, and Gujarathi languages, respectively, iii) Homo_probfuse model obtained macro F1 scores of 0.86, 0.87, and 0.53 securing 2nd, 6th, and 2nd ranks for Tamil, Malayalam, and Spanish languages respectively, and iv) Homo_FSL model obtained a macro F1 score of 0.62 securing 2nd rank for Tulu dataset.

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ASR TAMIL SSN@ LT-EDI-2024: Automatic Speech Recognition system for Elderly People
Suhasini S | Bharathi B

The results of the Shared Task on Speech Recognition for Vulnerable Individuals in Tamil (LT-EDI-2024) are discussed in this paper. The goal is to create an automated system for Tamil voice recognition. The older population that speaks Tamil is the source of the dataset used in this task. The proposed ASR system is designed with pre-trained model akashsivanandan/wav2vec2-large-xls-r300m-tamil-colab-final. The Tamil common speech dataset is utilized to fine-tune the pretrained model that powers our system. The suggested system receives the test data that was released from the task; transcriptions are then created for the test samples and delivered to the task. Word Error Rate (WER) is the evaluation statistic used to assess the provided result based on the task. Our Proposed system attained a WER of 29.297%.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN 2024)

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Modular and Open Multilingual NLP (MOOMIN 2024)
Raúl Vázquez | Timothee Mickus | Jörg Tiedemann | Ivan Vulić | Ahmet Üstün

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Toward the Modular Training of Controlled Paraphrase Adapters
Teemu Vahtola | Mathias Creutz

Controlled paraphrase generation often focuses on a specific aspect of paraphrasing, for instance syntactically controlled paraphrase generation. However, these models face a limitation: they lack modularity. Consequently adapting them for another aspect, such as lexical variation, needs full retraining of the model each time. To enhance the flexibility in training controlled paraphrase models, our proposition involves incrementally training a modularized system for controlled paraphrase generation for English. We start by fine-tuning a pretrained language model to learn the broad task of paraphrase generation, generally emphasizing meaning preservation and surface form variation. Subsequently, we train a specialized sub-task adapter with limited sub-task specific training data. We can then leverage this adapter in guiding the paraphrase generation process toward a desired output aligning with the distinctive features within the sub-task training data. The preliminary results on comparing the fine-tuned and adapted model against various competing systems indicates that the most successful method for mastering both general paraphrasing skills and task-specific expertise follows a two-stage approach. This approach involves starting with the initial fine-tuning of a generic paraphrase model and subsequently tailoring it for the specific sub-task.

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Soft Prompt Tuning for Cross-Lingual Transfer: When Less is More
Fred Philippy | Siwen Guo | Shohreh Haddadan | Cedric Lothritz | Jacques Klein | Tegawendé F. Bissyandé

Soft Prompt Tuning (SPT) is a parameter-efficient method for adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) to specific tasks by inserting learnable embeddings, or soft prompts, at the input layer of the PLM, without modifying its parameters. This paper investigates the potential of SPT for cross-lingual transfer. Unlike previous studies on SPT for cross-lingual transfer that often fine-tune both the soft prompt and the model parameters, we adhere to the original intent of SPT by keeping the model parameters frozen and only training the soft prompt. This does not only reduce the computational cost and storage overhead of full-model fine-tuning, but we also demonstrate that this very parameter efficiency intrinsic to SPT can enhance cross-lingual transfer performance to linguistically distant languages. Moreover, we explore how different factors related to the prompt, such as the length or its reparameterization, affect cross-lingual transfer performance.

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Modular Adaptation of Multilingual Encoders to Written Swiss German Dialect
Jannis Vamvas | Noëmi Aepli | Rico Sennrich

Creating neural text encoders for written Swiss German is challenging due to a dearth of training data combined with dialectal variation. In this paper, we build on several existing multilingual encoders and adapt them to Swiss German using continued pre-training. Evaluation on three diverse downstream tasks shows that simply adding a Swiss German adapter to a modular encoder achieves 97.5% of fully monolithic adaptation performance. We further find that for the task of retrieving Swiss German sentences given Standard German queries, adapting a character-level model is more effective than the other adaptation strategies. We release our code and the models trained for our experiments.

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The Impact of Language Adapters in Cross-Lingual Transfer for NLU
Jenny Kunz | Oskar Holmström

Modular deep learning has been proposed for the efficient adaption of pre-trained models to new tasks, domains and languages. In particular, combining language adapters with task adapters has shown potential where no supervised data exists for a language. In this paper, we explore the role of language adapters in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer for natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks. We study the effect of including a target-language adapter in detailed ablation studies with two multilingual models and three multilingual datasets. Our results show that the effect of target-language adapters is highly inconsistent across tasks, languages and models. Retaining the source-language adapter instead often leads to an equivalent, and sometimes to a better, performance. Removing the language adapter after training has only a weak negative effect, indicating that the language adapters do not have a strong impact on the predictions.

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Mixing and Matching: Combining Independently Trained Translation Model Components
Taido Purason | Andre Tättar | Mark Fishel

This paper investigates how to combine encoders and decoders of different independently trained NMT models. Combining encoders/decoders is not directly possible since the intermediate representations of any two independent NMT models are different and cannot be combined without modification. To address this, firstly, a dimension adapter is added if the encoder and decoder have different embedding dimensionalities, and secondly, representation adapter layers are added to align the encoder’s representations for the decoder to process. As a proof of concept, this paper looks at many-to-Estonian translation and combines a massively multilingual encoder (NLLB) and a high-quality language-specific decoder. The paper successfully demonstrates that the sentence representations of two independent NMT models can be made compatible without changing the pre-trained components while keeping translation quality from deteriorating. Results show improvements in both translation quality and speed for many-to-one translation over the baseline multilingual model.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Human Resources (NLP4HR 2024)

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Human Resources (NLP4HR 2024)
Estevam Hruschka | Thom Lake | Naoki Otani | Tom Mitchell

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Deep Learning-based Computational Job Market Analysis: A Survey on Skill Extraction and Classification from Job Postings
Elena Senger | Mike Zhang | Rob Goot | Barbara Plank

Recent years have brought significant advances to Natural Language Processing (NLP), which enabled fast progress in the field of computational job market analysis. Core tasks in this application domain are skill extraction and classification from job postings. Because of its quick growth and its interdisciplinary nature, there is no exhaustive assessment of this field. This survey aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive overview of deep learning methodologies, datasets, and terminologies specific to NLP-driven skill extraction. Our comprehensive cataloging of publicly available datasets addresses the lack of consolidated information on dataset creation and characteristics. Finally, the focus on terminology addresses the current lack of consistent definitions for important concepts, such as hard and soft skills, and terms relating to skill extraction and classification.

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Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis for Open-Ended HR Survey Responses
Lois Rink | Job Meijdam | David Graus

Understanding preferences, opinions, and sentiment of the workforce is paramount for effective employee lifecycle management. Open-ended survey responses serve as a valuable source of information. This paper proposes a machine learning approach for aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) of Dutch open-ended responses in employee satisfaction surveys. Our approach aims to overcome the inherent noise and variability in these responses, enabling a comprehensive analysis of sentiments that can support employee lifecycle management. Through response clustering we identify six key aspects (salary, schedule, contact, communication, personal attention, agreements), which we validate by domain experts. We compile a dataset of 1,458 Dutch survey responses, revealing label imbalance in aspects and sentiments. We propose few-shot approaches for ABSA based on Dutch BERT models, and compare them against bag-of-words and zero-shot baselines.Our work significantly contributes to the field of ABSA by demonstrating the first successful application of Dutch pre-trained language models to aspect-based sentiment analysis in the domain of human resources (HR).

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Rethinking Skill Extraction in the Job Market Domain using Large Language Models
Khanh Nguyen | Mike Zhang | Syrielle Montariol | Antoine Bosselut

Skill Extraction involves identifying skills and qualifications mentioned in documents such as job postings and resumes. The task is commonly tackled by training supervised models using a sequence labeling approach with BIO tags. However, the reliance on manually annotated data limits the generalizability of such approaches. Moreover, the common BIO setting limits the ability of the models to capture complex skill patterns and handle ambiguous mentions. In this paper, we explore the use of in-context learning to overcome these challenges, on a benchmark of 6 uniformized skill extraction datasets. Our approach leverages the few-shot learning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to identify and extract skills from sentences. We show that LLMs, despite not being on par with traditional supervised models in terms of performance, can better handle syntactically complex skill mentions in skill extraction tasks.

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JobSkape: A Framework for Generating Synthetic Job Postings to Enhance Skill Matching
Antoine Magron | Anna Dai | Mike Zhang | Syrielle Montariol | Antoine Bosselut

Recent approaches in skill matching, employing synthetic training data for classification or similarity model training, have shown promising results, reducing the need for time-consuming and expensive annotations. However, previous synthetic datasets have limitations, such as featuring only one skill per sentence and generally comprising short sentences. In this paper, we introduce JobSkape, a framework to generate synthetic data that tackles these limitations, specifically designed to enhance skill-to-taxonomy matching. Within this framework, we create SkillSkape, a comprehensive open-source synthetic dataset of job postings tailored for skill-matching tasks. We introduce several offline metrics that show that our dataset resembles real-world data. Additionally, we present a multi-step pipeline for skill extraction and matching tasks using large language models (LLMs), benchmarking against known supervised methodologies. We outline that the downstream evaluation results on real-world data can beat baselines, underscoring its efficacy and adaptability.

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HR-MultiWOZ: A Task Oriented Dialogue (TOD) Dataset for HR LLM Agent
Weijie Xu | Zicheng Huang | Wenxiang Hu | Xi Fang | Rajesh Cherukuri | Naumaan Nayyar | Lorenzo Malandri | Srinivasan Sengamedu

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reshaping Natural Language Processing (NLP) task in several domains. Their use in the field of Human Resources (HR) has still room for expansions and could be beneficial for several time consuming tasks. Examples such as time-off submissions, medical claims filing, and access requests are noteworthy, but they are by no means the sole instances. However the aforementioned developments must grapple with the pivotal challenge of constructing a high-quality training dataset. On one hand, most conversation datasets are solving problems for customers not employees. On the other hand, gathering conversations with HR could raise privacy concerns. To solve it, we introduce HR-Multiwoz, a fully-labeled dataset of 550 conversations spanning 10 HR domains. Our work has the following contributions:(1) It is the first labeled open-sourced conversation dataset in the HR domain for NLP research. (2) It provides a detailed recipe for the data generation procedure along with data analysis and human evaluations. The data generation pipeline is transferrable and can be easily adapted for labeled conversation data generation in other domains. (3) The proposed data-collection pipeline is mostly based on LLMs with minimal human involvement for annotation, which is time and cost-efficient.

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Big City Bias: Evaluating the Impact of Metropolitan Size on Computational Job Market Abilities of Language Models
Charlie Campanella | Rob Goot

Large language models have emerged as a useful technology for job matching, for both candidates and employers. Job matching is often based on a particular geographic location, such as a city or region. However, LMs have known biases, commonly derived from their training data. In this work, we aim to quantify the metropolitan size bias encoded within large language models, evaluating zero-shot salary, employer presence, and commute duration predictions in 384 of the United States’ metropolitan regions. Across all benchmarks, we observe correlations between metropolitan population and the accuracy of predictions, with the smallest 10 metropolitan regions showing upwards of 300% worse benchmark performance than the largest 10.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Personalization of Generative AI Systems (PERSONALIZE 2024)

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Personalization of Generative AI Systems (PERSONALIZE 2024)
Ameet Deshpande | EunJeong Hwang | Vishvak Murahari | Joon Sung Park | Diyi Yang | Ashish Sabharwal | Karthik Narasimhan | Ashwin Kalyan

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RoleCraft-GLM: Advancing Personalized Role-Playing in Large Language Models
Meiling Tao | Liang Xuechen | Tianyu Shi | Lei Yu | Yiting Xie

This study presents RoleCraft-GLM, an innovative framework aimed at enhancing personalized role-playing with Large Language Models (LLMs). RoleCraft-GLM addresses the key issue of lacking personalized interactions in conversational AI, and offers a solution with detailed and emotionally nuanced character portrayals. We contribute a unique conversational dataset that shifts from conventional celebrity-centric characters to diverse, non-celebrity personas, thus enhancing the realism and complexity of language modeling interactions. Additionally, our approach includes meticulous character development, ensuring dialogues are both realistic and emotionally resonant. The effectiveness of RoleCraft-GLM is validated through various case studies, highlighting its versatility and skill in different scenarios. Our framework excels in generating dialogues that accurately reflect characters’ personality traits and emotions, thereby boosting user engagement. In conclusion, RoleCraft-GLM marks a significant leap in personalized AI interactions, and paves the way for more authentic and immersive AI-assisted role-playing experiences by enabling more nuanced and emotionally rich dialogues.

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How to use Language Models for Synthetic Text Generation in Cerebrovascular Disease-specific Medical Reports
Byoung-Doo Oh | Gi-Youn Kim | Chulho Kim | Yu-Seop Kim

The quantity and quality of data have a significant impact on the performance of artificial intelligence (AI). However, in the biomedical domain, data often contains sensitive information such as personal details, making it challenging to secure enough data for medical AI. Consequently, there is a growing interest in synthetic data generation for medical AI. However, research has primarily focused on medical images, with little given to text-based data such as medical records. Therefore, this study explores the application of language models (LMs) for synthetic text generation in low-resource domains like medical records. It compares the results of synthetic text generation based on different LMs. To achieve this, we focused on two criteria for LM-based synthetic text generation of medical records using two keywords entered by the user: 1) the impact of the LM’s knowledge, 2) the impact of the LM’s size. Additionally, we objectively evaluated the generated synthetic text, including representative metrics such as BLUE and ROUGE, along with clinician’s evaluations.

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Assessing Generalization for Subpopulation Representative Modeling via In-Context Learning
Gabriel Simmons | Vladislav Savinov

This study evaluates the ability of Large Language Model (LLM)-based Subpopulation Representative Models (SRMs) to generalize from empirical data, utilizing in-context learning with data from the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies. We explore generalization across response variables and demographic subgroups. While conditioning with empirical data improves performance on the whole, the benefit of in-context learning varies considerably across demographics, sometimes hurting performance for one demographic while helping performance for others. The inequitable benefits of in-context learning for SRM present a challenge for practitioners implementing SRMs, and for decision-makers who might come to rely on them. Our work highlights a need for fine-grained benchmarks captured from diverse subpopulations that test not only fidelity but generalization.

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HumSum: A Personalized Lecture Summarization Tool for Humanities Students Using LLMs
Zahra Kolagar | Alessandra Zarcone

Generative AI systems aim to create customizable content for their users, with a subsequent surge in demand for adaptable tools that can create personalized experiences. This paper presents HumSum, a web-based tool tailored for humanities students to effectively summarize their lecture transcripts and to personalize the summaries to their specific needs. We first conducted a survey driven by different potential scenarios to collect user preferences to guide the implementation of this tool. Utilizing Streamlit, we crafted the user interface, while Langchain’s Map Reduce function facilitated the summarization process for extensive lectures using OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. HumSum is an intuitive tool serving various summarization needs, infusing personalization into the tool’s functionality without necessitating the collection of personal user data.

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Can I trust You? LLMs as conversational agents
Marc Döbler | Raghavendran Mahendravarman | Anna Moskvina | Nasrin Saef

With the rising popularity of LLMs in the public sphere, they become more and more attractive as a tool for doing one’s own research without having to rely on search engines or specialized knowledge of a scientific field. But using LLMs as a source for factual information can lead one to fall prey to misinformation or hallucinations dreamed up by the model. In this paper we examine the gpt-4 LLM by simulating a large number of potential research queries and evaluate how many of the generated references are factually correct as well as existent.

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Emulating Author Style: A Feasibility Study of Prompt-enabled Text Stylization with Off-the-Shelf LLMs
Avanti Bhandarkar | Ronald Wilson | Anushka Swarup | Damon Woodard

User-centric personalization of text opens many avenues of applications from stylized email composition to machine translation. Existing approaches in this domain often encounter limitations in data and resource requirements. Drawing inspiration from the success of resource-efficient prompt-enabled stylization in related fields, this work conducts the first feasibility into testing 12 pre-trained SOTA LLMs for author style emulation. Although promising, the results suggest that current off-the-shelf LLMs fall short of achieving effective author style emulation. This work provides valuable insights through which off-the-shelf LLMs could be potentially utilized for user-centric personalization easily and at scale.

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LLMs Simulate Big5 Personality Traits: Further Evidence
Aleksandra Sorokovikova | Sharwin Rezagholi | Natalia Fedorova | Ivan Yamshchikov

An empirical investigation into the simulation of the Big5 personality traits by large language models (LLMs), namely Llama-2, GPT-4, and Mixtral, is presented. We analyze the personality traits simulated by these models and their stability. This contributes to the broader understanding of the capabilities of LLMs to simulate personality traits and the respective implications for personalized human-computer interaction.

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Personalized Text Generation with Fine-Grained Linguistic Control
Bashar Alhafni | Vivek Kulkarni | Dhruv Kumar | Vipul Raheja

As the text generation capabilities of large language models become increasingly prominent, recent studies have focused on controlling particular aspects of the generated text to make it more personalized. However, most research on controllable text generation focuses on controlling the content or modeling specific high-level/coarse-grained attributes that reflect authors’ writing styles, such as formality, domain, or sentiment. In this paper, we focus on controlling fine-grained attributes spanning multiple linguistic dimensions, such as lexical and syntactic attributes. We introduce a novel benchmark to train generative models and evaluate their ability to generate personalized text based on multiple fine-grained linguistic attributes. We systematically investigate the performance of various large language models on our benchmark and draw insights from the factors that impact their performance. We make our code, data, models, and benchmarks publicly available.

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LLM Agents in Interaction: Measuring Personality Consistency and Linguistic Alignment in Interacting Populations of Large Language Models
Ivar Frisch | Mario Giulianelli

Agent interaction has long been a key topic in psychology, philosophy, and artificial intelligence, and it is now gaining traction in large language model (LLM) research. This experimental study seeks to lay the groundwork for our understanding of dialogue-based interaction between LLMs: Do persona-prompted LLMs show consistent personality and language use in interaction? We condition GPT-3.5 on asymmetric personality profiles to create a population of LLM agents, administer personality tests and submit the agents to a collaborative writing task. We find different profiles exhibit different degrees of personality consistency and linguistic alignment in interaction.

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Quantifying learning-style adaptation in effectiveness of LLM teaching
Ruben Weijers | Gabrielle Fidelis de Castilho | Jean-François Godbout | Reihaneh Rabbany | Kellin Pelrine

This preliminary study aims to investigate whether AI, when prompted based on individual learning styles, can effectively improve comprehension and learning experiences in educational settings. It involves tailoring LLMs baseline prompts and comparing the results of a control group receiving standard content and an experimental group receiving learning style-tailored content. Preliminary results suggest that GPT-4 can generate responses aligned with various learning styles, indicating the potential for enhanced engagement and comprehension. However, these results also reveal challenges, including the model’s tendency for sycophantic behavior and variability in responses. Our findings suggest that a more sophisticated prompt engineering approach is required for integrating AI into education (AIEd) to improve educational outcomes.

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RAGs to Style: Personalizing LLMs with Style Embeddings
Abhiman Neelakanteswara | Shreyas Chaudhari | Hamed Zamani

This paper studies the use of style embeddings to enhance author profiling for the goal of personalization of Large Language Models (LLMs). Using a style-based Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) approach, we meticulously study the efficacy of style embeddings in capturing distinctive authorial nuances. The proposed method leverages this acquired knowledge to enhance the personalization capabilities of LLMs. In the assessment of this approach, we have employed the LaMP benchmark, specifically tailored for evaluating language models across diverse dimensions of personalization. The empirical observations from our investigation reveal that, in comparison to term matching or context matching, style proves to be marginally superior in the development of personalized LLMs.

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User Embedding Model for Personalized Language Prompting
Sumanth Doddapaneni | Krishna Sayana | Ambarish Jash | Sukhdeep Sodhi | Dima Kuzmin

Modeling long user histories plays a pivotal role in enhancing recommendation systems, allowing to capture users’ evolving preferences, resulting in more precise and personalized recommendations. In this study, we tackle the challenges of modeling long user histories for preference understanding in natural language. Specifically, we introduce a new User Embedding Module (UEM) that efficiently processes user history in free-form text by compressing and representing them as embeddings, to use them as soft prompts to a language model (LM). Our experiments demonstrate the superior capability of this approach in handling significantly longer histories compared to conventional text-based methods, yielding substantial improvements in predictive performance. Models trained using our approach exhibit substantial enhancements, with up to 0.21 and 0.25 F1 points improvement over the text-based prompting baselines. The main contribution of this research is to demonstrate the ability to bias language models via user signals.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the First edition of the Workshop on the Scaling Behavior of Large Language Models (SCALE-LLM 2024)

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Proceedings of the First edition of the Workshop on the Scaling Behavior of Large Language Models (SCALE-LLM 2024)
Antonio Valerio Miceli-Barone | Fazl Barez | Shay Cohen | Elena Voita | Ulrich Germann | Michal Lukasik

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A Proposal for Scaling the Scaling Laws
Wout Schellaert | Ronan Hamon | Fernando Martínez-Plumed | Jose Hernandez-Orallo

Scaling laws are predictable relations between the performance of AI systems and various scalable design choices such as model or dataset size. In order to keep predictions interpretable, scaling analysis has traditionally relied on heavy summarisation of both the system design and its performance. We argue this summarisation and aggregation is a major source of predictive inaccuracy and lack of generalisation. With a synthetic example we show how scaling analysis needs to be _instance-based_ to accurately model realistic benchmark behaviour, highlighting the need for richer evaluation datasets and more complex inferential tools, for which we outline an actionable proposal.

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Scaling Behavior of Machine Translation with Large Language Models under Prompt Injection Attacks
Zhifan Sun | Antonio Valerio Miceli-Barone

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly becoming the preferred foundation platforms for many Natural Language Processing tasks such as Machine Translation, owing to their quality often comparable to or better than task-specific models, and the simplicity of specifying the task through natural language instructions or in-context examples.Their generality, however, opens them up to subversion by end users who may embed into their requests instructions that cause the model to behave in unauthorized and possibly unsafe ways.In this work we study these Prompt Injection Attacks (PIAs) on multiple families of LLMs on a Machine Translation task, focusing on the effects of model size on the attack success rates.We introduce a new benchmark data set and we discover that on multiple language pairs and injected prompts written in English, larger models under certain conditions may become more susceptible to successful attacks, an instance of the Inverse Scaling phenomenon (McKenzie et al., 2023).To our knowledge, this is the first work to study non-trivial LLM scaling behaviour in a multi-lingual setting.

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Can Large Language Models Reason About Goal-Oriented Tasks?
Filippos Bellos | Yayuan Li | Wuao Liu | Jason Corso

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

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InstructEval: Towards Holistic Evaluation of Instruction-Tuned Large Language Models
Yew Ken Chia | Pengfei Hong | Lidong Bing | Soujanya Poria

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

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Detecting Mode Collapse in Language Models via Narration
Sil Hamilton

No two authors write alike. Personal flourishes invoked in written narratives, from lexicon to rhetorical devices, imply a particular author—what literary theorists label the implied or virtual author; distinct from the real author or narrator of a text. Early large language models trained on unfiltered training sets drawn from a variety of discordant sources yielded incoherent personalities, problematic for conversational tasks but proving useful for sampling literature from multiple perspectives. Successes in alignment research in recent years have allowed researchers to impose subjectively consistent personae on language models via instruction tuning and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), but whether aligned models retain the ability to model an arbitrary virtual author has received little scrutiny. By studying 4,374 stories sampled from three OpenAI language models, we show successive versions of GPT-3 suffer from increasing degrees of “mode collapse” whereby overfitting the model during alignment constrains it from generalizing over authorship: models suffering from mode collapse become unable to assume a multiplicity of perspectives. Our method and results are significant for researchers seeking to employ language models in sociological simulations.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Simulating Conversational Intelligence in Chat (SCI-CHAT 2024)

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Simulating Conversational Intelligence in Chat (SCI-CHAT 2024)
Yvette Graham | Qun Liu | Gerasimos Lampouras | Ignacio Iacobacci | Sinead Madden | Haider Khalid | Rameez Qureshi

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Findings of the First Workshop on Simulating Conversational Intelligence in Chat
Yvette Graham | Mohammed Rameez Qureshi | Haider Khalid | Gerasimos Lampouras | Ignacio Iacobacci | Qun Liu

The aim of this workshop is to bring together experts working on open-domain dialogue research. In this speedily advancing research area many challenges still exist, such as learning information from conversations, engaging in realistic and convincing simulation of human intelligence and reasoning. SCI-CHAT follows previous workshops on open domain dialogue but with a focus on the simulation of intelligent conversation as judged in a live human evaluation. Models aim to include the ability to follow a challenging topic over a multi-turn conversation, while positing, refuting and reasoning over arguments. The workshop included both a research track and shared task. The main goal of this paper is to provide an overview of the shared task and a link to an additional paper that will include an in depth analysis of the shared task results following presentation at the workshop.

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Improving Dialog Safety using Socially Aware Contrastive Learning
Souvik Das | Rohini K. Srihari

State-of-the-art conversational AI systems raise concerns due to their potential risks of generating unsafe, toxic, unethical, or dangerous content. Previous works have developed datasets to teach conversational agents the appropriate social paradigms to respond effectively to specifically designed hazardous content. However, models trained on these adversarial datasets still struggle to recognize subtle unsafe situations that appear naturally in conversations or introduce an inappropriate response in a casual context. To understand the extent of this problem, we study prosociality in both adversarial and casual dialog contexts and audit the response quality of general-purpose language models in terms of propensity to produce unsafe content. We propose a dual-step fine-tuning process to address these issues using a socially aware n-pair contrastive loss. Subsequently, we train a base model that integrates prosocial behavior by leveraging datasets like Moral Integrity Corpus (MIC) and ProsocialDialog. Experimental results on several dialog datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in generating socially appropriate responses.

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Reliable LLM-based User Simulator for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Ivan Sekulic | Silvia Terragni | Victor Guimarães | Nghia Khau | Bruna Guedes | Modestas Filipavicius | Andre Ferreira Manso | Roland Mathis

In the realm of dialogue systems, user simulation techniques have emerged as a game-changer, redefining the evaluation and enhancement of task-oriented dialogue (TOD) systems. These methods are crucial for replicating real user interactions, enabling applications like synthetic data augmentation, error detection, and robust evaluation. However, existing approaches often rely on rigid rule-based methods or on annotated data. This paper introduces DAUS, a Domain-Aware User Simulator. Leveraging large language models, we fine-tune DAUS on real examples of task-oriented dialogues. Results on two relevant benchmarks showcase significant improvements in terms of user goal fulfillment. Notably, we have observed that fine-tuning enhances the simulator’s coherence with user goals, effectively mitigating hallucinations—a major source of inconsistencies in simulator responses.

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Evaluating Modular Dialogue System for Form Filling Using Large Language Models
Sherzod Hakimov | Yan Weiser | David Schlangen

This paper introduces a novel approach to form-filling and dialogue system evaluation by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs). The proposed method establishes a setup wherein multiple modules collaborate on addressing the form-filling task. The dialogue system is constructed on top of LLMs, focusing on defining specific roles for individual modules. We show that using multiple independent sub-modules working cooperatively on this task can improve performance and handle the typical constraints of using LLMs, such as context limitations. The study involves testing the modular setup on four selected forms of varying topics and lengths, employing commercial and open-access LLMs. The experimental results demonstrate that the modular setup consistently outperforms the baseline, showcasing the effectiveness of this approach. Furthermore, our findings reveal that open-access models perform comparably to commercial models for the specified task.

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KAUCUS - Knowledgeable User Simulators for Training Large Language Models
Kaustubh Dhole

An effective multi-turn instruction-following assistant can be developed by creating a simulator that can generate useful interaction data. Apart from relying on its intrinsic weights, an ideal user simulator should also be able to bootstrap external knowledge rapidly in its raw form to simulate the multifarious diversity of text available over the internet. Previous user simulators generally lacked diversity, were mostly closed domain, and necessitated rigid schema making them inefficient to rapidly scale to incorporate external knowledge. In this regard, we introduce Kaucus, a Knowledge-Augmented User Simulator framework, to outline a process of creating diverse user simulators, that can seamlessly exploit external knowledge as well as benefit downstream assistant model training. Through two GPT-J based simulators viz., a Retrieval Augmented Simulator and a Summary Controlled Simulator we generate diverse simulator-assistant interactions. Through reward and preference model-based evaluations, we find that these interactions serve as useful training data and create more helpful downstream assistants. We also find that incorporating knowledge through retrieval augmentation or summary control helps create better assistants.

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SarcEmp - Fine-tuning DialoGPT for Sarcasm and Empathy
Mohammed Rizwan

Conversational models often face challenges such as a lack of emotional temperament and a limited sense of humor when interacting with users. To address these issues, we have selected relevant data and fine-tuned the model to (i) humanize the chatbot based on the user’s emotional response and the context of the conversation using a dataset based on empathy and (ii) enhanced conversations while incorporating humor/sarcasm for better user engagement. We aspire to achieve more personalized and enhanced user-computer interactions with the help of varied datasets involving sarcasm together with empathy on top of already available state-of-the-art conversational systems.

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Emo-Gen BART - A Multitask Emotion-Informed Dialogue Generation Framework
Alok Debnath | Yvette Graham | Owen Conlan

This paper is the model description for the Emo-Gen BART dialogue generation architecture, as submitted to the SCI-CHAT 2024 Shared Task. The Emotion-Informed Dialogue Generation model is a multi-task BARTbased model which performs dimensional and categorical emotion detection and uses that information to augment the input to the generation models. Our implementation is trained and validated against the IEMOCAP dataset, and compared against contemporary architectures in both dialogue emotion classification and dialogue generation. We show that certain loss function ablations are competitive against the state-of-the-art single-task models.

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Advancing Open-Domain Conversational Agents - Designing an Engaging System for Natural Multi-Turn Dialogue
Islam A. Hassan | Yvette Graham

This system paper describes our conversational AI agent developed for the SCI-CHAT competition. The goal is to build automated dialogue agents that can have natural, coherent conversations with humans over multiple turns. Our model is based on fine-tuning the Snorkel-Mistral-PairRM-DPO language model on podcast conversation transcripts. This allows the model to leverage Snorkel-Mistral-PairRMDPO’s linguistic knowledge while adapting it for multi-turn dialogue modeling using LoRA. During evaluation, human judges will converse with the agent on specified topics and provide ratings on response quality. Our system aims to demonstrate how large pretrained language models, when properly adapted and evaluated, can effectively converse on open-ended topics spanning multiple turns.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

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Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
Michael Hahn | Alexey Sorokin | Ritesh Kumar | Andreas Shcherbakov | Yulia Otmakhova | Jinrui Yang | Oleg Serikov | Priya Rani | Edoardo M. Ponti | Saliha Muradoğlu | Rena Gao | Ryan Cotterell | Ekaterina Vylomova

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Syntactic dependency length shaped by strategic memory allocation
Weijie Xu | Richard Futrell

Human processing of nonlocal syntactic dependencies requires engagement of limited working memory for encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. This process creates an evolutionary pressure for language to be structured in a way that keeps the subparts of a dependency closer to each other, an efficiency principle termed dependency locality. The current study proposes that such a dependency locality pressure can be modulated by the surprisal of the antecedent, defined as the first part of a dependency, due to strategic allocation of working memory. In particular, antecedents with novel and unpredictable information are prioritized for memory encoding, receiving more robust representation against memory interference and decay, and thus are more capable of handling longer dependency length. We examine this claim by examining dependency corpora of six languages (Danish, English, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, and Spanish), with word surprisal generated from GPT-3 language model. In support of our hypothesis, we find evidence for a positive correlation between dependency length and the antecedent surprisal in most of the languages in our analyses.

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GUIDE: Creating Semantic Domain Dictionaries for Low-Resource Languages
Jonathan Janetzki | Gerard De Melo | Joshua Nemecek | Daniel Whitenack

Over 7,000 of the world’s 7,168 living languages are still low-resourced. This paper aims to narrow the language documentation gap by creating multiparallel dictionaries, clustered by SIL’s semantic domains. This task is new for machine learning and has previously been done manually by native speakers. We propose GUIDE, a language-agnostic tool that uses a GNN to create and populate semantic domain dictionaries, using seed dictionaries and Bible translations as a parallel text corpus. Our work sets a new benchmark, achieving an exemplary average precision of 60% in eight zero-shot evaluation languages and predicting an average of 2,400 dictionary entries. We share the code, model, multilingual evaluation data, and new dictionaries with the research community: https://github.com/janetzki/GUIDE

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A New Dataset for Tonal and Segmental Dialectometry from the Yue- and Pinghua-Speaking Area
Ho Sung | Jelena Prokic | Yiya Chen

Traditional dialectology or dialect geography is the study of geographical variation of language. Originated in Europe and pioneered in Germany and France, this field has predominantly been focusing on sounds, more specifically, on segments. Similarly, quantitative approaches to language variation concerned with the phonetic level are in most cases focusing on segments as well. However, more than half of the world’s languages include lexical tones (Yip, 2002). Despite this, tones are still underexplored in quantitative language comparison, partly due to the low accessibility of the suitable data. This paper aims to introduce a newly digitised dataset which comes from the Yue- and Pinghua-speaking areas in Southern China, with over 100 dialects. This dataset consists of two parts: tones and segments. In this paper, we illustrate how we can computationaly model tones in order to explore linguistic variation. We have applied a tone distance metric on our data, and we have found that 1) dialects also form a continuum on the tonal level and 2) other than tonemic (inventory) and tonetic differences, dialects can also differ in the lexical distribution of tones. The availability of this dataset will hopefully enable further exploration of the role of tones in quantitative typology and NLP research.

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A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages
Jessica Nieder | Johann-Mattis List

Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in psycholinguistic experiments. To study mutual intelligibility computationally, we propose a computer-assisted method using the Linear Discriminative Learner, a computational model developed to approximate the cognitive processes by which humans learn languages, which we expand with multilingual semantic vectors and multilingual sound classes. We test the model on cognate data from German, Dutch, and English, three closely related Germanic languages. We find that our model’s comprehension accuracy depends on 1) the automatic trimming of inflections and 2) the language pair for which comprehension is tested. Our multilingual modelling approach does not only offer new methodological findings for automatic testing of mutual intelligibility across languages but also extends the use of Linear Discriminative Learning to multilingual settings.

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Predicting Mandarin and Cantonese Adult Speakers’ Eye-Movement Patterns in Natural Reading
Li Junlin | Yu-Yin Hsu | Emmanuele Chersoni | Bo Peng

Please find the attached PDF file for the extended abstract of our study.

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The Typology of Ellipsis: A Corpus for Linguistic Analysis and Machine Learning Applications
Damir Cavar | Ludovic Mompelat | Muhammad Abdo

State-of-the-art (SotA) Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology faces significant challenges with constructions that contain ellipses. Although theoretically well-documented and understood, there needs to be more sufficient cross-linguistic language resources to document, study, and ultimately engineer NLP solutions that can adequately provide analyses for ellipsis constructions. This article describes the typological data set on ellipsis that we created for currently seventeen languages. We demonstrate how SotA parsers based on a variety of syntactic frameworks fail to parse sentences with ellipsis, and in fact, probabilistic, neural, and Large Language Models (LLM) do so, too. We demonstrate experiments that focus on detecting sentences with ellipsis, predicting the position of elided elements, and predicting elided surface forms in the appropriate positions. We show that cross-linguistic variation of ellipsis-related phenomena has different consequences for the architecture of NLP systems.

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Language Atlas of Japanese and Ryukyuan (LAJaR): A Linguistic Typology Database for Endangered Japonic Languages
Kanji Kato | So Miyagawa | Natsuko Nakagawa

LAJaR (Language Atlas of Japanese and Ryukyuan) is a linguistic typology database focusing on micro-variation of the Japonic (Japanese and Ryukyuan) languages. This paper aims to report the design and progress of this ongoing database project. Finally, we also show a case study utilizing its database on zero copulas among the Japonic languages.

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GTNC: A Many-To-One Dataset of Google Translations from NewsCrawl
Damiaan Reijnaers | Charlotte Pouw

This paper lays the groundwork for initiating research into Source Language Identification; the task of identifying the original language of a machine-translated text. We contribute a dataset of translations from a typologically diverse spectrum of languages into English and use it to set initial baselines for this novel task.

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Sociolinguistically Informed Interpretability: A Case Study on Hinglish Emotion Classification
Kushal Tatariya | Heather Lent | Johannes Bjerva | Miryam de Lhoneux

Emotion classification is a challenging task in NLP due to the inherent idiosyncratic and subjective nature of linguistic expression,especially with code-mixed data. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved high performance for many tasks and languages, but it remains to be seen whether these models learn and are robust to the differences in emotional expression across languages. Sociolinguistic studies have shown that Hinglish speakers switch to Hindi when expressing negative emotions and to English when expressing positive emotions. To understand if language models can learn these associations, we study the effect of language on emotion prediction across 3 PLMs on a Hinglish emotion classification dataset. Using LIME and token level language ID, we find that models do learn these associations between language choice and emotional expression. Moreover, having code-mixed data present in the pre-training can augment that learning when task-specific data is scarce. We also conclude from the misclassifications that the models may overgeneralise this heuristic to other infrequent examples where this sociolinguistic phenomenon does not apply.

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A Call for Consistency in Reporting Typological Diversity
Wessel Poelman | Esther Ploeger | Miryam de Lhoneux | Johannes Bjerva

In order to draw generalizable conclusions about the performance of multilingual models across languages, it is important to evaluate on a set of languages that captures linguistic diversity.Linguistic typology is increasingly used to justify language selection, inspired by language sampling in linguistics.However, justifications for ‘typological diversity’ exhibit great variation, as there seems to be no set definition, methodology or consistent link to linguistic typology.In this work, we provide a systematic insight into how previous work in the ACL Anthology uses the term ‘typological diversity’.Our two main findings are: 1) what is meant by typologically diverse language selection is not consistent and 2) the actual typological diversity of the language sets in these papers varies greatly.We argue that, when making claims about ‘typological diversity’, an operationalization of this should be included.A systematic approach that quantifies this claim, also with respect to the number of languages used, would be even better.

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Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?
Luise Häuser | Gerhard Jäger | Johann-Mattis List | Taraka Rama | Alexandros Stamatakis

In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not taken this potential into account. Most computational studies still rely on lexical cognates as major data source for phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics, although there do exist a few studies in which authors praise the benefits of comparing words at the level of sound sequences. Building on (a) ten diverse datasets from different language families, and (b) state-of-the-art methods for automated cognate and sound correspondence detection, we test, for the first time, the performance of sound-based versus cognate-based approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction. Our results show that phylogenies reconstructed from lexical cognates are topologically closer, by approximately one third with respect to the generalized quartet distance on average, to the gold standard phylogenies than phylogenies reconstructed from sound correspondences.

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Compounds in Universal Dependencies: A Survey in Five European Languages
Emil Svoboda | Magda Ševčíková

In Universal Dependencies, compounds, which we understand as words containing two or more roots, are represented according to tokenization, which reflects the orthographic conventions of the language. A closed compound (e.g. waterfall) corresponds to a single word in Universal Dependencies while a hyphenated compound (father-in-law) and an open compound (apple pie) to multiple words. The aim of this paper is to open a discussion on how to move towards a more consistent annotation of compounds.The solution we argue for is to represent the internal structure of all compound types analogously to syntactic phrases, which would not only increase the comparability of compounding within and across languages, but also allow comparisons of compounds and syntactic phrases.

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Predicting positive transfer for improved low-resource speech recognition using acoustic pseudo-tokens
Nay San | Georgios Paraskevopoulos | Aryaman Arora | Xiluo He | Prabhjot Kaur | Oliver Adams | Dan Jurafsky

While massively multilingual speech models like wav2vec 2.0 XLSR-128 can be directly fine-tuned for automatic speech recognition (ASR), downstream performance can still be relatively poor on languages that are under-represented in the pre-training data. Continued pre-training on 70–200 hours of untranscribed speech in these languages can help — but what about languages without that much recorded data? For such cases, we show that supplementing the target language with data from a similar, higher-resource ‘donor’ language can help. For example, continued pretraining on only 10 hours of low-resource Punjabi supplemented with 60 hours of donor Hindi is almost as good as continued pretraining on 70 hours of Punjabi. By contrast, sourcing supplemental data from less similar donors like Bengali does not improve ASR performance. To inform donor language selection, we propose a novel similarity metric based on the sequence distribution of induced acoustic units: the Acoustic Token Distribution Similarity (ATDS). Across a set of typologically different target languages (Punjabi, Galician, Iban, Setswana), we show that the ATDS between the target language and its candidate donors precisely predicts target language ASR performance.

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ModeLing: A Novel Dataset for Testing Linguistic Reasoning in Language Models
Nathan Chi | Teodor Malchev | Riley Kong | Ryan Chi | Lucas Huang | Ethan Chi | R. McCoy | Dragomir Radev

Large language models (LLMs) perform well on (at least) some evaluations of both few-shot multilingual adaptation and reasoning. However, evaluating the intersection of these two skills—multilingual few-shot reasoning—is difficult: even relatively low-resource languages can be found in large training corpora, raising the concern that when we intend to evaluate a model’s ability to generalize to a new language, that language may have in fact been present during the model’s training. If such language contamination has occurred, apparent cases of few-shot reasoning could actually be due to memorization. Towards understanding the capability of models to perform multilingual few-shot reasoning, we propose modeLing, a benchmark of Rosetta stone puzzles. This type of puzzle, originating from competitions called Linguistics Olympiads, contain a small number of sentences in a target language not previously known to the solver. Each sentence is translated to the solver’s language such that the provided sentence pairs uniquely specify a single most reasonable underlying set of rules; solving requires applying these rules to translate new expressions (Figure 1). modeLing languages are chosen to be extremely low-resource such that the risk of training data contamination is low, and unlike prior datasets, it consists entirely of problems written specifically for this work, as a further measure against data leakage. Empirically, we find evidence that popular LLMs do not have data leakage on our benchmark.

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TartuNLP @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task: Adapting XLM-RoBERTa for Ancient and Historical Languages
Aleksei Dorkin | Kairit Sirts

We present our submission to the unconstrained subtask of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages for morphological annotation, POS-tagging, lemmatization, characterand word-level gap-filling. We developed a simple, uniform, and computationally lightweight approach based on the adapters framework using parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We applied the same adapter-based approach uniformly to all tasks and 16 languages by fine-tuning stacked language- and task-specific adapters. Our submission obtained an overall second place out of three submissions, with the first place in word-level gap-filling. Our results show the feasibility of adapting language models pre-trained on modern languages to historical and ancient languages via adapter training.

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Heidelberg-Boston @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task: Enhancing Low-Resource Language Analysis With Character-Aware Hierarchical Transformers
Frederick Riemenschneider | Kevin Krahn

Historical languages present unique challenges to the NLP community, with one prominent hurdle being the limited resources available in their closed corpora. This work describes our submission to the constrained subtask of the SIGTYP 2024 shared task, focusing on PoS tagging, morphological tagging, and lemmatization for 13 historical languages. For PoS and morphological tagging we adapt a hierarchical tokenization method from Sun et al. (2023) and combine it with the advantages of the DeBERTa-V3 architecture, enabling our models to efficiently learn from every character in the training data. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of characterlevel T5 models on the lemmatization task. Pre-trained from scratch with limited data, our models achieved first place in the constrained subtask, nearly reaching the performance levels of the unconstrained task’s winner. Our code is available at https://github.com/bowphs/ SIGTYP-2024-hierarchical-transformers

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UDParse @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task : Modern Language Models for Historical Languages
Johannes Heinecke

SIGTYP’s Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages was proposed in two variants, constrained or unconstrained. Whereas the constrained variant disallowed any other data to train embeddings or models than the data provided, the unconstrained variant did not have these limits. We participated in the five tasks of the unconstrained variant and came out first. The tasks were the prediction of part-of-speech, lemmas and morphological features and filling masked words and masked characters on 16 historical languages. We decided to use a dependency parser and train the data using an underlying pretrained transformer model to predict part-of-speech tags, lemmas, and morphological features. For predicting masked words, we used multilingual distilBERT (with rather bad results). In order to predict masked characters, our language model is extremely small: it is a model of 5-gram frequencies, obtained by reading the available training data.

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Allen Institute for AI @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages
Lester James Miranda

In this paper, we describe Allen AI’s submission to the constrained track of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task. Using only the data provided by the organizers, we pretrained a transformer-based multilingual model, then finetuned it on the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations of a given language for a downstream task. Our systems achieved decent performance on the test set, beating the baseline in most language-task pairs, yet struggles with subtoken tags in multiword expressions as seen in Coptic and Ancient Hebrew. On the validation set, we obtained ≥70% F1- score on most language-task pairs. In addition, we also explored the cross-lingual capability of our trained models. This paper highlights our pretraining and finetuning process, and our findings from our internal evaluations.

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Findings of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages
Oksana Dereza | Adrian Doyle | Priya Rani | Atul Kr. Ojha | Pádraic Moran | John McCrae

This paper discusses the organisation and findings of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages. The shared task was split into the constrained and unconstrained tracks and involved solving either 3 or 5 problems for either 13 or 16 ancient and historical languages belonging to 4 language families, and making use of 6 different scripts. There were 14 registrations in total, of which 3 teams submitted to each track. Out of these 6 submissions, 2 systems were successful in the constrained setting and another 2 in the uncon- strained setting, and 4 system description papers were submitted by different teams. The best average result for morphological feature prediction was about 96%, while the best average results for POS-tagging and lemmatisation were 96% and 94% respectively. At the word level, the winning team could not achieve a higher average accuracy across all 16 languages than 5.95%, which demonstrates the difficulty of this problem. At the character level, the best average result over 16 languages 55.62%
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Worskhop on Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI 2024)

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Proceedings of the 1st Worskhop on Towards Ethical and Inclusive Conversational AI: Language Attitudes, Linguistic Diversity, and Language Rights (TEICAI 2024)
Nina Hosseini-Kivanani | Sviatlana Höhn | Dimitra Anastasiou | Bettina Migge | Angela Soltan | Doris Dippold | Ekaterina Kamlovskaya | Fred Philippy

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How Do Conversational Agents in Healthcare Impact on Patient Agency?
Kerstin Denecke

In healthcare, agency refers to the ability of patients to actively participate in and control their health through collaborating with providers, informed decision-making and understanding health information. Conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly used for realizing digital health interventions, but it is still unclear how they are enhancing patient agency. This paper explores which technological components are required to enable CAs impacting on patient agency, and identifies metrics for measuring and evaluating this impact. We do this by drawing on existing work related to developing and evaluating healthcare CAs and through analysis of a concrete example of a CA. As a result, we identify five main areas where CAs enhance patient agency, namely by: improved access to health information, personalized advice, increased engagement, emotional support and reduced barriers to care. For each of these areas, specific technological functions have to be integrated into CAs such as sentiment and emotion analysis methods that allow a CA to support emotionally.

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Why academia should cut back general enthusiasm about CAs
Alessia Giulimondi

This position paper will analyze LLMs, the core technology of CAs, from a socio-technical and linguistic perspective in order to argue for a limitation of its use in academia, which should be reflected in a more cautious adoption of CAs in private spaces. The article describes how machine learning technologies like LLMs are inserted into a more general process of platformization (van Dijck, 2021), negatively affecting autonomy of research (Kersessens and van Dijck, 2022). Moreover, fine-tuning practices, as means to polish language models (Kasirzadeh and Gabriel, 2023) are questioned, explaining how these foster a deterministic approach to language. A leading role of universities in this general gain of awareness is strongly advocated, as institutions that support transparent and open science, in order to foster and protect democratic values in our societies.

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Bridging the Language Gap: Integrating Language Variations into Conversational AI Agents for Enhanced User Engagement
Marcellus Amadeus | Jose Roberto Homeli da Silva | Joao Victor Pessoa Rocha

This paper presents the initial steps taken to integrate language variations into conversational AI agents to enhance user engagement. The study is built upon sociolinguistic and pragmatic traditions and involves the creation of an annotation taxonomy. The taxonomy includes eleven classes, ranging from concrete to abstract, and the covered aspects are the instance itself, time, sentiment, register, state, region, type, grammar, part of speech, meaning, and language. The paper discusses the challenges of incorporating vernacular language into AI agents, the procedures for data collection, and the taxonomy organization. It also outlines the next steps, including the database expansion and the computational implementation. The authors believe that integrating language variation into conversational AI will build near-real language inventories and boost user engagement. The paper concludes by discussing the limitations and the importance of building rapport with users through their own vernacular.

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Socio-cultural adapted chatbots: Harnessing Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models for enhanced context awarenes
Jader Camboim de Sá | Dimitra Anastasiou | Marcos Da Silveira | Cédric Pruski

Understanding the socio-cultural context is crucial in machine translation (MT). Although conversational AI systems and chatbots, in particular, are not designed for translation, they can be used for MT purposes. Yet, chatbots often struggle to identify any socio-cultural context during user interactions. In this paper, we highlight this challenge with real-world examples from popular chatbots. We advocate for the use of knowledge graphs as an external source of information that can potentially encapsulate socio-cultural contexts, aiding chatbots in enhancing translation. We further present a method to exploit external knowledge and extract contextual information that can significantly improve text translation, as evidenced by our interactions with these chatbots.

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How should Conversational Agent systems respond to sexual harassment?
Laura De Grazia | Alex Peiró Lilja | Mireia Farrús Cabeceran | Mariona Taulé

This paper investigates the appropriate responses that Conversational Agent systems (CAs) should employ when subjected to sexual harassment by users. Previous studies indicate that conventional CAs often respond neutrally or evade such requests. Enhancing the responsiveness of CAs to offensive speech is crucial, as users might carry over these interactions into their social interactions. To address this issue, we selected evaluators to compare a series of responses to sexual harassment from four commercial CAs (Amazon Alexa, Apple Siri, Google Home, and Microsoft Cortana) with alternative responses we realized based on insights from psychological and sociological studies. Focusing on CAs with a female voice, given their increased likelihood of encountering offensive language, we conducted two experiments involving 22 evaluators (11 females and 11 males). In the initial experiment, participants assessed the responses in a textual format, while the second experiment involved the evaluation of responses generated with a synthetic voice exhibiting three different intonations (angry, neutral, and assertive). Results from the first experiment revealed a general preference for the responses we formulated. For the most voted replies, female evaluators exhibited a tendency towards responses with an assertive intent, emphasizing the sexually harassing nature of the request. Conversely, male evaluators leaned towards a more neutral response, aligning with prior findings that highlight gender-based differences in the perception of sexual harassment. The second experiment underscored a preference for assertive responses. The study’s outcomes highlight the need to develop new, educational responses from CAs to instances of sexual harassment, aiming to discourage harmful behavior.

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Non-Referential Functions of Language in Social Agents: The Case of Social Proximity
Sviatlana Höhn

Non-referential functions of language such as setting group boundaries, identity construction and regulation of social proximity have rarely found place in the language technology creation process. Nevertheless, their importance has been postulated in literature. While multiple methods to include social information in large language models (LLM) cover group properties (gender, age, geographic relations, professional characteristics), a combination of group social characteristics and individual features of an agent (natural or artificial) play a role in social interaction but have not been studied in generated language. This article explores the orchestration of prompt engineering and retrieval-augmented generation techniques to linguistic features of social proximity and distance in language generated by an LLM. The study uses the immediacy/distance model from literature to analyse language generated by an LLM for different recipients. This research reveals that kinship terms are almost the only way of displaying immediacy in LLM-made conversations.

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Making a Long Story Short in Conversation Modeling
Yufei Tao | Tiernan Mines | Ameeta Agrawal

Conversation systems accommodate diverse users with unique personalities and distinct writing styles. Within the domain of multi-turn dialogue modeling, this work studies the impact of varied utterance lengths on the quality of subsequent responses generated by conversation models. Using GPT-3 as the base model, multiple dialogue datasets, and several metrics, we conduct a thorough exploration of this aspect of conversational models. Our analysis sheds light on the complex relationship between utterance lengths and the quality of follow-up responses generated by dialogue systems. Empirical findings suggests that, for certain types of conversations, utterance lengths can be reduced by up to 72% without any noticeable difference in the quality of follow-up responses.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP (UncertaiNLP 2024)

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Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Uncertainty-Aware NLP (UncertaiNLP 2024)
Raúl Vázquez | Hande Celikkanat | Dennis Ulmer | Jörg Tiedemann | Swabha Swayamdipta | Wilker Aziz | Barbara Plank | Joris Baan | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe

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Calibration-Tuning: Teaching Large Language Models to Know What They Don’t Know
Sanyam Kapoor | Nate Gruver | Manley Roberts | Arka Pal | Samuel Dooley | Micah Goldblum | Andrew Wilson

Large language models are increasingly deployed for high-stakes decision making, for example in financial and medical applications. In such applications, it is imperative that we be able to estimate our confidence in the answers output by a language model in order to assess risks. Although we can easily compute the probability assigned by a language model to the sequence of tokens that make up an answer, we cannot easily compute the probability of the answer itself, which could be phrased in numerous ways.While other works have engineered ways of assigning such probabilities to LLM outputs, a key problem remains: existing language models are poorly calibrated, often confident when they are wrong or unsure when they are correct. In this work, we devise a protocol called *calibration tuning* for finetuning LLMs to output calibrated probabilities. Calibration-tuned models demonstrate superior calibration performance compared to existing language models on a variety of question-answering tasks, including open-ended generation, without affecting accuracy. We further show that this ability transfers to new domains outside of the calibration-tuning train set.

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Context Tuning for Retrieval Augmented Generation
Raviteja Anantha | Danil Vodianik

Large language models (LLMs) have the remarkable ability to solve new tasks with just a few examples, but they need access to the right tools. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this problem by retrieving a list of relevant tools for a given task. However, RAG’s tool retrieval step requires all the required information to be explicitly present in the query. This is a limitation, as semantic search, the widely adopted tool retrieval method, can fail when the query is incomplete or lacks context. To address this limitation, we propose Context Tuning for RAG, which employs a smart context retrieval system to fetch relevant information that improves both tool retrieval and plan generation. Our lightweight context retrieval model uses numerical, categorical, and habitual usage signals to retrieve and rank context items. Our empirical results demonstrate that context tuning significantly enhances semantic search, achieving a 3.5-fold and 1.5-fold improvement in Recall@K for context retrieval and tool retrieval tasks respectively, and resulting in an 11.6% increase in LLM-based planner accuracy. Additionally, we show that our proposed lightweight model using Reciprocal Rank Fusion (RRF) with LambdaMART outperforms GPT-4 based retrieval. Moreover, we observe context augmentation at plan generation, even after tool retrieval, reduces hallucination.

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Optimizing Relation Extraction in Medical Texts through Active Learning: A Comparative Analysis of Trade-offs
Siting Liang | Pablo Sánchez | Daniel Sonntag

This work explores the effectiveness of employing Clinical BERT for Relation Extraction (RE) tasks in medical texts within an Active Learning (AL) framework. Our main objective is to optimize RE in medical texts through AL while examining the trade-offs between performance and computation time, comparing it with alternative methods like Random Forest and BiLSTM networks. Comparisons extend to feature engineering requirements, performance metrics, and considerations of annotation costs, including AL step times and annotation rates. The utilization of AL strategies aligns with our broader goal of enhancing the efficiency of relation classification models, particularly when dealing with the challenges of annotating complex medical texts in a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) setting. The results indicate that uncertainty-based sampling achieves comparable performance with significantly fewer annotated samples across three categories of supervised learning methods, thereby reducing annotation costs for clinical and biomedical corpora. While Clinical BERT exhibits clear performance advantages across two different corpora, the trade-off involves longer computation times in interactive annotation processes. In real-world applications, where practical feasibility and timely results are crucial, optimizing this trade-off becomes imperative.

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Linguistic Obfuscation Attacks and Large Language Model Uncertainty
Sebastian Steindl | Ulrich Schäfer | Bernd Ludwig | Patrick Levi

Large Language Models (LLMs) have taken the research field of Natural Language Processing by storm. Researchers are not only investigating their capabilities and possible applications, but also their weaknesses and how they may be exploited.This has resulted in various attacks and “jailbreaking” approaches that have gained large interest within the community.The vulnerability of LLMs to certain types of input may pose major risks regarding the real-world usage of LLMs in productive operations.We therefore investigate the relationship between a LLM’s uncertainty and its vulnerability to jailbreaking attacks.To this end, we focus on a probabilistic point of view of uncertainty and employ a state-of-the art open-source LLM.We investigate an attack that is based on linguistic obfuscation.Our results indicate that the model is subject to a higher level of uncertainty when confronted with manipulated prompts that aim to evade security mechanisms.This study lays the foundation for future research into the link between model uncertainty and its vulnerability to jailbreaks.

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Aligning Uncertainty: Leveraging LLMs to Analyze Uncertainty Transfer in Text Summarization
Zahra Kolagar | Alessandra Zarcone

Automatically generated summaries can be evaluated along different dimensions, one being how faithfully the uncertainty from the source text is conveyed in the summary. We present a study on uncertainty alignment in automatic summarization, starting from a two-tier lexical and semantic categorization of linguistic expression of uncertainty, which we used to annotate source texts and automatically generate summaries. We collected a diverse dataset including news articles and personal blogs and generated summaries using GPT-4. Source texts and summaries were annotated based on our two-tier taxonomy using a markup language. The automatic annotation was refined and validated by subsequent iterations based on expert input. We propose a method to evaluate the fidelity of uncertainty transfer in text summarization. The method capitalizes on a small amount of expert annotations and on the capabilities of Large language models (LLMs) to evaluate how the uncertainty of the source text aligns with the uncertainty expressions in the summary.

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How Does Beam Search improve Span-Level Confidence Estimation in Generative Sequence Labeling?
Kazuma Hashimoto | Iftekhar Naim | Karthik Raman

Sequence labeling is a core task in text understanding for IE/IR systems. Text generation models have increasingly become the go-to solution for such tasks (e.g., entity extraction and dialog slot filling). While most research has focused on the labeling accuracy, a key aspect – of vital practical importance – has slipped through the cracks: understanding model confidence. More specifically, we lack a principled understanding of how to reliably gauge the confidence of a model in its predictions for each labeled span. This paper aims to provide some empirical insights on estimating model confidence for generative sequence labeling. Most notably, we find that simply using the decoder’s output probabilities is not the best in realizing well-calibrated confidence estimates. As verified over six public datasets of different tasks, we show that our proposed approach – which leverages statistics from top-k predictions by a beam search – significantly reduces calibration errors of the predictions of a generative sequence labeling model.

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Efficiently Acquiring Human Feedback with Bayesian Deep Learning
Haishuo Fang | Jeet Gor | Edwin Simpson

Learning from human feedback can improve models for text generation or passage ranking, aligning them better to a user’s needs. Data is often collected by asking users to compare alternative outputs to a given input, which may require a large number of comparisons to learn a ranking function. The amount of comparisons needed can be reduced using Bayesian Optimisation (BO) to query the user about only the most promising candidate outputs. Previous applications of BO to text ranking relied on shallow surrogate models to learn ranking functions over candidate outputs,and were therefore unable to fine-tune rankers based on deep, pretrained language models. This paper leverages Bayesian deep learning (BDL) to adapt pretrained language models to highly specialised text ranking tasks, using BO to tune the model with a small number of pairwise preferences between candidate outputs. We apply our approach to community question answering (cQA) and extractive multi-document summarisation (MDS) with simulated noisy users, finding that our BDL approach significantly outperforms both a shallow Gaussian process model and traditional active learning with a standard deep neural network, while remaining robust to noise in the user feedback.

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Order Effects in Annotation Tasks: Further Evidence of Annotation Sensitivity
Jacob Beck | Stephanie Eckman | Bolei Ma | Rob Chew | Frauke Kreuter

The data-centric revolution in AI has revealed the importance of high-quality training data for developing successful AI models. However, annotations are sensitive to annotator characteristics, training materials, and to the design and wording of the data collection instrument. This paper explores the impact of observation order on annotations. We find that annotators’ judgments change based on the order in which they see observations. We use ideas from social psychology to motivate hypotheses about why this order effect occurs. We believe that insights from social science can help AI researchers improve data and model quality.

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The Effect of Generalisation on the Inadequacy of the Mode
Bryan Eikema

The highest probability sequences of most neural language generation models tend to be degenerate in some way, a problem known as the inadequacy of the mode. While many approaches to tackling particular aspects of the problem exist, such as dealing with too short sequences or excessive repetitions, explanations of why it occurs in the first place are rarer and do not agree with each other. We believe none of the existing explanations paint a complete picture. In this position paper, we want to bring light to the incredible complexity of the modelling task and the problems that generalising to previously unseen contexts bring. We argue that our desire for models to generalise to contexts it has never observed before is exactly what leads to spread of probability mass and inadequate modes. While we do not claim that adequate modes are impossible, we argue that they are not to be expected either.

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Uncertainty Resolution in Misinformation Detection
Yury Orlovskiy | Camille Thibault | Anne Imouza | Jean-François Godbout | Reihaneh Rabbany | Kellin Pelrine

Misinformation poses a variety of risks, such as undermining public trust and distorting factual discourse. Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have been shown effective in mitigating misinformation, particularly in handling statements where enough context is provided. However, they struggle to assess ambiguous or context-deficient statements accurately. This work introduces a new method to resolve uncertainty in such statements. We propose a framework to categorize missing information and publish category labels for the LIAR-New dataset, which is adaptable to cross-domain content with missing information. We then leverage this framework to generate effective user queries for missing context. Compared to baselines, our method improves the rate at which generated questions are answerable by the user by 38 percentage points and classification performance by over 10 percentage points macro F1. Thus, this approach may provide a valuable component for future misinformation mitigation pipelines.

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Don’t Blame the Data, Blame the Model: Understanding Noise and Bias When Learning from Subjective Annotations
Abhishek Anand | Negar Mokhberian | Prathyusha Kumar | Anweasha Saha | Zihao He | Ashwin Rao | Fred Morstatter | Kristina Lerman

Researchers have raised awareness about the harms of aggregating labels especially in subjective tasks that naturally contain disagreements among human annotators. In this work we show that models that are only provided aggregated labels show low confidence on high-disagreement data instances. While previous studies consider such instances as mislabeled, we argue that the reason the high-disagreement text instances have been hard-to-learn is that the conventional aggregated models underperform in extracting useful signals from subjective tasks. Inspired by recent studies demonstrating the effectiveness of learning from raw annotations, we investigate classifying using Multiple Ground Truth (Multi-GT) approaches. Our experiments show an improvement of confidence for the high-disagreement instances.

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Combining Confidence Elicitation and Sample-based Methods for Uncertainty Quantification in Misinformation Mitigation
Mauricio Rivera | Jean-François Godbout | Reihaneh Rabbany | Kellin Pelrine

Large Language Models have emerged as prime candidates to tackle misinformation mitigation. However, existing approaches struggle with hallucinations and overconfident predictions. We propose an uncertainty quantification framework that leverages both direct confidence elicitation and sampled-based consistency methods to provide better calibration for NLP misinformation mitigation solutions. We first investigate the calibration of sample-based consistency methods that exploit distinct features of consistency across sample sizes and stochastic levels. Next, we evaluate the performance and distributional shift of a robust numeric verbalization prompt across single vs. two-step confidence elicitation procedure. We also compare the performance of the same prompt with different versions of GPT and different numerical scales. Finally, we combine the sample-based consistency and verbalized methods to propose a hybrid framework that yields a better uncertainty estimation for GPT models. Overall, our work proposes novel uncertainty quantification methods that will improve the reliability of Large Language Models in misinformation mitigation applications.

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Linguistically Communicating Uncertainty in Patient-Facing Risk Prediction Models
Adarsa Sivaprasad | Ehud Reiter

This paper addresses the unique challenges associated with uncertainty quantification in AI models when applied to patient-facing contexts within healthcare. Unlike traditional eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods tailored for model developers or domain experts, additional considerations of communicating in natural language, its presentation and evaluating understandability are necessary. We identify the challenges in communication model performance, confidence, reasoning and unknown knowns using natural language in the context of risk prediction. We propose a design aimed at addressing these challenges, focusing on the specific application of in-vitro fertilisation outcome prediction.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language

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Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language
Valentina Pyatkin | Daniel Fried | Elias Stengel-Eskin | Elias Stengel-Eskin | Alisa Liu | Sandro Pezzelle

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Taking Action Towards Graceful Interaction: The Effects of Performing Actions on Modelling Policies for Instruction Clarification Requests
Brielen Madureira | David Schlangen

Clarification requests are a mechanism to help solve communication problems, e.g. due to ambiguity or underspecification, in instruction-following interactions. Despite their importance, even skilful models struggle with producing or interpreting such repair acts. In this work, we test three hypotheses concerning the effects of action taking as an auxiliary task in modelling iCR policies. Contrary to initial expectations, we conclude that its contribution to learning an iCR policy is limited, but some information can still be extracted from prediction uncertainty. We present further evidence that even well-motivated, Transformer-based models fail to learn good policies for when to ask Instruction CRs (iCRs), while the task of determining what to ask about can be more successfully modelled. Considering the implications of these findings, we further discuss the shortcomings of the data-driven paradigm for learning meta-communication acts.

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More Labels or Cases? Assessing Label Variation in Natural Language Inference
Cornelia Gruber | Katharina Hechinger | Matthias Assenmacher | Göran Kauermann | Barbara Plank

In this work, we analyze the uncertainty that is inherently present in the labels used for supervised machine learning in natural language inference (NLI). In cases where multiple annotations per instance are available, neither the majority vote nor the frequency of individual class votes is a trustworthy representation of the labeling uncertainty. We propose modeling the votes via a Bayesian mixture model to recover the data-generating process, i.e., the “true” latent classes, and thus gain insight into the class variations. This will enable a better understanding of the confusion happening during the annotation process. We also assess the stability of the proposed estimation procedure by systematically varying the numbers of i) instances and ii) labels. Thereby, we observe that few instances with many labels can predict the latent class borders reasonably well, while the estimation fails for many instances with only a few labels. This leads us to conclude that multiple labels are a crucial building block for properly analyzing label uncertainty.

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Resolving Transcription Ambiguity in Spanish: A Hybrid Acoustic-Lexical System for Punctuation Restoration
Xiliang Zhu | Chia-Tien Chang | Shayna Gardiner | David Rossouw | Jonas Robertson

Punctuation restoration is a crucial step after Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems to enhance transcript readability and facilitate subsequent NLP tasks. Nevertheless, conventional lexical-based approaches are inadequate for solving the punctuation restoration task in Spanish, where ambiguity can be often found between unpunctuated declaratives and questions. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid acoustic-lexical punctuation restoration system for Spanish transcription, which consolidates acoustic and lexical signals through a modular process. Our experiment results show that the proposed system can effectively improve F1 score of question marks and overall punctuation restoration on both public and internal Spanish conversational datasets. Additionally, benchmark comparison against LLMs (Large Language Model) indicates the superiority of our approach in accuracy, reliability and latency. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the Word Error Rate (WER) of the ASR module also benefits from our proposed system.

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Assessing the Significance of Encoded Information in Contextualized Representations to Word Sense Disambiguation
Deniz Ekin Yavas

The similarity of representations is crucial for WSD. However, a lot of information is encoded in the contextualized representations, and it is not clear which sentence context features drive this similarity and whether these features are significant to WSD. In this study, we address these questions. First, we identify the sentence context features that are responsible for the similarity of the contextualized representations of different occurrences of words. For this purpose, we conduct an explainability experiment and identify the sentence context features that lead to the formation of the clusters in word sense clustering with CWEs. Then, we provide a qualitative evaluation for assessing the significance of these features to WSD. Our results show that features that lack significance to WSD determine the similarity of the representations even when different senses of a word occur in highly diverse contexts and sentence context provides clear clues for different senses.

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Below the Sea (with the Sharks): Probing Textual Features of Implicit Sentiment in a Literary Case-study
Yuri Bizzoni | Pascale Feldkamp

Literary language presents an ongoing challenge for Sentiment Analysis due to its complex, nuanced, and layered form of expression. It is often suggested that effective literary writing is evocative, operating beneath the surface and understating emotional expression. To explore features of implicitness in literary expression, this study takes Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea as a case for examining implicit sentiment expression. We examine sentences where automatic sentiment annotations show substantial divergences from human sentiment annotations, and probe these sentences for distinctive traits. We find that sentences where humans perceived a strong sentiment while models did not are significantly lower in arousal and higher in concreteness than sentences where humans and models were more aligned, suggesting the importance of simplicity and concreteness for implicit sentiment expression in literary prose.

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Exposing propaganda: an analysis of stylistic cues comparing human annotations and machine classification
Géraud Faye | Benjamin Icard | Morgane Casanova | Julien Chanson | François Maine | François Bancilhon | Guillaume Gadek | Guillaume Gravier | Paul Égré

This paper investigates the language of propaganda and its stylistic features. It presents the PPN dataset, standing for Propagandist Pseudo-News, a multisource, multilingual, multimodal dataset composed of news articles extracted from websites identified as propaganda sources by expert agencies. A limited sample from this set was randomly mixed with papers from the regular French press, and their URL masked, to conduct an annotation-experiment by humans, using 11 distinct labels. The results show that human annotators were able to reliably discriminate between the two types of press across each of the labels. We use different NLP techniques to identify the cues used by annotators, and to compare them with machine classification: first the analyzer VAGO to detect discourse vagueness and subjectivity, and then four different classifiers, two based on RoBERTa, one CATS using syntax, and one XGBoost combining syntactic and semantic features.

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Different Tastes of Entities: Investigating Human Label Variation in Named Entity Annotations
Siyao Peng | Zihang Sun | Sebastian Loftus | Barbara Plank

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a key information extraction task with a long-standing tradition. While recent studies address and aim to correct annotation errors via re-labeling efforts, little is known about the sources of label variation, such as text ambiguity, annotation error, or guideline divergence. This is especially the case for high-quality datasets and beyond English CoNLL03. This paper studies disagreements in expert-annotated named entity datasets for three varieties: English, Danish, and DialectX. We show that text ambiguity and artificial guideline changes are dominant factors for diverse annotations among high-quality revisions. We survey student annotations on a subset of difficult entities and substantiate the feasibility and necessity of manifold annotations for understanding named entity ambiguities from a distributional perspective.

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Colour Me Uncertain: Representing Vagueness with Probabilistic Semantics
Kin Chun Cheung | Guy Emerson

People successfully communicate in everyday situations using vague language. In particular, colour terms have no clear boundaries as to the ranges of colours they describe. We model people’s reasoning process in a dyadic reference game using the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework and probabilistic semantics, and we find that the implementation of probabilistic semantics requires a modification from pure theory to perform well on real-world data. In addition, we explore approaches to handling target disagreements in reference games, an issue that is rarely discussed in the RSA literature.
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bib (full) Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text (W-NUT 2024)

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Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Noisy and User-generated Text (W-NUT 2024)
Rob van der Goot | JinYeong Bak | Max Müller-Eberstein | Wei Xu | Alan Ritter | Tim Baldwin

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Correcting Challenging Finnish Learner Texts With Claude, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Large Language Models
Mathias Creutz

This paper studies the correction of challenging authentic Finnish learner texts at beginner level (CEFR A1). Three state-of-the-art large language models are compared, and it is shown that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5, which in turn outperforms Claude v1 on this task. Additionally, ensemble models based on classifiers combining outputs of multiple single models are evaluated. The highest accuracy for an ensemble model is 84.3%, whereas the best single model, which is a GPT-4 model, produces sentences that are fully correct 83.3% of the time. In general, the different models perform on a continuum, where grammatical correctness, fluency and coherence go hand in hand.

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Context-aware Adversarial Attack on Named Entity Recognition
Shuguang Chen | Leonardo Neves | Thamar Solorio

In recent years, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on many natural language processing benchmarks. Despite their success, prior studies have shown that PLMs are vulnerable to attacks from adversarial examples. In this work, we focus on the named entity recognition task and study context-aware adversarial attack methods to examine the model’s robustness. Specifically, we propose perturbing the most informative words for recognizing entities to create adversarial examples and investigate different candidate replacement methods to generate natural and plausible adversarial examples. Experiments and analyses show that our methods are more effective in deceiving the model into making wrong predictions than strong baselines.

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Effects of different types of noise in user-generated reviews on human and machine translations including ChatGPT
Maja Popovic | Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski | Maarit Koponen

This paper investigates effects of noisy source texts (containing spelling and grammar errors, informal words or expressions, etc.) on human and machine translations, namely whether the noisy phenomena are kept in the translations, corrected, or caused errors. The analysed data consists of English user reviews of Amazon products translated into Croatian, Russian and Finnish by professional translators, translation students, machine translation (MT) systems, and ChatGPT language model. The results show that overall, ChatGPT and professional translators mostly correct/standardise those parts, while students are often keeping them. Furthermore, MT systems are most prone to errors while ChatGPT is more robust, but notably less robust than human translators. Finally, some of the phenomena are particularly challenging both for MT systems and for ChatGPT, especially spelling errors and informal constructions.

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Stanceosaurus 2.0 - Classifying Stance Towards Russian and Spanish Misinformation
Anton Lavrouk | Ian Ligon | Jonathan Zheng | Tarek Naous | Wei Xu | Alan Ritter

The Stanceosaurus corpus (Zheng et al., 2022) was designed to provide high-quality, annotated, 5-way stance data extracted from Twitter, suitable for analyzing cross-cultural and cross-lingual misinformation. In the Stanceosaurus 2.0 iteration, we extend this framework to encompass Russian and Spanish. The former is of current significance due to prevalent misinformation amid escalating tensions with the West and the violent incursion into Ukraine. The latter, meanwhile, represents an enormous community that has been largely overlooked on major social media platforms. By incorporating an additional 3,874 Spanish and Russian tweets over 41 misinformation claims, our objective is to support research focused on these issues. To demonstrate the value of this data, we employed zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on multilingual BERT, yielding results on par with the initial Stanceosaurus study with a macro F1 score of 43 for both languages. This underlines the viability of stance classification as an effective tool for identifying multicultural misinformation.

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A Comparative Analysis of Noise Reduction Methods in Sentiment Analysis on Noisy Bangla Texts
Kazi Elahi | Tasnuva Rahman | Shakil Shahriar | Samir Sarker | Md. Shawon | G. M. Shibli

While Bangla is considered a language with limited resources, sentiment analysis has been a subject of extensive research in the literature. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of exploration into sentiment analysis specifically in the realm of noisy Bangla texts. In this paper, we introduce a dataset (NC-SentNoB) that we annotated manually to identify ten different types of noise found in a pre-existing sentiment analysis dataset comprising of around 15K noisy Bangla texts. At first, given an input noisy text, we identify the noise type, addressing this as a multi-label classification task. Then, we introduce baseline noise reduction methods to alleviate noise prior to conducting sentiment analysis. Finally, we assess the performance of fine-tuned sentiment analysis models with both noisy and noise-reduced texts to make comparisons. The experimental findings indicate that the noise reduction methods utilized are not satisfactory, highlighting the need for more suitable noise reduction methods in future research endeavors. We have made the implementation and dataset presented in this paper publicly available at https://github.com/ktoufiquee/A-Comparative-Analysis-of-Noise-Reduction-Methods-in-Sentiment-Analysis-on-Noisy-Bangla-Texts

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Label Supervised Contrastive Learning for Imbalanced Text Classification in Euclidean and Hyperbolic Embedding Spaces
Baber Khalid | Shuyang Dai | Tara Taghavi | Sungjin Lee

Text classification is an important problem with a wide range of applications in NLP. However, naturally occurring data is imbalanced which can induce biases when training classification models. In this work, we introduce a novel contrastive learning (CL) approach to help with imbalanced text classification task. CL has an inherent structure which pushes similar data closer in embedding space and vice versa using data samples anchors. However, in traditional CL methods text embeddings are used as anchors, which are scattered over the embedding space. We propose a CL approach which learns key anchors in the form of label embeddings and uses them as anchors. This allows our approach to bring the embeddings closer to their labels in the embedding space and divide the embedding space between labels in a fairer manner. We also introduce a novel method to improve the interpretability of our approach in a multi-class classification scenario. This approach learns the inter-class relationships during training which provide insight into the model decisions. Since our approach is focused on dividing the embedding space between different labels we also experiment with hyperbolic embeddings since they have been proven successful in embedding hierarchical information. Our proposed method outperforms several state-of-the-art baselines by an average 11% F1. Our interpretable approach highlights key data relationships and our experiments with hyperbolic embeddings give us important insights for future investigations. We will release the implementation of our approach with the publication.

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MaintNorm: A corpus and benchmark model for lexical normalisation and masking of industrial maintenance short text
Tyler Bikaun | Melinda Hodkiewicz | Wei Liu

Maintenance short texts are invaluable unstructured data sources, serving as a diagnostic and prognostic window into the operational health and status of physical assets. These user-generated texts, created during routine or ad-hoc maintenance activities, offer insights into equipment performance, potential failure points, and maintenance needs. However, the use of information captured in these texts is hindered by inherent challenges: the prevalence of engineering jargon, domain-specific vernacular, random spelling errors without identifiable patterns, and the absence of standard grammatical structures. To transform these texts into accessible and analysable data, we introduce the MaintNorm dataset, the first resource specifically tailored for the lexical normalisation task of maintenance short texts. Comprising 12,000 examples, this dataset enables the efficient processing and interpretation of these texts. We demonstrate the utility of MaintNorm by training a lexical normalisation model as a sequence-to-sequence learning task with two learning objectives, namely, enhancing the quality of the texts and masking segments to obscure sensitive information to anonymise data. Our benchmark model demonstrates a universal error reduction rate of 95.8%. The dataset and benchmark outcomes are available to the public.

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The Effects of Data Quality on Named Entity Recognition
Divya Bhadauria | Alejandro Sierra Múnera | Ralf Krestel

The extraction of valuable information from the vast amount of digital data available today has become increasingly important, making Named Entity Recognition models an essential component of information extraction tasks. This emphasizes the importance of understanding the factors that can compromise the performance of these models. Many studies have examined the impact of data annotation errors on NER models, leaving the broader implication of overall data quality on these models unexplored. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of three prominent NER models on datasets with varying amounts of textual noise types. The results show that as the noise in the dataset increases, model performance declines, with a minor impact for some noise types and a significant drop in performance for others. The findings of this research can be used as a foundation for building robust NER systems by enhancing dataset quality beforehand.

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Topic Bias in Emotion Classification
Maximilian Wegge | Roman Klinger

Emotion corpora are typically sampled based on keyword/hashtag search or by asking study participants to generate textual instances. In any case, these corpora are not uniform samples representing the entirety of a domain. We hypothesize that this practice of data acquision leads to unrealistic correlations between overrepresented topics in these corpora that harm the generalizability of models. Such topic bias could lead to wrong predictions for instances like “I organized the service for my aunt’s funeral.” when funeral events are overpresented for instances labeled with sadness, despite the emotion of pride being more appropriate here. In this paper, we study this topic bias both from the data and the modeling perspective. We first label a set of emotion corpora automatically via topic modeling and show that emotions in fact correlate with specific topics. Further, we see that emotion classifiers are confounded by such topics. Finally, we show that the established debiasing method of adversarial correction via gradient reversal mitigates the issue. Our work points out issues with existing emotion corpora and that more representative resources are required for fair evaluation of models predicting affective concepts from text.

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Stars Are All You Need: A Distantly Supervised Pyramid Network for Unified Sentiment Analysis
Wenchang Li | Yixing Chen | Shuang Zheng | Lei Wang | John Lalor

Data for the Rating Prediction (RP) sentiment analysis task such as star reviews are readily available. However, data for aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) is often desired because of the fine-grained nature but are expensive to collect. In this work we present a method for learning ACSA using only RP labels. We propose Unified Sentiment Analysis (Uni-SA) to efficiently understand aspect and review sentiment in a unified manner. We propose a Distantly Supervised Pyramid Network (DSPN) to efficiently perform Aspect-Category Detection (ACD), ACSA, and OSA using only RP labels for training. We evaluate DSPN on multi-aspect review datasets in English and Chinese and find that with only star rating labels for supervision, DSPN performs comparably well to a variety of benchmark models. We also demonstrate the interpretability of DSPN’s outputs on reviews to show the pyramid structure inherent in document level end-to-end sentiment analysis.