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Daniel Fried, Nicholas Tomlin, Jennifer Hu, Roma Patel, Aida Nematzadeh

People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require similar skills in pragmatics: relying on various types of context — from shared linguistic goals and conventions, to the visual and embodied world — to use language effectively. We survey existing grounded settings and pragmatic modeling approaches and analyze how the task goals, environmental contexts, and communicative affordances in each work enrich linguistic meaning. We present recommendations for future grounded task design to naturally elicit pragmatic phenomena, and suggest directions that focus on a broader range of communicative contexts and affordances.

Chengpeng Fu, Xiaocheng Feng, Yichong Huang, Wenshuai Huo, Hui Wang, Bing Qin, Ting Liu

Unsupervised neural machine translation has recently made remarkable strides, achieving impressive results with the exclusive use of monolingual corpora. Nonetheless, these methods still exhibit fundamental flaws, such as confusing similar words. A straightforward remedy to rectify this drawback is to employ bilingual dictionaries, however, high-quality bilingual dictionaries can be costly to obtain. To overcome this limitation, we propose a method that incorporates images at the word level to augment the lexical mappings. Specifically, our method inserts visual representations into the model, modifying the corresponding embedding layer information. Besides, a visible matrix is adopted to isolate the impact of images on other unrelated words. Experiments on the Multi30k dataset with over 300,000 self-collected images validate the effectiveness in generating more accurate word translation, achieving an improvement of up to +2.81 BLEU score, which is comparable or even superior to using bilingual dictionaries.

Dimosthenis Antypas, Asahi Ushio, Francesco Barbieri, Leonardo Neves, Kiamehr Rezaee, Luis Espinosa-Anke, Jiaxin Pei, Jose Camacho-Collados

Despite its relevance, the maturity of NLP for social media pales in comparison with general-purpose models, metrics and benchmarks. This fragmented landscape makes it hard for the community to know, for instance, given a task, which is the best performing model and how it compares with others. To alleviate this issue, we introduce a unified benchmark for NLP evaluation in social media, SuperTweetEval, which includes a heterogeneous set of tasks and datasets combined, adapted and constructed from scratch. We benchmarked the performance of a wide range of models on SuperTweetEval and our results suggest that, despite the recent advances in language modelling, social media remains challenging.

Hellina Nigatu, Atnafu Tonja, Jugal Kalita

Multilingual Language Models offer a way to incorporate multiple languages in one model and utilize cross-language transfer learning to improve performance for different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Despite progress in multilingual models, not all languages are supported as well, particularly in low-resource settings. In this work, we investigate the linguistic representation of different languages in multilingual models. We start by asking the question which languages are supported in popular multilingual models and which languages are left behind. Then, for included languages, we look at models’ learned representations based on language family and dialect and try to understand how models’ learned representations for (1) seen and (2) unseen languages vary across different language groups. In addition, we test and analyze performance on downstream tasks such as text generation and Named Entity Recognition. We observe from our experiments that community-centered models—models that focus on languages of a given family or geographical location and are built by communities who speak them—perform better at distinguishing between languages in the same family for low-resource languages. Our paper contributes to the literature in understanding multilingual models and their shortcomings and offers insights on potential ways to improve them.

Young-Suk Lee, Md Sultan, Yousef El-Kurdi, Tahira Naseem, Asim Munawar, Radu Florian, Salim Roukos, Ramón Astudillo

Using in-context learning (ICL) for data generation, techniques such as Self-Instruct (Wang et al., 2023) or the follow-up Alpaca (Taori et al., 2023) can train strong conversational agents with only a small amount of human supervision. One limitation of these approaches is that they resort to very large language models (around 175B parameters) that are also proprietary and non-public. Here we explore the application of such techniques to language models that are much smaller (around 10B–40B parameters) and have permissive licenses. We find the Self-Instruct approach to be less effective at these sizes and propose new ICL methods that draw on two main ideas: (a) categorization and simplification of the ICL templates to make prompt learning easier for the LM, and (b) ensembling over multiple LM outputs to help select high-quality synthetic examples. Our algorithm leverages the 175 Self-Instruct seed tasks and employs separate pipelines for instructions that require an input and instructions that do not. Empirical investigations with different LMs show that: (1) Our proposed method yields higher-quality instruction tuning data than Self-Instruct, (2) It improves performances of both vanilla and instruction-tuned LMs by significant margins, and (3) Smaller instruction-tuned LMs generate more useful examples than their larger un-tuned counterparts.

Shulin Cao, Jiajie Zhang, Jiaxin Shi, Xin Lv, Zijun Yao, Qi Tian, Lei Hou, Juanzi Li

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of answering knowledge-intensive complex questions with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning. However, they tend to generate factually incorrect reasoning steps when the required knowledge is not available or up-to-date in models’ parameters. Recent works turn to retrieving external knowledge to augment CoT reasoning. Despite being promising, these chain-based methods suffer from: 1) Negative retrieval. Unnecessary or incorrect retrieval may mislead the reasoning; 2) Limited sight. Lacking the ability to look backward or forward, a local error in one step will propagate along the chain. In this paper, we propose a novel approach: Probabilistic Tree-of-thought Reasoning (ProbTree). First, LLMs translate a complex question into a query tree, in which each non-root node denotes a sub-question of its parent node. Then, probabilistic reasoning is conducted over the tree, by solving questions from leaf to root considering the confidence of both question decomposing and answering. During reasoning, for leaf nodes, LLMs choose a more confident answer from Closed-book QA that employs parametric knowledge and Open-book QA that employs retrieved external knowledge, thus eliminating the negative retrieval problem. For non-leaf nodes, with the hierarchical structure, LLMs have broader sights and are able to globally reason with the information from child nodes, thus recovering from local errors. The experiments on three Complex QA datasets under the open-domain setting show that our approach outperforms SOTA methods significantly, demonstrating the effect of probabilistic tree-of-thought reasoning.

Song Wang, Zhen Tan, Ruocheng Guo, Jundong Li

Adopting a two-stage paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved substantial advancements in the field of natural language processing. However, in real-world scenarios, data labels are often noisy due to the complex annotation process, making it essential to develop strategies for fine-tuning PLMs with such noisy labels. To this end, we introduce an innovative approach for fine-tuning PLMs using noisy labels, which incorporates the guidance of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This guidance assists in accurately distinguishing between clean and noisy samples and provides supplementary information beyond the noisy labels, thereby boosting the learning process during fine-tuning PLMs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world noisy datasets further demonstrate the superior advantages of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines.

Wencong You, Zayd Hammoudeh, Daniel Lowd

Backdoor attacks manipulate model predictions by inserting innocuous triggers into training and test data. We focus on more realistic and more challenging clean-label attacks where the adversarial training examples are correctly labeled. Our attack, LLMBkd, leverages language models to automatically insert diverse style-based triggers into texts. We also propose a poison selection technique to improve the effectiveness of both LLMBkd as well as existing textual backdoor attacks. Lastly, we describe REACT, a baseline defense to mitigate backdoor attacks via antidote training examples. Our evaluations demonstrate LLMBkd’s effectiveness and efficiency, where we consistently achieve high attack success rates across a wide range of styles with little effort and no model training.

Naihao Deng, Xinliang Frederick Zhang, Siyang Liu, Winston Wu, Lu Wang, Rada Mihalcea

Annotator disagreement is ubiquitous in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. There are multiple reasons for such disagreements, including the subjectivity of the task, difficult cases, unclear guidelines, and so on. Rather than simply aggregating labels to obtain data annotations, we instead try to directly model the diverse perspectives of the annotators, and explicitly account for annotators’ idiosyncrasies in the modeling process by creating representations for each annotator (*annotator embeddings*) and also their annotations (*annotation embeddings*). In addition, we propose **TID-8**, **T**he **I**nherent **D**isagreement - **8** dataset, a benchmark that consists of eight existing language understanding datasets that have inherent annotator disagreement. We test our approach on TID-8 and show that our approach helps models learn significantly better from disagreements on six different datasets in TID-8 while increasing model size by fewer than 1% parameters. By capturing the unique tendencies and subjectivity of individual annotators through embeddings, our representations prime AI models to be inclusive of diverse viewpoints.

Shaurya Vats, Atharva Zope, Somsubhra De, Anurag Sharma, Upal Bhattacharya, Shubham Kumar Nigam, Shouvik Guha, Koustav Rudra, Kripabandhu Ghosh

The Large Language Models (LLMs) have impacted many real-life tasks. To examine the efficacy of LLMs in a high-stake domain like law, we have applied state-of-the-art LLMs for two popular tasks: Statute Prediction and Judgment Prediction, on Indian Supreme Court cases. We see that while LLMs exhibit excellent predictive performance in Statute Prediction, their performance dips in Judgment Prediction when compared with many standard models. The explanations generated by LLMs (along with prediction) are of moderate to decent quality. We also see evidence of gender and religious bias in the LLM-predicted results. In addition, we present a note from a senior legal expert on the ethical concerns of deploying LLMs in these critical legal tasks.

Xiaomeng Jin, Bhanukiran Vinzamuri, Sriram Venkatapathy, Heng Ji, Pradeep Natarajan

Large language models (LLM’s) have been widely used for several applications such as question answering, text classification and clustering. While the preliminary results across the aforementioned tasks looks promising, recent work has dived deep into LLM’s performing poorly for complex Named Entity Recognition (NER) tasks in comparison to fine-tuned pre-trained language models (PLM’s). To enhance wider adoption of LLM’s, our paper investigates the robustness of such LLM NER models and its instruction fine-tuned variants to adversarial attacks. In particular, we propose a novel attack which relies on disentanglement and word attribution techniques where the former aids in learning an embedding capturing both entity and non-entity influences separately, and the latter aids in identifying important words across both components. This is in stark contrast to most techniques which primarily leverage non-entity words for perturbations limiting the space being explored to synthesize effective adversarial examples. Adversarial training results based on our method improves the F1 score over original LLM NER model by 8% and 18% on CoNLL-2003 and Ontonotes 5.0 datasets respectively.

Haoyu Wang, Yaqing Wang, Huaxiu Yao, Jing Gao

Cross-lingual natural language understanding(NLU) is one of the fundamental tasks of NLP. The goal is to learn a model which can generalize well on both high-resource and low-resource language data. Recent pre-trained multilingual language models, e.g., multilingual BERT, XLM, have shown impressive performance on cross-lingual NLU tasks. However, such promising results request the use of sufficient training data, which is a difficult condition to satisfy for low-resource language. When the data is limited in those low resource languages, the accuracy of existing models will drop. In light of this challenge, we investigate the important task of how to train the cross-lingual model with abundant high-source language data and limited low-resource language data. Existing methods typically learn language-agnostic representation via adversarial training and mutual information estimation. Existing approaches may suffer When data is very limited (e.g., low-resource language) because it is challenging to estimate data distribution accurately. To tackle this issue, we propose a conceptually innovative approach to remove language-associated information via minimizing representation coding rate reduction(Macedon). Specifically, Macedon avoids using extra codes to encode language-related information, which is measured by the rate-distortion function. To validate the effectiveness of Macedon, we conduct extensive experiments on three tasks, including paraphrase identification, natural language inference, and query advertisement matching. The experiment results show that the proposed Macedon outperforms state-of-the-art cross-lingual NLU approaches.

Yan Junbing, Chengyu Wang, Taolin Zhang, Xiaofeng He, Jun Huang, Wei Zhang

Reasoning is a distinctive human capacity, enabling us to address complex problems by breaking them down into a series of manageable cognitive steps. Yet, complex logical reasoning is still cumbersome for language models. Based on the dual process theory in cognitive science, we are the first to unravel the cognitive reasoning abilities of language models. Our framework employs an iterative methodology to construct a Cognitive Tree (CogTree). The root node of this tree represents the initial query, while the leaf nodes consist of straightforward questions that can be answered directly. This construction involves two main components: the implicit extraction module (referred to as the intuitive system) and the explicit reasoning module (referred to as the reflective system). The intuitive system rapidly generates multiple responses by utilizing in-context examples, while the reflective system scores these responses using comparative learning. The scores guide the intuitive system in its subsequent generation step.Our experimental results on two popular and challenging reasoning tasks indicate that it is possible to achieve a performance level comparable to that of GPT-3.5 (with 175B parameters), using a significantly smaller language model that contains fewer parameters (<=7B) than 5% of GPT-3.5.

Jinyan Su, Terry Zhuo, Di Wang, Preslav Nakov

With the rapid progress of Large language models (LLMs) and the huge amount of text they generate, it becomes impractical to manually distinguish whether a text is machine-generated. The growing use of LLMs in social media and education, prompts us to develop methods to detect machine-generated text, preventing malicious use such as plagiarism, misinformation, and propaganda. In this paper, we introduce two novel zero-shot methods for detecting machine-generated text by leveraging the Log-Rank information. One is called DetectLLM-LRR, which is fast and efficient, and the other is called DetectLLM-NPR, which is more accurate, but slower due to the need for perturbations. Our experiments on three datasets and seven language models show that our proposed methods improve over the state of the art by 3.9 and 1.75 AUROC points absolute. Moreover, DetectLLM-NPR needs fewer perturbations than previous work to achieve the same level of performance, which makes it more practical for real-world use. We also investigate the efficiency-performance trade-off based on users’ preference for these two measures and provide intuition for using them in practice effectively. We release the data and the code of both methods in https://github.com/mbzuai-nlp/DetectLLM.

Haoyang Huang, Tianyi Tang, Dongdong Zhang, Xin Zhao, Ting Song, Yan Xia, Furu Wei

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive multilingual capability, but their performance varies substantially across different languages. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective method, called cross-lingual-thought prompting (XLT), to systematically improve the multilingual capability of LLMs. Specifically, XLT is a generic template prompt that stimulates cross-lingual and logical reasoning skills to enhance task performance across languages. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on 7 typical benchmarks related to reasoning, understanding, and generation tasks, covering both high-resource and low-resource languages. Experimental results show that XLT not only remarkably enhances the performance of various multilingual tasks but also significantly reduces the gap between the average performance and the best performance of each task in different languages. Notably, XLT brings over 10 points of average improvement in arithmetic reasoning and open-domain question-answering tasks.

Yi Tay, Mostafa Dehghani, Samira Abnar, Hyung Chung, William Fedus, Jinfeng Rao, Sharan Narang, Vinh Tran, Dani Yogatama, Donald Metzler

There have been a lot of interest in the scaling properties of Transformer models. However, not much has been done on the front of investigating the effect of scaling properties of different inductive biases and model architectures. Do model architectures scale differently? If so, how does inductive bias affect scaling behaviour? How does this influence upstream (pretraining) and downstream (transfer)? This paper conducts a systematic study of scaling behaviour of ten diverse model architectures such as Transformers, Switch Transformers, Universal Transformers, Dynamic convolutions, Performers, and recently proposed MLP-Mixers. Via extensive experiments, we show that (1) architecture is an indeed an important consideration when performing scaling and (2) the best performing model can fluctuate at different scales. We believe that the findings outlined in this work has significant implications to how model architectures are currently evaluated in the community.

Yuwei Bao, Keunwoo Yu, Yichi Zhang, Shane Storks, Itamar Bar-Yossef, Alex de la Iglesia, Megan Su, Xiao Zheng, Joyce Chai

Despite tremendous advances in AI, it remains a significant challenge to develop interactive task guidance systems that can offer situated, personalized guidance and assist humans in various tasks. These systems need to have a sophisticated understanding of the user as well as the environment, and make timely accurate decisions on when and what to say. To address this issue, we created a new multimodal benchmark dataset, Watch, Talk and Guide (WTaG) based on natural interaction between a human user and a human instructor. We further proposed two tasks: User and Environment Understanding, and Instructor Decision Making. We leveraged several foundation models to study to what extent these models can be quickly adapted to perceptually enabled task guidance. Our quantitative, qualitative, and human evaluation results show that these models can demonstrate fair performances in some cases with no task-specific training, but a fast and reliable adaptation remains a significant challenge. Our benchmark and baselines will provide a stepping stone for future work on situated task guidance.

Pola Schwöbel, Jacek Golebiowski, Michele Donini, Cedric Archambeau, Danish Pruthi

Large language models (LLMs) encode vast amounts of world knowledge. However, since these models are trained on large swaths of internet data, they are at risk of inordinately capturing information about dominant groups. This imbalance can propagate into generated language. In this work, we study and operationalise a form of geographical erasure wherein language models underpredict certain countries. We demonstrate consistent instances of erasure across a range of LLMs. We discover that erasure strongly correlates with low frequencies of country mentions in the training corpus. Lastly, we mitigate erasure by finetuning using a custom objective.

Seonghyeon Ye, Joel Jang, Doyoung Kim, Yongrae Jo, Minjoon Seo

Enhancing the zero-shot performance of instruction-following models requires heavy computation, either by scaling the total number of training datasets or the model size. In this work, we explore how retrieval of soft prompts obtained through prompt tuning can efficiently assist hard prompts in zero-shot task generalization. Specifically, we train soft prompt embeddings for each prompt through prompt tuning, store the samples of the training instances mapped with the prompt embeddings, and retrieve the corresponding prompt embedding of the training instance closest to the query instance during inference. While only adding 0.007% additional parameters, retrieval of soft prompt enhances the performance of T0 on unseen tasks by outperforming it on 10 out of 11 datasets as well as improving the mean accuracy of T0 on BIG-bench benchmark by 2.39% points. Also, we report an interesting finding that retrieving source embeddings trained on similar answer choice formats is more important than those on similar task types.

Giuseppe Samo, Vivi Nastase, Chunyang Jiang, Paola Merlo

Current NLP models appear to be achieving performance comparable to human capabilities on well-established benchmarks. New benchmarks are now necessary to test deeper layers of understanding of natural languages by these models. Blackbird’s Language Matrices are a recently developed framework that draws inspiration from tests of human analytic intelligence. The BLM task has revealed that successful performances in previously studied linguistic problems do not yet stem from a deep understanding of the generative factors that define these problems. In this study, we define a new BLM task for predicate-argument structure, and develop a structured dataset for its investigation, concentrating on the spray-load verb alternations in English, as a case study. The context sentences include one alternant from the spray-load alternation and the target sentence is the other alternant, to be chosen among a minimally contrastive and adversarial set of answers. We describe the generation process of the dataset and the reasoning behind the generating rules. The dataset aims to facilitate investigations into how verb information is encoded in sentence embeddings and how models generalize to the complex properties of argument structures. Benchmarking experiments conducted on the dataset and qualitative error analysis on the answer set reveal the inherent challenges associated with the problem even for current high-performing representations.