Thailand

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by duplicated data in their extensive pre-training datasets. Current approaches primarily focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. To address this, we propose a soft deduplication method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. Central to our approach is the concept of &quot;data commonness&quot;, a metric we introduce to quantify the degree of duplication by measuring the occurrence probabilities of samples using an n-gram model. Empirical analysis shows that this method significantly improves training efficiency, achieving comparable perplexity scores with at least a 26\% reduction in required training steps. Additionally, it enhances average few-shot downstream accuracy by 1.77\% when trained for an equivalent duration. Importantly, this approach consistently improves performance, even on rigorously deduplicated datasets, indicating its potential to complement existing methods and become a standard pre-training process for LLMs.

ACL 2024

SoftDedup: an Efficient Data Reweighting Method for Speeding Up Language Model Pre-training

data deduplication

data reweighting

language model

**Welcome to EMNLP 2023!**

On behalf of the EMNLP 2023 Organizing Committee, I extend a warm and heartfelt welcome to all of you to the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). It is with immense pleasure and excitement that we gather here in Singapore, a vibrant hub of innovation and technological advancement.

The conference program is packed with insightful presentations, thought-provoking workshops, and engaging networking opportunities. In addition to the technical sessions, we have also planned several social events that will provide you with the opportunity to connect with your colleagues.

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Of course, we are grateful to our sponsors and partners for their generous support of EMNLP 2023, whose contributions make it possible for us to host this world-class event.

Yuji Matsumoto (RIKEN AIP) 
EMNLP 2023 General Chair

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EMNLP 2023

EMNLP 2023 took place in Singapore from Dec 6th to Dec 10th, 2023.

The effectiveness of large language models (LLMs) is often hindered by duplicated data in their extensive pre-training datasets. Current approaches primarily focus on detecting and removing duplicates, which risks the loss of valuable information and neglects the varying degrees of duplication. To address this, we propose a soft deduplication method that maintains dataset integrity while selectively reducing the sampling weight of data with high commonness. Central to our approach is the concept of "data commonness", a metric we introduce to quantify the degree of duplication by measuring the occurrence probabilities of samples using an n-gram model. Empirical analysis shows that this method significantly improves training efficiency, achieving comparable perplexity scores with at least a 26\% reduction in required training steps. Additionally, it enhances average few-shot downstream accuracy by 1.77\% when trained for an equivalent duration. Importantly, this approach consistently improves performance, even on rigorously deduplicated datasets, indicating its potential to complement existing methods and become a standard pre-training process for LLMs.

poster

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Complex reasoning ability is one of the most important features of Large Language Models (LLMs). Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the reasoning abilities of LLMs. However, they are inadequate in offering a rigorous evaluation and prone to the risk of overfitting, as these publicly accessible and static benchmarks allow models to potentially tailor their responses to specific benchmark metrics, thereby inflating their performance. Addressing these limitations, we introduce a new benchmark NPHardEval. It contains a broad spectrum of 900 algorithmic questions belonging up to the NP-Hard complexity class, offering a rigorous measure of the reasoning ability of LLMs utilizing computational complexity. Moreover, this benchmark is designed with a dynamic update mechanism, where the datapoints are refreshed on a monthly basis. Such regular updates play a crucial role in mitigating the risk of LLMs overfitting to the benchmark, promoting a more accurate and reliable assessment of their reasoning capabilities. The benchmark dataset and code of NPHardEval are available at https://github.com/casmlab/NPHardEval.

NPHardEval: Dynamic Benchmark on Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models via Complexity Classes

This study investigates the privacy risks associated with text embeddings, focusing on the scenario where attackers cannot access the original embedding model. Contrary to previous research requiring direct model access, we explore a more realistic threat model by developing a transfer attack method. This approach uses a surrogate model to mimic the victim model's behavior, allowing the attacker to infer sensitive information from text embeddings without direct access. Our experiments across various embedding models and a clinical dataset demonstrate that our transfer attack significantly outperforms traditional methods, revealing the potential privacy vulnerabilities in embedding technologies and emphasizing the need for enhanced security measures.

Transferable Embedding Inversion Attack: Uncovering Privacy Risks in Text Embeddings without Model Queries

Generative AI systems have become ubiquitous for all kinds of modalities, which makes the issue of the evaluation of such models more pressing. One popular approach is preference ratings, where the generated outputs of different systems are shown to evaluators who choose their preferences. In recent years the field shifted towards the development of automated (trained) metrics to assess generated outputs, which can be used to create preference ratings automatically. In this work, we investigate the evaluation of the metrics themselves, which currently rely on measuring the correlation to human judgments or computing sign accuracy scores. 

These measures only assess how well the metric agrees with the human ratings. However, our research shows that this does not tell the whole story. Most metrics exhibit a disagreement with human system assessments which is often skewed in favor of particular text generation systems, exposing a degree of favoritism in automated metrics. This paper introduces a formal definition of favoritism in preference metrics, and derives the Favi-Score, which measures this phenomenon. In particular we show that favoritism is strongly related to errors in final system rankings. Thus, we propose that preference-based metrics ought to be evaluated on both sign accuracy scores and favoritism.

Favi-Score: A Measure for Favoritism in Automated Preference Ratings for Generative AI Evaluation

There is abundant evidence of the fact that the way words change their meaning can be classified in different types of change, highlighting the relationship between the old and new meanings (among which generalisation, specialisation and co-hyponymy transfer).
In this paper, we present a way of detecting these types of change by constructing a model that leverages information both from synchronic lexical relations and definitions of word meanings. Specifically, we use synset definitions and hierarchy information from WordNet and test it on a digitized version of Blank's (1997) dataset of semantic change types. Finally, we show how the sense relationships can improve models for both approximation of human judgments of semantic relatedness as well as binary Lexical Semantic Change Detection.

Using Synchronic Definitions and Semantic Relations to Classify Semantic Change Types

Collaborative review and revision of textual documents is the core of knowledge work and a promising target for empirical analysis and NLP assistance. Yet, a holistic framework that would allow modeling complex relationships between document revisions, reviews and author responses is lacking. To address this gap, we introduce Re3, a framework for joint analysis of collaborative document revision. We instantiate this framework in the scholarly domain, and present Re3-Sci, a large corpus of aligned scientific paper revisions manually labeled according to their action and intent, and supplemented with the respective peer reviews and human-written edit summaries. We use the new data to provide first empirical insights into collaborative document revision in the academic domain, and to assess the capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs at automating edit analysis and facilitating text-based collaboration. We make our annotation environment and protocols, the resulting data and experimental code publicly available.

Re3: A Holistic Framework and Dataset for Modeling Collaborative Document Revision

The ability to follow instructions is crucial for Large Language Models (LLMs) to handle various real-world applications. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on evaluating pure response quality, rather than assessing whether the response follows constraints stated in the instruction. To fill this research gap, in this paper, we propose FollowBench, a Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for LLMs. FollowBench comprehensively includes five different types (i.e., Content, Situation, Style, Format, and Example) of fine-grained constraints. To enable a precise constraint following estimation on diverse difficulties, we introduce a Multi-level mechanism that incrementally adds a single constraint to the initial instruction at each increased level. To assess whether LLMs' outputs have satisfied every individual constraint, we propose to prompt strong LLMs with constraint-evolution paths to handle challenging open-ended instructions. By evaluating 13 closed-source and open-source popular LLMs on FollowBench, we highlight the weaknesses of LLMs in instruction following and point towards potential avenues for future work. The data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/YJiangcm/FollowBench.

FollowBench: A Multi-level Fine-grained Constraints Following Benchmark for Large Language Models

Enhancing the attribution in large language models (LLMs) is a crucial task. One feasible approach is to enable LLMs to cite external sources that support their generations. However, existing datasets and evaluation methods in this domain still exhibit notable limitations. In this work, we formulate the task of attributed query-focused summarization (AQFS) and present WebCiteS, a Chinese dataset featuring 7k human-annotated summaries with citations. WebCiteS derives from real-world user queries and web search results, offering a valuable resource for model training and evaluation. Prior works in attribution evaluation do not differentiate between groundedness errors and citation errors. They also fall short in automatically verifying sentences that draw partial support from multiple sources. We tackle these issues by developing detailed metrics and enabling the automatic evaluator to decompose the sentences into sub-claims for fine-grained verification. Our comprehensive evaluation of both open-source and proprietary models on WebCiteS highlights the challenge LLMs face in correctly citing sources, underscoring the necessity for further improvement. The dataset and code will be open-sourced to facilitate further research in this crucial field.

WebCiteS: Attributed Query-Focused Summarization on Chinese Web Search Results with Citations

In the field of natural language processing, correction of performance assessment for chance agreement plays a crucial role in evaluating the reliability of annotations. However, there is a notable dearth of research focusing on chance correction for assessing the reliability of sequence annotation tasks, despite their widespread prevalence in the field. To address this gap, this paper introduces a novel model for generating random annotations, which serves as the foundation for estimating chance agreement in sequence annotation tasks. Utilizing the proposed randomization model and a related comparison approach, we successfully derive the analytical form of the distribution, enabling the computation of the probable location of each annotated text segment and subsequent chance agreement estimation. Through a combination simulation and corpus-based evaluation, we successfully assess its applicability and validate its accuracy and efficacy.

Estimating Agreement by Chance for Sequence Annotation

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs) and the expansion of their context windows, existing long-context benchmarks fall short in effectively evaluating the models' comprehension and reasoning abilities in extended texts. Moreover, conventional benchmarks relying on F1 metrics often inaccurately score responses: they may undervalue correct answers that differ from the reference responses and overvalue incorrect ones that resemble the reference texts. In response to these limitations, we introduce Marathon, a novel evaluation benchmark that adopts a multiple-choice question format. It is specifically designed to overcome the constraints of previous benchmarks and provide a rapid, precise, and unbiased appraisal of the long-context comprehension skills of large language models. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the Marathon benchmark with a range of state-of-the-art LLMs and assessed the effectiveness of various optimization strategies tailored for long-context generation. We anticipate that the Marathon benchmark and its associated leaderboard will enable a more precise and equitable evaluation of LLMs' capabilities in understanding and reasoning over extended contexts.

Marathon: A Race Through the Realm of Long Context with Large Language Models

While LLMs can provide reasoned explanations along with their answers, the nature and quality of those explanations are still poorly understood. In response, our goal is to define a detailed way of characterizing the explanation capabilities of modern models and to create a nuanced, interpretable explanation evaluation tool that can generate such characterizations automatically, without relying on expensive API calls or human annotations. Our approach is to (a) define the new task of explanation critiquing - identifying and categorizing any main flaw in an explanation and providing suggestions to address the flaw, (b) create a sizeable, human-verified dataset for this task, and (c) train an open-source, automatic critique model (called Digital Socrates) using this data. Through quantitative and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate how Digital Socrates is useful for revealing insights about student models by examining their reasoning chains, and how it can provide high-quality, nuanced, automatic evaluation of those model explanations for the first time. Digital Socrates thus fills an important gap in evaluation tools for understanding and improving the explanation behavior of models.

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NPHardEval: Dynamic Benchmark on Reasoning Ability of Large Language Models via Complexity Classes

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