Thailand

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable potential across various domains, yet their application in addressing complex scientific problems remains a formidable challenge. This paper presents a novel methodology to augment the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs by assigning them roles as domain-specific experts. By simulating a panel of experts, each LLM is tasked with delivering professional and cautious responses to scientific inquiries. Our approach involves querying multiple LLMs and assessing the consistency of their responses. High agreement among the LLMs suggests greater confidence in the proposed solution, whereas discrepancies prompt a collaborative discussion among the LLMs to reach a consensus. This method emulates real-world scientific problem-solving processes, fostering a more reliable and robust mechanism for LLMs to tackle scientific questions. Our experimental results show that assigning roles to multiple LLMs as domain-specific experts significantly improves their accuracy and reliability in solving scientific problems. This framework has the potential to advance the application of AI in scientific research, enhancing its effectiveness and trustworthiness.

ACL 2024

Simulating Expert Discussions with Multi-agent for Enhanced Scientific Problem Solving

simulating expert discussions

scientific problem solving

multi-agent

large language models

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
I have been lucky to work with many amazing people. Without their insight, dedication and patience, and without the many hours of work they put in, NAACL would not have been possible. A huge thank you to the program chairs Helena Gomez, Kevin Duh, and Steve Bethard – you are the best! 
 
Finally, I would like to thank all authors, invited speakers and panelists, area chairs and reviewers, the volunteers organizing and chairing sessions, and all attendees, in-person and virtual. Thank you for helping us make NAACL 2024 come to life. 
 
Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
*You can read the full Welcome message in the [Conference Handbook (downloadable)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H1NvW0VASQjkSCYgw3mr-3l4yYDSxz6B/view?usp=sharing)*

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NAACL 2024

2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

### 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.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

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.

Scientific extreme summarization, the task of generating concise one-sentence summaries (TLDRs) for scientific papers, presents significant challenges due to the need for deep domain-specific understanding and the ability to distill salient information. This study identifies the critical role of titles and keywords in enhancing TLDR generation through quantitative analysis. We propose a novel method, External Attention Prompting (EAP), which leverages LLMs by guiding them to focus on the most critical parts of the source text through varying degrees of attention signals. Our method employs Markdown emphasis syntax to annotate attention levels, enabling LLMs to prioritize salient information effectively. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EAP significantly outperforms baseline methods across various LLMs and metrics in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. Further evaluations by GPT-4 demonstrate that EAP can enable LLMs to generate TLDRs of higher human-aligned quality.

Guiding Large Language Models via External Attention Prompting for Scientific Extreme Summarization

Generative AI, as it becomes increasingly integrated into our lives, has brought convenience, though some concerns have arisen regarding its potential impact on the rigor and authenticity of scientific research. To encourage the development of robust and reliable automatically-generated scientific text detection systems, the "DAGPap24: Detecting Automatically Generated Scientific Papers" competition was held and shared the same task with the 4th Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024) to be held at ACL 2024. In the DAGPap24 competition, participants were tasked with constructing a generative text detection model that could accurately distinguish between the human written fragment, the synonym replacement fragment, the ChatGPT rewrite fragment, and the generated summary fragment of a paper. In this competition, we first conducted a comprehensive analysis of the training set to build a generative paper detection model. Then we tried various language models, including SciBERT, ALBERT, DeBERTa, RoBERTa, etc. After that, we introduced an Anomalous Label Smoothing (ALS) method and a majority voting method to improve the final results. Finally, we achieved 0.9948 and 0.9944 F1 scores during the development and testing phases respectively, and we achieved second place in the competition.

Utilizing an Ensemble Model with Anomalous Label Smoothing to Detect Generated Scientific Papers

Research papers are long documents that contain information about various aspects such as background, prior work, methodology, and results. Existing works on scientific document representation learning only leverage the title and abstract of the paper. We present CoSAEmb, a model that learns representations from the full text of 97402 scientific papers from the S2ORC dataset. We present a novel supervised contrastive training framework for long documents using triplet loss and margin gradation. Our framework can be used to learn representations of long documents with any existing encoder-only transformer model without retraining it from scratch. CoSAEmb shows improved performance on information retrieval from the paper's full text in comparison to models trained only on paper titles and abstracts. We also evaluate CoSAEmb on SciRepEval and CSFCube benchmarks, showing comparable performance with existing state-of-the-art models.

CoSAEmb: Contrastive Section-aware Aspect Embeddings for Scientific Articles

An automatic citation generation system aims to concisely and accurately describe the relationship between two scientific articles. To do so, such a system must ground its outputs to the content of the cited paper to avoid non-factual hallucinations. Due to the length of scientific documents, existing abstractive approaches have conditioned only on cited paper abstracts. We demonstrate empirically that the abstract is not always the most appropriate input for citation generation and that models trained in this way learn to hallucinate. We propose to condition instead on the cited text span (CTS) as an alternative to the abstract. Because manual CTS annotation is extremely time- and labor-intensive, we experiment with distant labeling of candidate CTS sentences, achieving sufficiently strong performance to substitute for expensive human annotations in model training, and we propose a human-in-the-loop, keyword-based CTS retrieval approach that makes generating citation texts grounded in the full text of cited

Cited Text Spans for Scientific Citation Text Generation

Citation generation aims to generate a citation sentence that refers to a chosen paper in the context of a manuscript. However, a rigid citation generation process is at odds with an author's desire to control specific attributes, such as 1) the citation intent, e.g., either introducing background information or comparing results, and 2) keywords that should appear in the citation text. To provide these degrees of controllability during citation generation, we propose to integrate the manuscript context, the context of the referenced paper, and the desired control attributes into a structured template and use it to fine-tune a language model (LM) via next-token prediction. We then utilize Proximal Policy Optimization to directly optimize the LM in favor of a high score of our proposed controllability metric. The proposed workflow harmoniously combines citation attribute suggestion and conditional citation generation into one LM, allowing for better user control.

Controllable Citation Sentence Generation with Language Models

The inception of a research agenda typically commences with the creation of a comprehensive research proposal. The efficacy of the proposal often hinges on its ability to connect with the existing scientific literature that supports its ideas. To effectively assess the relevance of existing articles to a research proposal, it is imperative to categorize these articles into high-level thematic groups, referred to as topics, that align with the proposal. This paper introduces a novel task of aligning scientific articles, relevant to a proposal, with researcher-provided proposal topics. Additionally, we construct a dataset to serve as a benchmark for this task. We establish human and Large Language Model (LLM) baselines and propose a novel three-stage approach to address this challenge. We synthesize and use pseudo-labels that map proposal topics to text spans from cited articles to train Language Models (LMs) for two purposes: (i) as a retriever, to extract relevant text spans from cited articles for each topic, and (ii) as a classifier, to categorize the articles into the proposal topics. Our retriever-classifier pipeline, which employs very small open-source LMs fine-tuned with our constructed dataset, achieves results comparable to a vanilla paid LLM-based classifier, demonstrating its efficacy. However, a notable gap of 23.57 F1 score between our approach and the human baseline highlights the complexity of this task and emphasizes the need for further research.

Beyond Retrieval: Topic-based Alignment of Scientific Papers to Research Proposal

When examining reviews of research papers, we can distinguish between two hypothetical referees: the maximally lenient referee who accepts any paper with a vacuous review and the maximally strict one who rejects any paper with an overly pedantic review. Clearly, both are of no practical value. Our interest is in a referee who makes a balanced judgement and provides a review abiding by the guidelines. In this paper, we present a case study of automatic correction of an existing machine-generated or human review. The AutoRef system implements an iterative approach that progressively "refines'' a review by attempting to make it more compliant with pre-defined requirements of a "good'' review. It implements the following steps: (1) Translate the review requirements into a specification in natural language, of "yes/no'' questions; (2) Given a (paper, review) pair, extract answers to the questions; (3) Use the results in (2) to generate a new review; and (4) Return to Step (2) with the paper and the new review. Here, (2) and (3) are implemented by large language model (LLM) based agents. We present a case study using papers and reviews made available for the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). Our initial empirical results suggest that AutoRef progressively improves the compliance of the generated reviews to the specification. Currently designed specification makes AutoRef progressively generate reviews which are stricter, making the decisions more inclined towards "rejections''. This demonstrates the applicability of AutoRef for: (1) The progressive correction of overly lenient reviews, being useful for referees and meta-reviewers; and (2) The generation of progressively stricter reviews for a paper, starting from a vacuous review ("Great paper. Accept.''), facilitating authors when trying to assess weaknesses in their papers.

AutoRef: Generating Refinements of Reviews Given Guidelines

This paper describes a system designed to distinguish between AI-generated and human-written scientific excerpts in the DAGPap24 competition hosted within the Fourth Workshop on Scientific Document Processing. In this competition the task is to find artificially generated token-level text fragments in documents of a scientific domain. Our work focuses on the use of a multi-task learning architecture with two heads. The application of this approach is justified by the specificity of the task, where class spans are continuous over several hundred characters. We considered different encoder variations to obtain a state vector for each token in the sequence, as well as a variation in splitting fragments into tokens to further feed into the input of a transform-based encoder. This approach allows us to achieve a 9% quality improvement relative to the baseline solution score on the development set (from 0.86 to 0.95) using the average macro $F_{1}$-score, as well as a score of 0.96 on a closed test part of the dataset from the competition.

Multi-head Span-based Detector for AI-generated Fragments in Scientific Papers

Taking note of the current challenges of the peer review system, this paper inventories the research tasks for analysing and possibly automating parts of the reviewing process, like matching submissions with a reviewer's domain of expertise. For each of these tasks we list their associated datasets, analysing their quality in terms of available documentation of creation and use. Building up on this, we give a set of recommendations to take into account when collecting and releasing data.

An Analysis of Tasks and Datasets in Peer Reviewing

To help readers understand the novelty and the research context, an excellent related work section is structured (i.e., the section consists of paragraphs determined by categorizing papers into several topics) and includes descriptions of novelty. However, previous studies viewed related work generation as multi-document summarization, and the structure and novelty statement are ignored in such studies. In this paper, we redefine the related work generation task as summarization with structure (i.e., multiple paragraphs with citation) and novelty statement. For this task, we propose a quality-oriented dataset and evaluation metrics. Experiments evaluated the state-of-the-art language models on our tasks, and we confirmed the issues with the current models and the validity of the evaluation indicators.

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