Thailand

Active formulation of subgoals in problem-solving is an effective learning strategy for programming learners, allowing the transfer of knowledge across similar problems. Although proper guidance and feedback for learners are crucial to correct mistakes and misconceptions during subgoal formulation, providing them at scale is challenging and costly. With recent advances in generative AI, we investigate the practicality of using generative AI as TAs in programming education by examining their effectiveness in a subgoal learning environment. We explore whether programming learners can distinguish AI TAs from humans and whether the subgoal learning workflow with AI TAs yields learning gains and assess their capability to assist in coding the subgoals into executable programs. Our study shows that learners can distinguish AI TAs from human TAs based on response length and accuracy. Learners show learning gains over sessions with AI TAs in formulating subgoals and can produce code solutions faster with comparable satisfaction scores with AI TAs as human TAs.

ACL 2024

Learning from Teaching Assistants to Formulate Subgoals for Programming Tasks: Exploring the Potential for AI Teaching Assistants

subgoal learning

generative ai

human-ai interaction

cs education

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. The program featured plenary speakers, sessions, workshops and many special activities.

For more information please visit the 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting page at: https://www.aapt.org/Conferences/SM2020/index.cfm.


AAPT SM 20

The 2020 AAPT Virtual Summer Meeting brought together physics educators from around the globe to learn about the latest in physics theory, research methodology and education from leaders in their field. 

workshop paper

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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.

Large Vision Language Models can be used to assist visually impaired individuals by describing images they capture in their daily lives. Current evaluation datasets may not reflect the diverse cultural user backgrounds nor the situational context of this use case. To address this problem, we create a survey to determine caption preferences and propose a culture-centric evaluation benchmark by filtering VizWiz, an existing dataset with images taken by people who are blind. We then evaluate different models and prompts, investigating their reliability as visual assistants. While the evaluation results for state-of-the-art models seem promising, we identified some weak spots such as hallucinations and problems with conventional evaluation metrics. Our survey, data, code, and model outputs will be publicly available.

Vision-Language Models under Cultural and Inclusive Considerations

Despite the advancement of automatic summarization methods based on pre-trained language models, evaluating their effectiveness remains a challenge, particularly in the absence of a medical document reference-free summary evaluation metric. This paper proposes a novel reference-free evaluation metric for medical document summaries by employing contrastive learning using medical text-tailored data augmentation techniques. Our research showcases the metric’s superior performance in assessing the quality of generated summaries without the need for comparison texts. Through extensive experimentation and analysis, this work makes significant strides in improving the reliability and usability of automatic medical document evaluation tools in medical document settings.

Reference-free Medical Multi-document Summary Evaluation Metric via Contrastive Learning

We present a framework to assess the sensitivity of Large Language Models (LLMs) to textually embedded social signals using an Appraisal Theory perspective. We report on an experiment that uses prompts encoding three dimensions of social signals: Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation. In response to the prompt, an LLM generates both an analysis (Insight) and a conversational Response, which are analyzed in terms of sensitivity to the signals. We quantitatively evaluate the output text through topical analysis of the Insight and predicted social intelligence scores of the Response in terms of empathy and emotional polarity. Key findings show that LLMs are more sensitive to positive signals. The personas impact Responses but not the Insight. We discuss how our framework can be extended to a broader set of social signals, personas, and scenarios to evaluate LLM behaviors under various conditions.

Evaluating Large Language Models on Social Signal Sensitivity: An Appraisal Theory Approach

As Large Language Models (LLMs) reach wider application, aligning them with human values like helpfulness and harmlessness becomes increasingly crucial. Although Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective, it is complicated and highly resource intensive. As such, offline RLHF methods have emerged as simpler alternatives, directly optimizing LLMs with ranking losses on a fixed preference dataset. Despite their promise, these methods only capture the ordering relationship between responses, overlooking the crucial aspect of ``how much'' one is preferred over the other. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective solution based on reward difference prediction. Specifically, we introduce reward difference coefficients to reweigh sample pairs in offline RLHF methods. We then present a difference model that considers rich interactions between a pair of responses for predicting these difference coefficients. Experiments with Alpaca-7b and the HH dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in both automatic metrics and human evaluation, highlighting its potential for aligning LLMs with human values.

Offline RLHF Methods Need More Accurate Supervision Signals

During conversations, people align to one another over time, by using similar words, concepts, and syntax. This helps form a shared understanding of the conversational content and is associated with increased engagement and satisfaction. It also affects conversation outcomes: e.g., when talking to language learners, an above normal level of linguistic alignment of parents or language teachers is correlated with faster language acquisition. These benefits make human-like alignment an important property of dialogue systems, which has often been overlooked by the NLP community. In order to fill this gap, we ask: (RQ1) Due to the importance for engagement and satisfaction, to what degree do state-of-the-art dialogue systems align to adult users? (RQ2) With a potential application to child language acquisition in mind, do systems, similar to parents, show high levels of alignment during conversations with children? Our experiments show that ChatGPT aligns to adults at roughly human levels, while Llama2 shows elevated alignment. However, when responding to a child, both systems' alignment is below human levels.

Aligning to Adults Is Easy, Aligning to Children Is Hard: A Study of Linguistic Alignment in Dialogue Systems

Generative models are increasingly being used in various applications, such as text generation, commonsense reasoning, and question-answering. To be effective globally, these models must be aware of and account for local socio-cultural contexts, making it necessary to have benchmarks to evaluate the models for their cultural familiarity. Since the training data for LLMs is web-based and the Web is limited in its representation of information, it does not capture knowledge present within communities that are not on the Web. Thus, these models exacerbate the inequities, semantic misalignment, and stereotypes from the Web. There has been a growing call for community-centered participatory research methods in NLP. In this work, we respond to this call by using participatory research methods to introduce DOSA, the first community-generated Dataset of 615 Social Artifacts, by engaging with 260 participants from 19 different Indian geographic subcultures. We use a gamified framework that relies on collective sensemaking to collect the names and descriptions of these artifacts such that the descriptions semantically align with the shared sensibilities of the individuals from those cultures. Next, we benchmark four popular LLMs and find that they show significant variation across regional sub-cultures in their ability to infer the artifacts.

DOSA: A Dataset of Social Artifacts from Different Indian Geographical Subcultures

The open-ended nature of language generation makes the evaluation of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) challenging. One common evaluation approach uses multiple-choice questions (MCQ) to limit the response space. The model is then evaluated by ranking the candidate answers by the log probability of the first token prediction. However, first-tokens may not consistently reflect the final response output, due to model's diverse response styles such as starting with "Sure" or refusing to answer. Consequently, MCQ evaluation is not indicative of model behaviour when interacting with users. But by how much? We evaluate how aligned first-token evaluation is with the text output along several dimensions, namely final option choice, refusal rate, choice distribution and robustness under prompt perturbation. Our results show that the two approaches are severely misaligned on all dimensions, reaching mismatch rates over 60%. Models heavily fine-tuned on conversational or safety data are especially impacted. Crucially, models remain misaligned even when we increasingly constrain prompts, i.e., force them to start with an option letter or example template. Our findings i) underscore the importance of inspecting the text output as well and ii) caution against relying solely on first-token evaluation.

My Answer is C: First-Token Probabilities Do Not Match Text Answers in Instruction-Tuned Language Models

This paper presents an interpretable unsupervised morphological learning model, showing comparable performance to supervised models in learning complex morphological rules of Turkish as evidenced by its application to the problem of morphological inflection within the SIGMORPHON Shared Tasks. The significance of our unsupervised approach lies in its alignment with how humans naturally acquire rules from raw data without supervision. To achieve this, we construct a model with multiple codebooks of VQ-VAE employing continuous and discrete latent variables during word generation. We evaluate the model's performance under high and low-resource scenarios, and use probing techniques to examine encoded information in latent representations. We also evaluate its generalization capabilities by testing unseen suffixation scenarios within the SIGMORPHON-UniMorph 2022 Shared Task 0. Our results demonstrate our model's ability to distinguish word structures into lemmas and suffixes, with each codebook specialized for different morphological features, contributing to the interpretability of our model and effectively performing morphological inflection on both seen and unseen morphological features.

Unsupervised Learning of Turkish Morphology with Multiple Codebook VQ-VAE

The emergence of multilingual large language models has enabled the development of language understanding and generation systems in Azerbaijani. However, most of the production-grade systems rely on cloud solutions, such as GPT-4. While there have been several attempts to develop open foundation models for Azerbaijani, these works have not found their way into common use due to a lack of systemic benchmarking. This paper encompasses several lines of work that promote open-source foundation models for Azerbaijani. We introduce (1) a large text corpus for Azerbaijani, (2) a family of encoder-only language models trained on this dataset, (3) labeled datasets for evaluating these models, and (4) extensive evaluation that covers all major open-source models with Azerbaijani support.

Open foundation models for Azerbaijani language

We introduce ImplicaTR, a linguistically informed diagnostic dataset designed to evaluate semantic and pragmatic reasoning capabilities of Natural Language Inference (NLI) models in Turkish. Existing Turkish NLI datasets treat NLI as determining whether a sentence pair represents $\textit{entailment}$, $\textit{contradiction}$, or a $\textit{neutral}$ relation. Such datasets do not distinguish between $\textit{semantic entailment}$ and $\textit{pragmatic implicature}$, which linguists have long recognized as separate inferences types. ImplicaTR addresses this by testing NLI models' ability to differentiate between $\textit{entailment}$ and $\textit{implicature}$, thus assessing their pragmatic reasoning skills. The dataset consists of 19,350 semi-automatically generated sentence pairs covering $\textit{implicature, entailment, contradiction,}$ and $\textit{neutral}$ relations. We evaluated various models (BERT, Gemma, Llama-2, and Mistral) on ImplicaTR and found out that these models can reach up to 98\% accuracy on semantic and pragmatic reasoning. We also fine tuned various models on subsets of ImplicaTR to test the abilities of NLI models to generalize across unseen implicature contexts. Our results indicate that model performance is highly dependent on the diversity of linguistic expressions within each subset, highlighting a weakness in the abstract generalization capabilities of large language models regarding pragmatic reasoning. We share all the code, models, and the dataset.

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