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Large Language Models (LLMs) undergo extensive evaluation against various benchmarks collected in established leaderboards to assess their performance across multiple tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of comprehensive studies evaluating these models&#39; linguistic abilities independent of specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation methodology designed to test LLMs&#39; sentence generation abilities under specific linguistic constraints. Drawing on the `linguistic profiling&#39; approach, we rigorously investigate the extent to which five LLMs of varying sizes, tested in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, effectively adhere to (morpho)syntactic constraints. Our findings shed light on the linguistic proficiency of LLMs, revealing both their capabilities and limitations in generating linguistically-constrained sentences.

EMNLP 2024

Evaluating Large Language Models via Linguistic Profiling

kiki-bouba

sensory perception

vlms

phonetics

iconicity

sound symbolism

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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Large Language Models (LLMs) undergo extensive evaluation against various benchmarks collected in established leaderboards to assess their performance across multiple tasks. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of comprehensive studies evaluating these models' linguistic abilities independent of specific tasks. In this paper, we introduce a novel evaluation methodology designed to test LLMs' sentence generation abilities under specific linguistic constraints. Drawing on the `linguistic profiling' approach, we rigorously investigate the extent to which five LLMs of varying sizes, tested in both zero- and few-shot scenarios, effectively adhere to (morpho)syntactic constraints. Our findings shed light on the linguistic proficiency of LLMs, revealing both their capabilities and limitations in generating linguistically-constrained sentences.

poster

Program induction (PI) has become a promising paradigm for using knowledge bases (KBs) to help large language models (LLMs) answer complex knowledge-intensive questions. Nonetheless, PI typically relies on a large number of parallel question-program pairs to make the LLM aware of the schema of a given KB, and is thus challenging for many low-resourced KBs that lack annotated data. To this end, we propose KB-Plugin, a plug-and-play framework that enables LLMs to induce programs over any low-resourced KB. Firstly, KB-Plugin adopts self-supervised learning to encode the detailed schema information of a given KB into a pluggable module, namely schema plugin. Secondly, KB-Plugin utilizes abundant annotated data from a rich-resourced KB to train another pluggable module, namely PI plugin, which can help the LLM extract question-relevant schema information from the schema plugin of any KB and utilize the information to induce programs over this KB. Experiments show that KB-Plugin outperforms SoTA low-resourced PI methods with 25x smaller backbone LLM on both large-scale and domain-specific KBs, and even approaches the performance of supervised methods.

KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Bases

Capturing inter-modal incongruities within the text-image pair is a critical challenge in multi-modal sarcasm detection (MSD). Fortunately, graph neural networks (GNNs) have made promising advancements in MSD, which show advantages in explicitly capturing data relationships. Nevertheless, current GNN-based MSD methods do not effectively address some of the inherent limitations of GNNs, which include: 1) neglecting high-order relationships, and 2) underestimating high-frequency messages. In this paper, we propose a $\textbf{D}$ual $\textbf{G}$raph-based $\textbf{L}$earning $\textbf{F}$ramework ($\textbf{DGLF}$) to address the above two issues. Specifically, we construct a hypergraph to perform high-order aware propagation and a vanilla graph to perform high-frequency enhanced propagation, respectively. We empower GNNs to 1) better capture the inherent and complicated relationships based on the hypergraph and 2) deliver sufficient modeling through high-frequency enhanced messages on the vanilla graph. Besides, we introduce multi-modal fusion information bottleneck to effectively fuse the two learned graph features. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets show that the proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

DGLF: A Dual Graph-based Learning Framework for Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection

High-quality data is crucial for the pre-training performance of large language models. Unfortunately, existing quality filtering methods rely on a known high-quality dataset as reference, which can introduce potential bias and compromise diversity. In this paper, we propose ScalingFilter, a novel approach that evaluates text quality based on the perplexity difference between two language models trained on the same data, thereby eliminating the influence of the reference dataset in the filtering process. An theoretical analysis shows that ScalingFilter is equivalent to an inverse utilization of scaling laws. Through training models with 1.3B parameters on the same data source processed by various quality filters, we find ScalingFilter can improve zero-shot performance of pre-trained models in downstream tasks. To assess the bias introduced by quality filtering, we introduce semantic diversity, a metric of utilizing text embedding models for semantic representations. Extensive experiments reveal that semantic diversity is a reliable indicator of dataset diversity, and ScalingFilter achieves an optimal balance between downstream performance and semantic diversity.

ScalingFilter: Assessing Data Quality through Inverse Utilization of Scaling Laws

Recent studies have explored the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) for Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA). They typically require rewriting retrieved subgraphs into natural language formats comprehensible to LLMs. However, when tackling complex questions, the knowledge rewritten by existing methods may include irrelevant information, omit crucial details, or fail to align with the question's semantics. To address them, we propose a novel rewriting method CoTKR, Chain- of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting, for generating reasoning traces and corresponding knowledge in an interleaved manner, thereby mitigating the limitations of single-step knowledge rewriting. Additionally, to bridge the preference gap between the knowledge rewriter and the question answering (QA) model, we propose a training strategy PAQAF, Preference Alignment from Question Answering Feedback, for leveraging feedback from the QA model to further optimize the knowledge rewriter. We conduct experiments using various LLMs across several KGQA benchmarks. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with previous knowledge rewriting methods, CoTKR generates the most beneficial knowledge representation for QA models, which significantly improves the performance of LLMs in KGQA.

CoTKR: Chain-of-Thought Enhanced Knowledge Rewriting for Complex Knowledge Graph Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) face significant challenges at inference time due to their high computational demands. To address this, we present Performance-Guided Knowledge Distillation (PGKD), a cost-effective and high-throughput solution for production text classification applications. PGKD utilizes teacher-student Knowledge Distillation to distill the knowledge of LLMs into smaller, task-specific models. PGKD establishes an active learning routine between the student model and the LLM; the LLM continuously generates new training data leveraging hard-negative mining, student model validation performance, and early-stopping protocols to inform the data generation. By employing a cyclical, performance-aware approach tailored for highly multi-class, sparsely annotated datasets prevalent in industrial text classification, PGKD effectively addresses training challenges and outperforms traditional BERT-base models and other knowledge distillation methods on several multi-class classification datasets. Additionally, cost and latency benchmarking reveals that models fine-tuned with PGKD are up to 130X faster and 25X less expensive than LLMs for inference on the same classification task. While PGKD is showcased for text classification tasks, its versatile framework can be extended to any LLM distillation task, including language generation, making it a powerful tool for optimizing performance across a wide range of AI applications.

Performance-Guided LLM Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Text Classification at Scale

Multilingual LLMs often have knowledge disparities across languages, with larger gaps in under-resourced languages. Teaching LLMs to abstain in the face of knowledge gaps is thus a promising strategy to mitigate hallucinations in multilingual settings. However, previous studies on LLM abstention primarily focus on English; we find that directly applying existing solutions beyond English results in up to 20.5% performance gaps between high and low-resource languages, potentially due to LLMs' drop in calibration and reasoning beyond a few resource-rich languages. To this end, we propose strategies to enhance LLM abstention by learning from multilingual feedback, where LLMs self-reflect on proposed answers in one language by generating multiple feedback items in related languages: we show that this helps identifying the knowledge gaps across diverse languages, cultures, and communities. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our multilingual feedback approach outperforms various strong baselines, achieving up to 9.2% improvement for low-resource languages across three black-box and open models on three datasets, featuring open-book, closed-book, and commonsense QA. Further analysis reveals that multilingual feedback is both an effective and a more equitable abstain strategy to serve diverse language speakers, and cultural factors have great impact on language selection and LLM abstention behavior, highlighting future directions for multilingual and multi-cultural reliable language modeling.

Teaching LLMs to Abstain across Languages via Multilingual Feedback

Reasoning is most powerful when an LLM accurately aggregates relevant information. We examine the critical role of information aggregation in reasoning by requiring the LLM to analyze sports narratives. To succeed at this task, an LLM must infer points from actions, identify related entities, attribute points accurately to players and teams, and compile key statistics to draw conclusions. We conduct comprehensive experiments with real NBA basketball data and present SportsGen, a new method to synthesize game narratives. By synthesizing data, we can rigorously evaluate LLMs' reasoning capabilities under complex scenarios with varying narrative lengths and density of information. Our findings show that most models, including GPT-4o, often fail to accurately aggregate basketball scores due to frequent scoring patterns. Open-source models like Llama-3 further suffer from significant score hallucinations. Finally, the effectiveness of reasoning is influenced by narrative complexity, information density, and domain-specific terms, highlighting the challenges in analytical reasoning tasks.

When Reasoning Meets Information Aggregation: A Case Study with Sports Narratives

Question answering based on retrieval augmented generation (RAG-QA) is an important research topic in NLP and has a wide range of real-world applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are either constructed using a single source corpus or consist of short extractive answers, which fall short of evaluating large language model (LLM) based RAG-QA systems on cross-domain generalization. To address these limitations, we create Long-form RobustQA (LFRQA), a new dataset comprising human-written long-form answers that integrate short extractive answers from multiple documents into a single, coherent narrative, covering 26K queries and large corpora across seven different domains. We further propose RAG-QA Arena by directly comparing model-generated answers against LFRQA's answers using LLMs as evaluators. We show via extensive experiments that RAG-QA Arena and human judgments on answer quality are highly correlated. Moreover, only 41.3% of the most competitive LLM's answers are preferred to LFRQA's answers, demonstrating RAG-QA Arena as a challenging evaluation platform for future research.

RAG-QA Arena: Evaluating Domain Robustness for Long-form Retrieval Augmented Question Answering

This study introduces a hypothesis-testing framework to assess whether large language models (LLMs) possess genuine reasoning abilities or primarily depend on token bias. We go beyond evaluating LLMs on accuracy; rather, we aim to investigate their token bias in solving logical reasoning tasks. Specifically, we develop carefully controlled synthetic datasets, featuring conjunction fallacy and syllogistic problems. Our framework outlines a list of hypotheses where token biases are readily identifiable, with all null hypotheses assuming genuine reasoning capabilities of LLMs. The findings in this study suggest, with statistical guarantee, that most LLMs still struggle with logical reasoning. While they may perform well on classic problems, their success largely depends on recognizing superficial patterns with strong token bias, thereby raising concerns about their actual reasoning and generalization abilities.

A Peek into Token Bias: Large Language Models Are Not Yet Genuine Reasoners

Training large language models (LLMs) for external tool usage is a rapidly expanding field, with recent research focusing on generating synthetic data to address the shortage of available data. However, the absence of systematic data quality checks poses complications for properly training and testing models. To that end, we propose two approaches for assessing the reliability of data for training LLMs to use external tools. The first approach uses intuitive, human-defined correctness criteria. The second approach uses a model-driven assessment with in-context evaluation. We conduct a thorough evaluation of data quality on two popular benchmarks, followed by an extrinsic evaluation that showcases the impact of data quality on model performance. Our results demonstrate that models trained on high-quality data outperform those trained on unvalidated data, even when trained with a smaller quantity of data. These findings empirically support the significance of assessing and ensuring the reliability of training data for tool-using LLMs.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

KB-Plugin: A Plug-and-play Framework for Large Language Models to Induce Programs over Low-resourced Knowledge Bases

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