United States

Event Factuality Detection (EFD) task determines the factuality of textual events, i.e., classifying whether an event is a fact, possibility, or impossibility, which is essential for faithfully understanding and utilizing event knowledge. However, due to the lack of high-quality large-scale data, event factuality detection is under-explored in event understanding research, which limits the development of EFD community. To address these issues and provide faithful event understanding, we introduce MAVEN-FACT, a large-scale and high-quality EFD dataset based on the MAVEN dataset. MAVEN-FACT includes factuality annotations of $112,276$ events, making it the largest EFD dataset. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MAVEN-FACT is challenging for both conventional fine-tuned models and large language models (LLMs). Thanks to the comprehensive annotations of event arguments and relations in MAVEN, MAVEN-FACT also supports some further analyses and we find that adopting event arguments and relations helps in event factuality detection for fine-tuned models but does not benefit LLMs. Furthermore, we preliminarily study an application case of event factuality detection and find it helps in mitigating event-related hallucination in LLMs. We will release our dataset and codes to facilitate further research on event factuality detection.

EMNLP 2024

MAVEN-FACT: A Large-scale Event Factuality Detection Dataset

action prediction

minecraft

code generation

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ACL 2023

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing.

poster

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When extracting structured information from text, recognizing entities and extracting relationships are essential. Recent advances in both tasks generate a structured representation of the information in an autoregressive manner, a time-consuming and computationally expensive approach. This naturally raises the question of whether autoregressive methods are necessary in order to achieve comparable results. In this work, we propose ITER, an efficient encoder-based relation extraction model, that performs the task in three parallelizable steps, greatly accelerating a recent language modeling approach: ITER achieves an inference throughput of over 600 samples per second for a large model on a single consumer-grade GPU. Furthermore, we achieve state-of-the-art results on the relation extraction datasets ADE and ACE05, and demonstrate competitive performance for both named entity recognition with GENIA and CoNLL03, and for relation extraction with SciERC and CoNLL04.

ITER: Iterative Transformer-based Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction

Persuasion plays a pivotal role in a wide range of applications from health intervention to the promotion of social good. Persuasive chatbots employed responsibly for social good can be an enabler of positive individual and social change. Existing methods rely on fine-tuning persuasive chatbots with task-specific training data which is costly, if not infeasible, to collect. Furthermore, they employ only a handful of pre-defined persuasion strategies. 

We propose PersuaBot, a zero-shot chatbot based on Large Language Models (LLMs) that is factual and more persuasive by leveraging many more nuanced strategies. PersuaBot uses an LLM to first generate a natural responses, from which the strategies used are extracted. To combat hallucination of LLMs, Persuabot replace any unsubstantiated claims in the response with retrieved facts supporting the extracted strategies. We applied our chatbot, PersuaBot, to three significantly different domains needing persuasion skills: donation solicitation, recommendations, and health intervention. 

Our experiments on simulated and human conversations show that our zero-shot approach is more persuasive than prior work, while achieving factual accuracy surpassing state-of-the-art knowledge-oriented chatbots.

Zero-shot Persuasive Chatbots with LLM-Generated Strategies and Information Retrieval

Previous research leveraged Large Language Models (LLMs) in numerous ways in the educational domain. Here, we show that they can be used to answer exam questions simulating students of different skill levels and share a prompt, engineered for GPT-3.5, that enables the simulation of varying student skill levels on questions from different educational domains. We evaluate the proposed prompt on three publicly available datasets (one from science exams and two from English reading comprehension exams) and three LLMs (two versions of GPT-3.5 and one of GPT-4), and show that it is robust to different educational domains and capable of generalising to data unseen during the prompt engineering phase. We also show that, being engineered for a specific version of GPT-3.5, the prompt does not generalise well to different LLMs, stressing the need for prompt engineering for each model in practical applications. Lastly, we find that there is not a direct correlation between the quality of the rationales obtained with chain-of-thought prompting and the accuracy in the student simulation task.

Using LLMs to simulate students' responses to exam questions

Recent approaches to zero-shot commonsense reasoning have enabled Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) to learn a broad range of commonsense knowledge without being tailored to specific situations. However, they often suffer from human reporting bias inherent in textual commonsense knowledge, leading to discrepancies in understanding between PLMs and humans. In this work, we aim to bridge this gap by introducing an additional information channel to PLMs. We propose Imagine (Machine Imagination-based Reasoning), a novel zero-shot commonsense reasoning framework designed to complement textual inputs with visual signals derived from machine-generated images. To achieve this, we enhance PLMs with imagination capabilities by incorporating an image generator into the reasoning process. To guide PLMs in effectively leveraging machine imagination, we create a synthetic pre-training dataset that simulates visual question-answering. Our extensive experiments on diverse reasoning benchmarks and analysis show that Imagine outperforms existing methods by a large margin, highlighting the strength of machine imagination in mitigating reporting bias and enhancing generalization capabilities.

Zero-shot Commonsense Reasoning over Machine Imagination

Many datasets have been developed to train and evaluate document-level relation extraction (RE) models. Most of these are constructed using real-world data. It has been shown that RE models trained on real-world data suffer from factual biases. To evaluate and address this issue, we present CovEReD, a counterfactual data generation approach for document-level relation extraction datasets using entity replacement. We first demonstrate that models trained on factual data exhibit inconsistent behavior: while they accurately extract triples from factual data, they fail to extract the same triples after counterfactual modification. This inconsistency suggests that models trained on factual data rely on spurious signals such as specific entities and external knowledge -- rather than on context -- to extract triples. We show that by generating document-level counterfactual data with CovEReD and training models on them, consistency is maintained with minimal impact on RE performance. We release our CovEReD pipeline as well as Re-DocRED-CF, a dataset of counterfactual RE documents, to assist in evaluating and addressing inconsistency in document-level RE.

Consistent Document-level Relation Extraction via Counterfactuals

Modular programming, which aims to construct the final program by integrating smaller, independent building blocks, has been regarded as a desirable practice in software development. However, with the rise of recent code generation agents built upon large language models (LLMs), a question emerges: is this traditional practice equally effective for these new tools? In this work, we assess the impact of modularity in code generation by introducing a novel metric for its quantitative measurement. Surprisingly, unlike conventional wisdom on the topic, we find that modularity is not a core factor for improving the performance of code generation models. We also explore potential explanations for why LLMs do not exhibit a preference for modular code compared to non-modular code.

Revisiting the Impact of Pursuing Modularity for Code Generation

Trolling in online communities typically involves disruptive behaviors such as provoking anger and manipulating discussions, leading to a polarized atmosphere and emotional distress. Robust moderation is essential for mitigating these negative impacts and maintaining a healthy and constructive community atmosphere. However, effectively addressing trolls is difficult because their behaviors vary widely and require different response strategies (RSs) to counter them. This diversity makes it challenging to choose an appropriate RS for each specific situation.
To address this challenge, our research investigates whether humans have preferred strategies tailored to different types of trolling behaviors.
Our findings reveal a correlation between the types of trolling encountered and the preferred RS. In this paper, we introduce a methodology for generating counter-responses to trolls by recommending appropriate RSs, supported by a dataset aligning these strategies with human preferences across various troll contexts. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed approach guides constructive discussion and reduces the negative effects of trolls, thereby enhancing the online community environment.

Towards Effective Counter-Responses: Aligning Human Preferences with Strategies to Combat Online Trolling

Although human evaluation remains the gold standard for open-domain dialogue evaluation, the growing popularity of automated evaluation using Large Language Models (LLMs) has also extended to dialogue. However, most frameworks leverage benchmarks that assess older chatbots on aspects such as fluency and relevance, which are not reflective of the challenges associated with contemporary models. In fact, a qualitative analysis on Soda. (Kim et al., 2023), a GPT-3.5 generated dialogue dataset, suggests that current chatbots may exhibit several recurring issues related to coherence and commonsense knowledge, but generally produce highly fluent and relevant responses.

Noting the aforementioned limitations, this paper introduces Soda-Eval, an annotated dataset based on Soda that covers over 120K turn-level assessments across 10K dialogues, where the annotations were generated by GPT-4. Using Soda-Eval as a benchmark, we then study the performance of several open-access instruction-tuned LLMs, finding that dialogue evaluation remains challenging. Fine-tuning these models improves performance over few-shot inferences, both in terms of correlation and explanation.

Soda-Eval: Open-Domain Dialogue Evaluation in the age of LLMs

Recently introduced dialogue systems have demonstrated high usability. However, they still fall short of reflecting real-world conversation scenarios. Current dialogue systems exhibit an inability to replicate the dynamic, continuous, long-term interactions involving multiple partners. This shortfall arises because there have been limited efforts to account for both aspects of real-world dialogues: deeply layered interactions over the long-term dialogue and widely expanded conversation networks involving multiple participants. As the effort to incorporate these aspects combined, we introduce Mixed-Session Conversation, a dialogue system designed to construct conversations with various partners in a multi-session dialogue setup. We propose a new dataset called MiSC to implement this system. The dialogue episodes of MiSC consist of 6 consecutive sessions, with four speakers (one main speaker and three partners) appearing in each episode. Also, we propose a new dialogue model with a novel memory management mechanism, called Egocentric Memory Enhanced Mixed-Session Conversation Agent (EMMA). EMMA collects and retains memories from the main speaker's perspective during conversations with partners, enabling seamless continuity in subsequent interactions. Extensive human evaluations validate that the dialogues in MiSC demonstrate a seamless conversational flow, even when conversation partners change in each session. EMMA trained with MiSC is also evaluated to maintain high memorability without contradiction throughout the entire conversation.

Mixed-Session Conversation with Egocentric Memory

Math word problems are critical K-8 educational tools, but writing them is time consuming and requires extensive expertise. To be educational, problems must be solvable, have accurate answers, and, most importantly, be educationally appropriate. We propose that language models have potential to support K-8 math education by automatically generating word problems. However, evaluating educational appropriateness is hard to quantify. We fill this gap by having teachers evaluate problems generated by LLMs, who find existing models and data often fail to be educationally appropriate. We then explore automatically generating *educational* word problems, ultimately using our expert annotations to finetune a 70B language model. Our model, MATHWELL, is the first K-8 word problem generator targeted at educational appropriateness. Further expert studies find MATHWELL generates problems far more solvable, accurate, and appropriate than public models. MATHWELL also matches GPT-4's problem quality while attaining more appropriate reading levels for K-8 students and avoiding generating harmful questions.

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ITER: Iterative Transformer-based Entity Recognition and Relation Extraction

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Towards Generative Event Factuality Prediction