United States

Medical knowledge is context-dependent and requires consistent reasoning across various natural language expressions of semantically equivalent phrases. This is particularly crucial for drug names, where patients often use brand names like Advil or Tylenol instead of their generic equivalents. To study this, we create a new robustness dataset, \textbf{RABBITS}, to evaluate performance differences on medical benchmarks after swapping brand and generic drug names using physician expert annotations.

We assess both open-source and API-based LLMs on MedQA and MedMCQA, revealing a consistent performance drop ranging from 1-10%. Furthermore, we identify a potential source of this fragility as the contamination of test data in widely used pre-training datasets.

EMNLP 2024

Language Models are Surprisingly Fragile to Drug Names in Biomedical Benchmarks

synthetic data

large language models

grammatical error correction

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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

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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The advancement in healthcare has shifted focus toward patient-centric approaches, particularly in self-care and patient education, facilitated by access to Electronic Health Records (EHR). However, medical jargon in EHRs poses significant challenges in patient comprehension. To address this, we introduce a new task of automatically generating lay definitions, aiming to simplify complex medical terms into patient-friendly lay language. We first created the README dataset, an extensive collection of over 50,000 unique (medical term, lay definition) pairs and 300,000 mentions, each offering context-aware lay definitions manually annotated by domain experts. We have also engineered a data-centric Human-AI pipeline that synergizes data filtering, augmentation, and selection to improve data quality. We then used README as the training data for models and leveraged a Retrieval-Augmented Generation method to reduce hallucinations and improve the quality of model outputs. Our extensive automatic and human evaluations demonstrate that open-source mobile-friendly models, when fine-tuned with high-quality data, are capable of matching or even surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art closed-source large language models like ChatGPT. This research represents a significant stride in closing the knowledge gap in patient education and advancing patient-centric healthcare solutions.

README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP

Large language models (LLMs) offer significant potential as tools to support an expanding range of decision-making tasks. Given their training on human (created) data, LLMs have been shown to inherit societal biases against protected groups, as well as be subject to bias functionally resembling cognitive bias. Human-like bias can impede fair and explainable decisions made with LLM assistance. 
Our work introduces BiasBuster, a framework designed to uncover, evaluate, and mitigate cognitive bias in LLMs, particularly in high-stakes decision-making tasks. Inspired by prior research in psychology and cognitive science, we develop a dataset containing 13,465 prompts to evaluate LLM decisions on different cognitive biases (e.g., prompt-induced, sequential, inherent). We test various bias mitigation strategies, while proposing a novel method utilizing LLMs to debias their own human-like cognitive bias within prompts. 
Our analysis provides a comprehensive picture of the presence and effects of cognitive bias across commercial and open-source models. We demonstrate that our selfhelp debiasing effectively mitigates model answers that display patterns akin to human cognitive bias without having to manually craft examples for each bias.

Cognitive Bias in Decision-Making with LLMs

This paper introduces LADAM, a novel method for enhancing the performance of text classification tasks. LADAM employs attention mechanisms to exchange semantically similar words between sentences. This approach generates a greater diversity of synthetic sentences compared to simpler operations like random insertions, while maintaining the context of the original sentences. Additionally, LADAM is an easy-to-use, lightweight technique that does not require external datasets or large language models. Our experimental results across five datasets demonstrate that LADAM consistently outperforms baseline methods across diverse text classification conditions.

All You Need is Attention: Lightweight Attention-based Data Augmentation for Text Classification

The recent integration of chemistry with natural language processing (NLP) has advanced drug discovery. Molecule representation in language models (LMs) is crucial in enhancing chemical understanding. We propose Augmented Molecular Retrieval (AMORE), a flexible zero-shot framework for assessment of Chemistry LMs of different natures: trained solely on molecules for chemical tasks and on a combined corpus of natural language texts and string-based structures. The framework relies on molecule augmentations that preserve an underlying chemical, such as kekulization and cycle replacements. We evaluate encoder-only and generative LMs by calculating a metric based on the similarity score between distributed representations of molecules and their augmentations. Our experiments on ChEBI-20 and QM9 benchmarks show that these models exhibit significantly lower scores than graph-based molecular models trained without language modeling objectives. Additionally, our results on the molecule captioning task for cross-domain models, MolT5 and Text+Chem T5, demonstrate that the lower the representation-based evaluation metrics, the lower the classical text generation metrics like ROUGE and METEOR.

Lost in Translation: Chemical Language Models and the Misunderstanding of Molecule Structures

In this short paper we propose a data augmentation method for intent detection in zero-resource domains.

Existing data augmentation methods rely on few labelled examples for each intent category, which can be expensive in settings with many possible intents.

We use a two-stage approach: First, we generate utterances for intent labels using an open-source large language model in a zero-shot setting. Second, we develop a smaller sequence-to-sequence model (the Refiner), to improve the generated utterances. The Refiner is fine-tuned on seen domains and then applied to unseen domains. We evaluate our method by training an intent classifier on the generated data, and evaluating it on real (human) data.

We find that the Refiner significantly improves the data utility and diversity over the zero-shot LLM baseline for unseen domains and over common baseline approaches.

Our results indicate that a two-step approach of a generative LLM in zero-shot setting and a smaller sequence-to-sequence model can provide high-quality data for intent detection.

Generate then Refine: Data Augmentation for Zero-shot Intent Detection

Humans perform visual perception at multiple levels, including low-level object recognition and high-level semantic interpretation such as behavior understanding. Subtle differences in low-level details can lead to substantial changes in high-level perception. For example, substituting the shopping bag held by a person with a gun suggests violent behavior, implying criminal or violent activity. Despite significant advancements in various multimodal tasks, Large Visual Language Models (LVLMs) remain unexplored in their capabilities to conduct such multi-level visual perceptions.

To investigate the perception gap between LVLMs and humans, we introduce MVP-Bench, the first visual--language benchmark systematically evaluating both low- and high-level visual perception of LVLMs. We construct MVP-Bench across natural and synthetic images to investigate how manipulated content influences model perception. Using MVP-Bench, we diagnose the visual perception of 10 open-source and 2 closed-source LVLMs, showing that high-level perception tasks significantly challenge existing LVLMs. The state-of-the-art GPT-4o only achieves an accuracy of $56$\% on Yes/No questions, compared with $74$\% in low-level scenarios. Furthermore, the performance gap between natural and manipulated images indicates that current LVLMs do not generalize in understanding the visual semantics of synthetic images as humans do.

MVP-Bench: Can Large Vision-Language Models Conduct Multi-level Visual Perception Like Humans?

This paper attempts to discover communication patterns automatically within dog vocalizations in a data-driven approach, which breaks the barrier previous approaches that rely on human prior knowledge on limited data. We present a self-supervised approach with HuBERT, enabling the accurate classification of phones, and an adaptive grammar induction method that identifies phone sequence patterns that suggest a preliminary vocabulary within dog vocalizations. Our results show that a subset of this vocabulary has substantial causality relations with certain canine activities, suggesting signs of stable semantics associated with these ``words''.

Phonetic and Lexical Discovery of Canine Vocalization

The difficulty of acquiring abundant, high-quality data, especially in multi-lingual contexts, has sparked interest in addressing low-resource scenarios. Moreover, current literature rely on fixed expressions from language IDs, which results in the inadequate learning of language representations, and the failure to generate speech in unseen languages. To address these challenges, we propose a novel method that directly extracts linguistic features from audio input while effectively filtering out miscellaneous acoustic information including speaker-specific attributes like timbre. Subjective and objective evaluations affirm the effectiveness of our approach for multi-lingual text-to-speech, and highlight its superiority in low-resource transfer learning for previously unseen language.

Audio-Based Linguistic Feature Extraction for Enhancing Multi-lingual and Low-Resource Text-to-Speech

Existing datasets for tabular question answering typically focus exclusively on text within cells. However, real-world data is inherently multimodal, often blending images such as symbols, faces, icons, patterns, and charts with textual content in tables. With the evolution of AI models capable of multimodal reasoning, it is pertinent to assess their efficacy in handling such structured data. This study investigates whether current AI models can perform knowledge-aware reasoning on multimodal structured data. We explore their ability to reason on tables that integrate both images and text, introducing MMTabQA, a new dataset designed for this purpose. Our experiments highlight substantial challenges for current AI models in effectively integrating and interpreting multiple text and image inputs, understanding visual context, and comparing visual content across images. These findings establish our dataset as a robust benchmark for advancing AI's comprehension and capabilities in analyzing multimodal structured data.

Knowledge-Aware Reasoning over Multimodal Semi-structured Tables

While coreference resolution is traditionally used as a component in individual document understanding, in this work we take a more global view and explore what can we learn about a domain from the set of all document-level coreference relations that are present in a large corpus. We derive coreference chains from a corpus of 30 million biomedical abstracts and construct a graph based on the string phrases within these chains, establishing connections between phrases if they co-occur within the same coreference chain. We then use the graph structure and the betweeness centrality measure to distinguish between edges denoting hierarchy, identity and noise, assign directionality to edges denoting hierarchy, and split nodes (strings) that correspond to multiple distinct concepts. The result is a rich, data-driven ontology over concepts in the biomedical domain, parts of which overlaps significantly with human-authored ontologies. We release the coreference chains and resulting ontology under a creative-commons license.

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Next from EMNLP 2024

README: Bridging Medical Jargon and Lay Understanding for Patient Education through Data-Centric NLP

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