United States

Verbs form the backbone of language, providing the structure and meaning to sentences. Yet, their intricate semantic nuances pose a longstanding challenge. Understanding verb relations through the concept of lexical entailment is crucial for comprehending sentence meanings and grasping verb dynamics. This work investigates the capabilities of eight Large Language Models in recognizing lexical entailment relations among verbs through differently devised prompting strategies and zero-/few-shot settings over verb pairs from two lexical databases, namely WordNet and HyperLex. Our findings unveil that the models can tackle the lexical entailment recognition task with moderately good performance, although at varying degree of effectiveness and under different conditions. Also, utilizing few-shot prompting can enhance the models&#39; performance. However, perfectly solving the task arises as an unmet challenge for all examined LLMs, which raises an emergence for further research developments on this topic.

EMNLP 2024

Talking the Talk Does Not Entail Walking the Walk: On the Limits of Large Language Models in Lexical Entailment Recognition

knowledge parsing

self-training

stages 

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

First established in 1965, the biennial COLING conference is held in diverse parts of the globe and attracts participants from both top-ranked research centers and emerging countries. Today, the most important developments in our field are taking place not only in universities and academic research institutes, but also in industrial research departments and in technological startups. COLING conferences provide opportunities for all these communities to showcase their exciting developments.

COLING 2020

COLING, the International Conference on Computational Linguistics, is one of the premier conferences for natural language processing and computational linguistics. Often grouped within the field of artificial intelligence, but actually pre-dating the development of artificial intelligence, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing are now some of the major drivers behind the use of artificial intelligence for commercial and social applications – for example, on-line search, machine translation and with voice-assisted conversational devices.

Verbs form the backbone of language, providing the structure and meaning to sentences. Yet, their intricate semantic nuances pose a longstanding challenge. Understanding verb relations through the concept of lexical entailment is crucial for comprehending sentence meanings and grasping verb dynamics. This work investigates the capabilities of eight Large Language Models in recognizing lexical entailment relations among verbs through differently devised prompting strategies and zero-/few-shot settings over verb pairs from two lexical databases, namely WordNet and HyperLex. Our findings unveil that the models can tackle the lexical entailment recognition task with moderately good performance, although at varying degree of effectiveness and under different conditions. Also, utilizing few-shot prompting can enhance the models' performance. However, perfectly solving the task arises as an unmet challenge for all examined LLMs, which raises an emergence for further research developments on this topic.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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The pursuit of personalized education has led to the integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in developing intelligent tutoring systems. To better understand and adapt to individual student needs, including their misconceptions, LLMs need to be trained on extensive datasets of student-tutor dialogues. Our research uncovers a fundamental challenge in this approach: the "Student Data Paradox". This paradox emerges when LLMs, trained on student data to understand learner behavior, inadvertently compromise their own factual knowledge and reasoning abilities. We investigate this paradox by training state-of-the-art language models on student-tutor dialogue datasets and evaluating their performance across multiple benchmarks. These benchmarks assess various aspects of language model capabilities, including reasoning, truthfulness, and common sense understanding. Our findings reveal significant declines in the models' performance across these diverse benchmarks, indicating a broad impact on their capabilities when trained to model student behavior. Our research makes two primary contributions: (1) empirical demonstration of the Student Data Paradox through quantitative analysis of model performance, and (2) introduction of ``hallucination tokens'' as a mitigation strategy. These tokens, while improving performance, highlight the persistent challenge of balancing accurate student behavior modeling with maintaining the LLM's integrity as an educational tool.
This study emphasizes the need for innovative solutions to reconcile the conflicting goals of faithfully understanding diverse student cognition while preserving the model's ability to provide accurate information and guidance.

The Student Data Paradox: Examining the Regressive Side Effects of Training LLMs for Personalized Learning

Topic modeling is a powerful technique for uncovering hidden themes within a collection of documents. However, the effectiveness of traditional topic models often relies on sufficient word co-occurrence, which is lacking in short texts. Therefore, existing approaches, whether probabilistic or neural, frequently struggle to extract meaningful patterns from such data, resulting in incoherent topics. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach that leverages large language models (LLMs) to extend short texts into more detailed sequences before applying topic modeling. To further improve the efficiency and solve the problem of semantic inconsistency from LLM-generated texts, we propose to use prefix tuning to train a smaller language model coupled with a variational autoencoder for short-text topic modeling. Our method significantly improves short-text topic modeling performance, as demonstrated by extensive experiments on real-world datasets with extreme data sparsity, outperforming current state-of-the-art topic models.

Prefix-VAE: Efficient and Consistent Short-Text Topic Modeling with LLMs

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is widely used to inject external non-parametric knowledge into large language models (LLMs). Recent works suggest that Knowledge Graphs (KGs) contain valuable external knowledge for LLMs. Retrieving information from KGs differs from extracting it from document sets. Most existing approaches seek to directly retrieve relevant subgraphs, thereby eliminating the need for extensive SPARQL annotations, traditionally required by semantic parsing methods. In this paper, we model the subgraph retrieval task as a conditional generation task handled by small language models. Specifically, we define a subgraph identifier as a sequence of relations, each represented as a special token stored in the language models. Our base generative subgraph retrieval model, consisting of only 220M parameters, achieves competitive retrieval performance compared to state-of-the-art models relying on 7B parameters, demonstrating that small language models are capable of performing the subgraph retrieval task. Furthermore, our largest 3B model, when plugged with an LLM reader, sets new SOTA end-to-end performance on both the WebQSP and CWQ benchmarks. Our model and data will be made available online: https://github.com/hwy9855/GSR.

Less is More: Making Smaller Language Models Competent Subgraph Retrievers for Multi-hop KGQA

Audio-Visual Question Answering (AVQA) is a challenging task that involves answering questions based on both auditory and visual information in videos. A significant challenge is interpreting complex multi-modal scenes, which include both visual objects and sound sources, and connecting them to the given question. In this paper, we introduce the Source-aware Semantic Representation Network (SaSR-Net), a novel model designed for AVQA. SaSR-Net utilizes source-wise learnable tokens to efficiently capture and align audio-visual elements with the corresponding question. It streamlines the fusion of audio and visual information using spatial and temporal attention mechanisms to identify answers in multi-modal scenes. Extensive experiments on the Music-AVQA and AVQA-Yang datasets show that SaSR-Net outperforms state-of-the-art AVQA methods. We will release our source code and pre-trained models.

SaSR-Net: Source-Aware Semantic Representation Network for Enhancing Audio-Visual Question Answering

Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to significant improvements in the Knowledge Base Question Answering (KBQA) task. However, datasets used in KBQA studies do not capture the true complexity of KBQA tasks. They either have simple questions, use synthetically generated logical forms, or are based on small knowledge base (KB) schemas.

We introduce the SPINACH dataset, an expert-annotated KBQA dataset collected from discussions on Wikidata's "Request a Query" forum with 320 decontextualized question-SPARQL pairs. The complexity of these in-the-wild queries calls for a KBQA system that can dynamically explore large and often incomplete schemas and reason about them, as it is infeasible to create a comprehensive training dataset. 

We also introduce an in-context learning KBQA agent, also called SPINACH, that mimics how a human expert would write SPARQLs to handle challenging questions. SPINACH achieves a new state of the art on the QALD-7, QALD-9 Plus and QALD-10 datasets by 31.0%, 27.0%, and 10.0% in $F_1$, respectively, and coming within 1.6\% of the fine-tuned LLaMA SOTA model on WikiWebQuestions.
On our new SPINACH dataset, the SPINACH agent outperforms all baselines, including the best GPT-4-based KBQA agent, by at least 38.1% in $F_1$.

SPINACH: SPARQL-Based Information Navigation for Challenging Real-World Questions

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is an effective approach for aligning language models to human preferences. Central to RLHF is learning a reward function for scoring human preferences. Two main approaches for learning a reward model are 1) training an EXplicit Reward Model (EXRM) as in RLHF, and 2) using an implicit reward learned from preference data through methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Prior work has shown that the implicit reward model of DPO (denoted as DPORM) can approximate an EXRM on the limit infinite samples. However, it is unclear how effective is DPORM in practice. DPORM's effectiveness directly implies the optimality of learned policy of DPO and also has practical implication for more advanced alignment methods, such as iterative DPO. We compare the accuracy at distinguishing preferred and rejected answers using both DPORM and EXRM. Our findings indicate that even though DPORM can fit the training dataset, it generalizes less effective than EXRM, especially when the validation datasets contain distributional shifts. Across five out-of-distribution settings, DPORM has a mean drop in accuracy of 3% and a maximum drop of 7%. These findings highlight that DPORM has limited generalization ability and substantiates the integration of an explicit reward model in iterative DPO approaches.

On the Limited Generalization Capability of the Implicit Reward Model Induced by Direct Preference Optimization

Large language models have demonstrated significant potential as the next-generation information access engines. However, their reliability is hindered by issues of hallucination and generating non-factual content. This is particularly problematic in long-form responses, where assessing and ensuring factual accuracy is complex. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing FactAlign, a novel alignment framework designed to enhance the factuality of LLMs' long-form responses while maintaining their helpfulness. We introduce fKTO, a fine-grained, sentence-level alignment algorithm that extends the Kahneman-Tversky Optimization (KTO) alignment method. Leveraging recent advances in automatic factuality evaluation, FactAlign utilizes fine-grained factuality assessments to guide the alignment process. Our experiments on open-domain prompts and information-seeking questions demonstrate that FactAlign significantly improves the factual accuracy of LLM responses while also improving their helpfulness. Further analyses identify that FactAlign is capable of training LLMs to provide more information without losing factual precision, thus improving the factual F1 score. Our source code, datasets, and trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/MiuLab/FactAlign

FactAlign: Long-form Factuality Alignment of Large Language Models

The proliferation of inflammatory or misleading “fake” news content has become increasingly common in recent years. Simultaneously, it has become easier than ever to use AI tools to generate photorealistic images depicting any scene imaginable. Combining these two—AI-generated fake news content—is particularly potent and dangerous. To combat the spread of AI-generated fake news, we propose the MiRAGeNews Dataset, a dataset of 12,500 high-quality real and AI-generated image-caption pairs from state-of-the-art generators. We find that our dataset poses a significant challenge to humans (60% F-1) and state-of-the-art multi-modal LLMs (< 24% F-1). Using our dataset we train a multi-modal detector (MiRAGe) that improves by +5.1% F-1 over state-of-the-art baselines on image-caption pairs from out-of-domain image generators and news publishers. We release our code and data to aid future work on detecting AI-generated content.

MiRAGeNews: Multimodal Realistic AI-Generated News Detection

In this work, we study in-context teaching(ICT), where a teacher provides in-context example rationales to teach a student to reason
over unseen cases. Human teachers are usually required to craft in-context demonstrations, which are costly and have high variance. We ask whether a large language model (LLM) can serve as a more effective in-context teacher for itself or other
LLMs, compared to humans. Inspired by the Encoding Specificity Hypothesis from human episodic memory, we hypothesize that
in-context exemplars crafted by the teacher should match the training data of the student. This hypothesis motivates us to propose Self-Explain where an LLM’s self-elicited explanations are used as in-context demonstrations for prompting it as they are generalized from
the model’s training examples. Self-Explain is shown to significantly outperform using human-crafted exemplars and other baselines.


Furthermore, we reveal that for ICT, rationales from different teacher LLMs or human experts that more resemble the student LLM’s self-explanations are better in-context demonstrations. This supports our encoding specificity hypothesis. We then propose Teach-Back that aligns a teacher LLM with the student to enhance the ICT performance. For example, Teach-Back enables a 7B model to teach the much larger GPT-3.5 in context, surpassing human teachers by around 5% in test accuracy on medical question answering.

Large Language Models are In-context Teachers for Knowledge Reasoning

Conditional question answering (CQA) is an important task that aims to find probable answers and identify missing conditions. Existing approaches struggle with CQA due to two challenges: (1) precisely identifying necessary conditions and the logical relationship, and (2) verifying conditions to detect any that are missing. In this paper, we propose a novel prompting approach, Chain of condition, by first identifying all conditions and constructing their logical relationships explicitly according to the document, then verifying whether these conditions are satisfied, finally solving the logical expression to indicate any missing conditions and generating the answer accordingly. Experiments on two CQA benchmark datasets show our chain of condition outperforms existing prompting baselines, establishing a new state of the art. Furthermore, with only a few examples, our method can facilitate GPT-3.5-Turbo or GPT-4 to outperform all existing supervised models.

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The Student Data Paradox: Examining the Regressive Side Effects of Training LLMs for Personalized Learning

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Lexical entailment with semantic graphs