United States

Dialect and gender-based biases have become an area of concern in language-dependent AI systems
including around automatic speech recognition (ASR) which processes speech audio into text. These potential biases raise concern for discriminatory outcomes with AI systems depending on demographic- particularly gender discrimination against women, and racial discrimination against minorities with ethnic or cultural English dialects.As such we aim to evaluate the performance of ASR systems across different genders and across dialects of English. Concretely, we take a deep dive of the performance of ASR systems on men and women across four US-based English dialects: Standard American English (SAE), 
African American Vernacular English (AAVE), Chicano English, and Spanglish. To do this, we construct a labeled dataset of 13 hours of podcast audio, transcribed by speakers of the represented dialects. We then evaluate zero-shot performance of different automatic speech recognition models on our dataset, and further finetune models to better understand how finetuning can impact performance. Our work fills the gap of investigating possible gender disparities within underrepresented dialects.

EMNLP 2024

Modeling Gender and Dialect Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition

interpretability and analysis of models for nlp

computational social science and cultural analytics

language modeling

question answering

## 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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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

poster

Prompts are often employed to condition decoder-only language model generation on reference information. Just-in-time processing of a context is inefficient due to the quadratic cost of self-attention operations, and caching is desirable. However, caching transformer states can easily require almost as much space as the model parameters. When the right context is not known in advance, caching the prompt can be challenging. This work addresses these limitations by introducing models that, inspired by the encoder-decoder architecture, use cross-attention to condition generation on reference text without the prompt. More precisely, we leverage pre-trained decoder-only models and only train a small number of added layers. We use Question-Answering (QA) as a testbed to evaluate the ability of our models to perform conditional generation and observe that they outperform prompt-based inference methods, are comparable to fine-tuned prompted LLMs, and drastically reduce the space footprint relative to standard KV caching by two orders of magnitude. Specifically, we introduced XC-Llama which converts a pre-trained Llama 2 into an encoder-decoder architecture by integrating cross-attention layers interleaved in between existing self-attention layers.

XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference

Existing speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) models fall into two camps: they either leverage text as an intermediate step or require hundreds of hours of parallel speech data. Both approaches are incompatible with textless languages or language pairs with limited parallel data. We present PFB, a framework for training textless S2ST models that require just dozens of hours of parallel speech data. We first pretrain a model on large-scale monolingual speech data, finetune it with a small amount of parallel speech data (20-60 hours), and lastly train with an unsupervised backtranslation objective. We train and evaluate our models for English-to-German, German-to-English and Marathi-to-English translation on three different domains (European Parliament, Common Voice, and All India Radio) with single-speaker synthesized speech. Evaluated using the ASR-BLEU metric, our models achieve reasonable performance on all three domains, with some being within 1-2 points of our higher-resourced topline.

Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation With Limited Parallel Data

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly ubiquitous, yet their ability to retain and reason about temporal information remains limited, hindering their application in real-world scenarios where understanding the sequential nature of events is crucial. Our study experiments with 12 state-of-the-art models (ranging from 2B to 70B+ parameters) on a novel numerical-temporal dataset, TempUN, spanning from 10,000 BCE to 2100 CE, to uncover significant temporal retention and comprehension limitations. We propose six metrics to assess three learning paradigms to enhance temporal knowledge acquisition. Our findings reveal that open-source models exhibit knowledge gaps more frequently, suggesting a trade-off between limited knowledge and incorrect responses. Additionally, various fine-tuning approaches significantly improved performance, reducing incorrect outputs and impacting the identification of 'information not available' in the generations. The associated dataset and code are available at the [URL](https://anonymous.4open.science/r/TempUN-ARR/).

Remember This Event That Year? Assessing Temporal Information and Understanding in Large Language Models

The concept of *persona*, originally adopted in dialogue literature, has re-surged as a promising framework for tailoring large language models (LLMs) to specific context (*e.g.*, personalized search, LLM-as-a-judge). However, the growing research on leveraging persona in LLMs is relatively disorganized and lacks a systematic taxonomy. To close the gap, we present a comprehensive survey to categorize the current state of the field. We identify two lines of research, namely (1) *LLM Role-Playing*, where personas are assigned to LLMs, and (2) *LLM Personalization*, where LLMs take care of user personas. Additionally, we introduce existing methods for LLM personality evaluation. To the best of our knowledge, we present the first survey for role-playing and personalization in LLMs under the unified view of persona. We continuously maintain a paper collection to foster future endeavors.

Two Tales of Persona in LLMs: A Survey of Role-Playing and Personalization

The training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) with little to no supervised data remains an open question. In this work, we demonstrate that streaming Transformer-Transducer (TT) models can be trained from scratch in consumer and accessible GPUs in their entirety with pseudo-labeled (PL) speech from foundational speech models (FSM). This allows training a robust ASR model just in one stage and does not require large data and computational budget compared to the two-step scenario with pre-training and fine-tuning. We perform a comprehensive ablation on different aspects of PL-based streaming TT models such as the impact of (1) shallow fusion of n-gram LMs, (2) contextual biasing with named entities, (3) chunk-wise decoding for low-latency streaming applications, and (4) TT overall performance as the function of the FSM size. Our results demonstrate that TT can be trained from scratch without supervised data, even with very noisy PLs. We validate the proposed framework on 6 languages from CommonVoice and propose multiple heuristics to filter out hallucinated PLs.

Fast Streaming Transducer ASR Prototyping via Knowledge Distillation with Whisper

The recent development of fact verification systems with natural logic has enhanced their explainability by aligning claims with evidence through set-theoretic operators, providing faithful justifications. Despite these advancements, such systems often rely on a large amount of training data annotated with natural logic. To address this issue, we propose a zero-shot method that utilizes the generalization capabilities of instruction-tuned large language models. To comprehensively assess the zero-shot capabilities of our method and other fact verification systems, we evaluate all models on both artificial and real-world claims, including multilingual datasets. We also compare our method against other fact verification systems in two setups. First, in the zero-shot generalization setup, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms other systems that were not specifically trained on natural logic data, achieving an average accuracy improvement of 8.96 points over the best-performing baseline. Second, in the zero-shot transfer setup, we show that current systems trained on natural logic data do not generalize well to other domains, and our method outperforms these systems across all datasets with real-world claims.

Zero-Shot Fact Verification via Natural Logic and Large Language Models

Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have gained significant popularity for adapting pre-trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to downstream tasks, primarily due to their potential to significantly reduce memory and computational overheads. However, a common limitation in most PEFT approaches is their application of a uniform architectural design across all layers. This uniformity involves identical trainable modules and ignores the varying importance of each layer, leading to sub-optimal fine-tuning results. To overcome the above limitation and obtain better performance, we develop a novel approach, Importance-aware Sparse Tuning (IST), to fully utilize the inherent sparsity and select the most important subset of full layers with effective layer-wise importance scoring. The proposed IST is a versatile and plug-and-play technique compatible with various PEFT methods that operate on a per-layer basis. By leveraging the estimated importance scores, IST dynamically updates these selected layers in PEFT modules, leading to reduced memory demands. We further provide theoretical proof of convergence and empirical evidence of superior performance to demonstrate the advantages of IST over uniform updating strategies. Extensive experiments on a range of LLMs, PEFTs, and downstream tasks substantiate the effectiveness of our proposed method, showcasing IST's capacity to enhance existing layer-based PEFT methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/Kaiseem/IST

Layerwise Importance Matters: Less Memory for Better Performance in Parameter-efficient Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

Vision-extended LLMs have made significant strides in Visual Question Answering (VQA). Despite these advancements, VLLMs still encounter substantial difficulties in handling queries involving long-tail entities, with a tendency to produce erroneous or hallucinated responses. In this work, we introduce a novel evaluative benchmark named \textbf{SnapNTell}, specifically tailored for entity-centric VQA. This task aims to test the models' capabilities in identifying entities and providing detailed, entity-specific knowledge. We have developed the \textbf{SnapNTell Dataset}, distinct from traditional VQA datasets: (1) It encompasses a wide range of categorized entities, each represented by images and explicitly named in the answers; (2) It features QA pairs that require extensive knowledge for accurate responses. The dataset is organized into 22 major categories, containing 7,568 unique entities in total. For each entity, we curated 10 illustrative images and crafted 10 knowledge-intensive QA pairs. To address this novel task, we devised a scalable, efficient, and transparent retrieval-augmented multimodal LLM. Our approach markedly outperforms existing methods on the SnapNTell dataset, achieving a 66.5% improvement in the BELURT score.

SnapNTell: Enhancing Entity-Centric Visual Question Answering with Retrieval Augmented Multimodal LLM

Cloze testing is a common method for measuring the behavior of large language models on a number of benchmark tasks. Using the MMLU dataset, we show that the base-rate probability (BRP) differences across answer tokens are significant and affect task performance ie. guess $A$ if uncertain. We find that counterfactual prompting does sufficiently mitigate the BRP effect. The BRP effect is found to have a similar effect to test taking strategies employed by humans leading to the conflation of task performance and test-taking ability. We propose the Nvr-X-MMLU task, a variation of MMLU, which helps to disambiguate test-taking ability from task performance and reports the latter.

The Base-Rate Effect on LLM Benchmark Performance: Disambiguating Test-Taking Strategies from Benchmark Performance

Language models (LMs), despite their advances, often depend on spurious correlations, undermining their accuracy and generalizability. This study addresses the overlooked impact of subtler, more complex shortcuts that compromise model reliability beyond oversimplified shortcuts. We introduce a comprehensive benchmark that categorizes shortcuts into occurrence, style, and concept, aiming to explore the nuanced ways in which these shortcuts influence the performance of LMs. Through extensive experiments across traditional LMs, large language models, and state-of-the-art robust models, our research systematically investigates models' resilience and susceptibilities to sophisticated shortcuts. Our benchmark and code can be found at: https://github.com/yuqing-zhou/shortcut-learning-in-text-classification.

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XC-Cache: Cross-Attending to Cached Context for Efficient LLM Inference

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