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Neural retrieval models have emerged as an effective tool for information retrieval, but their performance suffers when there is a domain shift between training and test data distributions. Recent work aims to construct pseudo-training data for the target domain by generating domain-adapted pseudo-queries using large language models (LLMs). However, we identifies that LLMs exhibit a &#39;&#39;seen term bias&#39;&#39; where the generated pseudo-queries fail to include relevant &#39;&#39;unseen&#39;&#39; terms as expected for domain adaptation purposes. To address this limitation, we propose to improve the term recall of unseen query terms, by using term-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation (tRAG). Specifically, unlike existing document-level RAG, we propose to generate domain-specific keywords from all documents in the corpus, including those unseen in any individual document. To filter hallucination, generated keywords are retrieved and reranked, leveraging relevance feedback from both retrievers and LLMs. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark show tRAG significantly improves recall for unseen terms by 10.6% and outperforms LLM and retrieval-augmented generation baselines on overall retrieval performance.

NAACL 2025

tRAG: Term-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Domain-Adaptive Retrieval

retrieval-augmented generation

information retrieval

domain adaptation

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ACL 2024

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Neural retrieval models have emerged as an effective tool for information retrieval, but their performance suffers when there is a domain shift between training and test data distributions. Recent work aims to construct pseudo-training data for the target domain by generating domain-adapted pseudo-queries using large language models (LLMs). However, we identifies that LLMs exhibit a ''seen term bias'' where the generated pseudo-queries fail to include relevant ''unseen'' terms as expected for domain adaptation purposes. To address this limitation, we propose to improve the term recall of unseen query terms, by using term-level Retrieval-Augmented Generation (tRAG). Specifically, unlike existing document-level RAG, we propose to generate domain-specific keywords from all documents in the corpus, including those unseen in any individual document. To filter hallucination, generated keywords are retrieved and reranked, leveraging relevance feedback from both retrievers and LLMs. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark show tRAG significantly improves recall for unseen terms by 10.6% and outperforms LLM and retrieval-augmented generation baselines on overall retrieval performance.

technical paper

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
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Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Junlang Qian, Zixiao Zhu, Hanzhang Zhou, Zijian Feng, Zepeng Zhai, Kezhi Mao
Zero-shot text classification typically relies on prompt engineering, but the inherent prompt brittleness of large language models undermines its reliability. Minor changes in prompt can cause significant discrepancies in model performance. We attribute this prompt brittleness largely to the narrow focus on next-token probabilities in existing methods. To address this, we propose Placeholding Parallel Prediction (P3), a novel approach that predicts token probabilities across
multiple positions and simulates comprehensive sampling of generation paths in a single run of a language model. Experiments show improved accuracy and up to 98% reduction in the standard deviation across prompts, boosting robustness. Even without a prompt, P3 maintains comparable performance, reducing the need for prompt engineering.

Beyond the Next Token: Towards Prompt-Robust Zero-Shot Classification via Efficient Multi-Token Prediction

Large Language Models (LLMs) heavily rely on high-quality training data, making data valuation crucial for optimizing model performance, especially when working within a limited budget. In this work, we aim to offer a third-party data valuation approach that benefits both data providers and model developers. We introduce a linearized future influence kernel (LinFiK), which assesses the value of individual data samples in improving LLM performance during training. We further propose ALinFiK, a learning strategy to approximate LinFiK, enabling scalable data valuation. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that this approach surpasses existing baselines in effectiveness and efficiency, demonstrating significant scalability advantages as LLM parameters increase.

ALinFiK: Learning to Approximate Linearized Future Influence Kernel for Scalable Third-Parity LLM Data Valuation

The ability to communicate uncertainty and knowledge limitations is crucial for the safety of large language models (LLMs). Current evaluations of these abilities typically examine the correspondence between model accuracy and its internal probabilities or linguistic outputs. However, evaluation of the uncertainty of LLM communication should also focus on the behaviors of their human interlocutors: how much do users rely on what the LLM says? We introduce an interaction-centered evaluation approach called Rel-A.I. (pronounced ''rely'') that quantifies whether and how humans rely on LLMs' responses, complementing existing calibration evaluations. Through nine user studies with 450 participants, we investigate three crucial aspects that influence user reliance. We show that emphatic expressions of politeness (e.g., ''I'm happy to help!'') that precede LLM answers will cause participants to perceive these models as more competent, and in turn, rely 30% more on their generations. Additionally, the context of the interaction, such as the knowledge domain and nature of previous interactions with the LLM, substantially influences user reliance (e.g., users will rely 10% more on LLMs when responding to questions involving calculations). Our results show that calibration and language quality alone are insufficient in informing which LLMs are safely calibrated, and illustrate the need to consider features of the interactional context.

REL-A.I.: An Interaction-Centered Approach To Measuring Human-LM Reliance

This study finds that existing information retrieval (IR) models show significant biases based on the linguistic complexity of input queries, performing well on linguistically simpler (or more complex) queries while underperforming on linguistically more complex (or simpler) queries. To address this issue, we propose EqualizeIR, a framework to mitigate linguistic biases in IR models. EqualizeIR uses a {*linguistically biased} weak learner to capture linguistic biases in IR datasets and then trains a robust model by regularizing and refining its predictions using the biased weak learner. This approach effectively prevents the robust model from overfitting to specific linguistic patterns in data. We propose four approaches for developing linguistically-biased models. Extensive experiments on several datasets show that our method reduces performance disparities across linguistically simple and complex queries, while improving overall retrieval performance.

EqualizeIR: Mitigating Linguistic Biases in Retrieval Models

As the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to expand, their usage has become increasingly prevalent. However, as reflected in numerous ongoing lawsuits regarding LLM-generated content, addressing copyright infringement remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce PoisonedParrot: the first *stealthy* data poisoning attack that induces an LLM to generate copyrighted content even when the model has not been directly trained on the specific copyrighted material. PoisonedParrot integrates small fragments of copyrighted text into the poison samples using an off-the-shelf LLM. Despite its simplicity, evaluated in a wide range of experiments, PoisonedParrot is surprisingly effective at priming the model to generate copyrighted content with no discernible side effects. Moreover, we discover that existing defenses are largely ineffective against our attack. Finally, we make the first attempt at mitigating copyright-infringement poisoning attacks by proposing a defense: ParrotTrap. We encourage the community to explore this emerging threat model further.

PoisonedParrot: Subtle Data Poisoning Attacks to Elicit Copyright-Infringing Content from Large Language Models

Recent research has shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) are vulnerable to automated jailbreak attacks, where adversarial suffixes crafted by algorithms appended to harmful queries bypass safety alignment and trigger unintended responses. Current methods for generating these suffixes are computationally expensive and have low Attack Success Rates (ASR), especially against well-aligned models like Llama2 and Llama3. To overcome these limitations, we introduce **ADV-LLM**, an iterative self-tuning process that crafts adversarial LLMs with enhanced jailbreak ability. Our framework significantly reduces the computational cost of generating adversarial suffixes while achieving nearly 100% ASR on various open-source LLMs. Moreover, it exhibits strong attack transferability to closed-source models, achieving 99% ASR on GPT-3.5 and 49% ASR on GPT-4, despite being optimized solely on Llama3. Beyond improving jailbreak ability, ADV-LLM provides valuable insights for future safety alignment research through its ability to generate large datasets for studying LLM safety.

Iterative Self-Tuning LLMs for Enhanced Jailbreaking Capabilities

In a rapidly globalizing and digital world, content such as book and product reviews created by people from diverse cultures are read and consumed by others from different corners of the world. In this paper, we investigate the extent and patterns of gaps in understandability of book reviews due to the presence of culturally-specific items and elements that might be alien to users from another culture. Our user-study on 57 book reviews from Goodreads reveal that 83% of the reviews had at least one culture-specific difficult-to-understand element. We also evaluate the efficacy of GPT-4o in identifying such items, given the cultural background of the reader; the results are mixed, implying a significant scope for improvement. Our datasets are available here: https://github.com/sougata-ub/reading_between_lines.

Reading between the Lines: Can LLMs Identify Cross-Cultural Communication Gaps?

We study retrieving a set of documents that covers various perspectives on a complex and contentious question (e.g., will ChatGPT do more harm than good?). We curate a Benchmark for Retrieval Diversity for Subjective questions (BERDS), where each example consists of a question and diverse perspectives associated with the question, sourced from survey questions and debate websites. On this data, retrievers paired with a corpus are evaluated to surface a document set that contains diverse perspectives. Our framing diverges from most retrieval tasks in that document relevancy cannot be decided by simple string matches to references. Instead, we build a language model-based automatic evaluator that decides whether each retrieved document contains a perspective. This allows us to evaluate the performance of three different types of corpus (Wikipedia, web snapshot, and corpus constructed on the fly with retrieved pages from the search engine) paired with retrievers. Retrieving diverse documents remains challenging, with the outputs from existing retrievers covering all perspectives on only 33.74% of the examples. We further study the impact of query expansion and diversity-focused reranking approaches and analyze retriever sycophancy. Together, we lay the foundation for future studies in retrieval diversity handling complex queries.

Open-World Evaluation for Retrieving Diverse Perspectives

Conceptual combination is a cognitive process that merges basic concepts, enabling the creation of complex expressions. During this process, the properties of combination (e.g., the whiteness of a peeled apple) can be inherited from basic concepts, newly emerge, or be canceled. However, previous studies have evaluated a limited set of properties and have not examined the generative process. To address this gap, we introduce the Conceptual Combination with Property Type dataset (CCPT), which consists of 12.3K annotated triplets of noun phrases, properties, and property types. Using CCPT, we establish three types of tasks to evaluate LLMs for conceptual combination thoroughly. Our key findings are threefold: (1) Our automatic metric grading property emergence and cancellation closely corresponds with human judgments. (2) LLMs, including OpenAI's o1, struggle to generate noun phrases which possess given emergent properties. (3) Our proposed method, inspired by cognitive psychology model that explains how relationships between concepts are formed, improves performances in all generative tasks. The dataset and experimental code are available at https://github.com/seokwon99/CCPT.git.

Is a Peeled Apple Still Red? Evaluating LLMs' Ability for Conceptual Combination with Property Type

In this work, we propose a grounded approach to meaning in language typology. Using images captioned across languages, we can treat the images as an empirical language agnostic representation of meaning, allowing the quantification of language function and semantics. Using principles from information theory, we define ''groundedness'', an empirical measure of contextual semantic contentfulness which can be computed using multilingual (vision-and-)language models. As an initial application, we apply this measure to the typology of word classes. We find our measure captures the contentfulness asymmetry between functional (grammatical) and lexical (content) classes across languages, but contradicts the view that functional classes do not convey content. We release a dataset of groundedness scores for 30 languages. Our results suggest that the grounded typology approach can provide quantitative evidence about semantic function in language.

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Beyond the Next Token: Towards Prompt-Robust Zero-Shot Classification via Efficient Multi-Token Prediction

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