Canada

Reinforcement Learning remains an underutilized method of training and fine-tuning Language Models (LMs) despite recent successes. We present a simple approach of fine-tuning a language model with Reinforcement Learning to compete on the BEA 2023 Shared Task whose goal is to automatically generate teacher responses in educational dialogues. We show results for both the t5-base model with 220 million parameters from the HuggingFace repository submitted to the leaderboard that, despite its comparatively small size, has achieved a good performance on both test and dev set, as well as GPT-2 with 124 million parameters. The presented results show that despite maximizing only one of the metrics used in the evaluation as a reward function our model scores highly in the other metrics as well.

ACL 2023

Enhancing Educational Dialogues: A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Generating AI Teacher Responses

language models

reinforcement learning

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
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##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

workshop paper

This paper presents the results of our participation in the BEA 2023 shared task, which focuses on generating AI teacher responses in educational dialogues. We conducted experiments using several Open-Source Large Language Models (LLMs) and explored fine-tuning techniques along with prompting strategies, including Few-Shot and Chain-of-Thought approaches. Our best model was ranked 4.5 in the
competition with a BertScore F1 of 0.71 and a DialogRPT final (avg) of 0.35. Nevertheless, our internal results did not exactly correlate with those obtained in the competition, which showed the difficulty in evaluating this task. Other challenges we faced were data leakage on the train set and the irregular format of the conversations.

RETUYT-InCo at BEA 2023 Shared Task: Tuning Open-Source LLMs for Generating Teacher Responses

This paper presents our approach to the BEA 2023 shared task of generating teacher responses in educational dialogues, using the Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus. Our system prompts GPT-3.5-turbo to generate initial suggestions, which are then subjected to reranking. We explore multiple strategies for candidate generation, including prompting for multiple candidates and employing iterative few-shot prompts with negative examples. We aggregate all candidate responses and rerank them based on DialogRPT scores. To handle consecutive turns in the dialogue data, we divide the task of generating teacher utterances into two components: teacher replies to the student and teacher continuations of previously sent messages. Through our proposed methodology, our system achieved the top score on both automated metrics and human evaluation, surpassing the reference human teachers on the latter.

NAISTeacher: A Prompt and Rerank Approach to Generating Teacher Utterances in Educational Dialogues

Online communities of involuntary celibates (incels) are a prominent source of misogynist hate speech. In this paper, we use quantitative text and network analysis approaches to examine how identity groups are discussed on incels.is, the largest black-pilled incels forum. We find that this community produces a wide range of novel identity terms and, while terms for women are most common, mentions of other minoritized identities are increasing. An analysis of the associations made with identity groups suggests an essentialist ideology where physical appearance, as well as gender and racial hierarchies, determine human value. We discuss implications for research into automated misogynist hate speech detection.

Identity Construction in a Misogynist Incels Forum

Over the past few years, much research has been conducted to identify and regulate toxic language. However, few studies have addressed a broader range of sensitive texts that are not necessarily overtly toxic. In this paper, we introduce and define a new category of sensitive text called "delicate text." We provide the taxonomy of delicate text and present a detailed annotation scheme. We annotate DeTexD, the first benchmark dataset for delicate text detection. The significance of the difference in the definitions is highlighted by the relative performance deltas between models trained each definitions and corpora and evaluated on the other. We make publicly available the DeTexD Benchmark dataset, annotation guidelines, and baseline model for delicate text detection.

DeTexD: A Benchmark Dataset for Delicate Text Detection

Cyberbullying is a serious societal issue widespread on various channels and 
platforms, particularly social networking sites. Such platforms have proven to be exceptionally fertile grounds for such behavior. The dearth of high-quality training data for multilingual and low-resource scenarios, data that can accurately capture the nuances of social media conversations, often poses a roadblock to this task. This paper attempts to tackle cyberbullying, specifically its two most common manifestations - aggression and offensiveness. We present a novel dataset of a total of 10, 000 English and Hindi-English code-mixed tweets, manually annotated for aggression detection and offensive language detection tasks. Our annotations are supported by inter-annotator agreement scores of 0.67 and 0.74 for the two tasks, indicating substantial agreement. We perform comprehensive fine-tuning of pre-trained language models (PTLMs) using this dataset to check its efficacy. Our challenging test sets show that the best models achieve macro F1-scores of 67.87 and 65.45 on the two tasks, respectively. Further, we perform cross-dataset transfer learning to benchmark our dataset against existing aggression and offensive language datasets. We also present a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of errors in prediction, and with this paper, we publicly release the novel dataset, code, and models.

Towards Safer Communities: Detecting Aggression and Offensive Language in Code-Mixed Tweets to Combat Cyberbullying

As pointed out by several scholars, current research on hate speech (HS) recognition is characterized by unsystematic data creation strategies and diverging annotation schemata. Subsequently, supervised-learning models tend to generalize poorly to datasets they were not trained on, and the performance of the models trained on datasets labeled using different HS taxonomies cannot be compared. To ease this problem, we propose applying extremely weak supervision that only relies on the class name rather than on class samples from the annotated data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of a state-of-the-art weakly-supervised text classification model in various in-dataset and cross-dataset settings. Furthermore, we conduct an in-depth quantitative and qualitative analysis of the source of poor generalizability of HS classification models.

Towards Weakly-Supervised Hate Speech Classification Across Datasets

The ground truth in classification tasks is often approximated by the fraction of annotators who classified an item as belonging to the positive class. Instances for which this fraction is equal to or above 50% are considered positive, including however ones that receive polarized opinions. This is a problematic encoding convention that disregards the potentially polarized nature of opinions and which is often employed to estimate abusive language. We present the distance from unimodality (DFU), a measure that estimates the extent of polarization on the distribution of opinions and which correlates well with human judgment. By applying DFU to posts crowd-annotated for toxicity, we found that polarized opinions are more likely by annotators originating from different countries. Also, we show that DFU can be exploited as an objective function to train models to predict whether a post will provoke polarized opinions in the future.

Distance from Unimodality: Assessing Polarization in Abusive Language

Hate speech detection faces two significant challenges: 1) the limited availability of labeled data and 2) the high variability of hate speech across different contexts and languages. Prompting brings a ray of hope to these challenges. It allows injecting a model with task-specific knowledge without relying on labeled data. 
This paper explores zero-shot learning with prompting for hate speech detection. We investigate how well zero-shot learning can detect hate speech in 3 languages with limited labeled data. We experiment with various large language models and verbalizers on 8 benchmark datasets. Our findings highlight the impact of prompt selection on the results. They also suggest that prompting, specifically with recent large language models, can achieve performance comparable to and surpass fine-tuned models, making it a promising alternative for under-resourced languages. 
Our findings highlight the potential of prompting for hate speech detection and show how both the prompt and the model have a significant impact on achieving more accurate predictions in this task.

Respectful or Toxic? Using Zero-Shot Learning with Language Models to Detect Hate Speech

We present an extensive evaluation of different fine-tuned models to detect instances of offensive and abusive language in Dutch across three benchmarks: a standard held-out test, a task- agnostic functional benchmark, and a dynamic test set. We also investigate the use of data cartography to identify high quality training data. Our results show a relatively good quality of the manually annotated data used to train the models while highlighting some critical weakness. We have also found a good portability of trained models along the same language phenomena. As for the data cartography, we have found a positive impact only on the functional benchmark and when selecting data per annotated dimension rather than using the entire training material.

Benchmarking Socially Unacceptable Language in Dutch

We draw from the framework of relationality as a pathway for modeling social relations to address gaps in text classification, generally, and offensive language classification, specifically. We use minoritized language, such as queer speech, to motivate a need for understanding and modeling social relations-- both among individuals and among their social communities. We then point to socio-ethical style as a research area for inferring and measuring social relations as well as propose additional questions to structure future research on operationalizing social context.



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RETUYT-InCo at BEA 2023 Shared Task: Tuning Open-Source LLMs for Generating Teacher Responses

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NAISTeacher: A Prompt and Rerank Approach to Generating Teacher Utterances in Educational Dialogues