Malta

In this work, we focus on the use of sentence translation exercise in educational settings and attempted to automatic scoring.
While Sentence Translation Exercises (STE) are effective in L2 learning, the frequency of exercises is often limited due to the considerable burden of grading.
Therefore, automating the correction and feedback for translation exercises has the potential to significantly transform the educational environment in language learning．
The contributions of this study are the establishment of Sentence Translation Exercises (STE) as a new task in a format ready for practical use, the construction of a dataset according to task design, and the creation of a baseline that shows potential for advancement.

EACL 2024

Japanese-English Sentence Translation Exercises Dataset for Automatic Grading

llm evaluation

language education

educational application

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
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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.

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Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
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As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities at scale, particularly at generating text conditioned on a prompt. In our work, we investigate the use of LLMs to augment training data of smaller language models (SLMs) with automatically generated counterfactual (CF) instances -- i.e. minimally altered inputs -- in order to improve out-of-domain (OOD) performance of SLMs in the extractive question answering (QA) setup. We show that, across various LLM generators, such data augmentation consistently enhances OOD performance and improves model calibration for both confidence-based and rationale-augmented calibrator models. Furthermore, these performance improvements correlate with higher diversity of CF instances in terms of their surface form and semantic content. Finally, we show that CF augmented models which are easier to calibrate also exhibit much lower entropy when assigning importance, indicating that rationale-augmented calibrators prefer concise explanations.

CATfOOD: Counterfactual Augmented Training for Improving Out-of-Domain Performance and Calibration

While the Large Language Models (LLMs) dominate a majority of language understanding tasks, previous work shows that some of these results are supported by modelling spurious correlations of training datasets. Authors commonly assess model robustness by evaluating their models on out-of-distribution (OOD) datasets of the same task, but these datasets might share the bias of the training dataset. We propose a simple method for measuring a scale of models' reliance on any identified spurious feature and assess the robustness towards a large set of known and newly found prediction biases for various pre-trained models and debiasing methods in Question Answering (QA). We find that the reported OOD gains of debiasing methods can not be explained by mitigated reliance on biased features, suggesting that biases are shared among different QA datasets. We further evidence this by measuring that performance of OOD models depends on bias features comparably to the ID model. Our findings motivate future work to refine the reports of LLMs' robustness to a level of known spurious features.

Think Twice: Measuring the Efficiency of Eliminating Prediction Shortcuts of Question Answering Models

Despite the progress in building multilingual language models, evaluation is often limited to a few languages with available datasets which excludes a large number of low-resource languages. 
In this paper, we create SIB-200---a large-scale open-sourced benchmark dataset for topic classification in 205 languages and dialects to address the lack of evaluation dataset for Natural Language Understanding (NLU). For many of the languages covered in SIB-200, this is the first publicly available evaluation dataset for NLU. The dataset is based on Flores-200 machine translation corpus. We annotated the English portion of the dataset and extended the sentence-level annotation to the remaining 204 languages covered in the corpus. Despite the simplicity of this task, our evaluation in full-supervised setting, cross-lingual transfer setting and prompting of large language model setting show that there is still a large gap between the performance of high-resource and low-resource languages when multilingual evaluation is scaled to numerous world languages. We found that languages unseen during the pre-training of multilingual language models, languages from under-represented families (like Nilotic and Altantic-Congo), and languages from the regions of Africa, Americas, Oceania and South East Asia, often have the lowest performance on our topic classification dataset. We hope our dataset %will 
encourages a more inclusive evaluation of multilingual language models on a more diverse set of languages.

SIB-200: A Simple, Inclusive, and Big Evaluation Dataset for Topic Classification in 200+ Languages and Dialects

This work proposes a challenging yet more realistic setting for zero-shot cross-task generalization: zero-shot instruction following, presuming the existence of a paragraph-style task definition while no demonstrations exist. To better learn the task supervision from the definition, we propose two strategies: first, to automatically find out the critical sentences in the definition; second, a ranking objective to force the model to generate the gold outputs with higher probabilities when those critical parts are highlighted in the definition. The joint efforts of the two strategies yield state-of-the-art performance on the Super-NaturalInstructions. 



Toward Zero-Shot Instruction Following

Current machine translation (MT) systems perform well in the domains on which they were trained, but adaptation to unseen domains remains a challenge. Rather than fine-tuning on domain data or modifying the architecture for training, an alternative approach exploits large language models (LLMs), which are performant across NLP tasks especially when presented with in-context examples. We focus on adapting a pre-trained LLM to a domain at inference through in-context example selection. For MT, examples are usually randomly selected from a development set. Some more recent methods though select using the more intuitive basis of test source similarity. We employ topic models to select examples based on abstract semantic relationships below the level of a domain. We test the relevance of these statistical models and use them to select informative examples even for out-of-domain inputs, experimenting on 7 diverse domains and 11 language pairs of differing resourcedness. Our method outperforms baselines on challenging multilingual out-of-domain tests, though it does not match performance with strong baselines for the in-language setting. We find that adding few-shot examples and related keywords consistently improves translation quality, that example diversity must be balanced with source similarity, and that our pipeline is overly restrictive for example selection when a targeted development set is available.

Topic-guided Example Selection for Domain Adaptation in LLM-based Machine Translation

The linguistic validity of Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) parsing results relies heavily on treebanks for training and evaluation, so the treebank construction is crucial. Yet the current Japanese CCG treebank is known to have inaccuracies in its analyses of Japanese syntactic structures, including passive and causative constructions. While ABCTreebank, a treebank for ABC grammar, has been made to improve the analysis, particularly of argument structures, it lacks the detailed syntactic features required for Japanese CCG. In contrast, the Japanese CCG parser, lightblue, efficiently provides detailed syntactic features, but it does not accurately capture argument structures. We propose a method to generate a linguistically valid Japanese CCG treebank with detailed information by combining the strengths of ABCTreebank and lightblue. We develop an algorithm that filters lightblue’s lexical items using ABCTreebank, effectively converting lightblue output into a linguistically valid CCG treebank. To evaluate our treebank, we manually evaluate CCG syntactic structures and semantic representations and analyze conversion rates.

Reforging : A Method for Constructing a Linguistically Valid Japanese CCG Treebank

Writing tests for machine learning (ML) code is a crucial step towards ensuring the correctness and reliability of ML software. At the same time, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been adopted at a rapid pace for various code generation tasks, making it a natural choice for many developers who need to write ML tests. However, the implications of using these models, and how the LLM-generated tests differ from human-written ones, are relatively unexplored. In this work, we examine the use of LLMs to extract representations of ML source code and tests in order to understand the semantic relationships between human-written test functions and LLM-generated ones, and annotate a set of LLM-generated tests for several important qualities including usefulness, documentation, and correctness. We find that programmers prefer LLM-generated tests to those selected using retrieval-based methods, and in some cases, to those written by other humans.

Representation and Generation of Machine Learning Test Functions

This paper explores the assumption that Large Language Models (LLMs) skilled in generation tasks are equally adept as evaluators. We assess the performance of three LLMs and one open-source LM in Question-Answering (QA) and evaluation tasks using the TriviaQA (Joshi et al., 2017) dataset. Results indicate a significant disparity, with LLMs exhibiting lower performance in evaluation tasks compared to generation tasks. Intriguingly, we discover instances of unfaithful evaluation where models accurately evaluate answers in areas where they lack competence, underscoring the need to examine the faithfulness and trustworthiness of LLMs as evaluators. This study contributes to the understanding of "the Generative AI Paradox" (West et al., 2023), highlighting a need to explore the correlation between generative excellence and evaluation proficiency, and the necessity to scrutinize the faithfulness aspect in model evaluations.

The Generative AI Paradox in Evaluation: "What It Can Solve, It May Not Evaluate"

Integrated Gradients (IG) serve as a potent tool for explaining the internal structure of a lan- guage model. The calculation of IG requires numerical integration, wherein the number of steps serves as a critical hyperparameter. The step count can drastically alter the results, in- ducing considerable errors in interpretability. To scrutinize the effect of step variation on IG, we measured the difference between theoretical and observed IG totals for each step amount. Our findings indicate that the ideal number of steps to maintain minimal error varies from in- stance to instance. Consequently, we advocate for customizing the step count for each instance. Our study is the first to quantitatively analyze the variation of IG values with the number of steps.

The Impact of Integration Step on Integrated Gradients

This student paper explores the potential of augmenting computational models of semantic change with sentiment information. It tests the efficacy of this approach on the English SemEval of Lexical Semantic Change and its associated historical corpora. We first establish the feasibility of our approach by demonstrating that existing models extract reliable sentiment information from historical corpora, and then validate that words that underwent semantic change also show greater sentiment change in comparison to historically stable words. We then integrate sentiment information into standard models of semantic change for individual words, and test if this can improve the overall performance of the latter, showing mixed results. This research contributes to our understanding of language change by providing the first attempt to enrich standard models of semantic change with additional information. It taps into the multifaceted nature of language change, that should not be reduced only to binary or scalar report of change, but adds additional dimensions to this change, sentiment being only one of these. As such, this student paper suggests novel directions for future work in integrating additional, more nuanced information of change and interpretation for finer-grained semantic change analysis.

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Next from EACL 2024

CATfOOD: Counterfactual Augmented Training for Improving Out-of-Domain Performance and Calibration

Similar lecture

Learning from Partially Annotated Data: Example-aware Creation of Gap-filling Exercises for Language Learning