Malta

Instruction tuning has become an integral part of training pipelines for Large Language Models (LLMs) and has been shown to yield strong performance gains. 
In an orthogonal line of research, Annotation Error Detection (AED) has emerged as a tool for detecting quality problems in gold standard labels. So far, however, the application of AED methods has been limited to classification tasks. It is an open question how well AED methods generalize to language generation settings, which are becoming more widespread via LLMs. 
In this paper, we present a first and novel benchmark for AED on instruction tuning data: Donkii.
It comprises three instruction-tuning datasets enriched with error annotations by experts and semi-automatic methods. 
We also provide a novel taxonomy of error types for instruction-tuning data.
We find that all three datasets contain clear errors, which sometimes propagate directly into instruction-tuned LLMs. We propose four AED baselines for the generative setting and evaluate them extensively on the newly introduced dataset. 
Our results show that the choice of the right AED method and model size is indeed crucial and derive practical recommendations for how to use AED methods to clean instruction-tuning data.

EACL 2024

Donkii: Characterizing and Detecting Errors in Instruction-Tuning Datasets

annoation error detection

instruction tuning

dataset

**About**
 The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

 PETRA (which means “stone” in Greek) addresses important human living needs. From a technological perspective, PETRA motivates and inspires new scientific thrusts, innovations and discoveries to improve living environments, a particularly important issue, in an increasingly crowded and complex world where the need for inclusiveness and connectivity with the rest of the world is key. For the elderly in particular, PETRA addresses the fact that, as people grow older; they will increasingly rely on technology to be able to prolong staying in their homes and enjoy an independent life.

 The PETRA 2021 proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM ICPS program. The ISBN number assigned to PETRA '21 is 978-1-4503-8792-7

PETRA 2021

The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

workshop paper

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. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

Please register!

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.

This paper studies the correction of challenging authentic Finnish learner texts at beginner level (CEFR A1). Three state-of-the-art large language models are compared, and it is shown that GPT-4 outperforms GPT-3.5, which in turn outperforms Claude v1 on this task. Additionally, ensemble models based on classifiers combining outputs of multiple single models are evaluated. The highest accuracy for an ensemble model is 84.3%, whereas the best single model, which is a GPT-4 model, produces sentences that are fully correct 83.3% of the time. In general, the different models perform on a continuum, where grammatical correctness, fluency and coherence go hand in hand.

Correcting Challenging Finnish Learner Texts With Claude, GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Large Language Models

In recent years, large pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on many natural language processing benchmarks. Despite their success, prior studies have shown that PLMs are vulnerable to attacks from adversarial examples. In this work, we focus on the named entity recognition task and study context-aware adversarial attack methods to examine the model's robustness. Specifically, we propose perturbing the most informative words for recognizing entities to create adversarial examples and investigate different candidate replacement methods to generate natural and plausible adversarial examples. Experiments and analyses show that our methods are more effective in deceiving the model into making wrong predictions than strong baselines.

Context-aware Adversarial Attack on Named Entity Recognition

This paper investigates effects of noisy source texts (containing spelling and grammar errors, informal words or expressions, etc.) on human and machine translations, namely whether the noisy phenomena are kept in the translations, corrected, or caused errors. The analysed data consists of English user reviews of Amazon products translated into Croatian, Russian and Finnish by professional translators, translation students, machine translation (MT) systems, and ChatGPT language model. The results show that overall, ChatGPT and professional translators mostly correct/standardise those parts, while students are often keeping them. Furthermore, MT systems are most prone to errors while ChatGPT is more robust, but notably less robust than human translators. Finally, some of the phenomena are particularly challenging both for MT systems and for ChatGPT, especially spelling errors and informal constructions.

Effects of different types of noise in user-generated reviews on human and machine translations including ChatGPT

The Stanceosaurus corpus (Zheng et al., 2022) was designed to provide high-quality, annotated, 5-way stance data extracted from Twitter, suitable for analyzing cross-cultural and cross-lingual misinformation. In the Stanceosaurus 2.0 iteration, we extend this framework to encompass Russian and Spanish. The former is of current significance due to prevalent misinformation amid escalating tensions with the West and the violent incursion into Ukraine. The latter, meanwhile, represents an enormous community that has been largely overlooked on major social media platforms. By incorporating an additional 3,874 Spanish and Russian tweets over 41 misinformation claims, our objective is to support research focused on these issues. To demonstrate the value of this data, we employed zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on multilingual BERT, yielding results on par with the initial Stanceosaurus study with a macro F1 score of 43 for both languages. This underlines the viability of stance classification as an effective tool for identifying multicultural misinformation.

Stanceosaurus 2.0 - Classifying Stance Towards Russian and Spanish Misinformation

While Bangla is considered a language with limited resources, sentiment analysis has been a subject of extensive research in the literature. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of exploration into sentiment analysis specifically in the realm of noisy Bangla texts. In this paper, we introduce a dataset (NC-SentNoB) that we annotated manually to identify ten different types of noise found in a pre-existing sentiment analysis dataset comprising of around 15K noisy Bangla texts. At first, given an input noisy text, we identify the noise type, addressing this as a multi-label classification task. Then, we introduce baseline noise reduction methods to alleviate noise prior to conducting sentiment analysis. Finally, we assess the performance of fine-tuned sentiment analysis models with both noisy and noise-reduced texts to make comparisons. The experimental findings indicate that the noise reduction methods utilized are not satisfactory, highlighting the need for more suitable noise reduction methods in future research endeavors. We have made the implementation and dataset presented in this paper publicly available at https://github.com/ktoufiquee/A-Comparative-Analysis-of-Noise-Reduction-Methods-in-Sentiment-Analysis-on-Noisy-Bangla-Texts

A Comparative Analysis of Noise Reduction Methods in Sentiment Analysis on Noisy Bangla Texts

Maintenance short texts are invaluable unstructured data sources, serving as a diagnostic and prognostic window into the operational health and status of physical assets. These user-generated texts, created during routine or ad-hoc maintenance activities, offer insights into equipment performance, potential failure points, and maintenance needs. However, the use of information captured in these texts is hindered by inherent challenges: the prevalence of engineering jargon, domain-specific vernacular, random spelling errors without identifiable patterns, and the absence of standard grammatical structures. To transform these texts into accessible and analysable data, we introduce the MaintNorm dataset, the first resource specifically tailored for the lexical normalisation task of maintenance short texts. Comprising 12,000 examples, this dataset enables the efficient processing and interpretation of these texts. We demonstrate the utility of MaintNorm by training a lexical normalisation model as a sequence-to-sequence learning task with two learning objectives, namely, enhancing the quality of the texts and masking segments to obscure sensitive information to anonymise data. Our benchmark model demonstrates a universal error reduction rate of 95.8%. The dataset and benchmark outcomes are available to the public.

MaintNorm: A corpus and benchmark model for lexical normalisation and masking of industrial maintenance short text

Emotion corpora are typically sampled based on keyword/hashtag search or by asking study participants to generate textual instances. In any case, these corpora are not uniform samples representing the entirety of a domain. We hypothesize that this practice of data acquision leads to unrealistic correlations between overrepresented topics in these corpora that harm the generalizability of models. Such topic bias could lead to wrong predictions for instances like ``I organized the service for my aunt's funeral.'' when funeral events are overpresented for instances labeled with sadness, despite the emotion of pride being more appropriate here. In this paper, we study this topic bias both from the data and the modeling perspective. We first label a set of emotion corpora automatically via topic modeling and show that emotions in fact correlate with specific topics. Further, we see that emotion classifiers are confounded by such topics. Finally, we show that the established debiasing method of adversarial correction via gradient reversal mitigates the issue. Our work points out issues with existing emotion corpora and that more representative resources are required for fair evaluation of models predicting affective concepts from text.

Topic Bias in Emotion Classification

Data for the Rating Prediction (RP) sentiment analysis task such as star reviews are readily available. However, data for aspect-category sentiment analysis (ACSA) is often desired because of the fine-grained nature but are expensive to collect. In this work we present a method for learning ACSA using only RP labels. We propose Unified Sentiment Analysis (Uni-SA) to efficiently understand aspect and review sentiment in a unified manner. We propose a Distantly Supervised Pyramid Network (DSPN) to efficiently perform Aspect-Category Detection (ACD), ACSA, and OSA using only RP labels for training. We evaluate DSPN on multi-aspect review datasets in English and Chinese and find that with only star rating labels for supervision, DSPN performs comparably well to a variety of benchmark models. We also demonstrate the interpretability of DSPN's outputs on reviews to show the pyramid structure inherent in document level end-to-end sentiment analysis.

Stars Are All You Need: A Distantly Supervised Pyramid Network for Unified Sentiment Analysis

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such as for particular retrieval models, dataset domains, or query types. To answer this, we conduct the first comprehensive analysis of LM-based expansion. We find that there exists a strong negative correlation between retriever performance and gains from expansion: expansion improves scores for weaker models, but generally harms stronger models. We show this trend holds across a set of eleven expansion techniques, twelve datasets with diverse distribution shifts, and twenty-four retrieval models. Through qualitative error analysis, we hypothesize that although expansions provide extra information (potentially improving recall), they add additional noise that makes it difficult to discern between the top relevant documents (thus introducing false positives). Our results suggest the following recipe: use expansions for weaker models or when the target dataset significantly differs from training corpus in format; otherwise, avoid expansions to keep the relevance signal clear

When do Generative Query and Document Expansions Fail? A Comprehensive Study Across Methods, Retrievers, and Datasets

Annotation tools are the starting point for creating Natural Language Processing (NLP) datasets. There is a wide variety of tools available; setting up these tools is however a hindrance. We propose Eevee, an annotation tool focused on simplicity, efficiency, and ease of use. It can run directly in the browser (no setup required) and uses tab-separated files (as opposed to character offsets or task-specific formats) for annotation. It allows for annotation of multiple tasks on a single dataset and supports four task-types: sequence labeling, span labeling, text classification and seq2seq.

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