EMNLP 2024 Papers

Unlike professional Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce platforms (e.g., Amazon), Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) platforms (e.g., Facebook marketplace) are mainly targeting individual sellers who usually lack sufficient experience in e-commerce. Individual sellers often struggle to compose proper descriptions for selling products. With the recent advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), we attempt to integrate such state-of-the-art generative AI technologies into the product listing process. To this end, we develop IPL, an Intelligent Product Listing tool tailored to generate descriptions using various product attributes such as category, brand, color, condition, etc. IPL enables users to compose product descriptions by merely uploading photos of the selling product. More importantly, it can imitate the content style of our C2C platform Xianyu. This is achieved by employing domain-specific instruction tuning on MLLMs, and by adopting the multi-modal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) process. A comprehensive empirical evaluation demonstrates that the underlying model of IPL significantly outperforms the base model in domain-specific tasks while producing less hallucination. IPL has been successfully deployed in our production system, where 72% of users have their published product listings based on the generated content, and those product listings are shown to have a quality score 5.6% higher than those without AI assistance.

Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the closely-related domains of Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics, and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address NLP tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning based text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation for applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets, Climate-Change NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. We show that our models outperform both general-purpose (RoBERTa) and domain- specific (SciBERT) encoders on these new tasks as well as existing tasks in the domains of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of these models in two industrial settings- as a retrieval model for large-scale vector search applications and in automatic content tagging systems.

Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on diverse NLP tasks through pre-training and fine-tuning. However, fine-tuning the model with a large number of parameters on limited downstream datasets often leads to vulnerability to adversarial attacks, causing overfitting of the model on standard datasets. To address these issues, we propose IM-BERT from the perspective of a dynamic system by conceptualizing a layer of BERT as a solution of Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs). Under the situation of initial value perturbation, we analyze the numerical stability of two main numerical ODE solvers: *the explicit and implicit Euler approaches.* Based on these analyses, we introduce a numerically robust IM-connection incorporating BERT’s layers. This strategy enhances the robustness of PLMs against adversarial attacks, even in low-resource scenarios, without introducing additional parameters or adversarial training strategies. Experimental results on the adversarial GLUE (AdvGLUE) dataset validate the robustness of IM-BERT under various conditions. Compared to the original BERT, IM-BERT exhibits a performance improvement of approximately 8.3%p on the AdvGLUE dataset. Furthermore, in low-resource scenarios, IM-BERT outperforms BERT by achieving 5.9%p higher accuracy.

Recent advancements in image captioning have explored text-only training methods to overcome the limitations of paired image-text data. However, existing text-only training methods often overlook the modality gap between using text data during training and employing images during inference. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Image-like Retrieval, which aligns text features with visually relevant features to mitigate the modality gap. Our method further enhances the accuracy of generated captions by designing a fusion module that integrates retrieved captions with input features. Additionally, we introduce a Frequency-based Entity Filtering technique that significantly improves caption quality. We integrate these methods into a unified framework, which we refer to as IFCap (**I**mage-like Retrieval and **F**requency-based Entity Filtering for Zero-shot **Cap**tioning). Through extensive experimentation, our straightforward yet powerful approach has demonstrated its efficacy, outperforming the state-of-the-art methods by a significant margin in both image captioning and video captioning compared to zero-shot captioning based on text-only training.

The audio watermarking technique embeds messages into audio and accurately extracts messages from the watermarked audio. Traditional methods develop algorithms based on expert experience to embed watermarks into the time-domain or transform-domain of signals. With the development of deep neural networks, deep learning-based neural audio watermarking has emerged. Compared to traditional algorithms, neural audio watermarking achieves better robustness by considering various attacks during training. However, current neural watermarking methods suffer from low capacity and unsatisfactory imperceptibility. Additionally, the issue of watermark locating, which is extremely important and even more pronounced in neural audio water- marking, has not been adequately studied. In this paper, we design a dual-embedding wa- termarking model for efficient locating. We also consider the impact of the attack layer on the invertible neural network in robustness training, improving the model to enhance both its reasonableness and stability. Experiments show that the proposed model, IDEAW, can withstand various attacks with higher capacity and more efficient locating ability compared to existing methods.

Previous research on radiology report generation has made significant progress in terms of increasing the clinical accuracy of generated reports. In this paper, we emphasize another crucial quality that it should possess, i.e., inter-report consistency, which refers to the capability of generating consistent reports for semantically equivalent radiographs. This quality is even of greater significance than the overall report accuracy in terms of ensuring the system’s credibility, as a system prone to providing conflicting results would severely erode users’ trust. Regrettably, existing approaches struggle to maintain inter-report consistency, exhibiting biases towards common patterns and susceptibility to lesion variants. To address this issue, we propose ICON, which improves the inter-report consistency of radiology report generation. Aiming to enhance the system’s ability to capture similarities in semantically equivalent lesions, our approach first involves extracting lesions from input images and examining their characteristics. Then, we introduce a lesion-aware mixup technique to ensure that the representations of the semantically equivalent lesions align with the same attributes, achieved through a linear combination during the training phase. Extensive experiments on three publicly available chest X-ray datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach, both in terms of improving the consistency and accuracy of the generated reports.

In a practical scenario, multi-domain neural machine translation (MDNMT) aims to continuously acquire knowledge from new domain data while retaining old knowledge. Previous work separately learns each new domain knowledge based on parameter isolation methods, which effectively capture the new knowledge. However, task-specific parameters lead to isolation between models, which hinders the mutual transfer of knowledge between new domains. Given the scarcity of domain-specific corpora, we consider making full use of the data from multiple new domains. Therefore, our work aims to leverage previously acquired domain knowledge when modeling subsequent domains. To this end, we propose an Iterative Continual Learning (ICL) framework for multi-domain neural machine translation. Specifically, when each new domain arrives, (1) we first build a pluggable incremental learning model, (2) then we design an iterative updating algorithm to continuously update the original model, which can be used flexibly for constructing subsequent domain models. Furthermore, we design a domain knowledge transfer mechanism to enhance the fine-grained domain-specific representation, thereby solving the word ambiguity caused by mixing domain data. Experimental results on the UM-Corpus and OPUS multi-domain datasets show the superior performance of our proposed model compared to representative baselines.

The emergence of personalized generation has made it possible to create texts or images that meet the unique needs of users. Recent advances mainly focus on style or scene transfer based on given keywords. However, in e-commerce and recommender systems, it is almost an untouched area to explore user historical interactions, automatically mine user interests with semantic associations, and create item representations that closely align with user individual interests.In this paper, we propose a brand new framework called **I**nterest-**A**ugmented **M**ultimodal **G**enerator (**I-AM-G**). The framework first extracts tags from the multimodal information of items that the user has interacted with, and the most frequently occurred ones are extracted to rewrite the text description of the item. Then, the framework uses a decoupled text-to-text and image-to-image retriever to search for the top-K similar item text and image embeddings from the item pool. Finally, the Attention module for user interests fuses the retrieved information in a cross-modal manner and further guides the personalized generation process in collaboration with the rewritten text.We conducted extensive and comprehensive experiments to demonstrate that our framework can effectively generate results aligned with user preferences, which potentially provides a new paradigm of **Rewrite and Retrieve** for personalized generation.

Sentence transformers excel at grouping topically similar texts, but struggle to differentiate opposing viewpoints on the same topic. This shortcoming hinders their utility in applications where understanding nuanced differences in opinion is essential, such as those related to social and political discourse analysis. This paper addresses this issue by fine-tuning sentence transformers with arguments for and against human-generated controversial claims. We demonstrate how our fine-tuned model enhances the utility of sentence transformers for social computing tasks such as opinion mining and stance detection. We elaborate that applying stance-aware sentence transformers to opinion mining is a more computationally efficient and robust approach in comparison to the classic classification-based approaches.

This study explores the proactive ability of LLMs to seek user support. We propose metrics to evaluate the trade-off between performance improvements and user burden, and investigate whether LLMs can determine when to request help under varying information availability. Our experiments show that without external feedback, many LLMs struggle to recognize their need for user support. The findings highlight the importance of external signals and provide insights for future research on improving support-seeking strategies. Source code: https://github.com/appier-research/i-need-help

This paper explores an intriguing observation: fine-tuning a large language model (LLM) with responses generated by a LLM often yields better results than using responses generated by humans, particularly in reasoning tasks. We conduct an in-depth investigation to understand why this occurs. Contrary to the common belief that these instances is due to the more detailed nature of LLM-generated content, our study identifies another contributing factor: an LLM is inherently more “familiar” with LLM generated responses. This familiarity is evidenced by lower perplexity before fine-tuning. We design a series of experiments to understand the impact of the “familiarity” and our conclusion reveals that this “familiarity” significantly impacts learning performance. Training with LLM-generated responses not only enhances performance but also helps maintain the model’s capabilities in other reasoning tasks after fine-tuning on a specific task.

When seeking information from unfamiliar documents, users frequently pose questions that cannot be answered by the documents. While existing large language models (LLMs) identify these unanswerable questions, they do not assist users in reformulating their questions, thereby reducing their overall utility. We curate CouldAsk, an evaluation benchmark composed of existing and new datasets for document-grounded question answering, specifically designed to study reformulating unanswerable questions. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs on CouldAsk. The results demonstrate the limited capabilities of these models in reformulating questions. Specifically, GPT-4 and Llama2-7B successfully reformulate questions only 26% and 12% of the time, respectively. Error analysis shows that 62% of the unsuccessful reformulations stem from the models merely rephrasing the questions or even generating identical questions. We publicly release the benchmark and the code to reproduce the experiments.

Adapting pre-trained language models (PLMs) for cross-task generalization is a crucial research area within the field of NLP. While fine-tuning and in-context learning are effective approaches for adapting LMs to emerging tasks, they can be costly and inefficient. Recently, some researchers have focused on achieving efficient task adaptation via hypernetwork, which is a meta network that generates task-specific weights based on task-oriented information without any optimization. However, the training of hypernetworks often lacks stability since the optimization signal is not straightforward, and the task information is not adequately representative. Moreover, previous works train hypenetworks with the general corpus, which is struggling with few-shot adaptation. To address these issues, we introduce HyperLoRA, a hypernetwork for LoRA parameters generation involving hypernetwork pre-training on instruction-following data and generalization fine-tuning on sparse task data. Furthermore, we utilize a constrained training loss and a gradient-based demonstration selection strategy to enhance the training stability and performance. Experimental results and analysis across four benchmark datasets (P3, S-NI, BBH, and SuperGLUE) demonstrate the proposed approach has flexible generalization ability and superior performance.

Hypergraphs are characterized by complex topological structure, representing higher-order interactions among multiple entities through hyperedges. Lately, hypergraph-based deep learning methods to learn informative data representations for the problem of node classification on text-attributed hypergraphs have garnered increasing research attention. However, existing methods struggle to simultaneously capture the full extent of hypergraph structural information and the rich linguistic attributes inherent in the nodes attributes, which largely hampers their effectiveness and generalizability. To overcome these challenges, we explore ways to further augment a pretrained BERT model with specialized hypergraph-aware layers for the task of node classification. Such layers introduce higher-order structural inductive bias into the language model, thus improving the model’s capacity to harness both higher-order context information from the hypergraph structure and semantic information present in text. In this paper, we propose a new architecture, HyperBERT, a mixed text-hypergraph model which simultaneously models hypergraph relational structure while maintaining the high-quality text encoding capabilities of a pre-trained BERT. Notably, HyperBERT presents results that achieve a new state-of-the-art on five challenging text-attributed hypergraph node classification benchmarks.

These days, there is an increasing necessity to provide a user with a short knowledge-snippet for a query in commercial information retrieval services such as the featured snippet of Google. In this paper, we focus on how to automatically extract the candidates of query-knowledge snippet pairs from structured HTML documents by using a new Language Model (HTML-PLM). In particular, the proposed system is powerful on extracting them from Tables and Lists, and provides a new framework for automate query generation and knowledge-snippet extraction based on a QA-pair filtering procedure including the snippet refinement and verification processes, which enhance the quality of generated query-knowledge snippet pairs. As a result, 53.8% of the generated knowledge-snippets includes complex HTML structures such as tables and lists in our experiments of a real-world environments, and 66.5% of the knowledge-snippets are evaluated as valid.

Large language models (LLMs) enhanced with retrieval augmentation has shown great performance in many applications. However, the computational demands for these models pose a challenge when applying them to real-time tasks, such as composition assistance. To address this, we propose Hybrid Retrieval-Augmented Composition Assistance (Hybrid-RACA), a novel system for real-time text prediction that efficiently combines a cloud-based LLM with a smaller client-side model through retrieval augmented memory. This integration enables the client model to generate better responses, benefiting from the LLM’s capabilities and cloud-based data. Meanwhile, via a novel asynchronous memory update mechanism, the client model can deliver real-time completions to user inputs without the need to wait for responses from the cloud. Our experiments on five datasets demonstrate that Hybrid-RACA offers strong performance while maintaining low latency.

In retrieval-augmented systems, context ranking techniques are commonly employed to reorder the retrieved contexts based on their relevance to a user query. A standard approach is to measure this relevance through the similarity between contexts and queries in the embedding space. However, such similarity often fails to capture the relevance. Alternatively, large language models (LLMs) have been used for ranking contexts. However, they can encounter scalability issues when the number of candidate contexts grows and the context window sizes of the LLMs remain constrained. Additionally, these approaches require fine-tuning LLMs with domain-specific data. In this work, we introduce a scalable ranking framework that combines embedding similarity and LLM capabilities without requiring LLM fine-tuning. Our framework uses a pre-trained LLM to hypothesize the user query based on the retrieved contexts and ranks the context based on the similarity between the hypothesized queries and the user query. Our framework is efficient at inference time and is compatible with many other retrieval and ranking techniques. Experimental results show that our method improves the ranking performance across multiple benchmarks.

Adopting human and large language models (LLM) as judges (*a.k.a* human- and LLM-as-a-judge) for evaluating the performance of LLMs has recently gained attention. Nonetheless, this approach concurrently introduces potential biases from human and LLMs, questioning the reliability of the evaluation results. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that is free from referencing groundtruth annotations for investigating **Misinformation Oversight Bias**, **Gender Bias**, **Authority Bias** and **Beauty Bias** on LLM and human judges. We curate a dataset referring to the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and conduct thousands of evaluations. Results show that human and LLM judges are vulnerable to perturbations to various degrees, and that even the cutting-edge judges possess considerable biases. We further exploit these biases to conduct attacks on LLM judges. We hope that our work can notify the community of the bias and vulnerability of human- and LLM-as-a-judge, as well as the urgency of developing robust evaluation systems.

The quality is a crucial issue for crowd annotations. Answer aggregation is an important type of solution. The aggregated answers estimated from multiple crowd answers to the same instance are the eventually collected annotations, rather than the individual crowd answers themselves. Recently, the capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) on data annotation tasks has attracted interest from researchers. Most of the existing studies mainly focus on the average performance of individual crowd workers; several recent works studied the scenarios of aggregation on categorical labels and LLMs used as label creators. However, the scenario of aggregation on text answers and the role of LLMs as aggregators are not yet well-studied. In this paper, we investigate the capability of LLMs as aggregators in the scenario of close-ended crowd text answer aggregation. We propose a human-LLM hybrid text answer aggregation method with a Creator-Aggregator Multi-Stage (CAMS) crowdsourcing framework. We make the experiments based on public crowdsourcing datasets. The results show the effectiveness of our approach based on the collaboration of crowd workers and LLMs.