ACL 2024 论文列表

Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) refers to the task of automatically predicting judgment results (e.g., charges, law articles and term of penalty) given the fact description of cases. While SOTA models have achieved high accuracy and F1 scores on public datasets, existing datasets fail to evaluate specific aspects of these models (e.g., legal fairness, which significantly impact their applications in real scenarios). Inspired by functional testing in software engineering, we introduce LJPCHECK, a suite of functional tests for LJP models, to comprehend LJP models’ behaviors and offer diagnostic insights. We illustrate the utility of LJPCHECK on five SOTA LJP models. Extensive experiments reveal vulnerabilities in these models, prompting an in-depth discussion into the underlying reasons of their shortcomings.

Recently, tremendous strides have been made to align the generation of Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values to mitigate toxic or unhelpful content. Leveraging Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) proves effective and is widely adopted by researchers. However, implementing RLHF is complex, and its sensitivity to hyperparameters renders achieving stable performance and scalability challenging. Furthermore, prevailing approaches to preference alignment primarily concentrate on pairwise comparisons, with limited exploration into multi-response scenarios, thereby overlooking the potential richness within the candidate pool. For the above reasons, we propose a new approach: Listwise Reward Enhancement for Preference Alignment (LIRE), a gradient-based reward optimization approach that incorporates the offline rewards of multiple responses into a streamlined listwise framework, thus eliminating the need for online sampling during training. LIRE is straightforward to implement, requiring minimal parameter tuning, and seamlessly aligns with the pairwise paradigm while naturally extending to multi-response scenarios. Moreover, we introduce a self-enhancement algorithm aimed at iteratively refining the reward during training. Our experiments demonstrate that LIRE consistently outperforms existing methods across several benchmarks on dialogue and summarization tasks, with good transferability to out-of-distribution data, assessed using proxy reward models and human annotators.

Discourse Entity (DE) recognition is the task of identifying novel and known entities introduced within a text. While previous work has found that large language models have basic, if imperfect, DE recognition abilities (Schuster and Linzen, 2022), it remains largely unassessed which of the fundamental semantic properties that govern the introduction and subsequent reference to DEs they have knowledge of. We propose the Linguistically-Informed Evaluation for Discourse Entity Recognition (LIEDER) dataset that allows for a detailed examination of language models’ knowledge of four crucial semantic properties: existence, uniqueness, plurality, and novelty. We find evidence that state-of-the-art large language models exhibit sensitivity to all of these properties except novelty, which demonstrates that they have yet to reach human-level language understanding abilities.

In the new era of language models, small models (with billions of parameter sizes) are receiving increasing attention due to their flexibility and cost-effectiveness in deployment. However, limited by the model size, the performance of small models trained from scratch may often be unsatisfactory. Learning a stronger and smaller model with the help of larger models is an intuitive idea. Inspired by the observing modular structures in preliminary analysis, we propose LEMON to learn competent initial points for smaller models by fusing parameters from larger models, thereby laying a solid foundation for subsequent training. Specifically, the parameter fusion process involves two operators for layer and dimension, respectively, and we also introduce controllable receptive fields to model the prior parameter characteristics. In this way, the larger model could be transformed into any specific smaller scale and architecture. Starting from LLaMA 2-7B, we revive two stronger and smaller models with 1.3B and 2.7B. Experimental results demonstrate that the fusion-based method exhibits flexibility and outperforms a series of competitive baselines in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency.

Adapting English-based large language models (LLMs) to other languages has become increasingly popular due to the efficiency and potential of cross-lingual transfer. However, existing language adaptation methods often overlook the benefits of cross-lingual supervision. In this study, we introduce LEIA, a language adaptation tuning method that utilizes Wikipedia entity names aligned across languages. This method involves augmenting the target language corpus with English entity names and training the model using left-to-right language modeling. We assess LEIA on diverse question answering datasets using 7B-parameter LLMs, demonstrating significant performance gains across various non-English languages.

Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), their integration into language-grounded, human-like embodied agents remains incomplete, hindering complex real-life task performance in 3D environments. Existing integrations often feature limited open-sourcing, challenging collective progress in this field. We introduce LEGENT, an open, scalable platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs. LEGENT offers a dual approach: a rich 3D environment with interactive, communicable, and actionable agents, paired with a user-friendly interface, and a sophisticated data generation pipeline utilizing advanced algorithms to exploit supervision from simulated worlds at scale. In our experiments, an embryonic vision-language-action model trained on LEGENT-generated data surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks, showcasing promising generalization capabilities. The demo video is available at the following link https://video.legent.ai.

Multilingual neural machine translation models generally distinguish translation directions by the language tag (LT) in front of the source or target sentences. However, current LT strategies cannot indicate the desired target language as expected on zero-shot translation, i.e., the off-target issue. Our analysis reveals that the indication of the target language is sensitive to the placement of the target LT. For example, when placing the target LT on the decoder side, the indication would rapidly degrade along with decoding steps, while placing the target LT on the encoder side would lead to copying or paraphrasing the source input. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective strategy named Language Converter Strategy (LCS). By introducing the target language embedding into the top encoder layers, LCS mitigates confusion in the encoder and ensures stable language indication for the decoder. Experimental results on MultiUN, TED, and OPUS-100 datasets demonstrate that LCS could significantly mitigate the off-target issue, with language accuracy up to 95.28%, 96.21%, and 85.35% meanwhile outperforming the vanilla LT strategy by 3.07, 3,3, and 7.93 BLEU scores on zero-shot translation, respectively.

Event extraction (EE) is a critical task in natural language processing, yet deploying a practical EE system remains challenging. On one hand, powerful large language models (LLMs) currently show poor performance because EE task is more complex than other tasks. On the other hand, state-of-the-art (SOTA) small language models (SLMs) for EE tasks are typically developed through fine-tuning, lack flexibility, and have considerable room for improvement. We propose an approach, **L**LMs-as-**C**orrector for **E**vent **E**xtraction (**LC4EE**), aiming to leverage the superior extraction capability of SLMs and the instruction-following ability of LLMs to construct a robust and highly available EE system. By utilizing LLMs to identify and correct errors of SLMs predictions based on automatically generated feedback information, EE performances can be improved significantly. Experimental results on the representative datasets ACE2005 and MAVEN-Arg for Event Detection (ED) and EE tasks validated the effectiveness of our method.

Geometry problem solving (GPS) is a challenging mathematical reasoning task requiring multi-modal understanding, fusion, and reasoning. Existing neural solvers take GPS as a vision-language task but are short in the representation of geometry diagrams that carry rich and complex layout information. In this paper, we propose a layout-aware neural solver named LANS, integrated with two new modules: multimodal layout-aware pre-trained language module (MLA-PLM) and layout-aware fusion attention (LA-FA). MLA-PLM adopts structural-semantic pre-training (SSP) to implement global relationship modeling, and point-match pre-training (PMP) to achieve alignment between visual points and textual points. LA-FA employs a layout-aware attention mask to realize point-guided cross-modal fusion for further boosting layout awareness of LANS. Extensive experiments on datasets Geometry3K and PGPS9K validate the effectiveness of the layout-aware modules and superior problem-solving performance of our LANS solver, over existing symbolic and neural solvers. We have made our code and data publicly available.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promising results in multilingual translation even with limited bilingual supervision. The major challenges are catastrophic forgetting and parameter interference for finetuning LLMs when provided parallel training data. To address these challenges, we propose LANDeRMT, a Language-Aware Neuron Detecting and Routing framework that selectively finetunes LLMs to Machine Translation with diverse translation training data. In LANDeRMT, we evaluate the awareness of neurons to MT tasks and categorize them into language-general and language-specific neurons. This categorization enables selective parameter updates during finetuning, mitigating parameter interference and catastrophic forgetting issues. For the detected neurons, we further propose a conditional awareness-based routing mechanism to dynamically adjust language-general and language-specific capacity within LLMs, guided by translation signals. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed LANDeRMT is very effective in learning translation knowledge, significantly improving translation quality over various strong baselines for multiple language pairs.

Recently, there has been growing interest in long-context scaling of large language models (LLMs). To facilitate research in this field, we propose L-Eval to institute a more standardized evaluation for Long-Context Language Models (LCLMs) addressing two key aspects: dataset construction and evaluation metrics. On the one hand, we build a new evaluation suite containing 20 sub-tasks, 508 long documents, and more than 2,000 human-labeled query-response pairs including diverse task types, domains, and input length (3k~200k tokens). On the other hand, we investigate the effectiveness of evaluation metrics for LCLMs and we show that Length-instruction-enhanced (LIE) evaluation and LLM judges can better correlate with human judgments. We conducted a comprehensive study of 4 popular commercial LLMs and 12 open-source counterparts using the L-Eval benchmark. Our empirical findings offer useful insights into the study of LCLMs and lay the groundwork for the development of a more principled evaluation of these models.

To reliably deploy Large Language Models (LLMs) in a specific country, they must possess an understanding of the nation’s culture and basic knowledge. To this end, we introduce National Alignment, which measures the alignment between an LLM and a targeted country from two aspects: social value alignment and common knowledge alignment. We constructed KorNAT, the first benchmark that measures national alignment between LLMs and South Korea. KorNat contains 4K and 6K multiple-choice questions for social value and common knowledge, respectively. To attain an appropriately aligned ground truth in the social value dataset, we conducted a large-scale public survey with 6,174 South Koreans. For common knowledge, we created the data based on the South Korea text books and GED exams. Our dataset creation process is meticulously designed based on statistical sampling theory, and we also introduce metrics to measure national alignment, including three variations of social value alignment. We tested seven LLMs and found that only few models passed our reference score, indicating there exists room for improvement. Our dataset has received government approval following an assessment by a government-affiliated organization dedicated to evaluating dataset quality.

The evolution of large language models (LLMs) has culminated in a multitask model paradigm where prompts drive the generation of user-specific outputs. However, this advancement has revealed a critical challenge: LLMs frequently produce outputs against socially acceptable commonsense standards in various scenarios. To address this gap in commonsense reasoning, we present KoCommonGEN v2, a fine-grained benchmark dataset focused on Korean commonsense reasoning. This dataset, enriched with human annotations, comprises multiple-choice questions across seven error categories. These categories include commonsense memorization, numerical commonsense, toxic speech, and more, which are vulnerable to undermining the reliability of LLMs’ commonsense reasoning capabilities. The empirical results present that LLMs struggle with Korean commonsense reasoning. With human accuracy benchmarked at approximately 85%, GPT-4’s performance lags at about 74%, and other LLMs demonstrate an average accuracy of around 42%. Our findings emphasize the need for targeted improvements in Korean commonsense reasoning within LLMs, paving the way for more socially and contextually sensitive AI models.

Deploying large language models (LLMs) to real scenarios for domain-specific question answering (QA) is a key thrust for LLM applications, which poses numerous challenges, especially in ensuring that responses are both accommodating to user requirements and appropriately leveraging domain-specific knowledge bases. They are the two major difficulties for LLM application as vanilla fine-tuning falls short of addressing. Combining these requirements, we conceive of them as the requirement for the model’s preference to be harmoniously aligned with humans’. Thus, we introduce Knowledgeable Preference AlignmenT (KnowPAT), which constructs two kinds of preference sets to tackle the two issues. Besides, we design a new alignment objective to align the LLM preference with different human preferences uniformly, aiming to optimize LLM performance in real-world, domain-specific QA settings. Adequate experiments and comprehensive comparisons with 15 baseline methods illustrate that our KnowPAT is a superior pipeline for real-scenario domain-specific QA with LLMs.

Generating accurate SQL queries for user questions (text-to-SQL) has been a long-standing challenge since it requires a deep understanding of both the user’s question and the corresponding database schema in order to retrieve the desired content accurately. Existing methods rely on the comprehensive capability of large language models (LLMs) to generate the SQL. However, some necessary knowledge is not explicitly included in the database schema and user question or has been learned by LLMs. Thus, the generated SQL of the knowledge-insufficient questions may be inaccurate, negatively influencing the text-to-SQL models’ performance and robustness. To address this challenge, we propose the Knowledge-to-SQL framework, which employs tailored Data Expert LLM (DELLM) to provide helpful knowledge for all text-to-SQL models. Specifically, we introduce the detailed implementation of DELLM regarding table reading and the basic fine-tuning process. We further propose a Preference Learning via Database Feedback (PLDBF) strategy, refining the DELLM to generate more helpful knowledge for LLMs. Extensive experiments verify that DELLM can enhance the state-of-the-art approaches for text-to-SQL tasks. The corresponding code of DELLM is released for further research.

Clinical natural language processing faces challenges like complex medical terminology and clinical contexts. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in this domain. Yet, their direct deployment can lead to privacy issues and are constrained by resources. To address this challenge, we delve into synthetic clinical text generation with LLMs for clinical NLP tasks. We propose an innovative, resource-efficient approach, ClinGen, which infuses knowledge into the process. Our model involves clinical knowledge extraction and context-informed LLM prompting. Both clinical topics and writing styles are drawn from external domain-specific knowledge graphs and LLMs to guide data generation. Our extensive empirical study across 8 clinical NLP tasks and 18 datasets reveals that ClinGen consistently enhances performance across various tasks by 7.7%-8.7% on average, effectively aligning the distribution of real datasets and enriching the diversity of generated training instances.

The integration of generative Large Language Models (LLMs) into various applications, including the legal domain, has been accelerated by their expansive and versatile nature. However, when facing a legal case, users without a legal background often struggle to formulate professional queries and may inadvertently overlook critical legal factors when presenting their case narrative to LLMs. To address this issue, we propose the Diagnostic Legal Large Language Model (D3LM), which utilizes adaptive lawyer-like diagnostic questions to collect additional case information and then provides high-quality feedback. D3LM incorporates an innovative graph-based Positive-Unlabeled Reinforcement Learning (PURL) algorithm, enabling the generation of critical questions and enhancing user-LLM interactions. Moreover, an integrated LLM-based stopping criterion facilitates precise Court Views Generation (CVG). Our research also introduces a new English-language CVG dataset based on the US case law database, enriching the realm of LLM research and deployment with a vital dimension. D3LM surpasses classical LLMs by delivering outstanding performance and a remarkable user experience in the legal domain.

Relation extraction (RE) is a well-known NLP application often treated as a sentence or document-level task. However, a handful of recent efforts explore it across documents or in the cross-document setting (CrossDocRE). This is distinct from the single document case because different documents often focus on disparate themes, while text within a document tends to have a single goal.Current CrossDocRE efforts do not consider domain knowledge, which are often assumed to be known to the reader when documents are authored. Here, we propose a novel approach, KXDocRE, that embed domain knowledge of entities with input text for cross-document RE. Our proposed framework has three main benefits over baselines: 1) it incorporates domain knowledge of entities along with documents’ text; 2) it offers interpretability by producing explanatory text for predicted relations between entities 3) it improves performance over the prior methods. Code and models are available at https://github.com/kracr/cross-doc-relation-extraction.

This paper investigates the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in understanding their knowledge and uncertainty over questions. Specifically, we focus on addressing known-unknown questions, characterized by high uncertainty due to the absence of definitive answers. To facilitate our study, we collect a new dataset with Known-Unknown Questions (KUQ) and establish a categorization framework to clarify the origins of uncertainty in such queries. Subsequently, we examine the performance of open-source LLMs, fine-tuned using this dataset, in distinguishing between known and unknown queries within open-ended question-answering scenarios. The fine-tuned models demonstrated a significant improvement, achieving a considerable increase in F1-score relative to their pre-fine-tuning state. Through a comprehensive analysis, we reveal insights into the models’ improved uncertainty articulation and their consequent efficacy in multi-agent debates. These findings help us understand how LLMs can be trained to identify and express uncertainty, improving our knowledge of how they understand and express complex or unclear information.