A Taxonomy of Ambiguity Types for NLP

Ambiguity is an critical component of language that allows for more effective communication between speakers, but is often ignored in NLP. Recent work suggests that NLP systems may struggle to grasp certain elements of human language understanding because they may not handle ambiguities at the level that humans naturally do in communication. Additionally, different types of ambiguity may serve different purposes and require different approaches for resolution, and we aim to investigate how language models' abilities vary across types. We propose a taxonomy of ambiguity types as seen in English to facilitate NLP analysis. Our taxonomy can help make meaningful splits in language ambiguity data, allowing for more fine-grained assessments of both datasets and model performance.

Tuning Language Models by Proxy

Despite the general capabilities of large pretrained language models, they consistently benefit from further adaptation to better achieve desired behaviors. However, tuning these models has become increasingly resource-intensive, or impossible when model weights are private. We introduce proxy-tuning, a lightweight decoding-time algorithm that operates on top of black-box LMs to achieve the result of directly tuning the model, but by accessing only its prediction over the output vocabulary. Our method instead tunes a smaller LM, then applies the difference between the predictions of the small tuned and untuned LMs to shift the original predictions of the base model in the direction of tuning, while retaining the benefits of larger scale pretraining. In experiments, when we apply proxy-tuning to Llama2-70B using proxies of only 7B size, we can close 88% of the gap between Llama2-70B and its truly-tuned chat version, when evaluated across knowledge, reasoning, and safety benchmarks. Interestingly, when tested on TruthfulQA, proxy-tuned models are actually more truthful than directly tuned models, possibly because decoding-time guidance better retains the model's factual knowledge. We then demonstrate the generality of proxy-tuning by applying it for domain adaptation on code, and task-specific finetuning on question-answering and math problems. Our work demonstrates the promise of using small tuned LMs to efficiently customize large, potentially proprietary LMs through decoding-time guidance.

That was the last straw, we need more: Are Translation Systems Sensitive to Disambiguating Context?

The translation of ambiguous text presents a challenge for translation systems, as it requires using the surrounding context to disambiguate the intended meaning as much as possible. While prior work has studied ambiguities that result from different grammatical features of the source and target language, we study semantic ambiguities that exist in the source (English in this work) itself. In particular, we focus on idioms that are open to both literal and figurative interpretations (e.g., goose egg), and collect TIDE, a dataset of 512 pairs of English sentences containing idioms with disambiguating context such that one is literal (it laid a goose egg) and another is figurative (they scored a goose egg, as in a score of zero). In experiments, we compare MT-specific models and language models for (i) their preference when given an ambiguous subsentence, (ii) their sensitivity to disambiguating context, and (iii) the performance disparity between figurative and literal source sentences. We find that current MT models consistently translate English idioms literally, even when the context suggests a figurative interpretation. On the other hand, LMs are far more context-aware, although there remain disparities across target languages. Our findings underline the potential of LMs as a strong backbone for context-aware translation.

Inverse Scaling: When Bigger Isn't Better

Work on scaling laws has found that large language models (LMs) show predictable improvements to overall loss with increased scale (model size, training data, and compute). Here, we present evidence for the claim that LMs may show inverse scaling, or worse task performance with increased scale, e.g., due to flaws in the training objective and data. We present empirical evidence of inverse scaling on 11 datasets collected by running a public contest, the Inverse Scaling Prize, with a substantial prize pool. Through analysis of the datasets, along with other examples found in the literature, we identify four potential causes of inverse scaling: (i) preference to repeat memorized sequences over following in-context instructions, (ii) imitation of undesirable patterns in the training data, (iii) tasks containing an easy distractor task which LMs could focus on, rather than the harder real task, and (iv) correct but misleading few-shot demonstrations of the task. We release the winning datasets at https://inversescaling.com/data to allow for further investigation of inverse scaling. Our tasks have helped drive the discovery of U-shaped and inverted-U scaling trends, where an initial trend reverses, suggesting that scaling trends are less reliable at predicting the behavior of larger-scale models than previously understood. Overall, our results suggest that there are tasks for which increased model scale alone may not lead to progress, and that more careful thought needs to go into the data and objectives for training language models.

How Language Model Hallucinations Can Snowball

A major risk of using language models in practical applications is their tendency to hallucinate incorrect statements. Hallucinations are often attributed to knowledge gaps in LMs, but we hypothesize that in some cases, when justifying previously generated hallucinations, LMs output false claims that they can separately recognize as incorrect. We construct three question-answering datasets where ChatGPT and GPT-4 often state an incorrect answer and offer an explanation with at least one incorrect claim. Crucially, we find that ChatGPT and GPT-4 can identify 67% and 87% of their own mistakes, respectively. We refer to this phenomenon as hallucination snowballing: an LM over-commits to early mistakes, leading to more mistakes that it otherwise would not make.

We're Afraid Language Models Aren't Modeling Ambiguity

Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language models (LMs) are increasingly employed as dialogue interfaces and writing aids, handling ambiguous language is critical to their success. We characterize ambiguity in a sentence by its effect on entailment relations with another sentence, and collect AmbiEnt, a linguist-annotated benchmark of 1,645 examples with diverse kinds of ambiguity. We design a suite of tests based on AmbiEnt, presenting the first evaluation of pretrained LMs to recognize ambiguity and disentangle possible meanings. We find that the task remains extremely challenging, including for the recent GPT-4, whose generated disambiguations are considered correct only 32% of the time in human evaluation, compared to 90% for disambiguations in our dataset. Finally, to illustrate the value of ambiguity-sensitive tools, we show that a multilabel NLI model can flag political claims in the wild that are misleading due to ambiguity. We encourage the field to rediscover the importance of ambiguity for NLP.

Detoxifying Text with MaRCo: Controllable Revision with Experts and Anti-Experts

Text detoxification has the potential to mitigate the harms of toxicity by rephrasing text to remove offensive meaning, but subtle toxicity remains challenging to tackle. We introduce MaRCo, a detoxification algorithm that combines controllable generation and text rewriting methods using a Product of Experts with autoencoder language models (LMs). MaRCo uses likelihoods under a non-toxic LM (expert) and a toxic LM (anti-expert) to find candidate words to mask and potentially replace. We evaluate our method on several subtle toxicity and microaggressions datasets, and show that it not only outperforms baselines on automatic metrics, but MaRCo's rewrites are preferred 2.1 $\times$ more in human evaluation. Its applicability to instances of subtle toxicity is especially promising, demonstrating a path forward for addressing increasingly elusive online hate.

Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Model with Self Generated Instructions

Large "instruction-tuned" language models (finetuned to respond to instructions) have demonstrated a remarkable ability to generalize zero-shot to new tasks. Nevertheless, they depend heavily on human-written instruction data that is limited in quantity, diversity, and creativity, therefore hindering the generality of the tuned model. We introduce Self-Instruct, a framework for improving the instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off its own generations. Our pipeline generates instruction, input, and output samples from a language model, then prunes them before using them to finetune the original model. Applying our method to vanilla GPT3, we demonstrate a 33% absolute improvement over the original model on Super-NaturalInstructions, on par with the performance of InstructGPT_001, which is trained with private user data and human annotations. For further evaluation, we curate a set of expert-written instructions for novel tasks, and show through human evaluation that tuning GPT3 with Self-Instruct outperforms using existing public instruction datasets by a large margin, leaving only a 5% absolute gap behind InstructGPT_001. Self-Instruct provides an almost annotation-free method for aligning pre-trained language models with instructions, and we release our large synthetic dataset to facilitate future studies on instruction tuning.

WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creation

A recurring challenge of crowdsourcing NLP datasets at scale is that human writers often rely on repetitive patterns when crafting examples, leading to a lack of linguistic diversity. We introduce a novel paradigm for dataset creation based on human and machine collaboration, which brings together the generative strength of language models and the evaluative strength of humans. Starting with an existing dataset, MultiNLI, our approach uses dataset cartography to automatically identify examples that demonstrate challenging reasoning patterns, and instructs GPT-3 to compose new examples with similar patterns. Machine generated examples are then automatically filtered, and finally revised and labeled by human crowdworkers to ensure quality. The resulting dataset, WANLI, consists of 108,357 natural language inference (NLI) examples that present unique empirical strengths over existing NLI datasets. Remarkably, training a model on WANLI instead of MNLI (which is 4 times larger) improves performance on seven out-of-domain test sets we consider, including by 11% on HANS and 9% on Adversarial NLI. Moreover, combining MNLI with WANLI is more effective than combining with other augmentation sets that have been introduced. Our results demonstrate the potential of natural language generation techniques to curate NLP datasets of enhanced quality and diversity.

Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning

Despite their ability to capture large amount of knowledge during pretraining, large-scale language models often benefit from incorporating external knowledge bases, especially on commonsense reasoning tasks. This motivates us to explore how we can best leverage knowledge elicited from language models themselves. We propose generating knowledge statements directly from a language model with a generic prompt format, then selecting the knowledge which maximizes prediction probability. Despite its simplicity, this approach improves performance of both off-the-shelf and finetuned language models on four commonsense reasoning tasks, improving the state-of-the-art on numerical commonsense (NumerSense), general commonsense (CommonsenseQA 2.0), and scientific commonsense (QASC) benchmarks. Notably, we find that a model's predictions can improve when using its own generated knowledge, demonstrating the importance of symbolic knowledge representation in neural reasoning processes.