DELPHI: Data for Evaluating LLMs' Performance in Handling Controversial Issues

Controversy is a reflection of our zeitgeist, and an important aspect to any discourse. The rise of large language models (LLMs) as conversational systems has increased public reliance on these systems for answers to their various questions. Consequently, it is crucial to systematically examine how these models respond to questions that pertaining to ongoing debates. However, few such datasets exist in providing human-annotated labels reflecting the contemporary discussions. To foster research in this area, we propose a novel construction of a controversial questions dataset, expanding upon the publicly released Quora Question Pairs Dataset. This dataset presents challenges concerning knowledge recency, safety, fairness, and bias. We evaluate different LLMs using a subset of this dataset, illuminating how they handle controversial issues and the stances they adopt. This research ultimately contributes to our understanding of LLMs' interaction with controversial issues, paving the way for improvements in their comprehension and handling of complex societal debates.

A PhD Student's Perspective on Research in NLP in the Era of Very Large Language Models

Recent progress in large language models has enabled the deployment of many generative NLP applications. At the same time, it has also led to a misleading public discourse that ``it's all been solved.'' Not surprisingly, this has in turn made many NLP researchers -- especially those at the beginning of their career -- wonder about what NLP research area they should focus on. This document is a compilation of NLP research directions that are rich for exploration, reflecting the views of a diverse group of PhD students in an academic research lab. While we identify many research areas, many others exist; we do not cover those areas that are currently addressed by LLMs but where LLMs lag behind in performance, or those focused on LLM development. We welcome suggestions for other research directions to include: https://bit.ly/nlp-era-llm

Adaptable Claim Rewriting with Offline Reinforcement Learning for Effective Misinformation Discovery

We propose a novel system to help fact-checkers formulate search queries for known misinformation claims and effectively search across multiple social media platforms. We introduce an adaptable rewriting strategy, where editing actions (e.g., swap a word with its synonym; change verb tense into present simple) for queries containing claims are automatically learned through offline reinforcement learning. Specifically, we use a decision transformer to learn a sequence of editing actions that maximize query retrieval metrics such as mean average precision. Through several experiments, we show that our approach can increase the effectiveness of the queries by up to 42\% relatively, while producing editing action sequences that are human readable, thus making the system easy to use and explain.