Can Large Language Models Code Like a Linguist?: A Case Study in Low Resource Sound Law Induction

Historical linguists have long written a kind of incompletely formalized ''program'' that converts reconstructed words in an ancestor language into words in one of its attested descendants that consist of a series of ordered string rewrite functions (called sound laws). They do this by observing pairs of words in the reconstructed language (protoforms) and the descendent language (reflexes) and constructing a program that transforms protoforms into reflexes. However, writing these programs is error-prone and time-consuming. Prior work has successfully scaffolded this process computationally, but fewer researchers have tackled Sound Law Induction (SLI), which we approach in this paper by casting it as Programming by Examples. We propose a language-agnostic solution that utilizes the programming ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) by generating Python sound law programs from sound change examples. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach for various LLMs, propose effective methods to generate additional language-agnostic synthetic data to fine-tune LLMs for SLI, and compare our method with existing automated SLI methods showing that while LLMs lag behind them they can complement some of their weaknesses.

Generating Situated Reflection Triggers about Alternative Solution Paths: A Case Study of Generative AI for Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning

An advantage of Large Language Models (LLMs) is their contextualization capability - providing different responses based on student inputs like solution strategy or prior discussion, to potentially better engage students than standard feedback. We present a design and evaluation of a proof-of-concept LLM application to offer students dynamic and contextualized feedback. Specifically, we augment an Online Programming Exercise bot for a college-level Cloud Computing course with ChatGPT, which offers students contextualized reflection triggers during a collaborative query optimization task in database design. We demonstrate that LLMs can be used to generate highly situated reflection triggers that incorporate details of the collaborative discussion happening in context. We discuss in depth the exploration of the design space of the triggers and their correspondence with the learning objectives as well as the impact on student learning in a pilot study with 34 students.

On the Limitations of Embedding Based Methods for Measuring Functional Correctness for Code Generation

The task of code generation from natural language (NL2Code) has become extremely popular, especially with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, efforts to quantify and track this progress have suffered due to a lack of reliable metrics for functional correctness. While popular benchmarks like HumanEval have test cases to enable reliable evaluation of correctness, it is time-consuming and requires human effort to collect test cases. As an alternative several reference-based evaluation metrics have been proposed, with embedding-based metrics like CodeBERTScore being touted as having a high correlation with human preferences and functional correctness. In our work, we analyze the ability of embedding-based metrics like CodeBERTScore to measure functional correctness and other helpful constructs like editing effort by analyzing outputs of ten models over two popular code generation benchmarks. Our results show that while they have a weak correlation with functional correctness (0.16), they are strongly correlated (0.72) with editing effort.

Data Augmentation for Code Translation with Comparable Corpora and Multiple References

One major challenge of translating code between programming languages is that parallel training data is often limited. To overcome this challenge, we present two data augmentation techniques, one that builds comparable corpora (i.e., code pairs with similar functionality), and another that augments existing parallel data with multiple reference translations. Specifically, we build and analyze multiple types of comparable corpora, including programs generated from natural language documentation using a code generation model. Furthermore, to reduce overfitting to a single reference translation, we automatically generate additional translation references for available parallel data and filter the translations by unit tests, which increases variation in target translations. Experiments show that our data augmentation techniques significantly improve CodeT5 for translation between Java, Python, and C++ by an average of 7.5% Computational Accuracy (CA@1), which verifies the correctness of translations by execution. The code is available at https://github.com/Veronicium/CMTrans.

Tricking LLMs into Disobedience: Understanding, Analyzing, and Preventing Jailbreaks

Recent explorations with commercial Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown that non-expert users can jailbreak LLMs by simply manipulating the prompts; resulting in degenerate output behavior, privacy and security breaches, offensive outputs, and violations of content regulator policies. Limited formal studies have been carried out to formalize and analyze these attacks and their mitigations. We bridge this gap by proposing a formalism and a taxonomy of known (and possible) jailbreaks. We perform a survey of existing jailbreak methods and their effectiveness on open-source and commercial LLMs (such as GPT 3.5, OPT, BLOOM, and FLAN-T5-xxl). We further propose a limited set of prompt guards and discuss their effectiveness against known attack types.

Benchmarking Generalization via In-Context Instructions on 1,600+ Language Tasks

How can we measure the generalization of models to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with their language instructions? To facilitate progress in this goal, we introduce Natural-Instructions v2, a collection of 1,600+ diverse language tasks and their expert written instructions. More importantly, the benchmark covers 70+ distinct task types, such as tagging, in-filling, and rewriting. This benchmark is collected with contributions of NLP practitioners in the community and through an iterative peer review process to ensure their quality. This benchmark enables large-scale evaluation of cross-task generalization of the models -- training on a subset of tasks and evaluating on the remaining unseen ones. For instance, we are able to rigorously quantify generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances, and model sizes. As a by-product of these experiments. we introduce Tk-Instruct, an encoder-decoder Transformer that is trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples) which outperforms existing larger models on our benchmark. We hope this benchmark facilitates future progress toward more general-purpose language understanding models.

Representation Learning for Conversational Data using Discourse Mutual Information Maximization

Although many pretrained models exist for text or images, there have been relatively fewer attempts to train representations specifically for dialog understanding. Prior works usually relied on finetuned representations based on generic text representation models like BERT or GPT-2. But, existing pretraining objectives do not take the structural information of text into consideration. Although generative dialog models can learn structural features too, we argue that the structure-unaware word-by-word generation is not suitable for effective conversation modeling. We empirically demonstrate that such representations do not perform consistently across various dialog understanding tasks. Hence, we propose a structure-aware Mutual Information based loss-function DMI (Discourse Mutual Information) for training dialog-representation models, that additionally captures the inherent uncertainty in response prediction. Extensive evaluation on nine diverse dialog modeling tasks shows that our proposed DMI-based models outperform strong baselines by significant margins, even with small-scale pretraining. Our models show the most promising performance on the dialog evaluation task DailyDialog++, in both random and adversarial negative scenarios.

Weakly Supervised Explainable Phrasal Reasoning with Neural Fuzzy Logic

Natural language inference (NLI) aims to determine the logical relationship between two sentences among the target labels Entailment, Contradiction, and Neutral. In recent years, deep learning models have become a prevailing approach to NLI, but they lack interpretability and explainability. In this work, we address the explainability for NLI by weakly supervised logical reasoning, and propose an Explainable Phrasal Reasoning (EPR) approach. Our model first detects phrases as the semantic unit and aligns corresponding phrases. Then, the model predicts the NLI label for the aligned phrases, and induces the sentence label by fuzzy logic formulas. Our EPR is almost everywhere differentiable and thus the system can be trained end-to-end in a weakly supervised manner. We annotated a corpus and developed a set of metrics to evaluate phrasal reasoning. Results show that our EPR yields much more meaningful explanations in terms of F scores than previous studies. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to develop a weakly supervised phrasal reasoning model for the NLI task.

Understanding the Role of Affect Dimensions in Detecting Emotions from Tweets: A Multi-task Approach

We propose VADEC, a multi-task framework that exploits the correlation between the categorical and dimensional models of emotion representation for better subjectivity analysis. Focusing primarily on the effective detection of emotions from tweets, we jointly train multi-label emotion classification and multi-dimensional emotion regression, thereby utilizing the inter-relatedness between the tasks. Co-training especially helps in improving the performance of the classification task as we outperform the strongest baselines with 3.4%, 11%, and 3.9% gains in Jaccard Accuracy, Macro-F1, and Micro-F1 scores respectively on the AIT dataset. We also achieve state-of-the-art results with 11.3% gains averaged over six different metrics on the SenWave dataset. For the regression task, VADEC, when trained with SenWave, achieves 7.6% and 16.5% gains in Pearson Correlation scores over the current state-of-the-art on the EMOBANK dataset for the Valence (V) and Dominance (D) affect dimensions respectively. We conclude our work with a case study on COVID-19 tweets posted by Indians that further helps in establishing the efficacy of our proposed solution.

How Have We Reacted To The COVID-19 Pandemic? Analyzing Changing Indian Emotions Through The Lens of Twitter

Since its outbreak, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has caused unprecedented losses to human lives and economies around the world. As of 18th July 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported more than 13 million confirmed cases including close to 600,000 deaths across 216 countries and territories. Despite several government measures, India has gradually moved up the ranks to become the third worst-hit nation by the pandemic after the US and Brazil, thus causing widespread anxiety and fear among her citizens. As majority of the world's population continues to remain confined to their homes, more and more people have started relying on social media platforms such as Twitter for expressing their feelings and attitudes towards various aspects of the pandemic. With rising concerns of mental well-being, it becomes imperative to analyze the dynamics of public affect in order to anticipate any potential threats and take precautionary measures. Since affective states of human mind are more nuanced than meager binary sentiments, here we propose a deep learning-based system to identify people's emotions from their tweets. We achieve competitive results on two benchmark datasets for multi-label emotion classification. We then use our system to analyze the evolution of emotional responses among Indians as the pandemic continues to spread its wings. We also study the development of salient factors contributing towards the changes in attitudes over time. Finally, we discuss directions to further improve our work and hope that our analysis can aid in better public health monitoring.