Modelling Political Coalition Negotiations Using LLM-based Agents

Coalition negotiations are a cornerstone of parliamentary democracies, characterised by complex interactions and strategic communications among political parties. Despite its significance, the modelling of these negotiations has remained unexplored with the domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP), mostly due to lack of proper data. In this paper, we introduce coalition negotiations as a novel NLP task, and model it as a negotiation between large language model-based agents. We introduce a multilingual dataset, POLCA, comprising manifestos of European political parties and coalition agreements over a number of elections in these countries. This dataset addresses the challenge of the current scope limitations in political negotiation modelling by providing a diverse, real-world basis for simulation. Additionally, we propose a hierarchical Markov decision process designed to simulate the process of coalition negotiation between political parties and predict the outcomes. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) as agents in handling coalition negotiations, offering insights into their capabilities and paving the way for future advancements in political modelling.

NormMark: A Weakly Supervised Markov Model for Socio-cultural Norm Discovery

Norms, which are culturally accepted guidelines for behaviours, can be integrated into conversational models to generate utterances that are appropriate for the socio-cultural context. Existing methods for norm recognition tend to focus only on surface-level features of dialogues and do not take into account the interactions within a conversation. To address this issue, we propose NormMark, a probabilistic generative Markov model to carry the latent features throughout a dialogue. These features are captured by discrete and continuous latent variables conditioned on the conversation history, and improve the model's ability in norm recognition. The model is trainable on weakly annotated data using the variational technique. On a dataset with limited norm annotations, we show that our approach achieves higher F1 score, outperforming current state-of-the-art methods, including GPT3.

Few-shot Domain-Adaptive Visually-fused Event Detection from Text

Incorporating auxiliary modalities such as images into event detection models has attracted increasing interest over the last few years. The complexity of natural language in describing situations has motivated researchers to leverage the related visual context to improve event detection performance. However, current approaches in this area suffer from data scarcity, where a large amount of labelled text-image pairs are required for model training. Furthermore, limited access to the visual context at inference time negatively impacts the performance of such models, which makes them practically ineffective in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel domain-adaptive visually-fused event detection approach that can be trained on a few labelled image-text paired data points. Specifically, we introduce a visual imaginator method that synthesises images from text in the absence of visual context. Moreover, the imaginator can be customised to a specific domain. In doing so, our model can leverage the capabilities of pre-trained vision-language models and can be trained in a few-shot setting. This also allows for effective inference where only single-modality data (i.e. text) is available. The experimental evaluation on the benchmark M2E2 dataset shows that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art models, by up to 11 points.

Neural-Symbolic Commonsense Reasoner with Relation Predictors

Commonsense reasoning aims to incorporate sets of commonsense facts, retrieved from Commonsense Knowledge Graphs (CKG), to draw conclusion about ordinary situations. The dynamic nature of commonsense knowledge postulates models capable of performing multi-hop reasoning over new situations. This feature also results in having large-scale sparse Knowledge Graphs, where such reasoning process is needed to predict relations between new events. However, existing approaches in this area are limited by considering CKGs as a limited set of facts, thus rendering them unfit for reasoning over new unseen situations and events. In this paper, we present a neural-symbolic reasoner, which is capable of reasoning over large-scale dynamic CKGs. The logic rules for reasoning over CKGs are learned during training by our model. In addition to providing interpretable explanation, the learned logic rules help to generalise prediction to newly introduced events. Experimental results on the task of link prediction on CKGs prove the effectiveness of our model by outperforming the state-of-the-art models.

Domain Adaptative Causality Encoder

Current approaches which are mainly based on the extraction of low-level relations among individual events are limited by the shortage of publicly available labelled data. Therefore, the resulting models perform poorly when applied to a distributionally different domain for which labelled data did not exist at the time of training. To overcome this limitation, in this paper, we leverage the characteristics of dependency trees and adversarial learning to address the tasks of adaptive causality identification and localisation. The term adaptive is used since the training and test data come from two distributionally different datasets, which to the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to address. Moreover, we present a new causality dataset, namely MedCaus, which integrates all types of causality in the text. Our experiments on four different benchmark causality datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach over the existing baselines, by up to 7% improvement, on the tasks of identification and localisation of the causal relations from the text.

Learning Causal Bayesian Networks from Text

Causal relationships form the basis for reasoning and decision-making in Artificial Intelligence systems. To exploit the large volume of textual data available today, the automatic discovery of causal relationships from text has emerged as a significant challenge in recent years. Existing approaches in this realm are limited to the extraction of low-level relations among individual events. To overcome the limitations of the existing approaches, in this paper, we propose a method for automatic inference of causal relationships from human written language at conceptual level. To this end, we leverage the characteristics of hierarchy of concepts and linguistic variables created from text, and represent the extracted causal relationships in the form of a Causal Bayesian Network. Our experiments demonstrate superiority of our approach over the existing approaches in inferring complex causal reasoning from the text.

COSMO: Conditional SEQ2SEQ-based Mixture Model for Zero-Shot Commonsense Question Answering

Commonsense reasoning refers to the ability of evaluating a social situation and acting accordingly. Identification of the implicit causes and effects of a social context is the driving capability which can enable machines to perform commonsense reasoning. The dynamic world of social interactions requires context-dependent on-demand systems to infer such underlying information. However, current approaches in this realm lack the ability to perform commonsense reasoning upon facing an unseen situation, mostly due to incapability of identifying a diverse range of implicit social relations. Hence they fail to estimate the correct reasoning path. In this paper, we present Conditional SEQ2SEQ-based Mixture model (COSMO), which provides us with the capabilities of dynamic and diverse content generation. We use COSMO to generate context-dependent clauses, which form a dynamic Knowledge Graph (KG) on-the-fly for commonsense reasoning. To show the adaptability of our model to context-dependant knowledge generation, we address the task of zero-shot commonsense question answering. The empirical results indicate an improvement of up to +5.2% over the state-of-the-art models.