Romanization-based Large-scale Adaptation of Multilingual Language Models

Large multilingual pretrained language models (mPLMs) have become the de facto state of the art for cross-lingual transfer in NLP. However, their large-scale deployment to many languages, besides pretraining data scarcity, is also hindered by the increase in vocabulary size and limitations in their parameter budget. In order to boost the capacity of mPLMs to deal with low-resource and unseen languages, we explore the potential of leveraging transliteration on a massive scale. In particular, we explore the UROMAN transliteration tool, which provides mappings from UTF-8 to Latin characters for all the writing systems, enabling inexpensive romanization for virtually any language. We first focus on establishing how UROMAN compares against other language-specific and manually curated transliterators for adapting multilingual PLMs. We then study and compare a plethora of data- and parameter-efficient strategies for adapting the mPLMs to romanized and non-romanized corpora of 14 diverse low-resource languages. Our results reveal that UROMAN-based transliteration can offer strong performance for many languages, with particular gains achieved in the most challenging setups: on languages with unseen scripts and with limited training data without any vocabulary augmentation. Further analyses reveal that an improved tokenizer based on romanized data can even outperform non-transliteration-based methods in the majority of languages.

UKP-SQuARE v3: A Platform for Multi-Agent QA Research

The continuous development of Question Answering (QA) datasets has drawn the research community's attention toward multi-domain models. A popular approach is to use multi-dataset models, which are models trained on multiple datasets to learn their regularities and prevent overfitting to a single dataset. However, with the proliferation of QA models in online repositories such as GitHub or Hugging Face, an alternative is becoming viable. Recent works have demonstrated that combining expert agents can yield large performance gains over multi-dataset models. To ease research in multi-agent models, we extend UKP-SQuARE, an online platform for QA research, to support three families of multi-agent systems: i) agent selection, ii) early-fusion of agents, and iii) late-fusion of agents. We conduct experiments to evaluate their inference speed and discuss the performance vs. speed trade-off compared to multi-dataset models. UKP-SQuARE is open-source and publicly available at http://square.ukp-lab.de.

Elastic Weight Removal for Faithful and Abstractive Dialogue Generation

Ideally, dialogue systems should generate responses that are faithful to the knowledge contained in relevant documents. However, many models generate hallucinated responses instead that contradict it or contain unverifiable information. To mitigate such undesirable behaviour, it has been proposed to fine-tune a `negative expert' on negative examples and subtract its parameters from those of a pre-trained model. However, intuitively, this does not take into account that some parameters are more responsible than others in causing hallucinations. Thus, we propose to weigh their individual importance via (an approximation of) the Fisher Information matrix, which measures the uncertainty of their estimate. We call this method Elastic Weight Removal (EWR). We evaluate our method -- using different variants of Flan-T5 as a backbone language model -- on multiple datasets for information-seeking dialogue generation and compare our method with state-of-the-art techniques for faithfulness, such as CTRL, Quark, DExperts, and Noisy Channel reranking. Extensive automatic and human evaluation shows that EWR systematically increases faithfulness at minor costs in terms of other metrics. However, we notice that only discouraging hallucinations may increase extractiveness, i.e. shallow copy-pasting of document spans, which can be undesirable. Hence, as a second main contribution, we show that our method can be extended to simultaneously discourage hallucinations and extractive responses. We publicly release the code for reproducing EWR and all baselines.

Like a Good Nearest Neighbor: Practical Content Moderation with Sentence Transformers

Modern text classification systems have impressive capabilities but are infeasible to deploy and use reliably due to their dependence on prompting and billion-parameter language models. SetFit (Tunstall et al., 2022) is a recent, practical approach that fine-tunes a Sentence Transformer under a contrastive learning paradigm and achieves similar results to more unwieldy systems. Text classification is important for addressing the problem of domain drift in detecting harmful content, which plagues all social media platforms. Here, we propose Like a Good Nearest Neighbor (LaGoNN), an inexpensive modification to SetFit that requires no additional parameters or hyperparameters but modifies input with information about its nearest neighbor, for example, the label and text, in the training data, making novel data appear similar to an instance on which the model was optimized. LaGoNN is effective at the task of detecting harmful content and generally improves performance compared to SetFit. To demonstrate the value of our system, we conduct a thorough study of text classification systems in the context of content moderation under four label distributions.

CARE: Collaborative AI-Assisted Reading Environment

Recent years have seen impressive progress in AI-assisted writing, yet the developments in AI-assisted reading are lacking. We propose inline commentary as a natural vehicle for AI-based reading assistance, and present CARE: the first open integrated platform for the study of inline commentary and reading. CARE facilitates data collection for inline commentaries in a commonplace collaborative reading environment, and provides a framework for enhancing reading with NLP-based assistance, such as text classification, generation or question answering. The extensible behavioral logging allows unique insights into the reading and commenting behavior, and flexible configuration makes the platform easy to deploy in new scenarios. To evaluate CARE in action, we apply the platform in a user study dedicated to scholarly peer review. CARE facilitates the data collection and study of inline commentary in NLP, extrinsic evaluation of NLP assistance, and application prototyping. We invite the community to explore and build upon the open source implementation of CARE.

Opportunities and Challenges in Neural Dialog Tutoring

Designing dialog tutors has been challenging as it involves modeling the diverse and complex pedagogical strategies employed by human tutors. Although there have been significant recent advances in neural conversational systems using large language models and growth in available dialog corpora, dialog tutoring has largely remained unaffected by these advances. In this paper, we rigorously analyze various generative language models on two dialog tutoring datasets for language learning using automatic and human evaluations to understand the new opportunities brought by these advances as well as the challenges we must overcome to build models that would be usable in real educational settings. We find that although current approaches can model tutoring in constrained learning scenarios when the number of concepts to be taught and possible teacher strategies are small, they perform poorly in less constrained scenarios. Our human quality evaluation shows that both models and ground-truth annotations exhibit low performance in terms of equitable tutoring, which measures learning opportunities for students and how engaging the dialog is. To understand the behavior of our models in a real tutoring setting, we conduct a user study using expert annotators and find a significantly large number of model reasoning errors in 45% of conversations. Finally, we connect our findings to outline future work.

Improving Generalization of Adapter-Based Cross-lingual Transfer with Scheduled Unfreezing

Standard fine-tuning of language models typically performs well on in-distribution data, but suffers with generalization to distribution shifts. In this work, we aim to improve generalization of adapter-based cross-lingual task transfer where such cross-language distribution shifts are imminent. We investigate scheduled unfreezing algorithms -- originally proposed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in transfer learning -- for fine-tuning task adapters in cross-lingual transfer. Our experiments show that scheduled unfreezing methods close the gap to full fine-tuning and achieve state-of-the-art transfer performance, suggesting that these methods can go beyond just mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Next, aiming to delve deeper into those empirical findings, we investigate the learning dynamics of scheduled unfreezing using Fisher Information. Our in-depth experiments reveal that scheduled unfreezing induces different learning dynamics compared to standard fine-tuning, and provide evidence that the dynamics of Fisher Information during training correlate with cross-lingual generalization performance. We additionally propose a general scheduled unfreezing algorithm that achieves an average of 2 points improvement over four datasets compared to standard fine-tuning and provides strong empirical evidence for a theory-based justification of the heuristic unfreezing schedule (i.e., the heuristic schedule is implicitly maximizing Fisher Information). Our code will be publicly available.

Asking Clarification Questions for Code Generation in General-Purpose Programming Language

Code generation from text requires understanding the user's intent from a natural language description (NLD) and generating an executable program code snippet that satisfies this intent. While recent pretrained language models (PLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance for this task, these models fail when the given NLD is ambiguous due to the lack of enough specifications for generating a high-quality code snippet. In this work, we introduce a novel and more realistic setup for this task. We hypothesize that ambiguities in the specifications of an NLD are resolved by asking clarification questions (CQs). Therefore, we collect and introduce a new dataset named CodeClarQA containing NLD-Code pairs with created CQAs. We evaluate the performance of PLMs for code generation on our dataset. The empirical results support our hypothesis that clarifications result in more precise generated code, as shown by an improvement of 17.52 in BLEU, 12.72 in CodeBLEU, and 7.7\% in the exact match. Alongside this, our task and dataset introduce new challenges to the community, including when and what CQs should be asked.

CiteBench: A benchmark for Scientific Citation Text Generation

The publication rates are skyrocketing across many fields of science, and it is difficult to stay up to date with the latest research. This makes automatically summarizing the latest findings and helping scholars to synthesize related work in a given area an attractive research objective. In this paper we study the problem of citation text generation, where given a set of cited papers and citing context the model should generate a citation text. While citation text generation has been tackled in prior work, existing studies use different datasets and task definitions, which makes it hard to study citation text generation systematically. To address this, we propose CiteBench: a benchmark for citation text generation that unifies the previous datasets and enables standardized evaluation of citation text generation models across task settings and domains. Using the new benchmark, we investigate the performance of multiple strong baselines, test their transferability between the datasets, and deliver new insights into task definition and evaluation to guide the future research in citation text generation. We make CiteBench publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/citebench.