Enhancing Grammatical Error Correction Systems with Explanations

Grammatical error correction systems improve written communication by detecting and correcting language mistakes. To help language learners better understand why the GEC system makes a certain correction, the causes of errors (evidence words) and the corresponding error types are two key factors. To enhance GEC systems with explanations, we introduce EXPECT, a large dataset annotated with evidence words and grammatical error types. We propose several baselines and anlysis to understand this task. Furthermore, human evaluation verifies our explainable GEC system's explanations can assist second-language learners in determining whether to accept a correction suggestion and in understanding the associated grammar rule.

Deepfake Text Detection in the Wild

Recent advances in large language models have enabled them to reach a level of text generation comparable to that of humans. These models show powerful capabilities across a wide range of content, including news article writing, story generation, and scientific writing. Such capability further narrows the gap between human-authored and machine-generated texts, highlighting the importance of deepfake text detection to avoid potential risks such as fake news propagation and plagiarism. However, previous work has been limited in that they testify methods on testbed of specific domains or certain language models. In practical scenarios, the detector faces texts from various domains or LLMs without knowing their sources. To this end, we build a wild testbed by gathering texts from various human writings and deepfake texts generated by different LLMs. Human annotators are only slightly better than random guessing at identifying machine-generated texts. Empirical results on automatic detection methods further showcase the challenges of deepfake text detection in a wild testbed. In addition, out-of-distribution poses a greater challenge for a detector to be employed in realistic application scenarios. We release our resources at https://github.com/yafuly/DeepfakeTextDetect.

A Frustratingly Simple Decoding Method for Neural Text Generation

We introduce a frustratingly simple, super efficient and surprisingly effective decoding method, which we call Frustratingly Simple Decoding (FSD), for neural text generation. The idea behind FSD is straightforward: we build an anti-LM based on previously generated text and use this anti-LM to penalize future generation of what has been generated. The anti-LM can be implemented as simple as an n-gram language model or a vectorized variant. In this way, FSD introduces no extra model parameters and negligible computational overhead (FSD can be as fast as greedy search). Despite the simplicity, FSD is surprisingly effective; Experiments show that FSD can outperform the canonical methods to date (i.e., nucleus sampling) as well as several strong baselines that were proposed recently.

A Survey on Zero Pronoun Translation

Zero pronouns (ZPs) are frequently omitted in pro-drop languages (e.g. Chinese, Hungarian, and Hindi), but should be recalled in non-pro-drop languages (e.g. English). This phenomenon has been studied extensively in machine translation (MT), as it poses a significant challenge for MT systems due to the difficulty in determining the correct antecedent for the pronoun. This survey paper highlights the major works that have been undertaken in zero pronoun translation (ZPT) after the neural revolution, so that researchers can recognise the current state and future directions of this field. We provide an organisation of the literature based on evolution, dataset, method and evaluation. In addition, we compare and analyze competing models and evaluation metrics on different benchmarks. We uncover a number of insightful findings such as: 1) ZPT is in line with the development trend of large language model; 2) data limitation causes learning bias in languages and domains; 3) performance improvements are often reported on single benchmarks, but advanced methods are still far from real-world use; 4) general-purpose metrics are not reliable on nuances and complexities of ZPT, emphasizing the necessity of targeted metrics; 5) apart from commonly-cited errors, ZPs will cause risks of gender bias.

A Simple and Plug-and-play Method for Unsupervised Sentence Representation Enhancement

Generating proper embedding of sentences through an unsupervised way is beneficial to semantic matching and retrieval problems in real-world scenarios. This paper presents Representation ALchemy (RepAL), an extremely simple post-processing method that enhances sentence representations. The basic idea in RepAL is to de-emphasize redundant information of sentence embedding generated by pre-trained models. Through comprehensive experiments, we show that RepAL is free of training and is a plug-and-play method that can be combined with most existing unsupervised sentence learning models. We also conducted in-depth analysis to understand RepAL.

Exploring Human-Like Translation Strategy with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in general scenarios, exhibiting a level of aptitude that approaches, in some aspects even surpasses, human-level intelligence. Among their numerous skills, the translation abilities of LLMs have received considerable attention. In contrast to traditional machine translation that focuses solely on source-target mapping, LLM-based translation can potentially mimic the human translation process that takes many preparatory steps to ensure high-quality translation. This work aims to explore this possibility by proposing the MAPS framework, which stands for Multi-Aspect Prompting and Selection. Specifically, we enable LLMs to first analyze the given source text and extract three aspects of translation-related knowledge: keywords, topics and relevant demonstrations to guide the translation process. To filter out the noisy and unhelpful knowledge, we employ a selection mechanism based on quality estimation. Experiments suggest that MAPS brings significant and consistent improvements over text-davinci-003 and Alpaca on eight translation directions from the latest WMT22 test sets. Our further analysis shows that the extracted knowledge is critical in resolving up to 59% of hallucination mistakes in translation. Code is available at https://github.com/zwhe99/MAPS-mt.

ParroT: Translating During Chat Using Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have exhibited remarkable abilities on a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, including various machine translation abilities accomplished during chat. However, these models are only accessible through restricted APIs, which creates barriers to new research and advancements in the field. Therefore, we propose the $\mathbf{ParroT}$ framework to enhance and regulate the translation abilities during chat based on open-sourced LLMs (i.e., LLaMA-7b, BLOOMZ-7b-mt) and human written translation and evaluation data. Specifically, ParroT reformulates translation data into the instruction-following style, and introduces a "$\mathbf{Hint}$" field for incorporating extra requirements to regulate the translation process. Accordingly, we propose three instruction types for finetuning ParroT models, including translation instruction, contrastive instruction, and error-guided instruction. We can finetune either the full models or partial parameters via low rank adaptation (LoRA). Experiments on Flores subsets and WMT22 test sets suggest that translation instruction improves the translation performance of vanilla LLMs significantly while error-guided instruction can lead to a further improvement, which demonstrates the importance of learning from low-quality translations annotated by human. Meanwhile, the ParroT models can also preserve the ability on general tasks with the Alpaca multi-task dataset involved in finetuning. Please refer to our Github project for more implementation details: https://github.com/wxjiao/ParroT

Exploring the Use of Large Language Models for Reference-Free Text Quality Evaluation: A Preliminary Empirical Study

Evaluating the quality of generated text is a challenging task in natural language processing. This difficulty arises from the inherent complexity and diversity of text. Recently, OpenAI's ChatGPT, a powerful large language model (LLM), has garnered significant attention due to its impressive performance in various tasks. Therefore, we present this report to investigate the effectiveness of LLMs, especially ChatGPT, and explore ways to optimize their use in assessing text quality. We compared three kinds of reference-free evaluation methods based on ChatGPT or similar LLMs. The experimental results prove that ChatGPT is capable to evaluate text quality effectively from various perspectives without reference and demonstrates superior performance than most existing automatic metrics. In particular, the Explicit Score, which utilizes ChatGPT to generate a numeric score measuring text quality, is the most effective and reliable method among the three exploited approaches. However, directly comparing the quality of two texts using ChatGPT may lead to suboptimal results. We hope this report will provide valuable insights into selecting appropriate methods for evaluating text quality with LLMs such as ChatGPT.

Document-Level Machine Translation with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) such as Chat-GPT can produce coherent, cohesive, relevant, and fluent answers for various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Taking document-level machine translation (MT) as a testbed, this paper provides an in-depth evaluation of LLMs' ability on discourse modeling. The study fo-cuses on three aspects: 1) Effects of Discourse-Aware Prompts, where we investigate the impact of different prompts on document-level translation quality and discourse phenomena; 2) Comparison of Translation Models, where we compare the translation performance of Chat-GPT with commercial MT systems and advanced document-level MT methods; 3) Analysis of Discourse Modelling Abilities, where we further probe discourse knowledge encoded in LLMs and examine the impact of training techniques on discourse modeling. By evaluating a number of benchmarks, we surprisingly find that 1) leveraging their powerful long-text mod-eling capabilities, ChatGPT outperforms commercial MT systems in terms of human evaluation. 2) GPT-4 demonstrates a strong ability to explain discourse knowledge, even through it may select incorrect translation candidates in contrastive testing. 3) ChatGPT and GPT-4 have demonstrated superior performance and show potential to become a new and promising paradigm for document-level translation. This work highlights the challenges and opportunities of discourse modeling for LLMs, which we hope can inspire the future design and evaluation of LLMs.