Experimenting with Legal AI Solutions: The Case of Question-Answering for Access to Justice

Generative AI models, such as the GPT and Llama series, have significant potential to assist laypeople in answering legal questions. However, little prior work focuses on the data sourcing, inference, and evaluation of these models in the context of laypersons. To this end, we propose a human-centric legal NLP pipeline, covering data sourcing, inference, and evaluation. We introduce and release a dataset, LegalQA, with real and specific legal questions spanning from employment law to criminal law, corresponding answers written by legal experts, and citations for each answer. We develop an automatic evaluation protocol for this dataset, then show that retrieval-augmented generation from only 850 citations in the train set can match or outperform internet-wide retrieval, despite containing 9 orders of magnitude less data. Finally, we propose future directions for open-sourced efforts, which fall behind closed-sourced models.

Robust Utility-Preserving Text Anonymization Based on Large Language Models

Text anonymization is crucial for sharing sensitive data while maintaining privacy. Existing techniques face the emerging challenges of re-identification attack ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), which have shown advanced capability in memorizing detailed information and patterns as well as connecting disparate pieces of information. In defending against LLM-based re-identification attacks, anonymization could jeopardize the utility of the resulting anonymized data in downstream tasks -- the trade-off between privacy and data utility requires deeper understanding within the context of LLMs. This paper proposes a framework composed of three LLM-based components -- a privacy evaluator, a utility evaluator, and an optimization component, which work collaboratively to perform anonymization. To provide a practical model for large-scale and real-time environments, we distill the anonymization capabilities into a lightweight model using Direct Preference Optimization (DPO). Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed models outperform baseline models, showing robustness in reducing the risk of re-identification while preserving greater data utility in downstream tasks. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2024-rupta.

InferAct: Inferring Safe Actions for LLM-Based Agents Through Preemptive Evaluation and Human Feedback

A crucial requirement for deploying LLM-based agents in real-life applications is robustness against risky or irreversible mistakes. However, existing research lacks a focus on the preemptive evaluation of reasoning trajectories performed by LLM agents, leading to a gap in ensuring safe and reliable operations. To explore better solutions, this paper introduces InferAct, a novel approach that leverages the Theory-of-Mind capability of LLMs to proactively detect potential errors before critical actions are executed (e.g., "buy-now" in automatic online trading or web shopping). InferAct is also capable of integrating human feedback to prevent irreversible risks and enhance the actor agent's decision-making process. Experiments on three widely used tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of InferAct. The proposed solution presents a novel approach and concrete contributions toward developing LLM agents that can be safely deployed in different environments involving critical decision-making.

Fine-Tuning with Divergent Chains of Thought Boosts Reasoning Through Self-Correction in Language Models

Requiring a Large Language Model to generate intermediary reasoning steps has been shown to be an effective way of boosting performance. In fact, it has been found that instruction tuning on these intermediary reasoning steps improves model performance. In this work, we present a novel method of further improving performance by requiring models to compare multiple reasoning chains before generating a solution in a single inference step. We call this method Divergent CoT (DCoT). We find that instruction tuning on DCoT datasets boosts the performance of even smaller, and therefore more accessible, LLMs. Through a rigorous set of experiments spanning a wide range of tasks that require various reasoning types, we show that fine-tuning on DCoT consistently improves performance over the CoT baseline across model families and scales (1.3B to 70B). Through a combination of empirical and manual evaluation, we additionally show that these performance gains stem from models generating multiple divergent reasoning chains in a single inference step, indicative of the enabling of self-correction in language models. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/UKPLab/arxiv2024-divergent-cot.

Mitigating Social Biases in Language Models through Unlearning

Mitigating bias in language models (LMs) has become a critical problem due to the widespread deployment of LMs. Numerous approaches revolve around data pre-processing and fine-tuning of language models, tasks that can be both time-consuming and computationally demanding. Consequently, there is a growing interest in machine unlearning techniques given their capacity to induce the forgetting of undesired behaviors of the existing pre-trained or fine-tuned models with lower computational cost. In this work, we explore two unlearning methods, (1) Partitioned Contrastive Gradient Unlearning (PCGU) applied on decoder models and (2) Negation via Task Vector, to reduce social biases in state-of-the-art and open-source LMs such as LLaMA-2 and OPT. We also implement distributed PCGU for large models. It is empirically shown, through quantitative and qualitative analyses, that negation via Task Vector method outperforms PCGU in debiasing with minimum deterioration in performance and perplexity of the models. On LLaMA-27B, negation via Task Vector reduces the bias score by 11.8%

DARA: Decomposition-Alignment-Reasoning Autonomous Language Agent for Question Answering over Knowledge Graphs

Answering Questions over Knowledge Graphs (KGQA) is key to well-functioning autonomous language agents in various real-life applications. To improve the neural-symbolic reasoning capabilities of language agents powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) in KGQA, we propose the DecompositionAlignment-Reasoning Agent (DARA) framework. DARA effectively parses questions into formal queries through a dual mechanism: high-level iterative task decomposition and low-level task grounding. Importantly, DARA can be efficiently trained with a small number of high-quality reasoning trajectories. Our experimental results demonstrate that DARA fine-tuned on LLMs (e.g. Llama-2-7B, Mistral) outperforms both in-context learning-based agents with GPT-4 and alternative fine-tuned agents, across different benchmarks in zero-shot evaluation, making such models more accessible for real-life applications. We also show that DARA attains performance comparable to state-of-the-art enumerating-and-ranking-based methods for KGQA.

FAIIR: Building Toward A Conversational AI Agent Assistant for Youth Mental Health Service Provision

World's healthcare systems and mental health agencies face both a growing demand for youth mental health services, alongside a simultaneous challenge of limited resources. Given these constraints, this work presents our experience in the creation and evaluation of the FAIIR (Frontline Assistant: Issue Identification and Recommendation) tool, an ensemble of domain-adapted and fine-tuned transformer models, leveraging natural language processing to identify issues that youth may be experiencing. We explore the technical development, performance, and validation processes leveraged for the FAIIR tool in application to situations of frontline crisis response via Kids Help Phone. Frontline Crisis Responders assign an issue tag from a defined list following each conversation. Assisting with the identification of issues of relevance helps reduce the burden on CRs, ensuring that appropriate resources can be provided and that active rescues and mandatory reporting can take place in critical situations requiring immediate de-escalation.

SpaRC and SpaRP: Spatial Reasoning Characterization and Path Generation for Understanding Spatial Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models

Spatial reasoning is a crucial component of both biological and artificial intelligence. In this work, we present a comprehensive study of the capability of current state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on spatial reasoning. To support our study, we created and contribute a novel Spatial Reasoning Characterization (SpaRC) framework and Spatial Reasoning Paths (SpaRP) datasets, to enable an in-depth understanding of the spatial relations and compositions as well as the usefulness of spatial reasoning chains. We found that all the state-of-the-art LLMs do not perform well on the datasets -- their performances are consistently low across different setups. The spatial reasoning capability improves substantially as model sizes scale up. Finetuning both large language models (e.g., Llama-2-70B) and smaller ones (e.g., Llama-2-13B) can significantly improve their F1-scores by 7--32 absolute points. We also found that the top proprietary LLMs still significantly outperform their open-source counterparts in topological spatial understanding and reasoning.

The FAIIR Tool: A Conversational AI Agent Assistant for Youth Mental Health Service Provision

World's healthcare systems and mental health agencies face both a growing demand for youth mental health services, alongside a simultaneous challenge of limited resources. Given these constraints, this work presents our experience in the creation and evaluation of the FAIIR (Frontline Assistant: Issue Identification and Recommendation) tool, an ensemble of domain-adapted and fine-tuned transformer models, leveraging natural language processing to identify issues that youth may be experiencing. We explore the technical development, performance, and validation processes leveraged for the FAIIR tool in application to situations of frontline crisis response via Kids Help Phone. Frontline Crisis Responders assign an issue tag from a defined list following each conversation. Assisting with the identification of issues of relevance helps reduce the burden on CRs, ensuring that appropriate resources can be provided and that active rescues and mandatory reporting can take place in critical situations requiring immediate de-escalation.

What Can Natural Language Processing Do for Peer Review?

The number of scientific articles produced every year is growing rapidly. Providing quality control over them is crucial for scientists and, ultimately, for the public good. In modern science, this process is largely delegated to peer review -- a distributed procedure in which each submission is evaluated by several independent experts in the field. Peer review is widely used, yet it is hard, time-consuming, and prone to error. Since the artifacts involved in peer review -- manuscripts, reviews, discussions -- are largely text-based, Natural Language Processing has great potential to improve reviewing. As the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has enabled NLP assistance for many new tasks, the discussion on machine-assisted peer review is picking up the pace. Yet, where exactly is help needed, where can NLP help, and where should it stand aside? The goal of our paper is to provide a foundation for the future efforts in NLP for peer-reviewing assistance. We discuss peer review as a general process, exemplified by reviewing at AI conferences. We detail each step of the process from manuscript submission to camera-ready revision, and discuss the associated challenges and opportunities for NLP assistance, illustrated by existing work. We then turn to the big challenges in NLP for peer review as a whole, including data acquisition and licensing, operationalization and experimentation, and ethical issues. To help consolidate community efforts, we create a companion repository that aggregates key datasets pertaining to peer review. Finally, we issue a detailed call for action for the scientific community, NLP and AI researchers, policymakers, and funding bodies to help bring the research in NLP for peer review forward. We hope that our work will help set the agenda for research in machine-assisted scientific quality control in the age of AI, within the NLP community and beyond.