United States

Toxic online political discourse has become prevalent, where scholars debate about its impact to Democratic processes. This work presents a large-scale study of political incivility on Twitter. In line with theories of political communication, we differentiate between harsh `impolite&#39; style and intolerant substance. We present a dataset of 13K political tweets in the U.S. context, which we collected and labeled by those categories using crowd sourcing. Our dataset and results shed light on hostile political discourse focused on partisan conflicts in the U.S. The evaluation of state-of-the-art classifiers illustrates the challenges involved in political incivility detection, which often requires high-level semantic and social understanding. Nevertheless, performing incivility detection at scale, we are able to characterise its distribution across individual users and geopolitical regions, where our findings align and extend existing theories of political communication. In particular, we find that roughly 80% of the uncivil tweets are authored by 20% of the users, where users who are politically engaged are more inclined to use uncivil language. We further find that political incivility exhibits network homophily, and that incivility is more prominent in highly competitive geopolitical regions. Our results apply to both uncivil style and substance.

EMNLP 2024

A Closer Look at Multidimensional Online Political Incivility

generative models

representation learning

contrastive learning

# Welcome everyone to ACL 2022!

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ACL 2022

The Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) is the premier international scientific and professional society for people working on computational problems involving human language, a field often referred to as either computational linguistics or natural language processing (NLP). 

Toxic online political discourse has become prevalent, where scholars debate about its impact to Democratic processes. This work presents a large-scale study of political incivility on Twitter. In line with theories of political communication, we differentiate between harsh `impolite' style and intolerant substance. We present a dataset of 13K political tweets in the U.S. context, which we collected and labeled by those categories using crowd sourcing. Our dataset and results shed light on hostile political discourse focused on partisan conflicts in the U.S. The evaluation of state-of-the-art classifiers illustrates the challenges involved in political incivility detection, which often requires high-level semantic and social understanding. Nevertheless, performing incivility detection at scale, we are able to characterise its distribution across individual users and geopolitical regions, where our findings align and extend existing theories of political communication. In particular, we find that roughly 80% of the uncivil tweets are authored by 20% of the users, where users who are politically engaged are more inclined to use uncivil language. We further find that political incivility exhibits network homophily, and that incivility is more prominent in highly competitive geopolitical regions. Our results apply to both uncivil style and substance.

poster

## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
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EMNLP 2024 will take place in Miami, Florida from Nov 12th to Nov 16th, 2024, at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hote and on Underline for remote participants.

This study examines the potential of integrating Learning-to-Rank (LTR) with Query-focused Summarization (QFS) to enhance the summary relevance via content prioritization. Using a shared secondary decoder with the summarization decoder, we carry out the LTR task at the segment level. Compared to the state-of-the-art, our model outperforms on QMSum benchmark (all metrics) and matches on SQuALITY benchmark (2 metrics) as measured by Rouge and BertScore while offering a lower training overhead. Specifically, on the QMSum benchmark, our proposed system achieves improvements, particularly in Rouge-L (+0.42) and BertScore (+0.34), indicating enhanced understanding and relevance. While facing minor challenges in Rouge-1 and Rouge-2 scores on the SQuALITY benchmark, the model significantly excels in Rouge-L (+1.47), underscoring its capability to generate coherent summaries. Human evaluations emphasize the efficacy of our method in terms of relevance and faithfulness of the generated summaries, without sacrificing fluency. A deeper analysis reveals our model's superiority over the state-of-the-art for broad queries, as opposed to specific ones, from a qualitative standpoint. We further present an error analysis of our model, pinpointing challenges faced and suggesting potential directions for future research in this field.

Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization

Knowledge editing injects knowledge updates into language models to keep them correct and up-to-date. However, its current evaluations deviate significantly from practice: their knowledge updates solely consist of structured facts derived from meticulously crafted datasets, instead of practical sources---unstructured texts like news articles, and they often overlook practical real-world knowledge updates. To address these issues, in this paper we propose AKEW (Assessing Knowledge Editing in the Wild), a new practical benchmark for knowledge editing. AKEW fully covers three editing settings of knowledge updates: structured facts, unstructured texts as facts, and extracted triplets. It further introduces new datasets featuring both counterfactual and real-world knowledge updates. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the considerable gap between state-of-the-art knowledge-editing methods and practical scenarios. Our analyses further highlight key insights to motivate future research for practical knowledge editing.

AKEW: Assessing Knowledge Editing in the Wild

Susceptibility to misinformation describes the degree of belief in unverifiable claims, a latent aspect of individuals' mental processes that is not observable. Existing susceptibility studies heavily rely on self-reported beliefs, which can be subject to bias, expensive to collect, and challenging to scale for downstream applications. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose a computational approach to efficiently model users' latent susceptibility levels. As shown in previous work, susceptibility is influenced by various factors (e.g., demographic factors, political ideology), and directly influences people's reposting behavior on social media. To represent the underlying mental process, our susceptibility modeling incorporates these factors as inputs, guided by the supervision of people's sharing behavior. Using COVID-19 as a testbed, our experiments demonstrate a significant alignment between the susceptibility scores estimated by our computational modeling and human judgments, confirming the effectiveness of this latent modeling approach. Furthermore, we apply our model to annotate susceptibility scores on a large-scale dataset and analyze the relationships between susceptibility with various factors. Our analysis reveals that political leanings and other psychological factors exhibit varying degrees of association with susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation, and shows that susceptibility is unevenly distributed across different professional and geographical backgrounds.

Decoding Susceptibility: Modeling Misbelief to Misinformation Through a Computational Approach

General-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have achieved remarkable advancements in machine translation (MT) by leveraging extensive web content. On the other hand, translation-specific LLMs are built by pre-training on domain-specific monolingual corpora and fine-tuning with human-annotated translation data. Despite the superior performance, these methods either demand an unprecedented scale of computing and data or substantial human editing and annotation efforts. In this paper, we develop MT-Ladder, a novel model-agnostic and cost-effective tool to refine the performance of general LLMs for MT. MT-Ladder is trained on pseudo-refinement triplets which can be easily obtained from existing LLMs without additional human cost. During training, we propose a hierarchical fine-tuning strategy with an easy-to-hard schema, improving MT-Ladder's refining performance progressively. The trained MT-Ladder can be seamlessly integrated with any general-purpose LLMs to boost their translation performance. By utilizing Gemma-2B/7B as the backbone, MT-Ladder-2B can elevate raw translations to the level of top-tier open-source models (e.g., refining BigTranslate-13B with +6.91 BLEU and +3.52 COMET for XX→En), and MT-Ladder-7B can further enhance model performance to be on par with the state-of-the-art GPT-4. Extensive ablation and analysis corroborate the effectiveness of MT-Ladder in diverse settings.

Ladder: A Model-Agnostic Framework Boosting LLM-based Machine Translation to the Next Level

Prior work has explored the possibility of using the semantic information obtained from embedding representations to quantify social stereotypes, leveraging techniques such as word embeddings combined with a list of traits (Garg et al., 2018; Charlesworth et al., 2022) or semantic axes (An et al., 2018; Lucy et al., 2022). However, these approaches have struggled to fully capture the variability in stereotypes across different conceptual domains for the same social group (e.g., black in science, health, and art), in part because the identity of a word and the associations formed during pre-training can dominate its contextual representation (Field and Tsvetkov, 2019). This study explores the ability to recover stereotypes from the contexts surrounding targeted entities by utilizing state-of-the-art text embedding models and adaptive semantic axes enhanced by large language models (LLMs). Our results indicate that the proposed pipeline not only surpasses token-based methods in capturing in-domain framing but also effectively tracks stereotypes over time and along domain-specific semantic axes for in-domain texts. Our research highlights the potential of employing text embedding models to achieve a deeper understanding of nuanced social stereotypes.

Adaptive Axes: A Pipeline for In-domain Social Stereotype Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced reasoning at larger scales, driving efforts to distill these capabilities into smaller models via teacher-student learning.
Previous works simply fine-tune student models on teachers' generated Chain-of-Thoughts (CoTs) data. Although these methods enhance in-domain (IND) reasoning performance, they struggle to generalize to out-of-domain (OOD) tasks.
We believe that the widespread spurious correlations between questions and answers may lead the model to preset a specific answer which restricts the diversity and generalizability of its reasoning process.
In this paper, we propose \textbf{Cas}cading Decomposed \textbf{Co}Ts \textbf{D}istillation (CasCoD) to address these issues by decomposing the traditional single-step learning process into two cascaded learning steps. 
Specifically, by restructuring the training objectives—removing the answer from outputs and concatenating the question with the rationale as input—CasCoD's two-step learning process ensures that students focus on learning rationales without interference from the preset answers, thus improving reasoning generalizability. 
Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of CasCoD on both IND and OOD benchmark reasoning datasets\footnote{Code available at \url{https://github.com/C-W-D/CasCoD}

Improve Student’s Reasoning Generalizability through Cascading Decomposed CoTs Distillation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently revolutionized the NLP field, while they still fall short in some specific down-stream tasks. 
In the work, we focus on utilizing LLMs to perform machine translation, where we observe that two patterns of errors frequently occur and drastically affect the translation quality: language mismatch and repetition. 
The work sets out to explore the potential for mitigating these two issues by leveraging model editing methods, e.g., by locating Feed-Forward Network (FFN) neurons or something that are responsible for the errors and deactivating them in the inference time.
We find that directly applying such methods either limited effect on the targeted errors or has significant negative side-effect on the general translation quality, indicating that the located components may also be crucial for ensuring machine translation with LLMs on the rails.
To this end, we propose to refine the located components by fetching the intersection of the locating results under different language settings, filtering out the aforementioned information that is irrelevant to targeted errors. 
The experiment results empirically demonstrate that our methods can effectively reduce the language mismatch and repetition ratios and meanwhile enhance or keep the general translation quality in most cases.

Mitigating the Language Mismatch and Repetition Issues in LLM-based Machine Translation via Model Editing

We present a survey of more than 90 recent papers that aim to study cultural representation and inclusion in large language models (LLMs). We observe that none of the studies explicitly define "culture, which is a complex, multifaceted concept; instead, they probe the models on some specially designed datasets which represent certain aspects of "culture". We call these aspects the proxies of culture, and organize them across two dimensions of demographic and semantic proxies. We also categorize the probing methods employed. Our analysis indicates that only certain aspects of ``culture,'' such as values and objectives, have been studied, leaving several other interesting and important facets, especially the multitude of semantic domains (Thompson et al., 2020) and aboutness (Hershcovich et al., 2022), unexplored. Two other crucial gaps are the lack of robustness of probing techniques and situated studies on the impact of cultural mis- and under-representation in LLM-based applications.

Towards Measuring and Modeling “Culture" in LLMs: A Survey

Socio-demographic prompting is a commonly employed approach to study cultural biases in LLMs as well as for aligning models to certain cultures. In this paper, we systematically probe four LLMs (Llama 3, Mistral v0.2, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT4) with prompts that are conditioned on culturally sensitive and non-sensitive cues, on datasets that are supposed to be culturally sensitive (EtiCor and CALI) or neutral (MMLU and ETHICS). We observe that all models except GPT4 show significant variations in their responses on both kinds of datasets for both kinds of prompts, casting doubt on the robustness of the culturally-conditioned prompting as a method for eliciting cultural bias in models that are not sufficiently stable with respect to arbitrary prompting cues. Further, we also show that some of the supposedly culturally neutral datasets have a non-trivial fraction of culturally sensitive questions/tasks.

Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting

Handling long input contexts remains a significant challenge for Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly in resource-constrained environments such as mobile devices. Our work aims to address this limitation by introducing InfiniPot, a novel KV cache control framework designed to enable pre-trained LLMs to manage extensive sequences within fixed memory constraints efficiently, without requiring additional training. InfiniPot leverages Continual Context Distillation (CCD), an iterative process that compresses and retains essential information through novel importance metrics, effectively maintaining critical data even without access to future context. Our comprehensive evaluations indicate that InfiniPot significantly outperforms models trained for long contexts in various NLP tasks, establishing its efficacy and versatility. This work represents a substantial advancement toward making LLMs applicable to a broader range of real-world scenarios.

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Learning to Rank Salient Content for Query-focused Summarization

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