United States

Semi-structured interviews (SSIs) are a commonly employed data-collection method in healthcare research, offering in-depth qualitative insights into subject experiences. Despite their value, manual analysis of SSIs is notoriously time-consuming and labor-intensive, in part due to the difficulty of extracting and categorizing emotional responses, and challenges in scaling human evaluation for large populations. In this study, we develop RACER, a Large Language Model (LLM) based expert-guided automated pipeline that efficiently converts raw interview transcripts into insightful domain-relevant themes and sub-themes. We used RACER to analyze SSIs conducted with 93 healthcare professionals and trainees to assess the broad personal and professional mental health impacts of the COVID-19 crisis. RACER achieves moderately high agreement with two human evaluators (72\%), which approaches the human inter-rater agreement (77\%). Interestingly, LLMs and humans struggle with similar content involving nuanced emotional, ambivalent/dialectical, and psychological statements. Our study highlights the opportunities and challenges in using LLMs to improve research efficiency and opens new avenues for scalable analysis of SSIs in healthcare research.

EMNLP 2024

RACER: An LLM-powered Methodology for Scalable Analysis of Semi-structured Mental Health Interviews

semi-structured interviews

thematic analysis

large language model

covid

mental health

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## Welcome to EMNLP 2024! 
We are excited to welcome you to one of the most prominent conferences in the field of Natural Language Processing. This year, EMNLP 2024 is being held in a hybrid format,
offering both virtual and in-person participation in beautiful Miami. Due to a record-breaking number of submissions, we've expanded the total number of accepted papers to accommodate more cutting-edge research from around the globe.
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Understanding and modeling collective intelligence is essential for addressing complex social systems. Directed graphs called fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) offer a powerful tool for encoding causal mental models, but extracting high-integrity FCMs from text is challenging. This study presents an approach using large language models (LLMs) to automate FCM extraction. We introduce novel graph-based similarity measures and evaluate them by correlating their outputs with human judgments through the Elo rating system. Results show positive correlations with human evaluations, but even the best-performing measure exhibits limitations in capturing FCM nuances. Fine-tuning LLMs improves performance, but existing measures still fall short. This study highlights the need for soft similarity measures tailored to FCM extraction, advancing collective intelligence modeling with NLP.

Soft Measures for Extracting Causal Collective Intelligence

Effective generation of novel hypotheses is instrumental to scientific progress. So far, researchers have been the main powerhouse behind hypothesis generation by painstaking data analysis and thinking (also known as the Eureka moment). In this paper, we examine the potential of large language models (LLMs) to generate hypotheses. We focus on hypothesis generation based on data (i.e., labeled examples). To enable LLMs to handle long contexts, we generate initial hypotheses from a small number of examples and then update them iteratively to improve the quality of hypotheses. Inspired by multi-armed bandits, we design a reward function to inform the exploitation-exploration tradeoff in the update process. Our algorithm is able to generate hypotheses that enable much better predictive performance than few-shot prompting in classification tasks, improving accuracy by 31.7% on a synthetic dataset and by 13.9%, 3.3% and, 24.9% on three real-world datasets. We also outperform supervised learning by 12.1% and 11.6% on two challenging real-world datasets. Furthermore, we find that the generated hypotheses not only corroborate human-verified theories but also uncover new insights for the tasks.

Hypothesis Generation with Large Language Models

Large Language Model (LLM) agents have been increasingly adopted as simulation tools to model humans in applications such as social science. However, one fundamental question remains: can LLM agents really simulate human behaviors? In this paper, we focus on one of the most critical behaviors in human interactions, trust, and aim to investigate whether or not LLM agents can simulate human trust behaviors. We first find that LLM agents generally exhibit trust behaviors, referred to as agent trust, under the framework of Trust Games, which are widely recognized in behavioral economics. Then, we discover that LLM agents can have high behavioral alignment with humans regarding trust behaviors, particularly for GPT-4, indicating the feasibility to simulate human trust behaviors with LLM agents. In addition, we probe into the biases in agent trust and the differences in agent trust towards agents and humans. We also explore the intrinsic properties of agent trust under conditions including advanced reasoning strategies and external manipulations. We further offer important implications of our discoveries for various scenarios where trust is paramount. Our study provides new insights into the behaviors of LLM agents and the fundamental analogy between LLMs and humans.

Can Large Language Model Agents Simulate Human Trust Behaviors?

Moral sentiments expressed in natural language significantly influence both online and offline environments, shaping behavioral styles and in teraction patterns, including social media self presentation, cyberbullying, adherence to so cial norms, and ethical decision-making. To effectively measure moral sentiments in natural language processing texts, it is crucial to utilize large, annotated datasets that provide nuanced understanding for accurate analysis and model training. However, existing corpora, while valuable, often face linguistic limitations. To address this gap in the Chinese language domain, we introduce the Moral Foundations Weibo Corpus. This corpus consists of 25,671 Chinese comments on Weibo, encompassing six diverse topic areas. Each comment is manually annotated by at least three systematically trained an notators based on ten moral categories derived from a grounded theory of morality. To assess annotator reliability, we present the kappa test results, a gold standard for measuring consis tency. Additionally, we apply several the latest large language models to supplement the manual annotations, conducting analytical experiments to compare their performance and report baseline results for moral sentiment classification.

The Moral Foundations Weibo Corpus


Flavor development in the food industry is increasingly challenged by the need for rapid innovation and precise flavor profile creation. Traditional flavor research methods typically rely on iterative, subjective testing, which lacks the efficiency and scalability required for modern demands. This paper proposes three contributions to address the challenges. Firstly, we define a new problem domain for autonomous scientific agents in flavor science, conceptualized as the generation of hypotheses for flavor development using a vast database of chemical and sensory attributes.

FOODPUZZLE: Toward Developing Large Language Models as Flavor Scientist

Humor is an important social construct with various roles in human communication, yet clinicians remain divided on its appropriateness and effectiveness. Despite its importance, empirical research on humor in psychotherapy is limited. This study explores the theoretical concept of ``humor'' by examining the operational variable of "laughs" within psychotherapy. Method: We analyzed transcriptions from 872 psychotherapy sessions involving 68 clients treated by 59 therapists. Clients self-reported their symptoms and state of well-being before each session, while both clients and therapists provided self-reports on their therapeutic alliance after each session. Through text analysis, we extracted the number of laughs and words for each session. We investigated the within-client associations between laughs and symptoms, well-being, therapeutic alliance, and clients' number of words. Results: We found session-level associations between laughs and well-being, symptoms, and the number of words. However, no significant associations were observed between laughs and the therapeutic alliance, either from the perspective of the therapist or the client.

Why So Serious: Humor and its Association with Treatment Measurements Process and Outcome

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological and developmental disability that affects how an individual learns, communicates, interacts with others. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) is a gold standard therapy for children and adults suffering from ASD to improve their learning, social, and communication skills. Today, 1 in 36 children are diagnosed with ASD with expectations that this rate will only continue to rise. The supply of certified ABA providers is alarmingly insufficient to meet the needs of children with ASD. In fact, waitlists to receive ABA therapy in the United States exceed 10 months in most states. Clinicians or Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs) are now experiencing intense bottlenecks around diagnostic evaluations and developing treatment plans quickly enough to support timely access to care. Over the past few years, Artificial Intelligence has changed the way industries operate by offering powerful ways to process, analyze, generate, and predict data. In this paper, we have addressed the problem of both time and supply restrictions faced by ABA providers by proposing a novel method for personalized treatment plan generation and program prediction by leveraging the capabilities of Deep Learning and Large Language Models (LLM). Additionally, we have introduced two separate models for behavior program prediction (F1-Score: 0.671) and skill acquisition program predictions (Rouge-1 Score: 0.476) which will help ABA providers in treatment plan implementation. Results are promising: an AI-generated treatment plan demonstrates a high similarity (Average Similarity Score: 0.915) to the original treatment plan written by a BCBA. Finally, as we partnered with a multi-state ABA provider in building this product, we ran a single-blind study that concluded that BCBAs prefer an AI-generated treatment plan 65 percent of the time compared to a BCBA-generated one.

Personalized-ABA: Personalized Treatment Plan Generation for Applied Behavior Analysis using Natural Language Processing


Generating scientifically grounded hypotheses is a challenging frontier task for generative AI models in science. The difficulty arises from the inherent subjectivity of the task and the extensive knowledge of prior work required to assess the validity of a generated hypothesis. Large Language Models (LLMs), trained on vast datasets from diverse sources, have shown a strong ability to utilize the knowledge em- bedded in their training data. Recent research has explored using transformer-based models for scientific hypothesis generation, leveraging their advanced capabilities. However, these models often require a significant number of parameters to manage long sequences, which can be a limitation. State Space Models, such as Mamba, offer an alternative by effectively handling very long sequences with fewer parameters than transformers. In this work, we investigate the use of Mamba for scientific hypothesis generation. Our preliminary findings indicate that Mamba achieves similar performance w.r.t. transformer-based models of similar sizes for a higher-order complex task like hypothesis generation. We have made our code available here: https://github.com/fglx-c/Exploring- Scientific-Hypothesis-Generation-with- Mamba

Exploring Scientific Hypothesis Generation with Mamba


Theorem proving presents a significant chal- lenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the requirement for formal proofs to be rig- orously checked by proof assistants, such as Lean, eliminating any margin for error or hallu- cination. While existing LLM-based theorem provers attempt to operate autonomously, they often struggle with novel and complex theo- rems where human insights are essential. Lean Copilot is a novel framework that integrates LLM inference into the Lean proof assistant environment. In this work, we benchmark per- formance of several LLMs including general and math-specific models for theorem proving using the Lean Copilot framework. Our initial investigation suggests that a general-purpose large model like LLaMa-70B still has edge over math-specific smaller models for the task under consideration. We provide useful insights into the performance of different LLMs we chose for the task.

Benchmarking Automated Theorem Proving with Large Language Models

When building models of human behavior, we often struggle to find data that capture important factors at the right level of granularity. In these cases, we must rely on expert knowledge to build models. To help partially automate the organization of expert knowledge for modeling, we combine natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) methods in a tool called the Grid. The Grid helps users organize textual knowledge into clickable cells along two dimensions using iterative, collaborative clustering. We conduct a user study to explore participants' reactions to the Grid, as well as to investigate whether its clustering feature helps participants organize a corpus of expert knowledge. We find that participants using the Grid's clustering feature appeared to work more efficiently than those without it, but written feedback about the clustering was critical. We conclude that the general design of the Grid was positively received and that some of the user challenges can likely be mitigated through the use of LLMs.

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