Mexico

The proliferation of social media platforms has given rise to the amount of online debates and arguments. Consequently, the need for automatic summarization methods for such debates is imperative, however this area of summarization is rather understudied. The Key Point Analysis (KPA) task formulates argument summarization as representing the summary of a large collection of arguments in the form of concise sentences in bullet-style format, called key points. A sub-task of KPA, called Key Point Generation (KPG), focuses on generating these key points given the arguments. This paper introduces a novel extractive approach for key point generation, that outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods for the task. Our method utilizes an extractive clustering based approach that offers concise, high quality generated key points with higher coverage of reference summaries, and less redundant outputs. In addition, we show that the existing evaluation metrics for summarization such as ROUGE are incapable of differentiating between generated key points of different qualities. To this end, we propose a new evaluation metric for assessing the generated key points by their coverage. Our code can be accessed online.

NAACL 2024

Enhancing Argument Summarization: Prioritizing Exhaustiveness in Key Point Generation and Introducing an Automatic Coverage Evaluation Metric

argument

summarization

social media

argument mining

## Welcome to 2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics!
This year, the conference is in Mexico City. NAACL was actually already planned for Mexico City in 2021, but due to the pandemic the entire conference was moved online. This year, finally, we get to go! So it is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to Mexico City, whether in person or virtually. Having the conference in Mexico City is a good opportunity to emphasize that NAACL is our flagship conference for ACL members not only in North America but also in Central and South America, even though NAACL has been bearing “North” in its name. At this year’s conference, we have a theme to match, with a theme track on the Languages of Latin America to showcase the linguistic diversity of the region.
 
The opportunity to present at NAACL should not depend on a researcher’s travel budget, or their family status. This is why it is so important to make virtual participation at NAACL as good an experience as possible – but we want to also provide a good experience for in-person participants. As a community, we are still working out the best way to do that. This year at NAACL, we are trying out a big virtual poster session ahead of the conference, with the hope that this will make make for a lively and interactive experience. At the same time, we are reducing virtual oral presentations, which seem to be particularly tricky to make to work well. A big thanks to the NAACL program chairs and to Luciana Benotti for all their ideas and work to improve the virtual experience. And participants, virtual as well as in-person: Please let us know what worked for you and what didn’t, so we can continue to improve hybrid conferences. 
 
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Welcome and hope you all enjoy the conference! 
Katrin Erk 
The University of Texas at Austin 
NAACL-2024 General Chair 
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2024 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

technical paper

While large language models (LLMs) trained with large-scale unsupervised learning acquire a wide variety of world knowledge and skills, its behavior does not necessarily align with human preferences. RLHF methods achieve successes in aligning LLM responses with human preferences and improving the controllability of LLM behavior with human instruction. However, RLHF methods are considerably complicated to implement, computationally expensive to train, and notoriously tricky to tune. In this work, we propose Alignment with Residual Energy-Based Model (ARM), as a simple and flexible alternative to RLHF methods. Our method is driven by an observation that we can learn an aligned policy by minimizing a forward Kullback–Leibler (KL) divergence from a target policy (in the form of a residual energy-based model) to a parameteric policy (LLM), instead of a reverse KL as in RLHF methods. With samples from the energy-based target policy, we can leverage the power of DPO (or other offline methods) to learn an aligned policy efficiently. ARM is simple to implement and applicable in various data settings. Our extensive experiments demonstrate its strong performance across multiple datasets, compared to strong baselines like PPO, DPO.

ARM: Alignment with Residual Energy-Based Model

A central component of rational behavior is logical inference: the process of determining which conclusions follow from a set of premises. Psychologists have documented several ways in which humans' inferences deviate from the rules of logic. Do language models, which are trained on text generated by humans, replicate such human biases, or are they able to overcome them? Focusing on the case of syllogisms---inferences from two simple premises---we show that, within the PaLM~2 family of transformer language models, larger models are more logical than smaller ones, and also more logical than humans. At the same time, even the largest models make systematic errors, some of which mirror human reasoning biases: they show sensitivity to the (irrelevant) ordering of the variables in the syllogism, and draw confident but incorrect inferences from particular syllogisms (syllogistic fallacies). Overall, we find that language models often mimic the human biases included in their training data, but are able to overcome them in some cases.

A Systematic Comparison of Syllogistic Reasoning in Humans and Language Models

As research in human-centered NLP advances, there is a growing recognition of the importance of incorporating human and social factors into NLP models. At the same time, our NLP systems have become heavily reliant on LLMs, most of which do not model authors. To build NLP systems that can truly understand human language, we must better integrate human contexts into LLMs. This brings to the fore a range of design considerations and challenges in terms of what human aspects to capture, how to represent them, and what modeling strategies to pursue. To address these, we advocate for three positions toward creating large human language models (LHLMs) using concepts from psychological and behavioral sciences: First, LM training should include the human context. Second, LHLMs should recognize that people are more than their group(s). Third, LHLMs should be able to account for the dynamic and temporally-dependent nature of the human context. We refer to relevant advances and present open challenges that need to be addressed and their possible solutions in realizing these goals.

Large Human Language Models: A Need and the Challenges

A current limitation of Generative AI (GenAI) is its propensity to hallucinate. While Large Language Models (LLM) have taken the world by storm, without eliminating or at least reducing hallucination, real-world GenAI systems will likely continue to face challenges in user adoption. In the process of deploying an enterprise application that produces workflows from natural language requirements, we devised a system leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to improve the quality of the structured output that represents such workflows. Thanks to our implementation of RAG, our proposed system significantly reduces hallucination and allows the generalization of our LLM to out-of-domain settings. In addition, we show that using a small, well-trained retriever can reduce the size of the accompanying LLM at no loss in performance, thereby making deployments of LLM-based systems less resource-intensive.

Reducing hallucination in structured outputs via Retrieval-Augmented Generation

We present REXEL, the first architecture to jointly perform all subtasks of closed information extraction at a document level. REXEL extracts facts fully linked to a knowledge graph in one forward pass per document making it 11x faster than comparable methods while achieing state of the art performance. This makes REXEL suitable for extracting facts from unstuctured text accurately at web-scale.

REXEL: An End-to-end Model for Document-Level Relation Extraction and Entity Linking

In difficult decision-making scenarios, it is common to have conflicting opinions among expert human decision-makers as there may not be a single right answer. Such decisions may be guided by different attributes that can be used to characterize an individual's decision. We introduce a novel dataset for medical triage decision-making, labeled with a set of decision-maker attributes (DMAs). This dataset consists of 62 scenarios, covering six different DMAs, including ethical principles such as fairness and moral desert. We present a novel software framework for human-aligned decision-making by utilizing these DMAs, paving the way for trustworthy AI with better guardrails. Specifically, we demonstrate how large language models (LLMs) can serve as ethical decision-makers, and how their decisions can be aligned to different DMAs using zero-shot prompting. Our experiments focus on different open-source models with varying sizes and training techniques, such as Falcon, Mistral, and Llama 2. Finally, we also introduce a new form of weighted self-consistency that improves the overall quantified performance. Our results provide new research directions in the use of LLMs as alignable decision-makers. The dataset and open-source software are publicly available at: https://github.com/ITM-Kitware/llm-alignable-dm.

Language Models are Alignable Decision-Makers: Dataset and Application to the Medical Triage Domain

In e-commerce, accurately extracting product attribute values from multimodal data is crucial for improving user experience and operational efficiency of retailers. However, previous approaches to multimodal attribute value extraction often struggle with implicit attribute values embedded in images or text, rely heavily on extensive labeled data, and can easily confuse similar attribute values. To address these issues, we introduce EIVEN, a data- and parameter-efficient generative framework that pioneers the use of multimodal LLM for implicit attribute value extraction. EIVEN leverages the rich inherent knowledge of a pre-trained LLM and vision encoder to reduce reliance on labeled data. We also introduce a novel Learning-by-Comparison technique to reduce model confusion by enforcing attribute value comparison and difference identification. Additionally, we construct initial open-source datasets for multimodal implicit attribute value extraction. Our extensive experiments reveal that EIVEN significantly outperforms existing methods in extracting implicit attribute values while requiring less labeled data.

EIVEN: Efficient Implicit Attribute Value Extraction using Multimodal LLM

We introduce SOLAR 10.7B, a large language model (LLM) with 10.7 billion parameters, demonstrating superior performance in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Inspired by recent efforts to efficiently up-scale LLMs, we present a method for scaling LLMs called depth up-scaling (DUS), which encompasses depthwise scaling and continued pretraining. In contrast to other LLM up-scaling methods that use mixture-of-experts, DUS does not require complex changes to train and inference efficiently. We show experimentally that DUS is simple yet effective in scaling up high-performance LLMs from small ones. Building on the DUS model, we additionally present SOLAR 10.7B-Instruct, a variant fine-tuned for instruction-following capabilities, surpassing Mixtral-8x7B-Instruct. SOLAR 10.7B is publicly available under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting broad access and application in the LLM field.

SOLAR 10.7B: Scaling Large Language Models with Simple yet Effective Depth Up

Recently, there has been a growing availability of pre-trained text models on various model repositories. These models greatly reduce the cost of training new models from scratch as they can be fine-tuned for specific tasks or trained on large datasets. However, these datasets may not be publicly accessible due to the privacy, security, or intellectual property issues. In this paper, we aim to develop a lightweight student network that can learn from multiple teacher models without accessing their original training data. Hence, we investigate Data-Free Knowledge Amalgamation (DFKA), a knowledge-transfer task that combines insights from multiple pre-trained teacher models and transfers them effectively to a compact student network. To accomplish this, we propose STRATANET, a modeling framework comprising: (a) a steerable data generator that produces text data tailored to each teacher and (b) an amalgamation module that implements a self-regulative strategy using confidence estimates from the teachers' different layers to selectively integrate their knowledge and train a versatile student. We evaluate our method on three benchmark text classification datasets with varying labels or domains. Empirically, we demonstrate that the student model learned using our STRATANET outperforms several baselines significantly under data-driven and data-free constraints.

Self-Regulated Data-Free Knowledge Amalgamation for Text Classification

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable abilities, they are hindered by significant resource consumption and considerable latency due to autoregressive processing. In this study, we introduce Adaptive N-gram Parallel Decoding (ANPD), an innovative and lossless approach that accelerates inference by allowing the simultaneous generation of multiple tokens. ANPD incorporates a two-stage approach: it begins with a rapid drafting phase that employs an N-gram module, which adapts based on the current interactive context, followed by a verification phase, during which the original LLM assesses and confirms the proposed tokens. Consequently, ANPD preserves the integrity of the LLM's original output while enhancing processing speed. We further leverage a multi-level architecture for the N-gram module to enhance the precision of the initial draft, consequently reducing inference latency. ANPD eliminates the need for retraining or extra GPU memory, making it an efficient and plug-and-play enhancement. In our experiments, models such as LLaMA and its fine-tuned variants have shown speed improvements up to 3.67x, validating the effectiveness of our proposed ANPD.

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