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Despite their widespread adoption, neural conversation models have yet to exhibit natural chat capabilities with humans. In this research, we examine user utterances as causes and generated responses as effects, recognizing that changes in a cause should produce a different effect. To further explore this concept, we have compiled and expanded upon a new dataset called CausalDialogue through crowd-
sourcing. This dataset includes multiple cause-effect pairs within a directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure. Our analysis reveals that traditional loss functions struggle to effectively incorporate the DAG structure, leading us to propose a causality-enhanced method called Exponential Maximum Average Treatment Effect (ExMATE) to enhance the impact of causality at the utterance level in training neural conversation models. To evaluate the needs of considering causality in dialogue generation, we built a comprehensive benchmark on CausalDialogue dataset using different models, inference, and training methods. Through experiments, we find that a causality-inspired loss like ExMATE can improve the diversity and agility of conventional loss function and there is still room for improvement to reach human-level quality on this new dataset.

ACL 2023

CausalDialogue: Modeling Utterance-level Causality in Conversations

training loss

causal-effect

conditional text generation

dialogue generation

language model

game

response generation

causal inference

dataset

workshop paper

### Welcome to ACL 2023, the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics! 
 The conference will be held in Toronto, Canada, July 9-14, 2023. 
Following the succession of the recent conferences in our field, ACL 2023 will adopt a hybrid format.
While the impact of Covid has considerably diminished in terms of traveling, obtaining visas to Canada
entails a very long process. Moreover, the global economic conditions pose challenges for many individuals to travel to conferences. Recognizing these circumstances, we know many participants may not be
able to attend the conference in person. Therefore, we are committed to providing a great virtual platform
so everyone has the opportunity to interact with other participants and enjoy the conference. Based on the
current registered participants, approxiately 30% have chosen to attend the conference virtually. Whether
you join us in person or virtually, we sincerely hope everyone has a remarkable conference experience. 
This General Chair’s message is where I express my gratitude to the many individuals who have made
enormous contributions to the conference over the past year.

Read [**ACL 2023 General Chair's message**](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WobYM7norbG4dI48s75HfJoD89qgX5a_F-6U8AteLSA/edit?usp=sharing/) in full.

##### **[Conference Handbook](https://2023.aclweb.org/downloads/acl2023-handbook.pdf)**

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.

In this paper, we study the task of instructional dialogue and focus on the cooking domain. Analyzing the generated output of the GPT-J model, we reveal that the primary challenge for a recipe-grounded dialog system is how to provide the instructions in the correct order. We hypothesize that this is due to the model's lack of understanding of user intent and inability to track the instruction state (i.e., which step was last instructed). Therefore, we propose to explore two auxiliary subtasks, namely User Intent Detection and Instruction State Tracking, to support Response Generation with improved instruction grounding. Experimenting with our newly collected dataset, ChattyChef, shows that incorporating user intent and instruction state information helps the response generation model mitigate the incorrect order issue. Furthermore, to investigate whether ChatGPT has completely solved this task, we analyze its outputs and find that it also makes mistakes (10.7% of the responses), about half of which are out-of-order instructions. We will release ChattyChef to facilitate further research in this area at: https://github.com/octaviaguo/ChattyChef.

Improved Instruction Ordering in Recipe-Grounded Conversation

We introduce context awareness into text-to-text privatiaztion by replacing the word embedding with a sense embedding. This boost the performance of BERT by almost 7% on GLUE.

Driving Context into Text-to-Text Privatization

We analyze sentiment analysis and toxicity detection models to detect the presence of explicit bias against people with disability (PWD). We employ the bias identification framework of Perturbation Sensitivity Analysis to examine conversations related to PWD on social media platforms, specifically Twitter and Reddit, in order to gain insight into how disability bias is disseminated in real-world social settings. We then create the Bias Identification Test in Sentiment (BITS) corpus to quantify explicit disability bias in any sentiment analysis and toxicity detection models. Our study utilizes BITS to uncover significant biases in four open AIaaS (AI as a Service) sentiment analysis tools, namely TextBlob, VADER, Google Cloud Natural Language API, DistilBERT and two toxicity detection models, namely two versions of Toxic-BERT. Our findings indicate that all of these models exhibit statistically significant explicit bias against PWD.

Automated Ableism: An Exploration of Explicit Disability Biases in Sentiment and Toxicity Analysis Models

The textual adversarial attack refers to an attack method in which the attacker adds imperceptible perturbations to the original texts by elaborate design so that the NLP (natural language processing) model produces false judgments. This method is also used to evaluate the robustness of NLP models. Currently, most of the research in this field focuses on English, and there is also a certain amount of research on Chinese. However, to the best of our knowledge, there is little research targeting Chinese minority languages. Textual adversarial attacks are a new challenge for the information processing of Chinese minority languages. In response to this situation, we propose a Tibetan syllable-level black-box textual adversarial attack called TSAttacker based on syllable cosine distance and scoring mechanism. And then, we conduct TSAttacker on six models generated by fine-tuning two PLMs (pre-trained language models) for three downstream tasks. The experiment results show that TSAttacker is effective and generates high-quality adversarial samples. In addition, the robustness of the involved models still has much room for improvement.

Pay Attention to the Robustness of Chinese Minority Language Models! Syllable-level Textual Adversarial Attack on Tibetan Script

ChatGPT, the first large language model (LLM) with mass adoption, has demonstrated remarkable performance in numerous natural language tasks. Despite its evident usefulness, evaluating ChatGPT's performance in diverse problem domains remains challenging due to the closed nature of the model and its continuous updates via Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). We highlight the issue of data contamination in ChatGPT evaluations, with a case study of the task of stance detection. We discuss the challenge of preventing data contamination and ensuring fair model evaluation in the age of closed and continuously trained models.

Can we trust the evaluation on ChatGPT?

As language models continue to be integrated into applications of personal and societal relevance, ensuring these models’ trustworthiness is crucial, particularly with respect to producing consistent outputs regardless of sensitive attributes. Given that first names may serve as proxies for (intersectional) socio-demographic representations, it is imperative to examine the impact of first names on commonsense reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we study whether a model’s reasoning given a specific input differs based on the first names provided. Our underlying assumption is that the reasoning about Alice should not differ from the reasoning about James. We propose and implement a controlled experimental framework to measure the causal effect of first names on commonsense reasoning, enabling us to distinguish between model predictions due to chance and caused by actual factors of interest. Our results indicate that the frequency of first names has a direct effect on model prediction, with less frequent names yielding divergent predictions compared to more frequent names. To gain insights into the internal mechanisms of models that are contributing to these behaviors, we also conduct an in-depth explainable analysis. Overall, our findings suggest that to ensure model robust- ness, it is essential to augment datasets with more diverse first names during the configuration stage.

Examining the Causal Impact of First Names on Language Models: The Case of Social Commonsense Reasoning

Large language models (LLMs) have become mainstream technology with their versatile use cases and impressive performance. Despite the countless out-of-the-box applications, LLMs are still not reliable. A lot of work is being done to improve the factual accuracy, consistency, and ethical standards of these models through fine-tuning, prompting, and Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), but no systematic analysis of the responses of these models to different categories of statements, or on their potential vulnerabilities to simple prompting changes is available. In this work, we analyze what confuses GPT-3: how the model responds to certain sensitive topics and what effects the prompt wording has on the model response. We find that GPT-3 correctly disagrees with obvious Conspiracies and Stereotypes but makes mistakes with common Misconceptions and Controversies. The model responses are inconsistent across prompts and settings, highlighting GPT-3's unreliability.

Reliability Check: An Analysis of GPT-3's Response to Sensitive Topics and Prompt Wording

Adversarial attack research in natural language processing (NLP) has made significant progress in designing powerful attack methods and defence approaches. However, few efforts have sought to identify which source samples are the most attackable or robust, i.e. can we determine for an unseen target model, which samples are the most vulnerable to an adversarial attack. This work formally extends the definition of sample attackability/robustness for NLP attacks. Experiments on two popular NLP datasets, four state of the art models and four different NLP adversarial attack methods, demonstrate that sample uncertainty is insufficient for describing characteristics of attackable/robust samples and hence a deep learning based detector can perform much better at identifying the most attackable and robust samples for an unseen target model. Nevertheless, further analysis finds that there is little agreement in which samples are considered the most attackable/robust across different NLP attack methods, explaining a lack of portability of attackability detection methods across attack methods.

Sample Attackability in Natural Language Adversarial Attacks

Harmful content detection models tend to have higher false positive rates for content from marginalized groups. In the context of marginal abuse modeling on Twitter, such disproportionate penalization poses the risk of reduced visibility, where marginalized communities lose the opportunity to voice their opinion on the platform. Current approaches to algorithmic harm mitigation, and bias detection for NLP models are often very ad hoc and subject to human bias. We make two main contributions in this paper. First, we design a novel methodology, which provides a principled approach to detecting and measuring the severity of potential harms associated with a text-based model. Second, we apply our methodology to audit Twitter’s English marginal abuse model , which is used for removing amplification eligibility of marginally abusive content. Without utilizing demographic labels or dialect classifiers, we are still able to detect and measure the severity of issues related to the over-penalization of the speech of marginalized communities, such as the use of reclaimed speech, counterspeech, and identity related terms. In order to mitigate the associated harms, we experiment with adding additional true negative examples and find that doing so provides improvements to our fairness metrics without large degradations in model performance.

A Keyword Based Approach to Understanding the Overpenalization of Marginalized Groups by English Marginal Abuse Models on Twitter

Large-scale Pre-Trained Language Models (PTLMs) capture knowledge from massive human-written data which contains latent societal biases and toxic contents. In this paper, we leverage the primary task of PTLMs, i.e., language modeling, and propose a new metric to quantify manifested implicit representational harms in PTLMs towards 13 marginalized demographics. Using this metric, we conducted an empirical analysis of 24 widely used PTLMs. Our analysis provides insights into the correlation between the proposed metric in this work and other related metrics for representational harm. We observe that our metric correlates with most of the gender-specific metrics in the literature. Through extensive experiments, we explore the connections between PTLMs architectures and representational harms across two dimensions: depth and width of the networks. We found that prioritizing depth over width, mitigates representational harms in some PTLMs. Our code and data can be found at https://github.com/microsoft/SafeNLP.

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CausalDialogue: Modeling Utterance-level Causality in Conversations

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