Malta

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent, offering remarkable text generation capabilities. However, a pressing challenge is their tendency to make confidently wrong predictions, highlighting the critical need for uncertainty quantification (UQ) in LLMs. While previous works have mainly focused on addressing aleatoric uncertainty, the full spectrum of uncertainties, including epistemic, remains inadequately explored. Motivated by this gap, we introduce a novel UQ method, sampling with perturbation for UQ (SPUQ), designed to tackle both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties. The method entails generating a set of perturbations for LLM inputs, sampling outputs for each perturbation, and incorporating an aggregation module that generalizes the sampling uncertainty approach for text generation tasks. Through extensive experiments on various datasets, we investigated different perturbation and aggregation techniques. Our findings show a substantial improvement in model uncertainty calibration, with a reduction in Expected Calibration Error (ECE) by 50% on average. Our findings suggest that our proposed UQ method offers promising steps toward enhancing the reliability and trustworthiness of LLMs.

EACL 2024

SPUQ: Perturbation-Based Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models

large language modles

uncertainty quantification

### Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Welcome to the 2025 meeting of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics! I am proud to help organize the first NAACL conference to carry the new name of our organization, one that emphasizes inclusion for all of the Americas. I am also pleased to welcome you to Albuquerque, New Mexico, a state whose unique blend of cultural influences will make for an excellent backdrop for NAACL 2025, especially with this year’s special theme on NLP in a Multicultural World. 
**[Continue reading...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jX-qGhqVSZZCIrAnJaz798pflu5Irrdn/view?usp=sharing)**

*- Colin Cherry, Google, NAACL 2025 General Chair* 

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NAACL 2025

Welcome to 2025 Annual Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

poster

Welcome to the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL). Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL has selected the Malta community for the 18th EACL. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, the conference will be held at the Hotel Radisson Blu, St. Julians, in Malta, from 17 to 22 of March, 2024. The conference will also feature the possibility to participate virtually. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language. 
#### [Conference Handbook](https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Wn38q0yev6U3RTgnf4Tn5T9GuAuZ-xW/view?usp=sharing) *downloadable*

To access the EACL 2024 event page you need to register [**here**](https://acl.swoogo.com/EACL2024). 

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

The knowledge encapsulated in a model is the core factor determining its final performance on downstream tasks. 
Much research in NLP has focused on efficient methods for storing and adapting different types of knowledge, e.g., in dedicated modularized structures, and on how to effectively combine these, e.g., by learning additional parameters. However, given the many possible options, a thorough understanding of the mechanisms involved in these compositions is missing, and hence it remains unclear which strategies to utilize. To address this research gap, we propose a novel framework for zero-shot module composition, which encompasses existing and some novel variations for selecting, weighting, and combining parameter modules under a single unified notion. Focusing on the scenario of domain knowledge and adapter layers, our framework provides a systematic unification of concepts, allowing us to conduct the first comprehensive benchmarking study of various zero-shot knowledge composition strategies. In particular, we test two module combination methods and five selection and weighting strategies for their effectiveness and efficiency in an extensive experimental setup. Our results highlight the efficacy of ensembling but also hint at the power of simple though often-ignored weighting methods. Further in-depth analyses allow us to understand the role of weighting vs. top-k selection, and show that, to a certain extent, the performance of adapter composition can even be predicted.

What the Weight?! A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Knowledge Composition

Keyphrase extraction is the task of identifying a set of keyphrases present in a document that captures its most salient topics. Scientific domain-specific pre-training has led to achieving state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction performance with a majority of benchmarks being within the domain. In this work, we explore how to effectively enable the cross-domain generalization capabilities of such models without requiring the same scale of data. We primarily focus on the few-shot setting in non-scientific domain datasets such as OpenKP from the Web domain & StackEx from the StackExchange forum. We propose to leverage topic information intrinsically available in the data, to build a novel clustering-based sampling approach that facilitates selecting a few samples to label from the target domain facilitating building robust and performant models. This approach leads to large gains in performance of up to 26.35 points in F1 when compared to selecting few-shot samples uniformly at random. We also explore the setting where we have access to labeled data from the model's pretraining domain corpora and perform gradual training which involves slowly folding in target domain data to the source domain data. Here we demonstrate further improvements in the model performance by up to 12.76 F1 points.

Clustering-based Sampling for Few-Shot Cross-Domain Keyphrase Extraction

In the months since its release, ChatGPT and its underlying model, GPT3.5, have garnered massive attention, due to their potent mix of capability and accessibility. While a niche industry of papers have emerged examining the scope of capabilities these models possess, language — whether natural or stylized like code — has been the vehicle to exchange information with the network. Drawing inspiration from the multi-modal knowledge we’d expect an agent with true understanding to possess, we examine GPT3.5’s aptitude for visual tasks, where the inputs feature ASCII-art without overt distillation into a lingual summary. In particular, we scrutinize its performance on carefully designed image recognition and generation tasks. An extended version of this write-up is available at: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16806 .

Testing the Depth of ChatGPT's Comprehension via Cross-Modal Tasks Based on ASCII-Art: GPT3.5's Abilities in Regard to Recognizing and Generating ASCII-Art Are Not Totally Lacking

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized natural language processing (NLP) by excelling at understanding and generating human-like text. However, their widespread deployment can be prohibitively expensive. SortedNet is a recent training technique for enabling dynamic inference by leveraging the modularity in networks and sorting sub-models based on computation/accuracy in a nested manner. We extend SortedNet to generative NLP tasks, making large language models dynamic without any Pre-Training and by only replacing Standard Fine-Tuning (SFT) with Sorted Fine-Tuning (SoFT). Our approach boosts model efficiency, eliminating the need for multiple models for various scenarios during inference. We show that this approach can unlock the potential of intermediate layers of transformers in generating the target output. Our sub-models remain integral components of the original model, minimizing storage requirements and transition costs between different computational/latency budgets. The efficacy of our proposed method was demonstrated by applying it to tune LLaMA 2 13B on the Stanford Alpaca dataset for instruction following and TriviaQA for closed-book question answering. Our results show the superior performance of sub-models in comparison to Standard Fine-Tuning and SFT+ICT (Early-Exit), all achieved with very efficient tuning and without additional memory usage during inference.

Sorted LLaMA: Unlocking the Potential of Intermediate Layers of Large Language Models for Dynamic Inference

We present AnnoPlot, a web applica-
tion designed to analyze, manage, and visual-
ize annotated text data. Users can configure
projects, upload datasets, and explore their data
through interactive visualization of span anno-
tations with scatter plots, clusters, and statistics.
AnnoPlot supports various transformer models
to compute high-dimensional embeddings of
text annotations and utilizes dimensionality re-
duction algorithms to offer users a novel 2D
view of their datasets. A dynamic approach to
dimensionality reduction allows users to adjust
visualizations in real-time, facilitating category
reorganization and error identification. The
proposed application is open-source, promot-
ing transparency and user control. Especially
suited for the Digital Humanities, AnnoPlot
offers a novel solution to address challenges
in dynamic annotation datasets, empowering
users to enhance data integrity and adapt to
evolving categorizations.

AnnoPlot: Interactive Visualizations of Text Annotations

This paper presents a novel \textbf{Cross}-document \textbf{A}bstract \textbf{M}eaning \textbf{R}epresentation (X-AMR) annotation tool designed for annotating key corpus-level event semantics. Leveraging machine assistance through the Prodigy Annotation Tool, we enhance the user experience, ensuring ease and efficiency in the annotation process. Through empirical analyses, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in augmenting an existing event corpus, highlighting its advantages when integrated with GPT-4. Code and annotations

X-AMR Annotation Tool

In this paper we introduce TextBI, a multimodal generic dashboard designed to present multidimensional text annotations on large volumes of multilingual social media data. This tool focuses on four core dimensions: spatial, temporal, thematic, and personal, and also supports additional enrichment data such as sentiment and engagement. Multiple visualization modes are offered, including frequency, movement, and association. This dashboard addresses the challenge of facilitating the interpretation of NLP annotations by visualizing them in a user-friendly, interactive interface catering to two categories of users: (1) domain stakeholders and (2) NLP researchers. We conducted experiments within the domain of tourism leveraging data from X (formerly Twitter) and incorporating requirements from tourism offices. Our approach, TextBI, represents a significant advancement in the field of visualizing NLP annotations by integrating and blending features from a variety of Business Intelligence, Geographical Information Systems and NLP tools. 


TextBI: An Interactive Dashboard for Visualizing Multidimensional NLP Annotations in Social Media Data

Explanations for AI are expected to help human users understand AI-driven predictions. Evaluating plausibility, the helpfulness of the explanations, is therefore essential for developing eXplainable AI (XAI) that can really aid human users. Here we propose a human-centric evaluation platform to measure plausibility of explanations in the context of eXplainable Knowledge Graph Completion (XKGC). The target audience of the platform are researchers and practitioners who want to 1) investigate real needs and interests of their target users in XKGC, 2) evaluate the plausibility of the XKGC methods. We showcase these two use cases in an experimental setting to illustrate what results can be achieved with our system.

A Human-Centric Evaluation Platform for Explainable Knowledge Graph Completion

UNESCO has classified 2500 out of 7000 languages spoken worldwide as endangered. Attrition of a language leads to loss of traditional wisdom, folk literature, and the essence of the community that uses it. It is therefore imperative to bring digital inclusion to these languages and avoid its extinction. Low resource languages are at a greater risk of extinction. Lack of unsupervised Optical Character Recognition(OCR) methodologies for low resource languages is one of the reasons impeding their digital inclusion. We propose VOLTAGE - a contrastive learning based OCR methodology, leveraging auto-glyph feature recommendation for cluster-based labelling. We augment the labelled data for diversity and volume using image transformations and Generative Adversarial Networks. Voltage has been designed using Takri - a family of scripts used in 16th to 20th century in the Himalayan regions of India. We present results for Takri along with other Indic scripts (both low and high resource) to substantiate the universal behavior of the methodology. An accuracy of 95% for machine printed and 87% for handwritten samples on Takri script has been achieved. We conduct baseline and ablation studies along with building downstream use cases for Takri, demonstrating the usefulness of our work.

VOLTAGE: A Versatile Contrastive Learning based OCR Methodology for ultra low-resource scripts through Auto Glyph Feature Extraction

With the rise of increasingly powerful and user-facing NLP systems, there is growing interest in assessing whether they have a good _representation of uncertainty_ by evaluating the quality of their predictive distribution over outcomes. We identify two main perspectives that drive starkly different evaluation protocols. The first treats predictive probability as an indication of model confidence; the second as an indication of human label variation. We discuss their merits and limitations, and take the position that both are crucial for trustworthy and fair NLP systems, but that exploiting a single predictive distribution is limiting. We recommend tools and highlight exciting directions towards models with disentangled representations of uncertainty about predictions and uncertainty about human labels.

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What the Weight?! A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Knowledge Composition

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What the Weight?! A Unified Framework for Zero-Shot Knowledge Composition

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Token-Level Density-Based Uncertainty Quantification Methods for Eliciting Truthfulness of Large Language Models

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

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COMPANY

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