While large language models are able to retain vast amounts of world knowledge seen during pretraining, such knowledge is prone to going out of date and is nontrivial to update. Furthermore, these models are often used under temporal misalignment, tasked with answering questions about the present, despite having only been trained on data collected in the past. To mitigate the effects of temporal misalignment, we propose fact duration prediction: the task of predicting how long a given fact will remain true. In our experiments, we demonstrate that identifying which facts are prone to rapid change can help models avoid reciting outdated information and determine which predictions require seeking out up-to-date knowledge sources. We also show how modeling fact duration improves calibration for knowledge-intensive tasks, such as open-retrieval question answering, under temporal misalignment, by discarding volatile facts. Our data and code are released publicly at https://github.com/mikejqzhang/mitigating_misalignment.

Prompt-based models have gathered a lot of attention from researchers due to their remarkable advancements in the fields of zero-shot and few-shot learning. Developing an effective prompt template plays a critical role. However, prior studies have mainly focused on prompt vocabulary selection or embedding initialization within a predefined template with the prompt position fixed. In this empirical study, we conduct the most comprehensive analysis to date of prompt position for diverse natural language process tasks. Our findings quantify the substantial impact prompt position has on model performance. We observe that the prompt position used in prior studies is often sub-optimal. These findings suggest prompt position optimisation as a valuable research direction to fill the gap in existing prompt engineering methodologies.

We present a systematic study and comprehensive evaluation of large language models for automatic multilingual readability assessment. In particular, we construct ReadMe++, a multilingual multi-domain dataset with human annotations of 9757 sentences in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, and Russian collected from 112 different data sources. ReadMe++ offers more domain and language diversity than existing readability datasets, making it ideal for benchmarking multilingual and non-English language models (including mBERT, XLM-R, mT5, Llama-2, GPT-4, etc.) in the supervised, unsupervised, and few-shot prompting settings. Our experiments reveal that models fine-tuned on ReadMe++ outperform those trained on single-domain datasets, showcasing superior performance on multi-domain readability assessment and cross-lingual transfer capabilities. We also compare to traditional readability metrics (such as Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Open Source Metric for Measuring Arabic Narratives), as well as the state-of-the-art unsupervised metric RSRS (Martinc et al., 2021). We will make our data and code publicly available at: https://github.com/tareknaous/readme.

It is important that language models appropriately adapt to specific cultural contexts. However, as we show in this paper, multilingual and Arabic monolingual language models default to Western culture even when prompted in Arabic and contextualized by an Arab cultural setting. To measure this Western bias, we introduce CAMeL, a dataset of naturally occurring Arabic prompts spanning eight diverse cultural aspects and an extensive list of 20,504 cultural targets corresponding to Arab or Western culture. Using CAMeL, we show that models favor Western targets and demonstrate cultural unfairness on downstream tasks such as named entity recognition and sentiment analysis. Our analyses of pretraining corpora also reveal that commonly used sources such as Wikipedia may not be suited to build culturally aware models, underscoring the importance of carefully curating pretraining data in constructing language models to serve a global population.

In this paper, we explore the question of whether large language models can support cost-efficient information extraction from tables. We introduce schema-driven information extraction, a new task that transforms tabular data into structured records following a human-authored schema. To assess various LLM's capabilities on this task, we develop a benchmark composed of tables from four diverse domains: machine learning papers, chemistry literature, material science journals, and webpages. Alongside the benchmark, we present an extraction method based on instruction-tuned LLMs. Our approach shows competitive performance without task-specific labels, achieving F1 scores ranging from 74.2 to 96.1, while maintaining great cost efficiency. Moreover, we validate the possibility of distilling compact table-extraction models to reduce API reliance, as well as extraction from image tables using multi-modal models. By developing a benchmark and demonstrating the feasibility of this task using proprietary models, we aim to support future work on open-source schema-driven IE models.

Large language models (LLMs) are becoming attractive as few-shot reasoners to solve Natural Language (NL)-related tasks. However, there is still much to learn about how well LLMs understand structured data, such as tables. While it is true that tables can be used as inputs to LLMs with serialization, there is a lack of comprehensive studies examining whether LLMs can truly comprehend such data. In this paper, we try to understand this by designing a benchmark to evaluate the structural understanding capabilities (SUC) of LLMs. The benchmark we create includes seven tasks, each with its own unique challenges, \eg, cell lookup, row retrieval, and size detection. We conduct a series of evaluations on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4. We find that the performance varied depending on several input choices, including table input format, content order, role prompting, and partition marks. Drawing from the insights gained through the benchmark evaluations, we propose \textit{self-augmentation} for effective structural prompting, such as critical value / range identification using LLMs' internal knowledge. When combined with carefully chosen input choices, these structural prompting methods lead to promising improvements in LLM performance on a variety of tabular tasks, \eg, TabFact($\uparrow2.31\%$), HybridQA($\uparrow2.13\%$), SQA($\uparrow2.72\%$), Feverous($\uparrow0.84\%$), and ToTTo($\uparrow5.68\%$). We believe that our benchmark and proposed prompting methods can serve as a simple yet generic selection for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable prediction performance for a growing array of tasks. However, their rapid proliferation and increasing opaqueness have created a growing need for interpretability. Here, we ask whether we can automatically obtain natural language explanations for black box text modules. A "text module" is any function that maps text to a scalar continuous value, such as a submodule within an LLM or a fitted model of a brain region. "Black box" indicates that we only have access to the module's inputs/outputs. We introduce Summarize and Score (SASC), a method that takes in a text module and returns a natural language explanation of the module's selectivity along with a score for how reliable the explanation is. We study SASC in 3 contexts. First, we evaluate SASC on synthetic modules and find that it often recovers ground truth explanations. Second, we use SASC to explain modules found within a pre-trained BERT model, enabling inspection of the model's internals. Finally, we show that SASC can generate explanations for the response of individual fMRI voxels to language stimuli, with potential applications to fine-grained brain mapping. All code for using SASC and reproducing results is made available on Github.

Conventional Knowledge Graph Construction (KGC) approaches typically follow the static information extraction paradigm with a closed set of pre-defined schema. As a result, such approaches fall short when applied to dynamic scenarios or domains, whereas a new type of knowledge emerges. This necessitates a system that can handle evolving schema automatically to extract information for KGC. To address this need, we propose a new task called schema-adaptable KGC, which aims to continually extract entity, relation, and event based on a dynamically changing schema graph without re-training. We first split and convert existing datasets based on three principles to build a benchmark, i.e., horizontal schema expansion, vertical schema expansion, and hybrid schema expansion; then investigate the schema-adaptable performance of several well-known approaches such as Text2Event, TANL, UIE and GPT-3.5. We further propose a simple yet effective baseline dubbed \textsc{AdaKGC}, which contains schema-enriched prefix instructor and schema-conditioned dynamic decoding to better handle evolving schema. Comprehensive experimental results illustrate that AdaKGC can outperform baselines but still have room for improvement. We hope the proposed work can deliver benefits to the community. Code and datasets available at https://github.com/zjunlp/AdaKGC.

Comparative knowledge (e.g., steel is stronger and heavier than styrofoam) is an essential component of our world knowledge, yet understudied in prior literature. In this paper, we study the task of comparative knowledge acquisition, motivated by the dramatic improvements in the capabilities of extreme-scale language models like GPT-4, which have fueled efforts towards harvesting their knowledge into knowledge bases. While acquisition of such comparative knowledge is much easier from models like GPT-4, compared to their considerably smaller and weaker counterparts such as GPT-2, not even the most powerful models are exempt from making errors. We thus ask: to what extent are models at different scales able to generate valid and diverse comparative knowledge? We introduce NeuroComparatives, a novel framework for comparative knowledge distillation overgenerated from language models such as GPT-variants and Llama, followed by stringent filtering of the generated knowledge. Our framework acquires comparative knowledge between everyday objects, producing a corpus of up to 8.8M comparisons over 1.74M entity pairs - 10X larger and 30% more diverse than existing resources. Moreover, human evaluations show that NeuroComparatives outperform existing resources (up to 32% absolute improvement). We also demonstrate the utility of our distilled NeuroComparatives on three downstream tasks. Our results show that neuro-symbolic manipulation of smaller models offer complementary benefits to the currently dominant practice of prompting extreme-scale language models for knowledge distillation.

Large language models have revolutionized the field of artificial intelligence and have been used in various applications. Among these models, ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) has been developed by OpenAI, it stands out as a powerful tool that has been widely adopted. ChatGPT has been successfully applied in numerous areas, including chatbots, content generation, language translation, personalized recommendations, and even medical diagnosis and treatment. Its success in these applications can be attributed to its ability to generate human-like responses, understand natural language, and adapt to different contexts. Its versatility and accuracy make it a powerful tool for natural language processing (NLP). However, there are also limitations to ChatGPT, such as its tendency to produce biased responses and its potential to perpetuate harmful language patterns. This article provides a comprehensive overview of ChatGPT, its applications, advantages, and limitations. Additionally, the paper emphasizes the importance of ethical considerations when using this robust tool in real-world scenarios. Finally, This paper contributes to ongoing discussions surrounding artificial intelligence and its impact on vision and NLP domains by providing insights into prompt engineering techniques.