Generating concise summaries of news events is a challenging natural language processing task. While journalists often curate timelines to highlight key sub-events, newcomers to a news event face challenges in catching up on its historical context. In this paper, we address this need by introducing the task of background news summarization, which complements each timeline update with a background summary of relevant preceding events. We construct a dataset by merging existing timeline datasets and asking human annotators to write a background summary for each timestep of each news event. We establish strong baseline performance using state-of-the-art summarization systems and propose a query-focused variant to generate background summaries. To evaluate background summary quality, we present a question-answering-based evaluation metric, Background Utility Score (BUS), which measures the percentage of questions about a current event timestep that a background summary answers. Our experiments show the effectiveness of instruction fine-tuned systems such as Flan-T5, in addition to strong zero-shot performance using GPT-3.5.

We present an overview of the BLP Sentiment Shared Task, organized as part of the inaugural BLP 2023 workshop, co-located with EMNLP 2023. The task is defined as the detection of sentiment in a given piece of social media text. This task attracted interest from 71 participants, among whom 29 and 30 teams submitted systems during the development and evaluation phases, respectively. In total, participants submitted 597 runs. However, a total of 15 teams submitted system description papers. The range of approaches in the submitted systems spans from classical machine learning models, fine-tuning pre-trained models, to leveraging Large Language Model (LLMs) in zero- and few-shot settings. In this paper, we provide a detailed account of the task setup, including dataset development and evaluation setup. Additionally, we provide a brief overview of the systems submitted by the participants. All datasets and evaluation scripts from the shared task have been made publicly available for the research community, to foster further research in this domain

The quickly-expanding nature of published medical literature makes it challenging for clinicians and researchers to keep up with and summarize recent, relevant findings in a timely manner. While several closed-source summarization tools based on large language models (LLMs) now exist, rigorous and systematic evaluations of their outputs are lacking. Furthermore, there is a paucity of high-quality datasets and appropriate benchmark tasks with which to evaluate these tools. We address these issues with four contributions: we release Clinfo.ai, an open-source WebApp that answers clinical questions based on dynamically retrieved scientific literature; we specify an information retrieval and abstractive summarization task to evaluate the performance of such retrieval-augmented LLM systems; we release a dataset of 200 questions and corresponding answers derived from published systematic reviews, which we name PubMed Retrieval and Synthesis (PubMedRS-200); and report benchmark results for Clinfo.ai and other publicly available OpenQA systems on PubMedRS-200.

Understanding sentence meanings and updating information states appropriately across time -- what we call "situational understanding" (SU) -- is a critical ability for human-like AI agents. SU is essential in particular for chat models, such as ChatGPT, to enable consistent, coherent, and effective dialogue between humans and AI. Previous works have identified certain SU limitations in non-chatbot Large Language models (LLMs), but the extent and causes of these limitations are not well understood, and capabilities of current chat-based models in this domain have not been explored. In this work we tackle these questions, proposing a novel synthetic environment for SU testing which allows us to do controlled and systematic testing of SU in chat-oriented models, through assessment of models' ability to track and enumerate environment states. Our environment also allows for close analysis of dynamics of model performance, to better understand underlying causes for performance patterns. We apply our test to ChatGPT, the state-of-the-art chatbot, and find that despite the fundamental simplicity of the task, the model's performance reflects an inability to retain correct environment states across time. Our follow-up analyses suggest that performance degradation is largely because ChatGPT has non-persistent in-context memory (although it can access the full dialogue history) and it is susceptible to hallucinated updates -- including updates that artificially inflate accuracies. Our findings suggest overall that ChatGPT is not currently equipped for robust tracking of situation states, and that trust in the impressive dialogue performance of ChatGPT comes with risks. We release the codebase for reproducing our test environment, as well as all prompts and API responses from ChatGPT, at https://github.com/yangalan123/SituationalTesting.

The excellent generalization, contextual learning, and emergence abilities in the pre-trained large models (PLMs) handle specific tasks without direct training data, making them the better foundation models in the adversarial domain adaptation (ADA) methods to transfer knowledge learned from the source domain to target domains. However, existing ADA methods fail to account for the confounder properly, which is the root cause of the source data distribution that differs from the target domains. This study proposes an adversarial domain adaptation with confounder balancing for PLMs fine-tuning (ADA-CBF). The ADA-CBF includes a PLM as the foundation model for a feature extractor, a domain classifier and a confounder classifier, and they are jointly trained with an adversarial loss. This loss is designed to improve the domain-invariant representation learning by diluting the discrimination in the domain classifier. At the same time, the adversarial loss also balances the confounder distribution among source and unmeasured domains in training. Compared to existing ADA methods, ADA-CBF can correctly identify confounders in domain-invariant features, thereby eliminating the confounder biases in the extracted features from PLMs. The confounder classifier in ADA-CBF is designed as a plug-and-play and can be applied in the confounder measurable, unmeasurable, or partially measurable environments. Empirical results on natural language processing and computer vision downstream tasks show that ADA-CBF outperforms the newest GPT-4, LLaMA2, ViT and ADA methods.

The paper investigates using a Large Language Model (LLM) to automatically perform web software tasks using click, scroll, and text input operations. Previous approaches, such as reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning, are inefficient to train and task-specific. Our method uses filtered Document Object Model (DOM) elements as observations and performs tasks step-by-step, sequentially generating small programs based on the current observations. We use in-context learning, either benefiting from a single manually provided example, or an automatically generated example based on a successful zero-shot trial. We evaluate the proposed method on the MiniWob++ benchmark. With only one in-context example, our WebWISE method achieves similar or better performance than other methods that require many demonstrations or trials.

Social norms fundamentally shape interpersonal communication. We present NormDial, a high-quality dyadic dialogue dataset with turn-by-turn annotations of social norm adherences and violations for Chinese and American cultures. Introducing the task of social norm observance detection, our dataset is synthetically generated in both Chinese and English using a human-in-the-loop pipeline by prompting large language models with a small collection of expert-annotated social norms. We show that our generated dialogues are of high quality through human evaluation and further evaluate the performance of existing large language models on this task. Our findings point towards new directions for understanding the nuances of social norms as they manifest in conversational contexts that span across languages and cultures.

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance on knowledge-intensive tasks, suggesting that real-world knowledge is encoded in their model parameters. However, besides explorations on a few probing tasks in limited knowledge domains, it is not well understood how to evaluate LLMs' knowledge systematically and how well their knowledge abilities generalize, across a spectrum of knowledge domains and progressively complex task formats. To this end, we propose KGQuiz, a knowledge-intensive benchmark to comprehensively investigate the knowledge generalization abilities of LLMs. KGQuiz is a scalable framework constructed from triplet-based knowledge, which covers three knowledge domains and consists of five tasks with increasing complexity: true-or-false, multiple-choice QA, blank filling, factual editing, and open-ended knowledge generation. To gain a better understanding of LLMs' knowledge abilities and their generalization, we evaluate 10 open-source and black-box LLMs on the KGQuiz benchmark across the five knowledge-intensive tasks and knowledge domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that LLMs achieve impressive performance in straightforward knowledge QA tasks, while settings and contexts requiring more complex reasoning or employing domain-specific facts still present significant challenges. We envision KGQuiz as a testbed to analyze such nuanced variations in performance across domains and task formats, and ultimately to understand, evaluate, and improve LLMs' knowledge abilities across a wide spectrum of knowledge domains and tasks.

Recent work has shown the promise of learning with human feedback paradigms to produce human-determined high-quality text. Existing works use human feedback to train large language models (LLMs) in general domain abstractive summarization and have obtained summary quality exceeding traditional likelihood training. In this paper, we focus on a less explored form of human feedback -- Human Edits. We propose Sequence Alignment (un)Likelihood Training (SALT), a novel technique to use both the human-edited and model-generated data together in the training loop. In addition, we demonstrate simulating Human Edits with ground truth summaries coming from existing training data -- Imitation edits, along with the model-generated summaries obtained after the training, to reduce the need for expensive human-edit data. In our experiments, we extend human feedback exploration from general domain summarization to medical domain summarization. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of SALT in improving the summary quality with Human and Imitation Edits. Through additional experiments, we show that SALT outperforms the conventional RLHF method (designed for human preferences) -- DPO, when applied to human-edit data. We hope the evidence in our paper prompts researchers to explore, collect, and better use different human feedback approaches scalably.

Recent code translation techniques exploit neural machine translation models to translate source code from one programming language to another to satisfy production compatibility or to improve efficiency of codebase maintenance. Most existing code translation datasets only focus on a single pair of popular programming languages. To advance research on code translation and meet diverse requirements of real-world applications, we construct CodeTransOcean, a large-scale comprehensive benchmark that supports the largest variety of programming languages for code translation. CodeTransOcean consists of three novel multilingual datasets, namely, MultilingualTrans supporting translations between multiple popular programming languages, NicheTrans for translating between niche programming languages and popular ones, and LLMTrans for evaluating executability of translated code by large language models (LLMs). CodeTransOcean also includes a novel cross-framework dataset, DLTrans, for translating deep learning code across different frameworks. We develop multilingual modeling approaches for code translation and demonstrate their great potential in improving the translation quality of both low-resource and high-resource language pairs and boosting the training efficiency. We also propose a novel evaluation metric Debugging Success Rate@K for program-level code translation. Last but not least, we evaluate LLM ChatGPT on our datasets and investigate its potential for fuzzy execution predictions. We build baselines for CodeTransOcean and analyze challenges of code translation for guiding future research. The CodeTransOcean datasets and code are publicly available at https://github.com/WeixiangYAN/CodeTransOcean.