Online reporting platforms have enabled citizens around the world to collectively share their opinions and report in real time on events impacting their local communities. Systematically organizing (e.g., categorizing by attributes) and geotagging large amounts of crowdsourced information is crucial to ensuring that accurate and meaningful insights can be drawn from this data and used by policy makers to bring about positive change. These tasks, however, typically require extensive manual annotation efforts. In this paper we present Uchaguzi-2022, a dataset of 14k categorized and geotagged citizen reports related to the 2022 Kenyan General Election containing mentions of election-related issues such as official misconduct, vote count irregularities, and acts of violence. We use this dataset to investigate whether language models can assist in scalably categorizing and geotagging reports, thus highlighting its potential application in the AI for Social Good space.

This paper describes and analyzes our participation in the 2023 Eval4NLP shared task, which focuses on assessing the effectiveness of prompt-based techniques to empower Large Language Models to handle the task of quality estimation, particularly in the context of evaluating machine translations and summaries. We conducted systematic experiments with various prompting techniques, including standard prompting, prompts informed by annotator instructions, and innovative chain-of-thought prompting. In addition, we integrated these approaches with zero-shot and one-shot learning methods to maximize the efficacy of our evaluation procedures. Our work reveals that combining these approaches using a "small", open source model (orca_mini_v3_7B) yields competitive results.

To explore how humans can best leverage LLMs for writing and how interacting with these models affects feelings of ownership and trust in the writing process, we compared common human-AI interaction types (e.g., guiding system, selecting from system outputs, post-editing outputs) in the context of LLM-assisted news headline generation. While LLMs alone can generate satisfactory news headlines, on average, human control is needed to fix undesirable model outputs. Of the interaction methods, guiding and selecting model output added the most benefit with the lowest cost (in time and effort). Further, AI assistance did not harm participants' perception of control compared to freeform editing.

Recent work on Event Extraction has reframed the task as Question Answering (QA), with promising results. The advantage of this approach is that it addresses the error propagation issue found in traditional token-based classification approaches by directly predicting event arguments without extracting candidates first. However, the questions are typically based on fixed templates and they rarely leverage contextual information such as relevant arguments. In addition, prior QA-based approaches have difficulty handling cases where there are multiple arguments for the same role. In this paper, we propose QGA-EE, which enables a Question Generation (QG) model to generate questions that incorporate rich contextual information instead of using fixed templates. We also propose dynamic templates to assist the training of QG model. Experiments show that QGA-EE outperforms all prior single-task-based models on the ACE05 English dataset.

The ability to conduct retrospective analyses of attacks on human rights defenders over time and by location is important for humanitarian organizations to better understand historical or ongoing human rights violations and thus better manage the global impact of such events. We hypothesize that NLP can support such efforts by quickly processing large collections of news articles to detect and summarize the characteristics of attacks on human rights defenders. To that end, we propose a new dataset for detecting Attacks on Human Rights Defenders (HRDsAttack) consisting of crowdsourced annotations on 500 online news articles. The annotations include fine-grained information about the type and location of the attacks, as well as information about the victim(s). We demonstrate the usefulness of the dataset by using it to train and evaluate baseline models on several sub-tasks to predict the annotated characteristics.

The proliferation of automatic faithfulness metrics for summarization has produced a need for benchmarks to evaluate them. While existing benchmarks measure the correlation with human judgements of faithfulness on model-generated summaries, they are insufficient for diagnosing whether metrics are: 1) consistent, i.e., indicate lower faithfulness as errors are introduced into a summary, 2) effective on human-written texts, and 3) sensitive to different error types (as summaries can contain multiple errors). To address these needs, we present a benchmark of unfaithful minimal pairs (BUMP), a dataset of 889 human-written, minimally different summary pairs, where a single error is introduced to a summary from the CNN/DailyMail dataset to produce an unfaithful summary. We find BUMP complements existing benchmarks in a number of ways: 1) the summaries in BUMP are harder to discriminate and less probable under SOTA summarization models, 2) unlike non-pair-based datasets, BUMP can be used to measure the consistency of metrics, and reveals that the most discriminative metrics tend not to be the most consistent, and 3) unlike datasets containing generated summaries with multiple errors, BUMP enables the measurement of metrics' performance on individual error types.

The New Yorker publishes a weekly captionless cartoon. More than 5,000 readers submit captions for it. The editors select three of them and ask the readers to pick the funniest one. We describe an experiment that compares a dozen automatic methods for selecting the funniest caption. We show that negative sentiment, human-centeredness, and lexical centrality most strongly match the funniest captions, followed by positive sentiment. These results are useful for understanding humor and also in the design of more engaging conversational agents in text and multimodal (vision+text) systems. As part of this work, a large set of cartoons and captions is being made available to the community.

In photo-sharing websites and in social networks, photographs are most often browsed as a sequence: users who view a photo are likely to click on those that follow. The sequences of photos (which we call photostreams), as opposed to individual images, can therefore be considered to be very important content units in their own right. In spite of their importance, those sequences have received little attention even though they are at the core of how people consume image content. In this paper, we focus on photostreams. First, we perform an analysis of a large dataset of user logs containing over 100 million pageviews, examining navigation patterns between photostreams. Based on observations from the analysis, we build a stream transition graph to analyze common stream topic transitions (e.g., users often view “train” photostreams followed by “firetruck” photostreams). We then implement two stream recommendation algorithms, based on collaborative filtering and on photo tags, and report the results of a user study involving 40 participants. Our analysis yields interesting insights into how people navigate between photostreams, while the results of the user study provide useful feedback for evaluating the performance and characteristics of the recommendation algorithms.