Li, Yerong
VicSim: Enhancing Victim Simulation with Emotional and Linguistic Fidelity
Li, Yerong, Liu, Yiren, Huang, Yun
Scenario-based training has been widely adopted in many public service sectors. Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in simulating diverse personas to create these training scenarios. However, little is known about how LLMs can be developed to simulate victims for scenario-based training purposes. In this paper, we introduce VicSim (victim simulator), a novel model that addresses three key dimensions of user simulation: informational faithfulness, emotional dynamics, and language style (e.g., grammar usage). We pioneer the integration of scenario-based victim modeling with GAN-based training workflow and key-information-based prompting, aiming to enhance the realism of simulated victims. Our adversarial training approach teaches the discriminator to recognize grammar and emotional cues as reliable indicators of synthetic content. According to evaluations by human raters, the VicSim model outperforms GPT-4 in terms of human-likeness.
Improving Emotional Support Delivery in Text-Based Community Safety Reporting Using Large Language Models
Liu, Yiren, Li, Yerong, Mayfield, Ryan, Huang, Yun
Emotional support is a crucial aspect of communication between community members and police dispatchers during incident reporting. However, there is a lack of understanding about how emotional support is delivered through text-based systems, especially in various non-emergency contexts. In this study, we analyzed two years of chat logs comprising 57,114 messages across 8,239 incidents from 130 higher education institutions. Our empirical findings revealed significant variations in emotional support provided by dispatchers, influenced by the type of incident, service time, and a noticeable decline in support over time across multiple organizations. To improve the consistency and quality of emotional support, we developed and implemented a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), named dispatcherLLM. We evaluated dispatcherLLM by comparing its generated responses to those of human dispatchers and other off-the-shelf models using real chat messages. Additionally, we conducted a human evaluation to assess the perceived effectiveness of the support provided by dispatcherLLM. This study not only contributes new empirical understandings of emotional support in text-based dispatch systems but also demonstrates the significant potential of generative AI in improving service delivery.
Advancing Relation Extraction through Language Probing with Exemplars from Set Co-Expansion
Li, Yerong, Girju, Roxana
Relation Extraction (RE) is a pivotal task in automatically extracting structured information from unstructured text. In this paper, we present a multi-faceted approach that integrates representative examples and through co-set expansion. The primary goal of our method is to enhance relation classification accuracy and mitigating confusion between contrastive classes. Our approach begins by seeding each relationship class with representative examples. Subsequently, our co-set expansion algorithm enriches training objectives by incorporating similarity measures between target pairs and representative pairs from the target class. Moreover, the co-set expansion process involves a class ranking procedure that takes into account exemplars from contrastive classes. Contextual details encompassing relation mentions are harnessed via context-free Hearst patterns to ascertain contextual similarity. Empirical evaluation demonstrates the efficacy of our co-set expansion approach, resulting in a significant enhancement of relation classification performance. Our method achieves an observed margin of at least 1 percent improvement in accuracy in most settings, on top of existing fine-tuning approaches. To further refine our approach, we conduct an in-depth analysis that focuses on tuning contrastive examples. This strategic selection and tuning effectively reduce confusion between classes sharing similarities, leading to a more precise classification process. Experimental results underscore the effectiveness of our proposed framework for relation extraction. The synergy between co-set expansion and context-aware prompt tuning substantially contributes to improved classification accuracy. Furthermore, the reduction in confusion between contrastive classes through contrastive examples tuning validates the robustness and reliability of our method.