north american chapter
Text Alignment Is An Efficient Unified Model for Massive NLP Tasks
Large language models (LLMs), typically designed as a function of next-word prediction, have excelled across extensive NLP tasks. Despite the generality, next-word prediction is often not an efficient formulation for many of the tasks, demanding an extreme scale of model parameters (10s or 100s of billions) and sometimes yielding suboptimal performance. In practice, it is often desirable to build more efficient models--despite being less versatile, they still apply to a substantial subset of problems, delivering on par or even superior performance with much smaller model sizes.
Adapting AlignScore Mertic for Factual Consistency Evaluation of Text in Russian: A Student Abstract
Zimin, Mikhail, Shamsutdinova, Milyausha, Andriushchenko, Georgii
Ensuring factual consistency in generated text is crucial for reliable natural language processing applications. However, there is a lack of evaluation tools for factual consistency in Russian texts, as existing tools primarily focus on English corpora. To bridge this gap, we introduce AlignRuScore, a comprehensive adaptation of the AlignScore metric for Russian. To adapt the metric, we fine-tuned a RuBERT-based alignment model with task-specific classification and regression heads on Russian and translated English datasets. Our results demonstrate that a unified alignment metric can be successfully ported to Russian, laying the groundwork for robust multilingual factual consistency evaluation. We release the translated corpora, model checkpoints, and code to support further research.
Do Prompts Reshape Representations? An Empirical Study of Prompting Effects on Embeddings
Gonzalez-Gutierrez, Cesar, Hovy, Dirk
Prompting is a common approach for leveraging LMs in zero-shot settings. However, the underlying mechanisms that enable LMs to perform diverse tasks without task-specific supervision remain poorly understood. Studying the relationship between prompting and the quality of internal representations can shed light on how pre-trained embeddings may support in-context task solving. In this empirical study, we conduct a series of probing experiments on prompt embeddings, analyzing various combinations of prompt templates for zero-shot classification. Our findings show that while prompting affects the quality of representations, these changes do not consistently correlate with the relevance of the prompts to the target task. This result challenges the assumption that more relevant prompts necessarily lead to better representations. We further analyze potential factors that may contribute to this unexpected behavior.
Discrepancy Detection at the Data Level: Toward Consistent Multilingual Question Answering
Calvo-Bartolomé, Lorena, Aldana, Valérie, Cantarero, Karla, de Mesa, Alonso Madroñal, Arenas-García, Jerónimo, Boyd-Graber, Jordan
Multilingual question answering (QA) systems must ensure factual consistency across languages, especially for objective queries such as What is jaundice?, while also accounting for cultural variation in subjective responses. We propose MIND, a user-in-the-loop fact-checking pipeline to detect factual and cultural discrepancies in multilingual QA knowledge bases. MIND highlights divergent answers to culturally sensitive questions (e.g., Who assists in childbirth?) that vary by region and context. We evaluate MIND on a bilingual QA system in the maternal and infant health domain and release a dataset of bilingual questions annotated for factual and cultural inconsistencies. We further test MIND on datasets from other domains to assess generalization. In all cases, MIND reliably identifies inconsistencies, supporting the development of more culturally aware and factually consistent QA systems.
A Computational Framework for Interpretable Text-Based Personality Assessment from Social Media
Personality refers to individual differences in behavior, thinking, and feeling. With the growing availability of digital footprints, especially from social media, automated methods for personality assessment have become increasingly important. Natural language processing (NLP) enables the analysis of unstructured text data to identify personality indicators. However, two main challenges remain central to this thesis: the scarcity of large, personality-labeled datasets and the disconnect between personality psychology and NLP, which restricts model validity and interpretability. To address these challenges, this thesis presents two datasets -- MBTI9k and PANDORA -- collected from Reddit, a platform known for user anonymity and diverse discussions. The PANDORA dataset contains 17 million comments from over 10,000 users and integrates the MBTI and Big Five personality models with demographic information, overcoming limitations in data size, quality, and label coverage. Experiments on these datasets show that demographic variables influence model validity. In response, the SIMPA (Statement-to-Item Matching Personality Assessment) framework was developed - a computational framework for interpretable personality assessment that matches user-generated statements with validated questionnaire items. By using machine learning and semantic similarity, SIMPA delivers personality assessments comparable to human evaluations while maintaining high interpretability and efficiency. Although focused on personality assessment, SIMPA's versatility extends beyond this domain. Its model-agnostic design, layered cue detection, and scalability make it suitable for various research and practical applications involving complex label taxonomies and variable cue associations with target concepts.