Domenic Rosati


2024

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Long-form evaluation of model editing
Domenic Rosati | Robie Gonzales | Jinkun Chen | Xuemin Yu | Yahya Kayani | Frank Rudzicz | Hassan Sajjad
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Evaluations of model editing, a technique for changing the factual knowledge held by Large Language Models (LLMs), currently only use the ‘next few token’ completions after a prompt. As a result, the impact of these methods on longer natural language generation is largely unknown. We introduce long-form evaluation of model editing (LEME) a novel evaluation protocol that measures the efficacy and impact of model editing in long-form generative settings. Our protocol consists of a machine-rated survey and a classifier which correlates well with human ratings. Importantly, we find that our protocol has very little relationship with previous short-form metrics (despite being designed to extend efficacy, generalization, locality, and portability into a long-form setting), indicating that our method introduces a novel set of dimensions for understanding model editing methods. Using this protocol, we benchmark a number of model editing techniques and present several findings including that, while some methods (ROME and MEMIT) perform well in making consistent edits within a limited scope, they suffer much more from factual drift than other methods. Finally, we present a qualitative analysis that illustrates common failure modes in long-form generative settings including internal consistency, lexical cohesion, and locality issues.

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Overview of the DagPap24 Shared Task on Detecting Automatically Generated Scientific Paper
Savvas Chamezopoulos | Drahomira Herrmannova | Anita De Waard | Drahomira Herrmannova | Domenic Rosati | Yury Kashnitsky
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing (SDP 2024)

This paper provides an overview of the 2024 ACL Scholarly Document Processing workshop shared task on the detection of automatically generated scientific papers. Unlike our previous task, which focused on the binary classification of whether scientific passages were machine-generated or not, one likely use case for text generation technology in scientific writing is to intersperse human-written text with passages of machine-generated text. We frame the detection problem as a multiclass span classification task: given an expert of text, label token spans in the text as human-written or machine-generated We shared a dataset containing excerpts from human-written papers as well as artificially generated content collected by Elsevier publishing and editorial teams. As a test set, the participants were provided with a corpus of openly accessible human-written as well as generated papers from the same scientific domains of documents. The shared task saw 457 submissions across 28 participating teams and resulted in three published technical reports. We discuss our findings from the shared task in this overview paper.

2023

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Using contradictions improves question answering systems
Etienne Fortier-Dubois | Domenic Rosati
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

This work examines the use of contradiction in natural language inference (NLI) for question answering (QA). Typically, NLI systems help answer questions by determining if a potential answer is entailed (supported) by some background context. But is it useful to also determine if an answer contradicts the context? We test this in two settings, multiple choice and extractive QA, and find that systems that incorporate contradiction can do slightly better than entailment-only systems on certain datasets. However, the best performances come from using contradiction, entailment, and QA model confidence scores together. This has implications for the deployment of QA systems in domains such as medicine and science where safety is an issue.

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GRASUM at BioLaySumm Task 1: Background Knowledge Grounding for Readable, Relevant, and Factual Biomedical Lay Summaries
Domenic Rosati
The 22nd Workshop on Biomedical Natural Language Processing and BioNLP Shared Tasks

Communication of scientific findings to the public is important for keeping non-experts informed of developments such as life-saving medical treatments. However, generating readable lay summaries from scientific documents is challenging, and currently, these summaries suffer from critical factual errors. One popular intervention for improving factuality is using additional external knowledge to provide factual grounding. However, it is unclear how these grounding sources should be retrieved, selected, or integrated, and how supplementary grounding documents might affect the readability or relevance of the generated summaries. We develop a simple method for selecting grounding sources and integrating them with source documents. We then use the BioLaySum summarization dataset to evaluate the effects of different grounding sources on summary quality. We found that grounding source documents improves the relevance and readability of lay summaries but does not improve factuality of lay summaries. This continues to be true in zero-shot summarization settings where we hypothesized that grounding might be even more important for factual lay summaries.

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Mixture of Soft Prompts for Controllable Data Generation
Derek Chen | Celine Lee | Yunan Lu | Domenic Rosati | Zhou Yu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Large language models (LLMs) effectively generate fluent text when the target output follows natural language patterns. However, structured prediction tasks confine the output format to a limited ontology, causing even very large models to struggle since they were never trained with such restrictions in mind. The difficulty of using LLMs for direct prediction is exacerbated in few-shot learning scenarios, which commonly arise due to domain shift and resource limitations. We flip the problem on its head by leveraging the LLM as a tool for data augmentation rather than direct prediction. Our proposed Mixture of Soft Prompts (MSP) serves as a parameter-efficient procedure for generating multi-attribute data in a controlled manner. Denoising mechanisms are further applied to improve the quality of synthesized data. Automatic metrics show our method is capable of producing diverse and natural text, while preserving label semantics. Moreover, MSP achieves state-of-the-art results on three benchmarks when compared against strong baselines. Our method offers an alternate data-centric approach for applying LLMs to complex prediction tasks.

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Self-Consistency of Large Language Models under Ambiguity
Henning Bartsch | Ole Jorgensen | Domenic Rosati | Jason Hoelscher-Obermaier | Jacob Pfau
Proceedings of the 6th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Large language models (LLMs) that do not give consistent answers across contexts are problematic when used for tasks with expectations of consistency–e.g. question-answering, explanations, etc. Our work presents an evaluation benchmark for self-consistency in cases of under-specification where two or more answers can be correct. We conduct a series of behavioral experiments on the OpenAI model suite using an ambiguous integer sequence completion task. We find that average consistency ranges from 67% to 82%, far higher than would be predicted if a model’s consistency was random, and increases as model capability improves. Furthermore, we show that models tend to maintain self-consistency across a series of robustness checks, including prompting speaker changes and sequence length changes. These results suggest that self-consistency arises as an emergent capability without specifically training for it. Despite this, we find that models are uncalibrated when judging their own consistency, with models displaying both over- and under-confidence. We also propose a nonparametric test for determining from token output distribution whether a model assigns non-trivial probability to alternative answers. Using this test, we find that despite increases in self-consistency, models usually place significant weight on alternative, inconsistent answers. This distribution of probability mass provides evidence that even highly self-consistent models internally compute multiple possible responses.

2022

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Moving beyond word lists: towards abstractive topic labels for human-like topics of scientific documents
Domenic Rosati
Proceedings of the first Workshop on Information Extraction from Scientific Publications

Topic models represent groups of documents as a list of words (the topic labels). This work asks whether an alternative approach to topic labeling can be developed that is closer to a natural language description of a topic than a word list. To this end, we present an approach to generating human-like topic labels using abstractive multi-document summarization (MDS). We investigate our approach with an exploratory case study. We model topics in citation sentences in order to understand what further research needs to be done to fully operationalize MDS for topic labeling. Our case study shows that in addition to more human-like topics there are additional advantages to evaluation by using clustering and summarization measures instead of topic model measures. However, we find that there are several developments needed before we can design a well-powered study to evaluate MDS for topic modeling fully. Namely, improving cluster cohesion, improving the factuality and faithfulness of MDS, and increasing the number of documents that might be supported by MDS. We present a number of ideas on how these can be tackled and conclude with some thoughts on how topic modeling can also be used to improve MDS in general.

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SynSciPass: detecting appropriate uses of scientific text generation
Domenic Rosati
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Scholarly Document Processing

Approaches to machine generated text detection tend to focus on binary classification of human versus machine written text. In the scientific domain where publishers might use these models to examine manuscripts under submission, misclassification has the potential to cause harm to authors. Additionally, authors may appropriately use text generation models such as with the use of assistive technologies like translation tools. In this setting, a binary classification scheme might be used to flag appropriate uses of assistive text generation technology as simply machine generated which is a cause of concern. In our work, we simulate this scenario by presenting a state-of-the-art detector trained on the DAGPap22 with machine translated passages from Scielo and find that the model performs at random. Given this finding, we develop a framework for dataset development that provides a nuanced approach to detecting machine generated text by having labels for the type of technology used such as for translation or paraphrase resulting in the construction of SynSciPass. By training the same model that performed well on DAGPap22 on SynSciPass, we show that not only is the model more robust to domain shifts but also is able to uncover the type of technology used for machine generated text. Despite this, we conclude that current datasets are neither comprehensive nor realistic enough to understand how these models would perform in the wild where manuscript submissions can come from many unknown or novel distributions, how they would perform on scientific full-texts rather than small passages, and what might happen when there is a mix of appropriate and inappropriate uses of natural language generation.