Systematic Task Exploration with LLMs: A Study in Citation Text Generation

Furkan Şahinuç, Ilia Kuznetsov, Yufang Hou, Iryna Gurevych


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) bring unprecedented flexibility in defining and executing complex, creative natural language generation (NLG) tasks. Yet, this flexibility brings new challenges, as it introduces new degrees of freedom in formulating the task inputs and instructions and in evaluating model performance. To facilitate the exploration of creative NLG tasks, we propose a three-component research framework that consists of systematic input manipulation, reference data, and output measurement. We use this framework to explore citation text generation – a popular scholarly NLP task that lacks consensus on the task definition and evaluation metric and has not yet been tackled within the LLM paradigm. Our results highlight the importance of systematically investigating both task instruction and input configuration when prompting LLMs, and reveal non-trivial relationships between different evaluation metrics used for citation text generation. Additional human generation and human evaluation experiments provide new qualitative insights into the task to guide future research in citation text generation. We make our code and data publicly available.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.265
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4832–4855
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.265
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.265
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Furkan Şahinuç, Ilia Kuznetsov, Yufang Hou, and Iryna Gurevych. 2024. Systematic Task Exploration with LLMs: A Study in Citation Text Generation. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4832–4855, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Systematic Task Exploration with LLMs: A Study in Citation Text Generation (Şahinuç et al., ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.265.pdf