Demonstrations Are All You Need: Advancing Offensive Content Paraphrasing using In-Context Learning

Anirudh Som, Karan Sikka, Helen Gent, Ajay Divakaran, Andreas Kathol, Dimitra Vergyri


Abstract
Paraphrasing of offensive content is a better alternative to content removal and helps improve civility in a communication environment. Supervised paraphrasers; however, rely heavily on large quantities of labelled data to help preserve meaning and intent. They also often retain a large portion of the offensiveness of the original content, which raises questions on their overall usability. In this paper we aim to assist practitioners in developing usable paraphrasers by exploring In-Context Learning (ICL) with large language models (LLMs), i.e., using a limited number of input-label demonstration pairs to guide the model in generating desired outputs for specific queries. Our study focuses on key factors such as - number and order of demonstrations, exclusion of prompt instruction, and reduction in measured toxicity. We perform principled evaluation on three datasets, including our proposed Context-Aware Polite Paraphrase (CAPP) dataset, comprising of dialogue-style rude utterances, polite paraphrases, and additional dialogue context. We evaluate our approach using four closed source and one open source LLM. Our results reveal that ICL is comparable to supervised methods in generation quality, while being qualitatively better by 25% on human evaluation and attaining lower toxicity by 76%. Also, ICL-based paraphrasers only show a slight reduction in performance even with just 10% training data.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.749
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12612–12627
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.749
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Anirudh Som, Karan Sikka, Helen Gent, Ajay Divakaran, Andreas Kathol, and Dimitra Vergyri. 2024. Demonstrations Are All You Need: Advancing Offensive Content Paraphrasing using In-Context Learning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 12612–12627, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Demonstrations Are All You Need: Advancing Offensive Content Paraphrasing using In-Context Learning (Som et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.749.pdf