Kexun Zhang


2023

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Large Language Models Are Partially Primed in Pronoun Interpretation
Suet-Ying Lam | Qingcheng Zeng | Kexun Zhang | Chenyu You | Rob Voigt
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023

While a large body of literature suggests that large language models (LLMs) acquire rich linguistic representations, little is known about whether they adapt to linguistic biases in a human-like way. The present study probes this question by asking whether LLMs display human-like referential biases using stimuli and procedures from real psycholinguistic experiments. Recent psycholinguistic studies suggest that humans adapt their referential biases with recent exposure to referential patterns; closely replicating three relevant psycholinguistic experiments from Johnson & Arnold (2022) in an in-context learning (ICL) framework, we found that InstructGPT adapts its pronominal interpretations in response to the frequency of referential patterns in the local discourse, though in a limited fashion: adaptation was only observed relative to syntactic but not semantic biases. By contrast, FLAN-UL2 fails to generate meaningful patterns. Our results provide further evidence that contemporary LLMs discourse representations are sensitive to syntactic patterns in the local context but less so to semantic patterns. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/zkx06111/llm_priming.

2022

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Focus on the Action: Learning to Highlight and Summarize Jointly for Email To-Do Items Summarization
Kexun Zhang | Jiaao Chen | Diyi Yang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Automatic email to-do item generation is the task of generating to-do items from a given email to help people overview emails and schedule daily work. Different from prior research on email summarization, to-do item generation focuses on generating action mentions to provide more structured summaries of email text. Prior work either requires large amount of annotation for key sentences with potential actions or fails to pay attention to nuanced actions from these unstructured emails, and thus often lead to unfaithful summaries. To fill these gaps, we propose a simple and effective learning to highlight and summarize framework (LHS) to learn to identify the most salient text and actions, and incorporate these structured representations to generate more faithful to-do items. Experiments show that our LHS model outperforms the baselines and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in terms of both quantitative evaluation and human judgement. We also discussed specific challenges that current models faced with email to-do summarization.

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A Study of Syntactic Multi-Modality in Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Kexun Zhang | Rui Wang | Xu Tan | Junliang Guo | Yi Ren | Tao Qin | Tie-Yan Liu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

It is difficult for non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models to capture the multi-modal distribution of target translations due to their conditional independence assumption, which is known as the “multi-modality problem”, including the lexical multi-modality and the syntactic multi-modality. While the first one has been well studied, the syntactic multi-modality brings severe challenges to the standard cross entropy (XE) loss in NAT and is understudied. In this paper, we conduct a systematic study on the syntactic multi-modality problem. Specifically, we decompose it into short- and long-range syntactic multi-modalities and evaluate several recent NAT algorithms with advanced loss functions on both carefully designed synthesized datasets and real datasets. We find that the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss and the Order-Agnostic Cross Entropy (OAXE) loss can better handle short- and long-range syntactic multi-modalities respectively. Furthermore, we take the best of both and design a new loss function to better handle the complicated syntactic multi-modality in real-world datasets. To facilitate practical usage, we provide a guide to using different loss functions for different kinds of syntactic multi-modality.