Training data compositions for Large Language Models (LLMs) can significantly affect their downstream performance. However, a thorough data ablation study exploring large sets of candidate data mixtures is typically prohibitively expensive since the full effect is seen only after training the models; this can lead practitioners to settle for sub-optimal data mixtures. We propose an efficient method for approximating data ablations which trains individual models on subsets of a training corpus and reuses them across evaluations of combinations of subsets.In continued pre-training experiments, we find that, given an arbitrary evaluation set, the perplexity score of a single model trained on a candidate set of data is strongly correlated with perplexity scores of parameter averages of models trained on distinct partitions of that data. From this finding, we posit that researchers and practitioners can conduct inexpensive simulations of data ablations by maintaining a pool of models that were each trained on partitions of a large training corpus, and assessing candidate data mixtures by evaluating parameter averages of combinations of these models. This approach allows for substantial improvements in amortized training efficiency – scaling only linearly with respect to new data – by enabling reuse of previous training computation, opening new avenues for improving model performance through rigorous, incremental data assessment and mixing.

Adapting general-purpose language models to new skills is currently an expensive process that must be repeated as new instruction datasets targeting new skills are created, or can cause the models to forget older skills. In this work, we investigate the effectiveness of adding new skills to preexisting models by training on the new skills in isolation and later merging with the general model (e.g. using task vectors). In experiments focusing on scientific literature understanding, safety, and coding, we find that the parallel-train-then-merge procedure, which is significantly cheaper than retraining the models on updated data mixtures, is often comparably effective. Our experiments also show that parallel training is especially well-suited for enabling safety features in LMs relative to continued finetuning and retraining, as it dramatically improves model compliance with safe prompts while preserving its ability to refuse dangerous or harmful prompts.

Contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit a high degree of code generation and comprehension capability. A particularly promising area is their ability to interpret code modules from unfamiliar libraries for solving user-instructed tasks. Recent work has shown that large proprietary LLMs can learn novel library usage in-context from demonstrations. These results raise several open questions: whether demonstrations of library usage is required, whether smaller (and more open) models also possess such capabilities, etc. In this work, we take a broader approach by systematically evaluating a diverse array of LLMs across three scenarios reflecting varying levels of domain specialization to understand their abilities and limitations in generating code based on libraries defined in-context. Our results show that even smaller open-source LLMs like Llama-2 and StarCoder demonstrate an adept understanding of novel code libraries based on specification presented in-context. Our findings further reveal that LLMs exhibit a surprisingly high proficiency in learning novel library modules even when provided with just natural language descriptions or raw code implementations of the functions, which are often cheaper to obtain than demonstrations. Overall, our results pave the way for harnessing LLMs in more adaptable and dynamic coding environments.

Language models (LMs) have become ubiquitous in both NLP research and in commercial product offerings. As their commercial importance has surged, the most powerful models have become closed off, gated behind proprietary interfaces, with important details of their training data, architectures, and development undisclosed. Given the importance of these details in scientifically studying these models, including their biases and potential risks, we believe it is essential for the research community to have access to powerful, truly open LMs. To this end, we have built OLMo, a competitive, truly Open Language Model, to enable the scientific study of language models. Unlike most prior efforts that have only released model weights and inference code, we release OLMo alongside open training data and training and evaluation code. We hope this release will empower the open research community and inspire a new wave of innovation.

Obtaining labeled data to train a model for a task of interest is often expensive. Prior work shows training models on multitask data augmented with task descriptions (prompts) effectively transfers knowledge to new tasks. Towards efficiently building task-specific models, we assume access to a small number (32-1000) of unlabeled target-task examples and use those to retrieve the most similar labeled examples from a large pool of multitask data augmented with prompts. Compared to the current practice of finetuning models on uniformly sampled prompted multitask data (e.g.: FLAN, T0), our approach of finetuning on cross-task nearest neighbors is significantly more data-efficient. Using only 2% of the data from the P3 pool without any labeled target-task data, our models outperform strong baselines trained on all available data by 3-30% on 12 out of 14 datasets representing held-out tasks including legal and scientific document QA. Similarly, models trained on cross-task nearest neighbors from SuperNaturalInstructions, representing about 5% of the pool, obtain comparable performance to state-of-the-art models on 12 held-out tasks from that pool. Moreover, the models produced by our approach also provide a better initialization than single multitask finetuned models for few-shot finetuning on target-task data, as shown by a 2-23% relative improvement over few-shot finetuned T0-3B models on 8 datasets.

While human evaluation remains best practice for accurately judging the faithfulness of automatically-generated summaries, few solutions exist to address the increased difficulty and workload when evaluating long-form summaries. Through a survey of 162 papers on long-form summarization, we first shed light on current human evaluation practices surrounding long-form summaries. We find that 73% of these papers do not perform any human evaluation on model-generated summaries, while other works face new difficulties that manifest when dealing with long documents (e.g., low inter-annotator agreement). Motivated by our survey, we present LongEval, a set of guidelines for human evaluation of faithfulness in long-form summaries that addresses the following challenges: (1) How can we achieve high inter-annotator agreement on faithfulness scores? (2) How can we minimize annotator workload while maintaining accurate faithfulness scores? and (3) Do humans benefit from automated alignment between summary and source snippets? We deploy LongEval in annotation studies on two long-form summarization datasets in different domains (SQuALITY and PubMed), and we find that switching to a finer granularity of judgment (e.g., clause-level) reduces inter-annotator variance in faithfulness scores (e.g., std-dev from 18.5 to 6.8). We also show that scores from a partial annotation of fine-grained units highly correlates with scores from a full annotation workload (0.89 Kendall’s tau using 50% judgements). We release our human judgments, annotation templates, and software as a Python library for future research.

Natural language processing models often exploit spurious correlations between task-independent features and labels in datasets to perform well only within the distributions they are trained on, while not generalising to different task distributions. We propose to tackle this problem by generating a debiased version of a dataset, which can then be used to train a debiased, off-the-shelf model, by simply replacing its training data. Our approach consists of 1) a method for training data generators to generate high-quality, label-consistent data samples; and 2) a filtering mechanism for removing data points that contribute to spurious correlations, measured in terms of z-statistics. We generate debiased versions of the SNLI and MNLI datasets, and we evaluate on a large suite of debiased, out-of-distribution, and adversarial test sets. Results show that models trained on our debiased datasets generalise better than those trained on the original datasets in all settings. On the majority of the datasets, our method outperforms or performs comparably to previous state-of-the-art debiasing strategies, and when combined with an orthogonal technique, product-of-experts, it improves further and outperforms previous best results of SNLI-hard and MNLI-hard.

Training retrieval models to fetch contexts for Question Answering (QA) over large corpora requires labeling relevant passages in those corpora. Since obtaining exhaustive manual annotations of all relevant passages is not feasible, prior work uses text overlap heuristics to find passages that are likely to contain the answer, but this is not feasible when the task requires deeper reasoning and answers are not extractable spans (e.g.: multi-hop, discrete reasoning). We address this issue by identifying relevant passages based on whether they are useful for a trained QA model to arrive at the correct answers, and develop a search process guided by the QA model’s loss. Our experiments show that this approach enables identifying relevant context for unseen data greater than 90% of the time on the IIRC dataset and generalizes better to the end QA task than those trained on just the gold retrieval data on IIRC and QASC datasets.

Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires data that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present Qasper, a dataset of 5049 questions over 1585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.

Question Answering (QA) tasks requiring information from multiple documents often rely on a retrieval model to identify relevant information for reasoning. The retrieval model is typically trained to maximize the likelihood of the labeled supporting evidence. However, when retrieving from large text corpora such as Wikipedia, the correct answer can often be obtained from multiple evidence candidates. Moreover, not all such candidates are labeled as positive during annotation, rendering the training signal weak and noisy. This problem is exacerbated when the questions are unanswerable or when the answers are Boolean, since the model cannot rely on lexical overlap to make a connection between the answer and supporting evidence. We develop a new parameterization of set-valued retrieval that handles unanswerable queries, and we show that marginalizing over this set during training allows a model to mitigate false negatives in supporting evidence annotations. We test our method on two multi-document QA datasets, IIRC and HotpotQA. On IIRC, we show that joint modeling with marginalization improves model performance by 5.5 F1 points and achieves a new state-of-the-art performance of 50.5 F1. We also show that retrieval marginalization results in 4.1 QA F1 improvement over a non-marginalized baseline on HotpotQA in the fullwiki setting.

When training most modern reading comprehension models, all the questions associated with a context are treated as being independent from each other. However, closely related questions and their corresponding answers are not independent, and leveraging these relationships could provide a strong supervision signal to a model. Drawing on ideas from contrastive estimation, we introduce several new supervision losses that compare question-answer scores across multiple related instances. Specifically, we normalize these scores across various neighborhoods of closely contrasting questions and/or answers, adding a cross entropy loss term in addition to traditional maximum likelihood estimation. Our techniques require bundles of related question-answer pairs, which we either mine from within existing data or create using automated heuristics. We empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of training with instance bundles on two datasets—HotpotQA and ROPES—showing up to 9% absolute gains in accuracy.

Standard test sets for supervised learning evaluate in-distribution generalization. Unfortunately, when a dataset has systematic gaps (e.g., annotation artifacts), these evaluations are misleading: a model can learn simple decision rules that perform well on the test set but do not capture the abilities a dataset is intended to test. We propose a more rigorous annotation paradigm for NLP that helps to close systematic gaps in the test data. In particular, after a dataset is constructed, we recommend that the dataset authors manually perturb the test instances in small but meaningful ways that (typically) change the gold label, creating contrast sets. Contrast sets provide a local view of a model’s decision boundary, which can be used to more accurately evaluate a model’s true linguistic capabilities. We demonstrate the efficacy of contrast sets by creating them for 10 diverse NLP datasets (e.g., DROP reading comprehension, UD parsing, and IMDb sentiment analysis). Although our contrast sets are not explicitly adversarial, model performance is significantly lower on them than on the original test sets—up to 25% in some cases. We release our contrast sets as new evaluation benchmarks and encourage future dataset construction efforts to follow similar annotation processes.

Humans often have to read multiple documents to address their information needs. However, most existing reading comprehension (RC) tasks only focus on questions for which the contexts provide all the information required to answer them, thus not evaluating a system’s performance at identifying a potential lack of sufficient information and locating sources for that information. To fill this gap, we present a dataset, IIRC, with more than 13K questions over paragraphs from English Wikipedia that provide only partial information to answer them, with the missing information occurring in one or more linked documents. The questions were written by crowd workers who did not have access to any of the linked documents, leading to questions that have little lexical overlap with the contexts where the answers appear. This process also gave many questions without answers, and those that require discrete reasoning, increasing the difficulty of the task. We follow recent modeling work on various reading comprehension datasets to construct a baseline model for this dataset, finding that it achieves 31.1% F1 on this task, while estimated human performance is 88.4%. The dataset, code for the baseline system, and a leaderboard can be found at https://allennlp.org/iirc.

High-quality and large-scale data are key to success for AI systems. However, large-scale data annotation efforts are often confronted with a set of common challenges: (1) designing a user-friendly annotation interface; (2) training enough annotators efficiently; and (3) reproducibility. To address these problems, we introduce CROWDAQ, an open-source platform that standardizes the data collection pipeline with customizable user-interface components, automated annotator qualification, and saved pipelines in a re-usable format. We show that CROWDAQ simplifies data annotation significantly on a diverse set of data collection use cases and we hope it will be a convenient tool for the community.

Reading comprehension has recently seen rapid progress, with systems matching humans on the most popular datasets for the task. However, a large body of work has highlighted the brittleness of these systems, showing that there is much work left to be done. We introduce a new reading comprehension benchmark, DROP, which requires Discrete Reasoning Over the content of Paragraphs. In this crowdsourced, adversarially-created, 55k-question benchmark, a system must resolve references in a question, perhaps to multiple input positions, and perform discrete operations over them (such as addition, counting, or sorting). These operations require a much more comprehensive understanding of the content of paragraphs, as they remove the paraphrase-and-entity-typing shortcuts available in prior datasets. We apply state-of-the-art methods from both the reading comprehension and semantic parsing literatures on this dataset and show that the best systems only achieve 38.4% F1 on our generalized accuracy metric, while expert human performance is 96%. We additionally present a new model that combines reading comprehension methods with simple numerical reasoning to achieve 51% F1.

Training semantic parsers from question-answer pairs typically involves searching over an exponentially large space of logical forms, and an unguided search can easily be misled by spurious logical forms that coincidentally evaluate to the correct answer. We propose a novel iterative training algorithm that alternates between searching for consistent logical forms and maximizing the marginal likelihood of the retrieved ones. This training scheme lets us iteratively train models that provide guidance to subsequent ones to search for logical forms of increasing complexity, thus dealing with the problem of spuriousness. We evaluate these techniques on two hard datasets: WikiTableQuestions (WTQ) and Cornell Natural Language Visual Reasoning (NLVR), and show that our training algorithm outperforms the previous best systems, on WTQ in a comparable setting, and on NLVR with significantly less supervision.

Machine comprehension of texts longer than a single sentence often requires coreference resolution. However, most current reading comprehension benchmarks do not contain complex coreferential phenomena and hence fail to evaluate the ability of models to resolve coreference. We present a new crowdsourced dataset containing more than 24K span-selection questions that require resolving coreference among entities in over 4.7K English paragraphs from Wikipedia. Obtaining questions focused on such phenomena is challenging, because it is hard to avoid lexical cues that shortcut complex reasoning. We deal with this issue by using a strong baseline model as an adversary in the crowdsourcing loop, which helps crowdworkers avoid writing questions with exploitable surface cues. We show that state-of-the-art reading comprehension models perform significantly worse than humans on this benchmark—the best model performance is 70.5 F1, while the estimated human performance is 93.4 F1.

Semantic parsing, the study of translating natural language utterances into machine-executable programs, is a well-established research area and has applications in question answering, instruction following, voice assistants, and code generation. In the last two years, the models used for semantic parsing have changed dramatically with the introduction of neural encoder-decoder methods that allow us to rethink many of the previous assumptions underlying semantic parsing. We aim to inform those already interested in semantic parsing research of these new developments in the field, as well as introduce the topic as an exciting research area to those who are unfamiliar with it. Current approaches for neural semantic parsing share several similarities with neural machine translation, but the key difference between the two fields is that semantic parsing translates natural language into a formal language, while machine translation translates it into a different natural language. The formal language used in semantic parsing allows for constrained decoding, where the model is constrained to only produce outputs that are valid formal statements. We will describe the various approaches researchers have taken to do this. We will also discuss the choice of formal languages used by semantic parsers, and describe why much recent work has chosen to use standard programming languages instead of more linguistically-motivated representations. We will then describe a particularly challenging setting for semantic parsing, where there is additional context or interaction that the parser must take into account when translating natural language to formal language, and give an overview of recent work in this direction. Finally, we will introduce some tools available in AllenNLP for doing semantic parsing research.

Modern natural language processing (NLP) research requires writing code. Ideally this code would provide a precise definition of the approach, easy repeatability of results, and a basis for extending the research. However, many research codebases bury high-level parameters under implementation details, are challenging to run and debug, and are difficult enough to extend that they are more likely to be rewritten. This paper describes AllenNLP, a library for applying deep learning methods to NLP research that addresses these issues with easy-to-use command-line tools, declarative configuration-driven experiments, and modular NLP abstractions. AllenNLP has already increased the rate of research experimentation and the sharing of NLP components at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and we are working to have the same impact across the field.

We present a new semantic parsing model for answering compositional questions on semi-structured Wikipedia tables. Our parser is an encoder-decoder neural network with two key technical innovations: (1) a grammar for the decoder that only generates well-typed logical forms; and (2) an entity embedding and linking module that identifies entity mentions while generalizing across tables. We also introduce a novel method for training our neural model with question-answer supervision. On the WikiTableQuestions data set, our parser achieves a state-of-the-art accuracy of 43.3% for a single model and 45.9% for a 5-model ensemble, improving on the best prior score of 38.7% set by a 15-model ensemble. These results suggest that type constraints and entity linking are valuable components to incorporate in neural semantic parsers.

Type-level word embeddings use the same set of parameters to represent all instances of a word regardless of its context, ignoring the inherent lexical ambiguity in language. Instead, we embed semantic concepts (or synsets) as defined in WordNet and represent a word token in a particular context by estimating a distribution over relevant semantic concepts. We use the new, context-sensitive embeddings in a model for predicting prepositional phrase (PP) attachments and jointly learn the concept embeddings and model parameters. We show that using context-sensitive embeddings improves the accuracy of the PP attachment model by 5.4% absolute points, which amounts to a 34.4% relative reduction in errors.

We introduce an electronic three-way lexicon, Tharwa, comprising Dialectal Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and English correspondents. The paper focuses on Egyptian Arabic as the first pilot dialect for the resource, with plans to expand to other dialects of Arabic in later phases of the project. We describe Tharwa’s creation process and report on its current status. The lexical entries are augmented with various elements of linguistic information such as POS, gender, rationality, number, and root and pattern information. The lexicon is based on a compilation of information from both monolingual and bilingual existing resources such as paper dictionaries and electronic, corpus-based dictionaries. Multiple levels of quality checks are performed on the output of each step in the creation process. The importance of this lexicon lies in the fact that it is the first resource of its kind bridging multiple variants of Arabic with English. Furthermore, it is a wide coverage lexical resource containing over 73,000 Egyptian entries. Tharwa is publicly available. We believe it will have a significant impact on both Theoretical Linguistics as well as Computational Linguistics research.