Complex news events, such as natural disasters and socio-political conflicts, require swift responses from the government and society. Relying on historical events to project the future is insufficient as such events are sparse and do not cover all possible conditions and nuanced situations. Simulation of these complex events can help better prepare and reduce the negative impact. We develop a controllable complex news event simulator guided by both the event schema representing domain knowledge about the scenario and user-provided assumptions representing case-specific conditions.As event dynamics depend on the fine-grained social and cultural context, we further introduce a geo-diverse commonsense and cultural norm-aware knowledge enhancement component.To enhance the coherence of the simulation, apart from the global timeline of events,we take an agent-based approach to simulate the individual character states, plans, and actions. By incorporating the schema and cultural norms, our generated simulations achieve much higher coherence and appropriateness and are received favorably by participants from a humanitarian assistance organization.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have evolved into interactive agents, proficient in planning, tool use, and task execution across various tasks. However, without agent-tuning, open-source models like LLaMA2 currently struggle to match the efficiency of larger models such as GPT-4 in scientific applications due to a lack of agent tuning datasets. In response, we introduce MIMIR, a streamlined platform that leverages large LLMs to generate agent-tuning data for fine-tuning smaller, specialized models. By employing a role-playing methodology, MIMIR enables larger models to simulate various roles and create interaction data, which can then be used to fine-tune open-source models like LLaMA2. This approach ensures that even smaller models can effectively serve as agents in scientific tasks. Integrating these features into an end-to-end platform, MIMIR facilitates everything from the uploading of scientific data to one-click agent fine-tuning. MIMIR is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github. com/gersteinlab/MIMIR, along with a demo video for quick-start, calling for broader development.

Advances in large vision-language models (LVLMs) have led to significant progress in generating natural language descriptions for visual contents. These powerful models are known for producing texts that are factually inconsistent with the visual input. While some efforts mitigate such inconsistencies in natural image captioning, the factuality of generated captions for structured visuals, such as charts, has not received as much scrutiny. This work introduces a comprehensive typology of factual errors in generated chart captions. A large-scale human annotation effort provides insight into the error patterns in captions generated by various models, ultimately forming the foundation of a dataset, CHOCOLATE. Our analysis reveals that even advanced models like GPT-4V frequently produce captions laced with factual inaccuracies. To combat this, we establish the task of Chart Caption Factual Error Correction and introduce CHARTVE, a visual entailment model that outperforms current LVLMs in evaluating caption factuality. Furthermore, we propose C2TFEC, an interpretable two-stage framework that excels at correcting factual errors. This work inaugurates a new domain in factual error correction for chart captions, presenting a novel evaluation metric, and demonstrating an effective approach to ensuring the factuality of generated chart captions. The code and data as well as the continuously updated benchmark can be found at: https://khuangaf.github.io/CHOCOLATE/.

Large vision-language models (LVLMs), while proficient in following instructions and responding to diverse questions, invariably generate detailed responses even when questions are ambiguous or unanswerable, leading to hallucinations and bias issues. Thus, it is essential for LVLMs to proactively engage with humans to ask for clarifications or additional information for better responses. In this study, we aim to shift LVLMs from passive answer providers to proactive engaged partners. We begin by establishing a three-tiered hierarchy for questions of invalid, ambiguous, and personalizable nature to measure the proactive engagement capabilities of LVLMs. Utilizing this hierarchy, we create PIE, (ProactIve Engagement Evaluation) through GPT-4o and human annotators, consisting of 853 questions across six distinct, fine-grained question types that are verified by human annotators and accompanied with well-defined metrics. Our evaluations on indicate poor performance of existing LVLMs, with the best-performing open-weights model only achieving an Aggregate Align Rate (AAR) of 0.28. In response, we introduce MACAROON, self-iMaginAtion for ContrAstive pReference OptimizatiON, which instructs LVLMs to autonomously generate contrastive response pairs for unlabeled questions given the task description and human-crafted criteria. Then, the self-imagined data is formatted for conditional reinforcement learning. Experimental results show MACAROON effectively improves LVLMs’ capabilities to be proactively engaged (0.84 AAR) while maintaining comparable performance on general tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized numerous domains with their impressive performance but still face their challenges. A predominant issue is the propensity for these models to generate non-existent facts, a concern termed hallucination. Our research is motivated by the observation that previous instruction tuning methods force the model to complete a sentence no matter whether the model knows the knowledge or not. When the question is out of the parametric knowledge, it will try to make up something and fail to indicate when it lacks knowledge. In this paper, we present a new approach called Refusal-Aware Instruction Tuning (R-Tuning). This approach is formalized by first identifying the disparity in knowledge encompassed by pre-trained parameters compared to that of instruction tuning data. Then, we construct the refusal-aware data based on the knowledge intersection, to tune LLMs to refrain from responding to questions beyond its parametric knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate R-Tuning effectively improves a model’s ability to answer known questions and refrain from answering unknown questions. Furthermore, when tested on out-of-domain datasets, the refusal ability was found to be a meta-skill that could be generalized to other tasks. Further analysis surprisingly finds that learning the uncertainty results in better calibration and an improved ability to estimate the uncertainty than uncertainty-based testing. Our code is available at https://github.com/shizhediao/R-Tuning

Language models (LMs) automatically learn word embeddings during pre-training on language corpora. Although word embeddings are usually interpreted as feature vectors for individual words, their roles in language model generation remain underexplored. In this work, we theoretically and empirically revisit output word embeddings and find that their linear transformations are equivalent to steering language model generation styles. We name such steers LM-Steers and find them existing in LMs of all sizes. It requires learning parameters equal to 0.2% of the original LMs’ size for steering each style. On tasks such as language model detoxification and sentiment control, LM-Steers can achieve comparable or superior performance compared with state-of-the-art controlled generation methods while maintaining a better balance with generation quality. The learned LM-Steer serves as a lens in text styles: it reveals that word embeddings are interpretable when associated with language model generations and can highlight text spans that most indicate the style differences. An LM-Steer is transferrable between different language models by an explicit form calculation. One can also continuously steer LMs simply by scaling the LM-Steer or compose multiple LM-Steers by adding their transformations. Our codes are publicly available at https://github.com/Glaciohound/LM-Steer.

This paper introduces a novel problem of automated question generation for courtroom examinations, CourtQG. While question generation has been studied in domains such as educational testing and product description, CourtQG poses several unique challenges owing to its non-cooperative and agenda-driven nature. Specifically, not only the generated questions need to be relevant to the case and underlying context, they also have to achieve certain objectives such as challenging the opponent’s arguments and/or revealing potential inconsistencies in their answers. We propose to leverage large language models (LLM) for CourtQG by fine-tuning them on two auxiliary tasks, agenda explanation (i.e., uncovering the underlying intents) and question type prediction. We additionally propose cold-start generation of questions from background documents without relying on examination history. We construct a dataset to evaluate our proposed method and show that it generates better questions according to standard metrics when compared to several baselines.

We describe our submission to SemEval 2023 Task 3, specifically the subtask on persuasion technique detection. In this work, our team NLUBot101 tackled a novel task of classifying persuasion techniques in online news articles at a paragraph level. The low-resource multilingual datasets, along with the imbalanced label distribution, make this task challenging. Our team presented a cross-lingual data augmentation approach and leveraged a recently proposed multilingual natural language inference model to address these challenges. Our solution achieves the highest macro-F1 score for the English task, and top 5 micro-F1 scores on both the English and Russian leaderboards.

Building cross-model intelligence that can understand charts and communicate the salient information hidden behind them is an appealing challenge in the vision and language (V+L) community. The capability to uncover the underlined table data of chart figures is a critical key to automatic chart understanding. We introduce ChartT5, a V+L model that learns how to interpret table information from chart images via cross-modal pre-training on plot table pairs. Specifically, we propose two novel pre-training objectives: Masked Header Prediction (MHP) and Masked Value Prediction (MVP) to facilitate the model with different skills to interpret the table information. We have conducted extensive experiments on chart question answering and chart summarization to verify the effectiveness of the proposed pre-training strategies. In particular, on the ChartQA benchmark, our ChartT5 outperforms the state-of-the-art non-pretraining methods by over 8% performance gains.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in utilizing tools, but their ability is limited by API availability and the instability of implicit reasoning, particularly when both planning and execution are involved. To overcome these limitations, we propose CREATOR, a novel framework that enables LLMs to create their own tools using documentation and code realization. CREATOR disentangles abstract tool creation and concrete decision execution, resulting in improved performance. We evaluate CREATOR on MATH and TabMWP benchmarks, respectively consisting of challenging math competition problems and diverse tabular contents. Remarkably, CREATOR outperforms existing chain-of-thought, program-of-thought, and tool-using baselines. Additionally, we introduce the Creation Challenge dataset, featuring 2K diverse questions, to emphasize the necessity and benefits of LLMs’ tool creation ability. Further research demonstrates that leveraging LLMs as tool creators facilitates knowledge transfer, and LLMs exhibit varying levels of tool creation abilities, enabling them to adapt to diverse situations. The tool creation ability revolutionizes the LLM’s problem-solving paradigm, driving us closer to the next frontier of artificial intelligence.

The recent explosion of performance of large language models (LLMs) has changed the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) more abruptly and seismically than any other shift in the field’s 80 year history. This has resulted in concerns that the field will become homogenized and resource-intensive. This new status quo has put many academic researchers, especially PhD students, at a disadvantage. This paper aims to define a new NLP playground by proposing 20+ PhD-dissertation-worthy research directions, covering theoretical analysis, new and challenging problems, learning paradigms and interdisciplinary applications.

Automatic response forecasting for news media plays a crucial role in enabling content producers to efficiently predict the impact of news releases and prevent unexpected negative outcomes such as social conflict and moral injury. To effectively forecast responses, it is essential to develop measures that leverage the social dynamics and contextual information surrounding individuals, especially in cases where explicit profiles or historical actions of the users are limited (referred to as lurkers). As shown in a previous study, 97% of all tweets are produced by only the most active 25% of users. However, existing approaches have limited exploration of how to best process and utilize these important features. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework, named SocialSense, that leverages a large language model to induce a belief-centered graph on top of an existent social network, along with graph-based propagation to capture social dynamics. We hypothesize that the induced graph that bridges the gap between distant users who share similar beliefs allows the model to effectively capture the response patterns. Our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art in experimental evaluations for both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in response forecasting. Moreover, the analysis reveals the framework’s capability to effectively handle unseen user and lurker scenarios, further highlighting its robustness and practical applicability.

Knowledge of norms is needed to understand and reason about acceptable behavior in human communication and interactions across sociocultural scenarios. Most computational research on norms has focused on a single culture, and manually built datasets, from non-conversational settings. We address these limitations by proposing a new framework, NormSage, to automatically extract culture-specific norms from multi-lingual conversations. NormSage uses GPT-3 prompting to 1) extract candidate norms directly from conversations and 2) provide explainable self-verification to ensure correctness and relevance. Comprehensive empirical results show the promise of our approach to extract high-quality culture-aware norms from multi-lingual conversations (English and Chinese), across several quality metrics. Further, our relevance verification can be extended to assess the adherence and violation of any norm with respect to a conversation on-the-fly, along with textual explanation. NormSage achieves an AUC of 94.6% in this grounding setup, with generated explanations matching human-written quality.

Long video content understanding poses a challenging set of research questions as it involves long-distance, cross-media reasoning and knowledge awareness. In this paper, we present a new benchmark for this problem domain, targeting the task of deep movie/TV question answering (QA) beyond previous work’s focus on simple plot summary and short video moment settings. We define several baselines based on direct retrieval of relevant context for long-distance movie QA. Observing that real-world QAs may require higher-order multi-hop inferences, we further propose a novel framework, called the DeepMaven, which extracts events, entities, and relations from the rich multimedia content in long videos to pre-construct movie knowledge graphs (movieKGs), and at the time of QA inference, complements general semantics with structured knowledge for more effective information retrieval and knowledge reasoning. We also introduce our recently collected DeepMovieQA dataset, including 1,000 long-form QA pairs from 41 hours of videos, to serve as a new and useful resource for future work. Empirical results show the DeepMaven performs competitively for both the new DeepMovieQA and the pre-existing MovieQA dataset.

For emerging events, human readers are often exposed to both real news and fake news. Multiple news articles may contain complementary or contradictory information that readers can leverage to help detect fake news. Inspired by this process, we propose a novel task of cross-document misinformation detection. Given a cluster of topically related news documents, we aim to detect misinformation at both document level and a more fine-grained level, event level. Due to the lack of data, we generate fake news by manipulating real news, and construct 3 new datasets with 422, 276, and 1,413 clusters of topically related documents, respectively. We further propose a graph-based detector that constructs a cross-document knowledge graph using cross-document event coreference resolution and employs a heterogeneous graph neural network to conduct detection at two levels. We then feed the event-level detection results into the document-level detector. Experimental results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms existing methods by up to 7 F1 points on this new task.

Claim detection and verification are crucial for news understanding and have emerged as promising technologies for mitigating misinformation and disinformation in the news. However, most existing work has focused on claim sentence analysis while overlooking additional crucial attributes (e.g., the claimer and the main object associated with the claim).In this work, we present NewsClaims, a new benchmark for attribute-aware claim detection in the news domain. We extend the claim detection problem to include extraction of additional attributes related to each claim and release 889 claims annotated over 143 news articles. NewsClaims aims to benchmark claim detection systems in emerging scenarios, comprising unseen topics with little or no training data. To this end, we see that zero-shot and prompt-based baselines show promising performance on this benchmark, while still considerably behind human performance.

Misinformation is a pressing issue in modern society. It arouses a mixture of anger, distrust, confusion, and anxiety that cause damage on our daily life judgments and public policy decisions. While recent studies have explored various fake news detection and media bias detection techniques in attempts to tackle the problem, there remain many ongoing challenges yet to be addressed, as can be witnessed from the plethora of untrue and harmful content present during the COVID-19 pandemic and the international crises of late. In this tutorial, we provide researchers and practitioners with a systematic overview of the frontier in fighting misinformation. Specifically, we dive into the important research questions of how to (i) develop a robust fake news detection system, which not only fact-check information pieces provable by background knowledge but also reason about the consistency and the reliability of subtle details for emerging events; (ii) uncover the bias and agenda of news sources to better characterize misinformation; as well as (iii) correct false information and mitigate news bias, while allowing diverse opinions to be expressed. Moreover, we discuss the remaining challenges, future research directions, and exciting opportunities to help make this world a better place, with safer and more harmonic information sharing.

To defend against machine-generated fake news, an effective mechanism is urgently needed. We contribute a novel benchmark for fake news detection at the knowledge element level, as well as a solution for this task which incorporates cross-media consistency checking to detect the fine-grained knowledge elements making news articles misinformative. Due to training data scarcity, we also formulate a novel data synthesis method by manipulating knowledge elements within the knowledge graph to generate noisy training data with specific, hard to detect, known inconsistencies. Our detection approach outperforms the state-of-the-art (up to 16.8% accuracy gain), and more critically, yields fine-grained explanations.

To combat COVID-19, both clinicians and scientists need to digest the vast amount of relevant biomedical knowledge in literature to understand the disease mechanism and the related biological functions. We have developed a novel and comprehensive knowledge discovery framework, COVID-KG to extract fine-grained multimedia knowledge elements (entities, relations and events) from scientific literature. We then exploit the constructed multimedia knowledge graphs (KGs) for question answering and report generation, using drug repurposing as a case study. Our framework also provides detailed contextual sentences, subfigures, and knowledge subgraphs as evidence. All of the data, KGs, reports.

We present a new information extraction system that can automatically construct temporal event graphs from a collection of news documents from multiple sources, multiple languages (English and Spanish for our experiment), and multiple data modalities (speech, text, image and video). The system advances state-of-the-art from two aspects: (1) extending from sentence-level event extraction to cross-document cross-lingual cross-media event extraction, coreference resolution and temporal event tracking; (2) using human curated event schema library to match and enhance the extraction output. We have made the dockerlized system publicly available for research purpose at GitHub, with a demo video.