Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine understanding of language need to be revised. This article critically evaluates the prevailing tendency to regard machine language performance as mere syntactic manipulation and the simulation of understanding, which is only partial and very shallow, without sufficient referential grounding in the world. The aim is to highlight the conditions crucial to attributing natural language understanding to state-of-the-art LLMs, where it can be legitimately argued that LLMs not only use syntax but also semantics, their understanding not being simulated but duplicated; and determine how they ground the meanings of linguistic expressions.
Sample selection models represent a common methodology for correcting bias induced by data missing not at random. It is well known that these models are not empirically identifiable without exclusion restrictions. In other words, some variables predictive of missingness do not affect the outcome model of interest. The drive to establish this requirement often leads to the inclusion of irrelevant variables in the model. A recent proposal uses adaptive LASSO to circumvent this problem, but its performance depends on the so-called covariance assumption, which can be violated in small to moderate samples. Additionally, there are no tools yet for post-selection inference for this model. To address these challenges, we propose two families of spike-and-slab priors to conduct Bayesian variable selection in sample selection models. These prior structures allow for constructing a Gibbs sampler with tractable conditionals, which is scalable to the dimensions of practical interest. We illustrate the performance of the proposed methodology through a simulation study and present a comparison against adaptive LASSO and stepwise selection. We also provide two applications using publicly available real data. An implementation and code to reproduce the results in this paper can be found at //github.com/adam-iqbal/selection-spike-slab
We introduce VisoGender, a novel dataset for benchmarking gender bias in vision-language models. We focus on occupation-related biases within a hegemonic system of binary gender, inspired by Winograd and Winogender schemas, where each image is associated with a caption containing a pronoun relationship of subjects and objects in the scene. VisoGender is balanced by gender representation in professional roles, supporting bias evaluation in two ways: i) resolution bias, where we evaluate the difference between pronoun resolution accuracies for image subjects with gender presentations perceived as masculine versus feminine by human annotators and ii) retrieval bias, where we compare ratios of professionals perceived to have masculine and feminine gender presentations retrieved for a gender-neutral search query. We benchmark several state-of-the-art vision-language models and find that they demonstrate bias in resolving binary gender in complex scenes. While the direction and magnitude of gender bias depends on the task and the model being evaluated, captioning models are generally less biased than Vision-Language Encoders. Dataset and code are available at //github.com/oxai/visogender
This paper offers a comprehensive survey of Arabic datasets focused on online toxic language. We systematically gathered a total of 49 available datasets and their corresponding papers and conducted a thorough analysis, considering 16 criteria across three primary dimensions: content, annotation process, and reusability. This analysis enabled us to identify existing gaps and make recommendations for future research works.
Multilingual large language models have been increasingly popular for their proficiency in comprehending and generating text across various languages. Previous research has shown that the presence of stereotypes and biases in monolingual large language models can be attributed to the nature of their training data, which is collected from humans and reflects societal biases. Multilingual language models undergo the same training procedure as monolingual ones, albeit with training data sourced from various languages. This raises the question: do stereotypes present in one social context leak across languages within the model? In our work, we first define the term ``stereotype leakage'' and propose a framework for its measurement. With this framework, we investigate how stereotypical associations leak across four languages: English, Russian, Chinese, and Hindi. To quantify the stereotype leakage, we employ an approach from social psychology, measuring stereotypes via group-trait associations. We evaluate human stereotypes and stereotypical associations manifested in multilingual large language models such as mBERT, mT5, and ChatGPT. Our findings show a noticeable leakage of positive, negative, and non-polar associations across all languages. Notably, Hindi within multilingual models appears to be the most susceptible to influence from other languages, while Chinese is the least. Additionally, ChatGPT exhibits a better alignment with human scores than other models.
Recent developments in Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) have created a paradigm shift in multiple areas of society, and the use of these technologies is likely to become a defining feature of education in coming decades. GenAI offers transformative pedagogical opportunities, while simultaneously posing ethical and academic challenges. Against this backdrop, we outline a practical, simple, and sufficiently comprehensive tool to allow for the integration of GenAI tools into educational assessment: the AI Assessment Scale (AIAS). The AIAS empowers educators to select the appropriate level of GenAI usage in assessments based on the learning outcomes they seek to address. The AIAS offers greater clarity and transparency for students and educators, provides a fair and equitable policy tool for institutions to work with, and offers a nuanced approach which embraces the opportunities of GenAI while recognising that there are instances where such tools may not be pedagogically appropriate or necessary. By adopting a practical, flexible approach that can be implemented quickly, the AIAS can form a much-needed starting point to address the current uncertainty and anxiety regarding GenAI in education. As a secondary objective, we engage with the current literature and advocate for a refocused discourse on GenAI tools in education, one which foregrounds how technologies can help support and enhance teaching and learning, which contrasts with the current focus on GenAI as a facilitator of academic misconduct.
Background: The detection and extraction of causality from natural language sentences have shown great potential in various fields of application. The field of requirements engineering is eligible for multiple reasons: (1) requirements artifacts are primarily written in natural language, (2) causal sentences convey essential context about the subject of requirements, and (3) extracted and formalized causality relations are usable for a (semi-)automatic translation into further artifacts, such as test cases. Objective: We aim at understanding the value of interactive causality extraction based on syntactic criteria for the context of requirements engineering. Method: We developed a prototype of a system for automatic causality extraction and evaluate it by applying it to a set of publicly available requirements artifacts, determining whether the automatic extraction reduces the manual effort of requirements formalization. Result: During the evaluation we analyzed 4457 natural language sentences from 18 requirements documents, 558 of which were causal (12.52%). The best evaluation of a requirements document provided an automatic extraction of 48.57% cause-effect graphs on average, which demonstrates the feasibility of the approach. Limitation: The feasibility of the approach has been proven in theory but lacks exploration of being scaled up for practical use. Evaluating the applicability of the automatic causality extraction for a requirements engineer is left for future research. Conclusion: A syntactic approach for causality extraction is viable for the context of requirements engineering and can aid a pipeline towards an automatic generation of further artifacts from requirements artifacts.
In survival analysis, complex machine learning algorithms have been increasingly used for predictive modeling. Given a collection of features available for inclusion in a predictive model, it may be of interest to quantify the relative importance of a subset of features for the prediction task at hand. In particular, in HIV vaccine trials, participant baseline characteristics are used to predict the probability of infection over the intended follow-up period, and investigators may wish to understand how much certain types of predictors, such as behavioral factors, contribute toward overall predictiveness. Time-to-event outcomes such as time to infection are often subject to right censoring, and existing methods for assessing variable importance are typically not intended to be used in this setting. We describe a broad class of algorithm-agnostic variable importance measures for prediction in the context of survival data. We propose a nonparametric efficient estimation procedure that incorporates flexible learning of nuisance parameters, yields asymptotically valid inference, and enjoys double-robustness. We assess the performance of our proposed procedure via numerical simulations and analyze data from the HVTN 702 study to inform enrollment strategies for future HIV vaccine trials.
This work introduces UstanceBR, a multimodal corpus in the Brazilian Portuguese Twitter domain for target-based stance prediction. The corpus comprises 86.8 k labelled stances towards selected target topics, and extensive network information about the users who published these stances on social media. In this article we describe the corpus multimodal data, and a number of usage examples in both in-domain and zero-shot stance prediction based on text- and network-related information, which are intended to provide initial baseline results for future studies in the field.
We present a parallel algorithm for the fast Fourier transform (FFT) in higher dimensions. This algorithm generalizes the cyclic-to-cyclic one-dimensional parallel algorithm to a cyclic-to-cyclic multidimensional parallel algorithm while retaining the property of needing only a single all-to-all communication step. This is under the constraint that we use at most $\sqrt{N}$ processors for an FFT on an array with a total of $N$ elements, irrespective of the dimension $d$ or the shape of the array. The only assumption we make is that $N$ is sufficiently composite. Our algorithm starts and ends in the same data distribution. We present our multidimensional implementation FFTU which utilizes the sequential FFTW program for its local FFTs, and which can handle any dimension $d$. We obtain experimental results for $d\leq 5$ using MPI on up to 4096 cores of the supercomputer Snellius, comparing FFTU with the parallel FFTW program and with PFFT and heFFTe. These results show that FFTU is competitive with the state of the art and that it allows one to use a larger number of processors, while keeping communication limited to a single all-to-all operation. For arrays of size $1024^3$ and $64^5$, FFTU achieves a speedup of a factor 149 and 176, respectively, on 4096 processors.
Incorporating prior knowledge into pre-trained language models has proven to be effective for knowledge-driven NLP tasks, such as entity typing and relation extraction. Current pre-training procedures usually inject external knowledge into models by using knowledge masking, knowledge fusion and knowledge replacement. However, factual information contained in the input sentences have not been fully mined, and the external knowledge for injecting have not been strictly checked. As a result, the context information cannot be fully exploited and extra noise will be introduced or the amount of knowledge injected is limited. To address these issues, we propose MLRIP, which modifies the knowledge masking strategies proposed by ERNIE-Baidu, and introduce a two-stage entity replacement strategy. Extensive experiments with comprehensive analyses illustrate the superiority of MLRIP over BERT-based models in military knowledge-driven NLP tasks.