Various evaluation metrics exist for natural language generation tasks, but they have limited utility for story generation since they generally do not correlate well with human judgments and are not designed to evaluate fine-grained story aspects, such as fluency and relatedness. In this paper, we propose deltascore, an approach that utilizes perturbation to evaluate fine-grained story aspects. Our core idea is based on the hypothesis that the better the story performs in a specific aspect (e.g., fluency), the more it will be affected by a particular perturbation (e.g., introducing typos). To measure the impact, we calculate the likelihood difference between the pre- and post-perturbation stories using large pre-trained language models. We evaluate deltascore against state-of-the-art model-based and traditional similarity-based metrics across two story domains, and investigate its correlation with human judgments on five fine-grained story aspects: fluency, coherence, relatedness, logicality, and interestingness. The findings of our study indicate that the deltascore approach exhibits exceptional performance in evaluating intricate story aspects. An unexpected discovery was made in our experiment, where a single perturbation method was found to effectively capture a majority of these aspects.
Story generation and understanding -- as with all NLG/NLU tasks -- has seen a surge in neurosymbolic work. Researchers have recognized that, while large language models (LLMs) have tremendous utility, they can be augmented with symbolic means to be even better and to make up for any flaws that the neural networks might have. However, symbolic methods are extremely costly in terms of the amount of time and expertise needed to create them. In this work, we capitalize on state-of-the-art Code-LLMs, such as Codex, to bootstrap the use of symbolic methods for tracking the state of stories and aiding in story understanding. We show that our CoRRPUS system and abstracted prompting procedures can beat current state-of-the-art structured LLM techniques on pre-existing story understanding tasks (bAbI Task 2 and Re^3) with minimal hand engineering. We hope that this work can help highlight the importance of symbolic representations and specialized prompting for LLMs as these models require some guidance for performing reasoning tasks properly.
Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task, owing to the complexity of hyperparameter selection and the difficulty involved in evaluating the tuned models. To determine the optimal hyperparameters, an automatic, robust, and reliable evaluation benchmark is essential. However, establishing such a benchmark is not a trivial task due to the challenges associated with evaluation accuracy and privacy protection. In response to these challenges, we introduce a judge large language model, named PandaLM, which is trained to distinguish the superior model given several LLMs. PandaLM's focus extends beyond just the objective correctness of responses, which is the main focus of traditional evaluation datasets. It addresses vital subjective factors such as relative conciseness, clarity, adherence to instructions, comprehensiveness, and formality. To ensure the reliability of PandaLM, we collect a diverse human-annotated test dataset, where all contexts are generated by humans and labels are aligned with human preferences. Our results indicate that PandaLM-7B achieves 93.75% of GPT-3.5's evaluation ability and 88.28% of GPT-4's in terms of F1-score on our test dataset. PandaLM enables the evaluation of LLM to be fairer but with less cost, evidenced by significant improvements achieved by models tuned through PandaLM compared to their counterparts trained with default Alpaca's hyperparameters. In addition, PandaLM does not depend on API-based evaluations, thus avoiding potential data leakage. All resources of PandaLM are released at //github.com/WeOpenML/PandaLM.
Large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate text data for training and evaluating other models. However, creating high-quality datasets with LLMs can be challenging. In this work, we explore human-AI partnerships to facilitate high diversity and accuracy in LLM-based text data generation. We first examine two approaches to diversify text generation: 1) logit suppression, which minimizes the generation of languages that have already been frequently generated, and 2) temperature sampling, which flattens the token sampling probability. We found that diversification approaches can increase data diversity but often at the cost of data accuracy (i.e., text and labels being appropriate for the target domain). To address this issue, we examined two human interventions, 1) label replacement (LR), correcting misaligned labels, and 2) out-of-scope filtering (OOSF), removing instances that are out of the user's domain of interest or to which no considered label applies. With oracle studies, we found that LR increases the absolute accuracy of models trained with diversified datasets by 14.4%. Moreover, we found that some models trained with data generated with LR interventions outperformed LLM-based few-shot classification. In contrast, OOSF was not effective in increasing model accuracy, implying the need for future work in human-in-the-loop text data generation.
Decision support systems for classification tasks are predominantly designed to predict the value of the ground truth labels. However, since their predictions are not perfect, these systems also need to make human experts understand when and how to use these predictions to update their own predictions. Unfortunately, this has been proven challenging. In this context, it has been recently argued that an alternative type of decision support systems may circumvent this challenge. Rather than providing a single label prediction, these systems provide a set of label prediction values constructed using a conformal predictor, namely a prediction set, and forcefully ask experts to predict a label value from the prediction set. However, the design and evaluation of these systems have so far relied on stylized expert models, questioning their promise. In this paper, we revisit the design of this type of systems from the perspective of online learning and develop a methodology that does not require, nor assumes, an expert model. Our methodology leverages the nested structure of the prediction sets provided by any conformal predictor and a natural counterfactual monotonicity assumption on the experts' predictions over the prediction sets to achieve an exponential improvement in regret in comparison with vanilla bandit algorithms. We conduct a large-scale human subject study ($n = 2{,}751$) to verify our counterfactual monotonicity assumption and compare our methodology to several competitive baselines. The results suggest that decision support systems that limit experts' level of agency may be practical and may offer greater performance than those allowing experts to always exercise their own agency.
Self-supervised speech representations are known to encode both speaker and phonetic information, but how they are distributed in the high-dimensional space remains largely unexplored. We hypothesize that they are encoded in orthogonal subspaces, a property that lends itself to simple disentanglement. Applying principal component analysis to representations of two predictive coding models, we identify two subspaces that capture speaker and phonetic variances, and confirm that they are nearly orthogonal. Based on this property, we propose a new speaker normalization method which collapses the subspace that encodes speaker information, without requiring transcriptions. Probing experiments show that our method effectively eliminates speaker information and outperforms a previous baseline in phone discrimination tasks. Moreover, the approach generalizes and can be used to remove information of unseen speakers.
Previous work in phonetically-grounded language generation has mainly focused on domains such as lyrics and poetry. In this paper, we present work on the generation of tongue twisters - a form of language that is required to be phonetically conditioned to maximise sound overlap, whilst maintaining semantic consistency with an input topic, and still being grammatically correct. We present \textbf{TwistList}, a large annotated dataset of tongue twisters, consisting of 2.1K+ human-authored examples. We additionally present several benchmark systems (referred to as TwisterMisters) for the proposed task of tongue twister generation, including models that both do and do not require training on in-domain data. We present the results of automatic and human evaluation to demonstrate the performance of existing mainstream pre-trained models in this task with limited (or no) task specific training and data, and no explicit phonetic knowledge. We find that the task of tongue twister generation is challenging for models under these conditions, yet some models are still capable of generating acceptable examples of this language type.
Automatic assessment of reading fluency using automatic speech recognition (ASR) holds great potential for early detection of reading difficulties and subsequent timely intervention. Precise assessment tools are required, especially for languages other than English. In this study, we evaluate six state-of-the-art ASR-based systems for automatically assessing Dutch oral reading accuracy using Kaldi and Whisper. Results show our most successful system reached substantial agreement with human evaluations (MCC = .63). The same system reached the highest correlation between forced decoding confidence scores and word correctness (r = .45). This system's language model (LM) consisted of manual orthographic transcriptions and reading prompts of the test data, which shows that including reading errors in the LM improves assessment performance. We discuss the implications for developing automatic assessment systems and identify possible avenues of future research.
While existing work in robust deep learning has focused on small pixel-level $\ell_p$ norm-based perturbations, this may not account for perturbations encountered in several real world settings. In many such cases although test data might not be available, broad specifications about the types of perturbations (such as an unknown degree of rotation) may be known. We consider a setup where robustness is expected over an unseen test domain that is not i.i.d. but deviates from the training domain. While this deviation may not be exactly known, its broad characterization is specified a priori, in terms of attributes. We propose an adversarial training approach which learns to generate new samples so as to maximize exposure of the classifier to the attributes-space, without having access to the data from the test domain. Our adversarial training solves a min-max optimization problem, with the inner maximization generating adversarial perturbations, and the outer minimization finding model parameters by optimizing the loss on adversarial perturbations generated from the inner maximization. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach on three types of naturally occurring perturbations -- object-related shifts, geometric transformations, and common image corruptions. Our approach enables deep neural networks to be robust against a wide range of naturally occurring perturbations. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach by showing the robustness gains of deep neural networks trained using our adversarial training on MNIST, CIFAR-10, and a new variant of the CLEVR dataset.
Recent advances in maximizing mutual information (MI) between the source and target have demonstrated its effectiveness in text generation. However, previous works paid little attention to modeling the backward network of MI (i.e., dependency from the target to the source), which is crucial to the tightness of the variational information maximization lower bound. In this paper, we propose Adversarial Mutual Information (AMI): a text generation framework which is formed as a novel saddle point (min-max) optimization aiming to identify joint interactions between the source and target. Within this framework, the forward and backward networks are able to iteratively promote or demote each other's generated instances by comparing the real and synthetic data distributions. We also develop a latent noise sampling strategy that leverages random variations at the high-level semantic space to enhance the long term dependency in the generation process. Extensive experiments based on different text generation tasks demonstrate that the proposed AMI framework can significantly outperform several strong baselines, and we also show that AMI has potential to lead to a tighter lower bound of maximum mutual information for the variational information maximization problem.
User engagement is a critical metric for evaluating the quality of open-domain dialogue systems. Prior work has focused on conversation-level engagement by using heuristically constructed features such as the number of turns and the total time of the conversation. In this paper, we investigate the possibility and efficacy of estimating utterance-level engagement and define a novel metric, {\em predictive engagement}, for automatic evaluation of open-domain dialogue systems. Our experiments demonstrate that (1) human annotators have high agreement on assessing utterance-level engagement scores; (2) conversation-level engagement scores can be predicted from properly aggregated utterance-level engagement scores. Furthermore, we show that the utterance-level engagement scores can be learned from data. These scores can improve automatic evaluation metrics for open-domain dialogue systems, as shown by correlation with human judgements. This suggests that predictive engagement can be used as a real-time feedback for training better dialogue models.