Related papers: Random Text Perturbations Work, but not Always

Despite their exceptional capabilities, large language models (LLMs) are prone to generating unintended text due to false or outdated knowledge. Given the resource-intensive nature of retraining LLMs, there has been a notable increase in…

Data augmentation is an effective technique for improving the performance of machine learning models. However, it has not been explored as extensively in natural language processing (NLP) as it has in computer vision. In this paper, we…

The NLP community has long advocated for the construction of multi-annotator datasets to better capture the nuances of language interpretation, subjectivity, and ambiguity. This paper conducts a retrospective study to show how performance…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on a range of downstream NLP tasks by generating text that closely resembles human writing. However, the ease of achieving this similarity raises concerns from potential…

Scaling existing applications and solutions to multiple human languages has traditionally proven to be difficult, mainly due to the language-dependent nature of preprocessing and feature engineering techniques employed in traditional…

Longitudinal NLP tasks require reasoning over temporally ordered text to detect persistence and change in human behavior and opinions. However, in-context learning with large language models struggles on tasks where models must integrate…

One of the long-standing goals in optimisation and constraint programming is to describe a problem in natural language and automatically obtain an executable, efficient model. Large language models appear to bring this vision closer,…

While learning with limited labelled data can improve performance when the labels are lacking, it is also sensitive to the effects of uncontrolled randomness introduced by so-called randomness factors (e.g., varying order of data). We…

Human evaluation is indispensable and inevitable for assessing the quality of texts generated by machine learning models or written by humans. However, human evaluation is very difficult to reproduce and its quality is notoriously unstable,…

When applying machine learning to problems in NLP, there are many choices to make about how to represent input texts. These choices can have a big effect on performance, but they are often uninteresting to researchers or practitioners who…

Text classification is a very classic NLP task, but it has two prominent shortcomings: On the one hand, text classification is deeply domain-dependent. That is, a classifier trained on the corpus of one domain may not perform so well in…

Using large language models (LMs) for query or document expansion can improve generalization in information retrieval. However, it is unknown whether these techniques are universally beneficial or only effective in specific settings, such…

To be successful in real-world tasks, Reinforcement Learning (RL) needs to exploit the compositional, relational, and hierarchical structure of the world, and learn to transfer it to the task at hand. Recent advances in representation…

This paper investigates the robustness of NLP against perturbed word forms. While neural approaches can achieve (almost) human-like accuracy for certain tasks and conditions, they often are sensitive to small changes in the input such as…

Benchmarking outcomes increasingly govern trust, selection, and deployment of LLMs, yet these evaluations remain vulnerable to semantically equivalent adversarial perturbations. Prior work on adversarial robustness in NLP has emphasized…

Multitask learning has been applied successfully to a range of tasks, mostly morphosyntactic. However, little is known on when MTL works and whether there are data characteristics that help to determine its success. In this paper we…

Multilingual large language models are designed, claimed, and expected to cater to speakers of varied languages. We hypothesise that the current practices of fine-tuning and evaluating these models may not perfectly align with this…

Data augmentation techniques are widely used for enhancing the performance of machine learning models by tackling class imbalance issues and data sparsity. State-of-the-art generative language models have been shown to provide significant…

Accurately evaluating machine-translated text remains a long-standing challenge, particularly for long documents. Recent work has shown that large language models (LLMs) can serve as reliable and interpretable sentence-level translation…

Data annotated by humans is a source of knowledge by describing the peculiarities of the problem and therefore fueling the decision process of the trained model. Unfortunately, the annotation process for subjective natural language…