Related papers: Simpler becomes Harder: Do LLMs Exhibit a Coherent…

The occurrence of unknown words in texts significantly hinders reading comprehension. To improve accessibility for specific target populations, computational modelling has been applied to identify complex words in texts and substitute them…

Modern text simplification (TS) heavily relies on the availability of gold standard data to build machine learning models. However, existing studies show that parallel TS corpora contain inaccurate simplifications and incorrect alignments.…

Large language models (LLMs) perform very well in several natural language processing tasks but raise explainability challenges. In this paper, we examine the effect of random elements in the training of LLMs on the explainability of their…

Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse…

Fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) typically relies on large quantities of high-quality annotated data, or questions with well-defined ground truth answers in the case of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). While…

Text simplification is the process of splitting and rephrasing a sentence to a sequence of sentences making it easier to read and understand while preserving the content and approximating the original meaning. Text simplification has been…

To date, most work on text simplification has focused on sentence-level inputs. Early attempts at document simplification merely applied these approaches iteratively over the sentences of a document. However, this fails to coherently…

Lexical Simplification (LS) is the task of replacing complex for simpler words in a sentence whilst preserving the sentence's original meaning. LS is the lexical component of Text Simplification (TS) with the aim of making texts more…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have grown increasingly powerful, yet ensuring their decisions remain transparent and trustworthy requires self-consistency -- no contradictions in their internal reasoning. Our study reveals that even on simple…

The conformity effect describes the tendency of individuals to align their responses with the majority. Studying this bias in large language models (LLMs) is crucial, as LLMs are increasingly used in various information-seeking and…

Assessing learners in ill-defined domains, such as scenario-based human tutoring training, is an area of limited research. Equity training requires a nuanced understanding of context, but do contemporary large language models (LLMs) have a…

A prominent achievement of natural language processing (NLP) is its ability to understand and generate meaningful human language. This capability relies on complex feedforward transformer block architectures pre-trained on large language…

This paper investigates the effectiveness of pre-training for few-shot intent classification. While existing paradigms commonly further pre-train language models such as BERT on a vast amount of unlabeled corpus, we find it highly effective…

While Large Language Models (LLMs) produce highly nuanced text simplifications, developers currently lack tools for a holistic, efficient, and reproducible diagnosis of their behavior. This paper introduces the Simplification Profiler, a…

In this work, we explore whether modeling recurrence into the Transformer architecture can both be beneficial and efficient, by building an extremely simple recurrent module into the Transformer. We compare our model to baselines following…

In "Embers of Autoregression" (McCoy et al., 2023), we showed that several large language models (LLMs) have some important limitations that are attributable to their origins in next-word prediction. Here we investigate whether these issues…

We present BLESS, a comprehensive performance benchmark of the most recent state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on the task of text simplification (TS). We examine how well off-the-shelf LLMs can solve this challenging task,…

The increasing integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) into society necessitates robust defenses against vulnerabilities from jailbreaking and adversarial prompts. This project proposes a recursive framework for enhancing the resistance…

Language models (LMs) are pre-trained on raw text datasets to generate text sequences token-by-token. While this approach facilitates the learning of world knowledge and reasoning, it does not explicitly optimize for linguistic competence.…

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