Large language models (LLMs) make it easy to rewrite a text in any style – e.g. to make it more polite, persuasive, or more positive – but evaluation thereof is not straightforward. A challenge lies in measuring content preservation: that content not attributable to style change is retained. This paper presents a large meta-evaluation of metrics for evaluating style and attribute transfer, focusing on content preservation. We find that meta-evaluation studies on existing datasets lead to misleading conclusions about the suitability of metrics for content preservation. Widely used metrics show a high correlation with human judgments despite being deemed unsuitable for the task – because they do not abstract from style changes when evaluating content preservation. We show that the overly high correlations with human judgment stem from the nature of the test data. To address this issue, we introduce a new, challenging test set specifically designed for evaluating content preservation metrics for style transfer. We construct the data by creating high variation in the content preservation. Using this dataset, we demonstrate that suitable metrics for content preservation for style transfer indeed are style-aware.To support efficient evaluation, we propose a new style-aware method that utilises small language models, obtaining a higher alignment with human judgements than prompting a model of a similar size as an autorater.

We are exposed to much information trying to influence us, such as teaser messages, debates, politically framed news, and propaganda — all of which use persuasive language. With the recent interest in Large Language Models (LLMs), we study the ability of LLMs to produce persuasive text. As opposed to prior work which focuses on particular domains or types of persuasion, we conduct a general study across various domains to measure and benchmark to what degree LLMs produce persuasive language - both when explicitly instructed to rewrite text to be more or less persuasive and when only instructed to paraphrase. We construct the new dataset Persuasive-Pairs of pairs of a short text and its rewrite by an LLM to amplify or diminish persuasive language. We multi-annotate the pairs on a relative scale for persuasive language: a valuable resource in itself, and for training a regression model to score and benchmark persuasive language, including for new LLMs across domains. In our analysis, we find that different ‘personas’ in LLaMA3’s system prompt change persuasive language substantially, even when only instructed to paraphrase.

Textual domain is a crucial property within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community due to its effects on downstream model performance. The concept itself is, however, loosely defined and, in practice, refers to any non-typological property, such as genre, topic, medium or style of a document. We investigate the core notion of domains via human proficiency in identifying related intrinsic textual properties, specifically the concepts of genre (communicative purpose) and topic (subject matter). We publish our annotations in TGeGUM: A collection of 9.1k sentences from the GUM dataset (Zeldes, 2017) with single sentence and larger context (i.e., prose) annotations for one of 11 genres (source type), and its topic/subtopic as per the Dewey Decimal library classification system (Dewey, 1979), consisting of 10/100 hierarchical topics of increased granularity. Each instance is annotated by three annotators, for a total of 32.7k annotations, allowing us to examine the level of human disagreement and the relative difficulty of each annotation task. With a Fleiss’ kappa of at most 0.53 on the sentence level and 0.66 at the prose level, it is evident that despite the ubiquity of domains in NLP, there is little human consensus on how to define them. By training classifiers to perform the same task, we find that this uncertainty also extends to NLP models.

We present an open-source toolkit for Danish Natural Language Processing, enabling easy access to Danish NLP’s latest advancements. The toolkit features wrapper-functions for loading models and datasets in a unified way using third-party NLP frameworks. The toolkit is developed to enhance community building, understanding the need from industry and knowledge sharing. As an example of this, we present Angry Tweets: An Annotation Game to create awareness of Danish NLP and create a new sentiment-annotated dataset.

We present a named entity annotation for the Danish Universal Dependencies treebank using the CoNLL-2003 annotation scheme: DaNE. It is the largest publicly available, Danish named entity gold annotation. We evaluate the quality of our annotations intrinsically by double annotating the entire treebank and extrinsically by comparing our annotations to a recently released named entity annotation of the validation and test sections of the Danish Universal Dependencies treebank. We benchmark the new resource by training and evaluating competitive architectures for supervised named entity recognition (NER), including FLAIR, monolingual (Danish) BERT and multilingual BERT. We explore cross-lingual transfer in multilingual BERT from five related languages in zero-shot and direct transfer setups, and we show that even with our modestly-sized training set, we improve Danish NER over a recent cross-lingual approach, as well as over zero-shot transfer from five related languages. Using multilingual BERT, we achieve higher performance by fine-tuning on both DaNE and a larger Bokmål (Norwegian) training set compared to only using DaNE. However, the highest performance isachieved by using a Danish BERT fine-tuned on DaNE. Our dataset enables improvements and applicability for Danish NER beyond cross-lingual methods. We employ a thorough error analysis of the predictions of the best models for seen and unseen entities, as well as their robustness on un-capitalized text. The annotated dataset and all the trained models are made publicly available.