Negation is a common linguistic phenomenon. Yet language models face challenges with negation in many natural language understanding tasks such as question answering and natural language inference. In this paper, we experiment with seamless strategies that incorporate affirmative interpretations (i.e., paraphrases without negation) to make models more robust against negation. Crucially, our affirmative interpretations are obtained automatically. We show improvements with CondaQA, a large corpus requiring reasoning with negation, and five natural language understanding tasks.

Detecting machine-generated text is a critical task in the era of large language models. In this paper, we present our systems for SemEval-2024 Task 8, which focuses on multi-class classification to discern between human-written and maching-generated texts by five state-of-the-art large language models. We propose three different systems: unsupervised text similarity, triplet-loss-trained text similarity, and text classification. We show that the triplet-loss trained text similarity system outperforms the other systems, achieving 80% accuracy on the test set and surpassing the baseline model for this subtask. Additionally, our text classification system, which takes into account sentence paraphrases generated by the candidate models, also outperforms the unsupervised text similarity system, achieving 74% accuracy.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized Natural Language Generation (NLG), offering unmatched text generation capabilities. However, this progress introduces significant challenges, notably hallucinations—semantically incorrect yet fluent outputs. This phenomenon undermines content reliability, as traditional detection systems focus more on fluency than accuracy, posing a risk of misinformation spread.Our study addresses these issues by proposing a unified strategy for detecting hallucinations in neural model-generated text, focusing on the SHROOM task in SemEval 2024. We employ diverse methodologies to identify output divergence from the source content. We utilized Sentence Transformers to measure cosine similarity between source-hypothesis and source-target embeddings, experimented with omitting source content in the cosine similarity computations, and Leveragied LLMs’ In-Context Learning with detailed task prompts as our methodologies. The varying performance of our different approaches across the subtasks underscores the complexity of Natural Language Understanding tasks, highlighting the importance of addressing the nuances of semantic correctness in the era of advanced language models.

Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data, and demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). We show that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).