Shaz Furniturewala


2024

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“Thinking” Fair and Slow: On the Efficacy of Structured Prompts for Debiasing Language Models
Shaz Furniturewala | Surgan Jandial | Abhinav Java | Pragyan Banerjee | Simra Shahid | Sumit Bhatia | Kokil Jaidka
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Existing debiasing techniques are typically training-based or require access to the model’s internals and output distributions, so they are inaccessible to end-users looking to adapt LLM outputs for their particular needs. In this study, we examine whether structured prompting techniques can offer opportunities for fair text generation. We evaluate a comprehensive end-user-focused iterative framework of debiasing that applies System 2 thinking processes for prompts to induce logical, reflective, and critical text generation, with single, multi-step, instruction, and role-based variants. By systematically evaluating many LLMs across many datasets and different prompting strategies, we show that the more complex System 2-based Implicative Prompts significantly improve over other techniques demonstrating lower mean bias in the outputs with competitive performance on the downstream tasks. Our work offers research directions for the design and the potential of end-user-focused evaluative frameworks for LLM use.

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Beyond Text: Leveraging Multi-Task Learning and Cognitive Appraisal Theory for Post-Purchase Intention Analysis
Gerard Yeo | Shaz Furniturewala | Kokil Jaidka
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Supervised machine-learning models for predicting user behavior offer a challenging classification problem with lower average prediction performance scores than other text classification tasks. This study evaluates multi-task learning frameworks grounded in Cognitive Appraisal Theory to predict user behavior as a function of users’ self-expression and psychological attributes. Our experiments show that users’ language and traits improve predictions above and beyond models predicting only from text. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating psychological constructs into NLP to enhance the understanding and prediction of user actions. We close with a discussion of the implications for future applications of large language models for computational psychology.

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Impact of Decoding Methods on Human Alignment of Conversational LLMs
Shaz Furniturewala | Kokil Jaidka | Yashvardhan Sharma
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis

To be included into chatbot systems, Large language models (LLMs) must be aligned with human conversational conventions. However, being trained mainly on web-scraped data gives existing LLMs a voice closer to informational text than actual human speech. In this paper, we examine the effect of decoding methods on the alignment between LLM-generated and human conversations, including Beam Search, Top K Sampling, and Nucleus Sampling. We present new measures of alignment in substance, style, and psychometric orientation, and experiment with two conversation datasets. Our results provide subtle insights: better alignment is attributed to fewer beams in Beam Search and lower values of P in Nucleus Sampling. We also find that task-oriented and open-ended datasets perform differently in terms of alignment, indicating the significance of taking into account the context of the interaction.

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Empaths at WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Shared Task: Turn-Level Empathy Prediction Using Psychological Indicators
Shaz Furniturewala | Kokil Jaidka
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Subjectivity, Sentiment, & Social Media Analysis

For the WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Prediction Shared Task, we propose a novel turn-level empathy detection method that decomposes empathy into six psychological indicators: Emotional Language, Perspective-Taking, Sympathy and Compassion, Extroversion, Openness, and Agreeableness. A pipeline of text enrichment using a Large Language Model (LLM) followed by DeBERTA fine-tuning demonstrates a significant improvement in the Pearson Correlation Coefficient and F1 scores for empathy detection, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Our system officially ranked 7th at the CONV-turn track.

2023

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Steno AI at SemEval-2023 Task 6: Rhetorical Role Labelling of Legal Documents using Transformers and Graph Neural Networks
Anshika Gupta | Shaz Furniturewala | Vijay Kumari | Yashvardhan Sharma
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

A legal document is usually long and dense requiring human effort to parse it. It also contains significant amounts of jargon which make deriving insights from it using existing models a poor approach. This paper presents the approaches undertaken to perform the task of rhetorical role labelling on Indian Court Judgements. We experiment with graph based approaches like Graph Convolutional Networks and Label Propagation Algorithm, and transformer-based approaches including variants of BERT to improve accuracy scores on text classification of complex legal documents.

2022

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BITS Pilani at HinglishEval: Quality Evaluation for Code-Mixed Hinglish Text Using Transformers
Shaz Furniturewala | Vijay Kumari | Amulya Ratna Dash | Hriday Kedia | Yashvardhan Sharma
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Natural Language Generation: Generation Challenges

Code-Mixed text data consists of sentences having words or phrases from more than one language. Most multi-lingual communities worldwide communicate using multiple languages, with English usually one of them. Hinglish is a Code-Mixed text composed of Hindi and English but written in Roman script. This paper aims to determine the factors influencing the quality of Code-Mixed text data generated by the system. For the HinglishEval task, the proposed model uses multilingual BERT to find the similarity between synthetically generated and human-generated sentences to predict the quality of synthetically generated Hinglish sentences.