2025
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BlackboxNLP-2025 MIB Shared Task: Exploring Ensemble Strategies for Circuit Localization Methods
Philipp Mondorf
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Mingyang Wang
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Sebastian Gerstner
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Ahmad Dawar Hakimi
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Yihong Liu
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Leonor Veloso
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Shijia Zhou
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Hinrich Schuetze
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Barbara Plank
Proceedings of the 8th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP
The Circuit Localization track of the Mechanistic Interpretability Benchmark (MIB) evaluates methods for localizing circuits within large language models (LLMs), i.e., subnetworks responsible for specific task behaviors. In this work, we investigate whether ensembling two or more circuit localization methods can improve performance. We explore two variants: parallel and sequential ensembling. In parallel ensembling, we combine attribution scores assigned to each edge by different methods—e.g., by averaging or taking the minimum or maximum value. In the sequential ensemble, we use edge attribution scores obtained via EAP-IG as a warm start for a more expensive but more precise circuit identification method, namely edge pruning. We observe that both approaches yield notable gains on the benchmark metrics, leading to a more precise circuit identification approach. Finally, we find that taking a parallel ensemble over various methods, including the sequential ensemble, achieves the best results. We evaluate our approach in the BlackboxNLP 2025 MIB Shared Task, comparing ensemble scores to official baselines across multiple model–task combinations.
2024
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CLIMATELI: Evaluating Entity Linking on Climate Change Data
Shijia Zhou
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Siyao Peng
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Barbara Plank
Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Natural Language Processing Meets Climate Change (ClimateNLP 2024)
Climate Change (CC) is a pressing topic of global importance, attracting increasing attention across research fields, from social sciences to Natural Language Processing (NLP). CC is also discussed in various settings and communication platforms, from academic publications to social media forums. Understanding who and what is mentioned in such data is a first critical step to gaining new insights into CC. We present CLIMATELI (CLIMATe Entity LInking), the first manually annotated CC dataset that links 3,087 entity spans to Wikipedia. Using CLIMATELI (CLIMATe Entity LInking), we evaluate existing entity linking (EL) systems on the CC topic across various genres and propose automated filtering methods for CC entities. We find that the performance of EL models notably lags behind humans at both token and entity levels. Testing within the scope of retaining or excluding non-nominal and/or non-CC entities particularly impacts the models’ performances.
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Constructions Are So Difficult That Even Large Language Models Get Them Right for the Wrong Reasons
Shijia Zhou
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Leonie Weissweiler
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Taiqi He
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Hinrich Schütze
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David R. Mortensen
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Lori Levin
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
In this paper, we make a contribution that can be understood from two perspectives: from an NLP perspective, we introduce a small challenge dataset for NLI with large lexical overlap, which minimises the possibility of models discerning entailment solely based on token distinctions, and show that GPT-4 and Llama 2 fail it with strong bias. We then create further challenging sub-tasks in an effort to explain this failure. From a Computational Linguistics perspective, we identify a group of constructions with three classes of adjectives which cannot be distinguished by surface features. This enables us to probe for LLM’s understanding of these constructions in various ways, and we find that they fail in a variety of ways to distinguish between them, suggesting that they don’t adequately represent their meaning or capture the lexical properties of phrasal heads.
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LMU-BioNLP at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Large Diverse Ensembles for Robust Clinical NLI
Zihang Sun
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Danqi Yan
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Anyi Wang
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Tanalp Agustoslu
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Qi Feng
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Chengzhi Hu
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Longfei Zuo
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Shijia Zhou
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Hermine Kleiner
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Pingjun Hong
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
In this paper, we describe our submission for the NLI4CT 2024 shared task on robust Natural Language Inference over clinical trial reports. Our system is an ensemble of nine diverse models which we aggregate via majority voting. The models use a large spectrum of different approaches ranging from a straightforward Convolutional Neural Network over fine-tuned Large Language Models to few-shot-prompted language models using chain-of-thought reasoning.Surprisingly, we find that some individual ensemble members are not only more accurate than the final ensemble model but also more robust.
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MaiNLP at SemEval-2024 Task 1: Analyzing Source Language Selection in Cross-Lingual Textual Relatedness
Shijia Zhou
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Huangyan Shan
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Barbara Plank
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Robert Litschko
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)
This paper presents our system developed for the SemEval-2024 Task 1: Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR), on Track C: Cross-lingual. The task aims to detect semantic relatedness of two sentences from the same languages. For cross-lingual approach we developed a set of linguistics-inspired models trained with several task-specific strategies. We 1) utilize language vectors for selection of donor languages; 2) investigate the multi-source approach for training; 3) use transliteration of non-latin script to study impact of “script gap”; 4) opt machine translation for data augmentation. We additionally compare the performance of XLM-RoBERTa and Furina with the same training strategy. Our submission achieved the first place in the C8 (Kinyarwanda) test.