In the last decade, the United States has lost more than 500,000 people from an overdose involving prescription and illicit opioids making it a national public health emergency (USDHHS, 2017). Medical practitioners require robust and timely tools that can effectively identify at-risk patients. Community-based social media platforms such as Reddit allow self-disclosure for users to discuss otherwise sensitive drug-related behaviors. We present a moderate size corpus of 2500 opioid-related posts from various subreddits labeled with six different phases of opioid use: Medical Use, Misuse, Addiction, Recovery, Relapse, Not Using. For every post, we annotate span-level extractive explanations and crucially study their role both in annotation quality and model development. We evaluate several state-of-the-art models in a supervised, few-shot, or zero-shot setting. Experimental results and error analysis show that identifying the phases of opioid use disorder is highly contextual and challenging. However, we find that using explanations during modeling leads to a significant boost in classification accuracy demonstrating their beneficial role in a high-stakes domain such as studying the opioid use disorder continuum.

We present the outcomes of the Multimodal Figurative Language Shared Task held at the 4th Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2024) co-located at NAACL 2024. The task utilized the V-FLUTE dataset which is comprised of <image, text> pairs that use figurative language and includes detailed textual explanations for the entailment or contradiction relationship of each pair. The challenge for participants was to develop models capable of accurately identifying the visual entailment relationship in these multimodal instances and generating persuasive free-text explanations. The results showed that the participants’ models significantly outperformed the initial baselines in both automated and human evaluations. We also provide an overview of the systems submitted and analyze the results of the evaluations. All participating systems outperformed the LLaVA-ZS baseline, provided by us in F1-score.

Visual metaphors are powerful rhetorical devices used to persuade or communicate creative ideas through images. Similar to linguistic metaphors, they convey meaning implicitly through symbolism and juxtaposition of the symbols. We propose a new task of generating visual metaphors from linguistic metaphors. This is a challenging task for diffusion-based text-to-image models, such as DALL⋅E 2, since it requires the ability to model implicit meaning and compositionality. We propose to solve the task through the collaboration between Large Language Models (LLMs) and Diffusion Models: Instruct GPT-3 (davinci-002) with Chain-of-Thought prompting generates text that represents a visual elaboration of the linguistic metaphor containing the implicit meaning and relevant objects, which is then used as input to the diffusion-based text-to-image models. Using a human-AI collaboration framework, where humans interact both with the LLM and the top-performing diffusion model, we create a high-quality dataset containing 6,476 visual metaphors for 1,540 linguistic metaphors and their associated visual elaborations. Evaluation by professional illustrators shows the promise of LLM-Diffusion Model collaboration for this task.To evaluate the utility of our Human-AI collaboration framework and the quality of our dataset, we perform both an intrinsic human-based evaluation and an extrinsic evaluation using visual entailment as a downstream task.

Natural language instructions are a powerful interface for editing the outputs of text-to-image diffusion models. However, several challenges need to be addressed: 1) underspecification (the need to model the implicit meaning of instructions) 2) grounding (the need to localize where the edit has to be performed), 3) faithfulness (the need to preserve the elements of the image not affected by the edit instruction). Current approaches focusing on image editing with natural language instructions rely on automatically generated paired data, which, as shown in our investigation, is noisy and sometimes nonsensical, exacerbating the above issues. Building on recent advances in segmentation, Chain-of-Thought prompting, and visual question answering, we significantly improve the quality of the paired data. In addition, we enhance the supervision signal by highlighting parts of the image that need to be changed by the instruction. The model fine-tuned on the improved data is capable of performing fine-grained object-centric edits better than state-of-the-art baselines, mitigating the problems outlined above, as shown by automatic and human evaluations. Moreover, our model is capable of generalizing to domains unseen during training, such as visual metaphors.

Knowledge of norms is needed to understand and reason about acceptable behavior in human communication and interactions across sociocultural scenarios. Most computational research on norms has focused on a single culture, and manually built datasets, from non-conversational settings. We address these limitations by proposing a new framework, NormSage, to automatically extract culture-specific norms from multi-lingual conversations. NormSage uses GPT-3 prompting to 1) extract candidate norms directly from conversations and 2) provide explainable self-verification to ensure correctness and relevance. Comprehensive empirical results show the promise of our approach to extract high-quality culture-aware norms from multi-lingual conversations (English and Chinese), across several quality metrics. Further, our relevance verification can be extended to assess the adherence and violation of any norm with respect to a conversation on-the-fly, along with textual explanation. NormSage achieves an AUC of 94.6% in this grounding setup, with generated explanations matching human-written quality.

Large language models such as GPT-3, GPT4, Claude etc., have advanced the state of the art in several natural language generation tasks such as text summarization and machine translation. However when it comes to open-ended tasks with a focus on creativity such as generating stories, poetry, or various forms of figurative language, these state-of-the-art language models are often found to be inadequate. This tutorial aims to bring awareness of the important and emerging research area of open-domain creative generation, with a focus on language generation while also touching on multi-modal generation (e.g., image captioning, visual metaphors). It targets natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) researchers as well as creative writing practitioners who are interested in building systems that are capable of emulating as well as augmenting human creativity. In particular, we will review recent studies on creative language generation both at the sentence level as well as longer forms of text. We will provide the audiences with a holistic view of 1) the importance and challenges of building creative language generation systems; 2) how we incorporate content planning, domain knowledge and creativity specific heuristics for different forms of creative language generation such as story, poetry, humor, metaphors etc 3) how can we build better evaluation methods for creative text generation? In particular, how could the recent advancement of AI shape the future workforce for creativity? We will conclude the tutorial by outlining future research directions in this area.

We present the results of the Shared Task on Understanding Figurative Language that we conducted as a part of the 3rd Workshop on Figurative Language Processing (FigLang 2022) at EMNLP 2022. The shared task is based on the FLUTE dataset (Chakrabarty et al., 2022), which consists of NLI pairs containing figurative language along with free text explanations for each NLI instance. The task challenged participants to build models that are able to not only predict the right label for a figurative NLI instance, but also generate a convincing free-text explanation. The participants were able to significantly improve upon provided baselines in both automatic and human evaluation settings. We further summarize the submitted systems and discuss the evaluation results.

Figurative language is ubiquitous in English. Yet, the vast majority of NLP research focuses on literal language. Existing text representations by design rely on compositionality, while figurative language is often non- compositional. In this paper, we study the interpretation of two non-compositional figurative languages (idioms and similes). We collected datasets of fictional narratives containing a figurative expression along with crowd-sourced plausible and implausible continuations relying on the correct interpretation of the expression. We then trained models to choose or generate the plausible continuation. Our experiments show that models based solely on pre-trained language models perform substantially worse than humans on these tasks. We additionally propose knowledge-enhanced models, adopting human strategies for interpreting figurative language types: inferring meaning from the context and relying on the constituent words’ literal meanings. The knowledge-enhanced models improve the performance on both the discriminative and generative tasks, further bridging the gap from human performance.

Recent work on question generation has largely focused on factoid questions such as who, what,where, when about basic facts. Generating open-ended why, how, what, etc. questions thatrequire long-form answers have proven more difficult. To facilitate the generation of openended questions, we propose CONSISTENT, a new end-to-end system for generating openended questions that are answerable from and faithful to the input text. Using news articles asa trustworthy foundation for experimentation, we demonstrate our model’s strength over several baselines using both automatic and human based evaluations. We contribute an evaluationdataset of expert-generated open-ended questions. We discuss potential downstream applications for news media organizations.

Recent work on large language models relies on the intuition that most natural language processing tasks can be described via natural language instructions and that models trained on these instructions show strong zero-shot performance on several standard datasets. However, these models even though impressive still perform poorly on a wide range of tasks outside of their respective training and evaluation sets.To address this limitation, we argue that a model should be able to keep extending its knowledge and abilities, without forgetting previous skills. In spite of the limited success of Continual Learning, we show that Fine-tuned Language Models can be continual learners.We empirically investigate the reason for this success and conclude that Continual Learning emerges from self-supervision pre-training. Our resulting model Continual-T0 (CT0) is able to learn 8 new diverse language generation tasks, while still maintaining good performance on previous tasks, spanning in total of 70 datasets. Finally, we show that CT0 is able to combine instructions in ways it was never trained for, demonstrating some level of instruction compositionality.

Recent work in training large language models (LLMs) to follow natural language instructions has opened up exciting opportunities for natural language interface design. Building on the prior success of large language models in the realm of computer assisted creativity, in this work, we present CoPoet, a collaborative poetry writing system, with the goal of to study if LLM’s actually improve the quality of the generated content. In contrast to auto-completing a user’s text, CoPoet is controlled by user instructions that specify the attributes of the desired text, such as Write a sentence about ‘love’ or Write a sentence ending in ‘fly’. The core component of our system is a language model fine-tuned on a diverse collection of instructions for poetry writing. Our model is not only competitive to publicly available LLMs trained on instructions (InstructGPT), but also capable of satisfying unseen compositional instructions. A study with 15 qualified crowdworkers shows that users successfully write poems with CoPoet on diverse topics ranging from Monarchy to Climate change, which are preferred by third-party evaluators over poems written without the system.

Figurative language understanding has been recently framed as a recognizing textual entailment (RTE) task (a.k.a. natural language inference (NLI)). However, similar to classical RTE/NLI datasets they suffer from spurious correlations and annotation artifacts. To tackle this problem, work on NLI has built explanation-based datasets such as eSNLI, allowing us to probe whether language models are right for the right reasons. Yet no such data exists for figurative language, making it harder to assess genuine understanding of such expressions. To address this issue, we release FLUTE, a dataset of 9,000 figurative NLI instances with explanations, spanning four categories: Sarcasm, Simile, Metaphor, and Idioms. We collect the data through a Human-AI collaboration framework based on GPT-3, crowd workers, and expert annotators. We show how utilizing GPT-3 in conjunction with human annotators (novices and experts) can aid in scaling up the creation of datasets even for such complex linguistic phenomena as figurative language. The baseline performance of the T5 model fine-tuned on FLUTE shows that our dataset can bring us a step closer to developing models that understand figurative language through textual explanations.

Fallacies are used as seemingly valid arguments to support a position and persuade the audience about its validity. Recognizing fallacies is an intrinsically difficult task both for humans and machines. Moreover, a big challenge for computational models lies in the fact that fallacies are formulated differently across the datasets with differences in the input format (e.g., question-answer pair, sentence with fallacy fragment), genre (e.g., social media, dialogue, news), as well as types and number of fallacies (from 5 to 18 types per dataset). To move towards solving the fallacy recognition task, we approach these differences across datasets as multiple tasks and show how instruction-based prompting in a multitask setup based on the T5 model improves the results against approaches built for a specific dataset such as T5, BERT or GPT-3. We show the ability of this multitask prompting approach to recognize 28 unique fallacies across domains and genres and study the effect of model size and prompt choice by analyzing the per-class (i.e., fallacy type) results. Finally, we analyze the effect of annotation quality on model performance, and the feasibility of complementing this approach with external knowledge.

Generating metaphors is a challenging task as it requires a proper understanding of abstract concepts, making connections between unrelated concepts, and deviating from the literal meaning. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. Based on a theoretically-grounded connection between metaphors and symbols, we propose a method to automatically construct a parallel corpus by transforming a large number of metaphorical sentences from the Gutenberg Poetry corpus (CITATION) to their literal counterpart using recent advances in masked language modeling coupled with commonsense inference. For the generation task, we incorporate a metaphor discriminator to guide the decoding of a sequence to sequence model fine-tuned on our parallel data to generate high-quality metaphors. Human evaluation on an independent test set of literal statements shows that our best model generates metaphors better than three well-crafted baselines 66% of the time on average. A task-based evaluation shows that human-written poems enhanced with metaphors proposed by our model are preferred 68% of the time compared to poems without metaphors.

Framing involves the positive or negative presentation of an argument or issue depending on the audience and goal of the speaker. Differences in lexical framing, the focus of our work, can have large effects on peoples’ opinions and beliefs. To make progress towards reframing arguments for positive effects, we create a dataset and method for this task. We use a lexical resource for “connotations” to create a parallel corpus and propose a method for argument reframing that combines controllable text generation (positive connotation) with a post-decoding entailment component (same denotation). Our results show that our method is effective compared to strong baselines along the dimensions of fluency, meaning, and trustworthiness/reduction of fear.

Having engaging and informative conversations with users is the utmost goal for open-domain conversational systems. Recent advances in transformer-based language models and their applications to dialogue systems have succeeded to generate fluent and human-like responses. However, they still lack control over the generation process towards producing contentful responses and achieving engaging conversations. To achieve this goal, we present DiSCoL (Dialogue Systems through Coversational Line guided response generation). DiSCoL is an open-domain dialogue system that leverages conversational lines (briefly convlines) as controllable and informative content-planning elements to guide the generation model produce engaging and informative responses. Two primary modules in DiSCoL’s pipeline are conditional generators trained for 1) predicting relevant and informative convlines for dialogue contexts and 2) generating high-quality responses conditioned on the predicted convlines. Users can also change the returned convlines to control the direction of the conversations towards topics that are more interesting for them. Through automatic and human evaluations, we demonstrate the efficiency of the convlines in producing engaging conversations.

Enthymemes are defined as arguments where a premise or conclusion is left implicit. We tackle the task of generating the implicit premise in an enthymeme, which requires not only an understanding of the stated conclusion and premise but also additional inferences that could depend on commonsense knowledge. The largest available dataset for enthymemes (Habernal et al., 2018) consists of 1.7k samples, which is not large enough to train a neural text generation model. To address this issue, we take advantage of a similar task and dataset: Abductive reasoning in narrative text (Bhagavatula et al., 2020). However, we show that simply using a state-of-the-art seq2seq model fine-tuned on this data might not generate meaningful implicit premises associated with the given enthymemes. We demonstrate that encoding discourse-aware commonsense during fine-tuning improves the quality of the generated implicit premises and outperforms all other baselines both in automatic and human evaluations on three different datasets.

Despite constant improvements in machine translation quality, automatic poetry translation remains a challenging problem due to the lack of open-sourced parallel poetic corpora, and to the intrinsic complexities involved in preserving the semantics, style and figurative nature of poetry. We present an empirical investigation for poetry translation along several dimensions: 1) size and style of training data (poetic vs. non-poetic), including a zero-shot setup; 2) bilingual vs. multilingual learning; and 3) language-family-specific models vs. mixed-language-family models. To accomplish this, we contribute a parallel dataset of poetry translations for several language pairs. Our results show that multilingual fine-tuning on poetic text significantly outperforms multilingual fine-tuning on non-poetic text that is 35X larger in size, both in terms of automatic metrics (BLEU, BERTScore, COMET) and human evaluation metrics such as faithfulness (meaning and poetic style). Moreover, multilingual fine-tuning on poetic data outperforms bilingual fine-tuning on poetic data.

Discrepancies exist among different cultures or languages. A lack of mutual understanding among different colingual groups about the perspectives on specific values or events may lead to uninformed decisions or biased opinions. Thus, automatically understanding the group perspectives can provide essential back-ground for many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we study colingual groups and use language corpora as a proxy to identify their distributional perspectives. We present a novel computational approach to learn shared understandings, and benchmark our method by building culturally-aware models for the English, Chinese, and Japanese languages. Ona held out set of diverse topics, including marriage, corruption, democracy, etc., our model achieves high correlation with human judgements regarding intra-group values and inter-group differences

We introduce a FEVER-like dataset COVID-Fact of 4,086 claims concerning the COVID-19 pandemic. The dataset contains claims, evidence for the claims, and contradictory claims refuted by the evidence. Unlike previous approaches, we automatically detect true claims and their source articles and then generate counter-claims using automatic methods rather than employing human annotators. Along with our constructed resource, we formally present the task of identifying relevant evidence for the claims and verifying whether the evidence refutes or supports a given claim. In addition to scientific claims, our data contains simplified general claims from media sources, making it better suited for detecting general misinformation regarding COVID-19. Our experiments indicate that COVID-Fact will provide a challenging testbed for the development of new systems and our approach will reduce the costs of building domain-specific datasets for detecting misinformation.

Generating metaphors is a difficult task as it requires understanding nuanced relationships between abstract concepts. In this paper, we aim to generate a metaphoric sentence given a literal expression by replacing relevant verbs. Guided by conceptual metaphor theory, we propose to control the generation process by encoding conceptual mappings between cognitive domains to generate meaningful metaphoric expressions. To achieve this, we develop two methods: 1) using FrameNet-based embeddings to learn mappings between domains and applying them at the lexical level (CM-Lex), and 2) deriving source/target pairs to train a controlled seq-to-seq generation model (CM-BART). We assess our methods through automatic and human evaluation for basic metaphoricity and conceptual metaphor presence. We show that the unsupervised CM-Lex model is competitive with recent deep learning metaphor generation systems, and CM-BART outperforms all other models both in automatic and human evaluations.

We propose an unsupervised approach for sarcasm generation based on a non-sarcastic input sentence. Our method employs a retrieve-and-edit framework to instantiate two major characteristics of sarcasm: reversal of valence and semantic incongruity with the context, which could include shared commonsense or world knowledge between the speaker and the listener. While prior works on sarcasm generation predominantly focus on context incongruity, we show that combining valence reversal and semantic incongruity based on the commonsense knowledge generates sarcasm of higher quality. Human evaluation shows that our system generates sarcasm better than humans 34% of the time, and better than a reinforced hybrid baseline 90% of the time.

The increased focus on misinformation has spurred development of data and systems for detecting the veracity of a claim as well as retrieving authoritative evidence. The Fact Extraction and VERification (FEVER) dataset provides such a resource for evaluating endto- end fact-checking, requiring retrieval of evidence from Wikipedia to validate a veracity prediction. We show that current systems for FEVER are vulnerable to three categories of realistic challenges for fact-checking – multiple propositions, temporal reasoning, and ambiguity and lexical variation – and introduce a resource with these types of claims. Then we present a system designed to be resilient to these “attacks” using multiple pointer networks for document selection and jointly modeling a sequence of evidence sentences and veracity relation predictions. We find that in handling these attacks we obtain state-of-the-art results on FEVER, largely due to improved evidence retrieval.

Long-form narrative text generated from large language models manages a fluent impersonation of human writing, but only at the local sentence level, and lacks structure or global cohesion. We posit that many of the problems of story generation can be addressed via high-quality content planning, and present a system that focuses on how to learn good plot structures to guide story generation. We utilize a plot-generation language model along with an ensemble of rescoring models that each implement an aspect of good story-writing as detailed in Aristotle’s Poetics. We find that stories written with our more principled plot-structure are both more relevant to a given prompt and higher quality than baselines that do not content plan, or that plan in an unprincipled way.

Literary tropes, from poetry to stories, are at the crux of human imagination and communication. Figurative language such as a simile go beyond plain expressions to give readers new insights and inspirations. In this paper, we tackle the problem of simile generation. Generating a simile requires proper understanding for effective mapping of properties between two concepts. To this end, we first propose a method to automatically construct a parallel corpus by transforming a large number of similes collected from Reddit to their literal counterpart using structured common sense knowledge. We then propose to fine-tune a pre-trained sequence to sequence model, BART (Lewis et al 2019), on the literal-simile pairs to gain generalizability, so that we can generate novel similes given a literal sentence. Experiments show that our approach generates 88% novel similes that do not share properties with the training data. Human evaluation on an independent set of literal statements shows that our model generates similes better than two literary experts 37% of the time when compared pairwise. We also show how replacing literal sentences with similes from our best model in machine-generated stories improves evocativeness and leads to better acceptance by human judges.

The goal of any social media platform is to facilitate healthy and meaningful interactions among its users. But more often than not, it has been found that it becomes an avenue for wanton attacks. We propose an experimental study that has three aims: 1) to provide us with a deeper understanding of current data sets that focus on different types of abusive language, which are sometimes overlapping (racism, sexism, hate speech, offensive language, and personal attacks); 2) to investigate what type of attention mechanism (contextual vs. self-attention) is better for abusive language detection using deep learning architectures; and 3) to investigate whether stacked architectures provide an advantage over simple architectures for this task.

Word pairs across argument spans have been shown to be effective for predicting the discourse relation between them. We propose an approach to distill knowledge from word pairs for discourse relation classification with convolutional neural networks by incorporating joint learning of implicit and explicit relations. Our novel approach of representing the input as word pairs achieves state-of-the-art results on four-way classification of both implicit and explicit relations as well as one of the binary classification tasks. For explicit relation prediction, we achieve around 20% error reduction on the four-way task. At the same time, compared to a two-layered Bi-LSTM-CRF model, our model is able to achieve these results with half the number of learnable parameters and approximately half the amount of training time.

Argumentation is a type of discourse where speakers try to persuade their audience about the reasonableness of a claim by presenting supportive arguments. Most work in argument mining has focused on modeling arguments in monologues. We propose a computational model for argument mining in online persuasive discussion forums that brings together the micro-level (argument as product) and macro-level (argument as process) models of argumentation. Fundamentally, this approach relies on identifying relations between components of arguments in a discussion thread. Our approach for relation prediction uses contextual information in terms of fine-tuning a pre-trained language model and leveraging discourse relations based on Rhetorical Structure Theory. We additionally propose a candidate selection method to automatically predict what parts of one’s argument will be targeted by other participants in the discussion. Our models obtain significant improvements compared to recent state-of-the-art approaches using pointer networks and a pre-trained language model.

Claims are the central component of an argument. Detecting claims across different domains or data sets can often be challenging due to their varying conceptualization. We propose to alleviate this problem by fine-tuning a language model using a Reddit corpus of 5.5 million opinionated claims. These claims are self-labeled by their authors using the internet acronyms IMO/IMHO (in my (humble) opinion). Empirical results show that using this approach improves the state of art performance across four benchmark argumentation data sets by an average of 4 absolute F1 points in claim detection. As these data sets include diverse domains such as social media and student essays this improvement demonstrates the robustness of fine-tuning on this novel corpus.

Community Question Answering forums are very popular nowadays, as they represent effective means for communities to share information around particular topics. But the information shared on these forums are often not authentic. This paper presents the ColumbiaNLP submission for the SemEval-2019 Task 8: Fact-Checking in Community Question Answering Forums. We show how fine-tuning a language model on a large unannotated corpus of old threads from Qatar Living forum helps us to classify question types (factual, opinion, socializing) and to judge the factuality of answers on the shared task labeled data from the same forum. Our system finished 4th and 2nd on Subtask A (question type classification) and B (answer factuality prediction), respectively, based on the official metric of accuracy.

This paper presents the ColumbiaNLP submission for the FEVER Workshop Shared Task. Our system is an end-to-end pipeline that extracts factual evidence from Wikipedia and infers a decision about the truthfulness of the claim based on the extracted evidence. Our pipeline achieves significant improvement over the baseline for all the components (Document Retrieval, Sentence Selection and Textual Entailment) both on the development set and the test set. Our team finished 6th out of 24 teams on the leader-board based on the preliminary results with a FEVER score of 49.06 on the blind test set compared to 27.45 of the baseline system.