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Masahiro Kaneko

Publications and source records attributed to Masahiro Kaneko.

At least 55 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

Eagle: Ethical Dataset Given from Real Interactions

Recent studies have demonstrated that large language models (LLMs) have ethical-related problems such as social biases, lack of moral reasoning, and generation of offensive content. The existing evaluation metrics and methods to address these ethical challenges use datasets intentionally created by instructing humans to create instances including ethical problems. Therefore, the data does not reflect prompts that users actually provide when utilizing LLM services in everyday contexts. This may not lead to the development of safe LLMs that can address ethical challenges arising in real-world applications. In this paper, we create Eagle datasets extracted from real interactions between ChatGPT and users that exhibit social biases, toxicity, and immoral problems. Our experiments show that Eagle captures complementary aspects, not covered by existing datasets proposed for evaluation and mitigation of such ethical challenges. Our code is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/MasahiroKaneko/eagle.

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In-Contextual Gender Bias Suppression for Large Language Models

Despite their impressive performance in a wide range of NLP tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been reported to encode worrying-levels of gender biases. Prior work has proposed debiasing methods that require human labelled examples, data augmentation and fine-tuning of LLMs, which are computationally costly. Moreover, one might not even have access to the model parameters for performing debiasing such as in the case of closed LLMs such as GPT-4. To address this challenge, we propose bias suppression that prevents biased generations of LLMs by simply providing textual preambles constructed from manually designed templates and real-world statistics, without accessing to model parameters. We show that, using CrowsPairs dataset, our textual preambles covering counterfactual statements can suppress gender biases in English LLMs such as LLaMA2. Moreover, we find that gender-neutral descriptions of gender-biased objects can also suppress their gender biases. Moreover, we show that bias suppression has acceptable adverse effect on downstream task performance with HellaSwag and COPA.

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OUTFOX: LLM-Generated Essay Detection Through In-Context Learning with Adversarially Generated Examples

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved human-level fluency in text generation, making it difficult to distinguish between human-written and LLM-generated texts. This poses a growing risk of misuse of LLMs and demands the development of detectors to identify LLM-generated texts. However, existing detectors lack robustness against attacks: they degrade detection accuracy by simply paraphrasing LLM-generated texts. Furthermore, a malicious user might attempt to deliberately evade the detectors based on detection results, but this has not been assumed in previous studies. In this paper, we propose OUTFOX, a framework that improves the robustness of LLM-generated-text detectors by allowing both the detector and the attacker to consider each other's output. In this framework, the attacker uses the detector's prediction labels as examples for in-context learning and adversarially generates essays that are harder to detect, while the detector uses the adversarially generated essays as examples for in-context learning to learn to detect essays from a strong attacker. Experiments in the domain of student essays show that the proposed detector improves the detection performance on the attacker-generated texts by up to +41.3 points F1-score. Furthermore, the proposed detector shows a state-of-the-art detection performance: up to 96.9 points F1-score, beating existing detectors on non-attacked texts. Finally, the proposed attacker drastically degrades the performance of detectors by up to -57.0 points F1-score, massively outperforming the baseline paraphrasing method for evading detection.

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Solving NLP Problems through Human-System Collaboration: A Discussion-based Approach

Humans work together to solve common problems by having discussions, explaining, and agreeing or disagreeing with each other. Similarly, if a system can have discussions with humans when solving tasks, it can improve the system's performance and reliability. In previous research on explainability, it has only been possible for the system to make predictions and for humans to ask questions about them rather than having a mutual exchange of opinions. This research aims to create a dataset and computational framework for systems that discuss and refine their predictions through dialogue. Through experiments, we show that the proposed system can have beneficial discussions with humans improving the accuracy by up to 25 points in the natural language inference task.

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Evaluating Gender Bias in Large Language Models via Chain-of-Thought Prompting

There exist both scalable tasks, like reading comprehension and fact-checking, where model performance improves with model size, and unscalable tasks, like arithmetic reasoning and symbolic reasoning, where model performance does not necessarily improve with model size. Large language models (LLMs) equipped with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting are able to make accurate incremental predictions even on unscalable tasks. Unfortunately, despite their exceptional reasoning abilities, LLMs tend to internalize and reproduce discriminatory societal biases. Whether CoT can provide discriminatory or egalitarian rationalizations for the implicit information in unscalable tasks remains an open question. In this study, we examine the impact of LLMs' step-by-step predictions on gender bias in unscalable tasks. For this purpose, we construct a benchmark for an unscalable task where the LLM is given a list of words comprising feminine, masculine, and gendered occupational words, and is required to count the number of feminine and masculine words. In our CoT prompts, we require the LLM to explicitly indicate whether each word in the word list is a feminine or masculine before making the final predictions. With counting and handling the meaning of words, this benchmark has characteristics of both arithmetic reasoning and symbolic reasoning. Experimental results in English show that without step-by-step prediction, most LLMs make socially biased predictions, despite the task being as simple as counting words. Interestingly, CoT prompting reduces this unconscious social bias in LLMs and encourages fair predictions.

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The Gaps between Pre-train and Downstream Settings in Bias Evaluation and Debiasing

The output tendencies of Pre-trained Language Models (PLM) vary markedly before and after Fine-Tuning (FT) due to the updates to the model parameters. These divergences in output tendencies result in a gap in the social biases of PLMs. For example, there exits a low correlation between intrinsic bias scores of a PLM and its extrinsic bias scores under FT-based debiasing methods. Additionally, applying FT-based debiasing methods to a PLM leads to a decline in performance in downstream tasks. On the other hand, PLMs trained on large datasets can learn without parameter updates via In-Context Learning (ICL) using prompts. ICL induces smaller changes to PLMs compared to FT-based debiasing methods. Therefore, we hypothesize that the gap observed in pre-trained and FT models does not hold true for debiasing methods that use ICL. In this study, we demonstrate that ICL-based debiasing methods show a higher correlation between intrinsic and extrinsic bias scores compared to FT-based methods. Moreover, the performance degradation due to debiasing is also lower in the ICL case compared to that in the FT case.

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Reducing Sequence Length by Predicting Edit Operations with Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various tasks and gained significant attention. LLMs are also used for local sequence transduction tasks, including grammatical error correction (GEC) and formality style transfer, where most tokens in a source text are kept unchanged. However, the models that generate all target tokens in such tasks have a tendency to simply copy the input text as is, without making needed changes, because the difference between input and output texts is minimal in the training data. This is also inefficient because the computational cost grows quadratically with the target sequence length with Transformer. This paper proposes predicting edit spans for the source text for local sequence transduction tasks. Representing an edit span with a position of the source text and corrected tokens, we can reduce the length of the target sequence and the computational cost for inference. We apply instruction tuning for LLMs on the supervision data of edit spans. Experiments show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance to the baseline in four tasks, paraphrasing, formality style transfer, GEC, and text simplification, despite reducing the length of the target text by as small as 21%. Furthermore, we report that the task-specific fine-tuning with the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art performance in the four tasks.

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Controlled Generation with Prompt Insertion for Natural Language Explanations in Grammatical Error Correction

In Grammatical Error Correction (GEC), it is crucial to ensure the user's comprehension of a reason for correction. Existing studies present tokens, examples, and hints as to the basis for correction but do not directly explain the reasons for corrections. Although methods that use Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide direct explanations in natural language have been proposed for various tasks, no such method exists for GEC. Generating explanations for GEC corrections involves aligning input and output tokens, identifying correction points, and presenting corresponding explanations consistently. However, it is not straightforward to specify a complex format to generate explanations, because explicit control of generation is difficult with prompts. This study introduces a method called controlled generation with Prompt Insertion (PI) so that LLMs can explain the reasons for corrections in natural language. In PI, LLMs first correct the input text, and then we automatically extract the correction points based on the rules. The extracted correction points are sequentially inserted into the LLM's explanation output as prompts, guiding the LLMs to generate explanations for the correction points. We also create an Explainable GEC (XGEC) dataset of correction reasons by annotating NUCLE, CoNLL2013, and CoNLL2014. Although generations from GPT-3 and ChatGPT using original prompts miss some correction points, the generation control using PI can explicitly guide to describe explanations for all correction points, contributing to improved performance in generating correction reasons.

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The Impact of Debiasing on the Performance of Language Models in Downstream Tasks is Underestimated

Pre-trained language models trained on large-scale data have learned serious levels of social biases. Consequently, various methods have been proposed to debias pre-trained models. Debiasing methods need to mitigate only discriminatory bias information from the pre-trained models, while retaining information that is useful for the downstream tasks. In previous research, whether useful information is retained has been confirmed by the performance of downstream tasks in debiased pre-trained models. On the other hand, it is not clear whether these benchmarks consist of data pertaining to social biases and are appropriate for investigating the impact of debiasing. For example in gender-related social biases, data containing female words (e.g. ``she, female, woman''), male words (e.g. ``he, male, man''), and stereotypical words (e.g. ``nurse, doctor, professor'') are considered to be the most affected by debiasing. If there is not much data containing these words in a benchmark dataset for a target task, there is the possibility of erroneously evaluating the effects of debiasing. In this study, we compare the impact of debiasing on performance across multiple downstream tasks using a wide-range of benchmark datasets that containing female, male, and stereotypical words. Experiments show that the effects of debiasing are consistently \emph{underestimated} across all tasks. Moreover, the effects of debiasing could be reliably evaluated by separately considering instances containing female, male, and stereotypical words than all of the instances in a benchmark dataset.

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Exploring Effectiveness of GPT-3 in Grammatical Error Correction: A Study on Performance and Controllability in Prompt-Based Methods

Large-scale pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have shown remarkable performance across various natural language processing tasks. However, applying prompt-based methods with GPT-3 for Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) tasks and their controllability remains underexplored. Controllability in GEC is crucial for real-world applications, particularly in educational settings, where the ability to tailor feedback according to learner levels and specific error types can significantly enhance the learning process. This paper investigates the performance and controllability of prompt-based methods with GPT-3 for GEC tasks using zero-shot and few-shot setting. We explore the impact of task instructions and examples on GPT-3's output, focusing on controlling aspects such as minimal edits, fluency edits, and learner levels. Our findings demonstrate that GPT-3 could effectively perform GEC tasks, outperforming existing supervised and unsupervised approaches. We also showed that GPT-3 could achieve controllability when appropriate task instructions and examples are given.

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Comparing Intrinsic Gender Bias Evaluation Measures without using Human Annotated Examples

Numerous types of social biases have been identified in pre-trained language models (PLMs), and various intrinsic bias evaluation measures have been proposed for quantifying those social biases. Prior works have relied on human annotated examples to compare existing intrinsic bias evaluation measures. However, this approach is not easily adaptable to different languages nor amenable to large scale evaluations due to the costs and difficulties when recruiting human annotators. To overcome this limitation, we propose a method to compare intrinsic gender bias evaluation measures without relying on human-annotated examples. Specifically, we create multiple bias-controlled versions of PLMs using varying amounts of male vs. female gendered sentences, mined automatically from an unannotated corpus using gender-related word lists. Next, each bias-controlled PLM is evaluated using an intrinsic bias evaluation measure, and the rank correlation between the computed bias scores and the gender proportions used to fine-tune the PLMs is computed. Experiments on multiple corpora and PLMs repeatedly show that the correlations reported by our proposed method that does not require human annotated examples are comparable to those computed using human annotated examples in prior work.

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Gender Bias in Meta-Embeddings

Different methods have been proposed to develop meta-embeddings from a given set of source embeddings. However, the source embeddings can contain unfair gender-related biases, and how these influence the meta-embeddings has not been studied yet. We study the gender bias in meta-embeddings created under three different settings: (1) meta-embedding multiple sources without performing any debiasing (Multi-Source No-Debiasing), (2) meta-embedding multiple sources debiased by a single method (Multi-Source Single-Debiasing), and (3) meta-embedding a single source debiased by different methods (Single-Source Multi-Debiasing). Our experimental results show that meta-embedding amplifies the gender biases compared to input source embeddings. We find that debiasing not only the sources but also their meta-embedding is needed to mitigate those biases. Moreover, we propose a novel debiasing method based on meta-embedding learning where we use multiple debiasing methods on a single source embedding and then create a single unbiased meta-embedding.

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Debiasing isn't enough! -- On the Effectiveness of Debiasing MLMs and their Social Biases in Downstream Tasks

We study the relationship between task-agnostic intrinsic and task-specific extrinsic social bias evaluation measures for Masked Language Models (MLMs), and find that there exists only a weak correlation between these two types of evaluation measures. Moreover, we find that MLMs debiased using different methods still re-learn social biases during fine-tuning on downstream tasks. We identify the social biases in both training instances as well as their assigned labels as reasons for the discrepancy between intrinsic and extrinsic bias evaluation measurements. Overall, our findings highlight the limitations of existing MLM bias evaluation measures and raise concerns on the deployment of MLMs in downstream applications using those measures.

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Are Neighbors Enough? Multi-Head Neural n-gram can be Alternative to Self-attention

Impressive performance of Transformer has been attributed to self-attention, where dependencies between entire input in a sequence are considered at every position. In this work, we reform the neural $n$-gram model, which focuses on only several surrounding representations of each position, with the multi-head mechanism as in Vaswani et al.(2017). Through experiments on sequence-to-sequence tasks, we show that replacing self-attention in Transformer with multi-head neural $n$-gram can achieve comparable or better performance than Transformer. From various analyses on our proposed method, we find that multi-head neural $n$-gram is complementary to self-attention, and their combinations can further improve performance of vanilla Transformer.

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Gender Bias in Masked Language Models for Multiple Languages

Masked Language Models (MLMs) pre-trained by predicting masked tokens on large corpora have been used successfully in natural language processing tasks for a variety of languages. Unfortunately, it was reported that MLMs also learn discriminative biases regarding attributes such as gender and race. Because most studies have focused on MLMs in English, the bias of MLMs in other languages has rarely been investigated. Manual annotation of evaluation data for languages other than English has been challenging due to the cost and difficulty in recruiting annotators. Moreover, the existing bias evaluation methods require the stereotypical sentence pairs consisting of the same context with attribute words (e.g. He/She is a nurse). We propose Multilingual Bias Evaluation (MBE) score, to evaluate bias in various languages using only English attribute word lists and parallel corpora between the target language and English without requiring manually annotated data. We evaluated MLMs in eight languages using the MBE and confirmed that gender-related biases are encoded in MLMs for all those languages. We manually created datasets for gender bias in Japanese and Russian to evaluate the validity of the MBE. The results show that the bias scores reported by the MBE significantly correlates with that computed from the above manually created datasets and the existing English datasets for gender bias.

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Sense Embeddings are also Biased--Evaluating Social Biases in Static and Contextualised Sense Embeddings

Sense embedding learning methods learn different embeddings for the different senses of an ambiguous word. One sense of an ambiguous word might be socially biased while its other senses remain unbiased. In comparison to the numerous prior work evaluating the social biases in pretrained word embeddings, the biases in sense embeddings have been relatively understudied. We create a benchmark dataset for evaluating the social biases in sense embeddings and propose novel sense-specific bias evaluation measures. We conduct an extensive evaluation of multiple static and contextualised sense embeddings for various types of social biases using the proposed measures. Our experimental results show that even in cases where no biases are found at word-level, there still exist worrying levels of social biases at sense-level, which are often ignored by the word-level bias evaluation measures.

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Interpretability for Language Learners Using Example-Based Grammatical Error Correction

Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) should not focus only on high accuracy of corrections but also on interpretability for language learning. However, existing neural-based GEC models mainly aim at improving accuracy, and their interpretability has not been explored. A promising approach for improving interpretability is an example-based method, which uses similar retrieved examples to generate corrections. In addition, examples are beneficial in language learning, helping learners understand the basis of grammatically incorrect/correct texts and improve their confidence in writing. Therefore, we hypothesize that incorporating an example-based method into GEC can improve interpretability as well as support language learners. In this study, we introduce an Example-Based GEC (EB-GEC) that presents examples to language learners as a basis for a correction result. The examples consist of pairs of correct and incorrect sentences similar to a given input and its predicted correction. Experiments demonstrate that the examples presented by EB-GEC help language learners decide to accept or refuse suggestions from the GEC output. Furthermore, the experiments also show that retrieved examples improve the accuracy of corrections.

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Proficiency Matters Quality Estimation in Grammatical Error Correction

This study investigates how supervised quality estimation (QE) models of grammatical error correction (GEC) are affected by the learners' proficiency with the data. QE models for GEC evaluations in prior work have obtained a high correlation with manual evaluations. However, when functioning in a real-world context, the data used for the reported results have limitations because prior works were biased toward data by learners with relatively high proficiency levels. To address this issue, we created a QE dataset that includes multiple proficiency levels and explored the necessity of performing proficiency-wise evaluation for QE of GEC. Our experiments demonstrated that differences in evaluation dataset proficiency affect the performance of QE models, and proficiency-wise evaluation helps create more robust models.

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