DFKI-NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 2: Towards Robust LLMs Using Data Perturbations and MinMax Training

The NLI4CT task at SemEval-2024 emphasizes the development of robust models for Natural Language Inference on Clinical Trial Reports (CTRs) using large language models (LLMs). This edition introduces interventions specifically targeting the numerical, vocabulary, and semantic aspects of CTRs. Our proposed system harnesses the capabilities of the state-of-the-art Mistral model, complemented by an auxiliary model, to focus on the intricate input space of the NLI4CT dataset. Through the incorporation of numerical and acronym-based perturbations to the data, we train a robust system capable of handling both semantic-altering and numerical contradiction interventions. Our analysis on the dataset sheds light on the challenging sections of the CTRs for reasoning.

Full-Text Argumentation Mining on Scientific Publications

Scholarly Argumentation Mining (SAM) has recently gained attention due to its potential to help scholars with the rapid growth of published scientific literature. It comprises two subtasks: argumentative discourse unit recognition (ADUR) and argumentative relation extraction (ARE), both of which are challenging since they require e.g. the integration of domain knowledge, the detection of implicit statements, and the disambiguation of argument structure. While previous work focused on dataset construction and baseline methods for specific document sections, such as abstract or results, full-text scholarly argumentation mining has seen little progress. In this work, we introduce a sequential pipeline model combining ADUR and ARE for full-text SAM, and provide a first analysis of the performance of pretrained language models (PLMs) on both subtasks. We establish a new SotA for ADUR on the Sci-Arg corpus, outperforming the previous best reported result by a large margin (+7% F1). We also present the first results for ARE, and thus for the full AM pipeline, on this benchmark dataset. Our detailed error analysis reveals that non-contiguous ADUs as well as the interpretation of discourse connectors pose major challenges and that data annotation needs to be more consistent.