OATH-Frames: Characterizing Online Attitudes Towards Homelessness with LLM Assistants

Warning: Contents of this paper may be upsetting. Public attitudes towards key societal issues, expressed on online media, are of immense value in policy and reform efforts, yet challenging to understand at scale. We study one such social issue: homelessness in the U.S., by leveraging the remarkable capabilities of large language models to assist social work experts in analyzing millions of posts from Twitter. We introduce a framing typology: Online Attitudes Towards Homelessness (OATH) Frames: nine hierarchical frames capturing critiques, responses and perceptions. We release annotations with varying degrees of assistance from language models, with immense benefits in scaling: 6.5x speedup in annotation time while only incurring a 3 point F1 reduction in performance with respect to the domain experts. Our experiments demonstrate the value of modeling OATH-Frames over existing sentiment and toxicity classifiers. Our large-scale analysis with predicted OATH-Frames on 2.4M posts on homelessness reveal key trends in attitudes across states, time periods and vulnerable populations, enabling new insights on the issue. Our work provides a general framework to understand nuanced public attitudes at scale, on issues beyond homelessness.

Tailoring Self-Rationalizers with Multi-Reward Distillation

Large language models (LMs) are capable of generating free-text rationales to aid question answering. However, prior work 1) suggests that useful self-rationalization is emergent only at significant scales (e.g., 175B parameter GPT-3); and 2) focuses largely on downstream performance, ignoring the semantics of the rationales themselves, e.g., are they faithful, true, and helpful for humans? In this work, we enable small-scale LMs (approx. 200x smaller than GPT-3) to generate rationales that not only improve downstream task performance, but are also more plausible, consistent, and diverse, assessed both by automatic and human evaluation. Our method, MaRio (Multi-rewArd RatIOnalization), is a multi-reward conditioned self-rationalization algorithm that optimizes multiple distinct properties like plausibility, diversity and consistency. Results on five difficult question-answering datasets StrategyQA, QuaRel, OpenBookQA, NumerSense and QASC show that not only does MaRio improve task accuracy, but it also improves the self-rationalization quality of small LMs across the aforementioned axes better than a supervised fine-tuning (SFT) baseline. Extensive human evaluations confirm that MaRio rationales are preferred vs. SFT rationales, as well as qualitative improvements in plausibility and consistency.

Are Machine Rationales (Not) Useful to Humans? Measuring and Improving Human Utility of Free-Text Rationales

Among the remarkable emergent capabilities of large language models (LMs) is free-text rationalization; beyond a certain scale, large LMs are capable of generating seemingly useful rationalizations, which in turn, can dramatically enhance their performances on leaderboards. This phenomenon raises a question: can machine generated rationales also be useful for humans, especially when lay humans try to answer questions based on those machine rationales? We observe that human utility of existing rationales is far from satisfactory, and expensive to estimate with human studies. Existing metrics like task performance of the LM generating the rationales, or similarity between generated and gold rationales are not good indicators of their human utility. While we observe that certain properties of rationales like conciseness and novelty are correlated with their human utility, estimating them without human involvement is challenging. We show that, by estimating a rationale's helpfulness in answering similar unseen instances, we can measure its human utility to a better extent. We also translate this finding into an automated score, GEN-U, that we propose, which can help improve LMs' ability to generate rationales with better human utility, while maintaining most of its task performance. Lastly, we release all code and collected data with this project.

KNIFE: Knowledge Distillation with Free-Text Rationales

Free-text rationales (FTRs) follow how humans communicate by explaining reasoning processes via natural language. A number of recent works have studied how to improve language model (LM) generalization by using FTRs to teach LMs the correct reasoning processes behind correct task outputs. These prior works aim to learn from FTRs by appending them to the LM input or target output, but this may introduce an input distribution shift or conflict with the task objective, respectively. We propose KNIFE, which distills FTR knowledge from an FTR-augmented teacher LM (takes both task input and FTR) to a student LM (takes only task input), which is used for inference. Crucially, the teacher LM's forward computation has a bottleneck stage in which all of its FTR states are masked out, which pushes knowledge from the FTR states into the task input/output states. Then, FTR knowledge is distilled to the student LM by training its task input/output states to align with the teacher LM's. On two question answering datasets, we show that KNIFE significantly outperforms existing FTR learning methods, in both fully-supervised and low-resource settings.

XMD: An End-to-End Framework for Interactive Explanation-Based Debugging of NLP Models

NLP models are susceptible to learning spurious biases (i.e., bugs) that work on some datasets but do not properly reflect the underlying task. Explanation-based model debugging aims to resolve spurious biases by showing human users explanations of model behavior, asking users to give feedback on the behavior, then using the feedback to update the model. While existing model debugging methods have shown promise, their prototype-level implementations provide limited practical utility. Thus, we propose XMD: the first open-source, end-to-end framework for explanation-based model debugging. Given task- or instance-level explanations, users can flexibly provide various forms of feedback via an intuitive, web-based UI. After receiving user feedback, XMD automatically updates the model in real time, by regularizing the model so that its explanations align with the user feedback. The new model can then be easily deployed into real-world applications via Hugging Face. Using XMD, we can improve the model's OOD performance on text classification tasks by up to 18%.

ER-TEST: Evaluating Explanation Regularization Methods for NLP Models

Neural language models' (NLMs') reasoning processes are notoriously hard to explain. Recently, there has been much progress in automatically generating machine rationales of NLM behavior, but less in utilizing the rationales to improve NLM behavior. For the latter, explanation regularization (ER) aims to improve NLM generalization by pushing the machine rationales to align with human rationales. Whereas prior works primarily evaluate such ER models via in-distribution (ID) generalization, ER's impact on out-of-distribution (OOD) is largely underexplored. Plus, little is understood about how ER model performance is affected by the choice of ER criteria or by the number/choice of training instances with human rationales. In light of this, we propose ER-TEST, a protocol for evaluating ER models' OOD generalization along three dimensions: (1) unseen datasets, (2) contrast set tests, and (3) functional tests. Using ER-TEST, we study three key questions: (A) Which ER criteria are most effective for the given OOD setting? (B) How is ER affected by the number/choice of training instances with human rationales? (C) Is ER effective with distantly supervised human rationales? ER-TEST enables comprehensive analysis of these questions by considering a diverse range of tasks and datasets. Through ER-TEST, we show that ER has little impact on ID performance, but can yield large gains on OOD performance w.r.t. (1)-(3). Also, we find that the best ER criterion is task-dependent, while ER can improve OOD performance even with limited and distantly-supervised human rationales.

The Devil is in the Details: Evaluating Limitations of Transformer-based Methods for Granular Tasks

Contextual embeddings derived from transformer-based neural language models have shown state-of-the-art performance for various tasks such as question answering, sentiment analysis, and textual similarity in recent years. Extensive work shows how accurately such models can represent abstract, semantic information present in text. In this expository work, we explore a tangent direction and analyze such models' performance on tasks that require a more granular level of representation. We focus on the problem of textual similarity from two perspectives: matching documents on a granular level (requiring embeddings to capture fine-grained attributes in the text), and an abstract level (requiring embeddings to capture overall textual semantics). We empirically demonstrate, across two datasets from different domains, that despite high performance in abstract document matching as expected, contextual embeddings are consistently (and at times, vastly) outperformed by simple baselines like TF-IDF for more granular tasks. We then propose a simple but effective method to incorporate TF-IDF into models that use contextual embeddings, achieving relative improvements of up to 36% on granular tasks.

Generating Clues for Gender based Occupation De-biasing in Text

Vast availability of text data has enabled widespread training and use of AI systems that not only learn and predict attributes from the text but also generate text automatically. However, these AI models also learn gender, racial and ethnic biases present in the training data. In this paper, we present the first system that discovers the possibility that a given text portrays a gender stereotype associated with an occupation. If the possibility exists, the system offers counter-evidences of opposite gender also being associated with the same occupation in the context of user-provided geography and timespan. The system thus enables text de-biasing by assisting a human-in-the-loop. The system can not only act as a text pre-processor before training any AI model but also help human story writers write stories free of occupation-level gender bias in the geographical and temporal context of their choice.