LegalCore: A Dataset for Legal Documents Event Coreference Resolution

Recognizing events and their coreferential mentions in a document is essential for understanding semantic meanings of text. The existing research on event coreference resolution is mostly limited to news articles. In this paper, we present the first dataset for the legal domain, LegalCore, which has been annotated with comprehensive event and event coreference information. The legal contract documents we annotated in this dataset are several times longer than news articles, with an average length of around 25k tokens per document. The annotations show that legal documents have dense event mentions and feature both short-distance and super long-distance coreference links between event mentions. We further benchmark mainstream Large Language Models (LLMs) on this dataset for both event detection and event coreference resolution tasks, and find that this dataset poses significant challenges for state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary LLMs, which perform significantly worse than a supervised baseline. We will publish the dataset as well as the code.

Evaluating Gender Bias of LLMs in Making Morality Judgements

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in a multitude of Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. However, these models are still not immune to limitations such as social biases, especially gender bias. This work investigates whether current closed and open-source LLMs possess gender bias, especially when asked to give moral opinions. To evaluate these models, we curate and introduce a new dataset GenMO (Gender-bias in Morality Opinions) comprising parallel short stories featuring male and female characters respectively. Specifically, we test models from the GPT family (GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct, GPT-4-turbo), Llama 3 and 3.1 families (8B/70B), Mistral-7B and Claude 3 families (Sonnet and Opus). Surprisingly, despite employing safety checks, all production-standard models we tested display significant gender bias with GPT-3.5-turbo giving biased opinions in 24% of the samples. Additionally, all models consistently favour female characters, with GPT showing bias in 68-85% of cases and Llama 3 in around 81-85% instances. Additionally, our study investigates the impact of model parameters on gender bias and explores real-world situations where LLMs reveal biases in moral decision-making.

EMONA: Event-level Moral Opinions in News Articles

Most previous research on moral frames has focused on social media short texts, little work has explored moral sentiment within news articles. In news articles, authors often express their opinions or political stance through moral judgment towards events, specifically whether the event is right or wrong according to social moral rules. This paper initiates a new task to understand moral opinions towards events in news articles. We have created a new dataset, EMONA, and annotated event-level moral opinions in news articles. This dataset consists of 400 news articles containing over 10k sentences and 45k events, among which 9,613 events received moral foundation labels. Extracting event morality is a challenging task, as moral judgment towards events can be very implicit. Baseline models were built for event moral identification and classification. In addition, we also conduct extrinsic evaluations to integrate event-level moral opinions into three downstream tasks. The statistical analysis and experiments show that moral opinions of events can serve as informative features for identifying ideological bias or subjective events.

Towards Modeling the Interaction of Spatial-Associative Neural Network Representations for Multisensory Perception

Our daily perceptual experience is driven by different neural mechanisms that yield multisensory interaction as the interplay between exogenous stimuli and endogenous expectations. While the interaction of multisensory cues according to their spatiotemporal properties and the formation of multisensory feature-based representations have been widely studied, the interaction of spatial-associative neural representations has received considerably less attention. In this paper, we propose a neural network architecture that models the interaction of spatial-associative representations to perform causal inference of audiovisual stimuli. We investigate the spatial alignment of exogenous audiovisual stimuli modulated by associative congruence. In the spatial layer, topographically arranged networks account for the interaction of audiovisual input in terms of population codes. In the associative layer, congruent audiovisual representations are obtained via the experience-driven development of feature-based associations. Levels of congruency are obtained as a by-product of the neurodynamics of self-organizing networks, where the amount of neural activation triggered by the input can be expressed via a nonlinear distance function. Our novel proposal is that activity-driven levels of congruency can be used as top-down modulatory projections to spatially distributed representations of sensory input, e.g. semantically related audiovisual pairs will yield a higher level of integration than unrelated pairs. Furthermore, levels of neural response in unimodal layers may be seen as sensory reliability for the dynamic weighting of crossmodal cues. We describe a series of planned experiments to validate our model in the tasks of multisensory interaction on the basis of semantic congruence and unimodal cue reliability.

Closing the loop on multisensory interactions: A neural architecture for multisensory causal inference and recalibration

When the brain receives input from multiple sensory systems, it is faced with the question of whether it is appropriate to process the inputs in combination, as if they originated from the same event, or separately, as if they originated from distinct events. Furthermore, it must also have a mechanism through which it can keep sensory inputs calibrated to maintain the accuracy of its internal representations. We have developed a neural network architecture capable of i) approximating optimal multisensory spatial integration, based on Bayesian causal inference, and ii) recalibrating the spatial encoding of sensory systems. The architecture is based on features of the dorsal processing hierarchy, including the spatial tuning properties of unisensory neurons and the convergence of different sensory inputs onto multisensory neurons. Furthermore, we propose that these unisensory and multisensory neurons play dual roles in i) encoding spatial location as separate or integrated estimates and ii) accumulating evidence for the independence or relatedness of multisensory stimuli. We further propose that top-down feedback connections spanning the dorsal pathway play key a role in recalibrating spatial encoding at the level of early unisensory cortices. Our proposed architecture provides possible explanations for a number of human electrophysiological and neuroimaging results and generates testable predictions linking neurophysiology with behaviour.