UnSeenTimeQA: Time-Sensitive Question-Answering Beyond LLMs' Memorization

This paper introduces UnSeenTimeQA, a novel time-sensitive question-answering (TSQA) benchmark that diverges from traditional TSQA benchmarks by avoiding factual and web-searchable queries. We present a series of time-sensitive event scenarios decoupled from real-world factual information. It requires large language models (LLMs) to engage in genuine temporal reasoning, disassociating from the knowledge acquired during the pre-training phase. Our evaluation of six open-source LLMs (ranging from 2B to 70B in size) and three closed-source LLMs reveal that the questions from the UnSeenTimeQA present substantial challenges. This indicates the models' difficulties in handling complex temporal reasoning scenarios. Additionally, we present several analyses shedding light on the models' performance in answering time-sensitive questions.

Chaos with Keywords: Exposing Large Language Models Sycophancy to Misleading Keywords and Evaluating Defense Strategies

This study explores the sycophantic tendencies of Large Language Models (LLMs), where these models tend to provide answers that match what users want to hear, even if they are not entirely correct. The motivation behind this exploration stems from the common behavior observed in individuals searching the internet for facts with partial or misleading knowledge. Similar to using web search engines, users may recall fragments of misleading keywords and submit them to an LLM, hoping for a comprehensive response. Our empirical analysis of several LLMs shows the potential danger of these models amplifying misinformation when presented with misleading keywords. Additionally, we thoroughly assess four existing hallucination mitigation strategies to reduce LLMs sycophantic behavior. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of these strategies for generating factually correct statements. Furthermore, our analyses delve into knowledge-probing experiments on factual keywords and different categories of sycophancy mitigation.

Asking and Answering Questions to Extract Event-Argument Structures

This paper presents a question-answering approach to extract document-level event-argument structures. We automatically ask and answer questions for each argument type an event may have. Questions are generated using manually defined templates and generative transformers. Template-based questions are generated using predefined role-specific wh-words and event triggers from the context document. Transformer-based questions are generated using large language models trained to formulate questions based on a passage and the expected answer. Additionally, we develop novel data augmentation strategies specialized in inter-sentential event-argument relations. We use a simple span-swapping technique, coreference resolution, and large language models to augment the training instances. Our approach enables transfer learning without any corpora-specific modifications and yields competitive results with the RAMS dataset. It outperforms previous work, and it is especially beneficial to extract arguments that appear in different sentences than the event trigger. We also present detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses shedding light on the most common errors made by our best model.

Generating Uncontextualized and Contextualized Questions for Document-Level Event Argument Extraction

This paper presents multiple question generation strategies for document-level event argument extraction. These strategies do not require human involvement and result in uncontextualized questions as well as contextualized questions grounded on the event and document of interest. Experimental results show that combining uncontextualized and contextualized questions is beneficial, especially when event triggers and arguments appear in different sentences. Our approach does not have corpus-specific components, in particular, the question generation strategies transfer across corpora. We also present a qualitative analysis of the most common errors made by our best model.

Interpreting Indirect Answers to Yes-No Questions in Multiple Languages

Yes-no questions expect a yes or no for an answer, but people often skip polar keywords. Instead, they answer with long explanations that must be interpreted. In this paper, we focus on this challenging problem and release new benchmarks in eight languages. We present a distant supervision approach to collect training data. We also demonstrate that direct answers (i.e., with polar keywords) are useful to train models to interpret indirect answers (i.e., without polar keywords). Experimental results demonstrate that monolingual fine-tuning is beneficial if training data can be obtained via distant supervision for the language of interest (5 languages). Additionally, we show that cross-lingual fine-tuning is always beneficial (8 languages).