Papers by Alisa Liu
That was the last straw, we need more: Are Translation Systems Sensitive to Disambiguating Context? (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing models for translation of ambiguous text use context to disambiguate meaning . current models for MTs consistently translate English idioms literally, whereas LMs are context-aware . |
| Approach: | They use a dataset of 512 pairs of English sentences to study semantic ambiguities . they use literal and figurative idioms to disambiguate intended meaning . |
| Outcome: | The results show that current models translate English idioms literally, even when the context suggests a figurative interpretation. |
Synthetic Data in the Era of Large Language Models (2025.acl-tutorials)
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| Challenge: | 'synthetic data' is a data generated with the assistance of large language models to make dataset construction faster and cheaper. |
| Approach: | This tutorial seeks to build a shared understanding of recent progress in synthetic data generation from NLP and related fields by grouping and describing major methods, applications, and open problems. |
| Outcome: | This tutorial will describe methods, applications, and open problems that have been developed and are being used to improve the quality and efficiency of synthetic data generation. |
LlamaPIE: Proactive In-Ear Conversation Assistants (2025.findings-acl)
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| Challenge: | LlamaPIE is the first real-time proactive assistant designed to enhance human conversations . it provides discreet, concise guidance delivered via hearable devices . traditional language models require explicit user invocation, but the assistant operates in the background . |
| Approach: | They propose a two-model pipeline that decides when to respond and a larger model that generates the response. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach is effective in providing helpful, unobtrusive assistance on real-world datasets. |
WANLI: Worker and AI Collaboration for Natural Language Inference Dataset Creation (2022.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Existing datasets are often flooded with repetitive and spurious patterns, leading to a lack of linguistic diversity. |
| Approach: | They propose a method that uses cartography to automatically identify and filter examples that demonstrate challenging reasoning patterns and then automatically compose new ones with similar patterns. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach improves performance on eight out-of-domain test sets compared to training on the 4x larger MultiNLI dataset. |
DExperts: Decoding-Time Controlled Text Generation with Experts and Anti-Experts (2021.acl-long)
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Alisa Liu, Maarten Sap, Ximing Lu, Swabha Swayamdipta, Chandra Bhagavatula, Noah A. Smith, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | Decoding-time Experts is a decoding- time method for controlled text generation . it combines a pretrained language model with "expert" LMs and/or "anti-expert" experts . |
| Approach: | They propose a decoding-time method that combines a pretrained language model with "expert" LMs and/or "anti-expert" experts to generate controlled text. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms existing controllable generation methods on automatic and human evaluations. |
Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions (2023.acl-long)
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Yizhong Wang, Yeganeh Kordi, Swaroop Mishra, Alisa Liu, Noah A. Smith, Daniel Khashabi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
| Challenge: | Large “instruction-tuned” language models depend heavily on human-written instruction data . this limited quantity, diversity, and creativity hinders the generality of the tuned model . |
| Approach: | They propose a framework for improving instruction-following capabilities of pretrained language models by bootstrapping off their own generations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework outperforms existing public instruction datasets by 5% . it generates instructions, input, and output samples, then filters invalid or similar ones . |
Does Liking Yellow Imply Driving a School Bus? Semantic Leakage in Language Models (2025.naacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Despite their wide adoption, the biases and unintended behaviors of language models remain poorly understood. |
| Approach: | They propose an evaluation setting to detect semantic leakage by humans and automatically . they also curate a diverse test suite for diagnosing this behavior in 13 flagship models . |
| Outcome: | The proposed evaluation setting detects semantic leakage by humans and automatically, and measures it in 13 flagship models. |
Detoxifying Text with MaRCo: Controllable Revision with Experts and Anti-Experts (2023.acl-short)
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| Challenge: | Text detoxification can mitigate the harms of toxicity by rephrasing text to remove offensive meaning, but subtle toxicity remains challenging to tackle. |
| Approach: | They propose a text detoxification algorithm that combines controllable generation and text rewriting methods using a Product of Experts and autoencoder language models to find candidate words to mask and potentially replace. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method outperforms baselines on automatic metrics and is preferred 2.1 times more in human evaluation. |
Generated Knowledge Prompting for Commonsense Reasoning (2022.acl-long)
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Jiacheng Liu, Alisa Liu, Ximing Lu, Sean Welleck, Peter West, Ronan Le Bras, Yejin Choi, Hannaneh Hajishirzi
| Challenge: | Existing methods for commonsense reasoning rely on high-quality knowledge, but they are often dominated by large-scale pretrained models that are fine-tuned on a target benchmark. |
| Approach: | They develop generated knowledge prompting which generates knowledge from a language model and provides it as additional input when answering a question. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method improves state-of-the-art models on four commonsense reasoning tasks. |
When One LLM Drools, Multi-LLM Collaboration Rules (2026.acl-long)
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Shangbin Feng, Wenxuan Ding, Alisa Liu, Zifeng Wang, Weijia Shi, Yike Wang, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Xiaochuang Han, Hunter Lang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister, Yejin Choi, Yulia Tsvetkov
| Challenge: | a single general-purpose LLM is not enough to produce a reliable output, argues this paper . a multi-LLM collaboration approach addresses reliability, democratization, and pluralism . |
| Approach: | They argue that a single general-purpose LLM is not enough to produce a reliable output . they organize existing multi-LLM collaboration methods into a hierarchy based on access and information exchange . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method addresses reliability, democratization, and pluralism challenges a single LLM fails to produce a reliable output. |
We’re Afraid Language Models Aren’t Modeling Ambiguity (2023.emnlp-main)
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Alisa Liu, Zhaofeng Wu, Julian Michael, Alane Suhr, Peter West, Alexander Koller, Swabha Swayamdipta, Noah Smith, Yejin Choi
| Challenge: | Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language, allowing us to anticipate misunderstandings and revise our interpretations as listeners. |
| Approach: | They use AmbiEnt to capture ambiguity in a sentence and analyze it to evaluate pretrained LMs. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can flag political claims in the wild that are misleading due to ambiguity. |