Papers by Rachel Rudinger
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| Challenge: | a new benchmark evaluates coreference resolution systems' ability to recognize singular personal "they" we find that current systems overwhelmingly choose to resolve "they's" correctly to a singular entity or to 'a group' |
| Approach: | They propose to evaluate coreference resolution systems for singular personal "they" they use WinoNB schemas to evaluate whether they can correctly resolve singular "they". |
| Outcome: | The proposed benchmark evaluates coreference resolution systems for singular personal "they" they show that they are biased toward resolving "they", not "them" |
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| Challenge: | Defeasible inference is a mode of reasoning in which an inference may be weakened or overturned in light of new evidence. |
| Approach: | They propose a dataset for defeasible inference in natural language that includes extensions to existing inference datasets. |
| Outcome: | Defeasible NLI extends existing datasets for defeaasibility inference in natural language . generative models can weaken or strengthen inferences up to 68% of the time, it shows . |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models encode correlations between social groups and traits, like associating the group with the group. |
| Approach: | They adapt the Agency-Belief-Communion (ABC) stereotype model to a language model and introduce the sensitivity test (SeT) to measure stereotypical associations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework is used to measure stereotyping of intersectional identities in language models. |
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| Challenge: | Social psychology studies how social stereotypes are shared as part of cultural knowledge . |
| Approach: | They study how stereotypes manifest when potential targets are situated in neutral contexts . they collect human judgments on the presence of stereotypes in generated inferences based on annotator positionality . |
| Outcome: | The results show that the annotators' positions differ depending on the type of inferences they generate . |
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| Challenge: | a plethora of new natural language inference datasets has been created in recent years . however, these datasets do not provide clear insight into what type of reasoning or inference a model may be performing. |
| Approach: | They propose to recast 13 existing natural language inference datasets into a common structure. |
| Outcome: | The proposed datasets provide insight into how well a sentence representation captures distinct types of reasoning. |
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| Challenge: | Recent efforts focus on single-LLM, single-turn generation approaches, but it can be challenging for any single model to support all cultures equally well. |
| Approach: | They propose to exploit the complementary strengths of multiple LLMs to promote cultural adaptability. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves accuracy and cultural group parity over single-LLM models. |
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| Challenge: | lexicosyntactic inferences are triggered by surprising aspects of the syntactical context that a word occurs in. |
| Approach: | They build a factuality judgment dataset for English clause-embedding verbs in various syntactic contexts and use it to probe the behavior of current state-of-the-art neural systems. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model makes systematic errors that are visible through the lens of factuality prediction. |
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| Challenge: | We show that models are less likely to predict romantic relationships for same-gender character pairs than different-grace character pairs. |
| Approach: | They perform name-replacement experiments to examine gender biases in large language models . they hypothesize that models mirror heteronormative biase and prejudice against interracial romantic relationships . |
| Outcome: | The results suggest that models may mirror heteronormative biases and prejudice against interracial romantic relationships in human and society. |
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| Challenge: | a study of coreference resolution systems that resolve gender differences in pairs is aimed at examining implicit gender biases. |
| Approach: | They propose a Winograd schema-style set of minimal pair sentences that differ only by gender . they evaluate and confirm systematic gender bias in three publicly-available coreference resolution systems . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system resolves a male and neutral pronoun as coreferent with "The surgeon" but does not resolve the female pronounce. |
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| Challenge: | Recent research aims to unlock the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) chain-of-thought (COT) prompting can help LLMs reason toward correct answers, but its efficacy in reasoning toward incorrect answers is unexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a task where large language models reason toward incorrect answers using chain-of-thought prompting. |
| Outcome: | The proposed task underperforms the strategy of choosing the correct answer on commonsense and scientific reasoning datasets. |
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| Challenge: | a large number of crowdworker-constructed datasets have been used to conduct natural language inference (NLI) on unstructured, domainspecific texts such as patient notes, pathology reports, and scientific papers. |
| Approach: | They investigate whether MedNLI contains lexical and syntactic annotation artifacts associated with annotation process that allow hypothesis-only classifiers to achieve better-than-random performance. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms a majority-class baseline model on a physician-annotated dataset with premises extracted from clinical notes. |
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| Challenge: | Word embeddings such as word2vec and GloVe exhibit human-like implicit biases based on gender, race, and other social constructs. |
| Approach: | They propose a simple generaliza test to measure bias in word embeddings by comparing two sets of target-concept words to two sets . |
| Outcome: | The proposed test shows that word2vec and word2Ve exhibit human-like implicit biases based on gender, race, and other social constructs. |
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| Challenge: | Recent work has highlighted the culturally-contingent nature of commonsense knowledge . a multi-stage process is used to evaluate the commonsence of English LLMs . |
| Approach: | They propose a test set of 525 multiple-choice questions to evaluate commonsense knowledge of English LLMs in Ghana and the u.s. They use existing commonsensible datasets to rewrite them in a multi-stage process. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model improves on the culturally-contingent commonsense knowledge of English LLMs in Ghana and the United States. |
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| Challenge: | Researchers have shown that many datasets contain statistical biases, or "annotation artifacts" that systems leverage to correctly predict entailment. |
| Approach: | They propose to use edited contexts to examine RoBERTa models' sensitivity to edited context to examine their model's sensitivity. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can learn to condition on context, despite being trained on artifact-ridden datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Neologisms and emerging slang are central to daily conversation, yet challenging for non-native speakers (NNS) to interpret and use appropriately in cross-cultural communication with native speakers (NS). |
| Approach: | They use AI to learn English neologisms and write messages using the learned word to an NS friend. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model shows that AI Explanation yields the largest gains over no support in NS-rated competence, while contextual appropriateness judgments show indifference across support. |
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| Challenge: | Experiments with LLMs reveal similar patterns of influence on human plausibility judgments of commonsense benchmark answers. |
| Approach: | They find that human plausibility judgments of commonsense benchmark answers are affected by implausibility arguments for or against an answer. |
| Outcome: | The results show that human judges find LLM rationales convincing and that human annotators agree on the most plausible answer when the plausibility gap is wide. |
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| Challenge: | a question-answering system must address pragmatic inferences to answer usefully, says a new study . human information needs are often inferred from the surface form, but answers must address the pragmatic needs of the question. |
| Approach: | They examine assumptions and implications made when mothers ask questions . they find that incorporating these inferences into QA pipelines produces more complete answers . |
| Outcome: | a study shows that incorporating inferences from questions helps to address harmful beliefs . human needs vary when asking questions, but a complete answer can address them . a QA pipeline can be more effective in addressing these needs, the study finds . |
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| Challenge: | Question answering (QA) is a popular task, but we test both separately . a recent study found that LLMs are less accurate in numerical RQA than RQA . |
| Approach: | We run 16 LLMs on QA and RQA with trivia questions/answers . they find question and answer types that lead to RQA errors and suggest improvements . |
| Outcome: | The results show that LLMs are less accurate in RQA for numerical answers than RQA . RQA errors correlate with question difficulty and inversely correlate with answer frequencies . |
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| Challenge: | Script Knowledge is important for language understanding but expensive to produce manually and difficult to induce from text due to reporting bias. |
| Approach: | They propose a pipeline-based script induction framework which can generate good quality ESDs for unseen scenarios. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework produces good quality ESDs for unseen scenarios, but manual evaluation shows there is room for improvement. |
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| Challenge: | Large language models (LLMs) give reasoning before answering, excelling in multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) . but, some studies find that LLMs sans reasoning fail in MCQA without using the question, i.e., choices-only. |
| Approach: | They propose to use reasoning LLMs to separate problematic data from less problematic strategies by examining reasoning traces. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models perform well in multiple-choice question answering without the question, but they fail to use the question. |
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that LLMs can't tailor outputs to users with uncommon preferences . despite the success of persona inference, we may need debiasing and abstention. |
| Approach: | They propose to use preference data to infer needs and interests of users who prefer either output . they argue that training on preference data augmented with PI boosts personalization . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method can be used to improve personalization with less privacy concerns. |
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| Challenge: | Studies of human psychology have shown that people are more motivated to extend empathy to in-group members than out-group member. |
| Approach: | They propose to use language models to study intergroup empathy gap . they use a short description of an experience to predict emotion intensity . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model exhibited strongest intergroup bias among those tested. |
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| Challenge: | We examine LLM representations of gender for first names in various occupational contexts to study how occupations and the gender perception of first names influence each other mutually. |
| Approach: | They examine LLM representations of gender for first names in various occupational contexts and examine how occupations and the gender perception of first names influence each other mutually. |
| Outcome: | The representations shift with the occupational context and are influenced by stereotypically feminine or masculine occupations. |
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| Challenge: | a recent study shows that commonsense knowledge is universally shared by most people . early efforts to schematize commonsensical knowledge as scripts provide examples of unintended biases . |
| Approach: | They propose a set of questions for probing cultural biases and assumptions in commonsense reasoning systems . they test commonsensibleQA-style questions on food-related customs in the u.s. |
| Outcome: | The proposed questions show that they are better at detecting biases in commonsense reasoning systems than on non-US cultures. |
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| Challenge: | A central function of natural language is to convey information about the properties of events. |
| Approach: | They propose to use a FactBank, UW, and MEANTIME event factuality dataset to build two neural models that outperform previous models. |
| Outcome: | The proposed models outperform previous models on FactBank, UW, and MEANTIME datasets. |
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| Challenge: | Renewed interest in semantic analysis has led to a surge of proposed new frameworks . many of these efforts are limited to the analysis of English, but with a number of exceptions e.g., recent efforts in Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS) and multilingual FrameNet annotation and parsing. |
| Approach: | They propose a cross-lingual decompositional semantic analysis task based on a target language . they propose 'end-to-end' model with an annotating mechanism that supports intra-sentential coreference . |
| Outcome: | The proposed model outperforms baselines by at least 1.75 F1 score on an evaluation dataset. |
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| Challenge: | a misalignment or misunderstanding can disrupt communication, leading to confusion or conflict. |
| Approach: | They study failures of grounding in Ubuntu IRC datasets to identify misalignments . they find disruptions in conversational flow are driven by a divergence in beliefs . |
| Outcome: | The findings show that misalignment in common ground can disrupt communication . the study also shows that miscommunications can lead to confusion or conflict . |
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| Challenge: | Many commonsense reasoning questions require a hard selection of a single correct answer . ambiguity and semantic mismatches are common in many MCQs . |
| Approach: | They collect plausibility judgments on 5 000 commonsense reasoning questions . they find that the answer rated most plausible does not match the benchmark gold answers . |
| Outcome: | Experiments with LLMS reveal low accuracy and high variation in performance on the subset . high plausibility rating for the most plausible answer is highlighted in bold . |
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| Challenge: | Decomposing text into atomic propositions allows for finergrained inspection of text. |
| Approach: | They propose to decompose atomic propositions into atomic sub-problems that models must weigh when solving the overall problem. |
| Outcome: | The proposed method measures the inferential consistency of models and the diversity of examples in benchmark datasets. |
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| Challenge: | When a question is poorly posed, answerers struggle to converge on dominant interpretations, while models attempt comprehensive coverage by addressing many interpretations simultaneously. |
| Approach: | They propose a computational framework to study poorly-posedness of questions by generating spaces of potential interpretations and computing distributions based on interpretations chosen by answerers in the Reddit question thread. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework analyzes poorly-posed questions using a set of interpretations chosen by human answerers and large language models. |
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| Challenge: | Multiple choice question answering (MCQA) is popular for LLM evaluation due to its simplicity and human-like testing. |
| Approach: | They argue for a reform of multiple choice question answering (MCQA) they argue for more generative formats based on human testing . |
| Outcome: | The proposed reforms improve the quality of MCQA, the authors argue . they show that even when MCQ is a useful format, its datasets suffer from leakage, unanswerability, shortcuts and saturation. |
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| Challenge: | Standardized math assessments require expensive human pilot studies to establish the difficulty of test items. |
| Approach: | They propose to use large language models to model difficulty of multiple-choice math questions for real-world students. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model predicts difficulty of multiple-choice math questions for students . correlations between model and real-world difficulty are high, the authors show . |
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| Challenge: | Pre-trained language models perpetuate biases originating in their training corpus to downstream models. |
| Approach: | They focus on the representations of given names in pre-trained language models and show that name perturbation can have an effect on downstream tasks. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model can be used to model the representation of given names in pre-trained language models on reading comprehension probes where name perturbation changes the model answers. |
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| Challenge: | We study whether large language models exhibit race- and gender-based name discrimination in hiring decisions . |
| Approach: | They propose templatic prompts to LLMs to write an email to a named job applicant informing them of a hiring decision. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model generates an acceptance or rejection email based on the applicant's first name . |
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| Challenge: | Prior work on script induction relied on correlation between instances of events in corpus . instead, we propose an approach based on causal effects between events . |
| Approach: | They propose to use causal effects to induce scripts from text . they propose to compute a function that matches the intuition of what a script represents . |
| Outcome: | The proposed method matches the intuition of what a script represents, the authors show . |
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| Challenge: | Existing models for semantic proto-role labeling are based on a bidirectional LSTM encoding strategy. |
| Approach: | They propose a neural model for semantic proto-role labeling using a bidirectional LSTM encoding strategy that is adapted for the task. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model achieves state-of-the-art in a sentence with a LSTM encoder and a decoder. |
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| Challenge: | We test alignment methods to ensure LLMs are helpful, but they train or evaluate on what users prefer . |
| Approach: | They test alignment methods to ensure LLMs generate plans that help users . they get 4388 plan executions and 5584 comparisons to measure user preferences . |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach can be applied to the problem of user preferences and helpfulness. |
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| Challenge: | Large Language Models are increasingly involved in high-stakes domains, yet how they reason about socially sensitive decisions remains underexplored. |
| Approach: | They propose a dual-process audit framework to probe LLMs’ reasoning behaviors in sensitive applications using a synthetic dataset of 30,000 applicant profiles grounded in real-world correlations. |
| Outcome: | The proposed framework exploits a synthetic dataset of 30,000 applicant profiles grounded in real-world correlations to probe LLMs' reasoning behaviors in sensitive applications. |
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| Challenge: | Existing systems that generate section-wise summaries of contracts can be tedious due to length and complexity of legalese. |
| Approach: | They propose a task of party-specific extractive summarization for legal contracts . they train a pairwise importance ranker and propose incorporating domain-specific notions of importance . |
| Outcome: | The proposed system generates a party-specific contract summary using a dataset of lease agreements and lease agreements. |
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| Challenge: | Existing diagnostic tests for detecting social biases in NLP models only detect stereotypic associations pre-specified by the designer. |
| Approach: | They propose an approach for automatic social bias discovery in social commonsense question-answering by substituting names associated with different demographic groups and generating many distractor answers from a masked language model. |
| Outcome: | The proposed approach uncovers model’s stereotypic associations between demographic groups and an open set of words. |
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| Challenge: | a contract is a legal document executed by two or more parties. |
| Approach: | They propose a corpus of English contracts annotated with deontic modalities . they benchmark this corpus on agent-specific deontics and trigger span detection . |
| Outcome: | The proposed dataset can detect red flags with high recall. |
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is often used to evaluate large language models . a recent study found that LLMs perform MCQA with choices-only prompts . |
| Approach: | They investigate whether LLMs can perform multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) with choices-only prompts . they find no evidence that the choices- only accuracy stems from memorization alone . |
| Outcome: | The results show that LLMs perform MCQA with choices-only prompts with 0.33 accuracy gain. |
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| Challenge: | Decompositional semantics is a method of crowd-sourcing semantic annotations while retaining high interannotator agreement. |
| Approach: | They present the Universal Decompositional Semantics dataset (v1.0) they propose a decomposition-aligned approach to semantic annotation that uses simple questions to answer . |
| Outcome: | The dataset is bundled with the Decomp toolkit (v0.1) both datasets are publicly available at http://decomp.io. |
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| Challenge: | Prior research has shown that social commonsense reasoning models exhibit biases along dimensions of race, ethnicity, and gender. |
| Approach: | They conduct first name substitution experiments to measure the influence of demographic attributes of a name and name tokenization length on models' disparate behavior. |
| Outcome: | The results show that demographic attributes of a name and name tokenization length are factors that systematically affect the behavior of social commonsense reasoning models. |
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| Challenge: | Multiple-choice question answering (MCQ) is standard in NLP, but benchmarks lack rigorous quality control. |
| Approach: | They propose an education-inspired toolkit that uses LLM judges to flag flaws in MCQs . they validate the tool with annotations and run it to audit 12 benchmarks based on 19-rule education rubric . |
| Outcome: | The proposed toolkit flags three common MCQ flaws based on a 19-rule education rubric . contaminated MCqs tend to inflate accuracy, while writing errors lower it and change rankings . |