Some Empirical Criteria for Attributing Creativity to a Computer Program

Peer reviewedPostprin

LLMs as Workers in Human-Computational Algorithms? Replicating Crowdsourcing Pipelines with LLMs

LLMs have shown promise in replicating human-like behavior in crowdsourcing tasks that were previously thought to be exclusive to human abilities. However, current efforts focus mainly on simple atomic tasks. We explore whether LLMs can replicate more complex crowdsourcing pipelines. We find that modern LLMs can simulate some of crowdworkers' abilities in these "human computation algorithms," but the level of success is variable and influenced by requesters' understanding of LLM capabilities, the specific skills required for sub-tasks, and the optimal interaction modality for performing these sub-tasks. We reflect on human and LLMs' different sensitivities to instructions, stress the importance of enabling human-facing safeguards for LLMs, and discuss the potential of training humans and LLMs with complementary skill sets. Crucially, we show that replicating crowdsourcing pipelines offers a valuable platform to investigate (1) the relative strengths of LLMs on different tasks (by cross-comparing their performances on sub-tasks) and (2) LLMs' potential in complex tasks, where they can complete part of the tasks while leaving others to humans

SMRT Chatbots: Improving Non-Task-Oriented Dialog with Simulated Multiple Reference Training

Non-task-oriented dialog models suffer from poor quality and non-diverse responses. To overcome limited conversational data, we apply Simulated Multiple Reference Training (SMRT; Khayrallah et al., 2020), and use a paraphraser to simulate multiple responses per training prompt. We find SMRT improves over a strong Transformer baseline as measured by human and automatic quality scores and lexical diversity. We also find SMRT is comparable to pretraining in human evaluation quality, and outperforms pretraining on automatic quality and lexical diversity, without requiring related-domain dialog data.Comment: EMNLP 2020 Camera Read

Towards a Gold Standard Corpus for Variable Detection and Linking in Social Science Publications

In this paper, we describe our effort to create a new corpus for the evaluation of detecting and linking so-called survey variables in social science publications (e.g., "Do you believe in Heaven?"). The task is to recognize survey variable mentions in a given text, disambiguate them, and link them to the corresponding variable within a knowledge base. Since there are generally hundreds of candidates to link to and due to the wide variety of forms they can take, this is a challenging task within NLP. The contribution of our work is the first gold standard corpus for the variable detection and linking task. We describe the annotation guidelines and the annotation process. The produced corpus is multilingual - German and English - and includes manually curated word and phrase alignments. Moreover, it includes text samples that could not be assigned to any variables, denoted as negative examples. Based on the new dataset, we conduct an evaluation of several state-of-the-art text classification and textual similarity methods. The annotated corpus is made available along with an open-source baseline system for variable mention identification and linking