Session B-4: Who Freed the Slaves? Emancipation and the Sources of Social Change

Abraham Lincoln argued that all knew slavery was “somehow the cause of the war”. And every student knows that one of the most significant outcomes of the Civil War was the abolition of slavery. But how did this happen? Who actually freed the slaves? In this session, we’ll model a lesson that teachers can use, rooted in historical thinking and primary sources that helps students engage in authentic historical inquiry about a turning point in our nation’s past

Thresh: A Unified, Customizable and Deployable Platform for Fine-Grained Text Evaluation

Fine-grained, span-level human evaluation has emerged as a reliable and robust method for evaluating text generation tasks such as summarization, simplification, machine translation and news generation, and the derived annotations have been useful for training automatic metrics and improving language models. However, existing annotation tools implemented for these evaluation frameworks lack the adaptability to be extended to different domains or languages, or modify annotation settings according to user needs. And the absence of a unified annotated data format inhibits the research in multi-task learning. In this paper, we introduce Thresh, a unified, customizable and deployable platform for fine-grained evaluation. By simply creating a YAML configuration file, users can build and test an annotation interface for any framework within minutes -- all in one web browser window. To facilitate collaboration and sharing, Thresh provides a community hub that hosts a collection of fine-grained frameworks and corresponding annotations made and collected by the community, covering a wide range of NLP tasks. For deployment, Thresh offers multiple options for any scale of annotation projects from small manual inspections to large crowdsourcing ones. Additionally, we introduce a Python library to streamline the entire process from typology design and deployment to annotation processing. Thresh is publicly accessible at https://thresh.tools

LENS: A Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification

Training learnable metrics using modern language models has recently emerged as a promising method for the automatic evaluation of machine translation. However, existing human evaluation datasets for text simplification have limited annotations that are based on unitary or outdated models, making them unsuitable for this approach. To address these issues, we introduce the SimpEval corpus that contains: SimpEval_past, comprising 12K human ratings on 2.4K simplifications of 24 past systems, and SimpEval_2022, a challenging simplification benchmark consisting of over 1K human ratings of 360 simplifications including GPT-3.5 generated text. Training on SimpEval, we present LENS, a Learnable Evaluation Metric for Text Simplification. Extensive empirical results show that LENS correlates much better with human judgment than existing metrics, paving the way for future progress in the evaluation of text simplification. We also introduce Rank and Rate, a human evaluation framework that rates simplifications from several models in a list-wise manner using an interactive interface, which ensures both consistency and accuracy in the evaluation process and is used to create the SimpEval datasets.Comment: Accepted at ACL 202

Dancing Between Success and Failure: Edit-level Simplification Evaluation using SALSA

Large language models (e.g., GPT-4) are uniquely capable of producing highly rated text simplification, yet current human evaluation methods fail to provide a clear understanding of systems' specific strengths and weaknesses. To address this limitation, we introduce SALSA, an edit-based human annotation framework that enables holistic and fine-grained text simplification evaluation. We develop twenty one linguistically grounded edit types, covering the full spectrum of success and failure across dimensions of conceptual, syntactic and lexical simplicity. Using SALSA, we collect 19K edit annotations on 840 simplifications, revealing discrepancies in the distribution of simplification strategies performed by fine-tuned models, prompted LLMs and humans, and find GPT-3.5 performs more quality edits than humans, but still exhibits frequent errors. Using our fine-grained annotations, we develop LENS-SALSA, a reference-free automatic simplification metric, trained to predict sentence- and word-level quality simultaneously. Additionally, we introduce word-level quality estimation for simplification and report promising baseline results. Our data, new metric, and annotation toolkit are available at https://salsa-eval.com.Comment: Accepted to EMNLP 202

Fostering Organizational Integrity through Departmental Program Reviews

Conducting a departmental program review can be a stressful and arduous process. At the same time, the final report can provide valuable insights. The challenges and benefits of program reviews have been well noted by scholars. We seek to add to this conversation by arguing that program reviews can prove beneficial by fostering and maintaining organizational integrity. In our essay, we review relevant literature on program reviews, provide an explanation of organizational integrity, present a narrative of our program review process, and explain how this process fostered organizational integrity

Student’s Attitudes toward Academic Dishonesty: An Exploration

Academic dishonesty in college/university classrooms is widely recognized as a serious problem (Offstein and Chory 2017). Studies indicate that academic dishonesty is pervasive. Klein, Levenburg, McKendall, and Mothersell (2007), report 40-80 percent of college students are involved in academic dishonesty, whereas McCabe, Butterfield, and Treviňo (2012), report 65-87 percent involvement. Studies also report that cheating activity is increasing (Forsha 2017; Pérez-Peňa 2012), facilitated by increasing levels of tolerance (where instances of academic dishonesty are overlooked by classroom instructors (Coren 2011)), and advances in technology (Best and Shirley 2018). Consequently, academic dishonesty has become an increasingly important area of concern and, likewise, an important area of study (Robinson and Glanzer 2017). Academic dishonesty is not a victimless activity. With the growth of cheating activity, the integrity of higher education is increasingly being questioned (Drye, Lomo-David, and Snyder 2018). Pervasive academic dishonesty prevents academic institutions from being able to certify that graduates have gained a specific level of knowledge and ability from their education (Yu, Glanzer, Johnson, Sriram, and Moore 2018). Academic dishonesty has also been connected with a number of other undesirable activities (Biswas 2014), including unethical work behaviors (Harding, Carpenter, Finelli, and Passow 2004). Several studies suggest that academic dishonesty primes students for continuing dishonesty in their subsequent employment (e.g., Harding, Carpenter, Finelli, and Passow 2004; Hsiao and Yang 2011; Nonis and Swift 2001; Yang, Huang, and Chen 2013). Consequently, recent highly publicized business scandals have focused renewed attention on cheating activities in the classroom (Rakovski and Levy 2007). Past ethics research has explored many important issues involving academic dishonesty, including the effectiveness of various tactics to reduce the incidence of academic dishonesty. Examples of these tactics include the implementation/enforcement of honor codes (McCabe, Treviño, and Butterfield 2001; Tatum and Schwartz 2017), required ethics courses (Medeiros et al. 2017), ethics instruction integrated into discipline-specific coursework (Desplaces, Melchar, Beauvais, and Bosco 2007), campus climate (Molar 2015), and the activities of faculty to fight dishonesty (Coalter, Lim, and Wanorie 2007). The attitudes of students toward academic dishonesty have also received a significant amount of research attention (e.g., Johns and Strand 2007). An area that has not received the same level of research attention involves the effects that students’ perceptions of the ethicality of their academic environment have on their attitudes toward academic dishonesty. Specifically, do students’ perceptions of the ethicality of their college/university, their faculty, and their student body affect their attitudes toward academic dishonesty? This is an important area of study since if students’ attitudes toward academic dishonesty are affected by their perceptions of the ethicality of their institution and their colleagues, it may be possible to affect students’ participation in academic dishonesty by affecting their perceptions of their school environment. To explore this issue, first, student academic dishonesty in higher education is examined. Second, hypotheses are developed and tested. Finally, conclusions are drawn

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: The Role of a Consumer Mentality in Higher Education and Exploring How it Can be Overcome

Serving and satisfying customers is often viewed as the primary function of businesses. Consequently, a customer orientation, or a focus on determining customers’ wants and needs and designing and offering products to satisfy them, is a key concept within marketing. Is the importance of a customer orientation also true in higher education? Several believe that it is. The answer to the question of who is the customer in higher education, however, is less clear. Historically, society was viewed to be the primary customer of higher education – the purpose of higher education was viewed to produce educated individuals who possess the knowledge and skills to serve society by serving as leaders in society and its primary institutions, including government and business. Arguably, this view of the purpose of higher educations has changed. Today, students are most often viewed as the customers of higher education. Indeed, when viewing the activities of colleges and universities, the extent to which a consumer mentality has been accepted and employed quickly becomes obvious. The promise of consumer (student) satisfaction is viewed to be key to attracting students and is an essential component of most university marketing programs. Not all agree with this assessment of the role of a consumer mentality in higher education, however. Several believe that a consumer mentality is antithetical to higher education, which logically raises an important question: Why would a customer mentality be appropriate for most organizations, but not higher education? The focus of this special session is to explore this issue

Plate fixation or intramedullary fixation of humeral shaft fractures: An updated meta-analysis

Background The optimal approach to operative treatment of humeral shaft fractures remains debatable. Previously published trials have been limited in size and have been inconclusive regarding important patient outcome variables following treatment with either intramedullary nails or plates. We conducted a meta-analysis of available trials comparing treatment of humeral shaft fractures

Efficacy Results of a Trial of a Herpes Simplex Vaccine

Two previous studies of a herpes simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) subunit vaccine containing glycoprotein D in HSV-discordant couples revealed 73% and 74% efficacy against genital disease in women who were negative for both HSV type 1 (HSV-1) and HSV-2 antibodies. Efficacy was not observed in men or HSV-1 seropositive women