Tarek Naous

Yao Dou, Isadora Krsek, Tarek Naous et al. · cmu

Self-disclosure, while being common and rewarding in social media interaction, also poses privacy risks. In this paper, we take the initiative to protect the user-side privacy associated with online self-disclosure through detection and abstraction. We develop a taxonomy of 19 self-disclosure categories and curate a large corpus consisting of 4.8K annotated disclosure spans. We then fine-tune a language model for detection, achieving over 65% partial span F$_1$. We further conduct an HCI user study, with 82% of participants viewing the model positively, highlighting its real-world applicability. Motivated by the user feedback, we introduce the task of self-disclosure abstraction, which is rephrasing disclosures into less specific terms while preserving their utility, e.g., "Im 16F" to "I'm a teenage girl". We explore various fine-tuning strategies, and our best model can generate diverse abstractions that moderately reduce privacy risks while maintaining high utility according to human evaluation. To help users in deciding which disclosures to abstract, we present a task of rating their importance for context understanding. Our fine-tuned model achieves 80% accuracy, on-par with GPT-3.5. Given safety and privacy considerations, we will only release our corpus and models to researcher who agree to the ethical guidelines outlined in Ethics Statement.

Zohaib Khan, Mustafa Dogan, Ifeoma Okoh et al.

Misinformation is on the rise, and the strong writing capabilities of LLMs lower the barrier for malicious actors to produce and disseminate false information. We study how LLMs behave when prompted to spread misinformation across languages and target countries, and introduce GlobalLies, a multilingual parallel dataset of 440 misinformation generation prompt templates and 6,867 entities, spanning 8 languages and 195 countries. Using both human annotations and large-scale LLM-as-a-judge evaluations across hundreds of thousands of generations from state-of-the-art models, we show that misinformation generation varies systematically based on the country being discussed. Propagation of lies by LLMs is substantially higher in many lower-resource languages and for countries with a lower Human Development Index (HDI). We find that existing mitigation strategies provide uneven protection: input safety classifiers exhibit cross-lingual gaps, and retrieval-augmented fact-checking remains inconsistent across regions due to unequal information availability. We release GlobalLies for research purposes, aiming to support the development of mitigation strategies to reduce the spread of global misinformation: https://github.com/zohaib-khan5040/globallies

Jonathan Zheng, Ashutosh Baheti, Tarek Naous et al.

We present Stanceosaurus, a new corpus of 28,033 tweets in English, Hindi, and Arabic annotated with stance towards 251 misinformation claims. As far as we are aware, it is the largest corpus annotated with stance towards misinformation claims. The claims in Stanceosaurus originate from 15 fact-checking sources that cover diverse geographical regions and cultures. Unlike existing stance datasets, we introduce a more fine-grained 5-class labeling strategy with additional subcategories to distinguish implicit stance. Pre-trained transformer-based stance classifiers that are fine-tuned on our corpus show good generalization on unseen claims and regional claims from countries outside the training data. Cross-lingual experiments demonstrate Stanceosaurus' capability of training multi-lingual models, achieving 53.1 F1 on Hindi and 50.4 F1 on Arabic without any target-language fine-tuning. Finally, we show how a domain adaptation method can be used to improve performance on Stanceosaurus using additional RumourEval-2019 data. We make Stanceosaurus publicly available to the research community and hope it will encourage further work on misinformation identification across languages and cultures.

Tarek Naous, Wei Xu

Language Models (LMs) have been shown to exhibit a strong preference towards entities associated with Western culture when operating in non-Western languages. In this paper, we aim to uncover the origins of entity-related cultural biases in LMs by analyzing several contributing factors, including the representation of entities in pre-training data and the impact of variations in linguistic phenomena across languages. We introduce CAMeL-2, a parallel Arabic-English benchmark of 58,086 entities associated with Arab and Western cultures and 367 masked natural contexts for entities. Our evaluations using CAMeL-2 reveal reduced performance gaps between cultures by LMs when tested in English compared to Arabic. We find that LMs struggle in Arabic with entities that appear at high frequencies in pre-training, where entities can hold multiple word senses. This also extends to entities that exhibit high lexical overlap with languages that are not Arabic but use the Arabic script. Further, we show how frequency-based tokenization leads to this issue in LMs, which gets worse with larger Arabic vocabularies. We will make CAMeL-2 available at: https://github.com/tareknaous/camel2

Anton Lavrouk, Tarek Naous, Alan Ritter et al.

The culture of the Post-Soviet states is complex, shaped by a turbulent history that continues to influence current events. In this study, we investigate the Post-Soviet cultural food knowledge of foundation models by constructing BORSch, a multimodal dataset encompassing 1147 and 823 dishes in the Russian and Ukrainian languages, centered around the Post-Soviet region. We demonstrate that leading models struggle to correctly identify the origins of dishes from Post-Soviet nations in both text-only and multimodal Question Answering (QA), instead over-predicting countries linked to the language the question is asked in. Through analysis of pretraining data, we show that these results can be explained by misleading dish-origin co-occurrences, along with linguistic phenomena such as Russian-Ukrainian code mixing. Finally, to move beyond QA-based assessments, we test models' abilities to produce accurate visual descriptions of dishes. The weak correlation between this task and QA suggests that QA alone may be insufficient as an evaluation of cultural understanding. To foster further research, we will make BORSch publicly available at https://github.com/alavrouk/BORSch.

Geyang Guo, Tarek Naous, Hiromi Wakaki et al.

Language Models (LMs) are typically tuned with human preferences to produce helpful responses, but the impact of preference tuning on the ability to handle culturally diverse queries remains understudied. In this paper, we systematically analyze how native human cultural preferences can be incorporated into the preference learning process to train more culturally aware LMs. We introduce \textbf{CARE}, a multilingual resource containing 3,490 culturally specific questions and 31.7k responses with human judgments. We demonstrate how a modest amount of high-quality native preferences improves cultural awareness across various LMs, outperforming larger generic preference data. Our analyses reveal that models with stronger initial cultural performance benefit more from alignment, leading to gaps among models developed in different regions with varying access to culturally relevant data. CARE is publicly available at https://github.com/Guochry/CARE.

Tarek Naous, Michael J. Ryan, Anton Lavrouk et al.

We present a comprehensive evaluation of large language models for multilingual readability assessment. Existing evaluation resources lack domain and language diversity, limiting the ability for cross-domain and cross-lingual analyses. This paper introduces ReadMe++, a multilingual multi-domain dataset with human annotations of 9757 sentences in Arabic, English, French, Hindi, and Russian, collected from 112 different data sources. This benchmark will encourage research on developing robust multilingual readability assessment methods. Using ReadMe++, we benchmark multilingual and monolingual language models in the supervised, unsupervised, and few-shot prompting settings. The domain and language diversity in ReadMe++ enable us to test more effective few-shot prompting, and identify shortcomings in state-of-the-art unsupervised methods. Our experiments also reveal exciting results of superior domain generalization and enhanced cross-lingual transfer capabilities by models trained on ReadMe++. We will make our data publicly available and release a python package tool for multilingual sentence readability prediction using our trained models at: https://github.com/tareknaous/readme

Tarek Naous, Michael J. Ryan, Alan Ritter et al.

As the reach of large language models (LMs) expands globally, their ability to cater to diverse cultural contexts becomes crucial. Despite advancements in multilingual capabilities, models are not designed with appropriate cultural nuances. In this paper, we show that multilingual and Arabic monolingual LMs exhibit bias towards entities associated with Western culture. We introduce CAMeL, a novel resource of 628 naturally-occurring prompts and 20,368 entities spanning eight types that contrast Arab and Western cultures. CAMeL provides a foundation for measuring cultural biases in LMs through both extrinsic and intrinsic evaluations. Using CAMeL, we examine the cross-cultural performance in Arabic of 16 different LMs on tasks such as story generation, NER, and sentiment analysis, where we find concerning cases of stereotyping and cultural unfairness. We further test their text-infilling performance, revealing the incapability of appropriate adaptation to Arab cultural contexts. Finally, we analyze 6 Arabic pre-training corpora and find that commonly used sources such as Wikipedia may not be best suited to build culturally aware LMs, if used as they are without adjustment. We will make CAMeL publicly available at: https://github.com/tareknaous/camel

Isadora Krsek, Anubha Kabra, Yao Dou et al. · cmu

In pseudonymous online fora like Reddit, the benefits of self-disclosure are often apparent to users (e.g., I can vent about my in-laws to understanding strangers), but the privacy risks are more abstract (e.g., will my partner be able to tell that this is me?). Prior work has sought to develop natural language processing (NLP) tools that help users identify potentially risky self-disclosures in their text, but none have been designed for or evaluated with the users they hope to protect. Absent this assessment, these tools will be limited by the social-technical gap: users need assistive tools that help them make informed decisions, not paternalistic tools that tell them to avoid self-disclosure altogether. To bridge this gap, we conducted a study with N = 21 Reddit users; we had them use a state-of-the-art NLP disclosure detection model on two of their authored posts and asked them questions to understand if and how the model helped, where it fell short, and how it could be improved to help them make more informed decisions. Despite its imperfections, users responded positively to the model and highlighted its use as a tool that can help them catch mistakes, inform them of risks they were unaware of, and encourage self-reflection. However, our work also shows how, to be useful and usable, AI for supporting privacy decision-making must account for posting context, disclosure norms, and users' lived threat models, and provide explanations that help contextualize detected risks.

Anton Lavrouk, Ian Ligon, Tarek Naous et al.

The Stanceosaurus corpus (Zheng et al., 2022) was designed to provide high-quality, annotated, 5-way stance data extracted from Twitter, suitable for analyzing cross-cultural and cross-lingual misinformation. In the Stanceosaurus 2.0 iteration, we extend this framework to encompass Russian and Spanish. The former is of current significance due to prevalent misinformation amid escalating tensions with the West and the violent incursion into Ukraine. The latter, meanwhile, represents an enormous community that has been largely overlooked on major social media platforms. By incorporating an additional 3,874 Spanish and Russian tweets over 41 misinformation claims, our objective is to support research focused on these issues. To demonstrate the value of this data, we employed zero-shot cross-lingual transfer on multilingual BERT, yielding results on par with the initial Stanceosaurus study with a macro F1 score of 43 for both languages. This underlines the viability of stance classification as an effective tool for identifying multicultural misinformation.

Tarek Naous, Philippe Laban, Wei Xu et al. · microsoft-research

Conversations with LMs involve two participants: a human user leading the conversation, and an LM assistant responding to the user's request. To satisfy this specific role, LMs are post-trained to be helpful assistants -- optimized to produce exhaustive and well-structured responses, free of ambiguity and grammar errors. User utterances, on the other hand, are rarely perfected, with each user phrasing requests in unique ways, sometimes putting in partial effort at each turn and refining on the fly. To evaluate LM performance in realistic settings, prior work simulated users in multi-turn conversations, often prompting an LLM originally trained to be a helpful assistant to act as a user. However, we show that assistant LMs make for poor user simulators, with the surprising finding that better assistants yield worse simulators. Instead, we introduce purpose-built User Language Models (User LMs) - models post-trained to simulate human users in multi-turn conversations. Through various evaluations, we show how User LMs align better with human behavior and achieve better simulation robustness than existing simulation methods. When leveraging User LMs to simulate coding and math conversations, the performance of a strong assistant (GPT-4o) drops from 74.6% to 57.4%, confirming that more realistic simulation environments lead to assistant struggles as they fail to cope with the nuances of users in multi-turn setups.

Tarek Naous, Anagha Savit, Carlos Rafael Catalan et al.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) gain stronger multilingual capabilities, their ability to handle culturally diverse entities becomes crucial. Prior work has shown that LLMs often favor Western-associated entities in Arabic, raising concerns about cultural fairness. Due to the lack of multilingual benchmarks, it remains unclear if such biases also manifest in different non-Western languages. In this paper, we introduce Camellia, a benchmark for measuring entity-centric cultural biases in nine Asian languages spanning six distinct Asian cultures. Camellia includes 19,530 entities manually annotated for association with the specific Asian or Western culture, as well as 2,173 naturally occurring masked contexts for entities derived from social media posts. Using Camellia, we evaluate cultural biases in four recent multilingual LLM families across various tasks such as cultural context adaptation, sentiment association, and entity extractive QA. Our analyses show a struggle by LLMs at cultural adaptation in all Asian languages, with performance differing across models developed in regions with varying access to culturally-relevant data. We further observe that different LLM families hold their distinct biases, differing in how they associate cultures with particular sentiments. Lastly, we find that LLMs struggle with context understanding in Asian languages, creating performance gaps between cultures in entity extraction.

Michael J. Ryan, Tarek Naous, Wei Xu

Recent advancements in high-quality, large-scale English resources have pushed the frontier of English Automatic Text Simplification (ATS) research. However, less work has been done on multilingual text simplification due to the lack of a diverse evaluation benchmark that covers complex-simple sentence pairs in many languages. This paper introduces the MultiSim benchmark, a collection of 27 resources in 12 distinct languages containing over 1.7 million complex-simple sentence pairs. This benchmark will encourage research in developing more effective multilingual text simplification models and evaluation metrics. Our experiments using MultiSim with pre-trained multilingual language models reveal exciting performance improvements from multilingual training in non-English settings. We observe strong performance from Russian in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer to low-resource languages. We further show that few-shot prompting with BLOOM-176b achieves comparable quality to reference simplifications outperforming fine-tuned models in most languages. We validate these findings through human evaluation.

Tarek Naous, Srinjay Sarkar, Abubakar Abid et al.

Clustering algorithms are one of the main analytical methods to detect patterns in unlabeled data. Existing clustering methods typically treat samples in a dataset as points in a metric space and compute distances to group together similar points. In this paper, we present a wholly different way of clustering points in 2-dimensional space, inspired by how humans cluster data: by training neural networks to perform instance segmentation on plotted data. Our approach, Visual Clustering, has several advantages over traditional clustering algorithms: it is much faster than most existing clustering algorithms (making it suitable for very large datasets), it agrees strongly with human intuition for clusters, and it is by default hyperparameter free (although additional steps with hyperparameters can be introduced for more control of the algorithm). We describe the method and compare it to ten other clustering methods on synthetic data to illustrate its advantages and disadvantages. We then demonstrate how our approach can be extended to higher dimensional data and illustrate its performance on real-world data. The implementation of Visual Clustering is publicly available and can be applied to any dataset in a few lines of code.

Tarek Naous, Wissam Antoun, Reem A. Mahmoud et al.

Enabling empathetic behavior in Arabic dialogue agents is an important aspect of building human-like conversational models. While Arabic Natural Language Processing has seen significant advances in Natural Language Understanding (NLU) with language models such as AraBERT, Natural Language Generation (NLG) remains a challenge. The shortcomings of NLG encoder-decoder models are primarily due to the lack of Arabic datasets suitable to train NLG models such as conversational agents. To overcome this issue, we propose a transformer-based encoder-decoder initialized with AraBERT parameters. By initializing the weights of the encoder and decoder with AraBERT pre-trained weights, our model was able to leverage knowledge transfer and boost performance in response generation. To enable empathy in our conversational model, we train it using the ArabicEmpatheticDialogues dataset and achieve high performance in empathetic response generation. Specifically, our model achieved a low perplexity value of 17.0 and an increase in 5 BLEU points compared to the previous state-of-the-art model. Also, our proposed model was rated highly by 85 human evaluators, validating its high capability in exhibiting empathy while generating relevant and fluent responses in open-domain settings.