Nils Feldhus

Gabriele Sarti, Nils Feldhus, Ludwig Sickert et al.

Past work in natural language processing interpretability focused mainly on popular classification tasks while largely overlooking generation settings, partly due to a lack of dedicated tools. In this work, we introduce Inseq, a Python library to democratize access to interpretability analyses of sequence generation models. Inseq enables intuitive and optimized extraction of models' internal information and feature importance scores for popular decoder-only and encoder-decoder Transformers architectures. We showcase its potential by adopting it to highlight gender biases in machine translation models and locate factual knowledge inside GPT-2. Thanks to its extensible interface supporting cutting-edge techniques such as contrastive feature attribution, Inseq can drive future advances in explainable natural language generation, centralizing good practices and enabling fair and reproducible model evaluations.

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus et al.

Natural language explanations (NLEs) are vital for elucidating the reasoning behind large language model (LLM) decisions. Many techniques have been developed to generate NLEs using LLMs. However, like humans, LLMs might not always produce optimal NLEs on first attempt. Inspired by human learning processes, we introduce Cross-Refine, which employs role modeling by deploying two LLMs as generator and critic, respectively. The generator outputs a first NLE and then refines this initial explanation using feedback and suggestions provided by the critic. Cross-Refine does not require any supervised training data or additional training. We validate Cross-Refine across three NLP tasks using three state-of-the-art open-source LLMs through automatic and human evaluation. We select Self-Refine (Madaan et al., 2023) as the baseline, which only utilizes self-feedback to refine the explanations. Our findings from automatic evaluation and a user study indicate that Cross-Refine outperforms Self-Refine. Meanwhile, Cross-Refine can perform effectively with less powerful LLMs, whereas Self-Refine only yields strong results with ChatGPT. Additionally, we conduct an ablation study to assess the importance of feedback and suggestions. Both of them play an important role in refining explanations. We further evaluate Cross-Refine on a bilingual dataset in English and German.

Nils Feldhus, Leonhard Hennig, Maximilian Dustin Nasert et al.

Saliency maps can explain a neural model's predictions by identifying important input features. They are difficult to interpret for laypeople, especially for instances with many features. In order to make them more accessible, we formalize the underexplored task of translating saliency maps into natural language and compare methods that address two key challenges of this approach -- what and how to verbalize. In both automatic and human evaluation setups, using token-level attributions from text classification tasks, we compare two novel methods (search-based and instruction-based verbalizations) against conventional feature importance representations (heatmap visualizations and extractive rationales), measuring simulatability, faithfulness, helpfulness and ease of understanding. Instructing GPT-3.5 to generate saliency map verbalizations yields plausible explanations which include associations, abstractive summarization and commonsense reasoning, achieving by far the highest human ratings, but they are not faithfully capturing numeric information and are inconsistent in their interpretation of the task. In comparison, our search-based, model-free verbalization approach efficiently completes templated verbalizations, is faithful by design, but falls short in helpfulness and simulatability. Our results suggest that saliency map verbalization makes feature attribution explanations more comprehensible and less cognitively challenging to humans than conventional representations.

Jingyi Sun, Qianli Wang, Pepa Atanasova et al.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) faithfulness, i.e., whether CoTs genuinely reflect large language models' (LLM) underlying behavior, is typically evaluated under two disjoint paradigms: contextual faithfulness, measured by perturbing the input or CoT trace, and parametric faithfulness, assessed by intervening on a model's parametric knowledge. Yet prior work compares them only descriptively. We fill this gap by proposing FaithMate, a unified preference-alignment interface for optimizing models towards either faithfulness paradigm. It enables us to investigate the interplay between the two paradigms, examining whether and to what extent faithfulness gains generalize within and across paradigms. Across three models, two datasets, and six faithfulness metrics, we find that the two paradigms are positively coupled, yet asymmetric: optimizing towards parametric faithfulness yields consistent gains across both paradigms, whereas the contextual counterpart delivers more variable gains. Within the contextual paradigm, faithfulness gains on one metric do not consistently transfer to others, implying that existing contextual metrics capture disjoint facets of faithfulness and exposing inherent trade-offs. These findings imply that CoT faithfulness is not a monolithic objective and therefore requires multifaceted optimization and evaluation.

Nils Feldhus, Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina et al.

While recently developed NLP explainability methods let us open the black box in various ways (Madsen et al., 2022), a missing ingredient in this endeavor is an interactive tool offering a conversational interface. Such a dialogue system can help users explore datasets and models with explanations in a contextualized manner, e.g. via clarification or follow-up questions, and through a natural language interface. We adapt the conversational explanation framework TalkToModel (Slack et al., 2022) to the NLP domain, add new NLP-specific operations such as free-text rationalization, and illustrate its generalizability on three NLP tasks (dialogue act classification, question answering, hate speech detection). To recognize user queries for explanations, we evaluate fine-tuned and few-shot prompting models and implement a novel Adapter-based approach. We then conduct two user studies on (1) the perceived correctness and helpfulness of the dialogues, and (2) the simulatability, i.e. how objectively helpful dialogical explanations are for humans in figuring out the model's predicted label when it's not shown. We found rationalization and feature attribution were helpful in explaining the model behavior. Moreover, users could more reliably predict the model outcome based on an explanation dialogue rather than one-off explanations.

Nils Feldhus, Ajay Madhavan Ravichandran, Sebastian Möller

The human-centric explainable artificial intelligence (HCXAI) community has raised the need for framing the explanation process as a conversation between human and machine. In this position paper, we establish desiderata for Mediators, text-based conversational agents which are capable of explaining the behavior of neural models interactively using natural language. From the perspective of natural language processing (NLP) research, we engineer a blueprint of such a Mediator for the task of sentiment analysis and assess how far along current research is on the path towards dialogue-based explanations.

Yi-Sheng Hsu, Nils Feldhus, Sherzod Hakimov

Free-text rationales justify model decisions in natural language and thus become likable and accessible among approaches to explanation across many tasks. However, their effectiveness can be hindered by misinterpretation and hallucination. As a perturbation test, we investigate how large language models (LLMs) perform rationale generation under the effects of readability level control, i.e., being prompted for an explanation targeting a specific expertise level, such as sixth grade or college. We find that explanations are adaptable to such instruction, though the observed distinction between readability levels does not fully match the defined complexity scores according to traditional readability metrics. Furthermore, the generated rationales tend to feature medium level complexity, which correlates with the measured quality using automatic metrics. Finally, our human annotators confirm a generally satisfactory impression on rationales at all readability levels, with high-school-level readability being most commonly perceived and favored.

Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Pepa Atanasova et al.

Quantization is widely used to accelerate inference and streamline the deployment of large language models (LLMs), yet its effects on self-explanations (SEs) remain unexplored. SEs, generated by LLMs to justify their own outputs, require reasoning about the model's own decision-making process, a capability that may exhibit particular sensitivity to quantization. As SEs are increasingly relied upon for transparency in high-stakes applications, understanding whether and to what extent quantization degrades SE quality and faithfulness is critical. To address this gap, we examine two types of SEs: natural language explanations (NLEs) and counterfactual examples, generated by LLMs quantized using three common techniques at distinct bit widths. Our findings indicate that quantization typically leads to moderate declines in both SE quality (up to 4.4\%) and faithfulness (up to 2.38\%). The user study further demonstrates that quantization diminishes both the coherence and trustworthiness of SEs (up to 8.5\%). Compared to smaller models, larger models show limited resilience to quantization in terms of SE quality but better maintain faithfulness. Moreover, no quantization technique consistently excels across task accuracy, SE quality, and faithfulness. Given that quantization's impact varies by context, we recommend validating SE quality for specific use cases, especially for NLEs, which show greater sensitivity. Nonetheless, the relatively minor deterioration in SE quality and faithfulness does not undermine quantization's effectiveness as a model compression technique.

Qianli Wang, Van Bach Nguyen, Yihong Liu et al.

Counterfactuals refer to minimally edited inputs that cause a model's prediction to change, serving as a promising approach to explaining the model's behavior. Large language models (LLMs) excel at generating English counterfactuals and demonstrate multilingual proficiency. However, their effectiveness in generating multilingual counterfactuals remains unclear. To this end, we conduct a comprehensive study on multilingual counterfactuals. We first conduct automatic evaluations on both directly generated counterfactuals in the target languages and those derived via English translation across six languages. Although translation-based counterfactuals offer higher validity than their directly generated counterparts, they demand substantially more modifications and still fall short of matching the quality of the original English counterfactuals. Second, we find the patterns of edits applied to high-resource European-language counterfactuals to be remarkably similar, suggesting that cross-lingual perturbations follow common strategic principles. Third, we identify and categorize four main types of errors that consistently appear in the generated counterfactuals across languages. Finally, we reveal that multilingual counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) yields larger model performance improvements than cross-lingual CDA, especially for lower-resource languages. Yet, the imperfections of the generated counterfactuals limit gains in model performance and robustness.

Jing Yang, Moritz Hechtbauer, Elisabeth Khalilov et al.

For socially sensitive tasks like hate speech detection, the quality of explanations from Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for factors like user trust and model alignment. While Persona prompting (PP) is increasingly used as a way to steer model towards user-specific generation, its effect on model rationales remains underexplored. We investigate how LLM-generated rationales vary when conditioned on different simulated demographic personas. Using datasets annotated with word-level rationales, we measure agreement with human annotations from different demographic groups, and assess the impact of PP on model bias and human alignment. Our evaluation across three LLMs results reveals three key findings: (1) PP improving classification on the most subjective task (hate speech) but degrading rationale quality. (2) Simulated personas fail to align with their real-world demographic counterparts, and high inter-persona agreement shows models are resistant to significant steering. (3) Models exhibit consistent demographic biases and a strong tendency to over-flag content as harmful, regardless of PP. Our findings reveal a critical trade-off: while PP can improve classification in socially-sensitive tasks, it often comes at the cost of rationale quality and fails to mitigate underlying biases, urging caution in its application.

Jing Yang, Nils Feldhus, Salar Mohtaj et al.

Despite advances in Natural Language Generation (NLG), evaluation remains challenging. Although various new metrics and LLM-as-a-judge (LaaJ) methods are proposed, human judgment persists as the gold standard. To systematically review how NLG evaluation has evolved, we employ an automatic information extraction scheme to gather key information from NLG papers, focusing on different evaluation methods (metrics, LaaJ and human evaluation). With extracted metadata from 14,171 papers across four major conferences (ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, and INLG) over the past six years, we reveal several critical findings: (1) Task Divergence: While Dialogue Generation demonstrates a rapid shift toward LaaJ (>40% in 2025), Machine Translation remains locked into n-gram metrics, and Question Answering exhibits a substantial decline in the proportion of studies conducting human evaluation. (2) Metric Inertia: Despite the development of semantic metrics, general-purpose metrics (e.g., BLEU, ROUGE) continue to be widely used across tasks without empirical justification, often lacking the discriminative power to distinguish between specific quality criteria. (3) Human-LaaJ Divergence: Our association analysis challenges the assumption that LLMs act as mere proxies for humans; LaaJ and human evaluations prioritize very different signals, and explicit validation is scarce (<8% of papers comparing the two), with only moderate to low correlation. Based on these observations, we derive practical recommendations to improve the rigor of future NLG evaluation.

Nils Feldhus, Tanja Baeumel, Elena Golimblevskaia et al.

LLM-as-a-judge has become the dominant paradigm for grading model outputs at scale, yet the same model assigns systematically different scores when its output format changes (e.g., a 1-5 rating vs. a True/False label). Existing diagnoses of these format-induced inconsistencies stop at the input-output level. Using Position-aware Edge Attribution Patching (PEAP), we causally investigate the internal mechanism in Gemma-3, Qwen2.5, and Llama-3. We find that judgments across structured understanding and open-ended preference tasks share a sparse, generalized Latent Evaluator sub-graph in the mid-to-late multi-layer perceptrons (MLPs); zero-ablating it collapses judgment while preserving world knowledge in architecturally modular models. By structurally decoupling abstract judging from output formatting, we provide a mechanistic account of format-induced inconsistency on the open-weight models we study: a continuous judgment signal computed in the shared trunk is mapped through fragile, format-specific terminal branches, enabling format-independent preference to be isolated downstream of the requested output format. Our findings imply that benchmark-level reliability comparisons across formats are partially measuring formatter geometry rather than evaluation quality.

Nils Feldhus, Robert Schwarzenberg, Sebastian Möller

In the language domain, as in other domains, neural explainability takes an ever more important role, with feature attribution methods on the forefront. Many such methods require considerable computational resources and expert knowledge about implementation details and parameter choices. To facilitate research, we present Thermostat which consists of a large collection of model explanations and accompanying analysis tools. Thermostat allows easy access to over 200k explanations for the decisions of prominent state-of-the-art models spanning across different NLP tasks, generated with multiple explainers. The dataset took over 10k GPU hours (> one year) to compile; compute time that the community now saves. The accompanying software tools allow to analyse explanations instance-wise but also accumulatively on corpus level. Users can investigate and compare models, datasets and explainers without the need to orchestrate implementation details. Thermostat is fully open source, democratizes explainability research in the language domain, circumvents redundant computations and increases comparability and replicability.

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus et al.

Interpretability tools that offer explanations in the form of a dialogue have demonstrated their efficacy in enhancing users' understanding (Slack et al., 2023; Shen et al., 2023), as one-off explanations may fall short in providing sufficient information to the user. Current solutions for dialogue-based explanations, however, often require external tools and modules and are not easily transferable to tasks they were not designed for. With LLMCheckup, we present an easily accessible tool that allows users to chat with any state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) about its behavior. We enable LLMs to generate explanations and perform user intent recognition without fine-tuning, by connecting them with a broad spectrum of Explainable AI (XAI) methods, including white-box explainability tools such as feature attributions, and self-explanations (e.g., for rationale generation). LLM-based (self-)explanations are presented as an interactive dialogue that supports follow-up questions and generates suggestions. LLMCheckupprovides tutorials for operations available in the system, catering to individuals with varying levels of expertise in XAI and supporting multiple input modalities. We introduce a new parsing strategy that substantially enhances the user intent recognition accuracy of the LLM. Finally, we showcase LLMCheckup for the tasks of fact checking and commonsense question answering.

Laura Kopf, Nils Feldhus, Kirill Bykov et al.

Automated interpretability research aims to identify concepts encoded in neural network features to enhance human understanding of model behavior. Within the context of large language models (LLMs) for natural language processing (NLP), current automated neuron-level feature description methods face two key challenges: limited robustness and the assumption that each neuron encodes a single concept (monosemanticity), despite increasing evidence of polysemanticity. This assumption restricts the expressiveness of feature descriptions and limits their ability to capture the full range of behaviors encoded in model internals. To address this, we introduce Polysemantic FeatuRe Identification and Scoring Method (PRISM), a novel framework specifically designed to capture the complexity of features in LLMs. Unlike approaches that assign a single description per neuron, common in many automated interpretability methods in NLP, PRISM produces more nuanced descriptions that account for both monosemantic and polysemantic behavior. We apply PRISM to LLMs and, through extensive benchmarking against existing methods, demonstrate that our approach produces more accurate and faithful feature descriptions, improving both overall description quality (via a description score) and the ability to capture distinct concepts when polysemanticity is present (via a polysemanticity score).

Qianli Wang, Mingyang Wang, Nils Feldhus et al.

Quantization methods are widely used to accelerate inference and streamline the deployment of large language models (LLMs). While prior research has extensively investigated the degradation of various LLM capabilities due to quantization, its effects on model explainability and interpretability, which are crucial for understanding decision-making processes, remain unexplored. To address this gap, we conduct comprehensive experiments using three common quantization techniques at distinct bit widths, in conjunction with two explainability methods, counterfactual examples and natural language explanations, as well as two interpretability approaches, knowledge memorization analysis and latent multi-hop reasoning analysis. We complement our analysis with a thorough user study, evaluating selected explainability methods. Our findings reveal that, depending on the configuration, quantization can significantly impact model explainability and interpretability. Notably, the direction of this effect is not consistent, as it strongly depends on (1) the quantization method, (2) the explainability or interpretability approach, and (3) the evaluation protocol. In some settings, human evaluation shows that quantization degrades explainability, while in others, it even leads to improvements. Our work serves as a cautionary tale, demonstrating that quantization can unpredictably affect model transparency. This insight has important implications for deploying LLMs in applications where transparency is a critical requirement.

Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus, Simon Ostermann et al.

Counterfactual examples are widely used in natural language processing (NLP) as valuable data to improve models, and in explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to understand model behavior. The automated generation of counterfactual examples remains a challenging task even for large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance on many tasks. In this paper, we first introduce ZeroCF, a faithful approach for leveraging important words derived from feature attribution methods to generate counterfactual examples in a zero-shot setting. Second, we present a new framework, FitCF, which further verifies aforementioned counterfactuals by label flip verification and then inserts them as demonstrations for few-shot prompting, outperforming two state-of-the-art baselines. Through ablation studies, we identify the importance of each of FitCF's core components in improving the quality of counterfactuals, as assessed through flip rate, perplexity, and similarity measures. Furthermore, we show the effectiveness of LIME and Integrated Gradients as backbone attribution methods for FitCF and find that the number of demonstrations has the largest effect on performance. Finally, we reveal a strong correlation between the faithfulness of feature attribution scores and the quality of generated counterfactuals, which we hope will serve as an important finding for future research in this direction.

Mahdi Dhaini, Ege Erdogan, Nils Feldhus et al.

While research on applications and evaluations of explanation methods continues to expand, fairness of the explanation methods concerning disparities in their performance across subgroups remains an often overlooked aspect. In this paper, we address this gap by showing that, across three tasks and five language models, widely used post-hoc feature attribution methods exhibit significant gender disparity with respect to their faithfulness, robustness, and complexity. These disparities persist even when the models are pre-trained or fine-tuned on particularly unbiased datasets, indicating that the disparities we observe are not merely consequences of biased training data. Our results highlight the importance of addressing disparities in explanations when developing and applying explainability methods, as these can lead to biased outcomes against certain subgroups, with particularly critical implications in high-stakes contexts. Furthermore, our findings underscore the importance of incorporating the fairness of explanations, alongside overall model fairness and explainability, as a requirement in regulatory frameworks.

Aaron Louis Eidt, Nils Feldhus

While mechanistic interpretability has developed powerful tools to analyze the internal workings of Large Language Models (LLMs), their complexity has created an accessibility gap, limiting their use to specialists. We address this challenge by designing, building, and evaluating ELIA (Explainable Language Interpretability Analysis), an interactive web application that simplifies the outcomes of various language model component analyses for a broader audience. The system integrates three key techniques -- Attribution Analysis, Function Vector Analysis, and Circuit Tracing -- and introduces a novel methodology: using a vision-language model to automatically generate natural language explanations (NLEs) for the complex visualizations produced by these methods. The effectiveness of this approach was empirically validated through a mixed-methods user study, which revealed a clear preference for interactive, explorable interfaces over simpler, static visualizations. A key finding was that the AI-powered explanations helped bridge the knowledge gap for non-experts; a statistical analysis showed no significant correlation between a user's prior LLM experience and their comprehension scores, suggesting that the system reduced barriers to comprehension across experience levels. We conclude that an AI system can indeed simplify complex model analyses, but its true power is unlocked when paired with thoughtful, user-centered design that prioritizes interactivity, specificity, and narrative guidance.

Yilong Wang, Qianli Wang, Nils Feldhus

Counterfactual examples are minimal edits to an input that alter a model's prediction. They are widely employed in explainable AI to probe model behavior and in natural language processing (NLP) to augment training data. However, generating valid counterfactuals with large language models (LLMs) remains challenging, as existing single-pass methods often fail to induce reliable label changes, neglecting LLMs' self-correction capabilities. To explore this untapped potential, we propose iFlip, an iterative refinement approach that leverages three types of feedback, including model confidence, feature attribution, and natural language. Our results show that iFlip achieves an average 57.8% higher validity than the five state-of-the-art baselines, as measured by the label flipping rate. The user study further corroborates that iFlip outperforms baselines in completeness, overall satisfaction, and feasibility. In addition, ablation studies demonstrate that three components are paramount for iFlip to generate valid counterfactuals: leveraging an appropriate number of iterations, pointing to highly attributed words, and early stopping. Finally, counterfactuals generated by iFlip enable effective counterfactual data augmentation, substantially improving model performance and robustness.

Nils Feldhus, Laura Kopf

Understanding the decision-making processes of neural networks is a central goal of mechanistic interpretability. In the context of Large Language Models (LLMs), this involves uncovering the underlying mechanisms and identifying the roles of individual model components such as neurons and attention heads, as well as model abstractions such as the learned sparse features extracted by Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs). A rapidly growing line of work tackles this challenge by using powerful generator models to produce open-vocabulary, natural language concept descriptions for these components. In this paper, we provide the first survey of the emerging field of concept descriptions for model components and abstractions. We chart the key methods for generating these descriptions, the evolving landscape of automated and human metrics for evaluating them, and the datasets that underpin this research. Our synthesis reveals a growing demand for more rigorous, causal evaluation. By outlining the state of the art and identifying key challenges, this survey provides a roadmap for future research toward making models more transparent.

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus et al.

Conversational explainable artificial intelligence (ConvXAI) systems based on large language models (LLMs) have garnered considerable attention for their ability to enhance user comprehension through dialogue-based explanations. Current ConvXAI systems often are based on intent recognition to accurately identify the user's desired intention and map it to an explainability method. While such methods offer great precision and reliability in discerning users' underlying intentions for English, a significant challenge in the scarcity of training data persists, which impedes multilingual generalization. Besides, the support for free-form custom inputs, which are user-defined data distinct from pre-configured dataset instances, remains largely limited. To bridge these gaps, we first introduce MultiCoXQL, a multilingual extension of the CoXQL dataset spanning five typologically diverse languages, including one low-resource language. Subsequently, we propose a new parsing approach aimed at enhancing multilingual parsing performance, and evaluate three LLMs on MultiCoXQL using various parsing strategies. Furthermore, we present Compass, a new multilingual dataset designed for custom input extraction in ConvXAI systems, encompassing 11 intents across the same five languages as MultiCoXQL. We conduct monolingual, cross-lingual, and multilingual evaluations on Compass, employing three LLMs of varying sizes alongside BERT-type models.

Johann Frei, Nils Feldhus, Lisa Raithel et al.

For clinical data integration and healthcare services, the HL7 FHIR standard has established itself as a desirable format for interoperability between complex health data. Previous attempts at automating the translation from free-form clinical notes into structured FHIR resources rely on modular, rule-based systems or LLMs with instruction tuning and constrained decoding. Since they frequently suffer from limited generalizability and structural inconformity, we propose an end-to-end framework powered by LLM agents, code execution, and healthcare terminology database tools to address these issues. Our solution, called Infherno, is designed to adhere to the FHIR document schema and competes well with a human baseline in predicting FHIR resources from unstructured text. The implementation features a front end for custom and synthetic data and both local and proprietary models, supporting clinical data integration processes and interoperability across institutions.

Ekaterina Borisova, Fabio Barth, Nils Feldhus et al.

Tables are among the most widely used tools for representing structured data in research, business, medicine, and education. Although LLMs demonstrate strong performance in downstream tasks, their efficiency in processing tabular data remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of both text-based and multimodal LLMs on table understanding tasks through a cross-domain and cross-modality evaluation. Specifically, we compare their performance on tables from scientific vs. non-scientific contexts and examine their robustness on tables represented as images vs. text. Additionally, we conduct an interpretability analysis to measure context usage and input relevance. We also introduce the TableEval benchmark, comprising 3017 tables from scholarly publications, Wikipedia, and financial reports, where each table is provided in five different formats: Image, Dictionary, HTML, XML, and LaTeX. Our findings indicate that while LLMs maintain robustness across table modalities, they face significant challenges when processing scientific tables.

Qianli Wang, Van Bach Nguyen, Nils Feldhus et al.

Counterfactual examples are widely employed to enhance the performance and robustness of large language models (LLMs) through counterfactual data augmentation (CDA). However, the selection of the judge model used to evaluate label flipping, the primary metric for assessing the validity of generated counterfactuals for CDA, yields inconsistent results. To decipher this, we define four types of relationships between the counterfactual generator and judge models: being the same model, belonging to the same model family, being independent models, and having an distillation relationship. Through extensive experiments involving two state-of-the-art LLM-based methods, three datasets, four generator models, and 15 judge models, complemented by a user study (n = 90), we demonstrate that judge models with an independent, non-fine-tuned relationship to the generator model provide the most reliable label flipping evaluations. Relationships between the generator and judge models, which are closely aligned with the user study for CDA, result in better model performance and robustness. Nevertheless, we find that the gap between the most effective judge models and the results obtained from the user study remains considerably large. This suggests that a fully automated pipeline for CDA may be inadequate and requires human intervention.

Sebastian Möller, Pia Knoeferle, Britta Schulte et al.

Machine learning techniques have conquered many different tasks in speech and natural language processing, such as speech recognition, information extraction, text and speech generation, and human machine interaction using natural language or speech (chatbots). Modern techniques typically rely on large models for representing general knowledge of one or several languages (Large Language Models, LLMs), or for representing speech and general audio characteristics. These models have been trained with large amounts of speech and language data, typically including web content. When humans interact with such technologies, the effectiveness of the interaction will be influenced by how far humans make use of the same type of language the models have been trained on or, in other words, if the models are able to generalize to the language used by humans when interacting with the technology. This may lead to some gradual forms of adaptation in human speech and language production, and users who do not adapt may be excluded from efficient use of such technologies. On top of this, as commercial model development follows market needs, under-represented languages and dialects/sociolects may decrease in terms of priorities. Furthermore, for many lesser spoken languages the necessary data is not available, which will worsen a digital divide in speech and language technology usage. The workshop sets out to discuss this problem based on scientific contributions from the perspective of computer science and linguistics (including computational linguistics and NLP).

Qianli Wang, Tatiana Anikina, Nils Feldhus et al.

Conversational explainable artificial intelligence (ConvXAI) systems based on large language models (LLMs) have garnered significant interest from the research community in natural language processing (NLP) and human-computer interaction (HCI). Such systems can provide answers to user questions about explanations in dialogues, have the potential to enhance users' comprehension and offer more information about the decision-making and generation processes of LLMs. Currently available ConvXAI systems are based on intent recognition rather than free chat, as this has been found to be more precise and reliable in identifying users' intentions. However, the recognition of intents still presents a challenge in the case of ConvXAI, since little training data exist and the domain is highly specific, as there is a broad range of XAI methods to map requests onto. In order to bridge this gap, we present CoXQL, the first dataset in the NLP domain for user intent recognition in ConvXAI, covering 31 intents, seven of which require filling multiple slots. Subsequently, we enhance an existing parsing approach by incorporating template validations, and conduct an evaluation of several LLMs on CoXQL using different parsing strategies. We conclude that the improved parsing approach (MP+) surpasses the performance of previous approaches. We also discover that intents with multiple slots remain highly challenging for LLMs.

Robert Schwarzenberg, Nils Feldhus, Sebastian Möller

Amid a discussion about Green AI in which we see explainability neglected, we explore the possibility to efficiently approximate computationally expensive explainers. To this end, we propose feature attribution modelling with Empirical Explainers. Empirical Explainers learn from data to predict the attribution maps of expensive explainers. We train and test Empirical Explainers in the language domain and find that they model their expensive counterparts surprisingly well, at a fraction of the cost. They could thus mitigate the computational burden of neural explanations significantly, in applications that tolerate an approximation error.

Karolina Zaczynska, Nils Feldhus, Robert Schwarzenberg et al.

Pre-trained transformer language models (TLMs) have recently refashioned natural language processing (NLP): Most state-of-the-art NLP models now operate on top of TLMs to benefit from contextualization and knowledge induction. To explain their success, the scientific community conducted numerous analyses. Besides other methods, syntactic agreement tests were utilized to analyse TLMs. Most of the studies were conducted for the English language, however. In this work, we analyse German TLMs. To this end, we design numerous agreement tasks, some of which consider peculiarities of the German language. Our experimental results show that state-of-the-art German TLMs generally perform well on agreement tasks, but we also identify and discuss syntactic structures that push them to their limits.

Georg Rehm, Dimitrios Galanis, Penny Labropoulou et al.

With regard to the wider area of AI/LT platform interoperability, we concentrate on two core aspects: (1) cross-platform search and discovery of resources and services; (2) composition of cross-platform service workflows. We devise five different levels (of increasing complexity) of platform interoperability that we suggest to implement in a wider federation of AI/LT platforms. We illustrate the approach using the five emerging AI/LT platforms AI4EU, ELG, Lynx, QURATOR and SPEAKER.