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Kellin Pelrine

Doctorat - McGill University
Superviseur⋅e principal⋅e

Publications

Combining Confidence Elicitation and Sample-based Methods for Uncertainty Quantification in Misinformation Mitigation
Mauricio Rivera
Jean-François Godbout
Kellin Pelrine
Comparing GPT-4 and Open-Source Language Models in Misinformation Mitigation
Tyler Vergho
Jean-François Godbout
Kellin Pelrine
Recent large language models (LLMs) have been shown to be effective for misinformation detection. However, the choice of LLMs for experiment… (voir plus)s varies widely, leading to uncertain conclusions. In particular, GPT-4 is known to be strong in this domain, but it is closed source, potentially expensive, and can show instability between different versions. Meanwhile, alternative LLMs have given mixed results. In this work, we show that Zephyr-7b presents a consistently viable alternative, overcoming key limitations of commonly used approaches like Llama-2 and GPT-3.5. This provides the research community with a solid open-source option and shows open-source models are gradually catching up on this task. We then highlight how GPT-3.5 exhibits unstable performance, such that this very widely used model could provide misleading results in misinformation detection. Finally, we validate new tools including approaches to structured output and the latest version of GPT-4 (Turbo), showing they do not compromise performance, thus unlocking them for future research and potentially enabling more complex pipelines for misinformation mitigation.
Uncertainty Resolution in Misinformation Detection
Yury Orlovskiy
Camille Thibault
Anne Imouza
Jean-François Godbout
Kellin Pelrine
Quantifying learning-style adaptation in effectiveness of LLM teaching
Ruben Weijers
Gabrielle Fidelis de Castilho
Jean-François Godbout
Kellin Pelrine
This preliminary study aims to investigate whether AI, when prompted based on individual learning styles, can effectively improve comprehens… (voir plus)ion and learning experiences in educational settings. It involves tailoring LLMs baseline prompts and comparing the results of a control group receiving standard content and an experimental group receiving learning style-tailored content. Preliminary results suggest that GPT-4 can generate responses aligned with various learning styles, indicating the potential for enhanced engagement and comprehension. However, these results also reveal challenges, including the model’s tendency for sycophantic behavior and variability in responses. Our findings suggest that a more sophisticated prompt engineering approach is required for integrating AI into education (AIEd) to improve educational outcomes.
SWEET - Weakly Supervised Person Name Extraction for Fighting Human Trafficking
Javin Liu
Hao Yu
Vidya Sujaya
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
In this work, we propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET: Supervise Weakly for Entity Extraction to fight Trafficking for extracting perso… (voir plus)n names from noisy escort advertisements. Our method combines the simplicity of rule-matching (through antirules, i.e., negated rules) and the generalizability of large language models fine-tuned on benchmark, domain-specific and synthetic datasets, treating them as weak labels. One of the major challenges in this domain is limited labeled data. SWEET addresses this by obtaining multiple weak labels through labeling functions and effectively aggregating them. SWEET outperforms the previous supervised SOTA method for this task by 9% F1 score on domain data and better generalizes to common benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we also release HTGEN, a synthetically generated dataset of escort advertisements (built using ChatGPT) to facilitate further research within the community.
Towards Reliable Misinformation Mitigation: Generalization, Uncertainty, and GPT-4
Kellin Pelrine
Anne Imouza
Meilina Reksoprodjo
Camille Thibault
Caleb Gupta
Joel Christoph
Jean-François Godbout
Misinformation poses a critical societal challenge, and current approaches have yet to produce an effective solution. We propose focusing on… (voir plus) generalization, uncertainty, and how to leverage recent large language models, in order to create more practical tools to evaluate information veracity in contexts where perfect classification is impossible. We first demonstrate that GPT-4 can outperform prior methods in multiple settings and languages. Next, we explore generalization, revealing that GPT-4 and RoBERTa-large exhibit differences in failure modes. Third, we propose techniques to handle uncertainty that can detect impossible examples and strongly improve outcomes. We also discuss results on other language models, temperature, prompting, versioning, explainability, and web retrieval, each one providing practical insights and directions for future research. Finally, we publish the LIAR-New dataset with novel paired English and French misinformation data and Possibility labels that indicate if there is sufficient context for veracity evaluation. Overall, this research lays the groundwork for future tools that can drive real-world progress to combat misinformation.
Party Prediction for Twitter
Kellin Pelrine
Anne Imouza
Zachary Yang
Jacob-Junqi Tian
Sacha Lévy
Gabrielle Desrosiers-Brisebois
Aarash Feizi
C'ecile Amadoro
André Blais
Jean-François Godbout
Open, Closed, or Small Language Models for Text Classification?
Hao Yu
Zachary Yang
Kellin Pelrine
Jean-François Godbout
Recent advancements in large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various NLP tasks. But many questions remain, … (voir plus)including whether open-source models match closed ones, why these models excel or struggle with certain tasks, and what types of practical procedures can improve performance. We address these questions in the context of classification by evaluating three classes of models using eight datasets across three distinct tasks: named entity recognition, political party prediction, and misinformation detection. While larger LLMs often lead to improved performance, open-source models can rival their closed-source counterparts by fine-tuning. Moreover, supervised smaller models, like RoBERTa, can achieve similar or even greater performance in many datasets compared to generative LLMs. On the other hand, closed models maintain an advantage in hard tasks that demand the most generalizability. This study underscores the importance of model selection based on task requirements
Active Keyword Selection to Track Evolving Topics on Twitter
Sacha Lévy
Farimah Poursafaei
Kellin Pelrine
How can we study social interactions on evolving topics at a mass scale? Over the past decade, researchers from diverse fields such as econo… (voir plus)mics, political science, and public health have often done this by querying Twitter's public API endpoints with hand-picked topical keywords to search or stream discussions. However, despite the API's accessibility, it remains difficult to select and update keywords to collect high-quality data relevant to topics of interest. In this paper, we propose an active learning method for rapidly refining query keywords to increase both the yielded topic relevance and dataset size. We leverage a large open-source COVID-19 Twitter dataset to illustrate the applicability of our method in tracking Tweets around the key sub-topics of Vaccine, Mask, and Lockdown. Our experiments show that our method achieves an average topic-related keyword recall 2x higher than baselines. We open-source our code along with a web interface for keyword selection to make data collection from Twitter more systematic for researchers.
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Extracting Person Names from User Generated Text: Named-Entity Recognition for Combating Human Trafficking
Yifei Li
Pratheeksha Nair
Kellin Pelrine
Online escort advertisement websites are widely used for advertising victims of human trafficking. Domain experts agree that advertising mul… (voir plus)tiple people in the same ad is a strong indicator of trafficking. Thus, extracting person names from the text of these ads can provide valuable clues for further analysis. However, Named-Entity Recognition (NER) on escort ads is challenging because the text can be noisy, colloquial and often lacking proper grammar and punctuation. Most existing state-of-the-art NER models fail to demonstrate satisfactory performance in this task. In this paper, we propose NEAT (Name Extraction Against Trafficking) for extracting person names. It effectively combines classic rule-based and dictionary extractors with a contextualized language model to capture ambiguous names (e.g penny, hazel) and adapts to adversarial changes in the text by expanding its dictionary. NEAT shows 19% improvement on average in the F1 classification score for name extraction compared to previous state-of-the-art in two domain-specific datasets.
Towards Better Evaluation for Dynamic Link Prediction
Farimah Poursafaei
Andy Huang
Shenyang Huang
Kellin Pelrine
Despite the prevalence of recent success in learning from static graphs, learning from time-evolving graphs remains an open challenge. In th… (voir plus)is work, we design new, more stringent evaluation procedures for link prediction specific to dynamic graphs, which reflect real-world considerations, to better compare the strengths and weaknesses of methods. First, we create two visualization techniques to understand the reoccurring patterns of edges over time and show that many edges reoccur at later time steps. Based on this observation, we propose a pure memorization-based baseline called EdgeBank. EdgeBank achieves surprisingly strong performance across multiple settings which highlights that the negative edges used in the current evaluation are easy. To sample more challenging negative edges, we introduce two novel negative sampling strategies that improve robustness and better match real-world applications. Lastly, we introduce six new dynamic graph datasets from a diverse set of domains missing from current benchmarks, providing new challenges and opportunities for future research. Our code repository is accessible at https://github.com/fpour/DGB.git.