Scholarly text is often laden with jargon, or specialized language that divides disciplines. We extend past work that characterizes science at the level of word types, by using BERT-based word sense induction to find additional words that are widespread but overloaded with different uses across fields. We define scholarly jargon as discipline-specific word types and senses, and estimate its prevalence across hundreds of fields using interpretable, information-theoretic metrics. We demonstrate the utility of our approach for science of science and computational sociolinguistics by highlighting two key social implications. First, we measure audience design, and find that most fields reduce jargon when publishing in general-purpose journals, but some do so more than others. Second, though jargon has varying correlation with articles' citation rates within fields, it nearly always impedes interdisciplinary impact. Broadly, our measurements can inform ways in which language could be revised to serve as a bridge rather than a barrier in science.

Many scientific fields -- including biology, health, education, and the social sciences -- use machine learning (ML) to help them analyze data at an unprecedented scale. However, ML researchers who develop advanced methods rarely provide detailed tutorials showing how to apply these methods. Existing tutorials are often costly to participants, presume extensive programming knowledge, and are not tailored to specific application fields. In an attempt to democratize ML methods, we organized a year-long, free, online tutorial series targeted at teaching advanced natural language processing (NLP) methods to computational social science (CSS) scholars. Two organizers worked with fifteen subject matter experts to develop one-hour presentations with hands-on Python code for a range of ML methods and use cases, from data pre-processing to analyzing temporal variation of language change. Although live participation was more limited than expected, a comparison of pre- and post-tutorial surveys showed an increase in participants' perceived knowledge of almost one point on a 7-point Likert scale. Furthermore, participants asked thoughtful questions during tutorials and engaged readily with tutorial content afterwards, as demonstrated by 10K~total views of posted tutorial recordings. In this report, we summarize our organizational efforts and distill five principles for democratizing ML+X tutorials. We hope future organizers improve upon these principles and continue to lower barriers to developing ML skills for researchers of all fields.

科学研究的基本目标是了解因果关系。然而，尽管因果关系在生活和社会科学中的重要作用，但在自然语言处理（NLP）中并不具有相同的重要性，而自然语言处理（NLP）传统上更加重视预测任务。这种区别开始逐渐消失，随着因果推理和语言处理的融合，跨学科研究的新兴领域。尽管如此，关于NLP因果关系的研究仍然散布在没有统一的定义，基准数据集的情况下，并清楚地表达了将因果推论应用于文本领域的挑战和机遇，并具有其独特的属性。在这项调查中，我们巩固了整个学术领域的研究，并将其置于更广泛的NLP景观中。我们介绍了用文本估算因果效应的统计挑战，其中包含文本用作结果，治疗或解决混杂问题的设置。此外，我们探讨了因果推理的潜在用途，以提高NLP模型的鲁棒性，公平性和解释性。因此，我们提供了NLP社区因果推断的统一概述。

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

We address the problem of unsupervised domain adaptation when the source domain differs from the target domain because of a shift in the distribution of a latent subgroup. When this subgroup confounds all observed data, neither covariate shift nor label shift assumptions apply. We show that the optimal target predictor can be non-parametrically identified with the help of concept and proxy variables available only in the source domain, and unlabeled data from the target. The identification results are constructive, immediately suggesting an algorithm for estimating the optimal predictor in the target. For continuous observations, when this algorithm becomes impractical, we propose a latent variable model specific to the data generation process at hand. We show how the approach degrades as the size of the shift changes, and verify that it outperforms both covariate and label shift adjustment.

We present Hybrid Infused Reranking for Passages Retrieval (HYRR), a framework for training rerankers based on a hybrid of BM25 and neural retrieval models. Retrievers based on hybrid models have been shown to outperform both BM25 and neural models alone. Our approach exploits this improved performance when training a reranker, leading to a robust reranking model. The reranker, a cross-attention neural model, is shown to be robust to different first-stage retrieval systems, achieving better performance than rerankers simply trained upon the first-stage retrievers in the multi-stage systems. We present evaluations on a supervised passage retrieval task using MS MARCO and zero-shot retrieval tasks using BEIR. The empirical results show strong performance on both evaluations.

We present NusaCrowd, a collaborative initiative to collect and unite existing resources for Indonesian languages, including opening access to previously non-public resources. Through this initiative, we have has brought together 137 datasets and 117 standardized data loaders. The quality of the datasets has been assessed manually and automatically, and their effectiveness has been demonstrated in multiple experiments. NusaCrowd's data collection enables the creation of the first zero-shot benchmarks for natural language understanding and generation in Indonesian and its local languages. Furthermore, NusaCrowd brings the creation of the first multilingual automatic speech recognition benchmark in Indonesian and its local languages. Our work is intended to help advance natural language processing research in under-represented languages.

The recent advent of large language models - large neural networks trained on a simple predictive objective over a massive corpus of natural language - has reinvigorated debate over whether human cognitive capacities might emerge in such generic models given sufficient training data. Of particular interest is the ability of these models to reason about novel problems zero-shot, without any direct training on those problems. In human cognition, this capacity is closely tied to an ability to reason by analogy. Here, we performed a direct comparison between human reasoners and a large language model (GPT-3) on a range of analogical tasks, including a novel text-based matrix reasoning task closely modeled on Raven's Progressive Matrices. We found that GPT-3 displayed a surprisingly strong capacity for abstract pattern induction, matching or even surpassing human capabilities in most settings. Our results indicate that large language models such as GPT-3 have acquired an emergent ability to find zero-shot solutions to a broad range of analogy problems.

Developments in autonomous vehicles (AVs) are rapidly advancing and will in the next 20 years become a central part to our society. However, especially in the early stages of deployment, there is expected to be incidents involving AVs. In the event of AV incidents, decisions will need to be made that require ethical decisions, e.g., deciding between colliding into a group of pedestrians or a rigid barrier. For an AV to undertake such ethical decision making and path planning, simulation models of the situation will be required that are used in real-time on-board the AV. These models will enable path planning and ethical decision making to be undertaken based on predetermined collision injury severity levels. In this research, models are developed for the path planning and ethical decision making that predetermine knowledge regarding the possible collision injury severities, i.e., peak deformation of the AV colliding into the rigid barrier or the impact velocity of the AV colliding into a pedestrian. Based on such knowledge and using fuzzy logic, a novel nonlinear weighted utility cost function for the collision injury severity levels is developed. This allows the model-based predicted collision outcomes arising from AV peak deformation and AV-pedestrian impact velocity to be examined separately via weighted utility cost functions with a common structure. The general form of the weighted utility cost function exploits a fuzzy sets approach, thus allowing common utility costs from the two separate utility cost functions to be meaningfully compared. A decision-making algorithm, which makes use of a utilitarian ethical approach, ensures that the AV will always steer onto the path which represents the lowest injury severity level, hence utility cost to society.

Eco-driving strategies have been shown to provide significant reductions in fuel consumption. This paper outlines an active driver assistance approach that uses a residual policy learning (RPL) agent trained to provide residual actions to default power train controllers while balancing fuel consumption against other driver-accommodation objectives. Using previous experiences, our RPL agent learns improved traction torque and gear shifting residual policies to adapt the operation of the powertrain to variations and uncertainties in the environment. For comparison, we consider a traditional reinforcement learning (RL) agent trained from scratch. Both agents employ the off-policy Maximum A Posteriori Policy Optimization algorithm with an actor-critic architecture. By implementing on a simulated commercial vehicle in various car-following scenarios, we find that the RPL agent quickly learns significantly improved policies compared to a baseline source policy but in some measures not as good as those eventually possible with the RL agent trained from scratch.