Reading with Intent -- Neutralizing Intent

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dataset and method for transforming context passages to neutral tone to improve large language model performance in retrieval tasks, especially when dealing with emotionally charged or sarcastic content.

Contribution

It develops a synthetic dataset for emotional tone transformation, trains an emotion translation model, and demonstrates improved retrieval performance by neutralizing context passages.

Findings

Emotion translation model benefits from synthetic data

Neutralizing passages improves retrieval accuracy by about 3%

Synthetic data generation enhances emotion translation quality

Abstract

Queries to large language models (LLMs) can be divided into two parts: the instruction/question and the accompanying context. The context for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems in most benchmarks comes from Wikipedia or Wikipedia-like texts which are written in a neutral and factual tone. However, when RAG systems retrieve internet-based content, they encounter text with diverse tones and linguistic styles, introducing challenges for downstream tasks. The Reading with Intent task addresses this issue by evaluating how varying tones in context passages affect model performance. Building on prior work that focused on sarcasm, we extend this paradigm by constructing a dataset where context passages are transformed to $11$ distinct emotions using a better synthetic data generation approach. Using this dataset, we train an emotion translation model to systematically adapt passages to specified emotional tones. The human evaluation shows that the LLM fine-tuned to become the emotion-translator benefited from the synthetically generated data. Finally, the emotion-translator is used in the Reading with Intent task to transform the passages to a neutral tone. By neutralizing the passages, it mitigates the challenges posed by sarcastic passages and improves overall results on this task by about $3\%$.