OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Hierarchical model for goal guided summarization of annual financial reports
Authors: Yash Agrawal, Vivek Anand, S. Arunachalam, Vasudeva Varma
Venue: Conference WWW 2021
Year: 2021

Every year publicly listed companies file financial reports to give insights about their activities. These reports are meant for shareholders or general public to evaluate the company’s health and decide whether to buy or sell stakes in the company. However, these annual financial reports tend to be long, and it is time-consuming to go through the reports for each company. We propose a Goal Guided Summarization technique through which the summary is extracted. The goal, in our case, is the decision to buy or sell company’s shares. We use hierarchical neural models for achieving this goal while extracting summaries. By the means of intrinsic and extrinsic evaluation we observe that the summaries extracted by our approach can model the decision of buying and selling shares better compared to summaries extracted by other summarization techniques as well as the complete document itself. We also observe that the summary extractor model can be used to construct stock portfolios which give better returns compared to major stock index.
Alignment rationale for query-document relevance
Authors: Youngwoo Kim, Razieh Rahimi, James Allan
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

Deep neural networks are widely used for text pair classification tasks such as as adhoc information retrieval. These deep neural networks are not inherently interpretable and require additional efforts to get rationale behind their decisions. Existing explanation models are not yet capable of inducing alignments between the query terms and the document terms -- which part of the document rationales are responsible for which part of the query? In this paper, we study how the input perturbations can be used to infer or evaluate alignments between the query and document spans, which best explain the black-box ranker's relevance prediction. We use different perturbation strategies and accordingly propose a set of metrics to evaluate the faithfulness of alignment rationales to the model. Our experiments show that the defined metrics based on substitution-based perturbation are more successful in preferring higher-quality alignments, compared to the deletion-based metrics.
Modeling transferable topics for cross-target stance detection
Authors: Penghui Wei, Wenji Mao
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2019
Year: 2019

Targeted stance detection aims to classify the attitude of an opinionated text towards a pre-defined target. Previous methods mainly focus on in-target setting that models are trained and tested using data specific to the same target. In practical cases, the target we concern may have few or no labeled data, which restrains us from training a target-specific model. In this paper we study the problem of cross-target stance detection, utilizing labeled data of a source target to learn models that can be adapted to a destination target. To this end, we propose an effective method, the core intuition of which is to leverage shared latent topics between two targets as transferable knowledge to facilitate model adaptation. Our method acquires topic knowledge with neural variational inference, and further adopts adversarial training that encourages the model to learn target-invariant representations. Experimental results verify that our proposed method is superior to the state-of-the-art methods.
Privacy for free: How does dataset condensation help privacy?
Authors: Tian Dong, Bo Zhao 0038, Lingjuan Lyu
Venue: Conference ICML 2022
Year: 2022

To prevent unintentional data leakage, research community has resorted to data generators that can produce differentially private data for model training. However, for the sake of the data privacy, existing solutions suffer from either expensive training cost or poor generalization performance. Therefore, we raise the question whether training efficiency and privacy can be achieved simultaneously. In this work, we for the first time identify that dataset condensation (DC) which is originally designed for improving training efficiency is also a better solution to replace the traditional data generators for private data generation, thus providing privacy for free. To demonstrate the privacy benefit of DC, we build a connection between DC and differential privacy, and theoretically prove on linear feature extractors (and then extended to non-linear feature extractors) that the existence of one sample has limited impact ($O(m/n)$) on the parameter distribution of networks trained on $m$ samples synthesized from $n (n \gg m)$ raw samples by DC. We also empirically validate the visual privacy and membership privacy of DC-synthesized data by launching both the loss-based and the state-of-the-art likelihood-based membership inference attacks. We envision this work as a milestone for data-efficient and privacy-preserving machine learning.
Plaid: an efficient engine for late interaction retrieval
Authors: Keshav Santhanam, Omar Khattab, Christopher Potts, Matei Zaharia
Venue: Conference CIKM 2022
Year: 2022

Pre-trained language models are increasingly important components across multiple information retrieval (IR) paradigms. Late interaction, introduced with the ColBERT model and recently refined in ColBERTv2, is a popular paradigm that holds state-of-the-art status across many benchmarks. To dramatically speed up the search latency of late interaction, we introduce the Performance-optimized Late Interaction Driver (PLAID). Without impacting quality, PLAID swiftly eliminates low-scoring passages using a novel centroid interaction mechanism that treats every passage as a lightweight bag of centroids. PLAID uses centroid interaction as well as centroid pruning, a mechanism for sparsifying the bag of centroids, within a highly-optimized engine to reduce late interaction search latency by up to 7$\times$ on a GPU and 45$\times$ on a CPU against vanilla ColBERTv2, while continuing to deliver state-of-the-art retrieval quality. This allows the PLAID engine with ColBERTv2 to achieve latency of tens of milliseconds on a GPU and tens or just few hundreds of milliseconds on a CPU at large scale, even at the largest scales we evaluate with 140M passages.
Retrieving complex tables with multi-granular graph representation learning
Authors: Fei Wang 0060, Kexuan Sun 0002, Muhao Chen 0001, Jay Pujara, Pedro A. Szekely
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2021
Year: 2021

The task of natural language table retrieval (NLTR) seeks to retrieve semantically relevant tables based on natural language queries. Existing learning systems for this task often treat tables as plain text based on the assumption that tables are structured as dataframes. However, tables can have complex layouts which indicate diverse dependencies between subtable structures, such as nested headers. As a result, queries may refer to different spans of relevant content that is distributed across these structures. Moreover, such systems fail to generalize to novel scenarios beyond those seen in the training set. Prior methods are still distant from a generalizable solution to the NLTR problem, as they fall short in handling complex table layouts or queries over multiple granularities. To address these issues, we propose Graph-based Table Retrieval (GTR), a generalizable NLTR framework with multi-granular graph representation learning. In our framework, a table is first converted into a tabular graph, with cell nodes, row nodes and column nodes to capture content at different granularities. Then the tabular graph is input to a Graph Transformer model that can capture both table cell content and the layout structures. To enhance the robustness and generalizability of the model, we further incorporate a self-supervised pre-training task based on graph-context matching. Experimental results on two benchmarks show that our method leads to significant improvements over the current state-of-the-art systems. Further experiments demonstrate promising performance of our method on cross-dataset generalization, and enhanced capability of handling complex tables and fulfilling diverse query intents. Code and data are available at https://github.com/FeiWang96/GTR.
Inducing causal structure for interpretable neural networks
Authors: Atticus Geiger, Zhengxuan Wu, Hanson Lu, Josh Rozner, Elisa Kreiss, Thomas Icard, Noah D. Goodman, Christopher Potts
Venue: Conference ICML 2022
Year: 2022

In many areas, we have well-founded insights about causal structure that would be useful to bring into our trained models while still allowing them to learn in a data-driven fashion. To achieve this, we present the new method of interchange intervention training (IIT). In IIT, we (1) align variables in a causal model (e.g., a deterministic program or Bayesian network) with representations in a neural model and (2) train the neural model to match the counterfactual behavior of the causal model on a base input when aligned representations in both models are set to be the value they would be for a source input. IIT is fully differentiable, flexibly combines with other objectives, and guarantees that the target causal model is a causal abstraction of the neural model when its loss is zero. We evaluate IIT on a structural vision task (MNIST-PVR), a navigational language task (ReaSCAN), and a natural language inference task (MQNLI). We compare IIT against multi-task training objectives and data augmentation. In all our experiments, IIT achieves the best results and produces neural models that are more interpretable in the sense that they more successfully realize the target causal model.
Multi-lingual evaluation of code generation models
Authors: Ben Athiwaratkun, Sanjay Krishna Gouda, Zijian Wang 0002, Xiaopeng Li 0002, Yuchen Tian, Ming Tan, Wasi Uddin Ahmad, Shiqi Wang 0002, Qing Sun 0013, Mingyue Shang, Sujan Kumar Gonugondla, Hantian Ding, Varun Kumar, Nathan Fulton, Arash Farahani, Siddhartha Jain 0001, Robert Giaquinto, Haifeng Qian, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Ramesh Nallapati
Venue: Conference ICLR 2023
Year: 2023

We present new benchmarks on evaluation code generation models: MBXP and Multilingual HumanEval, and MathQA-X. These datasets cover over 10 programming languages and are generated using a scalable conversion framework that transpiles prompts and test cases from the original Python datasets into the corresponding data in the target language. Using these benchmarks, we are able to assess the performance of code generation models in a multi-lingual fashion, and discovered generalization ability of language models on out-of-domain languages, advantages of multi-lingual models over mono-lingual, the ability of few-shot prompting to teach the model new languages, and zero-shot translation abilities even on mono-lingual settings. Furthermore, we use our code generation model to perform large-scale bootstrapping to obtain synthetic canonical solutions in several languages, which can be used for other code-related evaluations such as code insertion, robustness, or summarization tasks. Overall, our benchmarks represents a significant step towards a deeper understanding of language models' code generation abilities. We publicly release our code and datasets at https://github.com/amazon-research/mxeval.
Collaborative social group influence for event recommendation
Authors: Li Gao, Jia Wu, Zhi Qiao, Chuan Zhou, Hong Yang, Yue Hu
Venue: Conference CIKM 2016
Year: 2016

In event-based social networks, such as Meetup, social groups refer to self-organized communities that consist of users who share the same interests. In many real-world scenarios, users usually have social group preference and join interested social groups to attend events. It is therefore necessary to consider the influence of social groups to improve the event recommendation performance; however, existing event recommendation models generally consider users' individual preferences and neglect the influence of social groups. To this end, we propose a new Bayesian latent factor model SogBmf that combines social group influence and individual preference for event recommendation. Experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
Hallucination detection: Robustly discerning reliable answers in large language models
Authors: Yuyan Chen, Qiang Fu, Yichen Yuan, Zhihao Wen, Ge Fan, Dayiheng Liu, Dongmei Zhang, Zhixu Li, Yanghua Xiao
Venue: Conference CIKM 2023
Year: 2023

Large language models (LLMs) have gained widespread adoption in various natural language processing tasks, including question answering and dialogue systems. However, a major drawback of LLMs is the issue of hallucination, where they generate unfaithful or inconsistent content that deviates from the input source, leading to severe consequences. In this paper, we propose a robust discriminator named RelD to effectively detect hallucination in LLMs' generated answers. RelD is trained on the constructed RelQA, a bilingual question-answering dialogue dataset along with answers generated by LLMs and a comprehensive set of metrics. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed RelD successfully detects hallucination in the answers generated by diverse LLMs. Moreover, it performs well in distinguishing hallucination in LLMs' generated answers from both in-distribution and out-of-distribution datasets. Additionally, we also conduct a thorough analysis of the types of hallucinations that occur and present valuable insights. This research significantly contributes to the detection of reliable answers generated by LLMs and holds noteworthy implications for mitigating hallucination in the future work.
Researcher homepage classification using unlabeled data
Authors: Sujatha Das Gollapalli, Cornelia Caragea, Prasenjit Mitra, C. Lee Giles
Venue: Conference WWW 2013
Year: 2013

A classifier that determines if a webpage is relevant to a specified set of topics comprises a key component for focused crawling. Can a classifier that is tuned to perform well on training datasets continue to filter out irrelevant pages in the face of changed content on the Web? We investigate this question in the context of researcher homepage crawling. We show experimentally that classifiers trained on existing datasets for homepage identification underperform while classifying "irrelevant" pages on current-day academic websites. As an alternative to obtaining datasets to retrain the classifier for the new content, we propose to use effectively unlimited amounts of unlabeled data readily available from these websites in a co-training scenario. To this end, we design novel URL-based features and use them in conjunction with content-based features as complementary views of the data to obtain remarkable improvements in accurately identifying homepages from the current-day university websites. In addition, we propose a novel technique for "learning a conforming pair of classifiers" using mini-batch gradient descent. Our algorithm seeks to minimize a loss (objective) function quantifying the difference in predictions from the two views afforded by co-training. We demonstrate that tuning the classifiers so that they make "similar" predictions on unlabeled data strongly corresponds to the effect achieved by co-training algorithms. We argue that this loss formulation provides insight into understanding the co-training process and can be used even in absence of a validation set.
Utilizing knowledge graphs for text-centric information retrieval
Authors: Laura Dietz, Alexander Kotov, Edgar Meij
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2018
Year: 2018

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of several publicly available and proprietary knowledge graphs (KGs). The depth and breadth of content in these KGs made them not only rich sources of structured knowledge by themselves, but also valuable resources for search systems. A surge of recent developments in entity linking and entity retrieval methods gave rise to a new line of research that aims at utilizing KGs for text-centric retrieval applications. This tutorial is the first to summarize and disseminate the progress in this emerging area to industry practitioners and researchers.
Biomedical information retrieval incorporating knowledge graph for explainable precision medicine
Authors: Zuoxi Yang
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2020
Year: 2020

As for many complex diseases, there is no "one size fits all" solutions for patients with a particular diagnosis in practice, which should be treated depends on patient's genetic, environmental, lifestyle choices and so on. Precision medicine can provide personalized treatment for a particular patient that has been drawn more and more attention. There are a large number of treatment options, which is overwhelming for clinicians to make best treatment for a particular patient. One of the effective ways to alleviate this problem is biomedical information retrieval system, which can automatically find out relevant information and proper treatment from mass of alternative treatments and cases. However, in the biomedical literature and clinical trials, there is a larger number of synonymous, polysemous and context terms, causing the semantic gap between query and document in traditional biomedical information retrieval systems.
ORCAS-I: queries annotated with intent using weak supervision
Authors: Daria Alexander, Wojciech Kusa, Arjen P. de Vries
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2022
Year: 2022

User intent classification is an important task in information retrieval. In this work, we introduce a revised taxonomy of user intent. We take the widely used differentiation between navigational, transactional and informational queries as a starting point, and identify three different sub-classes for the informational queries: instrumental, factual and abstain. The resulting classification of user queries is more fine-grained, reaches a high level of consistency between annotators, and can serve as the basis for an effective automatic classification process. The newly introduced categories help distinguish between types of queries that a retrieval system could act upon, for example by prioritizing different types of results in the ranking. We have used a weak supervision approach based on Snorkel to annotate the ORCAS dataset according to our new user intent taxonomy, utilising established heuristics and keywords to construct rules for the prediction of the intent category. We then present a series of experiments with a variety of machine learning models, using the labels from the weak supervision stage as training data, but find that the results produced by Snorkel are not outperformed by these competing approaches and can be considered state-of-the-art. The advantage of a rule-based approach like Snorkel's is its efficient deployment in an actual system, where intent classification would be executed for every query issued. The resource released with this paper is the ORCAS-I dataset: a labelled version of the ORCAS click-based dataset of Web queries, which provides 18 million connections to 10 million distinct queries. We anticipate the usage of this resource in a scenario where the retrieval system would change its internal workings and search user interface to match the type of information request. For example, a navigational query could trigger just a short result list; and, for instrumental intent the system could rank tutorials and instructions higher than for other types of queries.
DeepSpeed: System Optimizations Enable Training Deep Learning Models with Over 100 Billion Parameters
Authors: Jeff Rasley, Samyam Rajbhandari, Olatunji Ruwase, Yuxiong He
Venue: Conference KDD 2020
Year: 2020

Explore new techniques in Microsoft's open source library called DeepSpeed, which advances large model training by improving scale, speed, cost, and usability, unlocking the ability to train 100-billion-parameter models. DeepSpeed is compatible with PyTorch. One piece of our library, called ZeRO, is a new parallelized optimizer that greatly reduces the resources needed for model and data parallelism while massively increasing the number of parameters that can be trained. Researchers have used these breakthroughs to create Turing Natural Language Generation (Turing-NLG), which at the time of its release was the largest publicly known language model at 17 billion parameters. In addition we will also go over our latest transformer kernel advancements that led the DeepSpeed team to achieve the world fastest BERT pretraining record.
Summarize dates first: a paradigm shift in timeline summarization
Authors: Moreno La Quatra, Luca Cagliero, Elena Baralis, Alberto Messina, Maurizio Montagnuolo
Venue: Conference SIGIR 2021
Year: 2021

Timeline summarization aims at presenting long news stories in a compact manner. State-of-the-art approaches first select the most relevant dates from the original event timeline then produce per-date news summaries. Date selection is driven by either per-date news content or date-level references. When coping with complex event data, characterized by inherent news flow redundancy, this pipeline may encounter relevant issues in both date selection and summarization due to a limited use of news content in date selection and no use of high-level temporal references (e.g., the past month). This paper proposes a paradigm shift in timeline summarization aimed at overcoming the above issues. It presents a new approach, namely Summarize Date First, which focuses on first generating date-level summaries then selecting the most relevant dates on top of summarized knowledge. In the latter stage, it performs date aggregations to consider high-level temporal references as well. The proposed pipeline also supports frequent incremental timeline updates more efficiently than previous approaches. We tested our unsupervised approach both on existing benchmark datasets and on a newly proposed benchmark dataset describing the COVID-19 news timeline. The achieved results were superior to state-of-the-art unsupervised methods and competitive against supervised ones.
Predicting relevant news events for timeline summaries
Authors: Giang Binh Tran, Mohammad Alrifai, Dat Quoc Nguyen
Venue: Conference WWW 2013
Year: 2013

This paper presents a framework for automatically constructing timeline summaries from collections of web news articles. We also evaluate our solution against manually created timelines and in comparison with related work.
An unconstrained layer-peeled perspective on neural collapse
Authors: Wenlong Ji, Yiping Lu 0001, Yiliang Zhang, Zhun Deng, Weijie J. Su
Venue: Conference ICLR 2022
Year: 2022

Neural collapse is a highly symmetric geometric pattern of neural networks that emerges during the terminal phase of training, with profound implications on the generalization performance and robustness of the trained networks. To understand how the last-layer features and classifiers exhibit this recently discovered implicit bias, in this paper, we introduce a surrogate model called the unconstrained layer-peeled model (ULPM). We prove that gradient flow on this model converges to critical points of a minimum-norm separation problem exhibiting neural collapse in its global minimizer. Moreover, we show that the ULPM with the cross-entropy loss has a benign global landscape for its loss function, which allows us to prove that all the critical points are strict saddle points except the global minimizers that exhibit the neural collapse phenomenon. Empirically, we show that our results also hold during the training of neural networks in real-world tasks when explicit regularization or weight decay is not used.