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The notion of face described by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been studied in great detail, but a critical aspect of the framework, that which focuses on how intentions mediate the planning of turns which impose upon face, has received far less attention. We present an analysis of three computational systems trained for classifying both intention and politeness, focusing on how the former influences the latter. In politeness theory, agents attend to the desire to have their wants appreciated (positive face), and a complementary desire to act unimpeded and maintain freedom (negative face). Similar to speech acts, utterances can perform so-called face acts which can either raise or threaten the positive or negative face of the speaker or hearer. We begin by using an existing corpus to train a model which classifies face acts, achieving a new SoTA in the process. We then observe that every face act has an underlying intention that motivates it and perform additional experiments integrating dialog act annotations to provide these intentions by proxy. Our analysis finds that dialog acts improve performance on face act detection for minority classes and points to a close relationship between aspects of face and intent.
Intention and Face in Dialog
Eye movements during reading offer a window into cognitive processes and language comprehension, but the scarcity of reading data with interruptions – which learners frequently encounter in their everyday learning environments – hampers advances in the development of intelligent learning technologies. We introduce InteRead – a novel 50-participant dataset of gaze data recorded during self-paced reading of real-world text. InteRead further offers fine-grained annotations of interruptions interspersed throughout the text as well as resumption lags incurred by these interruptions. Interruptions were triggered automatically once readers reached predefined target words. We validate our dataset by reporting interdisciplinary analyses on different measures of gaze behavior. In line with prior research, our analyses show that the interruptions as well as word length and word frequency effects significantly impact eye movements during reading. We also explore individual differences within our dataset, shedding light on the potential for tailored educational solutions. InteRead is accessible from our datasets web-page: https://www.ife.uni-stuttgart.de/en/llis/research/datasets/.
InteRead: An Eye Tracking Dataset of Interrupted Reading
This paper sheds light on a relatively unexplored area which is deep learning interpretability for speech disorder assessment and characterization. Building upon a state-of-the-art methodology for the explainability and interpretability of hidden representation inside a deep-learning speech model, we provide a deeper understanding and interpretation of the final intelligibility assessment of patients experiencing speech disorders due to Head and Neck Cancers (HNC). Promising results have been obtained regarding the prediction of speech intelligibility and severity of HNC patients while giving relevant interpretations of the final assessment both at the phonemes and phonetic feature levels. The potential of this approach becomes evident as clinicians can acquire more valuable insights for speech therapy. Indeed, this can help identify the specific linguistic units that affect intelligibility from an acoustic point of view and enable the development of tailored rehabilitation protocols to improve the patient’s ability to communicate effectively, and thus, the patient’s quality of life.
Interpretable Assessment of Speech Intelligibility Using Deep Learning: A Case Study on Speech Disorders Due to Head and Neck Cancers
With the rapid development of social media and short video applications in recent years, browsing short videos has become the norm. Due to its large user base and unique appeal, spreading rumors via short videos has become a severe social problem. Many methods simply fuse multimodal features for rumor detection, which lack interpretability. For short video rumors, rumor makers create rumors by modifying and/or splicing different modal information, so we should consider how to detect rumors from the perspective of modality tampering. Inspired by cross-modal contrastive learning, we propose a novel short video rumor detection framework by designing two pretraining tasks: modality tampering detection and inter-modal matching, imbuing the model with the ability to detect modality tampering and employing it for downstream rumor detection tasks. In addition, we design an interpretability mechanism to make the rumor detection results more reasonable by backtracking the model’s decision-making process. The experimental results show that the method on the short video rumor dataset has an improvement of about 4.6%-12% in macro-F1 compared with other models and can explain whether the short video is a rumor or not through the perspective of modality tampering.
Interpretable Short Video Rumor Detection Based on Modality Tampering
Reading comprehension continues to be a crucial research focus in the NLP community. Recent advances in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) have mostly centered on literal comprehension, referring to the surface-level understanding of content. In this work, we focus on the next level - interpretive comprehension, with a particular emphasis on inferring the themes of a narrative text. We introduce the first dataset specifically designed for interpretive comprehension of educational narratives, providing corresponding well-edited theme texts. The dataset spans a variety of genres and cultural origins and includes human-annotated theme keywords with varying levels of granularity. We further formulate NLP tasks under different abstractions of interpretive comprehension toward the main idea of a story. After conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art methods, we found the task to be both challenging and significant for NLP research. The dataset and source code have been made publicly available to the research community at https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/EduStory.
Interpreting Themes from Educational Stories
The large success of deep learning based methods in Visual Question Answering (VQA) has concurrently increased the demand for explainable methods. Most methods in Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) focus on generating post-hoc explanations rather than taking an intrinsic approach, the latter characterizing an interpretable model. In this work, we introduce an interpretable approach for graph-based VQA and demonstrate competitive performance on the GQA dataset. This approach bridges the gap between interpretability and performance. Our model is designed to intrinsically produce a subgraph during the question-answering process as its explanation, providing insight into the decision making. To evaluate the quality of these generated subgraphs, we compare them against established post-hoc explainability methods for graph neural networks, and perform a human evaluation. Moreover, we present quantitative metrics that correlate with the evaluations of human assessors, acting as automatic metrics for the generated explanatory subgraphs. Our code will be made publicly available at link removed due to anonymity period.
Intrinsic Subgraph Generation for Interpretable Graph Based Visual Question Answering
We outline the ongoing development of the Indiana Parsed Corpus of (Historical) High German. Once completed, this corpus will fill the gap in Penn-style treebanks for Germanic languages by spanning High German from 1050 to 1950. This paper describes the process of building the corpus: selection of texts, decisions on part-of-speech tags and other labels, the process of annotation, and illustrative annotation issues unique to historical High German. The construction of the corpus has led to a refinement of the Penn labels, tailored to the particulars of this language.
Introducing a Parsed Corpus of Historical High German
We present a new question answering corpus in French designed to educational domain. To be useful in such domain, we have to propose more complex questions and to be able to justify the answers on validated material. We analyze some properties of this corpus. The last part of this paper will be devoted to present the first experiments we have carried out to demonstrate the value of this dataset for learning a Retrieval Augmented Genration framework. Different experiments are proposed, with an automatic evaluation. A human evaluation is proposed to confirm or infirm this automatic evaluation.
Introducing CQuAE : A New French Contextualised Question-Answering Corpus for the Education Domain
For a viewpoint-diverse news recommender, identifying whether two news articles express the same viewpoint is essential. One way to determine “same or different” viewpoint is stance detection. In this paper, we investigate the robustness of operationalization choices for few-shot stance detection, with special attention to modelling stance across different topics. Our experiments test pre-registered hypotheses on stance detection. Specifically, we compare two stance task definitions (Pro/Con versus Same Side Stance), two LLM architectures (bi-encoding versus cross-encoding), and adding Natural Language Inference knowledge, with pre-trained RoBERTa models trained with shots of 100 examples from 7 different stance detection datasets. Some of our hypotheses and claims from earlier work can be confirmed, while others give more inconsistent results. The effect of the Same Side Stance definition on performance differs per dataset and is influenced by other modelling choices. We found no relationship between the number of training topics in the training shots and performance. In general, cross-encoding out-performs bi-encoding, and adding NLI training to our models gives considerable improvement, but these results are not consistent across all datasets. Our results indicate that it is essential to include multiple datasets and systematic modelling experiments when aiming to find robust modelling choices for the concept ‘stance’.
Investigating the Robustness of Modelling Decisions for Few-Shot Cross-Topic Stance Detection: A Preregistered Study
Effective information retrieval (IR) in settings with limited training data, particularly for complex queries, remains a challenging task. This paper introduces IR2, Information Regularization for Information Retrieval, a technique for reducing overfitting during synthetic data generation. This approach, representing a novel application of regularization techniques in synthetic data creation for IR, is tested on three recent IR tasks characterized by complex queries: DORIS-MAE, ArguAna, and WhatsThatBook. Experimental results indicate that our regularization techniques not only outperform previous synthetic query generation methods on the tasks considered but also reduce cost by up to 50%. Furthermore, this paper categorizes and explores three regularization methods at different stages of the query synthesis pipeline—input, prompt, and output—each offering varying degrees of performance improvement compared to models where no regularization is applied. This provides a systematic approach for optimizing synthetic data generation in data-limited, complex-query IR scenarios. All code, prompts and synthetic data are available at https://github.com/Info-Regularization/Information-Regularization.
IR2: Information Regularization for Information Retrieval
To construct a chat-oriented dialogue system that will be used for a long time by users, it is important to build a good relationship between the user and the system. To achieve a good relationship, several methods for remembering and utilizing information on users (preferences, experiences, jobs, etc.) in system utterances have been investigated. One way to do this is to utilize user information to fill in utterance templates for use in response generation, but the utterances do not always fit the context. Another way is to use neural-based generation, but in current methods, user information can be incorporated only when the current dialogue topic is similar to that of the user information. This paper tackled these problems by constructing a novel corpus to incorporate arbitrary user information into system utterances regardless of the current dialogue topic while retaining appropriateness for the context. We then fine-tuned a model for generating system utterances using the constructed corpus. The result of a subjective evaluation demonstrated the effectiveness of our model. Furthermore, we incorporated our fine-tuned model into a dialogue system and confirmed the effectiveness of the system through interactive dialogues with users.
I Remember You!: SUI Corpus for Remembering and Utilizing Users’ Information in Chat-oriented Dialogue Systems
We introduce ÌròyìnSpeech corpus—a new dataset influenced by a desire to increase the amount of high quality, freely available, contemporary Yorùbá speech data that can be used for both Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) tasks. We curated about 23,000 text sentences from the news and creative writing domains with an open license i.e., CC-BY-4.0 and asked multiple speakers to record each sentence. To encourage more participatory approach to data creation, we provide 5 000 utterances from the curated sentences to the Mozilla Common Voice platform to crowd-source the recording and validation of Yorùbá speech data. In total, we created about 42 hours of speech data recorded by 80 volunteers in-house, and 6 hours validated recordings on Mozilla Common Voice platform. Our evaluation on TTS shows that we can create a good quality general domain single-speaker TTS model for Yorùbá with as little 5 hours of speech by leveraging an end-to-end VITS architecture. Similarly, for ASR, we obtained a WER of 21.5.
ÌròyìnSpeech: A Multi-purpose Yorùbá Speech Corpus
Wide usage of ChatGPT has highlighted the potential of reinforcement learning from human feedback. However, its training pipeline relies on manual ranking, a resource-intensive process. To reduce labor costs, we propose a self-supervised text ranking approach for applying Proximal-Policy-Optimization to fine-tune language models while eliminating the need for human annotators. Our method begins with probabilistic sampling to encourage a language model to generate diverse responses for each input. We then employ TextRank and ISODATA algorithms to rank and cluster these responses based on their semantics. Subsequently, we construct a reward model to learn the rank and optimize our generative policy. Our experimental results, conducted using two language models on three tasks, demonstrate that the models trained by our method considerably outperform baselines regarding BLEU, GLEU, and METEOR scores. Furthermore, our manual evaluation shows that our ranking results exhibit a remarkably high consistency with that of humans. This research significantly reduces training costs of proximal policy-guided models and demonstrates the potential for self-correction of language models.
Is Crowdsourcing Breaking Your Bank? Cost-Effective Fine-Tuning of Pre-trained Language Models with Proximal Policy Optimization
We investigate how gender authorship influences polar, i.e. positive and negative gender reference. Given German-language newspaper texts where the full name of the authors are known and their gender can be inferred from the first names. And given that nouns in the text have gender reference, i.e. are labeled by a gender classifier as female or male denoting nouns. If these nouns carry a polar load, they count towards the gender-specific statistics we are interested in. A polar load is given either via phrase-level sentiment composition, or by a verb-based analysis of the polar role a noun (phrase) plays: is it framed by the verb as a positive or negative actor, or as receiving a positive or negative effect? Also, reported gender-gender relations (in favor, against) might be gender-specific. Statistical hypothesis testing is carried out in order to find out whether significant gender-wise correlations exist. We found that, in fact, gender reference is gender-specific: each gender significantly more often focuses on their own gender than the other one and e.g. positive actorship supremacy is claimed (intra-) gender-wise.
Is Gender Reference Gender-specific? Studies in a Polar Domain
Text simplification is a common task where the text is adapted to make it easier to understand. Similarly, text elaboration can make a passage more sophisticated, offering a method to control the complexity of reading comprehension tests. However, text simplification and elaboration tasks are limited to only relatively alter the readability of texts. It is useful to directly modify the readability of any text to an absolute target readability level to cater to a diverse audience. Ideally, the readability of readability-controlled generated text should be independent of the source text. Therefore, we propose a novel readability-controlled text modification task. The task requires the generation of 8 versions at various target readability levels for each input text. We introduce novel readability-controlled text modification metrics. The baselines for this task use ChatGPT and Llama-2, with an extension approach introducing a two-step process (generating paraphrases by passing through the language model twice). The zero-shot approaches are able to push the readability of the paraphrases in the desired direction but the final readability remains correlated with the original text’s readability. We also find greater drops in semantic and lexical similarity between the source and target texts with greater shifts in the readability.
Is It Possible to Modify Text to a Target Readability Level? An Initial Investigation Using Zero-Shot Large Language Models
The use of large language models (LLM), especially ChatGPT, to help with research has come into practice. Researchers use it for timely advice and hope to obtain in-depth feedback. However, can LLM be a qualified and reliable reviewer? Although there already exist several review-related datasets, few works have carefully and thoroughly inspected model’s capability as a reviewer, especially the correctness of generated reviews. In this paper, we first evaluate GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 (the current top-performing LLM) on 2 types of tasks under different settings: the score prediction task and the review generation task. In addition, we propose a dataset containing 197 review-revision multiple-choice questions (RR-MCQ) with detailed labels from the review-rebuttal forum in ICLR-2023. By asking questions from technical details to the overall presentation and quality, our RR-MCQ data provides a more complete model ability assessment. The results show that LLM is generally helpful, but great caution is needed as it always makes mistakes. Although it can give passable decisions (> 60% accuracy) on single options, completely correct answers are still rare (about 20%); models are still weak on long paper processing, zero-shot scoring, and giving critical feedback like human reviewers.
Is LLM a Reliable Reviewer? A Comprehensive Evaluation of LLM on Automatic Paper Reviewing Tasks
The rise of Modular Deep Learning showcases its potential in various Natural Language Processing applications. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) modularity has been shown to work for various use cases, from domain adaptation to multilingual setups. However, all this work covers the case where the modular components are trained and deployed within one single Pre-trained Language Model (PLM). This model-specific setup is a substantial limitation on the very modularity that modular architectures are trying to achieve. We ask whether current modular approaches are transferable between models and whether we can transfer the modules from more robust and larger PLMs to smaller ones. In this work, we aim to fill this gap via a lens of Knowledge Distillation, commonly used for model compression, and present an extremely straightforward approach to transferring pre-trained, task-specific PEFT modules between same-family PLMs. Moreover, we propose a method that allows the transfer of modules between incompatible PLMs without any change in the inference complexity. The experiments on Named Entity Recognition, Natural Language Inference, and Paraphrase Identification tasks over multiple languages and PEFT methods showcase the initial potential of transferable modularity.
Is Modularity Transferable? A Case Study through the Lens of Knowledge Distillation
This paper presents ISO 24617-12, an annotation scheme for quantification phenomena in natural language., as part of the ISO Semantic Annotation Framework (ISO 24617). This scheme combines ideas from the theory of generalised quantifiers, from neo-Davidsonian event semantics, and from Discourse Representation Theory. The scheme consists of (1) an abstract syntax which defines ‘annotation structures’ as triples and other set-theoretic constructs of quantification-related concepts; (2) a reference representation of annotation structures (‘concrete syntax’); and (3) a compositional semantics of annotation structures. Together, these components define the markup language QuantML. This paper focuses on the identification and structuring of the semantic information useful for the characterisation of quantification in natural language and the interoperable representation of these information structures in QuantML.
ISO 24617-12: A New Standard for Semantic Annotation
We introduce IsraParlTweet, a new linked corpus of Hebrew-language parliamentary discussions from the Knesset (Israeli Parliament) between the years 1992-2023 and Twitter posts made by Members of the Knesset between the years 2008-2023, containing a total of 294.5 million Hebrew tokens. In addition to raw text, the corpus contains comprehensive metadata on speakers and Knesset sessions as well as several linguistic annotations. As a result, IsraParlTweet can be used to conduct a wide variety of quantitative and qualitative analyses and provide valuable insights into political discourse in Israel.
IsraParlTweet: The Israeli Parliamentary and Twitter Resource
Even though various speech data sets are available in Hungarian, there is a lack of a general overview about their types and sizes. To fill in this gap, we provide a survey of available data sets in spoken Hungarian in five categories (e.g., monolingual, Hungarian part of multilingual, pathological, child-related and dialectal collections). In total, the estimated size of available data is about 2800 hours (across 7500 speakers) and it represents a rich spoken language diversity. However, the distribution of the data and its alignment to real-life (e.g. speech recognition) tasks is far from optimal indicating the need for additional larger-scale natural language speech data sets. Our survey presents an overview of available data sets for Hungarian explaining their strengths and weaknesses which is useful for researchers working on Hungarian across disciplines. In addition, our survey serves as a starting point towards a unified foundational speech model specific to Hungarian.
Is Spoken Hungarian Low-resource?: A Quantitative Survey of Hungarian Speech Data Sets
Research on automated text summarization typically uses human and automatic evaluation methods. While most recent studies focus on intrinsic evaluation, which assesses the general quality of summaries, e.g. coherence and informativeness, we concentrate on task-based extrinsic evaluation to determine the usefulness of summaries. We incorporate three downstream tasks, namely question answering, text classification, and text similarity assessment, and measure the usefulness of summaries for these tasks by several metrics. Our findings reveal that summaries are generally useful in tasks that require a comprehensive grasp of the text but are less useful in tasks requiring a more specific understanding of the text. We also analyze the usefulness and inherent properties of summaries from different models, and find that fine-tuned models consistently produce more useful summaries across all three tasks. In contrast, zero-shot models tend to lean towards text classification and similarity assessment, providing more general and less detailed summaries. Additionally, we assess the correlation between 14 intrinsic automatic metrics and human judgments. Intrinsic metrics perform well in evaluating summaries for question answering but are less effective in the other two tasks. This highlights the limitations of relying solely on intrinsic metrics for assessing summary performance and usefulness.
Is Summary Useful or Not? An Extrinsic Human Evaluation of Text Summaries on Downstream Tasks
Instruction tuning has demonstrated its superiority in unlocking the abilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs), including their capability to respond to diverse human instructions and conduct complex reasoning. In order to further enhance the continuous learning capabilities of pre-trained LLMs, we explore the training process of instruction tuning through the lens of task sequences. We propose a 2-phase automated curriculum learning guided instruction tuning framework, IT2ACL that learns easy-to-hard instructions for LLMs in a self-adjusting dynamic manner. To facilitate curriculum learning from instructions, we propose a loss-driven progress signal for two-phase strategies: instruction prediction gain that decides the instruction level syllabus. Through comprehensive experiments on 70 Chinese datasets which have been grouped into 16 distinct task clusters, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in eliciting latent ability in pre-trained LLMs and achieving superior performance across diverse tasks.
IT2ACL Learning Easy-to-Hard Instructions via 2-Phase Automated Curriculum Learning for Large Language Models
We introduce IT5, the first family of encoder-decoder transformer models pretrained specifically on Italian. We document and perform a thorough cleaning procedure for a large Italian corpus and use it to pretrain four IT5 model sizes. We then introduce the ItaGen benchmark, which includes a broad range of natural language understanding and generation tasks for Italian, and use it to evaluate the performance of IT5 models and multilingual baselines. We find monolingual IT5 models to provide the best scale-to-performance ratio across tested models, consistently outperforming their multilingual counterparts and setting a new state-of-the-art for Italian language generation.
IT5: Text-to-text Pretraining for Italian Language Understanding and Generation
Neural word embeddings have proven valuable in the development of medical applications. However, for the Italian language, there are no publicly available corpora, embeddings, or evaluation resources tailored to this domain. In this paper, we introduce an Italian corpus for the medical domain, that includes texts from Wikipedia, medical journals, drug leaflets, and specialized websites. Using this corpus, we generate neural word embeddings from scratch. These embeddings are then evaluated using standard evaluation resources, that we translated into Italian exploiting the concept graph in the UMLS Metathesaurus. Despite the relatively small size of the corpus, our experimental results indicate that the new embeddings correlate well with human judgments regarding the similarity and the relatedness of medical concepts. Moreover, these medical-specific embeddings outperform a baseline model trained on the full Wikipedia corpus, which includes the medical pages we used. We believe that our embeddings and the newly introduced textual resources will foster further advancements in the field of Italian medical Natural Language Processing.
Italian Word Embeddings for the Medical Domain
Generic commercial language-based assistants have become ubiquitously available, originally in the form of smart speakers and mobile apps, and more recently in the form of systems based on generative AI. At first glance, their capabilities seem remarkable. Speech recognition works well, NLU mostly works, and access to back-end information sources is usually quite good. However, there is still a lot of work to be done. In the area of NLU in particular, focused probes into the capabilities of language-based assistants easily reveal significant areas of brittleness that demonstrate large gaps in their coverage. For example, the straightforward disjunctive query is this monday or tuesday elicited the nonsensical response it’s 2:50 p.m. many consider it to be the afternoon. These gaps are difficult to identify if the development process relies on training the system with an ongoing supply of natural user data, because this natural data can become distorted by a self-reinforcing feedback loop where the system ‘trains’ the user to produce data that works. This paper describes a process for collecting specific kinds of data to uncover these gaps and an annotation scheme for system responses, and includes examples of simple utterances that nonetheless fail to be correctly processed. The systems tested include both Conventional assistants, such as Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, as well as GenAI systems, including ChatGPT and Bard/Gemini. We claim that these failures are due to a lack of attention to the full spectrum of input possibilities, and argue that systems would benefit from the inclusion of focused manual assessment to directly target likely gaps.
It’s Not under the Lamppost: Expanding the Reach of Conversational AI
We constructed JaParaPat (Japanese-English Parallel Patent Application Corpus), a bilingual corpus of more than 300 million Japanese-English sentence pairs from patent applications published in Japan and the United States from 2000 to 2021. We obtained the publication of unexamined patent applications from the Japan Patent Office (JPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). We also obtained patent family information from the DOCDB, that is a bibliographic database maintained by the European Patent Office (EPO). We extracted approximately 1.4M Japanese-English document pairs, which are translations of each other based on the patent families, and extracted about 350M sentence pairs from the document pairs using a translation-based sentence alignment method whose initial translation model is bootstrapped from a dictionary-based sentence alignment. We experimentally improved the accuracy of the patent translations by 20 bleu points by adding more than 300M sentence pairs obtained from patent applications to 22M sentence pairs obtained from the web.
JaParaPat: A Large-Scale Japanese-English Parallel Patent Application Corpus
Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) are the de facto backbone of most state-of-the-art NLP systems. In this paper, we introduce a family of domain-specific pretrained PLMs for French, focusing on three important domains: transcribed speech, medicine, and law. We use a transformer architecture based on efficient methods (LinFormer) to maximise their utility, since these domains often involve processing long documents. We evaluate and compare our models to state-of-the-art models on a diverse set of tasks and datasets, some of which are introduced in this paper. We gather the datasets into a new French-language evaluation benchmark for these three domains. We also compare various training configurations: continued pretraining, pretraining from scratch, as well as single- and multi-domain pretraining. Extensive domain-specific experiments show that it is possible to attain competitive downstream performance even when pre-training with the approximative LinFormer attention mechanism. For full reproducibility, we release the models and pretraining data, as well as contributed datasets.
Jargon: A Suite of Language Models and Evaluation Tasks for French Specialized Domains
Neural language models have exhibited outstanding performance in a range of downstream tasks. However, there is limited understanding regarding the extent to which these models internalize syntactic knowledge, so that various datasets have recently been constructed to facilitate syntactic evaluation of language models across languages. In this paper, we introduce JCoLA (Japanese Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability), which consists of 10,020 sentences annotated with binary acceptability judgments. Specifically, those sentences are manually extracted from linguistics textbooks, handbooks and journal articles, and split into in-domain data (86 %; relatively simple acceptability judgments extracted from textbooks and handbooks) and out-of-domain data (14 %; theoretically significant acceptability judgments extracted from journal articles), the latter of which is categorized by 12 linguistic phenomena. We then evaluate the syntactic knowledge of 9 different types of Japanese and multilingual language models on JCoLA. The results demonstrated that several models could surpass human performance for the in-domain data, while no models were able to exceed human performance for the out-of-domain data. Error analyses by linguistic phenomena further revealed that although neural language models are adept at handling local syntactic dependencies like argument structure, their performance wanes when confronted with long-distance syntactic dependencies like verbal agreement and NPI licensing.
JCoLA: Japanese Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability
Understanding expressions that refer to the physical world is crucial for such human-assisting systems in the real world, as robots that must perform actions that are expected by users. In real-world reference resolution, a system must ground the verbal information that appears in user interactions to the visual information observed in egocentric views. To this end, we propose a multimodal reference resolution task and construct a Japanese Conversation dataset for Real-world Reference Resolution (J-CRe3). Our dataset contains egocentric video and dialogue audio of real-world conversations between two people acting as a master and an assistant robot at home. The dataset is annotated with crossmodal tags between phrases in the utterances and the object bounding boxes in the video frames. These tags include indirect reference relations, such as predicate-argument structures and bridging references as well as direct reference relations. We also constructed an experimental model and clarified the challenges in multimodal reference resolution tasks.
J-CRe3: A Japanese Conversation Dataset for Real-world Reference Resolution
Document question answering is a task of question answering on given documents such as reports, slides, pamphlets, and websites, and it is a truly demanding task as paper and electronic forms of documents are so common in our society. This is known as a quite challenging task because it requires not only text understanding but also understanding of figures and tables, and hence visual question answering (VQA) methods are often examined in addition to textual approaches. We introduce Japanese Document Question Answering (JDocQA), a large-scale document-based QA dataset, essentially requiring both visual and textual information to answer questions, which comprises 5,504 documents in PDF format and annotated 11,600 question-and-answer instances in Japanese. Each QA instance includes references to the document pages and bounding boxes for the answer clues. We incorporate multiple categories of questions and unanswerable questions from the document for realistic question-answering applications. We empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our dataset with text-based large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models. Incorporating unanswerable questions in finetuning may contribute to harnessing the so-called hallucination generation.
JDocQA: Japanese Document Question Answering Dataset for Generative Language Models
We present JEMHopQA, a multi-hop QA dataset for the development of explainable QA systems. The dataset consists not only of question-answer pairs, but also of supporting evidence in the form of derivation triples, which contributes to making the QA task more realistic and difficult. It is created based on Japanese Wikipedia using both crowd-sourced human annotation as well as prompting a large language model (LLM), and contains a diverse set of question, answer and topic categories as compared with similar datasets released previously. We describe the details of how we built the dataset as well as the evaluation of the QA task presented by this dataset using GPT-4, and show that the dataset is sufficiently challenging for the state-of-the-art LLM while showing promise for combining such a model with existing knowledge resources to achieve better performance.
JEMHopQA: Dataset for Japanese Explainable Multi-Hop Question Answering
Large language models (LLMs) have proficiently solved a broad range of tasks with their rich knowledge but often struggle with logical reasoning. To foster the research on logical reasoning, many benchmarks have been proposed so far. However, most of these benchmarks are limited to English, hindering the evaluation of LLMs specialized for each language. To address this, we propose **JFLD** (**J**apanese **F**ormal **L**ogic **D**eduction), a deductive reasoning benchmark for Japanese. JFLD assess whether LLMs can generate logical steps to (dis-)prove a given hypothesis based on a given set of facts. Its key features are assessing pure logical reasoning abilities isolated from knowledge and assessing various reasoning rules. We evaluate various Japanese LLMs and see that they are still poor at logical reasoning, thus highlighting a substantial need for future research.
JFLD: A Japanese Benchmark for Deductive Reasoning Based on Formal Logic
Models, such as BERT, have made a significant breakthrough in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain solving 11+ tasks. This is achieved by training on a large scale of unlabelled text resources and leveraging Transformers architecture making it the “Jack of all NLP trades”. However, one of the popular and challenging tasks in Sequence Classification is Short Text Classification (STC). Short Texts face the problem of being short, equivocal, and non-standard. In this paper, we address two major problems: 1. Improving STC tasks performance in Japanese language which consists of many varieties and dialects. 2. Building a light-weight Japanese BERT model with cross-domain functionality and comparable accuracy with State of the Art (SOTA) BERT models. To solve this, we propose a novel cross-domain scalable model called JLBert, which is pre-trained on a rich, diverse and less explored Japanese e-commerce corpus. We present results from extensive experiments to show that JLBert is outperforming SOTA Multilingual and Japanese specialized BERT models on three Short Text datasets by approx 1.5% across various domain.
JLBert: Japanese Light BERT for Cross-Domain Short Text Classification
The detection of hate speech is a subject extensively explored by researchers, and machine learning algorithms play a crucial role in this domain. The existing resources mostly focus on text sequence classification for the task of hate speech detection. However, the target of hateful content is another dimension that has not been studied in details due to the lack of data resources. In this study, we address this gap by introducing a novel tweet dataset for the task of joint learning of hate speech detection and target detection, called JL-Hate, for the tasks of sequential text classification and token classification, respectively. The JL-Hate dataset consists of 1,530 tweets divided equally in English and Turkish languages. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct a series of benchmark experiments. We utilize a joint learning model to concurrently perform sequence and token classification tasks on our data. Our experimental results demonstrate consistent performance with the prevalent studies, both in sequence and token classification tasks.
JL-Hate: An Annotated Dataset for Joint Learning of Hate Speech and Target Detection
Dialogue datasets are crucial for deep learning-based task-oriented dialogue system research. While numerous English language multi-domain task-oriented dialogue datasets have been developed and contributed to significant advancements in task-oriented dialogue systems, such a dataset does not exist in Japanese, and research in this area is limited compared to that in English. In this study, towards the advancement of research and development of task-oriented dialogue systems in Japanese, we constructed JMultiWOZ, the first Japanese language large-scale multi-domain task-oriented dialogue dataset. Using JMultiWOZ, we evaluated the dialogue state tracking and response generation capabilities of the state-of-the-art methods on the existing major English benchmark dataset MultiWOZ2.2 and the latest large language model (LLM)-based methods. Our evaluation results demonstrated that JMultiWOZ provides a benchmark that is on par with MultiWOZ2.2. In addition, through evaluation experiments of interactive dialogues with the models and human participants, we identified limitations in the task completion capabilities of LLMs in Japanese.
JMultiWOZ: A Large-Scale Japanese Multi-Domain Task-Oriented Dialogue Dataset
In this paper, we compare different ways to annotate both syntactic and morphological relations in a dependency treebank and we propose new formats we call mSUD and mUD, compatible with the Universal Dependencies (UD) schema for syntactic treebanks. We emphasize mSUD rather than mUD, the former being based on distributional criteria for the choice of the head of any combination, which allow us to clearly encode the internal structure of a word, that is, the derivational path. We investigate different problems posed by a morph-based annotation, concerning tokenization, choice of the head of a morph combination, relations between morphs, additional features needed, such as the token type differentiating roots and derivational and inflectional affixes. We show how our annotation schema can be applied to different languages from polysynthetic languages such as Yupik to isolating languages such as Chinese.
Joint Annotation of Morphology and Syntax in Dependency Treebanks
Dialogue policy learning (DPL) aims to determine an abstract representation (also known as action) to guide what the response should be. Typically, DPL is cast as a sequential decision problem across a series of predefined action candidates. However, such static and narrow actions can limit response diversity and impede the dialogue agent’s adaptability to new scenarios and edge cases. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel Joint Transformer Reinforcement Learning framework, coined as JoTR, where a text-to-text Transformer-based model is employed to directly generate dialogue actions. More concretely, JoTR formulates a token-grained policy, facilitating more dynamic and adaptable dialogue action generation without the need for predefined action candidates. This method not only enhances the diversity of responses but also significantly improves the system’s capability to manage unfamiliar scenarios. Furthermore, JoTR utilizes Reinforcement Learning with a reward-shaping mechanism to efficiently fine-tune the token-grained policy. This allows the model to evolve through interactions, thereby enhancing its performance over time. Our extensive evaluation demonstrates that JoTR surpasses previous state-of-the-art models, showing improvements of 9% and 13% in success rate, and 34% and 37% in the diversity of dialogue actions across two benchmark dialogue modeling tasks respectively. These results have been validated by both user simulators and human evaluators. Code and data are available at ://github.com/KwanWaiChung/JoTR.
JoTR: A Joint Transformer and Reinforcement Learning Framework for Dialogue Policy Learning
Many systems rely on the ability to effectively search through databases of personal and organization entity names in multiple writing scripts. Despite this, there is a relative lack of research studying this problem in isolation. In this work, we discuss this problem in detail and support future research by publishing what we believe is the first comprehensive dataset designed for this task. Additionally, we present a number of baselines against which future work can be compared; among which, we describe a neural solution based on ByT5 (Xue et al. 2022) which demonstrates up to a 12% performance gain over preexisting baselines, indicating that there remains much room for improvement in this space.
JRC-Names-Retrieval: A Standardized Benchmark for Name Search
Many languages use adpositions (prepositions or postpositions) to mark a variety of semantic relations, with different languages exhibiting both commonalities and idiosyncrasies in the relations grouped under the same lexeme. We present the first Japanese extension of the SNACS framework (Schneider et al., 2018), which has served as the basis for annotating adpositions in corpora from several languages. After establishing which of the set of particles (joshi) in Japanese qualify as case markers and adpositions as defined in SNACS, we annotate 10 chapters (≈10k tokens) of the Japanese translation of Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince), achieving high inter-annotator agreement. We find that, while a majority of the particles and their uses are captured by the existing and extended SNACS annotation guidelines from the previous work, some unique cases were observed. We also conduct experiments investigating the cross-lingual similarity of adposition and case marker supersenses, showing that the language-agnostic SNACS framework captures similarities not clearly observed in multilingual embedding space.
J-SNACS: Adposition and Case Supersenses for Japanese Joshi
Transformer-based language models create hidden representations of their inputs at every layer, but only use final-layer representations for prediction. This obscures the internal decision-making process of the model and the utility of its intermediate representations. One way to elucidate this is to cast the hidden representations as final representations, bypassing the transformer computation in-between. In this work, we suggest a simple method for such casting, using linear transformations. This approximation far exceeds the prevailing practice of inspecting hidden representations from all layers, in the space of the final layer. Moreover, in the context of language modeling, our method produces more accurate predictions from hidden layers, across various model scales, architectures, and data distributions. This allows “peeking” into intermediate representations, showing that GPT-2 and BERT often predict the final output already in early layers. We then demonstrate the practicality of our method to recent early exit strategies, showing that when aiming, for example, at retention of 95% accuracy, our approach saves additional 7.9% layers for GPT-2 and 5.4% layers for BERT. Last, we extend our method to linearly approximate sub-modules, finding that attention is most tolerant to this change. Our code and learned mappings are publicly available at https://github.com/sashayd/mat.
Jump to Conclusions: Short-Cutting Transformers with Linear Transformations
This study focuses on the creation of the KazEmoTTS dataset, designed for emotional Kazakh text-to-speech (TTS) applications. KazEmoTTS is a collection of 54,760 audio-text pairs, with a total duration of 74.85 hours, featuring 34.23 hours delivered by a female narrator and 40.62 hours by two male narrators. The list of the emotions considered include “neutral”, “angry”, “happy”, “sad”, “scared”, and “surprised”. We also developed a TTS model trained on the KazEmoTTS dataset. Objective and subjective evaluations were employed to assess the quality of synthesized speech, yielding an MCD score within the range of 6.02 to 7.67, alongside a MOS that spanned from 3.51 to 3.57. To facilitate reproducibility and inspire further research, we have made our code, pre-trained model, and dataset accessible in our GitHub repository.
KazEmoTTS: A Dataset for Kazakh Emotional Text-to-Speech Synthesis
We introduce KazParC, a parallel corpus designed for machine translation across Kazakh, English, Russian, and Turkish. The first and largest publicly available corpus of its kind, KazParC contains a collection of 371,902 parallel sentences covering different domains and developed with the assistance of human translators. Our research efforts also extend to the development of a neural machine translation model nicknamed Tilmash. Remarkably, the performance of Tilmash is on par with, and in certain instances, surpasses that of industry giants, such as Google Translate and Yandex Translate, as measured by standard evaluation metrics such as BLEU and chrF. Both KazParC and Tilmash are openly available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.
KazParC: Kazakh Parallel Corpus for Machine Translation
We introduce KazQAD—a Kazakh open-domain question answering (ODQA) dataset—that can be used in both reading comprehension and full ODQA settings, as well as for information retrieval experiments. KazQAD contains just under 6,000 unique questions with extracted short answers and nearly 12,000 passage-level relevance judgements. We use a combination of machine translation, Wikipedia search, and in-house manual annotation to ensure annotation efficiency and data quality. The questions come from two sources: translated items from the Natural Questions (NQ) dataset (only for training) and the original Kazakh Unified National Testing (UNT) exam (for development and testing). The accompanying text corpus contains more than 800,000 passages from the Kazakh Wikipedia. As a supplementary dataset, we release around 61,000 question-passage-answer triples from the NQ dataset that have been machine-translated into Kazakh. We develop baseline retrievers and readers that achieve reasonable scores in retrieval (NDCG10 = 0.389 MRR = 0.382), reading comprehension (EM = 38.5 F1 = 54.2), and full ODQA (EM = 17.8 F1 = 28.7) settings. Nevertheless, these results are substantially lower than state-of-the-art results for English QA collections, and we think that there should still be ample room for improvement. We also show that the current OpenAI’s ChatGPTv3.5 is not able to answer KazQAD test questions in the closed-book setting with acceptable quality. The dataset is freely available under the Creative Commons licence (CC BY-SA) at url https://github.com/IS2AI/KazQAD
KazQAD: Kazakh Open-Domain Question Answering Dataset
This paper presents KazSAnDRA, a dataset developed for Kazakh sentiment analysis that is the first and largest publicly available dataset of its kind. KazSAnDRA comprises an extensive collection of 180,064 reviews obtained from various sources and includes numerical ratings ranging from 1 to 5, providing a quantitative representation of customer attitudes. The study also pursued the automation of Kazakh sentiment classification through the development and evaluation of four machine learning models trained for both polarity classification and score classification. Experimental analysis included evaluation of the results considering both balanced and imbalanced scenarios. The most successful model attained an F1-score of 0.81 for polarity classification and 0.39 for score classification on the test sets. The dataset and fine-tuned models are open access and available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.
KazSAnDRA: Kazakh Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Reviews and Attitudes
The goal of knowledge graph completion (KGC) is to predict missing facts among entities. Previous methods for KGC re-ranking are mostly built on non-generative language models to obtain the probability of each candidate. Recently, generative large language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance on several tasks such as information extraction and dialog systems. Leveraging them for KGC re-ranking is beneficial for leveraging the extensive pre-trained knowledge and powerful generative capabilities. However, it may encounter new problems when accomplishing the task, namely mismatch, misordering and omission. To this end, we introduce KC-GenRe, a knowledge-constrained generative re-ranking method based on LLMs for KGC. To overcome the mismatch issue, we formulate the KGC re-ranking task as a candidate identifier sorting generation problem implemented by generative LLMs. To tackle the misordering issue, we develop a knowledge-guided interactive training method that enhances the identification and ranking of candidates. To address the omission issue, we design a knowledge-augmented constrained inference method that enables contextual prompting and controlled generation, so as to obtain valid rankings. Experimental results show that KG-GenRe achieves state-of-the-art performance on four datasets, with gains of up to 6.7% and 7.7% in the MRR and Hits@1 metric compared to previous methods, and 9.0% and 11.1% compared to that without re-ranking. Extensive analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of components in KG-GenRe.
KC-GenRe: A Knowledge-constrained Generative Re-ranking Method Based on Large Language Models for Knowledge Graph Completion
Named Entity Recognition(NER), as a crucial subtask in natural language processing(NLP), is limited to a few labeled samples(a.k.a. few-shot). Metric-based meta-learning methods aim to learn the semantic space and assign the entity to its nearest label based on the similarity of their representations. However, these methods have trouble with semantic space learning and result in suboptimal performance. Specifically, the label name or its description is widely used for label semantic representation learning, but the label information extracted from the existing label description is limited. In addition, these methods focus on reducing the distance between the entity and the corresponding label, which may also reduce the distance between the labels and thus cause misclassification. In this paper, we propose a few-shot NER method that harnesses the power of Knowledge Graph and Contrastive Learning to improve the prototypical semantic space learning. First, KCL leverages knowledge graphs to provide rich and structured label information for label semantic representation learning. Then, KCL introduces the idea of contrastive learning to learn the label semantic representation. The label semantic representation is used to help distance the label clusters in the prototypical semantic space to reduce misclassification. Extensive experiments show that KCL achieves significant improvement over the state-of-the-art methods.
KCL: Few-shot Named Entity Recognition with Knowledge Graph and Contrastive Learning
Knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language models (KEPLMs) leverage relation triples from knowledge graphs (KGs) and integrate these external data sources into language models via self-supervised learning. Previous works treat knowledge enhancement as two independent operations, i.e., knowledge injection and knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose to learn Knowledge-Enhanced language representations with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (KEHRL), which jointly addresses the problems of detecting positions for knowledge injection and integrating external knowledge into the model in order to avoid injecting inaccurate or irrelevant knowledge. Specifically, a high-level reinforcement learning (RL) agent utilizes both internal and prior knowledge to iteratively detect essential positions in texts for knowledge injection, which filters out less meaningful entities to avoid diverting the knowledge learning direction. Once the entity positions are selected, a relevant triple filtration module is triggered to perform low-level RL to dynamically refine the triples associated with polysemic entities through binary-valued actions. Experiments validate KEHRL’s effectiveness in probing factual knowledge and enhancing the model’s performance on various natural language understanding tasks.
KEHRL: Learning Knowledge-Enhanced Language Representations with Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning
Due to the concise and structured nature of tables, the knowledge contained therein may be incomplete or missing, posing a significant challenge for table question answering (TableQA) systems. However, most existing datasets either overlook the challenge of missing knowledge in TableQA or only utilize unstructured text as supplementary information for tables. In this paper, we propose to use a knowledge base (KB) as the external knowledge source for TableQA and construct a dataset KET-QA with fine-grained gold evidence annotation. Each table in the dataset corresponds to a sub-graph of the entire KB, and every question requires the integration of information from both the table and the sub-graph to be answered. To extract pertinent information from the vast knowledge sub-graph and apply it to TableQA, we design a retriever-reasoner structured pipeline model. Experimental results demonstrate that our model consistently achieves remarkable relative performance improvements ranging from 1.9 to 6.5 times on EM scores across three distinct settings (fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot), in comparison with solely relying on table information. However, even the best model achieves a 60.23% EM score, which still lags behind the human-level performance, highlighting the challenging nature of KET-QA for the question-answering community.
KET-QA: A Dataset for Knowledge Enhanced Table Question Answering
Reproducibility studies are treated as means to verify the validity of a scientific method, but what else can we learn from such experiments? We addressed this question taking Keyphrase Generation (KPG) as the use case in this paper, by studying three state-of-the-art KPG models in terms of reproducibility under either the same (same data/model/code) or varied (different training data/model, but same code) conditions, and exploring different ways of comparing KPG models beyond the most commonly used evaluation measures. We drew some conclusions on the state of the art in KPG based on these experiments, and provided guidelines for researchers working on the topic about reporting experimental results in a more comprehensive manner.
Keyphrase Generation: Lessons from a Reproducibility Study
We present KGConv, a large corpus of 71k English conversations where each question-answer pair is grounded in a Wikidata fact. Conversations contain on average 8.6 questions and for each Wikidata fact, we provide multiple variants (12 on average) of the corresponding question using templates, human annotations, hand-crafted rules and a question rewriting neural model. We provide baselines for the task of Knowledge-Based, Conversational Question Generation. KGConv can further be used for other generation and analysis tasks such as single-turn question generation from Wikidata triples, question rewriting, question answering from conversation or from knowledge graphs and quiz generation.
KGConv, a Conversational Corpus Grounded in Wikidata
We present the Khan Academy Corpus totalling 10122 hours in 87394 recordings across 29 languages, where 43% of recordings (4252 hours) are equipped with human-written subtitles. The subtitle texts cover a total of 137 languages. The dataset was collected from open access Khan Academy lectures, benefiting from their manual transcripts and manual translations of the transcripts. The dataset can serve in creation or evaluation of multilingual speech recognition or translation systems, featuring a diverse set of subject domains.
Khan Academy Corpus: A Multilingual Corpus of Khan Academy Lectures
This paper presents Killkan, the first dataset for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the Kichwa language, an indigenous language of Ecuador. Kichwa is an extremely low-resource endangered language, and there have been no resources before Killkan for Kichwa to be incorporated in applications of natural language processing. The dataset contains approximately 4 hours of audio with transcription, translation into Spanish, and morphosyntactic annotation in the format of Universal Dependencies, all done in ELAN, the annotation software. The audio data was retrieved from a publicly available radio program in Kichwa. This paper also provides corpus-linguistic analyses of the dataset with a special focus on the agglutinative morphology of Kichwa and frequent code-switching with Spanish. The experiments show that the dataset makes it possible to develop the first ASR system for Kichwa with reliable quality despite its small dataset size. This dataset, the ASR model, and the code used to develop them will be publicly available. Thus, our study positively showcases resource building and its applications for low-resource languages and their community.
Killkan: The Automatic Speech Recognition Dataset for Kichwa with Morphosyntactic Information
Instruction Tuning on Large Language Models is an essential process for model to function well and achieve high performance in the specific tasks. Accordingly, in mainstream languages such as English, instruction-based datasets are being constructed and made publicly available. In the case of Korean, publicly available models and datasets all rely on using the output of ChatGPT or translating datasets built in English. In this paper, We introduce KIT-19 as an instruction dataset for the development of LLM in Korean. KIT-19 is a dataset created in an instruction format, comprising 19 existing open-source datasets for Korean NLP tasks. In this paper, we train a Korean Pretrained LLM using KIT-19 to demonstrate its effectiveness. The experimental results show that the model trained on KIT-19 significantly outperforms existing Korean LLMs. Based on the its quality and empirical results, this paper proposes that KIT-19 has the potential to make a substantial contribution to the future improvement of Korean LLMs’ performance.
KIT-19: A Comprehensive Korean Instruction Toolkit on 19 Tasks for Fine-Tuning Korean Large Language Models
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) is a promising approach to mitigate the challenges about the model adaptation of pretrained language models (PLMs) for the named entity recognition (NER) task. Recent studies have highlighted the improvements that can be made to the quality of information retrieved from PLMs by adding explicit knowledge from external source like KGs to otherwise naive PEFTs. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledgeable adapter, Know-adapter, to incorporate structure and semantic knowledge of knowledge graphs into PLMs for few-shot NER. First, we construct a related KG entity type sequence for each sentence using a knowledge retriever. However, the type system of a domain-specific NER task is typically independent of that of current KGs and thus exhibits heterogeneity issue inevitably, which makes matching between the original NER and KG types (e.g. Person in NER potentially matches President in KBs) less likely, or introduces unintended noises. Thus, then we design a unified taxonomy based on KG ontology for KG entity types and NER labels. This taxonomy is used to build a learnable shared representation module, which provides shared representations for both KG entity type sequences and NER labels. Based on these shared representations, our Know-adapter introduces high semantic relevance knowledge and structure knowledge from KGs as inductive bias to guide the updating process of the adapter. Additionally, the shared representations guide the learnable representation module to reduce noise in the unsupervised expansion of label words. Extensive experiments on multiple NER datasets show the superiority of Know-Adapter over other state-of-the-art methods in both full-resource and low-resource settings.
Know-Adapter: Towards Knowledge-Aware Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for Few-shot Named Entity Recognition
Adverse drug events (ADEs) are an important aspect of drug safety. Various texts such as biomedical literature, drug reviews, and user posts on social media and medical forums contain a wealth of information about ADEs. Recent studies have applied word embedding and deep learning-based natural language processing to automate ADE detection from text. However, they did not explore incorporating explicit medical knowledge about drugs and adverse reactions or the corresponding feature learning. This paper adopts the heterogeneous text graph, which describes relationships between documents, words, and concepts, augments it with medical knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System, and proposes a concept-aware attention mechanism that learns features differently for the different types of nodes in the graph. We further utilize contextualized embeddings from pretrained language models and convolutional graph neural networks for effective feature representation and relational learning. Experiments on four public datasets show that our model performs competitively to the recent advances, and the concept-aware attention consistently outperforms other attention mechanisms.
Knowledge-augmented Graph Neural Networks with Concept-aware Attention for Adverse Drug Event Detection
The first 24 hours’ medication plan is critical to patients with serious or life-threatening illnesses and injuries. An appropriate medication can result in a lower mortality, a shorter length stay and a higher APACHE score. However, in clinical practice, the medication plan is often error-prone, especially when a decision must be made quickly for life-threatening situations in Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Therefore, predicting the effectiveness of the first 24 hours’ medication plan is of great importance in assisting doctors to make proper decisions. Existing effectiveness prediction works usually focus on one specific medicine, one specific disease, or one specific lab test, making it hard to extend to general medicines and diseases in hospital/ICU scenarios. In this paper, we propose to predict medication effectiveness of the first 24 hours in hospital/ICU based on patients’ information. Specifically, we use a knowledge enhanced module to incorporate external knowledge about medications and a medical feature learning module to determine the interaction between diagnosis and medications. To handle the data imbalance problem, we further optimize the proposed model with a contrastive loss. Extensive experimental results on a public dataset show that our model can significantly outperform state-of-the-art methods.
Knowledge-aware Attention Network for Medication Effectiveness Prediction
In recent years, multilingual pre-trained language models (mPLMs) have achieved significant progress in cross-lingual dense retrieval. However, most mPLMs neglect the importance of knowledge. Knowledge always conveys similar semantic concepts in a language-agnostic manner, while query-passage pairs in cross-lingual retrieval also share common factual information. Motivated by this observation, we introduce KEPT, a novel mPLM that effectively leverages knowledge to learn language-agnostic semantic representations. To achieve this, we construct a multilingual knowledge base using hyperlinks and cross-language page alignment data annotated by Wiki. From this knowledge base, we mine intra- and cross-language pairs by extracting symmetrically linked segments and multilingual entity descriptions. Subsequently, we adopt contrastive learning with the mined pairs to pre-train KEPT. We evaluate KEPT on three widely-used benchmarks, considering both zero-shot cross-lingual transfer and supervised multilingual fine-tuning scenarios. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that KEPT achieves strong multilingual and cross-lingual retrieval performance with significant improvements over existing mPLMs.
Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Cross-lingual Dense Retrieval
Dialogue-based relation extraction (DRE) aims to determine the semantic relation of a given pair of arguments from a piece of dialogue, which has received increasing attention. Due to the low information density of dialogue text, it is difficult for the model to focus on key information. To this end, in this paper, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Prompt-Tuning (KEPT) method to effectively enhance DRE model by exploiting trigger and label semantic. Specifically, we propose two beneficial tasks, masked trigger prediction, and verbalizer representation learning, to effectively inject trigger knowledge and label semantic knowledge respectively. Furthermore, we convert the DRE task to a masked language modeling task to unify the format of knowledge injection and utilization, aiming to better promote DRE performance. Experimental results on the DialogRE dataset show that our KEPT achieves state-of-the-art performance in F1 and F1c scores. Detailed analyses demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed approach. Code is available at https://github.com/blackbookay/KEPT.
Knowledge-enhanced Prompt Tuning for Dialogue-based Relation Extraction with Trigger and Label Semantic
Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) models provide a low-dimensional representation of knowledge graphs in continuous vector spaces. This representation learning enables different downstream AI tasks such as link prediction for graph completion. However, most embedding models are only designed considering the algebra and geometry of the entity embedding space, the algebra of the relation embedding space, and the interaction between relation and entity embeddings. Neglecting the geometry of relation embedding limits the optimization of entity and relation distribution leading to suboptimal performance of knowledge graph completion. To address this issue, we propose a new perspective in the design of KGEs by looking into the geometry of relation embedding space. The proposed method and its variants are developed on top of an existing framework, RotatE, from which we leverage the geometry of the relation embeddings by mutating the unit circle to an ellipse, and further generalize it with the concept of a butterfly curve, consecutively. Besides the theoretical abilities of the model in preserving topological and relational patterns, the experiments on the WN18RR, FB15K-237 and YouTube benchmarks showed that this new family of KGEs can challenge or outperform state-of-the-art models.
Knowledge GeoGebra: Leveraging Geometry of Relation Embeddings in Knowledge Graph Completion
Despite recent progress in automated rumour verification, little has been done on evaluating rumours in a real-world setting. We advance the state-of-the-art on the PHEME dataset, which consists of Twitter response threads collected as a rumour was unfolding. We automatically collect evidence relevant to PHEME and use it to construct knowledge graphs in a time-sensitive manner, excluding information post-dating rumour emergence. We identify discrepancies between the evidence retrieved and PHEME’s labels, which are discussed in detail and amended to release an updated dataset. We develop a novel knowledge graph approach which finds paths linking disjoint fragments of evidence. Our rumour verification model which combines evidence from the graph outperforms the state-of-the-art on PHEME and has superior generisability when evaluated on a temporally distant rumour verification dataset.
Knowledge Graphs for Real-World Rumour Verification
Visual question generation (VQG) task aims to generate high-quality questions based on the input image. Current methods primarily focus on generating questions containing specified content utilizing answers or question types as constraints. However, these constraints make it challenging to control the topic of generated questions (e.g., conversation or test subject topics) for various applications. Thus, it is necessary to utilize topics as constraints to guide question generation. Considering that there are many topics and it is almost impossible for human annotations to cover them, we propose the cross-topic learning VQG (CTL-VQG) task, which aims to generate questions related to unseen topics in cross-topic scenarios. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-guided cross-topic visual question generation (KC-VQG) model to extract unseen topic-related information for question generation. Specifically, an image-topic feature extractor is introduced in our model to extract topic-related intuitive visual features; an image-topic knowledge extractor is used to extract and select the most appropriate topic-related implicit knowledge from large language models for generating questions. Extensive experiments show that our model outperforms baselines and can effectively generate unseen topic-related questions in cross-topic scenarios.
Knowledge-Guided Cross-Topic Visual Question Generation
Scientific Information Extraction (SciIE) is a vital task and is increasingly being adopted in biomedical data mining to conceptualize and epitomize knowledge triplets from the scientific literature. Existing relation extraction methods aim to extract explicit triplet knowledge from documents, however, they can hardly perceive unobserved factual relations. Recent generative methods have more flexibility, but their generated relations will encounter trustworthiness problems. In this paper, we first propose a novel Extraction-Contextualization-Derivation (ECD) strategy to generate a document-specific and entity-expanded dynamic graph from a shared static knowledge graph. Then, we propose a novel Dual-Graph Resonance Network (DGRN) which can generate richer explicit and implicit relations under the guidance of static and dynamic knowledge topologies. Experiments conducted on a public PubMed corpus validate the superiority of our method against several state-of-the-art baselines.
Knowledge Triplets Derivation from Scientific Publications via Dual-Graph Resonance
In Visually-rich Document Understanding (VrDU), recent advances of incorporating layout and image features into the pre-training language models have achieved significant progress. Existing methods usually developed complicated dedicated architectures based on pre-trained models and fine-tuned them with costly high-quality data to eliminate the inconsistency of knowledge distribution between the pre-training task and specialized downstream tasks. However, due to their huge data demands, these methods are not suitable for few-shot settings, which are essential for quick applications with limited resources but few previous works are presented. To solve these problems, we propose a unified Knowledge-aware prompt-tuning framework for Visual-rich Document Understanding (KnowVrDU) to enable broad utilization for diverse concrete applications and reduce data requirements. To model heterogeneous VrDU structures without designing task-specific architectures, we propose to reformulate various VrDU tasks into a single question-answering format with task-specific prompts and train the pre-trained model with the parameter-efficient prompt tuning method. To bridge the knowledge gap between the pre-training task and specialized VrDU tasks without additional annotations, we propose a prompt knowledge integration mechanism to leverage external open-source knowledge bases. We conduct experiments on several benchmark datasets in few-shot settings and the results validate the effectiveness of our method.
KnowVrDU: A Unified Knowledge-aware Prompt-Tuning Framework for Visually-rich Document Understanding
Sarcasm is a way of verbal irony where someone says the opposite of what they mean, often to ridicule a person, situation, or idea. It is often difficult to detect sarcasm in the dialogue since detecting sarcasm should reflect the context (i.e., dialogue history). In this paper, we introduce a new dataset for the Korean dialogue sarcasm detection task, KoCoSa (Korean Context-aware Sarcasm Detection Dataset), which consists of 12.8K daily Korean dialogues and the labels for this task on the last response. To build the dataset, we propose an efficient sarcasm detection dataset generation pipeline: 1) generating new sarcastic dialogues from source dialogues with large language models, 2) automatic and manual filtering of abnormal and toxic dialogues, and 3) human annotation for the sarcasm detection task. We also provide a simple but effective baseline for the Korean sarcasm detection task trained on our dataset. Experimental results on the dataset show that our baseline system outperforms strong baselines like large language models, such as GPT-3.5, in the Korean sarcasm detection task. We show that the sarcasm detection task relies deeply on the existence of sufficient context. We will release the dataset at https://github.com/Yu-billie/KoCoSa_sarcasm_detection.
KoCoSa: Korean Context-aware Sarcasm Detection Dataset
As language models are often deployed as chatbot assistants, it becomes a virtue for models to engage in conversations in a user’s first language. While these models are trained on a wide range of languages, a comprehensive evaluation of their proficiency in low-resource languages such as Korean has been lacking. In this work, we introduce KoDialogBench, a benchmark designed to assess language models’ conversational capabilities in Korean. To this end, we collect native Korean dialogues on daily topics from public sources, or translate dialogues from other languages. We then structure these conversations into diverse test datasets, spanning from dialogue comprehension to response selection tasks. Leveraging the proposed benchmark, we conduct extensive evaluations and analyses of various language models to measure a foundational understanding of Korean dialogues. Experimental results indicate that there exists significant room for improvement in models’ conversation skills. Furthermore, our in-depth comparisons across different language models highlight the effectiveness of recent training techniques in enhancing conversational proficiency. We anticipate that KoDialogBench will promote the progress towards conversation-aware Korean language models.
KoDialogBench: Evaluating Conversational Understanding of Language Models with Korean Dialogue Benchmark
Word frequencies are integral in linguistic studies, showing strong correlations with speakers’ cognitive abilities and other important linguistic parameters including the Age of Acquisition (AoA). However, the formulation of credible Korean word frequency norms has been obstructed by the lack of expansive speech data and a reliable part-ofspeech (POS) tagger. In this study, we unveil Korean word frequency norms (KoFREN), derived from large-scale spontaneous speech corpora (41 million words) that include a balanced representation of gender and age. We employed a machine learning-powered POS tagger, showcasing accuracy on par with human annotators. Our frequency norms correlate significantly with external studies’ lexical decision time (LDT) and AoA measures. KoFREN also aligns with English counterparts sourced from SUBTLEX_US - an English word frequency measure that has been frequently used in the literature. KoFREN is poised to facilitate research in spontaneous Contemporary Korean and can be utilized in many fields, including clinical studies of Korean patients.
KoFREN: Comprehensive Korean Word Frequency Norms Derived from Large Scale Free Speech Corpora
Konkani is a language spoken by a large number of people from the states located in the west coast of India. It is the official language of Goa state from the Indian subcontinent. Currently there is a lack of idioms corpus in the low-resource Konkani language. This paper aims to improve the progress in idiomatic sentence identification in order to enhance linguistic processing by creating the first corpus for idioms in the Konkani language. We select a unique list of 1597 idioms from multiple sources and proceed with a strictly controlled sentence creation procedure through crowdsourcing. This is followed by quality check of the sentences and annotation procedure by the experts in the Konkani language. We were able to build a good quality corpus comprising of 6520 sentences written in the Devanagari script of Konkani language. Analysis of the collected idioms and their usage in the created sentences revealed the dominance of selective domains like ‘human body’ in the creation and occurrences of idiomatic expressions in the Konkani language. This corpus is made publicly available.
Konidioms Corpus: A Dataset of Idioms in Konkani Language
Named Entity Recognition (NER) plays a pivotal role in medical Natural Language Processing (NLP). Yet, there has not been an open-source medical NER dataset specifically for the Korean language. To address this, we utilized ChatGPT to assist in constructing the KBMC (Korean Bio-Medical Corpus), which we are now presenting to the public. With the KBMC dataset, we noticed an impressive 20% increase in medical NER performance compared to models trained on general Korean NER datasets. This research underscores the significant benefits and importance of using specialized tools and datasets, like ChatGPT, to enhance language processing in specialized fields such as healthcare.
Korean Bio-Medical Corpus (KBMC) for Medical Named Entity Recognition
Sign language is a crucial means of communication for deaf communities. However, those outside deaf communities often lack understanding of sign language, leading to inadequate communication accessibility for the deaf. Therefore, sign language translation is a significantly important research area. In this context, we present a new benchmark dataset for Korean sign language translation named SSL:korean disaster Safety information Sign Language translation benchmark dataset. Korean sign language translation datasets provided by the National Information Society Agency in South Korea have faced challenges related to computational resources, heterogeneity between train and test sets, and unrefined data. To alleviate the aforementioned issue, we refine the origin data and release them. Additionally, we report experimental results of baseline using a transformer architecture. We empirically demonstrate that the baseline performance varies depending on the tokenization method applied to gloss sequences. In particular, tokenization based on characteristics of sign language outperforms tokenization considering characteristics of spoken language and tokenization utilizing statistical techniques. We release materials at our https://github.com/SSL-Sign-Language/Korean-Disaster-Safety-Information-Sign-Language-Translation-Benchmark-Dataset
Korean Disaster Safety Information Sign Language Translation Benchmark Dataset
Existing English-based text similarity measurements primarily focus on the semantic dimension, neglecting the unique linguistic attributes found in languages like Korean, where honorific expressions are explicitly integrated. To address this limitation, this study proposes Kosmic, a novel Korean text-similarity metric that encompasses the semantic and tonal facets of a given text pair. For the evaluation, we introduce a novel benchmark annotated by human experts, empirically showing that Kosmic outperforms the existing method. Moreover, by leveraging Kosmic, we assess various Korean paraphrasing methods to determine which techniques are most effective in preserving semantics and tone.
Kosmic: Korean Text Similarity Metric Reflecting Honorific Distinctions
Zero-shot stance detection on social media (ZSSD-SM) aims to distinguish the attitude in tweets towards an unseen target. Previous work capture latent variables between source and target domains to perform this task, but the lack of context knowledge hinders the detection performance. Recent studies have been devoted to obtaining the accurate representation of tweets by bringing additional facts from Knowledge Graph (KG), showing promising performance. However, these knowledge injection methods still suffer from two challenges: (i) The pipeline of knowledge injection causes error accumulation and (ii) irrelevant knowledge makes them fail to understand the semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel knowledge injection method for ZSSD-SM, which adopts two training stages, namely knowledge compression and task guidance, to flexibly inject knowledge into the pre-trained language model (PLM) and adaptively expand tweets context. Specifically, in the knowledge compression stage, the latent representation of KG is reconstructed by the triplet denoising task and compressed into external matrices; while in the task guidance stage, the frozen matrices are employed to guide the PLM to adaptively extract its own context-related knowledge, and then complete the fine-tuning of the ZSSD-SM task. Extensive experiments on multiple datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method. The code is available at: https://github.com/ShuohaoLin/KPatch.
KPatch: Knowledge Patch to Pre-trained Language Model for Zero-Shot Stance Detection on Social Media
Lyric translation, a field studied for over a century, is now attracting computational linguistics researchers. We identified two limitations in previous studies. Firstly, lyric translation studies have predominantly focused on Western genres and languages, with no previous study centering on K-pop despite its popularity. Second, the field of lyric translation suffers from a lack of publicly available datasets; to the best of our knowledge, no such dataset exists. To broaden the scope of genres and languages in lyric translation studies, we introduce a novel singable lyric translation dataset, approximately 89% of which consists of K-pop song lyrics. This dataset aligns Korean and English lyrics line-by-line and section-by-section. We leveraged this dataset to unveil unique characteristics of K-pop lyric translation, distinguishing it from other extensively studied genres, and to construct a neural lyric translation model, thereby underscoring the importance of a dedicated dataset for singable lyric translations.
K-pop Lyric Translation: Dataset, Analysis, and Neural-Modelling
Linear Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) are used to classify the node in the graph data. However, we note that most existing linear GCN models perform neural network operations in Euclidean space, which do not explicitly capture the tree-like hierarchical structure exhibited in real-world datasets that modeled as graphs. In this paper, we attempt to introduce hyperbolic space into linear GCN and propose a novel framework for Lorentzian linear GCN. Specifically, we map the learned features of graph nodes into hyperbolic space, and then perform a Lorentzian linear feature transformation to capture the underlying tree-like structure of data. Experimental results on standard citation networks datasets with semi-supervised learning show that our approach yields new state-of-the-art results of accuracy 74.7% on Citeseer and 81.3% on PubMed datasets. Furthermore, we observe that our approach can be trained up to two orders of magnitude faster than other nonlinear GCN models on PubMed dataset. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/llqy123/LLGC-master.
Lˆ2GC:Lorentzian Linear Graph Convolutional Networks for Node Classification
We address the challenge of detecting questionable content in online media, specifically the subcategory of comic mischief. This type of content combines elements such as violence, adult content, or sarcasm with humor, making it difficult to detect. Employing a multimodal approach is vital to capture the subtle details inherent in comic mischief content. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel end-to-end multimodal system for the task of comic mischief detection. As part of this contribution, we release a novel dataset for the targeted task consisting of three modalities: video, text (video captions and subtitles), and audio. We also design a HIerarchical Cross-attention model with CAPtions (HICCAP) to capture the intricate relationships among these modalities. The results show that the proposed approach makes a significant improvement over robust baselines and state-of-the-art models for comic mischief detection and its type classification. This emphasizes the potential of our system to empower users, to make informed decisions about the online content they choose to see.
Labeling Comic Mischief Content in Online Videos with a Multimodal Hierarchical-Cross-Attention Model
The combination of topic modeling and automatic topic labeling sheds light on understanding large corpora of text. It can be used to add semantic information for existing metadata. In addition, one can use the documents and the corresponding topic labels for topic classification. While there are existing algorithms for topic modeling readily accessible for processing texts, there is a need to postprocess the result to make the topics more interpretable and self-explanatory. The topic words from the topic model are ranked and the first/top word could easily be considered as a label. However, it is imperative to use automatic topic labeling, because the highest scored word is not the word that sums up the topic in the best way. Using the lexical-semantic word net GermaNet, the first step is to disambiguate words that are represented in GermaNet with more than one sense. We show how to find the correct sense in the context of a topic with the method of word sense disambiguation. To enhance accuracy, we present a similarity measure based on vectors of topic words that considers semantic relations of the senses demonstrating superior performance of the investigated cases compared to existing methods.
Labeling Results of Topic Models: Word Sense Disambiguation as Key Method for Automatic Topic Labeling with GermaNet
Lip reading, the process of interpreting silent speech from visual lip movements, has gained rising attention for its wide range of realistic applications. Deep learning approaches greatly improve current lip reading systems. However, lip reading in cross-speaker scenarios where the speaker identity changes, poses a challenging problem due to inter-speaker variability. A well-trained lip reading system may perform poorly when handling a brand new speaker. To learn a speaker-robust lip reading model, a key insight is to reduce visual variations across speakers, avoiding the model overfitting to specific speakers. In this work, in view of both input visual clues and latent representations based on a hybrid CTC/attention architecture, we propose to exploit the lip landmark-guided fine-grained visual clues instead of frequently-used mouth-cropped images as input features, diminishing speaker-specific appearance characteristics. Furthermore, a max-min mutual information regularization approach is proposed to capture speaker-insensitive latent representations. Experimental evaluations on public lip reading datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach under the intra-speaker and inter-speaker conditions.
Landmark-Guided Cross-Speaker Lip Reading with Mutual Information Regularization
Kurdish, an Indo-European language spoken by over 30 million speakers, is considered a dialect continuum and known for its diversity in language varieties. Previous studies addressing language and speech technology for Kurdish handle it in a monolithic way as a macro-language, resulting in disparities for dialects and varieties for which there are few resources and tools available. In this paper, we take a step towards developing resources for language and speech technology for varieties of Central Kurdish, creating a corpus by transcribing movies and TV series as an alternative to fieldwork. Additionally, we report the performance of machine translation, automatic speech recognition, and language identification as downstream tasks evaluated on Central Kurdish subdialects. Data and models are publicly available under an open license at https://github.com/sinaahmadi/CORDI.
Language and Speech Technology for Central Kurdish Varieties
Since they rely on the distributional hypothesis, static and contextual language models are closely linked to lexical semantic relations. In this paper, we exploit this link for enhancing a BERT model. More precisely, we propose to extract lexical semantic relations with two unsupervised methods, one based on a static language model, the other on a contextual model, and to inject the extracted relations into a BERT model for improving its semantic capabilities. Through various evaluations performed for English and focusing on semantic similarity at the word and sentence levels, we show the interest of this approach, allowing us to semantically enrich a BERT model without using any external semantic resource.
Language Models and Semantic Relations: A Dual Relationship
Recent foundational language models have shown state-of-the-art performance in many NLP tasks in zero- and few-shot settings. An advantage of these models over more standard approaches based on fine-tuning is the ability to understand instructions written in natural language (prompts), which helps them generalise better to different tasks and domains without the need for specific training data. This makes them suitable for addressing text classification problems for domains with limited amounts of annotated instances. However, existing research is limited in scale and lacks understanding of how text generation models combined with prompting techniques compare to more established methods for text classification such as fine-tuning masked language models. In this paper, we address this research gap by performing a large-scale evaluation study for 16 text classification datasets covering binary, multiclass, and multilabel problems. In particular, we compare zero- and few-shot approaches of large language models to fine-tuning smaller language models. We also analyse the results by prompt, classification type, domain, and number of labels. In general, the results show how fine-tuning smaller and more efficient language models can still outperform few-shot approaches of larger language models, which have room for improvement when it comes to text classification.
Language Models for Text Classification: Is In-Context Learning Enough?
Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is an important task in NLP, which serves the purpose of automatically disambiguating a polysemous word with its most likely sense in context. Recent studies have advanced the state of the art in this task, but most of the work has been carried out on contemporary English or other modern languages, leaving challenges posed by low-resource languages and diachronic change open. Although the problem with low-resource languages has recently been mitigated by using existing multilingual resources to propagate otherwise expensive annotations from English to other languages, such techniques have hitherto not been applied to historical languages such as Latin. In this work, we make the following two major contributions. First, we test such a strategy on a historical language and propose a new approach in this framework which makes use of existing bilingual corpora instead of native English datasets. Second, we fine-tune a Latin WSD model on the data produced and achieve state-of-the-art results on a standard benchmark for the task. Finally, we release the dataset generated with our approach, which is the largest dataset for Latin WSD to date. This work opens the door to further research, as our approach can be used for different historical and, generally, under-resourced languages.
Language Pivoting from Parallel Corpora for Word Sense Disambiguation of Historical Languages: A Case Study on Latin
In this position paper we argue that researchers interested in language and/or language technologies should attend to challenges of linguistic and algorithmic injustice together with language communities. We put forward that this can be done by drawing together diverse scholarly and experiential insights, building strong interdisciplinary teams, and paying close attention to the wider social, cultural and historical contexts of both language communities and the technologies we aim to develop.
Language Technologies as If People Mattered: Centering Communities in Language Technology Development
Language identification is an important first step in many NLP applications. Most publicly available language identification datasets, however, are compiled under the assumption that the gold label of each instance is determined by where texts are retrieved from. Research has shown that this is a problematic assumption, particularly in the case of very similar languages (e.g., Croatian and Serbian) and national language varieties (e.g., Brazilian and European Portuguese), where texts may contain no distinctive marker of the particular language or variety. To overcome this important limitation, this paper presents DSL True Labels (DSL-TL), the first human-annotated multilingual dataset for language variety identification. DSL-TL contains a total of 12,900 instances in Portuguese, split between European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese; Spanish, split between Argentine Spanish and Castilian Spanish; and English, split between American English and British English. We trained multiple models to discriminate between these language varieties, and we present the results in detail. The data and models presented in this paper provide a reliable benchmark toward the development of robust and fairer language variety identification systems. We make DSL-TL freely available to the research community.
Language Variety Identification with True Labels
Data annotation is expensive in Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems. New Intent Discovery (NID) is a task aims to identify novel intents while retaining the ability to recognize known intents. It is essential for expanding the intent base of task-based dialogue systems. Previous works relying on external datasets are hardly extendable. Meanwhile, the effective ones are generally depends on the power of the Large Language Models (LLMs). To address the limitation of model extensibility and take advantages of LLMs for the NID task, we propose LANID, a framework that leverages LLM’s zero-shot capability to enhance the performance of a smaller text encoder on the NID task. LANID employs KNN and DBSCAN algorithms to select appropriate pairs of utterances from the training set. The LLM is then asked to determine the relationships between them. The collected data are then used to construct finetuning task and the small text encoder is optimized with a triplet loss. Our experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method on three distinct NID datasets, surpassing all strong baselines in both unsupervised and semi-supervised settings. Our code can be found in https://github.com/floatSDSDS/LANID.
LANID: LLM-assisted New Intent Discovery
Modern large language models and chatbots based on them show impressive results in text generation and dialog tasks. At the same time, these models are subject to criticism in many aspects, e.g., they can generate hate speech and untrue and biased content. In this work, we show another problematic feature of such chatbots: they are echo chambers in the sense that they tend to agree with the opinions of their users. Social media, such as Facebook, was criticized for a similar problem and called an echo chamber. We experimentally test five LLM-based chatbots, which we feed with opinionated inputs. We annotate the chatbot answers whether they agree or disagree with the input. All chatbots tend to agree. However, the echo chamber effect is not equally strong. We discuss the differences between the chatbots and make the dataset publicly available.
Large Language Models Are Echo Chambers
Collecting labeled datasets in finance is challenging due to scarcity of domain experts and higher cost of employing them. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in data annotation tasks on general domain datasets, their effectiveness on domain specific datasets remains under-explored. To address this gap, we investigate the potential of LLMs as efficient data annotators for extracting relations in financial documents. We compare the annotations produced by three LLMs (GPT-4, PaLM 2, and MPT Instruct) against expert annotators and crowdworkers. We demonstrate that the current state-of-the-art LLMs can be sufficient alternatives to non-expert crowdworkers. We analyze models using various prompts and parameter settings and find that customizing the prompts for each relation group by providing specific examples belonging to those groups is paramount. Furthermore, we introduce a reliability index (LLM-RelIndex) used to identify outputs that may require expert attention. Finally, we perform an extensive time, cost and error analysis and provide recommendations for the collection and usage of automated annotations in domain-specific settings.
Large Language Models as Financial Data Annotators: A Study on Effectiveness and Efficiency
Large language models (LLM) not only have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to reshape many other fields, e.g., recommender systems (RS). However, most of the related work treats an LLM as a component of the conventional recommendation pipeline (e.g., as a feature extractor), which may not be able to fully leverage the generative power of LLM. Instead of separating the recommendation process into multiple stages, such as score computation and re-ranking, this process can be simplified to one stage with LLM: directly generating recommendations from the complete pool of items. This survey reviews the progress, methods, and future directions of LLM-based generative recommendation by examining three questions: 1) What generative recommendation is, 2) Why RS should advance to generative recommendation, and 3) How to implement LLM-based generative recommendation for various RS tasks. We hope that this survey can provide the context and guidance needed to explore this interesting and emerging topic.
Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions
Topic modelling, as a well-established unsupervised technique, has found extensive use in automatically detecting significant topics within a corpus of documents. However, classic topic modelling approaches (e.g., LDA) have certain drawbacks, such as the lack of semantic understanding and the presence of overlapping topics. In this work, we investigate the untapped potential of large language models (LLMs) as an alternative for uncovering the underlying topics within extensive text corpora. To this end, we introduce a framework that prompts LLMs to generate topics from a given set of documents and establish evaluation protocols to assess the clustering efficacy of LLMs. Our findings indicate that LLMs with appropriate prompts can stand out as a viable alternative, capable of generating relevant topic titles and adhering to human guidelines to refine and merge topics. Through in-depth experiments and evaluation, we summarise the advantages and constraints of employing LLMs in topic extraction.
Large Language Models Offer an Alternative to the Traditional Approach of Topic Modelling
In this paper, we present an evaluation of two different approaches to the free-form Question Answering (QA) task. The main difference between the two approaches is that one is based on latent representations of knowledge, and the other uses explicit knowledge representation. For the evaluation, we developed DynaKnowledge, a new benchmark composed of questions concerning Wikipedia low-frequency entities. We wanted to ensure, on the one hand, that the questions are answerable and, on the other, that the models can provide information about very specific facts. The evaluation that we conducted highlights that the proposed benchmark is particularly challenging. The best model answers correctly only on 50% of the questions. Analysing the results, we also found that ChatGPT shows low reliance on low-frequency entity questions, manifesting a popularity bias. On the other hand, a simpler model based on explicit knowledge is less affected by this bias. With this paper, we want to provide a living benchmark for open-form QA to test knowledge and latent representation models on a dynamic benchmark.
Latent vs Explicit Knowledge Representation: How ChatGPT Answers Questions about Low-Frequency Entities
With the evolution of LLMs, they are endowed with impressive logical reasoning, or vertical thinking capabilities. But can they think out of the box? Do they possess proficient lateral thinking abilities? Following the setup of Lateral Thinking Puzzles, we propose a novel evaluation benchmark, LatEval, which assesses the model’s lateral thinking within an interactive framework. In our benchmark, we challenge LLMs with 2 aspects: (1) posing high-quality questions that break out of conventional norms but are beneficial for puzzle-solving. (2) integrating existing information to gradually deduce the truth through reasoning. We observe that it is hard for most LLMs to accomplish lateral thinking during interactions. Even the most powerful LLM, GPT-4, faces challenges in achieving satisfactory performance, and for most open-source models, simply completing this task is quite difficult. This evaluation benchmark provides LLMs with a highly challenging and differentiating task that is crucial to an effective AI assistant. Our dataset and source codes are available at https://github.com/THUKElab/LatEval.
LatEval: An Interactive LLMs Evaluation Benchmark with Incomplete Information from Lateral Thinking Puzzles
The few-shot tasks require the model to have the ability to generalize from a few samples. However, due to the lack of cognitive ability, the current works cannot fully utilize limited samples to expand the sample space and still suffer from overfitting issues. To address the problems, we propose a LLM-Augmented Unsupervised Contrastive Learning Framework (LA-UCL), which introduces a cognition-enabled Large Language Model (LLM) for efficient data augmentation, and presents corresponding contrastive learning strategies. Specifically, in the self-augmented contrastive learning module, we construct a retrieval-based in-context prompt scheme by retrieving similar but different category data from the original samples, guiding the LLM to generate more discriminative augmented data. Then, by designing group-level contrastive loss to enhance the model’s discriminative ability. In the external-augmented contrastive learning module, we utilize web knowledge retrieval to expand the sample space and leverage LLM to generate more diverse data, and introduce sample-level contrastive loss for unlabeled data to improve the model’s generalization. Experimental results on six datasets show that our model exceeds the baseline models.
LA-UCL: LLM-Augmented Unsupervised Contrastive Learning Framework for Few-Shot Text Classification
Among the various pre-trained neural language models that are popular today, dropout is already an indispensable regularization technique. To solve the inconsistency between training and inference caused by the randomness of dropout, some studies use consistency training to regularize dropout at the output layer. In this paper, we propose a novel Layer-wise Regularized Dropout (LR-Drop), which is specially designed for Transformer-based Language models. Specifically, LR-Drop layer-wise regularizes each Transformer layer using the consistency training strategy. Each training sample passes through the two siamese sub-models sampled by dropout, and then LR-Drop forces the hidden states, multi-head attention matrices, and output distribution of the two siamese sub-models to be consistent. The proposed LR-Drop can be regarded as a “self-distillation” framework, in which each sub-model generated by dropout is the other’s “teacher” model and “student” model. Through extensive experiments on 8 natural language understanding datasets, 6 neural machine translation datasets, and 1 abstractive summarization dataset (a total of 15 datasets), we show that LR-Drop achieves superior performances, including state-of-the-art results.
Layer-wise Regularized Dropout for Neural Language Models
This paper proposes LayoutLLM, a more flexible document analysis method for understanding imaged documents. Visually Rich Document Understanding tasks, such as document image classification and information extraction, have gained significant attention due to their importance. Existing methods have been developed to enhance document comprehension by incorporating pre-training awareness of images, text, and layout structure. However, these methods require fine-tuning for each task and dataset, and the models are expensive to train and operate. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new LayoutLLM that integrates these with large-scale language models (LLMs). By leveraging the strengths of existing research in document image understanding and LLMs’ superior language understanding capabilities, the proposed model, fine-tuned with multimodal instruction datasets, performs an understanding of document images in a single model. Our experiments demonstrate improvement over the baseline model in various document analysis tasks.
LayoutLLM: Large Language Model Instruction Tuning for Visually Rich Document Understanding
In syntactic parsing, *proof nets* are graphical structures that have the advantageous property of invariance to spurious ambiguities. Semantically-equivalent derivations correspond to a single proof net. Recent years have seen fresh interest in statistical syntactic parsing with proof nets, including the development of methods based on neural networks. However, training of statistical parsers requires corpora that provide ground-truth syntactic analyses. Unfortunately, there has been a paucity of corpora in formalisms for which proof nets are applicable, such as Lambek categorial grammar (LCG), a formalism related to combinatory categorial grammar (CCG). To address this, we leverage CCGbank and the relationship between LCG and CCG to develop LCGbank, an English-language corpus of syntactic analyses based on LCG proof nets. In contrast to CCGbank, LCGbank eschews type-changing and uses only categorial rules; the syntactic analyses thus provide fully compositional semantics, exploiting the transparency between syntax and semantics that so characterizes categorial grammars.
LCGbank: A Corpus of Syntactic Analyses Based on Proof Nets
Empathetic leadership communication plays a pivotal role in modern workplaces as it is associated with a wide range of positive individual and organizational outcomes. This paper introduces LeadEmpathy, an innovative expert-annotated German dataset for modeling empathy in written leadership communication. It features a novel theory-based coding scheme to model cognitive and affective empathy in asynchronous communication. The final dataset comprises 770 annotated emails from 385 participants who were allowed to rewrite their emails after receiving recommendations for increasing empathy in an online experiment. Two independent annotators achieved substantial inter-annotator agreement of >= .79 for all categories, indicating that the annotation scheme can be applied to produce high-quality, multidimensional empathy ratings in current and future applications. Beyond outlining the dataset’s development procedures, we present a case study on automatic empathy detection, establishing baseline models for predicting empathy scores in a range of ten possible scores that achieve a Pearson correlation of 0.816 and a mean squared error of 0.883. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/caisa-lab/LEAD-empathy-dataset.
LeadEmpathy: An Expert Annotated German Dataset of Empathy in Written Leadership Communication
For nearly the past forty years, there has been discussion regarding whether symbolic representations are involved in morphological inflection, a debate commonly known as the Past Tense Debate. The previous literature has extensively explored whether neural models, which do not use symbolic representations can process morphological inflection like humans. However, current research interest has shifted towards whether neural models can acquire morphological inflection like humans. In this paper, we trained neural models, the recurrent neural network (RNN) with attention and the transformer, and a symbolic model, the Minimal Generalization Learner (MGL), under a human-like learning environment. Evaluating the models from the perspective of language acquisition, we found that while the transformer and the MGL exhibited some human-like characteristics, the RNN with attention did not demonstrate human-like behavior across all the evaluation metrics considered in this study. Furthermore, none of the models accurately inflected verbs in the same manner as humans in terms of morphological inflection direction. These results suggest that these models fall short as cognitive models of morphological inflection.
Learning Bidirectional Morphological Inflection like Humans
Resource scarcity in Neural Machine Translation is a challenging problem in both industry applications and in the support of less-spoken languages represented, in the worst case, by endangered and low-resource languages. Many Data Augmentation methods rely on additional linguistic sources and software tools but these are often not available in less favoured language. For this reason, we present USKI (Unaligned Sentences Keytokens pre-traIning), a pre-training strategy that leverages the relationships and similarities that exist between unaligned sentences. By doing so, we increase the dataset size of endangered and low-resource languages by the square of the initial quantity, matching the typical size of high-resource language datasets such as WMT14 En-Fr. Results showcase the effectiveness of our approach with an increase on average of 0.9 BLEU across the benchmarks using a small fraction of the entire unaligned corpus, suggesting the importance of the research topic and the potential of a currently under-utilized resource and under-explored approach.
Learning from Wrong Predictions in Low-Resource Neural Machine Translation
Gradient-based explanation methods are increasingly used to interpret neural models in natural language processing (NLP) due to their high fidelity. Such methods determine word-level importance using dimension-level gradient values through a norm function, often presuming equal significance for all gradient dimensions. However, in the context of Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA), our preliminary research suggests that only specific dimensions are pertinent. To address this, we propose the Information Bottleneck-based Gradient (IBG) explanation framework for ABSA. This framework leverages an information bottleneck to refine word embeddings into a concise intrinsic dimension, maintaining essential features and omitting unrelated information. Comprehensive tests show that our IBG approach considerably improves both the models’ performance and the explanations’ clarity by identifying sentiment-aware features.
Learning Intrinsic Dimension via Information Bottleneck for Explainable Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Argument mining has typically been researched for specific corpora belonging to concrete languages and domains independently in each research work. Human argumentation, however, has domain- and language-dependent linguistic features that determine the content and structure of arguments. Also, when deploying argument mining systems in the wild, we might not be able to control some of these features. Therefore, an important aspect that has not been thoroughly investigated in the argument mining literature is the robustness of such systems to variations in language and domain. In this paper, we present a complete analysis across three different languages and three different domains that allow us to have a better understanding on how to leverage the scarce available corpora to design argument mining systems that are more robust to natural language variations.
Learning Strategies for Robust Argument Mining: An Analysis of Variations in Language and Domain
This paper presents preliminary experiments for the lemmatisation of unedited, Byzantine Greek epigrams. This type of Greek is quite different from its classical ancestor, mostly because of its orthographic inconsistencies. Existing lemmatisation algorithms display an accuracy drop of around 30pp when tested on these Byzantine book epigrams. We conducted seven different lemmatisation experiments, which were either transformer-based or based on neural edit-trees. The best performing lemmatiser was a hybrid method combining transformer-based embeddings with a dictionary look-up. We compare our results with existing lemmatisers, and provide a detailed error analysis revealing why unedited, Byzantine Greek is so challenging for lemmatisation.
Lemmatisation of Medieval Greek: Against the Limits of Transformer’s Capabilities?
Recent work shows large language models can be prompted to generate useful rationales for commonsense question answering (CQA), which can improve the performance of both themselves and other models. However, the cost of deployment and further tuning is relatively expensive for the large models. Some work explores to distill the the rationale-generation ability to convenient small-sized models, yet it typically requires human-authored QA instances during the distillation. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that leverages both knowledge graphs and large language models to synthesize rationale-augmented CQA data. Based on it, we train Leros, a model that can generate helpful rationales to assist generic QA models to accomplish unseen CQA tasks. Empirical results demonstrate Leros can substantially enhance the performance of QA models on five unseen CQA benchmarks, providing better gains than both same-sized counterpart models trained with downstream data and 10x larger language models. Our work reveals a novel way to integrate knowledge from both knowledge graphs and large language models into smaller models. The codes and synthesized resources are publicly available at https://github.com/wchrepo/leros.
Leros: Learning Explicit Reasoning on Synthesized Data for Commonsense Question Answering