pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Topics, Authors, and Institutions in Large Language Model Research: Trends from 17K arXiv Papers
Authors: Rajiv Movva, Sidhika Balachandar, Kenny Peng, Gabriel Agostini, Nikhil Garg, Emma Pierson
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) are dramatically influencing AI research, spurring discussions on what has changed so far and how to shape the field's future. To clarify such questions, we analyze a new dataset of 16,979 LLM-related arXiv papers, focusing on recent trends in 2023 vs. 2018-2022. First, we study disciplinary shifts: LLM research increasingly considers societal impacts, evidenced by 20x growth in LLM submissions to the Computers and Society sub-arXiv. An influx of new authors -- half of all first authors in 2023 -- are entering from non-NLP fields of CS, driving disciplinary expansion. Second, we study industry and academic publishing trends. Surprisingly, industry accounts for a smaller publication share in 2023, largely due to reduced output from Google and other Big Tech companies; universities in Asia are publishing more. Third, we study institutional collaboration: while industry-academic collaborations are common, they tend to focus on the same topics that industry focuses on rather than bridging differences. The most prolific institutions are all US- or China-based, but there is very little cross-country collaboration. We discuss implications around (1) how to support the influx of new authors, (2) how industry trends may affect academics, and (3) possible effects of (the lack of) collaboration.
A Dataset and Strong Baselines for Classification of Czech News Texts
Authors: Hynek Kydlíček, Jindřich Libovický
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Classification, NER, News Classification, POS, POS Tagging, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

Pre-trained models for Czech Natural Language Processing are often evaluated on purely linguistic tasks (POS tagging, parsing, NER) and relatively simple classification tasks such as sentiment classification or article classification from a single news source. As an alternative, we present CZEch~NEws~Classification~dataset (CZE-NEC), one of the largest Czech classification datasets, composed of news articles from various sources spanning over twenty years, which allows a more rigorous evaluation of such models. We define four classification tasks: news source, news category, inferred author's gender, and day of the week. To verify the task difficulty, we conducted a human evaluation, which revealed that human performance lags behind strong machine-learning baselines built upon pre-trained transformer models. Furthermore, we show that language-specific pre-trained encoder analysis outperforms selected commercially available large-scale generative language models.
Exploring the Landscape of Natural Language Processing Research
Authors: Tim Schopf, Karim Arabi, Florian Matthes
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00

As an efficient approach to understand, generate, and process natural language texts, research in natural language processing (NLP) has exhibited a rapid spread and wide adoption in recent years. Given the increasing research work in this area, several NLP-related approaches have been surveyed in the research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics, identifies trends, and outlines areas for future research remains absent. Contributing to closing this gap, we have systematically classified and analyzed research papers in the ACL Anthology. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of fields of study in NLP, analyze recent developments in NLP, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.
A Deep Dive into the Disparity of Word Error Rates Across Thousands of NPTEL MOOC Videos
Authors: Anand Kumar Rai, Siddharth D Jaiswal, Animesh Mukherjee
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are designed to transcribe spoken language into written text and find utility in a variety of applications including voice assistants and transcription services. However, it has been observed that state-of-the-art ASR systems which deliver impressive benchmark results, struggle with speakers of certain regions or demographics due to variation in their speech properties. In this work, we describe the curation of a massive speech dataset of 8740 hours consisting of $\sim9.8$K technical lectures in the English language along with their transcripts delivered by instructors representing various parts of Indian demography. The dataset is sourced from the very popular NPTEL MOOC platform. We use the curated dataset to measure the existing disparity in YouTube Automatic Captions and OpenAI Whisper model performance across the diverse demographic traits of speakers in India. While there exists disparity due to gender, native region, age and speech rate of speakers, disparity based on caste is non-existent. We also observe statistically significant disparity across the disciplines of the lectures. These results indicate the need of more inclusive and robust ASR systems and more representational datasets for disparity evaluation in them.
Instruction-following Evaluation through Verbalizer Manipulation
Authors: Shiyang Li, Jun Yan, Hai Wang, Zheng Tang, Xiang Ren, Vijay Srinivasan, Hongxia Jin
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

While instruction-tuned models have shown remarkable success in various natural language processing tasks, accurately evaluating their ability to follow instructions remains challenging. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on common instructions that align well with what the model learned during training. However, proficiency in responding to these instructions does not necessarily imply strong ability in instruction following. In this paper, we propose a novel instruction-following evaluation protocol called verbalizer manipulation. It instructs the model to verbalize the task label with words aligning with model priors to different extents, adopting verbalizers from highly aligned (e.g., outputting ``postive'' for positive sentiment), to minimally aligned (e.g., outputting ``negative'' for positive sentiment). Verbalizer manipulation can be seamlessly integrated with any classification benchmark to examine the model's reliance on priors and its ability to override them to accurately follow the instructions. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of four major model families across nine datasets, employing twelve sets of verbalizers for each of them. We observe that the instruction-following abilities of models, across different families and scales, are significantly distinguished by their performance on less natural verbalizers. Even the strongest GPT-4 model struggles to perform better than random guessing on the most challenging verbalizer, emphasizing the need for continued advancements to improve their instruction-following abilities.
Gender-tuning: Empowering Fine-tuning for Debiasing Pre-trained Language Models
Authors: Somayeh Ghanbarzadeh, Yan Huang, Hamid Palangi, Radames Cruz Moreno, Hamed Khanpour
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

Recent studies have revealed that the widely-used Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) propagate societal biases from the large unmoderated pre-training corpora. Existing solutions require debiasing training processes and datasets for debiasing, which are resource-intensive and costly. Furthermore, these methods hurt the PLMs' performance on downstream tasks. In this study, we propose Gender-tuning, which debiases the PLMs through fine-tuning on downstream tasks' datasets. For this aim, Gender-tuning integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) training objectives into fine-tuning's training process. Comprehensive experiments show that Gender-tuning outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of average gender bias scores in PLMs while improving PLMs' performance on downstream tasks solely using the downstream tasks' dataset. Also, Gender-tuning is a deployable debiasing tool for any PLM that works with original fine-tuning.
General Debiasing for Multimodal Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Teng Sun, Juntong Ni, Wenjie Wang, Liqiang Jing, Yinwei Wei, Liqiang Nie
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Multimodal Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Analysis

Existing work on Multimodal Sentiment Analysis (MSA) utilizes multimodal information for prediction yet unavoidably suffers from fitting the spurious correlations between multimodal features and sentiment labels. For example, if most videos with a blue background have positive labels in a dataset, the model will rely on such correlations for prediction, while "blue background" is not a sentiment-related feature. To address this problem, we define a general debiasing MSA task, which aims to enhance the Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalization ability of MSA models by reducing their reliance on spurious correlations. To this end, we propose a general debiasing framework based on Inverse Probability Weighting (IPW), which adaptively assigns small weights to the samples with larger bias (i.e., the severer spurious correlations). The key to this debiasing framework is to estimate the bias of each sample, which is achieved by two steps: 1) disentangling the robust features and biased features in each modality, and 2) utilizing the biased features to estimate the bias. Finally, we employ IPW to reduce the effects of large-biased samples, facilitating robust feature learning for sentiment prediction. To examine the model's generalization ability, we keep the original testing sets on two benchmarks and additionally construct multiple unimodal and multimodal OOD testing sets. The empirical results demonstrate the superior generalization ability of our proposed framework. We have released the code and data to facilitate the reproduction https://github.com/Teng-Sun/GEAR.
What can we learn from Data Leakage and Unlearning for Law?
Authors: Jaydeep Borkar
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Memorization

Large Language Models (LLMs) have a privacy concern because they memorize training data (including personally identifiable information (PII) like emails and phone numbers) and leak it during inference. A company can train an LLM on its domain-customized data which can potentially also include their users' PII. In order to comply with privacy laws such as the "right to be forgotten", the data points of users that are most vulnerable to extraction could be deleted. We find that once the most vulnerable points are deleted, a new set of points become vulnerable to extraction. So far, little attention has been given to understanding memorization for fine-tuned models. In this work, we also show that not only do fine-tuned models leak their training data but they also leak the pre-training data (and PII) memorized during the pre-training phase. The property of new data points becoming vulnerable to extraction after unlearning and leakage of pre-training data through fine-tuned models can pose significant privacy and legal concerns for companies that use LLMs to offer services. We hope this work will start an interdisciplinary discussion within AI and law communities regarding the need for policies to tackle these issues.
Improving the Reusability of Pre-trained Language Models in Real-world Applications
Authors: Somayeh Ghanbarzadeh, Hamid Palangi, Yan Huang, Radames Cruz Moreno, Hamed Khanpour
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling

The reusability of state-of-the-art Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) is often limited by their generalization problem, where their performance drastically decreases when evaluated on examples that differ from the training dataset, known as Out-of-Distribution (OOD)/unseen examples. This limitation arises from PLMs' reliance on spurious correlations, which work well for frequent example types but not for general examples. To address this issue, we propose a training approach called Mask-tuning, which integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) training objectives into the fine-tuning process to enhance PLMs' generalization. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that Mask-tuning surpasses current state-of-the-art techniques and enhances PLMs' generalization on OOD datasets while improving their performance on in-distribution datasets. The findings suggest that Mask-tuning improves the reusability of PLMs on unseen data, making them more practical and effective for real-world applications.
Thrust: Adaptively Propels Large Language Models with External Knowledge
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

Although large-scale pre-trained language models (PTLMs) are shown to encode rich knowledge in their model parameters, the inherent knowledge in PTLMs can be opaque or static, making external knowledge necessary. However, the existing information retrieval techniques could be costly and may even introduce noisy and sometimes misleading knowledge. To address these challenges, we propose the instance-level adaptive propulsion of external knowledge (IAPEK), where we only conduct the retrieval when necessary. To achieve this goal, we propose measuring whether a PTLM contains enough knowledge to solve an instance with a novel metric, Thrust, which leverages the representation distribution of a small number of seen instances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that thrust is a good measurement of PTLM models' instance-level knowledgeability. Moreover, we can achieve significantly higher cost-efficiency with the Thrust score as the retrieval indicator than the naive usage of external knowledge on 88% of the evaluated tasks with 26% average performance improvement. Such findings shed light on the real-world practice of knowledge-enhanced LMs with a limited knowledge-seeking budget due to computation latency or costs.
PharmacyGPT: The AI Pharmacist
Authors: Zhengliang Liu, Zihao Wu, Mengxuan Hu, Bokai Zhao, Lin Zhao, Tianyi Zhang, Haixing Dai, Xianyan Chen, Ye Shen, Sheng Li, Quanzheng Li, Xiang Li, Brian Murray, Tianming Liu, Andrea Sikora
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00

In this study, we introduce PharmacyGPT, a novel framework to assess the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 in emulating the role of clinical pharmacists. Our methodology encompasses the utilization of LLMs to generate comprehensible patient clusters, formulate medication plans, and forecast patient outcomes. We conduct our investigation using real data acquired from the intensive care unit (ICU) at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill (UNC) Hospital. Our analysis offers valuable insights into the potential applications and limitations of LLMs in the field of clinical pharmacy, with implications for both patient care and the development of future AI-driven healthcare solutions. By evaluating the performance of PharmacyGPT, we aim to contribute to the ongoing discourse surrounding the integration of artificial intelligence in healthcare settings, ultimately promoting the responsible and efficacious use of such technologies.
Mutual Reinforcement Effects in Japanese Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition Tasks
Authors: Chengguang Gan, Qinghao Zhang, Tatsunori Mori
Date: 2023-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Few-Shot Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Sentence, Sentence Classification

Information extraction(IE) is a crucial subfield within natural language processing. However, for the traditionally segmented approach to sentence classification and Named Entity Recognition, the intricate interactions between these individual subtasks remain largely uninvestigated. In this study, we propose an integrative analysis, converging sentence classification with Named Entity Recognition, with the objective to unveil and comprehend the mutual reinforcement effect within these two information extraction subtasks. To achieve this, we introduce a Sentence Classification and Named Entity Recognition Multi-task (SCNM) approach that combines Sentence Classification (SC) and Named Entity Recognition (NER). We develop a Sentence-to-Label Generation (SLG) framework for SCNM and construct a Wikipedia dataset containing both SC and NER. Using a format converter, we unify input formats and employ a generative model to generate SC-labels, NER-labels, and associated text segments. We propose a Constraint Mechanism (CM) to improve generated format accuracy. Our results show SC accuracy increased by 1.13 points and NER by 1.06 points in SCNM compared to standalone tasks, with CM raising format accuracy from 63.61 to 100. The findings indicate mutual reinforcement effects between SC and NER, and integration enhances both tasks' performance. We additionally implemented the SLG framework on single SC task. It yielded superior accuracies compared to the baseline on two distinct Japanese SC datasets. Notably, in the experiment of few-shot learning, SLG framework shows much better performance than fine-tune method. These empirical findings contribute additional evidence to affirm the efficacy of the SLG framework.
Automated Action Model Acquisition from Narrative Texts
Authors: RuiQi Li, Leyang Cui, Songtuan Lin, Patrik Haslum
Date: 2023-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: model

Action models, which take the form of precondition/effect axioms, facilitate causal and motivational connections between actions for AI agents. Action model acquisition has been identified as a bottleneck in the application of planning technology, especially within narrative planning. Acquiring action models from narrative texts in an automated way is essential, but challenging because of the inherent complexities of such texts. We present NaRuto, a system that extracts structured events from narrative text and subsequently generates planning-language-style action models based on predictions of commonsense event relations, as well as textual contradictions and similarities, in an unsupervised manner. Experimental results in classical narrative planning domains show that NaRuto can generate action models of significantly better quality than existing fully automated methods, and even on par with those of semi-automated methods.
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation using Lexical Transformations and Label Injection for Twitter Data
Authors: Akshat Gupta, Xiaomo Liu, Sameena Shah
Date: 2023-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Part-Of-Speech Tagging, POS, POS Tagging, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Domain adaptation is an important and widely studied problem in natural language processing. A large body of literature tries to solve this problem by adapting models trained on the source domain to the target domain. In this paper, we instead solve this problem from a dataset perspective. We modify the source domain dataset with simple lexical transformations to reduce the domain shift between the source dataset distribution and the target dataset distribution. We find that models trained on the transformed source domain dataset performs significantly better than zero-shot models. Using our proposed transformations to convert standard English to tweets, we reach an unsupervised part-of-speech (POS) tagging accuracy of 92.14% (from 81.54% zero shot accuracy), which is only slightly below the supervised performance of 94.45%. We also use our proposed transformations to synthetically generate tweets and augment the Twitter dataset to achieve state-of-the-art performance for POS tagging.
Edge-set reduction to efficiently solve the graph partitioning problem with the genetic algorithm
Authors: Ali Chaouche, Menouar Boulif
Date: 2023-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: graph partitioning

The graph partitioning problem (GPP) is among the most challenging models in optimization. Because of its NP-hardness, the researchers directed their interest towards approximate methods such as the genetic algorithms (GA). The edge-based GA has shown promising results when solving GPP. However, for big dense instances, the size of the encoding representation becomes too huge and affects GA's efficiency. In this paper, we investigate the impact of modifying the size of the chromosomes on the edge based GA by reducing the GPP edge set. We study the GA performance with different levels of reductions, and we report the obtained results.
Unsupervised Learning in Complex Systems
Authors: Hugo Cisneros
Date: 2023-07-11 00:00:00

In this thesis, we explore the use of complex systems to study learning and adaptation in natural and artificial systems. The goal is to develop autonomous systems that can learn without supervision, develop on their own, and become increasingly complex over time. Complex systems are identified as a suitable framework for understanding these phenomena due to their ability to exhibit growth of complexity. Being able to build learning algorithms that require limited to no supervision would enable greater flexibility and adaptability in various applications. By understanding the fundamental principles of learning in complex systems, we hope to advance our ability to design and implement practical learning algorithms in the future. This thesis makes the following key contributions: the development of a general complexity metric that we apply to search for complex systems that exhibit growth of complexity, the introduction of a coarse-graining method to study computations in large-scale complex systems, and the development of a metric for learning efficiency as well as a benchmark dataset for evaluating the speed of learning algorithms. Our findings add substantially to our understanding of learning and adaptation in natural and artificial systems. Moreover, our approach contributes to a promising new direction for research in this area. We hope these findings will inspire the development of more effective and efficient learning algorithms in the future.
Multiply Robust Estimator Circumvents Hyperparameter Tuning of Neural Network Models in Causal Inference
Authors: Mehdi Rostami, Olli Saarela
Date: 2023-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Estimation of the Average Treatment Effect (ATE) is often carried out in 2 steps, wherein the first step, the treatment and outcome are modeled, and in the second step the predictions are inserted into the ATE estimator. In the first steps, numerous models can be fit to the treatment and outcome, including using machine learning algorithms. However, it is a difficult task to choose among the hyperparameter sets which will result in the best causal effect estimation and inference. Multiply Robust (MR) estimator allows us to leverage all the first-step models in a single estimator. We show that MR estimator is $n^r$ consistent if one of the first-step treatment or outcome models is $n^r$ consistent. We also show that MR is the solution to a broad class of estimating equations, and is asymptotically normal if one of the treatment models is $\sqrt{n}$-consistent. The standard error of MR is also calculated which does not require a knowledge of the true models in the first step. Our simulations study supports the theoretical findings.