pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Conversational Recommender System and Large Language Model Are Made for Each Other in E-commerce Pre-sales Dialogue
Authors: Yuanxing Liu, Wei-Nan Zhang, Yifan Chen, Yuchi Zhang, Haopeng Bai, Fan Feng, Hengbin Cui, Yongbin Li, Wanxiang Che
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Recommendation Systems

E-commerce pre-sales dialogue aims to understand and elicit user needs and preferences for the items they are seeking so as to provide appropriate recommendations. Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) learn user representation and provide accurate recommendations based on dialogue context, but rely on external knowledge. Large language models (LLMs) generate responses that mimic pre-sales dialogues after fine-tuning, but lack domain-specific knowledge for accurate recommendations. Intuitively, the strengths of LLM and CRS in E-commerce pre-sales dialogues are complementary, yet no previous work has explored this. This paper investigates the effectiveness of combining LLM and CRS in E-commerce pre-sales dialogues, proposing two collaboration methods: CRS assisting LLM and LLM assisting CRS. We conduct extensive experiments on a real-world dataset of Ecommerce pre-sales dialogues. We analyze the impact of two collaborative approaches with two CRSs and two LLMs on four tasks of Ecommerce pre-sales dialogue. We find that collaborations between CRS and LLM can be very effective in some cases.
Efficient Cross-Task Prompt Tuning for Few-Shot Conversational Emotion Recognition
Authors: Yige Xu, Zhiwei Zeng, Zhiqi Shen
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion Recognition in Conversation (ERC) has been widely studied due to its importance in developing emotion-aware empathetic machines. The rise of pre-trained language models (PLMs) has further pushed the limit of ERC performance. However, most recent works on ERC using PLMs are heavily data-driven, and requires fine-tuning the entire PLMs. To improve both sample and computational efficiency, we propose a derivative-free optimization method called Cross-Task Prompt Tuning (CTPT) for few-shot conversational emotion recognition. Unlike existing methods that learn independent knowledge from individual tasks, CTPT leverages sharable cross-task knowledge by exploiting external knowledge from other source tasks to improve learning performance under the few-shot setting. Moreover, CTPT only needs to optimize a vector under the low intrinsic dimensionality without gradient, which is highly parameter-efficient compared with existing approaches. Experiments on five different contextual conversation datasets demonstrate that our CTPT method has superior results on both few-shot scenarios and zero-shot transfers.
That was the last straw, we need more: Are Translation Systems Sensitive to Disambiguating Context?
Authors: Jaechan Lee, Alisa Liu, Orevaoghene Ahia, Hila Gonen, Noah A. Smith
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

The translation of ambiguous text presents a challenge for translation systems, as it requires using the surrounding context to disambiguate the intended meaning as much as possible. While prior work has studied ambiguities that result from different grammatical features of the source and target language, we study semantic ambiguities that exist in the source (English in this work) itself. In particular, we focus on idioms that are open to both literal and figurative interpretations (e.g., goose egg), and collect TIDE, a dataset of 512 pairs of English sentences containing idioms with disambiguating context such that one is literal (it laid a goose egg) and another is figurative (they scored a goose egg, as in a score of zero). In experiments, we compare MT-specific models and language models for (i) their preference when given an ambiguous subsentence, (ii) their sensitivity to disambiguating context, and (iii) the performance disparity between figurative and literal source sentences. We find that current MT models consistently translate English idioms literally, even when the context suggests a figurative interpretation. On the other hand, LMs are far more context-aware, although there remain disparities across target languages. Our findings underline the potential of LMs as a strong backbone for context-aware translation.
Long Short-Term Planning for Conversational Recommendation Systems
Authors: Xian Li, Hongguang Shi, Yunfei Wang, Yeqin Zhang, Xubin Li, Cam-Tu Nguyen
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Conversational Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

In Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS), the central question is how the conversational agent can naturally ask for user preferences and provide suitable recommendations. Existing works mainly follow the hierarchical architecture, where a higher policy decides whether to invoke the conversation module (to ask questions) or the recommendation module (to make recommendations). This architecture prevents these two components from fully interacting with each other. In contrast, this paper proposes a novel architecture, the long short-term feedback architecture, to connect these two essential components in CRS. Specifically, the recommendation predicts the long-term recommendation target based on the conversational context and the user history. Driven by the targeted recommendation, the conversational model predicts the next topic or attribute to verify if the user preference matches the target. The balance feedback loop continues until the short-term planner output matches the long-term planner output, that is when the system should make the recommendation.
M2DF: Multi-grained Multi-curriculum Denoising Framework for Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis
Authors: Fei Zhao, Chunhui Li, Zhen Wu, Yawen Ouyang, Jianbing Zhang, Xinyu Dai
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis, Denoising, Sentiment Analysis

Multimodal Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis (MABSA) is a fine-grained Sentiment Analysis task, which has attracted growing research interests recently. Existing work mainly utilizes image information to improve the performance of MABSA task. However, most of the studies overestimate the importance of images since there are many noise images unrelated to the text in the dataset, which will have a negative impact on model learning. Although some work attempts to filter low-quality noise images by setting thresholds, relying on thresholds will inevitably filter out a lot of useful image information. Therefore, in this work, we focus on whether the negative impact of noisy images can be reduced without modifying the data. To achieve this goal, we borrow the idea of Curriculum Learning and propose a Multi-grained Multi-curriculum Denoising Framework (M2DF), which can achieve denoising by adjusting the order of training data. Extensive experimental results show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art work on three sub-tasks of MABSA.
Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Vietnamese Community-based COVID-19 Question Answering
Authors: Tam Minh Vo, Khiem Vinh Tran
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering

Recent studies have provided empirical evidence of the wide-ranging potential of Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), a pretrained language model, in the field of natural language processing. GPT has been effectively employed as a decoder within state-of-the-art (SOTA) question answering systems, yielding exceptional performance across various tasks. However, the current research landscape concerning GPT's application in Vietnamese remains limited. This paper aims to address this gap by presenting an implementation of GPT-2 for community-based question answering specifically focused on COVID-19 related queries in Vietnamese. We introduce a novel approach by conducting a comparative analysis of different Transformers vs SOTA models in the community-based COVID-19 question answering dataset. The experimental findings demonstrate that the GPT-2 models exhibit highly promising outcomes, outperforming other SOTA models as well as previous community-based COVID-19 question answering models developed for Vietnamese.
Large Search Model: Redefining Search Stack in the Era of LLMs
Authors: Liang Wang, Nan Yang, Xiaolong Huang, Linjun Yang, Rangan Majumder, Furu Wei
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Retrieval, Text Generation

Modern search engines are built on a stack of different components, including query understanding, retrieval, multi-stage ranking, and question answering, among others. These components are often optimized and deployed independently. In this paper, we introduce a novel conceptual framework called large search model, which redefines the conventional search stack by unifying search tasks with one large language model (LLM). All tasks are formulated as autoregressive text generation problems, allowing for the customization of tasks through the use of natural language prompts. This proposed framework capitalizes on the strong language understanding and reasoning capabilities of LLMs, offering the potential to enhance search result quality while simultaneously simplifying the existing cumbersome search stack. To substantiate the feasibility of this framework, we present a series of proof-of-concept experiments and discuss the potential challenges associated with implementing this approach within real-world search systems.
Exploring the Boundaries of GPT-4 in Radiology
Authors: Qianchu Liu, Stephanie Hyland, Shruthi Bannur, Kenza Bouzid, Daniel C. Castro, Maria Teodora Wetscherek, Robert Tinn, Harshita Sharma, Fernando Pérez-García, Anton Schwaighofer, Pranav Rajpurkar, Sameer Tajdin Khanna, Hoifung Poon, Naoto Usuyama, Anja Thieme, Aditya V. Nori, Matthew P. Lungren, Ozan Oktay, Javier Alvarez-Valle
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Inference, Sentence, Sentence Similarity

The recent success of general-domain large language models (LLMs) has significantly changed the natural language processing paradigm towards a unified foundation model across domains and applications. In this paper, we focus on assessing the performance of GPT-4, the most capable LLM so far, on the text-based applications for radiology reports, comparing against state-of-the-art (SOTA) radiology-specific models. Exploring various prompting strategies, we evaluated GPT-4 on a diverse range of common radiology tasks and we found GPT-4 either outperforms or is on par with current SOTA radiology models. With zero-shot prompting, GPT-4 already obtains substantial gains ($\approx$ 10% absolute improvement) over radiology models in temporal sentence similarity classification (accuracy) and natural language inference ($F_1$). For tasks that require learning dataset-specific style or schema (e.g. findings summarisation), GPT-4 improves with example-based prompting and matches supervised SOTA. Our extensive error analysis with a board-certified radiologist shows GPT-4 has a sufficient level of radiology knowledge with only occasional errors in complex context that require nuanced domain knowledge. For findings summarisation, GPT-4 outputs are found to be overall comparable with existing manually-written impressions.
Language Models Hallucinate, but May Excel at Fact Verification
Authors: Jian Guan, Jesse Dodge, David Wadden, Minlie Huang, Hao Peng
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Fact Verification, Hallucination

Recent progress in natural language processing (NLP) owes much to remarkable advances in large language models (LLMs). Nevertheless, LLMs frequently "hallucinate," resulting in non-factual outputs. Our carefully-designed human evaluation substantiates the serious hallucination issue, revealing that even GPT-3.5 produces factual outputs less than 25% of the time. This underscores the importance of fact verifiers in order to measure and incentivize progress. Our systematic investigation affirms that LLMs can be repurposed as effective fact verifiers with strong correlations with human judgments. Surprisingly, FLAN-T5-11B, the least factual generator in our study, performs the best as a fact verifier, even outperforming more capable LLMs like GPT3.5 and ChatGPT. Delving deeper, we analyze the reliance of these LLMs on high-quality evidence, as well as their deficiencies in robustness and generalization ability. Our study presents insights for developing trustworthy generation models.
NormDial: A Comparable Bilingual Synthetic Dialog Dataset for Modeling Social Norm Adherence and Violation
Authors: Oliver Li, Mallika Subramanian, Arkadiy Saakyan, Sky CH-Wang, Smaranda Muresan
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00

Social norms fundamentally shape interpersonal communication. We present NormDial, a high-quality dyadic dialogue dataset with turn-by-turn annotations of social norm adherences and violations for Chinese and American cultures. Introducing the task of social norm observance detection, our dataset is synthetically generated in both Chinese and English using a human-in-the-loop pipeline by prompting large language models with a small collection of expert-annotated social norms. We show that our generated dialogues are of high quality through human evaluation and further evaluate the performance of existing large language models on this task. Our findings point towards new directions for understanding the nuances of social norms as they manifest in conversational contexts that span across languages and cultures.
The Skipped Beat: A Study of Sociopragmatic Understanding in LLMs for 64 Languages
Authors: Chiyu Zhang, Khai Duy Doan, Qisheng Liao, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Few-Shot Learning

Instruction tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable performance in a wide range of tasks. Despite numerous recent studies that examine the performance of instruction-tuned LLMs on various NLP benchmarks, there remains a lack of comprehensive investigation into their ability to understand cross-lingual sociopragmatic meaning (SM), i.e., meaning embedded within social and interactive contexts. This deficiency arises partly from SM not being adequately represented in any of the existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we present SPARROW, an extensive multilingual benchmark specifically designed for SM understanding. SPARROW comprises 169 datasets covering 13 task types across six primary categories (e.g., anti-social language detection, emotion recognition). SPARROW datasets encompass 64 different languages originating from 12 language families representing 16 writing scripts. We evaluate the performance of various multilingual pretrained language models (e.g., mT5) and instruction-tuned LLMs (e.g., BLOOMZ, ChatGPT) on SPARROW through fine-tuning, zero-shot, and/or few-shot learning. Our comprehensive analysis reveals that existing open-source instruction tuned LLMs still struggle to understand SM across various languages, performing close to a random baseline in some cases. We also find that although ChatGPT outperforms many LLMs, it still falls behind task-specific finetuned models with a gap of 12.19 SPARROW score. Our benchmark is available at: https://github.com/UBC-NLP/SPARROW
Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks
Authors: Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Frederick Wieting, Nanyun Peng, Xuezhe Ma
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Generation, Question-Generation, Reading Comprehension, Sentence

While recent studies have looked into the abilities of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc, there have been few studies looking into the controllability of large language models on generation tasks. We present an extensive analysis of various benchmarks including a sentence planning benchmark with different granularities. After comparing large language models against state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models, we present a spectrum showing large language models falling behind, are comparable, or exceed the ability of smaller models. We conclude that **large language models struggle at meeting fine-grained hard constraints**.
Continual Named Entity Recognition without Catastrophic Forgetting
Authors: Duzhen Zhang, Wei Cong, Jiahua Dong, Yahan Yu, Xiuyi Chen, Yonggang Zhang, Zhen Fang
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Continual Named Entity Recognition, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

Continual Named Entity Recognition (CNER) is a burgeoning area, which involves updating an existing model by incorporating new entity types sequentially. Nevertheless, continual learning approaches are often severely afflicted by catastrophic forgetting. This issue is intensified in CNER due to the consolidation of old entity types from previous steps into the non-entity type at each step, leading to what is known as the semantic shift problem of the non-entity type. In this paper, we introduce a pooled feature distillation loss that skillfully navigates the trade-off between retaining knowledge of old entity types and acquiring new ones, thereby more effectively mitigating the problem of catastrophic forgetting. Additionally, we develop a confidence-based pseudo-labeling for the non-entity type, \emph{i.e.,} predicting entity types using the old model to handle the semantic shift of the non-entity type. Following the pseudo-labeling process, we suggest an adaptive re-weighting type-balanced learning strategy to handle the issue of biased type distribution. We carried out comprehensive experiments on ten CNER settings using three different datasets. The results illustrate that our method significantly outperforms prior state-of-the-art approaches, registering an average improvement of $6.3$\% and $8.0$\% in Micro and Macro F1 scores, respectively.
Dual-Feedback Knowledge Retrieval for Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems
Authors: Tianyuan Shi, Liangzhi Li, Zijian Lin, Tao Yang, Xiaojun Quan, Qifan Wang
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Question Answering, Question Answering, Response Generation, Retrieval, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Efficient knowledge retrieval plays a pivotal role in ensuring the success of end-to-end task-oriented dialogue systems by facilitating the selection of relevant information necessary to fulfill user requests. However, current approaches generally integrate knowledge retrieval and response generation, which poses scalability challenges when dealing with extensive knowledge bases. Taking inspiration from open-domain question answering, we propose a retriever-generator architecture that harnesses a retriever to retrieve pertinent knowledge and a generator to generate system responses.~Due to the lack of retriever training labels, we propose relying on feedback from the generator as pseudo-labels to train the retriever. To achieve this, we introduce a dual-feedback mechanism that generates both positive and negative feedback based on the output of the generator. Our method demonstrates superior performance in task-oriented dialogue tasks, as evidenced by experimental results on three benchmark datasets.
Rethinking Word-Level Auto-Completion in Computer-Aided Translation
Authors: Xingyu Chen, Lemao Liu, Guoping Huang, Zhirui Zhang, Mingming Yang, Shuming Shi, Rui Wang
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Word-Level Auto-Completion (WLAC) plays a crucial role in Computer-Assisted Translation. It aims at providing word-level auto-completion suggestions for human translators. While previous studies have primarily focused on designing complex model architectures, this paper takes a different perspective by rethinking the fundamental question: what kind of words are good auto-completions? We introduce a measurable criterion to answer this question and discover that existing WLAC models often fail to meet this criterion. Building upon this observation, we propose an effective approach to enhance WLAC performance by promoting adherence to the criterion. Notably, the proposed approach is general and can be applied to various encoder-based architectures. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach outperforms the top-performing system submitted to the WLAC shared tasks in WMT2022, while utilizing significantly smaller model sizes.
QUDEVAL: The Evaluation of Questions Under Discussion Discourse Parsing
Authors: Yating Wu, Ritika Mangla, Greg Durrett, Junyi Jessy Li
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Discourse Parsing, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Generation, Question-Generation, Sentence

Questions Under Discussion (QUD) is a versatile linguistic framework in which discourse progresses as continuously asking questions and answering them. Automatic parsing of a discourse to produce a QUD structure thus entails a complex question generation task: given a document and an answer sentence, generate a question that satisfies linguistic constraints of QUD and can be grounded in an anchor sentence in prior context. These questions are known to be curiosity-driven and open-ended. This work introduces the first framework for the automatic evaluation of QUD parsing, instantiating the theoretical constraints of QUD in a concrete protocol. We present QUDeval, a dataset of fine-grained evaluation of 2,190 QUD questions generated from both fine-tuned systems and LLMs. Using QUDeval, we show that satisfying all constraints of QUD is still challenging for modern LLMs, and that existing evaluation metrics poorly approximate parser quality. Encouragingly, human-authored QUDs are scored highly by our human evaluators, suggesting that there is headroom for further progress on language modeling to improve both QUD parsing and QUD evaluation.
Turn-Level Active Learning for Dialogue State Tracking
Authors: Zihan Zhang, Meng Fang, Fanghua Ye, Ling Chen, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Dialogue State Tracking, Task-Oriented Dialogue Systems

Dialogue state tracking (DST) plays an important role in task-oriented dialogue systems. However, collecting a large amount of turn-by-turn annotated dialogue data is costly and inefficient. In this paper, we propose a novel turn-level active learning framework for DST to actively select turns in dialogues to annotate. Given the limited labelling budget, experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of selective annotation of dialogue turns. Additionally, our approach can effectively achieve comparable DST performance to traditional training approaches with significantly less annotated data, which provides a more efficient way to annotate new dialogue data.
CITB: A Benchmark for Continual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Zihan Zhang, Meng Fang, Ling Chen, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) is a paradigm that aims to replicate the human ability to learn and accumulate knowledge continually without forgetting previous knowledge and transferring it to new tasks. Recent instruction tuning (IT) involves fine-tuning models to make them more adaptable to solving NLP tasks in general. However, it is still uncertain how instruction tuning works in the context of CL tasks. This challenging yet practical problem is formulated as Continual Instruction Tuning (CIT). In this work, we establish a CIT benchmark consisting of learning and evaluation protocols. We curate two long dialogue task streams of different types, InstrDialog and InstrDialog++, to study various CL methods systematically. Our experiments show that existing CL methods do not effectively leverage the rich natural language instructions, and fine-tuning an instruction-tuned model sequentially can yield similar or better results. We further explore different aspects that might affect the learning of CIT. We hope this benchmark will facilitate more research in this direction.