pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SelfEvolve: A Code Evolution Framework via Large Language Models
Authors: Shuyang Jiang, Yuhao Wang, Yu Wang
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, Retrieval

Large language models (LLMs) have already revolutionized code generation, after being pretrained on publicly available code data. However, while various methods have been proposed to augment LLMs with retrieved knowledge and enhance the quality of code generation, the performance of these retrieval-based methods is limited by the strength of the retrievers used. In addition, while LLMs show great emergent ability, they still struggle to produce the correct code in one turn. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-step pipeline, called \autoknow, that leverages LLMs as both knowledge providers and self-reflective programmers. Unlike retrieval-based methods, \autoknow~obtains the knowledge from input prompts and generates intermediate code based on the generated knowledge. After that, \autoknow~asks LLM to act as an expert programmer to perform debugging for the generated code. This is achieved by receiving the error message from the interpreter, without requiring special test cases for correctness verification. We evaluate \autoknow~on three code generation datasets, including DS-1000 for data science code, HumanEval for software engineering code, and TransCoder for C++-to-Python translation. Our empirical experiments show that \autoknow~outperforms strong baselines by a significant margin on all datasets. We also conduct exhaustive analytical experiments to validate the effectiveness of the two stages of \autoknow, and find that both are superior to other prompting-based methods. Further scalability analysis demonstrates that \autoknow~can be adapted to other more advanced models, such as GPT-4, and bring consistent efficacy improvement.
N-Shot Benchmarking of Whisper on Diverse Arabic Speech Recognition
Authors: Bashar Talafha, Abdul Waheed, Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Arabic Speech Recognition, Benchmarking, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Whisper, the recently developed multilingual weakly supervised model, is reported to perform well on multiple speech recognition benchmarks in both monolingual and multilingual settings. However, it is not clear how Whisper would fare under diverse conditions even on languages it was evaluated on such as Arabic. In this work, we address this gap by comprehensively evaluating Whisper on several varieties of Arabic speech for the ASR task. Our evaluation covers most publicly available Arabic speech data and is performed under n-shot (zero-, few-, and full) finetuning. We also investigate the robustness of Whisper under completely novel conditions, such as in dialect-accented standard Arabic and in unseen dialects for which we develop evaluation data. Our experiments show that although Whisper zero-shot outperforms fully finetuned XLS-R models on all datasets, its performance deteriorates significantly in the zero-shot setting for five unseen dialects (i.e., Algeria, Jordan, Palestine, UAE, and Yemen).
Gen-IR @ SIGIR 2023: The First Workshop on Generative Information Retrieval
Authors: Gabriel Bénédict, Ruqing Zhang, Donald Metzler
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Information Retrieval, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

Generative information retrieval (IR) has experienced substantial growth across multiple research communities (e.g., information retrieval, computer vision, natural language processing, and machine learning), and has been highly visible in the popular press. Theoretical, empirical, and actual user-facing products have been released that retrieve documents (via generation) or directly generate answers given an input request. We would like to investigate whether end-to-end generative models are just another trend or, as some claim, a paradigm change for IR. This necessitates new metrics, theoretical grounding, evaluation methods, task definitions, models, user interfaces, etc. The goal of this workshop (https://coda.io/@sigir/gen-ir) is to focus on previously explored Generative IR techniques like document retrieval and direct Grounded Answer Generation, while also offering a venue for the discussion and exploration of how Generative IR can be applied to new domains like recommendation systems, summarization, etc. The format of the workshop is interactive, including roundtable and keynote sessions and tends to avoid the one-sided dialogue of a mini-conference.
DecompX: Explaining Transformers Decisions by Propagating Token Decomposition
Authors: Ali Modarressi, Mohsen Fayyaz, Ehsan Aghazadeh, Yadollah Yaghoobzadeh, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00

An emerging solution for explaining Transformer-based models is to use vector-based analysis on how the representations are formed. However, providing a faithful vector-based explanation for a multi-layer model could be challenging in three aspects: (1) Incorporating all components into the analysis, (2) Aggregating the layer dynamics to determine the information flow and mixture throughout the entire model, and (3) Identifying the connection between the vector-based analysis and the model's predictions. In this paper, we present DecompX to tackle these challenges. DecompX is based on the construction of decomposed token representations and their successive propagation throughout the model without mixing them in between layers. Additionally, our proposal provides multiple advantages over existing solutions for its inclusion of all encoder components (especially nonlinear feed-forward networks) and the classification head. The former allows acquiring precise vectors while the latter transforms the decomposition into meaningful prediction-based values, eliminating the need for norm- or summation-based vector aggregation. According to the standard faithfulness evaluations, DecompX consistently outperforms existing gradient-based and vector-based approaches on various datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/mohsenfayyaz/DecompX.
Text-To-KG Alignment: Comparing Current Methods on Classification Tasks
Authors: Sondre Wold, Lilja Øvrelid, Erik Velldal
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

In contrast to large text corpora, knowledge graphs (KG) provide dense and structured representations of factual information. This makes them attractive for systems that supplement or ground the knowledge found in pre-trained language models with an external knowledge source. This has especially been the case for classification tasks, where recent work has focused on creating pipeline models that retrieve information from KGs like ConceptNet as additional context. Many of these models consist of multiple components, and although they differ in the number and nature of these parts, they all have in common that for some given text query, they attempt to identify and retrieve a relevant subgraph from the KG. Due to the noise and idiosyncrasies often found in KGs, it is not known how current methods compare to a scenario where the aligned subgraph is completely relevant to the query. In this work, we try to bridge this knowledge gap by reviewing current approaches to text-to-KG alignment and evaluating them on two datasets where manually created graphs are available, providing insights into the effectiveness of current methods.
On "Scientific Debt" in NLP: A Case for More Rigour in Language Model Pre-Training Research
Authors: Made Nindyatama Nityasya, Haryo Akbarianto Wibowo, Alham Fikri Aji, Genta Indra Winata, Radityo Eko Prasojo, Phil Blunsom, Adhiguna Kuncoro
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

This evidence-based position paper critiques current research practices within the language model pre-training literature. Despite rapid recent progress afforded by increasingly better pre-trained language models (PLMs), current PLM research practices often conflate different possible sources of model improvement, without conducting proper ablation studies and principled comparisons between different models under comparable conditions. These practices (i) leave us ill-equipped to understand which pre-training approaches should be used under what circumstances; (ii) impede reproducibility and credit assignment; and (iii) render it difficult to understand: "How exactly does each factor contribute to the progress that we have today?" We provide a case in point by revisiting the success of BERT over its baselines, ELMo and GPT-1, and demonstrate how -- under comparable conditions where the baselines are tuned to a similar extent -- these baselines (and even-simpler variants thereof) can, in fact, achieve competitive or better performance than BERT. These findings demonstrate how disentangling different factors of model improvements can lead to valuable new insights. We conclude with recommendations for how to encourage and incentivize this line of work, and accelerate progress towards a better and more systematic understanding of what factors drive the progress of our foundation models today.
Improving Conversational Recommendation Systems via Counterfactual Data Simulation
Authors: Xiaolei Wang, Kun Zhou, Xinyu Tang, Wayne Xin Zhao, Fan Pan, Zhao Cao, Ji-Rong Wen
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, counterfactual, Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Recommendation Systems

Conversational recommender systems (CRSs) aim to provide recommendation services via natural language conversations. Although a number of approaches have been proposed for developing capable CRSs, they typically rely on sufficient training data for training. Since it is difficult to annotate recommendation-oriented dialogue datasets, existing CRS approaches often suffer from the issue of insufficient training due to the scarcity of training data. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a CounterFactual data simulation approach for CRS, named CFCRS, to alleviate the issue of data scarcity in CRSs. Our approach is developed based on the framework of counterfactual data augmentation, which gradually incorporates the rewriting to the user preference from a real dialogue without interfering with the entire conversation flow. To develop our approach, we characterize user preference and organize the conversation flow by the entities involved in the dialogue, and design a multi-stage recommendation dialogue simulator based on a conversation flow language model. Under the guidance of the learned user preference and dialogue schema, the flow language model can produce reasonable, coherent conversation flows, which can be further realized into complete dialogues. Based on the simulator, we perform the intervention at the representations of the interacted entities of target users, and design an adversarial training method with a curriculum schedule that can gradually optimize the data augmentation strategy. Extensive experiments show that our approach can consistently boost the performance of several competitive CRSs, and outperform other data augmentation methods, especially when the training data is limited. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CFCRS.
UNIDECOR: A Unified Deception Corpus for Cross-Corpus Deception Detection
Authors: Aswathy Velutharambath, Roman Klinger
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-corpus, Deception Detection, Domain Generalization

Verbal deception has been studied in psychology, forensics, and computational linguistics for a variety of reasons, like understanding behaviour patterns, identifying false testimonies, and detecting deception in online communication. Varying motivations across research fields lead to differences in the domain choices to study and in the conceptualization of deception, making it hard to compare models and build robust deception detection systems for a given language. With this paper, we improve this situation by surveying available English deception datasets which include domains like social media reviews, court testimonials, opinion statements on specific topics, and deceptive dialogues from online strategy games. We consolidate these datasets into a single unified corpus. Based on this resource, we conduct a correlation analysis of linguistic cues of deception across datasets to understand the differences and perform cross-corpus modeling experiments which show that a cross-domain generalization is challenging to achieve. The unified deception corpus (UNIDECOR) can be obtained from https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/data/unidecor.
Enhancing Language Representation with Constructional Information for Natural Language Understanding
Authors: Lvxiaowei Xu, Jianwang Wu, Jiawei Peng, Zhilin Gong, Ming Cai, Tianxiang Wang
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding

Natural language understanding (NLU) is an essential branch of natural language processing, which relies on representations generated by pre-trained language models (PLMs). However, PLMs primarily focus on acquiring lexico-semantic information, while they may be unable to adequately handle the meaning of constructions. To address this issue, we introduce construction grammar (CxG), which highlights the pairings of form and meaning, to enrich language representation. We adopt usage-based construction grammar as the basis of our work, which is highly compatible with statistical models such as PLMs. Then a HyCxG framework is proposed to enhance language representation through a three-stage solution. First, all constructions are extracted from sentences via a slot-constraints approach. As constructions can overlap with each other, bringing redundancy and imbalance, we formulate the conditional max coverage problem for selecting the discriminative constructions. Finally, we propose a relational hypergraph attention network to acquire representation from constructional information by capturing high-order word interactions among constructions. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model on a variety of NLU tasks.
MCTS: A Multi-Reference Chinese Text Simplification Dataset
Authors: Ruining Chong, Luming Lu, Liner Yang, Jinran Nie, Zhenghao Liu, Shuo Wang, Shuhan Zhou, Yaoxin Li, Erhong Yang
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Text Simplification

Text simplification aims to make the text easier to understand by applying rewriting transformations. There has been very little research on Chinese text simplification for a long time. The lack of generic evaluation data is an essential reason for this phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce MCTS, a multi-reference Chinese text simplification dataset. We describe the annotation process of the dataset and provide a detailed analysis. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of several unsupervised methods and advanced large language models. We additionally provide Chinese text simplification parallel data that can be used for training, acquired by utilizing machine translation and English text simplification. We hope to build a basic understanding of Chinese text simplification through the foundational work and provide references for future research. All of the code and data are released at https://github.com/blcuicall/mcts/.
German CheXpert Chest X-ray Radiology Report Labeler
Authors: Alessandro Wollek, Sardi Hyska, Thomas Sedlmeyr, Philip Haitzer, Johannes Rueckel, Bastian O. Sabel, Michael Ingrisch, Tobias Lasser
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: X-ray Classification

This study aimed to develop an algorithm to automatically extract annotations for chest X-ray classification models from German thoracic radiology reports. An automatic label extraction model was designed based on the CheXpert architecture, and a web-based annotation interface was created for iterative improvements. Results showed that automated label extraction can reduce time spent on manual labeling and improve overall modeling performance. The model trained on automatically extracted labels performed competitively to manually labeled data and strongly outperformed the model trained on publicly available data.
Cross-Lingual Transfer with Target Language-Ready Task Adapters
Authors: Marinela Parović, Alan Ansell, Ivan Vulić, Anna Korhonen
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Adapters have emerged as a modular and parameter-efficient approach to (zero-shot) cross-lingual transfer. The established MAD-X framework employs separate language and task adapters which can be arbitrarily combined to perform the transfer of any task to any target language. Subsequently, BAD-X, an extension of the MAD-X framework, achieves improved transfer at the cost of MAD-X's modularity by creating "bilingual" adapters specific to the source-target language pair. In this work, we aim to take the best of both worlds by (i) fine-tuning task adapters adapted to the target language(s) (so-called "target language-ready" (TLR) adapters) to maintain high transfer performance, but (ii) without sacrificing the highly modular design of MAD-X. The main idea of "target language-ready" adapters is to resolve the training-vs-inference discrepancy of MAD-X: the task adapter "sees" the target language adapter for the very first time during inference, and thus might not be fully compatible with it. We address this mismatch by exposing the task adapter to the target language adapter during training, and empirically validate several variants of the idea: in the simplest form, we alternate between using the source and target language adapters during task adapter training, which can be generalized to cycling over any set of language adapters. We evaluate different TLR-based transfer configurations with varying degrees of generality across a suite of standard cross-lingual benchmarks, and find that the most general (and thus most modular) configuration consistently outperforms MAD-X and BAD-X on most tasks and languages.
PULSAR: Pre-training with Extracted Healthcare Terms for Summarising Patients' Problems and Data Augmentation with Black-box Large Language Models
Authors: Hao Li, Yuping Wu, Viktor Schlegel, Riza Batista-Navarro, Thanh-Tung Nguyen, Abhinav Ramesh Kashyap, Xiaojun Zeng, Daniel Beck, Stefan Winkler, Goran Nenadic
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Medical progress notes play a crucial role in documenting a patient's hospital journey, including his or her condition, treatment plan, and any updates for healthcare providers. Automatic summarisation of a patient's problems in the form of a problem list can aid stakeholders in understanding a patient's condition, reducing workload and cognitive bias. BioNLP 2023 Shared Task 1A focuses on generating a list of diagnoses and problems from the provider's progress notes during hospitalisation. In this paper, we introduce our proposed approach to this task, which integrates two complementary components. One component employs large language models (LLMs) for data augmentation; the other is an abstractive summarisation LLM with a novel pre-training objective for generating the patients' problems summarised as a list. Our approach was ranked second among all submissions to the shared task. The performance of our model on the development and test datasets shows that our approach is more robust on unknown data, with an improvement of up to 3.1 points over the same size of the larger model.
CELDA: Leveraging Black-box Language Model as Enhanced Classifier without Labels
Authors: Hyunsoo Cho, Youna Kim, Sang-goo Lee
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, text-classification, Text Classification

Utilizing language models (LMs) without internal access is becoming an attractive paradigm in the field of NLP as many cutting-edge LMs are released through APIs and boast a massive scale. The de-facto method in this type of black-box scenario is known as prompting, which has shown progressive performance enhancements in situations where data labels are scarce or unavailable. Despite their efficacy, they still fall short in comparison to fully supervised counterparts and are generally brittle to slight modifications. In this paper, we propose Clustering-enhanced Linear Discriminative Analysis, a novel approach that improves the text classification accuracy with a very weak-supervision signal (i.e., name of the labels). Our framework draws a precise decision boundary without accessing weights or gradients of the LM model or data labels. The core ideas of CELDA are twofold: (1) extracting a refined pseudo-labeled dataset from an unlabeled dataset, and (2) training a lightweight and robust model on the top of LM, which learns an accurate decision boundary from an extracted noisy dataset. Throughout in-depth investigations on various datasets, we demonstrated that CELDA reaches new state-of-the-art in weakly-supervised text classification and narrows the gap with a fully-supervised model. Additionally, our proposed methodology can be applied universally to any LM and has the potential to scale to larger models, making it a more viable option for utilizing large LMs.
End-to-End Word-Level Pronunciation Assessment with MASK Pre-training
Authors: Yukang Liang, Kaitao Song, Shaoguang Mao, Huiqiang Jiang, Luna Qiu, Yuqing Yang, Dongsheng Li, Linli Xu, Lili Qiu
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00

Pronunciation assessment is a major challenge in the computer-aided pronunciation training system, especially at the word (phoneme)-level. To obtain word (phoneme)-level scores, current methods usually rely on aligning components to obtain acoustic features of each word (phoneme), which limits the performance of assessment to the accuracy of alignments. Therefore, to address this problem, we propose a simple yet effective method, namely \underline{M}asked pre-training for \underline{P}ronunciation \underline{A}ssessment (MPA). Specifically, by incorporating a mask-predict strategy, our MPA supports end-to-end training without leveraging any aligning components and can solve misalignment issues to a large extent during prediction. Furthermore, we design two evaluation strategies to enable our model to conduct assessments in both unsupervised and supervised settings. Experimental results on SpeechOcean762 dataset demonstrate that MPA could achieve better performance than previous methods, without any explicit alignment. In spite of this, MPA still has some limitations, such as requiring more inference time and reference text. They expect to be addressed in future work.
Improving Grammar-based Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling with Decomposition and Constraints
Authors: Chao Lou, Kewei Tu
Date: 2023-06-05 00:00:00

Neural QCFG is a grammar-based sequence-tosequence (seq2seq) model with strong inductive biases on hierarchical structures. It excels in interpretability and generalization but suffers from expensive inference. In this paper, we study two low-rank variants of Neural QCFG for faster inference with different trade-offs between efficiency and expressiveness. Furthermore, utilizing the symbolic interface provided by the grammar, we introduce two soft constraints over tree hierarchy and source coverage. We experiment with various datasets and find that our models outperform vanilla Neural QCFG in most settings.