pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Constructing Tree-based Index for Efficient and Effective Dense Retrieval
Authors: Haitao Li, Qingyao Ai, Jingtao Zhan, Jiaxin Mao, Yiqun Liu, Zheng Liu, Zhao Cao
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Retrieval

Recent studies have shown that Dense Retrieval (DR) techniques can significantly improve the performance of first-stage retrieval in IR systems. Despite its empirical effectiveness, the application of DR is still limited. In contrast to statistic retrieval models that rely on highly efficient inverted index solutions, DR models build dense embeddings that are difficult to be pre-processed with most existing search indexing systems. To avoid the expensive cost of brute-force search, the Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) algorithm and corresponding indexes are widely applied to speed up the inference process of DR models. Unfortunately, while ANN can improve the efficiency of DR models, it usually comes with a significant price on retrieval performance. To solve this issue, we propose JTR, which stands for Joint optimization of TRee-based index and query encoding. Specifically, we design a new unified contrastive learning loss to train tree-based index and query encoder in an end-to-end manner. The tree-based negative sampling strategy is applied to make the tree have the maximum heap property, which supports the effectiveness of beam search well. Moreover, we treat the cluster assignment as an optimization problem to update the tree-based index that allows overlapped clustering. We evaluate JTR on numerous popular retrieval benchmarks. Experimental results show that JTR achieves better retrieval performance while retaining high system efficiency compared with widely-adopted baselines. It provides a potential solution to balance efficiency and effectiveness in neural retrieval system designs.
Generating Topic Pages for Scientific Concepts Using Scientific Publications
Authors: Hosein Azarbonyad, Zubair Afzal, George Tsatsaronis
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00

In this paper, we describe Topic Pages, an inventory of scientific concepts and information around them extracted from a large collection of scientific books and journals. The main aim of Topic Pages is to provide all the necessary information to the readers to understand scientific concepts they come across while reading scholarly content in any scientific domain. Topic Pages are a collection of automatically generated information pages using NLP and ML, each corresponding to a scientific concept. Each page contains three pieces of information: a definition, related concepts, and the most relevant snippets, all extracted from scientific peer-reviewed publications. In this paper, we discuss the details of different components to extract each of these elements. The collection of pages in production contains over 360,000 Topic Pages across 20 different scientific domains with an average of 23 million unique visits per month, constituting it a popular source for scientific information.
Directed Acyclic Transformer Pre-training for High-quality Non-autoregressive Text Generation
Authors: Fei Huang, Pei Ke, Minlie Huang
Date: 2023-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Text Generation

Non-AutoRegressive (NAR) text generation models have drawn much attention because of their significantly faster decoding speed and good generation quality in machine translation. However, in a wider range of text generation tasks, existing NAR models lack proper pre-training, making them still far behind the pre-trained autoregressive models. In this paper, we propose Pre-trained Directed Acyclic Transformer (PreDAT) and a novel pre-training task to promote prediction consistency in NAR generation. Experiments on five text generation tasks show that our PreDAT remarkably outperforms existing pre-trained NAR models (+4.2 scores on average) and even achieves better results than pre-trained autoregressive baselines in n-gram-based metrics, along with 17 times speedup in throughput. Further analysis shows that PreDAT benefits from the unbiased prediction order that alleviates the error accumulation problem in autoregressive generation, which provides new insights into the advantages of NAR generation.
NAIST-SIC-Aligned: an Aligned English-Japanese Simultaneous Interpretation Corpus
Authors: Jinming Zhao, Yuka Ko, Kosuke Doi, Ryo Fukuda, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

It remains a question that how simultaneous interpretation (SI) data affects simultaneous machine translation (SiMT). Research has been limited due to the lack of a large-scale training corpus. In this work, we aim to fill in the gap by introducing NAIST-SIC-Aligned, which is an automatically-aligned parallel English-Japanese SI dataset. Starting with a non-aligned corpus NAIST-SIC, we propose a two-stage alignment approach to make the corpus parallel and thus suitable for model training. The first stage is coarse alignment where we perform a many-to-many mapping between source and target sentences, and the second stage is fine-grained alignment where we perform intra- and inter-sentence filtering to improve the quality of aligned pairs. To ensure the quality of the corpus, each step has been validated either quantitatively or qualitatively. This is the first open-sourced large-scale parallel SI dataset in the literature. We also manually curated a small test set for evaluation purposes. Our results show that models trained with SI data lead to significant improvement in translation quality and latency over baselines. We hope our work advances research on SI corpora construction and SiMT. Our data can be found at https://github.com/mingzi151/AHC-SI.
A Lightweight Constrained Generation Alternative for Query-focused Summarization
Authors: Zhichao Xu, Daniel Cohen
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Query-focused Summarization, Retrieval

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to provide a summary of a document that satisfies information need of a given query and is useful in various IR applications, such as abstractive snippet generation. Current QFS approaches typically involve injecting additional information, e.g. query-answer relevance or fine-grained token-level interaction between a query and document, into a finetuned large language model. However, these approaches often require extra parameters \& training, and generalize poorly to new dataset distributions. To mitigate this, we propose leveraging a recently developed constrained generation model Neurological Decoding (NLD) as an alternative to current QFS regimes which rely on additional sub-architectures and training. We first construct lexical constraints by identifying important tokens from the document using a lightweight gradient attribution model, then subsequently force the generated summary to satisfy these constraints by directly manipulating the final vocabulary likelihood. This lightweight approach requires no additional parameters or finetuning as it utilizes both an off-the-shelf neural retrieval model to construct the constraints and a standard generative language model to produce the QFS. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach on two public QFS collections achieving near parity with the state-of-the-art model with substantially reduced complexity.
Domain Mastery Benchmark: An Ever-Updating Benchmark for Evaluating Holistic Domain Knowledge of Large Language Model--A Preliminary Release
Authors: Zhouhong Gu, Xiaoxuan Zhu, Haoning Ye, Lin Zhang, Zhuozhi Xiong, Zihan Li, Qianyu He, Sihang Jiang, Hongwei Feng, Yanghua Xiao
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Domain knowledge refers to the in-depth understanding, expertise, and familiarity with a specific subject, industry, field, or area of special interest. The existing benchmarks are all lack of an overall design for domain knowledge evaluation. Holding the belief that the real ability of domain language understanding can only be fairly evaluated by an comprehensive and in-depth benchmark, we introduces the Domma, a Domain Mastery Benchmark. DomMa targets at testing Large Language Models (LLMs) on their domain knowledge understanding, it features extensive domain coverage, large data volume, and a continually updated data set based on Chinese 112 first-level subject classifications. DomMa consist of 100,000 questions in both Chinese and English sourced from graduate entrance examinations and undergraduate exams in Chinese college. We have also propose designs to make benchmark and evaluation process more suitable to LLMs.
Hold the Suspect! : An Analysis on Media Framing of Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush
Authors: TaeYoung Kang
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Clustering

Based on the 10.9K articles from top 40 news providers of South Korea, this paper analyzed the media framing of Itaewon Halloween Crowd Crush during the first 72 hours after the incident. By adopting word-vector embedding and clustering, we figured out that conservative media focused on political parties' responses and the suspect's identity while the liberal media covered the responsibility of the government and possible unequal spillover effect on the low-income industry workers. Although the social tragedy was not directly connected to institutional politics, the media clearly exhibited political bias in the coverage process.
Evaluating ChatGPT's Information Extraction Capabilities: An Assessment of Performance, Explainability, Calibration, and Faithfulness
Authors: Bo Li, Gexiang Fang, Yang Yang, Quansen Wang, Wei Ye, Wen Zhao, Shikun Zhang
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00

The capability of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT to comprehend user intent and provide reasonable responses has made them extremely popular lately. In this paper, we focus on assessing the overall ability of ChatGPT using 7 fine-grained information extraction (IE) tasks. Specially, we present the systematically analysis by measuring ChatGPT's performance, explainability, calibration, and faithfulness, and resulting in 15 keys from either the ChatGPT or domain experts. Our findings reveal that ChatGPT's performance in Standard-IE setting is poor, but it surprisingly exhibits excellent performance in the OpenIE setting, as evidenced by human evaluation. In addition, our research indicates that ChatGPT provides high-quality and trustworthy explanations for its decisions. However, there is an issue of ChatGPT being overconfident in its predictions, which resulting in low calibration. Furthermore, ChatGPT demonstrates a high level of faithfulness to the original text in the majority of cases. We manually annotate and release the test sets of 7 fine-grained IE tasks contains 14 datasets to further promote the research. The datasets and code are available at https://github.com/pkuserc/ChatGPT_for_IE.
Graph Neural Networks for Text Classification: A Survey
Authors: Kunze Wang, Yihao Ding, Soyeon Caren Han
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, graph construction, Graph Neural Network, Survey, text-classification, Text Classification

Text Classification is the most essential and fundamental problem in Natural Language Processing. While numerous recent text classification models applied the sequential deep learning technique, graph neural network-based models can directly deal with complex structured text data and exploit global information. Many real text classification applications can be naturally cast into a graph, which captures words, documents, and corpus global features. In this survey, we bring the coverage of methods up to 2023, including corpus-level and document-level graph neural networks. We discuss each of these methods in detail, dealing with the graph construction mechanisms and the graph-based learning process. As well as the technological survey, we look at issues behind and future directions addressed in text classification using graph neural networks. We also cover datasets, evaluation metrics, and experiment design and present a summary of published performance on the publicly available benchmarks. Note that we present a comprehensive comparison between different techniques and identify the pros and cons of various evaluation metrics in this survey.
Processing Natural Language on Embedded Devices: How Well Do Transformer Models Perform?
Authors: Souvika Sarkar, Mohammad Fakhruddin Babar, Md Mahadi Hassan, Monowar Hasan, Shubhra Kanti Karmaker Santu
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification

This paper presents a performance study of transformer language models under different hardware configurations and accuracy requirements and derives empirical observations about these resource/accuracy trade-offs. In particular, we study how the most commonly used BERT-based language models (viz., BERT, RoBERTa, DistilBERT, and TinyBERT) perform on embedded systems. We tested them on four off-the-shelf embedded platforms (Raspberry Pi, Jetson, UP2, and UDOO) with 2 GB and 4 GB memory (i.e., a total of eight hardware configurations) and four datasets (i.e., HuRIC, GoEmotion, CoNLL, WNUT17) running various NLP tasks. Our study finds that executing complex NLP tasks (such as "sentiment" classification) on embedded systems is feasible even without any GPUs (e.g., Raspberry Pi with 2 GB of RAM). Our findings can help designers understand the deployability and performance of transformer language models, especially those based on BERT architectures.
Lost in Translationese? Reducing Translation Effect Using Abstract Meaning Representation
Authors: Shira Wein, Nathan Schneider
Date: 2023-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, Machine Translation, Paraphrase Generation, Translation

Translated texts bear several hallmarks distinct from texts originating in the language. Though individual translated texts are often fluent and preserve meaning, at a large scale, translated texts have statistical tendencies which distinguish them from text originally written in the language ("translationese") and can affect model performance. We frame the novel task of translationese reduction and hypothesize that Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), a graph-based semantic representation which abstracts away from the surface form, can be used as an interlingua to reduce the amount of translationese in translated texts. By parsing English translations into an AMR and then generating text from that AMR, the result more closely resembles originally English text across three quantitative macro-level measures, without severely compromising fluency or adequacy. We compare our AMR-based approach against three other techniques based on machine translation or paraphrase generation. This work makes strides towards reducing translationese in text and highlights the utility of AMR as an interlingua.
A bounded rationality account of dependency length minimization in Hindi
Authors: Sidharth Ranjan, Titus von der Malsburg
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Decision Making, Sentence

The principle of DEPENDENCY LENGTH MINIMIZATION, which seeks to keep syntactically related words close in a sentence, is thought to universally shape the structure of human languages for effective communication. However, the extent to which dependency length minimization is applied in human language systems is not yet fully understood. Preverbally, the placement of long-before-short constituents and postverbally, short-before-long constituents are known to minimize overall dependency length of a sentence. In this study, we test the hypothesis that placing only the shortest preverbal constituent next to the main-verb explains word order preferences in Hindi (a SOV language) as opposed to the global minimization of dependency length. We characterize this approach as a least-effort strategy because it is a cost-effective way to shorten all dependencies between the verb and its preverbal dependencies. As such, this approach is consistent with the bounded-rationality perspective according to which decision making is governed by "fast but frugal" heuristics rather than by a search for optimal solutions. Consistent with this idea, our results indicate that actual corpus sentences in the Hindi-Urdu Treebank corpus are better explained by the least effort strategy than by global minimization of dependency lengths. Additionally, for the task of distinguishing corpus sentences from counterfactual variants, we find that the dependency length and constituent length of the constituent closest to the main verb are much better predictors of whether a sentence appeared in the corpus than total dependency length. Overall, our findings suggest that cognitive resource constraints play a crucial role in shaping natural languages.
LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization
Authors: Alireza Salemi, Sheshera Mysore, Michael Bendersky, Hamed Zamani
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding, Retrieval, text-classification, Text Classification, Text Generation

This paper highlights the importance of personalization in large language models and introduces the LaMP benchmark -- a novel benchmark for training and evaluating language models for producing personalized outputs. LaMP offers a comprehensive evaluation framework with diverse language tasks and multiple entries for each user profile. It consists of seven personalized tasks, spanning three text classification and four text generation tasks. We additionally propose two retrieval augmentation approaches that retrieve personal items from each user profile for personalizing language model outputs. To this aim, we study various retrieval models, including term matching, semantic matching, and time-aware methods. Extensive experiments on LaMP for zero-shot and fine-tuned language models demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed retrieval augmentation approach and highlight the impact of personalization in various natural language tasks.
Transformer-Based Language Model Surprisal Predicts Human Reading Times Best with About Two Billion Training Tokens
Authors: Byung-Doh Oh, William Schuler
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent psycholinguistic studies have drawn conflicting conclusions about the relationship between the quality of a language model and the ability of its surprisal estimates to predict human reading times, which has been speculated to be due to the large gap in both the amount of training data and model capacity across studies. The current work aims to consolidate these findings by evaluating surprisal estimates from Transformer-based language model variants that vary systematically in the amount of training data and model capacity on their ability to predict human reading times. The results show that surprisal estimates from most variants with contemporary model capacities provide the best fit after seeing about two billion training tokens, after which they begin to diverge from humanlike expectations. Additionally, newly-trained smaller model variants reveal a 'tipping point' at convergence, after which the decrease in language model perplexity begins to result in poorer fits to human reading times. These results suggest that the massive amount of training data is mainly responsible for the poorer fit achieved by surprisal from larger pre-trained language models, and that a certain degree of model capacity is necessary for Transformer-based language models to capture humanlike expectations.
SAILER: Structure-aware Pre-trained Language Model for Legal Case Retrieval
Authors: Haitao Li, Qingyao Ai, Jia Chen, Qian Dong, Yueyue Wu, Yiqun Liu, Chong Chen, Qi Tian
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Legal case retrieval, which aims to find relevant cases for a query case, plays a core role in the intelligent legal system. Despite the success that pre-training has achieved in ad-hoc retrieval tasks, effective pre-training strategies for legal case retrieval remain to be explored. Compared with general documents, legal case documents are typically long text sequences with intrinsic logical structures. However, most existing language models have difficulty understanding the long-distance dependencies between different structures. Moreover, in contrast to the general retrieval, the relevance in the legal domain is sensitive to key legal elements. Even subtle differences in key legal elements can significantly affect the judgement of relevance. However, existing pre-trained language models designed for general purposes have not been equipped to handle legal elements. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose SAILER, a new Structure-Aware pre-traIned language model for LEgal case Retrieval. It is highlighted in the following three aspects: (1) SAILER fully utilizes the structural information contained in legal case documents and pays more attention to key legal elements, similar to how legal experts browse legal case documents. (2) SAILER employs an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to integrate several different pre-training objectives. In this way, rich semantic information across tasks is encoded into dense vectors. (3) SAILER has powerful discriminative ability, even without any legal annotation data. It can distinguish legal cases with different charges accurately. Extensive experiments over publicly available legal benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods in legal case retrieval.
Romanian Multiword Expression Detection Using Multilingual Adversarial Training and Lateral Inhibition
Authors: Andrei-Marius Avram, Verginica Barbu Mititelu, Dumitru-Clementin Cercel
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00

Multiword expressions are a key ingredient for developing large-scale and linguistically sound natural language processing technology. This paper describes our improvements in automatically identifying Romanian multiword expressions on the corpus released for the PARSEME v1.2 shared task. Our approach assumes a multilingual perspective based on the recently introduced lateral inhibition layer and adversarial training to boost the performance of the employed multilingual language models. With the help of these two methods, we improve the F1-score of XLM-RoBERTa by approximately 2.7% on unseen multiword expressions, the main task of the PARSEME 1.2 edition. In addition, our results can be considered SOTA performance, as they outperform the previous results on Romanian obtained by the participants in this competition.
Semantic Specialization for Knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation
Authors: Sakae Mizuki, Naoaki Okazaki
Date: 2023-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Reranking, Sentence, Word Sense Disambiguation

A promising approach for knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is to select the sense whose contextualized embeddings computed for its definition sentence are closest to those computed for a target word in a given sentence. This approach relies on the similarity of the \textit{sense} and \textit{context} embeddings computed by a pre-trained language model. We propose a semantic specialization for WSD where contextualized embeddings are adapted to the WSD task using solely lexical knowledge. The key idea is, for a given sense, to bring semantically related senses and contexts closer and send different/unrelated senses farther away. We realize this idea as the joint optimization of the Attract-Repel objective for sense pairs and the self-training objective for context-sense pairs while controlling deviations from the original embeddings. The proposed method outperformed previous studies that adapt contextualized embeddings. It achieved state-of-the-art performance on knowledge-based WSD when combined with the reranking heuristic that uses the sense inventory. We found that the similarity characteristics of specialized embeddings conform to the key idea. We also found that the (dis)similarity of embeddings between the related/different/unrelated senses correlates well with the performance of WSD.