pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Theoretical Insight into Attack and Defense of Gradient Leakage in Transformer
Authors: Chenyang Li, Zhao Song, Weixin Wang, Chiwun Yang
Date: 2023-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

The Deep Leakage from Gradient (DLG) attack has emerged as a prevalent and highly effective method for extracting sensitive training data by inspecting exchanged gradients. This approach poses a substantial threat to the privacy of individuals and organizations alike. This research presents a comprehensive analysis of the gradient leakage method when applied specifically to transformer-based models. Through meticulous examination, we showcase the capability to accurately recover data solely from gradients and rigorously investigate the conditions under which gradient attacks can be executed, providing compelling evidence. Furthermore, we reevaluate the approach of introducing additional noise on gradients as a protective measure against gradient attacks. To address this, we outline a theoretical proof that analyzes the associated privacy costs within the framework of differential privacy. Additionally, we affirm the convergence of the Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) algorithm under perturbed gradients. The primary objective of this study is to augment the understanding of gradient leakage attack and defense strategies while actively contributing to the development of privacy-preserving techniques specifically tailored for transformer-based models. By shedding light on the vulnerabilities and countermeasures associated with gradient leakage, this research aims to foster advancements in safeguarding sensitive data and upholding privacy in the context of transformer-based models.
Machine Translation for Ge'ez Language
Authors: Aman Kassahun Wassie
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Machine Translation, Transfer Learning, Translation

Machine translation (MT) for low-resource languages such as Ge'ez, an ancient language that is no longer the native language of any community, faces challenges such as out-of-vocabulary words, domain mismatches, and lack of sufficient labeled training data. In this work, we explore various methods to improve Ge'ez MT, including transfer-learning from related languages, optimizing shared vocabulary and token segmentation approaches, finetuning large pre-trained models, and using large language models (LLMs) for few-shot translation with fuzzy matches. We develop a multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) model based on languages relatedness, which brings an average performance improvement of about 4 BLEU compared to standard bilingual models. We also attempt to finetune the NLLB-200 model, one of the most advanced translation models available today, but find that it performs poorly with only 4k training samples for Ge'ez. Furthermore, we experiment with using GPT-3.5, a state-of-the-art LLM, for few-shot translation with fuzzy matches, which leverages embedding similarity-based retrieval to find context examples from a parallel corpus. We observe that GPT-3.5 achieves a remarkable BLEU score of 9.2 with no initial knowledge of Ge'ez, but still lower than the MNMT baseline of 15.2. Our work provides insights into the potential and limitations of different approaches for low-resource and ancient language MT.
Analysing the Impact of Removing Infrequent Words on Topic Quality in LDA Models
Authors: Victor Bystrov, Viktoriia Naboka-Krell, Anna Staszewska-Bystrova, Peter Winker
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00

An initial procedure in text-as-data applications is text preprocessing. One of the typical steps, which can substantially facilitate computations, consists in removing infrequent words believed to provide limited information about the corpus. Despite popularity of vocabulary pruning, not many guidelines on how to implement it are available in the literature. The aim of the paper is to fill this gap by examining the effects of removing infrequent words for the quality of topics estimated using Latent Dirichlet Allocation. The analysis is based on Monte Carlo experiments taking into account different criteria for infrequent terms removal and various evaluation metrics. The results indicate that pruning is beneficial and that the share of vocabulary which might be eliminated can be quite considerable.
SER_AMPEL: a multi-source dataset for speech emotion recognition of Italian older adults
Authors: Alessandra Grossi, Francesca Gasparini
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

In this paper, SER_AMPEL, a multi-source dataset for speech emotion recognition (SER) is presented. The peculiarity of the dataset is that it is collected with the aim of providing a reference for speech emotion recognition in case of Italian older adults. The dataset is collected following different protocols, in particular considering acted conversations, extracted from movies and TV series, and recording natural conversations where the emotions are elicited by proper questions. The evidence of the need for such a dataset emerges from the analysis of the state of the art. Preliminary considerations on the critical issues of SER are reported analyzing the classification results on a subset of the proposed dataset.
Controlled Text Generation via Language Model Arithmetic
Authors: Jasper Dekoninck, Marc Fischer, Luca Beurer-Kellner, Martin Vechev
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Text Generation

As Large Language Models (LLMs) are deployed more widely, customization with respect to vocabulary, style, and character becomes more important. In this work, we introduce model arithmetic, a novel inference framework for composing and biasing LLMs without the need for model (re)training or highly specific datasets. In addition, the framework allows for more precise control of generated text than direct prompting and prior controlled text generation (CTG) techniques. Using model arithmetic, we can express prior CTG techniques as simple formulas and naturally extend them to new and more effective formulations. Further, we show that speculative sampling, a technique for efficient LLM sampling, extends to our setting. This enables highly efficient text generation with multiple composed models with only marginal overhead over a single model. Our empirical evaluation demonstrates that model arithmetic allows fine-grained control of generated text while outperforming state-of-the-art on the task of toxicity reduction. We release an open source easy-to-use implementation of our framework at https://github.com/eth-sri/language-model-arithmetic.
DP-NMT: Scalable Differentially-Private Machine Translation
Authors: Timour Igamberdiev, Doan Nam Long Vu, Felix Künnecke, Zhuo Yu, Jannik Holmer, Ivan Habernal
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Privacy Preserving, Text Generation, Translation

Neural machine translation (NMT) is a widely popular text generation task, yet there is a considerable research gap in the development of privacy-preserving NMT models, despite significant data privacy concerns for NMT systems. Differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DP-SGD) is a popular method for training machine learning models with concrete privacy guarantees; however, the implementation specifics of training a model with DP-SGD are not always clarified in existing models, with differing software libraries used and code bases not always being public, leading to reproducibility issues. To tackle this, we introduce DP-NMT, an open-source framework for carrying out research on privacy-preserving NMT with DP-SGD, bringing together numerous models, datasets, and evaluation metrics in one systematic software package. Our goal is to provide a platform for researchers to advance the development of privacy-preserving NMT systems, keeping the specific details of the DP-SGD algorithm transparent and intuitive to implement. We run a set of experiments on datasets from both general and privacy-related domains to demonstrate our framework in use. We make our framework publicly available and welcome feedback from the community.
ÚFAL CorPipe at CRAC 2023: Larger Context Improves Multilingual Coreference Resolution
Authors: Milan Straka
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: coreference-resolution, Coreference Resolution, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We present CorPipe, the winning entry to the CRAC 2023 Shared Task on Multilingual Coreference Resolution. Our system is an improved version of our earlier multilingual coreference pipeline, and it surpasses other participants by a large margin of 4.5 percent points. CorPipe first performs mention detection, followed by coreference linking via an antecedent-maximization approach on the retrieved spans. Both tasks are trained jointly on all available corpora using a shared pretrained language model. Our main improvements comprise inputs larger than 512 subwords and changing the mention decoding to support ensembling. The source code is available at https://github.com/ufal/crac2023-corpipe.
Average Token Delay: A Duration-aware Latency Metric for Simultaneous Translation
Authors: Yasumasa Kano, Katsuhito Sudoh, Satoshi Nakamura
Date: 2023-11-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Simultaneous translation is a task in which the translation begins before the end of an input speech segment. Its evaluation should be conducted based on latency in addition to quality, and for users, the smallest possible amount of latency is preferable. Most existing metrics measure latency based on the start timings of partial translations and ignore their duration. This means such metrics do not penalize the latency caused by long translation output, which delays the comprehension of users and subsequent translations. In this work, we propose a novel latency evaluation metric for simultaneous translation called \emph{Average Token Delay} (ATD) that focuses on the duration of partial translations. We demonstrate its effectiveness through analyses simulating user-side latency based on Ear-Voice Span (EVS). In our experiment, ATD had the highest correlation with EVS among baseline latency metrics under most conditions.
Question Answering in Natural Language: the Special Case of Temporal Expressions
Authors: Armand Stricker
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: RANLP 2021 9
Tasks: Question Answering

Although general question answering has been well explored in recent years, temporal question answering is a task which has not received as much focus. Our work aims to leverage a popular approach used for general question answering, answer extraction, in order to find answers to temporal questions within a paragraph. To train our model, we propose a new dataset, inspired by SQuAD, specifically tailored to provide rich temporal information. We chose to adapt the corpus WikiWars, which contains several documents on history's greatest conflicts. Our evaluation shows that a deep learning model trained to perform pattern matching, often used in general question answering, can be adapted to temporal question answering, if we accept to ask questions whose answers must be directly present within a text.
Searching for Snippets of Open-Domain Dialogue in Task-Oriented Dialogue Datasets
Authors: Armand Stricker, Patrick Paroubek
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00

Most existing dialogue corpora and models have been designed to fit into 2 predominant categories : task-oriented dialogues portray functional goals, such as making a restaurant reservation or booking a plane ticket, while chit-chat/open-domain dialogues focus on holding a socially engaging talk with a user. However, humans tend to seamlessly switch between modes and even use chitchat to enhance task-oriented conversations. To bridge this gap, new datasets have recently been created, blending both communication modes into conversation examples. The approaches used tend to rely on adding chit-chat snippets to pre-existing, human-generated task-oriented datasets. Given the tendencies observed in humans, we wonder however if the latter do not \textit{already} hold chit-chat sequences. By using topic modeling and searching for topics which are most similar to a set of keywords related to social talk, we explore the training sets of Schema-Guided Dialogues and MultiWOZ. Our study shows that sequences related to social talk are indeed naturally present, motivating further research on ways chitchat is combined into task-oriented dialogues.
Enhancing Task-Oriented Dialogues with Chitchat: a Comparative Study Based on Lexical Diversity and Divergence
Authors: Armand Stricker, Patrick Paroubek
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

As a recent development, task-oriented dialogues (TODs) have been enriched with chitchat in an effort to make dialogues more diverse and engaging. This enhancement is particularly valuable as TODs are often confined to narrow domains, making the mitigation of repetitive and predictable responses a significant challenge. This paper presents a comparative analysis of three chitchat enhancements, aiming to identify the most effective approach in terms of diversity. Additionally, we quantify the divergence between the added chitchat, the original task-oriented language, and chitchat typically found in chitchat datasets, highlighting the top 20 divergent keywords for each comparison. Our findings drive a discussion on future enhancements for augmenting TODs, emphasizing the importance of grounding dialogues beyond the task to achieve more diverse and natural exchanges.
Efficient Trigger Word Insertion
Authors: Yueqi Zeng, Ziqiang Li, Pengfei Xia, Lei Liu, Bin Li
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: text-classification, Text Classification

With the boom in the natural language processing (NLP) field these years, backdoor attacks pose immense threats against deep neural network models. However, previous works hardly consider the effect of the poisoning rate. In this paper, our main objective is to reduce the number of poisoned samples while still achieving a satisfactory Attack Success Rate (ASR) in text backdoor attacks. To accomplish this, we propose an efficient trigger word insertion strategy in terms of trigger word optimization and poisoned sample selection. Extensive experiments on different datasets and models demonstrate that our proposed method can significantly improve attack effectiveness in text classification tasks. Remarkably, our approach achieves an ASR of over 90% with only 10 poisoned samples in the dirty-label setting and requires merely 1.5% of the training data in the clean-label setting.
MLLM-Bench: Evaluating Multimodal LLMs with Per-sample Criteria
Authors: Wentao Ge, Shunian Chen, Guiming Hardy Chen, Junying Chen, Zhihong Chen, Nuo Chen, Wenya Xie, Shuo Yan, Chenghao Zhu, Ziyue Lin, Song Dingjie, Xidong Wang, Anningzhe Gao, Zhang Zhiyi, Jianquan Li, Xiang Wan, Benyou Wang
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have broadened the scope of AI applications. Existing automatic evaluation methodologies for MLLMs are mainly limited in evaluating queries without considering user experiences, inadequately addressing the nuances of creative and associative multimodal tasks. However, the open-ended and subjective nature of such tasks poses a significant challenge to the evaluation methodology, where it is difficult to define the ground-truth answers for them. To this end, in our paper, we propose a new evaluation paradigm for MLLMs, which is evaluating MLLMs with per-sample criteria using potent MLLM as the judge. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of this paradigm, we design a benchmark, dubbed MLLM-Bench, by curating the evaluation samples across six comprehensive cognitive levels. We benchmark 21 popular MLLMs in a pairwise-comparison fashion, showing diverse performance across models. Moreover, the validity of our benchmark manifests itself in reaching 88.02% agreement with human evaluation. We contend that the proposed paradigm explores the potential of MLLMs as effective evaluation tools with the help of per-sample criteria. See online leaderboard at \url{https://mllm-bench.llmzoo.com}.
Exploring Methods for Cross-lingual Text Style Transfer: The Case of Text Detoxification
Authors: Daryna Dementieva, Daniil Moskovskiy, David Dale, Alexander Panchenko
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Style Transfer, Text Style Transfer

Text detoxification is the task of transferring the style of text from toxic to neutral. While here are approaches yielding promising results in monolingual setup, e.g., (Dale et al., 2021; Hallinan et al., 2022), cross-lingual transfer for this task remains a challenging open problem (Moskovskiy et al., 2022). In this work, we present a large-scale study of strategies for cross-lingual text detoxification -- given a parallel detoxification corpus for one language; the goal is to transfer detoxification ability to another language for which we do not have such a corpus. Moreover, we are the first to explore a new task where text translation and detoxification are performed simultaneously, providing several strong baselines for this task. Finally, we introduce new automatic detoxification evaluation metrics with higher correlations with human judgments than previous benchmarks. We assess the most promising approaches also with manual markup, determining the answer for the best strategy to transfer the knowledge of text detoxification between languages.
Some Like It Small: Czech Semantic Embedding Models for Industry Applications
Authors: Jiří Bednář, Jakub Náplava, Petra Barančíková, Ondřej Lisický
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Knowledge Distillation, Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding

This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.
Dialogue Quality and Emotion Annotations for Customer Support Conversations
Authors: John Mendonça, Patrícia Pereira, Miguel Menezes, Vera Cabarrão, Ana C. Farinha, Helena Moniz, João Paulo Carvalho, Alon Lavie, Isabel Trancoso
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diversity, Emotion Recognition, text-classification, Text Classification

Task-oriented conversational datasets often lack topic variability and linguistic diversity. However, with the advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) pretrained on extensive, multilingual and diverse text data, these limitations seem overcome. Nevertheless, their generalisability to different languages and domains in dialogue applications remains uncertain without benchmarking datasets. This paper presents a holistic annotation approach for emotion and conversational quality in the context of bilingual customer support conversations. By performing annotations that take into consideration the complete instances that compose a conversation, one can form a broader perspective of the dialogue as a whole. Furthermore, it provides a unique and valuable resource for the development of text classification models. To this end, we present benchmarks for Emotion Recognition and Dialogue Quality Estimation and show that further research is needed to leverage these models in a production setting.
Grammatical Error Correction via Mixed-Grained Weighted Training
Authors: Jiahao Li, Quan Wang, Chiwei Zhu, Zhendong Mao, Yongdong Zhang
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Grammatical Error Correction, Sentence

The task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to automatically correct grammatical errors in natural texts. Almost all previous works treat annotated training data equally, but inherent discrepancies in data are neglected. In this paper, the inherent discrepancies are manifested in two aspects, namely, accuracy of data annotation and diversity of potential annotations. To this end, we propose MainGEC, which designs token-level and sentence-level training weights based on inherent discrepancies in accuracy and potential diversity of data annotation, respectively, and then conducts mixed-grained weighted training to improve the training effect for GEC. Empirical evaluation shows that whether in the Seq2Seq or Seq2Edit manner, MainGEC achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the mixed-grained weighted training. Further ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of designed weights of both granularities in MainGEC.
DaG LLM ver 1.0: Pioneering Instruction-Tuned Language Modeling for Korean NLP
Authors: Dongjun Jang, Sangah Lee, Sungjoo Byun, Jinwoong Kim, Jean Seo, Minseok Kim, Soyeon Kim, Chaeyoung Oh, Jaeyoon Kim, Hyemi Jo, Hyopil Shin
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

This paper presents the DaG LLM (David and Goliath Large Language Model), a language model specialized for Korean and fine-tuned through Instruction Tuning across 41 tasks within 13 distinct categories.
Transformer-based Named Entity Recognition in Construction Supply Chain Risk Management in Australia
Authors: Milad Baghalzadeh Shishehgarkhaneh, Robert C. Moehler, Yihai Fang, Amer A. Hijazi, Hamed Aboutorab
Date: 2023-11-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Management, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

The construction industry in Australia is characterized by its intricate supply chains and vulnerability to myriad risks. As such, effective supply chain risk management (SCRM) becomes imperative. This paper employs different transformer models, and train for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the context of Australian construction SCRM. Utilizing NER, transformer models identify and classify specific risk-associated entities in news articles, offering a detailed insight into supply chain vulnerabilities. By analysing news articles through different transformer models, we can extract relevant entities and insights related to specific risk taxonomies local (milieu) to the Australian construction landscape. This research emphasises the potential of NLP-driven solutions, like transformer models, in revolutionising SCRM for construction in geo-media specific contexts.
Surpassing GPT-4 Medical Coding with a Two-Stage Approach
Authors: Zhichao Yang, Sanjit Singh Batra, Joel Stremmel, Eran Halperin
Date: 2023-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) show potential for clinical applications, such as clinical decision support and trial recommendations. However, the GPT-4 LLM predicts an excessive number of ICD codes for medical coding tasks, leading to high recall but low precision. To tackle this challenge, we introduce LLM-codex, a two-stage approach to predict ICD codes that first generates evidence proposals using an LLM and then employs an LSTM-based verification stage. The LSTM learns from both the LLM's high recall and human expert's high precision, using a custom loss function. Our model is the only approach that simultaneously achieves state-of-the-art results in medical coding accuracy, accuracy on rare codes, and sentence-level evidence identification to support coding decisions without training on human-annotated evidence according to experiments on the MIMIC dataset.