pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Topic-aware Summarization Framework with Different Modal Side Information
Authors: Xiuying Chen, Mingzhe Li, Shen Gao, Xin Cheng, Qiang Yang, Qishen Zhang, Xin Gao, Xiangliang Zhang
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Triplet

Automatic summarization plays an important role in the exponential document growth on the Web. On content websites such as CNN.com and WikiHow.com, there often exist various kinds of side information along with the main document for attention attraction and easier understanding, such as videos, images, and queries. Such information can be used for better summarization, as they often explicitly or implicitly mention the essence of the article. However, most of the existing side-aware summarization methods are designed to incorporate either single-modal or multi-modal side information, and cannot effectively adapt to each other. In this paper, we propose a general summarization framework, which can flexibly incorporate various modalities of side information. The main challenges in designing a flexible summarization model with side information include: (1) the side information can be in textual or visual format, and the model needs to align and unify it with the document into the same semantic space, (2) the side inputs can contain information from various aspects, and the model should recognize the aspects useful for summarization. To address these two challenges, we first propose a unified topic encoder, which jointly discovers latent topics from the document and various kinds of side information. The learned topics flexibly bridge and guide the information flow between multiple inputs in a graph encoder through a topic-aware interaction. We secondly propose a triplet contrastive learning mechanism to align the single-modal or multi-modal information into a unified semantic space, where the summary quality is enhanced by better understanding the document and side information. Results show that our model significantly surpasses strong baselines on three public single-modal or multi-modal benchmark summarization datasets.
From Alignment to Entailment: A Unified Textual Entailment Framework for Entity Alignment
Authors: Yu Zhao, Yike Wu, Xiangrui Cai, Ying Zhang, Haiwei Zhang, Xiaojie Yuan
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Entity Alignment, Knowledge Graphs, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Inference

Entity Alignment (EA) aims to find the equivalent entities between two Knowledge Graphs (KGs). Existing methods usually encode the triples of entities as embeddings and learn to align the embeddings, which prevents the direct interaction between the original information of the cross-KG entities. Moreover, they encode the relational triples and attribute triples of an entity in heterogeneous embedding spaces, which prevents them from helping each other. In this paper, we transform both triples into unified textual sequences, and model the EA task as a bi-directional textual entailment task between the sequences of cross-KG entities. Specifically, we feed the sequences of two entities simultaneously into a pre-trained language model (PLM) and propose two kinds of PLM-based entity aligners that model the entailment probability between sequences as the similarity between entities. Our approach captures the unified correlation pattern of two kinds of information between entities, and explicitly models the fine-grained interaction between original entity information. The experiments on five cross-lingual EA datasets show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art EA methods and enables the mutual enhancement of the heterogeneous information. Codes are available at https://github.com/OreOZhao/TEA.
RCOT: Detecting and Rectifying Factual Inconsistency in Reasoning by Reversing Chain-of-Thought
Authors: Tianci Xue, Ziqi Wang, Zhenhailong Wang, Chi Han, Pengfei Yu, Heng Ji
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Arithmetic Reasoning, GSM8K, Hallucination

Large language Models (LLMs) have achieved promising performance on arithmetic reasoning tasks by incorporating step-by-step chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. However, LLMs face challenges in maintaining factual consistency during reasoning, exhibiting tendencies to condition overlooking, question misinterpretation, and condition hallucination over given problems. Existing methods use coarse-grained feedback (e.g., whether the answer is correct) to improve factual consistency. In this work, we propose RCoT (Reversing Chain-of-Thought), a novel method to improve LLMs' reasoning abilities by automatically detecting and rectifying factual inconsistency in LLMs, generated solutions. To detect factual inconsistency, RCoT first asks LLMs to reconstruct the problem based on generated solutions. Then fine-grained comparisons between the original problem and the reconstructed problem expose the factual inconsistency in the original solutions. To rectify the solution, RCoT formulates detected factual inconsistency into fine-grained feedback to guide LLMs in revising solutions. Experimental results demonstrate improvements of RCoT over standard CoT, Self-Consistency and Self-Refine across seven arithmetic datasets. Moreover, we find that manually written fine-grained feedback can dramatically improve LLMs' reasoning abilities (e.g., ChatGPT reaches 94.6% accuracy on GSM8K), encouraging the community to further explore the fine-grained feedback generation methods.
Enhancing Personalized Dialogue Generation with Contrastive Latent Variables: Combining Sparse and Dense Persona
Authors: Yihong Tang, Bo wang, Miao Fang, Dongming Zhao, Kun Huang, Ruifang He, Yuexian Hou
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Generation

The personalized dialogue explores the consistent relationship between dialogue generation and personality. Existing personalized dialogue agents model persona profiles from three resources: sparse or dense persona descriptions and dialogue histories. However, sparse structured persona attributes are explicit but uninformative, dense persona texts contain rich persona descriptions with much noise, and dialogue history query is both noisy and uninformative for persona modeling. In this work, we combine the advantages of the three resources to obtain a richer and more accurate persona. We design a Contrastive Latent Variable-based model (CLV) that clusters the dense persona descriptions into sparse categories, which are combined with the history query to generate personalized responses. Experimental results on Chinese and English datasets demonstrate our model's superiority in personalization.
Extending Memory for Language Modelling
Authors: Anupiya Nugaliyadde
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding

Breakthroughs in deep learning and memory networks have made major advances in natural language understanding. Language is sequential and information carried through the sequence can be captured through memory networks. Learning the sequence is one of the key aspects in learning the language. However, memory networks are not capable of holding infinitely long sequences in their memories and are limited by various constraints such as the vanishing or exploding gradient problem. Therefore, natural language understanding models are affected when presented with long sequential text. We introduce Long Term Memory network (LTM) to learn from infinitely long sequences. LTM gives priority to the current inputs to allow it to have a high impact. Language modeling is an important factor in natural language understanding. LTM was tested in language modeling, which requires long term memory. LTM is tested on Penn Tree bank dataset, Google Billion Word dataset and WikiText-2 dataset. We compare LTM with other language models which require long term memory.
Analyzing and Reducing the Performance Gap in Cross-Lingual Transfer with Fine-tuning Slow and Fast
Authors: Yiduo Guo, Yaobo Liang, Dongyan Zhao, Bing Liu, Duan Nan
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Existing research has shown that a multilingual pre-trained language model fine-tuned with one (source) language also performs well on downstream tasks for non-source languages, even though no fine-tuning is done on these languages. However, there is a clear gap between the performance of the source language and that of the non-source languages. This paper analyzes the fine-tuning process, discovers when the performance gap changes and identifies which network weights affect the overall performance most. Additionally, the paper seeks to answer to what extent the gap can be reduced by reducing forgetting. Based on the analysis results, a method named Fine-tuning slow and fast with four training policies is proposed to address these issues. Experimental results show the proposed method outperforms baselines by a clear margin.
Phonetic and Prosody-aware Self-supervised Learning Approach for Non-native Fluency Scoring
Authors: Kaiqi Fu, Shaojun Gao, Shuju Shi, Xiaohai Tian, Wei Li, Zejun Ma
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Speech fluency/disfluency can be evaluated by analyzing a range of phonetic and prosodic features. Deep neural networks are commonly trained to map fluency-related features into the human scores. However, the effectiveness of deep learning-based models is constrained by the limited amount of labeled training samples. To address this, we introduce a self-supervised learning (SSL) approach that takes into account phonetic and prosody awareness for fluency scoring. Specifically, we first pre-train the model using a reconstruction loss function, by masking phones and their durations jointly on a large amount of unlabeled speech and text prompts. We then fine-tune the pre-trained model using human-annotated scoring data. Our experimental results, conducted on datasets such as Speechocean762 and our non-native datasets, show that our proposed method outperforms the baseline systems in terms of Pearson correlation coefficients (PCC). Moreover, we also conduct an ablation study to better understand the contribution of phonetic and prosody factors during the pre-training stage.
DUB: Discrete Unit Back-translation for Speech Translation
Authors: Dong Zhang, Rong Ye, Tom Ko, Mingxuan Wang, Yaqian Zhou
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Translation

How can speech-to-text translation (ST) perform as well as machine translation (MT)? The key point is to bridge the modality gap between speech and text so that useful MT techniques can be applied to ST. Recently, the approach of representing speech with unsupervised discrete units yields a new way to ease the modality problem. This motivates us to propose Discrete Unit Back-translation (DUB) to answer two questions: (1) Is it better to represent speech with discrete units than with continuous features in direct ST? (2) How much benefit can useful MT techniques bring to ST? With DUB, the back-translation technique can successfully be applied on direct ST and obtains an average boost of 5.5 BLEU on MuST-C En-De/Fr/Es. In the low-resource language scenario, our method achieves comparable performance to existing methods that rely on large-scale external data. Code and models are available at https://github.com/0nutation/DUB.
Comfort Foods and Community Connectedness: Investigating Diet Change during COVID-19 Using YouTube Videos on Twitter
Authors: Yelena Mejova, Lydia Manikonda
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Nutrition, Time Series Analysis

Unprecedented lockdowns at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic have drastically changed the routines of millions of people, potentially impacting important health-related behaviors. In this study, we use YouTube videos embedded in tweets about diet, exercise and fitness posted before and during COVID-19 to investigate the influence of the pandemic lockdowns on diet and nutrition. In particular, we examine the nutritional profile of the foods mentioned in the transcript, description and title of each video in terms of six macronutrients (protein, energy, fat, sodium, sugar, and saturated fat). These macronutrient values were further linked to demographics to assess if there are specific effects on those potentially having insufficient access to healthy sources of food. Interrupted time series analysis revealed a considerable shift in the aggregated macronutrient scores before and during COVID-19. In particular, whereas areas with lower incomes showed decrease in energy, fat, and saturated fat, those with higher percentage of African Americans showed an elevation in sodium. Word2Vec word similarities and odds ratio analysis suggested a shift from popular diets and lifestyle bloggers before the lockdowns to the interest in a variety of healthy foods, communal sharing of quick and easy recipes, as well as a new emphasis on comfort foods. To the best of our knowledge, this work is novel in terms of linking attention signals in tweets, content of videos, their nutrients profile, and aggregate demographics of the users. The insights made possible by this combination of resources are important for monitoring the secondary health effects of social distancing, and informing social programs designed to alleviate these effects.
Characterizing tradeoffs between teaching via language and demonstrations in multi-agent systems
Authors: Dhara Yu, Noah D. Goodman, Jesse Mu
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00

Humans teach others about the world through language and demonstration. When might one of these modalities be more effective than the other? In this work, we study the factors that modulate the effectiveness of language vs. demonstration using multi-agent systems to model human communication. Specifically, we train neural network agents to teach via language or demonstration in a grounded communication task, manipulating 1) the inherent difficulty of the task and 2) the competence of the teacher. We find that teaching by demonstration is more effective in the simplest settings, but language is more effective as task difficulty increases, due to its ability to generalize more effectively to unseen scenarios. Overall, these results provide converging evidence for a tradeoff between language and demonstration as teaching modalities in humans, and make the novel predictions that demonstration may be optimal for easy tasks, while language enables generalization in more challenging settings.
AutoTrial: Prompting Language Models for Clinical Trial Design
Authors: Zifeng Wang, Cao Xiao, Jimeng Sun
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Clinical trials are critical for drug development. Constructing the appropriate eligibility criteria (i.e., the inclusion/exclusion criteria for patient recruitment) is essential for the trial's success. Proper design of clinical trial protocols should consider similar precedent trials and their eligibility criteria to ensure sufficient patient coverage. In this paper, we present a method named AutoTrial to aid the design of clinical eligibility criteria using language models. It allows (1) controllable generation under instructions via a hybrid of discrete and neural prompting, (2) scalable knowledge incorporation via in-context learning, and (3) explicit reasoning chains to provide rationales for understanding the outputs. Experiments on over 70K clinical trials verify that AutoTrial generates high-quality criteria texts that are fluent and coherent and with high accuracy in capturing the relevant clinical concepts to the target trial. It is noteworthy that our method, with a much smaller parameter size, gains around 60% winning rate against the GPT-3.5 baselines via human evaluations.
MD3: The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues
Authors: Jacob Eisenstein, Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, Clara Rivera, Dorottya Demszky, Devyani Sharma
Date: 2023-05-19 00:00:00

We introduce a new dataset of conversational speech representing English from India, Nigeria, and the United States. The Multi-Dialect Dataset of Dialogues (MD3) strikes a new balance between open-ended conversational speech and task-oriented dialogue by prompting participants to perform a series of short information-sharing tasks. This facilitates quantitative cross-dialectal comparison, while avoiding the imposition of a restrictive task structure that might inhibit the expression of dialect features. Preliminary analysis of the dataset reveals significant differences in syntax and in the use of discourse markers. The dataset, which will be made publicly available with the publication of this paper, includes more than 20 hours of audio and more than 200,000 orthographically-transcribed tokens.
Automatic Generation of Conversational Interfaces for Tabular Data Analysis
Authors: Marcos Gomez-Vazquez, Jordi Cabot, Robert Clarisó
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Tabular data is the most common format to publish and exchange structured data online. A clear example is the growing number of open data portals published by public administrations. However, exploitation of these data sources is currently limited to technical people able to programmatically manipulate and digest such data. As an alternative, we propose the use of chatbots to offer a conversational interface to facilitate the exploration of tabular data sources, including support for data analytics questions that are responded via charts rendered by the chatbot. Moreover, our chatbots are automatically generated from the data source itself thanks to the instantiation of a configurable collection of conversation patterns matched to the chatbot intents and entities.
Collaborative Generative AI: Integrating GPT-k for Efficient Editing in Text-to-Image Generation
Authors: Wanrong Zhu, Xinyi Wang, Yujie Lu, Tsu-Jui Fu, Xin Eric Wang, Miguel Eckstein, William Yang Wang
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Text Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

The field of text-to-image (T2I) generation has garnered significant attention both within the research community and among everyday users. Despite the advancements of T2I models, a common issue encountered by users is the need for repetitive editing of input prompts in order to receive a satisfactory image, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Given the demonstrated text generation power of large-scale language models, such as GPT-k, we investigate the potential of utilizing such models to improve the prompt editing process for T2I generation. We conduct a series of experiments to compare the common edits made by humans and GPT-k, evaluate the performance of GPT-k in prompting T2I, and examine factors that may influence this process. We found that GPT-k models focus more on inserting modifiers while humans tend to replace words and phrases, which includes changes to the subject matter. Experimental results show that GPT-k are more effective in adjusting modifiers rather than predicting spontaneous changes in the primary subject matters. Adopting the edit suggested by GPT-k models may reduce the percentage of remaining edits by 20-30%.
Improving Toponym Resolution with Better Candidate Generation, Transformer-based Reranking, and Two-Stage Resolution
Authors: Zeyu Zhang, Steven Bethard
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Reranking, Retrieval, Toponym Resolution

Geocoding is the task of converting location mentions in text into structured data that encodes the geospatial semantics. We propose a new architecture for geocoding, GeoNorm. GeoNorm first uses information retrieval techniques to generate a list of candidate entries from the geospatial ontology. Then it reranks the candidate entries using a transformer-based neural network that incorporates information from the ontology such as the entry's population. This generate-and-rerank process is applied twice: first to resolve the less ambiguous countries, states, and counties, and second to resolve the remaining location mentions, using the identified countries, states, and counties as context. Our proposed toponym resolution framework achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets. Code and models are available at \url{https://github.com/clulab/geonorm}.
CHBias: Bias Evaluation and Mitigation of Chinese Conversational Language Models
Authors: Jiaxu Zhao, Meng Fang, Zijing Shi, Yitong Li, Ling Chen, Mykola Pechenizkiy
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation

\textit{\textbf{\textcolor{red}{Warning}:} This paper contains content that may be offensive or upsetting.} Pretrained conversational agents have been exposed to safety issues, exhibiting a range of stereotypical human biases such as gender bias. However, there are still limited bias categories in current research, and most of them only focus on English. In this paper, we introduce a new Chinese dataset, CHBias, for bias evaluation and mitigation of Chinese conversational language models. Apart from those previous well-explored bias categories, CHBias includes under-explored bias categories, such as ageism and appearance biases, which received less attention. We evaluate two popular pretrained Chinese conversational models, CDial-GPT and EVA2.0, using CHBias. Furthermore, to mitigate different biases, we apply several debiasing methods to the Chinese pretrained models. Experimental results show that these Chinese pretrained models are potentially risky for generating texts that contain social biases, and debiasing methods using the proposed dataset can make response generation less biased while preserving the models' conversational capabilities.
Reasoning Implicit Sentiment with Chain-of-Thought Prompting
Authors: Hao Fei, Bobo Li, Qian Liu, Lidong Bing, Fei Li, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Sentiment Analysis

While sentiment analysis systems try to determine the sentiment polarities of given targets based on the key opinion expressions in input texts, in implicit sentiment analysis (ISA) the opinion cues come in an implicit and obscure manner. Thus detecting implicit sentiment requires the common-sense and multi-hop reasoning ability to infer the latent intent of opinion. Inspired by the recent chain-of-thought (CoT) idea, in this work we introduce a Three-hop Reasoning (THOR) CoT framework to mimic the human-like reasoning process for ISA. We design a three-step prompting principle for THOR to step-by-step induce the implicit aspect, opinion, and finally the sentiment polarity. Our THOR+Flan-T5 (11B) pushes the state-of-the-art (SoTA) by over 6% F1 on supervised setup. More strikingly, THOR+GPT3 (175B) boosts the SoTA by over 50% F1 on zero-shot setting. Our code is open at https://github.com/scofield7419/THOR-ISA.
Computational thematics: Comparing algorithms for clustering the genres of literary fiction
Authors: Oleg Sobchuk, Artjoms Šeļa
Date: 2023-05-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

What are the best methods of capturing thematic similarity between literary texts? Knowing the answer to this question would be useful for automatic clustering of book genres, or any other thematic grouping. This paper compares a variety of algorithms for unsupervised learning of thematic similarities between texts, which we call "computational thematics". These algorithms belong to three steps of analysis: text preprocessing, extraction of text features, and measuring distances between the lists of features. Each of these steps includes a variety of options. We test all the possible combinations of these options: every combination of algorithms is given a task to cluster a corpus of books belonging to four pre-tagged genres of fiction. This clustering is then validated against the "ground truth" genre labels. Such comparison of algorithms allows us to learn the best and the worst combinations for computational thematic analysis. To illustrate the sharp difference between the best and the worst methods, we then cluster 5000 random novels from the HathiTrust corpus of fiction.