pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Bigger is not Always Better: The Effect of Context Size on Speech Pre-Training
Authors: Sean Robertson, Ewan Dunbar
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Self-Supervised Learning, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

It has been generally assumed in the automatic speech recognition (ASR) literature that it is better for models to have access to wider context windows. Yet, many of the potential reasons this might be true in the supervised setting do not necessarily transfer over to the case of unsupervised learning. We investigate how much context is necessary to achieve high-quality pre-trained acoustic models using self-supervised learning. We principally investigate contrastive predictive coding (CPC), which we adapt to be able to precisely control the amount of context visible to the model during training and inference. We find that phone discriminability in the resulting model representations peaks at around 40~ms of preceding context, and that having too much context (beyond around 320 ms) substantially degrades the quality of the representations. Surprisingly, we find that this pattern also transfers to supervised ASR when the pre-trained representations are used as frozen input features. Our results point to potential changes in the design of current upstream architectures to better facilitate a variety of downstream tasks.
Unsupervised Approach to Evaluate Sentence-Level Fluency: Do We Really Need Reference?
Authors: Gopichand Kanumolu, Lokesh Madasu, Pavan Baswani, Ananya Mukherjee, Manish Shrivastava
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Text Generation, Word Embeddings

Fluency is a crucial goal of all Natural Language Generation (NLG) systems. Widely used automatic evaluation metrics fall short in capturing the fluency of machine-generated text. Assessing the fluency of NLG systems poses a challenge since these models are not limited to simply reusing words from the input but may also generate abstractions. Existing reference-based fluency evaluations, such as word overlap measures, often exhibit weak correlations with human judgments. This paper adapts an existing unsupervised technique for measuring text fluency without the need for any reference. Our approach leverages various word embeddings and trains language models using Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) architectures. We also experiment with other available multilingual Language Models (LMs). To assess the performance of the models, we conduct a comparative analysis across 10 Indic languages, correlating the obtained fluency scores with human judgments. Our code and human-annotated benchmark test-set for fluency is available at https://github.com/AnanyaCoder/TextFluencyForIndicLanaguges.
CEScore: Simple and Efficient Confidence Estimation Model for Evaluating Split and Rephrase
Authors: AlMotasem Bellah Al Ajlouni, Jinlong Li
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Split and Rephrase

The split and rephrase (SR) task aims to divide a long, complex sentence into a set of shorter, simpler sentences that convey the same meaning. This challenging problem in NLP has gained increased attention recently because of its benefits as a pre-processing step in other NLP tasks. Evaluating quality of SR is challenging, as there no automatic metric fit to evaluate this task. In this work, we introduce CEScore, as novel statistical model to automatically evaluate SR task. By mimicking the way humans evaluate SR, CEScore provides 4 metrics (Sscore, Gscore, Mscore, and CEscore) to assess simplicity, grammaticality, meaning preservation, and overall quality, respectively. In experiments with 26 models, CEScore correlates strongly with human evaluations, achieving 0.98 in Spearman correlations at model-level. This underscores the potential of CEScore as a simple and effective metric for assessing the overall quality of SR models.
NLEBench+NorGLM: A Comprehensive Empirical Analysis and Benchmark Dataset for Generative Language Models in Norwegian
Authors: Peng Liu, Lemei Zhang, Terje Farup, Even W. Lauvrak, Jon Espen Ingvaldsen, Simen Eide, Jon Atle Gulla, Zhirong Yang
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Text Generation, Topic Classification

Norwegian, spoken by only 5 million population, is under-representative within the most impressive breakthroughs in NLP tasks. To the best of our knowledge, there has not yet been a comprehensive evaluation of the existing language models (LMs) on Norwegian generation tasks during the article writing process. To fill this gap, we 1) compiled the existing Norwegian dataset and pre-trained 4 Norwegian Open Language Models varied from parameter scales and architectures, collectively called NorGLM; 2) introduced a comprehensive benchmark, NLEBench, for evaluating natural language generation capabilities in Norwegian, encompassing translation and human annotation. Based on the investigation, we find that: 1) the mainstream, English-dominated LM GPT-3.5 has limited capability in understanding the Norwegian context; 2) the increase in model parameter scales demonstrates limited impact on the performance of downstream tasks when the pre-training dataset is constrained in size; 3) smaller models also demonstrate the reasoning capability through Chain-of-Thought; 4) a multi-task dataset that includes synergy tasks can be used to verify the generalizability of LLMs on natural language understanding and, meanwhile, test the interconnectedness of these NLP tasks. We share our resources and code for reproducibility under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Bridging Background Knowledge Gaps in Translation with Automatic Explicitation
Authors: Hyojung Han, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber, Marine Carpuat
Date: 2023-12-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Translation

Translations help people understand content written in another language. However, even correct literal translations do not fulfill that goal when people lack the necessary background to understand them. Professional translators incorporate explicitations to explain the missing context by considering cultural differences between source and target audiences. Despite its potential to help users, NLP research on explicitation is limited because of the dearth of adequate evaluation methods. This work introduces techniques for automatically generating explicitations, motivated by WikiExpl: a dataset that we collect from Wikipedia and annotate with human translators. The resulting explicitations are useful as they help answer questions more accurately in a multilingual question answering framework.
Challenges and Applications of Automated Extraction of Socio-political Events from Text (CASE 2023): Workshop and Shared Task Report
Authors: Ali Hürriyetoğlu, Hristo Tanev, Osman Mutlu, Surendrabikram Thapa, Fiona Anting Tan, Erdem Yörük
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction

We provide a summary of the sixth edition of the CASE workshop that is held in the scope of RANLP 2023. The workshop consists of regular papers, three keynotes, working papers of shared task participants, and shared task overview papers. This workshop series has been bringing together all aspects of event information collection across technical and social science fields. In addition to contributing to the progress in text based event extraction, the workshop provides a space for the organization of a multimodal event information collection task.
UCE-FID: Using Large Unlabeled, Medium Crowdsourced-Labeled, and Small Expert-Labeled Tweets for Foodborne Illness Detection
Authors: Ruofan Hu, Dongyu Zhang, Dandan Tao, Huayi Zhang, Hao Feng, Elke Rundensteiner
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00

Foodborne illnesses significantly impact public health. Deep learning surveillance applications using social media data aim to detect early warning signals. However, labeling foodborne illness-related tweets for model training requires extensive human resources, making it challenging to collect a sufficient number of high-quality labels for tweets within a limited budget. The severe class imbalance resulting from the scarcity of foodborne illness-related tweets among the vast volume of social media further exacerbates the problem. Classifiers trained on a class-imbalanced dataset are biased towards the majority class, making accurate detection difficult. To overcome these challenges, we propose EGAL, a deep learning framework for foodborne illness detection that uses small expert-labeled tweets augmented by crowdsourced-labeled and massive unlabeled data. Specifically, by leveraging tweets labeled by experts as a reward set, EGAL learns to assign a weight of zero to incorrectly labeled tweets to mitigate their negative influence. Other tweets receive proportionate weights to counter-balance the unbalanced class distribution. Extensive experiments on real-world \textit{TWEET-FID} data show that EGAL outperforms strong baseline models across different settings, including varying expert-labeled set sizes and class imbalance ratios. A case study on a multistate outbreak of Salmonella Typhimurium infection linked to packaged salad greens demonstrates how the trained model captures relevant tweets offering valuable outbreak insights. EGAL, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), has the potential to be deployed for real-time analysis of tweet streaming, contributing to foodborne illness outbreak surveillance efforts.
Enabling Quantum Natural Language Processing for Hindi Language
Authors: Naman Srivastava, Gaurang Belekar, Sunil Saumya, Aswath Babu H
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

Quantum Natural Language Processing (QNLP) is taking huge leaps in solving the shortcomings of classical Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and moving towards a more "Explainable" NLP system. The current literature around QNLP focuses primarily on implementing QNLP techniques in sentences in the English language. In this paper, we propose to enable the QNLP approach to HINDI, which is the third most spoken language in South Asia. We present the process of building the parameterized quantum circuits required to undertake QNLP on Hindi sentences. We use the pregroup representation of Hindi and the DisCoCat framework to draw sentence diagrams. Later, we translate these diagrams to Parameterised Quantum Circuits based on Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial (IQP) style ansatz. Using these parameterized quantum circuits allows one to train grammar and topic-aware sentence classifiers for the Hindi Language.
Here Is Not There: Measuring Entailment-Based Trajectory Similarity for Location-Privacy Protection and Beyond
Authors: Zilong Liu, Krzysztof Janowicz, Kitty Currier, Meilin Shi, Jinmeng Rao, Song Gao, Ling Cai, Anita Graser
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

While the paths humans take play out in social as well as physical space, measures to describe and compare their trajectories are carried out in abstract, typically Euclidean, space. When these measures are applied to trajectories of actual individuals in an application area, alterations that are inconsequential in abstract space may suddenly become problematic once overlaid with geographic reality. In this work, we present a different view on trajectory similarity by introducing a measure that utilizes logical entailment. This is an inferential perspective that considers facts as triple statements deduced from the social and environmental context in which the travel takes place, and their practical implications. We suggest a formalization of entailment-based trajectory similarity, measured as the overlapping proportion of facts, which are spatial relation statements in our case study. With the proposed measure, we evaluate LSTM-TrajGAN, a privacy-preserving trajectory-generation model. The entailment-based model evaluation reveals potential consequences of disregarding the rich structure of geographic space (e.g., miscalculated insurance risk due to regional shifts in our toy example). Our work highlights the advantage of applying logical entailment to trajectory-similarity reasoning for location-privacy protection and beyond.
Towards leveraging LLMs for Conditional QA
Authors: Syed-Amad Hussain, Parag Pravin Dakle, SaiKrishna Rallabandi, Preethi Raghavan
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Extractive Question-Answering, Question Answering, Retrieval

This study delves into the capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) in the challenging domain of conditional question-answering. Utilizing the Conditional Question Answering (CQA) dataset and focusing on generative models like T5 and UL2, we assess the performance of LLMs across diverse question types. Our findings reveal that fine-tuned LLMs can surpass the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in some cases, even without fully encoding all input context, with an increase of 7-8 points in Exact Match (EM) and F1 scores for Yes/No questions. However, these models encounter challenges in extractive question answering, where they lag behind the SOTA by over 10 points, and in mitigating the risk of injecting false information. A study with oracle-retrievers emphasizes the critical role of effective evidence retrieval, underscoring the necessity for advanced solutions in this area. Furthermore, we highlight the significant influence of evaluation metrics on performance assessments and advocate for a more comprehensive evaluation framework. The complexity of the task, the observed performance discrepancies, and the need for effective evidence retrieval underline the ongoing challenges in this field and underscore the need for future work focusing on refining training tasks and exploring prompt-based techniques to enhance LLM performance in conditional question-answering tasks.
TURead: An eye movement dataset of Turkish reading
Authors: Cengiz Acarturk, Aysegul Ozkan, Tugce Nur Pekcetin, Zuhal Ormanoglu, Bilal Kirkici
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloze Test, Sentence

In this study, we present TURead, an eye movement dataset of silent and oral sentence reading in Turkish, an agglutinative language with a shallow orthography understudied in reading research. TURead provides empirical data to investigate the relationship between morphology and oculomotor control. We employ a target-word approach in which target words are manipulated by word length and by the addition of two commonly used suffixes in Turkish. The dataset contains well-established eye movement variables; prelexical characteristics such as vowel harmony and bigram-trigram frequencies and word features, such as word length, predictability, frequency, eye voice span measures, Cloze test scores of the root word and suffix predictabilities, as well as the scores obtained from two working memory tests. Our findings on fixation parameters and word characteristics are in line with the patterns reported in the relevant literature.
End-to-End Speech-to-Text Translation: A Survey
Authors: Nivedita Sethiya, Chandresh Kumar Maurya
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Machine Translation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Speech-to-Text, Speech-to-Text Translation, Survey, Translation

Speech-to-text translation pertains to the task of converting speech signals in a language to text in another language. It finds its application in various domains, such as hands-free communication, dictation, video lecture transcription, and translation, to name a few. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), as well as Machine Translation(MT) models, play crucial roles in traditional ST translation, enabling the conversion of spoken language in its original form to written text and facilitating seamless cross-lingual communication. ASR recognizes spoken words, while MT translates the transcribed text into the target language. Such disintegrated models suffer from cascaded error propagation and high resource and training costs. As a result, researchers have been exploring end-to-end (E2E) models for ST translation. However, to our knowledge, there is no comprehensive review of existing works on E2E ST. The present survey, therefore, discusses the work in this direction. Our attempt has been to provide a comprehensive review of models employed, metrics, and datasets used for ST tasks, providing challenges and future research direction with new insights. We believe this review will be helpful to researchers working on various applications of ST models.
SCTc-TE: A Comprehensive Formulation and Benchmark for Temporal Event Forecasting
Authors: Yunshan Ma, Chenchen Ye, Zijian Wu, Xiang Wang, Yixin Cao, Liang Pang, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Temporal complex event forecasting aims to predict the future events given the observed events from history. Most formulations of temporal complex event are unstructured or without extensive temporal information, resulting in inferior representations and limited forecasting capabilities. To bridge these gaps, we innovatively introduce the formulation of Structured, Complex, and Time-complete temporal event (SCTc-TE). Following this comprehensive formulation, we develop a fully automated pipeline and construct a large-scale dataset named MidEast-TE from about 0.6 million news articles. This dataset focuses on the cooperation and conflict events among countries mainly in the MidEast region from 2015 to 2022. Not limited to the dataset construction, more importantly, we advance the forecasting methods by discriminating the crucial roles of various contextual information, i.e., local and global contexts. Thereby, we propose a novel method LoGo that is able to take advantage of both Local and Global contexts for SCTc-TE forecasting. We evaluate our proposed approach on both our proposed MidEast-TE dataset and the original GDELT-TE dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our forecasting model LoGo. The code and datasets are released via https://github.com/yecchen/GDELT-ComplexEvent.
Detection and Analysis of Stress-Related Posts in Reddit Acamedic Communities
Authors: Nazzere Oryngozha, Pakizar Shamoi, Ayan Igali
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00

Nowadays, the significance of monitoring stress levels and recognizing early signs of mental illness cannot be overstated. Automatic stress detection in text can proactively help manage stress and protect mental well-being. In today's digital era, social media platforms reflect the psychological well-being and stress levels within various communities. This study focuses on detecting and analyzing stress-related posts in Reddit academic communities. Due to online education and remote work, these communities have become central for academic discussions and support. We classify text as stressed or not using natural language processing and machine learning classifiers, with Dreaddit as our training dataset, which contains labeled data from Reddit. Next, we collect and analyze posts from various academic subreddits. We identified that the most effective individual feature for stress detection is the Bag of Words, paired with the Logistic Regression classifier, achieving a 77.78% accuracy rate and an F1 score of 0.79 on the DReaddit dataset. This combination also performs best in stress detection on human-annotated datasets, with a 72% accuracy rate. Our key findings reveal that posts and comments in professors Reddit communities are the most stressful, compared to other academic levels, including bachelor, graduate, and Ph.D. students. This research contributes to our understanding of the stress levels within academic communities. It can help academic institutions and online communities develop measures and interventions to address this issue effectively.
Large Language Models Are Zero-Shot Text Classifiers
Authors: Zhiqiang Wang, Yiran Pang, Yanbin Lin
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, text-classification, Text Classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Retrained large language models (LLMs) have become extensively used across various sub-disciplines of natural language processing (NLP). In NLP, text classification problems have garnered considerable focus, but still faced with some limitations related to expensive computational cost, time consumption, and robust performance to unseen classes. With the proposal of chain of thought prompting (CoT), LLMs can be implemented using zero-shot learning (ZSL) with the step by step reasoning prompts, instead of conventional question and answer formats. The zero-shot LLMs in the text classification problems can alleviate these limitations by directly utilizing pretrained models to predict both seen and unseen classes. Our research primarily validates the capability of GPT models in text classification. We focus on effectively utilizing prompt strategies to various text classification scenarios. Besides, we compare the performance of zero shot LLMs with other state of the art text classification methods, including traditional machine learning methods, deep learning methods, and ZSL methods. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of LLMs underscores their effectiveness as zero-shot text classifiers in three of the four datasets analyzed. The proficiency is especially advantageous for small businesses or teams that may not have extensive knowledge in text classification.
From Beginner to Expert: Modeling Medical Knowledge into General LLMs
Authors: Qiang Li, Xiaoyan Yang, Haowen Wang, Qin Wang, Lei Liu, Junjie Wang, Yang Zhang, Mingyuan Chu, Sen Hu, Yicheng Chen, Yue Shen, Cong Fan, Wangshu Zhang, Teng Xu, Jinjie Gu, Jing Zheng, Guannan Zhang Ant Group
Date: 2023-12-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Natural Language Understanding, Question Answering, Task 2

Recently, large language model (LLM) based artificial intelligence (AI) systems have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, these models face a significant challenge when it comes to sensitive applications, such as reasoning over medical knowledge and answering medical questions in a physician-like manner. Prior studies attempted to overcome this challenge by increasing the model size (>100B) to learn more general medical knowledge, while there is still room for improvement in LLMs with smaller-scale model sizes (<100B). In this work, we start from a pre-trained general LLM model (AntGLM-10B) and fine-tune it from a medical beginner towards a medical expert (called AntGLM-Med-10B), which leverages a 3-stage optimization procedure, i.e., general medical knowledge injection, medical domain instruction tuning, and specific medical task adaptation. Our contributions are threefold: (1) We specifically investigate how to adapt a pre-trained general LLM in medical domain, especially for a specific medical task. (2) We collect and construct large-scale medical datasets for each stage of the optimization process. These datasets encompass various data types and tasks, such as question-answering, medical reasoning, multi-choice questions, and medical conversations. (3) Specifically for multi-choice questions in the medical domain, we propose a novel Verification-of-Choice approach for prompting engineering, which significantly enhances the reasoning ability of LLMs. Remarkably, by combining the above approaches, our AntGLM-Med-10B model can outperform the most of LLMs on PubMedQA, including both general and medical LLMs, even when these LLMs have larger model size.