pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Code Generation
Authors: Swapnil Sharma, Nikita Anand, Kranthi Kiran G. V
Date: 2023-04-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Decoder, HumanEval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

Large language models pre-trained for code generation can generate high-quality short code but often struggle with generating coherent long code and understanding higher-level or system-level specifications. This issue is also observed in language modeling for long text generation, and one proposed solution is the use of a latent stochastic process. This approach involves generating a document plan and then producing text that is consistent with it. In this study, we investigate whether this technique can be applied to code generation to improve coherence. We base our proposed encoder and decoder on the pre-trained GPT-2 based CodeParrot model and utilize the APPS dataset for training. We evaluate our results using the HumanEval benchmark and observe that the modified Time Control model performs similarly to CodeParrot on this evaluation.
Accurate and Definite Mutational Effect Prediction with Lightweight Equivariant Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Bingxin Zhou, Outongyi Lv, Kai Yi, Xinye Xiong, Pan Tan, Liang Hong, Yu Guang Wang
Date: 2023-04-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Directed evolution as a widely-used engineering strategy faces obstacles in finding desired mutants from the massive size of candidate modifications. While deep learning methods learn protein contexts to establish feasible searching space, many existing models are computationally demanding and fail to predict how specific mutational tests will affect a protein's sequence or function. This research introduces a lightweight graph representation learning scheme that efficiently analyzes the microenvironment of wild-type proteins and recommends practical higher-order mutations exclusive to the user-specified protein and function of interest. Our method enables continuous improvement of the inference model by limited computational resources and a few hundred mutational training samples, resulting in accurate prediction of variant effects that exhibit near-perfect correlation with the ground truth across deep mutational scanning assays of 19 proteins. With its affordability and applicability to both computer scientists and biochemical laboratories, our solution offers a wide range of benefits that make it an ideal choice for the community.
Prak: An automatic phonetic alignment tool for Czech
Authors: Václav Hanžl, Adléta Hanžlová
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Labeling speech down to the identity and time boundaries of phones is a labor-intensive part of phonetic research. To simplify this work, we created a free open-source tool generating phone sequences from Czech text and time-aligning them with audio. Low architecture complexity makes the design approachable for students of phonetics. Acoustic model ReLU NN with 56k weights was trained using PyTorch on small CommonVoice data. Alignment and variant selection decoder is implemented in Python with matrix library. A Czech pronunciation generator is composed of simple rule-based blocks capturing the logic of the language where possible, allowing modification of transcription approach details. Compared to tools used until now, data preparation efficiency improved, the tool is usable on Mac, Linux and Windows in Praat GUI or command line, achieves mostly correct pronunciation variant choice including glottal stop detection, algorithmically captures most of Czech assimilation logic and is both didactic and practical.
LED: A Dataset for Life Event Extraction from Dialogs
Authors: Yi-Pei Chen, An-Zi Yen, Hen-Hsen Huang, Hideki Nakayama, Hsin-Hsi Chen
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Extraction, Relation Extraction

Lifelogging has gained more attention due to its wide applications, such as personalized recommendations or memory assistance. The issues of collecting and extracting personal life events have emerged. People often share their life experiences with others through conversations. However, extracting life events from conversations is rarely explored. In this paper, we present Life Event Dialog, a dataset containing fine-grained life event annotations on conversational data. In addition, we initiate a novel conversational life event extraction task and differentiate the task from the public event extraction or the life event extraction from other sources like microblogs. We explore three information extraction (IE) frameworks to address the conversational life event extraction task: OpenIE, relation extraction, and event extraction. A comprehensive empirical analysis of the three baselines is established. The results suggest that the current event extraction model still struggles with extracting life events from human daily conversations. Our proposed life event dialog dataset and in-depth analysis of IE frameworks will facilitate future research on life event extraction from conversations.
VECO 2.0: Cross-lingual Language Model Pre-training with Multi-granularity Contrastive Learning
Authors: Zhen-Ru Zhang, Chuanqi Tan, Songfang Huang, Fei Huang
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Sentence

Recent studies have demonstrated the potential of cross-lingual transferability by training a unified Transformer encoder for multiple languages. In addition to involving the masked language model objective, existing cross-lingual pre-training works leverage sentence-level contrastive learning or plugs in extra cross-attention module to complement the insufficient capabilities of cross-lingual alignment. Nonetheless, synonym pairs residing in bilingual corpus are not exploited and aligned, which is more crucial than sentence interdependence establishment for token-level tasks. In this work, we propose a cross-lingual pre-trained model VECO~2.0 based on contrastive learning with multi-granularity alignments. Specifically, the sequence-to-sequence alignment is induced to maximize the similarity of the parallel pairs and minimize the non-parallel pairs. Then, token-to-token alignment is integrated to bridge the gap between synonymous tokens excavated via the thesaurus dictionary from the other unpaired tokens in a bilingual instance. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for cross-lingual model pre-training on the XTREME benchmark.
Political corpus creation through automatic speech recognition on EU debates
Authors: Hugo de Vos, Suzan Verberne
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Domain Adaptation, Language Modelling, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In this paper, we present a transcribed corpus of the LIBE committee of the EU parliament, totalling 3.6 Million running words. The meetings of parliamentary committees of the EU are a potentially valuable source of information for political scientists but the data is not readily available because only disclosed as speech recordings together with limited metadata. The meetings are in English, partly spoken by non-native speakers, and partly spoken by interpreters. We investigated the most appropriate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model to create an accurate text transcription of the audio recordings of the meetings in order to make their content available for research and analysis. We focused on the unsupervised domain adaptation of the ASR pipeline. Building on the transformer-based Wav2vec2.0 model, we experimented with multiple acoustic models, language models and the addition of domain-specific terms. We found that a domain-specific acoustic model and a domain-specific language model give substantial improvements to the ASR output, reducing the word error rate (WER) from 28.22 to 17.95. The use of domain-specific terms in the decoding stage did not have a positive effect on the quality of the ASR in terms of WER. Initial topic modelling results indicated that the corpus is useful for downstream analysis tasks. We release the resulting corpus and our analysis pipeline for future research.
An Empirical Study of Multitask Learning to Improve Open Domain Dialogue Systems
Authors: Mehrdad Farahani, Richard Johansson
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Dialogue Generation

Autoregressive models used to generate responses in open-domain dialogue systems often struggle to take long-term context into account and to maintain consistency over a dialogue. Previous research in open-domain dialogue generation has shown that the use of \emph{auxiliary tasks} can introduce inductive biases that encourage the model to improve these qualities. However, most previous research has focused on encoder-only or encoder/decoder models, while the use of auxiliary tasks in \emph{decoder-only} autoregressive models is under-explored. This paper describes an investigation where four different auxiliary tasks are added to small and medium-sized GPT-2 models fine-tuned on the PersonaChat and DailyDialog datasets. The results show that the introduction of the new auxiliary tasks leads to small but consistent improvement in evaluations of the investigated models.
A Comparative Study between Full-Parameter and LoRA-based Fine-Tuning on Chinese Instruction Data for Instruction Following Large Language Model
Authors: Xianghui Sun, Yunjie Ji, Baochang Ma, Xiangang Li
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recently, the instruction-tuning of large language models is a crucial area of research in the field of natural language processing. Due to resource and cost limitations, several researchers have employed parameter-efficient tuning techniques, such as LoRA, for instruction tuning, and have obtained encouraging results In comparison to full-parameter fine-tuning, LoRA-based tuning demonstrates salient benefits in terms of training costs. In this study, we undertook experimental comparisons between full-parameter fine-tuning and LoRA-based tuning methods, utilizing LLaMA as the base model. The experimental results show that the selection of the foundational model, training dataset scale, learnable parameter quantity, and model training cost are all important factors. We hope that the experimental conclusions of this paper can provide inspiration for training large language models, especially in the field of Chinese, and help researchers find a better trade-off strategy between training cost and model performance. To facilitate the reproduction of the paper's results, the dataset, model and code will be released.
ERTIM@MC2: Diversified Argumentative Tweets Retrieval
Authors: Kévin Deturck, Parantapa Goswami, Damien Nouvel, Frédérique Segond
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Retrieval, Task 2

In this paper, we present our participation to CLEF MC2 2018 edition for the task 2 Mining opinion argumentation. It consists in detecting the most argumentative and diverse Tweets about some festivals in English and French from a massive multilingual collection. We measure argumentativity of a Tweet computing the amount of argumentation compounds it contains. We consider argumentation compounds as a combination between opinion expression and its support with facts and a particular structuration. Regarding diversity, we consider the amount of festival aspects covered by Tweets. An initial step filters the original dataset to fit the language and topic requirements of the task. Then, we compute and integrate linguistic descriptors to detect claims and their respective justifications in Tweets. The final step extracts the most diverse arguments by clustering Tweets according to their textual content and selecting the most argumentative ones from each cluster. We conclude the paper describing the different ways we combined the descriptors among the different runs we submitted and discussing their results.
A Question-Answering Approach to Key Value Pair Extraction from Form-like Document Images
Authors: Kai Hu, Zhuoyuan Wu, Zhuoyao Zhong, WeiHong Lin, Lei Sun, Qiang Huo
Date: 2023-04-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Form, Key-value Pair Extraction, Prediction, Question Answering

In this paper, we present a new question-answering (QA) based key-value pair extraction approach, called KVPFormer, to robustly extracting key-value relationships between entities from form-like document images. Specifically, KVPFormer first identifies key entities from all entities in an image with a Transformer encoder, then takes these key entities as \textbf{questions} and feeds them into a Transformer decoder to predict their corresponding \textbf{answers} (i.e., value entities) in parallel. To achieve higher answer prediction accuracy, we propose a coarse-to-fine answer prediction approach further, which first extracts multiple answer candidates for each identified question in the coarse stage and then selects the most likely one among these candidates in the fine stage. In this way, the learning difficulty of answer prediction can be effectively reduced so that the prediction accuracy can be improved. Moreover, we introduce a spatial compatibility attention bias into the self-attention/cross-attention mechanism for \Ours{} to better model the spatial interactions between entities. With these new techniques, our proposed \Ours{} achieves state-of-the-art results on FUNSD and XFUND datasets, outperforming the previous best-performing method by 7.2\% and 13.2\% in F1 score, respectively.
Towards Better Instruction Following Language Models for Chinese: Investigating the Impact of Training Data and Evaluation
Authors: Yunjie Ji, Yan Gong, Yong Deng, Yiping Peng, Qiang Niu, Baochang Ma, Xiangang Li
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Recently, significant public efforts have been directed towards developing low-cost models with capabilities akin to ChatGPT, thereby fostering the growth of open-source conversational models. However, there remains a scarcity of comprehensive and in-depth evaluations of these models' performance. In this study, we examine the influence of training data factors, including quantity, quality, and linguistic distribution, on model performance. Our analysis is grounded in several publicly accessible, high-quality instruction datasets, as well as our own Chinese multi-turn conversations. We assess various models using a evaluation set of 1,000 samples, encompassing nine real-world scenarios. Our goal is to supplement manual evaluations with quantitative analyses, offering valuable insights for the continued advancement of open-source chat models. Furthermore, to enhance the performance and training and inference efficiency of models in the Chinese domain, we extend the vocabulary of LLaMA - the model with the closest open-source performance to proprietary language models like GPT-3 - and conduct secondary pre-training on 3.4B Chinese words. We make our model, data, as well as code publicly available.
ChatPLUG: Open-Domain Generative Dialogue System with Internet-Augmented Instruction Tuning for Digital Human
Authors: Junfeng Tian, Hehong Chen, Guohai Xu, Ming Yan, Xing Gao, Jianhai Zhang, Chenliang Li, Jiayi Liu, Wenshen Xu, Haiyang Xu, Qi Qian, Wei Wang, Qinghao Ye, Jiejing Zhang, Ji Zhang, Fei Huang, Jingren Zhou
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: World Knowledge

In this paper, we present ChatPLUG, a Chinese open-domain dialogue system for digital human applications that instruction finetunes on a wide range of dialogue tasks in a unified internet-augmented format. Different from other open-domain dialogue models that focus on large-scale pre-training and scaling up model size or dialogue corpus, we aim to build a powerful and practical dialogue system for digital human with diverse skills and good multi-task generalization by internet-augmented instruction tuning. To this end, we first conduct large-scale pre-training on both common document corpus and dialogue data with curriculum learning, so as to inject various world knowledge and dialogue abilities into ChatPLUG. Then, we collect a wide range of dialogue tasks spanning diverse features of knowledge, personality, multi-turn memory, and empathy, on which we further instruction tune \modelname via unified natural language instruction templates. External knowledge from an internet search is also used during instruction finetuning for alleviating the problem of knowledge hallucinations. We show that \modelname outperforms state-of-the-art Chinese dialogue systems on both automatic and human evaluation, and demonstrates strong multi-task generalization on a variety of text understanding and generation tasks. In addition, we deploy \modelname to real-world applications such as Smart Speaker and Instant Message applications with fast inference. Our models and code will be made publicly available on ModelScope: https://modelscope.cn/models/damo/ChatPLUG-3.7B and Github: https://github.com/X-PLUG/ChatPLUG .
The language of sounds unheard: Exploring musical timbre semantics of large language models
Authors: Kai Siedenburg, Charalampos Saitis
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Semantic dimensions of sound have been playing a central role in understanding the nature of auditory sensory experience as well as the broader relation between perception, language, and meaning. Accordingly, and given the recent proliferation of large language models (LLMs), here we asked whether such models exhibit an organisation of perceptual semantics similar to those observed in humans. Specifically, we prompted ChatGPT, a chatbot based on a state-of-the-art LLM, to rate musical instrument sounds on a set of 20 semantic scales. We elicited multiple responses in separate chats, analogous to having multiple human raters. ChatGPT generated semantic profiles that only partially correlated with human ratings, yet showed robust agreement along well-known psychophysical dimensions of musical sounds such as brightness (bright-dark) and pitch height (deep-high). Exploratory factor analysis suggested the same dimensionality but different spatial configuration of a latent factor space between the chatbot and human ratings. Unexpectedly, the chatbot showed degrees of internal variability that were comparable in magnitude to that of human ratings. Our work highlights the potential of LLMs to capture salient dimensions of human sensory experience.
EasyNER: A Customizable Easy-to-Use Pipeline for Deep Learning- and Dictionary-based Named Entity Recognition from Medical Text
Authors: Rafsan Ahmed, Petter Berntsson, Alexander Skafte, Salma Kazemi Rashed, Marcus Klang, Adam Barvesten, Ola Olde, William Lindholm, Antton Lamarca Arrizabalaga, Pierre Nugues, Sonja Aits
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Background Medical research generates millions of publications and it is a great challenge for researchers to utilize this information in full since its scale and complexity greatly surpasses human reading capabilities. Automated text mining can help extract and connect information spread across this large body of literature but this technology is not easily accessible to life scientists. Results Here, we developed an easy-to-use end-to-end pipeline for deep learning- and dictionary-based named entity recognition (NER) of typical entities found in medical research articles, including diseases, cells, chemicals, genes/proteins, and species. The pipeline can access and process large medical research article collections (PubMed, CORD-19) or raw text and incorporates a series of deep learning models fine-tuned on the HUNER corpora collection. In addition, the pipeline can perform dictionary-based NER related to COVID-19 and other medical topics. Users can also load their own NER models and dictionaries to include additional entities. The output consists of publication-ready ranked lists and graphs of detected entities and files containing the annotated texts. An associated script allows rapid inspection of the results for specific entities of interest. As model use cases, the pipeline was deployed on two collections of autophagy-related abstracts from PubMed and on the CORD19 dataset, a collection of 764 398 research article abstracts related to COVID-19. Conclusions The NER pipeline we present is applicable in a variety of medical research settings and makes customizable text mining accessible to life scientists.
SikuGPT: A Generative Pre-trained Model for Intelligent Information Processing of Ancient Texts from the Perspective of Digital Humanities
Authors: Liu Chang, Wang Dongbo, Zhao Zhixiao, Hu Die, Wu Mengcheng, Lin Litao, Shen Si, Li Bin, Liu Jiangfeng, Zhang Hai, Zhao Lianzheng
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cultural Vocal Bursts Intensity Prediction, text-classification, Text Classification, Translation

The rapid advance in artificial intelligence technology has facilitated the prosperity of digital humanities research. Against such backdrop, research methods need to be transformed in the intelligent processing of ancient texts, which is a crucial component of digital humanities research, so as to adapt to new development trends in the wave of AIGC. In this study, we propose a GPT model called SikuGPT based on the corpus of Siku Quanshu. The model's performance in tasks such as intralingual translation and text classification exceeds that of other GPT-type models aimed at processing ancient texts. SikuGPT's ability to process traditional Chinese ancient texts can help promote the organization of ancient information and knowledge services, as well as the international dissemination of Chinese ancient culture.
Syntactic Complexity Identification, Measurement, and Reduction Through Controlled Syntactic Simplification
Authors: Muhammad Salman, Armin Haller, Sergio J. Rodríguez Méndez
Date: 2023-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Sentence, Split and Rephrase, Text Simplification

Text simplification is one of the domains in Natural Language Processing (NLP) that offers an opportunity to understand the text in a simplified manner for exploration. However, it is always hard to understand and retrieve knowledge from unstructured text, which is usually in the form of compound and complex sentences. There are state-of-the-art neural network-based methods to simplify the sentences for improved readability while replacing words with plain English substitutes and summarising the sentences and paragraphs. In the Knowledge Graph (KG) creation process from unstructured text, summarising long sentences and substituting words is undesirable since this may lead to information loss. However, KG creation from text requires the extraction of all possible facts (triples) with the same mentions as in the text. In this work, we propose a controlled simplification based on the factual information in a sentence, i.e., triple. We present a classical syntactic dependency-based approach to split and rephrase a compound and complex sentence into a set of simplified sentences. This simplification process will retain the original wording with a simple structure of possible domain facts in each sentence, i.e., triples. The paper also introduces an algorithm to identify and measure a sentence's syntactic complexity (SC), followed by reduction through a controlled syntactic simplification process. Last, an experiment for a dataset re-annotation is also conducted through GPT3; we aim to publish this refined corpus as a resource. This work is accepted and presented in International workshop on Learning with Knowledge Graphs (IWLKG) at WSDM-2023 Conference. The code and data is available at www.github.com/sallmanm/SynSim.