pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Boundary Offset Prediction Network for Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Minghao Tang, Yongquan He, Yongxiu Xu, Hongbo Xu, Wenyuan Zhang, Yang Lin
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Prediction

Named entity recognition (NER) is a fundamental task in natural language processing that aims to identify and classify named entities in text. However, span-based methods for NER typically assign entity types to text spans, resulting in an imbalanced sample space and neglecting the connections between non-entity and entity spans. To address these issues, we propose a novel approach for NER, named the Boundary Offset Prediction Network (BOPN), which predicts the boundary offsets between candidate spans and their nearest entity spans. By leveraging the guiding semantics of boundary offsets, BOPN establishes connections between non-entity and entity spans, enabling non-entity spans to function as additional positive samples for entity detection. Furthermore, our method integrates entity type and span representations to generate type-aware boundary offsets instead of using entity types as detection targets. We conduct experiments on eight widely-used NER datasets, and the results demonstrate that our proposed BOPN outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
A Review of Reinforcement Learning for Natural Language Processing, and Applications in Healthcare
Authors: Ying Liu, Haozhu Wang, Huixue Zhou, Mingchen Li, Yu Hou, Sicheng Zhou, Fang Wang, Rama Hoetzlein, Rui Zhang
Date: 2023-10-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Machine Translation, Question Answering, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling, Text Summarization, Translation

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful approach for tackling complex medical decision-making problems such as treatment planning, personalized medicine, and optimizing the scheduling of surgeries and appointments. It has gained significant attention in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to its ability to learn optimal strategies for tasks such as dialogue systems, machine translation, and question-answering. This paper presents a review of the RL techniques in NLP, highlighting key advancements, challenges, and applications in healthcare. The review begins by visualizing a roadmap of machine learning and its applications in healthcare. And then it explores the integration of RL with NLP tasks. We examined dialogue systems where RL enables the learning of conversational strategies, RL-based machine translation models, question-answering systems, text summarization, and information extraction. Additionally, ethical considerations and biases in RL-NLP systems are addressed.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Enhanced Product Descriptions in eCommerce
Authors: Jianghong Zhou, Bo Liu, Jhalak Nilesh Acharya Yao Hong, Kuang-Chih Lee, Musen Wen
Date: 2023-10-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling

In the dynamic field of eCommerce, the quality and comprehensiveness of product descriptions are pivotal for enhancing search visibility and customer engagement. Effective product descriptions can address the 'cold start' problem, align with market trends, and ultimately lead to increased click-through rates. Traditional methods for crafting these descriptions often involve significant human effort and may lack both consistency and scalability. This paper introduces a novel methodology for automating product description generation using the LLAMA 2.0 7B language model. We train the model on a dataset of authentic product descriptions from Walmart, one of the largest eCommerce platforms. The model is then fine-tuned for domain-specific language features and eCommerce nuances to enhance its utility in sales and user engagement. We employ multiple evaluation metrics, including NDCG, customer click-through rates, and human assessments, to validate the effectiveness of our approach. Our findings reveal that the system is not only scalable but also significantly reduces the human workload involved in creating product descriptions. This study underscores the considerable potential of large language models like LLAMA 2.0 7B in automating and optimizing various facets of eCommerce platforms, offering significant business impact, including improved search functionality and increased sales.
Overview of the CLAIMSCAN-2023: Uncovering Truth in Social Media through Claim Detection and Identification of Claim Spans
Authors: Megha Sundriyal, Md Shad Akhtar, Tanmoy Chakraborty
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Misinformation

A significant increase in content creation and information exchange has been made possible by the quick development of online social media platforms, which has been very advantageous. However, these platforms have also become a haven for those who disseminate false information, propaganda, and fake news. Claims are essential in forming our perceptions of the world, but sadly, they are frequently used to trick people by those who spread false information. To address this problem, social media giants employ content moderators to filter out fake news from the actual world. However, the sheer volume of information makes it difficult to identify fake news effectively. Therefore, it has become crucial to automatically identify social media posts that make such claims, check their veracity, and differentiate between credible and false claims. In response, we presented CLAIMSCAN in the 2023 Forum for Information Retrieval Evaluation (FIRE'2023). The primary objectives centered on two crucial tasks: Task A, determining whether a social media post constitutes a claim, and Task B, precisely identifying the words or phrases within the post that form the claim. Task A received 40 registrations, demonstrating a strong interest and engagement in this timely challenge. Meanwhile, Task B attracted participation from 28 teams, highlighting its significance in the digital era of misinformation.
Fusing Temporal Graphs into Transformers for Time-Sensitive Question Answering
Authors: Xin Su, Phillip Howard, Nagib Hakim, Steven Bethard
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Temporal Information Extraction

Answering time-sensitive questions from long documents requires temporal reasoning over the times in questions and documents. An important open question is whether large language models can perform such reasoning solely using a provided text document, or whether they can benefit from additional temporal information extracted using other systems. We address this research question by applying existing temporal information extraction systems to construct temporal graphs of events, times, and temporal relations in questions and documents. We then investigate different approaches for fusing these graphs into Transformer models. Experimental results show that our proposed approach for fusing temporal graphs into input text substantially enhances the temporal reasoning capabilities of Transformer models with or without fine-tuning. Additionally, our proposed method outperforms various graph convolution-based approaches and establishes a new state-of-the-art performance on SituatedQA and three splits of TimeQA.
Test Suites Task: Evaluation of Gender Fairness in MT with MuST-SHE and INES
Authors: Beatrice Savoldi, Marco Gaido, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: de-en, Fairness

As part of the WMT-2023 "Test suites" shared task, in this paper we summarize the results of two test suites evaluations: MuST-SHE-WMT23 and INES. By focusing on the en-de and de-en language pairs, we rely on these newly created test suites to investigate systems' ability to translate feminine and masculine gender and produce gender-inclusive translations. Furthermore we discuss metrics associated with our test suites and validate them by means of human evaluations. Our results indicate that systems achieve reasonable and comparable performance in correctly translating both feminine and masculine gender forms for naturalistic gender phenomena. Instead, the generation of inclusive language forms in translation emerges as a challenging task for all the evaluated MT models, indicating room for future improvements and research on the topic.
Japanese SimCSE Technical Report
Authors: Hayato Tsukagoshi, Ryohei Sasano, Koichi Takeda
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence, Sentence Embedding, Sentence-Embedding, Sentence Embeddings

We report the development of Japanese SimCSE, Japanese sentence embedding models fine-tuned with SimCSE. Since there is a lack of sentence embedding models for Japanese that can be used as a baseline in sentence embedding research, we conducted extensive experiments on Japanese sentence embeddings involving 24 pre-trained Japanese or multilingual language models, five supervised datasets, and four unsupervised datasets. In this report, we provide the detailed training setup for Japanese SimCSE and their evaluation results.
A Lightweight Method to Generate Unanswerable Questions in English
Authors: Vagrant Gautam, Miaoran Zhang, Dietrich Klakow
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

If a question cannot be answered with the available information, robust systems for question answering (QA) should know _not_ to answer. One way to build QA models that do this is with additional training data comprised of unanswerable questions, created either by employing annotators or through automated methods for unanswerable question generation. To show that the model complexity of existing automated approaches is not justified, we examine a simpler data augmentation method for unanswerable question generation in English: performing antonym and entity swaps on answerable questions. Compared to the prior state-of-the-art, data generated with our training-free and lightweight strategy results in better models (+1.6 F1 points on SQuAD 2.0 data with BERT-large), and has higher human-judged relatedness and readability. We quantify the raw benefits of our approach compared to no augmentation across multiple encoder models, using different amounts of generated data, and also on TydiQA-MinSpan data (+9.3 F1 points with BERT-large). Our results establish swaps as a simple but strong baseline for future work.
Constituency Parsing using LLMs
Authors: Xuefeng Bai, Jialong Wu, Yulong Chen, Zhongqing Wang, Yue Zhang
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Constituency Parsing

Constituency parsing is a fundamental yet unsolved natural language processing task. In this paper, we explore the potential of recent large language models (LLMs) that have exhibited remarkable performance across various domains and tasks to tackle this task. We employ three linearization strategies to transform output trees into symbol sequences, such that LLMs can solve constituency parsing by generating linearized trees. We conduct experiments using a diverse range of LLMs, including ChatGPT, GPT-4, OPT, LLaMA, and Alpaca, comparing their performance against the state-of-the-art constituency parsers. Our experiments encompass zero-shot, few-shot, and full-training learning settings, and we evaluate the models on one in-domain and five out-of-domain test datasets. Our findings reveal insights into LLMs' performance, generalization abilities, and challenges in constituency parsing.
MiLe Loss: a New Loss for Mitigating the Bias of Learning Difficulties in Generative Language Models
Authors: Zhenpeng Su, Xing Wu, Xue Bai, Zijia Lin, Hui Chen, Guiguang Ding, Wei Zhou, Songlin Hu
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-task Language Understanding

Generative language models are usually pretrained on large text corpus via predicting the next token (i.e., sub-word/word/phrase) given the previous ones. Recent works have demonstrated the impressive performance of large generative language models on downstream tasks. However, existing generative language models generally neglect an inherent challenge in text corpus during training, i.e., the imbalance between frequent tokens and infrequent ones. It can lead a language model to be dominated by common and easy-to-learn tokens, thereby overlooking the infrequent and difficult-to-learn ones. To alleviate that, we propose a MiLe Loss function for mitigating the bias of learning difficulties with tokens. During training, it can dynamically assess the learning difficulty of a to-be-learned token, according to the information entropy of the corresponding predicted probability distribution over the vocabulary. Then it scales the training loss adaptively, trying to lead the model to focus more on the difficult-to-learn tokens. On the Pile dataset, we train generative language models at different scales of 468M, 1.2B, and 6.7B parameters. Experiments reveal that models incorporating the proposed MiLe Loss can gain consistent performance improvement on downstream benchmarks.
A Novel Representation to Improve Team Problem Solving in Real-Time
Authors: Alex Doboli
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00

This paper proposes a novel representation to support computing metrics that help understanding and improving in real-time a team's behavior during problem solving in real-life. Even though teams are important in modern activities, there is little computing aid to improve their activity. The representation captures the different mental images developed, enhanced, and utilized during solving. A case study illustrates the representation.
Improving Input-label Mapping with Demonstration Replay for In-context Learning
Authors: Zhuocheng Gong, Jiahao Liu, Qifan Wang, Jingang Wang, Xunliang Cai, Dongyan Zhao, Rui Yan
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

In-context learning (ICL) is an emerging capability of large autoregressive language models where a few input-label demonstrations are appended to the input to enhance the model's understanding of downstream NLP tasks, without directly adjusting the model parameters. The effectiveness of ICL can be attributed to the strong language modeling capabilities of large language models (LLMs), which enable them to learn the mapping between input and labels based on in-context demonstrations. Despite achieving promising results, the causal nature of language modeling in ICL restricts the attention to be backward only, i.e., a token only attends to its previous tokens, failing to capture the full input-label information and limiting the model's performance. In this paper, we propose a novel ICL method called Repeated Demonstration with Sliding Causal Attention, (RdSca). Specifically, we duplicate later demonstrations and concatenate them to the front, allowing the model to `observe' the later information even under the causal restriction. Besides, we introduce sliding causal attention, which customizes causal attention to avoid information leakage. Experimental results show that our method significantly improves the input-label mapping in ICL demonstrations. We also conduct an in-depth analysis of how to customize the causal attention without training, which has been an unexplored area in previous research.
KeyGen2Vec: Learning Document Embedding via Multi-label Keyword Generation in Question-Answering
Authors: Iftitahu Ni'mah, Samaneh Khoshrou, Vlado Menkovski, Mykola Pechenizkiy
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Embedding, Keyphrase Generation, Question Answering, Representation Learning

Representing documents into high dimensional embedding space while preserving the structural similarity between document sources has been an ultimate goal for many works on text representation learning. Current embedding models, however, mainly rely on the availability of label supervision to increase the expressiveness of the resulting embeddings. In contrast, unsupervised embeddings are cheap, but they often cannot capture implicit structure in target corpus, particularly for samples that come from different distribution with the pretraining source. Our study aims to loosen up the dependency on label supervision by learning document embeddings via Sequence-to-Sequence (Seq2Seq) text generator. Specifically, we reformulate keyphrase generation task into multi-label keyword generation in community-based Question Answering (cQA). Our empirical results show that KeyGen2Vec in general is superior than multi-label keyword classifier by up to 14.7% based on Purity, Normalized Mutual Information (NMI), and F1-Score metrics. Interestingly, although in general the absolute advantage of learning embeddings through label supervision is highly positive across evaluation datasets, KeyGen2Vec is shown to be competitive with classifier that exploits topic label supervision in Yahoo! cQA with larger number of latent topic labels.
Dynamics of Instruction Tuning: Each Ability of Large Language Models Has Its Own Growth Pace
Authors: Chiyu Song, Zhanchao Zhou, Jianhao Yan, Yuejiao Fei, Zhenzhong Lan, Yue Zhang
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Logical Reasoning

Instruction tuning is a burgeoning method to elicit the general intelligence of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, the creation of instruction data is still largely heuristic, leading to significant variation in quantity and quality across existing datasets. While some research advocates for expanding the number of instructions, others suggest that a small set of well-chosen examples is adequate. To better understand data construction guidelines, our research provides a granular analysis of how data volume, parameter size, and data construction methods influence the development of each underlying ability of LLM, such as creative writing, code generation, and logical reasoning. We present a meticulously curated dataset with over 40k instances across ten abilities and examine instruction-tuned models with 7b to 33b parameters. Our study reveals three primary findings: (i) Despite the models' overall performance being tied to data and parameter scale, individual abilities have different sensitivities to these factors. (ii) Human-curated data strongly outperforms synthetic data from GPT-4 in efficiency and can constantly enhance model performance with volume increases, but is unachievable with synthetic data. (iii) Instruction data brings powerful cross-ability generalization, as evidenced by out-of-domain evaluations. Furthermore, we demonstrate how these findings can guide more efficient data constructions, leading to practical performance improvements on two public benchmarks.
Interpretable-by-Design Text Understanding with Iteratively Generated Concept Bottleneck
Authors: Josh Magnus Ludan, Qing Lyu, Yue Yang, Liam Dugan, Mark Yatskar, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, text-classification, Text Classification

Black-box deep neural networks excel in text classification, yet their application in high-stakes domains is hindered by their lack of interpretability. To address this, we propose Text Bottleneck Models (TBM), an intrinsically interpretable text classification framework that offers both global and local explanations. Rather than directly predicting the output label, TBM predicts categorical values for a sparse set of salient concepts and uses a linear layer over those concept values to produce the final prediction. These concepts can be automatically discovered and measured by a Large Language Model (LLM) without the need for human curation. Experiments on 12 diverse text understanding datasets demonstrate that TBM can rival the performance of black-box baselines such as few-shot GPT-4 and finetuned DeBERTa while falling short against finetuned GPT-3.5. Comprehensive human evaluation validates that TBM can generate high-quality concepts relevant to the task, and the concept measurement aligns well with human judgments, suggesting that the predictions made by TBMs are interpretable. Overall, our findings suggest that TBM is a promising new framework that enhances interpretability with minimal performance tradeoffs.
Exploring the Reliability of Large Language Models as Customized Evaluators for Diverse NLP Tasks
Authors: Qintong Li, Leyang Cui, Lingpeng Kong, Wei Bi
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Math, Story Generation, Text Generation

Previous work adopts large language models (LLMs) as evaluators to evaluate natural language process (NLP) tasks. However, certain shortcomings, e.g., fairness, scope, and accuracy, persist for current LLM evaluators. To analyze whether LLMs can serve as reliable alternatives to humans, we examine the fine-grained alignment between LLM evaluators and human annotators, particularly in understanding the target evaluation tasks and conducting evaluations that meet diverse criteria. This paper explores both conventional tasks (e.g., story generation) and alignment tasks (e.g., math reasoning), each with different evaluation criteria. Our analysis shows that 1) LLM evaluators can generate unnecessary criteria or omit crucial criteria, resulting in a slight deviation from the experts. 2) LLM evaluators excel in general criteria, such as fluency, but face challenges with complex criteria, such as numerical reasoning. We also find that LLM-pre-drafting before human evaluation can help reduce the impact of human subjectivity and minimize annotation outliers in pure human evaluation, leading to more objective evaluation.
Chain-of-Thought Embeddings for Stance Detection on Social Media
Authors: Joseph Gatto, Omar Sharif, Sarah Masud Preum
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Stance Detection

Stance detection on social media is challenging for Large Language Models (LLMs), as emerging slang and colloquial language in online conversations often contain deeply implicit stance labels. Chain-of-Thought (COT) prompting has recently been shown to improve performance on stance detection tasks -- alleviating some of these issues. However, COT prompting still struggles with implicit stance identification. This challenge arises because many samples are initially challenging to comprehend before a model becomes familiar with the slang and evolving knowledge related to different topics, all of which need to be acquired through the training data. In this study, we address this problem by introducing COT Embeddings which improve COT performance on stance detection tasks by embedding COT reasonings and integrating them into a traditional RoBERTa-based stance detection pipeline. Our analysis demonstrates that 1) text encoders can leverage COT reasonings with minor errors or hallucinations that would otherwise distort the COT output label. 2) Text encoders can overlook misleading COT reasoning when a sample's prediction heavily depends on domain-specific patterns. Our model achieves SOTA performance on multiple stance detection datasets collected from social media.
The Eval4NLP 2023 Shared Task on Prompting Large Language Models as Explainable Metrics
Authors: Christoph Leiter, Juri Opitz, Daniel Deutsch, Yang Gao, Rotem Dror, Steffen Eger
Date: 2023-10-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Text Generation

With an increasing number of parameters and pre-training data, generative large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities to solve tasks with minimal or no task-related examples. Notably, LLMs have been successfully employed as evaluation metrics in text generation tasks. Within this context, we introduce the Eval4NLP 2023 shared task that asks participants to explore prompting and score extraction for machine translation (MT) and summarization evaluation. Specifically, we propose a novel competition setting in which we select a list of allowed LLMs and disallow fine-tuning to ensure a focus on prompting. We present an overview of participants' approaches and evaluate them on a new reference-free test set spanning three language pairs for MT and a summarization dataset. Notably, despite the task's restrictions, the best-performing systems achieve results on par with or even surpassing recent reference-free metrics developed using larger models, including GEMBA and Comet-Kiwi-XXL. Finally, as a separate track, we perform a small-scale human evaluation of the plausibility of explanations given by the LLMs.