pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Boosting Local Spectro-Temporal Features for Speech Analysis
Authors: Michael Guerzhoy
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, object-detection, Object Detection, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

We introduce the problem of phone classification in the context of speech recognition, and explore several sets of local spectro-temporal features that can be used for phone classification. In particular, we present some preliminary results for phone classification using two sets of features that are commonly used for object detection: Haar features and SVM-classified Histograms of Gradients (HoG).
Searching for Needles in a Haystack: On the Role of Incidental Bilingualism in PaLM's Translation Capability
Authors: Eleftheria Briakou, Colin Cherry, George Foster
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Translation, Translation

Large, multilingual language models exhibit surprisingly good zero- or few-shot machine translation capabilities, despite having never seen the intentionally-included translation examples provided to typical neural translation systems. We investigate the role of incidental bilingualism -- the unintentional consumption of bilingual signals, including translation examples -- in explaining the translation capabilities of large language models, taking the Pathways Language Model (PaLM) as a case study. We introduce a mixed-method approach to measure and understand incidental bilingualism at scale. We show that PaLM is exposed to over 30 million translation pairs across at least 44 languages. Furthermore, the amount of incidental bilingual content is highly correlated with the amount of monolingual in-language content for non-English languages. We relate incidental bilingual content to zero-shot prompts and show that it can be used to mine new prompts to improve PaLM's out-of-English zero-shot translation quality. Finally, in a series of small-scale ablations, we show that its presence has a substantial impact on translation capabilities, although this impact diminishes with model scale.
M3KE: A Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models
Authors: Chuang Liu, Renren Jin, Yuqi Ren, Linhao Yu, Tianyu Dong, Xiaohan Peng, Shuting Zhang, Jianxiang Peng, Peiyi Zhang, Qingqing Lyu, Xiaowen Su, Qun Liu, Deyi Xiong
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Multiple-choice, Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA)

Large language models have recently made tremendous progress in a variety of aspects, e.g., cross-task generalization, instruction following. Comprehensively evaluating the capability of large language models in multiple tasks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose M3KE, a Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation benchmark, which is developed to measure knowledge acquired by Chinese large language models by testing their multitask accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings. We have collected 20,477 questions from 71 tasks. Our selection covers all major levels of Chinese education system, ranging from the primary school to college, as well as a wide variety of subjects, including humanities, history, politics, law, education, psychology, science, technology, art and religion. All questions are multiple-choice questions with four options, hence guaranteeing a standardized and unified assessment process. We've assessed a number of state-of-the-art open-source Chinese large language models on the proposed benchmark. The size of these models varies from 335M to 130B parameters. Experiment results demonstrate that they perform significantly worse than GPT-3.5 that reaches an accuracy of ~ 48% on M3KE. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/M3KE.
OpenSLU: A Unified, Modularized, and Extensible Toolkit for Spoken Language Understanding
Authors: Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Xiao Xu, Yunlong Feng, Wanxiang Che
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Spoken Language Understanding

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is one of the core components of a task-oriented dialogue system, which aims to extract the semantic meaning of user queries (e.g., intents and slots). In this work, we introduce OpenSLU, an open-source toolkit to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible toolkit for spoken language understanding. Specifically, OpenSLU unifies 10 SLU models for both single-intent and multi-intent scenarios, which support both non-pretrained and pretrained models simultaneously. Additionally, OpenSLU is highly modularized and extensible by decomposing the model architecture, inference, and learning process into reusable modules, which allows researchers to quickly set up SLU experiments with highly flexible configurations. OpenSLU is implemented based on PyTorch, and released at \url{https://github.com/LightChen233/OpenSLU}.
Boosting Distress Support Dialogue Responses with Motivational Interviewing Strategy
Authors: Anuradha Welivita, Pearl Pu
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Data Augmentation

AI-driven chatbots have become an emerging solution to address psychological distress. Due to the lack of psychotherapeutic data, researchers use dialogues scraped from online peer support forums to train them. But since the responses in such platforms are not given by professionals, they contain both conforming and non-conforming responses. In this work, we attempt to recognize these conforming and non-conforming response types present in online distress-support dialogues using labels adapted from a well-established behavioral coding scheme named Motivational Interviewing Treatment Integrity (MITI) code and show how some response types could be rephrased into a more MI adherent form that can, in turn, enable chatbot responses to be more compliant with the MI strategy. As a proof of concept, we build several rephrasers by fine-tuning Blender and GPT3 to rephrase MI non-adherent "Advise without permission" responses into "Advise with permission". We show how this can be achieved with the construction of pseudo-parallel corpora avoiding costs for human labor. Through automatic and human evaluation we show that in the presence of less training data, techniques such as prompting and data augmentation can be used to produce substantially good rephrasings that reflect the intended style and preserve the content of the original text.
Variable-length Neural Interlingua Representations for Zero-shot Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Zhuoyuan Mao, Haiyue Song, Raj Dabre, Chenhui Chu, Sadao Kurohashi
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

The language-independency of encoded representations within multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) models is crucial for their generalization ability on zero-shot translation. Neural interlingua representations have been shown as an effective method for achieving this. However, fixed-length neural interlingua representations introduced in previous work can limit its flexibility and representation ability. In this study, we introduce a novel method to enhance neural interlingua representations by making their length variable, thereby overcoming the constraint of fixed-length neural interlingua representations. Our empirical results on zero-shot translation on OPUS, IWSLT, and Europarl datasets demonstrate stable model convergence and superior zero-shot translation results compared to fixed-length neural interlingua representations. However, our analysis reveals the suboptimal efficacy of our approach in translating from certain source languages, wherein we pinpoint the defective model component in our proposed method.
Knowledge-enhanced Mixed-initiative Dialogue System for Emotional Support Conversations
Authors: Yang Deng, Wenxuan Zhang, Yifei Yuan, Wai Lam
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00

Unlike empathetic dialogues, the system in emotional support conversations (ESC) is expected to not only convey empathy for comforting the help-seeker, but also proactively assist in exploring and addressing their problems during the conversation. In this work, we study the problem of mixed-initiative ESC where the user and system can both take the initiative in leading the conversation. Specifically, we conduct a novel analysis on mixed-initiative ESC systems with a tailor-designed schema that divides utterances into different types with speaker roles and initiative types. Four emotional support metrics are proposed to evaluate the mixed-initiative interactions. The analysis reveals the necessity and challenges of building mixed-initiative ESC systems. In the light of this, we propose a knowledge-enhanced mixed-initiative framework (KEMI) for ESC, which retrieves actual case knowledge from a large-scale mental health knowledge graph for generating mixed-initiative responses. Experimental results on two ESC datasets show the superiority of KEMI in both content-preserving evaluation and mixed initiative related analyses.
Cultural evolution via iterated learning and communication explains efficient color naming systems
Authors: Emil Carlsson, Devdatt Dubhashi, Terry Regier
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00

It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and a model of cultural evolution that combines iterated learning and communication. We show that this model, instantiated in neural networks, converges to color naming systems that are efficient in the IB sense and similar to human color naming systems. We also show that some other proposals such as iterated learning alone, communication alone, or the greater learnability of convex categories, do not yield the same outcome as clearly. We conclude that the combination of iterated learning and communication provides a plausible means by which human semantic systems become efficient.
Multi-Grained Knowledge Retrieval for End-to-End Task-Oriented Dialog
Authors: Fanqi Wan, Weizhou Shen, Ke Yang, Xiaojun Quan, Wei Bi
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Response Generation, Retrieval

Retrieving proper domain knowledge from an external database lies at the heart of end-to-end task-oriented dialog systems to generate informative responses. Most existing systems blend knowledge retrieval with response generation and optimize them with direct supervision from reference responses, leading to suboptimal retrieval performance when the knowledge base becomes large-scale. To address this, we propose to decouple knowledge retrieval from response generation and introduce a multi-grained knowledge retriever (MAKER) that includes an entity selector to search for relevant entities and an attribute selector to filter out irrelevant attributes. To train the retriever, we propose a novel distillation objective that derives supervision signals from the response generator. Experiments conducted on three standard benchmarks with both small and large-scale knowledge bases demonstrate that our retriever performs knowledge retrieval more effectively than existing methods. Our code has been made publicly available.\footnote{https://github.com/18907305772/MAKER}
Improving Language Model Negotiation with Self-Play and In-Context Learning from AI Feedback
Authors: Yao Fu, Hao Peng, Tushar Khot, Mirella Lapata
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Rolling Shutter Correction

We study whether multiple large language models (LLMs) can autonomously improve each other in a negotiation game by playing, reflecting, and criticizing. We are interested in this question because if LLMs were able to improve each other, it would imply the possibility of creating strong AI agents with minimal human intervention. We ask two LLMs to negotiate with each other, playing the roles of a buyer and a seller, respectively. They aim to reach a deal with the buyer targeting a lower price and the seller a higher one. A third language model, playing the critic, provides feedback to a player to improve the player's negotiation strategies. We let the two agents play multiple rounds, using previous negotiation history and AI feedback as in-context demonstrations to improve the model's negotiation strategy iteratively. We use different LLMs (GPT and Claude) for different roles and use the deal price as the evaluation metric. Our experiments reveal multiple intriguing findings: (1) Only a subset of the language models we consider can self-play and improve the deal price from AI feedback, weaker models either do not understand the game's rules or cannot incorporate AI feedback for further improvement. (2) Models' abilities to learn from the feedback differ when playing different roles. For example, it is harder for Claude-instant to improve as the buyer than as the seller. (3) When unrolling the game to multiple rounds, stronger agents can consistently improve their performance by meaningfully using previous experiences and iterative AI feedback, yet have a higher risk of breaking the deal. We hope our work provides insightful initial explorations of having models autonomously improve each other with game playing and AI feedback.
Additive manifesto decomposition: A policy domain aware method for understanding party positioning
Authors: Tanise Ceron, Dmitry Nikolaev, Sebastian Padó
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00

Automatic extraction of party (dis)similarities from texts such as party election manifestos or parliamentary speeches plays an increasing role in computational political science. However, existing approaches are fundamentally limited to targeting only global party (dis)-similarity: they condense the relationship between a pair of parties into a single figure, their similarity. In aggregating over all policy domains (e.g., health or foreign policy), they do not provide any qualitative insights into which domains parties agree or disagree on. This paper proposes a workflow for estimating policy domain aware party similarity that overcomes this limitation. The workflow covers (a) definition of suitable policy domains; (b) automatic labeling of domains, if no manual labels are available; (c) computation of domain-level similarities and aggregation at a global level; (d) extraction of interpretable party positions on major policy axes via multidimensional scaling. We evaluate our workflow on manifestos from the German federal elections. We find that our method (a) yields high correlation when predicting party similarity at a global level and (b) provides accurate party-specific positions, even with automatically labelled policy domains.
Empirical Analysis of Oral and Nasal Vowels of Konkani
Authors: Swapnil Fadte, Edna Vaz, Atul Kr. Ojha, Ramdas Karmali, Jyoti D. Pawar
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Synthesis

Konkani is a highly nasalised language which makes it unique among Indo-Aryan languages. This work investigates the acoustic-phonetic properties of Konkani oral and nasal vowels. For this study, speech samples from six speakers (3 male and 3 female) were collected. A total of 74 unique sentences were used as a part of the recording script, 37 each for oral and nasal vowels, respectively. The final data set consisted of 1135 vowel phonemes. A comparative F1-F2 plot of Konkani oral and nasal vowels is presented with an experimental result and formant analysis. The average F1, F2 and F3 values are also reported for the first time through experimentation for all nasal and oral vowels. This study can be helpful for the linguistic research on vowels and speech synthesis systems specific to the Konkani language.
Are You Copying My Model? Protecting the Copyright of Large Language Models for EaaS via Backdoor Watermark
Authors: Wenjun Peng, Jingwei Yi, Fangzhao Wu, Shangxi Wu, Bin Zhu, Lingjuan Lyu, Binxing Jiao, Tong Xu, Guangzhong Sun, Xing Xie
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Model extraction

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in both text understanding and generation. Companies have begun to offer Embedding as a Service (EaaS) based on these LLMs, which can benefit various natural language processing (NLP) tasks for customers. However, previous studies have shown that EaaS is vulnerable to model extraction attacks, which can cause significant losses for the owners of LLMs, as training these models is extremely expensive. To protect the copyright of LLMs for EaaS, we propose an Embedding Watermark method called EmbMarker that implants backdoors on embeddings. Our method selects a group of moderate-frequency words from a general text corpus to form a trigger set, then selects a target embedding as the watermark, and inserts it into the embeddings of texts containing trigger words as the backdoor. The weight of insertion is proportional to the number of trigger words included in the text. This allows the watermark backdoor to be effectively transferred to EaaS-stealer's model for copyright verification while minimizing the adverse impact on the original embeddings' utility. Our extensive experiments on various datasets show that our method can effectively protect the copyright of EaaS models without compromising service quality.
AD-KD: Attribution-Driven Knowledge Distillation for Language Model Compression
Authors: Siyue Wu, Hongzhan Chen, Xiaojun Quan, Qifan Wang, Rui Wang
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Model Compression, Transfer Learning

Knowledge distillation has attracted a great deal of interest recently to compress pre-trained language models. However, existing knowledge distillation methods suffer from two limitations. First, the student model simply imitates the teacher's behavior while ignoring the underlying reasoning. Second, these methods usually focus on the transfer of sophisticated model-specific knowledge but overlook data-specific knowledge. In this paper, we present a novel attribution-driven knowledge distillation approach, which explores the token-level rationale behind the teacher model based on Integrated Gradients (IG) and transfers attribution knowledge to the student model. To enhance the knowledge transfer of model reasoning and generalization, we further explore multi-view attribution distillation on all potential decisions of the teacher. Comprehensive experiments are conducted with BERT on the GLUE benchmark. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of our approach to several state-of-the-art methods.
DinoSR: Self-Distillation and Online Clustering for Self-supervised Speech Representation Learning
Authors: Alexander H. Liu, Heng-Jui Chang, Michael Auli, Wei-Ning Hsu, James R. Glass
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Clustering, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Online Clustering, Representation Learning, Speech Representation Learning

In this paper, we introduce self-distillation and online clustering for self-supervised speech representation learning (DinoSR) which combines masked language modeling, self-distillation, and online clustering. We show that these concepts complement each other and result in a strong representation learning model for speech. DinoSR first extracts contextualized embeddings from the input audio with a teacher network, then runs an online clustering system on the embeddings to yield a machine-discovered phone inventory, and finally uses the discretized tokens to guide a student network. We show that DinoSR surpasses previous state-of-the-art performance in several downstream tasks, and provide a detailed analysis of the model and the learned discrete units.
Dual Semantic Knowledge Composed Multimodal Dialog Systems
Authors: Xiaolin Chen, Xuemeng Song, Yinwei Wei, Liqiang Nie, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Relation, Response Generation

Textual response generation is an essential task for multimodal task-oriented dialog systems.Although existing studies have achieved fruitful progress, they still suffer from two critical limitations: 1) focusing on the attribute knowledge but ignoring the relation knowledge that can reveal the correlations between different entities and hence promote the response generation}, and 2) only conducting the cross-entropy loss based output-level supervision but lacking the representation-level regularization. To address these limitations, we devise a novel multimodal task-oriented dialog system (named MDS-S2). Specifically, MDS-S2 first simultaneously acquires the context related attribute and relation knowledge from the knowledge base, whereby the non-intuitive relation knowledge is extracted by the n-hop graph walk. Thereafter, considering that the attribute knowledge and relation knowledge can benefit the responding to different levels of questions, we design a multi-level knowledge composition module in MDS-S2 to obtain the latent composed response representation. Moreover, we devise a set of latent query variables to distill the semantic information from the composed response representation and the ground truth response representation, respectively, and thus conduct the representation-level semantic regularization. Extensive experiments on a public dataset have verified the superiority of our proposed MDS-S2. We have released the codes and parameters to facilitate the research community.
Knowledge Card: Filling LLMs' Knowledge Gaps with Plug-in Specialized Language Models
Authors: Shangbin Feng, Weijia Shi, Yuyang Bai, Vidhisha Balachandran, Tianxing He, Yulia Tsvetkov
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

By design, large language models (LLMs) are static general-purpose models, expensive to retrain or update frequently. As they are increasingly adopted for knowledge-intensive tasks, it becomes evident that these design choices lead to failures to generate factual, relevant, and up-to-date knowledge. To this end, we propose Knowledge Card, a modular framework to plug in new factual and relevant knowledge into general-purpose LLMs. We first introduce knowledge cards -- specialized language models trained on corpora from specific domains and sources. Knowledge cards serve as parametric repositories that are selected at inference time to generate background knowledge for the base LLM. We then propose three content selectors to dynamically select and retain information in documents generated by knowledge cards, specifically controlling for relevance, brevity, and factuality of outputs. Finally, we propose two complementary integration approaches to augment the base LLM with the (relevant, factual) knowledge curated from the specialized LMs. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that Knowledge Card achieves state-of-the-art performance on six benchmark datasets. Ultimately, Knowledge Card framework enables dynamic synthesis and updates of knowledge from diverse domains. Its modularity will ensure that relevant knowledge can be continuously updated through the collective efforts of the research community.
Balancing Lexical and Semantic Quality in Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Jeewoo Sul, Yong Suk Choi
Date: 2023-05-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Re-Ranking, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

An important problem of the sequence-to-sequence neural models widely used in abstractive summarization is exposure bias. To alleviate this problem, re-ranking systems have been applied in recent years. Despite some performance improvements, this approach remains underexplored. Previous works have mostly specified the rank through the ROUGE score and aligned candidate summaries, but there can be quite a large gap between the lexical overlap metric and semantic similarity. In this paper, we propose a novel training method in which a re-ranker balances the lexical and semantic quality. We further newly define false positives in ranking and present a strategy to reduce their influence. Experiments on the CNN/DailyMail and XSum datasets show that our method can estimate the meaning of summaries without seriously degrading the lexical aspect. More specifically, it achieves an 89.67 BERTScore on the CNN/DailyMail dataset, reaching new state-of-the-art performance. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jeewoo1025/BalSum.