pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Unveiling Topological Structures in Text: A Comprehensive Survey of Topological Data Analysis Applications in NLP
Authors: Adaku Uchendu, Thai Le
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis

The surge of data available on the internet has led to the adoption of various computational methods to analyze and extract valuable insights from this wealth of information. Among these, the field of Machine Learning (ML) has thrived by leveraging data to extract meaningful insights. However, ML techniques face notable challenges when dealing with real-world data, often due to issues of imbalance, noise, insufficient labeling, and high dimensionality. To address these limitations, some researchers advocate for the adoption of Topological Data Analysis (TDA), a statistical approach that discerningly captures the intrinsic shape of data despite noise. Despite its potential, TDA has not gained as much traction within the Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain compared to structurally distinct areas like computer vision. Nevertheless, a dedicated community of researchers has been exploring the application of TDA in NLP, yielding 87 papers we comprehensively survey in this paper. Our findings categorize these efforts into theoretical and non-theoretical approaches. Theoretical approaches aim to explain linguistic phenomena from a topological viewpoint, while non-theoretical approaches merge TDA with ML features, utilizing diverse numerical representation techniques. We conclude by exploring the challenges and unresolved questions that persist in this niche field. Resources and a list of papers on this topic can be found at: https://github.com/AdaUchendu/AwesomeTDA4NLP.
Automated Coding of Communications in Collaborative Problem-solving Tasks Using ChatGPT
Authors: Jiangang Hao, Wenju Cui, Patrick Kyllonen, Emily Kerzabi, Lei Liu, Michael Flor
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is widely recognized as a critical 21st-century skill. Assessing CPS depends heavily on coding the communication data using a construct-relevant framework, and this process has long been a major bottleneck to scaling up such assessments. Based on five datasets and two coding frameworks, we demonstrate that ChatGPT can code communication data to a satisfactory level, though performance varies across ChatGPT models, and depends on the coding framework and task characteristics. Interestingly, newer reasoning-focused models such as GPT-o1-mini and GPT-o3-mini do not necessarily yield better coding results. Additionally, we show that refining prompts based on feedback from miscoded cases can improve coding accuracy in some instances, though the effectiveness of this approach is not consistent across all tasks. These findings offer practical guidance for researchers and practitioners in developing scalable, efficient methods to analyze communication data in support of 21st-century skill assessment.
Entropy and type-token ratio in gigaword corpora
Authors: Pablo Rosillo-Rodes, Maxi San Miguel, David Sanchez
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Diversity, Relation

There are different ways of measuring diversity in complex systems. In particular, in language, lexical diversity is characterized in terms of the type-token ratio and the word entropy. We here investigate both diversity metrics in six massive linguistic datasets in English, Spanish, and Turkish, consisting of books, news articles, and tweets. These gigaword corpora correspond to languages with distinct morphological features and differ in registers and genres, thus constituting a varied testbed for a quantitative approach to lexical diversity. We unveil an empirical functional relation between entropy and type-token ratio of texts of a given corpus and language, which is a consequence of the statistical laws observed in natural language. Further, in the limit of large text lengths we find an analytical expression for this relation relying on both Zipf and Heaps laws that agrees with our empirical findings.
Compound-QA: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLMs on Compound Questions
Authors: Yutao Hou, Yajing Luo, Zhiwen Ruan, Hongru Wang, Weifeng Ge, Yun Chen, Guanhua Chen
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable performance across various tasks, prompting researchers to develop diverse evaluation benchmarks. However, existing benchmarks typically measure the ability of LLMs to respond to individual questions, neglecting the complex interactions in real-world applications. In this paper, we introduce Compound Question Synthesis (CQ-Syn) to create the Compound-QA benchmark, focusing on compound questions with multiple sub-questions. This benchmark is derived from existing QA datasets, annotated with proprietary LLMs and verified by humans for accuracy. It encompasses five categories: Factual-Statement, Cause-and-Effect, Hypothetical-Analysis, Comparison-and-Selection, and Evaluation-and-Suggestion. It evaluates the LLM capability in terms of three dimensions including understanding, reasoning, and knowledge. Our assessment of eight open-source LLMs using Compound-QA reveals distinct patterns in their responses to compound questions, which are significantly poorer than those to non-compound questions. Additionally, we investigate various methods to enhance LLMs performance on compound questions. The results indicate that these approaches significantly improve the models' comprehension and reasoning abilities on compound questions.
An Effective Framework to Help Large Language Models Handle Numeric-involved Long-context Tasks
Authors: Yijiong Yu
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling long texts and have almost perfect performance in traditional retrieval tasks. However, their performance significantly degrades when it comes to numerical calculations in the long-context. Numeric-involved long-context tasks typically cannot be addressed by current LLMs in normal settings due to their inherent limitations in simultaneously handling complex and massive information. Some CoT like prompting methods can improve accuracy but demands massive output tokens, which is costly and slow. To address this issue, we propose a workflow, which decompose a numeric-involved long-context task into 4 low-level subtasks: judging, extracting and processing with code and conclusion. The former 2 subtasks is relatively simple, which allows us to use smaller models for efficiently processing long context. When numerical calculations are required, we use code generated by LLMs to avoid the disadvantage of LLM not being good at calculations. The results in 2 numeric-involved long-context benchmarks demonstrate our workflow can not only improve accuracy, but also significantly reduce the cost of API calls.
Xmodel-1.5: An 1B-scale Multilingual LLM
Authors: Wang Qun, Liu Yang, Lin Qingquan, Jiang Ling
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

We introduce Xmodel-1.5, a 1-billion-parameter multilingual large language model pretrained on 2 trillion tokens, designed for balanced performance and scalability. Unlike most large models that use the BPE tokenizer, Xmodel-1.5 employs a custom unigram tokenizer with 65,280 tokens, optimizing both efficiency and accuracy. The model delivers competitive results across multiple languages, including Thai, Arabic, French, Chinese, and English, outperforming Alibaba's PolyLM-1.7B on respective evaluation datasets. Xmodel-1.5 excels in benchmarks like mMMLU and PIQA, and achieves state-of-the-art results in Thai. To support low-resource language research, we release Xdata_Thai, a Thai-specific evaluation dataset featuring unique linguistic challenges such as gendered particles and idioms. While the model demonstrates strong performance, there is still room for improvement in handling culturally specific nuances. We hope this work contributes to advancements in multilingual AI research. Models and code are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/XmodelLM-1.5
Understanding The Effect Of Temperature On Alignment With Human Opinions
Authors: Maja Pavlovic, Massimo Poesio
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00

With the increasing capabilities of LLMs, recent studies focus on understanding whose opinions are represented by them and how to effectively extract aligned opinion distributions. We conducted an empirical analysis of three straightforward methods for obtaining distributions and evaluated the results across a variety of metrics. Our findings suggest that sampling and log-probability approaches with simple parameter adjustments can return better aligned outputs in subjective tasks compared to direct prompting. Yet, assuming models reflect human opinions may be limiting, highlighting the need for further research on how human subjectivity affects model uncertainty.
Layer Importance and Hallucination Analysis in Large Language Models via Enhanced Activation Variance-Sparsity
Authors: Zichen Song, Sitan Huang, Yuxin Wu, Zhongfeng Kang
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, Sentiment Classification, TriviaQA, TruthfulQA

Evaluating the importance of different layers in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for optimizing model performance and interpretability. This paper first explores layer importance using the Activation Variance-Sparsity Score (AVSS), which combines normalized activation variance and sparsity to quantify each layer's contribution to overall model performance. By ranking layers based on AVSS and pruning the least impactful 25\%, our experiments on tasks such as question answering, language modeling, and sentiment classification show that over 90\% of the original performance is retained, highlighting potential redundancies in LLM architectures. Building on AVSS, we propose an enhanced version tailored to assess hallucination propensity across layers (EAVSS). This improved approach introduces Hallucination-Specific Activation Variance (HSAV) and Hallucination-Specific Sparsity (HSS) metrics, allowing precise identification of hallucination-prone layers. By incorporating contrastive learning on these layers, we effectively mitigate hallucination generation, contributing to more robust and efficient LLMs(The maximum performance improvement is 12\%). Our results on the NQ, SciQ, TriviaQA, TruthfulQA, and WikiQA datasets demonstrate the efficacy of this method, offering a comprehensive framework for both layer importance evaluation and hallucination mitigation in LLMs.
CMATH: Cross-Modality Augmented Transformer with Hierarchical Variational Distillation for Multimodal Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Authors: Xiaofei Zhu, Jiawei Cheng, Zhou Yang, Zhuo Chen, Qingyang Wang, Jianfeng Yao
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation, Multimodal Emotion Recognition, multimodal interaction

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MER) aims to accurately identify emotions in conversational utterances by integrating multimodal information. Previous methods usually treat multimodal information as equal quality and employ symmetric architectures to conduct multimodal fusion. However, in reality, the quality of different modalities usually varies considerably, and utilizing a symmetric architecture is difficult to accurately recognize conversational emotions when dealing with uneven modal information. Furthermore, fusing multi-modality information in a single granularity may fail to adequately integrate modal information, exacerbating the inaccuracy in emotion recognition. In this paper, we propose a novel Cross-Modality Augmented Transformer with Hierarchical Variational Distillation, called CMATH, which consists of two major components, i.e., Multimodal Interaction Fusion and Hierarchical Variational Distillation. The former is comprised of two submodules, including Modality Reconstruction and Cross-Modality Augmented Transformer (CMA-Transformer), where Modality Reconstruction focuses on obtaining high-quality compressed representation of each modality, and CMA-Transformer adopts an asymmetric fusion strategy which treats one modality as the central modality and takes others as auxiliary modalities. The latter first designs a variational fusion network to fuse the fine-grained representations learned by CMA- Transformer into a coarse-grained representations. Then, it introduces a hierarchical distillation framework to maintain the consistency between modality representations with different granularities. Experiments on the IEMOCAP and MELD datasets demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines. Implementation codes can be available at https://github.com/ cjw-MER/CMATH.
Information Extraction from Clinical Notes: Are We Ready to Switch to Large Language Models?
Authors: Yan Hu, Xu Zuo, Yujia Zhou, Xueqing Peng, Jimin Huang, Vipina K. Keloth, Vincent J. Zhang, Ruey-Ling Weng, Qingyu Chen, Xiaoqian Jiang, Kirk E. Roberts, Hua Xu
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Relation Extraction

Backgrounds: Information extraction (IE) is critical in clinical natural language processing (NLP). While large language models (LLMs) excel on generative tasks, their performance on extractive tasks remains debated. Methods: We investigated Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Relation Extraction (RE) using 1,588 clinical notes from four sources (UT Physicians, MTSamples, MIMIC-III, and i2b2). We developed an annotated corpus covering 4 clinical entities and 16 modifiers, and compared instruction-tuned LLaMA-2 and LLaMA-3 against BERT in terms of performance, generalizability, computational resources, and throughput to BERT. Results: LLaMA models outperformed BERT across datasets. With sufficient training data, LLaMA showed modest improvements (1% on NER, 1.5-3.7% on RE); improvements were larger with limited training data. On unseen i2b2 data, LLaMA-3-70B outperformed BERT by 7% (F1) on NER and 4% on RE. However, LLaMA models required more computing resources and ran up to 28 times slower. We implemented "Kiwi," a clinical IE package featuring both models, available at https://kiwi.clinicalnlp.org/. Conclusion: This study is among the first to develop and evaluate a comprehensive clinical IE system using open-source LLMs. Results indicate that LLaMA models outperform BERT for clinical NER and RE but with higher computational costs and lower throughputs. These findings highlight that choosing between LLMs and traditional deep learning methods for clinical IE applications should remain task-specific, taking into account both performance metrics and practical considerations such as available computing resources and the intended use case scenarios.
Once More, With Feeling: Measuring Emotion of Acting Performances in Contemporary American Film
Authors: Naitian Zhou, David Bamman
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

Narrative film is a composition of writing, cinematography, editing, and performance. While much computational work has focused on the writing or visual style in film, we conduct in this paper a computational exploration of acting performance. Applying speech emotion recognition models and a variationist sociolinguistic analytical framework to a corpus of popular, contemporary American film, we find narrative structure, diachronic shifts, and genre- and dialogue-based constraints located in spoken performances.
HistoLens: An LLM-Powered Framework for Multi-Layered Analysis of Historical Texts -- A Case Application of Yantie Lun
Authors: Yifan Zeng
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: graph construction, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

This paper proposes HistoLens, a multi-layered analysis framework for historical texts based on Large Language Models (LLMs). Using the important Western Han dynasty text "Yantie Lun" as a case study, we demonstrate the framework's potential applications in historical research and education. HistoLens integrates NLP technology (especially LLMs), including named entity recognition, knowledge graph construction, and geographic information visualization. The paper showcases how HistoLens explores Western Han culture in "Yantie Lun" through multi-dimensional, visual, and quantitative methods, focusing particularly on the influence of Confucian and Legalist thoughts on political, economic, military, and ethnic. We also demonstrate how HistoLens constructs a machine teaching scenario using LLMs for explainable analysis, based on a dataset of Confucian and Legalist ideas extracted with LLM assistance. This approach offers novel and diverse perspectives for studying historical texts like "Yantie Lun" and provides new auxiliary tools for history education. The framework aims to equip historians and learners with LLM-assisted tools to facilitate in-depth, multi-layered analysis of historical texts and foster innovation in historical education.
LoRA-LiteE: A Computationally Efficient Framework for Chatbot Preference-Tuning
Authors: Yahe Yang, Chunliang Tao, Xiaojing Fan
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Ensemble Learning

Effective preference tuning is pivotal in aligning chatbot responses with human expectations, enhancing user satisfaction and engagement. Traditional approaches, notably Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) as employed in advanced models like GPT-4, have demonstrated considerable success in this domain. However, RLHF methods are often computationally intensive and resource-demanding, limiting their scalability and accessibility for broader applications. To address these challenges, this study introduces LoRA-Lite Ensemble (LoRA-LiteE), an innovative framework that combines Supervised Fine-tuning (SFT) with Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) and Ensemble Learning techniques to effectively aggregate predictions of lightweight models, which aim to achieve a balance between the performance and computational cost. Utilizing the Chatbot Arena benchmark dataset, we conduct a comprehensive comparative analysis among our LoRA-LiteE model, corresponding base models at different scales, and GPT-4 trained with RLHF. Our empirical results demonstrate that the proposed LoRA-LiteE model achieves comparable performance to un-finetuned GPT-4 and outperforms the single larger-scale models under limited resource constraints. These findings highlight that our LoRA-LiteE provides a feasible and efficient methodology for human preference prediction in chatbot systems, enhancing scalability and accessibility, and thereby broadening the applicability of preference-tuned chatbots in resource-constrained environments.
SlimLM: An Efficient Small Language Model for On-Device Document Assistance
Authors: Thang M. Pham, Phat T. Nguyen, Seunghyun Yoon, Viet Dac Lai, Franck Dernoncourt, Trung Bui
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Small Language Model

While small language models (SLMs) show promises for mobile deployment, their real-world performance and applications on smartphones remains underexplored. We present SlimLM, a series of SLMs optimized for document assistance tasks on mobile devices. Through extensive experiments on a Samsung Galaxy S24, we identify the optimal trade-offs between model size (ranging from 125M to 7B parameters), context length, and inference time for efficient on-device processing. SlimLM is pre-trained on SlimPajama-627B and fine-tuned on DocAssist, our constructed dataset for summarization, question answering and suggestion tasks. Our smallest model demonstrates efficient performance on S24, while larger variants offer enhanced capabilities within mobile constraints. We evaluate SlimLM against existing SLMs, showing comparable or superior performance and offering a benchmark for future research in on-device language models. We also provide an Android application, offering practical insights into SLM deployment. Our findings provide valuable insights and illuminate the capabilities of running advanced language models on high-end smartphones, potentially reducing server costs and enhancing privacy through on-device processing.
Refined and Segmented Price Sentiment Indices from Survey Comments
Authors: Masahiro Suzuki, Hiroki Sakaji
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Survey

We aim to enhance a price sentiment index and to more precisely understand price trends from the perspective of not only consumers but also businesses. We extract comments related to prices from the Economy Watchers Survey conducted by the Cabinet Office of Japan and classify price trends using a large language model (LLM). We classify whether the survey sample reflects the perspective of consumers or businesses, and whether the comments pertain to goods or services by utilizing information on the fields of comments and the industries of respondents included in the Economy Watchers Survey. From these classified price-related comments, we construct price sentiment indices not only for a general purpose but also for more specific objectives by combining perspectives on consumers and prices, as well as goods and services. It becomes possible to achieve a more accurate classification of price directions by employing a LLM for classification. Furthermore, integrating the outputs of multiple LLMs suggests the potential for the better performance of the classification. The use of more accurately classified comments allows for the construction of an index with a higher correlation to existing indices than previous studies. We demonstrate that the correlation of the price index for consumers, which has a larger sample size, is further enhanced by selecting comments for aggregation based on the industry of the survey respondents.
Research on Domain-Specific Chinese Spelling Correction Method Based on Plugin Extension Modules
Authors: Xiaowu Zhang, Hongfei Zhao, Xuan Chang
Date: 2024-11-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Spelling Correction

This paper proposes a Chinese spelling correction method based on plugin extension modules, aimed at addressing the limitations of existing models in handling domain-specific texts. Traditional Chinese spelling correction models are typically trained on general-domain datasets, resulting in poor performance when encountering specialized terminology in domain-specific texts. To address this issue, we design an extension module that learns the features of domain-specific terminology, thereby enhancing the model's correction capabilities within specific domains. This extension module can provide domain knowledge to the model without compromising its general spelling correction performance, thus improving its accuracy in specialized fields. Experimental results demonstrate that after integrating extension modules for medical, legal, and official document domains, the model's correction performance is significantly improved compared to the baseline model without any extension modules.