pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Whisper's Accuracy and Speed for Indian Languages through Prompt-Tuning and Tokenization
Authors: Kumud Tripathi, Raj Gothi, Pankaj Wasnik
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition has recently seen a significant advancement with large foundational models such as Whisper. However, these models often struggle to perform well in low-resource languages, such as Indian languages. This paper explores two novel approaches to enhance Whisper's multilingual speech recognition performance in Indian languages. First, we propose prompt-tuning with language family information, which enhances Whisper's accuracy in linguistically similar languages. Second, we introduce a novel tokenizer that reduces the number of generated tokens, thereby accelerating Whisper's inference speed. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the tokenizer significantly reduces inference time, while prompt-tuning enhances accuracy across various Whisper model sizes, including Small, Medium, and Large. Together, these techniques achieve a balance between optimal WER and inference speed.
Machine Generated Product Advertisements: Benchmarking LLMs Against Human Performance
Authors: Sanjukta Ghosh
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Persuasiveness

This study compares the performance of AI-generated and human-written product descriptions using a multifaceted evaluation model. We analyze descriptions for 100 products generated by four AI models (Gemma 2B, LLAMA, GPT2, and ChatGPT 4) with and without sample descriptions, against human-written descriptions. Our evaluation metrics include sentiment, readability, persuasiveness, Search Engine Optimization(SEO), clarity, emotional appeal, and call-to-action effectiveness. The results indicate that ChatGPT 4 performs the best. In contrast, other models demonstrate significant shortcomings, producing incoherent and illogical output that lacks logical structure and contextual relevance. These models struggle to maintain focus on the product being described, resulting in disjointed sentences that do not convey meaningful information. This research provides insights into the current capabilities and limitations of AI in the creation of content for e-Commerce.
Exploiting Domain-Specific Parallel Data on Multilingual Language Models for Low-resource Language Translation
Authors: Surangika Ranathungaa, Shravan Nayak, Shih-Ting Cindy Huang, Yanke Mao, Tong Su, Yun-Hsiang Ray Chan, Songchen Yuan, Anthony Rinaldi, Annie En-Shiun Lee
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT

Neural Machine Translation (NMT) systems built on multilingual sequence-to-sequence Language Models (msLMs) fail to deliver expected results when the amount of parallel data for a language, as well as the language's representation in the model are limited. This restricts the capabilities of domain-specific NMT systems for low-resource languages (LRLs). As a solution, parallel data from auxiliary domains can be used either to fine-tune or to further pre-train the msLM. We present an evaluation of the effectiveness of these two techniques in the context of domain-specific LRL-NMT. We also explore the impact of domain divergence on NMT model performance. We recommend several strategies for utilizing auxiliary parallel data in building domain-specific NMT models for LRLs.
Confidence v.s. Critique: A Decomposition of Self-Correction Capability for LLMs
Authors: Zhe Yang, Yichang Zhang, Yudong Wang, Ziyao Xu, Junyang Lin, Zhifang Sui
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) can correct their self-generated responses, but a decline in accuracy after self-correction is also witnessed. To have a deeper understanding of self-correction, we endeavor to decompose, evaluate, and analyze the self-correction behaviors of LLMs. By enumerating and analyzing answer correctness before and after self-correction, we decompose the self-correction capability into confidence (being confident to correct answers) and critique (turning wrong answers to correct) capabilities, and propose two metrics from a probabilistic perspective to measure these 2 capabilities, along with another metric for overall self-correction capability evaluation. Based on our decomposition and evaluation metrics, we conduct extensive experiments and draw some empirical conclusions. For example, we find different models can exhibit distinct behaviors: some models are confident while others are more critical. We also find the trade-off between the two capabilities (i.e. improving one can lead to a decline in the other) when manipulating model self-correction behavior by prompts or in-context learning. Further, we find a simple yet efficient strategy to improve self-correction capability by transforming Supervision Fine-Tuning (SFT) data format, and our strategy outperforms vanilla SFT in both capabilities and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.
Safeguard Fine-Tuned LLMs Through Pre- and Post-Tuning Model Merging
Authors: Hua Farn, Hsuan Su, Shachi H Kumar, Saurav Sahay, Shang-Tse Chen, Hung-Yi Lee
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for downstream tasks is a widely adopted approach, but it often leads to safety degradation in safety-aligned LLMs. Currently, many solutions address this issue by incorporating additional safety data, which can be impractical in many cases. In this paper, we address the question: How can we improve downstream task performance while preserving safety in LLMs without relying on additional safety data? We propose a simple and effective method that maintains the inherent safety of LLMs while enhancing their downstream task performance: merging the weights of pre- and post-fine-tuned safety-aligned models. Experimental results across various downstream tasks, models, and merging methods demonstrate that this approach effectively mitigates safety degradation while improving downstream task performance, offering a practical solution for adapting safety-aligned LLMs.
Pre-training, Fine-tuning and Re-ranking: A Three-Stage Framework for Legal Question Answering
Authors: Shiwen Ni, Hao Cheng, Min Yang
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Representation Learning, Re-Ranking

Legal question answering (QA) has attracted increasing attention from people seeking legal advice, which aims to retrieve the most applicable answers from a large-scale database of question-answer pairs. Previous methods mainly use a dual-encoder architecture to learn dense representations of both questions and answers. However, these methods could suffer from lacking domain knowledge and sufficient labeled training data. In this paper, we propose a three-stage (\underline{p}re-training, \underline{f}ine-tuning and \underline{r}e-ranking) framework for \underline{l}egal \underline{QA} (called PFR-LQA), which promotes the fine-grained text representation learning and boosts the performance of dense retrieval with the dual-encoder architecture. Concretely, we first conduct domain-specific pre-training on legal questions and answers through a self-supervised training objective, allowing the pre-trained model to be adapted to the legal domain. Then, we perform task-specific fine-tuning of the dual-encoder on legal question-answer pairs by using the supervised learning objective, leading to a high-quality dual-encoder for the specific downstream QA task. Finally, we employ a contextual re-ranking objective to further refine the output representations of questions produced by the document encoder, which uses contextual similarity to increase the discrepancy between the anchor and hard negative samples for better question re-ranking. We conduct extensive experiments on a manually annotated legal QA dataset. Experimental results show that our PFR-LQA method achieves better performance than the strong competitors for legal question answering.
Feature Alignment-Based Knowledge Distillation for Efficient Compression of Large Language Models
Authors: Shuo Wang, Chihang Wang, Jia Gao, Zhen Qi, Hongye Zheng, Xiaoxuan Liao
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Self-Supervised Learning, Transfer Learning

This study proposes a knowledge distillation algorithm based on large language models and feature alignment, aiming to effectively transfer the knowledge of large pre-trained models into lightweight student models, thereby reducing computational costs while maintaining high model performance. Different from the traditional soft label distillation method, this method introduces a multi-layer feature alignment strategy to deeply align the intermediate features and attention mechanisms of the teacher model and the student model, maximally retaining the semantic expression ability and context modeling ability of the teacher model. In terms of method design, a multi-task loss function is constructed, including feature matching loss, attention alignment loss, and output distribution matching loss, to ensure multi-level information transfer through joint optimization. The experiments were comprehensively evaluated on the GLUE data set and various natural language processing tasks. The results show that the proposed model performs very close to the state-of-the-art GPT-4 model in terms of evaluation indicators such as perplexity, BLEU, ROUGE, and CER. At the same time, it far exceeds baseline models such as DeBERTa, XLNet, and GPT-3, showing significant performance improvements and computing efficiency advantages. Research results show that the feature alignment distillation strategy is an effective model compression method that can significantly reduce computational overhead and storage requirements while maintaining model capabilities. Future research can be further expanded in the directions of self-supervised learning, cross-modal feature alignment, and multi-task transfer learning to provide more flexible and efficient solutions for the deployment and optimization of deep learning models.
Dynamic Skill Adaptation for Large Language Models
Authors: Jiaao Chen, Diyi Yang
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

We present Dynamic Skill Adaptation (DSA), an adaptive and dynamic framework to adapt novel and complex skills to Large Language Models (LLMs). Compared with previous work which learns from human-curated and static data in random orders, we propose to first automatically generate and organize the training data by mimicking the learning pathways of human and then dynamically tailor the training data based on the training dynamics. Specifically, inspired by the learning structures and teaching strategies in the human education system, we first construct a skill graph by decomposing complex skills into sub-skills and arranging them based on their dependencies in human syllables. For every skill, we utilize LLMs to generate both textbook-like data which contains detailed descriptions of skills for pre-training and exercise-like data which targets at explicitly utilizing the skills to solve problems for instruction-tuning. Furthermore, during the instruction-tuning, we dynamically update the training data which down-weight easy-to-learn examples, generate more complex examples, and filter out data with errors. Experiments on large language models such as LLAMA and Mistral demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed methods in adapting math reasoning skills and social study skills.
GFG -- Gender-Fair Generation: A CALAMITA Challenge
Authors: Simona Frenda, Andrea Piergentili, Beatrice Savoldi, Marco Madeddu, Martina Rosola, Silvia Casola, Chiara Ferrando, Viviana Patti, Matteo Negri, Luisa Bentivogli
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Translation

Gender-fair language aims at promoting gender equality by using terms and expressions that include all identities and avoid reinforcing gender stereotypes. Implementing gender-fair strategies is particularly challenging in heavily gender-marked languages, such as Italian. To address this, the Gender-Fair Generation challenge intends to help shift toward gender-fair language in written communication. The challenge, designed to assess and monitor the recognition and generation of gender-fair language in both mono- and cross-lingual scenarios, includes three tasks: (1) the detection of gendered expressions in Italian sentences, (2) the reformulation of gendered expressions into gender-fair alternatives, and (3) the generation of gender-fair language in automatic translation from English to Italian. The challenge relies on three different annotated datasets: the GFL-it corpus, which contains Italian texts extracted from administrative documents provided by the University of Brescia; GeNTE, a bilingual test set for gender-neutral rewriting and translation built upon a subset of the Europarl dataset; and Neo-GATE, a bilingual test set designed to assess the use of non-binary neomorphemes in Italian for both fair formulation and translation tasks. Finally, each task is evaluated with specific metrics: average of F1-score obtained by means of BERTScore computed on each entry of the datasets for task 1, an accuracy measured with a gender-neutral classifier, and a coverage-weighted accuracy for tasks 2 and 3.
"I've Heard of You!": Generate Spoken Named Entity Recognition Data for Unseen Entities
Authors: Jiawei Yu, Xiang Geng, Yuang Li, Mengxin Ren, Wei Tang, Jiahuan Li, Zhibin Lan, Min Zhang, Hao Yang, ShuJian Huang, Jinsong Su
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Spoken named entity recognition (NER) aims to identify named entities from speech, playing an important role in speech processing. New named entities appear every day, however, annotating their Spoken NER data is costly. In this paper, we demonstrate that existing Spoken NER systems perform poorly when dealing with previously unseen named entities. To tackle this challenge, we propose a method for generating Spoken NER data based on a named entity dictionary (NED) to reduce costs. Specifically, we first use a large language model (LLM) to generate sentences from the sampled named entities and then use a text-to-speech (TTS) system to generate the speech. Furthermore, we introduce a noise metric to filter out noisy data. To evaluate our approach, we release a novel Spoken NER benchmark along with a corresponding NED containing 8,853 entities. Experiment results show that our method achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in the in-domain, zero-shot domain adaptation, and fully zero-shot settings. Our data will be available at https://github.com/DeepLearnXMU/HeardU.
Advancing LLM detection in the ALTA 2024 Shared Task: Techniques and Analysis
Authors: Dima Galat
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Sentence

The recent proliferation of AI-generated content has prompted significant interest in developing reliable detection methods. This study explores techniques for identifying AI-generated text through sentence-level evaluation within hybrid articles. Our findings indicate that ChatGPT-3.5 Turbo exhibits distinct, repetitive probability patterns that enable consistent in-domain detection. Empirical tests show that minor textual modifications, such as rewording, have minimal impact on detection accuracy. These results provide valuable insights for advancing AI detection methodologies, offering a pathway toward robust solutions to address the complexities of synthetic text identification.
Robust Speech and Natural Language Processing Models for Depression Screening
Authors: Y. Lu, A. Harati, T. Rutowski, R. Oliveira, P. Chlebek, E. Shriberg
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Depression is a global health concern with a critical need for increased patient screening. Speech technology offers advantages for remote screening but must perform robustly across patients. We have described two deep learning models developed for this purpose. One model is based on acoustics; the other is based on natural language processing. Both models employ transfer learning. Data from a depression-labeled corpus in which 11,000 unique users interacted with a human-machine application using conversational speech is used. Results on binary depression classification have shown that both models perform at or above AUC=0.80 on unseen data with no speaker overlap. Performance is further analyzed as a function of test subset characteristics, finding that the models are generally robust over speaker and session variables. We conclude that models based on these approaches offer promise for generalized automated depression screening.
Cross-Demographic Portability of Deep NLP-Based Depression Models
Authors: Tomek Rutowski, Elizabeth Shriberg, Amir Harati, Yang Lu, Ricardo Oliveira, Piotr Chlebek
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00

Deep learning models are rapidly gaining interest for real-world applications in behavioral health. An important gap in current literature is how well such models generalize over different populations. We study Natural Language Processing (NLP) based models to explore portability over two different corpora highly mismatched in age. The first and larger corpus contains younger speakers. It is used to train an NLP model to predict depression. When testing on unseen speakers from the same age distribution, this model performs at AUC=0.82. We then test this model on the second corpus, which comprises seniors from a retirement community. Despite the large demographic differences in the two corpora, we saw only modest degradation in performance for the senior-corpus data, achieving AUC=0.76. Interestingly, in the senior population, we find AUC=0.81 for the subset of patients whose health state is consistent over time. Implications for demographic portability of speech-based applications are discussed.
Let the Fuzzy Rule Speak: Enhancing In-context Learning Debiasing with Interpretability
Authors: Ruixi Lin, Yang You
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Multi Class Text Classification, text-classification, Text Classification

One of the potential failures of large language models (LLMs) is their imbalanced class performances in text classification tasks. With in-context learning (ICL), LLMs yields good accuracy for some classes but low accuracy for others. This imbalance is particularly problematic when misclassifications lead to user dissatisfaction or safety risks. While the root causes may lie in the data, addressing them from the source through training is neither easy nor cost-effective. To delve deeper, the imbalance stems from certain classes consistently receiving disproportionately high ICL probabilities, while others receive lower probabilities, resulting in under-prediction and lower accuracy in the latter. Crucially, probability ranges vary in their impact on the imbalance, enabling precise corrections by range. Therefore, this work introduces an inference-time debiasing method, FuRud (Fuzzy Rule Optimization-based Debiasing), to tackle this issue. FuRud addresses core interpretability challenges by determining why certain classes require corrections and tailoring adjustments for each sample and class probability. Tailored corrections use fuzzy sets with triangular membership functions, because they can transform per-sample class probabilities based on probability ranges. Each class selects one from 19 triangular membership functions, solving a nonlinear integer programming selection problem with simulated annealing, to minimize class accuracy bias (COBias) and maximize overall accuracy without updating LLM parameters. Notably, across seven benchmark datasets, FuRud reduces COBias by more than half (56%), while achieving a relative increase of 21% in overall accuracy, outperforming state-of-the-art debiasing methods.
Dovetail: A CPU/GPU Heterogeneous Speculative Decoding for LLM inference
Authors: Libo Zhang, Zhaoning Zhang, Baizhou Xu, Songzhu Mei, Dongsheng Li
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, HumanEval

Due to the high resource demands of Large Language Models (LLMs), achieving widespread deployment on consumer-grade devices presents significant challenges. Typically, personal or consumer-grade devices, including servers configured prior to the era of large-scale models, generally have relatively weak GPUs and relatively strong CPUs. However, most current methods primarily depend on GPUs for computation. Therefore, we propose Dovetail, an approach that deploys the draft model on the GPU to generate draft tokens while allowing the target model to perform parallel verification on the CPU, thereby improving the utilization of all available hardware resources and occupying less inter-device communication bandwidth. Accordingly, we have redesigned the draft model to better align with heterogeneous hardware characteristics. To this end, we implemented several optimizations: reducing the number of draft tokens to mitigate latency in parallel verification, increasing the depth of the draft model to enhance its predictive capacity, and introducing DGF (Dynamic Gating Fusion) to improve the integration of features and token embeddings. In the HumanEval benchmark, Dovetail achieved an inference speed of 5.86 tokens per second for LLaMA2-Chat-7B using 3GB of VRAM, representing an approximately 2.77x improvement over CPU-only inference. Furthermore, the inference speed was increased to 8 tokens per second when utilizing 7GB of VRAM.
Research Experiment on Multi-Model Comparison for Chinese Text Classification Tasks
Authors: Jiacheng Li
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Sentiment Analysis, text-classification, Text Classification

With the explosive growth of Chinese text data and advancements in natural language processing technologies, Chinese text classification has become one of the key techniques in fields such as information retrieval and sentiment analysis, attracting increasing attention. This paper conducts a comparative study on three deep learning models:TextCNN, TextRNN, and FastText.specifically for Chinese text classification tasks. By conducting experiments on the THUCNews dataset, the performance of these models is evaluated, and their applicability in different scenarios is discussed.
Overview of MWE history, challenges, and horizons: standing at the 20th anniversary of the MWE workshop series via MWE-UD2024
Authors: Lifeng Han, Kilian Evang, Archna Bhatia, Gosse Bouma, A. Seza Doğruöz, Marcos Garcia, Voula Giouli, Joakim Nivre, Alexandre Rademacher
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Starting in 2003 when the first MWE workshop was held with ACL in Sapporo, Japan, this year, the joint workshop of MWE-UD co-located with the LREC-COLING 2024 conference marked the 20th anniversary of MWE workshop events over the past nearly two decades. Standing at this milestone, we look back to this workshop series and summarise the research topics and methodologies researchers have carried out over the years. We also discuss the current challenges that we are facing and the broader impacts/synergies of MWE research within the CL and NLP fields. Finally, we give future research perspectives. We hope this position paper can help researchers, students, and industrial practitioners interested in MWE get a brief but easy understanding of its history, current, and possible future.