pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Corpus Metadata to Detect Template-based Translation: An Exploratory Case Study of the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia Edition
Authors: Saied Alshahrani, Hesham Haroon, Ali Elfilali, Mariama Njie, Jeanna Matthews
Date: 2024-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Translation

Wikipedia articles (content pages) are commonly used corpora in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, especially in low-resource languages other than English. Yet, a few research studies have studied the three Arabic Wikipedia editions, Arabic Wikipedia (AR), Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia (ARZ), and Moroccan Arabic Wikipedia (ARY), and documented issues in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia edition regarding the massive automatic creation of its articles using template-based translation from English to Arabic without human involvement, overwhelming the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia with articles that do not only have low-quality content but also with articles that do not represent the Egyptian people, their culture, and their dialect. In this paper, we aim to mitigate the problem of template translation that occurred in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia by identifying these template-translated articles and their characteristics through exploratory analysis and building automatic detection systems. We first explore the content of the three Arabic Wikipedia editions in terms of density, quality, and human contributions and utilize the resulting insights to build multivariate machine learning classifiers leveraging articles' metadata to detect the template-translated articles automatically. We then publicly deploy and host the best-performing classifier, XGBoost, as an online application called EGYPTIAN WIKIPEDIA SCANNER and release the extracted, filtered, and labeled datasets to the research community to benefit from our datasets and the online, web-based detection system.
DivTOD: Unleashing the Power of LLMs for Diversifying Task-Oriented Dialogue Representations
Authors: Weihao Zeng, Dayuan Fu, Keqing He, Yejie Wang, Yukai Xu, Weiran Xu
Date: 2024-03-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Language models pre-trained on general text have achieved impressive results in diverse fields. Yet, the distinct linguistic characteristics of task-oriented dialogues (TOD) compared to general text limit the practical utility of existing language models. Current task-oriented dialogue pre-training methods overlook the one-to-many property of conversations, where multiple responses can be appropriate given the same conversation context. In this paper, we propose a novel dialogue pre-training model called DivTOD, which collaborates with LLMs to learn diverse task-oriented dialogue representations. DivTOD guides LLMs in transferring diverse knowledge to smaller models while removing domain knowledge that contradicts task-oriented dialogues. Experiments show that our model outperforms strong TOD baselines on various downstream dialogue tasks and learns the intrinsic diversity of task-oriented dialogues.
The Shape of Word Embeddings: Quantifying Non-Isometry With Topological Data Analysis
Authors: Ondřej Draganov, Steven Skiena
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Topological Data Analysis, Word Embeddings

Word embeddings represent language vocabularies as clouds of $d$-dimensional points. We investigate how information is conveyed by the general shape of these clouds, instead of representing the semantic meaning of each token. Specifically, we use the notion of persistent homology from topological data analysis (TDA) to measure the distances between language pairs from the shape of their unlabeled embeddings. These distances quantify the degree of non-isometry of the embeddings. To distinguish whether these differences are random training errors or capture real information about the languages, we use the computed distance matrices to construct language phylogenetic trees over 81 Indo-European languages. Careful evaluation shows that our reconstructed trees exhibit strong and statistically-significant similarities to the reference.
Addressing Both Statistical and Causal Gender Fairness in NLP Models
Authors: Hannah Chen, Yangfeng Ji, David Evans
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Data Augmentation, Fairness

Statistical fairness stipulates equivalent outcomes for every protected group, whereas causal fairness prescribes that a model makes the same prediction for an individual regardless of their protected characteristics. Counterfactual data augmentation (CDA) is effective for reducing bias in NLP models, yet models trained with CDA are often evaluated only on metrics that are closely tied to the causal fairness notion; similarly, sampling-based methods designed to promote statistical fairness are rarely evaluated for causal fairness. In this work, we evaluate both statistical and causal debiasing methods for gender bias in NLP models, and find that while such methods are effective at reducing bias as measured by the targeted metric, they do not necessarily improve results on other bias metrics. We demonstrate that combinations of statistical and causal debiasing techniques are able to reduce bias measured through both types of metrics.
NumeroLogic: Number Encoding for Enhanced LLMs' Numerical Reasoning
Authors: Eli Schwartz, Leshem Choshen, Joseph Shtok, Sivan Doveh, Leonid Karlinsky, Assaf Arbelle
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, MMLU

Language models struggle with handling numerical data and performing arithmetic operations. We hypothesize that this limitation can be partially attributed to non-intuitive textual numbers representation. When a digit is read or generated by a causal language model it does not know its place value (e.g. thousands vs. hundreds) until the entire number is processed. To address this issue, we propose a simple adjustment to how numbers are represented by including the count of digits before each number. For instance, instead of "42", we suggest using "{2:42}" as the new format. This approach, which we term NumeroLogic, offers an added advantage in number generation by serving as a Chain of Thought (CoT). By requiring the model to consider the number of digits first, it enhances the reasoning process before generating the actual number. We use arithmetic tasks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the NumeroLogic formatting. We further demonstrate NumeroLogic applicability to general natural language modeling, improving language understanding performance in the MMLU benchmark.
Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Multi-Domain, Multi-Task Framework for Embedding Model Selection
Authors: Vivek Khetan
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Model Selection, Position

This position paper proposes a systematic approach towards developing a framework to help select the most effective embedding models for natural language processing (NLP) tasks, addressing the challenge posed by the proliferation of both proprietary and open-source encoder models.
MetaIE: Distilling a Meta Model from LLM for All Kinds of Information Extraction Tasks
Authors: Letian Peng, Zilong Wang, Feng Yao, Zihan Wang, Jingbo Shang
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction

Information extraction (IE) is a fundamental area in natural language processing where prompting large language models (LLMs), even with in-context examples, cannot defeat small LMs tuned on very small IE datasets. We observe that IE tasks, such as named entity recognition and relation extraction, all focus on extracting important information, which can be formalized as a label-to-span matching. In this paper, we propose a novel framework MetaIE to build a small LM as meta-model by learning to extract "important information", i.e., the meta-understanding of IE, so that this meta-model can be adapted to all kind of IE tasks effectively and efficiently. Specifically, MetaIE obtains the small LM via a symbolic distillation from an LLM following the label-to-span scheme. We construct the distillation dataset via sampling sentences from language model pre-training datasets (e.g., OpenWebText in our implementation) and prompting an LLM to identify the typed spans of "important information". We evaluate the meta-model under the few-shot adaptation setting. Extensive results on 13 datasets from 6 IE tasks confirm that MetaIE can offer a better starting point for few-shot tuning on IE datasets and outperform other meta-models from (1) vanilla language model pre-training, (2) multi-IE-task pre-training with human annotations, and (3) single-IE-task symbolic distillation from LLM. Moreover, we provide comprehensive analyses of MetaIE, such as the size of the distillation dataset, the meta-model architecture, and the size of the meta-model.
DOCMASTER: A Unified Platform for Annotation, Training, & Inference in Document Question-Answering
Authors: Alex Nguyen, Zilong Wang, Jingbo Shang, Dheeraj Mekala
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving, Question Answering

The application of natural language processing models to PDF documents is pivotal for various business applications yet the challenge of training models for this purpose persists in businesses due to specific hurdles. These include the complexity of working with PDF formats that necessitate parsing text and layout information for curating training data and the lack of privacy-preserving annotation tools. This paper introduces DOCMASTER, a unified platform designed for annotating PDF documents, model training, and inference, tailored to document question-answering. The annotation interface enables users to input questions and highlight text spans within the PDF file as answers, saving layout information and text spans accordingly. Furthermore, DOCMASTER supports both state-of-the-art layout-aware and text models for comprehensive training purposes. Importantly, as annotations, training, and inference occur on-device, it also safeguards privacy. The platform has been instrumental in driving several research prototypes concerning document analysis such as the AI assistant utilized by University of California San Diego's (UCSD) International Services and Engagement Office (ISEO) for processing a substantial volume of PDF documents.
Automatic detection of relevant information, predictions and forecasts in financial news through topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation
Authors: Silvia García-Méndez, Francisco de Arriba-Pérez, Ana Barros-Vila, Francisco J. González-Castaño, Enrique Costa-Montenegro
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00

Financial news items are unstructured sources of information that can be mined to extract knowledge for market screening applications. Manual extraction of relevant information from the continuous stream of finance-related news is cumbersome and beyond the skills of many investors, who, at most, can follow a few sources and authors. Accordingly, we focus on the analysis of financial news to identify relevant text and, within that text, forecasts and predictions. We propose a novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) system to assist investors in the detection of relevant financial events in unstructured textual sources by considering both relevance and temporality at the discursive level. Firstly, we segment the text to group together closely related text. Secondly, we apply co-reference resolution to discover internal dependencies within segments. Finally, we perform relevant topic modelling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to separate relevant from less relevant text and then analyse the relevant text using a Machine Learning-oriented temporal approach to identify predictions and speculative statements. We created an experimental data set composed of 2,158 financial news items that were manually labelled by NLP researchers to evaluate our solution. The ROUGE-L values for the identification of relevant text and predictions/forecasts were 0.662 and 0.982, respectively. To our knowledge, this is the first work to jointly consider relevance and temporality at the discursive level. It contributes to the transfer of human associative discourse capabilities to expert systems through the combination of multi-paragraph topic segmentation and co-reference resolution to separate author expression patterns, topic modelling with LDA to detect relevant text, and discursive temporality analysis to identify forecasts and predictions within this text.
Do Vision-Language Models Understand Compound Nouns?
Authors: Sonal Kumar, Sreyan Ghosh, S Sakshi, Utkarsh Tyagi, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Open-vocabulary vision-language models (VLMs) like CLIP, trained using contrastive loss, have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text-to-image retrieval. However, do VLMs understand compound nouns (CNs) (e.g., lab coat) as well as they understand nouns (e.g., lab)? We curate Compun, a novel benchmark with 400 unique and commonly used CNs, to evaluate the effectiveness of VLMs in interpreting CNs. The Compun benchmark challenges a VLM for text-to-image retrieval where, given a text prompt with a CN, the task is to select the correct image that shows the CN among a pair of distractor images that show the constituent nouns that make up the CN. Next, we perform an in-depth analysis to highlight CLIPs' limited understanding of certain types of CNs. Finally, we present an alternative framework that moves beyond hand-written templates for text prompts widely used by CLIP-like models. We employ a Large Language Model to generate multiple diverse captions that include the CN as an object in the scene described by the caption. Our proposed method improves CN understanding of CLIP by 8.25% on Compun. Code and benchmark are available at: https://github.com/sonalkum/Compun
CoDa: Constrained Generation based Data Augmentation for Low-Resource NLP
Authors: Chandra Kiran Reddy Evuru, Sreyan Ghosh, Sonal Kumar, Ramaneswaran S, Utkarsh Tyagi, Dinesh Manocha
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Instruction Following

We present CoDa (Constrained Generation based Data Augmentation), a controllable, effective, and training-free data augmentation technique for low-resource (data-scarce) NLP. Our approach is based on prompting off-the-shelf instruction-following Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating text that satisfies a set of constraints. Precisely, we extract a set of simple constraints from every instance in the low-resource dataset and verbalize them to prompt an LLM to generate novel and diverse training instances. Our findings reveal that synthetic data that follows simple constraints in the downstream dataset act as highly effective augmentations, and CoDa can achieve this without intricate decoding-time constrained generation techniques or fine-tuning with complex algorithms that eventually make the model biased toward the small number of training instances. Additionally, CoDa is the first framework that provides users explicit control over the augmentation generation process, thereby also allowing easy adaptation to several domains. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CoDa across 11 datasets spanning 3 tasks and 3 low-resource settings. CoDa outperforms all our baselines, qualitatively and quantitatively, with improvements of 0.12%-7.19%. Code is available here: https://github.com/Sreyan88/CoDa
Detection of Temporality at Discourse Level on Financial News by Combining Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning
Authors: Silvia García-Méndez, Francisco de Arriba-Pérez, Ana Barros-Vila, Francisco J. González-Castaño
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Finance-related news such as Bloomberg News, CNN Business and Forbes are valuable sources of real data for market screening systems. In news, an expert shares opinions beyond plain technical analyses that include context such as political, sociological and cultural factors. In the same text, the expert often discusses the performance of different assets. Some key statements are mere descriptions of past events while others are predictions. Therefore, understanding the temporality of the key statements in a text is essential to separate context information from valuable predictions. We propose a novel system to detect the temporality of finance-related news at discourse level that combines Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning techniques, and exploits sophisticated features such as syntactic and semantic dependencies. More specifically, we seek to extract the dominant tenses of the main statements, which may be either explicit or implicit. We have tested our system on a labelled dataset of finance-related news annotated by researchers with knowledge in the field. Experimental results reveal a high detection precision compared to an alternative rule-based baseline approach. Ultimately, this research contributes to the state-of-the-art of market screening by identifying predictive knowledge for financial decision making.
UniMEEC: Towards Unified Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Emotion Cause
Authors: Guimin Hu, Zhihong Zhu, Daniel Hershcovich, Lijie Hu, Hasti Seifi, Jiayuan Xie
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Cause Extraction, Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction, Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition in Conversation, Multimodal Emotion Recognition

Multimodal emotion recognition in conversation (MERC) and multimodal emotion-cause pair extraction (MECPE) have recently garnered significant attention. Emotions are the expression of affect or feelings; responses to specific events, or situations -- known as emotion causes. Both collectively explain the causality between human emotion and intents. However, existing works treat emotion recognition and emotion cause extraction as two individual problems, ignoring their natural causality. In this paper, we propose a Unified Multimodal Emotion recognition and Emotion-Cause analysis framework (UniMEEC) to explore the causality between emotion and emotion cause. Concretely, UniMEEC reformulates the MERC and MECPE tasks as mask prediction problems and unifies them with a causal prompt template. To differentiate the modal effects, UniMEEC proposes a multimodal causal prompt to probe the pre-trained knowledge specified to modality and implements cross-task and cross-modality interactions under task-oriented settings. Experiment results on four public benchmark datasets verify the model performance on MERC and MECPE tasks and achieve consistent improvements compared with the previous state-of-the-art methods.
How Robust are the Tabular QA Models for Scientific Tables? A Study using Customized Dataset
Authors: Akash Ghosh, B Venkata Sahith, Niloy Ganguly, Pawan Goyal, Mayank Singh
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Question-answering (QA) on hybrid scientific tabular and textual data deals with scientific information, and relies on complex numerical reasoning. In recent years, while tabular QA has seen rapid progress, understanding their robustness on scientific information is lacking due to absence of any benchmark dataset. To investigate the robustness of the existing state-of-the-art QA models on scientific hybrid tabular data, we propose a new dataset, "SciTabQA", consisting of 822 question-answer pairs from scientific tables and their descriptions. With the help of this dataset, we assess the state-of-the-art Tabular QA models based on their ability (i) to use heterogeneous information requiring both structured data (table) and unstructured data (text) and (ii) to perform complex scientific reasoning tasks. In essence, we check the capability of the models to interpret scientific tables and text. Our experiments show that "SciTabQA" is an innovative dataset to study question-answering over scientific heterogeneous data. We benchmark three state-of-the-art Tabular QA models, and find that the best F1 score is only 0.462.
An Analysis of BPE Vocabulary Trimming in Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Marco Cognetta, Tatsuya Hiraoka, Naoaki Okazaki, Rico Sennrich, Yuval Pinter
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

We explore threshold vocabulary trimming in Byte-Pair Encoding subword tokenization, a postprocessing step that replaces rare subwords with their component subwords. The technique is available in popular tokenization libraries but has not been subjected to rigorous scientific scrutiny. While the removal of rare subwords is suggested as best practice in machine translation implementations, both as a means to reduce model size and for improving model performance through robustness, our experiments indicate that, across a large space of hyperparameter settings, vocabulary trimming fails to improve performance, and is even prone to incurring heavy degradation.
Jetsons at FinNLP 2024: Towards Understanding the ESG Impact of a News Article using Transformer-based Models
Authors: Parag Pravin Dakle, Alolika Gon, Sihan Zha, Liang Wang, SaiKrishna Rallabandi, Preethi Raghavan
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

In this paper, we describe the different approaches explored by the Jetsons team for the Multi-Lingual ESG Impact Duration Inference (ML-ESG-3) shared task. The shared task focuses on predicting the duration and type of the ESG impact of a news article. The shared task dataset consists of 2,059 news titles and articles in English, French, Korean, and Japanese languages. For the impact duration classification task, we fine-tuned XLM-RoBERTa with a custom fine-tuning strategy and using self-training and DeBERTa-v3 using only English translations. These models individually ranked first on the leaderboard for Korean and Japanese and in an ensemble for the English language, respectively. For the impact type classification task, our XLM-RoBERTa model fine-tuned using a custom fine-tuning strategy ranked first for the English language.
FineFake: A Knowledge-Enriched Dataset for Fine-Grained Multi-Domain Fake News Detection
Authors: Ziyi Zhou, XiaoMing Zhang, Litian Zhang, Jiacheng Liu, Senzhang Wang, Zheng Liu, Xi Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Fake News Detection

Existing benchmarks for fake news detection have significantly contributed to the advancement of models in assessing the authenticity of news content. However, these benchmarks typically focus solely on news pertaining to a single semantic topic or originating from a single platform, thereby failing to capture the diversity of multi-domain news in real scenarios. In order to understand fake news across various domains, the external knowledge and fine-grained annotations are indispensable to provide precise evidence and uncover the diverse underlying strategies for fabrication, which are also ignored by existing benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce a novel multi-domain knowledge-enhanced benchmark with fine-grained annotations, named \textbf{FineFake}. FineFake encompasses 16,909 data samples spanning six semantic topics and eight platforms. Each news item is enriched with multi-modal content, potential social context, semi-manually verified common knowledge, and fine-grained annotations that surpass conventional binary labels. Furthermore, we formulate three challenging tasks based on FineFake and propose a knowledge-enhanced domain adaptation network. Extensive experiments are conducted on FineFake under various scenarios, providing accurate and reliable benchmarks for future endeavors. The entire FineFake project is publicly accessible as an open-source repository at \url{https://github.com/Accuser907/FineFake}.