pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Fighting crime with Transformers: Empirical analysis of address parsing methods in payment data
Authors: Haitham Hammami, Louis Baligand, Bojan Petrovski
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

In the financial industry, identifying the location of parties involved in payments is a major challenge in the context of various regulatory requirements. For this purpose address parsing entails extracting fields such as street, postal code, or country from free text message attributes. While payment processing platforms are updating their standards with more structured formats such as SWIFT with ISO 20022, address parsing remains essential for a considerable volume of messages. With the emergence of Transformers and Generative Large Language Models (LLM), we explore the performance of state-of-the-art solutions given the constraint of processing a vast amount of daily data. This paper also aims to show the need for training robust models capable of dealing with real-world noisy transactional data. Our results suggest that a well fine-tuned Transformer model using early-stopping significantly outperforms other approaches. Nevertheless, generative LLMs demonstrate strong zero-shot performance and warrant further investigations.
SpeechAlign: Aligning Speech Generation to Human Preferences
Authors: Dong Zhang, Zhaowei Li, ShiMin Li, Xin Zhang, Pengyu Wang, Yaqian Zhou, Xipeng Qiu
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Speech language models have significantly advanced in generating realistic speech, with neural codec language models standing out. However, the integration of human feedback to align speech outputs to human preferences is often neglected. This paper addresses this gap by first analyzing the distribution gap in codec language models, highlighting how it leads to discrepancies between the training and inference phases, which negatively affects performance. Then we explore leveraging learning from human feedback to bridge the distribution gap. We introduce SpeechAlign, an iterative self-improvement strategy that aligns speech language models to human preferences. SpeechAlign involves constructing a preference codec dataset contrasting golden codec tokens against synthetic tokens, followed by preference optimization to improve the codec language model. This cycle of improvement is carried out iteratively to steadily convert weak models to strong ones. Through both subjective and objective evaluations, we show that SpeechAlign can bridge the distribution gap and facilitating continuous self-improvement of the speech language model. Moreover, SpeechAlign exhibits robust generalization capabilities and works for smaller models. Code and models will be available at https://github.com/0nutation/SpeechGPT.
MedExpQA: Multilingual Benchmarking of Large Language Models for Medical Question Answering
Authors: Iñigo Alonso, Maite Oronoz, Rodrigo Agerri
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Medical Question Answering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential of facilitating the development of Artificial Intelligence technology to assist medical experts for interactive decision support, which has been demonstrated by their competitive performances in Medical QA. However, while impressive, the required quality bar for medical applications remains far from being achieved. Currently, LLMs remain challenged by outdated knowledge and by their tendency to generate hallucinated content. Furthermore, most benchmarks to assess medical knowledge lack reference gold explanations which means that it is not possible to evaluate the reasoning of LLMs predictions. Finally, the situation is particularly grim if we consider benchmarking LLMs for languages other than English which remains, as far as we know, a totally neglected topic. In order to address these shortcomings, in this paper we present MedExpQA, the first multilingual benchmark based on medical exams to evaluate LLMs in Medical Question Answering. To the best of our knowledge, MedExpQA includes for the first time reference gold explanations written by medical doctors which can be leveraged to establish various gold-based upper-bounds for comparison with LLMs performance. Comprehensive multilingual experimentation using both the gold reference explanations and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) approaches show that performance of LLMs still has large room for improvement, especially for languages other than English. Furthermore, and despite using state-of-the-art RAG methods, our results also demonstrate the difficulty of obtaining and integrating readily available medical knowledge that may positively impact results on downstream evaluations for Medical Question Answering. So far the benchmark is available in four languages, but we hope that this work may encourage further development to other languages.
Enhancing Software-Related Information Extraction via Single-Choice Question Answering with Large Language Models
Authors: Wolfgang Otto, Sharmila Upadhyaya, Stefan Dietze
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, In-Context Learning, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, Question Answering, RAG, Relation Extraction, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Single Choice Question

This paper describes our participation in the Shared Task on Software Mentions Disambiguation (SOMD), with a focus on improving relation extraction in scholarly texts through generative Large Language Models (LLMs) using single-choice question-answering. The methodology prioritises the use of in-context learning capabilities of GLMs to extract software-related entities and their descriptive attributes, such as distributive information. Our approach uses Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques and GLMs for Named Entity Recognition (NER) and Attributive NER to identify relationships between extracted software entities, providing a structured solution for analysing software citations in academic literature. The paper provides a detailed description of our approach, demonstrating how using GLMs in a single-choice QA paradigm can greatly enhance IE methodologies. Our participation in the SOMD shared task highlights the importance of precise software citation practices and showcases our system's ability to overcome the challenges of disambiguating and extracting relationships between software mentions. This sets the groundwork for future research and development in this field.
Chinese Sequence Labeling with Semi-Supervised Boundary-Aware Language Model Pre-training
Authors: Longhui Zhang, Dingkun Long, Meishan Zhang, Yanzhao Zhang, Pengjun Xie, Min Zhang
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding

Chinese sequence labeling tasks are heavily reliant on accurate word boundary demarcation. Although current pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved substantial gains on these tasks, they rarely explicitly incorporate boundary information into the modeling process. An exception to this is BABERT, which incorporates unsupervised statistical boundary information into Chinese BERT's pre-training objectives. Building upon this approach, we input supervised high-quality boundary information to enhance BABERT's learning, developing a semi-supervised boundary-aware PLM. To assess PLMs' ability to encode boundaries, we introduce a novel ``Boundary Information Metric'' that is both simple and effective. This metric allows comparison of different PLMs without task-specific fine-tuning. Experimental results on Chinese sequence labeling datasets demonstrate that the improved BABERT variant outperforms the vanilla version, not only on these tasks but also more broadly across a range of Chinese natural language understanding tasks. Additionally, our proposed metric offers a convenient and accurate means of evaluating PLMs' boundary awareness.
RoT: Enhancing Large Language Models with Reflection on Search Trees
Authors: Wenyang Hui, Kewei Tu
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capability in reasoning and planning when integrated with tree-search-based prompting methods. However, since these methods ignore the previous search experiences, they often make the same mistakes in the search process. To address this issue, we introduce Reflection on search Trees (RoT), an LLM reflection framework designed to improve the performance of tree-search-based prompting methods. It uses a strong LLM to summarize guidelines from previous tree search experiences to enhance the ability of a weak LLM. The guidelines are instructions about solving this task through tree search which can prevent the weak LLMs from making similar mistakes in the past search process. In addition, we proposed a novel state selection method, which identifies the critical information from historical search processes to help RoT generate more specific and meaningful guidelines. In our extensive experiments, we find that RoT significantly improves the performance of LLMs in reasoning or planning tasks with various tree-search-based prompting methods (e.g., BFS and MCTS). Non-tree-search-based prompting methods such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) can also benefit from RoT guidelines since RoT can provide task-specific knowledge collected from the search experience.
XL$^2$Bench: A Benchmark for Extremely Long Context Understanding with Long-range Dependencies
Authors: Xuanfan Ni, Hengyi Cai, Xiaochi Wei, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Piji Li
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-Context Understanding, Reading Comprehension

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across diverse tasks but are constrained by their small context window sizes. Various efforts have been proposed to expand the context window to accommodate even up to 200K input tokens. Meanwhile, building high-quality benchmarks with much longer text lengths and more demanding tasks to provide comprehensive evaluations is of immense practical interest to facilitate long context understanding research of LLMs. However, prior benchmarks create datasets that ostensibly cater to long-text comprehension by expanding the input of traditional tasks, which falls short to exhibit the unique characteristics of long-text understanding, including long dependency tasks and longer text length compatible with modern LLMs' context window size. In this paper, we introduce a benchmark for extremely long context understanding with long-range dependencies, XL$^2$Bench, which includes three scenarios: Fiction Reading, Paper Reading, and Law Reading, and four tasks of increasing complexity: Memory Retrieval, Detailed Understanding, Overall Understanding, and Open-ended Generation, covering 27 subtasks in English and Chinese. It has an average length of 100K+ words (English) and 200K+ characters (Chinese). Evaluating six leading LLMs on XL$^2$Bench, we find that their performance significantly lags behind human levels. Moreover, the observed decline in performance across both the original and enhanced datasets underscores the efficacy of our approach to mitigating data contamination.
Language Models on a Diet: Cost-Efficient Development of Encoders for Closely-Related Languages via Additional Pretraining
Authors: Nikola Ljubešić, Vít Suchomel, Peter Rupnik, Taja Kuzman, Rik van Noord
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

The world of language models is going through turbulent times, better and ever larger models are coming out at an unprecedented speed. However, we argue that, especially for the scientific community, encoder models of up to 1 billion parameters are still very much needed, their primary usage being in enriching large collections of data with metadata necessary for downstream research. We investigate the best way to ensure the existence of such encoder models on the set of very closely related languages - Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Montenegrin, by setting up a diverse benchmark for these languages, and comparing the trained-from-scratch models with the new models constructed via additional pretraining of existing multilingual models. We show that comparable performance to dedicated from-scratch models can be obtained by additionally pretraining available multilingual models even with a limited amount of computation. We also show that neighboring languages, in our case Slovenian, can be included in the additional pretraining with little to no loss in the performance of the final model.
Know When To Stop: A Study of Semantic Drift in Text Generation
Authors: Ava Spataru, Eric Hambro, Elena Voita, Nicola Cancedda
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Reranking, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity, Text Generation

In this work, we explicitly show that modern LLMs tend to generate correct facts first, then "drift away" and generate incorrect facts later: this was occasionally observed but never properly measured. We develop a semantic drift score that measures the degree of separation between correct and incorrect facts in generated texts and confirm our hypothesis when generating Wikipedia-style biographies. This correct-then-incorrect generation pattern suggests that factual accuracy can be improved by knowing when to stop generation. Therefore, we explore the trade-off between information quantity and factual accuracy for several early stopping methods and manage to improve factuality by a large margin. We further show that reranking with semantic similarity can further improve these results, both compared to the baseline and when combined with early stopping. Finally, we try calling external API to bring the model back to the right generation path, but do not get positive results. Overall, our methods generalize and can be applied to any long-form text generation to produce more reliable information, by balancing trade-offs between factual accuracy, information quantity and computational cost.
NLP Progress in Indigenous Latin American Languages
Authors: Atnafu Lambebo Tonja, Fazlourrahman Balouchzahi, Sabur Butt, Olga Kolesnikova, Hector Ceballos, Alexander Gelbukh, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

The paper focuses on the marginalization of indigenous language communities in the face of rapid technological advancements. We highlight the cultural richness of these languages and the risk they face of being overlooked in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). We aim to bridge the gap between these communities and researchers, emphasizing the need for inclusive technological advancements that respect indigenous community perspectives. We show the NLP progress of indigenous Latin American languages and the survey that covers the status of indigenous languages in Latin America, their representation in NLP, and the challenges and innovations required for their preservation and development. The paper contributes to the current literature in understanding the need and progress of NLP for indigenous communities of Latin America, specifically low-resource and indigenous communities in general.
PORTULAN ExtraGLUE Datasets and Models: Kick-starting a Benchmark for the Neural Processing of Portuguese
Authors: Tomás Osório, Bernardo Leite, Henrique Lopes Cardoso, Luís Gomes, João Rodrigues, Rodrigo Santos, António Branco
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00

Leveraging research on the neural modelling of Portuguese, we contribute a collection of datasets for an array of language processing tasks and a corresponding collection of fine-tuned neural language models on these downstream tasks. To align with mainstream benchmarks in the literature, originally developed in English, and to kick start their Portuguese counterparts, the datasets were machine-translated from English with a state-of-the-art translation engine. The resulting PORTULAN ExtraGLUE benchmark is a basis for research on Portuguese whose improvement can be pursued in future work. Similarly, the respective fine-tuned neural language models, developed with a low-rank adaptation approach, are made available as baselines that can stimulate future work on the neural processing of Portuguese. All datasets and models have been developed and are made available for two variants of Portuguese: European and Brazilian.
Multi-Task Learning for Features Extraction in Financial Annual Reports
Authors: Syrielle Montariol, Matej Martinc, Andraž Pelicon, Senja Pollak, Boshko Koloski, Igor Lončarski, Aljoša Valentinčič
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Sentence, text-classification, Text Classification

For assessing various performance indicators of companies, the focus is shifting from strictly financial (quantitative) publicly disclosed information to qualitative (textual) information. This textual data can provide valuable weak signals, for example through stylistic features, which can complement the quantitative data on financial performance or on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria. In this work, we use various multi-task learning methods for financial text classification with the focus on financial sentiment, objectivity, forward-looking sentence prediction and ESG-content detection. We propose different methods to combine the information extracted from training jointly on different tasks; our best-performing method highlights the positive effect of explicitly adding auxiliary task predictions as features for the final target task during the multi-task training. Next, we use these classifiers to extract textual features from annual reports of FTSE350 companies and investigate the link between ESG quantitative scores and these features.
Interpreting Themes from Educational Stories
Authors: Yigeng Zhang, Fabio A. González, Thamar Solorio
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Reading comprehension continues to be a crucial research focus in the NLP community. Recent advances in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) have mostly centered on literal comprehension, referring to the surface-level understanding of content. In this work, we focus on the next level - interpretive comprehension, with a particular emphasis on inferring the themes of a narrative text. We introduce the first dataset specifically designed for interpretive comprehension of educational narratives, providing corresponding well-edited theme texts. The dataset spans a variety of genres and cultural origins and includes human-annotated theme keywords with varying levels of granularity. We further formulate NLP tasks under different abstractions of interpretive comprehension toward the main idea of a story. After conducting extensive experiments with state-of-the-art methods, we found the task to be both challenging and significant for NLP research. The dataset and source code have been made publicly available to the research community at https://github.com/RiTUAL-UH/EduStory.
Supervised Gradual Machine Learning for Aspect Category Detection
Authors: Murtadha Ahmed, Qun Chen
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Aspect Category Detection, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Sentence, Transfer Learning

Aspect Category Detection (ACD) aims to identify implicit and explicit aspects in a given review sentence. The state-of-the-art approaches for ACD use Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to address the problem as a multi-label classification task. However, learning category-specific representations heavily rely on the amount of labeled examples, which may not readily available in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to tackle the ACD task by combining DNNs with Gradual Machine Learning (GML) in a supervised setting. we aim to leverage the strength of DNN in semantic relation modeling, which can facilitate effective knowledge transfer between labeled and unlabeled instances during the gradual inference of GML. To achieve this, we first analyze the learned latent space of the DNN to model the relations, i.e., similar or opposite, between instances. We then represent these relations as binary features in a factor graph to efficiently convey knowledge. Finally, we conduct a comparative study of our proposed solution on real benchmark datasets and demonstrate that the GML approach, in collaboration with DNNs for feature extraction, consistently outperforms pure DNN solutions.
Linguistic Changes in Spontaneous Speech for Detecting Parkinsons Disease Using Large Language Models
Authors: Jonathan Crawford
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Parkinsons disease is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disorder with over ten million active cases worldwide and one million new diagnoses per year. Detecting and subsequently diagnosing the disease is challenging because of symptom heterogeneity with respect to complexity, as well as the type and timing of phenotypic manifestations. Typically, language impairment can present in the prodromal phase and precede motor symptoms suggesting that a linguistic-based approach could serve as a diagnostic method for incipient Parkinsons disease. Additionally, improved linguistic models may enhance other approaches through ensemble techniques. The field of large language models is advancing rapidly, presenting the opportunity to explore the use of these new models for detecting Parkinsons disease and to improve on current linguistic approaches with high-dimensional representations of linguistics. We evaluate the application of state-of-the-art large language models to detect Parkinsons disease automatically from spontaneous speech with up to 73% accuracy.
EcoVerse: An Annotated Twitter Dataset for Eco-Relevance Classification, Environmental Impact Analysis, and Stance Detection
Authors: Francesca Grasso, Stefano Locci, Giovanni Siragusa, Luigi di Caro
Date: 2024-04-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis, Stance Detection

Anthropogenic ecological crisis constitutes a significant challenge that all within the academy must urgently face, including the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. While recent years have seen increasing work revolving around climate-centric discourse, crucial environmental and ecological topics outside of climate change remain largely unaddressed, despite their prominent importance. Mainstream NLP tasks, such as sentiment analysis, dominate the scene, but there remains an untouched space in the literature involving the analysis of environmental impacts of certain events and practices. To address this gap, this paper presents EcoVerse, an annotated English Twitter dataset of 3,023 tweets spanning a wide spectrum of environmental topics. We propose a three-level annotation scheme designed for Eco-Relevance Classification, Stance Detection, and introducing an original approach for Environmental Impact Analysis. We detail the data collection, filtering, and labeling process that led to the creation of the dataset. Remarkable Inter-Annotator Agreement indicates that the annotation scheme produces consistent annotations of high quality. Subsequent classification experiments using BERT-based models, including ClimateBERT, are presented. These yield encouraging results, while also indicating room for a model specifically tailored for environmental texts. The dataset is made freely available to stimulate further research.