pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mixture-of-Instructions: Comprehensive Alignment of a Large Language Model through the Mixture of Diverse System Prompting Instructions
Authors: Bowen Xu, Shaoyu Wu, Kai Liu, Lulu Hu
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Mathematical Problem-Solving

With the proliferation of large language models (LLMs), the comprehensive alignment of such models across multiple tasks has emerged as a critical area of research. Existing alignment methodologies primarily address single task, such as multi-turn dialogue, coding, mathematical problem-solving, and tool usage. However, AI-driven products that leverage language models usually necessitate a fusion of these abilities to function effectively in real-world scenarios. Moreover, the considerable computational resources required for proper alignment of LLMs underscore the need for a more robust, efficient, and encompassing approach to multi-task alignment, ensuring improved generative performance. In response to these challenges, we introduce a novel technique termed Mixture-of-Instructions (MoI), which employs a strategy of instruction concatenation combined with diverse system prompts to boost the alignment efficiency of language models. We have also compiled a diverse set of seven benchmark datasets to rigorously evaluate the alignment efficacy of the MoI-enhanced language model. Our methodology was applied to the open-source Qwen-7B-chat model, culminating in the development of Qwen-SFT-MoI. This enhanced model demonstrates significant advancements in generative capabilities across coding, mathematics, and tool use tasks.
UMETTS: A Unified Framework for Emotional Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Multimodal Prompts
Authors: Zhi-Qi Cheng, Xiang Li, Jun-Yan He, Junyao Chen, Xiaomao Fan, Xiaojiang Peng, Alexander G. Hauptmann
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

Emotional Text-to-Speech (E-TTS) synthesis has garnered significant attention in recent years due to its potential to revolutionize human-computer interaction. However, current E-TTS approaches often struggle to capture the intricacies of human emotions, primarily relying on oversimplified emotional labels or single-modality input. In this paper, we introduce the Unified Multimodal Prompt-Induced Emotional Text-to-Speech System (UMETTS), a novel framework that leverages emotional cues from multiple modalities to generate highly expressive and emotionally resonant speech. The core of UMETTS consists of two key components: the Emotion Prompt Alignment Module (EP-Align) and the Emotion Embedding-Induced TTS Module (EMI-TTS). (1) EP-Align employs contrastive learning to align emotional features across text, audio, and visual modalities, ensuring a coherent fusion of multimodal information. (2) Subsequently, EMI-TTS integrates the aligned emotional embeddings with state-of-the-art TTS models to synthesize speech that accurately reflects the intended emotions. Extensive evaluations show that UMETTS achieves significant improvements in emotion accuracy and speech naturalness, outperforming traditional E-TTS methods on both objective and subjective metrics.
Exploring the Limits of Fine-grained LLM-based Physics Inference via Premise Removal Interventions
Authors: Jordan Meadows, Tamsin James, Andre Freitas
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

Language models (LMs) can hallucinate when performing complex mathematical reasoning. Physics provides a rich domain for assessing their mathematical capabilities, where physical context requires that any symbolic manipulation satisfies complex semantics (\textit{e.g.,} units, tensorial order). In this work, we systematically remove crucial context from prompts to force instances where model inference may be algebraically coherent, yet unphysical. We assess LM capabilities in this domain using a curated dataset encompassing multiple notations and Physics subdomains. Further, we improve zero-shot scores using synthetic in-context examples, and demonstrate non-linear degradation of derivation quality with perturbation strength via the progressive omission of supporting premises. We find that the models' mathematical reasoning is not physics-informed in this setting, where physical context is predominantly ignored in favour of reverse-engineering solutions.
QANA: LLM-based Question Generation and Network Analysis for Zero-shot Key Point Analysis and Beyond
Authors: Tomoki Fukuma, Koki Noda, Toshihide Ubukata Kousuke Hoso, Yoshiharu Ichikawa, Kyosuke Kambe, Yu Masubuch, Fujio Toriumi
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Key Point Matching, Opinion Mining, Question Answering, Question Generation, Question-Generation

The proliferation of social media has led to information overload and increased interest in opinion mining. We propose "Question-Answering Network Analysis" (QANA), a novel opinion mining framework that utilizes Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate questions from users' comments, constructs a bipartite graph based on the comments' answerability to the questions, and applies centrality measures to examine the importance of opinions. We investigate the impact of question generation styles, LLM selections, and the choice of embedding model on the quality of the constructed QA networks by comparing them with annotated Key Point Analysis datasets. QANA achieves comparable performance to previous state-of-the-art supervised models in a zero-shot manner for Key Point Matching task, also reducing the computational cost from quadratic to linear. For Key Point Generation, questions with high PageRank or degree centrality align well with manually annotated key points. Notably, QANA enables analysts to assess the importance of key points from various aspects according to their selection of centrality measure. QANA's primary contribution lies in its flexibility to extract key points from a wide range of perspectives, which enhances the quality and impartiality of opinion mining.
Comparing LLM prompting with Cross-lingual transfer performance on Indigenous and Low-resource Brazilian Languages
Authors: David Ifeoluwa Adelani, A. Seza Doğruöz, André Coneglian, Atul Kr. Ojha
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, POS

Large Language Models are transforming NLP for a variety of tasks. However, how LLMs perform NLP tasks for low-resource languages (LRLs) is less explored. In line with the goals of the AmericasNLP workshop, we focus on 12 LRLs from Brazil, 2 LRLs from Africa and 2 high-resource languages (HRLs) (e.g., English and Brazilian Portuguese). Our results indicate that the LLMs perform worse for the part of speech (POS) labeling of LRLs in comparison to HRLs. We explain the reasons behind this failure and provide an error analysis through examples observed in our data set.
Mapping 'when'-clauses in Latin American and Caribbean languages: an experiment in subtoken-based typology
Authors: Nilo Pedrazzini
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00

Languages can encode temporal subordination lexically, via subordinating conjunctions, and morphologically, by marking the relation on the predicate. Systematic cross-linguistic variation among the former can be studied using well-established token-based typological approaches to token-aligned parallel corpora. Variation among different morphological means is instead much harder to tackle and therefore more poorly understood, despite being predominant in several language groups. This paper explores variation in the expression of generic temporal subordination ('when'-clauses) among the languages of Latin America and the Caribbean, where morphological marking is particularly common. It presents probabilistic semantic maps computed on the basis of the languages of the region, thus avoiding bias towards the many world's languages that exclusively use lexified connectors, incorporating associations between character $n$-grams and English $when$. The approach allows capturing morphological clause-linkage devices in addition to lexified connectors, paving the way for larger-scale, strategy-agnostic analyses of typological variation in temporal subordination.
LEGENT: Open Platform for Embodied Agents
Authors: Zhili Cheng, Zhitong Wang, Jinyi Hu, Shengding Hu, An Liu, Yuge Tu, Pengkai Li, Lei Shi, Zhiyuan Liu, Maosong Sun
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Vision-Language-Action

Despite advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), their integration into language-grounded, human-like embodied agents remains incomplete, hindering complex real-life task performance in physical environments. Existing integrations often feature limited open sourcing, challenging collective progress in this field. We introduce LEGENT, an open, scalable platform for developing embodied agents using LLMs and LMMs. LEGENT offers a dual approach: a rich, interactive 3D environment with communicable and actionable agents, paired with a user-friendly interface, and a sophisticated data generation pipeline utilizing advanced algorithms to exploit supervision from simulated worlds at scale. In our experiments, an embryonic vision-language-action model trained on LEGENT-generated data surpasses GPT-4V in embodied tasks, showcasing promising generalization capabilities.
EkoHate: Abusive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Code-switched Political Discussions on Nigerian Twitter
Authors: Comfort Eseohen Ilevbare, Jesujoba O. Alabi, David Ifeoluwa Adelani, Firdous Damilola Bakare, Oluwatoyin Bunmi Abiola, Oluwaseyi Adesina Adeyemo
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Abusive Language, Cross-Lingual Transfer, Fact Checking, Hate Speech Detection, Transfer Learning

Nigerians have a notable online presence and actively discuss political and topical matters. This was particularly evident throughout the 2023 general election, where Twitter was used for campaigning, fact-checking and verification, and even positive and negative discourse. However, little or none has been done in the detection of abusive language and hate speech in Nigeria. In this paper, we curated code-switched Twitter data directed at three musketeers of the governorship election on the most populous and economically vibrant state in Nigeria; Lagos state, with the view to detect offensive speech in political discussions. We developed EkoHate -- an abusive language and hate speech dataset for political discussions between the three candidates and their followers using a binary (normal vs offensive) and fine-grained four-label annotation scheme. We analysed our dataset and provided an empirical evaluation of state-of-the-art methods across both supervised and cross-lingual transfer learning settings. In the supervised setting, our evaluation results in both binary and four-label annotation schemes show that we can achieve 95.1 and 70.3 F1 points respectively. Furthermore, we show that our dataset adequately transfers very well to three publicly available offensive datasets (OLID, HateUS2020, and FountaHate), generalizing to political discussions in other regions like the US.
Explaining vague language
Authors: Paul Égré, Benjamin Spector
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00

Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of vagueness in terms of mixed strategy that leads to a puzzle: vagueness cannot be strictly better than precision at equilibrium. More recently, \'Egr\'e, Spector, Mortier and Verheyen have put forward a Bayesian account of vagueness establishing that using vague words can be strictly more informative than using precise words. This paper proposes to compare both results and to explain why they are not in contradiction. Lipman's definition of vagueness relies exclusively on a property of signaling strategies, without making any assumptions about the lexicon, whereas \'Egr\'e et al.'s involves a layer of semantic content. We argue that the semantic account of vagueness is needed, and more adequate and explanatory of vagueness.
Contextual Spelling Correction with Language Model for Low-resource Setting
Authors: Nishant Luitel, Nirajan Bekoju, Anand Kumar Sah, Subarna Shakya
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Spelling Correction

The task of Spell Correction(SC) in low-resource languages presents a significant challenge due to the availability of only a limited corpus of data and no annotated spelling correction datasets. To tackle these challenges a small-scale word-based transformer LM is trained to provide the SC model with contextual understanding. Further, the probabilistic error rules are extracted from the corpus in an unsupervised way to model the tendency of error happening(error model). Then the combination of LM and error model is used to develop the SC model through the well-known noisy channel framework. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through experiments on the Nepali language where there is access to just an unprocessed corpus of textual data.
Fashion Recommendation: Outfit Compatibility using GNN
Authors: Samaksh Gulati
Date: 2024-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Numerous industries have benefited from the use of machine learning and fashion in industry is no exception. By gaining a better understanding of what makes a good outfit, companies can provide useful product recommendations to their users. In this project, we follow two existing approaches that employ graphs to represent outfits and use modified versions of the Graph neural network (GNN) frameworks. Both Node-wise Graph Neural Network (NGNN) and Hypergraph Neural Network aim to score a set of items according to the outfit compatibility of items. The data used is the Polyvore Dataset which consists of curated outfits with product images and text descriptions for each product in an outfit. We recreate the analysis on a subset of this data and compare the two existing models on their performance on two tasks Fill in the blank (FITB): finding an item that completes an outfit, and Compatibility prediction: estimating compatibility of different items grouped as an outfit. We can replicate the results directionally and find that HGNN does have a slightly better performance on both tasks. On top of replicating the results of the two papers we also tried to use embeddings generated from a vision transformer and witness enhanced prediction accuracy across the board
Quality Estimation with $k$-nearest Neighbors and Automatic Evaluation for Model-specific Quality Estimation
Authors: Tu Anh Dinh, Tobias Palzer, Jan Niehues
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Providing quality scores along with Machine Translation (MT) output, so-called reference-free Quality Estimation (QE), is crucial to inform users about the reliability of the translation. We propose a model-specific, unsupervised QE approach, termed $k$NN-QE, that extracts information from the MT model's training data using $k$-nearest neighbors. Measuring the performance of model-specific QE is not straightforward, since they provide quality scores on their own MT output, thus cannot be evaluated using benchmark QE test sets containing human quality scores on premade MT output. Therefore, we propose an automatic evaluation method that uses quality scores from reference-based metrics as gold standard instead of human-generated ones. We are the first to conduct detailed analyses and conclude that this automatic method is sufficient, and the reference-based MetricX-23 is best for the task.
Enhancing Pre-Trained Generative Language Models with Question Attended Span Extraction on Machine Reading Comprehension
Authors: Lin Ai, Zheng Hui, Zizhou Liu, Julia Hirschberg
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Reading Comprehension, Reading Comprehension

Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) poses a significant challenge in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). While mainstream MRC methods predominantly leverage extractive strategies using encoder-only models such as BERT, generative approaches face the issue of out-of-control generation -- a critical problem where answers generated are often incorrect, irrelevant, or unfaithful to the source text. To address these limitations in generative models for MRC, we introduce the Question-Attended Span Extraction (QASE) module. Integrated during the fine-tuning phase of pre-trained generative language models (PLMs), QASE significantly enhances their performance, allowing them to surpass the extractive capabilities of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 in few-shot settings. Notably, these gains in performance do not come with an increase in computational demands. The efficacy of the QASE module has been rigorously tested across various datasets, consistently achieving or even surpassing state-of-the-art (SOTA) results, thereby bridging the gap between generative and extractive models in extractive MRC tasks.
Transfer Learning Enhanced Single-choice Decision for Multi-choice Question Answering
Authors: Chenhao Cui, Yufan Jiang, Shuangzhi Wu, Zhoujun Li
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Machine Reading Comprehension, Question Answering, Reading Comprehension, Transfer Learning, Triplet

Multi-choice Machine Reading Comprehension (MMRC) aims to select the correct answer from a set of options based on a given passage and question. The existing methods employ the pre-trained language model as the encoder, share and transfer knowledge through fine-tuning.These methods mainly focus on the design of exquisite mechanisms to effectively capture the relationships among the triplet of passage, question and answers. It is non-trivial but ignored to transfer knowledge from other MRC tasks such as SQuAD due to task specific of MMRC.In this paper, we reconstruct multi-choice to single-choice by training a binary classification to distinguish whether a certain answer is correct. Then select the option with the highest confidence score as the final answer. Our proposed method gets rid of the multi-choice framework and can leverage resources of other tasks. We construct our model based on the ALBERT-xxlarge model and evaluate it on the RACE and DREAM datasets. Experimental results show that our model performs better than multi-choice methods. In addition, by transferring knowledge from other kinds of MRC tasks, our model achieves state-of-the-art results in both single and ensemble settings.
I Have an Attention Bridge to Sell You: Generalization Capabilities of Modular Translation Architectures
Authors: Timothee Mickus, Raúl Vázquez, Joseph Attieh
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Translation

Modularity is a paradigm of machine translation with the potential of bringing forth models that are large at training time and small during inference. Within this field of study, modular approaches, and in particular attention bridges, have been argued to improve the generalization capabilities of models by fostering language-independent representations. In the present paper, we study whether modularity affects translation quality; as well as how well modular architectures generalize across different evaluation scenarios. For a given computational budget, we find non-modular architectures to be always comparable or preferable to all modular designs we study.
Tool Calling: Enhancing Medication Consultation via Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models
Authors: Zhongzhen Huang, Kui Xue, Yongqi Fan, Linjie Mu, Ruoyu Liu, Tong Ruan, Shaoting Zhang, Xiaofan Zhang
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Answer Generation, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large-scale language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success across various language tasks but suffer from hallucinations and temporal misalignment. To mitigate these shortcomings, Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has been utilized to provide external knowledge to facilitate the answer generation. However, applying such models to the medical domain faces several challenges due to the lack of domain-specific knowledge and the intricacy of real-world scenarios. In this study, we explore LLMs with RAG framework for knowledge-intensive tasks in the medical field. To evaluate the capabilities of LLMs, we introduce MedicineQA, a multi-round dialogue benchmark that simulates the real-world medication consultation scenario and requires LLMs to answer with retrieved evidence from the medicine database. MedicineQA contains 300 multi-round question-answering pairs, each embedded within a detailed dialogue history, highlighting the challenge posed by this knowledge-intensive task to current LLMs. We further propose a new \textit{Distill-Retrieve-Read} framework instead of the previous \textit{Retrieve-then-Read}. Specifically, the distillation and retrieval process utilizes a tool calling mechanism to formulate search queries that emulate the keyword-based inquiries used by search engines. With experimental results, we show that our framework brings notable performance improvements and surpasses the previous counterparts in the evidence retrieval process in terms of evidence retrieval accuracy. This advancement sheds light on applying RAG to the medical domain.
PromptCL: Improving Event Representation via Prompt Template and Contrastive Learning
Authors: Yubo Feng, Lishuang Li, Yi Xiang, Xueyang Qin
Date: 2024-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Prompt Learning, Representation Learning

The representation of events in text plays a significant role in various NLP tasks. Recent research demonstrates that contrastive learning has the ability to improve event comprehension capabilities of Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) and enhance the performance of event representation learning. However, the efficacy of event representation learning based on contrastive learning and PLMs is limited by the short length of event texts. The length of event texts differs significantly from the text length used in the pre-training of PLMs. As a result, there is inconsistency in the distribution of text length between pre-training and event representation learning, which may undermine the learning process of event representation based on PLMs. In this study, we present PromptCL, a novel framework for event representation learning that effectively elicits the capabilities of PLMs to comprehensively capture the semantics of short event texts. PromptCL utilizes a Prompt template borrowed from prompt learning to expand the input text during Contrastive Learning. This helps in enhancing the event representation learning by providing a structured outline of the event components. Moreover, we propose Subject-Predicate-Object (SPO) word order and Event-oriented Masked Language Modeling (EventMLM) to train PLMs to understand the relationships between event components. Our experimental results demonstrate that PromptCL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on event related tasks. Additionally, we conduct a thorough analysis and demonstrate that using a prompt results in improved generalization capabilities for event representations. Our code will be available at https://github.com/YuboFeng2023/PromptCL.