pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MedS$^3$: Towards Medical Small Language Models with Self-Evolved Slow Thinking
Authors: Shuyang Jiang, Yusheng Liao, Zhe Chen, Ya zhang, Yanfeng Wang, Yu Wang
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice

Medical language models (MLMs) have become pivotal in advancing medical natural language processing. However, prior models that rely on pre-training or supervised fine-tuning often exhibit low data efficiency and limited practicality in real-world clinical applications. While OpenAIs O1 highlights test-time scaling in mathematics, attempts to replicate this approach in medicine typically distill responses from GPT-series models to open-source models, focusing primarily on multiple-choice tasks. This strategy, though straightforward, neglects critical concerns like data privacy and realistic deployment in clinical settings. In this work, we present a deployable, small-scale medical language model, \mone, designed for long-chain reasoning in clinical tasks using a self-evolution paradigm. Starting with a seed dataset of around 8,000 instances spanning five domains and 16 datasets, we prompt a base policy model to perform Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to construct verifiable reasoning chains. Each reasoning step is assigned an evolution rollout value, allowing verified trajectories to train the policy model and the reward model. During inference, the policy model generates multiple responses, and the reward model selects the one with the highest reward score. Experiments on eleven evaluation datasets demonstrate that \mone outperforms prior open-source models by 2 points, with the addition of the reward model further boosting performance ($\sim$13 points), surpassing GPT-4o-mini. Code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/pixas/MedSSS}.
Reference-free Evaluation Metrics for Text Generation: A Survey
Authors: Takumi Ito, Kees Van Deemter, Jun Suzuki
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation, Survey, Text Generation

A number of automatic evaluation metrics have been proposed for natural language generation systems. The most common approach to automatic evaluation is the use of a reference-based metric that compares the model's output with gold-standard references written by humans. However, it is expensive to create such references, and for some tasks, such as response generation in dialogue, creating references is not a simple matter. Therefore, various reference-free metrics have been developed in recent years. In this survey, which intends to cover the full breadth of all NLG tasks, we investigate the most commonly used approaches, their application, and their other uses beyond evaluating models. The survey concludes by highlighting some promising directions for future research.
A Hybrid Attention Framework for Fake News Detection with Large Language Models
Authors: Xiaochuan Xu, Peiyang Yu, Zeqiu Xu, Jiani Wang
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

With the rapid growth of online information, the spread of fake news has become a serious social challenge. In this study, we propose a novel detection framework based on Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify and classify fake news by integrating textual statistical features and deep semantic features. Our approach utilizes the contextual understanding capability of the large language model for text analysis and introduces a hybrid attention mechanism to focus on feature combinations that are particularly important for fake news identification. Extensive experiments on the WELFake news dataset show that our model significantly outperforms existing methods, with a 1.5\% improvement in F1 score. In addition, we assess the interpretability of the model through attention heat maps and SHAP values, providing actionable insights for content review strategies. Our framework provides a scalable and efficient solution to deal with the spread of fake news and helps build a more reliable online information ecosystem.
Proverbs Run in Pairs: Evaluating Proverb Translation Capability of Large Language Model
Authors: Minghan Wang, Viet-Thanh Pham, Farhad Moghimifar, Thuy-Trang Vu
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Despite achieving remarkable performance, machine translation (MT) research remains underexplored in terms of translating cultural elements in languages, such as idioms, proverbs, and colloquial expressions. This paper investigates the capability of state-of-the-art neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models (LLMs) in translating proverbs, which are deeply rooted in cultural contexts. We construct a translation dataset of standalone proverbs and proverbs in conversation for four language pairs. Our experiments show that the studied models can achieve good translation between languages with similar cultural backgrounds, and LLMs generally outperform NMT models in proverb translation. Furthermore, we find that current automatic evaluation metrics such as BLEU, CHRF++ and COMET are inadequate for reliably assessing the quality of proverb translation, highlighting the need for more culturally aware evaluation metrics.
HERITAGE: An End-to-End Web Platform for Processing Korean Historical Documents in Hanja
Authors: Seyoung Song, Haneul Yoo, Jiho Jin, Kyunghyun Cho, Alice Oh
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Machine Translation, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Punctuation Restoration

While Korean historical documents are invaluable cultural heritage, understanding those documents requires in-depth Hanja expertise. Hanja is an ancient language used in Korea before the 20th century, whose characters were borrowed from old Chinese but had evolved in Korea for centuries. Modern Koreans and Chinese cannot understand Korean historical documents without substantial additional help, and while previous efforts have produced some Korean and English translations, this requires in-depth expertise, and so most of the documents are not translated into any modern language. To address this gap, we present HERITAGE, the first open-source Hanja NLP toolkit to assist in understanding and translating the unexplored Korean historical documents written in Hanja. HERITAGE is a web-based platform providing model predictions of three critical tasks in historical document understanding via Hanja language models: punctuation restoration, named entity recognition, and machine translation (MT). HERITAGE also provides an interactive glossary, which provides the character-level reading of the Hanja characters in modern Korean, as well as character-level English definition. HERITAGE serves two purposes. First, anyone interested in these documents can get a general understanding from the model predictions and the interactive glossary, especially MT outputs in Korean and English. Second, since the model outputs are not perfect, Hanja experts can revise them to produce better annotations and translations. This would boost the translation efficiency and potentially lead to most of the historical documents being translated into modern languages, lowering the barrier on unexplored Korean historical documents.
Med-R$^2$: Crafting Trustworthy LLM Physicians via Retrieval and Reasoning of Evidence-Based Medicine
Authors: Keer Lu, Zheng Liang, Zhuoran Zhang, Da Pan, Shusen Zhang, Xin Wu, Zenan Zhou, Guosheng Dong, Bin Cui, Tengjiao Wang, Wentao Zhang
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in clinical scenarios. Despite their potential, existing works face challenges when applying LLMs to medical settings. Strategies relying on training with medical datasets are highly cost-intensive and may suffer from outdated training data. Leveraging external knowledge bases is a suitable alternative, yet it faces obstacles such as limited retrieval precision and poor effectiveness in answer extraction. These issues collectively prevent LLMs from demonstrating the expected level of proficiency in mastering medical expertise. To address these challenges, we introduce Med-R^2, a novel LLM physician framework that adheres to the Evidence-Based Medicine (EBM) process, efficiently integrating retrieval mechanisms as well as the selection and reasoning processes of evidence, thereby enhancing the problem-solving capabilities of LLMs in healthcare scenarios and fostering a trustworthy LLM physician. Our comprehensive experiments indicate that Med-R^2 achieves a 14.74\% improvement over vanilla RAG methods and even a 3.32\% enhancement compared to fine-tuning strategies, without incurring additional training costs.
Challenges in Expanding Portuguese Resources: A View from Open Information Extraction
Authors: Marlo Souza, Bruno Cabral, Daniela Claro, Lais Salvador
Date: 2025-01-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Open Information Extraction

Open Information Extraction (Open IE) is the task of extracting structured information from textual documents, independent of domain. While traditional Open IE methods were based on unsupervised approaches, recently, with the emergence of robust annotated datasets, new data-based approaches have been developed to achieve better results. These innovations, however, have focused mainly on the English language due to a lack of datasets and the difficulty of constructing such resources for other languages. In this work, we present a high-quality manually annotated corpus for Open Information Extraction in the Portuguese language, based on a rigorous methodology grounded in established semantic theories. We discuss the challenges encountered in the annotation process, propose a set of structural and contextual annotation rules, and validate our corpus by evaluating the performance of state-of-the-art Open IE systems. Our resource addresses the lack of datasets for Open IE in Portuguese and can support the development and evaluation of new methods and systems in this area.
The Value of Nothing: Multimodal Extraction of Human Values Expressed by TikTok Influencers
Authors: Alina Starovolsky-Shitrit, Alon Neduva, Naama Appel Doron, Ella Daniel, Oren Tsur
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Societal and personal values are transmitted to younger generations through interaction and exposure. Traditionally, children and adolescents learned values from parents, educators, or peers. Nowadays, social platforms serve as a significant channel through which youth (and adults) consume information, as the main medium of entertainment, and possibly the medium through which they learn different values. In this paper we extract implicit values from TikTok movies uploaded by online influencers targeting children and adolescents. We curated a dataset of hundreds of TikTok movies and annotated them according to the Schwartz Theory of Personal Values. We then experimented with an array of Masked and Large language model, exploring how values can be detected. Specifically, we considered two pipelines -- direct extraction of values from video and a 2-step approach in which videos are first converted to elaborated scripts and then values are extracted. Achieving state-of-the-art results, we find that the 2-step approach performs significantly better than the direct approach and that using a trainable Masked Language Model as a second step significantly outperforms a few-shot application of a number of Large Language Models. We further discuss the impact of fine-tuning and compare the performance of the different models on identification of values present or contradicted in the TikTok. Finally, we share the first values-annotated dataset of TikTok videos. Our results pave the way to further research on influence and value transmission in video-based social platforms.
YouLeQD: Decoding the Cognitive Complexity of Questions and Engagement in Online Educational Videos from Learners' Perspectives
Authors: Nong Ming, Sachin Sharma, Jiho Noh
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00

Questioning is a fundamental aspect of education, as it helps assess students' understanding, promotes critical thinking, and encourages active engagement. With the rise of artificial intelligence in education, there is a growing interest in developing intelligent systems that can automatically generate and answer questions and facilitate interactions in both virtual and in-person education settings. However, to develop effective AI models for education, it is essential to have a fundamental understanding of questioning. In this study, we created the YouTube Learners' Questions on Bloom's Taxonomy Dataset (YouLeQD), which contains learner-posed questions from YouTube lecture video comments. Along with the dataset, we developed two RoBERTa-based classification models leveraging Large Language Models to detect questions and analyze their cognitive complexity using Bloom's Taxonomy. This dataset and our findings provide valuable insights into the cognitive complexity of learner-posed questions in educational videos and their relationship with interaction metrics. This can aid in the development of more effective AI models for education and improve the overall learning experience for students.
PIKE-RAG: sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmented Generation
Authors: Jinyu Wang, Jingjing Fu, Rui Wang, Lei Song, Jiang Bian
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Logical Reasoning, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Despite notable advancements in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems that expand large language model (LLM) capabilities through external retrieval, these systems often struggle to meet the complex and diverse needs of real-world industrial applications. The reliance on retrieval alone proves insufficient for extracting deep, domain-specific knowledge performing in logical reasoning from specialized corpora. To address this, we introduce sPecIalized KnowledgE and Rationale Augmentation Generation (PIKE-RAG), focusing on extracting, understanding, and applying specialized knowledge, while constructing coherent rationale to incrementally steer LLMs toward accurate responses. Recognizing the diverse challenges of industrial tasks, we introduce a new paradigm that classifies tasks based on their complexity in knowledge extraction and application, allowing for a systematic evaluation of RAG systems' problem-solving capabilities. This strategic approach offers a roadmap for the phased development and enhancement of RAG systems, tailored to meet the evolving demands of industrial applications. Furthermore, we propose knowledge atomizing and knowledge-aware task decomposition to effectively extract multifaceted knowledge from the data chunks and iteratively construct the rationale based on original query and the accumulated knowledge, respectively, showcasing exceptional performance across various benchmarks.
Whose Boat Does it Float? Improving Personalization in Preference Tuning via Inferred User Personas
Authors: Nishant Balepur, Vishakh Padmakumar, Fumeng Yang, Shi Feng, Rachel Rudinger, Jordan Lee Boyd-Graber
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00

LLMs are tuned to follow instructions (aligned) by learning which of two outputs users prefer for a prompt. However, this preference data format does not convey why users prefer responses that are chosen or rejected, so LLMs trained on these datasets cannot tailor responses to varied user needs. To surface these parameters of personalization, we apply abductive reasoning to preference data, inferring needs and interests of users, i.e. personas, that may prefer each output. We test this idea in two steps: Persona Inference (PI)-abductively inferring personas of users who prefer chosen or rejected outputs-and Persona Tailoring (PT)-training models to tailor responses to personas from PI. We find: 1) LLMs infer personas accurately explaining why different users may prefer both chosen or rejected outputs; 2) Training on preference data augmented with PI personas via PT boosts personalization, enabling models to support user-written personas; and 3) Rejected response personas form harder personalization evaluations, showing PT better aids users with uncommon preferences versus typical alignment methods. We argue for an abductive view of preferences for personalization, asking not only which response is better but when, why, and for whom.
Curiosity-Driven Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
Authors: Haoran Sun, Yekun Chai, Shuohuan Wang, Yu Sun, Hua Wu, Haifeng Wang
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Instruction Following, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Text Summarization

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has proven effective in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, but often at the cost of reduced output diversity. This trade-off between diversity and alignment quality remains a significant challenge. Drawing inspiration from curiosity-driven exploration in reinforcement learning, we introduce curiosity-driven RLHF (CD-RLHF), a framework that incorporates intrinsic rewards for novel states, alongside traditional sparse extrinsic rewards, to optimize both output diversity and alignment quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CD-RLHF through extensive experiments on a range of tasks, including text summarization and instruction following. Our approach achieves significant gains in diversity on multiple diversity-oriented metrics while maintaining alignment with human preferences comparable to standard RLHF. We make our code publicly available at https://github.com/ernie-research/CD-RLHF.
Ontology Matching with Large Language Models and Prioritized Depth-First Search
Authors: Maria Taboada, Diego Martinez, Mohammed Arideh, Rosa Mosquera
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Ontology Matching

Ontology matching (OM) plays a key role in enabling data interoperability and knowledge sharing, but it remains challenging due to the need for large training datasets and limited vocabulary processing in machine learning approaches. Recently, methods based on Large Language Model (LLMs) have shown great promise in OM, particularly through the use of a retrieve-then-prompt pipeline. In this approach, relevant target entities are first retrieved and then used to prompt the LLM to predict the final matches. Despite their potential, these systems still present limited performance and high computational overhead. To address these issues, we introduce MILA, a novel approach that embeds a retrieve-identify-prompt pipeline within a prioritized depth-first search (PDFS) strategy. This approach efficiently identifies a large number of semantic correspondences with high accuracy, limiting LLM requests to only the most borderline cases. We evaluated MILA using the biomedical challenge proposed in the 2023 and 2024 editions of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative. Our method achieved the highest F-Measure in four of the five unsupervised tasks, outperforming state-of-the-art OM systems by up to 17%. It also performed better than or comparable to the leading supervised OM systems. MILA further exhibited task-agnostic performance, remaining stable across all tasks and settings, while significantly reducing LLM requests. These findings highlight that high-performance LLM-based OM can be achieved through a combination of programmed (PDFS), learned (embedding vectors), and prompting-based heuristics, without the need of domain-specific heuristics or fine-tuning.
RACCOON: A Retrieval-Augmented Generation Approach for Location Coordinate Capture from News Articles
Authors: Jonathan Lin, Aditya Joshi, Hye-Young Paik, Tri Dung Doung, Deepti Gurdasani
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Management, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Geocoding involves automatic extraction of location coordinates of incidents reported in news articles, and can be used for epidemic intelligence or disaster management. This paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Coordinate Capture Of Online News articles (RACCOON), an open-source geocoding approach that extracts geolocations from news articles. RACCOON uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) approach where candidate locations and associated information are retrieved in the form of context from a location database, and a prompt containing the retrieved context, location mentions and news articles is fed to an LLM to generate the location coordinates. Our evaluation on three datasets, two underlying LLMs, three baselines and several ablation tests based on the components of RACCOON demonstrate the utility of RACCOON. To the best of our knowledge, RACCOON is the first RAG-based approach for geocoding using pre-trained LLMs.
Verifying Cross-modal Entity Consistency in News using Vision-language Models
Authors: Sahar Tahmasebi, David Ernst, Eric Müller-Budack, Ralph Ewerth
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

The web has become a crucial source of information, but it is also used to spread disinformation, often conveyed through multiple modalities like images and text. The identification of inconsistent cross-modal information, in particular entities such as persons, locations, and events, is critical to detect disinformation. Previous works either identify out-of-context disinformation by assessing the consistency of images to the whole document, neglecting relations of individual entities, or focus on generic entities that are not relevant to news. So far, only few approaches have addressed the task of validating entity consistency between images and text in news. However, the potential of large vision-language models (LVLMs) has not been explored yet. In this paper, we propose an LVLM-based framework for verifying Cross-modal Entity Consistency~(LVLM4CEC), to assess whether persons, locations and events in news articles are consistent across both modalities. We suggest effective prompting strategies for LVLMs for entity verification that leverage reference images crawled from web. Moreover, we extend three existing datasets for the task of entity verification in news providing manual ground-truth data. Our results show the potential of LVLMs for automating cross-modal entity verification, showing improved accuracy in identifying persons and events when using evidence images. Moreover, our method outperforms a baseline for location and event verification in documents. The datasets and source code are available on GitHub at https://github.com/TIBHannover/LVLM4CEC.
Advancing Multi-Party Dialogue Framework with Speaker-ware Contrastive Learning
Authors: Zhongtian Hu, Qi He, Ronghan Li, Meng Zhao, Lifang Wang
Date: 2025-01-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Dialogue Generation, Response Generation

Multi-party dialogues, common in collaborative scenarios like brainstorming sessions and negotiations, pose significant challenges due to their complexity and diverse speaker roles. Current methods often use graph neural networks to model dialogue context, capturing structural dynamics but heavily relying on annotated graph structures and overlooking individual speaking styles. To address these challenges, we propose CMR, a Contrastive learning-based Multi-party dialogue Response generation framework. CMR employs a two-stage self-supervised contrastive learning framework. First, it captures global differences in speaking styles across individuals. Then, it focuses on intra-conversation comparisons to identify thematic transitions and contextually relevant facts. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach that applies contrastive learning in multi-party dialogue generation. Experimental results demonstrate that CMR not only significantly outperforms state-of-the-art models, but also generalizes well to large pre-trained language models, effectively enhancing their capability in handling multi-party conversations.