pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Acquiring Pronunciation Knowledge from Transcribed Speech Audio via Multi-task Learning
Authors: Siqi Sun, Korin Richmond
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

Recent work has shown the feasibility and benefit of bootstrapping an integrated sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) linguistic frontend from a traditional pipeline-based frontend for text-to-speech (TTS). To overcome the fixed lexical coverage of bootstrapping training data, previous work has proposed to leverage easily accessible transcribed speech audio as an additional training source for acquiring novel pronunciation knowledge for uncovered words, which relies on an auxiliary ASR model as part of a cumbersome implementation flow. In this work, we propose an alternative method to leverage transcribed speech audio as an additional training source, based on multi-task learning (MTL). Experiments show that, compared to a baseline Seq2Seq frontend, the proposed MTL-based method reduces PER from 2.5% to 1.6% for those word types covered exclusively in transcribed speech audio, achieving a similar performance to the previous method but with a much simpler implementation flow.
PersonaMark: Personalized LLM watermarking for model protection and user attribution
Authors: Yuehan Zhang, Peizhuo Lv, Yinpeng Liu, Yongqiang Ma, Wei Lu, XiaoFeng Wang, Xiaozhong Liu, Jiawei Liu
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Sentence, Text Detection, Text Generation

The rapid advancement of customized Large Language Models (LLMs) offers considerable convenience. However, it also intensifies concerns regarding the protection of copyright/confidential information. With the extensive adoption of private LLMs, safeguarding model copyright and ensuring data privacy have become critical. Text watermarking has emerged as a viable solution for detecting AI-generated content and protecting models. However, existing methods fall short in providing individualized watermarks for each user, a critical feature for enhancing accountability and traceability. In this paper, we introduce PersonaMark, a novel personalized text watermarking scheme designed to protect LLMs' copyrights and bolster accountability. PersonaMark leverages sentence structure as a subtle carrier of watermark information and optimizes the generation process to maintain the natural output of the model. By employing a personalized hashing function, unique watermarks are embedded for each user, enabling high-quality text generation without compromising the model's performance. This approach is both time-efficient and scalable, capable of handling large numbers of users through a multi-user hashing mechanism. To the best of our knowledge, this is a pioneer study to explore personalized watermarking in LLMs. We conduct extensive evaluations across four LLMs, analyzing various metrics such as perplexity, sentiment, alignment, and readability. The results validate that PersonaMark preserves text quality, ensures unbiased watermark insertion, and offers robust watermark detection capabilities, all while maintaining the model's behavior with minimal disruption.
Leveraging Open-Source Large Language Models for Native Language Identification
Authors: Yee Man Ng, Ilia Markov
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Language Acquisition, Language Identification, Marketing, Native Language Identification, open-set classification

Native Language Identification (NLI) - the task of identifying the native language (L1) of a person based on their writing in the second language (L2) - has applications in forensics, marketing, and second language acquisition. Historically, conventional machine learning approaches that heavily rely on extensive feature engineering have outperformed transformer-based language models on this task. Recently, closed-source generative large language models (LLMs), e.g., GPT-4, have demonstrated remarkable performance on NLI in a zero-shot setting, including promising results in open-set classification. However, closed-source LLMs have many disadvantages, such as high costs and undisclosed nature of training data. This study explores the potential of using open-source LLMs for NLI. Our results indicate that open-source LLMs do not reach the accuracy levels of closed-source LLMs when used out-of-the-box. However, when fine-tuned on labeled training data, open-source LLMs can achieve performance comparable to that of commercial LLMs.
Unveiling Gender Bias in Large Language Models: Using Teacher's Evaluation in Higher Education As an Example
Authors: Yuanning Huang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sentiment Analysis

This paper investigates gender bias in Large Language Model (LLM)-generated teacher evaluations in higher education setting, focusing on evaluations produced by GPT-4 across six academic subjects. By applying a comprehensive analytical framework that includes Odds Ratio (OR) analysis, Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT), sentiment analysis, and contextual analysis, this paper identified patterns of gender-associated language reflecting societal stereotypes. Specifically, words related to approachability and support were used more frequently for female instructors, while words related to entertainment were predominantly used for male instructors, aligning with the concepts of communal and agentic behaviors. The study also found moderate to strong associations between male salient adjectives and male names, though career and family words did not distinctly capture gender biases. These findings align with prior research on societal norms and stereotypes, reinforcing the notion that LLM-generated text reflects existing biases.
A Simple HMM with Self-Supervised Representations for Phone Segmentation
Authors: Gene-Ping Yang, Hao Tang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning

Despite the recent advance in self-supervised representations, unsupervised phonetic segmentation remains challenging. Most approaches focus on improving phonetic representations with self-supervised learning, with the hope that the improvement can transfer to phonetic segmentation. In this paper, contrary to recent approaches, we show that peak detection on Mel spectrograms is a strong baseline, better than many self-supervised approaches. Based on this finding, we propose a simple hidden Markov model that uses self-supervised representations and features at the boundaries for phone segmentation. Our results demonstrate consistent improvements over previous approaches, with a generalized formulation allowing versatile design adaptations.
Towards understanding evolution of science through language model series
Authors: Junjie Dong, Zhuoqi Lyu, Qing Ke
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Link Prediction, Representation Learning

We introduce AnnualBERT, a series of language models designed specifically to capture the temporal evolution of scientific text. Deviating from the prevailing paradigms of subword tokenizations and "one model to rule them all", AnnualBERT adopts whole words as tokens and is composed of a base RoBERTa model pretrained from scratch on the full-text of 1.7 million arXiv papers published until 2008 and a collection of progressively trained models on arXiv papers at an annual basis. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AnnualBERT models by showing that they not only have comparable performances in standard tasks but also achieve state-of-the-art performances on domain-specific NLP tasks as well as link prediction tasks in the arXiv citation network. We then utilize probing tasks to quantify the models' behavior in terms of representation learning and forgetting as time progresses. Our approach enables the pretrained models to not only improve performances on scientific text processing tasks but also to provide insights into the development of scientific discourse over time. The series of the models is available at https://huggingface.co/jd445/AnnualBERTs.
RethinkMCTS: Refining Erroneous Thoughts in Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation
Authors: Qingyao Li, Wei Xia, Kounianhua Du, Xinyi Dai, Ruiming Tang, Yasheng Wang, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval

LLM agents enhanced by tree search algorithms have yielded notable performances in code generation. However, current search algorithms in this domain suffer from low search quality due to several reasons: 1) Ineffective design of the search space for the high-reasoning demands of code generation tasks, 2) Inadequate integration of code feedback with the search algorithm, and 3) Poor handling of negative feedback during the search, leading to reduced search efficiency and quality. To address these challenges, we propose to search for the reasoning process of the code and use the detailed feedback of code execution to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. In this paper, we introduce RethinkMCTS, which employs the Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) algorithm to conduct thought-level searches before generating code, thereby exploring a wider range of strategies. More importantly, we construct verbal feedback from fine-grained code execution feedback to refine erroneous thoughts during the search. This ensures that the search progresses along the correct reasoning paths, thus improving the overall search quality of the tree by leveraging execution feedback. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that RethinkMCTS outperforms previous search-based and feedback-based code generation baselines. On the HumanEval dataset, it improves the pass@1 of GPT-3.5-turbo from 70.12 to 89.02 and GPT-4o-mini from 87.20 to 94.51. It effectively conducts more thorough exploration through thought-level searches and enhances the search quality of the entire tree by incorporating rethink operation.
Thesis proposal: Are We Losing Textual Diversity to Natural Language Processing?
Authors: Josef Jon
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

This thesis argues that the currently widely used Natural Language Processing algorithms possibly have various limitations related to the properties of the texts they handle and produce. With the wide adoption of these tools in rapid progress, we must ask what these limitations are and what are the possible implications of integrating such tools even more deeply into our daily lives. As a testbed, we have chosen the task of Neural Machine Translation (NMT). Nevertheless, we aim for general insights and outcomes, applicable even to current Large Language Models (LLMs). We ask whether the algorithms used in NMT have inherent inductive biases that are beneficial for most types of inputs but might harm the processing of untypical texts. To explore this hypothesis, we define a set of measures to quantify text diversity based on its statistical properties, like uniformity or rhythmicity of word-level surprisal, on multiple scales (sentence, discourse, language). We then conduct a series of experiments to investigate whether NMT systems struggle with maintaining the diversity of such texts, potentially reducing the richness of the language generated by these systems, compared to human translators. We search for potential causes of these limitations rooted in training objectives and decoding algorithms. Our ultimate goal is to develop alternatives that do not enforce uniformity in the distribution of statistical properties in the output and that allow for better global planning of the translation, taking into account the intrinsic ambiguity of the translation task.
ASR Error Correction using Large Language Models
Authors: Rao Ma, Mengjie Qian, Mark Gales, Kate Knill
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Domain Adaptation, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Error correction (EC) models play a crucial role in refining Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) transcriptions, enhancing the readability and quality of transcriptions. Without requiring access to the underlying code or model weights, EC can improve performance and provide domain adaptation for black-box ASR systems. This work investigates the use of large language models (LLMs) for error correction across diverse scenarios. 1-best ASR hypotheses are commonly used as the input to EC models. We propose building high-performance EC models using ASR N-best lists which should provide more contextual information for the correction process. Additionally, the generation process of a standard EC model is unrestricted in the sense that any output sequence can be generated. For some scenarios, such as unseen domains, this flexibility may impact performance. To address this, we introduce a constrained decoding approach based on the N-best list or an ASR lattice. Finally, most EC models are trained for a specific ASR system requiring retraining whenever the underlying ASR system is changed. This paper explores the ability of EC models to operate on the output of different ASR systems. This concept is further extended to zero-shot error correction using LLMs, such as ChatGPT. Experiments on three standard datasets demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed methods for both Transducer and attention-based encoder-decoder ASR systems. In addition, the proposed method can serve as an effective method for model ensembling.
Comparing Retrieval-Augmentation and Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Privacy-Preserving Personalization of Large Language Models
Authors: Alireza Salemi, Hamed Zamani
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Privacy Preserving, RAG, Retrieval

Privacy-preserving methods for personalizing large language models (LLMs) are relatively under-explored. There are two schools of thought on this topic: (1) generating personalized outputs by personalizing the input prompt through retrieval augmentation from the user's personal information (RAG-based methods), and (2) parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLMs per user that considers efficiency and space limitations (PEFT-based methods). This paper presents the first systematic comparison between two approaches on a wide range of personalization tasks using seven diverse datasets. Our results indicate that RAG-based and PEFT-based personalization methods on average yield 14.92% and 1.07% improvements over the non-personalized LLM, respectively. We find that combining RAG with PEFT elevates these improvements to 15.98%. Additionally, we identify a positive correlation between the amount of user data and PEFT's effectiveness, indicating that RAG is a better choice for cold-start users (i.e., user's with limited personal data).
Uddessho: An Extensive Benchmark Dataset for Multimodal Author Intent Classification in Low-Resource Bangla Language
Authors: Fatema Tuj Johora Faria, Mukaffi Bin Moin, Md. Mahfuzur Rahman, Md Morshed Alam Shanto, Asif Iftekher Fahim, Md. Moinul Hoque
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: intent-classification, Intent Classification

With the increasing popularity of daily information sharing and acquisition on the Internet, this paper introduces an innovative approach for intent classification in Bangla language, focusing on social media posts where individuals share their thoughts and opinions. The proposed method leverages multimodal data with particular emphasis on authorship identification, aiming to understand the underlying purpose behind textual content, especially in the context of varied user-generated posts on social media. Current methods often face challenges in low-resource languages like Bangla, particularly when author traits intricately link with intent, as observed in social media posts. To address this, we present the Multimodal-based Author Bangla Intent Classification (MABIC) framework, utilizing text and images to gain deeper insights into the conveyed intentions. We have created a dataset named "Uddessho," comprising 3,048 instances sourced from social media. Our methodology comprises two approaches for classifying textual intent and multimodal author intent, incorporating early fusion and late fusion techniques. In our experiments, the unimodal approach achieved an accuracy of 64.53% in interpreting Bangla textual intent. In contrast, our multimodal approach significantly outperformed traditional unimodal methods, achieving an accuracy of 76.19%. This represents an improvement of 11.66%. To our best knowledge, this is the first research work on multimodal-based author intent classification for low-resource Bangla language social media posts.
Keeping Humans in the Loop: Human-Centered Automated Annotation with Generative AI
Authors: Nicholas Pangakis, Samuel Wolken
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, text annotation

Automated text annotation is a compelling use case for generative large language models (LLMs) in social media research. Recent work suggests that LLMs can achieve strong performance on annotation tasks; however, these studies evaluate LLMs on a small number of tasks and likely suffer from contamination due to a reliance on public benchmark datasets. Here, we test a human-centered framework for responsibly evaluating artificial intelligence tools used in automated annotation. We use GPT-4 to replicate 27 annotation tasks across 11 password-protected datasets from recently published computational social science articles in high-impact journals. For each task, we compare GPT-4 annotations against human-annotated ground-truth labels and against annotations from separate supervised classification models fine-tuned on human-generated labels. Although the quality of LLM labels is generally high, we find significant variation in LLM performance across tasks, even within datasets. Our findings underscore the importance of a human-centered workflow and careful evaluation standards: Automated annotations significantly diverge from human judgment in numerous scenarios, despite various optimization strategies such as prompt tuning. Grounding automated annotation in validation labels generated by humans is essential for responsible evaluation.
Measuring the Influence of Incorrect Code on Test Generation
Authors: Dong Huang, Jie M. Zhang, Mark Harman, Mingzhe Du, Heming Cui
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: HumanEval, Large Language Model

It is natural to suppose that a Large Language Model is more likely to generate correct test cases when prompted with correct code under test, compared to incorrect code under test. However, the size of this effect has never been previously measured, despite its obvious importance for both practicing software engineers and researchers. To answer the question, we conducted a comprehensive empirical study on 5 open source and 6 closed source language models, with 3 widely-used benchmark data sets together with 41 repo-level real-world examples from two different real-world data sets. Our results reveal that, when compared to incorrect code under test, LLMs prompted with correct code achieve improvements in test accuracy, code coverage, and bug detection of 57\%, 12\%, and 24\% respectively. We further show that these scientific conclusions carry over from the three benchmark data sets to the real-world code, where tests generated for incorrect code experience a 47\% worse bug detection rate. Finally, we report that improvements of +18\% in accuracy, +4\% coverage, and +34\% in bug detection can be achieved by providing natural language code descriptions. These findings have actionable conclusions. For example, the 47\% reduction in real-world bug detection is a clear concern. Fortunately, it is a concern for which our findings about the added value of descriptions offer an immediately actionable remedy.
Towards Diverse and Efficient Audio Captioning via Diffusion Models
Authors: Manjie Xu, Chenxing Li, Xinyi Tu, Yong Ren, Ruibo Fu, Wei Liang, Dong Yu
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio captioning, Diversity, Text Generation

We introduce Diffusion-based Audio Captioning (DAC), a non-autoregressive diffusion model tailored for diverse and efficient audio captioning. Although existing captioning models relying on language backbones have achieved remarkable success in various captioning tasks, their insufficient performance in terms of generation speed and diversity impede progress in audio understanding and multimedia applications. Our diffusion-based framework offers unique advantages stemming from its inherent stochasticity and holistic context modeling in captioning. Through rigorous evaluation, we demonstrate that DAC not only achieves SOTA performance levels compared to existing benchmarks in the caption quality, but also significantly outperforms them in terms of generation speed and diversity. The success of DAC illustrates that text generation can also be seamlessly integrated with audio and visual generation tasks using a diffusion backbone, paving the way for a unified, audio-related generative model across different modalities.
Generating Event-oriented Attribution for Movies via Two-Stage Prefix-Enhanced Multimodal LLM
Authors: Yuanjie Lyu, Tong Xu, Zihan Niu, Bo Peng, Jing Ke, Enhong Chen
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00

The prosperity of social media platforms has raised the urgent demand for semantic-rich services, e.g., event and storyline attribution. However, most existing research focuses on clip-level event understanding, primarily through basic captioning tasks, without analyzing the causes of events across an entire movie. This is a significant challenge, as even advanced multimodal large language models (MLLMs) struggle with extensive multimodal information due to limited context length. To address this issue, we propose a Two-Stage Prefix-Enhanced MLLM (TSPE) approach for event attribution, i.e., connecting associated events with their causal semantics, in movie videos. In the local stage, we introduce an interaction-aware prefix that guides the model to focus on the relevant multimodal information within a single clip, briefly summarizing the single event. Correspondingly, in the global stage, we strengthen the connections between associated events using an inferential knowledge graph, and design an event-aware prefix that directs the model to focus on associated events rather than all preceding clips, resulting in accurate event attribution. Comprehensive evaluations of two real-world datasets demonstrate that our framework outperforms state-of-the-art methods.
A Compressive Memory-based Retrieval Approach for Event Argument Extraction
Authors: Wanlong Liu, Enqi Zhang, Li Zhou, Dingyi Zeng, Shaohuan Cheng, Chen Zhang, Malu Zhang, Wenyu Chen
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Event Argument Extraction, Retrieval

Recent works have demonstrated the effectiveness of retrieval augmentation in the Event Argument Extraction (EAE) task. However, existing retrieval-based EAE methods have two main limitations: (1) input length constraints and (2) the gap between the retriever and the inference model. These issues limit the diversity and quality of the retrieved information. In this paper, we propose a Compressive Memory-based Retrieval (CMR) mechanism for EAE, which addresses the two limitations mentioned above. Our compressive memory, designed as a dynamic matrix that effectively caches retrieved information and supports continuous updates, overcomes the limitations of the input length. Additionally, after pre-loading all candidate demonstrations into the compressive memory, the model further retrieves and filters relevant information from memory based on the input query, bridging the gap between the retriever and the inference model. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three public datasets (RAMS, WikiEvents, ACE05), significantly outperforming existing retrieval-based EAE methods.