yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: An Integrated Search System for Korea Weather Data
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: We introduce WeatherSearch, an integrated search system deployed at the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). WeatherSearch enables users to retrieve all the relevant data for weather forecasting from a massive weather database with simple natural language queries. We carefully design and conduct multiple expert surveys and interviews for template creation and apply data augmentation techniques including template filling to collect 4 million data points with minimal human labors. We then finetune mT5 on the collected dataset and achieve an average MRR of 0.66 and an average Recall of 0.82. We also discuss weather-data-specific characteristics that should be taken into account for creating such a system. We hope our paper serves as a simple and effective guideline for those designing similar systems in other regions of the world.
Title: Adaptive Hyper-parameter Learning for Deep Semantic Retrieval
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Deep semantic retrieval has achieved remarkable success in online E-commerce applications. The majority of methods aim to distinguish positive items and negative items for each query by utilizing margin loss or softmax loss. Despite their decent performance, these methods are highly sensitive to hyper-parameters, i.e., margin and temperature \tau, which measure the similarity of negative pairs and affect the distribution of items in metric space. How to design and choose adaptively parameters for different pairs is still an open challenge. Recently several methods have attempted to alleviate the above problem by learning each parameter through trainable/statistical methods in the recommendation. We argue that those are not suitable for retrieval scenarios, due to the agnosticism and diversity of the queries. To fully overcome this limitation, we propose a novel adaptive metric learning method that designs a simple and universal hyper-parameter-free learning method to improve the performance of retrieval. Specifically, we first propose a method that adaptive obtains the hyper-parameters by relying on the batch similarity without fixed or extra-trainable hyper-parameters. Subsequently, we adopt a symmetric metric learning method to mitigate model collapse issues. Furthermore, the proposed method is general and sheds a highlight on other fields. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method significantly outperforms previous methods on a real-world dataset, highlighting the superiority and effectiveness of our method. This method has been successfully deployed on an online E-commerce search platform and brought substantial economic benefits.
Title: On Sample-Efficient Code Generation
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Large language models often struggle to predict runtime behavior in code generation tasks, leading to a reliance on rejection sampling (best-of-n) to generate multiple code snippets then select the best. Our distinction is reducing sampling costs, without compromising generation quality. We introduce EFFICODE, a novel framework that prioritizes sampling on test problems that models can solve. We show how EFFICODE estimates solvability to optimize computational costs during multiple sampling. Based on empirical evidence, EFFICODE consistently demonstrates reduced sampling budgets while maintaining comparable code generation performance, especially when problems are challenging. In addition, utilizing EFFICODE to rank sampled code snippets also shows its effectiveness in answer code selection for reducing temporal costs, by not requiring any execution or test case generation.
Title: Batch Prompting: Efficient Inference with Large Language Model APIs
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Performing inference on large volumes of samples with large language models (LLMs) can be computationally and financially costly in industry and real-world use. We propose batch prompting, a simple yet effective prompting approach that enables the LLM to run inference in batches, instead of one sample at a time. Our method reduces both token and time costs while retaining downstream performance. We theoretically demonstrate that under a few-shot in-context learning setting, the inference costs decrease almost inverse linearly with the number of samples in each batch. We extensively validate the effectiveness of batch prompting on ten datasets across commonsense QA, arithmetic reasoning, and NLI/NLU: batch prompting significantly (up to 5\times with six samples in batch) reduces the LLM (Codex) inference token and time costs while achieving better or comparable performance. For state-of-the-art Chat-based LLMs, e.g., GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, we show the benefits of batch prompting also hold. Further analysis shows that the number of samples in each batch and the complexity of tasks affect its performance. Moreover, batch prompting can be applied across different reasoning methods using LLMs. Our code is released at the site https://github.com/xlang-ai/batch-prompting.
Title: Graph Meets LLM: A Novel Approach to Collaborative Filtering for Robust Conversational Understanding
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: A Personalized Query Rewriting system strives to minimize defective queries to ensure robust conversational functionality by considering individual user behavior and preferences. It’s designed as a search-based system, maintaining a user index of past successful interactions with the conversational AI. However, this method faces challenges with unseen interactions, which refers to novel user interactions not covered by the user’s historical index. This paper introduces our Collaborative Query Rewriting approach, which utilizes underlying topological information to assist in rewriting defective queries arising from unseen user interactions. This approach begins by constructing a “User Feedback Interaction Graph” (FIG) using historical user-entity interactions. Subsequently, we traverse through the graph edges to establish an enhanced user index, referred to as the “collaborative user index”. This paper then further explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in conjunction with graph traversal, leading to a significant increase in index coverage for unseen interactions. The effectiveness of our proposed approach has been proven through experiments on a large-scale real-world dataset and online A/B experiments.
Title: DELPHI: Data for Evaluating LLMs’ Performance in Handling Controversial Issues
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Controversy is a reflection of our zeitgeist, and an important aspect to any discourse. The rise of large language models (LLMs) as conversational systems has increased public reliance on these systems for answers to their various questions. Consequently, it is crucial to systematically examine how these models respond to questions that pertaining to ongoing debates. However, few such datasets exist in providing human-annotated labels reflecting the contemporary discussions. To foster research in this area, we propose a novel construction of a controversial questions dataset, expanding upon the publicly released Quora Question Pairs Dataset. This dataset presents challenges concerning knowledge recency, safety, fairness, and bias. We evaluate different LLMs using a subset of this dataset, illuminating how they handle controversial issues and the stances they adopt. This research ultimately contributes to our understanding of LLMs’ interaction with controversial issues, paving the way for improvements in their comprehension and handling of complex societal debates.
Title: Angel: Enterprise Search System for the Non-Profit Industry
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: information retrieval and text mining
Abstract: Non-profit industry need a system for accurately matching fund-seekers (e.g., AMERICAN NATIONAL RED CROSS) with fund-givers (e.g., BILL AND MELINDA GATES FOUNDATION) aligned in cause (e.g., cancer) and target beneficiary group (e.g., children). In this paper, we create an enterprise search system “ANGEL” for the non-profit industry that takes a fund-giver’s mission description as input and returns a ranked list of fund-seekers as output, and vice-versa. ANGEL employs ColBERT, a neural information retrieval model, which we enhance by exploiting the two techniques of (a) Syntax-aware local attention (SLA) to combine syntactic information in the mission description with multi-head self-attention and (b) Dense Pseudo Relevance Feedback (DPRF) for augmentation of short mission descriptions. We create a mapping dictionary “non-profit-dict” to curate a “non-profit-search database” containing information on 594K fund-givers and 194K fund-seekers from IRS-990 filings for the non-profit industry search engines . We also curate a “non-profit-evaluation” dataset containing scored matching between 463 fund-givers and 100 fund-seekers. The research is in collaboration with a philanthropic startup that identifies itself as an “AI matching platform, fundraising assistant, and philanthropy search base.” Domain experts at the philanthropic startup annotate the non-profit evaluation dataset and continuously evaluate the performance of ANGEL. ANGEL achieves an improvement of 0.14 MAP@10 and 0.16 MRR@10 over the state-of-the-art baseline on the non-profit evaluation dataset. To the best of our knowledge, ours is the first effort at building an enterprise search engine based on neural information retrieval for the non-profit industry.
Title: UniGen: Universal Domain Generalization for Sentiment Classification via Zero-shot Dataset Generation
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: low-resource methods for nlp
Abstract: Although pre-trained language models have exhibited great flexibility and versatility with prompt-based few-shot learning, they suffer from the extensive parameter size and limited applicability for inference. Recent studies have suggested that PLMs be used as dataset generators and a tiny task-specific model be trained to achieve efficient inference. However, their applicability to various domains is limited because they tend to generate domain-specific datasets. In this work, we propose a novel approach to universal domain generalization that generates a dataset regardless of the target domain. This allows for generalization of the tiny task model to any domain that shares the label space, thus enhancing the real-world applicability of the dataset generation paradigm. Our experiments indicate that the proposed method accomplishes generalizability across various domains while using a parameter set that is orders of magnitude smaller than PLMs.
Title: Multi-News+: Cost-efficient Dataset Cleansing via LLM-based Data Annotation
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: The quality of the dataset is crucial for ensuring optimal performance and reliability of downstream task models. However, datasets often contain noisy data inadvertently included during the construction process. Numerous attempts have been made to correct this issue through human annotators. However, hiring and managing human annotators is expensive and time-consuming. As an alternative, recent studies are exploring the use of large language models (LLMs) for data annotation.In this study, we present a case study that extends the application of LLM-based data annotation to enhance the quality of existing datasets through a cleansing strategy. Specifically, we leverage approaches such as chain-of-thought and majority voting to imitate human annotation and classify unrelated documents from the Multi-News dataset, which is widely used for the multi-document summarization task. Through our proposed cleansing method, we introduce an enhanced Multi-News+. By employing LLMs for data cleansing, we demonstrate an efficient and effective approach to improving dataset quality without relying on expensive human annotation efforts.
Title: FIZZ: Factual Inconsistency Detection by Zoom-in Summary and Zoom-out Document
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: summarization
Abstract: Through the advent of pre-trained language models, there have been notable advancements in abstractive summarization systems. Simultaneously, a considerable number of novel methods for evaluating factual consistency in abstractive summarization systems has been developed. But these evaluation approaches incorporate substantial limitations, especially on refinement and interpretability. In this work, we propose highly effective and interpretable factual inconsistency detection method FIZZ (Factual Inconsistency Detection by Zoom-in Summary and Zoom-out Document) for abstractive summarization systems that is based on fine-grained atomic facts decomposition. Moreover, we align atomic facts decomposed from the summary with the source document through adaptive granularity expansion. These atomic facts represent a more fine-grained unit of information, facilitating detailed understanding and interpretability of the summary’s factual inconsistency. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed factual consistency checking system significantly outperforms existing systems. We release the code at https://github.com/plm3332/FIZZ.
Title: Table Question Answering for Low-resourced Indic Languages
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: TableQA is the task of answering questions over tables of structured information, returning individual cells or tables as output. TableQA research has focused primarily on high-resource languages, leaving medium- and low-resource languages with little progress due to scarcity of annotated data and neural models. We address this gap by introducing a fully automatic large-scale tableQA data generation process for low-resource languages with limited budget. We incorporate our data generation method on two Indic languages, Bengali and Hindi, which have no tableQA datasets or models. TableQA models trained on our large-scale datasets outperform state-of-the-art LLMs. We further study the trained models on different aspects, including mathematical reasoning capabilities and zero-shot cross-lingual transfer. Our work is the first on low-resource tableQA focusing on scalable data generation and evaluation procedures. Our proposed data generation method can be applied to any low-resource language with a web presence. We release datasets, models, and code (https://github.com/kolk/Low-Resource-TableQA-Indic-languages).
Title: ImageInWords: Unlocking Hyper-Detailed Image Descriptions
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: multimodality and language grounding to vision, robotics and beyond
Abstract: Despite the longstanding adage ”an image is worth a thousand words,” generating accurate hyper-detailed image descriptions remains unsolved. Trained on short web-scraped image-text, vision-language models often generate incomplete descriptions with visual inconsistencies. We address this via a novel data-centric approach with ImageInWords (IIW), a carefully designed human-in-the-loop framework for curating hyper-detailed image descriptions. Human evaluations on IIW data show major gains compared to recent datasets (+66%) and GPT-4V (+48%) across comprehensiveness, specificity, hallucinations, and more. We also show that fine-tuning with IIW data improves these metrics by +31% against models trained with prior work, even with only 9k samples. Lastly, we evaluate IIW models with text-to-image generation and vision-language reasoning tasks. Our generated descriptions result in the highest fidelity images, and boost compositional reasoning by up to 6% on ARO, SVO-Probes, and Winoground datasets. We release the IIW-Eval benchmark with human judgement labels, object and image-level annotations from our framework, and existing image caption datasets enriched via IIW-model.
Title: LLM-Based Agent Society Investigation: Collaboration and Confrontation in Avalon Gameplay
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: This paper explores the open research problem of understanding the social behaviors of LLM-based agents. Using Avalon as a testbed, we employ system prompts to guide LLM agents in gameplay. While previous studies have touched on gameplay with LLM agents, research on their social behaviors is lacking. We propose a novel framework, tailored for Avalon, features a multi-agent system facilitating efficient communication and interaction. We evaluate its performance based on game success and analyze LLM agents’ social behaviors. Results affirm the framework’s effectiveness in creating adaptive agents and suggest LLM-based agents’ potential in navigating dynamic social interactions. By examining collaboration and confrontation behaviors, we offer insights into this field’s research and applications.
Title: When LLMs Meets Acoustic Landmarks: An Efficient Approach to Integrate Speech into Large Language Models for Depression Detection
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Depression is a critical concern in global mental health, prompting extensive research into AI-based detection methods. Among various AI technologies, Large Language Models (LLMs) stand out for their versatility in healthcare applications. However, the application of LLMs in the identification and analysis of depressive states remains relatively unexplored, presenting an intriguing avenue for future research. In this paper, we present an innovative approach to employ an LLM in the realm of depression detection, integrating acoustic speech information into the LLM framework for this specific application. We investigate an efficient method for automatic depression detection by integrating speech signals into LLMs utilizing Acoustic Landmarks. This approach is not only valuable for the detection of depression but also represents a new perspective in enhancing the ability of LLMs to comprehend and process speech signals. By incorporating acoustic landmarks, which are specific to the pronunciation of spoken words, our method adds critical dimensions to text transcripts. This integration also provides insights into the unique speech patterns of individuals, revealing the potential mental states of individuals. By encoding acoustic landmarks information into LLMs, evaluations of the proposed approach on the DAIC-WOZ dataset reveal state-of-the-art results when compared with existing Audio-Text baselines.
Title: Speaking in Wavelet Domain: A Simple and Efficient Approach to Speed up Speech Diffusion Model
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: speech processing and spoken language understanding
Abstract: Recently, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs) have attained leading performances across a diverse range of generative tasks. However, in the field of speech synthesis, although DDPMs exhibit impressive performance, their prolonged training duration and substantial inference costs hinder practical deployment. Existing approaches primarily focus on enhancing inference speed, while approaches to accelerate training—a key factor in the costs associated with adding or customizing voices—often necessitate complex modifications to the model, compromising their universal applicability. To address the aforementioned challenges, we propose an inquiry: is it possible to enhance the training/inference speed and performance of DDPMs by modifying the speech signal itself? In this paper, we double the training and inference speed of Speech DDPMs by simply redirecting the generative target to the wavelet domain. This method not only achieves comparable or superior performance to the original model in speech synthesis tasks but also demonstrates its versatility. By investigating and utilizing different wavelet bases, our approach proves effective not just in speech synthesis, but also in speech enhancement.
Title: A Usage-centric Take on Intent Understanding in E-Commerce
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Identifying and understanding user intents is a pivotal task for E-Commerce. Despite its essential role in product recommendation and business user profiling analysis, intent understanding has not been consistently defined or accurately benchmarked. In this paper, we focus on predicative user intents as “how a customer uses a product”, and pose intent understanding as a natural language reasoning task, independent of product ontologies. We identify two weaknesses of FolkScope, the SOTA E-Commerce Intent Knowledge Graph: category-rigidity and property-ambiguity. They limit its ability to strongly align user intents with products having the most desirable property, and to recommend useful products across diverse categories. Following these observations, we introduce a Product Recovery Benchmark featuring a novel evaluation framework and an example dataset. We further validate the above FolkScope weaknesses on this benchmark. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/stayones/Usgae-Centric-Intent-Understanding.
Title: Fine-Tuning or Retrieval? Comparing Knowledge Injection in LLMs
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) encapsulate a vast amount of factual information within their pre-trained weights, as evidenced by their ability to answer diverse questions across different domains. However, this knowledge is inherently limited, relying heavily on the characteristics of the training data. Consequently, using external datasets to incorporate new information or refine the capabilities of LLMs on previously seen information poses a significant challenge. In this study, we compare two common approaches: unsupervised fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). We evaluate both approaches on a variety of knowledge-intensive tasks across different topics. Our findings reveal that while unsupervised fine-tuning offers some improvement, RAG consistently outperforms it, both for existing knowledge encountered during training and entirely new knowledge. Moreover, we find that LLMs struggle to learn new factual information through unsupervised fine-tuning, and that exposing them to numerous variations of the same fact during training could alleviate this problem.
Title: Systematic Biases in LLM Simulations of Debates
Venue: EMNLP (2024)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs), has opened exciting possibilities for constructing computational simulations designed to replicate human behavior accurately. Current research suggests that LLM-based agents become increasingly human-like in their performance, sparking interest in using these AI agents as substitutes for human participants in behavioral studies. However, LLMs are complex statistical learners without straightforward deductive rules, making them prone to unexpected behaviors. Hence, it is crucial to study and pinpoint the key behavioral distinctions between humans and LLM-based agents. In this study, we highlight the limitations of LLMs in simulating human interactions, particularly focusing on LLMs’ ability to simulate political debates on topics that are important aspects of people’s day-to-day lives and decision-making processes. Our findings indicate a tendency for LLM agents to conform to the model’s inherent social biases despite being directed to debate from certain political perspectives. This tendency results in behavioral patterns that seem to deviate from well-established social dynamics among humans. We reinforce these observations using an automatic self-fine-tuning method, which enables us to manipulate the biases within the LLM and demonstrate that agents subsequently align with the altered biases. These results underscore the need for further research to develop methods that help agents overcome these biases, a critical step toward creating more realistic simulations.