yuz9yuz/NLPImpact huggingface dataset:
Title: PILE: Pairwise Iterative Logits Ensemble for Multi-Teacher Labeled Distillation
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: low-resource methods for nlp
Abstract: Pre-trained language models have become a crucial part of ranking systems and achieved very impressive effects recently. To maintain high performance while keeping efficient computations, knowledge distillation is widely used. In this paper, we focus on two key questions in knowledge distillation for ranking models: 1) how to ensemble knowledge from multi-teacher; 2) how to utilize the label information of data in the distillation process. We propose a unified algorithm called Pairwise Iterative Logits Ensemble (PILE) to tackle these two questions simultaneously. PILE ensembles multi-teacher logits supervised by label information in an iterative way and achieved competitive performance in both offline and online experiments. The proposed method has been deployed in a real-world commercial search system.
Title: A Comprehensive Evaluation of Biomedical Entity-centric Search
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: Biomedical information retrieval has often been studied as a task of detecting whether a system correctly detects entity spans and links these entities to concepts from a given terminology. Most academic research has focused on evaluation of named entity recognition (NER) and entity linking (EL) models which are key components to recognizing diseases and genes in PubMed abstracts. In this work, we perform a fine-grained evaluation intended to understand the efficiency of state-of-the-art BERT-based information extraction (IE) architecture as a biomedical search engine. We present a novel manually annotated dataset of abstracts for disease and gene search. The dataset contains 23K query-abstract pairs, where 152 queries are selected from logs of our target discovery platform and PubMed abstracts annotated with relevance judgments. Specifically, the query list also includes a subset of concepts with at least one ambiguous concept name. As a baseline, we use off-she-shelf Elasticsearch with BM25. Our experiments on NER, EL, and retrieval in a zero-shot setup show the neural IE architecture shows superior performance for both disease and gene concept queries.
Title: Domain Adaptation of Machine Translation with Crowdworkers
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: Although a machine translation model trained with a large in-domain parallel corpus achieves remarkable results, it still works poorly when no in-domain data are available. This situation restricts the applicability of machine translation when the target domain’s data are limited. However, there is great demand for high-quality domain-specific machine translation models for many domains. We propose a framework that efficiently and effectively collects parallel sentences in a target domain from the web with the help of crowdworkers.With the collected parallel data, we can quickly adapt a machine translation model to the target domain. Our experiments show that the proposed method can collect target-domain parallel data over a few days at a reasonable cost. We tested it with five domains, and the domain-adapted model improved the BLEU scores to +19.7 by an average of +7.8 points compared to a general-purpose translation model.
Title: Biomedical NER for the Enterprise with Distillated BERN2 and the Kazu Framework
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: In order to assist the drug discovery/development process, pharmaceutical companies often apply biomedical NER and linking techniques over internal and public corpora. Decades of study of the field of BioNLP has produced a plethora of algorithms, systems and datasets. However, our experience has been that no single open source system meets all the requirements of a modern pharmaceutical company. In this work, we describe these requirements according to our experience of the industry, and present Kazu, a highly extensible, scalable open source framework designed to support BioNLP for the pharmaceutical sector. Kazu is a built around a computationally efficient version of the BERN2 NER model (TinyBERN2), and subsequently wraps several other BioNLP technologies into one coherent system.
Title: Large-scale Machine Translation for Indian Languages in E-commerce under Low Resource Constraints
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: machine translation
Abstract: The democratization of e-commerce platforms has moved an increasingly diversified Indian user base to shop online. We have deployed reliable and precise large-scale Machine Translation systems for several Indian regional languages in this work. Building such systems is a challenge because of the low-resource nature of the Indian languages. We develop a structured model development pipeline as a closed feedback loop with external manual feedback through an Active Learning component. We show strong synthetic parallel data generation capability and consistent improvements to the model over iterations. Starting with 1.2M parallel pairs for English-Hindi we have compiled a corpus with 400M+ synthetic high quality parallel pairs across different domains. Further, we need colloquial translations to preserve the intent and friendliness of English content in regional languages, and make it easier to understand for our users. We perform robust and effective domain adaptation steps to achieve colloquial such translations. Over iterations, we show 9.02 BLEU points improvement for English to Hindi translation model. Along with Hindi, we show that the overall approach and best practices extends well to other Indian languages, resulting in deployment of our models across 7 Indian Languages.
Title: Topic Modeling by Clustering Language Model Embeddings: Human Validation on an Industry Dataset
Venue: EMNLP (2022)
Topic: resources and evaluation
Abstract: Topic models are powerful tools to get an overview of large collections of text data, a situation that is prevalent in industry applications. A rising trend within topic modeling is to directly cluster dimension-reduced embeddings created with pretrained language models. It is difficult to evaluate these models because there is no ground truth and automatic measurements may not mimic human judgment. To address this problem, we created a tool called STELLAR for interactive topic browsing which we used for human evaluation of topics created from a real-world dataset used in industry. Embeddings created with BERT were used together with UMAP and HDBSCAN to model the topics. The human evaluation found that our topic model creates coherent topics. The following discussion revolves around the requirements of industry and what research is needed for production-ready systems.
Title: IAG: Induction-Augmented Generation Framework for Answering Reasoning Questions
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: question answering
Abstract: Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), by incorporating external knowledge with parametric memory of language models, has become the state-of-the-art architecture for open-domain QA tasks. However, common knowledge bases are inherently constrained by limited coverage and noisy information, making retrieval-based approaches inadequate to answer implicit reasoning questions. In this paper, we propose an Induction-Augmented Generation (IAG) framework that utilizes inductive knowledge along with the retrieved documents for implicit reasoning. We leverage large language models (LLMs) for deriving such knowledge via a novel prompting method based on inductive reasoning patterns. On top of this, we implement two versions of IAG named IAG-GPT and IAG-Student, respectively. IAG-GPT directly utilizes the knowledge generated by GPT-3 for answer prediction, while IAG-Student gets rid of dependencies on GPT service at inference time by incorporating a student inductor model. The inductor is firstly trained via knowledge distillation and further optimized by back-propagating the generator feedback via differentiable beam scores. Experimental results show that IAG outperforms RAG baselines as well as ChatGPT on two Open-Domain QA tasks. Notably, our best models have won the first place in the official leaderboards of CSQA2.0 (since Nov 1, 2022) and StrategyQA (since Jan 8, 2023).
Title: Absolute Position Embedding Learns Sinusoid-like Waves for Attention Based on Relative Position
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Attention weight is a clue to interpret how a Transformer-based model makes an inference. In some attention heads, the attention focuses on the neighbors of each token. This allows the output vector of each token to depend on the surrounding tokens and contributes to make the inference context-dependent. We analyze the mechanism behind the concentration of attention on nearby tokens. We show that the phenomenon emerges as follows: (1) learned position embedding has sinusoid-like components, (2) such components are transmitted to the query and the key in the self-attention, (3) the attention head shifts the phases of the sinusoid-like components so that the attention concentrates on nearby tokens at specific relative positions. In other words, a certain type of Transformer-based model acquires the sinusoidal positional encoding to some extent on its own through Masked Language Modeling.
Title: Chinese Lexical Substitution: Dataset and Method
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: semantics: lexical, sentence-level semantics, textual inference and other areas
Abstract: Existing lexical substitution (LS) benchmarks were collected by asking human annotators to think of substitutes from memory, resulting in benchmarks with limited coverage and relatively small scales. To overcome this problem, we propose a novel annotation method to construct an LS dataset based on human and machine collaboration. Based on our annotation method, we construct the first Chinese LS dataset CHNLS which consists of 33,695 instances and 144,708 substitutes, covering three text genres (News, Novel, and Wikipedia). Specifically, we first combine four unsupervised LS methods as an ensemble method to generate the candidate substitutes, and then let human annotators judge these candidates or add new ones. This collaborative process combines the diversity of machine-generated substitutes with the expertise of human annotators. Experimental results that the ensemble method outperforms other LS methods. To our best knowledge, this is the first study for the Chinese LS task.
Title: Decoding the Silent Majority: Inducing Belief Augmented Social Graph with Large Language Model for Response Forecasting
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: computational social science and cultural analytics
Abstract: Automatic response forecasting for news media plays a crucial role in enabling content producers to efficiently predict the impact of news releases and prevent unexpected negative outcomes such as social conflict and moral injury. To effectively forecast responses, it is essential to develop measures that leverage the social dynamics and contextual information surrounding individuals, especially in cases where explicit profiles or historical actions of the users are limited (referred to as lurkers). As shown in a previous study, 97% of all tweets are produced by only the most active 25% of users. However, existing approaches have limited exploration of how to best process and utilize these important features. To address this gap, we propose a novel framework, named SocialSense, that leverages a large language model to induce a belief-centered graph on top of an existent social network, along with graph-based propagation to capture social dynamics. We hypothesize that the induced graph that bridges the gap between distant users who share similar beliefs allows the model to effectively capture the response patterns. Our method surpasses existing state-of-the-art in experimental evaluations for both zero-shot and supervised settings, demonstrating its effectiveness in response forecasting. Moreover, the analysis reveals the framework’s capability to effectively handle unseen user and lurker scenarios, further highlighting its robustness and practical applicability.
Title: Fine-grained Conversational Decoding via Isotropic and Proximal Search
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: dialogue and interactive systems
Abstract: General-purpose text decoding approaches are usually adopted for dialogue response generation. Although the quality of the generated responses can be improved with dialogue-specific encoding methods, conversational decoding methods are still under-explored. Inspired by SimDRC that a good dialogue feature space should follow the rules of locality and isotropy, we present a fine-grained conversational decoding method, termed isotropic and proximal search (IPS). Our method is designed to generate the semantic-concentrated response, while still maintaining informativeness and discrimination against the context. Experiments show that our approach significantly outperforms existing decoding strategies in the dialogue field across both automatic and human evaluation metrics. More in-depth analyses further confirm the effectiveness of our approach.
Title: Holistic Inter-Annotator Agreement and Corpus Coherence Estimation in a Large-scale Multilingual Annotation Campaign
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: human-centered nlp
Abstract: In this paper we report on the complexity of persuasion technique annotation in the context of a large multilingual annotation campaign involving 6 languages and approximately 40 annotators. We highlight the techniques that appear to be difficult for humans to annotate and elaborate on our findings on the causes of this phenomenon. We introduce Holistic IAA, a new word embedding-based annotator agreement metric and we report on various experiments using this metric and its correlation with the traditional Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) metrics. However, given somewhat limited and loose interaction between annotators, i.e., only a few annotators annotate the same document subsets, we try to devise a way to assess the coherence of the entire dataset and strive to find a good proxy for IAA between annotators tasked to annotate different documents and in different languages, for which classical IAA metrics can not be applied.
Title: PHD: Pixel-Based Language Modeling of Historical Documents
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: The digitisation of historical documents has provided historians with unprecedented research opportunities. Yet, the conventional approach to analysing historical documents involves converting them from images to text using OCR, a process that overlooks the potential benefits of treating them as images and introduces high levels of noise. To bridge this gap, we take advantage of recent advancements in pixel-based language models trained to reconstruct masked patches of pixels instead of predicting token distributions. Due to the scarcity of real historical scans, we propose a novel method for generating synthetic scans to resemble real historical documents. We then pre-train our model, PHD, on a combination of synthetic scans and real historical newspapers from the 1700-1900 period. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that PHD exhibits high proficiency in reconstructing masked image patches and provide evidence of our model’s noteworthy language understanding capabilities. Notably, we successfully apply our model to a historical QA task, highlighting its usefulness in this domain.
Title: Primacy Effect of ChatGPT
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: interpretability and analysis of models for nlp
Abstract: Instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have led to promising zero-shot performance in discriminative natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. This involves querying the LLM using a prompt containing the question, and the candidate labels to choose from. The question-answering capabilities of ChatGPT arise from its pre-training on large amounts of human-written text, as well as its subsequent fine-tuning on human preferences, which motivates us to ask: Does ChatGPT also inherit humans’ cognitive biases? In this paper, we study the primacy effect of ChatGPT: the tendency of selecting the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We have two main findings: i) ChatGPT’s decision is sensitive to the order of labels in the prompt; ii) ChatGPT has a clearly higher chance to select the labels at earlier positions as the answer. We hope that our experiments and analyses provide additional insights into building more reliable ChatGPT-based solutions. We release the source code at https://github.com/wangywUST/PrimacyEffectGPT.
Title: Evaluating the Rationale Understanding of Critical Reasoning in Logical Reading Comprehension
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: linguistic theories, cognitive modeling and psycholinguistics
Abstract: To precisely evaluate a language model’s capability for logical reading comprehension, we present a dataset for testing the understanding of the rationale behind critical reasoning. For questions taken from an existing multiple-choice logical reading comprehension dataset, we crowdsource rationale texts that explain why we should select or eliminate answer options, resulting in 3,003 multiple-choice subquestions that are associated with 943 main questions. Experiments on our dataset show that recent large language models (e.g., InstructGPT) struggle to answer the subquestions even if they are able to answer the main questions correctly. We find that the models perform particularly poorly in answering subquestions written for the incorrect options of the main questions, implying that the models have a limited capability for explaining why incorrect alternatives should be eliminated. These results suggest that our dataset encourages further investigation into the critical reasoning ability of language models while focusing on the elimination process of relevant alternatives.
Title: Evaluating and Modeling Attribution for Cross-Lingual Question Answering
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: Trustworthy answer content is abundant in many high-resource languages and is instantly accessible through question answering systems — yet this content can be hard to access for those that do not speak these languages. The leap forward in cross-lingual modeling quality offered by generative language models offers much promise, yet their raw generations often fall short in factuality. To improve trustworthiness in these systems, a promising direction is to attribute the answer to a retrieved source, possibly in a content-rich language different from the query. Our work is the first to study attribution for cross-lingual question answering. First, we collect data in 5 languages to assess the attribution level of a state-of-the-art cross-lingual QA system. To our surprise, we find that a substantial portion of the answers is not attributable to any retrieved passages (up to 50% of answers exactly matching a gold reference) despite the system being able to attend directly to the retrieved text. Second, to address this poor attribution level, we experiment with a wide range of attribution detection techniques. We find that Natural Language Inference models and PaLM 2 fine-tuned on a very small amount of attribution data can accurately detect attribution. With these models, we improve the attribution level of a cross-lingual QA system. Overall, we show that current academic generative cross-lingual QA systems have substantial shortcomings in attribution and we build tooling to mitigate these issues.
Title: Better Quality Pre-training Data and T5 Models for African Languages
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: multilinguality and language diversity
Abstract: In this study, we highlight the importance of enhancing the quality of pretraining data in multilingual language models. Existing web crawls have demonstrated quality issues, particularly in the context of low-resource languages. Consequently, we introduce a new multilingual pretraining corpus for 16 African languages, designed by carefully auditing existing pretraining corpora to understand and rectify prevalent quality issues. To compile this dataset, we undertake a rigorous examination of current data sources for thirteen languages within one of the most extensive multilingual web crawls, mC4, and extract cleaner data through meticulous auditing and improved web crawling strategies. Subsequently, we pretrain a new T5-based model on this dataset and evaluate its performance on multiple downstream tasks. Our model demonstrates better downstream effectiveness over existing pretrained models across four NLP tasks, underscoring the critical role data quality plays in pretraining language models in low-resource scenarios. Specifically, on cross-lingual QA evaluation, our new model is more than twice as effective as multilingual T5. All code, data and models are publicly available at https://github.com/castorini/AfriTeVa-keji.
Title: Sparse Universal Transformer
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: language modeling
Abstract: The Universal Transformer (UT) is a variant of the Transformer that shares parameters across its layers and is Turing-complete under certain assumptions. Empirical evidence also shows that UTs have better compositional generalization than Vanilla Transformers (VTs) in formal language tasks. The parameter-sharing also affords it better parameter efficiency than VTs. Despite its many advantages, most state-of-the-art NLP systems use VTs as their backbone model instead of UTs. This is mainly because scaling UT parameters is more compute and memory intensive than scaling up a VT. This paper proposes the Sparse Universal Transformer (SUT), which leverages Sparse Mixture of Experts (SMoE) to reduce UT’s computation complexity while retaining its parameter efficiency and generalization ability. Experiments show that SUT combines the best of both worlds, achieving strong generalization results on formal language tasks (Logical inference and CFQ) and impressive parameter and computation efficiency on standard natural language benchmarks like WMT’14.
Title: Theory of Mind for Multi-Agent Collaboration via Large Language Models
Venue: EMNLP (2023)
Topic: nlp applications
Abstract: While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive accomplishments in both reasoning and planning, their abilities in multi-agent collaborations remains largely unexplored. This study evaluates LLM-based agents in a multi-agent cooperative text game with Theory of Mind (ToM) inference tasks, comparing their performance with Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) and planning-based baselines. We observed evidence of emergent collaborative behaviors and high-order Theory of Mind capabilities among LLM-based agents. Our results reveal limitations in LLM-based agents’ planning optimization due to systematic failures in managing long-horizon contexts and hallucination about the task state. We explore the use of explicit belief state representations to mitigate these issues, finding that it enhances task performance and the accuracy of ToM inferences for LLM-based agents.