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SubscribeRobust Dialog State Tracking for Large Ontologies
The Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 (DSTC 4) differentiates itself from the previous three editions as follows: the number of slot-value pairs present in the ontology is much larger, no spoken language understanding output is given, and utterances are labeled at the subdialog level. This paper describes a novel dialog state tracking method designed to work robustly under these conditions, using elaborate string matching, coreference resolution tailored for dialogs and a few other improvements. The method can correctly identify many values that are not explicitly present in the utterance. On the final evaluation, our method came in first among 7 competing teams and 24 entries. The F1-score achieved by our method was 9 and 7 percentage points higher than that of the runner-up for the utterance-level evaluation and for the subdialog-level evaluation, respectively.
DongbaMIE: A Multimodal Information Extraction Dataset for Evaluating Semantic Understanding of Dongba Pictograms
Dongba pictographs are the only pictographs still in use in the world. They have pictorial ideographic features, and their symbols carry rich cultural and contextual information. Due to the lack of relevant datasets, existing research has difficulty in advancing the study of semantic understanding of Dongba pictographs. To this end, we propose DongbaMIE, the first multimodal dataset for semantic understanding and extraction of Dongba pictographs. The dataset consists of Dongba pictograph images and their corresponding Chinese semantic annotations. It contains 23,530 sentence-level and 2,539 paragraph-level images, covering four semantic dimensions: objects, actions, relations, and attributes. We systematically evaluate the GPT-4o, Gemini-2.0, and Qwen2-VL models. Experimental results show that the F1 scores of GPT-4o and Gemini in the best object extraction are only 3.16 and 3.11 respectively. The F1 score of Qwen2-VL after supervised fine-tuning is only 11.49. These results suggest that current large multimodal models still face significant challenges in accurately recognizing the diverse semantic information in Dongba pictographs. The dataset can be obtained from this URL.
LTNER: Large Language Model Tagging for Named Entity Recognition with Contextualized Entity Marking
The use of LLMs for natural language processing has become a popular trend in the past two years, driven by their formidable capacity for context comprehension and learning, which has inspired a wave of research from academics and industry professionals. However, for certain NLP tasks, such as NER, the performance of LLMs still falls short when compared to supervised learning methods. In our research, we developed a NER processing framework called LTNER that incorporates a revolutionary Contextualized Entity Marking Gen Method. By leveraging the cost-effective GPT-3.5 coupled with context learning that does not require additional training, we significantly improved the accuracy of LLMs in handling NER tasks. The F1 score on the CoNLL03 dataset increased from the initial 85.9% to 91.9%, approaching the performance of supervised fine-tuning. This outcome has led to a deeper understanding of the potential of LLMs.
Long-form factuality in large language models
Large language models (LLMs) often generate content that contains factual errors when responding to fact-seeking prompts on open-ended topics. To benchmark a model's long-form factuality in open domains, we first use GPT-4 to generate LongFact, a prompt set comprising thousands of questions spanning 38 topics. We then propose that LLM agents can be used as automated evaluators for long-form factuality through a method which we call Search-Augmented Factuality Evaluator (SAFE). SAFE utilizes an LLM to break down a long-form response into a set of individual facts and to evaluate the accuracy of each fact using a multi-step reasoning process comprising sending search queries to Google Search and determining whether a fact is supported by the search results. Furthermore, we propose extending F1 score as an aggregated metric for long-form factuality. To do so, we balance the percentage of supported facts in a response (precision) with the percentage of provided facts relative to a hyperparameter representing a user's preferred response length (recall). Empirically, we demonstrate that LLM agents can achieve superhuman rating performance - on a set of ~16k individual facts, SAFE agrees with crowdsourced human annotators 72% of the time, and on a random subset of 100 disagreement cases, SAFE wins 76% of the time. At the same time, SAFE is more than 20 times cheaper than human annotators. We also benchmark thirteen language models on LongFact across four model families (Gemini, GPT, Claude, and PaLM-2), finding that larger language models generally achieve better long-form factuality. LongFact, SAFE, and all experimental code are available at https://github.com/google-deepmind/long-form-factuality.
Diagnosis extraction from unstructured Dutch echocardiogram reports using span- and document-level characteristic classification
Clinical machine learning research and AI driven clinical decision support models rely on clinically accurate labels. Manually extracting these labels with the help of clinical specialists is often time-consuming and expensive. This study tests the feasibility of automatic span- and document-level diagnosis extraction from unstructured Dutch echocardiogram reports. We included 115,692 unstructured echocardiogram reports from the UMCU a large university hospital in the Netherlands. A randomly selected subset was manually annotated for the occurrence and severity of eleven commonly described cardiac characteristics. We developed and tested several automatic labelling techniques at both span and document levels, using weighted and macro F1-score, precision, and recall for performance evaluation. We compared the performance of span labelling against document labelling methods, which included both direct document classifiers and indirect document classifiers that rely on span classification results. The SpanCategorizer and MedRoBERTa.nl models outperformed all other span and document classifiers, respectively. The weighted F1-score varied between characteristics, ranging from 0.60 to 0.93 in SpanCategorizer and 0.96 to 0.98 in MedRoBERTa.nl. Direct document classification was superior to indirect document classification using span classifiers. SetFit achieved competitive document classification performance using only 10\% of the training data. Utilizing a reduced label set yielded near-perfect document classification results. We recommend using our published SpanCategorizer and MedRoBERTa.nl models for span- and document-level diagnosis extraction from Dutch echocardiography reports. For settings with limited training data, SetFit may be a promising alternative for document classification.
Findings of Factify 2: Multimodal Fake News Detection
With social media usage growing exponentially in the past few years, fake news has also become extremely prevalent. The detrimental impact of fake news emphasizes the need for research focused on automating the detection of false information and verifying its accuracy. In this work, we present the outcome of the Factify 2 shared task, which provides a multi-modal fact verification and satire news dataset, as part of the DeFactify 2 workshop at AAAI'23. The data calls for a comparison based approach to the task by pairing social media claims with supporting documents, with both text and image, divided into 5 classes based on multi-modal relations. In the second iteration of this task we had over 60 participants and 9 final test-set submissions. The best performances came from the use of DeBERTa for text and Swinv2 and CLIP for image. The highest F1 score averaged for all five classes was 81.82%.
Swiss-Judgment-Prediction: A Multilingual Legal Judgment Prediction Benchmark
In many jurisdictions, the excessive workload of courts leads to high delays. Suitable predictive AI models can assist legal professionals in their work, and thus enhance and speed up the process. So far, Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) datasets have been released in English, French, and Chinese. We publicly release a multilingual (German, French, and Italian), diachronic (2000-2020) corpus of 85K cases from the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (FSCS). We evaluate state-of-the-art BERT-based methods including two variants of BERT that overcome the BERT input (text) length limitation (up to 512 tokens). Hierarchical BERT has the best performance (approx. 68-70% Macro-F1-Score in German and French). Furthermore, we study how several factors (canton of origin, year of publication, text length, legal area) affect performance. We release both the benchmark dataset and our code to accelerate future research and ensure reproducibility.
Comparing Rule-Based and Deep Learning Models for Patient Phenotyping
Objective: We investigate whether deep learning techniques for natural language processing (NLP) can be used efficiently for patient phenotyping. Patient phenotyping is a classification task for determining whether a patient has a medical condition, and is a crucial part of secondary analysis of healthcare data. We assess the performance of deep learning algorithms and compare them with classical NLP approaches. Materials and Methods: We compare convolutional neural networks (CNNs), n-gram models, and approaches based on cTAKES that extract pre-defined medical concepts from clinical notes and use them to predict patient phenotypes. The performance is tested on 10 different phenotyping tasks using 1,610 discharge summaries extracted from the MIMIC-III database. Results: CNNs outperform other phenotyping algorithms in all 10 tasks. The average F1-score of our model is 76 (PPV of 83, and sensitivity of 71) with our model having an F1-score up to 37 points higher than alternative approaches. We additionally assess the interpretability of our model by presenting a method that extracts the most salient phrases for a particular prediction. Conclusion: We show that NLP methods based on deep learning improve the performance of patient phenotyping. Our CNN-based algorithm automatically learns the phrases associated with each patient phenotype. As such, it reduces the annotation complexity for clinical domain experts, who are normally required to develop task-specific annotation rules and identify relevant phrases. Our method performs well in terms of both performance and interpretability, which indicates that deep learning is an effective approach to patient phenotyping based on clinicians' notes.
De-identification of Patient Notes with Recurrent Neural Networks
Objective: Patient notes in electronic health records (EHRs) may contain critical information for medical investigations. However, the vast majority of medical investigators can only access de-identified notes, in order to protect the confidentiality of patients. In the United States, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) defines 18 types of protected health information (PHI) that needs to be removed to de-identify patient notes. Manual de-identification is impractical given the size of EHR databases, the limited number of researchers with access to the non-de-identified notes, and the frequent mistakes of human annotators. A reliable automated de-identification system would consequently be of high value. Materials and Methods: We introduce the first de-identification system based on artificial neural networks (ANNs), which requires no handcrafted features or rules, unlike existing systems. We compare the performance of the system with state-of-the-art systems on two datasets: the i2b2 2014 de-identification challenge dataset, which is the largest publicly available de-identification dataset, and the MIMIC de-identification dataset, which we assembled and is twice as large as the i2b2 2014 dataset. Results: Our ANN model outperforms the state-of-the-art systems. It yields an F1-score of 97.85 on the i2b2 2014 dataset, with a recall 97.38 and a precision of 97.32, and an F1-score of 99.23 on the MIMIC de-identification dataset, with a recall 99.25 and a precision of 99.06. Conclusion: Our findings support the use of ANNs for de-identification of patient notes, as they show better performance than previously published systems while requiring no feature engineering.
BASIR: Budget-Assisted Sectoral Impact Ranking -- A Dataset for Sector Identification and Performance Prediction Using Language Models
Government fiscal policies, particularly annual union budgets, exert significant influence on financial markets. However, real-time analysis of budgetary impacts on sector-specific equity performance remains methodologically challenging and largely unexplored. This study proposes a framework to systematically identify and rank sectors poised to benefit from India's Union Budget announcements. The framework addresses two core tasks: (1) multi-label classification of excerpts from budget transcripts into 81 predefined economic sectors, and (2) performance ranking of these sectors. Leveraging a comprehensive corpus of Indian Union Budget transcripts from 1947 to 2025, we introduce BASIR (Budget-Assisted Sectoral Impact Ranking), an annotated dataset mapping excerpts from budgetary transcripts to sectoral impacts. Our architecture incorporates fine-tuned embeddings for sector identification, coupled with language models that rank sectors based on their predicted performances. Our results demonstrate 0.605 F1-score in sector classification, and 0.997 NDCG score in predicting ranks of sectors based on post-budget performances. The methodology enables investors and policymakers to quantify fiscal policy impacts through structured, data-driven insights, addressing critical gaps in manual analysis. The annotated dataset has been released under CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0 license to advance computational economics research.
FoodMLLM-JP: Leveraging Multimodal Large Language Models for Japanese Recipe Generation
Research on food image understanding using recipe data has been a long-standing focus due to the diversity and complexity of the data. Moreover, food is inextricably linked to people's lives, making it a vital research area for practical applications such as dietary management. Recent advancements in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities, not only in their vast knowledge but also in their ability to handle languages naturally. While English is predominantly used, they can also support multiple languages including Japanese. This suggests that MLLMs are expected to significantly improve performance in food image understanding tasks. We fine-tuned open MLLMs LLaVA-1.5 and Phi-3 Vision on a Japanese recipe dataset and benchmarked their performance against the closed model GPT-4o. We then evaluated the content of generated recipes, including ingredients and cooking procedures, using 5,000 evaluation samples that comprehensively cover Japanese food culture. Our evaluation demonstrates that the open models trained on recipe data outperform GPT-4o, the current state-of-the-art model, in ingredient generation. Our model achieved F1 score of 0.531, surpassing GPT-4o's F1 score of 0.481, indicating a higher level of accuracy. Furthermore, our model exhibited comparable performance to GPT-4o in generating cooking procedure text.
Knowledge distillation to effectively attain both region-of-interest and global semantics from an image where multiple objects appear
Models based on convolutional neural networks (CNN) and transformers have steadily been improved. They also have been applied in various computer vision downstream tasks. However, in object detection tasks, accurately localizing and classifying almost infinite categories of foods in images remains challenging. To address these problems, we first segmented the food as the region-of-interest (ROI) by using the segment-anything model (SAM) and masked the rest of the region except ROI as black pixels. This process simplified the problems into a single classification for which annotation and training were much simpler than object detection. The images in which only the ROI was preserved were fed as inputs to fine-tune various off-the-shelf models that encoded their own inductive biases. Among them, Data-efficient image Transformers (DeiTs) had the best classification performance. Nonetheless, when foods' shapes and textures were similar, the contextual features of the ROI-only images were not enough for accurate classification. Therefore, we introduced a novel type of combined architecture, RveRNet, which consisted of ROI, extra-ROI, and integration modules that allowed it to account for both the ROI's and global contexts. The RveRNet's F1 score was 10% better than other individual models when classifying ambiguous food images. If the RveRNet's modules were DeiT with the knowledge distillation from the CNN, performed the best. We investigated how architectures can be made robust against input noise caused by permutation and translocation. The results indicated that there was a trade-off between how much the CNN teacher's knowledge could be distilled to DeiT and DeiT's innate strength. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/Seonwhee-Genome/RveRNet.
PSYCHIC: A Neuro-Symbolic Framework for Knowledge Graph Question-Answering Grounding
The Scholarly Question Answering over Linked Data (Scholarly QALD) at The International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC) 2023 challenge presents two sub-tasks to tackle question answering (QA) over knowledge graphs (KGs). We answer the KGQA over DBLP (DBLP-QUAD) task by proposing a neuro-symbolic (NS) framework based on PSYCHIC, an extractive QA model capable of identifying the query and entities related to a KG question. Our system achieved a F1 score of 00.18% on question answering and came in third place for entity linking (EL) with a score of 71.00%.
Overview of Memotion 3: Sentiment and Emotion Analysis of Codemixed Hinglish Memes
Analyzing memes on the internet has emerged as a crucial endeavor due to the impact this multi-modal form of content wields in shaping online discourse. Memes have become a powerful tool for expressing emotions and sentiments, possibly even spreading hate and misinformation, through humor and sarcasm. In this paper, we present the overview of the Memotion 3 shared task, as part of the DeFactify 2 workshop at AAAI-23. The task released an annotated dataset of Hindi-English code-mixed memes based on their Sentiment (Task A), Emotion (Task B), and Emotion intensity (Task C). Each of these is defined as an individual task and the participants are ranked separately for each task. Over 50 teams registered for the shared task and 5 made final submissions to the test set of the Memotion 3 dataset. CLIP, BERT modifications, ViT etc. were the most popular models among the participants along with approaches such as Student-Teacher model, Fusion, and Ensembling. The best final F1 score for Task A is 34.41, Task B is 79.77 and Task C is 59.82.
ANER: Arabic and Arabizi Named Entity Recognition using Transformer-Based Approach
One of the main tasks of Natural Language Processing (NLP), is Named Entity Recognition (NER). It is used in many applications and also can be used as an intermediate step for other tasks. We present ANER, a web-based named entity recognizer for the Arabic, and Arabizi languages. The model is built upon BERT, which is a transformer-based encoder. It can recognize 50 different entity classes, covering various fields. We trained our model on the WikiFANE\_Gold dataset which consists of Wikipedia articles. We achieved an F1 score of 88.7\%, which beats CAMeL Tools' F1 score of 83\% on the ANERcorp dataset, which has only 4 classes. We also got an F1 score of 77.7\% on the NewsFANE\_Gold dataset which contains out-of-domain data from News articles. The system is deployed on a user-friendly web interface that accepts users' inputs in Arabic, or Arabizi. It allows users to explore the entities in the text by highlighting them. It can also direct users to get information about entities through Wikipedia directly. We added the ability to do NER using our model, or CAMeL Tools' model through our website. ANER is publicly accessible at http://www.aner.online. We also deployed our model on HuggingFace at https://huggingface.co/boda/ANER, to allow developers to test and use it.
Column Type Annotation using ChatGPT
Column type annotation is the task of annotating the columns of a relational table with the semantic type of the values contained in each column. Column type annotation is an important pre-processing step for data search and data integration in the context of data lakes. State-of-the-art column type annotation methods either rely on matching table columns to properties of a knowledge graph or fine-tune pre-trained language models such as BERT for column type annotation. In this work, we take a different approach and explore using ChatGPT for column type annotation. We evaluate different prompt designs in zero- and few-shot settings and experiment with providing task definitions and detailed instructions to the model. We further implement a two-step table annotation pipeline which first determines the class of the entities described in the table and depending on this class asks ChatGPT to annotate columns using only the relevant subset of the overall vocabulary. Using instructions as well as the two-step pipeline, ChatGPT reaches F1 scores of over 85% in zero- and one-shot setups. To reach a similar F1 score a RoBERTa model needs to be fine-tuned with 356 examples. This comparison shows that ChatGPT is able deliver competitive results for the column type annotation task given no or only a minimal amount of task-specific demonstrations.
Naamapadam: A Large-Scale Named Entity Annotated Data for Indic Languages
We present, Naamapadam, the largest publicly available Named Entity Recognition (NER) dataset for the 11 major Indian languages from two language families. In each language, it contains more than 400k sentences annotated with a total of at least 100k entities from three standard entity categories (Person, Location and Organization) for 9 out of the 11 languages. The training dataset has been automatically created from the Samanantar parallel corpus by projecting automatically tagged entities from an English sentence to the corresponding Indian language sentence. We also create manually annotated testsets for 8 languages containing approximately 1000 sentences per language. We demonstrate the utility of the obtained dataset on existing testsets and the Naamapadam-test data for 8 Indic languages. We also release IndicNER, a multilingual mBERT model fine-tuned on the Naamapadam training set. IndicNER achieves the best F1 on the Naamapadam-test set compared to an mBERT model fine-tuned on existing datasets. IndicNER achieves an F1 score of more than 80 for 7 out of 11 Indic languages. The dataset and models are available under open-source licenses at https://ai4bharat.iitm.ac.in/naamapadam.
Can Brain Signals Reveal Inner Alignment with Human Languages?
Brain Signals, such as Electroencephalography (EEG), and human languages have been widely explored independently for many downstream tasks, however, the connection between them has not been well explored. In this study, we explore the relationship and dependency between EEG and language. To study at the representation level, we introduced MTAM, a Multimodal Transformer Alignment Model, to observe coordinated representations between the two modalities. We used various relationship alignment-seeking techniques, such as Canonical Correlation Analysis and Wasserstein Distance, as loss functions to transfigure features. On downstream applications, sentiment analysis and relation detection, we achieved new state-of-the-art results on two datasets, ZuCo and K-EmoCon. Our method achieved an F1-score improvement of 1.7% on K-EmoCon and 9.3% on Zuco datasets for sentiment analysis, and 7.4% on ZuCo for relation detection. In addition, we provide interpretations of the performance improvement: (1) feature distribution shows the effectiveness of the alignment module for discovering and encoding the relationship between EEG and language; (2) alignment weights show the influence of different language semantics as well as EEG frequency features; (3) brain topographical maps provide an intuitive demonstration of the connectivity in the brain regions. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jason-Qiu/EEG_Language_Alignment.
TaCube: Pre-computing Data Cubes for Answering Numerical-Reasoning Questions over Tabular Data
Existing auto-regressive pre-trained language models (PLMs) like T5 and BART, have been well applied to table question answering by UNIFIEDSKG and TAPEX, respectively, and demonstrated state-of-the-art results on multiple benchmarks. However, auto-regressive PLMs are challenged by recent emerging numerical reasoning datasets, such as TAT-QA, due to the error-prone implicit calculation. In this paper, we present TaCube, to pre-compute aggregation/arithmetic results for the table in advance, so that they are handy and readily available for PLMs to answer numerical reasoning questions. TaCube systematically and comprehensively covers a collection of computational operations over table segments. By simply concatenating TaCube to the input sequence of PLMs, it shows significant experimental effectiveness. TaCube promotes the F1 score from 49.6% to 66.2% on TAT-QA and achieves new state-of-the-art results on WikiTQ (59.6% denotation accuracy). TaCube's improvements on numerical reasoning cases are even more notable: on TAT-QA, TaCube promotes the exact match accuracy of BART-large by 39.6% on sum, 52.5% on average, 36.6% on substraction, and 22.2% on division. We believe that TaCube is a general and portable pre-computation solution that can be potentially integrated to various numerical reasoning frameworks
TabSim: A Siamese Neural Network for Accurate Estimation of Table Similarity
Tables are a popular and efficient means of presenting structured information. They are used extensively in various kinds of documents including web pages. Tables display information as a two-dimensional matrix, the semantics of which is conveyed by a mixture of structure (rows, columns), headers, caption, and content. Recent research has started to consider tables as first class objects, not just as an addendum to texts, yielding interesting results for problems like table matching, table completion, or value imputation. All of these problems inherently rely on an accurate measure for the semantic similarity of two tables. We present TabSim, a novel method to compute table similarity scores using deep neural networks. Conceptually, TabSim represents a table as a learned concatenation of embeddings of its caption, its content, and its structure. Given two tables in this representation, a Siamese neural network is trained to compute a score correlating with the tables' semantic similarity. To train and evaluate our method, we created a gold standard corpus consisting of 1500 table pairs extracted from biomedical articles and manually scored regarding their degree of similarity, and adopted two other corpora originally developed for a different yet similar task. Our evaluation shows that TabSim outperforms other table similarity measures on average by app. 7% pp F1-score in a binary similarity classification setting and by app. 1.5% pp in a ranking scenario.
Exploration of Interpretability Techniques for Deep COVID-19 Classification using Chest X-ray Images
The outbreak of COVID-19 has shocked the entire world with its fairly rapid spread and has challenged different sectors. One of the most effective ways to limit its spread is the early and accurate diagnosing infected patients. Medical imaging, such as X-ray and Computed Tomography (CT), combined with the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI), plays an essential role in supporting medical personnel in the diagnosis process. Thus, in this article five different deep learning models (ResNet18, ResNet34, InceptionV3, InceptionResNetV2 and DenseNet161) and their ensemble, using majority voting have been used to classify COVID-19, pneumoni{\ae} and healthy subjects using chest X-ray images. Multilabel classification was performed to predict multiple pathologies for each patient, if present. Firstly, the interpretability of each of the networks was thoroughly studied using local interpretability methods - occlusion, saliency, input X gradient, guided backpropagation, integrated gradients, and DeepLIFT, and using a global technique - neuron activation profiles. The mean Micro-F1 score of the models for COVID-19 classifications ranges from 0.66 to 0.875, and is 0.89 for the ensemble of the network models. The qualitative results showed that the ResNets were the most interpretable models. This research demonstrates the importance of using interpretability methods to compare different models before making a decision regarding the best performing model.
Yseop at SemEval-2020 Task 5: Cascaded BERT Language Model for Counterfactual Statement Analysis
In this paper, we explore strategies to detect and evaluate counterfactual sentences. We describe our system for SemEval-2020 Task 5: Modeling Causal Reasoning in Language: Detecting Counterfactuals. We use a BERT base model for the classification task and build a hybrid BERT Multi-Layer Perceptron system to handle the sequence identification task. Our experiments show that while introducing syntactic and semantic features does little in improving the system in the classification task, using these types of features as cascaded linear inputs to fine-tune the sequence-delimiting ability of the model ensures it outperforms other similar-purpose complex systems like BiLSTM-CRF in the second task. Our system achieves an F1 score of 85.00% in Task 1 and 83.90% in Task 2.
The Russian Drug Reaction Corpus and Neural Models for Drug Reactions and Effectiveness Detection in User Reviews
The Russian Drug Reaction Corpus (RuDReC) is a new partially annotated corpus of consumer reviews in Russian about pharmaceutical products for the detection of health-related named entities and the effectiveness of pharmaceutical products. The corpus itself consists of two parts, the raw one and the labelled one. The raw part includes 1.4 million health-related user-generated texts collected from various Internet sources, including social media. The labelled part contains 500 consumer reviews about drug therapy with drug- and disease-related information. Labels for sentences include health-related issues or their absence. The sentences with one are additionally labelled at the expression level for identification of fine-grained subtypes such as drug classes and drug forms, drug indications, and drug reactions. Further, we present a baseline model for named entity recognition (NER) and multi-label sentence classification tasks on this corpus. The macro F1 score of 74.85% in the NER task was achieved by our RuDR-BERT model. For the sentence classification task, our model achieves the macro F1 score of 68.82% gaining 7.47% over the score of BERT model trained on Russian data. We make the RuDReC corpus and pretrained weights of domain-specific BERT models freely available at https://github.com/cimm-kzn/RuDReC
Resolving Legalese: A Multilingual Exploration of Negation Scope Resolution in Legal Documents
Resolving the scope of a negation within a sentence is a challenging NLP task. The complexity of legal texts and the lack of annotated in-domain negation corpora pose challenges for state-of-the-art (SotA) models when performing negation scope resolution on multilingual legal data. Our experiments demonstrate that models pre-trained without legal data underperform in the task of negation scope resolution. Our experiments, using language models exclusively fine-tuned on domains like literary texts and medical data, yield inferior results compared to the outcomes documented in prior cross-domain experiments. We release a new set of annotated court decisions in German, French, and Italian and use it to improve negation scope resolution in both zero-shot and multilingual settings. We achieve token-level F1-scores of up to 86.7% in our zero-shot cross-lingual experiments, where the models are trained on two languages of our legal datasets and evaluated on the third. Our multilingual experiments, where the models were trained on all available negation data and evaluated on our legal datasets, resulted in F1-scores of up to 91.1%.
ModernBERT is More Efficient than Conventional BERT for Chest CT Findings Classification in Japanese Radiology Reports
Objective: This study aims to evaluate and compare the performance of two Japanese language models-conventional Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the newer ModernBERT-in classifying findings from chest CT reports, with a focus on tokenization efficiency, processing time, and classification performance. Methods: We conducted a retrospective study using the CT-RATE-JPN dataset containing 22,778 training reports and 150 test reports. Both models were fine-tuned for multi-label classification of 18 common chest CT conditions. The training data was split in 18,222:4,556 for training and validation. Performance was evaluated using F1 scores for each condition and exact match accuracy across all 18 labels. Results: ModernBERT demonstrated superior tokenization efficiency, requiring 24.0% fewer tokens per document (258.1 vs. 339.6) compared to BERT Base. This translated to significant performance improvements, with ModernBERT completing training in 1877.67 seconds versus BERT's 3090.54 seconds (39% reduction). ModernBERT processed 38.82 samples per second during training (1.65x faster) and 139.90 samples per second during inference (1.66x faster). Despite these efficiency gains, classification performance remained comparable, with ModernBERT achieving superior F1 scores in 8 conditions, while BERT performed better in 4 conditions. Overall exact match accuracy was slightly higher for ModernBERT (74.67% vs. 72.67%), though this difference was not statistically significant (p=0.6291). Conclusion: ModernBERT offers substantial improvements in tokenization efficiency and training speed without sacrificing classification performance. These results suggest that ModernBERT is a promising candidate for clinical applications in Japanese radiology reports analysis.
MHQA: A Diverse, Knowledge Intensive Mental Health Question Answering Challenge for Language Models
Mental health remains a challenging problem all over the world, with issues like depression, anxiety becoming increasingly common. Large Language Models (LLMs) have seen a vast application in healthcare, specifically in answering medical questions. However, there is a lack of standard benchmarking datasets for question answering (QA) in mental health. Our work presents a novel multiple choice dataset, MHQA (Mental Health Question Answering), for benchmarking Language models (LMs). Previous mental health datasets have focused primarily on text classification into specific labels or disorders. MHQA, on the other hand, presents question-answering for mental health focused on four key domains: anxiety, depression, trauma, and obsessive/compulsive issues, with diverse question types, namely, factoid, diagnostic, prognostic, and preventive. We use PubMed abstracts as the primary source for QA. We develop a rigorous pipeline for LLM-based identification of information from abstracts based on various selection criteria and converting it into QA pairs. Further, valid QA pairs are extracted based on post-hoc validation criteria. Overall, our MHQA dataset consists of 2,475 expert-verified gold standard instances called MHQA-gold and ~56.1k pairs pseudo labeled using external medical references. We report F1 scores on different LLMs along with few-shot and supervised fine-tuning experiments, further discussing the insights for the scores.
Do we still need Human Annotators? Prompting Large Language Models for Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction
Aspect sentiment quadruple prediction (ASQP) facilitates a detailed understanding of opinions expressed in a text by identifying the opinion term, aspect term, aspect category and sentiment polarity for each opinion. However, annotating a full set of training examples to fine-tune models for ASQP is a resource-intensive process. In this study, we explore the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) for zero- and few-shot learning on the ASQP task across five diverse datasets. We report F1 scores slightly below those obtained with state-of-the-art fine-tuned models but exceeding previously reported zero- and few-shot performance. In the 40-shot setting on the Rest16 restaurant domain dataset, LLMs achieved an F1 score of 52.46, compared to 60.39 by the best-performing fine-tuned method MVP. Additionally, we report the performance of LLMs in target aspect sentiment detection (TASD), where the F1 scores were also close to fine-tuned models, achieving 66.03 on Rest16 in the 40-shot setting, compared to 72.76 with MVP. While human annotators remain essential for achieving optimal performance, LLMs can reduce the need for extensive manual annotation in ASQP tasks.
Development of a Large-scale Dataset of Chest Computed Tomography Reports in Japanese and a High-performance Finding Classification Model
Background: Recent advances in large language models highlight the need for high-quality multilingual medical datasets. While Japan leads globally in CT scanner deployment and utilization, the lack of large-scale Japanese radiology datasets has hindered the development of specialized language models for medical imaging analysis. Objective: To develop a comprehensive Japanese CT report dataset through machine translation and establish a specialized language model for structured finding classification. Additionally, to create a rigorously validated evaluation dataset through expert radiologist review. Methods: We translated the CT-RATE dataset (24,283 CT reports from 21,304 patients) into Japanese using GPT-4o mini. The training dataset consisted of 22,778 machine-translated reports, while the validation dataset included 150 radiologist-revised reports. We developed CT-BERT-JPN based on "tohoku-nlp/bert-base-japanese-v3" architecture for extracting 18 structured findings from Japanese radiology reports. Results: Translation metrics showed strong performance with BLEU scores of 0.731 and 0.690, and ROUGE scores ranging from 0.770 to 0.876 for Findings and from 0.748 to 0.857 for Impression sections. CT-BERT-JPN demonstrated superior performance compared to GPT-4o in 11 out of 18 conditions, including lymphadenopathy (+14.2%), interlobular septal thickening (+10.9%), and atelectasis (+7.4%). The model maintained F1 scores exceeding 0.95 in 14 out of 18 conditions and achieved perfect scores in four conditions. Conclusions: Our study establishes a robust Japanese CT report dataset and demonstrates the effectiveness of a specialized language model for structured finding classification. The hybrid approach of machine translation and expert validation enables the creation of large-scale medical datasets while maintaining high quality.
Detecting Fallacies in Climate Misinformation: A Technocognitive Approach to Identifying Misleading Argumentation
Misinformation about climate change is a complex societal issue requiring holistic, interdisciplinary solutions at the intersection between technology and psychology. One proposed solution is a "technocognitive" approach, involving the synthesis of psychological and computer science research. Psychological research has identified that interventions in response to misinformation require both fact-based (e.g., factual explanations) and technique-based (e.g., explanations of misleading techniques) content. However, little progress has been made on documenting and detecting fallacies in climate misinformation. In this study, we apply a previously developed critical thinking methodology for deconstructing climate misinformation, in order to develop a dataset mapping different types of climate misinformation to reasoning fallacies. This dataset is used to train a model to detect fallacies in climate misinformation. Our study shows F1 scores that are 2.5 to 3.5 better than previous works. The fallacies that are easiest to detect include fake experts and anecdotal arguments, while fallacies that require background knowledge, such as oversimplification, misrepresentation, and slothful induction, are relatively more difficult to detect. This research lays the groundwork for development of solutions where automatically detected climate misinformation can be countered with generative technique-based corrections.
SaudiBERT: A Large Language Model Pretrained on Saudi Dialect Corpora
In this paper, we introduce SaudiBERT, a monodialect Arabic language model pretrained exclusively on Saudi dialectal text. To demonstrate the model's effectiveness, we compared SaudiBERT with six different multidialect Arabic language models across 11 evaluation datasets, which are divided into two groups: sentiment analysis and text classification. SaudiBERT achieved average F1-scores of 86.15\% and 87.86\% in these groups respectively, significantly outperforming all other comparative models. Additionally, we present two novel Saudi dialectal corpora: the Saudi Tweets Mega Corpus (STMC), which contains over 141 million tweets in Saudi dialect, and the Saudi Forums Corpus (SFC), which includes 15.2 GB of text collected from five Saudi online forums. Both corpora are used in pretraining the proposed model, and they are the largest Saudi dialectal corpora ever reported in the literature. The results confirm the effectiveness of SaudiBERT in understanding and analyzing Arabic text expressed in Saudi dialect, achieving state-of-the-art results in most tasks and surpassing other language models included in the study. SaudiBERT model is publicly available on https://huggingface.co/faisalq/SaudiBERT.
UPB @ ACTI: Detecting Conspiracies using fine tuned Sentence Transformers
Conspiracy theories have become a prominent and concerning aspect of online discourse, posing challenges to information integrity and societal trust. As such, we address conspiracy theory detection as proposed by the ACTI @ EVALITA 2023 shared task. The combination of pre-trained sentence Transformer models and data augmentation techniques enabled us to secure first place in the final leaderboard of both sub-tasks. Our methodology attained F1 scores of 85.71% in the binary classification and 91.23% for the fine-grained conspiracy topic classification, surpassing other competing systems.
A transformer-based method for zero and few-shot biomedical named entity recognition
Supervised named entity recognition (NER) in the biomedical domain is dependent on large sets of annotated texts with the given named entities, whose creation can be time-consuming and expensive. Furthermore, the extraction of new entities often requires conducting additional annotation tasks and retraining the model. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a transformer-based method for zero- and few-shot NER in the biomedical domain. The method is based on transforming the task of multi-class token classification into binary token classification (token contains the searched entity or does not contain the searched entity) and pre-training on a larger amount of datasets and biomedical entities, from where the method can learn semantic relations between the given and potential classes. We have achieved average F1 scores of 35.44% for zero-shot NER, 50.10% for one-shot NER, 69.94% for 10-shot NER, and 79.51% for 100-shot NER on 9 diverse evaluated biomedical entities with PubMedBERT fine-tuned model. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for recognizing new entities with limited examples, with comparable or better results from the state-of-the-art zero- and few-shot NER methods.
indicnlp@kgp at DravidianLangTech-EACL2021: Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages
The paper presents the submission of the team indicnlp@kgp to the EACL 2021 shared task "Offensive Language Identification in Dravidian Languages." The task aimed to classify different offensive content types in 3 code-mixed Dravidian language datasets. The work leverages existing state of the art approaches in text classification by incorporating additional data and transfer learning on pre-trained models. Our final submission is an ensemble of an AWD-LSTM based model along with 2 different transformer model architectures based on BERT and RoBERTa. We achieved weighted-average F1 scores of 0.97, 0.77, and 0.72 in the Malayalam-English, Tamil-English, and Kannada-English datasets ranking 1st, 2nd, and 3rd on the respective tasks.
HeBERT & HebEMO: a Hebrew BERT Model and a Tool for Polarity Analysis and Emotion Recognition
This paper introduces HeBERT and HebEMO. HeBERT is a Transformer-based model for modern Hebrew text, which relies on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations for Transformers) architecture. BERT has been shown to outperform alternative architectures in sentiment analysis, and is suggested to be particularly appropriate for MRLs. Analyzing multiple BERT specifications, we find that while model complexity correlates with high performance on language tasks that aim to understand terms in a sentence, a more-parsimonious model better captures the sentiment of entire sentence. Either way, out BERT-based language model outperforms all existing Hebrew alternatives on all common language tasks. HebEMO is a tool that uses HeBERT to detect polarity and extract emotions from Hebrew UGC. HebEMO is trained on a unique Covid-19-related UGC dataset that we collected and annotated for this study. Data collection and annotation followed an active learning procedure that aimed to maximize predictability. We show that HebEMO yields a high F1-score of 0.96 for polarity classification. Emotion detection reaches F1-scores of 0.78-0.97 for various target emotions, with the exception of surprise, which the model failed to capture (F1 = 0.41). These results are better than the best-reported performance, even among English-language models of emotion detection.
ColBERT: Using BERT Sentence Embedding in Parallel Neural Networks for Computational Humor
Automation of humor detection and rating has interesting use cases in modern technologies, such as humanoid robots, chatbots, and virtual assistants. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting and rating humor in short texts based on a popular linguistic theory of humor. The proposed technical method initiates by separating sentences of the given text and utilizing the BERT model to generate embeddings for each one. The embeddings are fed to separate lines of hidden layers in a neural network (one line for each sentence) to extract latent features. At last, the parallel lines are concatenated to determine the congruity and other relationships between the sentences and predict the target value. We accompany the paper with a novel dataset for humor detection consisting of 200,000 formal short texts. In addition to evaluating our work on the novel dataset, we participated in a live machine learning competition focused on rating humor in Spanish tweets. The proposed model obtained F1 scores of 0.982 and 0.869 in the humor detection experiments which outperform general and state-of-the-art models. The evaluation performed on two contrasting settings confirm the strength and robustness of the model and suggests two important factors in achieving high accuracy in the current task: 1) usage of sentence embeddings and 2) utilizing the linguistic structure of humor in designing the proposed model.
LettuceDetect: A Hallucination Detection Framework for RAG Applications
Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems remain vulnerable to hallucinated answers despite incorporating external knowledge sources. We present LettuceDetect a framework that addresses two critical limitations in existing hallucination detection methods: (1) the context window constraints of traditional encoder-based methods, and (2) the computational inefficiency of LLM based approaches. Building on ModernBERT's extended context capabilities (up to 8k tokens) and trained on the RAGTruth benchmark dataset, our approach outperforms all previous encoder-based models and most prompt-based models, while being approximately 30 times smaller than the best models. LettuceDetect is a token-classification model that processes context-question-answer triples, allowing for the identification of unsupported claims at the token level. Evaluations on the RAGTruth corpus demonstrate an F1 score of 79.22% for example-level detection, which is a 14.8% improvement over Luna, the previous state-of-the-art encoder-based architecture. Additionally, the system can process 30 to 60 examples per second on a single GPU, making it more practical for real-world RAG applications.
SeQwen at the Financial Misinformation Detection Challenge Task: Sequential Learning for Claim Verification and Explanation Generation in Financial Domains
This paper presents the system description of our entry for the COLING 2025 FMD challenge, focusing on misinformation detection in financial domains. We experimented with a combination of large language models, including Qwen, Mistral, and Gemma-2, and leveraged pre-processing and sequential learning for not only identifying fraudulent financial content but also generating coherent, and concise explanations that clarify the rationale behind the classifications. Our approach achieved competitive results with an F1-score of 0.8283 for classification, and ROUGE-1 of 0.7253 for explanations. This work highlights the transformative potential of LLMs in financial applications, offering insights into their capabilities for combating misinformation and enhancing transparency while identifying areas for future improvement in robustness and domain adaptation.
MTP: A Dataset for Multi-Modal Turning Points in Casual Conversations
Detecting critical moments, such as emotional outbursts or changes in decisions during conversations, is crucial for understanding shifts in human behavior and their consequences. Our work introduces a novel problem setting focusing on these moments as turning points (TPs), accompanied by a meticulously curated, high-consensus, human-annotated multi-modal dataset. We provide precise timestamps, descriptions, and visual-textual evidence high-lighting changes in emotions, behaviors, perspectives, and decisions at these turning points. We also propose a framework, TPMaven, utilizing state-of-the-art vision-language models to construct a narrative from the videos and large language models to classify and detect turning points in our multi-modal dataset. Evaluation results show that TPMaven achieves an F1-score of 0.88 in classification and 0.61 in detection, with additional explanations aligning with human expectations.
Building a Safer Maritime Environment Through Multi-Path Long-Term Vessel Trajectory Forecasting
Maritime transportation is paramount in achieving global economic growth, entailing concurrent ecological obligations in sustainability and safeguarding endangered marine species, most notably preserving large whale populations. In this regard, the Automatic Identification System (AIS) data plays a significant role by offering real-time streaming data on vessel movement, allowing enhanced traffic monitoring. This study explores using AIS data to prevent vessel-to-whale collisions by forecasting long-term vessel trajectories from engineered AIS data sequences. For such a task, we have developed an encoder-decoder model architecture using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (Bi-LSTM) to predict the next 12 hours of vessel trajectories using 1 to 3 hours of AIS data as input. We feed the model with probabilistic features engineered from historical AIS data that refer to each trajectory's potential route and destination. The model then predicts the vessel's trajectory, considering these additional features by leveraging convolutional layers for spatial feature learning and a position-aware attention mechanism that increases the importance of recent timesteps of a sequence during temporal feature learning. The probabilistic features have an F1 Score of approximately 85% and 75% for each feature type, respectively, demonstrating their effectiveness in augmenting information to the neural network. We test our model on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, a region known to be the habitat of North Atlantic Right Whales (NARW). Our model achieved a high R2 score of over 98% using various techniques and features. It stands out among other approaches as it can make complex decisions during turnings and path selection. Our study highlights the potential of data engineering and trajectory forecasting models for marine life species preservation.
LiveSeg: Unsupervised Multimodal Temporal Segmentation of Long Livestream Videos
Livestream videos have become a significant part of online learning, where design, digital marketing, creative painting, and other skills are taught by experienced experts in the sessions, making them valuable materials. However, Livestream tutorial videos are usually hours long, recorded, and uploaded to the Internet directly after the live sessions, making it hard for other people to catch up quickly. An outline will be a beneficial solution, which requires the video to be temporally segmented according to topics. In this work, we introduced a large Livestream video dataset named MultiLive, and formulated the temporal segmentation of the long Livestream videos (TSLLV) task. We propose LiveSeg, an unsupervised Livestream video temporal Segmentation solution, which takes advantage of multimodal features from different domains. Our method achieved a 16.8% F1-score performance improvement compared with the state-of-the-art method.
PLOD: An Abbreviation Detection Dataset for Scientific Documents
The detection and extraction of abbreviations from unstructured texts can help to improve the performance of Natural Language Processing tasks, such as machine translation and information retrieval. However, in terms of publicly available datasets, there is not enough data for training deep-neural-networks-based models to the point of generalising well over data. This paper presents PLOD, a large-scale dataset for abbreviation detection and extraction that contains 160k+ segments automatically annotated with abbreviations and their long forms. We performed manual validation over a set of instances and a complete automatic validation for this dataset. We then used it to generate several baseline models for detecting abbreviations and long forms. The best models achieved an F1-score of 0.92 for abbreviations and 0.89 for detecting their corresponding long forms. We release this dataset along with our code and all the models publicly in https://github.com/surrey-nlp/PLOD-AbbreviationDetection
CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge
Humans gather information by engaging in conversations involving a series of interconnected questions and answers. For machines to assist in information gathering, it is therefore essential to enable them to answer conversational questions. We introduce CoQA, a novel dataset for building Conversational Question Answering systems. Our dataset contains 127k questions with answers, obtained from 8k conversations about text passages from seven diverse domains. The questions are conversational, and the answers are free-form text with their corresponding evidence highlighted in the passage. We analyze CoQA in depth and show that conversational questions have challenging phenomena not present in existing reading comprehension datasets, e.g., coreference and pragmatic reasoning. We evaluate strong conversational and reading comprehension models on CoQA. The best system obtains an F1 score of 65.4%, which is 23.4 points behind human performance (88.8%), indicating there is ample room for improvement. We launch CoQA as a challenge to the community at http://stanfordnlp.github.io/coqa/
CAMU: Context Augmentation for Meme Understanding
Social media memes are a challenging domain for hate detection because they intertwine visual and textual cues into culturally nuanced messages. We introduce a novel framework, CAMU, which leverages large vision-language models to generate more descriptive captions, a caption-scoring neural network to emphasise hate-relevant content, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning of CLIP's text encoder for an improved multimodal understanding of memes. Experiments on publicly available hateful meme datasets show that simple projection layer fine-tuning yields modest gains, whereas selectively tuning deeper text encoder layers significantly boosts performance on all evaluation metrics. Moreover, our approach attains high accuracy (0.807) and F1-score (0.806) on the Hateful Memes dataset, at par with the existing SoTA framework while being much more efficient, offering practical advantages in real-world scenarios that rely on fixed decision thresholds. CAMU also achieves the best F1-score of 0.673 on the MultiOFF dataset for offensive meme identification, demonstrating its generalisability. Additional analyses on benign confounders reveal that robust visual grounding and nuanced text representations are crucial for reliable hate and offence detection. We will publicly release CAMU along with the resultant models for further research. Disclaimer: This paper includes references to potentially disturbing, hateful, or offensive content due to the nature of the task.
Vision-Language Modeling in PET/CT for Visual Grounding of Positive Findings
Vision-language models can connect the text description of an object to its specific location in an image through visual grounding. This has potential applications in enhanced radiology reporting. However, these models require large annotated image-text datasets, which are lacking for PET/CT. We developed an automated pipeline to generate weak labels linking PET/CT report descriptions to their image locations and used it to train a 3D vision-language visual grounding model. Our pipeline finds positive findings in PET/CT reports by identifying mentions of SUVmax and axial slice numbers. From 25,578 PET/CT exams, we extracted 11,356 sentence-label pairs. Using this data, we trained ConTEXTual Net 3D, which integrates text embeddings from a large language model with a 3D nnU-Net via token-level cross-attention. The model's performance was compared against LLMSeg, a 2.5D version of ConTEXTual Net, and two nuclear medicine physicians. The weak-labeling pipeline accurately identified lesion locations in 98% of cases (246/251), with 7.5% requiring boundary adjustments. ConTEXTual Net 3D achieved an F1 score of 0.80, outperforming LLMSeg (F1=0.22) and the 2.5D model (F1=0.53), though it underperformed both physicians (F1=0.94 and 0.91). The model achieved better performance on FDG (F1=0.78) and DCFPyL (F1=0.75) exams, while performance dropped on DOTATE (F1=0.58) and Fluciclovine (F1=0.66). The model performed consistently across lesion sizes but showed reduced accuracy on lesions with low uptake. Our novel weak labeling pipeline accurately produced an annotated dataset of PET/CT image-text pairs, facilitating the development of 3D visual grounding models. ConTEXTual Net 3D significantly outperformed other models but fell short of the performance of nuclear medicine physicians. Our study suggests that even larger datasets may be needed to close this performance gap.
Enhancing Grammatical Error Detection using BERT with Cleaned Lang-8 Dataset
This paper presents an improved LLM based model for Grammatical Error Detection (GED), which is a very challenging and equally important problem for many applications. The traditional approach to GED involved hand-designed features, but recently, Neural Networks (NN) have automated the discovery of these features, improving performance in GED. Traditional rule-based systems have an F1 score of 0.50-0.60 and earlier machine learning models give an F1 score of 0.65-0.75, including decision trees and simple neural networks. Previous deep learning models, for example, Bi-LSTM, have reported F1 scores within the range from 0.80 to 0.90. In our study, we have fine-tuned various transformer models using the Lang8 dataset rigorously cleaned by us. In our experiments, the BERT-base-uncased model gave an impressive performance with an F1 score of 0.91 and accuracy of 98.49% on training data and 90.53% on testing data, also showcasing the importance of data cleaning. Increasing model size using BERT-large-uncased or RoBERTa-large did not give any noticeable improvements in performance or advantage for this task, underscoring that larger models are not always better. Our results clearly show how far rigorous data cleaning and simple transformer-based models can go toward significantly improving the quality of GED.
Bonafide at LegalLens 2024 Shared Task: Using Lightweight DeBERTa Based Encoder For Legal Violation Detection and Resolution
In this work, we present two systems -- Named Entity Resolution (NER) and Natural Language Inference (NLI) -- for detecting legal violations within unstructured textual data and for associating these violations with potentially affected individuals, respectively. Both these systems are lightweight DeBERTa based encoders that outperform the LLM baselines. The proposed NER system achieved an F1 score of 60.01\% on Subtask A of the LegalLens challenge, which focuses on identifying violations. The proposed NLI system achieved an F1 score of 84.73\% on Subtask B of the LegalLens challenge, which focuses on resolving these violations by matching them with pre-existing legal complaints of class action cases. Our NER system ranked sixth and NLI system ranked fifth on the LegalLens leaderboard. We release the trained models and inference scripts.
Robust Scene Change Detection Using Visual Foundation Models and Cross-Attention Mechanisms
We present a novel method for scene change detection that leverages the robust feature extraction capabilities of a visual foundational model, DINOv2, and integrates full-image cross-attention to address key challenges such as varying lighting, seasonal variations, and viewpoint differences. In order to effectively learn correspondences and mis-correspondences between an image pair for the change detection task, we propose to a) ``freeze'' the backbone in order to retain the generality of dense foundation features, and b) employ ``full-image'' cross-attention to better tackle the viewpoint variations between the image pair. We evaluate our approach on two benchmark datasets, VL-CMU-CD and PSCD, along with their viewpoint-varied versions. Our experiments demonstrate significant improvements in F1-score, particularly in scenarios involving geometric changes between image pairs. The results indicate our method's superior generalization capabilities over existing state-of-the-art approaches, showing robustness against photometric and geometric variations as well as better overall generalization when fine-tuned to adapt to new environments. Detailed ablation studies further validate the contributions of each component in our architecture. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/ChadLin9596/Robust-Scene-Change-Detection.
EgyBERT: A Large Language Model Pretrained on Egyptian Dialect Corpora
This study presents EgyBERT, an Arabic language model pretrained on 10.4 GB of Egyptian dialectal texts. We evaluated EgyBERT's performance by comparing it with five other multidialect Arabic language models across 10 evaluation datasets. EgyBERT achieved the highest average F1-score of 84.25% and an accuracy of 87.33%, significantly outperforming all other comparative models, with MARBERTv2 as the second best model achieving an F1-score 83.68% and an accuracy 87.19%. Additionally, we introduce two novel Egyptian dialectal corpora: the Egyptian Tweets Corpus (ETC), containing over 34.33 million tweets (24.89 million sentences) amounting to 2.5 GB of text, and the Egyptian Forums Corpus (EFC), comprising over 44.42 million sentences (7.9 GB of text) collected from various Egyptian online forums. Both corpora are used in pretraining the new model, and they are the largest Egyptian dialectal corpora to date reported in the literature. Furthermore, this is the first study to evaluate the performance of various language models on Egyptian dialect datasets, revealing significant differences in performance that highlight the need for more dialect-specific models. The results confirm the effectiveness of EgyBERT model in processing and analyzing Arabic text expressed in Egyptian dialect, surpassing other language models included in the study. EgyBERT model is publicly available on https://huggingface.co/faisalq/EgyBERT.
T2IShield: Defending Against Backdoors on Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
While text-to-image diffusion models demonstrate impressive generation capabilities, they also exhibit vulnerability to backdoor attacks, which involve the manipulation of model outputs through malicious triggers. In this paper, for the first time, we propose a comprehensive defense method named T2IShield to detect, localize, and mitigate such attacks. Specifically, we find the "Assimilation Phenomenon" on the cross-attention maps caused by the backdoor trigger. Based on this key insight, we propose two effective backdoor detection methods: Frobenius Norm Threshold Truncation and Covariance Discriminant Analysis. Besides, we introduce a binary-search approach to localize the trigger within a backdoor sample and assess the efficacy of existing concept editing methods in mitigating backdoor attacks. Empirical evaluations on two advanced backdoor attack scenarios show the effectiveness of our proposed defense method. For backdoor sample detection, T2IShield achieves a detection F1 score of 88.9% with low computational cost. Furthermore, T2IShield achieves a localization F1 score of 86.4% and invalidates 99% poisoned samples. Codes are released at https://github.com/Robin-WZQ/T2IShield.
UnsafeBench: Benchmarking Image Safety Classifiers on Real-World and AI-Generated Images
Image safety classifiers play an important role in identifying and mitigating the spread of unsafe images online (e.g., images including violence, hateful rhetoric, etc.). At the same time, with the advent of text-to-image models and increasing concerns about the safety of AI models, developers are increasingly relying on image safety classifiers to safeguard their models. Yet, the performance of current image safety classifiers remains unknown for real-world and AI-generated images. To bridge this research gap, in this work, we propose UnsafeBench, a benchmarking framework that evaluates the effectiveness and robustness of image safety classifiers. First, we curate a large dataset of 10K real-world and AI-generated images that are annotated as safe or unsafe based on a set of 11 unsafe categories of images (sexual, violent, hateful, etc.). Then, we evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of five popular image safety classifiers, as well as three classifiers that are powered by general-purpose visual language models. Our assessment indicates that existing image safety classifiers are not comprehensive and effective enough in mitigating the multifaceted problem of unsafe images. Also, we find that classifiers trained only on real-world images tend to have degraded performance when applied to AI-generated images. Motivated by these findings, we design and implement a comprehensive image moderation tool called PerspectiveVision, which effectively identifies 11 categories of real-world and AI-generated unsafe images. The best PerspectiveVision model achieves an overall F1-Score of 0.810 on six evaluation datasets, which is comparable with closed-source and expensive state-of-the-art models like GPT-4V. UnsafeBench and PerspectiveVision can aid the research community in better understanding the landscape of image safety classification in the era of generative AI.
LEMDA: A Novel Feature Engineering Method for Intrusion Detection in IoT Systems
Intrusion detection systems (IDS) for the Internet of Things (IoT) systems can use AI-based models to ensure secure communications. IoT systems tend to have many connected devices producing massive amounts of data with high dimensionality, which requires complex models. Complex models have notorious problems such as overfitting, low interpretability, and high computational complexity. Adding model complexity penalty (i.e., regularization) can ease overfitting, but it barely helps interpretability and computational efficiency. Feature engineering can solve these issues; hence, it has become critical for IDS in large-scale IoT systems to reduce the size and dimensionality of data, resulting in less complex models with excellent performance, smaller data storage, and fast detection. This paper proposes a new feature engineering method called LEMDA (Light feature Engineering based on the Mean Decrease in Accuracy). LEMDA applies exponential decay and an optional sensitivity factor to select and create the most informative features. The proposed method has been evaluated and compared to other feature engineering methods using three IoT datasets and four AI/ML models. The results show that LEMDA improves the F1 score performance of all the IDS models by an average of 34% and reduces the average training and detection times in most cases.
CT-ADE: An Evaluation Benchmark for Adverse Drug Event Prediction from Clinical Trial Results
Adverse drug events (ADEs) significantly impact clinical research, causing many clinical trial failures. ADE prediction is key for developing safer medications and enhancing patient outcomes. To support this effort, we introduce CT-ADE, a dataset for multilabel predictive modeling of ADEs in monopharmacy treatments. CT-ADE integrates data from 2,497 unique drugs, encompassing 168,984 drug-ADE pairs extracted from clinical trials, annotated with patient and contextual information, and comprehensive ADE concepts standardized across multiple levels of the MedDRA ontology. Preliminary analyses with large language models (LLMs) achieved F1-scores up to 55.90%. Models using patient and contextual information showed F1-score improvements of 21%-38% over models using only chemical structure data. Our results highlight the importance of target population and treatment regimens in the predictive modeling of ADEs, offering greater performance gains than LLM domain specialization and scaling. CT-ADE provides an essential tool for researchers aiming to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance patient safety and minimize the impact of ADEs on pharmaceutical research and development. The dataset is publicly accessible at https://github.com/ds4dh/CT-ADE.
KazSAnDRA: Kazakh Sentiment Analysis Dataset of Reviews and Attitudes
This paper presents KazSAnDRA, a dataset developed for Kazakh sentiment analysis that is the first and largest publicly available dataset of its kind. KazSAnDRA comprises an extensive collection of 180,064 reviews obtained from various sources and includes numerical ratings ranging from 1 to 5, providing a quantitative representation of customer attitudes. The study also pursued the automation of Kazakh sentiment classification through the development and evaluation of four machine learning models trained for both polarity classification and score classification. Experimental analysis included evaluation of the results considering both balanced and imbalanced scenarios. The most successful model attained an F1-score of 0.81 for polarity classification and 0.39 for score classification on the test sets. The dataset and fine-tuned models are open access and available for download under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) through our GitHub repository.
Towards Neuro-Symbolic Video Understanding
The unprecedented surge in video data production in recent years necessitates efficient tools to extract meaningful frames from videos for downstream tasks. Long-term temporal reasoning is a key desideratum for frame retrieval systems. While state-of-the-art foundation models, like VideoLLaMA and ViCLIP, are proficient in short-term semantic understanding, they surprisingly fail at long-term reasoning across frames. A key reason for this failure is that they intertwine per-frame perception and temporal reasoning into a single deep network. Hence, decoupling but co-designing semantic understanding and temporal reasoning is essential for efficient scene identification. We propose a system that leverages vision-language models for semantic understanding of individual frames but effectively reasons about the long-term evolution of events using state machines and temporal logic (TL) formulae that inherently capture memory. Our TL-based reasoning improves the F1 score of complex event identification by 9-15% compared to benchmarks that use GPT4 for reasoning on state-of-the-art self-driving datasets such as Waymo and NuScenes.
SEPSIS: I Can Catch Your Lies -- A New Paradigm for Deception Detection
Deception is the intentional practice of twisting information. It is a nuanced societal practice deeply intertwined with human societal evolution, characterized by a multitude of facets. This research explores the problem of deception through the lens of psychology, employing a framework that categorizes deception into three forms: lies of omission, lies of commission, and lies of influence. The primary focus of this study is specifically on investigating only lies of omission. We propose a novel framework for deception detection leveraging NLP techniques. We curated an annotated dataset of 876,784 samples by amalgamating a popular large-scale fake news dataset and scraped news headlines from the Twitter handle of Times of India, a well-known Indian news media house. Each sample has been labeled with four layers, namely: (i) the type of omission (speculation, bias, distortion, sounds factual, and opinion), (ii) colors of lies(black, white, etc), and (iii) the intention of such lies (to influence, etc) (iv) topic of lies (political, educational, religious, etc). We present a novel multi-task learning pipeline that leverages the dataless merging of fine-tuned language models to address the deception detection task mentioned earlier. Our proposed model achieved an F1 score of 0.87, demonstrating strong performance across all layers including the type, color, intent, and topic aspects of deceptive content. Finally, our research explores the relationship between lies of omission and propaganda techniques. To accomplish this, we conducted an in-depth analysis, uncovering compelling findings. For instance, our analysis revealed a significant correlation between loaded language and opinion, shedding light on their interconnectedness. To encourage further research in this field, we will be making the models and dataset available with the MIT License, making it favorable for open-source research.
Multi-Label Topic Model for Financial Textual Data
This paper presents a multi-label topic model for financial texts like ad-hoc announcements, 8-K filings, finance related news or annual reports. I train the model on a new financial multi-label database consisting of 3,044 German ad-hoc announcements that are labeled manually using 20 predefined, economically motivated topics. The best model achieves a macro F1 score of more than 85%. Translating the data results in an English version of the model with similar performance. As application of the model, I investigate differences in stock market reactions across topics. I find evidence for strong positive or negative market reactions for some topics, like announcements of new Large Scale Projects or Bankruptcy Filings, while I do not observe significant price effects for some other topics. Furthermore, in contrast to previous studies, the multi-label structure of the model allows to analyze the effects of co-occurring topics on stock market reactions. For many cases, the reaction to a specific topic depends heavily on the co-occurrence with other topics. For example, if allocated capital from a Seasoned Equity Offering (SEO) is used for restructuring a company in the course of a Bankruptcy Proceeding, the market reacts positively on average. However, if that capital is used for covering unexpected, additional costs from the development of new drugs, the SEO implies negative reactions on average.
Product Attribute Value Extraction using Large Language Models
E-commerce applications such as faceted product search or product comparison are based on structured product descriptions like attribute/value pairs. The vendors on e-commerce platforms do not provide structured product descriptions but describe offers using titles or descriptions. To process such offers, it is necessary to extract attribute/value pairs from textual product attributes. State-of-the-art attribute/value extraction techniques rely on pre-trained language models (PLMs), such as BERT. Two major drawbacks of these models for attribute/value extraction are that (i) the models require significant amounts of task-specific training data and (ii) the fine-tuned models face challenges in generalizing to attribute values not included in the training data. This paper explores the potential of large language models (LLMs) as a training data-efficient and robust alternative to PLM-based attribute/value extraction methods. We consider hosted LLMs, such as GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, as well as open-source LLMs based on Llama2. We evaluate the models in a zero-shot scenario and in a scenario where task-specific training data is available. In the zero-shot scenario, we compare various prompt designs for representing information about the target attributes of the extraction. In the scenario with training data, we investigate (i) the provision of example attribute values, (ii) the selection of in-context demonstrations, and (iii) the fine-tuning of GPT-3.5. Our experiments show that GPT-4 achieves an average F1-score of 85% on the two evaluation datasets while the best PLM-based techniques perform on average 5% worse using the same amount of training data. GPT-4 achieves a 10% higher F1-score than the best open-source LLM. The fine-tuned GPT-3.5 model reaches a similar performance as GPT-4 while being significantly more cost-efficient.
BanglaAbuseMeme: A Dataset for Bengali Abusive Meme Classification
The dramatic increase in the use of social media platforms for information sharing has also fueled a steep growth in online abuse. A simple yet effective way of abusing individuals or communities is by creating memes, which often integrate an image with a short piece of text layered on top of it. Such harmful elements are in rampant use and are a threat to online safety. Hence it is necessary to develop efficient models to detect and flag abusive memes. The problem becomes more challenging in a low-resource setting (e.g., Bengali memes, i.e., images with Bengali text embedded on it) because of the absence of benchmark datasets on which AI models could be trained. In this paper we bridge this gap by building a Bengali meme dataset. To setup an effective benchmark we implement several baseline models for classifying abusive memes using this dataset. We observe that multimodal models that use both textual and visual information outperform unimodal models. Our best-performing model achieves a macro F1 score of 70.51. Finally, we perform a qualitative error analysis of the misclassified memes of the best-performing text-based, image-based and multimodal models.
Intent Detection and Slot Filling for Home Assistants: Dataset and Analysis for Bangla and Sylheti
As voice assistants cement their place in our technologically advanced society, there remains a need to cater to the diverse linguistic landscape, including colloquial forms of low-resource languages. Our study introduces the first-ever comprehensive dataset for intent detection and slot filling in formal Bangla, colloquial Bangla, and Sylheti languages, totaling 984 samples across 10 unique intents. Our analysis reveals the robustness of large language models for tackling downstream tasks with inadequate data. The GPT-3.5 model achieves an impressive F1 score of 0.94 in intent detection and 0.51 in slot filling for colloquial Bangla.
Using Large Language Models for Knowledge Engineering (LLMKE): A Case Study on Wikidata
In this work, we explore the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for knowledge engineering tasks in the context of the ISWC 2023 LM-KBC Challenge. For this task, given subject and relation pairs sourced from Wikidata, we utilize pre-trained LLMs to produce the relevant objects in string format and link them to their respective Wikidata QIDs. We developed a pipeline using LLMs for Knowledge Engineering (LLMKE), combining knowledge probing and Wikidata entity mapping. The method achieved a macro-averaged F1-score of 0.701 across the properties, with the scores varying from 1.00 to 0.328. These results demonstrate that the knowledge of LLMs varies significantly depending on the domain and that further experimentation is required to determine the circumstances under which LLMs can be used for automatic Knowledge Base (e.g., Wikidata) completion and correction. The investigation of the results also suggests the promising contribution of LLMs in collaborative knowledge engineering. LLMKE won Track 2 of the challenge. The implementation is available at https://github.com/bohuizhang/LLMKE.
SentiGOLD: A Large Bangla Gold Standard Multi-Domain Sentiment Analysis Dataset and its Evaluation
This study introduces SentiGOLD, a Bangla multi-domain sentiment analysis dataset. Comprising 70,000 samples, it was created from diverse sources and annotated by a gender-balanced team of linguists. SentiGOLD adheres to established linguistic conventions agreed upon by the Government of Bangladesh and a Bangla linguistics committee. Unlike English and other languages, Bangla lacks standard sentiment analysis datasets due to the absence of a national linguistics framework. The dataset incorporates data from online video comments, social media posts, blogs, news, and other sources while maintaining domain and class distribution rigorously. It spans 30 domains (e.g., politics, entertainment, sports) and includes 5 sentiment classes (strongly negative, weakly negative, neutral, and strongly positive). The annotation scheme, approved by the national linguistics committee, ensures a robust Inter Annotator Agreement (IAA) with a Fleiss' kappa score of 0.88. Intra- and cross-dataset evaluation protocols are applied to establish a standard classification system. Cross-dataset evaluation on the noisy SentNoB dataset presents a challenging test scenario. Additionally, zero-shot experiments demonstrate the generalizability of SentiGOLD. The top model achieves a macro f1 score of 0.62 (intra-dataset) across 5 classes, setting a benchmark, and 0.61 (cross-dataset from SentNoB) across 3 classes, comparable to the state-of-the-art. Fine-tuned sentiment analysis model can be accessed at https://sentiment.bangla.gov.bd.
VLSP2022-EVJVQA Challenge: Multilingual Visual Question Answering
Visual Question Answering (VQA) is a challenging task of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), attracting significant attention from researchers. English is a resource-rich language that has witnessed various developments in datasets and models for visual question answering. Visual question answering in other languages also would be developed for resources and models. In addition, there is no multilingual dataset targeting the visual content of a particular country with its own objects and cultural characteristics. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named EVJVQA, including 33,000+ pairs of question-answer over three languages: Vietnamese, English, and Japanese, on approximately 5,000 images taken from Vietnam for evaluating multilingual VQA systems or models. EVJVQA is used as a benchmark dataset for the challenge of multilingual visual question answering at the 9th Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2022). This task attracted 62 participant teams from various universities and organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 0.4392 in F1-score and 0.4009 in BLUE on the private test set. The multilingual QA systems proposed by the top 2 teams use ViT for the pre-trained vision model and mT5 for the pre-trained language model, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. EVJVQA is a challenging dataset that motivates NLP and CV researchers to further explore the multilingual models or systems for visual question answering systems. We released the challenge on the Codalab evaluation system for further research.
SpeechBlender: Speech Augmentation Framework for Mispronunciation Data Generation
The lack of labeled second language (L2) speech data is a major challenge in designing mispronunciation detection models. We introduce SpeechBlender - a fine-grained data augmentation pipeline for generating mispronunciation errors to overcome such data scarcity. The SpeechBlender utilizes varieties of masks to target different regions of phonetic units, and use the mixing factors to linearly interpolate raw speech signals while augmenting pronunciation. The masks facilitate smooth blending of the signals, generating more effective samples than the `Cut/Paste' method. Our proposed technique achieves state-of-the-art results, with Speechocean762, on ASR dependent mispronunciation detection models at phoneme level, with a 2.0% gain in Pearson Correlation Coefficient (PCC) compared to the previous state-of-the-art [1]. Additionally, we demonstrate a 5.0% improvement at the phoneme level compared to our baseline. We also observed a 4.6% increase in F1-score with Arabic AraVoiceL2 testset.
Empirical study of Machine Learning Classifier Evaluation Metrics behavior in Massively Imbalanced and Noisy data
With growing credit card transaction volumes, the fraud percentages are also rising, including overhead costs for institutions to combat and compensate victims. The use of machine learning into the financial sector permits more effective protection against fraud and other economic crime. Suitably trained machine learning classifiers help proactive fraud detection, improving stakeholder trust and robustness against illicit transactions. However, the design of machine learning based fraud detection algorithms has been challenging and slow due the massively unbalanced nature of fraud data and the challenges of identifying the frauds accurately and completely to create a gold standard ground truth. Furthermore, there are no benchmarks or standard classifier evaluation metrics to measure and identify better performing classifiers, thus keeping researchers in the dark. In this work, we develop a theoretical foundation to model human annotation errors and extreme imbalance typical in real world fraud detection data sets. By conducting empirical experiments on a hypothetical classifier, with a synthetic data distribution approximated to a popular real world credit card fraud data set, we simulate human annotation errors and extreme imbalance to observe the behavior of popular machine learning classifier evaluation matrices. We demonstrate that a combined F1 score and g-mean, in that specific order, is the best evaluation metric for typical imbalanced fraud detection model classification.
EmoMent: An Emotion Annotated Mental Health Corpus from two South Asian Countries
People often utilise online media (e.g., Facebook, Reddit) as a platform to express their psychological distress and seek support. State-of-the-art NLP techniques demonstrate strong potential to automatically detect mental health issues from text. Research suggests that mental health issues are reflected in emotions (e.g., sadness) indicated in a person's choice of language. Therefore, we developed a novel emotion-annotated mental health corpus (EmoMent), consisting of 2802 Facebook posts (14845 sentences) extracted from two South Asian countries - Sri Lanka and India. Three clinical psychology postgraduates were involved in annotating these posts into eight categories, including 'mental illness' (e.g., depression) and emotions (e.g., 'sadness', 'anger'). EmoMent corpus achieved 'very good' inter-annotator agreement of 98.3% (i.e. % with two or more agreement) and Fleiss' Kappa of 0.82. Our RoBERTa based models achieved an F1 score of 0.76 and a macro-averaged F1 score of 0.77 for the first task (i.e. predicting a mental health condition from a post) and the second task (i.e. extent of association of relevant posts with the categories defined in our taxonomy), respectively.
UPB at SemEval-2022 Task 5: Enhancing UNITER with Image Sentiment and Graph Convolutional Networks for Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification
In recent times, the detection of hate-speech, offensive, or abusive language in online media has become an important topic in NLP research due to the exponential growth of social media and the propagation of such messages, as well as their impact. Misogyny detection, even though it plays an important part in hate-speech detection, has not received the same attention. In this paper, we describe our classification systems submitted to the SemEval-2022 Task 5: MAMI - Multimedia Automatic Misogyny Identification. The shared task aimed to identify misogynous content in a multi-modal setting by analysing meme images together with their textual captions. To this end, we propose two models based on the pre-trained UNITER model, one enhanced with an image sentiment classifier, whereas the second leverages a Vocabulary Graph Convolutional Network (VGCN). Additionally, we explore an ensemble using the aforementioned models. Our best model reaches an F1-score of 71.4% in Sub-task A and 67.3% for Sub-task B positioning our team in the upper third of the leaderboard. We release the code and experiments for our models on GitHub
Wojood: Nested Arabic Named Entity Corpus and Recognition using BERT
This paper presents Wojood, a corpus for Arabic nested Named Entity Recognition (NER). Nested entities occur when one entity mention is embedded inside another entity mention. Wojood consists of about 550K Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and dialect tokens that are manually annotated with 21 entity types including person, organization, location, event and date. More importantly, the corpus is annotated with nested entities instead of the more common flat annotations. The data contains about 75K entities and 22.5% of which are nested. The inter-annotator evaluation of the corpus demonstrated a strong agreement with Cohen's Kappa of 0.979 and an F1-score of 0.976. To validate our data, we used the corpus to train a nested NER model based on multi-task learning and AraBERT (Arabic BERT). The model achieved an overall micro F1-score of 0.884. Our corpus, the annotation guidelines, the source code and the pre-trained model are publicly available.
HiNER: A Large Hindi Named Entity Recognition Dataset
Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a foundational NLP task that aims to provide class labels like Person, Location, Organisation, Time, and Number to words in free text. Named Entities can also be multi-word expressions where the additional I-O-B annotation information helps label them during the NER annotation process. While English and European languages have considerable annotated data for the NER task, Indian languages lack on that front -- both in terms of quantity and following annotation standards. This paper releases a significantly sized standard-abiding Hindi NER dataset containing 109,146 sentences and 2,220,856 tokens, annotated with 11 tags. We discuss the dataset statistics in all their essential detail and provide an in-depth analysis of the NER tag-set used with our data. The statistics of tag-set in our dataset show a healthy per-tag distribution, especially for prominent classes like Person, Location and Organisation. Since the proof of resource-effectiveness is in building models with the resource and testing the model on benchmark data and against the leader-board entries in shared tasks, we do the same with the aforesaid data. We use different language models to perform the sequence labelling task for NER and show the efficacy of our data by performing a comparative evaluation with models trained on another dataset available for the Hindi NER task. Our dataset helps achieve a weighted F1 score of 88.78 with all the tags and 92.22 when we collapse the tag-set, as discussed in the paper. To the best of our knowledge, no available dataset meets the standards of volume (amount) and variability (diversity), as far as Hindi NER is concerned. We fill this gap through this work, which we hope will significantly help NLP for Hindi. We release this dataset with our code and models at https://github.com/cfiltnlp/HiNER
VLSP 2021 - ViMRC Challenge: Vietnamese Machine Reading Comprehension
One of the emerging research trends in natural language understanding is machine reading comprehension (MRC) which is the task to find answers to human questions based on textual data. Existing Vietnamese datasets for MRC research concentrate solely on answerable questions. However, in reality, questions can be unanswerable for which the correct answer is not stated in the given textual data. To address the weakness, we provide the research community with a benchmark dataset named UIT-ViQuAD 2.0 for evaluating the MRC task and question answering systems for the Vietnamese language. We use UIT-ViQuAD 2.0 as a benchmark dataset for the challenge on Vietnamese MRC at the Eighth Workshop on Vietnamese Language and Speech Processing (VLSP 2021). This task attracted 77 participant teams from 34 universities and other organizations. In this article, we present details of the organization of the challenge, an overview of the methods employed by shared-task participants, and the results. The highest performances are 77.24% in F1-score and 67.43% in Exact Match on the private test set. The Vietnamese MRC systems proposed by the top 3 teams use XLM-RoBERTa, a powerful pre-trained language model based on the transformer architecture. The UIT-ViQuAD 2.0 dataset motivates researchers to further explore the Vietnamese machine reading comprehension task and related tasks such as question answering, question generation, and natural language inference.
Comparison of biomedical relationship extraction methods and models for knowledge graph creation
Biomedical research is growing at such an exponential pace that scientists, researchers, and practitioners are no more able to cope with the amount of published literature in the domain. The knowledge presented in the literature needs to be systematized in such a way that claims and hypotheses can be easily found, accessed, and validated. Knowledge graphs can provide such a framework for semantic knowledge representation from literature. However, in order to build a knowledge graph, it is necessary to extract knowledge as relationships between biomedical entities and normalize both entities and relationship types. In this paper, we present and compare few rule-based and machine learning-based (Naive Bayes, Random Forests as examples of traditional machine learning methods and DistilBERT, PubMedBERT, T5 and SciFive-based models as examples of modern deep learning transformers) methods for scalable relationship extraction from biomedical literature, and for the integration into the knowledge graphs. We examine how resilient are these various methods to unbalanced and fairly small datasets. Our experiments show that transformer-based models handle well both small (due to pre-training on a large dataset) and unbalanced datasets. The best performing model was the PubMedBERT-based model fine-tuned on balanced data, with a reported F1-score of 0.92. DistilBERT-based model followed with F1-score of 0.89, performing faster and with lower resource requirements. BERT-based models performed better then T5-based generative models.
DSC-IITISM at FinCausal 2021: Combining POS tagging with Attention-based Contextual Representations for Identifying Causal Relationships in Financial Documents
Causality detection draws plenty of attention in the field of Natural Language Processing and linguistics research. It has essential applications in information retrieval, event prediction, question answering, financial analysis, and market research. In this study, we explore several methods to identify and extract cause-effect pairs in financial documents using transformers. For this purpose, we propose an approach that combines POS tagging with the BIO scheme, which can be integrated with modern transformer models to address this challenge of identifying causality in a given text. Our best methodology achieves an F1-Score of 0.9551, and an Exact Match Score of 0.8777 on the blind test in the FinCausal-2021 Shared Task at the FinCausal 2021 Workshop.
Hope Speech detection in under-resourced Kannada language
Numerous methods have been developed to monitor the spread of negativity in modern years by eliminating vulgar, offensive, and fierce comments from social media platforms. However, there are relatively lesser amounts of study that converges on embracing positivity, reinforcing supportive and reassuring content in online forums. Consequently, we propose creating an English-Kannada Hope speech dataset, KanHope and comparing several experiments to benchmark the dataset. The dataset consists of 6,176 user-generated comments in code mixed Kannada scraped from YouTube and manually annotated as bearing hope speech or Not-hope speech. In addition, we introduce DC-BERT4HOPE, a dual-channel model that uses the English translation of KanHope for additional training to promote hope speech detection. The approach achieves a weighted F1-score of 0.756, bettering other models. Henceforth, KanHope aims to instigate research in Kannada while broadly promoting researchers to take a pragmatic approach towards online content that encourages, positive, and supportive.
Fighting an Infodemic: COVID-19 Fake News Dataset
Along with COVID-19 pandemic we are also fighting an `infodemic'. Fake news and rumors are rampant on social media. Believing in rumors can cause significant harm. This is further exacerbated at the time of a pandemic. To tackle this, we curate and release a manually annotated dataset of 10,700 social media posts and articles of real and fake news on COVID-19. We benchmark the annotated dataset with four machine learning baselines - Decision Tree, Logistic Regression, Gradient Boost, and Support Vector Machine (SVM). We obtain the best performance of 93.46% F1-score with SVM. The data and code is available at: https://github.com/parthpatwa/covid19-fake-news-dectection
High-resolution Piano Transcription with Pedals by Regressing Onset and Offset Times
Automatic music transcription (AMT) is the task of transcribing audio recordings into symbolic representations. Recently, neural network-based methods have been applied to AMT, and have achieved state-of-the-art results. However, many previous systems only detect the onset and offset of notes frame-wise, so the transcription resolution is limited to the frame hop size. There is a lack of research on using different strategies to encode onset and offset targets for training. In addition, previous AMT systems are sensitive to the misaligned onset and offset labels of audio recordings. Furthermore, there are limited researches on sustain pedal transcription on large-scale datasets. In this article, we propose a high-resolution AMT system trained by regressing precise onset and offset times of piano notes. At inference, we propose an algorithm to analytically calculate the precise onset and offset times of piano notes and pedal events. We show that our AMT system is robust to the misaligned onset and offset labels compared to previous systems. Our proposed system achieves an onset F1 of 96.72% on the MAESTRO dataset, outperforming previous onsets and frames system of 94.80%. Our system achieves a pedal onset F1 score of 91.86\%, which is the first benchmark result on the MAESTRO dataset. We have released the source code and checkpoints of our work at https://github.com/bytedance/piano_transcription.
UPB at SemEval-2020 Task 11: Propaganda Detection with Domain-Specific Trained BERT
Manipulative and misleading news have become a commodity for some online news outlets and these news have gained a significant impact on the global mindset of people. Propaganda is a frequently employed manipulation method having as goal to influence readers by spreading ideas meant to distort or manipulate their opinions. This paper describes our participation in the SemEval-2020, Task 11: Detection of Propaganda Techniques in News Articles competition. Our approach considers specializing a pre-trained BERT model on propagandistic and hyperpartisan news articles, enabling it to create more adequate representations for the two subtasks, namely propaganda Span Identification (SI) and propaganda Technique Classification (TC). Our proposed system achieved a F1-score of 46.060% in subtask SI, ranking 5th in the leaderboard from 36 teams and a micro-averaged F1 score of 54.302% for subtask TC, ranking 19th from 32 teams.
GoEmotions: A Dataset of Fine-Grained Emotions
Understanding emotion expressed in language has a wide range of applications, from building empathetic chatbots to detecting harmful online behavior. Advancement in this area can be improved using large-scale datasets with a fine-grained typology, adaptable to multiple downstream tasks. We introduce GoEmotions, the largest manually annotated dataset of 58k English Reddit comments, labeled for 27 emotion categories or Neutral. We demonstrate the high quality of the annotations via Principal Preserved Component Analysis. We conduct transfer learning experiments with existing emotion benchmarks to show that our dataset generalizes well to other domains and different emotion taxonomies. Our BERT-based model achieves an average F1-score of .46 across our proposed taxonomy, leaving much room for improvement.
TACRED Revisited: A Thorough Evaluation of the TACRED Relation Extraction Task
TACRED (Zhang et al., 2017) is one of the largest, most widely used crowdsourced datasets in Relation Extraction (RE). But, even with recent advances in unsupervised pre-training and knowledge enhanced neural RE, models still show a high error rate. In this paper, we investigate the questions: Have we reached a performance ceiling or is there still room for improvement? And how do crowd annotations, dataset, and models contribute to this error rate? To answer these questions, we first validate the most challenging 5K examples in the development and test sets using trained annotators. We find that label errors account for 8% absolute F1 test error, and that more than 50% of the examples need to be relabeled. On the relabeled test set the average F1 score of a large baseline model set improves from 62.1 to 70.1. After validation, we analyze misclassifications on the challenging instances, categorize them into linguistically motivated error groups, and verify the resulting error hypotheses on three state-of-the-art RE models. We show that two groups of ambiguous relations are responsible for most of the remaining errors and that models may adopt shallow heuristics on the dataset when entities are not masked.
A Named Entity Based Approach to Model Recipes
Traditional cooking recipes follow a structure which can be modelled very well if the rules and semantics of the different sections of the recipe text are analyzed and represented accurately. We propose a structure that can accurately represent the recipe as well as a pipeline to infer the best representation of the recipe in this uniform structure. The Ingredients section in a recipe typically lists down the ingredients required and corresponding attributes such as quantity, temperature, and processing state. This can be modelled by defining these attributes and their values. The physical entities which make up a recipe can be broadly classified into utensils, ingredients and their combinations that are related by cooking techniques. The instruction section lists down a series of events in which a cooking technique or process is applied upon these utensils and ingredients. We model these relationships in the form of tuples. Thus, using a combination of these methods we model cooking recipe in the dataset RecipeDB to show the efficacy of our method. This mined information model can have several applications which include translating recipes between languages, determining similarity between recipes, generation of novel recipes and estimation of the nutritional profile of recipes. For the purpose of recognition of ingredient attributes, we train the Named Entity Relationship (NER) models and analyze the inferences with the help of K-Means clustering. Our model presented with an F1 score of 0.95 across all datasets. We use a similar NER tagging model for labelling cooking techniques (F1 score = 0.88) and utensils (F1 score = 0.90) within the instructions section. Finally, we determine the temporal sequence of relationships between ingredients, utensils and cooking techniques for modeling the instruction steps.
MRQA 2019 Shared Task: Evaluating Generalization in Reading Comprehension
We present the results of the Machine Reading for Question Answering (MRQA) 2019 shared task on evaluating the generalization capabilities of reading comprehension systems. In this task, we adapted and unified 18 distinct question answering datasets into the same format. Among them, six datasets were made available for training, six datasets were made available for development, and the final six were hidden for final evaluation. Ten teams submitted systems, which explored various ideas including data sampling, multi-task learning, adversarial training and ensembling. The best system achieved an average F1 score of 72.5 on the 12 held-out datasets, 10.7 absolute points higher than our initial baseline based on BERT.
NELEC at SemEval-2019 Task 3: Think Twice Before Going Deep
Existing Machine Learning techniques yield close to human performance on text-based classification tasks. However, the presence of multi-modal noise in chat data such as emoticons, slang, spelling mistakes, code-mixed data, etc. makes existing deep-learning solutions perform poorly. The inability of deep-learning systems to robustly capture these covariates puts a cap on their performance. We propose NELEC: Neural and Lexical Combiner, a system which elegantly combines textual and deep-learning based methods for sentiment classification. We evaluate our system as part of the third task of 'Contextual Emotion Detection in Text' as part of SemEval-2019. Our system performs significantly better than the baseline, as well as our deep-learning model benchmarks. It achieved a micro-averaged F1 score of 0.7765, ranking 3rd on the test-set leader-board. Our code is available at https://github.com/iamgroot42/nelec
RAFT: A Real-World Few-Shot Text Classification Benchmark
Large pre-trained language models have shown promise for few-shot learning, completing text-based tasks given only a few task-specific examples. Will models soon solve classification tasks that have so far been reserved for human research assistants? Existing benchmarks are not designed to measure progress in applied settings, and so don't directly answer this question. The RAFT benchmark (Real-world Annotated Few-shot Tasks) focuses on naturally occurring tasks and uses an evaluation setup that mirrors deployment. Baseline evaluations on RAFT reveal areas current techniques struggle with: reasoning over long texts and tasks with many classes. Human baselines show that some classification tasks are difficult for non-expert humans, reflecting that real-world value sometimes depends on domain expertise. Yet even non-expert human baseline F1 scores exceed GPT-3 by an average of 0.11. The RAFT datasets and leaderboard will track which model improvements translate into real-world benefits at https://raft.elicit.org .
Relation Extraction in underexplored biomedical domains: A diversity-optimised sampling and synthetic data generation approach
The sparsity of labelled data is an obstacle to the development of Relation Extraction models and the completion of databases in various biomedical areas. While being of high interest in drug-discovery, the natural-products literature, reporting the identification of potential bioactive compounds from organisms, is a concrete example of such an overlooked topic. To mark the start of this new task, we created the first curated evaluation dataset and extracted literature items from the LOTUS database to build training sets. To this end, we developed a new sampler inspired by diversity metrics in ecology, named Greedy Maximum Entropy sampler, or GME-sampler (https://github.com/idiap/gme-sampler). The strategic optimization of both balance and diversity of the selected items in the evaluation set is important given the resource-intensive nature of manual curation. After quantifying the noise in the training set, in the form of discrepancies between the input abstracts text and the expected output labels, we explored different strategies accordingly. Framing the task as an end-to-end Relation Extraction, we evaluated the performance of standard fine-tuning as a generative task and few-shot learning with open Large Language Models (LLaMA 7B-65B). In addition to their evaluation in few-shot settings, we explore the potential of open Large Language Models (Vicuna-13B) as synthetic data generator and propose a new workflow for this purpose. All evaluated models exhibited substantial improvements when fine-tuned on synthetic abstracts rather than the original noisy data. We provide our best performing (f1-score=59.0) BioGPT-Large model for end-to-end RE of natural-products relationships along with all the generated synthetic data and the evaluation dataset. See more details at https://github.com/idiap/abroad-re.
Review GIDE -- Restaurant Review Gastrointestinal Illness Detection and Extraction with Large Language Models
Foodborne gastrointestinal (GI) illness is a common cause of ill health in the UK. However, many cases do not interact with the healthcare system, posing significant challenges for traditional surveillance methods. The growth of publicly available online restaurant reviews and advancements in large language models (LLMs) present potential opportunities to extend disease surveillance by identifying public reports of GI illness. In this study, we introduce a novel annotation schema, developed with experts in GI illness, applied to the Yelp Open Dataset of reviews. Our annotations extend beyond binary disease detection, to include detailed extraction of information on symptoms and foods. We evaluate the performance of open-weight LLMs across these three tasks: GI illness detection, symptom extraction, and food extraction. We compare this performance to RoBERTa-based classification models fine-tuned specifically for these tasks. Our results show that using prompt-based approaches, LLMs achieve micro-F1 scores of over 90% for all three of our tasks. Using prompting alone, we achieve micro-F1 scores that exceed those of smaller fine-tuned models. We further demonstrate the robustness of LLMs in GI illness detection across three bias-focused experiments. Our results suggest that publicly available review text and LLMs offer substantial potential for public health surveillance of GI illness by enabling highly effective extraction of key information. While LLMs appear to exhibit minimal bias in processing, the inherent limitations of restaurant review data highlight the need for cautious interpretation of results.
LAVID: An Agentic LVLM Framework for Diffusion-Generated Video Detection
The impressive achievements of generative models in creating high-quality videos have raised concerns about digital integrity and privacy vulnerabilities. Recent works of AI-generated content detection have been widely studied in the image field (e.g., deepfake), yet the video field has been unexplored. Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) has become an emerging tool for AI-generated content detection for its strong reasoning and multimodal capabilities. It breaks the limitations of traditional deep learning based methods faced with like lack of transparency and inability to recognize new artifacts. Motivated by this, we propose LAVID, a novel LVLMs-based ai-generated video detection with explicit knowledge enhancement. Our insight list as follows: (1) The leading LVLMs can call external tools to extract useful information to facilitate its own video detection task; (2) Structuring the prompt can affect LVLM's reasoning ability to interpret information in video content. Our proposed pipeline automatically selects a set of explicit knowledge tools for detection, and then adaptively adjusts the structure prompt by self-rewriting. Different from prior SOTA that trains additional detectors, our method is fully training-free and only requires inference of the LVLM for detection. To facilitate our research, we also create a new benchmark \vidfor with high-quality videos generated from multiple sources of video generation tools. Evaluation results show that LAVID improves F1 scores by 6.2 to 30.2% over the top baselines on our datasets across four SOTA LVLMs.
Revisiting the Performance of Deep Learning-Based Vulnerability Detection on Realistic Datasets
The impact of software vulnerabilities on everyday software systems is significant. Despite deep learning models being proposed for vulnerability detection, their reliability is questionable. Prior evaluations show high recall/F1 scores of up to 99%, but these models underperform in practical scenarios, particularly when assessed on entire codebases rather than just the fixing commit. This paper introduces Real-Vul, a comprehensive dataset representing real-world scenarios for evaluating vulnerability detection models. Evaluating DeepWukong, LineVul, ReVeal, and IVDetect shows a significant drop in performance, with precision decreasing by up to 95 percentage points and F1 scores by up to 91 points. Furthermore, Model performance fluctuates based on vulnerability characteristics, with better F1 scores for information leaks or code injection than for path resolution or predictable return values. The results highlight a significant performance gap that needs addressing before deploying deep learning-based vulnerability detection in practical settings. Overfitting is identified as a key issue, and an augmentation technique is proposed, potentially improving performance by up to 30%. Contributions include a dataset creation approach for better model evaluation, Real-Vul dataset, and empirical evidence of deep learning models struggling in real-world settings.
Image Classification for Snow Detection to Improve Pedestrian Safety
This study presents a computer vision approach aimed at detecting snow on sidewalks and pavements to reduce winter-related fall injuries, especially among elderly and visually impaired individuals. Leveraging fine-tuned VGG-19 and ResNet50 convolutional neural networks (CNNs), the research focuses on identifying snow presence in pavement images. The dataset comprises 98 images evenly split between snowy and snow-free conditions, evaluated with a separate test set using the F1 score and accuracy metrics. This work builds upon existing research by employing fine-tuned CNN architectures to accurately detect snow on pavements from smartphone-captured images. The methodology incorporates transfer learning and model ensembling techniques to integrate the best predictions from both the VGG19 and ResNet50 architectures. The study yields accuracy and F1 scores of 81.8% and 81.7%, respectively, showcasing the potential of computer vision in addressing winter-related hazards for vulnerable populations.
Named Clinical Entity Recognition Benchmark
This technical report introduces a Named Clinical Entity Recognition Benchmark for evaluating language models in healthcare, addressing the crucial natural language processing (NLP) task of extracting structured information from clinical narratives to support applications like automated coding, clinical trial cohort identification, and clinical decision support. The leaderboard provides a standardized platform for assessing diverse language models, including encoder and decoder architectures, on their ability to identify and classify clinical entities across multiple medical domains. A curated collection of openly available clinical datasets is utilized, encompassing entities such as diseases, symptoms, medications, procedures, and laboratory measurements. Importantly, these entities are standardized according to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model, ensuring consistency and interoperability across different healthcare systems and datasets, and a comprehensive evaluation of model performance. Performance of models is primarily assessed using the F1-score, and it is complemented by various assessment modes to provide comprehensive insights into model performance. The report also includes a brief analysis of models evaluated to date, highlighting observed trends and limitations. By establishing this benchmarking framework, the leaderboard aims to promote transparency, facilitate comparative analyses, and drive innovation in clinical entity recognition tasks, addressing the need for robust evaluation methods in healthcare NLP.
Chapter-Llama: Efficient Chaptering in Hour-Long Videos with LLMs
We address the task of video chaptering, i.e., partitioning a long video timeline into semantic units and generating corresponding chapter titles. While relatively underexplored, automatic chaptering has the potential to enable efficient navigation and content retrieval in long-form videos. In this paper, we achieve strong chaptering performance on hour-long videos by efficiently addressing the problem in the text domain with our 'Chapter-Llama' framework. Specifically, we leverage a pretrained large language model (LLM) with large context window, and feed as input (i) speech transcripts and (ii) captions describing video frames, along with their respective timestamps. Given the inefficiency of exhaustively captioning all frames, we propose a lightweight speech-guided frame selection strategy based on speech transcript content, and experimentally demonstrate remarkable advantages. We train the LLM to output timestamps for the chapter boundaries, as well as free-form chapter titles. This simple yet powerful approach scales to processing one-hour long videos in a single forward pass. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements (e.g., 45.3 vs 26.7 F1 score) over the state of the art on the recent VidChapters-7M benchmark. To promote further research, we release our code and models at our project page.
Automatic Differential Diagnosis using Transformer-Based Multi-Label Sequence Classification
As the field of artificial intelligence progresses, assistive technologies are becoming more widely used across all industries. The healthcare industry is no different, with numerous studies being done to develop assistive tools for healthcare professionals. Automatic diagnostic systems are one such beneficial tool that can assist with a variety of tasks, including collecting patient information, analyzing test results, and diagnosing patients. However, the idea of developing systems that can provide a differential diagnosis has been largely overlooked in most of these research studies. In this study, we propose a transformer-based approach for providing differential diagnoses based on a patient's age, sex, medical history, and symptoms. We use the DDXPlus dataset, which provides differential diagnosis information for patients based on 49 disease types. Firstly, we propose a method to process the tabular patient data from the dataset and engineer them into patient reports to make them suitable for our research. In addition, we introduce two data modification modules to diversify the training data and consequently improve the robustness of the models. We approach the task as a multi-label classification problem and conduct extensive experiments using four transformer models. All the models displayed promising results by achieving over 97% F1 score on the held-out test set. Moreover, we design additional behavioral tests to get a broader understanding of the models. In particular, for one of our test cases, we prepared a custom test set of 100 samples with the assistance of a doctor. The results on the custom set showed that our proposed data modification modules improved the model's generalization capabilities. We hope our findings will provide future researchers with valuable insights and inspire them to develop reliable systems for automatic differential diagnosis.
HistNERo: Historical Named Entity Recognition for the Romanian Language
This work introduces HistNERo, the first Romanian corpus for Named Entity Recognition (NER) in historical newspapers. The dataset contains 323k tokens of text, covering more than half of the 19th century (i.e., 1817) until the late part of the 20th century (i.e., 1990). Eight native Romanian speakers annotated the dataset with five named entities. The samples belong to one of the following four historical regions of Romania, namely Bessarabia, Moldavia, Transylvania, and Wallachia. We employed this proposed dataset to perform several experiments for NER using Romanian pre-trained language models. Our results show that the best model achieved a strict F1-score of 55.69%. Also, by reducing the discrepancies between regions through a novel domain adaption technique, we improved the performance on this corpus to a strict F1-score of 66.80%, representing an absolute gain of more than 10%.
HRDE: Retrieval-Augmented Large Language Models for Chinese Health Rumor Detection and Explainability
As people increasingly prioritize their health, the speed and breadth of health information dissemination on the internet have also grown. At the same time, the presence of false health information (health rumors) intermingled with genuine content poses a significant potential threat to public health. However, current research on Chinese health rumors still lacks a large-scale, public, and open-source dataset of health rumor information, as well as effective and reliable rumor detection methods. This paper addresses this gap by constructing a dataset containing 1.12 million health-related rumors (HealthRCN) through web scraping of common health-related questions and a series of data processing steps. HealthRCN is the largest known dataset of Chinese health information rumors to date. Based on this dataset, we propose retrieval-augmented large language models for Chinese health rumor detection and explainability (HRDE). This model leverages retrieved relevant information to accurately determine whether the input health information is a rumor and provides explanatory responses, effectively aiding users in verifying the authenticity of health information. In evaluation experiments, we compared multiple models and found that HRDE outperformed them all, including GPT-4-1106-Preview, in rumor detection accuracy and answer quality. HRDE achieved an average accuracy of 91.04% and an F1 score of 91.58%.
CXR-LLaVA: Multimodal Large Language Model for Interpreting Chest X-ray Images
Purpose: Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have expanded their capabilities in a multimodal fashion, potentially replicating the image interpretation of human radiologists. This study aimed to develop open-source multimodal large language model for interpreting chest X-ray images (CXR-LLaVA). We also examined the effect of prompt engineering and model parameters such as temperature and nucleus sampling. Materials and Methods: For training, we collected 659,287 publicly available CXRs: 417,336 CXRs had labels for certain radiographic abnormalities (dataset 1); 241,951 CXRs provided free-text radiology reports (dataset 2). After pre-training the Resnet50 as an image encoder, the contrastive language-image pre-training was used to align CXRs and corresponding radiographic abnormalities. Then, the Large Language Model Meta AI-2 was fine-tuned using dataset 2, which were refined using GPT-4, with generating various question answering scenarios. The code can be found at https://github.com/ECOFRI/CXR_LLaVA. Results: In the test set, we observed that the model's performance fluctuated based on its parameters. On average, it achieved F1 score of 0.34 for five pathologic findings (atelectasis, cardiomegaly, consolidation, edema, and pleural effusion), which was improved to 0.46 through prompt engineering. In the independent set, the model achieved an average F1 score of 0.30 for the same pathologic findings. Notably, for the pediatric chest radiograph dataset, which was unseen during training, the model differentiated abnormal radiographs with an F1 score ranging from 0.84 to 0.85. Conclusion: CXR-LLaVA demonstrates promising potential in CXR interpretation. Both prompt engineering and model parameter adjustments can play pivotal roles in interpreting CXRs.
Secret Breach Detection in Source Code with Large Language Models
Background: Leaking sensitive information, such as API keys, tokens, and credentials, in source code remains a persistent security threat. Traditional regex and entropy-based tools often generate high false positives due to limited contextual understanding. Aims: This work aims to enhance secret detection in source code using large language models (LLMs), reducing false positives while maintaining high recall. We also evaluate the feasibility of using fine-tuned, smaller models for local deployment. Method: We propose a hybrid approach combining regex-based candidate extraction with LLM-based classification. We evaluate pre-trained and fine-tuned variants of various Large Language Models on a benchmark dataset from 818 GitHub repositories. Various prompting strategies and efficient fine-tuning methods are employed for both binary and multiclass classification. Results: The fine-tuned LLaMA-3.1 8B model achieved an F1-score of 0.9852 in binary classification, outperforming regex-only baselines. For multiclass classification, Mistral-7B reached 0.982 accuracy. Fine-tuning significantly improved performance across all models. Conclusions: Fine-tuned LLMs offer an effective and scalable solution for secret detection, greatly reducing false positives. Open-source models provide a practical alternative to commercial APIs, enabling secure and cost-efficient deployment in development workflows.
3MDBench: Medical Multimodal Multi-agent Dialogue Benchmark
Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are increasingly being explored for applications in telemedicine, yet their ability to engage with diverse patient behaviors remains underexplored. We introduce 3MDBench (Medical Multimodal Multi-agent Dialogue Benchmark), an open-source evaluation framework designed to assess LLM-driven medical consultations. Unlike existing benchmarks, 3MDBench simulates real-world patient variability by incorporating four temperament-driven Patient Agents and an Assessor Agent that evaluates diagnostic accuracy and dialogue quality. The benchmark integrates textual and image-based patient data across 34 common diagnoses, mirroring real-world telemedicine interactions. Under different diagnostic strategies, we evaluate state-of-the-art LVLMs. Our findings demonstrate that incorporating dialogue improves the F1 score from 50.4 to 54.2 compared to non-dialogue settings, underscoring the value of context-driven, information-seeking questioning. Additionally, we demonstrate that multimodal inputs enhance diagnostic efficiency. Image-supported models outperform text-only counterparts by raising the diagnostic F1 score from 52.8 to 54.2 in a similar dialogue setting. Finally, we suggest an approach that improves the diagnostic F1-score to 70.3 by training the CNN model on the diagnosis prediction task and incorporating its top-3 predictions into the LVLM context. 3MDBench provides a reproducible and extendable evaluation framework for AI-driven medical assistants. It offers insights into how patient temperament, dialogue strategies, and multimodal reasoning influence diagnosis quality. By addressing real-world complexities in telemedicine, our benchmark paves the way for more empathetic, reliable, and context-aware AI-driven healthcare solutions. The source code of our benchmark is publicly available: https://github.com/univanxx/3mdbench
Hard-Attention Gates with Gradient Routing for Endoscopic Image Computing
To address overfitting and enhance model generalization in gastroenterological polyp size assessment, our study introduces Feature-Selection Gates (FSG) or Hard-Attention Gates (HAG) alongside Gradient Routing (GR) for dynamic feature selection. This technique aims to boost Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs) by promoting sparse connectivity, thereby reducing overfitting and enhancing generalization. HAG achieves this through sparsification with learnable weights, serving as a regularization strategy. GR further refines this process by optimizing HAG parameters via dual forward passes, independently from the main model, to improve feature re-weighting. Our evaluation spanned multiple datasets, including CIFAR-100 for a broad impact assessment and specialized endoscopic datasets (REAL-Colon, Misawa, and SUN) focusing on polyp size estimation, covering over 200 polyps in more than 370,000 frames. The findings indicate that our HAG-enhanced networks substantially enhance performance in both binary and triclass classification tasks related to polyp sizing. Specifically, CNNs experienced an F1 Score improvement to 87.8% in binary classification, while in triclass classification, the ViT-T model reached an F1 Score of 76.5%, outperforming traditional CNNs and ViT-T models. To facilitate further research, we are releasing our codebase, which includes implementations for CNNs, multistream CNNs, ViT, and HAG-augmented variants. This resource aims to standardize the use of endoscopic datasets, providing public training-validation-testing splits for reliable and comparable research in gastroenterological polyp size estimation. The codebase is available at github.com/cosmoimd/feature-selection-gates.
EntGPT: Linking Generative Large Language Models with Knowledge Bases
The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate factually correct output remains relatively unexplored due to the lack of fact-checking and knowledge grounding during training and inference. In this work, we aim to address this challenge through the Entity Disambiguation (ED) task. We first consider prompt engineering, and design a three-step hard-prompting method to probe LLMs' ED performance without supervised fine-tuning (SFT). Overall, the prompting method improves the micro-F_1 score of the original vanilla models by a large margin, on some cases up to 36% and higher, and obtains comparable performance across 10 datasets when compared to existing methods with SFT. We further improve the knowledge grounding ability through instruction tuning (IT) with similar prompts and responses. The instruction-tuned model not only achieves higher micro-F1 score performance as compared to several baseline methods on supervised entity disambiguation tasks with an average micro-F_1 improvement of 2.1% over the existing baseline models, but also obtains higher accuracy on six Question Answering (QA) tasks in the zero-shot setting. Our methodologies apply to both open- and closed-source LLMs.
Investigating the Efficacy of Large Language Models for Code Clone Detection
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success in various natural language processing and software engineering tasks, such as code generation. The LLMs are mainly utilized in the prompt-based zero/few-shot paradigm to guide the model in accomplishing the task. GPT-based models are one of the popular ones studied for tasks such as code comment generation or test generation. These tasks are `generative' tasks. However, there is limited research on the usage of LLMs for `non-generative' tasks such as classification using the prompt-based paradigm. In this preliminary exploratory study, we investigated the applicability of LLMs for Code Clone Detection (CCD), a non-generative task. By building a mono-lingual and cross-lingual CCD dataset derived from CodeNet, we first investigated two different prompts using ChatGPT to detect Type-4 code clones in Java-Java and Java-Ruby pairs in a zero-shot setting. We then conducted an analysis to understand the strengths and weaknesses of ChatGPT in CCD. ChatGPT surpasses the baselines in cross-language CCD attaining an F1-score of 0.877 and achieves comparable performance to fully fine-tuned models for mono-lingual CCD, with an F1-score of 0.878. Also, the prompt and the difficulty level of the problems has an impact on the performance of ChatGPT. Finally we provide insights and future directions based on our initial analysis
Exploring Different Levels of Supervision for Detecting and Localizing Solar Panels on Remote Sensing Imagery
This study investigates object presence detection and localization in remote sensing imagery, focusing on solar panel recognition. We explore different levels of supervision, evaluating three models: a fully supervised object detector, a weakly supervised image classifier with CAM-based localization, and a minimally supervised anomaly detector. The classifier excels in binary presence detection (0.79 F1-score), while the object detector (0.72) offers precise localization. The anomaly detector requires more data for viable performance. Fusion of model results shows potential accuracy gains. CAM impacts localization modestly, with GradCAM, GradCAM++, and HiResCAM yielding superior results. Notably, the classifier remains robust with less data, in contrast to the object detector.
Matbench Discovery -- An evaluation framework for machine learning crystal stability prediction
Matbench Discovery simulates the deployment of machine learning (ML) energy models in a high-throughput search for stable inorganic crystals. We address the disconnect between (i) thermodynamic stability and formation energy and (ii) in-domain vs out-of-distribution performance. Alongside this paper, we publish a Python package to aid with future model submissions and a growing online leaderboard with further insights into trade-offs between various performance metrics. To answer the question which ML methodology performs best at materials discovery, our initial release explores a variety of models including random forests, graph neural networks (GNN), one-shot predictors, iterative Bayesian optimizers and universal interatomic potentials (UIP). Ranked best-to-worst by their test set F1 score on thermodynamic stability prediction, we find CHGNet > M3GNet > MACE > ALIGNN > MEGNet > CGCNN > CGCNN+P > Wrenformer > BOWSR > Voronoi tessellation fingerprints with random forest. The top 3 models are UIPs, the winning methodology for ML-guided materials discovery, achieving F1 scores of ~0.6 for crystal stability classification and discovery acceleration factors (DAF) of up to 5x on the first 10k most stable predictions compared to dummy selection from our test set. We also highlight a sharp disconnect between commonly used global regression metrics and more task-relevant classification metrics. Accurate regressors are susceptible to unexpectedly high false-positive rates if those accurate predictions lie close to the decision boundary at 0 eV/atom above the convex hull where most materials are. Our results highlight the need to focus on classification metrics that actually correlate with improved stability hit rate.
QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework
Zero-shot transfer learning for document understanding is a crucial yet under-investigated scenario to help reduce the high cost involved in annotating document entities. We present a novel query-based framework, QueryForm, that extracts entity values from form-like documents in a zero-shot fashion. QueryForm contains a dual prompting mechanism that composes both the document schema and a specific entity type into a query, which is used to prompt a Transformer model to perform a single entity extraction task. Furthermore, we propose to leverage large-scale query-entity pairs generated from form-like webpages with weak HTML annotations to pre-train QueryForm. By unifying pre-training and fine-tuning into the same query-based framework, QueryForm enables models to learn from structured documents containing various entities and layouts, leading to better generalization to target document types without the need for target-specific training data. QueryForm sets new state-of-the-art average F1 score on both the XFUND (+4.6%~10.1%) and the Payment (+3.2%~9.5%) zero-shot benchmark, with a smaller model size and no additional image input.
Photos Are All You Need for Reciprocal Recommendation in Online Dating
Recommender Systems are algorithms that predict a user's preference for an item. Reciprocal Recommenders are a subset of recommender systems, where the items in question are people, and the objective is therefore to predict a bidirectional preference relation. They are used in settings such as online dating services and social networks. In particular, images provided by users are a crucial part of user preference, and one that is not exploited much in the literature. We present a novel method of interpreting user image preference history and using this to make recommendations. We train a recurrent neural network to learn a user's preferences and make predictions of reciprocal preference relations that can be used to make recommendations that satisfy both users. We show that our proposed system achieves an F1 score of 0.87 when using only photographs to produce reciprocal recommendations on a large real world online dating dataset. Our system significantly outperforms on the state of the art in both content-based and collaborative filtering systems.
Mobile App Tasks with Iterative Feedback (MoTIF): Addressing Task Feasibility in Interactive Visual Environments
In recent years, vision-language research has shifted to study tasks which require more complex reasoning, such as interactive question answering, visual common sense reasoning, and question-answer plausibility prediction. However, the datasets used for these problems fail to capture the complexity of real inputs and multimodal environments, such as ambiguous natural language requests and diverse digital domains. We introduce Mobile app Tasks with Iterative Feedback (MoTIF), a dataset with natural language commands for the greatest number of interactive environments to date. MoTIF is the first to contain natural language requests for interactive environments that are not satisfiable, and we obtain follow-up questions on this subset to enable research on task uncertainty resolution. We perform initial feasibility classification experiments and only reach an F1 score of 37.3, verifying the need for richer vision-language representations and improved architectures to reason about task feasibility.
Adobe-MIT submission to the DSTC 4 Spoken Language Understanding pilot task
The Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 (DSTC 4) proposes several pilot tasks. In this paper, we focus on the spoken language understanding pilot task, which consists of tagging a given utterance with speech acts and semantic slots. We compare different classifiers: the best system obtains 0.52 and 0.67 F1-scores on the test set for speech act recognition for the tourist and the guide respectively, and 0.52 F1-score for semantic tagging for both the guide and the tourist.
REALEDIT: Reddit Edits As a Large-scale Empirical Dataset for Image Transformations
Existing image editing models struggle to meet real-world demands. Despite excelling in academic benchmarks, they have yet to be widely adopted for real user needs. Datasets that power these models use artificial edits, lacking the scale and ecological validity necessary to address the true diversity of user requests. We introduce REALEDIT, a large-scale image editing dataset with authentic user requests and human-made edits sourced from Reddit. REALEDIT includes a test set of 9300 examples to evaluate models on real user requests. Our results show that existing models fall short on these tasks, highlighting the need for realistic training data. To address this, we introduce 48K training examples and train our REALEDIT model, achieving substantial gains - outperforming competitors by up to 165 Elo points in human judgment and 92 percent relative improvement on the automated VIEScore metric. We deploy our model on Reddit, testing it on new requests, and receive positive feedback. Beyond image editing, we explore REALEDIT's potential in detecting edited images by partnering with a deepfake detection non-profit. Finetuning their model on REALEDIT data improves its F1-score by 14 percentage points, underscoring the dataset's value for broad applications.
Targeting Alignment: Extracting Safety Classifiers of Aligned LLMs
Alignment in large language models (LLMs) is used to enforce guidelines such as safety. Yet, alignment fails in the face of jailbreak attacks that modify inputs to induce unsafe outputs. In this paper, we present and evaluate a method to assess the robustness of LLM alignment. We observe that alignment embeds a safety classifier in the target model that is responsible for deciding between refusal and compliance. We seek to extract an approximation of this classifier, called a surrogate classifier, from the LLM. We develop an algorithm for identifying candidate classifiers from subsets of the LLM model. We evaluate the degree to which the candidate classifiers approximate the model's embedded classifier in benign (F1 score) and adversarial (using surrogates in a white-box attack) settings. Our evaluation shows that the best candidates achieve accurate agreement (an F1 score above 80%) using as little as 20% of the model architecture. Further, we find attacks mounted on the surrogate models can be transferred with high accuracy. For example, a surrogate using only 50% of the Llama 2 model achieved an attack success rate (ASR) of 70%, a substantial improvement over attacking the LLM directly, where we only observed a 22% ASR. These results show that extracting surrogate classifiers is a viable (and highly effective) means for modeling (and therein addressing) the vulnerability of aligned models to jailbreaking attacks.
BanglishRev: A Large-Scale Bangla-English and Code-mixed Dataset of Product Reviews in E-Commerce
This work presents the BanglishRev Dataset, the largest e-commerce product review dataset to date for reviews written in Bengali, English, a mixture of both and Banglish, Bengali words written with English alphabets. The dataset comprises of 1.74 million written reviews from 3.2 million ratings information collected from a total of 128k products being sold in online e-commerce platforms targeting the Bengali population. It includes an extensive array of related metadata for each of the reviews including the rating given by the reviewer, date the review was posted and date of purchase, number of likes, dislikes, response from the seller, images associated with the review etc. With sentiment analysis being the most prominent usage of review datasets, experimentation with a binary sentiment analysis model with the review rating serving as an indicator of positive or negative sentiment was conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the large amount of data presented in BanglishRev for sentiment analysis tasks. A BanglishBERT model is trained on the data from BanglishRev with reviews being considered labeled positive if the rating is greater than 3 and negative if the rating is less than or equal to 3. The model is evaluated by being testing against a previously published manually annotated dataset for e-commerce reviews written in a mixture of Bangla, English and Banglish. The experimental model achieved an exceptional accuracy of 94\% and F1 score of 0.94, demonstrating the dataset's efficacy for sentiment analysis. Some of the intriguing patterns and observations seen within the dataset and future research directions where the dataset can be utilized is also discussed and explored. The dataset can be accessed through https://huggingface.co/datasets/BanglishRev/bangla-english-and-code-mixed-ecommerce-review-dataset.
Proactive Agent: Shifting LLM Agents from Reactive Responses to Active Assistance
Agents powered by large language models have shown remarkable abilities in solving complex tasks. However, most agent systems remain reactive, limiting their effectiveness in scenarios requiring foresight and autonomous decision-making. In this paper, we tackle the challenge of developing proactive agents capable of anticipating and initiating tasks without explicit human instructions. We propose a novel data-driven approach for this problem. Firstly, we collect real-world human activities to generate proactive task predictions. These predictions are then labeled by human annotators as either accepted or rejected. The labeled data is used to train a reward model that simulates human judgment and serves as an automatic evaluator of the proactiveness of LLM agents. Building on this, we develop a comprehensive data generation pipeline to create a diverse dataset, ProactiveBench, containing 6,790 events. Finally, we demonstrate that fine-tuning models with the proposed ProactiveBench can significantly elicit the proactiveness of LLM agents. Experimental results show that our fine-tuned model achieves an F1-Score of 66.47% in proactively offering assistance, outperforming all open-source and close-source models. These results highlight the potential of our method in creating more proactive and effective agent systems, paving the way for future advancements in human-agent collaboration.
CASE: Efficient Curricular Data Pre-training for Building Assistive Psychology Expert Models
The limited availability of psychologists necessitates efficient identification of individuals requiring urgent mental healthcare. This study explores the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) pipelines to analyze text data from online mental health forums used for consultations. By analyzing forum posts, these pipelines can flag users who may require immediate professional attention. A crucial challenge in this domain is data privacy and scarcity. To address this, we propose utilizing readily available curricular texts used in institutes specializing in mental health for pre-training the NLP pipelines. This helps us mimic the training process of a psychologist. Our work presents CASE-BERT that flags potential mental health disorders based on forum text. CASE-BERT demonstrates superior performance compared to existing methods, achieving an f1 score of 0.91 for Depression and 0.88 for Anxiety, two of the most commonly reported mental health disorders. Our code is publicly available.
PATE: Proximity-Aware Time series anomaly Evaluation
Evaluating anomaly detection algorithms in time series data is critical as inaccuracies can lead to flawed decision-making in various domains where real-time analytics and data-driven strategies are essential. Traditional performance metrics assume iid data and fail to capture the complex temporal dynamics and specific characteristics of time series anomalies, such as early and delayed detections. We introduce Proximity-Aware Time series anomaly Evaluation (PATE), a novel evaluation metric that incorporates the temporal relationship between prediction and anomaly intervals. PATE uses proximity-based weighting considering buffer zones around anomaly intervals, enabling a more detailed and informed assessment of a detection. Using these weights, PATE computes a weighted version of the area under the Precision and Recall curve. Our experiments with synthetic and real-world datasets show the superiority of PATE in providing more sensible and accurate evaluations than other evaluation metrics. We also tested several state-of-the-art anomaly detectors across various benchmark datasets using the PATE evaluation scheme. The results show that a common metric like Point-Adjusted F1 Score fails to characterize the detection performances well, and that PATE is able to provide a more fair model comparison. By introducing PATE, we redefine the understanding of model efficacy that steers future studies toward developing more effective and accurate detection models.
LegalLens: Leveraging LLMs for Legal Violation Identification in Unstructured Text
In this study, we focus on two main tasks, the first for detecting legal violations within unstructured textual data, and the second for associating these violations with potentially affected individuals. We constructed two datasets using Large Language Models (LLMs) which were subsequently validated by domain expert annotators. Both tasks were designed specifically for the context of class-action cases. The experimental design incorporated fine-tuning models from the BERT family and open-source LLMs, and conducting few-shot experiments using closed-source LLMs. Our results, with an F1-score of 62.69\% (violation identification) and 81.02\% (associating victims), show that our datasets and setups can be used for both tasks. Finally, we publicly release the datasets and the code used for the experiments in order to advance further research in the area of legal natural language processing (NLP).
QASiNa: Religious Domain Question Answering using Sirah Nabawiyah
Nowadays, Question Answering (QA) tasks receive significant research focus, particularly with the development of Large Language Model (LLM) such as Chat GPT [1]. LLM can be applied to various domains, but it contradicts the principles of information transmission when applied to the Islamic domain. In Islam we strictly regulates the sources of information and who can give interpretations or tafseer for that sources [2]. The approach used by LLM to generate answers based on its own interpretation is similar to the concept of tafseer, LLM is neither an Islamic expert nor a human which is not permitted in Islam. Indonesia is the country with the largest Islamic believer population in the world [3]. With the high influence of LLM, we need to make evaluation of LLM in religious domain. Currently, there is only few religious QA dataset available and none of them using Sirah Nabawiyah especially in Indonesian Language. In this paper, we propose the Question Answering Sirah Nabawiyah (QASiNa) dataset, a novel dataset compiled from Sirah Nabawiyah literatures in Indonesian language. We demonstrate our dataset by using mBERT [4], XLM-R [5], and IndoBERT [6] which fine-tuned with Indonesian translation of SQuAD v2.0 [7]. XLM-R model returned the best performance on QASiNa with EM of 61.20, F1-Score of 75.94, and Substring Match of 70.00. We compare XLM-R performance with Chat GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 [1]. Both Chat GPT version returned lower EM and F1-Score with higher Substring Match, the gap of EM and Substring Match get wider in GPT-4. The experiment indicate that Chat GPT tends to give excessive interpretations as evidenced by its higher Substring Match scores compared to EM and F1-Score, even after providing instruction and context. This concludes Chat GPT is unsuitable for question answering task in religious domain especially for Islamic religion.
Learning to Quantize Vulnerability Patterns and Match to Locate Statement-Level Vulnerabilities
Deep learning (DL) models have become increasingly popular in identifying software vulnerabilities. Prior studies found that vulnerabilities across different vulnerable programs may exhibit similar vulnerable scopes, implicitly forming discernible vulnerability patterns that can be learned by DL models through supervised training. However, vulnerable scopes still manifest in various spatial locations and formats within a program, posing challenges for models to accurately identify vulnerable statements. Despite this challenge, state-of-the-art vulnerability detection approaches fail to exploit the vulnerability patterns that arise in vulnerable programs. To take full advantage of vulnerability patterns and unleash the ability of DL models, we propose a novel vulnerability-matching approach in this paper, drawing inspiration from program analysis tools that locate vulnerabilities based on pre-defined patterns. Specifically, a vulnerability codebook is learned, which consists of quantized vectors representing various vulnerability patterns. During inference, the codebook is iterated to match all learned patterns and predict the presence of potential vulnerabilities within a given program. Our approach was extensively evaluated on a real-world dataset comprising more than 188,000 C/C++ functions. The evaluation results show that our approach achieves an F1-score of 94% (6% higher than the previous best) and 82% (19% higher than the previous best) for function and statement-level vulnerability identification, respectively. These substantial enhancements highlight the effectiveness of our approach to identifying vulnerabilities. The training code and pre-trained models are available at https://github.com/optimatch/optimatch.
An Open Dataset and Model for Language Identification
Language identification (LID) is a fundamental step in many natural language processing pipelines. However, current LID systems are far from perfect, particularly on lower-resource languages. We present a LID model which achieves a macro-average F1 score of 0.93 and a false positive rate of 0.033 across 201 languages, outperforming previous work. We achieve this by training on a curated dataset of monolingual data, the reliability of which we ensure by auditing a sample from each source and each language manually. We make both the model and the dataset available to the research community. Finally, we carry out detailed analysis into our model's performance, both in comparison to existing open models and by language class.
State Representation Learning Using an Unbalanced Atlas
The manifold hypothesis posits that high-dimensional data often lies on a lower-dimensional manifold and that utilizing this manifold as the target space yields more efficient representations. While numerous traditional manifold-based techniques exist for dimensionality reduction, their application in self-supervised learning has witnessed slow progress. The recent MSimCLR method combines manifold encoding with SimCLR but requires extremely low target encoding dimensions to outperform SimCLR, limiting its applicability. This paper introduces a novel learning paradigm using an unbalanced atlas (UA), capable of surpassing state-of-the-art self-supervised learning approaches. We investigated and engineered the DeepInfomax with an unbalanced atlas (DIM-UA) method by adapting the Spatiotemporal DeepInfomax (ST-DIM) framework to align with our proposed UA paradigm. The efficacy of DIM-UA is demonstrated through training and evaluation on the Atari Annotated RAM Interface (AtariARI) benchmark, a modified version of the Atari 2600 framework that produces annotated image samples for representation learning. The UA paradigm improves existing algorithms significantly as the number of target encoding dimensions grows. For instance, the mean F1 score averaged over categories of DIM-UA is ~75% compared to ~70% of ST-DIM when using 16384 hidden units.
Tweets Under the Rubble: Detection of Messages Calling for Help in Earthquake Disaster
The importance of social media is again exposed in the recent tragedy of the 2023 Turkey and Syria earthquake. Many victims who were trapped under the rubble called for help by posting messages in Twitter. We present an interactive tool to provide situational awareness for missing and trapped people, and disaster relief for rescue and donation efforts. The system (i) collects tweets, (ii) classifies the ones calling for help, (iii) extracts important entity tags, and (iv) visualizes them in an interactive map screen. Our initial experiments show that the performance in terms of the F1 score is up to 98.30 for tweet classification, and 84.32 for entity extraction. The demonstration, dataset, and other related files can be accessed at https://github.com/avaapm/deprem
How Large Language Models are Transforming Machine-Paraphrased Plagiarism
The recent success of large language models for text generation poses a severe threat to academic integrity, as plagiarists can generate realistic paraphrases indistinguishable from original work. However, the role of large autoregressive transformers in generating machine-paraphrased plagiarism and their detection is still developing in the literature. This work explores T5 and GPT-3 for machine-paraphrase generation on scientific articles from arXiv, student theses, and Wikipedia. We evaluate the detection performance of six automated solutions and one commercial plagiarism detection software and perform a human study with 105 participants regarding their detection performance and the quality of generated examples. Our results suggest that large models can rewrite text humans have difficulty identifying as machine-paraphrased (53% mean acc.). Human experts rate the quality of paraphrases generated by GPT-3 as high as original texts (clarity 4.0/5, fluency 4.2/5, coherence 3.8/5). The best-performing detection model (GPT-3) achieves a 66% F1-score in detecting paraphrases.
Data Augmentation for Improving Emotion Recognition in Software Engineering Communication
Emotions (e.g., Joy, Anger) are prevalent in daily software engineering (SE) activities, and are known to be significant indicators of work productivity (e.g., bug fixing efficiency). Recent studies have shown that directly applying general purpose emotion classification tools to SE corpora is not effective. Even within the SE domain, tool performance degrades significantly when trained on one communication channel and evaluated on another (e.g, StackOverflow vs. GitHub comments). Retraining a tool with channel-specific data takes significant effort since manually annotating large datasets of ground truth data is expensive. In this paper, we address this data scarcity problem by automatically creating new training data using a data augmentation technique. Based on an analysis of the types of errors made by popular SE-specific emotion recognition tools, we specifically target our data augmentation strategy in order to improve the performance of emotion recognition. Our results show an average improvement of 9.3% in micro F1-Score for three existing emotion classification tools (ESEM-E, EMTk, SEntiMoji) when trained with our best augmentation strategy.
Paddy Doctor: A Visual Image Dataset for Automated Paddy Disease Classification and Benchmarking
One of the critical biotic stress factors paddy farmers face is diseases caused by bacteria, fungi, and other organisms. These diseases affect plants' health severely and lead to significant crop loss. Most of these diseases can be identified by regularly observing the leaves and stems under expert supervision. In a country with vast agricultural regions and limited crop protection experts, manual identification of paddy diseases is challenging. Thus, to add a solution to this problem, it is necessary to automate the disease identification process and provide easily accessible decision support tools to enable effective crop protection measures. However, the lack of availability of public datasets with detailed disease information limits the practical implementation of accurate disease detection systems. This paper presents Paddy Doctor, a visual image dataset for identifying paddy diseases. Our dataset contains 16,225 annotated paddy leaf images across 13 classes (12 diseases and normal leaf). We benchmarked the Paddy Doctor dataset using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and four transfer learning based models (VGG16, MobileNet, Xception, and ResNet34). The experimental results showed that ResNet34 achieved the highest F1-score of 97.50%. We release our dataset and reproducible code in the open source for community use.
JaQuAD: Japanese Question Answering Dataset for Machine Reading Comprehension
Question Answering (QA) is a task in which a machine understands a given document and a question to find an answer. Despite impressive progress in the NLP area, QA is still a challenging problem, especially for non-English languages due to the lack of annotated datasets. In this paper, we present the Japanese Question Answering Dataset, JaQuAD, which is annotated by humans. JaQuAD consists of 39,696 extractive question-answer pairs on Japanese Wikipedia articles. We finetuned a baseline model which achieves 78.92% for F1 score and 63.38% for EM on test set. The dataset and our experiments are available at https://github.com/SkelterLabsInc/JaQuAD.
FiNCAT: Financial Numeral Claim Analysis Tool
While making investment decisions by reading financial documents, investors need to differentiate between in-claim and outof-claim numerals. In this paper, we present a tool which does it automatically. It extracts context embeddings of the numerals using one of the transformer based pre-trained language model called BERT. After this, it uses a Logistic Regression based model to detect whether the numerals is in-claim or out-of-claim. We use FinNum-3 (English) dataset to train our model. After conducting rigorous experiments we achieve a Macro F1 score of 0.8223 on the validation set. We have open-sourced this tool and it can be accessed from https://github.com/sohomghosh/FiNCAT_Financial_Numeral_Claim_Analysis_Tool
Hypers at ComMA@ICON: Modelling Aggressiveness, Gender Bias and Communal Bias Identification
Due to the exponentially increasing reach of social media, it is essential to focus on its negative aspects as it can potentially divide society and incite people into violence. In this paper, we present our system description of work on the shared task ComMA@ICON, where we have to classify how aggressive the sentence is and if the sentence is gender-biased or communal biased. These three could be the primary reasons to cause significant problems in society. As team Hypers we have proposed an approach that utilizes different pretrained models with Attention and mean pooling methods. We were able to get Rank 3 with 0.223 Instance F1 score on Bengali, Rank 2 with 0.322 Instance F1 score on Multi-lingual set, Rank 4 with 0.129 Instance F1 score on Meitei and Rank 5 with 0.336 Instance F1 score on Hindi. The source code and the pretrained models of this work can be found here.
How Hateful are Movies? A Study and Prediction on Movie Subtitles
In this research, we investigate techniques to detect hate speech in movies. We introduce a new dataset collected from the subtitles of six movies, where each utterance is annotated either as hate, offensive or normal. We apply transfer learning techniques of domain adaptation and fine-tuning on existing social media datasets, namely from Twitter and Fox News. We evaluate different representations, i.e., Bag of Words (BoW), Bi-directional Long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM), and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) on 11k movie subtitles. The BERT model obtained the best macro-averaged F1-score of 77%. Hence, we show that transfer learning from the social media domain is efficacious in classifying hate and offensive speech in movies through subtitles.
Is attention to bounding boxes all you need for pedestrian action prediction?
The human driver is no longer the only one concerned with the complexity of the driving scenarios. Autonomous vehicles (AV) are similarly becoming involved in the process. Nowadays, the development of AVs in urban places raises essential safety concerns for vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians. Therefore, to make the roads safer, it is critical to classify and predict the pedestrians' future behavior. In this paper, we present a framework based on multiple variations of the Transformer models able to infer predict the pedestrian street-crossing decision-making based on the dynamics of its initiated trajectory. We showed that using solely bounding boxes as input features can outperform the previous state-of-the-art results by reaching a prediction accuracy of 91\% and an F1-score of 0.83 on the PIE dataset. In addition, we introduced a large-size simulated dataset (CP2A) using CARLA for action prediction. Our model has similarly reached high accuracy (91\%) and F1-score (0.91) on this dataset. Interestingly, we showed that pre-training our Transformer model on the CP2A dataset and then fine-tuning it on the PIE dataset is beneficial for the action prediction task. Finally, our model's results are successfully supported by the "human attention to bounding boxes" experiment which we created to test humans ability for pedestrian action prediction without the need for environmental context. The code for the dataset and the models is available at: https://github.com/linaashaji/Action_Anticipation
Combining EfficientNet and Vision Transformers for Video Deepfake Detection
Deepfakes are the result of digital manipulation to forge realistic yet fake imagery. With the astonishing advances in deep generative models, fake images or videos are nowadays obtained using variational autoencoders (VAEs) or Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). These technologies are becoming more accessible and accurate, resulting in fake videos that are very difficult to be detected. Traditionally, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been used to perform video deepfake detection, with the best results obtained using methods based on EfficientNet B7. In this study, we focus on video deep fake detection on faces, given that most methods are becoming extremely accurate in the generation of realistic human faces. Specifically, we combine various types of Vision Transformers with a convolutional EfficientNet B0 used as a feature extractor, obtaining comparable results with some very recent methods that use Vision Transformers. Differently from the state-of-the-art approaches, we use neither distillation nor ensemble methods. Furthermore, we present a straightforward inference procedure based on a simple voting scheme for handling multiple faces in the same video shot. The best model achieved an AUC of 0.951 and an F1 score of 88.0%, very close to the state-of-the-art on the DeepFake Detection Challenge (DFDC).
AraStance: A Multi-Country and Multi-Domain Dataset of Arabic Stance Detection for Fact Checking
With the continuing spread of misinformation and disinformation online, it is of increasing importance to develop combating mechanisms at scale in the form of automated systems that support multiple languages. One task of interest is claim veracity prediction, which can be addressed using stance detection with respect to relevant documents retrieved online. To this end, we present our new Arabic Stance Detection dataset (AraStance) of 4,063 claim--article pairs from a diverse set of sources comprising three fact-checking websites and one news website. AraStance covers false and true claims from multiple domains (e.g., politics, sports, health) and several Arab countries, and it is well-balanced between related and unrelated documents with respect to the claims. We benchmark AraStance, along with two other stance detection datasets, using a number of BERT-based models. Our best model achieves an accuracy of 85\% and a macro F1 score of 78\%, which leaves room for improvement and reflects the challenging nature of AraStance and the task of stance detection in general.
Re-TACRED: Addressing Shortcomings of the TACRED Dataset
TACRED is one of the largest and most widely used sentence-level relation extraction datasets. Proposed models that are evaluated using this dataset consistently set new state-of-the-art performance. However, they still exhibit large error rates despite leveraging external knowledge and unsupervised pretraining on large text corpora. A recent study suggested that this may be due to poor dataset quality. The study observed that over 50% of the most challenging sentences from the development and test sets are incorrectly labeled and account for an average drop of 8% f1-score in model performance. However, this study was limited to a small biased sample of 5k (out of a total of 106k) sentences, substantially restricting the generalizability and broader implications of its findings. In this paper, we address these shortcomings by: (i) performing a comprehensive study over the whole TACRED dataset, (ii) proposing an improved crowdsourcing strategy and deploying it to re-annotate the whole dataset, and (iii) performing a thorough analysis to understand how correcting the TACRED annotations affects previously published results. After verification, we observed that 23.9% of TACRED labels are incorrect. Moreover, evaluating several models on our revised dataset yields an average f1-score improvement of 14.3% and helps uncover significant relationships between the different models (rather than simply offsetting or scaling their scores by a constant factor). Finally, aside from our analysis we also release Re-TACRED, a new completely re-annotated version of the TACRED dataset that can be used to perform reliable evaluation of relation extraction models.
FQuAD: French Question Answering Dataset
Recent advances in the field of language modeling have improved state-of-the-art results on many Natural Language Processing tasks. Among them, Reading Comprehension has made significant progress over the past few years. However, most results are reported in English since labeled resources available in other languages, such as French, remain scarce. In the present work, we introduce the French Question Answering Dataset (FQuAD). FQuAD is a French Native Reading Comprehension dataset of questions and answers on a set of Wikipedia articles that consists of 25,000+ samples for the 1.0 version and 60,000+ samples for the 1.1 version. We train a baseline model which achieves an F1 score of 92.2 and an exact match ratio of 82.1 on the test set. In order to track the progress of French Question Answering models we propose a leader-board and we have made the 1.0 version of our dataset freely available at https://illuin-tech.github.io/FQuAD-explorer/.
Span-based Joint Entity and Relation Extraction with Transformer Pre-training
We introduce SpERT, an attention model for span-based joint entity and relation extraction. Our key contribution is a light-weight reasoning on BERT embeddings, which features entity recognition and filtering, as well as relation classification with a localized, marker-free context representation. The model is trained using strong within-sentence negative samples, which are efficiently extracted in a single BERT pass. These aspects facilitate a search over all spans in the sentence. In ablation studies, we demonstrate the benefits of pre-training, strong negative sampling and localized context. Our model outperforms prior work by up to 2.6% F1 score on several datasets for joint entity and relation extraction.
Predicting Brazilian court decisions
Predicting case outcomes is useful but still an extremely hard task for attorneys and other Law professionals. It is not easy to search case information to extract valuable information as this requires dealing with huge data sets and their complexity. For instance, the complexity of Brazil legal system along with the high litigation rates makes this problem even harder. This paper introduces an approach for predicting Brazilian court decisions which is also able to predict whether the decision will be unanimous. We developed a working prototype which performs 79% of accuracy (F1-score) on a data set composed of 4,043 cases from a Brazilian court. To our knowledge, this is the first study to forecast judge decisions in Brazil.
Self-Attentive Model for Headline Generation
Headline generation is a special type of text summarization task. While the amount of available training data for this task is almost unlimited, it still remains challenging, as learning to generate headlines for news articles implies that the model has strong reasoning about natural language. To overcome this issue, we applied recent Universal Transformer architecture paired with byte-pair encoding technique and achieved new state-of-the-art results on the New York Times Annotated corpus with ROUGE-L F1-score 24.84 and ROUGE-2 F1-score 13.48. We also present the new RIA corpus and reach ROUGE-L F1-score 36.81 and ROUGE-2 F1-score 22.15 on it.
Toward a Standardized and More Accurate Indonesian Part-of-Speech Tagging
Previous work in Indonesian part-of-speech (POS) tagging are hard to compare as they are not evaluated on a common dataset. Furthermore, in spite of the success of neural network models for English POS tagging, they are rarely explored for Indonesian. In this paper, we explored various techniques for Indonesian POS tagging, including rule-based, CRF, and neural network-based models. We evaluated our models on the IDN Tagged Corpus. A new state-of-the-art of 97.47 F1 score is achieved with a recurrent neural network. To provide a standard for future work, we release the dataset split that we used publicly.
Deep Human Parsing with Active Template Regression
In this work, the human parsing task, namely decomposing a human image into semantic fashion/body regions, is formulated as an Active Template Regression (ATR) problem, where the normalized mask of each fashion/body item is expressed as the linear combination of the learned mask templates, and then morphed to a more precise mask with the active shape parameters, including position, scale and visibility of each semantic region. The mask template coefficients and the active shape parameters together can generate the human parsing results, and are thus called the structure outputs for human parsing. The deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is utilized to build the end-to-end relation between the input human image and the structure outputs for human parsing. More specifically, the structure outputs are predicted by two separate networks. The first CNN network is with max-pooling, and designed to predict the template coefficients for each label mask, while the second CNN network is without max-pooling to preserve sensitivity to label mask position and accurately predict the active shape parameters. For a new image, the structure outputs of the two networks are fused to generate the probability of each label for each pixel, and super-pixel smoothing is finally used to refine the human parsing result. Comprehensive evaluations on a large dataset well demonstrate the significant superiority of the ATR framework over other state-of-the-arts for human parsing. In particular, the F1-score reaches 64.38% by our ATR framework, significantly higher than 44.76% based on the state-of-the-art algorithm.
What Is a Good Caption? A Comprehensive Visual Caption Benchmark for Evaluating Both Correctness and Thoroughness
Visual captioning benchmarks have become outdated with the emergence of modern multimodal large language models (MLLMs), as the brief ground-truth sentences and traditional metrics fail to assess detailed captions effectively. While recent benchmarks attempt to address this by focusing on keyword extraction or object-centric evaluation, they remain limited to vague-view or object-view analyses and incomplete visual element coverage. In this paper, we introduce CAPability, a comprehensive multi-view benchmark for evaluating visual captioning across 12 dimensions spanning six critical views. We curate nearly 11K human-annotated images and videos with visual element annotations to evaluate the generated captions. CAPability stably assesses both the correctness and thoroughness of captions using F1-score. By converting annotations to QA pairs, we further introduce a heuristic metric, know but cannot tell (KT), indicating a significant performance gap between QA and caption capabilities. Our work provides the first holistic analysis of MLLMs' captioning abilities, as we identify their strengths and weaknesses across various dimensions, guiding future research to enhance specific aspects of capabilities.
Causal Micro-Narratives
We present a novel approach to classify causal micro-narratives from text. These narratives are sentence-level explanations of the cause(s) and/or effect(s) of a target subject. The approach requires only a subject-specific ontology of causes and effects, and we demonstrate it with an application to inflation narratives. Using a human-annotated dataset spanning historical and contemporary US news articles for training, we evaluate several large language models (LLMs) on this multi-label classification task. The best-performing model--a fine-tuned Llama 3.1 8B--achieves F1 scores of 0.87 on narrative detection and 0.71 on narrative classification. Comprehensive error analysis reveals challenges arising from linguistic ambiguity and highlights how model errors often mirror human annotator disagreements. This research establishes a framework for extracting causal micro-narratives from real-world data, with wide-ranging applications to social science research.
RoBERTa-BiLSTM: A Context-Aware Hybrid Model for Sentiment Analysis
Effectively analyzing the comments to uncover latent intentions holds immense value in making strategic decisions across various domains. However, several challenges hinder the process of sentiment analysis including the lexical diversity exhibited in comments, the presence of long dependencies within the text, encountering unknown symbols and words, and dealing with imbalanced datasets. Moreover, existing sentiment analysis tasks mostly leveraged sequential models to encode the long dependent texts and it requires longer execution time as it processes the text sequentially. In contrast, the Transformer requires less execution time due to its parallel processing nature. In this work, we introduce a novel hybrid deep learning model, RoBERTa-BiLSTM, which combines the Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach (RoBERTa) with Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks. RoBERTa is utilized to generate meaningful word embedding vectors, while BiLSTM effectively captures the contextual semantics of long-dependent texts. The RoBERTa-BiLSTM hybrid model leverages the strengths of both sequential and Transformer models to enhance performance in sentiment analysis. We conducted experiments using datasets from IMDb, Twitter US Airline, and Sentiment140 to evaluate the proposed model against existing state-of-the-art methods. Our experimental findings demonstrate that the RoBERTa-BiLSTM model surpasses baseline models (e.g., BERT, RoBERTa-base, RoBERTa-GRU, and RoBERTa-LSTM), achieving accuracies of 80.74%, 92.36%, and 82.25% on the Twitter US Airline, IMDb, and Sentiment140 datasets, respectively. Additionally, the model achieves F1-scores of 80.73%, 92.35%, and 82.25% on the same datasets, respectively.
Automated speech- and text-based classification of neuropsychiatric conditions in a multidiagnostic setting
Speech patterns have been identified as potential diagnostic markers for neuropsychiatric conditions. However, most studies only compare a single clinical group to healthy controls, whereas clinical practice often requires differentiating between multiple potential diagnoses (multiclass settings). To address this, we assembled a dataset of repeated recordings from 420 participants (67 with major depressive disorder, 106 with schizophrenia and 46 with autism, as well as matched controls), and tested the performance of a range of conventional machine learning models and advanced Transformer models on both binary and multiclass classification, based on voice and text features. While binary models performed comparably to previous research (F1 scores between 0.54-0.75 for autism spectrum disorder, ASD; 0.67-0.92 for major depressive disorder, MDD; and 0.71-0.83 for schizophrenia); when differentiating between multiple diagnostic groups performance decreased markedly (F1 scores between 0.35-0.44 for ASD, 0.57-0.75 for MDD, 0.15-0.66 for schizophrenia, and 0.38-0.52 macro F1). Combining voice and text-based models yielded increased performance, suggesting that they capture complementary diagnostic information. Our results indicate that models trained on binary classification may learn to rely on markers of generic differences between clinical and non-clinical populations, or markers of clinical features that overlap across conditions, rather than identifying markers specific to individual conditions. We provide recommendations for future research in the field, suggesting increased focus on developing larger transdiagnostic datasets that include more fine-grained clinical features, and that can support the development of models that better capture the complexity of neuropsychiatric conditions and naturalistic diagnostic assessment.
Stutter-TTS: Controlled Synthesis and Improved Recognition of Stuttered Speech
Stuttering is a speech disorder where the natural flow of speech is interrupted by blocks, repetitions or prolongations of syllables, words and phrases. The majority of existing automatic speech recognition (ASR) interfaces perform poorly on utterances with stutter, mainly due to lack of matched training data. Synthesis of speech with stutter thus presents an opportunity to improve ASR for this type of speech. We describe Stutter-TTS, an end-to-end neural text-to-speech model capable of synthesizing diverse types of stuttering utterances. We develop a simple, yet effective prosody-control strategy whereby additional tokens are introduced into source text during training to represent specific stuttering characteristics. By choosing the position of the stutter tokens, Stutter-TTS allows word-level control of where stuttering occurs in the synthesized utterance. We are able to synthesize stutter events with high accuracy (F1-scores between 0.63 and 0.84, depending on stutter type). By fine-tuning an ASR model on synthetic stuttered speech we are able to reduce word error by 5.7% relative on stuttered utterances, with only minor (<0.2% relative) degradation for fluent utterances.
MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition
African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of the settings where current methods are effective. In this paper, we make progress towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We create the largest human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages, and we study the behavior of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the choice of source language significantly affects performance. We show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14 points across 20 languages compared to using English. Our results highlight the need for benchmark datasets and models that cover typologically-diverse African languages.
WLV-RIT at SemEval-2021 Task 5: A Neural Transformer Framework for Detecting Toxic Spans
In recent years, the widespread use of social media has led to an increase in the generation of toxic and offensive content on online platforms. In response, social media platforms have worked on developing automatic detection methods and employing human moderators to cope with this deluge of offensive content. While various state-of-the-art statistical models have been applied to detect toxic posts, there are only a few studies that focus on detecting the words or expressions that make a post offensive. This motivates the organization of the SemEval-2021 Task 5: Toxic Spans Detection competition, which has provided participants with a dataset containing toxic spans annotation in English posts. In this paper, we present the WLV-RIT entry for the SemEval-2021 Task 5. Our best performing neural transformer model achieves an 0.68 F1-Score. Furthermore, we develop an open-source framework for multilingual detection of offensive spans, i.e., MUDES, based on neural transformers that detect toxic spans in texts.
MIMICause: Representation and automatic extraction of causal relation types from clinical notes
Understanding causal narratives communicated in clinical notes can help make strides towards personalized healthcare. Extracted causal information from clinical notes can be combined with structured EHR data such as patients' demographics, diagnoses, and medications. This will enhance healthcare providers' ability to identify aspects of a patient's story communicated in the clinical notes and help make more informed decisions. In this work, we propose annotation guidelines, develop an annotated corpus and provide baseline scores to identify types and direction of causal relations between a pair of biomedical concepts in clinical notes; communicated implicitly or explicitly, identified either in a single sentence or across multiple sentences. We annotate a total of 2714 de-identified examples sampled from the 2018 n2c2 shared task dataset and train four different language model based architectures. Annotation based on our guidelines achieved a high inter-annotator agreement i.e. Fleiss' kappa (kappa) score of 0.72, and our model for identification of causal relations achieved a macro F1 score of 0.56 on the test data. The high inter-annotator agreement for clinical text shows the quality of our annotation guidelines while the provided baseline F1 score sets the direction for future research towards understanding narratives in clinical texts.
Empirical Study of Mutual Reinforcement Effect and Application in Few-shot Text Classification Tasks via Prompt
The Mutual Reinforcement Effect (MRE) investigates the synergistic relationship between word-level and text-level classifications in text classification tasks. It posits that the performance of both classification levels can be mutually enhanced. However, this mechanism has not been adequately demonstrated or explained in prior research. To address this gap, we employ empirical experiment to observe and substantiate the MRE theory. Our experiments on 21 MRE mix datasets revealed the presence of MRE in the model and its impact. Specifically, we conducted compare experiments use fine-tune. The results of findings from comparison experiments corroborates the existence of MRE. Furthermore, we extended the application of MRE to prompt learning, utilizing word-level information as a verbalizer to bolster the model's prediction of text-level classification labels. In our final experiment, the F1-score significantly surpassed the baseline in 18 out of 21 MRE Mix datasets, further validating the notion that word-level information enhances the language model's comprehension of the text as a whole.
Human Re-ID Meets LVLMs: What can we expect?
Large vision-language models (LVLMs) have been regarded as a breakthrough advance in an astoundingly variety of tasks, from content generation to virtual assistants and multimodal search or retrieval. However, for many of these applications, the performance of these methods has been widely criticized, particularly when compared with state-of-the-art methods and technologies in each specific domain. In this work, we compare the performance of the leading large vision-language models in the human re-identification task, using as baseline the performance attained by state-of-the-art AI models specifically designed for this problem. We compare the results due to ChatGPT-4o, Gemini-2.0-Flash, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, and Qwen-VL-Max to a baseline ReID PersonViT model, using the well-known Market1501 dataset. Our evaluation pipeline includes the dataset curation, prompt engineering, and metric selection to assess the models' performance. Results are analyzed from many different perspectives: similarity scores, classification accuracy, and classification metrics, including precision, recall, F1 score, and area under curve (AUC). Our results confirm the strengths of LVLMs, but also their severe limitations that often lead to catastrophic answers and should be the scope of further research. As a concluding remark, we speculate about some further research that should fuse traditional and LVLMs to combine the strengths from both families of techniques and achieve solid improvements in performance.
Characterization of Magnetic Labyrinthine Structures through Junctions and Terminals Detection using Template Matching and CNN
In material sciences, characterizing faults in periodic structures is vital for understanding material properties. To characterize magnetic labyrinthine patterns, it is necessary to accurately identify junctions and terminals, often featuring over a thousand closely packed defects per image. This study introduces a new technique called TM-CNN (Template Matching - Convolutional Neural Network) designed to detect a multitude of small objects in images, such as defects in magnetic labyrinthine patterns. TM-CNN was used to identify these structures in 444 experimental images, and the results were explored to deepen the understanding of magnetic materials. It employs a two-stage detection approach combining template matching, used in initial detection, with a convolutional neural network, used to eliminate incorrect identifications. To train a CNN classifier, it is necessary to create a large number of training images. This difficulty prevents the use of CNN in many practical applications. TM-CNN significantly reduces the manual workload for creating training images by automatically making most of the annotations and leaving only a small number of corrections to human reviewers. In testing, TM-CNN achieved an impressive F1 score of 0.988, far outperforming traditional template matching and CNN-based object detection algorithms.
TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding
This work proposes TimeChat, a time-sensitive multimodal large language model specifically designed for long video understanding. Our model incorporates two key architectural contributions: (1) a timestamp-aware frame encoder that binds visual content with the timestamp of each frame, and (2) a sliding video Q-Former that produces a video token sequence of varying lengths to accommodate videos of various durations. Additionally, we construct an instruction-tuning dataset, encompassing 6 tasks and a total of 125K instances, to further enhance TimeChat's instruction-following performance. Experiment results across various video understanding tasks, such as dense captioning, temporal grounding, and highlight detection, demonstrate TimeChat's strong zero-shot temporal localization and reasoning capabilities. For example, it achieves +9.2 F1 score and +2.8 CIDEr on YouCook2, +5.8 HIT@1 on QVHighlights, and +27.5 R@1 (IoU=0.5) on Charades-STA, compared to state-of-the-art video large language models, holding the potential to serve as a versatile video assistant for long-form video comprehension tasks and satisfy realistic user requirements.
Automated Medical Coding on MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV: A Critical Review and Replicability Study
Medical coding is the task of assigning medical codes to clinical free-text documentation. Healthcare professionals manually assign such codes to track patient diagnoses and treatments. Automated medical coding can considerably alleviate this administrative burden. In this paper, we reproduce, compare, and analyze state-of-the-art automated medical coding machine learning models. We show that several models underperform due to weak configurations, poorly sampled train-test splits, and insufficient evaluation. In previous work, the macro F1 score has been calculated sub-optimally, and our correction doubles it. We contribute a revised model comparison using stratified sampling and identical experimental setups, including hyperparameters and decision boundary tuning. We analyze prediction errors to validate and falsify assumptions of previous works. The analysis confirms that all models struggle with rare codes, while long documents only have a negligible impact. Finally, we present the first comprehensive results on the newly released MIMIC-IV dataset using the reproduced models. We release our code, model parameters, and new MIMIC-III and MIMIC-IV training and evaluation pipelines to accommodate fair future comparisons.
The Power of Transfer Learning in Agricultural Applications: AgriNet
Advances in deep learning and transfer learning have paved the way for various automation classification tasks in agriculture, including plant diseases, pests, weeds, and plant species detection. However, agriculture automation still faces various challenges, such as the limited size of datasets and the absence of plant-domain-specific pretrained models. Domain specific pretrained models have shown state of art performance in various computer vision tasks including face recognition and medical imaging diagnosis. In this paper, we propose AgriNet dataset, a collection of 160k agricultural images from more than 19 geographical locations, several images captioning devices, and more than 423 classes of plant species and diseases. We also introduce AgriNet models, a set of pretrained models on five ImageNet architectures: VGG16, VGG19, Inception-v3, InceptionResNet-v2, and Xception. AgriNet-VGG19 achieved the highest classification accuracy of 94 % and the highest F1-score of 92%. Additionally, all proposed models were found to accurately classify the 423 classes of plant species, diseases, pests, and weeds with a minimum accuracy of 87% for the Inception-v3 model.Finally, experiments to evaluate of superiority of AgriNet models compared to ImageNet models were conducted on two external datasets: pest and plant diseases dataset from Bangladesh and a plant diseases dataset from Kashmir.
HalluMix: A Task-Agnostic, Multi-Domain Benchmark for Real-World Hallucination Detection
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains, detecting hallucinated contentx2013text that is not grounded in supporting evidencex2013has become a critical challenge. Existing benchmarks for hallucination detection are often synthetically generated, narrowly focused on extractive question answering, and fail to capture the complexity of real-world scenarios involving multi-document contexts and full-sentence outputs. We introduce the HalluMix Benchmark, a diverse, task-agnostic dataset that includes examples from a range of domains and formats. Using this benchmark, we evaluate seven hallucination detection systemsx2013both open and closed sourcex2013highlighting differences in performance across tasks, document lengths, and input representations. Our analysis highlights substantial performance disparities between short and long contexts, with critical implications for real-world Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) implementations. Quotient Detections achieves the best overall performance, with an accuracy of 0.82 and an F1 score of 0.84.
Who Wrote This? Identifying Machine vs Human-Generated Text in Hausa
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has allowed them to be proficient in various tasks, including content generation. However, their unregulated usage can lead to malicious activities such as plagiarism and generating and spreading fake news, especially for low-resource languages. Most existing machine-generated text detectors are trained on high-resource languages like English, French, etc. In this study, we developed the first large-scale detector that can distinguish between human- and machine-generated content in Hausa. We scrapped seven Hausa-language media outlets for the human-generated text and the Gemini-2.0 flash model to automatically generate the corresponding Hausa-language articles based on the human-generated article headlines. We fine-tuned four pre-trained Afri-centric models (AfriTeVa, AfriBERTa, AfroXLMR, and AfroXLMR-76L) on the resulting dataset and assessed their performance using accuracy and F1-score metrics. AfroXLMR achieved the highest performance with an accuracy of 99.23% and an F1 score of 99.21%, demonstrating its effectiveness for Hausa text detection. Our dataset is made publicly available to enable further research.
Comparative Analysis of Extrinsic Factors for NER in French
Named entity recognition (NER) is a crucial task that aims to identify structured information, which is often replete with complex, technical terms and a high degree of variability. Accurate and reliable NER can facilitate the extraction and analysis of important information. However, NER for other than English is challenging due to limited data availability, as the high expertise, time, and expenses are required to annotate its data. In this paper, by using the limited data, we explore various factors including model structure, corpus annotation scheme and data augmentation techniques to improve the performance of a NER model for French. Our experiments demonstrate that these approaches can significantly improve the model's F1 score from original CRF score of 62.41 to 79.39. Our findings suggest that considering different extrinsic factors and combining these techniques is a promising approach for improving NER performance where the size of data is limited.
VisDiff: SDF-Guided Polygon Generation for Visibility Reconstruction and Recognition
The capability to learn latent representations plays a key role in the effectiveness of recent machine learning methods. An active frontier in representation learning is understanding representations for combinatorial structures which may not admit well-behaved local neighborhoods or distance functions. For example, for polygons, slightly perturbing vertex locations might lead to significant changes in their combinatorial structure and may even lead to invalid polygons. In this paper, we investigate representations to capture the underlying combinatorial structures of polygons. Specifically, we study the open problem of Visibility Reconstruction: Given a visibility graph G, construct a polygon P whose visibility graph is G. We introduce VisDiff, a novel diffusion-based approach to reconstruct a polygon from its given visibility graph G. Our method first estimates the signed distance function (SDF) of P from G. Afterwards, it extracts ordered vertex locations that have the pairwise visibility relationship given by the edges of G. Our main insight is that going through the SDF significantly improves learning for reconstruction. In order to train VisDiff, we make two main contributions: (1) We design novel loss components for computing the visibility in a differentiable manner and (2) create a carefully curated dataset. We use this dataset to benchmark our method and achieve 21% improvement in F1-Score over standard methods. We also demonstrate effective generalization to out-of-distribution polygon types and show that learning a generative model allows us to sample the set of polygons with a given visibility graph. Finally, we extend our method to the related combinatorial problem of reconstruction from a triangulation. We achieve 95% classification accuracy of triangulation edges and a 4% improvement in Chamfer distance compared to current architectures.
AceParse: A Comprehensive Dataset with Diverse Structured Texts for Academic Literature Parsing
With the development of data-centric AI, the focus has shifted from model-driven approaches to improving data quality. Academic literature, as one of the crucial types, is predominantly stored in PDF formats and needs to be parsed into texts before further processing. However, parsing diverse structured texts in academic literature remains challenging due to the lack of datasets that cover various text structures. In this paper, we introduce AceParse, the first comprehensive dataset designed to support the parsing of a wide range of structured texts, including formulas, tables, lists, algorithms, and sentences with embedded mathematical expressions. Based on AceParse, we fine-tuned a multimodal model, named AceParser, which accurately parses various structured texts within academic literature. This model outperforms the previous state-of-the-art by 4.1% in terms of F1 score and by 5% in Jaccard Similarity, demonstrating the potential of multimodal models in academic literature parsing. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/JHW5981/AceParse.
Detecting Calls to Action in Multimodal Content: Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign on Instagram
This study investigates the automated classification of Calls to Action (CTAs) within the 2021 German Instagram election campaign to advance the understanding of mobilization in social media contexts. We analyzed over 2,208 Instagram stories and 712 posts using fine-tuned BERT models and OpenAI's GPT-4 models. The fine-tuned BERT model incorporating synthetic training data achieved a macro F1 score of 0.93, demonstrating a robust classification performance. Our analysis revealed that 49.58% of Instagram posts and 10.64% of stories contained CTAs, highlighting significant differences in mobilization strategies between these content types. Additionally, we found that FDP and the Greens had the highest prevalence of CTAs in posts, whereas CDU and CSU led in story CTAs.
PianoMime: Learning a Generalist, Dexterous Piano Player from Internet Demonstrations
In this work, we introduce PianoMime, a framework for training a piano-playing agent using internet demonstrations. The internet is a promising source of large-scale demonstrations for training our robot agents. In particular, for the case of piano-playing, Youtube is full of videos of professional pianists playing a wide myriad of songs. In our work, we leverage these demonstrations to learn a generalist piano-playing agent capable of playing any arbitrary song. Our framework is divided into three parts: a data preparation phase to extract the informative features from the Youtube videos, a policy learning phase to train song-specific expert policies from the demonstrations and a policy distillation phase to distil the policies into a single generalist agent. We explore different policy designs to represent the agent and evaluate the influence of the amount of training data on the generalization capability of the agent to novel songs not available in the dataset. We show that we are able to learn a policy with up to 56\% F1 score on unseen songs.
SPARKLE: Enhancing SPARQL Generation with Direct KG Integration in Decoding
Existing KBQA methods have traditionally relied on multi-stage methodologies, involving tasks such as entity linking, subgraph retrieval and query structure generation. However, multi-stage approaches are dependent on the accuracy of preceding steps, leading to cascading errors and increased inference time. Although a few studies have explored the use of end-to-end models, they often suffer from lower accuracy and generate inoperative query that is not supported by the underlying data. Furthermore, most prior approaches are limited to the static training data, potentially overlooking the evolving nature of knowledge bases over time. To address these challenges, we present a novel end-to-end natural language to SPARQL framework, SPARKLE. Notably SPARKLE leverages the structure of knowledge base directly during the decoding, effectively integrating knowledge into the query generation. Our study reveals that simply referencing knowledge base during inference significantly reduces the occurrence of inexecutable query generations. SPARKLE achieves new state-of-the-art results on SimpleQuestions-Wiki and highest F1 score on LCQuAD 1.0 (among models not using gold entities), while getting slightly lower result on the WebQSP dataset. Finally, we demonstrate SPARKLE's fast inference speed and its ability to adapt when the knowledge base differs between the training and inference stages.
Predicting the duration of traffic incidents for Sydney greater metropolitan area using machine learning methods
This research presents a comprehensive approach to predicting the duration of traffic incidents and classifying them as short-term or long-term across the Sydney Metropolitan Area. Leveraging a dataset that encompasses detailed records of traffic incidents, road network characteristics, and socio-economic indicators, we train and evaluate a variety of advanced machine learning models including Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (GBDT), Random Forest, LightGBM, and XGBoost. The models are assessed using Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) for regression tasks and F1 score for classification tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that XGBoost and LightGBM outperform conventional models with XGBoost achieving the lowest RMSE of 33.7 for predicting incident duration and highest classification F1 score of 0.62 for a 30-minute duration threshold. For classification, the 30-minute threshold balances performance with 70.84% short-term duration classification accuracy and 62.72% long-term duration classification accuracy. Feature importance analysis, employing both tree split counts and SHAP values, identifies the number of affected lanes, traffic volume, and types of primary and secondary vehicles as the most influential features. The proposed methodology not only achieves high predictive accuracy but also provides stakeholders with vital insights into factors contributing to incident durations. These insights enable more informed decision-making for traffic management and response strategies. The code is available by the link: https://github.com/Future-Mobility-Lab/SydneyIncidents
UniBridge: A Unified Approach to Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning for Low-Resource Languages
In this paper, we introduce UniBridge (Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning with Optimized Embeddings and Vocabulary), a comprehensive approach developed to improve the effectiveness of Cross-Lingual Transfer Learning, particularly in languages with limited resources. Our approach tackles two essential elements of a language model: the initialization of embeddings and the optimal vocabulary size. Specifically, we propose a novel embedding initialization method that leverages both lexical and semantic alignment for a language. In addition, we present a method for systematically searching for the optimal vocabulary size, ensuring a balance between model complexity and linguistic coverage. Our experiments across multilingual datasets show that our approach greatly improves the F1-Score in several languages. UniBridge is a robust and adaptable solution for cross-lingual systems in various languages, highlighting the significance of initializing embeddings and choosing the right vocabulary size in cross-lingual environments.
Enhancing Knowledge Retrieval with In-Context Learning and Semantic Search through Generative AI
Retrieving and extracting knowledge from extensive research documents and large databases presents significant challenges for researchers, students, and professionals in today's information-rich era. Existing retrieval systems, which rely on general-purpose Large Language Models (LLMs), often fail to provide accurate responses to domain-specific inquiries. Additionally, the high cost of pretraining or fine-tuning LLMs for specific domains limits their widespread adoption. To address these limitations, we propose a novel methodology that combines the generative capabilities of LLMs with the fast and accurate retrieval capabilities of vector databases. This advanced retrieval system can efficiently handle both tabular and non-tabular data, understand natural language user queries, and retrieve relevant information without fine-tuning. The developed model, Generative Text Retrieval (GTR), is adaptable to both unstructured and structured data with minor refinement. GTR was evaluated on both manually annotated and public datasets, achieving over 90% accuracy and delivering truthful outputs in 87% of cases. Our model achieved state-of-the-art performance with a Rouge-L F1 score of 0.98 on the MSMARCO dataset. The refined model, Generative Tabular Text Retrieval (GTR-T), demonstrated its efficiency in large database querying, achieving an Execution Accuracy (EX) of 0.82 and an Exact-Set-Match (EM) accuracy of 0.60 on the Spider dataset, using an open-source LLM. These efforts leverage Generative AI and In-Context Learning to enhance human-text interaction and make advanced AI capabilities more accessible. By integrating robust retrieval systems with powerful LLMs, our approach aims to democratize access to sophisticated AI tools, improving the efficiency, accuracy, and scalability of AI-driven information retrieval and database querying.
Lane2Seq: Towards Unified Lane Detection via Sequence Generation
In this paper, we present a novel sequence generation-based framework for lane detection, called Lane2Seq. It unifies various lane detection formats by casting lane detection as a sequence generation task. This is different from previous lane detection methods, which depend on well-designed task-specific head networks and corresponding loss functions. Lane2Seq only adopts a plain transformer-based encoder-decoder architecture with a simple cross-entropy loss. Additionally, we propose a new multi-format model tuning based on reinforcement learning to incorporate the task-specific knowledge into Lane2Seq. Experimental results demonstrate that such a simple sequence generation paradigm not only unifies lane detection but also achieves competitive performance on benchmarks. For example, Lane2Seq gets 97.95\% and 97.42\% F1 score on Tusimple and LLAMAS datasets, establishing a new state-of-the-art result for two benchmarks.
APT-Pipe: A Prompt-Tuning Tool for Social Data Annotation using ChatGPT
Recent research has highlighted the potential of LLM applications, like ChatGPT, for performing label annotation on social computing text. However, it is already well known that performance hinges on the quality of the input prompts. To address this, there has been a flurry of research into prompt tuning -- techniques and guidelines that attempt to improve the quality of prompts. Yet these largely rely on manual effort and prior knowledge of the dataset being annotated. To address this limitation, we propose APT-Pipe, an automated prompt-tuning pipeline. APT-Pipe aims to automatically tune prompts to enhance ChatGPT's text classification performance on any given dataset. We implement APT-Pipe and test it across twelve distinct text classification datasets. We find that prompts tuned by APT-Pipe help ChatGPT achieve higher weighted F1-score on nine out of twelve experimented datasets, with an improvement of 7.01% on average. We further highlight APT-Pipe's flexibility as a framework by showing how it can be extended to support additional tuning mechanisms.
Calibrated Seq2seq Models for Efficient and Generalizable Ultra-fine Entity Typing
Ultra-fine entity typing plays a crucial role in information extraction by predicting fine-grained semantic types for entity mentions in text. However, this task poses significant challenges due to the massive number of entity types in the output space. The current state-of-the-art approaches, based on standard multi-label classifiers or cross-encoder models, suffer from poor generalization performance or inefficient inference. In this paper, we present CASENT, a seq2seq model designed for ultra-fine entity typing that predicts ultra-fine types with calibrated confidence scores. Our model takes an entity mention as input and employs constrained beam search to generate multiple types autoregressively. The raw sequence probabilities associated with the predicted types are then transformed into confidence scores using a novel calibration method. We conduct extensive experiments on the UFET dataset which contains over 10k types. Our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art in terms of F1 score and calibration error, while achieving an inference speedup of over 50 times. Additionally, we demonstrate the generalization capabilities of our model by evaluating it in zero-shot and few-shot settings on five specialized domain entity typing datasets that are unseen during training. Remarkably, our model outperforms large language models with 10 times more parameters in the zero-shot setting, and when fine-tuned on 50 examples, it significantly outperforms ChatGPT on all datasets. Our code, models and demo are available at https://github.com/yanlinf/CASENT.
Multi-label Text Classification using GloVe and Neural Network Models
This study addresses the challenges of multi-label text classification. The difficulties arise from imbalanced data sets, varied text lengths, and numerous subjective feature labels. Existing solutions include traditional machine learning and deep neural networks for predictions. However, both approaches have their limitations. Traditional machine learning often overlooks the associations between words, while deep neural networks, despite their better classification performance, come with increased training complexity and time. This paper proposes a method utilizing the bag-of-words model approach based on the GloVe model and the CNN-BiLSTM network. The principle is to use the word vector matrix trained by the GloVe model as the input for the text embedding layer. Given that the GloVe model requires no further training, the neural network model can be trained more efficiently. The method achieves an accuracy rate of 87.26% on the test set and an F1 score of 0.8737, showcasing promising results.
AMuRD: Annotated Multilingual Receipts Dataset for Cross-lingual Key Information Extraction and Classification
Key information extraction involves recognizing and extracting text from scanned receipts, enabling retrieval of essential content, and organizing it into structured documents. This paper presents a novel multilingual dataset for receipt extraction, addressing key challenges in information extraction and item classification. The dataset comprises 47,720 samples, including annotations for item names, attributes like (price, brand, etc.), and classification into 44 product categories. We introduce the InstructLLaMA approach, achieving an F1 score of 0.76 and an accuracy of 0.68 for key information extraction and item classification. We provide code, datasets, and checkpoints.\url{https://github.com/Update-For-Integrated-Business-AI/AMuRD}.
Improving Information Extraction on Business Documents with Specific Pre-Training Tasks
Transformer-based Language Models are widely used in Natural Language Processing related tasks. Thanks to their pre-training, they have been successfully adapted to Information Extraction in business documents. However, most pre-training tasks proposed in the literature for business documents are too generic and not sufficient to learn more complex structures. In this paper, we use LayoutLM, a language model pre-trained on a collection of business documents, and introduce two new pre-training tasks that further improve its capacity to extract relevant information. The first is aimed at better understanding the complex layout of documents, and the second focuses on numeric values and their order of magnitude. These tasks force the model to learn better-contextualized representations of the scanned documents. We further introduce a new post-processing algorithm to decode BIESO tags in Information Extraction that performs better with complex entities. Our method significantly improves extraction performance on both public (from 93.88 to 95.50 F1 score) and private (from 84.35 to 84.84 F1 score) datasets composed of expense receipts, invoices, and purchase orders.
InstructUIE: Multi-task Instruction Tuning for Unified Information Extraction
Large language models have unlocked strong multi-task capabilities from reading instructive prompts. However, recent studies have shown that existing large models still have difficulty with information extraction tasks. For example, gpt-3.5-turbo achieved an F1 score of 18.22 on the Ontonotes dataset, which is significantly lower than the state-of-the-art performance. In this paper, we propose InstructUIE, a unified information extraction framework based on instruction tuning, which can uniformly model various information extraction tasks and capture the inter-task dependency. To validate the proposed method, we introduce IE INSTRUCTIONS, a benchmark of 32 diverse information extraction datasets in a unified text-to-text format with expert-written instructions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves comparable performance to Bert in supervised settings and significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art and gpt3.5 in zero-shot settings.
An Automatic SOAP Classification System Using Weakly Supervision And Transfer Learning
In this paper, we introduce a comprehensive framework for developing a machine learning-based SOAP (Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan) classification system without manually SOAP annotated training data or with less manually SOAP annotated training data. The system is composed of the following two parts: 1) Data construction, 2) A neural network-based SOAP classifier, and 3) Transfer learning framework. In data construction, since a manual construction of a large size training dataset is expensive, we propose a rule-based weak labeling method utilizing the structured information of an EHR note. Then, we present a SOAP classifier composed of a pre-trained language model and bi-directional long-short term memory with conditional random field (Bi-LSTM-CRF). Finally, we propose a transfer learning framework that re-uses the trained parameters of the SOAP classifier trained with the weakly labeled dataset for datasets collected from another hospital. The proposed weakly label-based learning model successfully performed SOAP classification (89.99 F1-score) on the notes collected from the target hospital. Otherwise, in the notes collected from other hospitals and departments, the performance dramatically decreased. Meanwhile, we verified that the transfer learning framework is advantageous for inter-hospital adaptation of the model increasing the models' performance in every cases. In particular, the transfer learning approach was more efficient when the manually annotated data size was smaller. We showed that SOAP classification models trained with our weakly labeling algorithm can perform SOAP classification without manually annotated data on the EHR notes from the same hospital. The transfer learning framework helps SOAP classification model's inter-hospital migration with a minimal size of the manually annotated dataset.
Playing Technique Detection by Fusing Note Onset Information in Guzheng Performance
The Guzheng is a kind of traditional Chinese instruments with diverse playing techniques. Instrument playing techniques (IPT) play an important role in musical performance. However, most of the existing works for IPT detection show low efficiency for variable-length audio and provide no assurance in the generalization as they rely on a single sound bank for training and testing. In this study, we propose an end-to-end Guzheng playing technique detection system using Fully Convolutional Networks that can be applied to variable-length audio. Because each Guzheng playing technique is applied to a note, a dedicated onset detector is trained to divide an audio into several notes and its predictions are fused with frame-wise IPT predictions. During fusion, we add the IPT predictions frame by frame inside each note and get the IPT with the highest probability within each note as the final output of that note. We create a new dataset named GZ_IsoTech from multiple sound banks and real-world recordings for Guzheng performance analysis. Our approach achieves 87.97% in frame-level accuracy and 80.76% in note-level F1-score, outperforming existing works by a large margin, which indicates the effectiveness of our proposed method in IPT detection.
Multi-Task Text Classification using Graph Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Low Resource Language
Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) have achieved state-of-art results on single text classification tasks like sentiment analysis, emotion detection, etc. However, the performance is achieved by testing and reporting on resource-rich languages like English. Applying GCN for multi-task text classification is an unexplored area. Moreover, training a GCN or adopting an English GCN for Indian languages is often limited by data availability, rich morphological variation, syntax, and semantic differences. In this paper, we study the use of GCN for the Telugu language in single and multi-task settings for four natural language processing (NLP) tasks, viz. sentiment analysis (SA), emotion identification (EI), hate-speech (HS), and sarcasm detection (SAR). In order to evaluate the performance of GCN with one of the Indian languages, Telugu, we analyze the GCN based models with extensive experiments on four downstream tasks. In addition, we created an annotated Telugu dataset, TEL-NLP, for the four NLP tasks. Further, we propose a supervised graph reconstruction method, Multi-Task Text GCN (MT-Text GCN) on the Telugu that leverages to simultaneously (i) learn the low-dimensional word and sentence graph embeddings from word-sentence graph reconstruction using graph autoencoder (GAE) and (ii) perform multi-task text classification using these latent sentence graph embeddings. We argue that our proposed MT-Text GCN achieves significant improvements on TEL-NLP over existing Telugu pretrained word embeddings, and multilingual pretrained Transformer models: mBERT, and XLM-R. On TEL-NLP, we achieve a high F1-score for four NLP tasks: SA (0.84), EI (0.55), HS (0.83) and SAR (0.66). Finally, we show our model's quantitative and qualitative analysis on the four NLP tasks in Telugu.
Grounding Dialogue Systems via Knowledge Graph Aware Decoding with Pre-trained Transformers
Generating knowledge grounded responses in both goal and non-goal oriented dialogue systems is an important research challenge. Knowledge Graphs (KG) can be viewed as an abstraction of the real world, which can potentially facilitate a dialogue system to produce knowledge grounded responses. However, integrating KGs into the dialogue generation process in an end-to-end manner is a non-trivial task. This paper proposes a novel architecture for integrating KGs into the response generation process by training a BERT model that learns to answer using the elements of the KG (entities and relations) in a multi-task, end-to-end setting. The k-hop subgraph of the KG is incorporated into the model during training and inference using Graph Laplacian. Empirical evaluation suggests that the model achieves better knowledge groundedness (measured via Entity F1 score) compared to other state-of-the-art models for both goal and non-goal oriented dialogues.
Simpson's Bias in NLP Training
In most machine learning tasks, we evaluate a model M on a given data population S by measuring a population-level metric F(S;M). Examples of such evaluation metric F include precision/recall for (binary) recognition, the F1 score for multi-class classification, and the BLEU metric for language generation. On the other hand, the model M is trained by optimizing a sample-level loss G(S_t;M) at each learning step t, where S_t is a subset of S (a.k.a. the mini-batch). Popular choices of G include cross-entropy loss, the Dice loss, and sentence-level BLEU scores. A fundamental assumption behind this paradigm is that the mean value of the sample-level loss G, if averaged over all possible samples, should effectively represent the population-level metric F of the task, such as, that E[ G(S_t;M) ] approx F(S;M). In this paper, we systematically investigate the above assumption in several NLP tasks. We show, both theoretically and experimentally, that some popular designs of the sample-level loss G may be inconsistent with the true population-level metric F of the task, so that models trained to optimize the former can be substantially sub-optimal to the latter, a phenomenon we call it, Simpson's bias, due to its deep connections with the classic paradox known as Simpson's reversal paradox in statistics and social sciences.
Language Detection Engine for Multilingual Texting on Mobile Devices
More than 2 billion mobile users worldwide type in multiple languages in the soft keyboard. On a monolingual keyboard, 38% of falsely auto-corrected words are valid in another language. This can be easily avoided by detecting the language of typed words and then validating it in its respective language. Language detection is a well-known problem in natural language processing. In this paper, we present a fast, light-weight and accurate Language Detection Engine (LDE) for multilingual typing that dynamically adapts to user intended language in real-time. We propose a novel approach where the fusion of character N-gram model and logistic regression based selector model is used to identify the language. Additionally, we present a unique method of reducing the inference time significantly by parameter reduction technique. We also discuss various optimizations fabricated across LDE to resolve ambiguity in input text among the languages with the same character pattern. Our method demonstrates an average accuracy of 94.5% for Indian languages in Latin script and that of 98% for European languages on the code-switched data. This model outperforms fastText by 60.39% and ML-Kit by 23.67% in F1 score for European languages. LDE is faster on mobile device with an average inference time of 25.91 microseconds.
Fast meningioma segmentation in T1-weighted MRI volumes using a lightweight 3D deep learning architecture
Automatic and consistent meningioma segmentation in T1-weighted MRI volumes and corresponding volumetric assessment is of use for diagnosis, treatment planning, and tumor growth evaluation. In this paper, we optimized the segmentation and processing speed performances using a large number of both surgically treated meningiomas and untreated meningiomas followed at the outpatient clinic. We studied two different 3D neural network architectures: (i) a simple encoder-decoder similar to a 3D U-Net, and (ii) a lightweight multi-scale architecture (PLS-Net). In addition, we studied the impact of different training schemes. For the validation studies, we used 698 T1-weighted MR volumes from St. Olav University Hospital, Trondheim, Norway. The models were evaluated in terms of detection accuracy, segmentation accuracy and training/inference speed. While both architectures reached a similar Dice score of 70% on average, the PLS-Net was more accurate with an F1-score of up to 88%. The highest accuracy was achieved for the largest meningiomas. Speed-wise, the PLS-Net architecture tended to converge in about 50 hours while 130 hours were necessary for U-Net. Inference with PLS-Net takes less than a second on GPU and about 15 seconds on CPU. Overall, with the use of mixed precision training, it was possible to train competitive segmentation models in a relatively short amount of time using the lightweight PLS-Net architecture. In the future, the focus should be brought toward the segmentation of small meningiomas (less than 2ml) to improve clinical relevance for automatic and early diagnosis as well as speed of growth estimates.
Toxic Language Detection in Social Media for Brazilian Portuguese: New Dataset and Multilingual Analysis
Hate speech and toxic comments are a common concern of social media platform users. Although these comments are, fortunately, the minority in these platforms, they are still capable of causing harm. Therefore, identifying these comments is an important task for studying and preventing the proliferation of toxicity in social media. Previous work in automatically detecting toxic comments focus mainly in English, with very few work in languages like Brazilian Portuguese. In this paper, we propose a new large-scale dataset for Brazilian Portuguese with tweets annotated as either toxic or non-toxic or in different types of toxicity. We present our dataset collection and annotation process, where we aimed to select candidates covering multiple demographic groups. State-of-the-art BERT models were able to achieve 76% macro-F1 score using monolingual data in the binary case. We also show that large-scale monolingual data is still needed to create more accurate models, despite recent advances in multilingual approaches. An error analysis and experiments with multi-label classification show the difficulty of classifying certain types of toxic comments that appear less frequently in our data and highlights the need to develop models that are aware of different categories of toxicity.
KUISAIL at SemEval-2020 Task 12: BERT-CNN for Offensive Speech Identification in Social Media
In this paper, we describe our approach to utilize pre-trained BERT models with Convolutional Neural Networks for sub-task A of the Multilingual Offensive Language Identification shared task (OffensEval 2020), which is a part of the SemEval 2020. We show that combining CNN with BERT is better than using BERT on its own, and we emphasize the importance of utilizing pre-trained language models for downstream tasks. Our system, ranked 4th with macro averaged F1-Score of 0.897 in Arabic, 4th with score of 0.843 in Greek, and 3rd with score of 0.814 in Turkish. Additionally, we present ArabicBERT, a set of pre-trained transformer language models for Arabic that we share with the community.
A Supervised Word Alignment Method based on Cross-Language Span Prediction using Multilingual BERT
We present a novel supervised word alignment method based on cross-language span prediction. We first formalize a word alignment problem as a collection of independent predictions from a token in the source sentence to a span in the target sentence. As this is equivalent to a SQuAD v2.0 style question answering task, we then solve this problem by using multilingual BERT, which is fine-tuned on a manually created gold word alignment data. We greatly improved the word alignment accuracy by adding the context of the token to the question. In the experiments using five word alignment datasets among Chinese, Japanese, German, Romanian, French, and English, we show that the proposed method significantly outperformed previous supervised and unsupervised word alignment methods without using any bitexts for pretraining. For example, we achieved an F1 score of 86.7 for the Chinese-English data, which is 13.3 points higher than the previous state-of-the-art supervised methods.
Benchmarking datasets for Anomaly-based Network Intrusion Detection: KDD CUP 99 alternatives
Machine Learning has been steadily gaining traction for its use in Anomaly-based Network Intrusion Detection Systems (A-NIDS). Research into this domain is frequently performed using the KDD~CUP~99 dataset as a benchmark. Several studies question its usability while constructing a contemporary NIDS, due to the skewed response distribution, non-stationarity, and failure to incorporate modern attacks. In this paper, we compare the performance for KDD-99 alternatives when trained using classification models commonly found in literature: Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, Decision Tree, Random Forest, Naive Bayes and K-Means. Applying the SMOTE oversampling technique and random undersampling, we create a balanced version of NSL-KDD and prove that skewed target classes in KDD-99 and NSL-KDD hamper the efficacy of classifiers on minority classes (U2R and R2L), leading to possible security risks. We explore UNSW-NB15, a modern substitute to KDD-99 with greater uniformity of pattern distribution. We benchmark this dataset before and after SMOTE oversampling to observe the effect on minority performance. Our results indicate that classifiers trained on UNSW-NB15 match or better the Weighted F1-Score of those trained on NSL-KDD and KDD-99 in the binary case, thus advocating UNSW-NB15 as a modern substitute to these datasets.
Statistical Analysis on E-Commerce Reviews, with Sentiment Classification using Bidirectional Recurrent Neural Network (RNN)
Understanding customer sentiments is of paramount importance in marketing strategies today. Not only will it give companies an insight as to how customers perceive their products and/or services, but it will also give them an idea on how to improve their offers. This paper attempts to understand the correlation of different variables in customer reviews on a women clothing e-commerce, and to classify each review whether it recommends the reviewed product or not and whether it consists of positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. To achieve these goals, we employed univariate and multivariate analyses on dataset features except for review titles and review texts, and we implemented a bidirectional recurrent neural network (RNN) with long-short term memory unit (LSTM) for recommendation and sentiment classification. Results have shown that a recommendation is a strong indicator of a positive sentiment score, and vice-versa. On the other hand, ratings in product reviews are fuzzy indicators of sentiment scores. We also found out that the bidirectional LSTM was able to reach an F1-score of 0.88 for recommendation classification, and 0.93 for sentiment classification.
The Critique of Critique
Critique, as a natural language description for assessing the quality of model-generated content, has been proven to play an essential role in the training, evaluation, and refinement of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, there is a lack of principled understanding in evaluating the quality of the critique itself. In this paper, we pioneer the critique of critique, termed MetaCritique, which is a framework to evaluate the critique from two aspects, i.e., factuality as precision score and comprehensiveness as recall score. We calculate the harmonic mean of precision and recall as the overall rating called F1 score. To obtain a reliable evaluation outcome, we propose Atomic Information Units (AIUs), which describe the critique in a more fine-grained manner. MetaCritique takes each AIU into account and aggregates each AIU's judgment for the overall score. Moreover, given the evaluation process involves intricate reasoning, our MetaCritique provides a natural language rationale to support each judgment. We construct a meta-evaluation dataset containing 300 critiques (2653 AIUs) across four tasks (question answering, reasoning, entailment, and summarization), and we conduct a comparative study to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness. Experiments also show superior critique judged by MetaCritique leads to better refinement, indicating generative artificial intelligence indeed has the potential to be significantly advanced with our MetaCritique. We will release relevant code and meta-evaluation datasets at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/MetaCritique.
REAL: Realism Evaluation of Text-to-Image Generation Models for Effective Data Augmentation
Recent advancements in text-to-image (T2I) generation models have transformed the field. However, challenges persist in generating images that reflect demanding textual descriptions, especially for fine-grained details and unusual relationships. Existing evaluation metrics focus on text-image alignment but overlook the realism of the generated image, which can be crucial for downstream applications like data augmentation in machine learning. To address this gap, we propose REAL, an automatic evaluation framework that assesses realism of T2I outputs along three dimensions: fine-grained visual attributes, unusual visual relationships, and visual styles. REAL achieves a Spearman's rho score of up to 0.62 in alignment with human judgement and demonstrates utility in ranking and filtering augmented data for tasks like image captioning, classification, and visual relationship detection. Empirical results show that high-scoring images evaluated by our metrics improve F1 scores of image classification by up to 11.3%, while low-scoring ones degrade that by up to 4.95%. We benchmark four major T2I models across the realism dimensions, providing insights for future improvements in T2I output realism.
Tutorials on Stance Detection using Pre-trained Language Models: Fine-tuning BERT and Prompting Large Language Models
This paper presents two self-contained tutorials on stance detection in Twitter data using BERT fine-tuning and prompting large language models (LLMs). The first tutorial explains BERT architecture and tokenization, guiding users through training, tuning, and evaluating standard and domain-specific BERT models with HuggingFace transformers. The second focuses on constructing prompts and few-shot examples to elicit stances from ChatGPT and open-source FLAN-T5 without fine-tuning. Various prompting strategies are implemented and evaluated using confusion matrices and macro F1 scores. The tutorials provide code, visualizations, and insights revealing the strengths of few-shot ChatGPT and FLAN-T5 which outperform fine-tuned BERTs. By covering both model fine-tuning and prompting-based techniques in an accessible, hands-on manner, these tutorials enable learners to gain applied experience with cutting-edge methods for stance detection.
$FPDM$: Domain-Specific Fast Pre-training Technique using Document-Level Metadata
Pre-training Transformers has shown promising results on open-domain and domain-specific downstream tasks. However, state-of-the-art Transformers require an unreasonably large amount of pre-training data and compute. In this paper, we propose FPDM (Fast Pre-training Technique using Document Level Metadata), a novel, compute-efficient framework that utilizes Document metadata and Domain-Specific Taxonomy as supervision signals to pre-train transformer encoder on a domain-specific corpus. The main innovation is that during domain-specific pretraining, an open-domain encoder is continually pre-trained using sentence-level embeddings as inputs (to accommodate long documents), however, fine-tuning is done with token-level embeddings as inputs to this encoder. We show that FPDM outperforms several transformer-based baselines in terms of character-level F1 scores and other automated metrics in the Customer Support, Scientific, and Legal Domains, and shows a negligible drop in performance on open-domain benchmarks. Importantly, the novel use of document-level supervision along with sentence-level embedding input for pre-training reduces pre-training compute by around 1,000, 4,500, and 500 times compared to MLM and/or NSP in Customer Support, Scientific, and Legal Domains, respectively. Code and datasets are available at https://bit.ly/FPDMCode.
HaT5: Hate Language Identification using Text-to-Text Transfer Transformer
We investigate the performance of a state-of-the art (SoTA) architecture T5 (available on the SuperGLUE) and compare with it 3 other previous SoTA architectures across 5 different tasks from 2 relatively diverse datasets. The datasets are diverse in terms of the number and types of tasks they have. To improve performance, we augment the training data by using an autoregressive model. We achieve near-SoTA results on a couple of the tasks - macro F1 scores of 81.66% for task A of the OLID 2019 dataset and 82.54% for task A of the hate speech and offensive content (HASOC) 2021 dataset, where SoTA are 82.9% and 83.05%, respectively. We perform error analysis and explain why one of the models (Bi-LSTM) makes the predictions it does by using a publicly available algorithm: Integrated Gradient (IG). This is because explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) is essential for earning the trust of users. The main contributions of this work are the implementation method of T5, which is discussed; the data augmentation using a new conversational AI model checkpoint, which brought performance improvements; and the revelation on the shortcomings of HASOC 2021 dataset. It reveals the difficulties of poor data annotation by using a small set of examples where the T5 model made the correct predictions, even when the ground truth of the test set were incorrect (in our opinion). We also provide our model checkpoints on the HuggingFace hub1 to foster transparency.
ROPE: Reading Order Equivariant Positional Encoding for Graph-based Document Information Extraction
Natural reading orders of words are crucial for information extraction from form-like documents. Despite recent advances in Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) on modeling spatial layout patterns of documents, they have limited ability to capture reading orders of given word-level node representations in a graph. We propose Reading Order Equivariant Positional Encoding (ROPE), a new positional encoding technique designed to apprehend the sequential presentation of words in documents. ROPE generates unique reading order codes for neighboring words relative to the target word given a word-level graph connectivity. We study two fundamental document entity extraction tasks including word labeling and word grouping on the public FUNSD dataset and a large-scale payment dataset. We show that ROPE consistently improves existing GCNs with a margin up to 8.4% F1-score.
Constructive and Toxic Speech Detection for Open-domain Social Media Comments in Vietnamese
The rise of social media has led to the increasing of comments on online forums. However, there still exists invalid comments which are not informative for users. Moreover, those comments are also quite toxic and harmful to people. In this paper, we create a dataset for constructive and toxic speech detection, named UIT-ViCTSD (Vietnamese Constructive and Toxic Speech Detection dataset) with 10,000 human-annotated comments. For these tasks, we propose a system for constructive and toxic speech detection with the state-of-the-art transfer learning model in Vietnamese NLP as PhoBERT. With this system, we obtain F1-scores of 78.59% and 59.40% for classifying constructive and toxic comments, respectively. Besides, we implement various baseline models as traditional Machine Learning and Deep Neural Network-Based models to evaluate the dataset. With the results, we can solve several tasks on the online discussions and develop the framework for identifying constructiveness and toxicity of Vietnamese social media comments automatically.
GuardReasoner-VL: Safeguarding VLMs via Reinforced Reasoning
To enhance the safety of VLMs, this paper introduces a novel reasoning-based VLM guard model dubbed GuardReasoner-VL. The core idea is to incentivize the guard model to deliberatively reason before making moderation decisions via online RL. First, we construct GuardReasoner-VLTrain, a reasoning corpus with 123K samples and 631K reasoning steps, spanning text, image, and text-image inputs. Then, based on it, we cold-start our model's reasoning ability via SFT. In addition, we further enhance reasoning regarding moderation through online RL. Concretely, to enhance diversity and difficulty of samples, we conduct rejection sampling followed by data augmentation via the proposed safety-aware data concatenation. Besides, we use a dynamic clipping parameter to encourage exploration in early stages and exploitation in later stages. To balance performance and token efficiency, we design a length-aware safety reward that integrates accuracy, format, and token cost. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model. Remarkably, it surpasses the runner-up by 19.27% F1 score on average. We release data, code, and models (3B/7B) of GuardReasoner-VL at https://github.com/yueliu1999/GuardReasoner-VL/
Understanding and Predicting Derailment in Toxic Conversations on GitHub
Software projects thrive on the involvement and contributions of individuals from different backgrounds. However, toxic language and negative interactions can hinder the participation and retention of contributors and alienate newcomers. Proactive moderation strategies aim to prevent toxicity from occurring by addressing conversations that have derailed from their intended purpose. This study aims to understand and predict conversational derailment leading to toxicity on GitHub. To facilitate this research, we curate a novel dataset comprising 202 toxic conversations from GitHub with annotated derailment points, along with 696 non-toxic conversations as a baseline. Based on this dataset, we identify unique characteristics of toxic conversations and derailment points, including linguistic markers such as second-person pronouns, negation terms, and tones of Bitter Frustration and Impatience, as well as patterns in conversational dynamics between project contributors and external participants. Leveraging these empirical observations, we propose a proactive moderation approach to automatically detect and address potentially harmful conversations before escalation. By utilizing modern LLMs, we develop a conversation trajectory summary technique that captures the evolution of discussions and identifies early signs of derailment. Our experiments demonstrate that LLM prompts tailored to provide summaries of GitHub conversations achieve 69% F1-Score in predicting conversational derailment, strongly improving over a set of baseline approaches.
A Multimodal Framework for the Assessment of the Schizophrenia Spectrum
This paper presents a novel multimodal framework to distinguish between different symptom classes of subjects in the schizophrenia spectrum and healthy controls using audio, video, and text modalities. We implemented Convolution Neural Network and Long Short Term Memory based unimodal models and experimented on various multimodal fusion approaches to come up with the proposed framework. We utilized a minimal Gated multimodal unit (mGMU) to obtain a bi-modal intermediate fusion of the features extracted from the input modalities before finally fusing the outputs of the bimodal fusions to perform subject-wise classifications. The use of mGMU units in the multimodal framework improved the performance in both weighted f1-score and weighted AUC-ROC scores.
Sea ice detection using concurrent multispectral and synthetic aperture radar imagery
Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery is the primary data type used for sea ice mapping due to its spatio-temporal coverage and the ability to detect sea ice independent of cloud and lighting conditions. Automatic sea ice detection using SAR imagery remains problematic due to the presence of ambiguous signal and noise within the image. Conversely, ice and water are easily distinguishable using multispectral imagery (MSI), but in the polar regions the ocean's surface is often occluded by cloud or the sun may not appear above the horizon for many months. To address some of these limitations, this paper proposes a new tool trained using concurrent multispectral Visible and SAR imagery for sea Ice Detection (ViSual\_IceD). ViSual\_IceD is a convolution neural network (CNN) that builds on the classic U-Net architecture by containing two parallel encoder stages, enabling the fusion and concatenation of MSI and SAR imagery containing different spatial resolutions. The performance of ViSual\_IceD is compared with U-Net models trained using concatenated MSI and SAR imagery as well as models trained exclusively on MSI or SAR imagery. ViSual\_IceD outperforms the other networks, with a F1 score 1.60\% points higher than the next best network, and results indicate that ViSual\_IceD is selective in the image type it uses during image segmentation. Outputs from ViSual\_IceD are compared to sea ice concentration products derived from the AMSR2 Passive Microwave (PMW) sensor. Results highlight how ViSual\_IceD is a useful tool to use in conjunction with PMW data, particularly in coastal regions. As the spatial-temporal coverage of MSI and SAR imagery continues to increase, ViSual\_IceD provides a new opportunity for robust, accurate sea ice coverage detection in polar regions.
HyperspectralViTs: General Hyperspectral Models for On-board Remote Sensing
On-board processing of hyperspectral data with machine learning models would enable unprecedented amount of autonomy for a wide range of tasks, for example methane detection or mineral identification. This can enable early warning system and could allow new capabilities such as automated scheduling across constellations of satellites. Classical methods suffer from high false positive rates and previous deep learning models exhibit prohibitive computational requirements. We propose fast and accurate machine learning architectures which support end-to-end training with data of high spectral dimension without relying on hand-crafted products or spectral band compression preprocessing. We evaluate our models on two tasks related to hyperspectral data processing. With our proposed general architectures, we improve the F1 score of the previous methane detection state-of-the-art models by 27% on a newly created synthetic dataset and by 13% on the previously released large benchmark dataset. We also demonstrate that training models on the synthetic dataset improves performance of models finetuned on the dataset of real events by 6.9% in F1 score in contrast with training from scratch. On a newly created dataset for mineral identification, our models provide 3.5% improvement in the F1 score in contrast to the default versions of the models. With our proposed models we improve the inference speed by 85% in contrast to previous classical and deep learning approaches by removing the dependency on classically computed features. With our architecture, one capture from the EMIT sensor can be processed within 30 seconds on realistic proxy of the ION-SCV 004 satellite.
Robust Claim Verification Through Fact Detection
Claim verification can be a challenging task. In this paper, we present a method to enhance the robustness and reasoning capabilities of automated claim verification through the extraction of short facts from evidence. Our novel approach, FactDetect, leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate concise factual statements from evidence and label these facts based on their semantic relevance to the claim and evidence. The generated facts are then combined with the claim and evidence. To train a lightweight supervised model, we incorporate a fact-detection task into the claim verification process as a multitasking approach to improve both performance and explainability. We also show that augmenting FactDetect in the claim verification prompt enhances performance in zero-shot claim verification using LLMs. Our method demonstrates competitive results in the supervised claim verification model by 15% on the F1 score when evaluated for challenging scientific claim verification datasets. We also demonstrate that FactDetect can be augmented with claim and evidence for zero-shot prompting (AugFactDetect) in LLMs for verdict prediction. We show that AugFactDetect outperforms the baseline with statistical significance on three challenging scientific claim verification datasets with an average of 17.3% performance gain compared to the best performing baselines.
Building Efficient and Effective OpenQA Systems for Low-Resource Languages
Question answering (QA) is the task of answering questions posed in natural language with free-form natural language answers extracted from a given passage. In the OpenQA variant, only a question text is given, and the system must retrieve relevant passages from an unstructured knowledge source and use them to provide answers, which is the case in the mainstream QA systems on the Web. QA systems currently are mostly limited to the English language due to the lack of large-scale labeled QA datasets in non-English languages. In this paper, we show that effective, low-cost OpenQA systems can be developed for low-resource contexts. The key ingredients are (1) weak supervision using machine-translated labeled datasets and (2) a relevant unstructured knowledge source in the target language context. Furthermore, we show that only a few hundred gold assessment examples are needed to reliably evaluate these systems. We apply our method to Turkish as a challenging case study, since English and Turkish are typologically very distinct and Turkish has limited resources for QA. We present SQuAD-TR, a machine translation of SQuAD2.0, and we build our OpenQA system by adapting ColBERT-QA and retraining it over Turkish resources and SQuAD-TR using two versions of Wikipedia dumps spanning two years. We obtain a performance improvement of 24-32% in the Exact Match (EM) score and 22-29% in the F1 score compared to the BM25-based and DPR-based baseline QA reader models. Our results show that SQuAD-TR makes OpenQA feasible for Turkish, which we hope encourages researchers to build OpenQA systems in other low-resource languages. We make all the code, models, and the dataset publicly available at https://github.com/boun-tabi/SQuAD-TR.
Semi-supervised learning via DQN for log anomaly detection
Log anomaly detection plays a critical role in ensuring the security and maintenance of modern software systems. At present, the primary approach for detecting anomalies in log data is through supervised anomaly detection. Nonetheless, existing supervised methods heavily rely on labeled data, which can be frequently limited in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a semi-supervised log anomaly detection method that combines the DQN algorithm from deep reinforcement learning, which is called DQNLog. DQNLog leverages a small amount of labeled data and a large-scale unlabeled dataset, effectively addressing the challenges of imbalanced data and limited labeling. This approach not only learns known anomalies by interacting with an environment biased towards anomalies but also discovers unknown anomalies by actively exploring the unlabeled dataset. Additionally, DQNLog incorporates a cross-entropy loss term to prevent model overestimation during Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). Our evaluation on three widely-used datasets demonstrates that DQNLog significantly improves recall rate and F1-score while maintaining precision, validating its practicality.
Generating Medical Prescriptions with Conditional Transformer
Access to real-world medication prescriptions is essential for medical research and healthcare quality improvement. However, access to real medication prescriptions is often limited due to the sensitive nature of the information expressed. Additionally, manually labelling these instructions for training and fine-tuning Natural Language Processing (NLP) models can be tedious and expensive. We introduce a novel task-specific model architecture, Label-To-Text-Transformer (LT3), tailored to generate synthetic medication prescriptions based on provided labels, such as a vocabulary list of medications and their attributes. LT3 is trained on a set of around 2K lines of medication prescriptions extracted from the MIMIC-III database, allowing the model to produce valuable synthetic medication prescriptions. We evaluate LT3's performance by contrasting it with a state-of-the-art Pre-trained Language Model (PLM), T5, analysing the quality and diversity of generated texts. We deploy the generated synthetic data to train the SpacyNER model for the Named Entity Recognition (NER) task over the n2c2-2018 dataset. The experiments show that the model trained on synthetic data can achieve a 96-98\% F1 score at Label Recognition on Drug, Frequency, Route, Strength, and Form. LT3 codes and data will be shared at https://github.com/HECTA-UoM/Label-To-Text-Transformer
Benchmarking Large Language Models on CMExam -- A Comprehensive Chinese Medical Exam Dataset
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have transformed the field of question answering (QA). However, evaluating LLMs in the medical field is challenging due to the lack of standardized and comprehensive datasets. To address this gap, we introduce CMExam, sourced from the Chinese National Medical Licensing Examination. CMExam consists of 60K+ multiple-choice questions for standardized and objective evaluations, as well as solution explanations for model reasoning evaluation in an open-ended manner. For in-depth analyses of LLMs, we invited medical professionals to label five additional question-wise annotations, including disease groups, clinical departments, medical disciplines, areas of competency, and question difficulty levels. Alongside the dataset, we further conducted thorough experiments with representative LLMs and QA algorithms on CMExam. The results show that GPT-4 had the best accuracy of 61.6% and a weighted F1 score of 0.617. These results highlight a great disparity when compared to human accuracy, which stood at 71.6%. For explanation tasks, while LLMs could generate relevant reasoning and demonstrate improved performance after finetuning, they fall short of a desired standard, indicating ample room for improvement. To the best of our knowledge, CMExam is the first Chinese medical exam dataset to provide comprehensive medical annotations. The experiments and findings of LLM evaluation also provide valuable insights into the challenges and potential solutions in developing Chinese medical QA systems and LLM evaluation pipelines. The dataset and relevant code are available at https://github.com/williamliujl/CMExam.
Computational Assessment of Hyperpartisanship in News Titles
We first adopt a human-guided machine learning framework to develop a new dataset for hyperpartisan news title detection with 2,200 manually labeled and 1.8 million machine-labeled titles that were posted from 2014 to the present by nine representative media organizations across three media bias groups - Left, Central, and Right in an active learning manner. The fine-tuned transformer-based language model achieves an overall accuracy of 0.84 and an F1 score of 0.78 on an external validation set. Next, we conduct a computational analysis to quantify the extent and dynamics of partisanship in news titles. While some aspects are as expected, our study reveals new or nuanced differences between the three media groups. We find that overall the Right media tends to use proportionally more hyperpartisan titles. Roughly around the 2016 Presidential Election, the proportions of hyperpartisan titles increased in all media bias groups where the relative increase in the proportion of hyperpartisan titles of the Left media was the most. We identify three major topics including foreign issues, political systems, and societal issues that are suggestive of hyperpartisanship in news titles using logistic regression models and the Shapley values. Through an analysis of the topic distribution, we find that societal issues gradually receive more attention from all media groups. We further apply a lexicon-based language analysis tool to the titles of each topic and quantify the linguistic distance between any pairs of the three media groups. Three distinct patterns are discovered. The Left media is linguistically more different from Central and Right in terms of foreign issues. The linguistic distance between the three media groups becomes smaller over recent years. In addition, a seasonal pattern where linguistic difference is associated with elections is observed for societal issues.
SALSA-Lite: A Fast and Effective Feature for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection with Microphone Arrays
Polyphonic sound event localization and detection (SELD) has many practical applications in acoustic sensing and monitoring. However, the development of real-time SELD has been limited by the demanding computational requirement of most recent SELD systems. In this work, we introduce SALSA-Lite, a fast and effective feature for polyphonic SELD using microphone array inputs. SALSA-Lite is a lightweight variation of a previously proposed SALSA feature for polyphonic SELD. SALSA, which stands for Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram, consists of multichannel log-spectrograms stacked channelwise with the normalized principal eigenvectors of the spectrotemporally corresponding spatial covariance matrices. In contrast to SALSA, which uses eigenvector-based spatial features, SALSA-Lite uses normalized inter-channel phase differences as spatial features, allowing a 30-fold speedup compared to the original SALSA feature. Experimental results on the TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2021 dataset showed that the SALSA-Lite feature achieved competitive performance compared to the full SALSA feature, and significantly outperformed the traditional feature set of multichannel log-mel spectrograms with generalized cross-correlation spectra. Specifically, using SALSA-Lite features increased localization-dependent F1 score and class-dependent localization recall by 15% and 5%, respectively, compared to using multichannel log-mel spectrograms with generalized cross-correlation spectra.
SALSA: Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram Features for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection
Sound event localization and detection (SELD) consists of two subtasks, which are sound event detection and direction-of-arrival estimation. While sound event detection mainly relies on time-frequency patterns to distinguish different sound classes, direction-of-arrival estimation uses amplitude and/or phase differences between microphones to estimate source directions. As a result, it is often difficult to jointly optimize these two subtasks. We propose a novel feature called Spatial cue-Augmented Log-SpectrogrAm (SALSA) with exact time-frequency mapping between the signal power and the source directional cues, which is crucial for resolving overlapping sound sources. The SALSA feature consists of multichannel log-spectrograms stacked along with the normalized principal eigenvector of the spatial covariance matrix at each corresponding time-frequency bin. Depending on the microphone array format, the principal eigenvector can be normalized differently to extract amplitude and/or phase differences between the microphones. As a result, SALSA features are applicable for different microphone array formats such as first-order ambisonics (FOA) and multichannel microphone array (MIC). Experimental results on the TAU-NIGENS Spatial Sound Events 2021 dataset with directional interferences showed that SALSA features outperformed other state-of-the-art features. Specifically, the use of SALSA features in the FOA format increased the F1 score and localization recall by 6% each, compared to the multichannel log-mel spectrograms with intensity vectors. For the MIC format, using SALSA features increased F1 score and localization recall by 16% and 7%, respectively, compared to using multichannel log-mel spectrograms with generalized cross-correlation spectra.
Meningioma segmentation in T1-weighted MRI leveraging global context and attention mechanisms
Meningiomas are the most common type of primary brain tumor, accounting for approximately 30% of all brain tumors. A substantial number of these tumors are never surgically removed but rather monitored over time. Automatic and precise meningioma segmentation is therefore beneficial to enable reliable growth estimation and patient-specific treatment planning. In this study, we propose the inclusion of attention mechanisms over a U-Net architecture: (i) Attention-gated U-Net (AGUNet) and (ii) Dual Attention U-Net (DAUNet), using a 3D MRI volume as input. Attention has the potential to leverage the global context and identify features' relationships across the entire volume. To limit spatial resolution degradation and loss of detail inherent to encoder-decoder architectures, we studied the impact of multi-scale input and deep supervision components. The proposed architectures are trainable end-to-end and each concept can be seamlessly disabled for ablation studies. The validation studies were performed using a 5-fold cross validation over 600 T1-weighted MRI volumes from St. Olavs University Hospital, Trondheim, Norway. For the best performing architecture, an average Dice score of 81.6% was reached for an F1-score of 95.6%. With an almost perfect precision of 98%, meningiomas smaller than 3ml were occasionally missed hence reaching an overall recall of 93%. Leveraging global context from a 3D MRI volume provided the best performances, even if the native volume resolution could not be processed directly. Overall, near-perfect detection was achieved for meningiomas larger than 3ml which is relevant for clinical use. In the future, the use of multi-scale designs and refinement networks should be further investigated to improve the performance. A larger number of cases with meningiomas below 3ml might also be needed to improve the performance for the smallest tumors.
CleanCoNLL: A Nearly Noise-Free Named Entity Recognition Dataset
The CoNLL-03 corpus is arguably the most well-known and utilized benchmark dataset for named entity recognition (NER). However, prior works found significant numbers of annotation errors, incompleteness, and inconsistencies in the data. This poses challenges to objectively comparing NER approaches and analyzing their errors, as current state-of-the-art models achieve F1-scores that are comparable to or even exceed the estimated noise level in CoNLL-03. To address this issue, we present a comprehensive relabeling effort assisted by automatic consistency checking that corrects 7.0% of all labels in the English CoNLL-03. Our effort adds a layer of entity linking annotation both for better explainability of NER labels and as additional safeguard of annotation quality. Our experimental evaluation finds not only that state-of-the-art approaches reach significantly higher F1-scores (97.1%) on our data, but crucially that the share of correct predictions falsely counted as errors due to annotation noise drops from 47% to 6%. This indicates that our resource is well suited to analyze the remaining errors made by state-of-the-art models, and that the theoretical upper bound even on high resource, coarse-grained NER is not yet reached. To facilitate such analysis, we make CleanCoNLL publicly available to the research community.
AWARE-NET: Adaptive Weighted Averaging for Robust Ensemble Network in Deepfake Detection
Deepfake detection has become increasingly important due to the rise of synthetic media, which poses significant risks to digital identity and cyber presence for security and trust. While multiple approaches have improved detection accuracy, challenges remain in achieving consistent performance across diverse datasets and manipulation types. In response, we propose a novel two-tier ensemble framework for deepfake detection based on deep learning that hierarchically combines multiple instances of three state-of-the-art architectures: Xception, Res2Net101, and EfficientNet-B7. Our framework employs a unique approach where each architecture is instantiated three times with different initializations to enhance model diversity, followed by a learnable weighting mechanism that dynamically combines their predictions. Unlike traditional fixed-weight ensembles, our first-tier averages predictions within each architecture family to reduce model variance, while the second tier learns optimal contribution weights through backpropagation, automatically adjusting each architecture's influence based on their detection reliability. Our experiments achieved state-of-the-art intra-dataset performance with AUC scores of 99.22% (FF++) and 100.00% (CelebDF-v2), and F1 scores of 98.06% (FF++) and 99.94% (CelebDF-v2) without augmentation. With augmentation, we achieve AUC scores of 99.47% (FF++) and 100.00% (CelebDF-v2), and F1 scores of 98.43% (FF++) and 99.95% (CelebDF-v2). The framework demonstrates robust cross-dataset generalization, achieving AUC scores of 88.20% and 72.52%, and F1 scores of 93.16% and 80.62% in cross-dataset evaluations.
Familiarity: Better Evaluation of Zero-Shot Named Entity Recognition by Quantifying Label Shifts in Synthetic Training Data
Zero-shot named entity recognition (NER) is the task of detecting named entities of specific types (such as 'Person' or 'Medicine') without any training examples. Current research increasingly relies on large synthetic datasets, automatically generated to cover tens of thousands of distinct entity types, to train zero-shot NER models. However, in this paper, we find that these synthetic datasets often contain entity types that are semantically highly similar to (or even the same as) those in standard evaluation benchmarks. Because of this overlap, we argue that reported F1 scores for zero-shot NER overestimate the true capabilities of these approaches. Further, we argue that current evaluation setups provide an incomplete picture of zero-shot abilities since they do not quantify the label shift (i.e., the similarity of labels) between training and evaluation datasets. To address these issues, we propose Familiarity, a novel metric that captures both the semantic similarity between entity types in training and evaluation, as well as their frequency in the training data, to provide an estimate of label shift. It allows researchers to contextualize reported zero-shot NER scores when using custom synthetic training datasets. Further, it enables researchers to generate evaluation setups of various transfer difficulties for fine-grained analysis of zero-shot NER.
Lbl2Vec: An Embedding-Based Approach for Unsupervised Document Retrieval on Predefined Topics
In this paper, we consider the task of retrieving documents with predefined topics from an unlabeled document dataset using an unsupervised approach. The proposed unsupervised approach requires only a small number of keywords describing the respective topics and no labeled document. Existing approaches either heavily relied on a large amount of additionally encoded world knowledge or on term-document frequencies. Contrariwise, we introduce a method that learns jointly embedded document and word vectors solely from the unlabeled document dataset in order to find documents that are semantically similar to the topics described by the keywords. The proposed method requires almost no text preprocessing but is simultaneously effective at retrieving relevant documents with high probability. When successively retrieving documents on different predefined topics from publicly available and commonly used datasets, we achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve value of 0.95 on one dataset and 0.92 on another. Further, our method can be used for multiclass document classification, without the need to assign labels to the dataset in advance. Compared with an unsupervised classification baseline, we increased F1 scores from 76.6 to 82.7 and from 61.0 to 75.1 on the respective datasets. For easy replication of our approach, we make the developed Lbl2Vec code publicly available as a ready-to-use tool under the 3-Clause BSD license.
Gestalt: a Stacking Ensemble for SQuAD2.0
We propose a deep-learning system -- for the SQuAD2.0 task -- that finds, or indicates the lack of, a correct answer to a question in a context paragraph. Our goal is to learn an ensemble of heterogeneous SQuAD2.0 models that, when blended properly, outperforms the best model in the ensemble per se. We created a stacking ensemble that combines top-N predictions from two models, based on ALBERT and RoBERTa, into a multiclass classification task to pick the best answer out of their predictions. We explored various ensemble configurations, input representations, and model architectures. For evaluation, we examined test-set EM and F1 scores; our best-performing ensemble incorporated a CNN-based meta-model and scored 87.117 and 90.306, respectively -- a relative improvement of 0.55% for EM and 0.61% for F1 scores, compared to the baseline performance of the best model in the ensemble, an ALBERT-based model, at 86.644 for EM and 89.760 for F1.
PadChest: A large chest x-ray image dataset with multi-label annotated reports
We present a labeled large-scale, high resolution chest x-ray dataset for the automated exploration of medical images along with their associated reports. This dataset includes more than 160,000 images obtained from 67,000 patients that were interpreted and reported by radiologists at Hospital San Juan Hospital (Spain) from 2009 to 2017, covering six different position views and additional information on image acquisition and patient demography. The reports were labeled with 174 different radiographic findings, 19 differential diagnoses and 104 anatomic locations organized as a hierarchical taxonomy and mapped onto standard Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) terminology. Of these reports, 27% were manually annotated by trained physicians and the remaining set was labeled using a supervised method based on a recurrent neural network with attention mechanisms. The labels generated were then validated in an independent test set achieving a 0.93 Micro-F1 score. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the largest public chest x-ray database suitable for training supervised models concerning radiographs, and the first to contain radiographic reports in Spanish. The PadChest dataset can be downloaded from http://bimcv.cipf.es/bimcv-projects/padchest/.
A Pointer Network-based Approach for Joint Extraction and Detection of Multi-Label Multi-Class Intents
In task-oriented dialogue systems, intent detection is crucial for interpreting user queries and providing appropriate responses. Existing research primarily addresses simple queries with a single intent, lacking effective systems for handling complex queries with multiple intents and extracting different intent spans. Additionally, there is a notable absence of multilingual, multi-intent datasets. This study addresses three critical tasks: extracting multiple intent spans from queries, detecting multiple intents, and developing a multi-lingual multi-label intent dataset. We introduce a novel multi-label multi-class intent detection dataset (MLMCID-dataset) curated from existing benchmark datasets. We also propose a pointer network-based architecture (MLMCID) to extract intent spans and detect multiple intents with coarse and fine-grained labels in the form of sextuplets. Comprehensive analysis demonstrates the superiority of our pointer network-based system over baseline approaches in terms of accuracy and F1-score across various datasets.
U-MATH: A University-Level Benchmark for Evaluating Mathematical Skills in LLMs
The current evaluation of mathematical skills in LLMs is limited, as existing benchmarks are either relatively small, primarily focus on elementary and high-school problems, or lack diversity in topics. Additionally, the inclusion of visual elements in tasks remains largely under-explored. To address these gaps, we introduce U-MATH, a novel benchmark of 1,100 unpublished open-ended university-level problems sourced from teaching materials. It is balanced across six core subjects, with 20% of multimodal problems. Given the open-ended nature of U-MATH problems, we employ an LLM to judge the correctness of generated solutions. To this end, we release mu-MATH, a dataset to evaluate the LLMs' capabilities in judging solutions. The evaluation of general domain, math-specific, and multimodal LLMs highlights the challenges presented by U-MATH. Our findings reveal that LLMs achieve a maximum accuracy of only 63% on text-based tasks, with even lower 45% on visual problems. The solution assessment proves challenging for LLMs, with the best LLM judge having an F1-score of 80% on mu-MATH.
NU-MCC: Multiview Compressive Coding with Neighborhood Decoder and Repulsive UDF
Remarkable progress has been made in 3D reconstruction from single-view RGB-D inputs. MCC is the current state-of-the-art method in this field, which achieves unprecedented success by combining vision Transformers with large-scale training. However, we identified two key limitations of MCC: 1) The Transformer decoder is inefficient in handling large number of query points; 2) The 3D representation struggles to recover high-fidelity details. In this paper, we propose a new approach called NU-MCC that addresses these limitations. NU-MCC includes two key innovations: a Neighborhood decoder and a Repulsive Unsigned Distance Function (Repulsive UDF). First, our Neighborhood decoder introduces center points as an efficient proxy of input visual features, allowing each query point to only attend to a small neighborhood. This design not only results in much faster inference speed but also enables the exploitation of finer-scale visual features for improved recovery of 3D textures. Second, our Repulsive UDF is a novel alternative to the occupancy field used in MCC, significantly improving the quality of 3D object reconstruction. Compared to standard UDFs that suffer from holes in results, our proposed Repulsive UDF can achieve more complete surface reconstruction. Experimental results demonstrate that NU-MCC is able to learn a strong 3D representation, significantly advancing the state of the art in single-view 3D reconstruction. Particularly, it outperforms MCC by 9.7% in terms of the F1-score on the CO3D-v2 dataset with more than 5x faster running speed.
Mapping the Media Landscape: Predicting Factual Reporting and Political Bias Through Web Interactions
Bias assessment of news sources is paramount for professionals, organizations, and researchers who rely on truthful evidence for information gathering and reporting. While certain bias indicators are discernible from content analysis, descriptors like political bias and fake news pose greater challenges. In this paper, we propose an extension to a recently presented news media reliability estimation method that focuses on modeling outlets and their longitudinal web interactions. Concretely, we assess the classification performance of four reinforcement learning strategies on a large news media hyperlink graph. Our experiments, targeting two challenging bias descriptors, factual reporting and political bias, showed a significant performance improvement at the source media level. Additionally, we validate our methods on the CLEF 2023 CheckThat! Lab challenge, outperforming the reported results in both, F1-score and the official MAE metric. Furthermore, we contribute by releasing the largest annotated dataset of news source media, categorized with factual reporting and political bias labels. Our findings suggest that profiling news media sources based on their hyperlink interactions over time is feasible, offering a bird's-eye view of evolving media landscapes.
Project SHADOW: Symbolic Higher-order Associative Deductive reasoning On Wikidata using LM probing
We introduce SHADOW, a fine-tuned language model trained on an intermediate task using associative deductive reasoning, and measure its performance on a knowledge base construction task using Wikidata triple completion. We evaluate SHADOW on the LM-KBC 2024 challenge and show that it outperforms the baseline solution by 20% with a F1 score of 68.72%.
HarmAug: Effective Data Augmentation for Knowledge Distillation of Safety Guard Models
Safety guard models that detect malicious queries aimed at large language models (LLMs) are essential for ensuring the secure and responsible deployment of LLMs in real-world applications. However, deploying existing safety guard models with billions of parameters alongside LLMs on mobile devices is impractical due to substantial memory requirements and latency. To reduce this cost, we distill a large teacher safety guard model into a smaller one using a labeled dataset of instruction-response pairs with binary harmfulness labels. Due to the limited diversity of harmful instructions in the existing labeled dataset, naively distilled models tend to underperform compared to larger models. To bridge the gap between small and large models, we propose HarmAug, a simple yet effective data augmentation method that involves jailbreaking an LLM and prompting it to generate harmful instructions. Given a prompt such as, "Make a single harmful instruction prompt that would elicit offensive content", we add an affirmative prefix (e.g., "I have an idea for a prompt:") to the LLM's response. This encourages the LLM to continue generating the rest of the response, leading to sampling harmful instructions. Another LLM generates a response to the harmful instruction, and the teacher model labels the instruction-response pair. We empirically show that our HarmAug outperforms other relevant baselines. Moreover, a 435-million-parameter safety guard model trained with HarmAug achieves an F1 score comparable to larger models with over 7 billion parameters, and even outperforms them in AUPRC, while operating at less than 25% of their computational cost.
SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text
We present the Stanford Question Answering Dataset (SQuAD), a new reading comprehension dataset consisting of 100,000+ questions posed by crowdworkers on a set of Wikipedia articles, where the answer to each question is a segment of text from the corresponding reading passage. We analyze the dataset to understand the types of reasoning required to answer the questions, leaning heavily on dependency and constituency trees. We build a strong logistic regression model, which achieves an F1 score of 51.0%, a significant improvement over a simple baseline (20%). However, human performance (86.8%) is much higher, indicating that the dataset presents a good challenge problem for future research. The dataset is freely available at https://stanford-qa.com
MorphBPE: A Morpho-Aware Tokenizer Bridging Linguistic Complexity for Efficient LLM Training Across Morphologies
Tokenization is fundamental to Natural Language Processing (NLP), directly impacting model efficiency and linguistic fidelity. While Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) is widely used in Large Language Models (LLMs), it often disregards morpheme boundaries, leading to suboptimal segmentation, particularly in morphologically rich languages. We introduce MorphBPE, a morphology-aware extension of BPE that integrates linguistic structure into subword tokenization while preserving statistical efficiency. Additionally, we propose two morphology-based evaluation metrics: (i) Morphological Consistency F1-Score, which quantifies the consistency between morpheme sharing and token sharing, contributing to LLM training convergence, and (ii) Morphological Edit Distance, which measures alignment between morphemes and tokens concerning interpretability. Experiments on English, Russian, Hungarian, and Arabic across 300M and 1B parameter LLMs demonstrate that MorphBPE consistently reduces cross-entropy loss, accelerates convergence, and improves morphological alignment scores. Fully compatible with existing LLM pipelines, MorphBPE requires minimal modifications for integration. The MorphBPE codebase and tokenizer playground will be available at: https://github.com/llm-lab-org/MorphBPE and https://tokenizer.llm-lab.org
Advacheck at GenAI Detection Task 1: AI Detection Powered by Domain-Aware Multi-Tasking
The paper describes a system designed by Advacheck team to recognise machine-generated and human-written texts in the monolingual subtask of GenAI Detection Task 1 competition. Our developed system is a multi-task architecture with shared Transformer Encoder between several classification heads. One head is responsible for binary classification between human-written and machine-generated texts, while the other heads are auxiliary multiclass classifiers for texts of different domains from particular datasets. As multiclass heads were trained to distinguish the domains presented in the data, they provide a better understanding of the samples. This approach led us to achieve the first place in the official ranking with 83.07% macro F1-score on the test set and bypass the baseline by 10%. We further study obtained system through ablation, error and representation analyses, finding that multi-task learning outperforms single-task mode and simultaneous tasks form a cluster structure in embeddings space.
MicroNAS: Memory and Latency Constrained Hardware-Aware Neural Architecture Search for Time Series Classification on Microcontrollers
Designing domain specific neural networks is a time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive task. Neural Architecture Search (NAS) exists to simplify domain-specific model development but there is a gap in the literature for time series classification on microcontrollers. Therefore, we adapt the concept of differentiable neural architecture search (DNAS) to solve the time-series classification problem on resource-constrained microcontrollers (MCUs). We introduce MicroNAS, a domain-specific HW-NAS system integration of DNAS, Latency Lookup Tables, dynamic convolutions and a novel search space specifically designed for time-series classification on MCUs. The resulting system is hardware-aware and can generate neural network architectures that satisfy user-defined limits on the execution latency and peak memory consumption. Our extensive studies on different MCUs and standard benchmark datasets demonstrate that MicroNAS finds MCU-tailored architectures that achieve performance (F1-score) near to state-of-the-art desktop models. We also show that our approach is superior in adhering to memory and latency constraints compared to domain-independent NAS baselines such as DARTS.
OUTFOX: LLM-generated Essay Detection through In-context Learning with Adversarially Generated Examples
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved human-level fluency in text generation, making it difficult to distinguish between human-written and LLM-generated texts. This poses a growing risk of misuse of LLMs and demands the development of detectors to identify LLM-generated texts. However, existing detectors lack robustness against attacks: they degrade detection accuracy by simply paraphrasing LLM-generated texts. Furthermore, a malicious user might attempt to deliberately evade the detectors based on detection results, but this has not been assumed in previous studies. In this paper, we propose OUTFOX, a framework that improves the robustness of LLM-generated-text detectors by allowing both the detector and the attacker to consider each other's output. In this framework, the attacker uses the detector's prediction labels as examples for in-context learning and adversarially generates essays that are harder to detect, while the detector uses the adversarially generated essays as examples for in-context learning to learn to detect essays from a strong attacker. Experiments in the domain of student essays show that the proposed detector improves the detection performance on the attacker-generated texts by up to +41.3 points in F1-score. Furthermore, the proposed detector shows a state-of-the-art detection performance: up to 96.9 points in F1-score, beating existing detectors on non-attacked texts. Finally, the proposed attacker drastically degrades the performance of detectors by up to -57.0 points F1-score, massively outperforming the baseline paraphrasing method for evading detection.
Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph
Business Intelligence (BI) is crucial in modern enterprises and billion-dollar business. Traditionally, technical experts like database administrators would manually prepare BI-models (e.g., in star or snowflake schemas) that join tables in data warehouses, before less-technical business users can run analytics using end-user dashboarding tools. However, the popularity of self-service BI (e.g., Tableau and Power-BI) in recent years creates a strong demand for less technical end-users to build BI-models themselves. We develop an Auto-BI system that can accurately predict BI models given a set of input tables, using a principled graph-based optimization problem we propose called k-Min-Cost-Arborescence (k-MCA), which holistically considers both local join prediction and global schema-graph structures, leveraging a graph-theoretical structure called arborescence. While we prove k-MCA is intractable and inapproximate in general, we develop novel algorithms that can solve k-MCA optimally, which is shown to be efficient in practice with sub-second latency and can scale to the largest BI-models we encounter (with close to 100 tables). Auto-BI is rigorously evaluated on a unique dataset with over 100K real BI models we harvested, as well as on 4 popular TPC benchmarks. It is shown to be both efficient and accurate, achieving over 0.9 F1-score on both real and synthetic benchmarks.
BioGPT: Generative Pre-trained Transformer for Biomedical Text Generation and Mining
Pre-trained language models have attracted increasing attention in the biomedical domain, inspired by their great success in the general natural language domain. Among the two main branches of pre-trained language models in the general language domain, i.e., BERT (and its variants) and GPT (and its variants), the first one has been extensively studied in the biomedical domain, such as BioBERT and PubMedBERT. While they have achieved great success on a variety of discriminative downstream biomedical tasks, the lack of generation ability constrains their application scope. In this paper, we propose BioGPT, a domain-specific generative Transformer language model pre-trained on large scale biomedical literature. We evaluate BioGPT on six biomedical NLP tasks and demonstrate that our model outperforms previous models on most tasks. Especially, we get 44.98%, 38.42% and 40.76% F1 score on BC5CDR, KD-DTI and DDI end-to-end relation extraction tasks respectively, and 78.2% accuracy on PubMedQA, creating a new record. Our larger model BioGPT-Large achieves 81.0% on PubMedQA. Our case study on text generation further demonstrates the advantage of BioGPT on biomedical literature to generate fluent descriptions for biomedical terms. Code is available at https://github.com/microsoft/BioGPT.
Harmful Terms and Where to Find Them: Measuring and Modeling Unfavorable Financial Terms and Conditions in Shopping Websites at Scale
Terms and conditions for online shopping websites often contain terms that can have significant financial consequences for customers. Despite their impact, there is currently no comprehensive understanding of the types and potential risks associated with unfavorable financial terms. Furthermore, there are no publicly available detection systems or datasets to systematically identify or mitigate these terms. In this paper, we take the first steps toward solving this problem with three key contributions. First, we introduce TermMiner, an automated data collection and topic modeling pipeline to understand the landscape of unfavorable financial terms. Second, we create ShopTC-100K, a dataset of terms and conditions from shopping websites in the Tranco top 100K list, comprising 1.8 million terms from 8,251 websites. Consequently, we develop a taxonomy of 22 types from 4 categories of unfavorable financial terms -- spanning purchase, post-purchase, account termination, and legal aspects. Third, we build TermLens, an automated detector that uses Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify unfavorable financial terms. Fine-tuned on an annotated dataset, TermLens achieves an F1 score of 94.6\% and a false positive rate of 2.3\% using GPT-4o. When applied to shopping websites from the Tranco top 100K, we find that 42.06\% of these sites contain at least one unfavorable financial term, with such terms being more prevalent on less popular websites. Case studies further highlight the financial risks and customer dissatisfaction associated with unfavorable financial terms, as well as the limitations of existing ecosystem defenses.
GFG -- Gender-Fair Generation: A CALAMITA Challenge
Gender-fair language aims at promoting gender equality by using terms and expressions that include all identities and avoid reinforcing gender stereotypes. Implementing gender-fair strategies is particularly challenging in heavily gender-marked languages, such as Italian. To address this, the Gender-Fair Generation challenge intends to help shift toward gender-fair language in written communication. The challenge, designed to assess and monitor the recognition and generation of gender-fair language in both mono- and cross-lingual scenarios, includes three tasks: (1) the detection of gendered expressions in Italian sentences, (2) the reformulation of gendered expressions into gender-fair alternatives, and (3) the generation of gender-fair language in automatic translation from English to Italian. The challenge relies on three different annotated datasets: the GFL-it corpus, which contains Italian texts extracted from administrative documents provided by the University of Brescia; GeNTE, a bilingual test set for gender-neutral rewriting and translation built upon a subset of the Europarl dataset; and Neo-GATE, a bilingual test set designed to assess the use of non-binary neomorphemes in Italian for both fair formulation and translation tasks. Finally, each task is evaluated with specific metrics: average of F1-score obtained by means of BERTScore computed on each entry of the datasets for task 1, an accuracy measured with a gender-neutral classifier, and a coverage-weighted accuracy for tasks 2 and 3.
Multi-head Span-based Detector for AI-generated Fragments in Scientific Papers
This paper describes a system designed to distinguish between AI-generated and human-written scientific excerpts in the DAGPap24 competition hosted within the Fourth Workshop on Scientific Document Processing. In this competition the task is to find artificially generated token-level text fragments in documents of a scientific domain. Our work focuses on the use of a multi-task learning architecture with two heads. The application of this approach is justified by the specificity of the task, where class spans are continuous over several hundred characters. We considered different encoder variations to obtain a state vector for each token in the sequence, as well as a variation in splitting fragments into tokens to further feed into the input of a transform-based encoder. This approach allows us to achieve a 9% quality improvement relative to the baseline solution score on the development set (from 0.86 to 0.95) using the average macro F1-score, as well as a score of 0.96 on a closed test part of the dataset from the competition.
Large Language Models versus Classical Machine Learning: Performance in COVID-19 Mortality Prediction Using High-Dimensional Tabular Data
Background: This study aimed to evaluate and compare the performance of classical machine learning models (CMLs) and large language models (LLMs) in predicting mortality associated with COVID-19 by utilizing a high-dimensional tabular dataset. Materials and Methods: We analyzed data from 9,134 COVID-19 patients collected across four hospitals. Seven CML models, including XGBoost and random forest (RF), were trained and evaluated. The structured data was converted into text for zero-shot classification by eight LLMs, including GPT-4 and Mistral-7b. Additionally, Mistral-7b was fine-tuned using the QLoRA approach to enhance its predictive capabilities. Results: Among the CML models, XGBoost and RF achieved the highest accuracy, with F1 scores of 0.87 for internal validation and 0.83 for external validation. In the LLM category, GPT-4 was the top performer with an F1 score of 0.43. Fine-tuning Mistral-7b significantly improved its recall from 1% to 79%, resulting in an F1 score of 0.74, which was stable during external validation. Conclusion: While LLMs show moderate performance in zero-shot classification, fine-tuning can significantly enhance their effectiveness, potentially aligning them closer to CML models. However, CMLs still outperform LLMs in high-dimensional tabular data tasks.
Implicit Sentiment Analysis Based on Chain of Thought Prompting
Implicit Sentiment Analysis (ISA) is a crucial research area in natural language processing. Inspired by the idea of large language model Chain of Thought (CoT), this paper introduces a Sentiment Analysis of Thinking (SAoT) framework. The framework first analyzes the implicit aspects and opinions in the text using common sense and thinking chain capabilities. Then, it reflects on the process of implicit sentiment analysis and finally deduces the polarity of sentiment. The model is evaluated on the SemEval 2014 dataset, consisting of 1120 restaurant reviews and 638 laptop reviews. The experimental results demonstrate that the utilization of the ERNIE-Bot-4+SAoT model yields a notable performance improvement. Specifically, on the restaurant dataset, the F1 score reaches 75.27, accompanied by an ISA score of 66.29. Similarly, on the computer dataset, the F1 score achieves 76.50, while the ISA score amounts to 73.46. Comparatively, the ERNIE-Bot-4+SAoT model surpasses the BERTAsp + SCAPt baseline by an average margin of 47.99%.
AGB-DE: A Corpus for the Automated Legal Assessment of Clauses in German Consumer Contracts
Legal tasks and datasets are often used as benchmarks for the capabilities of language models. However, openly available annotated datasets are rare. In this paper, we introduce AGB-DE, a corpus of 3,764 clauses from German consumer contracts that have been annotated and legally assessed by legal experts. Together with the data, we present a first baseline for the task of detecting potentially void clauses, comparing the performance of an SVM baseline with three fine-tuned open language models and the performance of GPT-3.5. Our results show the challenging nature of the task, with no approach exceeding an F1-score of 0.54. While the fine-tuned models often performed better with regard to precision, GPT-3.5 outperformed the other approaches with regard to recall. An analysis of the errors indicates that one of the main challenges could be the correct interpretation of complex clauses, rather than the decision boundaries of what is permissible and what is not.
Automatic Essay Multi-dimensional Scoring with Fine-tuning and Multiple Regression
Automated essay scoring (AES) involves predicting a score that reflects the writing quality of an essay. Most existing AES systems produce only a single overall score. However, users and L2 learners expect scores across different dimensions (e.g., vocabulary, grammar, coherence) for English essays in real-world applications. To address this need, we have developed two models that automatically score English essays across multiple dimensions by employing fine-tuning and other strategies on two large datasets. The results demonstrate that our systems achieve impressive performance in evaluation using three criteria: precision, F1 score, and Quadratic Weighted Kappa. Furthermore, our system outperforms existing methods in overall scoring.
SEntFiN 1.0: Entity-Aware Sentiment Analysis for Financial News
Fine-grained financial sentiment analysis on news headlines is a challenging task requiring human-annotated datasets to achieve high performance. Limited studies have tried to address the sentiment extraction task in a setting where multiple entities are present in a news headline. In an effort to further research in this area, we make publicly available SEntFiN 1.0, a human-annotated dataset of 10,753 news headlines with entity-sentiment annotations, of which 2,847 headlines contain multiple entities, often with conflicting sentiments. We augment our dataset with a database of over 1,000 financial entities and their various representations in news media amounting to over 5,000 phrases. We propose a framework that enables the extraction of entity-relevant sentiments using a feature-based approach rather than an expression-based approach. For sentiment extraction, we utilize 12 different learning schemes utilizing lexicon-based and pre-trained sentence representations and five classification approaches. Our experiments indicate that lexicon-based n-gram ensembles are above par with pre-trained word embedding schemes such as GloVe. Overall, RoBERTa and finBERT (domain-specific BERT) achieve the highest average accuracy of 94.29% and F1-score of 93.27%. Further, using over 210,000 entity-sentiment predictions, we validate the economic effect of sentiments on aggregate market movements over a long duration.
Degradation Prediction of Semiconductor Lasers using Conditional Variational Autoencoder
Semiconductor lasers have been rapidly evolving to meet the demands of next-generation optical networks. This imposes much more stringent requirements on the laser reliability, which are dominated by degradation mechanisms (e.g., sudden degradation) limiting the semiconductor laser lifetime. Physics-based approaches are often used to characterize the degradation behavior analytically, yet explicit domain knowledge and accurate mathematical models are required. Building such models can be very challenging due to a lack of a full understanding of the complex physical processes inducing the degradation under various operating conditions. To overcome the aforementioned limitations, we propose a new data-driven approach, extracting useful insights from the operational monitored data to predict the degradation trend without requiring any specific knowledge or using any physical model. The proposed approach is based on an unsupervised technique, a conditional variational autoencoder, and validated using vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) and tunable edge emitting laser reliability data. The experimental results confirm that our model (i) achieves a good degradation prediction and generalization performance by yielding an F1 score of 95.3%, (ii) outperforms several baseline ML based anomaly detection techniques, and (iii) helps to shorten the aging tests by early predicting the failed devices before the end of the test and thereby saving costs
Am I eligible? Natural Language Inference for Clinical Trial Patient Recruitment: the Patient's Point of View
Recruiting patients to participate in clinical trials can be challenging and time-consuming. Usually, participation in a clinical trial is initiated by a healthcare professional and proposed to the patient. Promoting clinical trials directly to patients via online recruitment might help to reach them more efficiently. In this study, we address the case where a patient is initiating their own recruitment process and wants to determine whether they are eligible for a given clinical trial, using their own language to describe their medical profile. To study whether this creates difficulties in the patient trial matching process, we design a new dataset and task, Natural Language Inference for Patient Recruitment (NLI4PR), in which patient language profiles must be matched to clinical trials. We create it by adapting the TREC 2022 Clinical Trial Track dataset, which provides patients' medical profiles, and rephrasing them manually using patient language. We also use the associated clinical trial reports where the patients are either eligible or excluded. We prompt several open-source Large Language Models on our task and achieve from 56.5 to 71.8 of F1 score using patient language, against 64.7 to 73.1 for the same task using medical language. When using patient language, we observe only a small loss in performance for the best model, suggesting that having the patient as a starting point could be adopted to help recruit patients for clinical trials. The corpus and code bases are all freely available on our Github and HuggingFace repositories.
VoiceGRPO: Modern MoE Transformers with Group Relative Policy Optimization GRPO for AI Voice Health Care Applications on Voice Pathology Detection
This research introduces a novel AI techniques as Mixture-of-Experts Transformers with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) for voice health care applications on voice pathology detection. With the architectural innovations, we adopt advanced training paradigms inspired by reinforcement learning, namely Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Group-wise Regularized Policy Optimization (GRPO), to enhance model stability and performance. Experiments conducted on a synthetically generated voice pathology dataset demonstrate that our proposed models significantly improve diagnostic accuracy, F1 score, and ROC-AUC compared to conventional approaches. These findings underscore the potential of integrating transformer architectures with novel training strategies to advance automated voice pathology detection and ultimately contribute to more effective healthcare delivery. The code we used to train and evaluate our models is available at https://github.com/enkhtogtokh/voicegrpo
Problem Solved? Information Extraction Design Space for Layout-Rich Documents using LLMs
This paper defines and explores the design space for information extraction (IE) from layout-rich documents using large language models (LLMs). The three core challenges of layout-aware IE with LLMs are 1) data structuring, 2) model engagement, and 3) output refinement. Our study delves into the sub-problems within these core challenges, such as input representation, chunking, prompting, and selection of LLMs and multimodal models. It examines the outcomes of different design choices through a new layout-aware IE test suite, benchmarking against the state-of-art (SoA) model LayoutLMv3. The results show that the configuration from one-factor-at-a-time (OFAT) trial achieves near-optimal results with 14.1 points F1-score gain from the baseline model, while full factorial exploration yields only a slightly higher 15.1 points gain at around 36x greater token usage. We demonstrate that well-configured general-purpose LLMs can match the performance of specialized models, providing a cost-effective alternative. Our test-suite is freely available at https://github.com/gayecolakoglu/LayIE-LLM.
TLOB: A Novel Transformer Model with Dual Attention for Stock Price Trend Prediction with Limit Order Book Data
Stock Price Trend Prediction (SPTP) based on Limit Order Book (LOB) data is a fundamental challenge in financial markets. Despite advances in deep learning, existing models fail to generalize across different market conditions and struggle to reliably predict short-term trends. Surprisingly, by adapting a simple MLP-based architecture to LOB, we show that we surpass SoTA performance; thus, challenging the necessity of complex architectures. Unlike past work that shows robustness issues, we propose TLOB, a transformer-based model that uses a dual attention mechanism to capture spatial and temporal dependencies in LOB data. This allows it to adaptively focus on the market microstructure, making it particularly effective for longer-horizon predictions and volatile market conditions. We also introduce a new labeling method that improves on previous ones, removing the horizon bias. We evaluate TLOB's effectiveness using the established FI-2010 benchmark, which exceeds the state-of-the-art by an average of 3.7 F1-score(\%). Additionally, TLOB shows improvements on Tesla and Intel with a 1.3 and 7.7 increase in F1-score(\%), respectively. Additionally, we empirically show how stock price predictability has declined over time (-6.68 absolute points in F1-score(\%)), highlighting the growing market efficiencies. Predictability must be considered in relation to transaction costs, so we experimented with defining trends using an average spread, reflecting the primary transaction cost. The resulting performance deterioration underscores the complexity of translating trend classification into profitable trading strategies. We argue that our work provides new insights into the evolving landscape of stock price trend prediction and sets a strong foundation for future advancements in financial AI. We release the code at https://github.com/LeonardoBerti00/TLOB.
Group-Adaptive Threshold Optimization for Robust AI-Generated Text Detection
The advancement of large language models (LLMs) has made it difficult to differentiate human-written text from AI-generated text. Several AI-text detectors have been developed in response, which typically utilize a fixed global threshold (e.g., {\theta} = 0.5) to classify machine-generated text. However, we find that one universal threshold can fail to account for subgroup-specific distributional variations. For example, when using a fixed threshold, detectors make more false positive errors on shorter human-written text than longer, and more positive classifications on neurotic writing styles than open among long text. These discrepancies can lead to misclassification that disproportionately affects certain groups. We address this critical limitation by introducing FairOPT, an algorithm for group-specific threshold optimization in AI-generated content classifiers. Our approach partitions data into subgroups based on attributes (e.g., text length and writing style) and learns decision thresholds for each group, which enables careful balancing of performance and fairness metrics within each subgroup. In experiments with four AI text classifiers on three datasets, FairOPT enhances overall F1 score and decreases balanced error rate (BER) discrepancy across subgroups. Our framework paves the way for more robust and fair classification criteria in AI-generated output detection.
Is your LLM trapped in a Mental Set? Investigative study on how mental sets affect the reasoning capabilities of LLMs
In this paper, we present an investigative study on how Mental Sets influence the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. LLMs have excelled in diverse natural language processing (NLP) tasks, driven by advancements in parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) and emergent capabilities like in-context learning (ICL). For complex reasoning tasks, selecting the right model for PEFT or ICL is critical, often relying on scores on benchmarks such as MMLU, MATH, and GSM8K. However, current evaluation methods, based on metrics like F1 Score or reasoning chain assessments by larger models, overlook a key dimension: adaptability to unfamiliar situations and overcoming entrenched thinking patterns. In cognitive psychology, Mental Set refers to the tendency to persist with previously successful strategies, even when they become inefficient - a challenge for problem solving and reasoning. We compare the performance of LLM models like Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct, Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct and GPT-4o in the presence of mental sets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to integrate cognitive psychology concepts into the evaluation of LLMs for complex reasoning tasks, providing deeper insights into their adaptability and problem-solving efficacy.
NyayaAnumana & INLegalLlama: The Largest Indian Legal Judgment Prediction Dataset and Specialized Language Model for Enhanced Decision Analysis
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in legal judgment prediction (LJP) has the potential to transform the legal landscape, particularly in jurisdictions like India, where a significant backlog of cases burdens the legal system. This paper introduces NyayaAnumana, the largest and most diverse corpus of Indian legal cases compiled for LJP, encompassing a total of 7,02,945 preprocessed cases. NyayaAnumana, which combines the words "Nyay" (judgment) and "Anuman" (prediction or inference) respectively for most major Indian languages, includes a wide range of cases from the Supreme Court, High Courts, Tribunal Courts, District Courts, and Daily Orders and, thus, provides unparalleled diversity and coverage. Our dataset surpasses existing datasets like PredEx and ILDC, offering a comprehensive foundation for advanced AI research in the legal domain. In addition to the dataset, we present INLegalLlama, a domain-specific generative large language model (LLM) tailored to the intricacies of the Indian legal system. It is developed through a two-phase training approach over a base LLaMa model. First, Indian legal documents are injected using continual pretraining. Second, task-specific supervised finetuning is done. This method allows the model to achieve a deeper understanding of legal contexts. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating diverse court data significantly boosts model accuracy, achieving approximately 90% F1-score in prediction tasks. INLegalLlama not only improves prediction accuracy but also offers comprehensible explanations, addressing the need for explainability in AI-assisted legal decisions.
ArtBrain: An Explainable end-to-end Toolkit for Classification and Attribution of AI-Generated Art and Style
Recently, the quality of artworks generated using Artificial Intelligence (AI) has increased significantly, resulting in growing difficulties in detecting synthetic artworks. However, limited studies have been conducted on identifying the authenticity of synthetic artworks and their source. This paper introduces AI-ArtBench, a dataset featuring 185,015 artistic images across 10 art styles. It includes 125,015 AI-generated images and 60,000 pieces of human-created artwork. This paper also outlines a method to accurately detect AI-generated images and trace them to their source model. This work proposes a novel Convolutional Neural Network model based on the ConvNeXt model called AttentionConvNeXt. AttentionConvNeXt was implemented and trained to differentiate between the source of the artwork and its style with an F1-Score of 0.869. The accuracy of attribution to the generative model reaches 0.999. To combine the scientific contributions arising from this study, a web-based application named ArtBrain was developed to enable both technical and non-technical users to interact with the model. Finally, this study presents the results of an Artistic Turing Test conducted with 50 participants. The findings reveal that humans could identify AI-generated images with an accuracy of approximately 58%, while the model itself achieved a significantly higher accuracy of around 99%.
Still Not Quite There! Evaluating Large Language Models for Comorbid Mental Health Diagnosis
In this study, we introduce ANGST, a novel, first-of-its kind benchmark for depression-anxiety comorbidity classification from social media posts. Unlike contemporary datasets that often oversimplify the intricate interplay between different mental health disorders by treating them as isolated conditions, ANGST enables multi-label classification, allowing each post to be simultaneously identified as indicating depression and/or anxiety. Comprising 2876 meticulously annotated posts by expert psychologists and an additional 7667 silver-labeled posts, ANGST posits a more representative sample of online mental health discourse. Moreover, we benchmark ANGST using various state-of-the-art language models, ranging from Mental-BERT to GPT-4. Our results provide significant insights into the capabilities and limitations of these models in complex diagnostic scenarios. While GPT-4 generally outperforms other models, none achieve an F1 score exceeding 72% in multi-class comorbid classification, underscoring the ongoing challenges in applying language models to mental health diagnostics.
Enhancing Skin Disease Classification Leveraging Transformer-based Deep Learning Architectures and Explainable AI
Skin diseases affect over a third of the global population, yet their impact is often underestimated. Automating skin disease classification to assist doctors with their prognosis might be difficult. Nevertheless, due to efficient feature extraction pipelines, deep learning techniques have shown much promise for various tasks, including dermatological disease identification. This study uses a skin disease dataset with 31 classes and compares it with all versions of Vision Transformers, Swin Transformers and DivoV2. The analysis is also extended to compare with benchmark convolution-based architecture presented in the literature. Transfer learning with ImageNet1k weights on the skin disease dataset contributes to a high test accuracy of 96.48\% and an F1-Score of 0.9727 using DinoV2, which is almost a 10\% improvement over this data's current benchmark results. The performance of DinoV2 was also compared for the HAM10000 and Dermnet datasets to test the model's robustness, and the trained model overcomes the benchmark results by a slight margin in test accuracy and in F1-Score on the 23 and 7 class datasets. The results are substantiated using explainable AI frameworks like GradCAM and SHAP, which provide precise image locations to map the disease, assisting dermatologists in early detection, prompt prognosis, and treatment.
Evaluating Transfer Learning in Deep Learning Models for Classification on a Custom Wildlife Dataset: Can YOLOv8 Surpass Other Architectures?
Biodiversity plays a crucial role in maintaining the balance of the ecosystem. However, poaching and unintentional human activities contribute to the decline in the population of many species. Hence, active monitoring is required to preserve these endangered species. Current human-led monitoring techniques are prone to errors and are labor-intensive. Therefore, we study the application of deep learning methods like Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and transfer learning, which can aid in automating the process of monitoring endangered species. For this, we create our custom dataset utilizing trustworthy online databases like iNaturalist and ZooChat. To choose the best model for our use case, we compare the performance of different architectures like DenseNet, ResNet, VGGNet, and YOLOv8 on the custom wildlife dataset. Transfer learning reduces training time by freezing the pre-trained weights and replacing only the output layer with custom, fully connected layers designed for our dataset. Our results indicate that YOLOv8 performs better, achieving a training accuracy of 97.39 % and an F1 score of 96.50 %, surpassing other models. Our findings suggest that integrating YOLOv8 into conservation efforts could revolutionize wildlife monitoring with its high accuracy and efficiency, potentially transforming how endangered species are monitored and protected worldwide.
Untangling the Unrestricted Web: Automatic Identification of Multilingual Registers
This article explores deep learning models for the automatic identification of registers - text varieties such as news reports and discussion forums - in web-based datasets across 16 languages. Identifying web registers, or genres, is crucial for understanding the content of web-scale datasets, which have become essential in corpus and computational linguistics. Despite recent advances, the full potential of register classifiers in the noisy, unrestricted web remains largely unexplored, particularly in multilingual settings. We experiment with various deep learning models using the Multilingual CORE corpora, newly introduced in this article, which includes 16 languages annotated with a detailed, hierarchical taxonomy of 25 registers designed to cover the entire web. Our classifiers achieve state-of-the-art results using a multi-label approach, demonstrating that competitive performance is possible using a relatively complex register taxonomy. However, all models hit a performance ceiling at approximately 80% F1 score, which we attribute to the non-discrete nature of web registers and the inherent uncertainty in labeling some documents. By pruning ambiguous examples, we enhance model performance to over 90%. Additionally, multilingual models consistently outperform monolingual ones, especially benefiting languages with fewer training examples and smaller registers. Although a zero-shot setting reduces performance by an average of 7%, these drops are not correlated with specific registers or languages. Instead, we find that registers are surprisingly similar across languages.
IndoToxic2024: A Demographically-Enriched Dataset of Hate Speech and Toxicity Types for Indonesian Language
Hate speech poses a significant threat to social harmony. Over the past two years, Indonesia has seen a ten-fold increase in the online hate speech ratio, underscoring the urgent need for effective detection mechanisms. However, progress is hindered by the limited availability of labeled data for Indonesian texts. The condition is even worse for marginalized minorities, such as Shia, LGBTQ, and other ethnic minorities because hate speech is underreported and less understood by detection tools. Furthermore, the lack of accommodation for subjectivity in current datasets compounds this issue. To address this, we introduce IndoToxic2024, a comprehensive Indonesian hate speech and toxicity classification dataset. Comprising 43,692 entries annotated by 19 diverse individuals, the dataset focuses on texts targeting vulnerable groups in Indonesia, specifically during the hottest political event in the country: the presidential election. We establish baselines for seven binary classification tasks, achieving a macro-F1 score of 0.78 with a BERT model (IndoBERTweet) fine-tuned for hate speech classification. Furthermore, we demonstrate how incorporating demographic information can enhance the zero-shot performance of the large language model, gpt-3.5-turbo. However, we also caution that an overemphasis on demographic information can negatively impact the fine-tuned model performance due to data fragmentation.
Adaptive Multiscale Retinal Diagnosis: A Hybrid Trio-Model Approach for Comprehensive Fundus Multi-Disease Detection Leveraging Transfer Learning and Siamese Networks
WHO has declared that more than 2.2 billion people worldwide are suffering from visual disorders, such as media haze, glaucoma, and drusen. At least 1 billion of these cases could have been either prevented or successfully treated, yet they remain unaddressed due to poverty, a lack of specialists, inaccurate ocular fundus diagnoses by ophthalmologists, or the presence of a rare disease. To address this, the research has developed the Hybrid Trio-Network Model Algorithm for accurately diagnosing 12 distinct common and rare eye diseases. This algorithm utilized the RFMiD dataset of 3,200 fundus images and the Binary Relevance Method to detect diseases separately, ensuring expandability and avoiding incorrect correlations. Each detector, incorporating finely tuned hyperparameters to optimize performance, consisted of three feature components: A classical transfer learning CNN model, a two-stage CNN model, and a Siamese Network. The diagnosis was made using features extracted through this Trio-Model with Ensembled Machine Learning algorithms. The proposed model achieved an average accuracy of 97% and an AUC score of 0.96. Compared to past benchmark studies, an increase of over 10% in the F1-score was observed for most diseases. Furthermore, using the Siamese Network, the model successfully made predictions in diseases like optic disc pallor, which past studies failed to predict due to low confidence. This diagnostic tool presents a stable, adaptive, cost-effective, efficient, accessible, and fast solution for globalizing early detection of both common and rare diseases.
WIBA: What Is Being Argued? A Comprehensive Approach to Argument Mining
We propose WIBA, a novel framework and suite of methods that enable the comprehensive understanding of "What Is Being Argued" across contexts. Our approach develops a comprehensive framework that detects: (a) the existence, (b) the topic, and (c) the stance of an argument, correctly accounting for the logical dependence among the three tasks. Our algorithm leverages the fine-tuning and prompt-engineering of Large Language Models. We evaluate our approach and show that it performs well in all the three capabilities. First, we develop and release an Argument Detection model that can classify a piece of text as an argument with an F1 score between 79% and 86% on three different benchmark datasets. Second, we release a language model that can identify the topic being argued in a sentence, be it implicit or explicit, with an average similarity score of 71%, outperforming current naive methods by nearly 40%. Finally, we develop a method for Argument Stance Classification, and evaluate the capability of our approach, showing it achieves a classification F1 score between 71% and 78% across three diverse benchmark datasets. Our evaluation demonstrates that WIBA allows the comprehensive understanding of What Is Being Argued in large corpora across diverse contexts, which is of core interest to many applications in linguistics, communication, and social and computer science. To facilitate accessibility to the advancements outlined in this work, we release WIBA as a free open access platform (wiba.dev).
Is There No Such Thing as a Bad Question? H4R: HalluciBot For Ratiocination, Rewriting, Ranking, and Routing
Hallucination continues to be one of the most critical challenges in the institutional adoption journey of Large Language Models (LLMs). While prior studies have primarily focused on the post-generation analysis and refinement of outputs, this paper centers on the effectiveness of queries in eliciting accurate responses from LLMs. We present HalluciBot, a model that estimates the query's propensity to hallucinate before generation, without invoking any LLMs during inference. HalluciBot can serve as a proxy reward model for query rewriting, offering a general framework to estimate query quality based on accuracy and consensus. In essence, HalluciBot investigates how poorly constructed queries can lead to erroneous outputs - moreover, by employing query rewriting guided by HalluciBot's empirical estimates, we demonstrate that 95.7% output accuracy can be achieved for Multiple Choice questions. The training procedure for HalluciBot consists of perturbing 369,837 queries n times, employing n+1 independent LLM agents, sampling an output from each query, conducting a Multi-Agent Monte Carlo simulation on the sampled outputs, and training an encoder classifier. The idea of perturbation is the outcome of our ablation studies that measures the increase in output diversity (+12.5 agreement spread) by perturbing a query in lexically different but semantically similar ways. Therefore, HalluciBot paves the way to ratiocinate (76.0% test F1 score, 46.6% in saved computation on hallucinatory queries), rewrite (+30.2% positive class transition from hallucinatory to non-hallucinatory), rank (+50.6% positive class transition from hallucinatory to non-hallucinatory), and route queries to effective pipelines.
Combining Fine-Tuning and LLM-based Agents for Intuitive Smart Contract Auditing with Justifications
Smart contracts are decentralized applications built atop blockchains like Ethereum. Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) have potential in auditing smart contracts, but the state-of-the-art indicates that even GPT-4 can achieve only 30% precision (when both decision and justification are correct). This is likely because off-the-shelf LLMs were primarily pre-trained on a general text/code corpus and not fine-tuned on the specific domain of Solidity smart contract auditing. In this paper, we propose TrustLLM, a general framework that combines fine-tuning and LLM-based agents for intuitive smart contract auditing with justifications. Specifically, TrustLLM is inspired by the observation that expert human auditors first perceive what could be wrong and then perform a detailed analysis of the code to identify the cause. As such, TrustLLM employs a two-stage fine-tuning approach: it first tunes a Detector model to make decisions and then tunes a Reasoner model to generate causes of vulnerabilities. However, fine-tuning alone faces challenges in accurately identifying the optimal cause of a vulnerability. Therefore, we introduce two LLM-based agents, the Ranker and Critic, to iteratively select and debate the most suitable cause of vulnerability based on the output of the fine-tuned Reasoner model. To evaluate TrustLLM, we collected a balanced dataset with 1,734 positive and 1,810 negative samples to fine-tune TrustLLM. We then compared it with traditional fine-tuned models (CodeBERT, GraphCodeBERT, CodeT5, and UnixCoder) as well as prompt learning-based LLMs (GPT4, GPT-3.5, and CodeLlama-13b/34b). On a dataset of 263 real smart contract vulnerabilities, TrustLLM achieves an F1 score of 91.21% and an accuracy of 91.11%. The causes generated by TrustLLM achieved a consistency of about 38% compared to the ground truth causes.
LDTR: Transformer-based Lane Detection with Anchor-chain Representation
Despite recent advances in lane detection methods, scenarios with limited- or no-visual-clue of lanes due to factors such as lighting conditions and occlusion remain challenging and crucial for automated driving. Moreover, current lane representations require complex post-processing and struggle with specific instances. Inspired by the DETR architecture, we propose LDTR, a transformer-based model to address these issues. Lanes are modeled with a novel anchor-chain, regarding a lane as a whole from the beginning, which enables LDTR to handle special lanes inherently. To enhance lane instance perception, LDTR incorporates a novel multi-referenced deformable attention module to distribute attention around the object. Additionally, LDTR incorporates two line IoU algorithms to improve convergence efficiency and employs a Gaussian heatmap auxiliary branch to enhance model representation capability during training. To evaluate lane detection models, we rely on Frechet distance, parameterized F1-score, and additional synthetic metrics. Experimental results demonstrate that LDTR achieves state-of-the-art performance on well-known datasets.
Ax-to-Grind Urdu: Benchmark Dataset for Urdu Fake News Detection
Misinformation can seriously impact society, affecting anything from public opinion to institutional confidence and the political horizon of a state. Fake News (FN) proliferation on online websites and Online Social Networks (OSNs) has increased profusely. Various fact-checking websites include news in English and barely provide information about FN in regional languages. Thus the Urdu FN purveyors cannot be discerned using factchecking portals. SOTA approaches for Fake News Detection (FND) count upon appropriately labelled and large datasets. FND in regional and resource-constrained languages lags due to the lack of limited-sized datasets and legitimate lexical resources. The previous datasets for Urdu FND are limited-sized, domain-restricted, publicly unavailable and not manually verified where the news is translated from English into Urdu. In this paper, we curate and contribute the first largest publicly available dataset for Urdu FND, Ax-to-Grind Urdu, to bridge the identified gaps and limitations of existing Urdu datasets in the literature. It constitutes 10,083 fake and real news on fifteen domains collected from leading and authentic Urdu newspapers and news channel websites in Pakistan and India. FN for the Ax-to-Grind dataset is collected from websites and crowdsourcing. The dataset contains news items in Urdu from the year 2017 to the year 2023. Expert journalists annotated the dataset. We benchmark the dataset with an ensemble model of mBERT,XLNet, and XLM RoBERTa. The selected models are originally trained on multilingual large corpora. The results of the proposed model are based on performance metrics, F1-score, accuracy, precision, recall and MCC value.
Can We Verify Step by Step for Incorrect Answer Detection?
Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has marked a significant advancement in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs). Previous studies have developed various extensions of CoT, which focus primarily on enhancing end-task performance. In addition, there has been research on assessing the quality of reasoning chains in CoT. This raises an intriguing question: Is it possible to predict the accuracy of LLM outputs by scrutinizing the reasoning chains they generate? To answer this research question, we introduce a benchmark, R2PE, designed specifically to explore the relationship between reasoning chains and performance in various reasoning tasks spanning five different domains. This benchmark aims to measure the falsehood of the final output of LLMs based on the reasoning steps. To make full use of information in multiple reasoning chains, we propose the process discernibility score (PDS) framework that beats the answer-checking baseline by a large margin. Concretely, this resulted in an average of 5.1% increase in the F1 score across all 45 subsets within R2PE. We further demonstrate our PDS's efficacy in advancing open-domain QA accuracy. Data and code are available at https://github.com/XinXU-USTC/R2PE.
COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation in Middle Income Countries
This paper introduces a multilingual dataset of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation, consisting of annotated tweets from three middle-income countries: Brazil, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The expertly curated dataset includes annotations for 5,952 tweets, assessing their relevance to COVID-19 vaccines, presence of misinformation, and the themes of the misinformation. To address challenges posed by domain specificity, the low-resource setting, and data imbalance, we adopt two approaches for developing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation detection models: domain-specific pre-training and text augmentation using a large language model. Our best misinformation detection models demonstrate improvements ranging from 2.7 to 15.9 percentage points in macro F1-score compared to the baseline models. Additionally, we apply our misinformation detection models in a large-scale study of 19 million unlabeled tweets from the three countries between 2020 and 2022, showcasing the practical application of our dataset and models for detecting and analyzing vaccine misinformation in multiple countries and languages. Our analysis indicates that percentage changes in the number of new COVID-19 cases are positively associated with COVID-19 vaccine misinformation rates in a staggered manner for Brazil and Indonesia, and there are significant positive associations between the misinformation rates across the three countries.
TAMPAR: Visual Tampering Detection for Parcel Logistics in Postal Supply Chains
Due to the steadily rising amount of valuable goods in supply chains, tampering detection for parcels is becoming increasingly important. In this work, we focus on the use-case last-mile delivery, where only a single RGB image is taken and compared against a reference from an existing database to detect potential appearance changes that indicate tampering. We propose a tampering detection pipeline that utilizes keypoint detection to identify the eight corner points of a parcel. This permits applying a perspective transformation to create normalized fronto-parallel views for each visible parcel side surface. These viewpoint-invariant parcel side surface representations facilitate the identification of signs of tampering on parcels within the supply chain, since they reduce the problem to parcel side surface matching with pair-wise appearance change detection. Experiments with multiple classical and deep learning-based change detection approaches are performed on our newly collected TAMpering detection dataset for PARcels, called TAMPAR. We evaluate keypoint and change detection separately, as well as in a unified system for tampering detection. Our evaluation shows promising results for keypoint (Keypoint AP 75.76) and tampering detection (81% accuracy, F1-Score 0.83) on real images. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis for tampering types, lens distortion and viewing angles is presented. Code and dataset are available at https://a-nau.github.io/tampar.
Rayleigh Quotient Graph Neural Networks for Graph-level Anomaly Detection
Graph-level anomaly detection has gained significant attention as it finds applications in various domains, such as cancer diagnosis and enzyme prediction. However, existing methods fail to capture the spectral properties of graph anomalies, resulting in unexplainable framework design and unsatisfying performance. In this paper, we re-investigate the spectral differences between anomalous and normal graphs. Our main observation shows a significant disparity in the accumulated spectral energy between these two classes. Moreover, we prove that the accumulated spectral energy of the graph signal can be represented by its Rayleigh Quotient, indicating that the Rayleigh Quotient is a driving factor behind the anomalous properties of graphs. Motivated by this, we propose Rayleigh Quotient Graph Neural Network (RQGNN), the first spectral GNN that explores the inherent spectral features of anomalous graphs for graph-level anomaly detection. Specifically, we introduce a novel framework with two components: the Rayleigh Quotient learning component (RQL) and Chebyshev Wavelet GNN with RQ-pooling (CWGNN-RQ). RQL explicitly captures the Rayleigh Quotient of graphs and CWGNN-RQ implicitly explores the spectral space of graphs. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets show that RQGNN outperforms the best rival by 6.74% in Macro-F1 score and 1.44% in AUC, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework. Our code is available at https://github.com/xydong127/RQGNN.
Question-Answering Model for Schizophrenia Symptoms and Their Impact on Daily Life using Mental Health Forums Data
In recent years, there is strong emphasis on mining medical data using machine learning techniques. A common problem is to obtain a noiseless set of textual documents, with a relevant content for the research question, and developing a Question Answering (QA) model for a specific medical field. The purpose of this paper is to present a new methodology for building a medical dataset and obtain a QA model for analysis of symptoms and impact on daily life for a specific disease domain. The ``Mental Health'' forum was used, a forum dedicated to people suffering from schizophrenia and different mental disorders. Relevant posts of active users, who regularly participate, were extrapolated providing a new method of obtaining low-bias content and without privacy issues. Furthermore, it is shown how to pre-process the dataset to convert it into a QA dataset. The Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), DistilBERT, RoBERTa, and BioBERT models were fine-tuned and evaluated via F1-Score, Exact Match, Precision and Recall. Accurate empirical experiments demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for obtaining an accurate dataset for QA model implementation. By fine-tuning the BioBERT QA model, we achieved an F1 score of 0.885, showing a considerable improvement and outperforming the state-of-the-art model for mental disorders domain.
Large Language Models as Data Preprocessors
Large Language Models (LLMs), typified by OpenAI's GPT series and Meta's LLaMA variants, have marked a significant advancement in artificial intelligence. Trained on vast amounts of text data, LLMs are capable of understanding and generating human-like text across a diverse range of topics. This study expands on the applications of LLMs, exploring their potential in data preprocessing, a critical stage in data mining and analytics applications. We delve into the applicability of state-of-the-art LLMs such as GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna-13B for error detection, data imputation, schema matching, and entity matching tasks. Alongside showcasing the inherent capabilities of LLMs, we highlight their limitations, particularly in terms of computational expense and inefficiency. We propose an LLM-based framework for data preprocessing, which integrates cutting-edge prompt engineering techniques, coupled with traditional methods like contextualization and feature selection, to improve the performance and efficiency of these models. The effectiveness of LLMs in data preprocessing is evaluated through an experimental study spanning 12 datasets. GPT-4 emerged as a standout, achieving 100\% accuracy or F1 score on 4 datasets, suggesting LLMs' immense potential in these tasks. Despite certain limitations, our study underscores the promise of LLMs in this domain and anticipates future developments to overcome current hurdles.
cantnlp@LT-EDI-2023: Homophobia/Transphobia Detection in Social Media Comments using Spatio-Temporally Retrained Language Models
This paper describes our multiclass classification system developed as part of the LTEDI@RANLP-2023 shared task. We used a BERT-based language model to detect homophobic and transphobic content in social media comments across five language conditions: English, Spanish, Hindi, Malayalam, and Tamil. We retrained a transformer-based crosslanguage pretrained language model, XLMRoBERTa, with spatially and temporally relevant social media language data. We also retrained a subset of models with simulated script-mixed social media language data with varied performance. We developed the best performing seven-label classification system for Malayalam based on weighted macro averaged F1 score (ranked first out of six) with variable performance for other language and class-label conditions. We found the inclusion of this spatio-temporal data improved the classification performance for all language and task conditions when compared with the baseline. The results suggests that transformer-based language classification systems are sensitive to register-specific and language-specific retraining.
Accurate Retraining-free Pruning for Pretrained Encoder-based Language Models
Given a pretrained encoder-based language model, how can we accurately compress it without retraining? Retraining-free structured pruning algorithms are crucial in pretrained language model compression due to their significantly reduced pruning cost and capability to prune large language models. However, existing retraining-free algorithms encounter severe accuracy degradation, as they fail to handle pruning errors, especially at high compression rates. In this paper, we propose K-prune (Knowledge-preserving pruning), an accurate retraining-free structured pruning algorithm for pretrained encoder-based language models. K-prune focuses on preserving the useful knowledge of the pretrained model to minimize pruning errors through a carefully designed iterative pruning process composed of knowledge measurement, knowledge-preserving mask search, and knowledge-preserving weight-tuning. As a result, K-prune shows significant accuracy improvements up to 58.02%p higher F1 score compared to existing retraining-free pruning algorithms under a high compression rate of 80% on the SQuAD benchmark without any retraining process.
EaSyGuide : ESG Issue Identification Framework leveraging Abilities of Generative Large Language Models
This paper presents our participation in the FinNLP-2023 shared task on multi-lingual environmental, social, and corporate governance issue identification (ML-ESG). The task's objective is to classify news articles based on the 35 ESG key issues defined by the MSCI ESG rating guidelines. Our approach focuses on the English and French subtasks, employing the CerebrasGPT, OPT, and Pythia models, along with the zero-shot and GPT3Mix Augmentation techniques. We utilize various encoder models, such as RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and FinBERT, subjecting them to knowledge distillation and additional training. Our approach yielded exceptional results, securing the first position in the English text subtask with F1-score 0.69 and the second position in the French text subtask with F1-score 0.78. These outcomes underscore the effectiveness of our methodology in identifying ESG issues in news articles across different languages. Our findings contribute to the exploration of ESG topics and highlight the potential of leveraging advanced language models for ESG issue identification.
AMPERE: AMR-Aware Prefix for Generation-Based Event Argument Extraction Model
Event argument extraction (EAE) identifies event arguments and their specific roles for a given event. Recent advancement in generation-based EAE models has shown great performance and generalizability over classification-based models. However, existing generation-based EAE models mostly focus on problem re-formulation and prompt design, without incorporating additional information that has been shown to be effective for classification-based models, such as the abstract meaning representation (AMR) of the input passages. Incorporating such information into generation-based models is challenging due to the heterogeneous nature of the natural language form prevalently used in generation-based models and the structured form of AMRs. In this work, we study strategies to incorporate AMR into generation-based EAE models. We propose AMPERE, which generates AMR-aware prefixes for every layer of the generation model. Thus, the prefix introduces AMR information to the generation-based EAE model and then improves the generation. We also introduce an adjusted copy mechanism to AMPERE to help overcome potential noises brought by the AMR graph. Comprehensive experiments and analyses on ACE2005 and ERE datasets show that AMPERE can get 4% - 10% absolute F1 score improvements with reduced training data and it is in general powerful across different training sizes.
Detecting automatically the layout of clinical documents to enhance the performances of downstream natural language processing
Objective:Develop and validate an algorithm for analyzing the layout of PDF clinical documents to improve the performance of downstream natural language processing tasks. Materials and Methods: We designed an algorithm to process clinical PDF documents and extract only clinically relevant text. The algorithm consists of several steps: initial text extraction using a PDF parser, followed by classification into categories such as body text, left notes, and footers using a Transformer deep neural network architecture, and finally an aggregation step to compile the lines of a given label in the text. We evaluated the technical performance of the body text extraction algorithm by applying it to a random sample of documents that were annotated. Medical performance was evaluated by examining the extraction of medical concepts of interest from the text in their respective sections. Finally, we tested an end-to-end system on a medical use case of automatic detection of acute infection described in the hospital report. Results:Our algorithm achieved per-line precision, recall, and F1 score of 98.4, 97.0, and 97.7, respectively, for body line extraction. The precision, recall, and F1 score per document for the acute infection detection algorithm were 82.54 (95CI 72.86-91.60), 85.24 (95CI 76.61-93.70), 83.87 (95CI 76, 92-90.08) with exploitation of the results of the advanced body extraction algorithm, respectively. Conclusion:We have developed and validated a system for extracting body text from clinical documents in PDF format by identifying their layout. We were able to demonstrate that this preprocessing allowed us to obtain better performances for a common downstream task, i.e., the extraction of medical concepts in their respective sections, thus proving the interest of this method on a clinical use case.
Low-Resource Multi-Granularity Academic Function Recognition Based on Multiple Prompt Knowledge
Fine-tuning pre-trained language models (PLMs), e.g., SciBERT, generally requires large numbers of annotated data to achieve state-of-the-art performance on a range of NLP tasks in the scientific domain. However, obtaining the fine-tune data for scientific NLP task is still challenging and expensive. Inspired by recent advancement in prompt learning, in this paper, we propose the Mix Prompt Tuning (MPT), which is a semi-supervised method to alleviate the dependence on annotated data and improve the performance of multi-granularity academic function recognition tasks with a small number of labeled examples. Specifically, the proposed method provides multi-perspective representations by combining manual prompt templates with automatically learned continuous prompt templates to help the given academic function recognition task take full advantage of knowledge in PLMs. Based on these prompt templates and the fine-tuned PLM, a large number of pseudo labels are assigned to the unlabeled examples. Finally, we fine-tune the PLM using the pseudo training set. We evaluate our method on three academic function recognition tasks of different granularity including the citation function, the abstract sentence function, and the keyword function, with datasets from computer science domain and biomedical domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method and statistically significant improvements against strong baselines. In particular, it achieves an average increase of 5% in Macro-F1 score compared with fine-tuning, and 6% in Macro-F1 score compared with other semi-supervised method under low-resource settings. In addition, MPT is a general method that can be easily applied to other low-resource scientific classification tasks.
CitePrompt: Using Prompts to Identify Citation Intent in Scientific Papers
Citations in scientific papers not only help us trace the intellectual lineage but also are a useful indicator of the scientific significance of the work. Citation intents prove beneficial as they specify the role of the citation in a given context. In this paper, we present CitePrompt, a framework which uses the hitherto unexplored approach of prompt-based learning for citation intent classification. We argue that with the proper choice of the pretrained language model, the prompt template, and the prompt verbalizer, we can not only get results that are better than or comparable to those obtained with the state-of-the-art methods but also do it with much less exterior information about the scientific document. We report state-of-the-art results on the ACL-ARC dataset, and also show significant improvement on the SciCite dataset over all baseline models except one. As suitably large labelled datasets for citation intent classification can be quite hard to find, in a first, we propose the conversion of this task to the few-shot and zero-shot settings. For the ACL-ARC dataset, we report a 53.86% F1 score for the zero-shot setting, which improves to 63.61% and 66.99% for the 5-shot and 10-shot settings, respectively.
Factify 2: A Multimodal Fake News and Satire News Dataset
The internet gives the world an open platform to express their views and share their stories. While this is very valuable, it makes fake news one of our society's most pressing problems. Manual fact checking process is time consuming, which makes it challenging to disprove misleading assertions before they cause significant harm. This is he driving interest in automatic fact or claim verification. Some of the existing datasets aim to support development of automating fact-checking techniques, however, most of them are text based. Multi-modal fact verification has received relatively scant attention. In this paper, we provide a multi-modal fact-checking dataset called FACTIFY 2, improving Factify 1 by using new data sources and adding satire articles. Factify 2 has 50,000 new data instances. Similar to FACTIFY 1.0, we have three broad categories - support, no-evidence, and refute, with sub-categories based on the entailment of visual and textual data. We also provide a BERT and Vison Transformer based baseline, which achieves 65% F1 score in the test set. The baseline codes and the dataset will be made available at https://github.com/surya1701/Factify-2.0.
Sheaf Neural Networks for Graph-based Recommender Systems
Recent progress in Graph Neural Networks has resulted in wide adoption by many applications, including recommendation systems. The reason for Graph Neural Networks' superiority over other approaches is that many problems in recommendation systems can be naturally modeled as graphs, where nodes can be either users or items and edges represent preference relationships. In current Graph Neural Network approaches, nodes are represented with a static vector learned at training time. This static vector might only be suitable to capture some of the nuances of users or items they define. To overcome this limitation, we propose using a recently proposed model inspired by category theory: Sheaf Neural Networks. Sheaf Neural Networks, and its connected Laplacian, can address the previous problem by associating every node (and edge) with a vector space instead than a single vector. The vector space representation is richer and allows picking the proper representation at inference time. This approach can be generalized for different related tasks on graphs and achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of F1-Score@N in collaborative filtering and Hits@20 in link prediction. For collaborative filtering, the approach is evaluated on the MovieLens 100K with a 5.1% improvement, on MovieLens 1M with a 5.4% improvement and on Book-Crossing with a 2.8% improvement, while for link prediction on the ogbl-ddi dataset with a 1.6% refinement with respect to the respective baselines.
Exploring the Potential of Machine Translation for Generating Named Entity Datasets: A Case Study between Persian and English
This study focuses on the generation of Persian named entity datasets through the application of machine translation on English datasets. The generated datasets were evaluated by experimenting with one monolingual and one multilingual transformer model. Notably, the CoNLL 2003 dataset has achieved the highest F1 score of 85.11%. In contrast, the WNUT 2017 dataset yielded the lowest F1 score of 40.02%. The results of this study highlight the potential of machine translation in creating high-quality named entity recognition datasets for low-resource languages like Persian. The study compares the performance of these generated datasets with English named entity recognition systems and provides insights into the effectiveness of machine translation for this task. Additionally, this approach could be used to augment data in low-resource language or create noisy data to make named entity systems more robust and improve them.
Lila: A Unified Benchmark for Mathematical Reasoning
Mathematical reasoning skills are essential for general-purpose intelligent systems to perform tasks from grocery shopping to climate modeling. Towards evaluating and improving AI systems in this domain, we propose LILA, a unified mathematical reasoning benchmark consisting of 23 diverse tasks along four dimensions: (i) mathematical abilities e.g., arithmetic, calculus (ii) language format e.g., question-answering, fill-in-the-blanks (iii) language diversity e.g., no language, simple language (iv) external knowledge e.g., commonsense, physics. We construct our benchmark by extending 20 datasets benchmark by collecting task instructions and solutions in the form of Python programs, thereby obtaining explainable solutions in addition to the correct answer. We additionally introduce two evaluation datasets to measure out-of-distribution performance and robustness to language perturbation. Finally, we introduce BHASKARA, a general-purpose mathematical reasoning model trained on LILA. Importantly, we find that multi-tasking leads to significant improvements (average relative improvement of 21.83% F1 score vs. single-task models), while the best performing model only obtains 60.40%, indicating the room for improvement in general mathematical reasoning and understanding.
Non-Monotonic Latent Alignments for CTC-Based Non-Autoregressive Machine Translation
Non-autoregressive translation (NAT) models are typically trained with the cross-entropy loss, which forces the model outputs to be aligned verbatim with the target sentence and will highly penalize small shifts in word positions. Latent alignment models relax the explicit alignment by marginalizing out all monotonic latent alignments with the CTC loss. However, they cannot handle non-monotonic alignments, which is non-negligible as there is typically global word reordering in machine translation. In this work, we explore non-monotonic latent alignments for NAT. We extend the alignment space to non-monotonic alignments to allow for the global word reordering and further consider all alignments that overlap with the target sentence. We non-monotonically match the alignments to the target sentence and train the latent alignment model to maximize the F1 score of non-monotonic matching. Extensive experiments on major WMT benchmarks show that our method substantially improves the translation performance of CTC-based models. Our best model achieves 30.06 BLEU on WMT14 En-De with only one-iteration decoding, closing the gap between non-autoregressive and autoregressive models.
Conversational Semantic Role Labeling with Predicate-Oriented Latent Graph
Conversational semantic role labeling (CSRL) is a newly proposed task that uncovers the shallow semantic structures in a dialogue text. Unfortunately several important characteristics of the CSRL task have been overlooked by the existing works, such as the structural information integration, near-neighbor influence. In this work, we investigate the integration of a latent graph for CSRL. We propose to automatically induce a predicate-oriented latent graph (POLar) with a predicate-centered Gaussian mechanism, by which the nearer and informative words to the predicate will be allocated with more attention. The POLar structure is then dynamically pruned and refined so as to best fit the task need. We additionally introduce an effective dialogue-level pre-trained language model, CoDiaBERT, for better supporting multiple utterance sentences and handling the speaker coreference issue in CSRL. Our system outperforms best-performing baselines on three benchmark CSRL datasets with big margins, especially achieving over 4% F1 score improvements on the cross-utterance argument detection. Further analyses are presented to better understand the effectiveness of our proposed methods.
Applying Transformer-based Text Summarization for Keyphrase Generation
Keyphrases are crucial for searching and systematizing scholarly documents. Most current methods for keyphrase extraction are aimed at the extraction of the most significant words in the text. But in practice, the list of keyphrases often includes words that do not appear in the text explicitly. In this case, the list of keyphrases represents an abstractive summary of the source text. In this paper, we experiment with popular transformer-based models for abstractive text summarization using four benchmark datasets for keyphrase extraction. We compare the results obtained with the results of common unsupervised and supervised methods for keyphrase extraction. Our evaluation shows that summarization models are quite effective in generating keyphrases in the terms of the full-match F1-score and BERTScore. However, they produce a lot of words that are absent in the author's list of keyphrases, which makes summarization models ineffective in terms of ROUGE-1. We also investigate several ordering strategies to concatenate target keyphrases. The results showed that the choice of strategy affects the performance of keyphrase generation.
Negation detection in Dutch clinical texts: an evaluation of rule-based and machine learning methods
As structured data are often insufficient, labels need to be extracted from free text in electronic health records when developing models for clinical information retrieval and decision support systems. One of the most important contextual properties in clinical text is negation, which indicates the absence of findings. We aimed to improve large scale extraction of labels by comparing three methods for negation detection in Dutch clinical notes. We used the Erasmus Medical Center Dutch Clinical Corpus to compare a rule-based method based on ContextD, a biLSTM model using MedCAT and (finetuned) RoBERTa-based models. We found that both the biLSTM and RoBERTa models consistently outperform the rule-based model in terms of F1 score, precision and recall. In addition, we systematically categorized the classification errors for each model, which can be used to further improve model performance in particular applications. Combining the three models naively was not beneficial in terms of performance. We conclude that the biLSTM and RoBERTa-based models in particular are highly accurate accurate in detecting clinical negations, but that ultimately all three approaches can be viable depending on the use case at hand.
M2FNet: Multi-modal Fusion Network for Emotion Recognition in Conversation
Emotion Recognition in Conversations (ERC) is crucial in developing sympathetic human-machine interaction. In conversational videos, emotion can be present in multiple modalities, i.e., audio, video, and transcript. However, due to the inherent characteristics of these modalities, multi-modal ERC has always been considered a challenging undertaking. Existing ERC research focuses mainly on using text information in a discussion, ignoring the other two modalities. We anticipate that emotion recognition accuracy can be improved by employing a multi-modal approach. Thus, in this study, we propose a Multi-modal Fusion Network (M2FNet) that extracts emotion-relevant features from visual, audio, and text modality. It employs a multi-head attention-based fusion mechanism to combine emotion-rich latent representations of the input data. We introduce a new feature extractor to extract latent features from the audio and visual modality. The proposed feature extractor is trained with a novel adaptive margin-based triplet loss function to learn emotion-relevant features from the audio and visual data. In the domain of ERC, the existing methods perform well on one benchmark dataset but not on others. Our results show that the proposed M2FNet architecture outperforms all other methods in terms of weighted average F1 score on well-known MELD and IEMOCAP datasets and sets a new state-of-the-art performance in ERC.
Singer Identification for Metaverse with Timbral and Middle-Level Perceptual Features
Metaverse is an interactive world that combines reality and virtuality, where participants can be virtual avatars. Anyone can hold a concert in a virtual concert hall, and users can quickly identify the real singer behind the virtual idol through the singer identification. Most singer identification methods are processed using the frame-level features. However, expect the singer's timbre, the music frame includes music information, such as melodiousness, rhythm, and tonal. It means the music information is noise for using frame-level features to identify the singers. In this paper, instead of only the frame-level features, we propose to use another two features that address this problem. Middle-level feature, which represents the music's melodiousness, rhythmic stability, and tonal stability, and is able to capture the perceptual features of music. The timbre feature, which is used in speaker identification, represents the singers' voice features. Furthermore, we propose a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) to combine three features for singer identification. The model firstly fuses the frame-level feature and timbre feature and then combines middle-level features to the mix features. In experiments, the proposed method achieves comparable performance on an average F1 score of 0.81 on the benchmark dataset of Artist20, which significantly improves related works.
A Keypoint-based Global Association Network for Lane Detection
Lane detection is a challenging task that requires predicting complex topology shapes of lane lines and distinguishing different types of lanes simultaneously. Earlier works follow a top-down roadmap to regress predefined anchors into various shapes of lane lines, which lacks enough flexibility to fit complex shapes of lanes due to the fixed anchor shapes. Lately, some works propose to formulate lane detection as a keypoint estimation problem to describe the shapes of lane lines more flexibly and gradually group adjacent keypoints belonging to the same lane line in a point-by-point manner, which is inefficient and time-consuming during postprocessing. In this paper, we propose a Global Association Network (GANet) to formulate the lane detection problem from a new perspective, where each keypoint is directly regressed to the starting point of the lane line instead of point-by-point extension. Concretely, the association of keypoints to their belonged lane line is conducted by predicting their offsets to the corresponding starting points of lanes globally without dependence on each other, which could be done in parallel to greatly improve efficiency. In addition, we further propose a Lane-aware Feature Aggregator (LFA), which adaptively captures the local correlations between adjacent keypoints to supplement local information to the global association. Extensive experiments on two popular lane detection benchmarks show that our method outperforms previous methods with F1 score of 79.63% on CULane and 97.71% on Tusimple dataset with high FPS. The code will be released at https://github.com/Wolfwjs/GANet.
PQuAD: A Persian Question Answering Dataset
We present Persian Question Answering Dataset (PQuAD), a crowdsourced reading comprehension dataset on Persian Wikipedia articles. It includes 80,000 questions along with their answers, with 25% of the questions being adversarially unanswerable. We examine various properties of the dataset to show the diversity and the level of its difficulty as an MRC benchmark. By releasing this dataset, we aim to ease research on Persian reading comprehension and development of Persian question answering systems. Our experiments on different state-of-the-art pre-trained contextualized language models show 74.8% Exact Match (EM) and 87.6% F1-score that can be used as the baseline results for further research on Persian QA.
Mythological Medical Machine Learning: Boosting the Performance of a Deep Learning Medical Data Classifier Using Realistic Physiological Models
Objective: To determine if a realistic, but computationally efficient model of the electrocardiogram can be used to pre-train a deep neural network (DNN) with a wide range of morphologies and abnormalities specific to a given condition - T-wave Alternans (TWA) as a result of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD - and significantly boost performance on a small database of rare individuals. Approach: Using a previously validated artificial ECG model, we generated 180,000 artificial ECGs with or without significant TWA, with varying heart rate, breathing rate, TWA amplitude, and ECG morphology. A DNN, trained on over 70,000 patients to classify 25 different rhythms, was modified the output layer to a binary class (TWA or no-TWA, or equivalently, PTSD or no-PTSD), and transfer learning was performed on the artificial ECG. In a final transfer learning step, the DNN was trained and cross-validated on ECG from 12 PTSD and 24 controls for all combinations of using the three databases. Main results: The best performing approach (AUROC = 0.77, Accuracy = 0.72, F1-score = 0.64) was found by performing both transfer learning steps, using the pre-trained arrhythmia DNN, the artificial data and the real PTSD-related ECG data. Removing the artificial data from training led to the largest drop in performance. Removing the arrhythmia data from training provided a modest, but significant, drop in performance. The final model showed no significant drop in performance on the artificial data, indicating no overfitting. Significance: In healthcare, it is common to only have a small collection of high-quality data and labels, or a larger database with much lower quality (and less relevant) labels. The paradigm presented here, involving model-based performance boosting, provides a solution through transfer learning on a large realistic artificial database, and a partially relevant real database.
ALL-IN-ONE: Multi-Task Learning BERT models for Evaluating Peer Assessments
Peer assessment has been widely applied across diverse academic fields over the last few decades and has demonstrated its effectiveness. However, the advantages of peer assessment can only be achieved with high-quality peer reviews. Previous studies have found that high-quality review comments usually comprise several features (e.g., contain suggestions, mention problems, use a positive tone). Thus, researchers have attempted to evaluate peer-review comments by detecting different features using various machine learning and deep learning models. However, there is no single study that investigates using a multi-task learning (MTL) model to detect multiple features simultaneously. This paper presents two MTL models for evaluating peer-review comments by leveraging the state-of-the-art pre-trained language representation models BERT and DistilBERT. Our results demonstrate that BERT-based models significantly outperform previous GloVe-based methods by around 6% in F1-score on tasks of detecting a single feature, and MTL further improves performance while reducing model size.
FH-SWF SG at GermEval 2021: Using Transformer-Based Language Models to Identify Toxic, Engaging, & Fact-Claiming Comments
In this paper we describe the methods we used for our submissions to the GermEval 2021 shared task on the identification of toxic, engaging, and fact-claiming comments. For all three subtasks we fine-tuned freely available transformer-based models from the Huggingface model hub. We evaluated the performance of various pre-trained models after fine-tuning on 80% of the training data with different hyperparameters and submitted predictions of the two best performing resulting models. We found that this approach worked best for subtask 3, for which we achieved an F1-score of 0.736.
Detecting Abusive Albanian
The ever growing usage of social media in the recent years has had a direct impact on the increased presence of hate speech and offensive speech in online platforms. Research on effective detection of such content has mainly focused on English and a few other widespread languages, while the leftover majority fail to have the same work put into them and thus cannot benefit from the steady advancements made in the field. In this paper we present Shaj, an annotated Albanian dataset for hate speech and offensive speech that has been constructed from user-generated content on various social media platforms. Its annotation follows the hierarchical schema introduced in OffensEval. The dataset is tested using three different classification models, the best of which achieves an F1 score of 0.77 for the identification of offensive language, 0.64 F1 score for the automatic categorization of offensive types and lastly, 0.52 F1 score for the offensive language target identification.
3D RegNet: Deep Learning Model for COVID-19 Diagnosis on Chest CT Image
In this paper, a 3D-RegNet-based neural network is proposed for diagnosing the physical condition of patients with coronavirus (Covid-19) infection. In the application of clinical medicine, lung CT images are utilized by practitioners to determine whether a patient is infected with coronavirus. However, there are some laybacks can be considered regarding to this diagnostic method, such as time consuming and low accuracy. As a relatively large organ of human body, important spatial features would be lost if the lungs were diagnosed utilizing two dimensional slice image. Therefore, in this paper, a deep learning model with 3D image was designed. The 3D image as input data was comprised of two-dimensional pulmonary image sequence and from which relevant coronavirus infection 3D features were extracted and classified. The results show that the test set of the 3D model, the result: f1 score of 0.8379 and AUC value of 0.8807 have been achieved.
PhotoChat: A Human-Human Dialogue Dataset with Photo Sharing Behavior for Joint Image-Text Modeling
We present a new human-human dialogue dataset - PhotoChat, the first dataset that casts light on the photo sharing behavior in onlin emessaging. PhotoChat contains 12k dialogues, each of which is paired with a user photo that is shared during the conversation. Based on this dataset, we propose two tasks to facilitate research on image-text modeling: a photo-sharing intent prediction task that predicts whether one intends to share a photo in the next conversation turn, and a photo retrieval task that retrieves the most relevant photo according to the dialogue context. In addition, for both tasks, we provide baseline models using the state-of-the-art models and report their benchmark performances. The best image retrieval model achieves 10.4% recall@1 (out of 1000 candidates) and the best photo intent prediction model achieves 58.1% F1 score, indicating that the dataset presents interesting yet challenging real-world problems. We are releasing PhotoChat to facilitate future research work among the community.
Vietnamese Complaint Detection on E-Commerce Websites
Customer product reviews play a role in improving the quality of products and services for business organizations or their brands. Complaining is an attitude that expresses dissatisfaction with an event or a product not meeting customer expectations. In this paper, we build a Open-domain Complaint Detection dataset (UIT-ViOCD), including 5,485 human-annotated reviews on four categories about product reviews on e-commerce sites. After the data collection phase, we proceed to the annotation task and achieve the inter-annotator agreement Am of 87%. Then, we present an extensive methodology for the research purposes and achieve 92.16% by F1-score for identifying complaints. With the results, in the future, we aim to build a system for open-domain complaint detection in E-commerce websites.
UPB at SemEval-2021 Task 5: Virtual Adversarial Training for Toxic Spans Detection
The real-world impact of polarization and toxicity in the online sphere marked the end of 2020 and the beginning of this year in a negative way. Semeval-2021, Task 5 - Toxic Spans Detection is based on a novel annotation of a subset of the Jigsaw Unintended Bias dataset and is the first language toxicity detection task dedicated to identifying the toxicity-level spans. For this task, participants had to automatically detect character spans in short comments that render the message as toxic. Our model considers applying Virtual Adversarial Training in a semi-supervised setting during the fine-tuning process of several Transformer-based models (i.e., BERT and RoBERTa), in combination with Conditional Random Fields. Our approach leads to performance improvements and more robust models, enabling us to achieve an F1-score of 65.73% in the official submission and an F1-score of 66.13% after further tuning during post-evaluation.
ANEA: Distant Supervision for Low-Resource Named Entity Recognition
Distant supervision allows obtaining labeled training corpora for low-resource settings where only limited hand-annotated data exists. However, to be used effectively, the distant supervision must be easy to gather. In this work, we present ANEA, a tool to automatically annotate named entities in texts based on entity lists. It spans the whole pipeline from obtaining the lists to analyzing the errors of the distant supervision. A tuning step allows the user to improve the automatic annotation with their linguistic insights without labelling or checking all tokens manually. In six low-resource scenarios, we show that the F1-score can be increased by on average 18 points through distantly supervised data obtained by ANEA.
A Hybrid Graph Neural Network Approach for Detecting PHP Vulnerabilities
This paper presents DeepTective, a deep learning approach to detect vulnerabilities in PHP source code. Our approach implements a novel hybrid technique that combines Gated Recurrent Units and Graph Convolutional Networks to detect SQLi, XSS and OSCI vulnerabilities leveraging both syntactic and semantic information. We evaluate DeepTective and compare it to the state of the art on an established synthetic dataset and on a novel real-world dataset collected from GitHub. Experimental results show that DeepTective achieves near perfect classification on the synthetic dataset, and an F1 score of 88.12% on the realistic dataset, outperforming related approaches. We validate DeepTective in the wild by discovering 4 novel vulnerabilities in established WordPress plugins.
Multi-Label Sentiment Analysis on 100 Languages with Dynamic Weighting for Label Imbalance
We investigate cross-lingual sentiment analysis, which has attracted significant attention due to its applications in various areas including market research, politics and social sciences. In particular, we introduce a sentiment analysis framework in multi-label setting as it obeys Plutchik wheel of emotions. We introduce a novel dynamic weighting method that balances the contribution from each class during training, unlike previous static weighting methods that assign non-changing weights based on their class frequency. Moreover, we adapt the focal loss that favors harder instances from single-label object recognition literature to our multi-label setting. Furthermore, we derive a method to choose optimal class-specific thresholds that maximize the macro-f1 score in linear time complexity. Through an extensive set of experiments, we show that our method obtains the state-of-the-art performance in 7 of 9 metrics in 3 different languages using a single model compared to the common baselines and the best-performing methods in the SemEval competition. We publicly share our code for our model, which can perform sentiment analysis in 100 languages, to facilitate further research.
A Natural Language Processing Pipeline of Chinese Free-text Radiology Reports for Liver Cancer Diagnosis
Despite the rapid development of natural language processing (NLP) implementation in electronic medical records (EMRs), Chinese EMRs processing remains challenging due to the limited corpus and specific grammatical characteristics, especially for radiology reports. In this study, we designed an NLP pipeline for the direct extraction of clinically relevant features from Chinese radiology reports, which is the first key step in computer-aided radiologic diagnosis. The pipeline was comprised of named entity recognition, synonyms normalization, and relationship extraction to finally derive the radiological features composed of one or more terms. In named entity recognition, we incorporated lexicon into deep learning model bidirectional long short-term memory-conditional random field (BiLSTM-CRF), and the model finally achieved an F1 score of 93.00%. With the extracted radiological features, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator and machine learning methods (support vector machine, random forest, decision tree, and logistic regression) were used to build the classifiers for liver cancer prediction. For liver cancer diagnosis, random forest had the highest predictive performance in liver cancer diagnosis (F1 score 86.97%, precision 87.71%, and recall 86.25%). This work was a comprehensive NLP study focusing on Chinese radiology reports and the application of NLP in cancer risk prediction. The proposed NLP pipeline for the radiological feature extraction could be easily implemented in other kinds of Chinese clinical texts and other disease predictive tasks.
MobileBERT: a Compact Task-Agnostic BERT for Resource-Limited Devices
Natural Language Processing (NLP) has recently achieved great success by using huge pre-trained models with hundreds of millions of parameters. However, these models suffer from heavy model sizes and high latency such that they cannot be deployed to resource-limited mobile devices. In this paper, we propose MobileBERT for compressing and accelerating the popular BERT model. Like the original BERT, MobileBERT is task-agnostic, that is, it can be generically applied to various downstream NLP tasks via simple fine-tuning. Basically, MobileBERT is a thin version of BERT_LARGE, while equipped with bottleneck structures and a carefully designed balance between self-attentions and feed-forward networks. To train MobileBERT, we first train a specially designed teacher model, an inverted-bottleneck incorporated BERT_LARGE model. Then, we conduct knowledge transfer from this teacher to MobileBERT. Empirical studies show that MobileBERT is 4.3x smaller and 5.5x faster than BERT_BASE while achieving competitive results on well-known benchmarks. On the natural language inference tasks of GLUE, MobileBERT achieves a GLUEscore o 77.7 (0.6 lower than BERT_BASE), and 62 ms latency on a Pixel 4 phone. On the SQuAD v1.1/v2.0 question answering task, MobileBERT achieves a dev F1 score of 90.0/79.2 (1.5/2.1 higher than BERT_BASE).
Deep Entity Matching with Pre-Trained Language Models
We present Ditto, a novel entity matching system based on pre-trained Transformer-based language models. We fine-tune and cast EM as a sequence-pair classification problem to leverage such models with a simple architecture. Our experiments show that a straightforward application of language models such as BERT, DistilBERT, or RoBERTa pre-trained on large text corpora already significantly improves the matching quality and outperforms previous state-of-the-art (SOTA), by up to 29% of F1 score on benchmark datasets. We also developed three optimization techniques to further improve Ditto's matching capability. Ditto allows domain knowledge to be injected by highlighting important pieces of input information that may be of interest when making matching decisions. Ditto also summarizes strings that are too long so that only the essential information is retained and used for EM. Finally, Ditto adapts a SOTA technique on data augmentation for text to EM to augment the training data with (difficult) examples. This way, Ditto is forced to learn "harder" to improve the model's matching capability. The optimizations we developed further boost the performance of Ditto by up to 9.8%. Perhaps more surprisingly, we establish that Ditto can achieve the previous SOTA results with at most half the number of labeled data. Finally, we demonstrate Ditto's effectiveness on a real-world large-scale EM task. On matching two company datasets consisting of 789K and 412K records, Ditto achieves a high F1 score of 96.5%.
Joint Extraction of Entities and Relations Based on a Novel Decomposition Strategy
Joint extraction of entities and relations aims to detect entity pairs along with their relations using a single model. Prior work typically solves this task in the extract-then-classify or unified labeling manner. However, these methods either suffer from the redundant entity pairs, or ignore the important inner structure in the process of extracting entities and relations. To address these limitations, in this paper, we first decompose the joint extraction task into two interrelated subtasks, namely HE extraction and TER extraction. The former subtask is to distinguish all head-entities that may be involved with target relations, and the latter is to identify corresponding tail-entities and relations for each extracted head-entity. Next, these two subtasks are further deconstructed into several sequence labeling problems based on our proposed span-based tagging scheme, which are conveniently solved by a hierarchical boundary tagger and a multi-span decoding algorithm. Owing to the reasonable decomposition strategy, our model can fully capture the semantic interdependency between different steps, as well as reduce noise from irrelevant entity pairs. Experimental results show that our method outperforms previous work by 5.2%, 5.9% and 21.5% (F1 score), achieving a new state-of-the-art on three public datasets
Towards Robust Named Entity Recognition for Historic German
Recent advances in language modeling using deep neural networks have shown that these models learn representations, that vary with the network depth from morphology to semantic relationships like co-reference. We apply pre-trained language models to low-resource named entity recognition for Historic German. We show on a series of experiments that character-based pre-trained language models do not run into trouble when faced with low-resource datasets. Our pre-trained character-based language models improve upon classical CRF-based methods and previous work on Bi-LSTMs by boosting F1 score performance by up to 6%. Our pre-trained language and NER models are publicly available under https://github.com/stefan-it/historic-ner .
NTUA-SLP at IEST 2018: Ensemble of Neural Transfer Methods for Implicit Emotion Classification
In this paper we present our approach to tackle the Implicit Emotion Shared Task (IEST) organized as part of WASSA 2018 at EMNLP 2018. Given a tweet, from which a certain word has been removed, we are asked to predict the emotion of the missing word. In this work, we experiment with neural Transfer Learning (TL) methods. Our models are based on LSTM networks, augmented with a self-attention mechanism. We use the weights of various pretrained models, for initializing specific layers of our networks. We leverage a big collection of unlabeled Twitter messages, for pretraining word2vec word embeddings and a set of diverse language models. Moreover, we utilize a sentiment analysis dataset for pretraining a model, which encodes emotion related information. The submitted model consists of an ensemble of the aforementioned TL models. Our team ranked 3rd out of 30 participants, achieving an F1 score of 0.703.
CCI3.0-HQ: a large-scale Chinese dataset of high quality designed for pre-training large language models
We present CCI3.0-HQ (https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-HQ), a high-quality 500GB subset of the Chinese Corpora Internet 3.0 (CCI3.0)(https://huggingface.co/datasets/BAAI/CCI3-Data), developed using a novel two-stage hybrid filtering pipeline that significantly enhances data quality. To evaluate its effectiveness, we trained a 0.5B parameter model from scratch on 100B tokens across various datasets, achieving superior performance on 10 benchmarks in a zero-shot setting compared to CCI3.0, SkyPile, and WanjuanV1. The high-quality filtering process effectively distills the capabilities of the Qwen2-72B-instruct model into a compact 0.5B model, attaining optimal F1 scores for Chinese web data classification. We believe this open-access dataset will facilitate broader access to high-quality language models.
Document Attribution: Examining Citation Relationships using Large Language Models
As Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied to document-based tasks - such as document summarization, question answering, and information extraction - where user requirements focus on retrieving information from provided documents rather than relying on the model's parametric knowledge, ensuring the trustworthiness and interpretability of these systems has become a critical concern. A central approach to addressing this challenge is attribution, which involves tracing the generated outputs back to their source documents. However, since LLMs can produce inaccurate or imprecise responses, it is crucial to assess the reliability of these citations. To tackle this, our work proposes two techniques. (1) A zero-shot approach that frames attribution as a straightforward textual entailment task. Our method using flan-ul2 demonstrates an improvement of 0.27% and 2.4% over the best baseline of ID and OOD sets of AttributionBench, respectively. (2) We also explore the role of the attention mechanism in enhancing the attribution process. Using a smaller LLM, flan-t5-small, the F1 scores outperform the baseline across almost all layers except layer 4 and layers 8 through 11.
Empirical Study of PEFT techniques for Winter Wheat Segmentation
Parameter Efficient Fine Tuning (PEFT) techniques have recently experienced significant growth and have been extensively employed to adapt large vision and language models to various domains, enabling satisfactory model performance with minimal computational needs. Despite these advances, more research has yet to delve into potential PEFT applications in real-life scenarios, particularly in the critical domains of remote sensing and crop monitoring. The diversity of climates across different regions and the need for comprehensive large-scale datasets have posed significant obstacles to accurately identify crop types across varying geographic locations and changing growing seasons. This study seeks to bridge this gap by comprehensively exploring the feasibility of cross-area and cross-year out-of-distribution generalization using the State-of-the-Art (SOTA) wheat crop monitoring model. The aim of this work is to explore PEFT approaches for crop monitoring. Specifically, we focus on adapting the SOTA TSViT model to address winter wheat field segmentation, a critical task for crop monitoring and food security. This adaptation process involves integrating different PEFT techniques, including BigFit, LoRA, Adaptformer, and prompt tuning. Using PEFT techniques, we achieved notable results comparable to those achieved using full fine-tuning methods while training only a mere 0.7% parameters of the whole TSViT architecture. The in-house labeled data-set, referred to as the Beqaa-Lebanon dataset, comprises high-quality annotated polygons for wheat and non-wheat classes with a total surface of 170 kmsq, over five consecutive years. Using Sentinel-2 images, our model achieved a 84% F1-score. We intend to publicly release the Lebanese winter wheat data set, code repository, and model weights.
Prompting with Pseudo-Code Instructions
Prompting with natural language instructions has recently emerged as a popular method of harnessing the capabilities of large language models. Given the inherent ambiguity present in natural language, it is intuitive to consider the possible advantages of prompting with less ambiguous prompt styles, such as the use of pseudo-code. In this paper we explore if prompting via pseudo-code instructions helps improve the performance of pre-trained language models. We manually create a dataset of pseudo-code prompts for 132 different tasks spanning classification, QA and generative language tasks, sourced from the Super-NaturalInstructions dataset. Using these prompts along with their counterparts in natural language, we study their performance on two LLM families - BLOOM and CodeGen. Our experiments show that using pseudo-code instructions leads to better results, with an average increase (absolute) of 7-16 points in F1 scores for classification tasks and an improvement (relative) of 12-38% in aggregate ROUGE-L scores across all tasks. We include detailed ablation studies which indicate that code comments, docstrings, and the structural clues encoded in pseudo-code all contribute towards the improvement in performance. To the best of our knowledge our work is the first to demonstrate how pseudo-code prompts can be helpful in improving the performance of pre-trained LMs.
Emotion Classification In Software Engineering Texts: A Comparative Analysis of Pre-trained Transformers Language Models
Emotion recognition in software engineering texts is critical for understanding developer expressions and improving collaboration. This paper presents a comparative analysis of state-of-the-art Pre-trained Language Models (PTMs) for fine-grained emotion classification on two benchmark datasets from GitHub and Stack Overflow. We evaluate six transformer models - BERT, RoBERTa, ALBERT, DeBERTa, CodeBERT and GraphCodeBERT against the current best-performing tool SEntiMoji. Our analysis reveals consistent improvements ranging from 1.17\% to 16.79\% in terms of macro-averaged and micro-averaged F1 scores, with general domain models outperforming specialized ones. To further enhance PTMs, we incorporate polarity features in attention layer during training, demonstrating additional average gains of 1.0\% to 10.23\% over baseline PTMs approaches. Our work provides strong evidence for the advancements afforded by PTMs in recognizing nuanced emotions like Anger, Love, Fear, Joy, Sadness, and Surprise in software engineering contexts. Through comprehensive benchmarking and error analysis, we also outline scope for improvements to address contextual gaps.
Financial Fraud Detection: A Comparative Study of Quantum Machine Learning Models
In this research, a comparative study of four Quantum Machine Learning (QML) models was conducted for fraud detection in finance. We proved that the Quantum Support Vector Classifier model achieved the highest performance, with F1 scores of 0.98 for fraud and non-fraud classes. Other models like the Variational Quantum Classifier, Estimator Quantum Neural Network (QNN), and Sampler QNN demonstrate promising results, propelling the potential of QML classification for financial applications. While they exhibit certain limitations, the insights attained pave the way for future enhancements and optimisation strategies. However, challenges exist, including the need for more efficient Quantum algorithms and larger and more complex datasets. The article provides solutions to overcome current limitations and contributes new insights to the field of Quantum Machine Learning in fraud detection, with important implications for its future development.
MIPHEI-ViT: Multiplex Immunofluorescence Prediction from H&E Images using ViT Foundation Models
Histopathological analysis is a cornerstone of cancer diagnosis, with Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining routinely acquired for every patient to visualize cell morphology and tissue architecture. On the other hand, multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) enables more precise cell type identification via proteomic markers, but has yet to achieve widespread clinical adoption due to cost and logistical constraints. To bridge this gap, we introduce MIPHEI (Multiplex Immunofluorescence Prediction from H&E), a U-Net-inspired architecture that integrates state-of-the-art ViT foundation models as encoders to predict mIF signals from H&E images. MIPHEI targets a comprehensive panel of markers spanning nuclear content, immune lineages (T cells, B cells, myeloid), epithelium, stroma, vasculature, and proliferation. We train our model using the publicly available ORION dataset of restained H&E and mIF images from colorectal cancer tissue, and validate it on two independent datasets. MIPHEI achieves accurate cell-type classification from H&E alone, with F1 scores of 0.88 for Pan-CK, 0.57 for CD3e, 0.56 for SMA, 0.36 for CD68, and 0.30 for CD20, substantially outperforming both a state-of-the-art baseline and a random classifier for most markers. Our results indicate that our model effectively captures the complex relationships between nuclear morphologies in their tissue context, as visible in H&E images and molecular markers defining specific cell types. MIPHEI offers a promising step toward enabling cell-type-aware analysis of large-scale H&E datasets, in view of uncovering relationships between spatial cellular organization and patient outcomes.
C-MTCSD: A Chinese Multi-Turn Conversational Stance Detection Dataset
Stance detection has become an essential tool for analyzing public discussions on social media. Current methods face significant challenges, particularly in Chinese language processing and multi-turn conversational analysis. To address these limitations, we introduce C-MTCSD, the largest Chinese multi-turn conversational stance detection dataset, comprising 24,264 carefully annotated instances from Sina Weibo, which is 4.2 times larger than the only prior Chinese conversational stance detection dataset. Our comprehensive evaluation using both traditional approaches and large language models reveals the complexity of C-MTCSD: even state-of-the-art models achieve only 64.07% F1 score in the challenging zero-shot setting, while performance consistently degrades with increasing conversation depth. Traditional models particularly struggle with implicit stance detection, achieving below 50% F1 score. This work establishes a challenging new benchmark for Chinese stance detection research, highlighting significant opportunities for future improvements.
A Binary Classification Social Network Dataset for Graph Machine Learning
Social networks have a vast range of applications with graphs. The available benchmark datasets are citation, co-occurrence, e-commerce networks, etc, with classes ranging from 3 to 15. However, there is no benchmark classification social network dataset for graph machine learning. This paper fills the gap and presents the Binary Classification Social Network Dataset (BiSND), designed for graph machine learning applications to predict binary classes. We present the BiSND in tabular and graph formats to verify its robustness across classical and advanced machine learning. We employ a diverse set of classifiers, including four traditional machine learning algorithms (Decision Trees, K-Nearest Neighbour, Random Forest, XGBoost), one Deep Neural Network (multi-layer perceptrons), one Graph Neural Network (Graph Convolutional Network), and three state-of-the-art Graph Contrastive Learning methods (BGRL, GRACE, DAENS). Our findings reveal that BiSND is suitable for classification tasks, with F1-scores ranging from 67.66 to 70.15, indicating promising avenues for future enhancements.
1DCNNTrans: BISINDO Sign Language Interpreters in Improving the Inclusiveness of Public Services
Indonesia ranks fourth globally in the number of deaf cases. Individuals with hearing impairments often find communication challenging, necessitating the use of sign language. However, there are limited public services that offer such inclusivity. On the other hand, advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) present promising solutions to overcome communication barriers faced by the deaf. This study aims to explore the application of AI in developing models for a simplified sign language translation app and dictionary, designed for integration into public service facilities, to facilitate communication for individuals with hearing impairments, thereby enhancing inclusivity in public services. The researchers compared the performance of LSTM and 1D CNN + Transformer (1DCNNTrans) models for sign language recognition. Through rigorous testing and validation, it was found that the LSTM model achieved an accuracy of 94.67%, while the 1DCNNTrans model achieved an accuracy of 96.12%. Model performance evaluation indicated that although the LSTM exhibited lower inference latency, it showed weaknesses in classifying classes with similar keypoints. In contrast, the 1DCNNTrans model demonstrated greater stability and higher F1 scores for classes with varying levels of complexity compared to the LSTM model. Both models showed excellent performance, exceeding 90% validation accuracy and demonstrating rapid classification of 50 sign language gestures.
ChartEye: A Deep Learning Framework for Chart Information Extraction
The widespread use of charts and infographics as a means of data visualization in various domains has inspired recent research in automated chart understanding. However, information extraction from chart images is a complex multitasked process due to style variations and, as a consequence, it is challenging to design an end-to-end system. In this study, we propose a deep learning-based framework that provides a solution for key steps in the chart information extraction pipeline. The proposed framework utilizes hierarchal vision transformers for the tasks of chart-type and text-role classification, while YOLOv7 for text detection. The detected text is then enhanced using Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks to improve the recognition output of the OCR. Experimental results on a benchmark dataset show that our proposed framework achieves excellent performance at every stage with F1-scores of 0.97 for chart-type classification, 0.91 for text-role classification, and a mean Average Precision of 0.95 for text detection.
Phrasing for UX: Enhancing Information Engagement through Computational Linguistics and Creative Analytics
This study explores the relationship between textual features and Information Engagement (IE) on digital platforms. It highlights the impact of computational linguistics and analytics on user interaction. The READ model is introduced to quantify key predictors like representativeness, ease of use, affect, and distribution, which forecast engagement levels. The model's effectiveness is validated through AB testing and randomized trials, showing strong predictive performance in participation (accuracy: 0.94), perception (accuracy: 0.85), perseverance (accuracy: 0.81), and overall IE (accuracy: 0.97). While participation metrics are strong, perception and perseverance show slightly lower recall and F1-scores, indicating some challenges. The study demonstrates that modifying text based on the READ model's insights leads to significant improvements. For example, increasing representativeness and positive affect boosts selection rates by 11 percent, raises evaluation averages from 3.98 to 4.46, and improves retention rates by 11 percent. These findings highlight the importance of linguistic factors in IE, providing a framework for enhancing digital text engagement. The research offers practical strategies applicable to fields like education, health, and media.
Towards Automation of Human Stage of Decay Identification: An Artificial Intelligence Approach
Determining the stage of decomposition (SOD) is crucial for estimating the postmortem interval and identifying human remains. Currently, labor-intensive manual scoring methods are used for this purpose, but they are subjective and do not scale for the emerging large-scale archival collections of human decomposition photos. This study explores the feasibility of automating two common human decomposition scoring methods proposed by Megyesi and Gelderman using artificial intelligence (AI). We evaluated two popular deep learning models, Inception V3 and Xception, by training them on a large dataset of human decomposition images to classify the SOD for different anatomical regions, including the head, torso, and limbs. Additionally, an interrater study was conducted to assess the reliability of the AI models compared to human forensic examiners for SOD identification. The Xception model achieved the best classification performance, with macro-averaged F1 scores of .878, .881, and .702 for the head, torso, and limbs when predicting Megyesi's SODs, and .872, .875, and .76 for the head, torso, and limbs when predicting Gelderman's SODs. The interrater study results supported AI's ability to determine the SOD at a reliability level comparable to a human expert. This work demonstrates the potential of AI models trained on a large dataset of human decomposition images to automate SOD identification.
Emotion Classification from Multi-Channel EEG Signals Using HiSTN: A Hierarchical Graph-based Spatial-Temporal Approach
This study introduces a parameter-efficient Hierarchical Spatial Temporal Network (HiSTN) specifically designed for the task of emotion classification using multi-channel electroencephalogram data. The network incorporates a graph hierarchy constructed from bottom-up at various abstraction levels, offering the dual advantages of enhanced task-relevant deep feature extraction and a lightweight design. The model's effectiveness is further amplified when used in conjunction with a proposed unique label smoothing method. Comprehensive benchmark experiments reveal that this combined approach yields high, balanced performance in terms of both quantitative and qualitative predictions. HiSTN, which has approximately 1,000 parameters, achieves mean F1 scores of 96.82% (valence) and 95.62% (arousal) in subject-dependent tests on the rarely-utilized 5-classification task problem from the DREAMER dataset. In the subject-independent settings, the same model yields mean F1 scores of 78.34% for valence and 81.59% for arousal. The adoption of the Sequential Top-2 Hit Rate (Seq2HR) metric highlights the significant enhancements in terms of the balance between model's quantitative and qualitative for predictions achieved through our approach when compared to training with regular one-hot labels. These improvements surpass 50% in subject-dependent tasks and 30% in subject-independent tasks. The study also includes relevant ablation studies and case explorations to further elucidate the workings of the proposed model and enhance its interpretability.
Rethinking Model Selection and Decoding for Keyphrase Generation with Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models
Keyphrase Generation (KPG) is a longstanding task in NLP with widespread applications. The advent of sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) pre-trained language models (PLMs) has ushered in a transformative era for KPG, yielding promising performance improvements. However, many design decisions remain unexplored and are often made arbitrarily. This paper undertakes a systematic analysis of the influence of model selection and decoding strategies on PLM-based KPG. We begin by elucidating why seq2seq PLMs are apt for KPG, anchored by an attention-driven hypothesis. We then establish that conventional wisdom for selecting seq2seq PLMs lacks depth: (1) merely increasing model size or performing task-specific adaptation is not parameter-efficient; (2) although combining in-domain pre-training with task adaptation benefits KPG, it does partially hinder generalization. Regarding decoding, we demonstrate that while greedy search achieves strong F1 scores, it lags in recall compared with sampling-based methods. Based on these insights, we propose DeSel, a likelihood-based decode-select algorithm for seq2seq PLMs. DeSel improves greedy search by an average of 4.7% semantic F1 across five datasets. Our collective findings pave the way for deeper future investigations into PLM-based KPG.
Fine-tuned LLMs Know More, Hallucinate Less with Few-Shot Sequence-to-Sequence Semantic Parsing over Wikidata
While large language models (LLMs) can answer many questions correctly, they can also hallucinate and give wrong answers. Wikidata, with its over 12 billion facts, can be used to ground LLMs to improve their factuality. This paper presents WikiWebQuestions, a high-quality question answering benchmark for Wikidata. Ported over from WebQuestions for Freebase, it consists of real-world data with SPARQL annotation. This paper presents a few-shot sequence-to-sequence semantic parser for Wikidata. We modify SPARQL to use the unique domain and property names instead of their IDs. We train the parser to use either the results from an entity linker or mentions in the query. We fine-tune LLaMA by adding the few-shot training data to that used to fine-tune Alpaca. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of this methodology, establishing a strong baseline of 76% and 65% answer accuracy in the dev and test sets of WikiWebQuestions, respectively. By pairing our semantic parser with GPT-3, we combine verifiable results with qualified GPT-3 guesses to provide useful answers to 96% of the questions in dev. We also show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art for the QALD-7 Wikidata dataset by 3.6% in F1 score.
Improving Spoken Language Identification with Map-Mix
The pre-trained multi-lingual XLSR model generalizes well for language identification after fine-tuning on unseen languages. However, the performance significantly degrades when the languages are not very distinct from each other, for example, in the case of dialects. Low resource dialect classification remains a challenging problem to solve. We present a new data augmentation method that leverages model training dynamics of individual data points to improve sampling for latent mixup. The method works well in low-resource settings where generalization is paramount. Our datamaps-based mixup technique, which we call Map-Mix improves weighted F1 scores by 2% compared to the random mixup baseline and results in a significantly well-calibrated model. The code for our method is open sourced on https://github.com/skit-ai/Map-Mix.
CROP: Zero-shot Cross-lingual Named Entity Recognition with Multilingual Labeled Sequence Translation
Named entity recognition (NER) suffers from the scarcity of annotated training data, especially for low-resource languages without labeled data. Cross-lingual NER has been proposed to alleviate this issue by transferring knowledge from high-resource languages to low-resource languages via aligned cross-lingual representations or machine translation results. However, the performance of cross-lingual NER methods is severely affected by the unsatisfactory quality of translation or label projection. To address these problems, we propose a Cross-lingual Entity Projection framework (CROP) to enable zero-shot cross-lingual NER with the help of a multilingual labeled sequence translation model. Specifically, the target sequence is first translated into the source language and then tagged by a source NER model. We further adopt a labeled sequence translation model to project the tagged sequence back to the target language and label the target raw sentence. Ultimately, the whole pipeline is integrated into an end-to-end model by the way of self-training. Experimental results on two benchmarks demonstrate that our method substantially outperforms the previous strong baseline by a large margin of +3~7 F1 scores and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
PatternRank: Leveraging Pretrained Language Models and Part of Speech for Unsupervised Keyphrase Extraction
Keyphrase extraction is the process of automatically selecting a small set of most relevant phrases from a given text. Supervised keyphrase extraction approaches need large amounts of labeled training data and perform poorly outside the domain of the training data. In this paper, we present PatternRank, which leverages pretrained language models and part-of-speech for unsupervised keyphrase extraction from single documents. Our experiments show PatternRank achieves higher precision, recall and F1-scores than previous state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we present the KeyphraseVectorizers package, which allows easy modification of part-of-speech patterns for candidate keyphrase selection, and hence adaptation of our approach to any domain.
Sequence Models for Drone vs Bird Classification
Drone detection has become an essential task in object detection as drone costs have decreased and drone technology has improved. It is, however, difficult to detect distant drones when there is weak contrast, long range, and low visibility. In this work, we propose several sequence classification architectures to reduce the detected false-positive ratio of drone tracks. Moreover, we propose a new drone vs. bird sequence classification dataset to train and evaluate the proposed architectures. 3D CNN, LSTM, and Transformer based sequence classification architectures have been trained on the proposed dataset to show the effectiveness of the proposed idea. As experiments show, using sequence information, bird classification and overall F1 scores can be increased by up to 73% and 35%, respectively. Among all sequence classification models, R(2+1)D-based fully convolutional model yields the best transfer learning and fine-tuning results.
Detection of fake faces in videos
: Deep learning methodologies have been used to create applications that can cause threats to privacy, democracy and national security and could be used to further amplify malicious activities. One of those deep learning-powered applications in recent times is synthesized videos of famous personalities. According to Forbes, Generative Adversarial Networks(GANs) generated fake videos growing exponentially every year and the organization known as Deeptrace had estimated an increase of deepfakes by 84% from the year 2018 to 2019. They are used to generate and modify human faces, where most of the existing fake videos are of prurient non-consensual nature, of which its estimates to be around 96% and some carried out impersonating personalities for cyber crime. In this paper, available video datasets are identified and a pretrained model BlazeFace is used to detect faces, and a ResNet and Xception ensembled architectured neural network trained on the dataset to achieve the goal of detection of fake faces in videos. The model is optimized over a loss value and log loss values and evaluated over its F1 score. Over a sample of data, it is observed that focal loss provides better accuracy, F1 score and loss as the gamma of the focal loss becomes a hyper parameter. This provides a k-folded accuracy of around 91% at its peak in a training cycle with the real world accuracy subjected to change over time as the model decays.
GuardReasoner: Towards Reasoning-based LLM Safeguards
As LLMs increasingly impact safety-critical applications, ensuring their safety using guardrails remains a key challenge. This paper proposes GuardReasoner, a new safeguard for LLMs, by guiding the guard model to learn to reason. Concretely, we first create the GuardReasonerTrain dataset, which consists of 127K samples with 460K detailed reasoning steps. Then, we introduce reasoning SFT to unlock the reasoning capability of guard models. In addition, we present hard sample DPO to further strengthen their reasoning ability. In this manner, GuardReasoner achieves better performance, explainability, and generalizability. Extensive experiments and analyses on 13 benchmarks of 3 guardrail tasks demonstrate its superiority. Remarkably, GuardReasoner 8B surpasses GPT-4o+CoT by 5.74% and LLaMA Guard 3 8B by 20.84% F1 score on average. We release the training data, code, and models with different scales (1B, 3B, 8B) of GuardReasoner : https://github.com/yueliu1999/GuardReasoner/.
PandaLM: An Automatic Evaluation Benchmark for LLM Instruction Tuning Optimization
Instruction tuning large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task, owing to the complexity of hyperparameter selection and the difficulty involved in evaluating the tuned models. To determine the optimal hyperparameters, an automatic, robust, and reliable evaluation benchmark is essential. However, establishing such a benchmark is not a trivial task due to the challenges associated with evaluation accuracy and privacy protection. In response to these challenges, we introduce a judge large language model, named PandaLM, which is trained to distinguish the superior model given several LLMs. PandaLM's focus extends beyond just the objective correctness of responses, which is the main focus of traditional evaluation datasets. It addresses vital subjective factors such as relative conciseness, clarity, adherence to instructions, comprehensiveness, and formality. To ensure the reliability of PandaLM, we collect a diverse human-annotated test dataset, where all contexts are generated by humans and labels are aligned with human preferences. Our results indicate that PandaLM-7B achieves 93.75% of GPT-3.5's evaluation ability and 88.28% of GPT-4's in terms of F1-score on our test dataset. PandaLM enables the evaluation of LLM to be fairer but with less cost, evidenced by significant improvements achieved by models tuned through PandaLM compared to their counterparts trained with default Alpaca's hyperparameters. In addition, PandaLM does not depend on API-based evaluations, thus avoiding potential data leakage. All resources of PandaLM are released at https://github.com/WeOpenML/PandaLM.
Emotion-LLaMA: Multimodal Emotion Recognition and Reasoning with Instruction Tuning
Accurate emotion perception is crucial for various applications, including human-computer interaction, education, and counseling. However, traditional single-modality approaches often fail to capture the complexity of real-world emotional expressions, which are inherently multimodal. Moreover, existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) face challenges in integrating audio and recognizing subtle facial micro-expressions. To address this, we introduce the MERR dataset, containing 28,618 coarse-grained and 4,487 fine-grained annotated samples across diverse emotional categories. This dataset enables models to learn from varied scenarios and generalize to real-world applications. Furthermore, we propose Emotion-LLaMA, a model that seamlessly integrates audio, visual, and textual inputs through emotion-specific encoders. By aligning features into a shared space and employing a modified LLaMA model with instruction tuning, Emotion-LLaMA significantly enhances both emotional recognition and reasoning capabilities. Extensive evaluations show Emotion-LLaMA outperforms other MLLMs, achieving top scores in Clue Overlap (7.83) and Label Overlap (6.25) on EMER, an F1 score of 0.9036 on MER2023-SEMI challenge, and the highest UAR (45.59) and WAR (59.37) in zero-shot evaluations on DFEW dataset.
Precise Legal Sentence Boundary Detection for Retrieval at Scale: NUPunkt and CharBoundary
We present NUPunkt and CharBoundary, two sentence boundary detection libraries optimized for high-precision, high-throughput processing of legal text in large-scale applications such as due diligence, e-discovery, and legal research. These libraries address the critical challenges posed by legal documents containing specialized citations, abbreviations, and complex sentence structures that confound general-purpose sentence boundary detectors. Our experimental evaluation on five diverse legal datasets comprising over 25,000 documents and 197,000 annotated sentence boundaries demonstrates that NUPunkt achieves 91.1% precision while processing 10 million characters per second with modest memory requirements (432 MB). CharBoundary models offer balanced and adjustable precision-recall tradeoffs, with the large model achieving the highest F1 score (0.782) among all tested methods. Notably, NUPunkt provides a 29-32% precision improvement over general-purpose tools while maintaining exceptional throughput, processing multi-million document collections in minutes rather than hours. Both libraries run efficiently on standard CPU hardware without requiring specialized accelerators. NUPunkt is implemented in pure Python with zero external dependencies, while CharBoundary relies only on scikit-learn and optional ONNX runtime integration for optimized performance. Both libraries are available under the MIT license, can be installed via PyPI, and can be interactively tested at https://sentences.aleainstitute.ai/. These libraries address critical precision issues in retrieval-augmented generation systems by preserving coherent legal concepts across sentences, where each percentage improvement in precision yields exponentially greater reductions in context fragmentation, creating cascading benefits throughout retrieval pipelines and significantly enhancing downstream reasoning quality.
Evaluating small vision-language models as AI assistants for radio astronomical source analysis tasks
The advent of next-generation radio telescopes is set to transform radio astronomy by producing massive data volumes that challenge traditional processing methods. Deep learning techniques have shown strong potential in automating radio analysis tasks, yet are often constrained by the limited availability of large annotated datasets. Recent progress in self-supervised learning has led to foundational radio vision models, but adapting them for new tasks typically requires coding expertise, limiting their accessibility to a broader astronomical community. Text-based AI interfaces offer a promising alternative by enabling task-specific queries and example-driven learning. In this context, Large Language Models (LLMs), with their remarkable zero-shot capabilities, are increasingly used in scientific domains. However, deploying large-scale models remains resource-intensive, and there is a growing demand for AI systems that can reason over both visual and textual data in astronomical analysis. This study explores small-scale Vision-Language Models (VLMs) as AI assistants for radio astronomy, combining LLM capabilities with vision transformers. We fine-tuned the LLaVA VLM on a dataset of 59k radio images from multiple surveys, enriched with 38k image-caption pairs from the literature. The fine-tuned models show clear improvements over base models in radio-specific tasks, achieving ~30% F1-score gains in extended source detection, but they underperform pure vision models and exhibit ~20% drop on general multimodal tasks. Inclusion of caption data and LoRA fine-tuning enhances instruction-following and helps recover ~10% accuracy on standard benchmarks. This work lays the foundation for future advancements in radio VLMs, highlighting their potential and limitations, such as the need for better multimodal alignment, higher-quality datasets, and mitigation of catastrophic forgetting.
AI-generated Text Detection with a GLTR-based Approach
The rise of LLMs (Large Language Models) has contributed to the improved performance and development of cutting-edge NLP applications. However, these can also pose risks when used maliciously, such as spreading fake news, harmful content, impersonating individuals, or facilitating school plagiarism, among others. This is because LLMs can generate high-quality texts, which are challenging to differentiate from those written by humans. GLTR, which stands for Giant Language Model Test Room and was developed jointly by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and HarvardNLP, is a visual tool designed to help detect machine-generated texts based on GPT-2, that highlights the words in text depending on the probability that they were machine-generated. One limitation of GLTR is that the results it returns can sometimes be ambiguous and lead to confusion. This study aims to explore various ways to improve GLTR's effectiveness for detecting AI-generated texts within the context of the IberLef-AuTexTification 2023 shared task, in both English and Spanish languages. Experiment results show that our GLTR-based GPT-2 model overcomes the state-of-the-art models on the English dataset with a macro F1-score of 80.19%, except for the first ranking model (80.91%). However, for the Spanish dataset, we obtained a macro F1-score of 66.20%, which differs by 4.57% compared to the top-performing model.
MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations
Understanding documents with rich layouts and multi-modal components is a long-standing and practical task. Recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have made remarkable strides in various tasks, particularly in single-page document understanding (DU). However, their abilities on long-context DU remain an open problem. This work presents MMLongBench-Doc, a long-context, multi-modal benchmark comprising 1,062 expert-annotated questions. Distinct from previous datasets, it is constructed upon 130 lengthy PDF-formatted documents with an average of 49.4 pages and 20,971 textual tokens. Towards comprehensive evaluation, answers to these questions rely on pieces of evidence from (1) different sources (text, image, chart, table, and layout structure) and (2) various locations (i.e. page number). Moreover, 33.2% of the questions are cross-page questions requiring evidence across multiple pages. 22.8% of the questions are designed to be unanswerable for detecting potential hallucinations. Experiments on 14 LVLMs demonstrate that long-context DU greatly challenges current models. Notably, the best-performing model, GPT-4o, achieves an F1 score of only 42.7%, while the second-best, GPT-4V, scores 31.4%. Furthermore, 12 LVLMs (all except GPT-4o and GPT-4V) even present worse performance than their LLM counterparts which are fed with lossy-parsed OCR documents. These results validate the necessity of future research toward more capable long-context LVLMs. Project Page: https://mayubo2333.github.io/MMLongBench-Doc
Synthetic Dataset Creation and Fine-Tuning of Transformer Models for Question Answering in Serbian
In this paper, we focus on generating a synthetic question answering (QA) dataset using an adapted Translate-Align-Retrieve method. Using this method, we created the largest Serbian QA dataset of more than 87K samples, which we name SQuAD-sr. To acknowledge the script duality in Serbian, we generated both Cyrillic and Latin versions of the dataset. We investigate the dataset quality and use it to fine-tune several pre-trained QA models. Best results were obtained by fine-tuning the BERTi\'c model on our Latin SQuAD-sr dataset, achieving 73.91% Exact Match and 82.97% F1 score on the benchmark XQuAD dataset, which we translated into Serbian for the purpose of evaluation. The results show that our model exceeds zero-shot baselines, but fails to go beyond human performance. We note the advantage of using a monolingual pre-trained model over multilingual, as well as the performance increase gained by using Latin over Cyrillic. By performing additional analysis, we show that questions about numeric values or dates are more likely to be answered correctly than other types of questions. Finally, we conclude that SQuAD-sr is of sufficient quality for fine-tuning a Serbian QA model, in the absence of a manually crafted and annotated dataset.
NeSy is alive and well: A LLM-driven symbolic approach for better code comment data generation and classification
We present a neuro-symbolic (NeSy) workflow combining a symbolic-based learning technique with a large language model (LLM) agent to generate synthetic data for code comment classification in the C programming language. We also show how generating controlled synthetic data using this workflow fixes some of the notable weaknesses of LLM-based generation and increases the performance of classical machine learning models on the code comment classification task. Our best model, a Neural Network, achieves a Macro-F1 score of 91.412% with an increase of 1.033% after data augmentation.
Learning the Legibility of Visual Text Perturbations
Many adversarial attacks in NLP perturb inputs to produce visually similar strings ('ergo' rightarrow 'epsilonrgo') which are legible to humans but degrade model performance. Although preserving legibility is a necessary condition for text perturbation, little work has been done to systematically characterize it; instead, legibility is typically loosely enforced via intuitions around the nature and extent of perturbations. Particularly, it is unclear to what extent can inputs be perturbed while preserving legibility, or how to quantify the legibility of a perturbed string. In this work, we address this gap by learning models that predict the legibility of a perturbed string, and rank candidate perturbations based on their legibility. To do so, we collect and release LEGIT, a human-annotated dataset comprising the legibility of visually perturbed text. Using this dataset, we build both text- and vision-based models which achieve up to 0.91 F1 score in predicting whether an input is legible, and an accuracy of 0.86 in predicting which of two given perturbations is more legible. Additionally, we discover that legible perturbations from the LEGIT dataset are more effective at lowering the performance of NLP models than best-known attack strategies, suggesting that current models may be vulnerable to a broad range of perturbations beyond what is captured by existing visual attacks. Data, code, and models are available at https://github.com/dvsth/learning-legibility-2023.
Image Labels Are All You Need for Coarse Seagrass Segmentation
Seagrass meadows serve as critical carbon sinks, but accurately estimating the amount of carbon they store requires knowledge of the seagrass species present. Using underwater and surface vehicles equipped with machine learning algorithms can help to accurately estimate the composition and extent of seagrass meadows at scale. However, previous approaches for seagrass detection and classification have required full supervision from patch-level labels. In this paper, we reframe seagrass classification as a weakly supervised coarse segmentation problem where image-level labels are used during training (25 times fewer labels compared to patch-level labeling) and patch-level outputs are obtained at inference time. To this end, we introduce SeaFeats, an architecture that uses unsupervised contrastive pretraining and feature similarity to separate background and seagrass patches, and SeaCLIP, a model that showcases the effectiveness of large language models as a supervisory signal in domain-specific applications. We demonstrate that an ensemble of SeaFeats and SeaCLIP leads to highly robust performance, with SeaCLIP conservatively predicting the background class to avoid false seagrass misclassifications in blurry or dark patches. Our method outperforms previous approaches that require patch-level labels on the multi-species 'DeepSeagrass' dataset by 6.8% (absolute) for the class-weighted F1 score, and by 12.1% (absolute) F1 score for seagrass presence/absence on the 'Global Wetlands' dataset. We also present two case studies for real-world deployment: outlier detection on the Global Wetlands dataset, and application of our method on imagery collected by FloatyBoat, an autonomous surface vehicle.
Neural Media Bias Detection Using Distant Supervision With BABE -- Bias Annotations By Experts
Media coverage has a substantial effect on the public perception of events. Nevertheless, media outlets are often biased. One way to bias news articles is by altering the word choice. The automatic identification of bias by word choice is challenging, primarily due to the lack of a gold standard data set and high context dependencies. This paper presents BABE, a robust and diverse data set created by trained experts, for media bias research. We also analyze why expert labeling is essential within this domain. Our data set offers better annotation quality and higher inter-annotator agreement than existing work. It consists of 3,700 sentences balanced among topics and outlets, containing media bias labels on the word and sentence level. Based on our data, we also introduce a way to detect bias-inducing sentences in news articles automatically. Our best performing BERT-based model is pre-trained on a larger corpus consisting of distant labels. Fine-tuning and evaluating the model on our proposed supervised data set, we achieve a macro F1-score of 0.804, outperforming existing methods.
Transferring Monolingual Model to Low-Resource Language: The Case of Tigrinya
In recent years, transformer models have achieved great success in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Most of the current state-of-the-art NLP results are achieved by using monolingual transformer models, where the model is pre-trained using a single language unlabelled text corpus. Then, the model is fine-tuned to the specific downstream task. However, the cost of pre-training a new transformer model is high for most languages. In this work, we propose a cost-effective transfer learning method to adopt a strong source language model, trained from a large monolingual corpus to a low-resource language. Thus, using XLNet language model, we demonstrate competitive performance with mBERT and a pre-trained target language model on the cross-lingual sentiment (CLS) dataset and on a new sentiment analysis dataset for low-resourced language Tigrinya. With only 10k examples of the given Tigrinya sentiment analysis dataset, English XLNet has achieved 78.88% F1-Score outperforming BERT and mBERT by 10% and 7%, respectively. More interestingly, fine-tuning (English) XLNet model on the CLS dataset has promising results compared to mBERT and even outperformed mBERT for one dataset of the Japanese language.
Offensive Language and Hate Speech Detection for Danish
The presence of offensive language on social media platforms and the implications this poses is becoming a major concern in modern society. Given the enormous amount of content created every day, automatic methods are required to detect and deal with this type of content. Until now, most of the research has focused on solving the problem for the English language, while the problem is multilingual. We construct a Danish dataset containing user-generated comments from Reddit and Facebook. It contains user generated comments from various social media platforms, and to our knowledge, it is the first of its kind. Our dataset is annotated to capture various types and target of offensive language. We develop four automatic classification systems, each designed to work for both the English and the Danish language. In the detection of offensive language in English, the best performing system achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.74, and the best performing system for Danish achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.70. In the detection of whether or not an offensive post is targeted, the best performing system for English achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.62, while the best performing system for Danish achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.73. Finally, in the detection of the target type in a targeted offensive post, the best performing system for English achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.56, and the best performing system for Danish achieves a macro averaged F1-score of 0.63. Our work for both the English and the Danish language captures the type and targets of offensive language, and present automatic methods for detecting different kinds of offensive language such as hate speech and cyberbullying.
Structural Scaffolds for Citation Intent Classification in Scientific Publications
Identifying the intent of a citation in scientific papers (e.g., background information, use of methods, comparing results) is critical for machine reading of individual publications and automated analysis of the scientific literature. We propose structural scaffolds, a multitask model to incorporate structural information of scientific papers into citations for effective classification of citation intents. Our model achieves a new state-of-the-art on an existing ACL anthology dataset (ACL-ARC) with a 13.3% absolute increase in F1 score, without relying on external linguistic resources or hand-engineered features as done in existing methods. In addition, we introduce a new dataset of citation intents (SciCite) which is more than five times larger and covers multiple scientific domains compared with existing datasets. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/allenai/scicite.
This before That: Causal Precedence in the Biomedical Domain
Causal precedence between biochemical interactions is crucial in the biomedical domain, because it transforms collections of individual interactions, e.g., bindings and phosphorylations, into the causal mechanisms needed to inform meaningful search and inference. Here, we analyze causal precedence in the biomedical domain as distinct from open-domain, temporal precedence. First, we describe a novel, hand-annotated text corpus of causal precedence in the biomedical domain. Second, we use this corpus to investigate a battery of models of precedence, covering rule-based, feature-based, and latent representation models. The highest-performing individual model achieved a micro F1 of 43 points, approaching the best performers on the simpler temporal-only precedence tasks. Feature-based and latent representation models each outperform the rule-based models, but their performance is complementary to one another. We apply a sieve-based architecture to capitalize on this lack of overlap, achieving a micro F1 score of 46 points.
ArabianGPT: Native Arabic GPT-based Large Language Model
The predominance of English and Latin-based large language models (LLMs) has led to a notable deficit in native Arabic LLMs. This discrepancy is accentuated by the prevalent inclusion of English tokens in existing Arabic models, detracting from their efficacy in processing native Arabic's intricate morphology and syntax. Consequently, there is a theoretical and practical imperative for developing LLMs predominantly focused on Arabic linguistic elements. To address this gap, this paper proposes ArabianGPT, a series of transformer-based models within the ArabianLLM suite designed explicitly for Arabic. These models, including ArabianGPT-0.1B and ArabianGPT-0.3B, vary in size and complexity, aligning with the nuanced linguistic characteristics of Arabic. The AraNizer tokenizer, integral to these models, addresses the unique morphological aspects of Arabic script, ensuring more accurate text processing. Empirical results from fine-tuning the models on tasks like sentiment analysis and summarization demonstrate significant improvements. For sentiment analysis, the fine-tuned ArabianGPT-0.1B model achieved a remarkable accuracy of 95%, a substantial increase from the base model's 56%. Similarly, in summarization tasks, fine-tuned models showed enhanced F1