Computation and Language (cs.CL)

Abstract: Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) models are popular for their balance between speed and performance for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these CTC models still struggle in other areas, such as personalization towards custom words. A recent approach explores Contextual Adapters, wherein an attention-based biasing model for CTC is used to improve the recognition of custom entities. While this approach works well with enough data, we showcase that it isn't an effective strategy for low-resource languages. In this work, we propose a supervision loss for smoother training of the Contextual Adapters. Further, we explore a multilingual strategy to improve performance with limited training data. Our method achieves 48% F1 improvement in retrieving unseen custom entities for a low-resource language. Interestingly, as a by-product of training the Contextual Adapters, we see a 5-11% Word Error Rate (WER) reduction in the performance of the base CTC model as well.

Abstract: In order to construct or extend entity-centric and event-centric knowledge graphs (KG and EKG), the information extraction (IE) annotation toolkit is essential. However, existing IE toolkits have several non-trivial problems, such as not supporting multi-tasks, not supporting automatic updates. In this work, we present CollabKG, a learnable human-machine-cooperative IE toolkit for KG and EKG construction. Specifically, for the multi-task issue, CollabKG unifies different IE subtasks, including named entity recognition (NER), entity-relation triple extraction (RE), and event extraction (EE), and supports both KG and EKG. Then, combining advanced prompting-based IE technology, the human-machine-cooperation mechanism with LLMs as the assistant machine is presented which can provide a lower cost as well as a higher performance. Lastly, owing to the two-way interaction between the human and machine, CollabKG with learning ability allows self-renewal. Besides, CollabKG has several appealing features (e.g., customization, training-free, propagation, etc.) that make the system powerful, easy-to-use, and high-productivity. We holistically compare our toolkit with other existing tools on these features. Human evaluation quantitatively illustrates that CollabKG significantly improves annotation quality, efficiency, and stability simultaneously.

Abstract: While state-of-the-art Text-to-Speech systems can generate natural speech of very high quality at sentence level, they still meet great challenges in speech generation for paragraph / long-form reading. Such deficiencies are due to i) ignorance of cross-sentence contextual information, and ii) high computation and memory cost for long-form synthesis. To address these issues, this work develops a lightweight yet effective TTS system, ContextSpeech. Specifically, we first design a memory-cached recurrence mechanism to incorporate global text and speech context into sentence encoding. Then we construct hierarchically-structured textual semantics to broaden the scope for global context enhancement. Additionally, we integrate linearized self-attention to improve model efficiency. Experiments show that ContextSpeech significantly improves the voice quality and prosody expressiveness in paragraph reading with competitive model efficiency. Audio samples are available at: https://contextspeech.github.io/demo/

Abstract: Recently, there has been an increase in interest in evaluating large language models for emergent and dangerous capabilities. Importantly, agents could reason that in some scenarios their goal is better achieved if they are not turned off, which can lead to undesirable behaviors. In this paper, we investigate the potential of using toy textual scenarios to evaluate instrumental reasoning and shutdown avoidance in language models such as GPT-4 and Claude. Furthermore, we explore whether shutdown avoidance is merely a result of simple pattern matching between the dataset and the prompt or if it is a consistent behaviour across different environments and variations. We evaluated behaviours manually and also experimented with using language models for automatic evaluations, and these evaluations demonstrate that simple pattern matching is likely not the sole contributing factor for shutdown avoidance. This study provides insights into the behaviour of language models in shutdown avoidance scenarios and inspires further research on the use of textual scenarios for evaluations.

Abstract: The current advances in generative AI for learning large neural network models with the capability to produce essays, images, music and even 3D assets from text prompts create opportunities for a manifold of disciplines. In the present paper, we study the potential of deep text-to-3D models in the engineering domain, with focus on the chances and challenges when integrating and interacting with 3D assets in computational simulation-based design optimization. In contrast to traditional design optimization of 3D geometries that often searches for the optimum designs using numerical representations, such as B-Spline surface or deformation parameters in vehicle aerodynamic optimization, natural language challenges the optimization framework by requiring a different interpretation of variation operators while at the same time may ease and motivate the human user interaction. Here, we propose and realize a fully automated evolutionary design optimization framework using Shap-E, a recently published text-to-3D asset network by OpenAI, in the context of aerodynamic vehicle optimization. For representing text prompts in the evolutionary optimization, we evaluate (a) a bag-of-words approach based on prompt templates and Wordnet samples, and (b) a tokenisation approach based on prompt templates and the byte pair encoding method from GPT4. Our main findings from the optimizations indicate that, first, it is important to ensure that the designs generated from prompts are within the object class of application, i.e. diverse and novel designs need to be realistic, and, second, that more research is required to develop methods where the strength of text prompt variations and the resulting variations of the 3D designs share causal relations to some degree to improve the optimization.

Abstract: Previous question-answer pair generation methods aimed to produce fluent and meaningful question-answer pairs but tend to have poor diversity. Recent attempts addressing this issue suffer from either low model capacity or overcomplicated architecture. Furthermore, they overlooked the problem where the controllability of their models is highly dependent on the input. In this paper, we propose a model named VOLTA that enhances generative diversity by leveraging the Variational Autoencoder framework with a shared backbone network as its encoder and decoder. In addition, we propose adding InfoGAN-style latent codes to enable input-independent controllability over the generation process. We perform comprehensive experiments and the results show that our approach can significantly improve diversity and controllability over state-of-the-art models.

Abstract: Incomplete utterance rewriting has recently raised wide attention. However, previous works do not consider the semantic structural information between incomplete utterance and rewritten utterance or model the semantic structure implicitly and insufficiently. To address this problem, we propose a QUEry-Enhanced Network (QUEEN). Firstly, our proposed query template explicitly brings guided semantic structural knowledge between the incomplete utterance and the rewritten utterance making model perceive where to refer back to or recover omitted tokens. Then, we adopt a fast and effective edit operation scoring network to model the relation between two tokens. Benefiting from proposed query template and the well-designed edit operation scoring network, QUEEN achieves state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets.

Abstract: This paper describes the second-placed approach developed by the Fraunhofer SIT team in the CLEF-2023 CheckThat! lab Task 1B for English. Given a text snippet from a political debate, the aim of this task is to determine whether it should be assessed for check-worthiness. Detecting check-worthy statements aims to facilitate manual fact-checking efforts by prioritizing the claims that fact-checkers should consider first. It can also be considered as primary step of a fact-checking system. Our best-performing method took advantage of an ensemble classification scheme centered on Model Souping. When applied to the English data set, our submitted model achieved an overall F1 score of 0.878 and was ranked as the second-best model in the competition.

Abstract: We propose a simple approach for weighting self-connecting edges in a Graph Convolutional Network (GCN) and show its impact on depression detection from transcribed clinical interviews. To this end, we use a GCN for modeling non-consecutive and long-distance semantics to classify the transcriptions into depressed or control subjects. The proposed method aims to mitigate the limiting assumptions of locality and the equal importance of self-connections vs. edges to neighboring nodes in GCNs, while preserving attractive features such as low computational cost, data agnostic, and interpretability capabilities. We perform an exhaustive evaluation in two benchmark datasets. Results show that our approach consistently outperforms the vanilla GCN model as well as previously reported results, achieving an F1=0.84% on both datasets. Finally, a qualitative analysis illustrates the interpretability capabilities of the proposed approach and its alignment with previous findings in psychology.

Abstract: Semantic similarity measures are widely used in natural language processing to catalyze various computer-related tasks. However, no single semantic similarity measure is the most appropriate for all tasks, and researchers often use ensemble strategies to ensure performance. This research work proposes a method for automatically designing semantic similarity ensembles. In fact, our proposed method uses grammatical evolution, for the first time, to automatically select and aggregate measures from a pool of candidates to create an ensemble that maximizes correlation to human judgment. The method is evaluated on several benchmark datasets and compared to state-of-the-art ensembles, showing that it can significantly improve similarity assessment accuracy and outperform existing methods in some cases. As a result, our research demonstrates the potential of using grammatical evolution to automatically compare text and prove the benefits of using ensembles for semantic similarity tasks.

Abstract: With the proliferation of research means and computational methodologies, published biomedical literature is growing exponentially in numbers and volume. As a consequence, in the fields of biological, medical and clinical research, domain experts have to sift through massive amounts of scientific text to find relevant information. However, this process is extremely tedious and slow to be performed by humans. Hence, novel computational information extraction and correlation mechanisms are required to boost meaningful knowledge extraction. In this work, we present the design, implementation and application of a novel data extraction and exploration system. This system extracts deep semantic relations between textual entities from scientific literature to enrich existing structured clinical data in the domain of cancer cell lines. We introduce a new public data exploration portal, which enables automatic linking of genomic copy number variants plots with ranked, related entities such as affected genes. Each relation is accompanied by literature-derived evidences, allowing for deep, yet rapid, literature search, using existing structured data as a springboard. Our system is publicly available on the web at https://cancercelllines.org

Abstract: Large Language Models work quite well with general-purpose data and many tasks in Natural Language Processing. However, they show several limitations when used for a task such as domain-specific abstractive text summarization. This paper identifies three of those limitations as research problems in the context of abstractive text summarization: 1) Quadratic complexity of transformer-based models with respect to the input text length; 2) Model Hallucination, which is a model's ability to generate factually incorrect text; and 3) Domain Shift, which happens when the distribution of the model's training and test corpus is not the same. Along with a discussion of the open research questions, this paper also provides an assessment of existing state-of-the-art techniques relevant to domain-specific text summarization to address the research gaps.

Abstract: Bipolar disorder (BD) is closely associated with an increased risk of suicide. However, while the prior work has revealed valuable insight into understanding the behavior of BD patients on social media, little attention has been paid to developing a model that can predict the future suicidality of a BD patient. Therefore, this study proposes a multi-task learning model for predicting the future suicidality of BD patients by jointly learning current symptoms. We build a novel BD dataset clinically validated by psychiatrists, including 14 years of posts on bipolar-related subreddits written by 818 BD patients, along with the annotations of future suicidality and BD symptoms. We also suggest a temporal symptom-aware attention mechanism to determine which symptoms are the most influential for predicting future suicidality over time through a sequence of BD posts. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art models in both BD symptom identification and future suicidality prediction tasks. In addition, the proposed temporal symptom-aware attention provides interpretable attention weights, helping clinicians to apprehend BD patients more comprehensively and to provide timely intervention by tracking mental state progression.

Abstract: Post-OCR processing has significantly improved over the past few years. However, these have been primarily beneficial for texts consisting of natural, alphabetical words, as opposed to documents of numerical nature such as invoices, payslips, medical certificates, etc. To evaluate the OCR post-processing difficulty of these datasets, we propose a method to estimate the denoising complexity of a text and evaluate it on several datasets of varying nature, and show that texts of numerical nature have a significant disadvantage. We evaluate the estimated complexity ranking with respect to the error rates of modern-day denoising approaches to show the validity of our estimator.

Abstract: Multiple-choice reading and listening comprehension tests are an important part of language assessment. Content creators for standard educational tests need to carefully curate questions that assess the comprehension abilities of candidates taking the tests. However, recent work has shown that a large number of questions in general multiple-choice reading comprehension datasets can be answered without comprehension, by leveraging world knowledge instead. This work investigates how much of a contextual passage needs to be read in multiple-choice reading based on conversation transcriptions and listening comprehension tests to be able to work out the correct answer. We find that automated reading comprehension systems can perform significantly better than random with partial or even no access to the context passage. These findings offer an approach for content creators to automatically capture the trade-off between comprehension and world knowledge required for their proposed questions.

Abstract: In the current digitalization era, capturing and effectively representing knowledge is crucial in most real-world scenarios. In this context, knowledge graphs represent a potent tool for retrieving and organizing a vast amount of information in a properly interconnected and interpretable structure. However, their generation is still challenging and often requires considerable human effort and domain expertise, hampering the scalability and flexibility across different application fields. This paper proposes an innovative knowledge graph generation approach that leverages the potential of the latest generative large language models, such as GPT-3.5, that can address all the main critical issues in knowledge graph building. The approach is conveyed in a pipeline that comprises novel iterative zero-shot and external knowledge-agnostic strategies in the main stages of the generation process. Our unique manifold approach may encompass significant benefits to the scientific community. In particular, the main contribution can be summarized by: (i) an innovative strategy for iteratively prompting large language models to extract relevant components of the final graph; (ii) a zero-shot strategy for each prompt, meaning that there is no need for providing examples for "guiding" the prompt result; (iii) a scalable solution, as the adoption of LLMs avoids the need for any external resources or human expertise. To assess the effectiveness of our proposed model, we performed experiments on a dataset that covered a specific domain. We claim that our proposal is a suitable solution for scalable and versatile knowledge graph construction and may be applied to different and novel contexts.

Abstract: The biomedical field relies heavily on concept linking in various areas such as literature mining, graph alignment, information retrieval, question-answering, data, and knowledge integration. Although large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in many natural language processing tasks, their effectiveness in biomedical concept mapping is yet to be fully explored. This research investigates a method that exploits the in-context learning (ICL) capabilities of large models for biomedical concept linking. The proposed approach adopts a two-stage retrieve-and-rank framework. Initially, biomedical concepts are embedded using language models, and then embedding similarity is utilized to retrieve the top candidates. These candidates' contextual information is subsequently incorporated into the prompt and processed by a large language model to re-rank the concepts. This approach achieved an accuracy of 90.% in BC5CDR disease entity normalization and 94.7% in chemical entity normalization, exhibiting a competitive performance relative to supervised learning methods. Further, it showed a significant improvement, with an over 20-point absolute increase in F1 score on an oncology matching dataset. Extensive qualitative assessments were conducted, and the benefits and potential shortcomings of using large language models within the biomedical domain were discussed. were discussed.

Abstract: Pretrained language models (PLMs) are today the primary model for natural language processing. Despite their impressive downstream performance, it can be difficult to apply PLMs to new languages, a barrier to making their capabilities universally accessible. While prior work has shown it possible to address this issue by learning a new embedding layer for the new language, doing so is both data and compute inefficient. We propose to use an active forgetting mechanism during pretraining, as a simple way of creating PLMs that can quickly adapt to new languages. Concretely, by resetting the embedding layer every K updates during pretraining, we encourage the PLM to improve its ability of learning new embeddings within a limited number of updates, similar to a meta-learning effect. Experiments with RoBERTa show that models pretrained with our forgetting mechanism not only demonstrate faster convergence during language adaptation but also outperform standard ones in a low-data regime, particularly for languages that are distant from English.

Abstract: Recent works attribute the capability of in-context learning (ICL) in large pre-trained language models to implicitly simulating and fine-tuning an internal model (e.g., linear or 2-layer MLP) during inference. However, such constructions require large memory overhead, which makes simulation of more sophisticated internal models intractable. In this work, we propose an efficient construction, Transformer in Transformer (in short, TinT), that allows a transformer to simulate and fine-tune complex models internally during inference (e.g., pre-trained language models). In particular, we introduce innovative approximation techniques that allow a TinT model with less than 2 billion parameters to simulate and fine-tune a 125 million parameter transformer model within a single forward pass. TinT accommodates many common transformer variants and its design ideas also improve the efficiency of past instantiations of simple models inside transformers. We conduct end-to-end experiments to validate the internal fine-tuning procedure of TinT on various language modeling and downstream tasks. For example, even with a limited one-step budget, we observe TinT for a OPT-125M model improves performance by 4-16% absolute on average compared to OPT-125M. These findings suggest that large pre-trained language models are capable of performing intricate subroutines. To facilitate further work, a modular and extensible codebase for TinT is included.

Abstract: The media's representation of illicit substance use can lead to harmful stereotypes and stigmatization for individuals struggling with addiction, ultimately influencing public perception, policy, and public health outcomes. To explore how the discourse and coverage of illicit drug use changed over time, this study analyzes 157,476 articles published in the Philadelphia Inquirer over a decade. Specifically, the study focuses on articles that mentioned at least one commonly abused substance, resulting in a sample of 3,903 articles. Our analysis shows that cannabis and narcotics are the most frequently discussed classes of drugs. Hallucinogenic drugs are portrayed more positively than other categories, whereas narcotics are portrayed the most negatively. Our research aims to highlight the need for accurate and inclusive portrayals of substance use and addiction in the media.

Abstract: Recent advancements in Named Entity Recognition (NER) have significantly improved the identification of entities in textual data. However, spoken NER, a specialized field of spoken document retrieval, lags behind due to its limited research and scarce datasets. Moreover, cross-lingual transfer learning in spoken NER has remained unexplored. This paper utilizes transfer learning across Dutch, English, and German using pipeline and End-to-End (E2E) schemes. We employ Wav2Vec2-XLS-R models on custom pseudo-annotated datasets and investigate several architectures for the adaptability of cross-lingual systems. Our results demonstrate that End-to-End spoken NER outperforms pipeline-based alternatives over our limited annotations. Notably, transfer learning from German to Dutch surpasses the Dutch E2E system by 7% and the Dutch pipeline system by 4%. This study not only underscores the feasibility of transfer learning in spoken NER but also sets promising outcomes for future evaluations, hinting at the need for comprehensive data collection to augment the results.

Abstract: Over the past few years, self-supervised learned speech representations have emerged as fruitful replacements for conventional surface representations when solving Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) tasks. Simultaneously, multilingual models trained on massive textual data were introduced to encode language agnostic semantics. Recently, the SAMU-XLSR approach introduced a way to make profit from such textual models to enrich multilingual speech representations with language agnostic semantics. By aiming for better semantic extraction on a challenging Spoken Language Understanding task and in consideration with computation costs, this study investigates a specific in-domain semantic enrichment of the SAMU-XLSR model by specializing it on a small amount of transcribed data from the downstream task. In addition, we show the benefits of the use of same-domain French and Italian benchmarks for low-resource language portability and explore cross-domain capacities of the enriched SAMU-XLSR.

Abstract: Emotions are experienced and expressed differently across the world. In order to use Large Language Models (LMs) for multilingual tasks that require emotional sensitivity, LMs must reflect this cultural variation in emotion. In this study, we investigate whether the widely-used multilingual LMs in 2023 reflect differences in emotional expressions across cultures and languages. We find that embeddings obtained from LMs (e.g., XLM-RoBERTa) are Anglocentric, and generative LMs (e.g., ChatGPT) reflect Western norms, even when responding to prompts in other languages. Our results show that multilingual LMs do not successfully learn the culturally appropriate nuances of emotion and we highlight possible research directions towards correcting this.

Abstract: Transformer models using segment-based processing have been an effective architecture for simultaneous speech translation. However, such models create a context mismatch between training and inference environments, hindering potential translation accuracy. We solve this issue by proposing Shiftable Context, a simple yet effective scheme to ensure that consistent segment and context sizes are maintained throughout training and inference, even with the presence of partially filled segments due to the streaming nature of simultaneous translation. Shiftable Context is also broadly applicable to segment-based transformers for streaming tasks. Our experiments on the English-German, English-French, and English-Spanish language pairs from the MUST-C dataset demonstrate that when applied to the Augmented Memory Transformer, a state-of-the-art model for simultaneous speech translation, the proposed scheme achieves an average increase of 2.09, 1.83, and 1.95 BLEU scores across each wait-k value for the three language pairs, respectively, with a minimal impact on computation-aware Average Lagging.

Abstract: Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown great potential in Natural Language Generation, it is still challenging to characterize the uncertainty of model generations, i.e., when users could trust model outputs. Our research is derived from the heuristic facts that tokens are created unequally in reflecting the meaning of generations by auto-regressive LLMs, i.e., some tokens are more relevant (or representative) than others, yet all the tokens are equally valued when estimating uncertainty. It is because of the linguistic redundancy where mostly a few keywords are sufficient to convey the meaning of a long sentence. We name these inequalities as generative inequalities and investigate how they affect uncertainty estimation. Our results reveal that considerable tokens and sentences containing limited semantics are weighted equally or even heavily when estimating uncertainty. To tackle these biases posed by generative inequalities, we propose to jointly Shifting Attention to more Relevant (SAR) components from both the token level and the sentence level while estimating uncertainty. We conduct experiments over popular "off-the-shelf" LLMs (e.g., OPT, LLaMA) with model sizes up to 30B and powerful commercial LLMs (e.g., Davinci from OpenAI), across various free-form question-answering tasks. Experimental results and detailed demographic analysis indicate the superior performance of SAR. Code is available at https://github.com/jinhaoduan/shifting-attention-to-relevance.

Abstract: Simultaneous speech translation is an essential communication task difficult for humans whereby a translation is generated concurrently with oncoming speech inputs. For such a streaming task, transformers using block processing to break an input sequence into segments have achieved state-of-the-art performance at a reduced cost. Current methods to allow information to propagate across segments, including left context and memory banks, have faltered as they are both insufficient representations and unnecessarily expensive to compute. In this paper, we propose an Implicit Memory Transformer that implicitly retains memory through a new left context method, removing the need to explicitly represent memory with memory banks. We generate the left context from the attention output of the previous segment and include it in the keys and values of the current segment's attention calculation. Experiments on the MuST-C dataset show that the Implicit Memory Transformer provides a substantial speedup on the encoder forward pass with nearly identical translation quality when compared with the state-of-the-art approach that employs both left context and memory banks.

Abstract: The computational analysis of poetry is limited by the scarcity of tools to automatically analyze and scan poems. In a multilingual settings, the problem is exacerbated as scansion and rhyme systems only exist for individual languages, making comparative studies very challenging and time consuming. In this work, we present \textsc{Alberti}, the first multilingual pre-trained large language model for poetry. Through domain-specific pre-training (DSP), we further trained multilingual BERT on a corpus of over 12 million verses from 12 languages. We evaluated its performance on two structural poetry tasks: Spanish stanza type classification, and metrical pattern prediction for Spanish, English and German. In both cases, \textsc{Alberti} outperforms multilingual BERT and other transformers-based models of similar sizes, and even achieves state-of-the-art results for German when compared to rule-based systems, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of DSP in the poetry domain.

Abstract: The successful analysis of argumentative techniques from user-generated text is central to many downstream tasks such as political and market analysis. Recent argument mining tools use state-of-the-art deep learning methods to extract and annotate argumentative techniques from various online text corpora, however each task is treated as separate and different bespoke models are fine-tuned for each dataset. We show that different argument mining tasks share common semantic and logical structure by implementing a multi-task approach to argument mining that achieves better performance than state-of-the-art methods for the same problems. Our model builds a shared representation of the input text that is common to all tasks and exploits similarities between tasks in order to further boost performance via parameter-sharing. Our results are important for argument mining as they show that different tasks share substantial similarities and suggest a holistic approach to the extraction of argumentative techniques from text.