Although large language models (LLMs) acquire extensive world knowledge and some reasoning abilities, their proficiency in generating humorous sentences remains a challenge. Previous research has demonstrated that the humor generation capabilities of ChatGPT are confined to producing merely 25 unique jokes. In this work, we concentrate on endowing LLMs with the ability of generating puns, a particular category of humor by preference learning method. We propose a multi-stage curriculum preference learning framework to optimize both pun structure preferences and humor preferences. Specifically, we improve the Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) algorithm to address the challenge of multi-objective alignment problem. Besides, to facilitate further advancement in this field, we collect a Chinese Pun (ChinesePun) dataset, containing 2.1k puns and corresponding annotations. Experimental results on both Chinese and English benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms all the baseline models.

Incomplete utterance rewriting (IUR) aims to reconstruct the utterance with omitted information and pronouns to be standalone and complete based on the context. The existing works predominantly focus on simple ellipsis and coreference problems in brief multi-turn dialogues. But in actual scenarios: 1) the context of the dialogues frequently comprises multiple similar candidates for ellipsis and coreference resolution, pouring to confuse. 2) the number of turns tends to be more extensive, while the content with various topics also grows more complex. This paper proposes a novel method called CaT to address these issues. In particular, we first devise a tacker model, distilled from GPT4-turbo, to adopt Context Tracking that dynamically updates a list of key phrases turn by turn, as accurate candidates for ellipsis and coreference resolution. Second, we further present the Dynamic Context Introduction mechanism to filter irrelevant preceding contexts that are not relied on by any element within the key phrase list to condense extended dialogues. Comprehensive experiments indicate that our solution provides a significant improvement over the existing baselines, and achieves state-of-the-art on three benchmarks.

Argument mining aims to detect all possible argumentative components and identify their relationships automatically. As a thriving task in natural language processing, there has been a large amount of corpus for academic study and application development in this field. However, the research in this area is still constrained by the inherent limitations of existing datasets. Specifically, all the publicly available datasets are relatively small in scale, and few of them provide information from other modalities to facilitate the learning process. Moreover, the statements and expressions in these corpora are usually in a compact form, which restricts the generalization ability of models. To this end, we collect a novel dataset AntCritic to serve as a helpful complement to this area, which consists of about 10k free-form and visually-rich financial comments and supports both argument component detection and argument relation prediction tasks. Besides, to cope with the challenges brought by scenario expansion, we thoroughly explore the fine-grained relation prediction and structure reconstruction scheme and discuss the encoding mechanism for visual styles and layouts. On this basis, we design two simple but effective model architectures and conduct various experiments on this dataset to provide benchmark performances as a reference and verify the practicability of our proposed architecture. We release our data and code in this link, and this dataset follows CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

The objective of this shared task is to gain an understanding of legal texts, and it is beset with difficulties such as the comprehension of lengthy noisy legal documents, domain specificity as well as the scarcity of annotated data. To address these challenges, we propose a system that employs a hierarchical model and integrates domain-adaptive pretraining, data augmentation, and auxiliary-task learning techniques. Moreover, to enhance generalization and robustness, we ensemble the models that utilize these diverse techniques. Our system ranked first on the RR sub-task and in the middle for the other two sub-tasks.

Text-to-speech(TTS) has undergone remarkable improvements in performance, particularly with the advent of Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DDPMs). However, the perceived quality of audio depends not solely on its content, pitch, rhythm, and energy, but also on the physical environment.In this work, we propose ViT-TTS, the first visual TTS model with scalable diffusion transformers. ViT-TTS complement the phoneme sequence with the visual information to generate high-perceived audio, opening up new avenues for practical applications of AR and VR to allow a more immersive and realistic audio experience. To mitigate the data scarcity in learning visual acoustic information, we 1) introduce a self-supervised learning framework to enhance both the visual-text encoder and denoiser decoder; 2) leverage the diffusion transformer scalable in terms of parameters and capacity to learn visual scene information. Experimental results demonstrate that ViT-TTS achieves new state-of-the-art results, outperforming cascaded systems and other baselines regardless of the visibility of the scene. With low-resource data (1h, 2h, 5h), ViT-TTS achieves comparative results with rich-resource baselines.