Large language models (LLMs) trained on general domain corpora showed remarkable results on natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, previous research demonstrated LLMs trained using domain-focused corpora perform better on specialized tasks. Inspired by this insight, we developed INDUS, a comprehensive suite of LLMs tailored for the closely-related domains of Earth science, biology, physics, heliophysics, planetary sciences and astrophysics, and trained using curated scientific corpora drawn from diverse data sources. The suite of models include: (1) an encoder model trained using domain-specific vocabulary and corpora to address NLP tasks, (2) a contrastive-learning based text embedding model trained using a diverse set of datasets to address information retrieval tasks and (3) smaller versions of these models created using knowledge distillation for applications which have latency or resource constraints. We also created three new scientific benchmark datasets, Climate-Change NER (entity-recognition), NASA-QA (extractive QA) and NASA-IR (IR) to accelerate research in these multi-disciplinary fields. We show that our models outperform both general-purpose (RoBERTa) and domain- specific (SciBERT) encoders on these new tasks as well as existing tasks in the domains of interest. Furthermore, we demonstrate the use of these models in two industrial settings- as a retrieval model for large-scale vector search applications and in automatic content tagging systems.

Error correction (EC) based on large language models is an emerging technology to enhance the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems.Generally, training data for EC are collected by automatically pairing a large set of ASR hypotheses (as sources) and their gold references (as targets).However, the quality of such pairs is not guaranteed, and we observed various types of noise which can make the EC models brittle, e.g. inducing overcorrection in out-of-domain (OOD) settings.In this work, we propose two fundamental criteria that EC training data should satisfy: namely, EC targets should (1) improve linguistic acceptability over sources and (2) be inferable from the available context (e.g. source phonemes).Through these criteria, we identify low-quality EC pairs and train the models not to make any correction in such cases, the process we refer to as conservative data filtering.In our experiments, we focus on Japanese ASR using a strong Conformer-CTC as the baseline and finetune Japanese LLMs for EC.Through our evaluation on a suite of 21 internal benchmarks, we demonstrate that our approach can significantly reduce overcorrection and improve both the accuracy and quality of ASR results in the challenging OOD settings.

Large language models have become a vital component in modern NLP, achieving state of the art performance in a variety of tasks. However, they are often inefficient for real-world deployment due to their expensive inference costs. Knowledge distillation is a promising technique to improve their efficiency while retaining most of their effectiveness. In this paper, we reproduce, compare and analyze several representative methods for task-agnostic (general-purpose) distillation of Transformer language models. Our target of study includes Output Distribution (OD) transfer, Hidden State (HS) transfer with various layer mapping strategies, and Multi-Head Attention (MHA) transfer based on MiniLMv2. Through our extensive experiments, we study the effectiveness of each method for various student architectures in both monolingual (English) and multilingual settings. Overall, we show that MHA transfer based on MiniLMv2 is generally the best option for distillation and explain the potential reasons behind its success. Moreover, we show that HS transfer remains as a competitive baseline, especially under a sophisticated layer mapping strategy, while OD transfer consistently lags behind other approaches. Findings from this study helped us deploy efficient yet effective student models for latency-critical applications.

The sentence is a fundamental unit in many NLP applications. Sentence segmentation is widely used as the first preprocessing task, where an input text is split into consecutive sentences considering the end of the sentence (EOS) as their boundaries. This task formulation relies on a strong assumption that the input text consists only of sentences, or what we call the sentential units (SUs). However, real-world texts often contain non-sentential units (NSUs) such as metadata, sentence fragments, nonlinguistic markers, etc. which are unreasonable or undesirable to be treated as a part of an SU. To tackle this issue, we formulate a novel task of sentence identification, where the goal is to identify SUs while excluding NSUs in a given text. To conduct sentence identification, we propose a simple yet effective method which combines the beginning of the sentence (BOS) and EOS labels to determine the most probable SUs and NSUs based on dynamic programming. To evaluate this task, we design an automatic, language-independent procedure to convert the Universal Dependencies corpora into sentence identification benchmarks. Finally, our experiments on the sentence identification task demonstrate that our proposed method generally outperforms sentence segmentation baselines which only utilize EOS labels.

Common grounding is the process of creating and maintaining mutual understandings, which is a critical aspect of sophisticated human communication. While various task settings have been proposed in existing literature, they mostly focus on creating common ground under a static context and ignore the aspect of maintaining them overtime under dynamic context. In this work, we propose a novel task setting to study the ability of both creating and maintaining common ground in dynamic environments. Based on our minimal task formulation, we collected a large-scale dataset of 5,617 dialogues to enable fine-grained evaluation and analysis of various dialogue systems. Through our dataset analyses, we highlight novel challenges introduced in our setting, such as the usage of complex spatio-temporal expressions to create and maintain common ground. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments to assess the capabilities of our baseline dialogue system and discuss future prospects of our research.

Recent models achieve promising results in visually grounded dialogues. However, existing datasets often contain undesirable biases and lack sophisticated linguistic analyses, which make it difficult to understand how well current models recognize their precise linguistic structures. To address this problem, we make two design choices: first, we focus on OneCommon Corpus (CITATION), a simple yet challenging common grounding dataset which contains minimal bias by design. Second, we analyze their linguistic structures based on spatial expressions and provide comprehensive and reliable annotation for 600 dialogues. We show that our annotation captures important linguistic structures including predicate-argument structure, modification and ellipsis. In our experiments, we assess the model’s understanding of these structures through reference resolution. We demonstrate that our annotation can reveal both the strengths and weaknesses of baseline models in essential levels of detail. Overall, we propose a novel framework and resource for investigating fine-grained language understanding in visually grounded dialogues.