Despite the remarkable achievements of large language models (LLMs) in various tasks, there remains a linguistic bias that favors high-resource languages, such as English, often at the expense of low-resource and regional languages. To address this imbalance, we introduce SeaLLMs, an innovative series of language models that specifically focuses on Southeast Asian (SEA) languages. SeaLLMs are built upon popular English-centric models through continued pre-training with an extended vocabulary, specialized instruction and alignment tuning to better capture the intricacies of regional languages. This allows them to respect and reflect local cultural norms, customs, stylistic preferences, and legal considerations. Our comprehensive evaluation demonstrates that SeaLLM models exhibit superior performance across a wide spectrum of linguistic tasks and assistant-style instruction-following capabilities relative to comparable open-source models. Moreover, they outperform ChatGPT-3.5 in non-Latin languages, such as Thai, Khmer, Lao, and Burmese, by large margins while remaining lightweight and cost-effective to operate.

The impressive performance of proprietary LLMs like GPT4 in code generation has led to a trend to replicate these capabilities in open-source models through knowledge distillation (e.g. Code Evol-Instruct). However, these efforts often neglect the crucial aspect of response quality, relying heavily on teacher models for direct response distillation. This paradigm, especially for complex instructions, can degrade the quality of synthesized data, compromising the knowledge distillation process. To this end, our study introduces the Adaptive Modular Response Evolution (AMR-Evol) framework, which employs a two-stage process to refine response distillation. The first stage, modular decomposition, breaks down the direct response into more manageable sub-modules. The second stage, adaptive response evolution, automatically evolves the response with the related function modules. Our experiments with three popular code benchmarks—HumanEval, MBPP, and EvalPlus—attests to the superiority of the AMR-Evol framework over baseline response distillation methods. By comparing with the open-source Code LLMs trained on a similar scale of data, we observed performance enhancements: more than +3.0 points on HumanEval-Plus and +1.0 points on MBPP-Plus, which underscores the effectiveness of our framework. Our codes are available at https://github.com/ChiYeungLaw/AMR-Evol.

Document-level Relation Extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations between entity pairs in a document and poses many challenges as it involves multiple mentions of entities and cross-sentence inference. However, several aspects that are important for DocRE have not been considered and explored. Existing work ignores bidirectional mention interaction when generating relational features for entity pairs. Also, sophisticated neural networks are typically designed for cross-sentence evidence extraction to further enhance DocRE. More interestingly, we reveal a noteworthy finding: If a model has predicted a relation between an entity and other entities, this relation information may help infer and predict more relations between the entity’s adjacent entities and these other entities. Nonetheless, none of existing methods leverage secondary reasoning to exploit results of relation prediction. To this end, we propose a novel Secondary Reasoning Framework (SRF) for DocRE. In SRF, we initially propose a DocRE model that incorporates bidirectional mention fusion and a simple yet effective evidence extraction module (incurring only an additional learnable parameter overhead) for relation prediction. Further, for the first time, we elaborately design and propose a novel secondary reasoning method to discover more relations by exploring the results of the first relation prediction. Extensive experiments show that SRF achieves SOTA performance and our secondary reasoning method is both effective and general when integrated into existing models.

Automated synthesis of zeolite, one of the most important catalysts in chemical industries, holds great significance for attaining economic and environmental benefits. Structural synthesis data extracted through NLP technologies from zeolite experimental procedures can significantly expedite automated synthesis owing to its machine readability. However, the utilization of NLP technologies in information extraction of zeolite synthesis remains restricted due to the lack of annotated datasets. In this paper, we formulate an event extraction task to mine structural synthesis actions from experimental narratives for modular automated synthesis. Furthermore, we introduce ZSEE, a novel dataset containing fine-grained event annotations of zeolite synthesis actions. Our dataset features 16 event types and 13 argument roles which cover all the experimental operational steps of zeolite synthesis. We explore current state-of-the-art event extraction methods on ZSEE, perform error analysis based on the experimental results, and summarize the challenges and corresponding research directions to further facilitate the automated synthesis of zeolites. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/Hi-0317/ZSEE.

As intelligent education evolves, it will provide students with multiple personalized learning services based on their individual abilities. Computerized adaptive testing (CAT) is designed to accurately measure a student’s ability using the least questions, providing an efficient and personalized testing method. However, existing methods mainly focus on minimizing the number of questions required to assess ability, often lacking clear and reliable explanations for the question selection process. Educators and students can hardly trust and accept CAT systems without an understanding of the rationale behind the question selection process. To address this issue, we introduce LLM-Agent-Based CAT (LACAT), a novel agent powered by large language models to enhance CAT with human-like interpretability and explanation capabilities. LACAT consists of three key modules: the Summarizer, which generates interpretable student profiles; the Reasoner, which personalizes questions and provides human-readable explanations; and the Critic, which learns from past choices to optimize future question selection. We conducted extensive experiments on three real-world educational datasets. The results demonstrate that LACAT can perform comparably or superior to traditional CAT methods in accuracy and significantly improve the transparency and acceptability of the testing process. Human evaluations further confirm that LACAT can generate high-quality, understandable explanations, thereby enhancing student trust and satisfaction.

As a cross-modal task, visual storytelling aims to generate a story for an ordered image sequence automatically. Different from the image captioning task, visual storytelling requires not only modeling the relationships between objects in the image but also mining the connections between adjacent images. Recent approaches primarily utilize either end-to-end frameworks or multi-stage frameworks to generate relevant stories, but they usually overlook latent topic information. In this paper, in order to generate a more coherent and relevant story, we propose a novel method, Topic Aware Reinforcement Network for VIsual StoryTelling (TARN-VIST). In particular, we pre-extracted the topic information of stories from both visual and linguistic perspectives. Then we apply two topic-consistent reinforcement learning rewards to identify the discrepancy between the generated story and the human-labeled story so as to refine the whole generation process. Extensive experimental results on the VIST dataset and human evaluation demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms most of the competitive models across multiple evaluation metrics.

In cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER), self-training is commonly used to bridge the linguistic gap by training on pseudo-labeled target-language data. However, due to sub-optimal performance on target languages, the pseudo labels are often noisy and limit the overall performance. In this work, we aim to improve self-training for cross-lingual NER by combining representation learning and pseudo label refinement in one coherent framework. Our proposed method, namely ContProto mainly comprises two components: (1) contrastive self-training and (2) prototype-based pseudo-labeling. Our contrastive self-training facilitates span classification by separating clusters of different classes, and enhances cross-lingual transferability by producing closely-aligned representations between the source and target language. Meanwhile, prototype-based pseudo-labeling effectively improves the accuracy of pseudo labels during training. We evaluate ContProto on multiple transfer pairs, and experimental results show our method brings substantial improvements over current state-of-the-art methods.

Due to the huge amount of parameters, finetuning of pretrained language models (PLMs) is prone to overfitting in the low resource scenarios. In this work, we present a novel method that operates on the hidden representations of a PLM to reduce overfitting. During fine-tuning, our method inserts random autoencoders between the hidden layers of a PLM, which transform activations from the previous layers into multi-view compressed representations before feeding them into the upper layers. The autoencoders are plugged out after fine-tuning, so our method does not add extra parameters or increase computation cost during inference. Our method demonstrates promising performance improvement across a wide range of sequence- and token-level lowresource NLP tasks.

Span identification aims at identifying specific text spans from text input and classifying them into pre-defined categories. Different from previous works that merely leverage the Subordinate (SUB) relation (i.e. if a span is an instance of a certain category) to train models, this paper for the first time explores the Peer (PR) relation, which indicates that two spans are instances of the same category and share similar features. Specifically, a novel Peer Data Augmentation (PeerDA) approach is proposed which employs span pairs with the PR relation as the augmentation data for training. PeerDA has two unique advantages: (1) There are a large number of PR span pairs for augmenting the training data. (2) The augmented data can prevent the trained model from over-fitting the superficial span-category mapping by pushing the model to leverage the span semantics. Experimental results on ten datasets over four diverse tasks across seven domains demonstrate the effectiveness of PeerDA. Notably, PeerDA achieves state-of-the-art results on six of them.

We present multilingual Pre-trained Machine Reader (mPMR), a novel method for multilingual machine reading comprehension (MRC)-style pre-training. mPMR aims to guide multilingual pre-trained language models (mPLMs) to perform natural language understanding (NLU) including both sequence classification and span extraction in multiple languages. To achieve cross-lingual generalization when only source-language fine-tuning data is available, existing mPLMs solely transfer NLU capability from a source language to target languages. In contrast, mPMR allows the direct inheritance of multilingual NLU capability from the MRC-style pre-training to downstream tasks. Therefore, mPMR acquires better NLU capability for target languages. mPMR also provides a unified solver for tackling cross-lingual span extraction and sequence classification, thereby enabling the extraction of rationales to explain the sentence-pair classification process.

Our physical world is constantly evolving over time, rendering challenges for pre-trained language models to understand and reason over the temporal contexts of texts. Existing work focuses on strengthening the direct association between a piece of text and its time-stamp. However, the knowledge-time association is usually insufficient for the downstream tasks that require reasoning over temporal dependencies between knowledge. In this work, we make use of the underlying nature of time, all temporally-scoped sentences are strung together through a one-dimensional time axis, and suggest creating a graph structure based on the relative placements of events along the time axis. Inspired by the graph view, we propose RemeMo ( ̲Relative Ti ̲me  ̲Modeling), which explicitly connects all temporally-scoped facts by modeling the time relations between any two sentences. Experimental results show that RemeMo outperforms the baseline T5 on multiple temporal question answering datasets under various settings. Further analysis suggests that RemeMo is especially good at modeling long-range complex temporal dependencies.

We present Video-LLaMA, a multi-modal framework that empowers Large Language Models (LLMs) with the capability of understanding both visual and auditory content in the video. Video-LLaMA bootstraps cross-modal training from the frozen pre-trained visual & audio encoders and the frozen LLMs. Unlike previous works that complement LLMs to process the visual or audio signals only, Video-LLaMA enables video comprehension by tackling two challenges: (1) capturing the temporal changes in visual scenes, (2) integrating audio-visual signals. To counter the first challenge, we propose a Video Q-former to assemble a pre-trained image encoder into our video encoder and introduce a video-to-text generation task to learn video-language correspondence. For the second challenge, we leverage ImageBind, a universal embedding model aligning multiple modalities, as the pre-trained audio encoder and introduce an Audio Q-former on top of ImageBind to learn reasonable auditory query embeddings for the LLM module. To align the output of both visual & audio encoders with LLM’s embedding space, we first train Video-LLaMA on massive video/image-caption pairs and then tune our model with visual-instruction datasets of moderate amount but higher quality. We found Video-LLaMA shows the ability to perceive and comprehend video content and generate meaningful responses grounded in the visual and auditory information presented in the videos.

Argument mining involves multiple sub-tasks that automatically identify argumentative elements, such as claim detection, evidence extraction, stance classification, etc. However, each subtask alone is insufficient for a thorough understanding of the argumentative structure and reasoning process. To learn a complete view of an argument essay and capture the interdependence among argumentative components, we need to know what opinions people hold (i.e., claims), why those opinions are valid (i.e., supporting evidence), which source the evidence comes from (i.e., evidence type), and how those claims react to the debating topic (i.e., stance). In this work, we for the first time propose a challenging argument quadruplet extraction task (AQE), which can provide an all-in-one extraction of four argumentative components, i.e., claims, evidence, evidence types, and stances. To support this task, we construct a large-scale and challenging dataset. However, there is no existing method that can solve the argument quadruplet extraction. To fill this gap, we propose a novel quad-tagging augmented generative approach, which leverages a quadruplet tagging module to augment the training of the generative framework. The experimental results on our dataset demonstrate the empirical superiority of our proposed approach over several strong baselines.

Prompting shows promising results in few-shot scenarios. However, its strength for multilingual/cross-lingual problems has not been fully exploited. hao and Schütze (2021) made initial explorations in this direction by presenting that cross-lingual prompting outperforms cross-lingual finetuning. In this paper, we conduct an empirical exploration on the effect of each component in cross-lingual prompting and derive Universal Prompting, which helps alleviate the discrepancies between source-language training and target-language inference. Based on this, we propose DPA, a dual prompt augmentation framework, aiming at relieving the data scarcity issue in few-shot cross-lingual prompting. Notably, for XNLI, our method achieves 46.54% with only 16 English training examples per class, significantly better than 34.99% of fine-tuning. Our code is available at https://github.com/DAMO-NLP-SG/DPA.

Data augmentation is an effective solution to data scarcity in low-resource scenarios. However, when applied to token-level tasks such as NER, data augmentation methods often suffer from token-label misalignment, which leads to unsatsifactory performance. In this work, we propose Masked Entity Language Modeling (MELM) as a novel data augmentation framework for low-resource NER. To alleviate the token-label misalignment issue, we explicitly inject NER labels into sentence context, and thus the fine-tuned MELM is able to predict masked entity tokens by explicitly conditioning on their labels. Thereby, MELM generates high-quality augmented data with novel entities, which provides rich entity regularity knowledge and boosts NER performance. When training data from multiple languages are available, we also integrate MELM with code-mixing for further improvement. We demonstrate the effectiveness of MELM on monolingual, cross-lingual and multilingual NER across various low-resource levels. Experimental results show that our MELM consistently outperforms the baseline methods.

The bloom of the Internet and the recent breakthroughs in deep learning techniques open a new door to AI for E-commence, with a trend of evolving from using a few financial factors such as liquidity and profitability to using more advanced AI techniques to process complex and multi-modal data. In this paper, we tackle the practical problem of restaurant survival prediction. We argue that traditional methods ignore two essential respects, which are very helpful for the task: 1) modeling customer reviews and 2) jointly considering status prediction and result explanation. Thus, we propose a novel joint learning framework for explainable restaurant survival prediction based on the multi-modal data of user-restaurant interactions and users’ textual reviews. Moreover, we design a graph neural network to capture the high-order interactions and design a co-attention mechanism to capture the most informative and meaningful signal from noisy textual reviews. Our results on two datasets show a significant and consistent improvement over the SOTA techniques (average 6.8% improvement in prediction and 45.3% improvement in explanation).

We introduce a new method to improve existing multilingual sentence embeddings with Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR). Compared with the original textual input, AMR is a structured semantic representation that presents the core concepts and relations in a sentence explicitly and unambiguously. It also helps reduce the surface variations across different expressions and languages. Unlike most prior work that only evaluates the ability to measure semantic similarity, we present a thorough evaluation of existing multilingual sentence embeddings and our improved versions, which include a collection of five transfer tasks in different downstream applications. Experiment results show that retrofitting multilingual sentence embeddings with AMR leads to better state-of-the-art performance on both semantic textual similarity and transfer tasks.

Knowledge-enhanced language representation learning has shown promising results across various knowledge-intensive NLP tasks. However, prior methods are limited in efficient utilization of multilingual knowledge graph (KG) data for language model (LM) pretraining. They often train LMs with KGs in indirect ways, relying on extra entity/relation embeddings to facilitate knowledge injection. In this work, we explore methods to make better use of the multilingual annotation and language agnostic property of KG triples, and present novel knowledge based multilingual language models (KMLMs) trained directly on the knowledge triples. We first generate a large amount of multilingual synthetic sentences using the Wikidata KG triples. Then based on the intra- and inter-sentence structures of the generated data, we design pretraining tasks to enable the LMs to not only memorize the factual knowledge but also learn useful logical patterns. Our pretrained KMLMs demonstrate significant performance improvements on a wide range of knowledge-intensive cross-lingual tasks, including named entity recognition (NER), factual knowledge retrieval, relation classification, and a newly designed logical reasoning task.

Cross-lingual named entity recognition (NER) suffers from data scarcity in the target languages, especially under zero-shot settings. Existing translate-train or knowledge distillation methods attempt to bridge the language gap, but often introduce a high level of noise. To solve this problem, consistency training methods regularize the model to be robust towards perturbations on data or hidden states.However, such methods are likely to violate the consistency hypothesis, or mainly focus on coarse-grain consistency.We propose ConNER as a novel consistency training framework for cross-lingual NER, which comprises of: (1) translation-based consistency training on unlabeled target-language data, and (2) dropout-based consistency training on labeled source-language data. ConNER effectively leverages unlabeled target-language data and alleviates overfitting on the source language to enhance the cross-lingual adaptability. Experimental results show our ConNER achieves consistent improvement over various baseline methods.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has received increasing attention recently. Most existing work tackles ABSA in a discriminative manner, designing various task-specific classification networks for the prediction. Despite their effectiveness, these methods ignore the rich label semantics in ABSA problems and require extensive task-specific designs. In this paper, we propose to tackle various ABSA tasks in a unified generative framework. Two types of paradigms, namely annotation-style and extraction-style modeling, are designed to enable the training process by formulating each ABSA task as a text generation problem. We conduct experiments on four ABSA tasks across multiple benchmark datasets where our proposed generative approach achieves new state-of-the-art results in almost all cases. This also validates the strong generality of the proposed framework which can be easily adapted to arbitrary ABSA task without additional task-specific model design.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) has been extensively studied in recent years, which typically involves four fundamental sentiment elements, including the aspect category, aspect term, opinion term, and sentiment polarity. Existing studies usually consider the detection of partial sentiment elements, instead of predicting the four elements in one shot. In this work, we introduce the Aspect Sentiment Quad Prediction (ASQP) task, aiming to jointly detect all sentiment elements in quads for a given opinionated sentence, which can reveal a more comprehensive and complete aspect-level sentiment structure. We further propose a novel Paraphrase modeling paradigm to cast the ASQP task to a paraphrase generation process. On one hand, the generation formulation allows solving ASQP in an end-to-end manner, alleviating the potential error propagation in the pipeline solution. On the other hand, the semantics of the sentiment elements can be fully exploited by learning to generate them in the natural language form. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets show the superiority of our proposed method and the capacity of cross-task transfer with the proposed unified Paraphrase modeling framework.

We study multilingual AMR parsing from the perspective of knowledge distillation, where the aim is to learn and improve a multilingual AMR parser by using an existing English parser as its teacher. We constrain our exploration in a strict multilingual setting: there is but one model to parse all different languages including English. We identify that noisy input and precise output are the key to successful distillation. Together with extensive pre-training, we obtain an AMR parser whose performances surpass all previously published results on four different foreign languages, including German, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese, by large margins (up to 18.8 Smatch points on Chinese and on average 11.3 Smatch points). Our parser also achieves comparable performance on English to the latest state-of-the-art English-only parser.

Aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) typically focuses on extracting aspects and predicting their sentiments on individual sentences such as customer reviews. Recently, another kind of opinion sharing platform, namely question answering (QA) forum, has received increasing popularity, which accumulates a large number of user opinions towards various aspects. This motivates us to investigate the task of ABSA on QA forums (ABSA-QA), aiming to jointly detect the discussed aspects and their sentiment polarities for a given QA pair. Unlike review sentences, a QA pair is composed of two parallel sentences, which requires interaction modeling to align the aspect mentioned in the question and the associated opinion clues in the answer. To this end, we propose a model with a specific design of cross-sentence aspect-opinion interaction modeling to address this task. The proposed method is evaluated on three real-world datasets and the results show that our model outperforms several strong baselines adopted from related state-of-the-art models.

Standard autoregressive language models perform only polynomial-time computation to compute the probability of the next symbol. While this is attractive, it means they cannot model distributions whose next-symbol probability is hard to compute. Indeed, they cannot even model them well enough to solve associated easy decision problems for which an engineer might want to consult a language model. These limitations apply no matter how much computation and data are used to train the model, unless the model is given access to oracle parameters that grow superpolynomially in sequence length. Thus, simply training larger autoregressive language models is not a panacea for NLP. Alternatives include energy-based models (which give up efficient sampling) and latent-variable autoregressive models (which give up efficient scoring of a given string). Both are powerful enough to escape the above limitations.

Fine-grained entity typing is a challenging task with wide applications. However, most existing datasets for this task are in English. In this paper, we introduce a corpus for Chinese fine-grained entity typing that contains 4,800 mentions manually labeled through crowdsourcing. Each mention is annotated with free-form entity types. To make our dataset useful in more possible scenarios, we also categorize all the fine-grained types into 10 general types. Finally, we conduct experiments with some neural models whose structures are typical in fine-grained entity typing and show how well they perform on our dataset. We also show the possibility of improving Chinese fine-grained entity typing through cross-lingual transfer learning.

We propose a practical scheme to train a single multilingual sequence labeling model that yields state of the art results and is small and fast enough to run on a single CPU. Starting from a public multilingual BERT checkpoint, our final model is 6x smaller and 27x faster, and has higher accuracy than a state-of-the-art multilingual baseline. We show that our model especially outperforms on low-resource languages, and works on codemixed input text without being explicitly trained on codemixed examples. We showcase the effectiveness of our method by reporting on part-of-speech tagging and morphological prediction on 70 treebanks and 48 languages.

Joint extraction of aspects and sentiments can be effectively formulated as a sequence labeling problem. However, such formulation hinders the effectiveness of supervised methods due to the lack of annotated sequence data in many domains. To address this issue, we firstly explore an unsupervised domain adaptation setting for this task. Prior work can only use common syntactic relations between aspect and opinion words to bridge the domain gaps, which highly relies on external linguistic resources. To resolve it, we propose a novel Selective Adversarial Learning (SAL) method to align the inferred correlation vectors that automatically capture their latent relations. The SAL method can dynamically learn an alignment weight for each word such that more important words can possess higher alignment weights to achieve fine-grained (word-level) adaptation. Empirically, extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed SAL method.

Fine-grained entity typing is a challenging problem since it usually involves a relatively large tag set and may require to understand the context of the entity mention. In this paper, we use entity linking to help with the fine-grained entity type classification process. We propose a deep neural model that makes predictions based on both the context and the information obtained from entity linking results. Experimental results on two commonly used datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach. On both datasets, it achieves more than 5% absolute strict accuracy improvement over the state of the art.

In this paper, we investigate the modeling power of contextualized embeddings from pre-trained language models, e.g. BERT, on the E2E-ABSA task. Specifically, we build a series of simple yet insightful neural baselines to deal with E2E-ABSA. The experimental results show that even with a simple linear classification layer, our BERT-based architecture can outperform state-of-the-art works. Besides, we also standardize the comparative study by consistently utilizing a hold-out validation dataset for model selection, which is largely ignored by previous works. Therefore, our work can serve as a BERT-based benchmark for E2E-ABSA.

Target-oriented sentiment classification aims at classifying sentiment polarities over individual opinion targets in a sentence. RNN with attention seems a good fit for the characteristics of this task, and indeed it achieves the state-of-the-art performance. After re-examining the drawbacks of attention mechanism and the obstacles that block CNN to perform well in this classification task, we propose a new model that achieves new state-of-the-art results on a few benchmarks. Instead of attention, our model employs a CNN layer to extract salient features from the transformed word representations originated from a bi-directional RNN layer. Between the two layers, we propose a component which first generates target-specific representations of words in the sentence, and then incorporates a mechanism for preserving the original contextual information from the RNN layer.

We propose a novel LSTM-based deep multi-task learning framework for aspect term extraction from user review sentences. Two LSTMs equipped with extended memories and neural memory operations are designed for jointly handling the extraction tasks of aspects and opinions via memory interactions. Sentimental sentence constraint is also added for more accurate prediction via another LSTM. Experiment results over two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework.