Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate significant value in domain-specific applications, benefiting from their fundamental capabilities. Nevertheless, it is still unclear which fundamental capabilities contribute to success in specific domains. Moreover, the existing benchmark-based evaluation cannot effectively reflect the performance of real-world applications. In this survey, we review recent advances of LLMs in domain applications, aiming to summarize the fundamental capabilities and their collaboration. Furthermore, we establish connections between fundamental capabilities and specific domains, evaluating the varying importance of different capabilities. Based on our findings, we propose a reliable strategy for domains to choose more robust backbone LLMs for real-world applications.

Domain adaptation aims to enable Large Language Models (LLMs) to generalize domain datasets unseen effectively during the training phase. However, factors such as the size of the model parameters and the scale of training data are general influencers and do not reflect the nuances of domain adaptation performance. This paper investigates the fine-grained factors affecting domain adaptation performance, analyzing the specific impact of ‘words’ in training data on summarization tasks. We propose quantifying dataset learning difficulty as the learning difficulty of generative summarization, which is determined by two indicators: word-based compression rate and abstraction level. Our experiments conclude that, when considering dataset learning difficulty, the cross-domain overlap and the performance gain in summarization tasks exhibit an approximate linear relationship, which is not directly related to the number of words. Based on this finding, predicting a model’s performance on unknown domain datasets is possible without undergoing training. Source code and scripts are available at https://github.com/li-aolong/Word-Matters.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable adaptability across domains, these models often fall short in structured knowledge extraction tasks such as named entity recognition (NER). This paper explores an innovative, cost-efficient strategy to harness LLMs with modest NER capabilities for producing superior NER datasets. Our approach diverges from the basic class-conditional prompts by instructing LLMs to self-reflect on the specific domain, thereby generating domain-relevant attributes (such as category and emotions for movie reviews), which are utilized for creating attribute-rich training data. Furthermore, we preemptively generate entity terms and then develop NER context data around these entities, effectively bypassing the LLMs’ challenges with complex structures. Our experiments across both general and niche domains reveal significant performance enhancements over conventional data generation methods while being more cost-effective than existing alternatives.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive abilities in generating unstructured natural language according to instructions. However, their performance can be inconsistent when tasked with producing text that adheres to specific structured formats, which is crucial in applications like named entity recognition (NER) or relation extraction (RE). To address this issue, this paper introduces an efficient method, G&O, to enhance their structured text generation capabilities. It breaks the generation into a two-step pipeline: initially, LLMs generate answers in natural language as intermediate responses. Subsequently, LLMs are asked to organize the output into the desired structure, using the intermediate responses as context. G&O effectively separates the generation of content from the structuring process, reducing the pressure of completing two orthogonal tasks simultaneously. Tested on zero-shot NER and RE, the results indicate a significant improvement in LLM performance with minimal additional efforts. This straightforward and adaptable prompting technique can also be combined with other strategies, like self-consistency, to further elevate LLM capabilities in various structured text generation tasks.

Language style is necessary for AI systems to accurately understand and generate diverse human language. However, previous text style transfer primarily focused on sentence-level data-driven approaches, limiting exploration of potential problems in large language models (LLMs) and the ability to meet complex application needs. To overcome these limitations, we introduce a novel task called Public-Speaking Style Transfer (PSST), which aims to simulate humans to transform passage-level, official texts into a public-speaking style. Grounded in the analysis of real-world data from a linguistic perspective, we decompose public-speaking style into key sub-styles to pose challenges and quantify the style modeling capability of LLMs. For such intricate text style transfer, we further propose a fine-grained evaluation framework to analyze the characteristics and identify the problems of stylized texts. Comprehensive experiments suggest that current LLMs struggle to generate public speaking texts that align with human preferences, primarily due to excessive stylization and loss of semantic information. We will release our data, code, and model upon acceptance.

Recent studies have demonstrated that In-Context Learning (ICL), through the use of specific demonstrations, can align Large Language Models (LLMs) with human preferences known as In-Context Alignment (ICA), indicating that models can comprehend human instructions without requiring parameter adjustments. However, the exploration of the mechanism and applicability of ICA remains limited. In this paper, we begin by dividing the context text used in ICA into three categories: format, system prompt, and example. Through ablation experiments, we investigate the effectiveness of each part in enabling ICA to function effectively. We then examine how variants in these parts impact the model’s alignment performance. Our findings indicate that the example part is crucial for enhancing the model’s alignment capabilities, with changes in examples significantly affecting alignment performance. We also conduct a comprehensive evaluation of ICA’s zero-shot capabilities in various alignment tasks. The results indicate that compared to parameter fine-tuning methods, ICA demonstrates superior performance in knowledge-based tasks and tool-use tasks. However, it still exhibits certain limitations in areas such as multi-turn dialogues and instruction following. Source codes and scripts are available at https://github.com/li-aolong/how-far-can-ica-go.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable proficiency in language understanding and have been successfully applied to a variety of real-world tasks through task-specific fine-tuning or prompt engineering. Despite these advancements, it remains an open question whether LLMs are fundamentally capable of reasoning and planning, or if they primarily rely on recalling and synthesizing information from their training data. In our research, we introduce a novel task—Minesweeper—specifically designed in a format unfamiliar to LLMs and absent from their training datasets. This task challenges LLMs to identify the locations of mines based on numerical clues provided by adjacent opened cells. Successfully completing this task requires an understanding of each cell’s state, discerning spatial relationships between the clues and mines, and strategizing actions based on logical deductions drawn from the arrangement of the cells. Our experiments, including trials with the advanced GPT-4 model, indicate that while LLMs possess the foundational abilities required for this task, they struggle to integrate these into a coherent, multi-step logical reasoning process needed to solve Minesweeper. These findings highlight the need for further research to understand the nature of reasoning capabilities in LLMs under similar circumstances, and to explore pathways towards more sophisticated AI reasoning and planning models.

Scientific information extraction (SciIE), which aims to automatically extract information from scientific literature, is becoming more important than ever. However, there are no existing SciIE datasets for polymer materials, which is an important class of materials used ubiquitously in our daily lives. To bridge this gap, we introduce POLYIE, a new SciIE dataset for polymer materials. POLYIE is curated from 146 full-length polymer scholarly articles, which are annotated with different named entities (i.e., materials, properties, values, conditions) as well as their N-ary relations by domain experts. POLYIE presents several unique challenges due to diverse lexical formats of entities, ambiguity between entities, and variable-length relations. We evaluate state-of-the-art named entity extraction and relation extraction models on POLYIE, analyze their strengths and weaknesses, and highlight some difficult cases for these models. To the best of our knowledge, POLYIE is the first SciIE benchmark for polymer materials, and we hope it will lead to more research efforts from the community on this challenging task. Our code and data are available on: https://github.com/jerry3027/PolyIE.

Grammatical error correction (GEC) can be divided into sequence-to-edit (Seq2Edit) and sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) frameworks, both of which have their pros and cons. To utilize the strengths and make up for the shortcomings of these frameworks, this paper proposes a novel method, TemplateGEC, which capitalizes on the capabilities of both Seq2Edit and Seq2Seq frameworks in error detection and correction respectively. TemplateGEC utilizes the detection labels from a Seq2Edit model, to construct the template as the input. A Seq2Seq model is employed to enforce consistency between the predictions of different templates by utilizing consistency learning. Experimental results on the Chinese NLPCC18, English BEA19 and CoNLL14 benchmarks show the effectiveness and robustness of TemplateGEC.Further analysis reveals the potential of our method in performing human-in-the-loop GEC. Source code and scripts are available at https://github.com/li-aolong/TemplateGEC.

Recommending a diversity of product types (PTs) is important for a good shopping experience when customers are looking for products around their high-level shopping interests (SIs) such as hiking. However, the SI-PT connection is typically absent in e-commerce product catalogs and expensive to construct manually due to the volume of potential SIs, which prevents us from establishing a recommender with easily accessible knowledge systems. To establish such connections, we propose to extract PTs from the Web pages containing hand-crafted PT recommendations for SIs. The extraction task is formulated as binary HTML node classification given the general observation that an HTML node in our target Web pages can present one and only one PT phrase. Accordingly, we introduce TrENC, which stands for Tree-Transformer Encoders for Node Classification. It improves the inter-node dependency modeling with modified attention mechanisms that preserve the long-term sibling and ancestor-descendant relations. TrENC also injects SI into node features for better semantic representation. Trained on pages regarding limited SIs, TrEnc is ready to be applied to other unobserved interests. Experiments on our manually constructed dataset, WebPT, show that TrENC outperforms the best baseline model by 2.37 F1 points in the zero-shot setup. The performance indicates the feasibility of constructing SI-PT relations and using them to power downstream applications such as search and recommendation.

We study the problem of extracting N-ary relation tuples from scientific articles. This task is challenging because the target knowledge tuples can reside in multiple parts and modalities of the document. Our proposed method ReSel decomposes this task into a two-stage procedure that first retrieves the most relevant paragraph/table and then selects the target entity from the retrieved component. For the high-level retrieval stage, ReSel designs a simple and effective feature set, which captures multi-level lexical and semantic similarities between the query and components. For the low-level selection stage, ReSel designs a cross-modal entity correlation graph along with a multi-view architecture, which models both semantic and document-structural relations between entities. Our experiments on three scientific information extraction datasets show that ReSel outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly.

We study the problem of learning a named entity recognition (NER) tagger using noisy labels from multiple weak supervision sources. Though cheap to obtain, the labels from weak supervision sources are often incomplete, inaccurate, and contradictory, making it difficult to learn an accurate NER model. To address this challenge, we propose a conditional hidden Markov model (CHMM), which can effectively infer true labels from multi-source noisy labels in an unsupervised way. CHMM enhances the classic hidden Markov model with the contextual representation power of pre-trained language models. Specifically, CHMM learns token-wise transition and emission probabilities from the BERT embeddings of the input tokens to infer the latent true labels from noisy observations. We further refine CHMM with an alternate-training approach (CHMM-ALT). It fine-tunes a BERT-NER model with the labels inferred by CHMM, and this BERT-NER’s output is regarded as an additional weak source to train the CHMM in return. Experiments on four NER benchmarks from various domains show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art weakly supervised NER models by wide margins.

We study the problem of learning neural text classifiers without using any labeled data, but only easy-to-provide rules as multiple weak supervision sources. This problem is challenging because rule-induced weak labels are often noisy and incomplete. To address these two challenges, we design a label denoiser, which estimates the source reliability using a conditional soft attention mechanism and then reduces label noise by aggregating rule-annotated weak labels. The denoised pseudo labels then supervise a neural classifier to predicts soft labels for unmatched samples, which address the rule coverage issue. We evaluate our model on five benchmarks for sentiment, topic, and relation classifications. The results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art weakly-supervised and semi-supervised methods consistently, and achieves comparable performance with fully-supervised methods even without any labeled data. Our code can be found at https://github.com/weakrules/Denoise-multi-weak-sources.