Chinese geographic re-ranking task aims to find the most relevant addresses among retrieved candidates, which is crucial for location-related services such as navigation maps. Unlike the general sentences, Chinese geographic contexts are closely intertwined with geographical concepts, from general spans (e.g., province) to specific spans (e.g., road). Given this feature, we propose an innovative framework, namely Geo-Encoder, to more effectively integrate Chinese geographical semantics into re-ranking pipelines. Our methodology begins by employing off-the-shelf tools to associate text with geographical spans, treating them as chunking units. Then, we present a multi-task learning module to simultaneously acquire an effective attention matrix that determines chunk contributions to geographic representations. Furthermore, we put forth an asynchronous update mechanism for the proposed task, aiming to guide the model to focus on specific chunks. Experiments on two Chinese benchmark datasets, show that the Geo-Encoder achieves significant improvements when compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, it leads to a substantial improvement in the Hit@1 score of MGEO-BERT, increasing it by 6.22% from 62.76 to 68.98 on the GeoTES dataset.

The most recent large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown exceptional capabilities of generalist models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of NLP tasks with little or no adaptation. How effective are such models in the finance domain? Understanding this basic question would have a significant impact on many downstream financial analytical tasks. In this paper, we conduct empirical studies and provide experimental evidences of their performance on a wide variety of financial text analytical problems, using eight benchmark datasets from five categories of tasks. We report both the strengths and limitations of the current models by comparing them to the state-of-the-art fine-tuned approaches and the recently released domain-specific pretrained models. We hope our study can help to understand the capability of the existing models in the financial domain and facilitate further improvements.

Knowledge base question answering (KBQA) is a challenging task that aims to retrieve correct answers from large-scale knowledge bases. Existing attempts primarily focus on entity representation and final answer reasoning, which results in limited supervision for this task. Moreover, the relations, which empirically determine the reasoning path selection, are not fully considered in recent advancements. In this study, we propose a novel framework, RE-KBQA, that utilizes relations in the knowledge base to enhance entity representation and introduce additional supervision. We explore guidance from relations in three aspects, including (1) distinguishing similar entities by employing a variational graph auto-encoder to learn relation importance; (2) exploring extra supervision by predicting relation distributions as soft labels with a multi-task scheme; (3) designing a relation-guided re-ranking algorithm for post-processing. Experimental results on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our framework, improving the F1 score by 5.8% from 40.5 to 46.3 on CWQ and 5.7% from 62.8 to 68.5 on WebQSP, better or on par with state-of-the-art methods.

Sign language recognition and translation first uses a recognition module to generate glosses from sign language videos and then employs a translation module to translate glosses into spoken sentences. Most existing works focus on the recognition step, while paying less attention to sign language translation. In this work, we propose a task-aware instruction network, namely TIN-SLT, for sign language translation, by introducing the isntruction module and the learning-based feature fuse strategy into a Transformer network. In this way, the pre-trained model’s language ability can be well explored and utilized to further boost the translation performance. Moreover, by exploring the representation space of sign language glosses and target spoken language, we propose a multi-level data augmentation scheme to adjust the data distribution of the training set. We conduct extensive experiments on two challenging benchmark datasets, PHOENIX-2014-T and ASLG-PC12, on which our method outperforms former best solutions by 1.65 and 1.42 in terms of BLEU-4. Our code and trained networks will be available upon the publication of this work.

With the recent surge of NLP technologies in the financial domain, banks and other financial entities have adopted virtual agents (VA) to assist customers. A challenging problem for VAs in this domain is determining a user’s reason or intent for contacting the VA, especially when the intent was unseen or open during the VA’s training. One method for handling open intents is adaptive decision boundary (ADB) post-processing, which learns tight decision boundaries from intent representations to separate known and open intents. We propose incorporating two methods for supervised pre-training of intent representations: prefix tuning and fine-tuning just the last layer of a large language model (LLM). With this proposal, our accuracy is 1.63% - 2.07% higher than the prior state-of-the-art ADB method for open intent classification on the banking77 benchmark amongst others. Notably, we only supplement the original ADB model with 0.1% additional trainable parameters. Ablation studies also determine that our method yields better results than full fine-tuning the entire model. We hypothesize that our findings could stimulate a new optimal method of downstream tuning that combines parameter efficient tuning modules with fine-tuning a subset of the base model’s layers.