Most named entity recognition (NER) systems focus on improving model performance, ignoring the need to quantify model uncertainty, which is critical to the reliability of NER systems in open environments. Evidential deep learning (EDL) has recently been proposed as a promising solution to explicitly model predictive uncertainty for classification tasks. However, directly applying EDL to NER applications faces two challenges, i.e., the problems of sparse entities and OOV/OOD entities in NER tasks. To address these challenges, we propose a trustworthy NER framework named E-NER by introducing two uncertainty-guided loss terms to the conventional EDL, along with a series of uncertainty-guided training strategies. Experiments show that E-NER can be applied to multiple NER paradigms to obtain accurate uncertainty estimation. Furthermore, compared to state-of-the-art baselines, the proposed method achieves a better OOV/OOD detection performance and better generalization ability on OOV entities.

In recent years, few-shot relation classification has evoked many research interests. Yet a more challenging problem, i.e. none-of-the-above (NOTA), is under-explored. Existing works mainly regard NOTA as an extra class and treat it the same as known relations. However, such a solution ignores the overall instance distribution, where NOTA instances are actually outliers and distributed unnaturally compared with known ones. In this paper, we propose a density-aware prototypical network (D-Proto) to treat various instances distinctly. Specifically, we design unique training objectives to separate known instances and isolate NOTA instances, respectively. This produces an ideal instance distribution, where known instances are dense yet NOTAs have a small density. Moreover, we propose a NOTA detection module to further enlarge the density of known samples, and discriminate NOTA and known samples accurately. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms strong baselines with robustness towards various NOTA rates. The code will be made public after the paper is accepted.

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have showcased remarkable zero-shot performance across various NLP tasks. However, the potential of LLMs in personality detection, which involves identifying an individual’s personality from their written texts, remains largely unexplored. Drawing inspiration from Psychological Questionnaires, which are carefully designed by psychologists to evaluate individual personality traits through a series of targeted items, we argue that these items can be regarded as a collection of well-structured chain-of-thought (CoT) processes. By incorporating these processes, LLMs can enhance their capabilities to make more reasonable inferences on personality from textual input. In light of this, we propose a novel personality detection method, called PsyCoT, which mimics the way individuals complete psychological questionnaires in a multi-turn dialogue manner. In particular, we employ a LLM as an AI assistant with a specialization in text analysis. We prompt the assistant to rate individual items at each turn and leverage the historical rating results to derive a conclusive personality preference. Our experiments demonstrate that PsyCoT significantly improves the performance and robustness of GPT-3.5 in personality detection, achieving an average F1 score improvement of 4.23/10.63 points on two benchmark datasets compared to the standard prompting method. Our code is available at https://github.com/TaoYang225/PsyCoT.

Tabular-format data is widely adopted in various real-world applications. Various machine learning models have achieved remarkable success in both industrial applications and data-science competitions. Despite these successes, most current machine learning methods for tabular data lack accurate confidence estimation, which is needed by some high-risk sensitive applications such as credit modeling and financial fraud detection. In this paper, we study the confidence estimation of machine learning models applied to tabular data. The key finding of our paper is that a real-world tabular dataset typically contains implicit sample relations, and this can further help to obtain a more accurate estimation. To this end, we introduce a general post-training confidence calibration framework named RECAL to calibrate the predictive confidence of current machine learning models by employing graph neural networks to model the relations between different samples. We perform extensive experiments on tabular datasets with both implicit and explicit graph structures and show that RECAL can significantly improve the calibration quality compared to the conventional method without considering the sample relations.

Large language models (LLMs) outperform information retrieval techniques for downstream knowledge-intensive tasks when being prompted to generate world knowledge. However, community concerns abound regarding the factuality and potential implications of using this uncensored knowledge. In light of this, we introduce CONNER, a COmpreheNsive kNowledge Evaluation fRamework, designed to systematically and automatically evaluate generated knowledge from six important perspectives – Factuality, Relevance, Coherence, Informativeness, Helpfulness and Validity. We conduct an extensive empirical analysis of the generated knowledge from three different types of LLMs on two widely studied knowledge-intensive tasks, i.e., open-domain question answering and knowledge-grounded dialogue. Surprisingly, our study reveals that the factuality of generated knowledge, even if lower, does not significantly hinder downstream tasks. Instead, the relevance and coherence of the outputs are more important than small factual mistakes. Further, we show how to use CONNER to improve knowledge-intensive tasks by designing two strategies: Prompt Engineering and Knowledge Selection. Our evaluation code and LLM-generated knowledge with human annotations will be released to facilitate future research.