This paper addresses the critical need for democratizing large language models (LLM) in the Arab world, a region that has seen slower progress in developing models comparable to state-of-the-art offerings like GPT-4 or GPT-3.5, due to a predominant focus on mainstream languages (e.g., English and Chinese). One practical objective for Arabic LLMs is to utilize Arabic-specific vocabulary in the tokenizer to accelerate decoding. However, using a different vocabulary often leads to degradation of the model’s learned knowledge, since many words become out-of-vocabulary (OOV) at the beginning of training. Inspired by the vocabulary learning during Second Language (Arabic) Acquisition for humans, the released AraLLaMA employs progressive vocabulary expansion, which is implemented by a modified BPE algorithm that progressively extends the Arabic subwords in its dynamic vocabulary during training, thereby balancing the OOV ratio at every stage. The ablation study demonstrated the effectiveness of Progressive Vocabulary Expansion.Moreover, AraLLaMA achieves decent performance comparable to the best Arabic LLMs across a variety of Arabic benchmarks. Our model weights are available at: https://github.com/FreedomIntelligence/AraLLaMa.

With the popularity of large language models (LLMs) and their ability to handle longer input documents, there is a growing need for high-quality long document summarization datasets. Although many models already support 16k input, current lengths of summarization datasets are inadequate, and salient information is not evenly distributed. To bridge these gaps, we collect a new summarization dataset called SumSurvey, consisting of more than 18k scientific survey papers. With an average document length exceeding 12k and a quarter exceeding 16k, as well as the uniformity metric outperforming current mainstream long document summarization datasets, SumSurvey brings new challenges and expectations to both fine-tuned models and LLMs. The informativeness of summaries and the models supporting the evaluation of long document summarization warrant further attention. Automatic and human evaluation results on this abstractive dataset confirm this view. Our dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Oswald1997/SumSurvey.

This paper summarizes two approaches developed for BioNLP2023 workshop task 1A: clinical problem list summarization. We develop two types of methods with either rules or pre-trained language models. In the rule-based summarization model, we leverage UMLS (Unified Medical Language System) and a negation detector to extract text spans to represent the summary. We also fine tune three pre-trained language models (BART, T5 and GPT2) to generate the summaries. Experiment results show the rule based system returns extractive summaries but lower ROUGE-L score (0.043), while the fine tuned T5 returns a higher ROUGE-L score (0.208).

Abstractive summarization has made tremendous progress in recent years. In this work, we perform fine-grained human annotations to evaluate long document abstractive summarization systems (i.e., models and metrics) with the aim of implementing them to generate reliable summaries. For long document abstractive models, we show that the constant strive for state-of-the-art ROUGE results can lead us to generate more relevant summaries but not factual ones. For long document evaluation metrics, human evaluation results show that ROUGE remains the best at evaluating the relevancy of a summary. It also reveals important limitations of factuality metrics in detecting different types of factual errors and the reasons behind the effectiveness of BARTScore. We then suggest promising directions in the endeavor of developing factual consistency metrics. Finally, we release our annotated long document dataset with the hope that it can contribute to the development of metrics across a broader range of summarization settings.