Mirali Purohit


2022

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In-BoXBART: Get Instructions into Biomedical Multi-Task Learning
Mihir Parmar | Swaroop Mishra | Mirali Purohit | Man Luo | Murad Mohammad | Chitta Baral
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2022

Single-task models have proven pivotal in solving specific tasks; however, they have limitations in real-world applications where multi-tasking is necessary and domain shifts are exhibited. Recently, instructional prompts have shown significant improvement towards multi-task generalization; however, the effect of instructional prompts and Multi-Task Learning (MTL) has not been systematically studied in the biomedical domain. Motivated by this, this paper explores the impact of instructional prompts for biomedical MTL. We introduce the BoX, a collection of 32 instruction tasks for Biomedical NLP across (X) various categories. Using this meta-dataset, we propose a unified model termed as In-BoXBART, that can jointly learn all tasks of the BoX without any task-specific modules. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to propose a unified model in the biomedical domain and use instructions to achieve generalization across several biomedical tasks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed model: 1) outperforms single-task baseline by ~3% and multi-task (without instruction) baseline by ~18% on an average, and 2) shows ~23% improvement compared to single-task baseline in few-shot learning (i.e., 32 instances per task) on an average. Our analysis indicates that there is significant room for improvement across tasks in the BoX, implying the scope for future research direction.

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Super-NaturalInstructions: Generalization via Declarative Instructions on 1600+ NLP Tasks
Yizhong Wang | Swaroop Mishra | Pegah Alipoormolabashi | Yeganeh Kordi | Amirreza Mirzaei | Atharva Naik | Arjun Ashok | Arut Selvan Dhanasekaran | Anjana Arunkumar | David Stap | Eshaan Pathak | Giannis Karamanolakis | Haizhi Lai | Ishan Purohit | Ishani Mondal | Jacob Anderson | Kirby Kuznia | Krima Doshi | Kuntal Kumar Pal | Maitreya Patel | Mehrad Moradshahi | Mihir Parmar | Mirali Purohit | Neeraj Varshney | Phani Rohitha Kaza | Pulkit Verma | Ravsehaj Singh Puri | Rushang Karia | Savan Doshi | Shailaja Keyur Sampat | Siddhartha Mishra | Sujan Reddy A | Sumanta Patro | Tanay Dixit | Xudong Shen
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

How well can NLP models generalize to a variety of unseen tasks when provided with task instructions? To address this question, we first introduce Super-NaturalInstructions, a benchmark of 1,616 diverse NLP tasks and their expert-written instructions. Our collection covers 76 distinct task types, including but not limited to classification, extraction, infilling, sequence tagging, text rewriting, and text composition. This large and diverse collection of tasks enables rigorous benchmarking of cross-task generalization under instructions—training models to follow instructions on a subset of tasks and evaluating them on the remaining unseen ones.Furthermore, we build Tk-Instruct, a transformer model trained to follow a variety of in-context instructions (plain language task definitions or k-shot examples). Our experiments show that Tk-Instruct outperforms existing instruction-following models such as InstructGPT by over 9% on our benchmark despite being an order of magnitude smaller. We further analyze generalization as a function of various scaling parameters, such as the number of observed tasks, the number of instances per task, and model sizes. We hope our dataset and model facilitate future progress towards more general-purpose NLP models.