Dynamic Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) has shown great success in mitigating hallucinations in large language models (LLMs) during generation. However, existing dynamic RAG methods face significant limitations in two key aspects: 1) Lack of an effective mechanism to control retrieval triggers, and 2) Lack of effective scrutiny of retrieval content. To address these limitations, we propose an innovative dynamic RAG method, DioR (Adaptive Cognitive Detection and Contextual Retrieval Optimization), which consists of two main components: adaptive cognitive detection and contextual retrieval optimization, specifically designed to determine when retrieval is needed and what to retrieve for LLMs is useful. Experimental results demonstrate that DioR achieves superior performance on all tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our work.

Legal judgment prediction (LJP) aims to function as a judge by making final rulings based on case claims and facts, which plays a vital role in the judicial domain for supporting court decision-making and improving judicial efficiency. However, existing methods often struggle with logical errors when conducting complex legal reasoning. We propose LegalReasoner, which enhances LJP reliability through step-wise verification and correction of the reasoning process. Specifically, it first identifies dispute points to decompose complex cases, and then conducts step-wise reasoning while employing a process verifier to validate each step’s logic from correctness, progressiveness, and potential perspectives. When errors are detected, expert-designed attribution and resolution strategies are applied for correction. To fine-tune LegalReasoner, we release the LegalHK dataset, containing 58,130 Hong Kong court cases with detailed annotations of dispute points, step-by-step reasoning chains, and process verification labels. Experiments demonstrate that LegalReasoner significantly improves concordance with court decisions from 72.37 to 80.27 on LLAMA-3.1-70B. The data is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/weijiezz/LegalHK.

Retrieval-augmented language models (RALMs) aim to incorporate external knowledge to address the issues of factual hallucination and knowledge obsolescence faced by large language models (LLMs). Inevitably, the retrieved passages based on similarity search may be irrelevant to the given question, and the aggregation of these passages can confuse the model to give a correct answer. To improve the performance of RALM in such conditions, we propose layer-knowledge guided attention for RALMs, which harnesses the layer-wise knowledge of LLMs to optimize per-layer attention on useful passages, making the model pay attention to the most relevant content and ignore irrelevant ones. Specifically, we first systematically study LLM’s attention patterns and their relationship with the accuracy of RALM responses, where middle-focus attentions play a crucial role in selectively gathering relevant information. Based on this, a layer-wise passage estimator leverages the varied knowledge encoded across LLM layers to assess not only passage relevance scores but also associated confidences. Finally, a relevance-aware passage fusion enables selective attention to relevant passages, mitigating distractibility and positional bias of causal attention. Experiments show that our method outperforms existing methods on RALM benchmarks.

This paper describes our system submitted to task 4 of SemEval 2020: Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE) which consists of three sub-tasks. The task is to directly validate the given sentence whether or not to make sense and require the model to explain it. Based on BERT architecture with the multi-task setting, we propose an effective and interpretable “Explain, Reason and Predict” (ERP) system to solve the three sub-tasks about commonsense: (a) Validation, (b) Reasoning, and (c) Explanation. Inspired by cognitive studies of common sense, our system first generates a reason or understanding of the sentences and then choose which one statement makes sense, which is achieved by multi-task learning. During the post-evaluation, our system has reached 92.9% accuracy in subtask A (rank 11), 89.7% accuracy in subtask B (rank 9), and BLEU score of 12.9 in subtask C (rank 8).

Review text has been widely studied in traditional tasks such as sentiment analysis and aspect extraction. However, to date, no work is towards the abstractive review summarization that is essential for business organizations and individual consumers to make informed decisions. This work takes the lead to study the aspect/sentiment-aware abstractive review summarization by exploring multi-factor attentions. Specifically, we propose an interactive attention mechanism to interactively learns the representations of context words, sentiment words and aspect words within the reviews, acted as an encoder. The learned sentiment and aspect representations are incorporated into the decoder to generate aspect/sentiment-aware review summaries via an attention fusion network. In addition, the abstractive summarizer is jointly trained with the text categorization task, which helps learn a category-specific text encoder, locating salient aspect information and exploring the variations of style and wording of content with respect to different text categories. The experimental results on a real-life dataset demonstrate that our model achieves impressive results compared to other strong competitors.

This paper provides an overview along with our findings of the Chinese Spelling Check shared task at NLPTEA 2017. The goal of this task is to develop a computer-assisted system to automatically diagnose typing errors in traditional Chinese sentences written by students. We defined six types of errors which belong to two categories. Given a sentence, the system should detect where the errors are, and for each detected error determine its type and provide correction suggestions. We designed, constructed, and released a benchmark dataset for this task.

We present a system called ACE for Automatic Colloquialism and Errors detection for written Chinese. ACE is based on the combination of N-gram model and rule-base model. Although it focuses on detecting colloquial Cantonese (a dialect of Chinese) at the current stage, it can be extended to detect other dialects. We chose Cantonese becauase it has many interesting properties, such as unique grammar system and huge colloquial terms, that turn the detection task extremely challenging. We conducted experiments using real data and synthetic data. The results indicated that ACE is highly reliable and effective.