We introduce Speech-based Intelligence Quotient (SIQ) as a new form of human cognition-inspired evaluation pipeline for voice understanding large language models (LLM_Voice), designed to assess their voice understanding ability. Moving beyond popular voice understanding metrics such as word error rate (WER), SIQ examines LLM_Voice across three cognitive levels motivated by Bloom’s Taxonomy: (1) Remembering (i.e., WER for verbatim accuracy); (2) Understanding (i.e., similarity of LLM’s interpretations); and (3) Application (i.e., QA accuracy for simulating downstream tasks). We demonstrate that SIQ not only quantifies voice understanding abilities but also provides unified comparisons between cascaded methods (e.g., ASR-LLM) and end-to-end models, identifies annotation errors in existing benchmarks, and detects hallucinations in LLM_Voice. Our framework represents a first-of-its-kind intelligence examination that bridges cognitive principles with voice-oriented benchmarks, while exposing overlooked challenges in multi-modal training. Our code and data will be open source to encourage future studies.

Construction of a general-purpose post-recognition error corrector poses a crucial question: how can we most effectively train a model on a large mixture of domain datasets? The answer would lie in learning dataset-specific features and digesting their knowledge in a single model. Previous methods achieve this by having separate correction language models, resulting in a significant increase in parameters. In this work, we present Mixture-of-Experts as a solution, highlighting that MoEs are much more than a scalability tool. We propose a Multi-Task Correction MoE, where we train the experts to become an “expert” of speech-to-text, language-to-text and vision-to-text datasets by learning to route each dataset’s tokens to its mapped expert. Experiments on the Open ASR Leaderboard show that we explore a new state-of-the-art performance by achieving an average relative 5.0% WER reduction and substantial improvements in BLEU scores for speech and translation tasks. On zero-shot evaluation, NeKo outperforms GPT-3.5 and Claude-3.5-Sonnet with 15.5% to 27.6% relative WER reduction in the Hyporadise benchmark. NeKo performs competitively on grammar and post-OCR correction as a multi-task model.

Large language models (LLMs) can rewrite the N-best hypotheses from a speech-to-text model, often fixing recognition or translation errors that traditional rescoring cannot. Yet research on generative error correction (GER) has been focusing on monolingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), leaving its multilingual and multitask potential underexplored. We introduce CoVoGER, a benchmark for GER that covers both ASR and speech-to-text translation (ST) across 15 languages and 28 language pairs. CoVoGER is constructed by decoding Common Voice 20.0 and CoVoST-2 with Whisper of three model sizes and SeamlessM4T of two model sizes, providing 5-best lists obtained via a mixture of beam search and temperature sampling. We evaluated various instruction-tuned LLMs, including commercial models in zero-shot mode and open-sourced models with LoRA fine-tuning, and found that the mixture decoding strategy yields the best GER performance in most settings. CoVoGER will be released to promote research on reliable language-universal speech-to-text GER. The code and data for the benchmark are available at https://github.com/N-Orien/CoVoGER.

Extracting causal relationships from a medical case report is essential for comprehending the case, particularly its diagnostic process. Since the diagnostic process is regarded as a bottom-up inference, causal relationships in cases naturally form a multi-layered tree structure. The existing tasks, such as medical relation extraction, are insufficient for capturing the causal relationships of an entire case, as they treat all relations equally without considering the hierarchical structure inherent in the diagnostic process. Thus, we propose a novel task, Causal Tree Extraction (CTE), which receives a case report and generates a causal tree with the primary disease as the root, providing an intuitive understanding of a case’s diagnostic process. Subsequently, we construct a Japanese case report CTE dataset, J-Casemap, propose a generation-based CTE method that outperforms the baseline by 20.2 points in the human evaluation, and introduce evaluation metrics that reflect clinician preferences. Further experiments also show that J-Casemap enhances the performance of solving other medical tasks, such as question answering.

In this study, we investigate whether non-English-centric large language models, ‘think’ in their specialized language. Specifically, we analyze how intermediate layer representations, when projected into the vocabulary space, favor certain languages during generation—termed as latent languages. We categorize non-English-centric models into two groups: CPMs, which are English-centric models with continued pre-training on its specialized language, and BLMs, which are pre-trained on a balanced mix of multiple languages from scratch. Our findings reveal that while English-centric models rely exclusively on English as their latent language, non-English-centric models activate multiple latent languages, dynamically selecting the most similar one based on both the source and target languages. This also influences responses to culture difference questions, reducing English-centric biases in non-English models. This study deepens our understanding of language representation in non-English-centric LLMs, shedding light on the intricate dynamics of multilingual processing at the representational level.

Limited low-resource language corpora in professional domains like medicine hinder cross-lingual domain adaptation of pre-trained large language models (PLMs). While abundant English medical corpora could complement this scarcity, the effective mixture of English and target language, including machine-translated content, remains underexplored. We examined how linguistic features (e.g., token sizes and language proportions) affect performance on a Japanese–English medical knowledge benchmark. Through continued pre-training of a bilingual PLM on multilingual corpora with varying proportions of English and Japanese texts (both original and machine-translated), we analyzed correlations between linguistic features and fine-grained task performance. Our findings suggest a practical approach to optimizing multilingual corpora for cross-lingual domain adaptation, which requires leveraging specialized knowledge from English corpora while ensuring sufficient coverage of language-specific expressions in a target language (Japanese). Such insights will contribute to the development of multilingual models that effectively leverage English-language resources in various professional domains with low-resource languages.

While large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4 have recently demonstrated astonishing zero-shot capabilities in general domain tasks, they often generate content with hallucinations in specific domains such as Chinese law, hindering their application in these areas. This is typically due to the absence of training data that encompasses such a specific domain, preventing GPT-4 from acquiring in-domain knowledge. A pressing challenge is that it’s not plausible to continue training LLMs of the GPT-4’s scale on in-domain data.This paper introduces a simple yet effective domain adaptation framework for GPT-4 by reformulating generation as an adapt-retrieve-revise process. The initial step is to adapt an affordable 7B LLM to the Chinese legal domain by continuing learning in-domain data. When solving an in-domain task, we leverage the adapted LLM to generate a draft answer given a task query. Then, the draft answer will be used to retrieve supporting evidence candidates from an external in-domain knowledge base. Finally, the draft answer and retrieved evidence are concatenated into a whole prompt to let GPT-4 assess the evidence and revise the draft answer to generate the final answer. Our proposal combines the advantages of the efficiency of adapting a smaller 7B model with the evidence-assessing capability of GPT-4 and effectively prevents GPT-4 from generating hallucinatory content. In the zero-shot setting of four Chinese legal tasks, our method improves the average score by +33.6 points, compared to GPT-4 direct generation. When compared to two stronger retrieval-based baselines, our method outperforms them by +17.0 and +23.5.

Deep learning models have performed well on many NLP tasks. However, their internal mechanisms are typically difficult for humans to understand. The development of methods to explain models has become a key issue in the reliability of deep learning models in many important applications. Various saliency explanation methods, which give each feature of input a score proportional to the contribution of output, have been proposed to determine the part of the input which a model values most. Despite a considerable body of work on the evaluation of saliency methods, whether the results of various evaluation metrics agree with human cognition remains an open question. In this study, we propose a new human-based method to evaluate saliency methods in NLP by crowdsourcing. We recruited 800 crowd workers and empirically evaluated seven saliency methods on two datasets with the proposed method. We analyzed the performance of saliency methods, compared our results with existing automated evaluation methods, and identified notable differences between NLP and computer vision (CV) fields when using saliency methods. The instance-level data of our crowdsourced experiments and the code to reproduce the explanations are available at https://github.com/xtlu/lreccoling_evaluation.

The creation of instruction data and evaluation benchmarks for serving Large language models often involves enormous human annotation. This issue becomes particularly pronounced when rapidly developing such resources for a non-English language like Japanese. Instead of following the popular practice of directly translating existing English resources into Japanese (e.g., Japanese-Alpaca), we propose an efficient self-instruct method based on GPT-4. We first translate a small amount of English instructions into Japanese and post-edit them to obtain native-level quality. GPT-4 then utilizes them as demonstrations to automatically generate Japanese instruction data. We also construct an evaluation benchmark containing 80 questions across 8 categories, using GPT-4 to automatically assess the response quality of LLMs without human references. The empirical results suggest that the models fine-tuned on our GPT-4 self-instruct data significantly outperformed the Japanese-Alpaca across all three base pre-trained models. Our GPT-4 self-instruct data allowed the LLaMA 13B model to defeat GPT-3.5 (Davinci-003) with a 54.37% win-rate. The human evaluation exhibits the consistency between GPT-4’s assessments and human preference. Our high-quality instruction data and evaluation benchmark are released here.

In spite of the potential for ground-breaking achievements offered by large language models (LLMs) (e.g., GPT-3) via in-context learning (ICL), they still lag significantly behind fully-supervised baselines (e.g., fine-tuned BERT) in relation extraction (RE). This is due to the two major shortcomings of ICL for RE: (1) low relevance regarding entity and relation in existing sentence-level demonstration retrieval approaches for ICL; and (2) the lack of explaining input-label mappings of demonstrations leading to poor ICL effectiveness. In this paper, we propose GPT-RE to successfully address the aforementioned issues by (1) incorporating task-aware representations in demonstration retrieval; and (2) enriching the demonstrations with gold label-induced reasoning logic. We evaluate GPT-RE on four widely-used RE datasets, and observe that GPT-RE achieves improvements over not only existing GPT-3 baselines, but also fully-supervised baselines as in Figure 1. Specifically, GPT-RE achieves SOTA performances on the Semeval and SciERC datasets, and competitive performances on the TACRED and ACE05 datasets. Additionally, a critical issue of LLMs revealed by previous work, the strong inclination to wrongly classify NULL examples into other pre-defined labels, is substantially alleviated by our method. We show an empirical analysis.

Contrastive pre-training on distant supervision has shown remarkable effectiveness in improving supervised relation extraction tasks. However, the existing methods ignore the intrinsic noise of distant supervision during the pre-training stage. In this paper, we propose a weighted contrastive learning method by leveraging the supervised data to estimate the reliability of pre-training instances and explicitly reduce the effect of noise. Experimental results on three supervised datasets demonstrate the advantages of our proposed weighted contrastive learning approach compared to two state-of-the-art non-weighted baselines. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/WCL.

To solve Math Word Problems, human students leverage diverse reasoning logic that reaches different possible equation solutions. However, the mainstream sequence-to-sequence approach of automatic solvers aims to decode a fixed solution equation supervised by human annotation. In this paper, we propose a controlled equation generation solver by leveraging a set of control codes to guide the model to consider certain reasoning logic and decode the corresponding equations expressions transformed from the human reference. The empirical results suggest that our method universally improves the performance on single-unknown (Math23K) and multiple-unknown (DRAW1K, HMWP) benchmarks, with substantial improvements up to 13.2% accuracy on the challenging multiple-unknown datasets.

Relation extraction (RE) has achieved remarkable progress with the help of pre-trained language models. However, existing RE models are usually incapable of handling two situations: implicit expressions and long-tail relation types, caused by language complexity and data sparsity. In this paper, we introduce a simple enhancement of RE using k nearest neighbors (kNN-RE). kNN-RE allows the model to consult training relations at test time through a nearest-neighbor search and provides a simple yet effective means to tackle the two issues above. Additionally, we observe that kNN-RE serves as an effective way to leverage distant supervision (DS) data for RE. Experimental results show that the proposed kNN-RE achieves state-of-the-art performances on a variety of supervised RE datasets, i.e., ACE05, SciERC, and Wiki80, along with outperforming the best model to date on the i2b2 and Wiki80 datasets in the setting of allowing using DS. Our code and models are available at: https://github.com/YukinoWan/kNN-RE.

Word alignment has proven to benefit many-to-many neural machine translation (NMT). However, high-quality ground-truth bilingual dictionaries were used for pre-editing in previous methods, which are unavailable for most language pairs. Meanwhile, the contrastive objective can implicitly utilize automatically learned word alignment, which has not been explored in many-to-many NMT. This work proposes a word-level contrastive objective to leverage word alignments for many-to-many NMT. Empirical results show that this leads to 0.8 BLEU gains for several language pairs. Analyses reveal that in many-to-many NMT, the encoder’s sentence retrieval performance highly correlates with the translation quality, which explains when the proposed method impacts translation. This motivates future exploration for many-to-many NMT to improve the encoder’s sentence retrieval performance.