Text editing is a crucial task of modifying text to better align with user intents. However, existing text editing benchmark datasets contain only coarse-grained instructions and lack explainability, thus resulting in outputs that deviate from the intended changes outlined in the gold reference. To comprehensively investigate the text editing capabilities of large language models (LLMs), this paper introduces XATU, the first benchmark specifically designed for fine-grained instruction-based explainable text editing. XATU considers finer-grained text editing tasks of varying difficulty (simplification, grammar check, fact-check, etc.), incorporating lexical, syntactic, semantic, and knowledge-intensive edit aspects. To enhance interpretability, we combine LLM-based annotation and human annotation, resulting in a benchmark that includes fine-grained instructions and gold-standard edit explanations. By evaluating existing LLMs against our benchmark, we demonstrate the effectiveness of instruction tuning and the impact of underlying architecture across various editing tasks. Furthermore, extensive experimentation reveals the significant role of explanations in fine-tuning language models for text editing tasks. The benchmark will be open-sourced to support reproduction and facilitate future research at https://github.com/megagonlabs/xatu.

While large language models (LMs) demonstrate remarkable performance, they encounter challenges in providing accurate responses when queried for information beyond their pre-trained memorization. Although augmenting them with relevant external information can mitigate these issues, failure to consider the necessity of retrieval may adversely affect overall performance. Previous research has primarily focused on examining how entities influence retrieval models and knowledge recall in LMs, leaving other aspects relatively unexplored. In this work, our goal is to offer a more detailed, fact-centric analysis by exploring the effects of combinations of entities and relations. To facilitate this, we construct a new question answering (QA) dataset called WiTQA (Wikipedia Triple Question Answers). This dataset includes questions about entities and relations of various popularity levels, each accompanied by a supporting passage. Our extensive experiments with diverse LMs and retrievers reveal when retrieval does not consistently enhance LMs from the viewpoints of fact-centric popularity. Confirming earlier findings, we observe that larger LMs excel in recalling popular facts. However, they notably encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers. Interestingly, they can effectively retain popular relations of less common entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our finer-grained metric and insights through an adaptive retrieval system that selectively employs retrieval and recall based on the frequencies of entities and relations in the question.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promising performance in summary evaluation tasks, yet they face challenges such as high computational costs and the Lost-in-the-Middle problem where important information in the middle of long documents is often overlooked. To address these issues, this paper introduces a novel approach, Extract-then-Evaluate, which involves extracting key sentences from a long source document and then evaluating the summary by prompting LLMs. The results reveal that the proposed method not only significantly reduces evaluation costs but also exhibits a higher correlation with human evaluations. Furthermore, we provide practical recommendations for optimal document length and sentence extraction methods, contributing to the development of cost-effective yet more accurate methods for LLM-based text generation evaluation.

Many people read online reviews to learn about real-world entities of their interest. However, majority of reviews only describes general experiences and opinions of the customers, and may not reveal facts that are specific to the entity being reviewed. In this work, we focus on a novel task of mining from a review corpus sentences that are unique for each entity. We refer to this task as Salient Fact Extraction. Salient facts are extremely scarce due to their very nature. Consequently, collecting labeled examples for training supervised models is tedious and cost-prohibitive. To alleviate this scarcity problem, we develop an unsupervised method, ZL-Distiller, which leverages contextual language representations of the reviews and their distributional patterns to identify salient sentences about entities. Our experiments on multiple domains (hotels, products, and restaurants) show that ZL-Distiller achieves state-of-the-art performance and further boosts the performance of other supervised/unsupervised algorithms for the task. Furthermore, we show that salient sentences mined by ZL-Distiller provide unique and detailed information about entities, which benefit downstream NLP applications including question answering and summarization.

Entity set expansion (ESE) aims at obtaining a more complete set of entities given a textual corpus and a seed set of entities of a concept. Although it is a critical task in many NLP applications, existing benchmarks are limited to well-formed text (e.g., Wikipedia) and well-defined concepts (e.g., countries and diseases). Furthermore, only a small number of predictions are evaluated compared to the actual size of an entity set. A rigorous assessment of ESE methods warrants more comprehensive benchmarks and evaluation. In this paper, we consider user-generated text to understand the generalizability of ESE methods. We develop new benchmarks and propose more rigorous evaluation metrics for assessing the performance of ESE methods. Additionally, we identify phenomena such as non-named entities, multifaceted entities, vague concepts that are more prevalent in user-generated text than well-formed text, and use them to profile ESE methods. We observe that the strong performance of state-of-the-art ESE methods does not generalize well to user-generated text. We conduct comprehensive empirical analysis and draw insights from the findings.

A major drawback of modern neural OpenIE systems and benchmarks is that they prioritize high coverage of information in extractions over compactness of their constituents. This severely limits the usefulness of OpenIE extractions in many downstream tasks. The utility of extractions can be improved if extractions are compact and share constituents. To this end, we study the problem of identifying compact extractions with neural-based methods. We propose CompactIE, an OpenIE system that uses a novel pipelined approach to produce compact extractions with overlapping constituents. It first detects constituents of the extractions and then links them to build extractions. We train our system on compact extractions obtained by processing existing benchmarks. Our experiments on CaRB and Wire57 datasets indicate that CompactIE finds 1.5x-2x more compact extractions than previous systems, with high precision, establishing a new state-of-the-art performance in OpenIE.

There have been many efforts to try to understand what grammatical knowledge (e.g., ability to understand the part of speech of a token) is encoded in large pre-trained language models (LM). This is done through ‘Edge Probing’ (EP) tests: supervised classification tasks to predict the grammatical properties of a span (whether it has a particular part of speech) using only the token representations coming from the LM encoder. However, most NLP applications fine-tune these LM encoders for specific tasks. Here, we ask: if an LM is fine-tuned, does the encoding of linguistic information in it change, as measured by EP tests? Specifically, we focus on the task of Question Answering (QA) and conduct experiments on multiple datasets. We find that EP test results do not change significantly when the fine-tuned model performs well or in adversarial situations where the model is forced to learn wrong correlations. From a similar finding, some recent papers conclude that fine-tuning does not change linguistic knowledge in encoders but they do not provide an explanation. We find that EP models are susceptible to exploiting spurious correlations in the EP datasets. When this dataset bias is corrected, we do see an improvement in the EP test results as expected.

Subjectivity is the expression of internal opinions or beliefs which cannot be objectively observed or verified, and has been shown to be important for sentiment analysis and word-sense disambiguation. Furthermore, subjectivity is an important aspect of user-generated data. In spite of this, subjectivity has not been investigated in contexts where such data is widespread, such as in question answering (QA). We develop a new dataset which allows us to investigate this relationship. We find that subjectivity is an important feature in the case of QA, albeit with more intricate interactions between subjectivity and QA performance than found in previous work on sentiment analysis. For instance, a subjective question may or may not be associated with a subjective answer. We release an English QA dataset (SubjQA) based on customer reviews, containing subjectivity annotations for questions and answer spans across 6 domains.

Knowledge-based question answering (KB_QA) has long focused on simple questions that can be answered from a single knowledge source, a manually curated or an automatically extracted KB. In this work, we look at answering complex questions which often require combining information from multiple sources. We present a novel KB-QA system, Multique, which can map a complex question to a complex query pattern using a sequence of simple queries each targeted at a specific KB. It finds simple queries using a neural-network based model capable of collective inference over textual relations in extracted KB and ontological relations in curated KB. Experiments show that our proposed system outperforms previous KB-QA systems on benchmark datasets, ComplexWebQuestions and WebQuestionsSP.

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE) extracts meaningful structured tuples from free-form text. Most previous work on OpenIE considers extracting data from one sentence at a time. We describe NeurON, a system for extracting tuples from question-answer pairs. One of the main motivations for NeurON is to be able to extend knowledge bases in a way that considers precisely the information that users care about. NeurON addresses several challenges. First, an answer text is often hard to understand without knowing the question, and second, relevant information can span multiple sentences. To address these, NeurON formulates extraction as a multi-source sequence-to-sequence learning task, wherein it combines distributed representations of a question and an answer to generate knowledge facts. We describe experiments on two real-world datasets that demonstrate that NeurON can find a significant number of new and interesting facts to extend a knowledge base compared to state-of-the-art OpenIE methods.

Fundamental to several knowledge-centric applications is the need to identify named entities from their textual mentions. However, entities lack a unique representation and their mentions can differ greatly. These variations arise in complex ways that cannot be captured using textual similarity metrics. However, entities have underlying structures, typically shared by entities of the same entity type, that can help reason over their name variations. Discovering, learning and manipulating these structures typically requires high manual effort in the form of large amounts of labeled training data and handwritten transformation programs. In this work, we propose an active-learning based framework that drastically reduces the labeled data required to learn the structures of entities. We show that programs for mapping entity mentions to their structures can be automatically generated using human-comprehensible labels. Our experiments show that our framework consistently outperforms both handwritten programs and supervised learning models. We also demonstrate the utility of our framework in relation extraction and entity resolution tasks.