Zhuyun Dai


2023

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PaRaDe: Passage Ranking using Demonstrations with LLMs
Andrew Drozdov | Honglei Zhuang | Zhuyun Dai | Zhen Qin | Razieh Rahimi | Xuanhui Wang | Dana Alon | Mohit Iyyer | Andrew McCallum | Donald Metzler | Kai Hui
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) can be instructed to effectively perform zero-shot passage re-ranking, in which the results of a first stage retrieval method, such as BM25, are rated and reordered to improve relevance. In this work, we improve LLM-based re-ranking by algorithmically selecting few-shot demonstrations to include in the prompt. Our analysis investigates the conditions where demonstrations are most helpful, and shows that adding even one demonstration is significantly beneficial. We propose a novel demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than the commonly used semantic similarity. Furthermore, we find that demonstrations helpful for ranking are also effective at question generation. We hope our work will spur more principled research into question generation and passage ranking.

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RARR: Researching and Revising What Language Models Say, Using Language Models
Luyu Gao | Zhuyun Dai | Panupong Pasupat | Anthony Chen | Arun Tejasvi Chaganty | Yicheng Fan | Vincent Zhao | Ni Lao | Hongrae Lee | Da-Cheng Juan | Kelvin Guu
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Language models (LMs) now excel at many tasks such as question answering, reasoning, and dialog. However, they sometimes generate unsupported or misleading content. A user cannot easily determine whether their outputs are trustworthy or not, because most LMs do not have any built-in mechanism for attribution to external evidence. To enable attribution while still preserving all the powerful advantages of recent generation models, we propose RARR (Retrofit Attribution using Research and Revision), a system that 1) automatically finds attribution for the output of any text generation model, and 2) post-edits the output to fix unsupported content while preserving the original output as much as possible. When applied to the output of several state-of-the-art LMs on a diverse set of generation tasks, we find that RARR significantly improves attribution while otherwise preserving the original input to a much greater degree than previously explored edit models. Furthermore, the implementation of RARR requires only a handful of training examples, a large language model, and standard web search.

2022

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Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers
Jianmo Ni | Chen Qu | Jing Lu | Zhuyun Dai | Gustavo Hernandez Abrego | Ji Ma | Vincent Zhao | Yi Luan | Keith Hall | Ming-Wei Chang | Yinfei Yang
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

It has been shown that dual encoders trained on one domain often fail to generalize to other domains for retrieval tasks. One widespread belief is that the bottleneck layer of a dual encoder, where the final score is simply a dot-product between a query vector and a passage vector, is too limited compared to models with fine-grained interactions between the query and the passage. In this paper, we challenge this belief by scaling up the size of the dual encoder model while keeping the bottleneck layer as a single dot-product with a fixed size. With multi-stage training, scaling up the model size brings significant improvement on a variety of retrieval tasks, especially for out-of-domain generalization. We further analyze the impact of the bottleneck layer and demonstrate diminishing improvement when scaling up the embedding size. Experimental results show that our dual encoders, Generalizable T5-based dense Retrievers (GTR), outperform previous sparse and dense retrievers on the BEIR dataset significantly. Most surprisingly, our ablation study finds that GTR is very data efficient, as it only needs 10% of MS Marco supervised data to match the out-of-domain performance of using all supervised data.

2021

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COIL: Revisit Exact Lexical Match in Information Retrieval with Contextualized Inverted List
Luyu Gao | Zhuyun Dai | Jamie Callan
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Classical information retrieval systems such as BM25 rely on exact lexical match and can carry out search efficiently with inverted list index. Recent neural IR models shifts towards soft matching all query document terms, but they lose the computation efficiency of exact match systems. This paper presents COIL, a contextualized exact match retrieval architecture, where scoring is based on overlapping query document tokens’ contextualized representations. The new architecture stores contextualized token representations in inverted lists, bringing together the efficiency of exact match and the representation power of deep language models. Our experimental results show COIL outperforms classical lexical retrievers and state-of-the-art deep LM retrievers with similar or smaller latency.

2020

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Adapting Open Domain Fact Extraction and Verification to COVID-FACT through In-Domain Language Modeling
Zhenghao Liu | Chenyan Xiong | Zhuyun Dai | Si Sun | Maosong Sun | Zhiyuan Liu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

With the epidemic of COVID-19, verifying the scientifically false online information, such as fake news and maliciously fabricated statements, has become crucial. However, the lack of training data in the scientific domain limits the performance of fact verification models. This paper proposes an in-domain language modeling method for fact extraction and verification systems. We come up with SciKGAT to combine the advantages of open-domain literature search, state-of-the-art fact verification systems and in-domain medical knowledge through language modeling. Our experiments on SCIFACT, a dataset of expert-written scientific fact verification, show that SciKGAT achieves 30% absolute improvement on precision. Our analyses show that such improvement thrives from our in-domain language model by picking up more related evidence pieces and accurate fact verification. Our codes and data are released via Github.

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Modularized Transfomer-based Ranking Framework
Luyu Gao | Zhuyun Dai | Jamie Callan
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

Recent innovations in Transformer-based ranking models have advanced the state-of-the-art in information retrieval. However, these Transformers are computationally expensive, and their opaque hidden states make it hard to understand the ranking process. In this work, we modularize the Transformer ranker into separate modules for text representation and interaction. We show how this design enables substantially faster ranking using offline pre-computed representations and light-weight online interactions. The modular design is also easier to interpret and sheds light on the ranking process in Transformer rankers.