Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed for general problem-solving across various domains yet remain constrained to chaining immediate reasoning steps and depending solely on parametric knowledge. Integrating an information retrieval system directly into the reasoning process of LLMs can improve answer accuracy but might disrupt the natural reasoning sequence. Consequently, LLMs may underperform in complex, knowledge-intensive tasks requiring multiple reasoning steps, extensive real-world knowledge, or critical initial decisions. To overcome these challenges, we introduce a novel framework, Topology-of-Question-Decomposition (ToQD), which activates retrieval only when necessary. Globally, ToQD guides LLMs in constructing a topology graph from the input question, each node representing a sub-question. Locally, ToQD employs self-verify inference to determine whether a sub-question should retrieve relevant documents, necessitate further decomposition, or directly provide an answer. Experiments demonstrate that ToQD achieves superior performance and robustness in complex, knowledge-intensive tasks, significantly enhancing system response efficiency.

The rapid development of social media has led to an increase in online harassment and offensive speech, posing significant challenges for effective content moderation. Existing automated detection models often exhibit a bias towards predicting offensive speech based on specific vocabulary, which not only compromises model fairness but also potentially exacerbates biases against vulnerable and minority groups. Addressing these issues, this paper proposes a bias self-awareness and data self-iteration framework for mitigating model biases. This framework aims to “giving control back to models: enabling offensive language detection models to autonomously identify and mitigate biases” through bias self-awareness algorithms and self-iterative data augmentation method. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively reduces the false positive rate of models in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tests, enhances model accuracy and fairness, and shows promising performance improvements in detecting offensive speech on larger-scale datasets.

This paper introduces a system designed for SemEval-2024 Task 1 that focuses on assessing Semantic Textual Relatedness (STR) between sentence pairs, including its multilingual version. STR, which evaluates the coherence of sentences, is distinct from Semantic Textual Similarity (STS). However, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ERNIE-Bot-turbo, typically trained on STS data, often struggle to differentiate between the two concepts. To address this, we developed a self-instruction method that enhances their performance distinguishing STR, particularly in cases with high STS but low STR. Beginning with a task description, the system generates new task instructions refined through human feedback. It then iteratively enhances these instructions by comparing them to the original and evaluating the differences. Utilizing the Large Language Models’ (LLMs) natural language comprehension abilities, the system aims to produce progressively optimized instructions based on the resulting scores. Through our optimized instructions, ERNIE-Bot-turbo exceeds the performance of conventional models,achieving a score enhancement of 4 to 7% on multilingual development datasets.

In this paper, we propose a novel SQL guided pre-training framework STAR for context-dependent text-to-SQL parsing, which leverages contextual information to enrich natural language (NL) utterance and table schema representations for text-to-SQL conversations. Concretely, we propose two novel pre-training objectives which respectively explore the context-dependent interactions of NL utterances and SQL queries within each text-to-SQL conversation: (i) schema state tracking (SST) objective that tracks and explores the schema states of context-dependent SQL queries in the form of schema-states by predicting and updating the value of each schema slot during interaction; (ii) utterance dependency tracking (UDT) objective that employs weighted contrastive learning to pull together two semantically similar NL utterances and push away the representations of semantically dissimilar NL utterances within each conversation. In addition, we construct a high-quality large-scale context-dependent text-to-SQL conversation corpus to pre-train STAR. Extensive experiments show that STAR achieves new state-of-the-art performance on two downstream benchmarks (SParC and CoSQL), significantly outperforming previous pre-training methods and ranking first on the leaderboard. We believe the release of the constructed corpus, codebase and pre-trained STAR checkpoints would push forward the research in this area.