Daily Papers

Large language models (LLMs) have significantly advanced audio processing through audio codecs that convert audio into discrete tokens, enabling the application of language modelling techniques to audio data. However, traditional codecs often operate at high bitrates or within narrow domains such as speech and lack the semantic clues required for efficient language modelling. Addressing these challenges, we introduce SemantiCodec, a novel codec designed to compress audio into fewer than a hundred tokens per second across diverse audio types, including speech, general audio, and music, without compromising quality. SemantiCodec features a dual-encoder architecture: a semantic encoder using a self-supervised AudioMAE, discretized using k-means clustering on extensive audio data, and an acoustic encoder to capture the remaining details. The semantic and acoustic encoder outputs are used to reconstruct audio via a diffusion-model-based decoder. SemantiCodec is presented in three variants with token rates of 25, 50, and 100 per second, supporting a range of ultra-low bit rates between 0.31 kbps and 1.43 kbps. Experimental results demonstrate that SemantiCodec significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art Descript codec on reconstruction quality. Our results also suggest that SemantiCodec contains significantly richer semantic information than all evaluated audio codecs, even at significantly lower bitrates. Our code and demos are available at https://haoheliu.github.io/SemantiCodec/.

The shared topology of human skeletons motivated the recent investigation of graph convolutional network (GCN) solutions for action recognition. However, the existing GCNs rely on the binary connection of two neighbouring vertices (joints) formed by an edge (bone), overlooking the potential of constructing multi-vertex convolution structures. In this paper we address this oversight and explore the merits of a hyper-graph convolutional network (Hyper-GCN) to achieve the aggregation of rich semantic information conveyed by skeleton vertices. In particular, our Hyper-GCN adaptively optimises multi-scale hyper-graphs during training, revealing the action-driven multi-vertex relations. Besides, virtual connections are often designed to support efficient feature aggregation, implicitly extending the spectrum of dependencies within the skeleton. By injecting virtual connections into hyper-graphs, the semantic clues of diverse action categories can be highlighted. The results of experiments conducted on the NTU-60, NTU-120, and NW-UCLA datasets, demonstrate the merits of our Hyper-GCN, compared to the state-of-the-art methods. Specifically, we outperform the existing solutions on NTU-120, achieving 90.2\% and 91.4\% in terms of the top-1 recognition accuracy on X-Sub and X-Set.

Many existing adversarial attacks generate L_p-norm perturbations on image RGB space. Despite some achievements in transferability and attack success rate, the crafted adversarial examples are easily perceived by human eyes. Towards visual imperceptibility, some recent works explore unrestricted attacks without L_p-norm constraints, yet lacking transferability of attacking black-box models. In this work, we propose a novel imperceptible and transferable attack by leveraging both the generative and discriminative power of diffusion models. Specifically, instead of direct manipulation in pixel space, we craft perturbations in latent space of diffusion models. Combined with well-designed content-preserving structures, we can generate human-insensitive perturbations embedded with semantic clues. For better transferability, we further "deceive" the diffusion model which can be viewed as an additional recognition surrogate, by distracting its attention away from the target regions. To our knowledge, our proposed method, DiffAttack, is the first that introduces diffusion models into adversarial attack field. Extensive experiments on various model structures (including CNNs, Transformers, MLPs) and defense methods have demonstrated our superiority over other attack methods.

Recent deep-learning-based approaches to single-image reflection removal have shown promising advances, primarily for two reasons: 1) the utilization of recognition-pretrained features as inputs, and 2) the design of dual-stream interaction networks. However, according to the Information Bottleneck principle, high-level semantic clues tend to be compressed or discarded during layer-by-layer propagation. Additionally, interactions in dual-stream networks follow a fixed pattern across different layers, limiting overall performance. To address these limitations, we propose a novel architecture called Reversible Decoupling Network (RDNet), which employs a reversible encoder to secure valuable information while flexibly decoupling transmission- and reflection-relevant features during the forward pass. Furthermore, we customize a transmission-rate-aware prompt generator to dynamically calibrate features, further boosting performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of RDNet over existing SOTA methods on five widely-adopted benchmark datasets. Our code will be made publicly available.

The rapid development of generative AI facilitates content creation and makes image manipulation easier and more difficult to detect. While multimodal Large Language Models (LLMs) have encoded rich world knowledge, they are not inherently tailored for combating AI-generated Content (AIGC) and struggle to comprehend local forgery details. In this work, we investigate the application of multimodal LLMs in forgery detection. We propose a framework capable of evaluating image authenticity, localizing tampered regions, providing evidence, and tracing generation methods based on semantic tampering clues. Our method demonstrates that the potential of LLMs in forgery analysis can be effectively unlocked through meticulous prompt engineering and the application of few-shot learning techniques. We conduct qualitative and quantitative experiments and show that GPT4V can achieve an accuracy of 92.1% in Autosplice and 86.3% in LaMa, which is competitive with state-of-the-art AIGC detection methods. We further discuss the limitations of multimodal LLMs in such tasks and propose potential improvements.

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), such as GPT4o, have shown strong capabilities in visual reasoning and explanation generation. However, despite these strengths, they face significant challenges in the increasingly critical task of Image Forgery Detection and Localization (IFDL). Moreover, existing IFDL methods are typically limited to the learning of low-level semantic-agnostic clues and merely provide a single outcome judgment. To tackle these issues, we propose ForgeryGPT, a novel framework that advances the IFDL task by capturing high-order forensics knowledge correlations of forged images from diverse linguistic feature spaces, while enabling explainable generation and interactive dialogue through a newly customized Large Language Model (LLM) architecture. Specifically, ForgeryGPT enhances traditional LLMs by integrating the Mask-Aware Forgery Extractor, which enables the excavating of precise forgery mask information from input images and facilitating pixel-level understanding of tampering artifacts. The Mask-Aware Forgery Extractor consists of a Forgery Localization Expert (FL-Expert) and a Mask Encoder, where the FL-Expert is augmented with an Object-agnostic Forgery Prompt and a Vocabulary-enhanced Vision Encoder, allowing for effectively capturing of multi-scale fine-grained forgery details. To enhance its performance, we implement a three-stage training strategy, supported by our designed Mask-Text Alignment and IFDL Task-Specific Instruction Tuning datasets, which align vision-language modalities and improve forgery detection and instruction-following capabilities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

The existing search tools for exploring the NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) can be quite rich and empowering (e.g., similar and trending operators), but researchers are not yet allowed to fully leverage semantic search. For example, a query for "results from the Planck mission" should be able to distinguish between all the various meanings of Planck (person, mission, constant, institutions and more) without further clarification from the user. At ADS, we are applying modern machine learning and natural language processing techniques to our dataset of recent astronomy publications to train astroBERT, a deeply contextual language model based on research at Google. Using astroBERT, we aim to enrich the ADS dataset and improve its discoverability, and in particular we are developing our own named entity recognition tool. We present here our preliminary results and lessons learned.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving relevant code given a natural language query. While related to other information retrieval tasks, it requires bridging the gap between the language used in code (often abbreviated and highly technical) and natural language more suitable to describe vague concepts and ideas. To enable evaluation of progress on code search, we are releasing the CodeSearchNet Corpus and are presenting the CodeSearchNet Challenge, which consists of 99 natural language queries with about 4k expert relevance annotations of likely results from CodeSearchNet Corpus. The corpus contains about 6 million functions from open-source code spanning six programming languages (Go, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Python, and Ruby). The CodeSearchNet Corpus also contains automatically generated query-like natural language for 2 million functions, obtained from mechanically scraping and preprocessing associated function documentation. In this article, we describe the methodology used to obtain the corpus and expert labels, as well as a number of simple baseline solutions for the task. We hope that CodeSearchNet Challenge encourages researchers and practitioners to study this interesting task further and will host a competition and leaderboard to track the progress on the challenge. We are also keen on extending CodeSearchNet Challenge to more queries and programming languages in the future.

In this work we will show that language models with less than one billion parameters can be used to translate natural language to SPARQL queries after fine-tuning. Using three different datasets ranging from academic to real world, we identify prerequisites that the training data must fulfill in order for the training to be successful. The goal is to empower users of semantic web technology to use AI assistance with affordable commodity hardware, making them more resilient against external factors.

This document offers a detailed linguistic description of SNACS (Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al., 2018), an inventory of 52 semantic labels ("supersenses") that characterize the use of adpositions and case markers at a somewhat coarse level of granularity, as demonstrated in the STREUSLE corpus (https://github.com/nert-nlp/streusle/ ; version 4.5 tracks guidelines version 2.6). Though the SNACS inventory aspires to be universal, this document is specific to English; documentation for other languages will be published separately. Version 2 is a revision of the supersense inventory proposed for English by Schneider et al. (2015, 2016) (henceforth "v1"), which in turn was based on previous schemes. The present inventory was developed after extensive review of the v1 corpus annotations for English, plus previously unanalyzed genitive case possessives (Blodgett and Schneider, 2018), as well as consideration of adposition and case phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and German. Hwang et al. (2017) present the theoretical underpinnings of the v2 scheme. Schneider et al. (2018) summarize the scheme, its application to English corpus data, and an automatic disambiguation task. Liu et al. (2021) offer an English Lexical Semantic Recognition tagger that includes SNACS labels in its output. This documentation can also be browsed alongside corpus data on the Xposition website (Gessler et al., 2022): http://www.xposition.org/

We provide here a dataset for tasks related to natural language understanding and natural language inference. The dataset contains logical puzzles in natural language from three domains: comparing puzzles, knighs and knaves, and zebra puzzles. Each puzzle is associated with the entire set of atomic questions that can be generated based on the relations and individuals occurring in the text. For each question we provide the correct answer: entailment, contradiction or ambiguity. The answer's correctness is verified against theorem provers. Good puzzles have two properties: (i) each piece of information is necessary and (ii) no unnecessary information is provided. These properties make puzzles interesting candidates for machine comprehension tasks.

Patent examiners need to solve a complex information retrieval task when they assess the novelty and inventive step of claims made in a patent application. Given a claim, they search for prior art, which comprises all relevant publicly available information. This time-consuming task requires a deep understanding of the respective technical domain and the patent-domain-specific language. For these reasons, we address the computer-assisted search for prior art by creating a training dataset for supervised machine learning called PatentMatch. It contains pairs of claims from patent applications and semantically corresponding text passages of different degrees from cited patent documents. Each pair has been labeled by technically-skilled patent examiners from the European Patent Office. Accordingly, the label indicates the degree of semantic correspondence (matching), i.e., whether the text passage is prejudicial to the novelty of the claimed invention or not. Preliminary experiments using a baseline system show that PatentMatch can indeed be used for training a binary text pair classifier on this challenging information retrieval task. The dataset is available online: https://hpi.de/naumann/s/patentmatch.

Humanities scholars commonly provide evidence for claims that they make about a work of literature (e.g., a novel) in the form of quotations from the work. We collect a large-scale dataset (RELiC) of 78K literary quotations and surrounding critical analysis and use it to formulate the novel task of literary evidence retrieval, in which models are given an excerpt of literary analysis surrounding a masked quotation and asked to retrieve the quoted passage from the set of all passages in the work. Solving this retrieval task requires a deep understanding of complex literary and linguistic phenomena, which proves challenging to methods that overwhelmingly rely on lexical and semantic similarity matching. We implement a RoBERTa-based dense passage retriever for this task that outperforms existing pretrained information retrieval baselines; however, experiments and analysis by human domain experts indicate that there is substantial room for improvement over our dense retriever.

ClueWeb22, the newest iteration of the ClueWeb line of datasets, provides 10 billion web pages affiliated with rich information. Its design was influenced by the need for a high quality, large scale web corpus to support a range of academic and industry research, for example, in information systems, retrieval-augmented AI systems, and model pretraining. Compared with earlier ClueWeb corpora, the ClueWeb22 corpus is larger, more varied, of higher-quality, and aligned with the document distributions in commercial web search. Besides raw HTML, ClueWeb22 includes rich information about the web pages provided by industry-standard document understanding systems, including the visual representation of pages rendered by a web browser, parsed HTML structure information from a neural network parser, and pre-processed cleaned document text to lower the barrier to entry. Many of these signals have been widely used in industry but are available to the research community for the first time at this scale.

Crossword puzzles are popular linguistic games often used as tools to engage students in learning. Educational crosswords are characterized by less cryptic and more factual clues that distinguish them from traditional crossword puzzles. Despite there exist several publicly available clue-answer pair databases for traditional crosswords, educational clue-answer pairs datasets are missing. In this article, we propose a methodology to build educational clue generation datasets that can be used to instruct Large Language Models (LLMs). By gathering from Wikipedia pages informative content associated with relevant keywords, we use Large Language Models to automatically generate pedagogical clues related to the given input keyword and its context. With such an approach, we created clue-instruct, a dataset containing 44,075 unique examples with text-keyword pairs associated with three distinct crossword clues. We used clue-instruct to instruct different LLMs to generate educational clues from a given input content and keyword. Both human and automatic evaluations confirmed the quality of the generated clues, thus validating the effectiveness of our approach.

PaECTER is a publicly available, open-source document-level encoder specific for patents. We fine-tune BERT for Patents with examiner-added citation information to generate numerical representations for patent documents. PaECTER performs better in similarity tasks than current state-of-the-art models used in the patent domain. More specifically, our model outperforms the next-best patent specific pre-trained language model (BERT for Patents) on our patent citation prediction test dataset on two different rank evaluation metrics. PaECTER predicts at least one most similar patent at a rank of 1.32 on average when compared against 25 irrelevant patents. Numerical representations generated by PaECTER from patent text can be used for downstream tasks such as classification, tracing knowledge flows, or semantic similarity search. Semantic similarity search is especially relevant in the context of prior art search for both inventors and patent examiners. PaECTER is available on Hugging Face.

Dense retrieval has become a prominent method to obtain relevant context or world knowledge in open-domain NLP tasks. When we use a learned dense retriever on a retrieval corpus at inference time, an often-overlooked design choice is the retrieval unit in which the corpus is indexed, e.g. document, passage, or sentence. We discover that the retrieval unit choice significantly impacts the performance of both retrieval and downstream tasks. Distinct from the typical approach of using passages or sentences, we introduce a novel retrieval unit, proposition, for dense retrieval. Propositions are defined as atomic expressions within text, each encapsulating a distinct factoid and presented in a concise, self-contained natural language format. We conduct an empirical comparison of different retrieval granularity. Our results reveal that proposition-based retrieval significantly outperforms traditional passage or sentence-based methods in dense retrieval. Moreover, retrieval by proposition also enhances the performance of downstream QA tasks, since the retrieved texts are more condensed with question-relevant information, reducing the need for lengthy input tokens and minimizing the inclusion of extraneous, irrelevant information.

We present our submission to the AXOLOTL-24 shared task. The shared task comprises two subtasks: identifying new senses that words gain with time (when comparing newer and older time periods) and producing the definitions for the identified new senses. We implemented a conceptually simple and computationally inexpensive solution to both subtasks. We trained adapter-based binary classification models to match glosses with usage examples and leveraged the probability output of the models to identify novel senses. The same models were used to match examples of novel sense usages with Wiktionary definitions. Our submission attained third place on the first subtask and the first place on the second subtask.

Despite the remarkable progress of Large Language Models (LLMs), their performance in question answering (QA) remains limited by the lack of domain-specific and up-to-date knowledge. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) addresses this limitation by incorporating external information, often from graph-structured data. However, existing graph-based RAG methods suffer from poor graph quality due to incomplete extraction and insufficient utilization of query information during retrieval. To overcome these limitations, we propose Clue-RAG, a novel approach that introduces (1) a multi-partite graph index incorporates Chunk, knowledge unit, and entity to capture semantic content at multiple levels of granularity, coupled with a hybrid extraction strategy that reduces LLM token usage while still producing accurate and disambiguated knowledge units, and (2) Q-Iter, a query-driven iterative retrieval strategy that enhances relevance through semantic search and constrained graph traversal. Experiments on three QA benchmarks show that Clue-RAG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, achieving up to 99.33% higher Accuracy and 113.51% higher F1 score while reducing indexing costs by 72.58%. Remarkably, Clue-RAG matches or outperforms baselines even without using an LLM for indexing. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of Clue-RAG in advancing graph-based RAG systems.

Did you try out the new Bing Search? Or maybe you fiddled around with Google AI~Overviews? These might sound familiar because the modern-day search stack has recently evolved to include retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. They allow searching and incorporating real-time data into large language models (LLMs) to provide a well-informed, attributed, concise summary in contrast to the traditional search paradigm that relies on displaying a ranked list of documents. Therefore, given these recent advancements, it is crucial to have an arena to build, test, visualize, and systematically evaluate RAG-based search systems. With this in mind, we propose the TREC 2024 RAG Track to foster innovation in evaluating RAG systems. In our work, we lay out the steps we've made towards making this track a reality -- we describe the details of our reusable framework, Ragnar\"ok, explain the curation of the new MS MARCO V2.1 collection choice, release the development topics for the track, and standardize the I/O definitions which assist the end user. Next, using Ragnar\"ok, we identify and provide key industrial baselines such as OpenAI's GPT-4o or Cohere's Command R+. Further, we introduce a web-based user interface for an interactive arena allowing benchmarking pairwise RAG systems by crowdsourcing. We open-source our Ragnar\"ok framework and baselines to achieve a unified standard for future RAG systems.

Context: Recent research indicates that Web queries written by software developers are not very successful in retrieving relevant results, performing measurably worse compared to general purpose Web queries. Most approaches up to this point have addressed this problem with software engineering-specific automated query reformulation techniques, which work without developer involvement but are limited by the content of the original query. In other words, these techniques automatically improve the existing query but can not contribute new, previously unmentioned, concepts. Objective: In this paper, we propose a technique to guide software developers in manually improving their own Web search queries. We examine a conversational approach that follows unsuccessful queries with a clarification question aimed at eliciting additional query terms, thus providing to the developer a clear dimension along which the query could be improved. Methods: We describe a set of clarification questions derived from a corpus of software developer queries and a neural approach to recommending them for a newly issued query. Results: Our evaluation indicates that the recommendation technique is accurate, predicting a valid clarification question 80% of the time and outperforms simple baselines, as well as, state-of-the-art Learning To Rank (LTR) baselines. Conclusion: As shown in the experimental results, the described approach is capable at recommending appropriate clarification questions to software developers and considered useful by a sample of developers ranging from novices to experienced professionals.

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for robust tools to detect LLM-generated text, especially in light of paraphrasing techniques that often evade existing detection methods. To address this challenge, we present a novel semantic-enhanced framework for detecting LLM-generated text (SEFD) that leverages a retrieval-based mechanism to fully utilize text semantics. Our framework improves upon existing detection methods by systematically integrating retrieval-based techniques with traditional detectors, employing a carefully curated retrieval mechanism that strikes a balance between comprehensive coverage and computational efficiency. We showcase the effectiveness of our approach in sequential text scenarios common in real-world applications, such as online forums and Q\&A platforms. Through comprehensive experiments across various LLM-generated texts and detection methods, we demonstrate that our framework substantially enhances detection accuracy in paraphrasing scenarios while maintaining robustness for standard LLM-generated content.

People say, "A picture is worth a thousand words". Then how can we get the rich information out of the image? We argue that by using visual clues to bridge large pretrained vision foundation models and language models, we can do so without any extra cross-modal training. Thanks to the strong zero-shot capability of foundation models, we start by constructing a rich semantic representation of the image (e.g., image tags, object attributes / locations, captions) as a structured textual prompt, called visual clues, using a vision foundation model. Based on visual clues, we use large language model to produce a series of comprehensive descriptions for the visual content, which is then verified by the vision model again to select the candidate that aligns best with the image. We evaluate the quality of generated descriptions by quantitative and qualitative measurement. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of such a structured semantic representation.

A promising approach for knowledge-based Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) is to select the sense whose contextualized embeddings computed for its definition sentence are closest to those computed for a target word in a given sentence. This approach relies on the similarity of the sense and context embeddings computed by a pre-trained language model. We propose a semantic specialization for WSD where contextualized embeddings are adapted to the WSD task using solely lexical knowledge. The key idea is, for a given sense, to bring semantically related senses and contexts closer and send different/unrelated senses farther away. We realize this idea as the joint optimization of the Attract-Repel objective for sense pairs and the self-training objective for context-sense pairs while controlling deviations from the original embeddings. The proposed method outperformed previous studies that adapt contextualized embeddings. It achieved state-of-the-art performance on knowledge-based WSD when combined with the reranking heuristic that uses the sense inventory. We found that the similarity characteristics of specialized embeddings conform to the key idea. We also found that the (dis)similarity of embeddings between the related/different/unrelated senses correlates well with the performance of WSD.

ROOTS is a 1.6TB multilingual text corpus developed for the training of BLOOM, currently the largest language model explicitly accompanied by commensurate data governance efforts. In continuation of these efforts, we present the ROOTS Search Tool: a search engine over the entire ROOTS corpus offering both fuzzy and exact search capabilities. ROOTS is the largest corpus to date that can be investigated this way. The ROOTS Search Tool is open-sourced and available on Hugging Face Spaces. We describe our implementation and the possible use cases of our tool.

Natural Language Search (NLS) extends the capabilities of search engines that perform keyword search allowing users to issue queries in a more "natural" language. The engine tries to understand the meaning of the queries and to map the query words to the symbols it supports like Persons, Organizations, Time Expressions etc.. It, then, retrieves the information that satisfies the user's need in different forms like an answer, a record or a list of records. We present an NLS system we implemented as part of the Search service of a major CRM platform. The system is currently in production serving thousands of customers. Our user studies showed that creating dynamic reports with NLS saved more than 50% of our user's time compared to achieving the same result with navigational search. We describe the architecture of the system, the particularities of the CRM domain as well as how they have influenced our design decisions. Among several submodules of the system we detail the role of a Deep Learning Named Entity Recognizer. The paper concludes with discussion over the lessons learned while developing this product.

This paper addresses the limitations of traditional keyword-based search in understanding user intent and introduces a novel hybrid search approach that leverages the strengths of non-semantic search engines, Large Language Models (LLMs), and embedding models. The proposed system integrates keyword matching, semantic vector embeddings, and LLM-generated structured queries to deliver highly relevant and contextually appropriate search results. By combining these complementary methods, the hybrid approach effectively captures both explicit and implicit user intent.The paper further explores techniques to optimize query execution for faster response times and demonstrates the effectiveness of this hybrid search model in producing comprehensive and accurate search outcomes.

When experiencing an information need, users want to engage with a domain expert, but often turn to an information retrieval system, such as a search engine, instead. Classical information retrieval systems do not answer information needs directly, but instead provide references to (hopefully authoritative) answers. Successful question answering systems offer a limited corpus created on-demand by human experts, which is neither timely nor scalable. Pre-trained language models, by contrast, are capable of directly generating prose that may be responsive to an information need, but at present they are dilettantes rather than domain experts -- they do not have a true understanding of the world, they are prone to hallucinating, and crucially they are incapable of justifying their utterances by referring to supporting documents in the corpus they were trained over. This paper examines how ideas from classical information retrieval and pre-trained language models can be synthesized and evolved into systems that truly deliver on the promise of domain expert advice.

Answer sentence selection is the task of identifying sentences that contain the answer to a given question. This is an important problem in its own right as well as in the larger context of open domain question answering. We propose a novel approach to solving this task via means of distributed representations, and learn to match questions with answers by considering their semantic encoding. This contrasts prior work on this task, which typically relies on classifiers with large numbers of hand-crafted syntactic and semantic features and various external resources. Our approach does not require any feature engineering nor does it involve specialist linguistic data, making this model easily applicable to a wide range of domains and languages. Experimental results on a standard benchmark dataset from TREC demonstrate that---despite its simplicity---our model matches state of the art performance on the answer sentence selection task.

Many NLP tasks require to automatically identify the most significant words in a text. In this work, we derive word significance from models trained to solve semantic task: Natural Language Inference and Paraphrase Identification. Using an attribution method aimed to explain the predictions of these models, we derive importance scores for each input token. We evaluate their relevance using a so-called cross-task evaluation: Analyzing the performance of one model on an input masked according to the other model's weight, we show that our method is robust with respect to the choice of the initial task. Additionally, we investigate the scores from the syntax point of view and observe interesting patterns, e.g. words closer to the root of a syntactic tree receive higher importance scores. Altogether, these observations suggest that our method can be used to identify important words in sentences without any explicit word importance labeling in training.

A diversity of tasks use language models trained on semantic similarity data. While there are a variety of datasets that capture semantic similarity, they are either constructed from modern web data or are relatively small datasets created in the past decade by human annotators. This study utilizes a novel source, newly digitized articles from off-copyright, local U.S. newspapers, to assemble a massive-scale semantic similarity dataset spanning 70 years from 1920 to 1989 and containing nearly 400M positive semantic similarity pairs. Historically, around half of articles in U.S. local newspapers came from newswires like the Associated Press. While local papers reproduced articles from the newswire, they wrote their own headlines, which form abstractive summaries of the associated articles. We associate articles and their headlines by exploiting document layouts and language understanding. We then use deep neural methods to detect which articles are from the same underlying source, in the presence of substantial noise and abridgement. The headlines of reproduced articles form positive semantic similarity pairs. The resulting publicly available HEADLINES dataset is significantly larger than most existing semantic similarity datasets and covers a much longer span of time. It will facilitate the application of contrastively trained semantic similarity models to a variety of tasks, including the study of semantic change across space and time.

The growing popularity of data mining catalyses the researchers to explore various exciting aspects of education. Early prediction of student performance is an emerging area among them. The researchers have used various predictors in performance modelling studies. Although prior cognition can affect student performance, establishing their relationship is still an open research challenge. Quantifying the knowledge from readily available data is the major challenge here. We have proposed a semantic approach for this purpose. Association mining on nearly 0.35 million observations establishes that prior cognition impacts the student performance. The proposed approach of measuring domain knowledge can help the early performance modelling studies to use it as a predictor.

Current approaches to learning semantic representations of sentences often use prior word-level knowledge. The current study aims to leverage visual information in order to capture sentence level semantics without the need for word embeddings. We use a multimodal sentence encoder trained on a corpus of images with matching text captions to produce visually grounded sentence embeddings. Deep Neural Networks are trained to map the two modalities to a common embedding space such that for an image the corresponding caption can be retrieved and vice versa. We show that our model achieves results comparable to the current state-of-the-art on two popular image-caption retrieval benchmark data sets: MSCOCO and Flickr8k. We evaluate the semantic content of the resulting sentence embeddings using the data from the Semantic Textual Similarity benchmark task and show that the multimodal embeddings correlate well with human semantic similarity judgements. The system achieves state-of-the-art results on several of these benchmarks, which shows that a system trained solely on multimodal data, without assuming any word representations, is able to capture sentence level semantics. Importantly, this result shows that we do not need prior knowledge of lexical level semantics in order to model sentence level semantics. These findings demonstrate the importance of visual information in semantics.

In this work, we aim to connect two research areas: instruction models and retrieval-based models. While instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at extracting information from text, they are not suitable for semantic retrieval. Similarity search over embedding vectors allows to index and query vectors, but the similarity reflected in the embedding is sub-optimal for many use cases. We identify the task of retrieving sentences based on abstract descriptions of their content. We demonstrate the inadequacy of current text embeddings and propose an alternative model that significantly improves when used in standard nearest neighbor search. The model is trained using positive and negative pairs sourced through prompting an a large language model (LLM). While it is easy to source the training material from an LLM, the retrieval task cannot be performed by the LLM directly. This demonstrates that data from LLMs can be used not only for distilling more efficient specialized models than the original LLM, but also for creating new capabilities not immediately possible using the original model.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) augments Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge to improve factuality. However, existing RAG systems frequently underutilize the retrieved documents, failing to extract and integrate the key clues needed to support faithful and interpretable reasoning, especially in cases where relevant evidence is implicit, scattered, or obscured by noise. To address this issue, we propose ClueAnchor, a novel framework for enhancing RAG via clue-anchored reasoning exploration and optimization. ClueAnchor extracts key clues from retrieved content and generates multiple reasoning paths based on different knowledge configurations, optimizing the model by selecting the most appropriate reasoning path for the given context through reward-based preference optimization. Experiments show that ClueAnchor significantly outperforms prior RAG baselines in the completeness and robustness of reasoning. Further analysis confirms its strong resilience to noisy or partially relevant retrieved content, as well as its capability to identify supporting evidence even in the absence of explicit clue supervision during inference. All codes are available at https://github.com/thunlp/ClueAnchor.

How can a robot efficiently extract a desired object from a shelf when it is fully occluded by other objects? Prior works propose geometric approaches for this problem but do not consider object semantics. Shelves in pharmacies, restaurant kitchens, and grocery stores are often organized such that semantically similar objects are placed close to one another. Can large language models (LLMs) serve as semantic knowledge sources to accelerate robotic mechanical search in semantically arranged environments? With Semantic Spatial Search on Shelves (S^4), we use LLMs to generate affinity matrices, where entries correspond to semantic likelihood of physical proximity between objects. We derive semantic spatial distributions by synthesizing semantics with learned geometric constraints. S^4 incorporates Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and semantic refinement with predictions from ViLD, an open-vocabulary object detection model. Simulation experiments suggest that semantic spatial search reduces the search time relative to pure spatial search by an average of 24% across three domains: pharmacy, kitchen, and office shelves. A manually collected dataset of 100 semantic scenes suggests that OCR and semantic refinement improve object detection accuracy by 35%. Lastly, physical experiments in a pharmacy shelf suggest 47.1% improvement over pure spatial search. Supplementary material can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/s4-rss/home.

Inspirational search, the process of exploring designs to inform and inspire new creative work, is pivotal in mobile user interface (UI) design. However, exploring the vast space of UI references remains a challenge. Existing AI-based UI search methods often miss crucial semantics like target users or the mood of apps. Additionally, these models typically require metadata like view hierarchies, limiting their practical use. We used a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to extract and interpret semantics from mobile UI images. We identified key UI semantics through a formative study and developed a semantic-based UI search system. Through computational and human evaluations, we demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing UI retrieval methods, offering UI designers a more enriched and contextually relevant search experience. We enhance the understanding of mobile UI design semantics and highlight MLLMs' potential in inspirational search, providing a rich dataset of UI semantics for future studies.

Most available semantic parsing datasets, comprising of pairs of natural utterances and logical forms, were collected solely for the purpose of training and evaluation of natural language understanding systems. As a result, they do not contain any of the richness and variety of natural-occurring utterances, where humans ask about data they need or are curious about. In this work, we release SEDE, a dataset with 12,023 pairs of utterances and SQL queries collected from real usage on the Stack Exchange website. We show that these pairs contain a variety of real-world challenges which were rarely reflected so far in any other semantic parsing dataset, propose an evaluation metric based on comparison of partial query clauses that is more suitable for real-world queries, and conduct experiments with strong baselines, showing a large gap between the performance on SEDE compared to other common datasets.

We present WeaverBird, an intelligent dialogue system designed specifically for the finance domain. Our system harnesses a large language model of GPT architecture that has been tuned using extensive corpora of finance-related text. As a result, our system possesses the capability to understand complex financial queries, such as "How should I manage my investments during inflation?", and provide informed responses. Furthermore, our system incorporates a local knowledge base and a search engine to retrieve relevant information. The final responses are conditioned on the search results and include proper citations to the sources, thus enjoying an enhanced credibility. Through a range of finance-related questions, we have demonstrated the superior performance of our system compared to other models. To experience our system firsthand, users can interact with our live demo at https://weaverbird.ttic.edu, as well as watch our 2-min video illustration at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyV2qQkX6Tc.

Scientific paper retrieval is essential for supporting literature discovery and research. While dense retrieval methods demonstrate effectiveness in general-purpose tasks, they often fail to capture fine-grained scientific concepts that are essential for accurate understanding of scientific queries. Recent studies also use large language models (LLMs) for query understanding; however, these methods often lack grounding in corpus-specific knowledge and may generate unreliable or unfaithful content. To overcome these limitations, we propose SemRank, an effective and efficient paper retrieval framework that combines LLM-guided query understanding with a concept-based semantic index. Each paper is indexed using multi-granular scientific concepts, including general research topics and detailed key phrases. At query time, an LLM identifies core concepts derived from the corpus to explicitly capture the query's information need. These identified concepts enable precise semantic matching, significantly enhancing retrieval accuracy. Experiments show that SemRank consistently improves the performance of various base retrievers, surpasses strong existing LLM-based baselines, and remains highly efficient.

We introduce a new problem KTRL+F, a knowledge-augmented in-document search task that necessitates real-time identification of all semantic targets within a document with the awareness of external sources through a single natural query. This task addresses following unique challenges for in-document search: 1) utilizing knowledge outside the document for extended use of additional information about targets to bridge the semantic gap between the query and the targets, and 2) balancing between real-time applicability with the performance. We analyze various baselines in KTRL+F and find there are limitations of existing models, such as hallucinations, low latency, or difficulties in leveraging external knowledge. Therefore we propose a Knowledge-Augmented Phrase Retrieval model that shows a promising balance between speed and performance by simply augmenting external knowledge embedding in phrase embedding. Additionally, we conduct a user study to verify whether solving KTRL+F can enhance search experience of users. It demonstrates that even with our simple model users can reduce the time for searching with less queries and reduced extra visits to other sources for collecting evidence. We encourage the research community to work on KTRL+F to enhance more efficient in-document information access.

The paper focuses on deep learning semantic search algorithms applied in the HR domain. The aim of the article is developing a novel approach to training a Siamese network to link the skills mentioned in the job ad with the title. It has been shown that the title normalization process can be based either on classification or similarity comparison approaches. While classification algorithms strive to classify a sample into predefined set of categories, similarity search algorithms take a more flexible approach, since they are designed to find samples that are similar to a given query sample, without requiring pre-defined classes and labels. In this article semantic similarity search to find candidates for title normalization has been used. A pre-trained language model has been adapted while teaching it to match titles and skills based on co-occurrence information. For the purpose of this research fifty billion title-descriptions pairs had been collected for training the model and thirty three thousand title-description-normalized title triplets, where normalized job title was picked up manually by job ad creator for testing purposes. As baselines FastText, BERT, SentenceBert and JobBert have been used. As a metric of the accuracy of the designed algorithm is Recall in top one, five and ten model's suggestions. It has been shown that the novel training objective lets it achieve significant improvement in comparison to other generic and specific text encoders. Two settings with treating titles as standalone strings, and with included skills as additional features during inference have been used and the results have been compared in this article. Improvements by 10% and 21.5% have been achieved using VacancySBERT and VacancySBERT (with skills) respectively. The benchmark has been developed as open-source to foster further research in the area.

The advent of natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks for English, such as GLUE and SuperGLUE allows new NLU models to be evaluated across a diverse set of tasks. These comprehensive benchmarks have facilitated a broad range of research and applications in natural language processing (NLP). The problem, however, is that most such benchmarks are limited to English, which has made it difficult to replicate many of the successes in English NLU for other languages. To help remedy this issue, we introduce the first large-scale Chinese Language Understanding Evaluation (CLUE) benchmark. CLUE is an open-ended, community-driven project that brings together 9 tasks spanning several well-established single-sentence/sentence-pair classification tasks, as well as machine reading comprehension, all on original Chinese text. To establish results on these tasks, we report scores using an exhaustive set of current state-of-the-art pre-trained Chinese models (9 in total). We also introduce a number of supplementary datasets and additional tools to help facilitate further progress on Chinese NLU. Our benchmark is released at https://www.CLUEbenchmarks.com

In this work, we unveil a novel tool for generating Italian crossword puzzles from text, utilizing advanced language models such as GPT-4o, Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.3, and Llama3-8b-Instruct. Crafted specifically for educational applications, this cutting-edge generator makes use of the comprehensive Italian-Clue-Instruct dataset, which comprises over 30,000 entries including diverse text, solutions, and types of clues. This carefully assembled dataset is designed to facilitate the creation of contextually relevant clues in various styles associated with specific texts and keywords. The study delves into four distinctive styles of crossword clues: those without format constraints, those formed as definite determiner phrases, copular sentences, and bare noun phrases. Each style introduces unique linguistic structures to diversify clue presentation. Given the lack of sophisticated educational tools tailored to the Italian language, this project seeks to enhance learning experiences and cognitive development through an engaging, interactive platform. By meshing state-of-the-art AI with contemporary educational strategies, our tool can dynamically generate crossword puzzles from Italian educational materials, thereby providing an enjoyable and interactive learning environment. This technological advancement not only redefines educational paradigms but also sets a new benchmark for interactive and cognitive language learning solutions.

Taking inspiration from Set Theory, we introduce SetCSE, an innovative information retrieval framework. SetCSE employs sets to represent complex semantics and incorporates well-defined operations for structured information querying under the provided context. Within this framework, we introduce an inter-set contrastive learning objective to enhance comprehension of sentence embedding models concerning the given semantics. Furthermore, we present a suite of operations, including SetCSE intersection, difference, and operation series, that leverage sentence embeddings of the enhanced model for complex sentence retrieval tasks. Throughout this paper, we demonstrate that SetCSE adheres to the conventions of human language expressions regarding compounded semantics, provides a significant enhancement in the discriminatory capability of underlying sentence embedding models, and enables numerous information retrieval tasks involving convoluted and intricate prompts which cannot be achieved using existing querying methods.

We propose using automatically generated natural language definitions of contextualised word usages as interpretable word and word sense representations. Given a collection of usage examples for a target word, and the corresponding data-driven usage clusters (i.e., word senses), a definition is generated for each usage with a specialised Flan-T5 language model, and the most prototypical definition in a usage cluster is chosen as the sense label. We demonstrate how the resulting sense labels can make existing approaches to semantic change analysis more interpretable, and how they can allow users -- historical linguists, lexicographers, or social scientists -- to explore and intuitively explain diachronic trajectories of word meaning. Semantic change analysis is only one of many possible applications of the `definitions as representations' paradigm. Beyond being human-readable, contextualised definitions also outperform token or usage sentence embeddings in word-in-context semantic similarity judgements, making them a new promising type of lexical representation for NLP.

The web provides a rich, open-domain environment with textual, structural, and spatial properties. We propose a new task for grounding language in this environment: given a natural language command (e.g., "click on the second article"), choose the correct element on the web page (e.g., a hyperlink or text box). We collected a dataset of over 50,000 commands that capture various phenomena such as functional references (e.g. "find who made this site"), relational reasoning (e.g. "article by john"), and visual reasoning (e.g. "top-most article"). We also implemented and analyzed three baseline models that capture different phenomena present in the dataset.

Although we have witnessed impressive progress in Semantic Role Labeling (SRL), most of the research in the area is carried out assuming that the majority of predicates are verbs. Conversely, predicates can also be expressed using other parts of speech, e.g., nouns and adjectives. However, non-verbal predicates appear in the benchmarks we commonly use to measure progress in SRL less frequently than in some real-world settings -- newspaper headlines, dialogues, and tweets, among others. In this paper, we put forward a new PropBank dataset which boasts wide coverage of multiple predicate types. Thanks to it, we demonstrate empirically that standard benchmarks do not provide an accurate picture of the current situation in SRL and that state-of-the-art systems are still incapable of transferring knowledge across different predicate types. Having observed these issues, we also present a novel, manually-annotated challenge set designed to give equal importance to verbal, nominal, and adjectival predicate-argument structures. We use such dataset to investigate whether we can leverage different linguistic resources to promote knowledge transfer. In conclusion, we claim that SRL is far from "solved", and its integration with other semantic tasks might enable significant improvements in the future, especially for the long tail of non-verbal predicates, thereby facilitating further research on SRL for non-verbal predicates.

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of generating multiple responses to a single prompt, yet little effort has been expended to help end-users or system designers make use of this capability. In this paper, we explore how to present many LLM responses at once. We design five features, which include both pre-existing and novel methods for computing similarities and differences across textual documents, as well as how to render their outputs. We report on a controlled user study (n=24) and eight case studies evaluating these features and how they support users in different tasks. We find that the features support a wide variety of sensemaking tasks and even make tasks previously considered to be too difficult by our participants now tractable. Finally, we present design guidelines to inform future explorations of new LLM interfaces.

When re-finding items, users who forget or are uncertain about identifying details often rely on creative strategies for expressing their information needs -- complex queries that describe content elements (e.g., book characters or events), information beyond the document text (e.g., descriptions of book covers), or personal context (e.g., when they read a book). This retrieval setting, called tip of the tongue (TOT), is especially challenging for models heavily reliant on lexical and semantic overlap between query and document text. In this work, we introduce a simple yet effective framework for handling such complex queries by decomposing the query into individual clues, routing those as sub-queries to specialized retrievers, and ensembling the results. This approach allows us to take advantage of off-the-shelf retrievers (e.g., CLIP for retrieving images of book covers) or incorporate retriever-specific logic (e.g., date constraints). We show that our framework incorportating query decompositions into retrievers can improve gold book recall up to 7% relative again for Recall@5 on a new collection of 14,441 real-world query-book pairs from an online community for resolving TOT inquiries.

This article presents the Cogni-CISMeF project, which aims at improving medical information search in the CISMeF system (Catalog and Index of French-language health resources) by including a conversational agent to interact with the user in natural language. To study the cognitive processes involved during the information search, a bottom-up methodology was adopted. Experimentation has been set up to obtain human dialogs between a user (playing the role of patient) dealing with medical information search and a CISMeF expert refining the request. The analysis of these dialogs underlined the use of discursive evidence: vocabulary, reformulation, implicit or explicit expression of user intentions, conversational sequences, etc. A model of artificial agent is proposed. It leads the user in its information search by proposing to him examples, assistance and choices. This model was implemented and integrated in the CISMeF system. ---- Cet article d\'ecrit le projet Cogni-CISMeF qui propose un module de dialogue Homme-Machine \`a int\'egrer dans le syst\`eme d'indexation de connaissances m\'edicales CISMeF (Catalogue et Index des Sites M\'edicaux Francophones). Nous avons adopt\'e une d\'emarche de mod\'elisation cognitive en proc\'edant \`a un recueil de corpus de dialogues entre un utilisateur (jouant le r\^ole d'un patient) d\'esirant une information m\'edicale et un expert CISMeF af inant cette demande pour construire la requ\^ete. Nous avons analys\'e la structure des dialogues ainsi obtenus et avons \'etudi\'e un certain nombre d'indices discursifs : vocabulaire employ\'e, marques de reformulation, commentaires m\'eta et \'epilinguistiques, expression implicite ou explicite des intentions de l'utilisateur, encha\^inement conversationnel, etc. De cette analyse, nous avons construit un mod\`ele d'agent artificiel dot\'e de capacit\'es cognitives capables d'aider l'utilisateur dans sa t\^ache de recherche d'information. Ce mod\`ele a \'et\'e impl\'ement\'e et int\'egr\'e dans le syst\`eme CISMeF.

The latest generation of LLMs can be prompted to achieve impressive zero-shot or few-shot performance in many NLP tasks. However, since performance is highly sensitive to the choice of prompts, considerable effort has been devoted to crowd-sourcing prompts or designing methods for prompt optimisation. Yet, we still lack a systematic understanding of how linguistic properties of prompts correlate with task performance. In this work, we investigate how LLMs of different sizes, pre-trained and instruction-tuned, perform on prompts that are semantically equivalent, but vary in linguistic structure. We investigate both grammatical properties such as mood, tense, aspect and modality, as well as lexico-semantic variation through the use of synonyms. Our findings contradict the common assumption that LLMs achieve optimal performance on lower perplexity prompts that reflect language use in pretraining or instruction-tuning data. Prompts transfer poorly between datasets or models, and performance cannot generally be explained by perplexity, word frequency, ambiguity or prompt length. Based on our results, we put forward a proposal for a more robust and comprehensive evaluation standard for prompting research.

Natural Language Understanding has seen an increasing number of publications in the last few years, especially after robust word embeddings models became prominent, when they proved themselves able to capture and represent semantic relationships from massive amounts of data. Nevertheless, traditional models often fall short in intrinsic issues of linguistics, such as polysemy and homonymy. Any expert system that makes use of natural language in its core, can be affected by a weak semantic representation of text, resulting in inaccurate outcomes based on poor decisions. To mitigate such issues, we propose a novel approach called Most Suitable Sense Annotation (MSSA), that disambiguates and annotates each word by its specific sense, considering the semantic effects of its context. Our approach brings three main contributions to the semantic representation scenario: (i) an unsupervised technique that disambiguates and annotates words by their senses, (ii) a multi-sense embeddings model that can be extended to any traditional word embeddings algorithm, and (iii) a recurrent methodology that allows our models to be re-used and their representations refined. We test our approach on six different benchmarks for the word similarity task, showing that our approach can produce state-of-the-art results and outperforms several more complex state-of-the-art systems.

The knowledge of city exploration trails of people is in short supply because of the complexity in defining meaningful trails representative of individual behaviours and in the access to actionable data. Existing datasets have only recorded isolated check-ins of activities featured by opaque venue types. In this paper, we fill the gaps in defining what is a semantic trail of city exploration and how it can be generated by integrating different data sources. Furthermore, we publicly release two datasets holding millions of semantic trails each and we discuss their most salient characteristics. We finally present an application using these datasets to build a recommender system meant to guide tourists while exploring a city.

This article proposes a new approach for assessing the quality of answers in political question-and-answer sessions. We measure the quality of an answer based on how easily and accurately it can be recognized in a random set of candidate answers given the question's text. This measure reflects the answer's relevance and depth of engagement with the question. Like semantic search, we can implement this approach by training a language model on the corpus of observed questions and answers without additional human-labeled data. We showcase and validate our methodology within the context of the Question Period in the Canadian House of Commons. Our analysis reveals that while some answers have a weak semantic connection to questions, hinting at some evasion or obfuscation, they are generally at least moderately relevant, far exceeding what we would expect from random replies. We also find a meaningful correlation between answer quality and the party affiliation of the members of Parliament asking the questions.

In recent years, short Text Matching tasks have been widely applied in the fields ofadvertising search and recommendation. The difficulty lies in the lack of semantic information and word ambiguity caused by the short length of the text. Previous works have introduced complement sentences or knowledge bases to provide additional feature information. However, these methods have not fully interacted between the original sentence and the complement sentence, and have not considered the noise issue that may arise from the introduction of external knowledge bases. Therefore, this paper proposes a short Text Matching model that combines contrastive learning and external knowledge. The model uses a generative model to generate corresponding complement sentences and uses the contrastive learning method to guide the model to obtain more semantically meaningful encoding of the original sentence. In addition, to avoid noise, we use keywords as the main semantics of the original sentence to retrieve corresponding knowledge words in the knowledge base, and construct a knowledge graph. The graph encoding model is used to integrate the knowledge base information into the model. Our designed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on two publicly available Chinese Text Matching datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness of our model.

We announce a shared task on UCCA parsing in English, German and French, and call for participants to submit their systems. UCCA is a cross-linguistically applicable framework for semantic representation, which builds on extensive typological work and supports rapid annotation. UCCA poses a challenge for existing parsing techniques, as it exhibits reentrancy (resulting in DAG structures), discontinuous structures and non-terminal nodes corresponding to complex semantic units. Given the success of recent semantic parsing shared tasks (on SDP and AMR), we expect the task to have a significant contribution to the advancement of UCCA parsing in particular, and semantic parsing in general. Furthermore, existing applications for semantic evaluation that are based on UCCA will greatly benefit from better automatic methods for UCCA parsing. The competition website is https://competitions.codalab.org/competitions/19160

Semantic search for candidate retrieval is an important yet neglected problem in retrieval-based Chatbots, which aims to select a bunch of candidate responses efficiently from a large pool. The existing bottleneck is to ensure the model architecture having two points: 1) rich interactions between a query and a response to produce query-relevant responses; 2) ability of separately projecting the query and the response into latent spaces to apply efficiently in semantic search during online inference. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel approach, called Multitask-based Semantic Search Neural Network (MSSNN) for candidate retrieval, which accomplishes query-response interactions through multi-tasks. The method employs a Seq2Seq modeling task to learn a good query encoder, and then performs a word prediction task to build response embeddings, finally conducts a simple matching model to form the dot-product scorer. Experimental studies have demonstrated the potential of the proposed approach.

After decades of massive digitisation, an unprecedented amount of historical documents is available in digital format, along with their machine-readable texts. While this represents a major step forward with respect to preservation and accessibility, it also opens up new opportunities in terms of content mining and the next fundamental challenge is to develop appropriate technologies to efficiently search, retrieve and explore information from this 'big data of the past'. Among semantic indexing opportunities, the recognition and classification of named entities are in great demand among humanities scholars. Yet, named entity recognition (NER) systems are heavily challenged with diverse, historical and noisy inputs. In this survey, we present the array of challenges posed by historical documents to NER, inventory existing resources, describe the main approaches deployed so far, and identify key priorities for future developments.

In the field of language modeling, models augmented with retrieval components have emerged as a promising solution to address several challenges faced in the natural language processing (NLP) field, including knowledge grounding, interpretability, and scalability. Despite the primary focus on NLP, we posit that the paradigm of retrieval-enhancement can be extended to a broader spectrum of machine learning (ML) such as computer vision, time series prediction, and computational biology. Therefore, this work introduces a formal framework of this paradigm, Retrieval-Enhanced Machine Learning (REML), by synthesizing the literature in various domains in ML with consistent notations which is missing from the current literature. Also, we found that while a number of studies employ retrieval components to augment their models, there is a lack of integration with foundational Information Retrieval (IR) research. We bridge this gap between the seminal IR research and contemporary REML studies by investigating each component that comprises the REML framework. Ultimately, the goal of this work is to equip researchers across various disciplines with a comprehensive, formally structured framework of retrieval-enhanced models, thereby fostering interdisciplinary future research.

We investigate the exploitation of both lexical and neural relevance signals for ad-hoc passage retrieval. Our exploration involves a large-scale training dataset in which dense neural representations of MS-MARCO queries and passages are complemented and integrated with 253 hand-crafted lexical features extracted from the same corpus. Blending of the relevance signals from the two different groups of features is learned by a classical Learning-to-Rank (LTR) model based on a forest of decision trees. To evaluate our solution, we employ a pipelined architecture where a dense neural retriever serves as the first stage and performs a nearest-neighbor search over the neural representations of the documents. Our LTR model acts instead as the second stage that re-ranks the set of candidates retrieved by the first stage to enhance effectiveness. The results of reproducible experiments conducted with state-of-the-art dense retrievers on publicly available resources show that the proposed solution significantly enhances the end-to-end ranking performance while relatively minimally impacting efficiency. Specifically, we achieve a boost in nDCG@10 of up to 11% with an increase in average query latency of only 4.3%. This confirms the advantage of seamlessly combining two distinct families of signals that mutually contribute to retrieval effectiveness.

Humans can reason compositionally when presented with new tasks. Previous research shows that appropriate prompting techniques enable large language models (LLMs) to solve artificial compositional generalization tasks such as SCAN. In this work, we identify additional challenges in more realistic semantic parsing tasks with larger vocabulary and refine these prompting techniques to address them. Our best method is based on least-to-most prompting: it decomposes the problem using prompting-based syntactic parsing, then uses this decomposition to select appropriate exemplars and to sequentially generate the semantic parse. This method allows us to set a new state of the art for CFQ while requiring only 1% of the training data used by traditional approaches. Due to the general nature of our approach, we expect similar efforts will lead to new results in other tasks and domains, especially for knowledge-intensive applications.

Learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings is an open problem in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. Through experiments on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the performance across various datasets and pre-trained encoders. In particular, combining a small amount of multimodal data with a large text-only corpus, we improve the state-of-the-art average Spearman's correlation by 1.7%. By analyzing the properties of the textual embedding space, we show that our model excels in aligning semantically similar sentences, providing an explanation for its improved performance.

We present our systems submitted for the shared tasks of Acronym Identification (AI) and Acronym Disambiguation (AD) held under Workshop on SDU. We mainly experiment with BERT and SciBERT. In addition, we assess the effectiveness of "BIOless" tagging and blending along with the prowess of ensembling in AI. For AD, we formulate the problem as a span prediction task, experiment with different training techniques and also leverage the use of external data. Our systems rank 11th and 3rd in AI and AD tasks respectively.

One characteristic that makes humans superior to modern artificially intelligent models is the ability to interpret images beyond what is visually apparent. Consider the following two natural language search queries - (i) "a queue of customers patiently waiting to buy ice cream" and (ii) "a queue of tourists going to see a famous Mughal architecture in India." Interpreting these queries requires one to reason with (i) Commonsense such as interpreting people as customers or tourists, actions as waiting to buy or going to see; and (ii) Fact or world knowledge associated with named visual entities, for example, whether the store in the image sells ice cream or whether the landmark in the image is a Mughal architecture located in India. Such reasoning goes beyond just visual recognition. To enable both commonsense and factual reasoning in the image search, we present a unified framework, namely Knowledge Retrieval-Augmented Multimodal Transformer (KRAMT), that treats the named visual entities in an image as a gateway to encyclopedic knowledge and leverages them along with natural language query to ground relevant knowledge. Further, KRAMT seamlessly integrates visual content and grounded knowledge to learn alignment between images and search queries. This unified framework is then used to perform image search requiring commonsense and factual reasoning. The retrieval performance of KRAMT is evaluated and compared with related approaches on a new dataset we introduce - namely COFAR. We make our code and dataset available at https://vl2g.github.io/projects/cofar

Multi-stage ranking pipelines have been a practical solution in modern search systems, where the first-stage retrieval is to return a subset of candidate documents, and latter stages attempt to re-rank those candidates. Unlike re-ranking stages going through quick technique shifts during past decades, the first-stage retrieval has long been dominated by classical term-based models. Unfortunately, these models suffer from the vocabulary mismatch problem, which may block re-ranking stages from relevant documents at the very beginning. Therefore, it has been a long-term desire to build semantic models for the first-stage retrieval that can achieve high recall efficiently. Recently, we have witnessed an explosive growth of research interests on the first-stage semantic retrieval models. We believe it is the right time to survey current status, learn from existing methods, and gain some insights for future development. In this paper, we describe the current landscape of the first-stage retrieval models under a unified framework to clarify the connection between classical term-based retrieval methods, early semantic retrieval methods and neural semantic retrieval methods. Moreover, we identify some open challenges and envision some future directions, with the hope of inspiring more researches on these important yet less investigated topics.

We introduce a new language learning setting relevant to building adaptive natural language interfaces. It is inspired by Wittgenstein's language games: a human wishes to accomplish some task (e.g., achieving a certain configuration of blocks), but can only communicate with a computer, who performs the actual actions (e.g., removing all red blocks). The computer initially knows nothing about language and therefore must learn it from scratch through interaction, while the human adapts to the computer's capabilities. We created a game in a blocks world and collected interactions from 100 people playing it. First, we analyze the humans' strategies, showing that using compositionality and avoiding synonyms correlates positively with task performance. Second, we compare computer strategies, showing how to quickly learn a semantic parsing model from scratch, and that modeling pragmatics further accelerates learning for successful players.

Coecke, Sadrzadeh, and Clark (arXiv:1003.4394v1 [cs.CL]) developed a compositional model of meaning for distributional semantics, in which each word in a sentence has a meaning vector and the distributional meaning of the sentence is a function of the tensor products of the word vectors. Abstractly speaking, this function is the morphism corresponding to the grammatical structure of the sentence in the category of finite dimensional vector spaces. In this paper, we provide a concrete method for implementing this linear meaning map, by constructing a corpus-based vector space for the type of sentence. Our construction method is based on structured vector spaces whereby meaning vectors of all sentences, regardless of their grammatical structure, live in the same vector space. Our proposed sentence space is the tensor product of two noun spaces, in which the basis vectors are pairs of words each augmented with a grammatical role. This enables us to compare meanings of sentences by simply taking the inner product of their vectors.

Legal case retrieval, which aims to find relevant cases for a query case, plays a core role in the intelligent legal system. Despite the success that pre-training has achieved in ad-hoc retrieval tasks, effective pre-training strategies for legal case retrieval remain to be explored. Compared with general documents, legal case documents are typically long text sequences with intrinsic logical structures. However, most existing language models have difficulty understanding the long-distance dependencies between different structures. Moreover, in contrast to the general retrieval, the relevance in the legal domain is sensitive to key legal elements. Even subtle differences in key legal elements can significantly affect the judgement of relevance. However, existing pre-trained language models designed for general purposes have not been equipped to handle legal elements. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose SAILER, a new Structure-Aware pre-traIned language model for LEgal case Retrieval. It is highlighted in the following three aspects: (1) SAILER fully utilizes the structural information contained in legal case documents and pays more attention to key legal elements, similar to how legal experts browse legal case documents. (2) SAILER employs an asymmetric encoder-decoder architecture to integrate several different pre-training objectives. In this way, rich semantic information across tasks is encoded into dense vectors. (3) SAILER has powerful discriminative ability, even without any legal annotation data. It can distinguish legal cases with different charges accurately. Extensive experiments over publicly available legal benchmarks demonstrate that our approach can significantly outperform previous state-of-the-art methods in legal case retrieval.

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode syntactic and semantic structures of language is well examined in NLP. Additionally, analogy identification, in the form of word analogies are extensively studied in the last decade of language modeling literature. In this work we specifically look at how LLMs' abilities to capture sentence analogies (sentences that convey analogous meaning to each other) vary with LLMs' abilities to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Through our analysis, we find that LLMs' ability to identify sentence analogies is positively correlated with their ability to encode syntactic and semantic structures of sentences. Specifically, we find that the LLMs which capture syntactic structures better, also have higher abilities in identifying sentence analogies.

Semantic search is an important task which objective is to find the relevant index from a database for query. It requires a retrieval model that can properly learn the semantics of sentences. Transformer-based models are widely used as retrieval models due to their excellent ability to learn semantic representations. in the meantime, many regularization methods suitable for them have also been proposed. In this paper, we propose a new regularization method: Regularized Contrastive Learning, which can help transformer-based models to learn a better representation of sentences. It firstly augments several different semantic representations for every sentence, then take them into the contrastive objective as regulators. These contrastive regulators can overcome overfitting issues and alleviate the anisotropic problem. We firstly evaluate our approach on 7 semantic search benchmarks with the outperforming pre-trained model SRoBERTA. The results show that our method is more effective for learning a superior sentence representation. Then we evaluate our approach on 2 challenging FAQ datasets, Cough and Faqir, which have long query and index. The results of our experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms baseline methods.

In this paper, we propose a multi-modal search engine for interior design that combines visual and textual queries. The goal of our engine is to retrieve interior objects, e.g. furniture or wall clocks, that share visual and aesthetic similarities with the query. Our search engine allows the user to take a photo of a room and retrieve with a high recall a list of items identical or visually similar to those present in the photo. Additionally, it allows to return other items that aesthetically and stylistically fit well together. To achieve this goal, our system blends the results obtained using textual and visual modalities. Thanks to this blending strategy, we increase the average style similarity score of the retrieved items by 11%. Our work is implemented as a Web-based application and it is planned to be opened to the public.

This paper describes the organization and findings of AXOLOTL'24, the first multilingual explainable semantic change modeling shared task. We present new sense-annotated diachronic semantic change datasets for Finnish and Russian which were employed in the shared task, along with a surprise test-only German dataset borrowed from an existing source. The setup of AXOLOTL'24 is new to the semantic change modeling field, and involves subtasks of identifying unknown (novel) senses and providing dictionary-like definitions to these senses. The methods of the winning teams are described and compared, thus paving a path towards explainability in computational approaches to historical change of meaning.

We present a large-scale dataset, ReCoRD, for machine reading comprehension requiring commonsense reasoning. Experiments on this dataset demonstrate that the performance of state-of-the-art MRC systems fall far behind human performance. ReCoRD represents a challenge for future research to bridge the gap between human and machine commonsense reading comprehension. ReCoRD is available at http://nlp.jhu.edu/record.

Semantic representations of text, i.e. representations of natural language which capture meaning by geometry, are essential for areas such as information retrieval and document grouping. High-dimensional trained dense vectors have received much attention in recent years as such representations. We investigate the structure of semantic spaces that arise from embeddings made with Sentence-BERT and find that the representations suffer from a well-known problem in high dimensions called hubness. Hubness results in asymmetric neighborhood relations, such that some texts (the hubs) are neighbours of many other texts while most texts (so-called anti-hubs), are neighbours of few or no other texts. We quantify the semantic quality of the embeddings using hubness scores and error rate of a neighbourhood based classifier. We find that when hubness is high, we can reduce error rate and hubness using hubness reduction methods. We identify a combination of two methods as resulting in the best reduction. For example, on one of the tested pretrained models, this combined method can reduce hubness by about 75% and error rate by about 9%. Thus, we argue that mitigating hubness in the embedding space provides better semantic representations of text.

By design, word embeddings are unable to model the dynamic nature of words' semantics, i.e., the property of words to correspond to potentially different meanings. To address this limitation, dozens of specialized meaning representation techniques such as sense or contextualized embeddings have been proposed. However, despite the popularity of research on this topic, very few evaluation benchmarks exist that specifically focus on the dynamic semantics of words. In this paper we show that existing models have surpassed the performance ceiling of the standard evaluation dataset for the purpose, i.e., Stanford Contextual Word Similarity, and highlight its shortcomings. To address the lack of a suitable benchmark, we put forward a large-scale Word in Context dataset, called WiC, based on annotations curated by experts, for generic evaluation of context-sensitive representations. WiC is released in https://pilehvar.github.io/wic/.

Analyzing the pattern of semantic variation in long real-world texts such as books or transcripts is interesting from the stylistic, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives. It is also useful for applications such as text segmentation, document summarization, and detection of semantic novelty. The recent emergence of several vector-space methods for sentence embedding has made such analysis feasible. However, this raises the issue of how consistent and meaningful the semantic representations produced by various methods are in themselves. In this paper, we compare several recent sentence embedding methods via time-series of semantic similarity between successive sentences and matrices of pairwise sentence similarity for multiple books of literature. In contrast to previous work using target tasks and curated datasets to compare sentence embedding methods, our approach provides an evaluation of the methods 'in the wild'. We find that most of the sentence embedding methods considered do infer highly correlated patterns of semantic similarity in a given document, but show interesting differences.

Large language models (LLMs) have grown in their usage to provide support for question answering across numerous disciplines. The models on their own have already shown promise for answering basic questions, however fail quickly where expert domain knowledge is required or the question is nuanced. Scientific research often involves searching for relevant literature, distilling pertinent information from that literature and analysing how the findings support or contradict one another. The information is often encapsulated in the full text body of research articles, rather than just in the abstracts. Statements within these articles frequently require the wider article context to be fully understood. We have built an LLM-based system that performs such search and distillation of information encapsulated in scientific literature, and we evaluate our keyword based search and information distillation system against a set of biology related questions from previously released literature benchmarks. We demonstrate sparse retrieval methods exhibit results close to state of the art without the need for dense retrieval, with its associated infrastructure and complexity overhead. We also show how to increase the coverage of relevant documents for literature review generation.

We consider the problem of Recognizing Textual Entailment within an Information Retrieval context, where we must simultaneously determine the relevancy as well as degree of entailment for individual pieces of evidence to determine a yes/no answer to a binary natural language question. We compare several variants of neural networks for sentence embeddings in a setting of decision-making based on evidence of varying relevance. We propose a basic model to integrate evidence for entailment, show that joint training of the sentence embeddings to model relevance and entailment is feasible even with no explicit per-evidence supervision, and show the importance of evaluating strong baselines. We also demonstrate the benefit of carrying over text comprehension model trained on an unrelated task for our small datasets. Our research is motivated primarily by a new open dataset we introduce, consisting of binary questions and news-based evidence snippets. We also apply the proposed relevance-entailment model on a similar task of ranking multiple-choice test answers, evaluating it on a preliminary dataset of school test questions as well as the standard MCTest dataset, where we improve the neural model state-of-art.

There has been an increase of interest in code search using natural language. Assessing the performance of such code search models can be difficult without a readily available evaluation suite. In this paper, we present an evaluation dataset consisting of natural language query and code snippet pairs, with the hope that future work in this area can use this dataset as a common benchmark. We also provide the results of two code search models ([1] and [6]) from recent work. The evaluation dataset is available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/Neural-Code-Search-Evaluation-Dataset

We present ASAP, a new framework for detecting and grounding multi-modal media manipulation (DGM4).Upon thorough examination, we observe that accurate fine-grained cross-modal semantic alignment between the image and text is vital for accurately manipulation detection and grounding. While existing DGM4 methods pay rare attention to the cross-modal alignment, hampering the accuracy of manipulation detecting to step further. To remedy this issue, this work targets to advance the semantic alignment learning to promote this task. Particularly, we utilize the off-the-shelf Multimodal Large-Language Models (MLLMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct paired image-text pairs, especially for the manipulated instances. Subsequently, a cross-modal alignment learning is performed to enhance the semantic alignment. Besides the explicit auxiliary clues, we further design a Manipulation-Guided Cross Attention (MGCA) to provide implicit guidance for augmenting the manipulation perceiving. With the grounding truth available during training, MGCA encourages the model to concentrate more on manipulated components while downplaying normal ones, enhancing the model's ability to capture manipulations. Extensive experiments are conducted on the DGM4 dataset, the results demonstrate that our model can surpass the comparison method with a clear margin.

This paper describes a linguistically-motivated approach to the 2024 edition of the BabyLM Challenge (Warstadt et al. 2023). Rather than pursuing a first language learning (L1) paradigm, we approach the challenge from a second language (L2) learning perspective. In L2 learning, there is a stronger focus on learning explicit linguistic information, such as grammatical notions, definitions of words or different ways of expressing a meaning. This makes L2 learning potentially more efficient and concise. We approximate this using data from Wiktionary, grammar examples either generated by an LLM or sourced from grammar books, and paraphrase data. We find that explicit information about word meaning (in our case, Wiktionary) does not boost model performance, while grammatical information can give a small improvement. The most impactful data ingredient is sentence paraphrases, with our two best models being trained on 1) a mix of paraphrase data and data from the BabyLM pretraining dataset, and 2) exclusively paraphrase data.

The degree of semantic relatedness of two units of language has long been considered fundamental to understanding meaning. Additionally, automatically determining relatedness has many applications such as question answering and summarization. However, prior NLP work has largely focused on semantic similarity, a subset of relatedness, because of a lack of relatedness datasets. In this paper, we introduce a dataset for Semantic Textual Relatedness, STR-2022, that has 5,500 English sentence pairs manually annotated using a comparative annotation framework, resulting in fine-grained scores. We show that human intuition regarding relatedness of sentence pairs is highly reliable, with a repeat annotation correlation of 0.84. We use the dataset to explore questions on what makes sentences semantically related. We also show the utility of STR-2022 for evaluating automatic methods of sentence representation and for various downstream NLP tasks. Our dataset, data statement, and annotation questionnaire can be found at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7599667

Network interpretation as an effort to reveal the features learned by a network remains largely visualization-based. In this paper, our goal is to tackle semantic network interpretation at both filter and decision level. For filter-level interpretation, we represent the concepts a filter encodes with a probability distribution of visual attributes. The decision-level interpretation is achieved by textual summarization that generates an explanatory sentence containing clues behind a network's decision. A Bayesian inference algorithm is proposed to automatically associate filters and network decisions with visual attributes. Human study confirms that the semantic interpretation is a beneficial alternative or complement to visualization methods. We demonstrate the crucial role that semantic network interpretation can play in understanding a network's failure patterns. More importantly, semantic network interpretation enables a better understanding of the correlation between a model's performance and its distribution metrics like filter selectivity and concept sparseness.

This paper presents a multilingual study of word meaning representations in context. We assess the ability of both static and contextualized models to adequately represent different lexical-semantic relations, such as homonymy and synonymy. To do so, we created a new multilingual dataset that allows us to perform a controlled evaluation of several factors such as the impact of the surrounding context or the overlap between words, conveying the same or different senses. A systematic assessment on four scenarios shows that the best monolingual models based on Transformers can adequately disambiguate homonyms in context. However, as they rely heavily on context, these models fail at representing words with different senses when occurring in similar sentences. Experiments are performed in Galician, Portuguese, English, and Spanish, and both the dataset (with more than 3,000 evaluation items) and new models are freely released with this study.

Recent advances in scene understanding benefit a lot from depth maps because of the 3D geometry information, especially in complex conditions (e.g., low light and overexposed). Existing approaches encode depth maps along with RGB images and perform feature fusion between them to enable more robust predictions. Taking into account that depth can be regarded as a geometry supplement for RGB images, a straightforward question arises: Do we really need to explicitly encode depth information with neural networks as done for RGB images? Based on this insight, in this paper, we investigate a new way to learn RGBD feature representations and present DFormerv2, a strong RGBD encoder that explicitly uses depth maps as geometry priors rather than encoding depth information with neural networks. Our goal is to extract the geometry clues from the depth and spatial distances among all the image patch tokens, which will then be used as geometry priors to allocate attention weights in self-attention. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DFormerv2 exhibits exceptional performance in various RGBD semantic segmentation benchmarks. Code is available at: https://github.com/VCIP-RGBD/DFormer.

We present Lean Finder, a semantic search engine for Lean and mathlib that understands and aligns with the intents of mathematicians. Progress in formal theorem proving is often hindered by the difficulty of locating relevant theorems and the steep learning curve of the Lean 4 language, making advancement slow and labor-intensive. Existing Lean search engines, though helpful, rely primarily on informalizations (natural language translation of the formal statements), while largely overlooking the mismatch with real-world user queries. In contrast, we propose a user-centered semantic search tailored to the needs of mathematicians. Our approach begins by analyzing and clustering the semantics of public Lean discussions, then fine-tuning text embeddings on synthesized queries that emulate user intents. We further align Lean Finder with mathematicians' preferences using diverse feedback signals, encoding it with a rich awareness of their goals from multiple perspectives. Evaluations on real-world queries, informalized statements, and proof states demonstrate that our Lean Finder achieves over 30% relative improvement compared to previous search engines and GPT-4o. In addition, Lean Finder is compatible with LLM-based theorem provers, bridging retrieval with formal reasoning. Lean Finder is available at: https://leanfinder.github.io

We present a new knowledge-base of hasPart relationships, extracted from a large corpus of generic statements. Complementary to other resources available, it is the first which is all three of: accurate (90% precision), salient (covers relationships a person may mention), and has high coverage of common terms (approximated as within a 10 year old's vocabulary), as well as having several times more hasPart entries than in the popular ontologies ConceptNet and WordNet. In addition, it contains information about quantifiers, argument modifiers, and links the entities to appropriate concepts in Wikipedia and WordNet. The knowledge base is available at https://allenai.org/data/haspartkb

Word embeddings have been shown to be useful across state-of-the-art systems in many natural language processing tasks, ranging from question answering systems to dependency parsing. (Herbelot and Vecchi, 2015) explored word embeddings and their utility for modeling language semantics. In particular, they presented an approach to automatically map a standard distributional semantic space onto a set-theoretic model using partial least squares regression. We show in this paper that a simple baseline achieves a +51% relative improvement compared to their model on one of the two datasets they used, and yields competitive results on the second dataset.

This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.

Listeners of long-form talk-audio content, such as podcast episodes, often find it challenging to understand the overall structure and locate relevant sections. A practical solution is to divide episodes into chapters--semantically coherent segments labeled with titles and timestamps. Since most episodes on our platform at Spotify currently lack creator-provided chapters, automating the creation of chapters is essential. Scaling the chapterization of podcast episodes presents unique challenges. First, episodes tend to be less structured than written texts, featuring spontaneous discussions with nuanced transitions. Second, the transcripts are usually lengthy, averaging about 16,000 tokens, which necessitates efficient processing that can preserve context. To address these challenges, we introduce PODTILE, a fine-tuned encoder-decoder transformer to segment conversational data. The model simultaneously generates chapter transitions and titles for the input transcript. To preserve context, each input text is augmented with global context, including the episode's title, description, and previous chapter titles. In our intrinsic evaluation, PODTILE achieved an 11% improvement in ROUGE score over the strongest baseline. Additionally, we provide insights into the practical benefits of auto-generated chapters for listeners navigating episode content. Our findings indicate that auto-generated chapters serve as a useful tool for engaging with less popular podcasts. Finally, we present empirical evidence that using chapter titles can enhance effectiveness of sparse retrieval in search tasks.

Recently, fake news with text and images have achieved more effective diffusion than text-only fake news, raising a severe issue of multimodal fake news detection. Current studies on this issue have made significant contributions to developing multimodal models, but they are defective in modeling the multimodal content sufficiently. Most of them only preliminarily model the basic semantics of the images as a supplement to the text, which limits their performance on detection. In this paper, we find three valuable text-image correlations in multimodal fake news: entity inconsistency, mutual enhancement, and text complementation. To effectively capture these multimodal clues, we innovatively extract visual entities (such as celebrities and landmarks) to understand the news-related high-level semantics of images, and then model the multimodal entity inconsistency and mutual enhancement with the help of visual entities. Moreover, we extract the embedded text in images as the complementation of the original text. All things considered, we propose a novel entity-enhanced multimodal fusion framework, which simultaneously models three cross-modal correlations to detect diverse multimodal fake news. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model compared to the state of the art.

This paper contains what the Georgetown InfoSense group has done in regard to solving the challenges presented by TREC iKAT 2023. Our submitted runs outperform the median runs by a significant margin, exhibiting superior performance in nDCG across various cut numbers and in overall success rate. Our approach uses a Generate-Retrieve-Generate method, which we've found to greatly outpace Retrieve-Then-Generate approaches for the purposes of iKAT. Our solution involves the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for initial answers, answer grounding by BM25, passage quality filtering by logistic regression, and answer generation by LLMs again. We leverage several purpose-built Language Models, including BERT, Chat-based, and text-to-transfer-based models, for text understanding, classification, generation, and summarization. The official results of the TREC evaluation contradict our initial self-evaluation, which may suggest that a decrease in the reliance on our retrieval and classification methods is better. Nonetheless, our findings suggest that the sequence of involving these different components matters, where we see an essentiality of using LLMs before using search engines.

In semantic segmentation, generalizing a visual system to both seen categories and novel categories at inference time has always been practically valuable yet challenging. To enable such functionality, existing methods mainly rely on either providing several support demonstrations from the visual aspect or characterizing the informative clues from the textual aspect (e.g., the class names). Nevertheless, both two lines neglect the complementary intrinsic of low-level visual and high-level language information, while the explorations that consider visual and textual modalities as a whole to promote predictions are still limited. To close this gap, we propose to encompass textual and visual clues as multi-modal prototypes to allow more comprehensive support for open-world semantic segmentation, and build a novel prototype-based segmentation framework to realize this promise. To be specific, unlike the straightforward combination of bi-modal clues, we decompose the high-level language information as multi-aspect prototypes and aggregate the low-level visual information as more semantic prototypes, on basis of which, a fine-grained complementary fusion makes the multi-modal prototypes more powerful and accurate to promote the prediction. Based on an elastic mask prediction module that permits any number and form of prototype inputs, we are able to solve the zero-shot, few-shot and generalized counterpart tasks in one architecture. Extensive experiments on both PASCAL-5^i and COCO-20^i datasets show the consistent superiority of the proposed method compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches, and a range of ablation studies thoroughly dissects each component in our framework both quantitatively and qualitatively that verify their effectiveness.

Conditional inference on joint textual and visual clues is a multi-modal reasoning task that textual clues provide prior permutation or external knowledge, which are complementary with visual content and pivotal to deducing the correct option. Previous methods utilizing pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) have achieved impressive performances, yet they show a lack of multimodal context reasoning capability, especially for text-modal information. To address this issue, we propose a Multi-modal Context Reasoning approach, named ModCR. Compared to VLMs performing reasoning via cross modal semantic alignment, it regards the given textual abstract semantic and objective image information as the pre-context information and embeds them into the language model to perform context reasoning. Different from recent vision-aided language models used in natural language processing, ModCR incorporates the multi-view semantic alignment information between language and vision by introducing the learnable alignment prefix between image and text in the pretrained language model. This makes the language model well-suitable for such multi-modal reasoning scenario on joint textual and visual clues. We conduct extensive experiments on two corresponding data sets and experimental results show significantly improved performance (exact gain by 4.8% on PMR test set) compared to previous strong baselines. Code Link: https://github.com/YunxinLi/Multimodal-Context-Reasoning.

We describe PARANMT-50M, a dataset of more than 50 million English-English sentential paraphrase pairs. We generated the pairs automatically by using neural machine translation to translate the non-English side of a large parallel corpus, following Wieting et al. (2017). Our hope is that ParaNMT-50M can be a valuable resource for paraphrase generation and can provide a rich source of semantic knowledge to improve downstream natural language understanding tasks. To show its utility, we use ParaNMT-50M to train paraphrastic sentence embeddings that outperform all supervised systems on every SemEval semantic textual similarity competition, in addition to showing how it can be used for paraphrase generation.

Learning semantically meaningful representations from scientific documents can facilitate academic literature search and improve performance of recommendation systems. Pre-trained language models have been shown to learn rich textual representations, yet they cannot provide powerful document-level representations for scientific articles. We propose MIReAD, a simple method that learns high-quality representations of scientific papers by fine-tuning transformer model to predict the target journal class based on the abstract. We train MIReAD on more than 500,000 PubMed and arXiv abstracts across over 2,000 journal classes. We show that MIReAD produces representations that can be used for similar papers retrieval, topic categorization and literature search. Our proposed approach outperforms six existing models for representation learning on scientific documents across four evaluation standards.

The largest store of continually updating knowledge on our planet can be accessed via internet search. In this work we study giving access to this information to conversational agents. Large language models, even though they store an impressive amount of knowledge within their weights, are known to hallucinate facts when generating dialogue (Shuster et al., 2021); moreover, those facts are frozen in time at the point of model training. In contrast, we propose an approach that learns to generate an internet search query based on the context, and then conditions on the search results to finally generate a response, a method that can employ up-to-the-minute relevant information. We train and evaluate such models on a newly collected dataset of human-human conversations whereby one of the speakers is given access to internet search during knowledgedriven discussions in order to ground their responses. We find that search-query based access of the internet in conversation provides superior performance compared to existing approaches that either use no augmentation or FAISS-based retrieval (Lewis et al., 2020).

Keeping track of scientific challenges, advances and emerging directions is a fundamental part of research. However, researchers face a flood of papers that hinders discovery of important knowledge. In biomedicine, this directly impacts human lives. To address this problem, we present a novel task of extraction and search of scientific challenges and directions, to facilitate rapid knowledge discovery. We construct and release an expert-annotated corpus of texts sampled from full-length papers, labeled with novel semantic categories that generalize across many types of challenges and directions. We focus on a large corpus of interdisciplinary work relating to the COVID-19 pandemic, ranging from biomedicine to areas such as AI and economics. We apply a model trained on our data to identify challenges and directions across the corpus and build a dedicated search engine. In experiments with 19 researchers and clinicians using our system, we outperform a popular scientific search engine in assisting knowledge discovery. Finally, we show that models trained on our resource generalize to the wider biomedical domain and to AI papers, highlighting its broad utility. We make our data, model and search engine publicly available. https://challenges.apps.allenai.org/

The recently introduced continuous Skip-gram model is an efficient method for learning high-quality distributed vector representations that capture a large number of precise syntactic and semantic word relationships. In this paper we present several extensions that improve both the quality of the vectors and the training speed. By subsampling of the frequent words we obtain significant speedup and also learn more regular word representations. We also describe a simple alternative to the hierarchical softmax called negative sampling. An inherent limitation of word representations is their indifference to word order and their inability to represent idiomatic phrases. For example, the meanings of "Canada" and "Air" cannot be easily combined to obtain "Air Canada". Motivated by this example, we present a simple method for finding phrases in text, and show that learning good vector representations for millions of phrases is possible.

The semantic matching capabilities of neural information retrieval can ameliorate synonymy and polysemy problems of symbolic approaches. However, neural models' dense representations are more suitable for re-ranking, due to their inefficiency. Sparse representations, either in symbolic or latent form, are more efficient with an inverted index. Taking the merits of the sparse and dense representations, we propose an ultra-high dimensional (UHD) representation scheme equipped with directly controllable sparsity. UHD's large capacity and minimal noise and interference among the dimensions allow for binarized representations, which are highly efficient for storage and search. Also proposed is a bucketing method, where the embeddings from multiple layers of BERT are selected/merged to represent diverse linguistic aspects. We test our models with MS MARCO and TREC CAR, showing that our models outperforms other sparse models

Event Causality Identification (ECI) focuses on extracting causal relations between events in texts. Existing methods for ECI primarily rely on causal features and external knowledge. However, these approaches fall short in two dimensions: (1) causal features between events in a text often lack explicit clues, and (2) external knowledge may introduce bias, while specific problems require tailored analyses. To address these issues, we propose SemDI - a simple and effective Semantic Dependency Inquiry Network for ECI. SemDI captures semantic dependencies within the context using a unified encoder. Then, it utilizes a Cloze Analyzer to generate a fill-in token based on comprehensive context understanding. Finally, this fill-in token is used to inquire about the causal relation between two events. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of SemDI, surpassing state-of-the-art methods on three widely used benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/hrlics/SemDI.

Camera-based 3D semantic scene completion (SSC) is pivotal for predicting complicated 3D layouts with limited 2D image observations. The existing mainstream solutions generally leverage temporal information by roughly stacking history frames to supplement the current frame, such straightforward temporal modeling inevitably diminishes valid clues and increases learning difficulty. To address this problem, we present HTCL, a novel Hierarchical Temporal Context Learning paradigm for improving camera-based semantic scene completion. The primary innovation of this work involves decomposing temporal context learning into two hierarchical steps: (a) cross-frame affinity measurement and (b) affinity-based dynamic refinement. Firstly, to separate critical relevant context from redundant information, we introduce the pattern affinity with scale-aware isolation and multiple independent learners for fine-grained contextual correspondence modeling. Subsequently, to dynamically compensate for incomplete observations, we adaptively refine the feature sampling locations based on initially identified locations with high affinity and their neighboring relevant regions. Our method ranks 1^{st} on the SemanticKITTI benchmark and even surpasses LiDAR-based methods in terms of mIoU on the OpenOccupancy benchmark. Our code is available on https://github.com/Arlo0o/HTCL.

Document-level event argument extraction poses new challenges of long input and cross-sentence inference compared to its sentence-level counterpart. However, most prior works focus on capturing the relations between candidate arguments and the event trigger in each event, ignoring two crucial points: a) non-argument contextual clue information; b) the relevance among argument roles. In this paper, we propose a SCPRG (Span-trigger-based Contextual Pooling and latent Role Guidance) model, which contains two novel and effective modules for the above problem. The Span-Trigger-based Contextual Pooling(STCP) adaptively selects and aggregates the information of non-argument clue words based on the context attention weights of specific argument-trigger pairs from pre-trained model. The Role-based Latent Information Guidance (RLIG) module constructs latent role representations, makes them interact through role-interactive encoding to capture semantic relevance, and merges them into candidate arguments. Both STCP and RLIG introduce no more than 1% new parameters compared with the base model and can be easily applied to other event extraction models, which are compact and transplantable. Experiments on two public datasets show that our SCPRG outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, with 1.13 F1 and 2.64 F1 improvements on RAMS and WikiEvents respectively. Further analyses illustrate the interpretability of our model.

Distributional word representation methods exploit word co-occurrences to build compact vector encodings of words. While these representations enjoy widespread use in modern natural language processing, it is unclear whether they accurately encode all necessary facets of conceptual meaning. In this paper, we evaluate how well these representations can predict perceptual and conceptual features of concrete concepts, drawing on two semantic norm datasets sourced from human participants. We find that several standard word representations fail to encode many salient perceptual features of concepts, and show that these deficits correlate with word-word similarity prediction errors. Our analyses provide motivation for grounded and embodied language learning approaches, which may help to remedy these deficits.

Words have been represented in a high-dimensional vector space that encodes their semantic similarities, enabling downstream applications such as retrieving synonyms, antonyms, and relevant contexts. However, despite recent advances in multilingual language models (LMs), the effectiveness of these models' representations in semantic retrieval contexts has not been comprehensively explored. To fill this gap, this paper introduces the MINERS, a benchmark designed to evaluate the ability of multilingual LMs in semantic retrieval tasks, including bitext mining and classification via retrieval-augmented contexts. We create a comprehensive framework to assess the robustness of LMs in retrieving samples across over 200 diverse languages, including extremely low-resource languages in challenging cross-lingual and code-switching settings. Our results demonstrate that by solely retrieving semantically similar embeddings yields performance competitive with state-of-the-art approaches, without requiring any fine-tuning.

We discuss an algorithm which produces the meaning of a sentence given meanings of its words, and its resemblance to quantum teleportation. In fact, this protocol was the main source of inspiration for this algorithm which has many applications in the area of Natural Language Processing.

In pace with developments in the research field of artificial intelligence, knowledge graphs (KGs) have attracted a surge of interest from both academia and industry. As a representation of semantic relations between entities, KGs have proven to be particularly relevant for natural language processing (NLP), experiencing a rapid spread and wide adoption within recent years. Given the increasing amount of research work in this area, several KG-related approaches have been surveyed in the NLP research community. However, a comprehensive study that categorizes established topics and reviews the maturity of individual research streams remains absent to this day. Contributing to closing this gap, we systematically analyzed 507 papers from the literature on KGs in NLP. Our survey encompasses a multifaceted review of tasks, research types, and contributions. As a result, we present a structured overview of the research landscape, provide a taxonomy of tasks, summarize our findings, and highlight directions for future work.

In this article, we use probing to investigate phenomena that occur during fine-tuning and knowledge distillation of a BERT-based natural language understanding (NLU) model. Our ultimate purpose was to use probing to better understand practical production problems and consequently to build better NLU models. We designed experiments to see how fine-tuning changes the linguistic capabilities of BERT, what the optimal size of the fine-tuning dataset is, and what amount of information is contained in a distilled NLU based on a tiny Transformer. The results of the experiments show that the probing paradigm in its current form is not well suited to answer such questions. Structural, Edge and Conditional probes do not take into account how easy it is to decode probed information. Consequently, we conclude that quantification of information decodability is critical for many practical applications of the probing paradigm.

In populous countries, pending legal cases have been growing exponentially. There is a need for developing NLP-based techniques for processing and automatically understanding legal documents. To promote research in the area of Legal NLP we organized the shared task LegalEval - Understanding Legal Texts at SemEval 2023. LegalEval task has three sub-tasks: Task-A (Rhetorical Roles Labeling) is about automatically structuring legal documents into semantically coherent units, Task-B (Legal Named Entity Recognition) deals with identifying relevant entities in a legal document and Task-C (Court Judgement Prediction with Explanation) explores the possibility of automatically predicting the outcome of a legal case along with providing an explanation for the prediction. In total 26 teams (approx. 100 participants spread across the world) submitted systems paper. In each of the sub-tasks, the proposed systems outperformed the baselines; however, there is a lot of scope for improvement. This paper describes the tasks, and analyzes techniques proposed by various teams.

Phrase Grounding aims to detect and localize objects in images that are referred to and are queried by natural language phrases. Phrase grounding finds applications in tasks such as Visual Dialog, Visual Search and Image-text co-reference resolution. In this paper, we present a framework that leverages information such as phrase category, relationships among neighboring phrases in a sentence and context to improve the performance of phrase grounding systems. We propose three modules: Proposal Indexing Network(PIN); Inter-phrase Regression Network(IRN) and Proposal Ranking Network(PRN) each of which analyze the region proposals of an image at increasing levels of detail by incorporating the above information. Also, in the absence of ground-truth spatial locations of the phrases(weakly-supervised), we propose knowledge transfer mechanisms that leverages the framework of PIN module. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the Flickr 30k Entities and ReferItGame datasets, for which we achieve improvements over state-of-the-art approaches in both supervised and weakly-supervised variants.

By leveraging the retrieval of information from external knowledge databases, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit enhanced capabilities for accomplishing many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, due to the inherent flaws of current retrieval systems, there might exist irrelevant information within those retrieving top-ranked passages. In this work, we present a comprehensive investigation into the robustness of LLMs to different types of irrelevant information under various conditions. We initially introduce a framework to construct high-quality irrelevant information that ranges from semantically unrelated, partially related, and related to questions. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that the constructed irrelevant information not only scores highly on similarity metrics, being highly retrieved by existing systems, but also bears semantic connections to the context. Our investigation reveals that current LLMs still face challenges in discriminating highly semantically related information and can be easily distracted by these irrelevant yet misleading contents. Besides, we also find that current solutions for handling irrelevant information have limitations in improving the robustness of LLMs to such distractions. Resources are available at https://github.com/Di-viner/LLM-Robustness-to-Irrelevant-Information.

This paper presents a systematic review of benchmarks and approaches for explainability in Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC). We present how the representation and inference challenges evolved and the steps which were taken to tackle these challenges. We also present the evaluation methodologies to assess the performance of explainable systems. In addition, we identify persisting open research questions and highlight critical directions for future work.

Fast and effective automated indexing is critical for search and personalized services. Key phrases that consist of one or more words and represent the main concepts of the document are often used for the purpose of indexing. In this paper, we investigate the use of additional semantic features and pre-processing steps to improve automatic key phrase extraction. These features include the use of signal words and freebase categories. Some of these features lead to significant improvements in the accuracy of the results. We also experimented with 2 forms of document pre-processing that we call light filtering and co-reference normalization. Light filtering removes sentences from the document, which are judged peripheral to its main content. Co-reference normalization unifies several written forms of the same named entity into a unique form. We also needed a "Gold Standard" - a set of labeled documents for training and evaluation. While the subjective nature of key phrase selection precludes a true "Gold Standard", we used Amazon's Mechanical Turk service to obtain a useful approximation. Our data indicates that the biggest improvements in performance were due to shallow semantic features, news categories, and rhetorical signals (nDCG 78.47% vs. 68.93%). The inclusion of deeper semantic features such as Freebase sub-categories was not beneficial by itself, but in combination with pre-processing, did cause slight improvements in the nDCG scores.

The widely studied task of Natural Language Inference (NLI) requires a system to recognize whether one piece of text is textually entailed by another, i.e. whether the entirety of its meaning can be inferred from the other. In current NLI datasets and models, textual entailment relations are typically defined on the sentence- or paragraph-level. However, even a simple sentence often contains multiple propositions, i.e. distinct units of meaning conveyed by the sentence. As these propositions can carry different truth values in the context of a given premise, we argue for the need to recognize the textual entailment relation of each proposition in a sentence individually. We propose PropSegmEnt, a corpus of over 35K propositions annotated by expert human raters. Our dataset structure resembles the tasks of (1) segmenting sentences within a document to the set of propositions, and (2) classifying the entailment relation of each proposition with respect to a different yet topically-aligned document, i.e. documents describing the same event or entity. We establish strong baselines for the segmentation and entailment tasks. Through case studies on summary hallucination detection and document-level NLI, we demonstrate that our conceptual framework is potentially useful for understanding and explaining the compositionality of NLI labels.

Users may strive to formulate an adequate textual query for their information need. Search engines assist the users by presenting query suggestions. To preserve the original search intent, suggestions should be context-aware and account for the previous queries issued by the user. Achieving context awareness is challenging due to data sparsity. We present a probabilistic suggestion model that is able to account for sequences of previous queries of arbitrary lengths. Our novel hierarchical recurrent encoder-decoder architecture allows the model to be sensitive to the order of queries in the context while avoiding data sparsity. Additionally, our model can suggest for rare, or long-tail, queries. The produced suggestions are synthetic and are sampled one word at a time, using computationally cheap decoding techniques. This is in contrast to current synthetic suggestion models relying upon machine learning pipelines and hand-engineered feature sets. Results show that it outperforms existing context-aware approaches in a next query prediction setting. In addition to query suggestion, our model is general enough to be used in a variety of other applications.

When language models correctly parse "The cat that the dog chased meowed," are they analyzing syntax or simply familiar with dogs chasing cats? Despite extensive benchmarking, we lack methods to distinguish structural understanding from semantic pattern matching. We introduce CenterBench, a dataset of 9,720 comprehension questions on center-embedded sentences (like "The cat [that the dog chased] meowed") where relative clauses nest recursively, creating processing demands from simple to deeply nested structures. Each sentence has a syntactically identical but semantically implausible counterpart (e.g., mailmen prescribe medicine, doctors deliver mail) and six comprehension questions testing surface understanding, syntactic dependencies, and causal reasoning. Testing six models reveals that performance gaps between plausible and implausible sentences widen systematically with complexity, with models showing median gaps up to 26.8 percentage points, quantifying when they abandon structural analysis for semantic associations. Notably, semantic plausibility harms performance on questions about resulting actions, where following causal relationships matters more than semantic coherence. Reasoning models improve accuracy but their traces show semantic shortcuts, overthinking, and answer refusal. Unlike models whose plausibility advantage systematically widens with complexity, humans shows variable semantic effects. CenterBench provides the first framework to identify when models shift from structural analysis to pattern matching.

Cloze-style reading comprehension in Chinese is still limited due to the lack of various corpora. In this paper we propose a large-scale Chinese cloze test dataset ChID, which studies the comprehension of idiom, a unique language phenomenon in Chinese. In this corpus, the idioms in a passage are replaced by blank symbols and the correct answer needs to be chosen from well-designed candidate idioms. We carefully study how the design of candidate idioms and the representation of idioms affect the performance of state-of-the-art models. Results show that the machine accuracy is substantially worse than that of human, indicating a large space for further research.

Neural networks -- especially those that use large, pre-trained language models -- have improved search engines in various ways. Most prominently, they can estimate the relevance of a passage or document to a user's query. In this work, we depart from this direction by exploring whether neural networks can effectively predict which of a document's passages are unlikely to be relevant to any query submitted to the search engine. We refer to this query-agnostic estimation of passage relevance as a passage's quality. We find that our novel methods for estimating passage quality allow passage corpora to be pruned considerably while maintaining statistically equivalent effectiveness; our best methods can consistently prune >25% of passages in a corpora, across various retrieval pipelines. Such substantial pruning reduces the operating costs of neural search engines in terms of computing resources, power usage, and carbon footprint -- both when processing queries (thanks to a smaller index size) and when indexing (lightweight models can prune low-quality passages prior to the costly dense or learned sparse encoding step). This work sets the stage for developing more advanced neural "learning-what-to-index" methods.