Many natural language processing (NLP) tasks rely on labeled data to train machine learning models with high performance. However, data annotation is time-consuming and expensive, especially when the task involves a large amount of data or requires specialized domains. Recently, GPT-3.5 series models have demonstrated remarkable few-shot and zero-shot ability across various NLP tasks. In this paper, we first claim that large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3.5, can serve as an excellent crowdsourced annotator when provided with sufficient guidance and demonstrated examples. Accordingly, we propose AnnoLLM, an annotation system powered by LLMs, which adopts a two-step approach, explain-then-annotate. Concretely, we first prompt LLMs to provide explanations for why the specific ground truth answer/label was assigned for a given example. Then, we construct the few-shot chain-of-thought prompt with the self-generated explanation and employ it to annotate the unlabeled data with LLMs. Our experiment results on three tasks, including user input and keyword relevance assessment, BoolQ, and WiC, demonstrate that AnnoLLM surpasses or performs on par with crowdsourced annotators. Furthermore, we build the first conversation-based information retrieval dataset employing AnnoLLM. This dataset is designed to facilitate the development of retrieval models capable of retrieving pertinent documents for conversational text. Human evaluation has validated the dataset’s high quality.

Factual Error Correction (FEC) aims to rectify false claims by making minimal revisions to align them more accurately with supporting evidence. However, the lack of datasets containing false claims and their corresponding corrections has impeded progress in this field. Existing distantly supervised models typically employ the mask-then-correct paradigm, where a masker identifies problematic spans in false claims, followed by a corrector to predict the masked portions. Unfortunately, accurately identifying errors in claims is challenging, leading to issues like over-erasure and incorrect masking. To overcome these challenges, we present PivotFEC, a method that enhances few-shot FEC with a pivot task approach using large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we introduce a pivot task called factual error injection, which leverages LLMs (e.g., ChatGPT) to intentionally generate text containing factual errors under few-shot settings; then, the generated text with factual errors can be used to train the FEC corrector. Our experiments on a public dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of PivotFEC in two significant ways: Firstly, it improves the widely-adopted SARI metrics by 11.3 compared to the best-performing distantly supervised methods. Secondly, it outperforms its few-shot counterpart (i.e., LLMs are directly used to solve FEC) by 7.9 points in SARI, validating the efficacy of our proposed pivot task.

The dual-encoder has become the de facto architecture for dense retrieval. Typically, it computes the latent representations of the query and document independently, thus failing to fully capture the interactions between the query and document. To alleviate this, recent research has focused on obtaining query-informed document representations. During training, it expands the document with a real query, but during inference, it replaces the real query with a generated one. This inconsistency between training and inference causes the dense retrieval model to prioritize query information while disregarding the document when computing the document representation. Consequently, it performs even worse than the vanilla dense retrieval model because its performance heavily relies on the relevance between the generated queries and the real query. In this paper, we propose a curriculum sampling strategy that utilizes pseudo queries during training and progressively enhances the relevance between the generated query and the real query. By doing so, the retrieval model learns to extend its attention from the document alone to both the document and query, resulting in high-quality query-informed document representations. Experimental results on both in-domain and out-of-domain datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms previous dense retrieval models.

Commonsense generation aims to generate a realistic sentence describing a daily scene under the given concepts, which is very challenging, since it requires models to have relational reasoning and compositional generalization capabilities. Previous work focuses on retrieving prototype sentences for the provided concepts to assist generation. They first use a sparse retriever to retrieve candidate sentences, then re-rank the candidates with a ranker. However, the candidates returned by their ranker may not be the most relevant sentences, since the ranker treats all candidates equally without considering their relevance to the reference sentences of the given concepts. Another problem is that re-ranking is very expensive, but only using retrievers will seriously degrade the performance of their generation models. To solve these problems, we propose the metric distillation rule to distill knowledge from the metric (e.g., BLEU) to the ranker. We further transfer the critical knowledge summarized by the distilled ranker to the retriever. In this way, the relevance scores of candidate sentences predicted by the ranker and retriever will be more consistent with their quality measured by the metric. Experimental results on the CommonGen benchmark verify the effectiveness of our proposed method: (1) Our generation model with the distilled ranker achieves a new state-of-the-art result. (2) Our generation model with the distilled retriever even surpasses the previous SOTA.