Despite the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs), theyoften lag behind specialized models in various tasks. LLMs only use a fractionof the existing training data for in-context learning, while task-specificmodels harness the full dataset for fine-tuning. In this work, we tackle theproblem of leveraging training data to improve the performance of LLMs withoutfine-tuning. Our approach directly targets LLM predictions without requiringaccess to their weights. We create a pool of candidates from the LLM throughfew-shot prompting and we employ a compact model, the LM-corrector (LMCor),specifically trained to merge these candidates to produce an enhanced output.Our experiments on four natural language generation tasks demonstrate that evena small LMCor model (250M) substantially improves the few-shot performance ofLLMs (62B), matching and even outperforming standard fine-tuning. Furthermore,we illustrate the robustness of LMCor against different prompts, therebyminimizing the need for extensive prompt engineering. Finally, we show thatLMCor can be seamlessly integrated with different LLMs at inference, serving asa plug-and-play module to improve their performance.

Chain of thought prompting successfully improves the reasoning capabilities of large language models, achieving state of the art results on a range of datasets. However, these reasoning capabilities only appear to emerge in models with at least tens of billions of parameters. In this paper, we explore the transfer of such reasoning capabilities to smaller models via knowledge distillation, also investigating model and dataset size trade-off. Specifically, we finetune a student model on the chain of thought outputs generated by a larger teacher model. Our experiments show that the proposed method improves task performance across arithmetic, commonsense and symbolic reasoning datasets. For example, the accuracy of T5 XXL on GSM8K improves from 8.11% to 21.99% and 18.42% when finetuned on PaLM 540B and GPT-3 175B generated chains of thought, respectively.

Text-editing models have recently become a prominent alternative to seq2seq models for monolingual text-generation tasks such as grammatical error correction, text simplification, and style transfer. These tasks share a common trait – they exhibit a large amount of textual overlap between the source and target texts. Text-editing models take advantage of this observation and learn to generate the output by predicting edit operations applied to the source sequence. In contrast, seq2seq models generate outputs word-by-word from scratch thus making them slow at inference time. Text-editing models provide several benefits over seq2seq models including faster inference speed, higher sample efficiency, and better control and interpretability of the outputs. This tutorial provides a comprehensive overview of the text-edit based models and current state-of-the-art approaches analyzing their pros and cons. We discuss challenges related to deployment and how these models help to mitigate hallucination and bias, both pressing challenges in the field of text generation.

We present EdiT5 - a novel semi-autoregressive text-editing approach designed to combine the strengths of non-autoregressive text-editing and autoregressive decoding. EdiT5 is faster at inference times than conventional sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models, while being capable of modeling flexible input-output transformations.This is achieved by decomposing the generation process into three sub-tasks: (1) tagging to decide on the subset of input tokens to be preserved in the output, (2) re-ordering to define their order in the output text, and (3) insertion to infill the missing tokens that are not present in the input. The tagging and re-ordering steps, which are responsible for generating the largest portion of the output, are non-autoregressive, while the insertion uses an autoregressive decoder.Depending on the task, EdiT5 requires significantly fewer autoregressive steps demonstrating speedups of up to 25x when compared to classic seq2seq models. Quality-wise, EdiT5 is initialized with a pre-trained T5 checkpoint yielding comparable performance to T5 in high-resource settings and clearly outperforms it on low-resource settings when evaluated on three NLG tasks: Sentence Fusion, Grammatical Error Correction, and Decontextualization.

This paper presents a simple recipe to trainstate-of-the-art multilingual Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) models. We achieve this by first proposing a language-agnostic method to generate a large number of synthetic examples. The second ingredient is to use large-scale multilingual language models (up to 11B parameters). Once fine-tuned on language-specific supervised sets we surpass the previous state-of-the-art results on GEC benchmarks in four languages: English, Czech, German and Russian. Having established a new set of baselines for GEC, we make our results easily reproducible and accessible by releasing a CLANG-8 dataset. It is produced by using our best model, which we call gT5, to clean the targets of a widely used yet noisy Lang-8 dataset. cLang-8 greatly simplifies typical GEC training pipelines composed of multiple fine-tuning stages – we demonstrate that performing a single fine-tuning stepon cLang-8 with the off-the-shelf language models yields further accuracy improvements over an already top-performing gT5 model for English.

Unsupervised pre-training of large neural models has recently revolutionized Natural Language Processing. By warm-starting from the publicly released checkpoints, NLP practitioners have pushed the state-of-the-art on multiple benchmarks while saving significant amounts of compute time. So far the focus has been mainly on the Natural Language Understanding tasks. In this paper, we demonstrate the efficacy of pre-trained checkpoints for Sequence Generation. We developed a Transformer-based sequence-to-sequence model that is compatible with publicly available pre-trained BERT, GPT-2, and RoBERTa checkpoints and conducted an extensive empirical study on the utility of initializing our model, both encoder and decoder, with these checkpoints. Our models result in new state-of-the-art results on Machine Translation, Text Summarization, Sentence Splitting, and Sentence Fusion.

We present FELIX – a flexible text-editing approach for generation, designed to derive maximum benefit from the ideas of decoding with bi-directional contexts and self-supervised pretraining. In contrast to conventional sequenceto-sequence (seq2seq) models, FELIX is efficient in low-resource settings and fast at inference time, while being capable of modeling flexible input-output transformations. We achieve this by decomposing the text-editing task into two sub-tasks: tagging to decide on the subset of input tokens and their order in the output text and insertion to in-fill the missing tokens in the output not present in the input. The tagging model employs a novel Pointer mechanism, while the insertion model is based on a Masked Language Model (MLM). Both of these models are chosen to be non-autoregressive to guarantee faster inference. FELIX performs favourably when compared to recent text-editing methods and strong seq2seq baselines when evaluated on four NLG tasks: Sentence Fusion, Machine Translation Automatic Post-Editing, Summarization, and Text Simplification

We propose Masker, an unsupervised text-editing method for style transfer. To tackle cases when no parallel source–target pairs are available, we train masked language models (MLMs) for both the source and the target domain. Then we find the text spans where the two models disagree the most in terms of likelihood. This allows us to identify the source tokens to delete to transform the source text to match the style of the target domain. The deleted tokens are replaced with the target MLM, and by using a padded MLM variant, we avoid having to predetermine the number of inserted tokens. Our experiments on sentence fusion and sentiment transfer demonstrate that Masker performs competitively in a fully unsupervised setting. Moreover, in low-resource settings, it improves supervised methods’ accuracy by over 10 percentage points when pre-training them on silver training data generated by Masker.

We propose LaserTagger - a sequence tagging approach that casts text generation as a text editing task. Target texts are reconstructed from the inputs using three main edit operations: keeping a token, deleting it, and adding a phrase before the token. To predict the edit operations, we propose a novel model, which combines a BERT encoder with an autoregressive Transformer decoder. This approach is evaluated on English text on four tasks: sentence fusion, sentence splitting, abstractive summarization, and grammar correction. LaserTagger achieves new state-of-the-art results on three of these tasks, performs comparably to a set of strong seq2seq baselines with a large number of training examples, and outperforms them when the number of examples is limited. Furthermore, we show that at inference time tagging can be more than two orders of magnitude faster than comparable seq2seq models, making it more attractive for running in a live environment.

In this paper we explore the effect of architectural choices on learning a variational autoencoder (VAE) for text generation. In contrast to the previously introduced VAE model for text where both the encoder and decoder are RNNs, we propose a novel hybrid architecture that blends fully feed-forward convolutional and deconvolutional components with a recurrent language model. Our architecture exhibits several attractive properties such as faster run time and convergence, ability to better handle long sequences and, more importantly, it helps to avoid the issue of the VAE collapsing to a deterministic model.

This paper presents a novel approach to recurrent neural network (RNN) regularization. Differently from the widely adopted dropout method, which is applied to forward connections of feedforward architectures or RNNs, we propose to drop neurons directly in recurrent connections in a way that does not cause loss of long-term memory. Our approach is as easy to implement and apply as the regular feed-forward dropout and we demonstrate its effectiveness for the most effective modern recurrent network – Long Short-Term Memory network. Our experiments on three NLP benchmarks show consistent improvements even when combined with conventional feed-forward dropout.

In this paper we present SenTube – a dataset of user-generated comments on YouTube videos annotated for information content and sentiment polarity. It contains annotations that allow to develop classifiers for several important NLP tasks: (i) sentiment analysis, (ii) text categorization (relatedness of a comment to video and/or product), (iii) spam detection, and (iv) prediction of comment informativeness. The SenTube corpus favors the development of research on indexing and searching YouTube videos exploiting information derived from comments. The corpus will cover several languages: at the moment, we focus on English and Italian, with Spanish and Dutch parts scheduled for the later stages of the project. For all the languages, we collect videos for the same set of products, thus offering possibilities for multi- and cross-lingual experiments. The paper provides annotation guidelines, corpus statistics and annotator agreement details.