Code-switching (CS), which is when Vietnamese speech uses English words like drug names or procedures, is a common phenomenon in Vietnamese medical communication. This creates challenges for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, especially in low-resource languages like Vietnamese. Current most ASR systems struggle to recognize correctly English medical terms within Vietnamese sentences, and no benchmark addresses this challenge. In this paper, we construct a 34-hour Vietnamese Medical Code-Switching Speech dataset (ViMedCSS) containing 16,576 utterances. Each utterance includes at least one English medical term drawn from a curated bilingual lexicon covering five medical topics. Using this dataset, we evaluate several state-of-the-art ASR models and examine different specific fine-tuning strategies for improving medical term recognition to investigate the best approach to solve in the dataset. Experimental results show that Vietnamese-optimized models perform better on general segments, while multilingual pretraining helps capture English insertions. The combination of both approaches yields the best balance between overall and code-switched accuracy. This work provides the first benchmark for Vietnamese medical code-switching and offers insights into effective domain adaptation for low-resource, multilingual ASR systems.

Predicting program behavior and reasoning about code execution remain significant challenges in software engineering, particularly for large language models (LLMs) designed for code analysis. While these models excel at understanding static syntax, they often struggle with dynamic reasoning tasks. We introduce VisualCoder, a simple yet effective approach that enhances code reasoning by integrating multimodal Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning with a visual Control Flow Graph (CFG). By aligning code snippets with their corresponding CFGs, VisualCoder provides deeper insights into execution flows. We address challenges in multimodal CoT integration through a reference mechanism, ensuring consistency between code and its execution path, thereby improving performance in program behavior prediction, error detection, and output generation.

Machine translation for Vietnamese-English in the medical domain is still an under-explored research area. In this paper, we introduce MedEV—a high-quality Vietnamese-English parallel dataset constructed specifically for the medical domain, comprising approximately 360K sentence pairs. We conduct extensive experiments comparing Google Translate, ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo), state-of-the-art Vietnamese-English neural machine translation models and pre-trained bilingual/multilingual sequence-to-sequence models on our new MedEV dataset. Experimental results show that the best performance is achieved by fine-tuning “vinai-translate” for each translation direction. We publicly release our dataset to promote further research.

Target-driven recommendation dialogues present unique challenges in dialogue management due to the necessity of anticipating user interactions for successful conversations. Current methods face significant limitations: (I) inadequate capabilities for conversation anticipation, (II) computational inefficiencies due to costly simulations, and (III) neglect of valuable past dialogue experiences. To address these limitations, we propose a new framework, Experiential Policy Learning (EPL), for enhancing such dialogues. EPL embodies the principle of Learning From Experience, facilitating anticipation with an experiential scoring function that estimates dialogue state potential using similar past interactions stored in long-term memory. To demonstrate its flexibility, we introduce Tree-structured EPL (T-EPL) as one possible training-free realization with Large Language Models (LLMs) and Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). T-EPL assesses past dialogue states with LLMs while utilizing MCTS to achieve hierarchical and multi-level reasoning. Extensive experiments on two published datasets demonstrate the superiority and efficacy of T-EPL.

Existing works have shown that fine-tuned textual transformer models achieve state-of-the-art prediction performances but are also vulnerable to adversarial text perturbations. Traditional adversarial evaluation is often done only after fine-tuning the models and ignoring the training data. In this paper, we want to prove that there is also a strong correlation between training data and model robustness. To this end, we extract 13 different features representing a wide range of input fine-tuning corpora properties and use them to predict the adversarial robustness of the fine-tuned models. Focusing mostly on encoder-only transformer models BERT and RoBERTa with additional results for BART, ELECTRA and GPT2, we provide diverse evidence to support our argument. First, empirical analyses show that (a) extracted features can be used with a lightweight classifier such as Random Forest to effectively predict the attack success rate and (b) features with the most influence on the model robustness have a clear correlation with the robustness. Second, our framework can be used as a fast and effective additional tool for robustness evaluation since it (a) saves 30x-193x runtime compared to the traditional technique, (b) is transferable across models, (c) can be used under adversarial training, and (d) robust to statistical randomness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/CaptainCuong/RobustText_ACL2024.