The applications of large language models (LLMs) have expanded well beyond the confines of text processing, signaling a new era where LLMs are envisioned as generalist agents capable of operating within complex environments. These environments are often highly expansive, making it impossible for the LLM to process them within its short-term memory. Motivated by recent research on extending the capabilities of LLMs with tools, we seek to investigate the intriguing potential of tools to augment LLMs in handling such complexity by introducing a novel class of tools, termed *middleware*, to aid in the proactive exploration within these massive environments. Such specialized tools can serve as a middleware layer shielding the LLM from environmental complexity. In two representative complex environments—knowledge bases (KBs) and databases—we demonstrate the significant potential of augmenting language agents with tools in complex environments. Notably, equipped with the middleware, GPT-4 achieves **2.8**X the performance of the best baseline in tasks requiring access to database content and **2.2**X in KB tasks. Our findings illuminate the path for advancing language agents in real-world applications.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in various tasks, including identifying the political beliefs of English-speaking social media users from their posts. However, assessing LLMs for this task in non-English languages remains unexplored. In this work, we ask to what extent LLMs can predict the political ideologies of users in Persian social media. To answer this question, we first acknowledge that political parties are not well-defined among Persian users, and therefore, we simplify the task to a much simpler task of hyperpartisan ideology detection. We create a new benchmark and show the potential and limitations of both open-source and commercial LLMs in classifying the hyper-partisan ideologies of users. We compare these models with smaller fine-tuned models, both on the Persian language (ParsBERT) and translated data (RoBERTa), showing that they considerably outperform generative LLMs in this task. We further demonstrate that the performance of the generative LLMs degrades when classifying users based on their tweets instead of their bios and even when tweets are added as additional information, whereas the smaller fine-tuned models are robust and achieve similar performance for all classes. This study is a first step toward political ideology detection in Persian Twitter, with implications for future research to understand the dynamics of ideologies in Persian social media.

We present our systems for the three tasks and five languages included in the MRL 2024 Shared Task on Multilingual Multi-task Information Retrieval: (1) Named Entity Recognition, (2) Free-form Question Answering, and (3) Multiple-choice Question Answering. For each task, we explored the impact of selecting different multilingual language models for fine-tuning across various target languages, and implemented an ensemble system that generates final outputs based on predictions from multiple fine-tuned models. All models are large language models fine-tuned on task-specific data. Our experimental results show that a more balanced dataset would yield better results. However, when training data for certain languages are scarce, fine-tuning on a large amount of English data supplemented by a small amount of “triggering data” in the target language can produce decent results.

We introduce OpenWebAgent, an open toolkit designed to optimize web automation by integrating both large language models (LLMs) and large multimodal models (LMMs). This toolkit focuses on enhancing human-computer interactions on the web, simplifying complex tasks through an advanced HTML parser, a rapid action generation module, and an intuitive user interface. At the core of OpenWebAgent is an innovative web agent framework that uses a modular design to allow developers to seamlessly integrate a variety of models and tools to process web information and automate tasks on the web. This enables the development of powerful, task-oriented web agents, significantly enhancing user experience and operational efficiency on the web. The OpenWebAgent framework, Chrome plugin, and demo video are available at https://github.com/THUDM/OpenWebAgent/.

Previous studies employ the autoregressive translation (AT) paradigm in the document-to-document neural machine translation. These methods extend the translation unit from a single sentence to a pseudo-document and encodes the full pseudo-document, avoiding the redundant computation problem in context. However, the AT methods cannot parallelize decoding and struggle with error accumulation, especially when the length of sentences increases. In this work, we propose a context-aware non-autoregressive framework with the sentence-aligned connectionist temporal classification (SA-CTC) loss for document-level neural machine translation. In particular, the SA-CTC loss reduces the search space of the decoding path by fixing the positions of the beginning and end tokens for each sentence in the document. Meanwhile, the context-aware architecture introduces preset nodes to represent sentence-level information and utilizes a hierarchical attention structure to regulate the attention hypothesis space. Experimental results show that our proposed method can achieve competitive performance compared with several strong baselines. Our method implements non-autoregressive modeling in Doc-to-Doc translation manner, achieving an average 46X decoding speedup compared to the document-level AT baselines on three benchmarks.

In this work, we propose a weak supervision pipeline SWEET: Supervise Weakly for Entity Extraction to fight Trafficking for extracting person names from noisy escort advertisements. Our method combines the simplicity of rule-matching (through antirules, i.e., negated rules) and the generalizability of large language models fine-tuned on benchmark, domain-specific and synthetic datasets, treating them as weak labels. One of the major challenges in this domain is limited labeled data. SWEET addresses this by obtaining multiple weak labels through labeling functions and effectively aggregating them. SWEET outperforms the previous supervised SOTA method for this task by 9% F1 score on domain data and better generalizes to common benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we also release HTGEN, a synthetically generated dataset of escort advertisements (built using ChatGPT) to facilitate further research within the community.

A persistent goal of multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) is to continually adapt the model to support new language pairs or improve some current language pairs without accessing the previous training data. To achieve this, the existing methods primarily focus on preventing catastrophic forgetting by making compromises between the original and new language pairs, leading to sub-optimal performance on both translation tasks. To mitigate this problem, we propose a dual importance-based model division method to divide the model parameters into two parts and separately model the translation of the original and new tasks. Specifically, we first remove the parameters that are negligible to the original tasks but essential to the new tasks to obtain a pruned model, which is responsible for the original translation tasks. Then we expand the pruned model with external parameters and fine-tune the newly added parameters with new training data. The whole fine-tuned model will be used for the new translation tasks. Experimental results show that our method can efficiently adapt the original model to various new translation tasks while retaining the performance of the original tasks. Further analyses demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms several strong baselines under different incremental translation scenarios.

This paper describes the submission of DUTNLP Lab submission to WMT23 Discourse-Level Literary Translation in the Chinese to English translation direction under unconstrained conditions. Our primary system aims to leverage a large language model with various prompt strategies, which can fully investigate the potential capabilities of large language models for discourse-level neural machine translation. Moreover, we test a widely used discourse-level machine translation model, G-transformer, with different training strategies. In our experimental results, the method with large language models achieves a BLEU score of 28.16, while the fine-tuned method scores 25.26. These findings indicate that selecting appropriate prompt strategies based on large language models can significantly improve translation performance compared to traditional model training methods.

Precise information of word boundary can alleviate the problem of lexical ambiguity to improve the performance of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Thus, Chinese word segmentation (CWS) is a fundamental task in NLP. Due to the development of pre-trained language models (PLM), pre-trained knowledge can help neural methods solve the main problems of the CWS in significant measure. Existing methods have already achieved high performance on several benchmarks (e.g., Bakeoff-2005). However, recent outstanding studies are limited by the small-scale annotated corpus. To further improve the performance of CWS methods based on fine-tuning the PLMs, we propose a novel neural framework, LBGCN, which incorporates a lexicon-based graph convolutional network into the Transformer encoder. Experimental results on five benchmarks and four cross-domain datasets show the lexicon-based graph convolutional network successfully captures the information of candidate words and helps to improve performance on the benchmarks (Bakeoff-2005 and CTB6) and the cross-domain datasets (SIGHAN-2010). Further experiments and analyses demonstrate that our proposed framework effectively models the lexicon to enhance the ability of basic neural frameworks and strengthens the robustness in the cross-domain scenario.

In the hierarchical phrase based (HPB) translation model, in addition to hierarchical phrase pairs extracted from bi-text, glue rules are used to perform serial combination of phrases. However, this basic method for combining phrases is not sufficient for phrase reordering. In this paper, we extend the HPB model with maximum entropy based bracketing transduction grammar (BTG), which provides content-dependent combination of neighboring phrases in two ways: serial or inverse. Experimental results show that the extended HPB system achieves absolute improvements of 0.9∼1.8 BLEU points over the baseline for large-scale translation tasks.

With the growing interest in opinion mining from web data, more works are focused on mining in English and Chinese reviews. Probing into the problem of product opinion mining, this paper describes the details of our language resources, and imports them into the task of extracting product feature and sentiment task. Different from the traditional unsupervised methods, a supervised method is utilized to identify product features, combining the domain knowledge and lexical information. Nearest vicinity match and syntactic tree based methods are proposed to identify the opinions regarding the product features. Multi-level analysis module is proposed to determine the sentiment orientation of the opinions. With the experiments on the electronic reviews of COAE 2008, the validities of the product features identified by CRFs and the two opinion words identified methods are testified and compared. The results show the resource is well utilized in this task and our proposed method is valid.