Data annotation and synthesis generally refers to the labeling or generating of raw data with relevant information, which could be used for improving the efficacy of machine learning models. The process, however, is labor-intensive and costly. The emergence of advanced Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by GPT-4, presents an unprecedented opportunity to automate the complicated process of data annotation and synthesis. While existing surveys have extensively covered LLM architecture, training, and general applications, we uniquely focus on their specific utility for data annotation. This survey contributes to three core aspects: LLM-Based Annotation Generation, LLM-Generated Annotations Assessment, and LLM-Generated Annotations Utilization. Furthermore, this survey includes an in-depth taxonomy of data types that LLMs can annotate, a comprehensive review of learning strategies for models utilizing LLM-generated annotations, and a detailed discussion of the primary challenges and limitations associated with using LLMs for data annotation and synthesis. Serving as a key guide, this survey aims to assist researchers and practitioners in exploring the potential of the latest LLMs for data annotation, thereby fostering future advancements in this critical field.

Retrieval-Augmented Generative (RAG) models enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating external knowledge bases, improving their performance in applications like fact-checking and information searching. In this paper, we demonstrate a security threat where adversaries can exploit the openness of these knowledge bases by injecting deceptive content into the retrieval database, intentionally changing the model’s behavior. This threat is critical as it mirrors real-world usage scenarios where RAG systems interact with publicly accessible knowledge bases, such as web scrapings and user-contributed data pools. To be more realistic, we target a realistic setting where the adversary has no knowledge of users’ queries, knowledge base data, and the LLM parameters. We demonstrate that it is possible to exploit the model successfully through crafted content uploads with access to the retriever. Our findings emphasize an urgent need for security measures in the design and deployment of RAG systems to prevent potential manipulation and ensure the integrity of machine-generated content.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown unprecedented performance in various real-world applications. However, they are known to generate factually inaccurate outputs, a.k.a. the hallucination problem. In recent years, incorporating external knowledge extracted from Knowledge Graphs (KGs) has become a promising strategy to improve the factual accuracy of LLM-generated outputs. Nevertheless, most existing explorations rely on LLMs themselves to perform KG knowledge extraction, which is highly inflexible as LLMs can only provide binary judgment on whether a certain knowledge (e.g., a knowledge path in KG) should be used. In addition, LLMs tend to pick only knowledge with direct semantic relationship with the input text, while potentially useful knowledge with indirect semantics can be ignored. In this work, we propose a principled framework KELP with three stages to handle the above problems. Specifically, KELP is able to achieve finer granularity of flexible knowledge extraction by generating scores for knowledge paths with input texts via latent semantic matching. Meanwhile, knowledge paths with indirect semantic relationships with the input text can also be considered via trained encoding between the selected paths in KG and the input text. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of KELP.

In-context learning (ICL) empowers large language models (LLMs) to tackle new tasks by using a series of training instances as prompts. Since generating the prompts needs to sample from a vast pool of instances and annotate them (e.g., add labels in classification task), existing methods have proposed to select a subset of unlabeled examples for annotation, thus enhancing the quality of prompts and concurrently mitigating annotation costs. However, these methods often require a long time to select instances due to their complexity, hindering their practical viability. To address this limitation, we propose a graph-based selection method, FastGAS, designed to efficiently identify high-quality instances while minimizing computational overhead. Initially, we construct a data similarity graph based on instance similarities. Subsequently, employing a graph partitioning algorithm, we partition the graph into pieces. Within each piece (i.e., subgraph), we adopt a greedy approach to pick the most representative nodes. By aggregating nodes from diverse pieces and annotating the corresponding instances, we identify a set of diverse and representative instances for ICL. Compared to prior approaches, our method not only exhibits superior performance on different tasks but also significantly reduces selection time. In addition, we demonstrate the efficacy of our approach in LLMs of larger sizes.

In recent years, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have become successful in molecular property prediction tasks such as toxicity analysis. However, due to the black-box nature of GNNs, their outputs can be concerning in high-stakes decision-making scenarios, e.g., drug discovery. Facing such an issue, Graph Counterfactual Explanation (GCE) has emerged as a promising approach to improve GNN transparency. However, current GCE methods usually fail to take domain-specific knowledge into consideration, which can result in outputs that are not easily comprehensible by humans. To address this challenge, we propose a novel GCE method, LLM-GCE, to unleash the power of large language models (LLMs) in explaining GNNs for molecular property prediction. Specifically, we utilize an autoencoder to generate the counterfactual graph topology from a set of counterfactual text pairs (CTPs) based on an input graph. Meanwhile, we also incorporate a CTP dynamic feedback module to mitigate LLM hallucination, which provides intermediate feedback derived from the generated counterfactuals as an attempt to give more faithful guidance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of LLM-GCE. Our code is released on https://github.com/YinhanHe123/new_LLM4GNNExplanation.

Few-shot Knowledge Graph (KG) Relational Reasoning aims to predict unseen triplets (i.e., query triplets) for rare relations in KGs, given only several triplets of these relations as references (i.e., support triplets). This task has gained significant traction due to the widespread use of knowledge graphs in various natural language processing applications. Previous approaches have utilized meta-training methods and manually constructed meta-relation sets to tackle this task. Recent efforts have focused on edge-mask-based methods, which exploit the structure of the contextualized graphs of target triplets (i.e., a subgraph containing relevant triplets in the KG). However, existing edge-mask-based methods have limitations in extracting insufficient information from KG and are highly influenced by spurious information in KG. To overcome these challenges, we propose SAFER (Subgraph Adaptation for Few-shot Relational Reasoning), a novel approach that effectively adapts the information in contextualized graphs to various subgraphs generated from support and query triplets to perform the prediction. Specifically, SAFER enables the extraction of more comprehensive information from support triplets while minimizing the impact of spurious information when predicting query triplets. Experimental results on three prevalent datasets demonstrate the superiority of our proposed framework SAFER.

Twitter bots are automatic programs operated by malicious actors to manipulate public opinion and spread misinformation. Research efforts have been made to automatically identify bots based on texts and networks on social media. Existing methods only leverage texts or networks alone, and while few works explored the shallow combination of the two modalities, we hypothesize that the interaction and information exchange between texts and graphs could be crucial for holistically evaluating bot activities on social media. In addition, according to a recent survey (Cresci, 2020), Twitter bots are constantly evolving while advanced bots steal genuine users’ tweets and dilute their malicious content to evade detection. This results in greater inconsistency across the timeline of novel Twitter bots, which warrants more attention. In light of these challenges, we propose BIC, a Twitter Bot detection framework with text-graph Interaction and semantic Consistency. Specifically, in addition to separately modeling the two modalities on social media, BIC employs a text-graph interaction module to enable information exchange across modalities in the learning process. In addition, given the stealing behavior of novel Twitter bots, BIC proposes to model semantic consistency in tweets based on attention weights while using it to augment the decision process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that BIC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on two widely adopted datasets. Further analyses reveal that text-graph interactions and modeling semantic consistency are essential improvements and help combat bot evolution.

Adopting a two-stage paradigm of pretraining followed by fine-tuning, Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) have achieved substantial advancements in the field of natural language processing. However, in real-world scenarios, data labels are often noisy due to the complex annotation process, making it essential to develop strategies for fine-tuning PLMs with such noisy labels. To this end, we introduce an innovative approach for fine-tuning PLMs using noisy labels, which incorporates the guidance of Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This guidance assists in accurately distinguishing between clean and noisy samples and provides supplementary information beyond the noisy labels, thereby boosting the learning process during fine-tuning PLMs. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world noisy datasets further demonstrate the superior advantages of our framework over the state-of-the-art baselines.

Political perspective detection has become an increasingly important task that can help combat echo chambers and political polarization. Previous approaches generally focus on leveraging textual content to identify stances, while they fail to reason with background knowledge or leverage the rich semantic and syntactic textual labels in news articles. In light of these limitations, we propose KCD, a political perspective detection approach to enable multi-hop knowledge reasoning and incorporate textual cues as paragraph-level labels. Specifically, we firstly generate random walks on external knowledge graphs and infuse them with news text representations. We then construct a heterogeneous information network to jointly model news content as well as semantic, syntactic and entity cues in news articles. Finally, we adopt relational graph neural networks for graph-level representation learning and conduct political perspective detection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two benchmark datasets. We further examine the effect of knowledge walks and textual cues and how they contribute to our approach’s data efficiency.

Text classification is a critical research topic with broad applications in natural language processing. Recently, graph neural networks (GNNs) have received increasing attention in the research community and demonstrated their promising results on this canonical task. Despite the success, their performance could be largely jeopardized in practice since they are: (1) unable to capture high-order interaction between words; (2) inefficient to handle large datasets and new documents. To address those issues, in this paper, we propose a principled model – hypergraph attention networks (HyperGAT), which can obtain more expressive power with less computational consumption for text representation learning. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach on the text classification task.