Transforming natural language questions into SQL queries is crucial for precise data retrieval from electronic health record (EHR) databases. A significant challenge in this process is detecting and rejecting unanswerable questions that request information outside the database’s scope or exceed the system’s capabilities. In this paper, we introduce a novel text-to-SQL framework that focuses on standardizing the structure of questions into a templated format. Our framework begins by fine-tuning GPT-3.5-turbo, a powerful large language model (LLM), with detailed prompts involving the table schemas of the EHR database system. Our approach shows promising results on the EHRSQL-2024 benchmark dataset, part of the ClinicalNLP shared task. Although fine-tuning GPT achieves third place on the development set, it struggled with the diverse questions in the test set. With our framework, we improve our system’s adaptability and achieve fourth position in the official leaderboard of the EHRSQL-2024 challenge.

This paper studies the problem of open-domain question answering, with the aim of answering a diverse range of questions leveraging knowledge resources. Two types of sources, QA-pair and document corpora, have been actively leveraged with the following complementary strength. The former is highly precise when the paraphrase of given question q was seen and answered during training, often posed as a retrieval problem, while the latter generalizes better for unseen questions. A natural follow-up is thus leveraging both models, while a naive pipelining or integration approaches have failed to bring additional gains over either model alone. Our distinction is interpreting the problem as calibration, which estimates the confidence of predicted answers as an indicator to decide when to use a document or QA-pair corpus. The effectiveness of our method was validated on widely adopted benchmarks such as Natural Questions and TriviaQA.

Information-seeking questions in long-form question answering (LFQA) often prove misleading due to ambiguity or false presupposition in the question. While many existing approaches handle misleading questions, they are tailored to limited questions, which are insufficient in a real-world setting with unpredictable input characteristics. In this work, we propose PreWoMe, a unified approach capable of handling any type of information-seeking question. The key idea of PreWoMe involves extracting presuppositions in the question and exploiting them as working memory to generate feedback and action about the question. Our experiment shows that PreWoMe is effective not only in tackling misleading questions but also in handling normal ones, thereby demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging presuppositions, feedback, and action for real-world QA settings.

Large language models often struggle to predict runtime behavior in code generation tasks, leading to a reliance on rejection sampling (best-of-n) to generate multiple code snippets then select the best. Our distinction is reducing sampling costs, without compromising generation quality. We introduce EFFICODE, a novel framework that prioritizes sampling on test problems that models can solve. We show how EFFICODE estimates solvability to optimize computational costs during multiple sampling. Based on empirical evidence, EFFICODE consistently demonstrates reduced sampling budgets while maintaining comparable code generation performance, especially when problems are challenging. In addition, utilizing EFFICODE to rank sampled code snippets also shows its effectiveness in answer code selection for reducing temporal costs, by not requiring any execution or test case generation.

Dense retrieval has shown promising results in various information retrieval tasks, and hybrid retrieval, combined with the strength of sparse retrieval, has also been actively studied. A key challenge in hybrid retrieval is to make sparse and dense complementary to each other. Existing models have focused on dense models to capture “residual” features neglected in the sparse models. Our key distinction is to show how this notion of residual complementarity is limited, and propose a new objective, denoted as RoC (Ratio of Complementarity), which captures a fuller notion of complementarity. We propose a two-level orthogonality designed to improve RoC, then show that the improved RoC of our model, in turn, improves the performance of hybrid retrieval. Our method outperforms all state-of-the-art methods on three representative IR benchmarks: MSMARCO-Passage, Natural Questions, and TREC Robust04, with statistical significance. Our finding is also consistent in various adversarial settings.

This paper studies the problem of generatinglikely queries for multimodal documents withimages. Our application scenario is enablingefficient “first-stage retrieval” of relevant doc-uments, by attaching generated queries to doc-uments before indexing. We can then indexthis expanded text to efficiently narrow downto candidate matches using inverted index, sothat expensive reranking can follow. Our eval-uation results show that our proposed multi-modal representation meaningfully improvesrelevance ranking. More importantly, ourframework can achieve the state of the art inthe first stage retrieval scenarios

This paper studies the bias problem of multi-hop question answering models, of answering correctly without correct reasoning. One way to robustify these models is by supervising to not only answer right, but also with right reasoning chains. An existing direction is to annotate reasoning chains to train models, requiring expensive additional annotations. In contrast, we propose a new approach to learn evidentiality, deciding whether the answer prediction is supported by correct evidences, without such annotations. Instead, we compare counterfactual changes in answer confidence with and without evidence sentences, to generate “pseudo-evidentiality” annotations. We validate our proposed model on an original set and challenge set in HotpotQA, showing that our method is accurate and robust in multi-hop reasoning.

The performance of text classification has improved tremendously using intelligently engineered neural-based models, especially those injecting categorical metadata as additional information, e.g., using user/product information for sentiment classification. This information has been used to modify parts of the model (e.g., word embeddings, attention mechanisms) such that results can be customized according to the metadata. We observe that current representation methods for categorical metadata, which are devised for human consumption, are not as effective as claimed in popular classification methods, outperformed even by simple concatenation of categorical features in the final layer of the sentence encoder. We conjecture that categorical features are harder to represent for machine use, as available context only indirectly describes the category, and even such context is often scarce (for tail category). To this end, we propose using basis vectors to effectively incorporate categorical metadata on various parts of a neural-based model. This additionally decreases the number of parameters dramatically, especially when the number of categorical features is large. Extensive experiments on various data sets with different properties are performed and show that through our method, we can represent categorical metadata more effectively to customize parts of the model, including unexplored ones, and increase the performance of the model greatly.

This paper studies the problem of supporting question answering in a new language with limited training resources. As an extreme scenario, when no such resource exists, one can (1) transfer labels from another language, and (2) generate labels from unlabeled data, using translator and automatic labeling function respectively. However, these approaches inevitably introduce noises to the training data, due to translation or generation errors, which require a judicious use of data with varying confidence. To address this challenge, we propose a weakly-supervised framework that quantifies such noises from automatically generated labels, to deemphasize or fix noisy data in training. On reading comprehension task, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on low-resource languages with varying similarity to English, namely, Korean and French.