In real-world NLP applications, Large Language Models (LLMs) offer promising solutions due to their extensive training on vast datasets. However, the large size and high computation demands of LLMs limit their practicality in many applications, especially when further fine-tuning is required. To address these limitations, smaller models are typically preferred for deployment. However, their training is hindered by the scarcity of labeled data. In contrast, unlabeled data is often readily which can be leveraged by using LLMs to generate pseudo-labels for training smaller models. This enables the smaller models (student) to acquire knowledge from LLMs (teacher) while reducing computational costs. This process introduces challenges, such as potential noisy pseudo-labels. % and the high computational expense of processing large unlabeled datasets. Selecting high-quality and informative data is therefore critical to enhance model performance while improving the efficiency of data utilization. To address this, we propose LLKD that enables Learning with Less computational resources and less data for Knowledge Distillation from LLMs. LLKD is an adaptive sample selection method that incorporates signals from both the teacher and student. Specifically, it prioritizes samples where the teacher demonstrates high confidence in its labeling, indicating reliable labels, and where the student exhibits a high information need, identifying challenging samples that require further learning. Our comprehensive experiments show that LLKD achieves superior performance across various datasets with higher data efficiency.

Deep neural models for named entity recognition (NER) have shown impressive results in overcoming label scarcity and generalizing to unseen entities by leveraging distant supervision and auxiliary information such as explanations. However, the costs of acquiring such additional information are generally prohibitive. In this paper, we present a novel two-stage framework (AutoTriggER) to improve NER performance by automatically generating and leveraging “entity triggers” which are human-readable cues in the text that help guide the model to make better decisions. Our framework leverages post-hoc explanation to generate rationales and strengthens a model’s prior knowledge using an embedding interpolation technique. This approach allows models to exploit triggers to infer entity boundaries and types instead of solely memorizing the entity words themselves. Through experiments on three well-studied NER datasets, AutoTriggER shows strong label-efficiency, is capable of generalizing to unseen entities, and outperforms the RoBERTa-CRF baseline by nearly 0.5 F1 points on average.

We propose a novel framework for cross- lingual content flagging with limited target- language data, which significantly outperforms prior work in terms of predictive performance. The framework is based on a nearest-neighbor architecture. It is a modern instantiation of the vanilla k-nearest neighbor model, as we use Transformer representations in all its components. Our framework can adapt to new source- language instances, without the need to be retrained from scratch. Unlike prior work on neighborhood-based approaches, we encode the neighborhood information based on query– neighbor interactions. We propose two encoding schemes and we show their effectiveness using both qualitative and quantitative analysis. Our evaluation results on eight languages from two different datasets for abusive language detection show sizable improvements of up to 9.5 F1 points absolute (for Italian) over strong baselines. On average, we achieve 3.6 absolute F1 points of improvement for the three languages in the Jigsaw Multilingual dataset and 2.14 points for the WUL dataset.

We describe a multi-task learning approach to train a Neural Machine Translation (NMT) model with a Relevance-based Auxiliary Task (RAT) for search query translation. The translation process for Cross-lingual Information Retrieval (CLIR) task is usually treated as a black box and it is performed as an independent step. However, an NMT model trained on sentence-level parallel data is not aware of the vocabulary distribution of the retrieval corpus. We address this problem and propose a multi-task learning architecture that achieves 16% improvement over a strong baseline on Italian-English query-document dataset. We show using both quantitative and qualitative analysis that our model generates balanced and precise translations with the regularization effect it achieves from multi-task learning paradigm.