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.

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.

This paper presents Z-Code++, a new pre-trained language model optimized for abstractive text summarization. The model extends the state-of-the-art encoder-decoder model using three techniques. First, we use a two-phase pre-training to improve the model’s performance on low-resource summarization tasks. The model is first pre-trained using text corpora for language understanding, then is continually pre-trained on summarization corpora for grounded text generation. Second, we replace self-attention layers in the encoder with disentangled attention layers, where each word is represented using two vectors that encode its content and position, respectively. Third, we use fusion-in-encoder, a simple yet effective method of encoding long sequences in a hierarchical manner. Z-Code++ createsa new state-of-the-art on 9 of 13 text summarization tasks across 5 languages. Our model is parameter-efficient in that it outperforms the 600x larger PaLM540B on XSum, and the finetuned 200x larger GPT3175B on SAMSum. In zero-shot and few-shot settings, our model substantially outperforms the competing models.

Generate-then-rank is a widely used mechanism for text generation, where a generator produces multiple text candidates and a ranker chooses the best one among the text candidates. However, existing methods usually train the generator and the ranker individually, neglecting the mutual feedback that could further enhance the generation quality. To tackle this limitation, we propose JGR, a novel joint training algorithm that integrates the generator and the ranker in a single framework. JGR optimizes the generator with a hybrid objective that combines data likelihood and ranker reward, and trains the ranker with a contrastive loss that compares the generator outputs. By iteratively updating the generator and the ranker, JGR can effectively harmonize their learning and enhance their quality jointly. We evaluate JGR on various text generation tasks and demonstrate that it surpasses existing methods on four public datasets across three common generation scenarios. Our code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/microsoft/ProphetNet/tree/master/JGR.

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.

Query-focused summarization (QFS) aims to extract or generate a summary of an input document that directly answers or is relevant to a given query. The lack of large-scale datasets in the form of documents, queries, and summaries has hindered model development in this area. In contrast, multiple large-scale high-quality datasets for generic summarization exist. We hypothesize that there is a hidden query for each summary sentence in a generic summarization annotation, and we utilize a large-scale pretrained language model to recover it. In this way, we convert four generic summarization benchmarks into a new QFS benchmark dataset, LMGQS, which consists of over 1 million document-query-summary samples. We thoroughly investigate the properties of our proposed dataset and establish baselines with state-of-the-art summarization models. By fine-tuning a language model on LMGQS, we achieve state-of-the-art zero-shot and supervised performance on multiple existing QFS benchmarks, demonstrating the high quality and diversity of LMGQS.

Summarizing sales calls is a routine task performed manually by salespeople. We present a production system which combines generative models fine-tuned for customer-agent setting, with a human-in-the-loop user experience for an interactive summary curation process. We address challenging aspects of dialogue summarization task in a real-world setting including long input dialogues, content validation, lack of labeled data and quality evaluation. We show how GPT-3 can be leveraged as an offline data labeler to handle training data scarcity and accommodate privacy constraints in an industrial setting. Experiments show significant improvements by our models in tackling the summarization and content validation tasks on public datasets.

Dialog response generation in open domain is an important research topic where the main challenge is to generate relevant and diverse responses. In this paper, we propose a new dialog pre-training framework called DialogVED, which introduces continuous latent variables into the enhanced encoder-decoder pre-training framework to increase the relevance and diversity of responses. With the help of a large dialog corpus (Reddit), we pre-train the model using the following 4 tasks, used in training language models (LMs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) literature: 1) masked language model; 2) response generation; 3) bag-of-words prediction; and 4) KL divergence reduction. We also add additional parameters to model the turn structure in dialogs to improve the performance of the pre-trained model. We conduct experiments on PersonaChat, DailyDialog, and DSTC7-AVSD benchmarks for response generation. Experimental results show that our model achieves the new state-of-the-art results on all these datasets.

Short text classification is a fundamental task in natural language processing. It is hard due to the lack of context information and labeled data in practice. In this paper, we propose a new method called SHINE, which is based on graph neural network (GNN), for short text classification. First, we model the short text dataset as a hierarchical heterogeneous graph consisting of word-level component graphs which introduce more semantic and syntactic information. Then, we dynamically learn a short document graph that facilitates effective label propagation among similar short texts. Thus, comparing with existing GNN-based methods, SHINE can better exploit interactions between nodes of the same types and capture similarities between short texts. Extensive experiments on various benchmark short text datasets show that SHINE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, especially with fewer labels.

End-to-end neural models for goal-oriented conversational systems have become an increasingly active area of research, though results in real-world settings are few. We present real-world results for two issue types in the customer service domain. We train models on historical chat transcripts and test on live contacts using a human-in-the-loop research platform. Additionally, we incorporate customer profile features to assess their impact on model performance. We experiment with two approaches for response generation: (1) sequence-to-sequence generation and (2) template ranking. To test our models, a customer service agent handles live contacts and at each turn we present the top four model responses and allow the agent to select (and optionally edit) one of the suggestions or to type their own. We present results for turn acceptance rate, response coverage, and edit rate based on approximately 600 contacts, as well as qualitative analysis on patterns of turn rejection and edit behavior. Top-4 turn acceptance rate across all models ranges from 63%-80%. Our results suggest that these models are promising for an agent-support application.