Vasily Konovalov


2024

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DeepPavlov 1.0: Your Gateway to Advanced NLP Models Backed by Transformers and Transfer Learning
Maksim Savkin | Anastasia Voznyuk | Fedor Ignatov | Anna Korzanova | Dmitry Karpov | Alexander Popov | Vasily Konovalov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

We present DeepPavlov 1.0, an open-source framework for using Natural Language Processing (NLP) models by leveraging transfer learning techniques. DeepPavlov 1.0 is created for modular and configuration-driven development of state-of-the-art NLP models and supports a wide range of NLP model applications. DeepPavlov 1.0 is designed for practitioners with limited knowledge of NLP/ML. DeepPavlov is based on PyTorch and supports HuggingFace transformers. DeepPavlov is publicly released under the Apache 2.0 license and provides access to an online demo.

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Efficient Answer Retrieval System (EARS): Combining Local DB Search and Web Search for Generative QA
Nikita Krayko | Ivan Sidorov | Fedor Laputin | Daria Galimzianova | Vasily Konovalov
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

In this work, we propose an efficient answer retrieval system **EARS**: a production-ready, factual question answering (QA) system that combines local knowledge base search with generative, context-based QA. To assess the quality of the generated content, we devise comprehensive metrics for both manual and automatic evaluation of the answers to questions. A distinctive feature of our system is the Ranker component, which ranks answer candidates based on their relevance. This feature enhances the effectiveness of local knowledge base retrieval by 23%. Another crucial aspect of our system is the LLM, which utilizes contextual information from a web search API to generate responses. This results in substantial 92.8% boost in the usefulness of voice-based responses. **EARS** is language-agnostic and can be applied to any data domain.

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JellyBell at TextGraphs-17 Shared Task: Fusing Large Language Models with External Knowledge for Enhanced Question Answering
Julia Belikova | Evegeniy Beliakin | Vasily Konovalov
Proceedings of TextGraphs-17: Graph-based Methods for Natural Language Processing

This work describes an approach to develop Knowledge Graph Question Answering (KGQA) system for TextGraphs-17 shared task. The task focuses on the fusion of Large Language Models (LLMs) with Knowledge Graphs (KGs). The goal is to select a KG entity (out of several candidates) which corresponds to an answer given a textual question. Our approach applies LLM to identify the correct answer among the list of possible candidates. We confirm that integrating external information is particularly beneficial when the subject entities are not well-known, and using RAG can negatively impact the performance of LLM on questions related to popular entities, as the retrieved context might be misleading. With our result, we achieved 2nd place in the post-evaluation phase.

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DeepPavlov at SemEval-2024 Task 6: Detection of Hallucinations and Overgeneration Mistakes with an Ensemble of Transformer-based Models
Ivan Maksimov | Vasily Konovalov | Andrei Glinskii
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

The inclination of large language models (LLMs) to produce mistaken assertions, known as hallucinations, can be problematic. These hallucinations could potentially be harmful since sporadic factual inaccuracies within the generated text might be concealed by the overall coherence of the content, making it immensely challenging for users to identify them. The goal of the SHROOM shared-task is to detect grammatically sound outputs that contain incorrect or unsupported semantic information. Although there are a lot of existing hallucination detectors in generated AI content, we found out that pretrained Natural Language Inference (NLI) models yet exhibit success in detecting hallucinations. Moreover their ensemble outperforms more complicated models.

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DeepPavlov at SemEval-2024 Task 8: Leveraging Transfer Learning for Detecting Boundaries of Machine-Generated Texts
Anastasia Voznyuk | Vasily Konovalov
Proceedings of the 18th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2024)

The Multigenerator, Multidomain, and Multilingual Black-Box Machine-Generated Text Detection shared task in the SemEval-2024 competition aims to tackle the problem of misusing collaborative human-AI writing. Although there are a lot of existing detectors of AI content, they are often designed to give a binary answer and thus may not be suitable for more nuanced problem of finding the boundaries between human-written and machine-generated texts, while hybrid human-AI writing becomes more and more popular. In this paper, we address the boundary detection problem. Particularly, we present a pipeline for augmenting data for supervised fine-tuning of DeBERTaV3. We receive new best MAE score, according to the leaderboard of the competition, with this pipeline.

2016

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The Negochat Corpus of Human-agent Negotiation Dialogues
Vasily Konovalov | Ron Artstein | Oren Melamud | Ido Dagan
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)

Annotated in-domain corpora are crucial to the successful development of dialogue systems of automated agents, and in particular for developing natural language understanding (NLU) components of such systems. Unfortunately, such important resources are scarce. In this work, we introduce an annotated natural language human-agent dialogue corpus in the negotiation domain. The corpus was collected using Amazon Mechanical Turk following the ‘Wizard-Of-Oz’ approach, where a ‘wizard’ human translates the participants’ natural language utterances in real time into a semantic language. Once dialogue collection was completed, utterances were annotated with intent labels by two independent annotators, achieving high inter-annotator agreement. Our initial experiments with an SVM classifier show that automatically inferring such labels from the utterances is far from trivial. We make our corpus publicly available to serve as an aid in the development of dialogue systems for negotiation agents, and suggest that analogous corpora can be created following our methodology and using our available source code. To the best of our knowledge this is the first publicly available negotiation dialogue corpus.