Xiangru Tang


2024

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FinDVer: Explainable Claim Verification over Long and Hybrid-content Financial Documents
Yilun Zhao | Yitao Long | Tintin Jiang | Chengye Wang | Weiyuan Chen | Hongjun Liu | Xiangru Tang | Yiming Zhang | Chen Zhao | Arman Cohan
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

We introduce FinDVer, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the explainable claim verification capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing long, hybrid-content financial documents. FinDVer contains 4,000 expert-annotated examples across four subsets, each focusing on a type of scenario that frequently arises in real-world financial domains. We assess a broad spectrum of 25 LLMs under long-context and RAG settings. Our results show that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) significantly lags behind human experts. Our detailed findings and insights highlight the strengths and limitations of existing LLMs in this new task. We believe FinDVer can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLM capabilities in claim verification over complex, expert-domain documents.

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OpenT2T: An Open-Source Toolkit for Table-to-Text Generation
Haowei Zhang | Shengyun Si | Yilun Zhao | Lujing Xie | Zhijian Xu | Lyuhao Chen | Linyong Nan | Pengcheng Wang | Xiangru Tang | Arman Cohan
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Table data is pervasive in various industries, and its comprehension and manipulation demand significant time and effort for users seeking to extract relevant information. Consequently, an increasing number of studies have been directed towards table-to-text generation tasks. However, most existing methods are benchmarked solely on a limited number of datasets with varying configurations, leading to a lack of unified, standardized, fair, and comprehensive comparison between methods. This paper presents OpenT2T, the first open-source toolkit for table-to-text generation, designed to reproduce existing large language models (LLMs) for performance comparison and expedite the development of new models.We have implemented and compared a wide range of LLMs under zero- and few-shot settings on 9 table-to-text generation datasets, covering data insight generation, table summarization, and free-form table question answering. Additionally, we maintain a public leaderboard to provide insights for future work into how to choose appropriate table-to-text generation systems for real-world scenarios.

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MIMIR: A Customizable Agent Tuning Platform for Enhanced Scientific Applications
Xiangru Tang | Chunyuan Deng | Hanminwang Hanminwang | Haoran Wang | Yilun Zhao | Wenqi Shi | Yi Fung | Wangchunshu Zhou | Jiannan Cao | Heng Ji | Arman Cohan | Mark Gerstein
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have evolved into interactive agents, proficient in planning, tool use, and task execution across various tasks. However, without agent-tuning, open-source models like LLaMA2 currently struggle to match the efficiency of larger models such as GPT-4 in scientific applications due to a lack of agent tuning datasets. In response, we introduce MIMIR, a streamlined platform that leverages large LLMs to generate agent-tuning data for fine-tuning smaller, specialized models. By employing a role-playing methodology, MIMIR enables larger models to simulate various roles and create interaction data, which can then be used to fine-tune open-source models like LLaMA2. This approach ensures that even smaller models can effectively serve as agents in scientific tasks. Integrating these features into an end-to-end platform, MIMIR facilitates everything from the uploading of scientific data to one-click agent fine-tuning. MIMIR is publicly released and actively maintained at https://github. com/gersteinlab/MIMIR, along with a demo video for quick-start, calling for broader development.

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MedAgents: Large Language Models as Collaborators for Zero-shot Medical Reasoning
Xiangru Tang | Anni Zou | Zhuosheng Zhang | Ziming Li | Yilun Zhao | Xingyao Zhang | Arman Cohan | Mark Gerstein
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Large language models (LLMs), despite their remarkable progress across various general domains, encounter significant barriers in medicine and healthcare. This field faces unique challenges such as domain-specific terminologies and reasoning over specialized knowledge. To address these issues, we propose MedAgents, a novel multi-disciplinary collaboration framework for the medical domain. MedAgents leverages LLM-based agents in a role-playing setting that participate in a collaborative multi-round discussion, thereby enhancing LLM proficiency and reasoning capabilities. This training-free framework encompasses five critical steps: gathering domain experts, proposing individual analyses, summarising these analyses into a report, iterating over discussions until a consensus is reached, and ultimately making a decision. Our work focuses on the zero-shot setting, which is applicable in real-world scenarios. Experimental results on nine datasets (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, and six subtasks from MMLU) establish that our proposed MedAgents framework excels at mining and harnessing the medical expertise within LLMs, as well as extending its reasoning abilities. Our code can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/MedAgents.

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Unveiling the Spectrum of Data Contamination in Language Model: A Survey from Detection to Remediation
Chunyuan Deng | Yilun Zhao | Yuzhao Heng | Yitong Li | Jiannan Cao | Xiangru Tang | Arman Cohan
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Data contamination has garnered increased attention in the era of Large language models (LLMs) due to the reliance on extensive internet-derived training corpora. The issue of training corpus overlap with evaluation benchmarks—referred to as contamination—has been the focus of significant recent research. This body of work aims to identify contamination, understand its impacts, and explore mitigation strategies from diverse perspectives. However, comprehensive studies that provide a clear pathway from foundational concepts to advanced insights are lacking in this nascent field. Therefore, we present the first survey in the field of data contamination. We begin by examining the effects of data contamination across various stages and forms. We then provide a detailed analysis of current contamination detection methods, categorizing them to highlight their focus, assumptions, strengths, and limitations. We also discuss mitigation strategies, offering a clear guide for future research. This survey serves as a succinct overview of the most recent advancements in data contamination research, providing a straightforward guide for the benefit of future research endeavors.

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PRESTO: Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes
He Cao | Yanjun Shao | Zhiyuan Liu | Zijing Liu | Xiangru Tang | Yuan Yao | Yu Li
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have seen growing adoption across various scientific disciplines. These advancements encourage the investigation of molecule-text modeling within synthetic chemistry, a field dedicated to designing and conducting chemical reactions to synthesize new compounds with desired properties and applications. Current approaches, however, often neglect the critical role of multi-molecule graph interaction in understanding chemical reactions, leading to suboptimal performance in synthetic chemistry tasks. This study introduces PRESTO (Progressive Pretraining Enhances Synthetic Chemistry Outcomes), a new framework that bridges the molecule-text modality gap by integrating a comprehensive benchmark of pretraining strategies and dataset configurations. It progressively improves multimodal LLMs through cross-modal alignment and multi-graph understanding. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that PRESTO offers competitive results in downstream synthetic chemistry tasks. The code can be found at https://github.com/IDEA-XL/PRESTO.

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Investigating Data Contamination in Modern Benchmarks for Large Language Models
Chunyuan Deng | Yilun Zhao | Xiangru Tang | Mark Gerstein | Arman Cohan
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent observations have underscored a disparity between the inflated benchmark scores and the actual performance of LLMs, raising concerns about potential contamination of evaluation benchmarks. This issue is especially critical for closed-source models and certain open-source models where training data transparency is lacking. In this paper we study data contamination by proposing two methods tailored for both open-source and proprietary LLMs. We first introduce a retrieval-based system to explore potential overlaps between evaluation benchmarks and pretraining corpora. We further present a novel investigation protocol named Testset Slot Guessing (TS-Guessing), applicable to both open and proprietary models. This approach entails masking a wrong answer in a multiple-choice question and prompting the model to fill in the gap. Additionally, it involves obscuring an unlikely word in an evaluation example and asking the model to produce it. We find that certain commercial LLMs could surprisingly guess the missing option in various test sets. Specifically, in the MMLU benchmark, ChatGPT and GPT-4 demonstrated an exact match rate of 52% and 57%, respectively, in guessing the missing options in benchmark test data. We hope these results underscore the need for more robust evaluation methodologies and benchmarks in the field.

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Struc-Bench: Are Large Language Models Good at Generating Complex Structured Tabular Data?
Xiangru Tang | Yiming Zong | Jason Phang | Yilun Zhao | Wangchunshu Zhou | Arman Cohan | Mark Gerstein
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Despite the remarkable capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, producing complex, structured tabular data remains challenging. Our study assesses LLMs’ proficiency in structuring tables and introduces a novel fine-tuning method, cognizant of data structures, to bolster their performance. We unveil Struc-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring prominent LLMs (GPT-NeoX-20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna), which spans text tables, HTML, and LaTeX formats. Our proposed FormatCoT aids in crafting format-specific instructions from the intended outputs to populate this benchmark. Addressing the gap in task-centered evaluation, we propose two innovative metrics, P-Score (Prompting Score) and H-Score (Heuristical Score), to more accurately gauge LLM performance. Our experiments show that applying our structure-aware fine-tuning to LLaMA-7B leads to substantial performance gains, outshining its LLM counterparts across most measures. In-depth error analysis and creating an ability map across six dimensions, coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination, highlight areas for future enhancements and suggest forthcoming research trajectories. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

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DocMath-Eval: Evaluating Math Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs in Understanding Long and Specialized Documents
Yilun Zhao | Yitao Long | Hongjun Liu | Ryo Kamoi | Linyong Nan | Lyuhao Chen | Yixin Liu | Xiangru Tang | Rui Zhang | Arman Cohan
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recent LLMs have demonstrated remarkable performance in solving exam-like math word problems. However, the degree to which these numerical reasoning skills are effective in real-world scenarios, particularly in expert domains, is still largely unexplored. This paper introduces DocMath-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the numerical reasoning capabilities of LLMs in the context of understanding and analyzing specialized documents containing both text and tables. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 48 LLMs with Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought prompting methods, aiming to comprehensively assess the capabilities and limitations of existing LLMs in DocMath-Eval. We found that even the current best-performing system (i.e., GPT-4o) still significantly lags behind human experts in solving complex numerical reasoning problems grounded in long contexts. We believe that DocMath-Eval can serve as a valuable benchmark for evaluating LLMs' capabilities in solving challenging numerical reasoning problems within expert domains.

2023

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RobuT: A Systematic Study of Table QA Robustness Against Human-Annotated Adversarial Perturbations
Yilun Zhao | Chen Zhao | Linyong Nan | Zhenting Qi | Wenlin Zhang | Xiangru Tang | Boyu Mi | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Despite significant progress having been made in question answering on tabular data (Table QA), it’s unclear whether, and to what extent existing Table QA models are robust to task-specific perturbations, e.g., replacing key question entities or shuffling table columns. To systematically study the robustness of Table QA models, we propose a benchmark called RobuT, which builds upon existing Table QA datasets (WTQ, WikiSQL-Weak, and SQA) and includes human-annotated adversarial perturbations in terms of table header, table content, and question. Our results indicate that both state-of-the-art Table QA models and large language models (e.g., GPT-3) with few-shot learning falter in these adversarial sets. We propose to address this problem by using large language models to generate adversarial examples to enhance training, which significantly improves the robustness of Table QA models.

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Crosslingual Generalization through Multitask Finetuning
Niklas Muennighoff | Thomas Wang | Lintang Sutawika | Adam Roberts | Stella Biderman | Teven Le Scao | M Saiful Bari | Sheng Shen | Zheng Xin Yong | Hailey Schoelkopf | Xiangru Tang | Dragomir Radev | Alham Fikri Aji | Khalid Almubarak | Samuel Albanie | Zaid Alyafeai | Albert Webson | Edward Raff | Colin Raffel
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Multitask prompted finetuning (MTF) has been shown to help large language models generalize to new tasks in a zero-shot setting, but so far explorations of MTF have focused on English data and models. We apply MTF to the pretrained multilingual BLOOM and mT5 model families to produce finetuned variants called BLOOMZ and mT0. We find finetuning large multilingual language models on English tasks with English prompts allows for task genrealization to non-English languages that appear only in the pretraining corpus. Finetuning on multilingual tasks with English prompts further improves performance on English and non-English tasks leading to various state-of-the-art zero-shot results. We also investigate finetuning on multilingual tasks with prompts that have been machine-translated from English to match the language of each dataset. We find training on these machine-translated prompts leads to better performance on human-written prompts in the respective languages. Surprisingly, we find models are capable of zero-shot generalization to tasks in languages they have never intentionally seen. We conjecture that the models are learning higher-level capabilities that are both task- and language-agnostic. In addition, we introduce xP3, a composite of supervised datasets in 46 languages with English and machine-translated prompts. Our code, datasets and models are freely available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/xmtf.

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RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era
Bo Peng | Eric Alcaide | Quentin Anthony | Alon Albalak | Samuel Arcadinho | Stella Biderman | Huanqi Cao | Xin Cheng | Michael Chung | Leon Derczynski | Xingjian Du | Matteo Grella | Kranthi Gv | Xuzheng He | Haowen Hou | Przemyslaw Kazienko | Jan Kocon | Jiaming Kong | Bartłomiej Koptyra | Hayden Lau | Jiaju Lin | Krishna Sri Ipsit Mantri | Ferdinand Mom | Atsushi Saito | Guangyu Song | Xiangru Tang | Johan Wind | Stanisław Woźniak | Zhenyuan Zhang | Qinghua Zhou | Jian Zhu | Rui-Jie Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023

Transformers have revolutionized almost all natural language processing (NLP) tasks but suffer from memory and computational complexity that scales quadratically with sequence length. In contrast, recurrent neural networks (RNNs) exhibit linear scaling in memory and computational requirements but struggle to match the same performance as Transformers due to limitations in parallelization and scalability. We propose a novel model architecture, Receptance Weighted Key Value (RWKV), that combines the efficient parallelizable training of transformers with the efficient inference of RNNs. Our approach leverages a linear attention mechanism and allows us to formulate the model as either a Transformer or an RNN, thus parallelizing computations during training and maintains constant computational and memory complexity during inference. We scale our models as large as 14 billion parameters, by far the largest dense RNN ever trained, and find RWKV performs on par with similarly sized Transformers, suggesting future work can leverage this architecture to create more efficient models. This work presents a significant step towards reconciling trade-offs between computational efficiency and model performance in sequence processing tasks.

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QTSumm: Query-Focused Summarization over Tabular Data
Yilun Zhao | Zhenting Qi | Linyong Nan | Boyu Mi | Yixin Liu | Weijin Zou | Simeng Han | Ruizhe Chen | Xiangru Tang | Yumo Xu | Dragomir Radev | Arman Cohan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

People primarily consult tables to conduct data analysis or answer specific questions. Text generation systems that can provide accurate table summaries tailored to users’ information needs can facilitate more efficient access to relevant data insights. Motivated by this, we define a new query-focused table summarization task, where text generation models have to perform human-like reasoning and analysis over the given table to generate a tailored summary. We introduce a new benchmark named QTSumm for this task, which contains 7,111 human-annotated query-summary pairs over 2,934 tables covering diverse topics. We investigate a set of strong baselines on QTSumm, including text generation, table-to-text generation, and large language models. Experimental results and manual analysis reveal that the new task presents significant challenges in table-to-text generation for future research. Moreover, we propose a new approach named ReFactor, to retrieve and reason over query-relevant information from tabular data to generate several natural language facts. Experimental results demonstrate that ReFactor can bring effective improvements to baselines by concatenating the generated facts to the model input. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/QTSumm.

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Investigating Table-to-Text Generation Capabilities of Large Language Models in Real-World Information Seeking Scenarios
Yilun Zhao | Haowei Zhang | Shengyun Si | Linyong Nan | Xiangru Tang | Arman Cohan
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track

Tabular data is prevalent across various industries, necessitating significant time and effort for users to understand and manipulate for their information-seeking purposes. The advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown enormous potential to improve user efficiency. However, the adoption of LLMs in real-world applications for table information seeking remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the table-to-text capabilities of different LLMs using four datasets within two real-world information seeking scenarios. These include the LogicNLG and our newly-constructed LoTNLG datasets for data insight generation, along with the FeTaQA and our newly-constructed F2WTQ datasets for query-based generation. We structure our investigation around three research questions, evaluating the performance of LLMs in table-to-text generation, automated evaluation, and feedback generation, respectively. Experimental results indicate that the current high-performing LLM, specifically GPT-4, can effectively serve as a table-to-text generator, evaluator, and feedback generator, facilitating users’ information seeking purposes in real-world scenarios. However, a significant performance gap still exists between other open-sourced LLMs (e.g., Vicuna and LLaMA-2) and GPT-4 models. Our data and code are publicly available at https://github.com/yale-nlp/LLM-T2T.

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Aligning Factual Consistency for Clinical Studies Summarization through Reinforcement Learning
Xiangru Tang | Arman Cohan | Mark Gerstein
Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

In the rapidly evolving landscape of medical research, accurate and concise summarization of clinical studies is crucial to support evidence-based practice. This paper presents a novel approach to clinical studies summarization, leveraging reinforcement learning to enhance factual consistency and align with human annotator preferences. Our work focuses on two tasks: Conclusion Generation and Review Generation. We train a CONFIT summarization model that outperforms GPT-3 and previous state-of-the-art models on the same datasets and collects expert and crowd-worker annotations to evaluate the quality and factual consistency of the generated summaries. These annotations enable us to measure the correlation of various automatic metrics, including modern factual evaluation metrics like QAFactEval, with human-assessed factual consistency. By employing top-correlated metrics as objectives for a reinforcement learning model, we demonstrate improved factuality in generated summaries that are preferred by human annotators.

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GersteinLab at MEDIQA-Chat 2023: Clinical Note Summarization from Doctor-Patient Conversations through Fine-tuning and In-context Learning
Xiangru Tang | Andrew Tran | Jeffrey Tan | Mark Gerstein
Proceedings of the 5th Clinical Natural Language Processing Workshop

This paper presents our contribution to the MEDIQA-2023 Dialogue2Note shared task, encompassing both subtask A and subtask B. We approach the task as a dialogue summarization problem and implement two distinct pipelines: (a) a fine-tuning of a pre-trained dialogue summarization model and GPT-3, and (b) few-shot in-context learning (ICL) using a large language model, GPT-4. Both methods achieve excellent results in terms of ROUGE-1 F1, BERTScore F1 (deberta-xlarge-mnli), and BLEURT, with scores of 0.4011, 0.7058, and 0.5421, respectively. Additionally, we predict the associated section headers using RoBERTa and SciBERT based classification models. Our team ranked fourth among all teams, while each team is allowed to submit three runs as part of their submission. We also utilize expert annotations to demonstrate that the notes generated through the ICL GPT-4 are better than all other baselines. The code for our submission is available.

2022

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CONFIT: Toward Faithful Dialogue Summarization with Linguistically-Informed Contrastive Fine-tuning
Xiangru Tang | Arjun Nair | Borui Wang | Bingyao Wang | Jai Desai | Aaron Wade | Haoran Li | Asli Celikyilmaz | Yashar Mehdad | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Factual inconsistencies in generated summaries severely limit the practical applications of abstractive dialogue summarization. Although significant progress has been achieved by using pre-trained neural language models, substantial amounts of hallucinated content are found during the human evaluation. In this work, we first devised a typology of factual errors to better understand the types of hallucinations generated by current models and conducted human evaluation on popular dialog summarization dataset. We further propose a training strategy that improves the factual consistency and overall quality of summaries via a novel contrastive fine-tuning, called CONFIT. To tackle top factual errors from our annotation, we introduce additional contrastive loss with carefully designed hard negative samples and self-supervised dialogue-specific loss to capture the key information between speakers. We show that our model significantly reduces all kinds of factual errors on both SAMSum dialogue summarization and AMI meeting summarization. On both datasets, we achieve significant improvements over state-of-the-art baselines using both automatic metrics, ROUGE and BARTScore, and human evaluation.

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Investigating Crowdsourcing Protocols for Evaluating the Factual Consistency of Summaries
Xiangru Tang | Alexander Fabbri | Haoran Li | Ziming Mao | Griffin Adams | Borui Wang | Asli Celikyilmaz | Yashar Mehdad | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Current pre-trained models applied for summarization are prone to factual inconsistencies that misrepresent the source text. Evaluating the factual consistency of summaries is thus necessary to develop better models. However, the human evaluation setup for evaluating factual consistency has not been standardized. To determine the factors that affect the reliability of the human evaluation, we crowdsource evaluations for factual consistency across state-of-the-art models on two news summarization datasets using the rating-based Likert Scale and ranking-based Best-Worst Scaling. Our analysis reveals that the ranking-based Best-Worst Scaling offers a more reliable measure of summary quality across datasets and that the reliability of Likert ratings highly depends on the target dataset and the evaluation design. To improve crowdsourcing reliability, we extend the scale of the Likert rating and present a scoring algorithm for Best-Worst Scaling that we call value learning. Our crowdsourcing guidelines will be publicly available to facilitate future work on factual consistency in summarization.

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PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts
Stephen Bach | Victor Sanh | Zheng Xin Yong | Albert Webson | Colin Raffel | Nihal V. Nayak | Abheesht Sharma | Taewoon Kim | M Saiful Bari | Thibault Fevry | Zaid Alyafeai | Manan Dey | Andrea Santilli | Zhiqing Sun | Srulik Ben-david | Canwen Xu | Gunjan Chhablani | Han Wang | Jason Fries | Maged Al-shaibani | Shanya Sharma | Urmish Thakker | Khalid Almubarak | Xiangru Tang | Dragomir Radev | Mike Tian-jian Jiang | Alexander Rush
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: System Demonstrations

PromptSource is a system for creating, sharing, and using natural language prompts. Prompts are functions that map an example from a dataset to a natural language input and target output. Using prompts to train and query language models is an emerging area in NLP that requires new tools that let users develop and refine these prompts collaboratively. PromptSource addresses the emergent challenges in this new setting with (1) a templating language for defining data-linked prompts, (2) an interface that lets users quickly iterate on prompt development by observing outputs of their prompts on many examples, and (3) a community-driven set of guidelines for contributing new prompts to a common pool. Over 2,000 prompts for roughly 170 datasets are already available in PromptSource. PromptSource is available at https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/promptsource.

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Surfer100: Generating Surveys From Web Resources, Wikipedia-style
Irene Li | Alex Fabbri | Rina Kawamura | Yixin Liu | Xiangru Tang | Jaesung Tae | Chang Shen | Sally Ma | Tomoe Mizutani | Dragomir Radev
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Fast-developing fields such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) often outpace the efforts of encyclopedic sources such as Wikipedia, which either do not completely cover recently-introduced topics or lack such content entirely. As a result, methods for automatically producing content are valuable tools to address this information overload. We show that recent advances in pretrained language modeling can be combined for a two-stage extractive and abstractive approach for Wikipedia lead paragraph generation. We extend this approach to generate longer Wikipedia-style summaries with sections and examine how such methods struggle in this application through detailed studies with 100 reference human-collected surveys. This is the first study on utilizing web resources for long Wikipedia-style summaries to the best of our knowledge.

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FeTaQA: Free-form Table Question Answering
Linyong Nan | Chiachun Hsieh | Ziming Mao | Xi Victoria Lin | Neha Verma | Rui Zhang | Wojciech Kryściński | Hailey Schoelkopf | Riley Kong | Xiangru Tang | Mutethia Mutuma | Ben Rosand | Isabel Trindade | Renusree Bandaru | Jacob Cunningham | Caiming Xiong | Dragomir Radev | Dragomir Radev
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Volume 10

Existing table question answering datasets contain abundant factual questions that primarily evaluate a QA system’s comprehension of query and tabular data. However, restricted by their short-form answers, these datasets fail to include question–answer interactions that represent more advanced and naturally occurring information needs: questions that ask for reasoning and integration of information pieces retrieved from a structured knowledge source. To complement the existing datasets and to reveal the challenging nature of the table-based question answering task, we introduce FeTaQA, a new dataset with 10K Wikipedia-based table, question, free-form answer, supporting table cells pairs. FeTaQA is collected from noteworthy descriptions of Wikipedia tables that contain information people tend to seek; generation of these descriptions requires advanced processing that humans perform on a daily basis: Understand the question and table, retrieve, integrate, infer, and conduct text planning and surface realization to generate an answer. We provide two benchmark methods for the proposed task: a pipeline method based on semantic parsing-based QA systems and an end-to-end method based on large pretrained text generation models, and show that FeTaQA poses a challenge for both methods.

2021

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DART: Open-Domain Structured Data Record to Text Generation
Linyong Nan | Dragomir Radev | Rui Zhang | Amrit Rau | Abhinand Sivaprasad | Chiachun Hsieh | Xiangru Tang | Aadit Vyas | Neha Verma | Pranav Krishna | Yangxiaokang Liu | Nadia Irwanto | Jessica Pan | Faiaz Rahman | Ahmad Zaidi | Mutethia Mutuma | Yasin Tarabar | Ankit Gupta | Tao Yu | Yi Chern Tan | Xi Victoria Lin | Caiming Xiong | Richard Socher | Nazneen Fatema Rajani
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

We present DART, an open domain structured DAta Record to Text generation dataset with over 82k instances (DARTs). Data-to-text annotations can be a costly process, especially when dealing with tables which are the major source of structured data and contain nontrivial structures. To this end, we propose a procedure of extracting semantic triples from tables that encodes their structures by exploiting the semantic dependencies among table headers and the table title. Our dataset construction framework effectively merged heterogeneous sources from open domain semantic parsing and spoken dialogue systems by utilizing techniques including tree ontology annotation, question-answer pair to declarative sentence conversion, and predicate unification, all with minimum post-editing. We present systematic evaluation on DART as well as new state-of-the-art results on WebNLG 2017 to show that DART (1) poses new challenges to existing data-to-text datasets and (2) facilitates out-of-domain generalization. Our data and code can be found at https://github.com/Yale-LILY/dart.

2020

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CUHK at SemEval-2020 Task 4: CommonSense Explanation, Reasoning and Prediction with Multi-task Learning
Hongru Wang | Xiangru Tang | Sunny Lai | Kwong Sak Leung | Jia Zhu | Gabriel Pui Cheong Fung | Kam-Fai Wong
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Workshop on Semantic Evaluation

This paper describes our system submitted to task 4 of SemEval 2020: Commonsense Validation and Explanation (ComVE) which consists of three sub-tasks. The task is to directly validate the given sentence whether or not to make sense and require the model to explain it. Based on BERT architecture with the multi-task setting, we propose an effective and interpretable “Explain, Reason and Predict” (ERP) system to solve the three sub-tasks about commonsense: (a) Validation, (b) Reasoning, and (c) Explanation. Inspired by cognitive studies of common sense, our system first generates a reason or understanding of the sentences and then choose which one statement makes sense, which is achieved by multi-task learning. During the post-evaluation, our system has reached 92.9% accuracy in subtask A (rank 11), 89.7% accuracy in subtask B (rank 9), and BLEU score of 12.9 in subtask C (rank 8).

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Categorizing Offensive Language in Social Networks: A Chinese Corpus, Systems and an Explainable Tool
Xiangru Tang | Xianjun Shen
Proceedings of the 19th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics

Recently, more and more data have been generated in the online world, filled with offensive language such as threats, swear words or straightforward insults. It is disgraceful for a progressive society, and then the question arises on how language resources and technologies can cope with this challenge. However, previous work only analyzes the problem as a whole but fails to detect particular types of offensive content in a more fine-grained way, mainly because of the lack of annotated data. In this work, we present a densely annotated data-set COLA
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