Given a sentence and a particular aspect term, aspect-based sentiment analysis (ABSA) aims to predict the sentiment polarity towards this aspect term, which provides fine-grained analysis on sentiment understanding and it has attracted much attention in recent years. In order to achieve a good performance on ABSA, it is important for a model to appropriately encode contextual information, especially identifying salient features and eliminating noise in the context. To make incorrect predictions, most existing approaches employ powerful text encoders to locate important context features, as well as noises that mislead ABSA models. These approaches determine the noise in the text for ABSA by assigning low weights to context features or directly removing them from model input, which runs the risk of computing wrong weights or eliminating important context information. In this paper, we propose to improve ABSA with context denoising, where three types of word-level information are regarded as noise, namely, lexicographic noise, bag-of-words noise, and syntax noise. We utilize diffusion networks to perform the denoising process to gradually eliminate them so as to better predict sentiment polarities for given aspect terms. Our approach uses task-specific noise rather than the standard stochastic Gaussian noise in the diffusion networks. The experimental results on five widely used ABSA datasets demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of our approach.

Given several documents, multi-hop question generation (MQG) is a task aims to generate complicated questions that require reasoning over multiple pieces of these documents to find the answer. To perform this task, existing studies focus on designing advanced architectures to locate essential keywords or sentences in multiple documents and then generate questions accordingly, where they normally do not note that question types could provide crucial hints for extracting key information from the documents for MQG. In general, supervised approaches are used that rely on large annotated data, which is not available in many low-resource scenarios and thus makes MQG hard in these domains. Consider the recent success of large language models (LLMs) on natural language processing tasks using limited labeled data under few-shot settings, in this paper, we propose an approach named type-aware semantics extraction-based chain-of-thought method (TASE-CoT) for few-shot MQG. Specifically, our approach firstly extracts question types and essential semantic phrases from the given documents and the answer. Then, we design a three-step CoT template to leverage the extracted question type and semantic phrases to predict multi-hop questions. Extensive experiments and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and the proposed modules.

This paper introduces the system developed by USTC-BUPT for SemEval-2024 Task 8. The shared task comprises three subtasks across four tracks, aiming to develop automatic systems to distinguish between human-written and machine-generated text across various domains, languages and generators. Our system comprises four components: DATeD, LLAM, TLE, and AuDM, which empower us to effectively tackle all subtasks posed by the challenge. In the monolingual track, DATeD improves machine-generated text detection by incorporating a gradient reversal layer and integrating additional domain labels through Domain Adversarial Neural Networks, enhancing adaptation to diverse text domains. In the multilingual track, LLAM employs different strategies based on language characteristics. For English text, the LLM Embeddings approach utilizes embeddings from a proxy LLM followed by a two-stage CNN for classification, leveraging the broad linguistic knowledge captured during pre-training to enhance performance. For text in other languages, the LLM Sentinel approach transforms the classification task into a next-token prediction task, which facilitates easier adaptation to texts in various languages, especially low-resource languages. TLE utilizes the LLM Embeddings method with a minor modification in the classification strategy for subtask B. AuDM employs data augmentation and fine-tunes the DeBERTa model specifically for subtask C. Our system wins the multilingual track and ranks second in the monolingual track. Additionally, it achieves third place in both subtask B and C.

Current relation extraction methods suffer from the inadequacy of large-scale annotated data. While distant supervision alleviates the problem of data quantities, there still exists domain disparity in data qualities due to its reliance on domain-restrained knowledge bases. In this work, we propose S2ynRE, a framework of two-stage Self-training with Synthetic data for Relation Extraction.We first leverage the capability of large language models to adapt to the target domain and automatically synthesize large quantities of coherent, realistic training data. We then propose an accompanied two-stage self-training algorithm that iteratively and alternately learns from synthetic and golden data together. We conduct comprehensive experiments and detailed ablations on popular relation extraction datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Controllable text generation (CTG) aims to generate text with desired attributes, and decoding-time-based methods have shown promising performance on this task. However, in this paper, we identify the phenomenon of Attribute Collapse for the first time. It causes the fluency of generated text to rapidly decrease when the control strength exceeds a critical value, rendering the text completely unusable. This limitation hinders the effectiveness of decoding methods in achieving high levels of controllability. To address this problem, we propose a novel lightweight decoding framework named Air-Decoding. Its main idea is reconstructing the attribute distributions to balance the weights between attribute words and non-attribute words to generate more fluent text. Specifically, we train prefixes by prefix-tuning to obtain attribute distributions. Then we design a novel attribute distribution reconstruction method to balance the obtained distributions and use the reconstructed distributions to guide language models for generation, effectively avoiding the issue of Attribute Collapse. Experiments on multiple CTG tasks prove that our method achieves a new state-of-the-art control performance.

The task of Grammatical Error Correction (GEC) aims to automatically correct grammatical errors in natural texts. Almost all previous works treat annotated training data equally, but inherent discrepancies in data are neglected. In this paper, the inherent discrepancies are manifested in two aspects, namely, accuracy of data annotation and diversity of potential annotations. To this end, we propose MainGEC, which designs token-level and sentence-level training weights based on inherent discrepancies therein, and then conducts mixed-grained weighted training to improve the training effect for GEC. Empirical evaluation shows that whether in the Seq2Seq or Seq2Edit manner, MainGEC achieves consistent and significant performance improvements on two benchmark datasets, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the mixed-grained weighted training. Further ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of designed weights for both granularities in MainGEC.

As large language models attract increasing attention and find widespread application, concurrent challenges of reliability also arise at the same time. Confidence calibration, an effective analysis method for gauging the reliability of deep models, serves as a crucial tool for assessing and improving their reliability. However, such investigation has been comparatively underexplored. In this work, we conduct a systematic examination of the calibration of aligned language models throughout the entire construction process, including pretraining and alignment training. At each stage, we investigate how different training settings, such as parameter scales and training data, affect model calibration. To thoroughly assess model calibration, we evaluate models on three most concerned aspects: generation, factuality and understanding. Our work sheds light on whether popular LLMs are well-calibrated and how the training process influences model calibration.

Chinese spelling check (CSC) is a fundamental NLP task that detects and corrects spelling errors in Chinese texts. As most of these spelling errors are caused by phonetic similarity, effectively modeling the pronunciation of Chinese characters is a key factor for CSC. In this paper, we consider introducing an auxiliary task of Chinese pronunciation prediction (CPP) to improve CSC, and, for the first time, systematically discuss the adaptivity and granularity of this auxiliary task. We propose SCOPE which builds upon a shared encoder two parallel decoders, one for the primary CSC task and the other for a fine-grained auxiliary CPP task, with a novel adaptive weighting scheme to balance the two tasks. In addition, we design a delicate iterative correction strategy for further improvements during inference. Empirical evaluation shows that SCOPE achieves new state-of-the-art on three CSC benchmarks, demonstrating the effectiveness and superiority of the auxiliary CPP task. Comprehensive ablation studies further verify the positive effects of adaptivity and granularity of the task.

With the great success of pre-trained language models, the pretrain-finetune paradigm now becomes the undoubtedly dominant solution for natural language understanding (NLU) tasks. At the fine-tune stage, target task data is usually introduced in a completely random order and treated equally. However, examples in NLU tasks can vary greatly in difficulty, and similar to human learning procedure, language models can benefit from an easy-to-difficult curriculum. Based on this idea, we propose our Curriculum Learning approach. By reviewing the trainset in a crossed way, we are able to distinguish easy examples from difficult ones, and arrange a curriculum for language models. Without any manual model architecture design or use of external data, our Curriculum Learning approach obtains significant and universal performance improvements on a wide range of NLU tasks.